I didn’t touch Deuce’s personal crusade. I let it be. I ignored the cuts and the bruises and the far-off look he got when the news recounted stereotypical news stories surrounding the topic of drug violence.
We remained chummy. I couldn’t not be friends with him. But I kept my suspicions to myself. Were I to find out he were strong-arming people to pay of old gambling debts, I’d have, well, I’d have done something.
It all came to a head one day when I was on the couch, watching TV with the old man.
Deuce took the remote and turned the channel.
“The hell you think you’re doing?” Mino demanded.
“You can watch reruns of Meet the Browns on the DVR,” Deuce said. “We got ‘em all recorded.”
Deuce was looking for the national news stations. Page up. Page up. Page down.
“You know I don’t know how to work that damned thing,” he replied.
“There he is,” Deuce said, turning up the volume and tossing the remote on the couch.
A short, douchey banker-type was on-screen, smiling with an ever present grin. A mask of smug knowledge. I own the world, and you’re lucky to get a piece of what I’m working with.
“That’s the fucking guy?”
“That’s him,” Deuce said.
“The guy who left the jersey?”
“Don’t know. If his money stream dries up, it’s unlikely he’ll keep chasing me down.”
I waggled my two missing fingers at him.
“That,” he said, “was an exception. Most guys who do what they do for money don’t take unnecessary chances. Your man had busted a screw loose.”
“Virtually busted mine loose, too.”
Outside, Uncle Mino had dropped heavily into a folding chair and was sipping a red concoction that looked vaguely like fruit punch but smelled like a frat party.
He smiled a lot when he talked, but he didn’t offer much by way of conversation. He picked his nose thoughtfully and discarded the findings into a nearby box shrub.
His eyes, though, screamed sadness. In the moments between moments, he was lost and broken in that way people who reach a certain age and level of loneliness are.
“They always find a way to fuck the black man,” he said. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, young buck. White folk got no scruples, when it comes to us. No offense.”
“None taken.”
Deuce seemed happy enough, even if his mission to hunt and kill his brother’s murderer wasn’t fulfilled. There was a lightness to his being which had been missing.
I deliberated on where that left us.
Were we done? Was he going to let this money buy him a new way of life? Did this erase the need to bring down his brother’s killer?
The other big question was: What had become of the Red-Eyed Stranger? Didn’t know. Didn’t care. Maybe Deuce foregoing despair had knocked the demon loose. Rainy day dream. Didn’t seem likely, but hope was all I had left. Empty wishes. Hopes. Fucking rabbit hole thoughts.
One day, Reginald showed up and insisted on a family outing for everyone. He was sweating. He looked bad, tired. Smelled worse.
Old whiskey and new tears. Something was wrong with him.
But he was insistent, and because Deuce was off in his own world, I kept my mouth shut.
Still, I watched him. He knew it. Kept looking at me from the corner of one leaking eye. The family didn’t think any different of it. Figured he was just being his normal, eccentric self. They thought it a good idea to get out of the house, like they had resided in a crypt for far too long.
“Rolson, you sure you don't want to step out with us?”
I was sure.
Reginald, in all the time he spent at the house, not a single time did he mention me going with them. In fact, he completely sidestepped the idea when a cousin I had vaguely spoken to brought it up. I thought I saw the corner of one side of his mouth twitch slightly when I declined the invitation.
“Why don’t you ask Deuce, though?” I responded.
He nodded. Glanced toward the back of the house. “I might just do that,” he said.
He smiled, but the subject got dropped. But he looked at me with increasing frequency, up to the moment he knew everybody was on board with getting out.
“Maybe next time,” I said.
“Next time, homie,” he replied, and the laughter he belched into the air stank of betrayal.
I’d been suspicious of him, but this was the first time I outright distrusted him.
It was difficult not to say something, to do something. I wandered into the living room and sat with Uncle Mino. The old man radiated cold comfort.
“Uncle M, we’re all going out,” she said. “Reginald—”
“I’m too goddamned old to go anywhere,” Uncle Mino said. “I’m going to sit my ass right here and watch SportsCenter.”
“Suit yourself,” Deuce’s mother said, adding under her breath, “You old bastard. Hope you sit on a spring.”
“Woman, you think I can be hurt by your insults, you’ve got another thing coming. I’ve been tied up, beaten, held down, and nearly killed. And that’s just my first marriage.”
“Mino, that is just…too much.”
“When you’ve led the life I have, you get the prerogative to talk any old way about any old subject you damn well please.”
“All right, all right. You’ve made your point,” Deuce’s mother said.
“Shee-it, I could do this all day. I’ve already divulged to our white house-guest over there my various run-ins with the law. Didn’t even faze him. That young man” — he wagged one finger at me — “has got some demons of his own.”
Deuce’s mom was in the kitchen, busy setting out a plate of leftovers for the old man. “I don’t imagine your imaginary tales of running from the cops manages to scare anybody off.”
“Imaginary, my ass. You young folks grew up in an age where you don’t even have to remember people like the Reverend—”
The clatter of a spoon smacking the kitchen counter. “Don’t you mention Martin Luther King to me, old man. I remember him just fine. I was a little girl, but I remember crying when he was killed. You, now, you was probably blacked out on cheap wine to tell the difference between Selma, Alabama and Velma from the Scooby-Doo cartoons.”
“I tell you what: I done forgot more about the Civil Rights Movement than you’ll ever know, niece of mine.”
“You’ve forgotten plenty,” she countered, “but there’s even more you never learned. Like how to shut your mouth when your ass gets out in front of it and stinks up everything.”
Reginald didn’t notice me, but I saw him kneading his hands together nervously. He moved from room-to-room, bouncing around like he was nuked up on caffeine.
“Unc,” he said to Mino, “you sure you don't want to head out with us?”
“Young buck, I ain’t got the time or the patience to be wasting going outside when I can stay right here and do nothing.”
Reg’s face belied a whole mess of anxiety. “Mino, I’m serious—”
“Nigga, get your ass out this house and stop bothering me. Dorothy, get this young ‘un out of here so I can watch the television in peace.”
Deuce’s mom did as he asked, Uncle Mino grumbled but mostly kept quiet after that.
He did get off one parting shot as the family ducked out of the door. “I’m going to sit here and tell my new friend here about the many varied ways I suffered under the thumb of his people. Y’all go on and mope around at some graveyard. I’ll be right here with Whitey.”
“Rolson.”
“Whatever.”
I sipped a beer and got horizontal on the couch while me and Mino watched repetitive coverage of college football on ESPN. He regaled me with Jacksonville from way back in the day. Turns out, the city, not overly known for civil rights struggles, actually had some important history tied to it.
He sipped his own drink and gave me the details on a riot people call “Ax Handle Saturday”:
“Some black folks tried to go and sit at a lunch counter with white people and ended up getting throttled for it. Still, we was proud somebody had the gall to go and demand some equal treatment.”
It happened fifty years ago, and still his voice went sideways on him when he recalled it. “I wasn’t there, mind you,” he said, “but I had friends, younger than me, go and put themselves in harm’s way. Me, I stood on the sidelines and tried to play it safe. I was already hiding out from the law and was afraid to peep my head out in those damned demonstrations.”
“But you were there?”
He smirked. “I was close enough. It was frustrating. People had me riled up, too, I reckon, but I couldn’t get arrested. Couldn’t stick my neck out. If that happened, if I got my black ass arrested, they would have sent me back up to the chain gang. Maybe strung me up. It was a vile time back then.”
His eyes glistened once or twice. But he escorted me through a world I found essentially foreign. The irony of Haydon Burns being the mayor of Jacksonville, a segregationist remaining in power in the late 1950s due in large part to the support of the African-American community he claimed to despise.
“Hard to believe,” Mino told me, “but that white sumbitch was progressive for that time period. But he couldn’t be happy with his station as the mayor of some podunk Florida town. He had to go and run for governor, and guess what he did?”
“Doubled down on his segregationist policies?”
Mino pointed at me. “You goddamned right, he did. That’s when things down here started to collapse in on themselves. People got real riled up at that hypocritical white bastard, and it brought the NAACP down on the city. That’s when things really got interesting. August of 1960, some black kids went into a diner and tried to sit down with the white folks. So, naturally, the white folks showed up with ax handles and tried to beat the good sense out of them.”
I reflected on what it must have been like to see all of that and be capable of doing nothing. He saw me staring and sipped at his drink. “Aw, hell, it ain’t so bad. I seen some nasty things in my life. Life on the chain gang ain’t even the worst of what I witnessed in prison. But them riots, they tore something loose in me I was never able to stitch back up. Same for the one in ‘64. It got real ugly, then.”
“I think I heard of that one,” I said.
“Windows got shot out. Newspaper truck turned over and burned, the reporter beat up something awful. Bad, bad time. Could have been much worse, but it’s a sad thing that we look at history through the lens of, ‘oh, well, at least that didn’t happen.’ For me, Dr. King passing away the way he did, getting murdered, that was the moment everybody ‘round here knew, well, it could be as bad as we imagined.”
“It led to some great strides over the last few decades.”
He tipped his cup at me. He said, “That’s the way it goes, I reckon. People think it’s always getting better, always moving the needle toward some better point on the graph, but let me tell you what: it won’t take much to drag everything back to where we was when busloads of Negroes were getting hauled off to jail for protesting to get equal rights. I bet you turn yourself into a fly on the wall in some of these southern legislatures and get them to open up about their nigger president, you’ll see what this country’s real views on race are, my boy.”
He got up to pee, and I watched him hobble out, all eighty or so years of him, and I couldn’t help but be amazed by him. The rest of the family ribbed him for being a know-nothing, but his life held multitudes.
I waited until Uncle Mino got back, offered to help him with his plate of food. When he told me to go on and get the hell out of his way, I headed back to my erstwhile room to rest up for some reconnaissance later that evening. Deuce, of course, was sleeping.
Wasn’t long before I felt the call of the refrigerator. A few beers could only tide me over but could never satisfy, so I got up to sneak a few before sundown. Downing a few would level me out.
I thought I heard somebody as I padded down the hallway, but I didn’t have much time to contemplate who it might be.
Bullets ripped through the house, knocking photographs clean off the walls. I dropped to the ground, crawled along the hallway, trying to disassociate myself from the noise. I cut myself on glass. I elbowed along the living room.
I ducked into the nearest bedroom and took cover, pulling a mattress over me. The sound was muffled, but it was clear whoever was outside was emptying clip after clip into the house. From under the mattress, it sounded like someone beating a wooden table with a belt buckle, sped up five hundred percent. My ears rang. My heart thudded. I was furious and half-tempted to go bounding out into the yard after these dipshits.
When I thought the gunfire had ended, I found my feet and scuttled through the house. I passed a window and peeked through. No sign of them. Had to be the one that dropped by last time. Had to be.
“Deuce?” I called.
Hearing nothing, I moved toward the door.
“Deuce?” I called again, this time a bit louder. My ears made that pinging sound they get after a deafening concert.
I had a thought. It was a bizarre thought, and one I could not support quite yet, but in my heart, I knew it to be true.
Reginald had sold us out. He was the one. He was the Judas in our midst, and he had kept close only so he could make sure we didn’t come close to answer the questions we needed answering.
Where was he? Not here. He was supposed to be here. It was his idea to meet here today. He’d asked for us to be here today, demanded that the family go off on its own, but only so that we could conduct some dark business at the house.
I had to find Deuce. We had to get out of the house. I saw the tunnel of freedom closing to a small, opaque dot.
On to Deuce. Had to find him and get the hell out of this house. It was like a room slowly filling with poison, and by poison, I meant cops.
He lay under the table in a hidden corner of the house. It was a space used as a breakfast nook. He’d smacked his head on the corner and was out cold. A pool of blood had formed around the crown of his head.
He groaned as I helped him up.
He caught sight of his uncle and dropped, kneeling before the old man. I stepped out to the front porch to give him a moment to himself.
I put flame to a cigarette and took a few halfhearted drags before deciding to have a shot at getting Deuce to move along.
Dozens of people had stepped out into their front yards and were inching ever closer to Deuce’s front yard. Moms and kids and fathers and everybody else, rubbernecking at this most nearby of tragedies.
Sirens approached, growing ever closer, threatening the eventual outcome that we’d be taken along in the backseat.
I tugged at the sleeve of his ripped tee. I said, “We’ve got to go.”
He was soaking up the destruction. The house was a mess. This was not the house he’d grown up in, but nevertheless, it was his family’s house. There was a line you do not crossed, and not only had they stepped over it, they had turned around and pissed on it, as well.
The sirens drew ever closer.
I sighed. “If you want to get them back for this, then I’ll help you. I’m in this thing for the long haul. But if you want to have the opportunity to, we need to get the hell out of here right now. No waiting. No hesitation. Just road time. Period.”
The sirens were only a block or so away.
Deuce got behind the wheel, turned the key. He was already halfway out the drive by the time I was fully in the car.
“Buckle up,” he said.
And then he floored it.
We turned down the first side street. Deuce punched the gas. The rise and fall of sirens came from somewhere behind us. I caught sight of some blue for a moment before the car swerved onto another street. He sped through and around traffic, splitting the distance between two cars merging onto our lane. One driver laid on the horn while the other swerved into a parked car.
Eventually, we los
t them. Deuce didn’t slow down, but not being chased made it at least feel as though we wouldn’t crash and die.
His hands tightened on the wheel.
“I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” he said.
I nodded, showed I was on the same page, and then I stared ahead, trying to ignore the throbbing sensation in my phantom fingers.
“Maybe until this blows over,” I said.
He shook his head. “Rol, I appreciate the sentiment, but you and I both know we’re going to have to go deep under the dirt to keep our fingers off the chopping block. No offense.”
“No problem,” I said.
The echo of sirens never quite disappeared from my mind, even when we somehow made it into the clear beyond the city limits. No matter how fast or how far we ran, we’d be still within the reach of law enforcement.
“We’ll find a cheap hotel,” Deuce said. “Beds may be a little hot, but that’s the least of our worries.”
I patted a cigarette out of a half-empty pack. Hands checked all my pockets before I realized I didn’t have a lighter. Matches, either.
“We need to regroup,” I said. “That’s all.
I tapped the car lighter. It clicked.
“They’re going to come back for my mama, Rol,” Deuce said. “You and I know they aren’t going to leave ‘em alone, not ‘til everyone I know has gone to their reward.”
“That might be so, but by God, you can still get them before they get to you.”
I pulled the lighter. Damned thing was room temperature. Didn’t work. I tossed it on the floorboard and rolled the cig from one corner of my mouth to the other before spitting it out the open window.
“Rol,” he said. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Well, you can’t stop now,” I responded, putting my eyes on the sideview mirror. “They’re on our heels, man.”
His eyes rolled once, and I grabbed the wheel. The car lurched once before I managed to right it, but the gas pedal was beyond my control.
I weaved in and out of traffic, slipping between cars as I reached one hand to pull his foot free of the accelerator. I jumped the curb and veered onto the sidewalk for a half a block before turning back onto the street.
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