The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  He went back to the den and tried to read. The words blurred and he turned on the TV to fill the room with noise.

  Face it, Luria had said to him. Don’t hide from it. We’re not criminals, we’re soldiers. Heroes. Like the Haganah, the Irgun. They attack us, we fight. They kill us, we kill them. Don’t try to forget. Remember it like you would a battle. Victory.

  A football game was on, the crowd yelled, and suddenly he heard Willa’s scream. They were in the foyer, trying to get to the back stairs. To the big boy’s room, because it was supposed to be him. Only him. But Dworkin knocked over the poster or whatever it was, and she heard it and came out on the landing. They froze, she didn’t see them, and she went back. Levy thought it was all right, but she came out again and they couldn’t move. Then she came down the stairs with her robe floating around her. She crossed the foyer and he thought, if she just picked the thing up and went back, there was a chance; but she was heading for the light switch and he wanted to shout at her to stop. The light came on and she turned, and screamed so hard her head banged the wall. Levy’s throat ached and he shut his eyes. The floor shook and he waited to hear her body fall.

  But he heard glass break and he opened his eyes. The younger one had heard the scream and come to help his mother. He tore a slat off the poster and, eyes wide with terror, he was swinging it like a sword. It was too big for him. He smashed the wall clock with it and the crystal chandelier. Glass fell on them. It covered the floor and the boy stepped in it. It slashed his feet and he slipped in his own blood. The slat flew out of his hands and his body hit the side of the door with a crack. Then it fell and rolled while Willa screamed and screamed. It stopped face up and Willa stopped screaming. But her mouth stayed open to the end, which took longer.

  It was quiet then except for glass shards still falling. The mother was dead, the young boy, too, and the one they’d come for was still alive. Luria and Dworkin were in the shadows. He couldn’t see their faces but he heard Dworkin panting, like he’d been running. Then Luria hissed, “There!”

  The big boy was at the top of his stairs in his underwear. His arms and legs were long and skinny, his hands and feet were too big for them. Levy sobbed. If the boy ran back he had a chance; he could get out a bedroom window, shinny down a pipe, trellis, anything. Run away, hide in the woods. But the boy saw the broken door, the fog and path outside, and he ran for it. Levy rocked against the wall. The boy was so fast, so agile, Levy thought he’d make it. But his bare feet skidded in his brother’s blood. He fell.

  The football crowd screamed, and Levy turned off the set with shaking fingers. His face was reflected in the blank screen, soft and leprous looking. What battle? he asked his reflection. You killed a mother and little boy. He heard Luria again: How many mothers and little boys died around us? A thousand, a million . . .

  He heard another car pull into the street and he ran to the window, but the car kept going and he was suddenly sure that Rachel was never coming back. He raced up the stairs to her room and pulled open her closet door. Her slacks, blouses, skirts hung undisturbed. He opened her dresser drawers. Everything was intact there, too.

  Rachel passed Ronkonkoma. The road was empty, the houses were dark. Leah slept in her car seat and Rachel was alone.

  At first Hawkins didn’t believe she was going back. When he saw that she was, he started arguing. She didn’t even hear what he said and she went on packing Leah’s food and the Pampers in the tote bag. He grabbed her arm and she stopped moving. She was so tired, she longed to lie down somewhere. Even the floor would do. She closed her eyes and swayed slightly and he put his arms around her. She leaned against him and imagined making love to him on the floor next to the coffee table with her daughter watching gravely from the couch.

  His arms tightened around her. “You can’t go back there,” he whispered to her.

  “I have to,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She eased herself away from him. “Because he’s an old man and I can’t leave him alone there,” she said wearily. “Because they stole his food, his shoe, and he walked barefoot with splinters in his feet.” She looked at him. “What if he’s worried sick about us? What if he can’t sleep?”

  Hawkins didn’t say anything and she scooped Leah up in one arm and slung the tote bag over her shoulder. She was almost to the door when he said, “Rachel, they could kill you.”

  She faced him. “Jacob wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Yesterday you’d’ve said he wouldn’t hurt your friend.”

  When he said that she got frightened for the first time. She almost ran down the path from the house to the van. He called her, but she didn’t stop. She drove to the end of the street, pulled up, and looked back. He was standing in the open door. He was so big his head almost touched the top and his shape blocked most of the light. The houses on the block were lighted up, the street looked friendly, and she saw shadows move behind the windows. The service road and the ramp to the Expressway were dark and empty. Her hands started to sweat and she wanted to go back to Hawkins.

  Everything frightened her mother and her friends, strangers and being poor most of all. They thought she was crazy to marry Adam, who was broke, and move to Minnesota away from everyone. They said anything could happen to her out there, surrounded by strangers. But she went.

  Other faculty wives were scared of the Quetico-­Superior. They told her there were wolves and bears in the woods and she was crazy to go out there alone with Adam and nothing but a twenty-­two she barely knew how to use. But she went. And the first night, after Adam fell asleep, she sat next to the dying campfire and heard something rustle in the brush, something big, she thought. She wanted to wake him up and get out of there, back to town. But she made herself stay where she was, with the rifle across her knees, until the noises around her blended with the sound of the fire and the wind on the lake and in the trees, until it was a normal, natural sound that didn’t frighten her anymore. She was never scared of the woods after that.

  She was scared now but she kept the car at a steady sixty, heading for Laurel. She thought of the people who get flooded out by some river and go back to live on its banks. Reporters stuck mikes in their faces and asked them why they did it. The riverbank was home, they’d answer. They lived there. Rachel heard contempt in their voices. For the reporter who asked a coward’s question. For the scared people he asked the question for. She heard defiance too—they weren’t going to let any river tell them where to live.

  Headlights came up fast behind her. It was a truck keeping a schedule and he pulled out and passed her going seventy. She was glad for the company and she didn’t want to lose him, but she made herself keep to sixty and the truck’s taillights pulled away and disappeared up the road.

  It was after ten when she got to Sutter Lane. The street was empty and her house was dark. She pulled into the driveway and turned off the motor. Leah woke up and Rachel lifted her out of her seat onto the lawn. The house looked deserted, then the door opened and Levy came running out to them. He was in his shirt-­sleeves, his hair was a mess, and he looked like he’d been crying. Leah squealed with delight when she saw him. She reached out for him and he picked her up, then put her down and threw his arms around Rachel. He kissed her cheeks and nose. He kissed her hair and hugged her so tightly she could barely breathe.

  “You came back,” he said.

  Suddenly she laughed and hugged him, too. This was home and she was glad to be back. She hugged him again and had trouble letting him go. “Of course I came back,” she said. “I live here.”

  Hawkins left his mother watching the Lawrence Welk show and followed Rachel’s route along the street and up onto the Expressway. He turned right at the interchange and headed for eastern Long Island. He reached Laurel by ten-­thirty, found Sutter Lane, and drove slowly until he saw the van in a driveway. He stopped across the street and looked at their house. It was medium-­size
d. Bigger than his. Two magnolia trees stood on either side of the door and they were just starting to show pink blossoms. The downstairs was lit and he knew if he walked around the back the kitchen would be, too. He watched the windows and wondered what they were doing behind them. Leah would be asleep and Rachel would have made Levy something to eat. A sandwich probably, since it was so late. Tuna fish, or sliced cold roast beef. Levy loved that, on black bread which he’d smear with a cut piece of garlic. They must be in the kitchen together. He was eating and she was making tea. All Hawkins had to do was get out of the car, ring the bell, and he’d see Levy at last. He stared at the house until he saw Jacob come into the front room; Hawkins strained to see his features, but he was too far away. A wind came up and blew the curtains and Levy crossed the room to shut the window. Hawkins slipped down in his seat; he heard the window close and after a moment he sat up again. The front lights were out, there was no porch light, and from the street the house was dark. The scene was peaceful again.

  Hawkins started his car and drove up the street until he reached number eighteen, the Garner house.

  TV cables had torn furrows in the lawn and reporters and bystanders had knocked stones off the front fence. There was a light on the first floor and another upstairs. The door was closed but looked crooked. One of the guards came over to Hawkins.

  “Please move on,” he said politely.

  Hawkins showed him his badge, got out, and stood at the entrance to the drive. The guards waited. Hawkins looked at the empty lit windows for a while. It had been a pretty house, top of the heap for a black man from Norwalk, Connecticut.

  “Is it empty now?” he asked. The cop nodded and Hawkins got out of his car and went up the path.

  “It’s still a mess in there,” the cop called. But Hawkins kept going. They’d shut the door but it swung open when he pushed it and he went inside. Most of the clay had been washed up by now, but there was still a faint familiar smell in the house. The chandelier was broken and slivers of glass shone in the corner of the foyer. He went into the living room, saw clay at the edge of the rug, and followed traces of it out onto the porch. Then he turned back, meaning to look in the dining room and even upstairs, but the clay smell seemed to grow stronger and he was getting quick images of the basement in Brooklyn. The smell made him gag and he went back to the foyer and out the door into the fresh air. The blond cop was waiting for him.

  “I told you it was a mess,” he said.

  “Where’s your chief?” Hawkins asked.

  They directed Hawkins back to their station, to the second-­floor offices in the Town Hall that they shared with the tax collector. The moon was bright and he could see the Sound from the chief’s window. The chief was tall and thin and he looked very tired.

  He’d been going since five that morning, he told Hawkins, since Golda called. The press had been there all day with minicams and mikes, and he couldn’t get over how cold-­blooded they were. “I mean, here’re the dead kids and their mother, and they just film away like it’s a dope bust on Forty-­second Street.” Then he showed Hawkins the color pictures they’d taken. Hawkins took deep breaths and the chief, who was watching him, took the pictures away.

  “Don’t look, what’s the sense.”

  Hawkins looked out of the window but he could still see the woman’s fuzzy slippers that had somehow stayed on her feet. Finally he raised his head. The other man’s eyes looked kind and worried. Hawkins smiled, “I’m okay. I need a favor from you.”

  The chief nodded.

  “Share what you get on this . . . anything at all.”

  “Why?”

  Hawkins said, “It’s an old case”—he thought of Relkin —“from the forties,” he said.

  “Real old. Some kind of vendetta thing?” the chief asked.

  “Yes,” Hawkins said, “but it’s a department matter. I can’t tell you any more.”

  “I don’t want to know any more,” the chief said.

  Hawkins drove through the town fighting the feeling he’d had when they found Benny Gonnona—that everything was cold, bad, and ugly. It didn’t go with the pretty square, the smooth park and small shut-­up shops. It especially didn’t go with the white church he saw across the square, its handsome facade half covered by a white silk banner that said Get Out the Word. He pulled up in front of the church, got out, and without thinking, he tried the door. It was open and he stepped inside. The chapel was half lit by New England hurricane lamps on the walls and the moon coming through the clear windows. The place was warm and dry; it smelled of beeswax with a little wood smoke in it. He sat in the smooth wood pew and thought that the Gallos couldn’t come in here; neither could anything that smelled of clay and left a trail of slime. He felt safe for a minute; his shoulders relaxed, and he realized that he hadn’t felt safe in years, since President Street or before . . . since they killed the bookie, or even before; since the afternoons he’d spent in the bookstore. He crossed his arms on the back of the pew in front of him and put his head down. He could sleep here, like he hadn’t slept for a long time. Dumb-­assed scared nigger, he thought, and he closed his eyes.

  When Hawkins went through the archway into the chapel, a signal light went on in Reverend Ryder’s office. Ryder was writing the eulogy for the Garners’ funeral. He’d missed dinner and now was late for bed. He knew he had to talk about the way they died. He didn’t know what to say and he turned away from his typewriter and noticed that the red light was on. A stray cat had triggered the light about three years ago, and five or six years before that a nine-­year-­old boy who’d run away from home. The deacons wanted him to lock the church at night but he pointed out that they were Congregational, not Catholic. There were no chalices, vestments, statues with gold leaf, or jeweled halos to steal. Ryder never thought that anyone would come here to steal anything. But when Ryder went into the chapel and saw the huge, hunched-­over black man, he thought that this had to happen sooner or later. The black man was standing up. He was enormous, and Ryder told himself that he should have prepared himself for this moment. He thought he should pray but couldn’t think of anything appropriate. Maybe he should sing, but the only song that came to mind was “Ebb Tide.” Ryder reached slowly for the light switch, but the man didn’t jump him or pull a knife. The light came on and Ryder saw that the man was handsome —sweet-­looking, he told his wife later—and he looked to be in trouble of some kind, but Ryder knew from the jacket, the sport shirt, the coat, but most of all from Hawkins’s face, that the trouble wasn’t criminal. Ryder wished, as he had before, that he was a Catholic surrounded with likenesses of Christ and His relatives. It would be easier than facing people in pain in this bare room.

  Hawkins was abrupt. “You heard what happened in Laurel?” he asked Ryder.

  Ryder nodded. “The Garners came to church here.”

  “I’m a police officer.” Hawkins showed his badge. It was too far for Ryder to see his number and photo, but Ryder nodded again. “The same thing happened a couple of years ago,” Hawkins said, “in Brooklyn.”

  “Was it on your beat?” Ryder asked.

  “I don’t have a beat. I’m an inspector. Inspector Hawkins.”

  “How do you do.” Ryder had never felt so foolish but he didn’t know what else to say. “I’m Ed Ryder . . .”

  “The point is, it happened,” Hawkins said. “Same way . . . and the same people were in both places.” Suddenly Hawkins’s voice shook. “I knew them,” he said. “They were my friends. . . .” Hawkins wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his coat.

  “Do you want to talk?” Ryder asked.

  Hawkins hesitated.

  “Is it privileged? Like talking to a priest?”

  “If you want.”

  Hawkins nodded and Ryder led him through the dark church into his office. The big man made the room look small and fussy. Ryder gave him tea, then sat across from him.

 
“Are you a Protestant?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” Hawkins said. “My grandmother was a Baptist,” Hawkins went on, “and my mother’s the last thing she reads about in Fate magazine.”

  “Such as?”

  “Born-­again Christian, Tribal Catholic, Hinayana Buddhist. Now she’s a follower of macumba . . . voodoo. Been voodoo for a few years, so maybe it stuck. Once a week she and Mrs. Duval and some other old ladies take the E train to Mrs. Williams’s house in South Ozone Park. They have tea and cut a chicken’s throat. Then they carry it, flapping and dripping blood, around the backyard while they jiggle and chant. Then they bury it.”

  Ryder didn’t say anything. After a while Hawkins looked up at him. “It’s just bullshit, isn’t it,” he said, “chickens, blood, wine, wafers”—he took a breath— “candles, shawls, fringes . . . all bullshit.” Then, without any other preamble, he told Ryder about Levy, Luria, and the rest. He told him about the murders in Brooklyn and Relkin’s story from the camp. When Hawkins finished, Ryder didn’t say anything for a moment.

  Then he asked, “You think they killed the Garners, like the guards in the camp?”

  “I know they killed them.”

  “But you don’t know how.”

  “No.”

  “Magic . . . Cabala . . .”

  “No . . . I’m a middle-­class black man. A cop. My father was a carpenter. I don’t believe that bullshit. Neither would he,” Hawkins said.

  Ryder looked at Hawkins for a minute. Then he said,

  “My father was a fisherman, out of Montauk. He went out every day but Sunday . . . thunder, lightning, snow . . . once even in a hurricane. I should have admired his gallantry, but he did it for money and he came back cold, exhausted, wretched. He left my mother alone all day and most nights. For money. My brothers thought he was a hero for his persistence. I thought that was bullshit and he was a greedy fool. He died in a storm. They never found his body and I went to seminary as a sort of protest against him. But I inherited his persistence and when I found the first shreds of feeling for this plain bit of church I’m part of, I held on to them, hold on to them still, like a dog with locked teeth. It’s not bullshit to me.” He looked at Hawkins. “I’m a religious man,” he said, “which means that at some level I believe in magic.”