The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  Unable to make bail, Jim Ed passed the weekend asking everyone in the lockup how much time he’d have to serve, how large a fine he’d have to pay. He figured he’d have to drop out of school for a year, maybe two or more if the judge came down hard.

  “No fucking fine,” said one of the guards escorting him to court Monday morning. Cuffed and chained, paraded like a caged gorilla in a circus parade, Jim Ed felt the humiliation of a slave being led to the trading block. “Your ass’s doing time,” the guard said, “telephone number time.”

  Sitting in a small interview room handcuffed to a radiator too hot to touch, Jim Ed saw his future melting away. A criminal record would freeze him out of computers and electronics where a government security clearance was as necessary as a college degree. He might as well go to television repair school, but what white woman would believe a nigger like him had been sent by Sears and open her door?

  A man preceded by the stink of a cigar and trailed by a white woman entered. “I’m Claudius J. Antenor, but people call me C. J. Ant. This here’s Maddie Devlin, law student extraordinaire.”

  Balding, his head a rounded ovoid like a watermelon, C. J. Ant dressed in shades of green–a lime green sports jacket with a white vest over a pastel green shirt, dark green slacks–and white accessories, tie, belt, shoes, vest pocket handkerchief. A cigar bobbed up and down in his mouth as if it had a life of its own. Maddie Devlin wore a loose fitting jumper that flattened her figure. She stood in the doorway, half inside, half outside, holding a brief-case in front of her breasts like a shield.

  “Why’d they chain me to this hot box?” Jim Ed asked.

  C. J. Ant knocked the cigar ash to the floor. The heat in the room magnified the cigar’s stink and Jim Ed tasted it with every breath. “No Boston jury will acquit you for beating up a white cop, no matter how justified.”

  “What I need you for then?” Jim Ed asked.

  “I’m going to build so much reversible error into your trial the conviction’s guaranteed to be reversed on appeal. Sooner or later, the DA will have bigger fish to fry and I’ll cut a deal, maybe time served before trial, maybe a fine and a walk away.” He turned to Maddie, still standing in the doorway. “Can he afford me?”

  “He’s paying his way through college, electrical engineering and computer science at Northeastern.”

  “I can get you a nice little plea-bargain for a thousand. Thirty days tops.”

  “Those trials you mentioned,” Jim Ed said.

  “Twenty-five hundred. Each.”

  “I don’t have that kind of scratch. Can you cut me a break on the plea-bargain?”

  “Nine hundred ’cause I like your kind with the brains to try and make something of themselves. Give me your phone number so I can arrange for someone to bring down my fee.” C. J. Ant pointed his cigar at Maddie. “She’s going to ask you some questions. She’s only a third year law student, but she’s better than ninety per cent of the lawyers you’ll see in court this morning.”

  “I didn’t hire no law student,” Jim Ed said.

  “We’re a package deal.” C. J. left, taking his cigar, leaving its odor.

  As Maddie questioned him, education, job history, priors, Jim Ed wondered if Gabe Tucker had been right. Johnson’s Great Society wasn’t working out so great.

  Later that morning, C. J. Ant returned, cigar smoke garlanding his head. “Your lucky day. Judge Wayne John Webster’s handling dispositions. He’s a general in the Marine reserves.”

  Maddie added, “Volunteer for a four-year hitch. He’ll drop all charges and seal your record. You can legally tell people you have no record when they ask.”

  “No record?” Jim Ed asked.

  “Like it never happened,” C. J. Ant replied.

  “Security clearance?”

  C. J. Ant shrugged. “Depends what level.”

  “Don’t sound like volunteering to me.”

  “You’re the client,” C. J. Ant said. “You want to reject my best advice, be my guest.”

  Jim Ed wondered how many cases C. J. Ant knocked off a day, how many blacks he smart-talked into going to war. Slavery in a different uniform. At a thousand a pop, his wallet must be fatter than cheap bacon was greasy. The cunt’s pocket-book, too.

  Maddie handled the disposition, emphasizing Jim Ed was coming to the defense of an elderly woman, that he misinterpreted the intentions of the police officer, conceding that he shouldn’t have lost his temper. “A perfect candidate for the Marines,” she concluded. Judge Webster agreed.

  Several days later, after a physical and a battery of tests administered by the Marines under the watchful eyes of Suffolk County prison guards, Jim Ed having taken the oath at the court-house before he was released from custody, he and Leroy stood by the plate glass window in one of the terminals at Logan Airport, watching planes land and take off while they waited for his flight to Parris Island.

  “Gabe Tucker had it right,” Leroy said.

  “If I was convicted,” Jim Ed said, “I’m out of electronics and computers ’cause I can’t get a security clearance with a record. With the charges dropped and a good behavior in the Marines, maybe it’s like it never happened.”

  “And the cop gets a medal. It’s not like you choosing ’tween steak and lobster. You fell for the ol’ okee-dokee.” Leroy watched the trains of baggage cars snaking around the airport tarmac. “Gideon tell you the meaning of Wallaca?”

  “He gave me a hang dog out of hell look and Hannah just turned away and sucked on her handkerchief.”

  Leroy leaned against the plate glass window, warming his backside with the air rising from the baseboard heater. “Gideon, he may be hiding from the law. Hannah’s fearing some emperor see our name in the paper ’cause of you.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Gideon would only make your leaving twice as sour as that buttermilk he drinks.” Leroy squatted over the radiator. The warm air felt good on his crotch.

  “When it’s your turn to sing,” Jim Ed said, “I want you singin’ a new song.”

  “Zuluz.”

  “Fuck them.”

  Leroy turned away as a line of passengers entered the terminal from an incoming flight, tanned and dressed for summer in January, shirts red and blue and bright with flowers. They carried string bags of grapefruit and oranges. Men and women both sported Woburn Lions Club baseball caps–a gang of old folks displaying their colors. A metallic voice sounding like it was from another world announced Jim Ed’s flight.

  Jim Ed hugged Leroy. “Don’t run with the Zuluz. You’re all the folks got now.”

  “They get you back in twelve months.”

  “Sixteen. Marines rotate out after thirteen months, plus three months of boot camp.” Jim Ed picked up his duffel bag, then walked down the boarding ramp toward the waiting plane, one of an army of blacks dressed in green, fighting yellows in the jungles of Vietnam for the red, white and blue. The rainbow dream.

  After Jim Ed’s departure, Gideon withdrew so deeply into the constants of his life that the shadow of his former self became a black hole. Five days a week, including two weekends out of three, he sagged into the driver’s seat of a Greyhound in the Boston terminal at sunrise, arrived in New York, where he wolfed down a hot dog and a warm orange soda while the bus was refueled, and left for the return trip with lunch still sloshing around his stomach, arriving home for a late supper he was too tired to eat. Ten hours a day, sometimes eleven or twelve depending on weather or traffic, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, he jockeyed for lane space with double-hitched tractor trailers and watched his outside mirrors for tiny sports cars that sneaked into his blind spot while passing on the right. Three months into Jim Ed’s tour of duty marked Gideon’s tenth year without an accident. The company gave him a certificate torn off a pad of certificates bought at an office supply store, as well as both Thanksgiving and Christmas off in the same year.

  Whenever Leroy approached him to talk about the family name the talk explo
ded into a tirade.

  “You being tricked by the two-headed lady saying one thing out one mouth, opposite out the other,” Gideon liked to say. Half way through Jim Ed’s fourth month in Vietnam, Gideon started talking in circles about two-headed ladies, double-sighted persons and practitional doctors. He dismissed Hannah’s prayers for Jim Ed’s safe return as conjuring. He demonized the preachers who gave her solace as root doctors. When she persisted, he dragged her to a shield man to break the “spell.” For one hundred dollars cash money, the shield man mixed a potion of disturbment powder, confusion oil, poke root, and blood plant leaves, poured it into the cupped palm of a talking hand, and watched for the quivers as Gideon asked it questions. The talking hand didn’t even tremble. As a last resort, Gideon hung a frizzly chicken from the jamb of the kitchen doorway to ward off demons and evil spirits. The chicken hung by the neck, head bent as if it had been lynched, snatching appetites from everyone who sat at the kitchen table.

  Still, Hannah persevered, rejecting Gideon’s voodoo, surviving on prayers. As time passed, Leroy came to envy his mother’s strength, so much so he approached her with his questions; but, as in the past, she responded only with silence or evasion. Angry, frustrated, Leroy turned to the Zuluz to replace the family that departed with Jim Ed to Vietnam. When he wrote Jim Ed about his attempt to join the gang, Jim Ed wrote Luke Shaw, head nigga in charge of the Zuluz, that if the gang made Leroy a member, when he, Jim Ed, returned to Boston from Nam he would waste every fucking gang member starting with Shaw himself. Shaw so feared Jim Ed that one letter from the other side of the world was enough to blackball Leroy. In a phone call home while on leave in Saigon, Jim Ed cussed Leroy out, putting down the Zuluz for trashing its ’hood rather than helping its own. Leroy trashed his brother for fighting a war on the other side of the world instead of being home to stand up to Billy Sunshine when Billy Sunshine teased him Wallaca was a slave name. “That’s the name stitched on my uniform,” Jim Ed said to Leroy. “It’s all the name I’m ever going to have.”

  As the war escalated, the hate and resentment festering inside Leroy convinced him if he didn’t join the Zuluz, he would end up a loner without family, without gang colors to protect him, a loner whose life wasn’t worth dried dog shit. Being Chinatowned only offered so much protection. When he approached the Zuluz a few months later, Luke Shaw offered a deal: “Take down Billy Sunshine and maybe we let you hang.”

  Leroy had never thought about killing before. Jim Ed killed people every day, not for his country which didn’t need defending from the Viet Cong, but to stay alive. Self-defense. Killing Billy Sunshine the same. The more he thought about it, the more he realized real life was no different than the comic book. It was his choice whether he killed or be killed. America was as much a battlefield as some jungle halfway around the world, Boston’s streets as much a battlefield as the flat, dusty plain outside an ancient walled city.

  “Want me to nine him?” Leroy asked Luke Shaw.

  “Coward’s way. Hand to hand.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Spider, Luke’s warlord said, “maybe you and him you’ll waste each other.”

  “Better double check your fortune cookie,” Leroy replied.

  Later that week on the way to shoot hoops, Leroy detoured to the candy store where Billy Sunshine hung out.

  “Hey, slave boy,” Billy said.

  “I hear your momma spreads her jelly over white bread by the loaf.” Leroy stood with his weight toward the front of his feet, trying to look nonchalant so Billy wouldn’t see how his legs and feet were positioned to spring forward or dodge to the side. Billy, he figured, would lead with his right, being right-handed. He eyed that hand while he let Billy squeeze his shoulder. He faked a cry of pain, until Billy, laughing, relaxed, then rammed the heel of his palm into the bottom of Billy’s nose, pushing his head back against the iron grating that covered the window in the door. When Billy straightened out, Leroy gave him a shot to the groin that shoved his balls into his guts, followed by a stiff arm to the eye.

  “Man,” Leroy said, “you bleeding like your momma’s pussy after she comes home from work.” Blood gushed from Billy’s nose and leaked from his eye socket. When he reached for the gun he kept in the holster in the small of his back, Leroy straight-armed him again, angling upwards this time, shoving the bone in his nose back into his brain. Billy Sunshine died before his head hit the cement.

  Time slowed to a crawl as Leroy waited for Jim Ed’s letter and Luke Shaw’s invite to join the Zuluz. Somehow, Jim Ed always found out what was going down back home and would write Leroy letters preaching like a Sunday sermonizer about schooling, about not doing drugs, about not running with the Zuluz, sermons that didn’t mean shit because Jim Ed, with all his schooling, with all his hard working, was still LBJ’s slave boy in Vietnam. As much as he hated those sermons, Leroy welcomed them because letters were now his only connection to his brother. Time passed without word and Leroy worried Jim Ed was dead or missing or a prisoner of war. On the streets, the Zuluz avoided him and the talk was that Luke Shaw feared him the way elderly white folk feared niggas. People who never talked to him before warned him about being jumped. Still, he worried too much about Jim Ed to gangsta limp ’round the ’hood like the new HNIC. He had the sugar from knowing people feared him, but the novelty wore off faster than a two-minute brotha. He’d trade it for having Jim Ed home.

  Weeks after Billy Sunshine’s murder, Jim Ed called from Saigon sounding like he was no farther away than the phone booth at the candy store. “Leroy,” he said, “you so dumb I wonder if you dump rainwater out your boots ’fore you put ’em on.”

  “Billy Sunshine don’t got the tongue to put me down no more. People step aside when I stroll the street.” Leroy tried to visualize his brother. Was Jim Ed in some bar surrounded by gook pussy looking to make a day’s pay? Wherever he was, he was no longer the man in dress blues in the photograph on the mantle.

  “When I done whipping you,” Jim Ed said, “people be thinking Sonny Liston looked good and Joe Louis looked bad. Know what I’m saying?”

  Leroy started to respond, but static swallowed his words and the overseas operator disconnected them.

  On March 4, 1973, Gideon and Hannah received the telegram: ‘President Nixon shares your grief at the loss of a son, but is comforted in knowing he died answering his country’s call.’ Later that month, the Marines confessed they could not identify a body as being Jim Ed’s, but, nonetheless, promised a coffin, a flag, and a funeral with full military honors. In mid-April, two weeks after Leroy’s fourteenth birthday, Hannah and Gideon buried an empty coffin, dull gray like a sardine tin, dented in one corner where it was dropped in transit. Leroy mourned Jim Ed and the way their brotherhood ended in static, static on a telephone line, static between their hearts. With Jim Ed dead, Gideon drifting around the house like he was under a spell, Hannah serving detention in the amen corner, Leroy figured it was time to make the Zuluz his own.

  On a Friday night in late April when the first south wind of the season blanketed the ’hood with a summery heat, Leroy crashed a gang-only party at the Zuluz crib. As soon as Luke’s posse seen him, someone pulled the jukebox plug and flipped on the overhead lights. On Luke’s signal, the Zuluz retreated to the side, leaving Luke and his girl, Becky Hawkins, in the center of the room. “By the Zuluz code,” Leroy said to Luke Shaw, “I challenge you here and now, winner be HNIC, loser be dead.”

  “Your ass frontin’ your mouth,” Luke said, “the way you jaw jackin’ like a house nigga praising his master.”

  “You as good at handfighting as lipfighting?” Leroy asked.

  “You sure wanting to wear our colors bad.”

  “Fuck your colors. You soon be wearing mine.”

  “We Zuluz now and we Zuluz forever.”

  “And your momma’s pussy backs up worse than the Southeast Expressway at Friday rush hour. I hear she sells monthly passes to commuters.”

  Luke told Becky to join the rest of the
gang and dispatched Spider, his warlord, to lock the outside door. “Where you want the body shipped, boy?”

  “Fire up the jukebox. Dancing with Mr. D., dedicated to the late, great Luke Shaw.”

  “You talk a good fight, but I ain’t Billy Sunshine.”

  “You soon be setting all the same.”

  The strident vocal filled the room as Luke and Leroy circled each other. When Luke plunged forward, Leroy grabbed his wrist and flipped him to the floor. They circled again. Leroy’s leg shot out, catching Luke flush on the nose and knocking him off his feet.

  Luke licked blood off his lips. “I’m gonna close my hands ‘round your neck tighter than white on rice.” He rocked from side to side. When Luke lunged, Leroy yanked his arm and snapped his elbow. Luke backed away, the blood from his nose tracking his retreat on the floor. Leroy stalked him. As they moved, Luke reached for his blade, custom made with a cutting edge sharpened and ground to a fine point so he could either slice or plunge. Thrown hard enough, it would stick in a bone like an arrow shot from a crossbow. “Suck on this, slave boy!”

  “Your blade’s made of Jell-O same as your cock.”

  Luke swung the knife in wide arcs. Leroy figured Luke wouldn’t risk throwing it, wouldn’t risk losing the one thing that gave him half a chance. Leroy also figured Luke had to get in tight enough to gut him. Leroy saw fear in Luke’s eyes as Luke maneuvered to get close, but with each step forward, Leroy stepped back, avoiding the corners, daring Luke to attack. They moved in lockstep until Luke charged. Leroy slide-stepped, then broke Luke’s cheekbone with one punch. The knife fell, vibrating as it stuck in the floor. Luke looked to the Zuluz for help.

  “You eating at a table for one,” Spider said, holding back the gang.

  Luke edged toward the stairs, his right arm hanging down like an empty sleeve. Leroy pulled the knife from the floor, measured his target, and flung it. End over end it whirred until it entered Luke’s neck and lodged in his windpipe, killing him so fast his soul didn’t have time to escape. The beat of his body tumbling down the stairs became part of the beat of the music until, with a final thud like a final drum roll, Luke came to rest against the locked door. The room was as silent as a bitch who cock-teased and got raped.