Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  Sometimes, Bob forgot they were in Mississippi. Sometimes, looking at the bloated bellies of children too listless even to bat away the flies that crawled brazenly upon their faces, he felt like he was doing missionary work in Ethiopia. It took an effort of will to remember that this was America, too.

  Janeka’s little committee numbered five in all. Besides herself and Bob, there was a white girl, Rebecca Spivey, and two black guys, Hank Cates and Parker Ross. Janeka tried sending her teams out in different configurations, hoping to tap some personal or racial chemistry that might induce these reluctant tenant farmers to do more than listen.

  She went into the field herself with Hank and Parker and Rebecca. She sent Bob out with Rebecca. She sent Hank and Parker out together. She never, of course, sent either of the two black guys out with the white girl. Not that there was any reason to believe doing so would have made a difference. Nothing else had. No matter the racial or gender configuration of the teams that showed up at their doors, the tenant farmers were apt to do the same thing: listen politely and then say, “Well, you let me study on that for awhile.”

  Janeka fumed. “It’s as if these people have been exploited for so long it’s become habit to them,” she told Bob once as they were sitting on The Hill watching clouds roll by. “It’s as if it’s become second nature.”

  “Maybe there aren’t enough of us,” said Bob. “Maybe it’s going to take a larger operation or a more concrete program like with Freedom Summer in ’64. They had—what? Dozens of people? Hundreds of people, maybe? We have five.”

  This brought a rueful smile from Janeka. “We be small, but we be mighty,” she said.

  Bob laughed. “Aye, Captain. That we be.”

  It was a good moment, a moment that bonded them in shared frustration and laughter. Those moments came less frequently now than they once had.

  The truth—and Bob didn’t dare acknowledge this, even in the privacy of his own thoughts—was that there was something fragile in their relationship in that early part of 1968. It was like a broken plate that has been glued back together and looks more or less the same as it always did, but will always be just a little weaker at the point of the break.

  Yes, they still laughed together. Yes, they still held hands as they walked across campus. Yes, they still loved.

  And yet…what had been easy and unforced once upon a time now sometimes felt—sometimes felt—mannered, formal, and on guard, particularly when they were talking about race. Bob had never before felt that he was “white” in those discussions. He had felt only that he was who he had always been: himself.

  Now he sometimes caught himself being careful, caught himself weighing his words for blind spots and hidden traps. He caught himself being on guard. He did not like the feeling.

  And as Bob had never felt he was “white,” he had also never felt Janeka was “black.”

  He knew better than to say any of this out loud. He knew enough to realize it would insult her, though for the life of him, he could not say why. But at any rate, the point was moot; these days, it sometimes seemed to him that she went out of her way to force him to think of her as black, as if she would not allow him to think of her in any other terms. He had the sense sometimes that she was testing him.

  At the end of January came the stunning news out of Vietnam. The Cong had broken a holiday ceasefire—it was the lunar New Year, what the Vietnamese called Tet—to launch a major offensive strike against more than 100 cities across the war-torn nation, battles raging in Hue, in Khe-Sahn and even in Saigon, on the grounds of the US embassy.

  There was a protest on their campus, as there were on campuses around the country, demonstrators carrying signs denouncing the war, denouncing the president, and demanding the withdrawal of US troops. Janeka was one of the speakers, and instead of just condemning the unjust and unnecessary war, she spent most of her allotted ten minutes complaining that black soldiers were fighting and dying in disproportionate numbers.

  Bob understood that this disparity was happening and that it was wrong. But as far as he was concerned, it was secondary to the overall issue—the wrongness of the war itself. He wondered why Janeka could not see this. But he kept that question to himself.

  In February, during one of the twice-a-month meetings of SOUL, Janeka floated a resolution. She wanted to invite Stokely Carmichael to speak on campus. The meeting erupted.

  Someone wanted to know if the fiery black power advocate was even a Christian.

  Someone else asked if they shouldn’t invite Martin Luther King if they were going to invite a black leader.

  Even members of her own committee sharply challenged the resolution.

  “When he was chairman of SNCC, didn’t they vote out all the white people?” demanded Rebecca Spivey. “What’s the difference between that kind of discrimination and the discrimination we’re all fighting against?”

  “And this whole black power thing,” said Parker Ross, “just seems to me like a cover for a philosophy of Negro supremacy. I don’t believe in Negro supremacy any more than I believe in white supremacy.”

  This brought a snort of derision from Hank Cates. “Stop Tomming, Park. It’s not about Negro supremacy and you know it. It’s about black self-sufficiency, about us getting our own instead of always having to crawl to them.”

  “I don’t think there’s any need for name calling,” said Parker, stiffly.

  Rebecca said, “Am I a ‘them’ now, Hank? Is that what I am to you?”

  Bob caught Janeka staring at him then across the room. It was a look that implored him. But to do what? Did she really think he would stand up and say, “Yes, by all means, let’s invite Stokely Carmichael, who preaches black supremacy and violence, to the campus of our Christian university?” Did she really think that might happen?

  He loved her. God, he loved her. And he believed she loved him, too.

  But it was in moments like this that he felt the distance between them, and he had no idea if the love they felt would be enough to bridge it. So he did the only thing he could. He turned toward the imploring look and hunched his shoulders in a helpless shrug. And he wondered if she knew that the impotence and inability it expressed were not just about this moment in this meeting, but about many things far beyond.

  “Bob Carson? Is that you? Lord have mercy.”

  The voice came to him over the muted rumble of restaurant chatter. Memory broke. Bob blinked, startled. And just like that, 40 years had passed and he was looking up into the face of Janeka Lattimore.

  fourteen

  Doug Perry was out of breath and promising himself he would never again eat bear claws for breakfast as he trotted across the parking garage and up to the street.

  The ambulance was still there. Amy was sitting upright on a gurney in back, one paramedic taking her blood pressure, another writing something on a clipboard. She looked ghastly. One side of her face was crooked and stained by a garish bruise the color of sunset. Her glasses were askew. She was holding a cold pack to her head.

  Doug was in shirtsleeves and his armpits were dark with sweat from the unaccustomed exertion. At the sight of Amy, he shouldered his way through the crowd of tourists, shoppers, and office workers who had stopped to see the spectacle. Amy’s eyes were foggy. They sharpened all at once when she saw him.

  “Yag,” she said, and Doug guessed that this was supposed to be his name.

  “Amy?” he said. “What the hell?”

  “Yag, e ah le ma fuh efo…” It was no use. Her jaw would not properly close and gibberish was the only language she could speak. Consternation pinched her features. But Amy was not to be defeated. She snatched the pen from the paramedic with the clipboard and mimed writing until, with a grimace of exasperation, he handed her a piece of paper.

  Amy wrote on it with great concentration, wincing occasionally from pain. When she was done, she handed the paper to Doug, returned the paramedic’s pen, and sagged a little as if fatigued. Doug studied the paper. In the margins of
a memo on the cleaning and maintaining of emergency rigs, she had written in a spidery hand: This wasn’t random! The guy who was here before, he hit me. He took the disk back. Ask Jalil. He saw.

  Jalil. She had to mean the big, black kid who worked day security. That was his name, wasn’t it? Something Arabic, at least. But what was this about a disk? And a guy from before? Doug looked the questions at her. She nodded emphatically, brushed at the air as if shooing him off.

  He turned to go, thought better of it and turned back. “I’ll meet you at the hospital,” he said. “I’ll call your husband. Where’s he work?”

  “E ou a houn,” she said.

  It took him a moment. “Out of town?” he finally guessed.

  She nodded. Then the pain winched her eyes shut.

  Again, Doug turned to go. Again, he thought better of it. She had kids, didn’t she? He wasn’t sure, but he seemed to remember two little ones capering after her last year at the holiday gathering that had once, in a less politically correct era, been called a Christmas party.

  “What about your kids? You want us to see to them?”

  “Wih a si-ah.”

  Doug whispered the strange sounds in his mind until he understood them. “With your sister. Okay, got it. I’m sure we have her number. We’ll call and let her know.”

  The paramedic with the clipboard interrupted. “Okay, mister, we got to roll.”

  “Where are you taking her?”

  “Mercy,” said the paramedic as they pushed the gurney into the wagon. Doug heard it lock into place.

  One paramedic went around to the driver’s side door. The second climbed in back with Amy. He closed one side of the rig and was reaching for the other when Amy called out.

  “Ock ou Ya-il!” Doug heard her command.

  Talk to Jalil.

  “I will,” he called. But the door had already slammed shut.

  Siren howling, the ambulance pulled away from the curb and out into Michigan Avenue traffic. Doug wheeled around to head back into the building and ran into a phalanx of Post employees pouring out through the glass doors of the elevator lobby. Like him, they had heard something was going on right at the entrance to their garage. Denis was leading the way.

  “What’s this I hear about a mugging?” he said. “Is it true?”

  Doug didn’t answer immediately. He lifted both hands, index fingers wagging toward the elevators. “Everybody back to work,” he ordered. “There’s nothing to see out there. Amy Landingham was jumped here in the garage, but she’s going to be fine. The paramedics have already taken her away.”

  A few of them—the younger ones, mostly—stopped and went back, their questions answered. The rest paused, listened, then walked past him to see for themselves. Doug shook his head. The same thing that made some people good reporters made them absolutely lousy at following directions.

  “Amy was mugged?” Lassiter was at his elbow.

  Doug shook his head. “No,” he said. “She was attacked, not mugged. She—”

  And then he stopped, stunned by what he saw. Lassiter stared at him, first quizzical, then impatient. “Yeah?” he said. “Go on.”

  “Gun,” said Doug.

  “What?”

  Doug pointed to where a black Luger lay on the concrete next to the right, rear tire of somebody’s car. “Gun,” he said again.

  Lassiter looked where Denis was pointing. He started when he saw it. “Holy shit,” he said. “You figure the guy who attacked Amy dropped it?”

  Doug found himself wondering—and not for the first time—how it was that this guy was his boss instead of the other way around. “That’d be my guess,” he said. “Yeah.

  A low whistle. “Holy hell. What should we do?”

  “Call Mendoza. Have him seal the garage and put a couple of his guys down here to make sure nobody touches the gun. Get a photographer down to get pictures. Call the cops.”

  It struck Doug how bizarre it was that he was giving orders to Lassiter this way. But Lassiter didn’t seem to notice. His nod was thoughtful. “Yeah,” he said, “those sound like good ideas. I’ll call Mendoza.”

  “Good,” said Doug, moving away. “You’ll want to keep an eye on things til his men get here to make sure nobody messes with that thing. This is a crime scene now.” Several of the reporters were now staring at the gun and taking pictures with their smartphones.

  “Where are you going?” asked Lassiter.

  “Going to talk to the kid in the lobby.”

  “What for?”

  Doug stopped. “Amy said it wasn’t just a random mugging. She knew the guy—or at least she’d seen him before. He came through here earlier today. She told me the kid in the lobby saw him, too.”

  Lassiter stared at him for a beat, taking all this in. Then he said, “First Malcolm disappears, now this. What the hell is going on here?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” Doug strode off through a second, late-arriving group of reporters, reached the elevator, and punched the button for the main lobby. Behind him, he heard Lassiter telling people to step back.

  Doug couldn’t make sense of it. Someone coming after Malcolm at least made some kind of sense. He wrote an opinion column, after all. Opinions piss people off. But Amy? She was a good-natured young reporter who, as far as he knew, didn’t have an enemy in the world—unless you counted that married alderman who used campaign funds to take his boyfriend on a ski trip to Aspen. When he wouldn’t give her an interview, Amy had ambushed him in a public meeting and questioned him so relentlessly he broke down crying at the podium.

  Other than that, who would wish ill on Amy Landingham? Heck, who, beyond the most assiduous newspaper junkies, even knew her name?

  Could it be a coincidence, her getting attacked the same day Malcolm went missing?

  It could be, he supposed, but the idea just didn’t feel right. No, somehow, all of this was connected. He just didn’t know how. Doug felt as if he were trying to solve some bizarre puzzle to which he held a few random pieces, but had no idea what the finished product was supposed to be.

  The elevator opened on the lobby. The security guy was just sending off an angry subscriber with a replacement copy of that day’s paper. He saw Doug coming. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I heard them say somebody got mugged down in the garage?”

  Instead of answering, Doug nodded toward the retreating customer. “Been like that all day?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “All day. So what’s happening in the garage?”

  “You’re Jalil, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Doug had folded and creased the memo from the paramedics. Now he unfolded it and placed it beneath the big man’s eyes. “A few minutes ago, some guy coldcocked Amy Landingham down in the garage.”

  Jalil looked up from the paper, eyes rounded by distress. “Amy? But she ain’t big as a minute. Was she hurt?”

  “They’re taking her to the hospital,” said Doug, “but I think she’ll be all right. She looked all right, at least, more or less.”

  “So what’s this I’m lookin’ at? Some kind of paramedics memo?”

  “No. Amy wrote that note out for me, the one right there in the margins. She said you would know what it means.”

  Jalil read. Then the line of his jaw stiffened and something pulsed in his temple. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  Jalil looked up. “Yeah,” he said. “I know who she’s talking about. Came here asking to see Malcolm Toussaint’s editor. Said he had something important for him. Some computer disk. I knew there was something hinky about that guy. I knew it.”

  “He was angry about Toussaint’s column?”

  Jalil shook his head. “Actually, he didn’t even mention it. I mean, we’ve had a lot of folks through these doors today so pissed off they could spit. But that didn’t seem to be where he was comin’ from. He just kept demanding to see Toussaint’s boss, and when I explained to him that Mr. Toussaint didn’t work he
re anymore and his boss didn’t, either, that seemed to throw him.”

  “When was this?”

  “Couple hours ago, I guess.”

  “Can you show me?”

  He nodded and beckoned Doug to join him behind the security desk. There he had a console with five screens, one showing the parking elevator downstairs, one showing the front of the building, one showing the newsroom upstairs, two watching the lobby from different angles. None, Doug noted, with a view of the garage where Amy was assaulted. “We need more cameras,” he told Jalil.

  Jalil nodded. “Yeah,” he said, tapping the keyboard. “I told Mendoza the same thing. He said no way that happens. Budget cutbacks.”

  There was weariness in Doug’s sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Lot of that in this business lately. You want my advice, kid?”

  When Jalil glanced up, Doug told him, “Keep your eyes open for another job opportunity. Grab it if it comes.”

  The younger man grinned. “All due respect, sir, I ain’t dependin’ on this place to take care of me forever. I’m in school. Got one more semester til I get my degree in video game design.”

  “Video game design? That’s a thing now? You can get a degree in that?”

  “Oh, hell yeah,” said Jalil, still grinning. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m looking to start the next Rockstar Games.”

  Doug did not know what that was. He felt old.

  As he spoke, Jalil was fast-forwarding through images from a little more than two hours ago, a procession of people who darted up to the desk, spoke rapidly, gestured broadly, darted away. All at once, Jalil slowed the playback. “There he is,” he said.

  Doug fumbled for the glasses he kept in his shirt pocket and leaned forward. He saw a thin man in his forties with nervous eyes and a bizarre hairstyle, buzz-cut on one side, thick on the other, chopped off just above the ear “He ought to stab his barber with his own scissors,” muttered Doug.