Troubled Waters

by Carolyn Wheat

  Her thanks were far more profuse than my actual commitment warranted.

  I took my leave and went back down to the Morning Glory.

  “What I need,” I said, slipping into the stool nearest the old-fashioned cash register, “is a forensic accountant.”

  “What you need,” Dorinda said with her maddening cheerfulness, “is a nice glass of chilled tamarind juice.” She pushed burnt-orange liquid at me. I gave it a tentative sip, grimaced at the sour taste, and put my coffee mug on the counter for a refill.

  “Spider,” she said firmly.

  “Where?” I jumped off the stool and looked around, then remembered.

  “You mean your new boyfriend Spider?” I was annoyed at myself for overreacting and convinced that this time Dorinda had gone around the bend. “I said I needed an accountant, not a musician.”

  “You’re in luck, Cass. He’s both.” She pushed keys on the cash register and the door flew open with a clang. She reached into the drawer, lifting the heavy money clip, and fished out a card, which she handed across the counter.

  It was plain white pasteboard and proclaimed in dark, raised letters: SPIDER TANNENBAUM, BLUES ACCOUNTANT.

  “You are kidding. I mean, this can’t be—”

  “He’s an accountant by day and a bluesman at night.”

  “Then I’d better call him during the day.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Now we turn on the safe-light,” I said, then realized my companion wouldn’t know what that meant. “You can’t expose photographs in regular light, so this is a special bulb that lets us see what we’re doing without ruining the prints.”

  Three long days had passed since I’d argued Keith’s appeal; I was hoping the court would come down with a decision before the Jewish New Year, which always managed to close the courts for at least a week.

  I needed something to take my mind off the obsessive thoughts I kept having about the decision. It had been too long since I’d put up my blackout curtain, donned my acid-stained “Photographers Do It in the Dark” T-shirt, and turned my kitchen into a darkroom. Today I was doing it in the dark with Marvella’s fourteen-year-old son, Oliver, who wore a Buju Banton T-shirt and pants five times too big for him. He also wore an expression of boredom I hoped to change into one of intense interest. He usually spent his after-school time playing Dungeons and Dragons on the computer, but I’d lured him into the darkroom today.

  Oliver nodded, although I wasn’t sure he really remembered what I was talking about. I’d given him a crash course in photo processing before we set up the darkroom, but I’d been so busy filling the trays with solution, setting out the tongs, and putting the enlarger together that I hadn’t reviewed the procedures.

  I pulled the chain on the antique wrought-iron floor lamp with the oversized red bulb that served as my darkroom illumination. When I switched off the overhead lights, the room flooded with a low-level amber glow, not unlike the streetlamps of the gaslight era. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and then I felt the peace that always enveloped me when I committed myself to a couple of hours in the darkroom. I was safe in the glow of the bulb, safe from needy clients and angry judges, from pending motions and briefs to be written and court appearances that couldn’t be adjourned. All that mattered was the negative in the enlarger and the photographic paper going through its cycle of chemical baths. All that mattered was focus and exposure and timing and keeping the dust off the negative.

  Nobody was going to jail if my picture turned out badly. Nobody was going to do time for something he didn’t do if my photograph came out fuzzy or overexposed. In the darkroom, unlike the courtroom, I was free to fail.

  “Let’s try this at thirty seconds,” I said. I’d already shown Oliver how to place the negative in the metal holder inside the enlarger. I’d placed unexposed paper into the easel and positioned it beneath the enlarger lamp. I handed Oliver the oversized clock and let him adjust the timer. Then I turned on the enlarger and watched the picture appear on the paper.

  “Hey, it’s like backwards,” Oliver exclaimed. “All the shit that supposed to be dark is light.”

  Oliver’s mother would have told him not to say shit. I contented myself with remarking, “Good observation. That’s because this is still the negative. When we put the picture into the developer bath, it will come up positive.” I suited action to words, taking the paper out of the easel and slipping it into the first tray along the counter.

  Usually when I print, I watch the picture come up. I love the way a blank piece of paper becomes a photograph. Sometimes I love it so much I let the paper stay in too long and end up with a too-dark print. But today my eyes were on Oliver’s face. Would he get the same thrill I did? Would he see the magic of an image forming where only a minute earlier there had been nothing?

  “Here it come,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. He gave me a white-toothed grin. “Here come the skull.”

  Then he lowered his voice and did a perfect imitation of the old Here-come-the-judge routine, substituting the word skull for judge.

  The kid was a born comic. He already spoke several languages, in that he could switch from a street argot so arcane I couldn’t understand a word to perfectly grammatical English; he could imitate his parents’ Jamaican accent so well you’d think he just got off the plane from Kingston; or he could do a Southern drawl that had you believing he’d been born in Alabama.

  “It’s coming up nicely,” I agreed. “I’d suggest we leave it in for another minute. If it’s too light it won’t have impact.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Skull like that gotta jump off the picture. Like it’s gonna bite somebody.” If you closed your eyes, you could hear Jim Carrey’s over-the-top delivery of the word bite.

  He reached for the tongs. “Can I take it out when it’s done?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But what did I tell you about the tongs?”

  “They gotta stay in they own tray. Can’t go mixing up the chemicals or the picture be ruined.”

  “Right. So you can pick up the picture with those tongs, but don’t let the tongs get into the second bath. Just toss the picture into the tray when we’re ready.”

  “I forgot what the second bath do.”

  “It’s called the stop bath. It stops the developer from working, so the picture doesn’t go all black.”

  “That the one smell like my old sweat socks?” He put thumb and finger over his broad nose and said, “Whooeee, that stuff shore do stink, maw. I think the outhouse done got turned over again.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve been watching ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ on Nick at Nite.”

  “Nah,” he said with a contemptuous shake of his head. “This one called ‘The Real McCoys’ and there’s this old dude talks cracker.”

  “Walter Brennan,” I murmured, wondering at television’s amazing ability to recycle itself and infect new generations with the same useless information my mind was filled with. But that wasn’t helping my student learn the information I was trying to put in his head.

  “No, that one is the fixer. It’s called hypo.” I pointed to the first tray and nodded. “Okay, move it now.”

  Oliver reached in with the tongs and picked up the picture. I knew what would happen before he did; he didn’t have a firm grip and the paper floated away from him, landing half in and half out of the tray.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. J.” His voice rose anxiously. “I musta lost hold of it.”

  “That’s okay, Oliver. Pick it up and move it.”

  “But it’s gonna be all screwed up.” He pointed to the picture. “See, the one part still in the tub gonna be darker than—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. This was a test print anyway. Just for practice.”

  Time is vital in photography. The extra seconds we’d spent discussing the matter had brought the picture to the point of ruin. I picked it up with the tips of my fingers and tossed it into the trash bin. “We’ll try another one,”
I said lightly.

  This time Oliver moved the picture from developer to stop bath to fixer without a hitch. When the picture was ready I dropped it into an empty tray and said, “Let’s go outside and see how it looks.”

  I pushed the heavy black curtain away from the door and opened it. Oliver followed as I stepped into my living room.

  “Lookin’ good, Ms. J.,” he said. “I like how them hollow eyes be starin’ out the skull.” He widened his own eyes in imitation.

  “Do you think they ought to be darker?”

  “Like black holes in space?” He considered the matter. “Yeah. Like you could look into ’em and see your own death.”

  Marvella will kill me. I wanted to show the kid what it was like to create something. I wanted to help him see that there was life beyond Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The last thing I wanted was to remind him that in his fourteen years of life he’d buried two friends and seen three others permanently maimed by gunshot wounds.

  “Where you take this picture at, anyway? Where you go to find a skull like this?”

  “It was at a street fair. A long time ago. I don’t even remember where it was. There was a table with a lot of stuff for sale on it, and one of the things for sale was a skull.”

  “Man, I wish I’d seen that. I’d of bought it. Take it home and—”

  “Take it home and watch your mother skin you alive.”

  He laughed. His unstraightened teeth shone in his dark face. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t need nobody else’s skull. I be a skeleton myself when Mama finish with me.”

  Oliver lifted his head and tilted it slightly to one side, thrust his chin out, placed his hands on his hips and said in a falsetto, “What you mean, boy, bringin’ home de skull of de dead to dis house? You t’ink you Rasta-man, gonna smear you face wit’ chicken blood? Noooo, you good Met’odist boy and we Met’odists don’t have no skulls in our house. Don’t try me, boy.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “You’d better not let Marvella catch you at that.”

  I pointed at the picture. “Think I should zoom in on the skull itself? Cut out all that stuff in the background?”

  “Yeah.” His finger, ebony-dark with a pink underside, pointed at the picture. “You don’t need this other shit, you hear what I’m sayin’? Whole point of the picture is the skull. Say you chop off this part over here and then down there.”

  “You’ve got a good eye, Oliver. That’s exactly what I think we should do.”

  So we did. We printed the skull picture another eight times before we had a print we both liked. I put it into the dryer and hunted for a mat. When I found one, I slipped the picture inside and handed it to Oliver.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve just produced your first professional photographic print. I was thirty years old before I did that.”

  He looked at the picture and smiled, a deep satisfied smile. “Yeah. It look real good, Ms. J. Good enough to be in a art museum.”

  Now was the time. Now came the moment I’d really been working toward. Marvella had decided it was time for Oliver to hear The Talk, to learn the facts of life all kids like him had to learn if they wanted to stay alive.

  The Talk wasn’t about sex or drugs or gangs. It wasn’t about AIDS or going to college or getting a girl pregnant or any of the things that occupied the worried thoughts of suburban parents. The Talk was about how not to die in a jail cell as a victim of police brutality.

  I was backing up The Talk by giving Oliver a copy of a pamphlet I’d bought in front of the courthouse. Written by a woman named Carol Taylor, it was called The Little Black Book and it contained thirty rules for dealing with cops and other authority figures as well as savvy tips for surviving on the streets.

  “Oliver,” I began, keeping my tone conversational, “what would you do if the police stopped you on the street?”

  “You mean like they push me up against a car, like that?”

  “It could be up against a car, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, that’s how they do. They shout, ‘You, spread ’em’ and like you better go upside that car and open your legs or you get hit with the stick. I seen ’em hit one dude didn’t go fast enough and he had a limp and shit, couldn’t go as fast as they wanted, but they hit him anyway. We was all yellin’ at ’em, sayin’ the man walking as fast he can, don’t hit him, but they kept on hitting him.”

  “Is this something you saw, or did it ever happen to you?”

  He shrugged. “Happen to me a couple times. I seen it happen a lot to other dudes, though. Like they be walkin’ down the street, not doin’ nothin’, and the cops roll up on ’em and make ’em spread they legs. Search ’em for drugs and shit. Find some, don’t find some, it don’t matter, ’cause they be back next week do the same damn thing.”

  “So you know that if the cops tell you to do something, you’d better do it and not try to be a hero, right?”

  “Yeah.” His tone said he didn’t like giving this answer one little bit.

  “Oliver, this is important. If a cop feels like you might do something to hurt him, or if he thought you had a gun, he could shoot you. It’s important not to mouth off at them. Just let them search and when they don’t find anything, they’ll move on to someone else.”

  “What if they find something I ain’t got?”

  “I’m not following—” But then I was following, and I swallowed hard. It was a hell of a question from a fourteen-year-old. But then most fourteen-year-olds of my acquaintance had never been asked to spread them.

  “You mean you’re afraid the police might plant evidence on you? ‘Find’ drugs or a gun that you didn’t really have?”

  He nodded, his dark, round face solemn.

  “Look, most cops really aren’t like that.” His face registered an impassive skepticism; I decided I’d better not argue the point.

  “For one thing, you say nothing. You have the right to remain silent, so use it. I’ll give you my card, and the minute they give you a phone call from the precinct, which they have to do by law, you call me. Don’t answer any questions or make any statements. Call me. Got that?”

  He nodded, his round, boyish face looking younger than his fourteen years, although his body was growing into manhood. He was big, if plump, and his skin was very, very dark.

  This was what worried Marvella—that when people who didn’t know him saw her son, they didn’t see a funny, sweet kid with a pleasant disposition and a great sense of humor. They didn’t see an A student who liked computer games and reggae music.

  They saw a young urban black male. They saw a potential threat. They saw someone who might be carrying a gun in his waistband.

  That was precisely what the Korean lady in the fruit store down the block had seen when Oliver walked in to buy a bottle of juice. She’d screamed and chased him out of the store with a broom, even after he showed her the money for the drink.

  What worried Marvella was that some day, some time, the person behind the counter or in the patrol car might have a gun and use it because they saw, not Oliver Jackman, but a predator with a hulking body and coal-black skin.

  I hoped The Talk had done even a tiny particle of good. I wasn’t at all sure it had.

  The knock on the door was loud and insistent. “Ms. J., you got a phone call out here,” Marvella shouted.

  “Can’t you take a message?” I called back.

  “It’s the clerk from the Appellate Division,” she replied. “He says he got news about that Keith.”

  I raced to the phone, heart pounding.

  “Yes?” I said, hardly bothering to catch my breath. “Is there a decision?”

  “Ms. Jameson, the court has come down with its ruling. I thought you should know at once because—”

  “Oh, God, I won! Really? I mean, you’re sure?” The only reason to call was so I could get a jump on the order that would release Keith from prison; if the court had affirmed the conviction, he wouldn’t be going anywhere, so there would be no hurry.<
br />
  “The court reversed the conviction in a four-to-one decision,” the clerk said. “The case has been remanded to Brooklyn Supreme Court for a new trial, but I thought you’d want to make a bail application in the meantime.”

  “Yes. I mean, thank you. How soon can I get a copy of the papers?”

  “The decision is ready and this office is open until five o’clock,” the bland voice replied. “And, Counselor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Congratulations. Nice win.”

  I felt light-headed and lighter-hearted. I was a hot-air balloon about to sail over the rooftops of Brooklyn. I was high as a flag on the Fourth of July. I hugged Marvella and thanked her profusely for typing and retyping my brief; I ran back to the darkroom and hugged Oliver. I ran downstairs to the Morning Glory and hugged Dorinda. I would have run out onto the street and started hugging people walking by except that I had work to do.

  Reversed and remanded. Those were the words the clerk had used, the ones that would be on the order. Which meant that the case against Keith hadn’t gone away entirely. He was no longer a convicted felon, but he was facing the old charges just as if he’d never had a trial. The district attorney would have to decide whether or not to retry him, and until that time, he was entitled to bail.

  But was he entitled to bail he could make?

  It was up to me to convince a court to set bail in a reasonable amount, and one way I could do that was to convince the trial judge that we had a good chance of winning the case.

  There was one slight problem: Judge Lucius Tolliver was no fan of mine, and he’d leaned heavily in favor of the prosecution the first time around. I’d have to pull out all the stops to get Keith out of jail pending trial, and then I’d have to work on the D.A.’s office to consider dismissing the charges instead of trying for a second bite at the conviction apple.

  I opened my top desk drawer and pulled out the last letter Keith had sent me from prison. I smiled as I read it for what was probably the fourth time. From your mouth, I had thought, to God’s ear. For once, God was listening.