Tough Lessons

by Chris Freeman

  “Hollywood’s loss was Antoinette Irving’s gain.”

  “If you say ‘Those who can do, and those who can’t teach,’ I swear I will hit you, Joseph Soyinka.”

  “I would never dream of it. I think teaching’s a fine thing to do.”

  “You really mean that, don’t you?” She seemed impressed.

  “Of course. When Yomi comes home from your class he tells me what he’s been learning. It’s good to hear he takes it all in and it proves you make a difference.”

  “Thank you, that’s nice to know,” she said. “So who did you want to be then, Joseph?”

  “When I was a boy in Lagos?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can remember.”

  “Not fair.” She said it like she was a child again. “I showed you mine, so you got to show me yours.”

  “Since you put it like that.”

  “Go on.”

  Before Joseph could answer, their attention was diverted by the sound of another vehicle. This time it was a police squad car that was easing its way along the same dirt track Macy Williams had just shot down in her pickup. It was heading steadily toward them and everybody stopped to watch its progress, including Coach Geller and all of his charges. The car rolled to a standstill by the touchline and two uniformed officers climbed out. One of the cops opened the rear door and out stepped none other than Assistant Chief McCavity. The three of them walked straight out onto the football field, right up to Coach Geller and the surrounding huddle of boys. There was a short muffled conversation that Joseph could not make out, and then the officers broke away from the group and began to return to their car. This time they had a boy with them. He was about fourteen years old and still dressed in his football kit, the only addition to it being the handcuffs that were keeping his hands clasped tightly together behind him.

  The cops were clearly taking no chances. They weren’t going to let him change his clothes and made sure they stood either side of the youngster, holding him firmly by the arms so he couldn’t make a run for it as he was led to their car. McCavity led the way, the two officers followed behind, and, as the figure they were escorting drew nearer, he was instantly recognizable to Joseph. The boy was tall and well built for his age, with the muscles of a young man already honed from hours of incessant football practice. The boy’s hair was shaved short but, unlike Coach Geller’s, his haircut spoke more of the street than an institution like the army. He may have resembled a man physically but the confusion and hurt in his eyes was still that of a child. As he was led away, it was clear to Joseph that the boy was terrified.

  “Talk of the devil,” Joseph said to himself.

  “What?” asked Brigitte, as she watched the police dragging the boy along.

  “That’s Jermaine Letts, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  One of the cops pressed Jermaine’s head down so he was bent forward and bundled into the back of the squad car. This time, McCavity rode up front, leaving the burliest male officer to travel in the back with the boy. Joseph wondered why she had chosen a marked squad car and uniformed officers for the arrest, instead of an unmarked vehicle and plain-clothes detectives. He knew McCavity never did anything without a reason. Then he realized, from the stunned looks on the faces of the children and the handful of parents scattered along the touchline, that she had opted for this approach deliberately. No one was going to forget this spectacle in a hurry. They were more likely to remember McCavity next time she was on the news, possibly even recall her years from now when she was canvassing their vote for some public office. The memory of the squad car parked on the edge of the football field, the cops with their batons and guns, the flame-haired detective in the power suit was so much more effective than a quiet and anonymous arrest at Jermaine Letts’s family home. McCavity certainly knew how to make an entrance.

  Brigitte said, “You don’t think?”

  “That Jermaine is responsible for the killing of Hernando Lopez? I don’t know but I doubt they would drive out all this way to pick him up if he had just robbed the charity box from his church, do you?”

  “Nope,” she said glumly. “And I’ve heard he does have gang links.”

  “So I hear,” said Joseph. “It’s a small world.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Coach Geller had broken up the training session as soon as the police car disappeared. He traipsed off the pitch right by Joseph and Brigitte, to be met by a small cluster of curious parents filled with questions. He told them what he knew. “I don’t suppose it’s a state secret that Jermaine Letts has just got himself arrested for the murder of Hernando Lopez.” The coach had then made it clear where his own sympathies lay. “There’s no helping some of these kids,” he told anybody who would listen. “Might as well take ’em straight from the womb and stick ’em in an eight-by-five cell. They are going to wind up in the prison yard one day anyhow. It’s either that or drown them at birth.” Geller must have spotted the look Joseph gave him. “What?” he challenged. “Say it isn’t so? I ain’t saying it’s not sad, but Jermaine Letts’s daddy is in a state correctional facility right now. He’s a dope fiend, a no-good pothead pusher. How long you think it will be before his son joins him there, with or without what happened to Lopez, that poor, sorry son of a bitch. They say he suffered before he died and I for one believe in an eye for an eye.”

  There were murmurs of agreement from about half of the assembled parents. The others chose to keep their own counsel. One or two looked at the ground.

  Joseph didn’t bother to argue. Geller was the stuff lynch mobs were made of. Once he had an idea in his head there was no shaking it. Maybe he was right. Perhaps Jermaine Letts never had a chance from the day he was born. Maybe he did kill his teacher and now he would get what he deserved, but maybe, just maybe, he had nothing to do with it at all.

  Once Yomi was showered and changed, he traipsed out to meet his father with his friends. On the way home, FJ and the other guys were full of fevered speculation about Jermaine Letts and his future. Mostly it centered around whether he was capable of “sticking” his teacher like that and, if so, where he would end up once the courts found him guilty. The consensus seemed to be that he was more than capable of such an act and now he was going to go to prison for the rest of his natural life. FJ ventured that he might be lucky and finally be freed back into society when he was a stooped and wrinkly old man. So much for Eddie’s theory that Jermaine was a good kid, thought Joseph. Yomi’s friends didn’t seem to think the older boy was worth a light.

  Despite the shock of Jermaine’s arrest and the excited chattering of the other boys, Yomi himself was uncharacteristically quiet. When his friends had all been dropped at their respective homes, Joseph asked, “Are you okay, son?”

  “Yeah.” Lomi was quiet for a time, and then he said, “Everybody says Jermaine Letts is a bad kid, but he’s not.”

  “Really?” It seemed a strange thing to say about the chief suspect in a homicide.

  “He’s tough but he’s not a bully. He protects his younger brother from the bigger kids and he looks out for people.”

  “Yomi, are you upset because they arrested this boy?”

  Yomi just shrugged. “It’s not that.” Then he corrected himself. “Not just that, I mean.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You know you always said if I was in trouble I could come talk to you, no matter what?”

  Joseph got the distinct impression he was going to regret those words, and sooner rather than later. “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m in trouble now.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Yomi took a long time to answer his father and Joseph had to tell himself to count to ten before he flew off the handle. He knew Apara would have told him not to push too hard. Let the boy speak in his own good time and it will all come out eventually, she would reaso
n. Instead, Yomi just stared out of the cab window as a street full of rundown stores with metal shutters or steel cages over their shabby windows rolled by outside.

  Finally he spoke. “That knife the cops found in Lopez’s classroom.” He said it hesitantly and Joseph realized he was holding his breath now. “They’re gonna find my prints all over it.”

  6

  Joseph did not sleep well that night, even by his usual standards. He eventually gave up entirely before the first white light of an early winter morning peeped through the drapes in his tiny bedroom. Instead, he walked out into the living room and sat down heavily in his ancient armchair, waiting for the sun to come up over the projects at the start of another day. He’d been up for nearly two hours before Yomi emerged groggily from his room to begin the school day. The pair of them drove to Antoinette Irving Junior High in silence. There wasn’t much left to say. It had all been said the night before.

  Joseph had tried not to fly off the handle, but the row that began in the cab on the way home from football practice the night before had continued in their apartment. Joseph had demanded to know how his son’s fingerprints could possibly be found on a murder weapon.

  “People were saying that it was Jermaine’s knife the police found but I didn’t know for sure,” he said sadly. “Until they took him away.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Yomi. How did your prints get on it?”

  It was killing Yomi to give his father the truth. “He took it from me.”

  Joseph took a moment to understand what his son was saying. “You mean it was your knife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Jermaine Letts stole it from you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what then?” Joseph’s fear was beginning to turn to anger. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “He took it from me because he said I was too young to be carrying a knife.”

  Joseph felt like he’d been punched in the gut. He sat down opposite his son and tried to calm his growing rage. “Well, Jermaine was right. What in hell were you doing with a knife, Yomi? You’re twelve years old. I didn’t bring you up to carry one, damn it!”

  “Dad, it’s for protection. Everybody carries a blade.”

  “No, they don’t. Not at your age.” Joseph said it adamantly, but he was now no longer sure about this.

  “They do, they do.” Yomi was raising his voice now, frustration making him angry at his father. “You don’t understand. You’re nobody unless they know you’re carrying. They’ve got to know or they’ll beat you bad. This is the only way I can keep the gangs off my back. Oh, you don’t get it!” He was shouting now and Joseph was taken aback. He expected shame and guilt from his son, not this. He was looking for understanding, apologies, and contrition. Instead, he was getting defiance from a misguided twelve-year-old, who couldn’t see that it was wrong to carry a knife. And this particular twelve-year-old was his own son.

  “So, you carry a knife to protect yourself from the older boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet an older boy comes along and takes it off you with ease, just like that. What if he’d stabbed you with it, Yomi? What then?”

  “It wasn’t like that. Jermaine’s a good guy. They all say he isn’t, but he is. He’s the best football player in his year and I’m one of the best in mine, so there’s respect.” That word again, thought Joseph, the one they bandy around all the time without remotely understanding its meaning. “He saw me showing my knife to a couple of the girls and he told me I shouldn’t be carrying at my age. Then he just took it, but he didn’t make me look bad in front of them and he didn’t kick me around or nothing.”

  “Well, that’s okay then,” said Joseph with heavy sarcasm. He was struggling to find the right words to make his son understand. “And you just accepted what he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was the end of the matter, was it? You agreed with Jermaine’s appraisal, since you respect this older boy so much?”

  Yomi was squirming a little. “I guess.”

  “So you didn’t go right out and buy a new knife?”

  Yomi hesitated for just a second and his father could see the lie in his eyes even before he spoke.

  “No.”

  Joseph walked over to the cupboard where he kept the bottle of whiskey and the glass tumblers. He opened the little drawer above the bottle and slid his hand in until he found what he was looking for. As Yomi watched him, Joseph drew out a duster and unwrapped it. In the middle of the cloth was the lock knife Joseph had fished out of the cistern at Antoinette Irving. Yomi seemed to wilt visibly in front of him.

  When Joseph spoke he was having difficulty containing his anger. “Yomi, so help me, I have never ever raised a hand to you but if you lie to me now I don’t know what I will do. I found this knife in the school bathroom the day that Mr. Lopez was stabbed. Is it yours?”

  Yomi ducked his head, unable to look his father directly in the eye, and when he finally admitted it the word was barely audible. “Yes.”

  Joseph let out a deep breath. “How could you do this, Yomi? After all the times we have talked about what it means to be a man, to do the right thing, not follow your stupid friends when they do all the stuff that gets them into trouble. There’s no winner in a knife fight. What happens if you don’t get stabbed? You kill the other boy, that’s what. You want to go to jail for the rest of your life? How could you do it?”

  “It’s not my fault!” Yomi shouted. “I didn’t ask to come here. You brought me to this shitty place when Mom died. You know how hard it is for me? Every day I go to that school I don’t know who’s going to try and give me a beating. Every day! You told me we were going to America and you’d be a cop again and we’d have a nice place to live. That’s what you said. Instead, you drive a cab and we’ve got nothing. We live in these horrible rooms in this bad place and I have to carry a blade so I don’t get stabbed by some other kid. It’s all your fault! What do you want from me?”

  Joseph was rocked by his son’s response. He could never get beyond the idea that any boy who carried a knife was a fool, a thug, or both but he couldn’t deny that everything his son had just said to him was true. He had promised Yomi a new and better life in America, then singularly failed to provide it. The job driving a cab, the crumbling apartment, the school so rough they were talking about installing metal detectors so no more teachers or pupils would be murdered there. All of this was his fault because he had trusted Captain Opara and he had stuck to his fine principles, right up until the point when they had killed Yomi’s mother and driven him and his son out of the country. Right now he couldn’t help thinking that if he had only taken the damned dirty money when it had been offered to him, he would still be living in Lagos in his nice home with his beautiful wife. He certainly wouldn’t be having this conversation with his son about carrying a knife.

  “Yomi,” said Joseph quietly when his son’s tirade had finally ceased. “Just go to your room.”

  It had been another frustrating day of delays on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Joseph’s nerves had been shattered by a cacophony of car horns, pointlessly sounded, as if their repetition would magically clear the way up ahead and set the traffic moving on its way again.

  When he was finally free of the gridlock and back in the tenements of the South Bronx, he managed to get a couple of fares back-to-back but it was to be a temporary respite. Something had suddenly blown in the engine and steam started to hiss out from beneath the bonnet of the cab. Cursing his luck, Joseph pulled over, took a rag from the glove box, and went round to the front of the Crown Victoria. He knew he should let the ancient radiator cool down before he did anything but he was way behind schedule, so he pressed the rag against the cap and turned it. He was rewarded by a gush of steam, followed by a short spurt of piping-hot water that bubbled up onto his hand before he could move it away. Passersby heard the language of a man who truly felt as if
life was pushing him to the brink. Joseph cursed the car, the city he lived in, and his own stupidity in that order. Then he willed himself to calm down.

  He would get the old cab looked at by Selwyn down at Wrays’ garage just as soon as he could. In the meantime, the problem with the radiator could be fixed. All he needed was water. He told himself it could have been far worse and he wandered away to find a Korean store whose owner sold him two liters of mineral water for the same price of a cold glass of beer down at the Impala. As he trudged back to the cab, he used the time to go over the events of the previous night.

  Jermaine Letts may not have been a bad kid at heart but he was still the prime suspect in a murder investigation, one that might soon implicate his own son. Yomi had admitted to handling the murder weapon, to his father if not yet the police, and now Joseph was torn. Should he go to the cops himself and explain what had happened with the knife, in the hope it might go easier for Yomi in the long run, or should he sit tight, hoping the police might never follow up on the other prints, particularly if they had already wrung a confession out of Jermaine Letts. He had to admit he did not relish the idea of turning in his own son. He had witnessed firsthand the suspicion that could be created within the NYPD if they failed to fully comprehend a situation. His own recent job interview had been a prime illustration of that.

  Joseph’s worries were compounded by the gang tag sprayed on Eddie’s door. The old man had already admitted to a run-in with Jermaine Letts. If the boy really was a gang leader, capable of murder over the most trivial of grievances, then Eddie could be in grave danger. How many more members of Jermaine Letts’s gang would hope to gain a reputation by stabbing a retired policeman for no other reason than he was in their way?

  Joseph was bitterly cold by the time he returned to his car. The radiator had been the last warm thing in New York but it had cooled down by now and it swallowed the water gratefully. A car must really be on its last legs for it to overheat in wintertime, thought Joseph, but at least he was back on his way again now. There was a reason for his urgency. He had to get a couple more fares in and earn some more precious dollars before he picked Yomi up from school and dropped him back at the apartment. He would have to cook them both a meal before leaving Yomi with Eddie for a couple of hours. Then he had to go out once more.