“You need to come dance on the Parkway, boy,” said Milo, looking up at me. “You need to jump in a band.”
“Right now I need to jump in a bed.”
He sat up and turned to face me, grinning and rubbing his weary-looking eyes. “Boy, you the strangest man I know. You the only man would drink coffee before going to sleep.”
“Not now, Milo. Don’t needle me. I’m drowning in shit.”
Milo dropped the scissors onto the floor and stood up. The grin had faded from his face. “What’s going on, boy?”
“Nothing for you to worry about.”
“I is your partner. If you got problems, it sure to affect the business.”
I told him what I could, leaving out the part about framing Stubby six years before.
“I need a drink,” he said after I’d finished my story.
“Don’t forget you gotta open the store tomorrow,” I said.
He crinkled his eyes and went to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of Old Oak rum and a short glass. In the oversized shorts his skinny legs looked like a bird’s.
He sat on the floor and poured a drink. “Blades, man, you can’t come here and scare me so.”
“It’s all in your mind, Milo.”
“That’s your answer to everything. Man, if your mind so powerful, how come you can’t get over your wife? That’s where this whole thing start.”
“How you figure that?”
“You still heartbroken. That’s why you in this mess. You was using this woman to get over Anais.”
He tilted his head back and gurgled the brown liquid down his throat, letting out a hoarse breath of fire.
“Shut up before I call Immigration and have your ass shipped back to Trinidad.”
“How come you can’t get over Anais if your mind so damn strong?”
“I ain’t even hearing you, Milo.”
“I seen this woman on TV. This Precious. She’s very pretty, but the only reason you sleep with her is because you can’t get Anais.”
I rested the cup on the floor. “What you want me to tell you, Milo? That I still love Anais? That I can’t seem to get over her? I don’t know how to stop loving the woman, Milo. Are you happy now?”
I stared at him, angry with him for making me admit something I’d been trying to ignore. Silence anchored itself between us. He began to cut a pattern from a piece of silver cloth that looked like foil.
“I’m going to sleep,” I said, and walked away.
“Hey, Blades.”
I stopped and turned to face him.
Putting the scissors down, he tossed the silver cloth into a basket on the sofa and got up, inching around the piles of cloth until he was in front of me.
“Your mind can’t do something you don’t want it to do. I’ve watched you ever since Anais left. You don’t really want to forget her. You fighting pride so hard you hardly living. Come to the Parkway, man. Come back to life.”
“I don’t see your apartment overflowing with lovers,” I said sarcastically.
“Then you blind. Look around you. Every one of these costumes in here is a person who appreciates me.”
“I have my family for that.”
“Who? Your cokehead brother who don’t know his ass from his mouth? Your white sister who wouldn’t care if your black ass disappear tomorrow?”
“Milo, you better slow your roll before I bend your skinny ass around one of these wires. First of all, Jason’s sick. And second, Melanie is not my white sister, all right? She’s my sister. Get that through your fucking coconut.”
“That girl don’t like you. She hate the fact that she got a black brother.”
“Maybe, but she’s still my sister.”
“Your sister? What kinda sister that? I wouldn’t want somebody like that to be my sister.”
“It’s my problem, not yours.”
“I know how it burns you up, Blades.”
“Don’t worry about what burns me up. Just make your stupid costumes.”
“It ain’t no more stupid than you thinking that girl will ever accept you.”
I pushed him. He stumbled backward and fell onto a heap of cloth. He grabbed his scissors and jumped up, waving the scissors in the air.
“You can’t bully everybody, Blades,” he said, his voice rising with urgency and passion. “You can’t beat up everybody for telling you something you don’t want to hear. It’d be nice if things were as simple as you make them sound. Melanie is your white sister whether you want to hear it or not. That’s the way America see it.”
“Well, fuck America. Fuck everybody. You don’t know my family. I don’t see my family that way. I don’t see my sister that way.”
“That’s your choice, Blades. If you wanna stay blind to who she really is, fine. But as your friend I telling you that you can’t have it both ways. Just because she’s your sister don’t make her holy.”
“Leave me alone, Milo. I don’t meddle with your family. Don’t meddle with mine.”
I retreated to the bedroom and closed the door behind me.
20
IOPENED MY eyes to the sound of loud chanting. I lay motionless, waiting for my mind to focus. The sound seemed to be coming from far away, and at the same time it had such a surreal sweetness I could easily have been dreaming. Slowly, my mind embraced daylight and reality.
Rain was falling against the window in rhythmic sheets, the loud echo resonating like choral chants. As I listened, I felt a kind of spiritual longing to be in the rain, dancing, waving my hands and singing. I didn’t know why I felt that way. Like I needed to release something deep from within my heart. What Milo said the night before came back to my thoughts. I tried to push it from my mind.
Milo hollered from the living room. “Blades! Come here, man!”
Before I could move, he appeared at the door, excitement shining in his eyes. “Blades, come quick! The Mayor is on TV. He’s talking about you.”
I didn’t rush. I was quite familiar with the Mayor’s diatribe. He was a man unable to admit that he was wrong about anything. I put on my pants and went into the living room.
The Mayor stood in front of a line of microphones, his patented comb-over barely managing to cover his scalp. One side of his mouth sagged heavily and his lips crimped at the edges, making his long slit of a mouth droop like someone who’d suffered a stroke. His wide-set horse’s eyes bulged with glee as he enthralled the reporters.
“I’m not surprised that this individual is a suspect in a pair of rather brutal murders,” he was saying. “I tried to tell you all before. But you wouldn’t listen. Blades Overstreet is unstable. Three years ago I suggested that he needed professional help. For him to think that what happened to him then was anything more than an accident was ludicrous. This is a man who once expressed a desire to kill his superiors. Clearly this is a man who shouldn’t have been a police officer, given the right to carry a weapon. We try to hire the best people for a tough job. It’s not a perfect process. Now it looks as though he may’ve killed not one but two people, including an FBI agent. We found some rather disturbing pictures on his computer. The same kind of pictures found at the scene of the FBI agent’s death. I don’t want to speculate, but therein may be the motive for these killings. I promise you we will bring this confused man to justice.”
Milo looked stupefied. “He’s crazy, that Mayor.”
“There’s gotta be a law against maniacs getting elected to office.”
“You want some coffee?” Milo said.
“You bet. Black.”
Milo, still dressed in the clothes from last night, headed to the kitchen. I wondered if he’d slept at all.
The Mayor’s news conference was continuing. He was answering questions about who he would be supporting in the upcoming congressional elections.
Just then there was a loud banging at the door.
“Open up! Police!” a voice barked from outside.
Milo ran out of the kitchen looking like he’d crappe
d in his drawers. Signaling to Milo to stall them, I rushed to the bedroom. I stumbled into my shoes and was about to leave without my shirt when I spotted it under the bed. Shirt in hand, I opened the window. The banging had gotten louder. They were busting the door down.
The window opened onto a huge oak tree, the nearest branch to me being about three feet away. Fifty feet below was a railway track. If I timed my jump well, I could catch onto a branch and climb down.
I jumped from the window. But the branch I grabbed was thick and wet. My fingers slipped and I lost my grip. My momentum sent me hurtling into the branches. I banged my head against the trunk and was stunned momentarily as I slid out of control, finally coming to a stop wedged in the Y of two branches.
I struggled to catch my breath. There was no sign of cops below. I reached up and grabbed the branch above me. My head was spinning, my heart exploding in my chest, but I’d suffered no broken bones.
I scuttled down the wet knobby trunk, jamming my thumb on a jagged branch. When I got within range, I jumped to the tracks. Every imaginable type of refuse lay beneath my feet. Keeping my eyes peeled for an outlet to the street, I ran down the canyon of debris, sidestepping bottles, cans, clothes, rotted tires, trying to ignore the stench. It was hard to believe these tracks were still used.
The rain was steady but not hard. At the first clearing, I clambered up the embankment, laying in the wet grass like a wild animal, scanning the street for cops. My lungs were pasted to my ribs, and I was wheezing like a 1960 Thunderbird on a hot summer day.
Putting on my shirt, I ducked under the perimeter fence separating the tracks from the houses and stepped onto the street. I looked up at the street signs to see where I was. East Seventh Street and Avenue H. My car was six or seven blocks east. Drenched, I walked briskly along Avenue H toward Rugby Road. My palms were slick with dirt and blood. I dried them on the side of my pants.
I reached Coney Island Avenue and crossed the street, walking under the arched canopy of trees that lined the street to Westminster Road. I got no farther. There was a line of police cruisers, two emergency service units and five unmarked cars down the next block.
Quickly, I walked back toward Coney Island Avenue, trying to think of what to do. I was concerned about Milo. In my haste I had forgotten my cell phone. There was a subway station nearby on Newkirk, and I headed that way.
I got some change and called Milo from the train station. He didn’t pick up. I assumed the police were still questioning him or had taken him away.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I was sitting hunched over on a Manhattan-bound Q train, my head resting heavily in my hands. The exertion on an empty stomach and the realization that I was a hunted man had drained all my energy. The adrenaline I’d used to escape had dissipated, and my head now felt as if it’d gotten in the way of a Mark McGuire home-run swing.
The train gradually began to fill up. I had lost count of the stations, but we were still in Brooklyn. A plan was beginning to formulate in my head. I would get the D train in Manhattan, heading for the Bronx. It seemed like a good place to begin, since that was where Noah lived.
Noise erupted around me with the suddenness of a car crash. Above the murmur of shuffling paper and subdued coughs, a shrill voice slammed my eardrums. I looked up to catch the offending mouth attached to a plump black woman with tiny fish eyes. The object of her wrath was a flat-faced, stocky man with slight blond hair and eyebrows thick as lawn grass.
When he replied, his thick European accent made it difficult to understand what he was saying, but Bessie Smith, cursing him in A-minor, seemed to have no such problem.
In the few moments that had gone by, they had fired enough invectives and racial epithets back and forth at each other to kill any peace treaty. But when the woman called the man a “Russian thief” and the man retorted in a high-pitched voice that she was an “ignorant monkey,” blows began.
I couldn’t tell who struck whom first, but the woman was getting the worst of the exchange. I got up and pushed my way past a scrawny white man and stepped between the two tongue-weary combatants. The woman was huffing as if she’d just run the New York Marathon. Froth swelling at the corners of the man’s wide mouth made me think of a horse after a race.
The man stared at me with wild green eyes. I could tell he wanted to push me out of the way to get at the woman, but he didn’t dare. I met his stony stare with a cold reverb of my own. We were locked in a stare-down, like a horn riffing to the bebop of the piano.
Other black women on the train applauded my action. In their eyes I was the black archetype that they could only dream about: a strong black man protecting a black woman from the wrath of the white monster. In my mind I was just trying to stop these two fools from prolonging my nightmare. If word filtered to the conductor that there was a fight on the train, the cops would be here sooner than I could spit.
Above my head they continued to shuttle words like monkey, Russian mobster, and cocksucker back and forth. Everybody, black and white, and Latino too, were begging them to shut up already.
We reached West Fourth and the black woman got off, but not before challenging the man to join her on the platform. He declined with a condescending snarl that she was too ugly to be seen with. The train pulled out of the station, and I moved away from the green-eyed troublemaker to stand at the far end of the train.
It’s startling how swiftly bad news travels, how easily stereotypes become archetypes. Even before some immigrants come to this country it seems as if they already know that before they can taste that elusive delicacy called the American Dream they must distance themselves from America’s nightmare: its niggers.
THE RAIN HAD abated slightly when I got off the D train at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Raindrops like soft kisses on my skin raised the hair on my neck. By the time I reached Noah’s apartment, the rain had melted away the memory of my train ride, and I was back to the ugly reality of my present dilemma.
21
NOAH PLANTIER WAS a man of uncanny self-control, a true friend, blessed with great patience and integrity. Once he was paid $200,000 to write a movie script about drug dealers and cops. When he turned over the script, the producer told him the black people sounded too intelligent and asked Noah to fix it so they sounded more street. Noah tore up the script and returned the money.
He’d spent many years as a cop before retiring to study theater and film, going on to get a Ph.D. During that time he began researching his roots. He discovered that his great-great-grandfather had come from Haiti and that somewhere in the process of assimilation the original family name of Plantier had been changed to Planter. Noah promptly contacted a lawyer and had his last name changed to Plantier.
It was at Noah’s suggestion that I started taking courses at City College when I left the NYPD. I took one of Noah’s playwriting courses and enjoyed it so much I considered enrolling full-time. Then Anais and I began our descent into marriage hell and I changed my mind.
Anais, with wide eyes always bright with optimism, was raised to expect riches from the world. And that is what I tried to give her until I got shot. The anger I felt never abated. It was as real as a cobra slithering up my back. I grew fat on its venom and poisoned our marriage with my daily tirades at the Mayor, the Commissioner and the press. Therapy didn’t help. It was like getting my dick sucked by a piranha. Not that I was ever really predisposed to the idea, but I tried. I told the doctor about the recurring bad dream I had about killing some member of my family in an accident and that some days I felt like picking up a gun and going down to One Police Plaza and taking everybody out. She wanted to put me on Zoloft. I refused to go back. Hell, everybody has bad dreams. That didn’t make me psychotic. Anais and I would argue about it for hours, and when we got tired of fighting, we would make love. It was a crazy marriage.
Anais did her best to brave the storm, but I refused to come in from the cold. Revenge was my goal; my marriage be damned. I was so upset that Detective Pagano got such little time, I
went out and got drunk the day he was sentenced. What else happened that night, I don’t remember. Anais was gone when I woke up the next morning. She’d left a cryptic note: Gone to be a movie star.
Shortly after that Noah separated me from my guns. I told him about a dream I had in which I’d shot myself accidentally in the head. He asked me if I’d ever thought about shooting myself. The answer was yes. After Anais left. He drove to my house that day and took my guns.
A month later I took off to find my father.
IWALKED THROUGH the rain to Noah’s co-op in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. After I rang the bell, he came to greet me at the entrance, and we walked side by side to his second-floor apartment. His casual greeting told me he had not yet heard the news.
Noah’s apartment was beautifully laid out and decorated. The man had taste, let me tell you. After unearthing roots in Haiti, Noah and his wife went one step further and made the pilgrimage to Africa that all progressive, educated middle-class blacks presume they have to make to be hip. And like all the others, had returned with the requisite treasures. The apartment was saturated with art: stunning African sculptures and masks of which Noah and his wife were rightly proud. The heads in green or shiny white stone from the Shoshona tribe of Zimbabwe were magnificent. Paintings on the wall reflected a wide selection of African-American art, from Beardon to Reid.
“Where’s Donna?” I asked when we got to the living room.
“Man, you got to be kidding me. You standing here dripping water on my expensive carpet and asking me about my wife with a straight face?” He began to laugh. “Get your black ass into the bathroom and dry yourself.”
That was my man Noah. His home was indeed his castle. And he would be the first to tell you the same. He’d moved from Harlem to the Bronx in his teens. When the redevelopment of Harlem began and whites started moving uptown, Noah flew into motion.
“Harlem is the cultural capital of black America,” he told me. “I was born there. And I ain’t letting white people come uptown and strip Harlem of its cultural identity. No way.”
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