Enraged, but neutralized by the crowd, by the eyes, Lorenzo returned to the car. Danny Martin was gone too. Lorenzo straightened up and spotted him walking in the opposite direction from Eight-Ball, marching stiff-legged, hands to his temples, elbows out, heading for the Gannon city line.
After cruising the boulevard by himself for another useless hour, the infuriating, obsessive playback in his head making him blind to the outside world, Lorenzo returned to Armstrong, planning on sneaking up to his mother’s apartment to catch a few hours’ sleep.
Although it wasn’t quite 10:00 A.M. when he stepped from the air-conditioned shell of his car onto the fissured asphalt of Hurley Street, he could see the thick air shimmy up from the pavement as if from a barbeque pit. Up on the tracks behind the media camp, a string of Tropicana container cars crawled toward Newark, their filthy bright orange sidings seeming to underscore the choking, no-exit oppressiveness of a humid summer’s day in the projects. Most of the kids running up and down the sloped retaining wall, both boys and girls, were now stripped to their tailbones, and many of the shooters on the hill had taken to wearing wet hand towels under their baseball caps. But to Lorenzo’s eyes, the only significant change of scenery from the night before was the presence of more black cops; someone upstairs had had the political savvy to make that move with the 7:00 A.M. shift in tours.
Ducking into the lobby of Five Building, Lorenzo decided he was too tired to take the stairs and wound up waiting a full ten minutes for the elevator. He almost nodded out in the car as it clanked and shuddered its way to the fourth floor. Coming out into the sepia gloom of the long, narrow hallway, he saw Felicia Mitchell down at the other end, leaning into the door of his mother’s apartment, apparently waiting for him.
“Hey.” Lorenzo slowed down as he approached her, trying to intuit the problem. “I was gonna call you today.”
She looked disheveled, her blouse partly out of her jeans and her short hair shooting off from her head in a half dozen directions. “They find her boy yet?” she asked, a little mechanically.
“Not yet,” he said slowly.
“Lorenzo, I got to talk to you.” Her voice took focus. “You know Billy?”
“Billy…”
“My boyfriend.”
“No, I never met him.”
“He started hitting me, Lorenzo.”
One of the apartment doors opened a few inches, and Lorenzo wiggled his fingers at the old lady who peeked out, a combination “Good morning” and “Mind your own business” gesture. The door closed.
“He hit me, like, yesterday and today.”
“What do you mean?” Lorenzo asked, distracted by another infinitesimal door opening, another eye peering out.
“I mean this.” Felicia tapped her cheekbone, but the light was too sickly for Lorenzo to see any damage. “Lorenzo, we been living together for like three years, he never…and Lorenzo, you got to come up to my house, give him a talk.”
“I can’t do that right now, Felicia.”
“Then you come tonight.”
“I’ll try.” He fingered his key ring blindly feeling for his mother’s key in the deep-fried murk of the hallway. “You know I got a full dance card right now.”
“I know.”
“You got anything for me on this?”
“Brenda?” Lorenzo waited, refraining from opening the apartment door. “I don’t know.” She looked off. “She’s a nice person.”
“Yeah? She got a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. She’s just a nice person, you know? I don’t know.”
“You gonna be at Jefferson later?”
“Yeah.” Felicia touched her cheekbone. “If he don’t kill me first.”
“I’ll come by, see you there, OK? I want to ask you some stuff.”
“Awright.” She sighed, then grabbed his key hand. “Lorenzo, you got to come to my house tonight and talk to him. Otherwise, I swear to God, I’m just gonna go to the police.”
He let himself into the apartment. The game plan was to grab an hour’s sleep, run some conversations, then pick up Brenda around noon, take her back to the scene of the crime, see how things looked to her after a few hours’ reflection.
His mother was in Atlantic City on a three-day gambling junket with her two sisters, so Lorenzo had the apartment to himself. Stripping down to his boxers and standing before the open refrigerator to catch a little coolness, he chugged down an entire quart of orange juice while running back Eight-Ball’s “black or blue” comment, belatedly retorting, “There ain’t no black or blue, just right or wrong.” This was the answer he usually gave when he was black or blued by the brothers, although the riff from that camp was a little more poetic: “Either you’re blue or you’re black, and if you turn your back, you might wind up both.”
He inhaled two pints of yogurt and three Eggo waffles, the last untoasted, and succeeded in evicting Eight-Ball from his consciousness. He tried doing the same with Rafik, but that flip Uncle Tom put-down was like an ingrown eyelash. He was used to white cops occasionally accusing him, mostly indirectly of being black first—that was no big deal. But nothing pissed him off more than having his sense of self challenged by someone in the black community no matter how off the wall or what segment of the political spectrum the charge came from.
Uncle Tom…
He took a shower, put on clean shorts, and moved into his old bedroom. The posters of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets overlooking his bed had been taped to the walls since 1972. The picture of the Dempsy High School gymnastics team on his desk, featuring the 145-pound vaulter Lorenzo Council, had been nesting in its scratched, foggy plastic Woolworth’s frame since 1969.
At the age of forty-seven, Lorenzo was a grandfather three times over. There were two girls by his son Reggie, a math teacher, and a two-year-old boy by his other son, Jason, who was currently—Lorenzo once again reminded himself, lacerated himself—doing three to five in the state annex of Dempsy County Correctional. So at this point in his life, the act of slipping into the narrow twin bed of his childhood always triggered an attack of dread, a vertigolike sensation of both intense isolation and impending death. As he lay there now, on top of the thin floral-patterned blanket, staring at the ceiling and riding it out, he wondered how long this most recent stay with his moms would last.
Lorenzo and his wife, Frankie, had been together since high school, their history of separations and reconciliations tracking over the last twenty-seven years like an endless series of figure eights. Most of the splits had been provoked by his drinking and drugging, but after he had sobered up, the fights had taken on a more disquieting character, involving, as they did, cold, clear assessments of each other, without the external drama of addiction to jazz up the picture.
Lorenzo was convinced that Frankie had liked him better when he was high. She was used to, and comfortable with, being the responsible one. She seemed angrier at him now than at any time in his juicehead, pothead life, accusing him of being unappreciative, disrespectful, insufferable; she seemed to be enraged at him for assuming that with sobriety came the resumption of control over the family’s destiny—as if all she had been doing over the years was keeping his throne warm, and now that he was straightened out she was supposed to step off for the Natural-Born Man. He refused to consider the possibility that she was right, refused to consider the possibility that he was doing a number on her yet again, this time the clean and sober way. He refused to consider any and all of this, because although he didn’t have a particularly hard time admitting to most people when he was wrong, somehow he knew that if he apologized to Frankie for anything, no matter how small, the dam would break and he’d wind up apologizing to her nonstop for the rest of their lives together, each apology for a transgression greater than the one preceding it, all apologies leading to the big one: Jason in jail.
But she did like him better all fucked up—he’d swear to it. Lorenzo set his alarm, thinking, We’ll work it out. He rang up Army Howard’s be
eper, punching in his phone number and the suffix 666, thinking, We always sort of do.
Army called him back in five minutes.
“Big Daddy, what’s up.”
“I need to see you.”
“When.”
“Right now. In an hour.”
“An hour?”
“That’s sixty minutes.”
“Awright.”
“That’s sixty minutes from now.”
“I’ll be in front of the jail,” Army said.
“Old jail or new.”
“Old.”
“Sixty, Army.”
“I’ll be there.”
“How’s your granddaughter?”
“We had to leave her in the hospital.”
“She gonna be OK?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
“Awright. Sixty minutes.”
Lorenzo hung up and closed his eyes. Rafik calling him an Uncle Tom … Lorenzo opened his eyes. He hadn’t said Uncle Tom, he’d said Uncle Cecil. Lorenzo sat up: What the hell was an Uncle Cecil?
10
On this first day of July, Jesse woke up to a gentle clattering. Shooting upright in the easy chair, disoriented, she saw Ben in the kitchen, Brenda facedown on the pulled-out convertible. Panic-stricken about the time, she looked to her brother, who whispered, “Nine-thirty” without her asking. Jesse needed a minute to lay out the timetable: call now, say good morning, hang up, call back at one with a heads up for the afternoon meeting—just a taste to keep them happy, don’t make anybody crazy. Since the Register was an evening paper, she would have until five-thirty or six to dump. Everything was under control, Jesse intending to keep her editor at arm’s length with one hand and hold Brenda close with the other, tucking her in like a Siamese twin through the day or days to come—holding her hand at the funeral or the reunion. Thinking about it, Jesse put her money on a funeral, possibly an arraignment.
Gouging the sleep from her eyes, she watched Ben scour the kitchen counter with a small scrub sponge, the fastidious and dainty proprietariness of the act magnifying his bulk. “What are you doing up here?” Jesse whispered, firing up a cigarette.
“I got the downstairs neighbor to watch the door for me.” Ben held up half of a torn twenty-dollar bill. “Very nice guy.”
“How’d you get in here?”
Ben placed two glasses of orange juice on the dining table. A full grocery bag sat by the sink. “Try locking the door next time.”
Brenda awoke with a sob, levitating to a sitting position on the couch, the skin around her eyes looking pink and flayed. She put her hands to her head, looked around wildly. “What happened?”
Jesse didn’t know if she wanted a complete recap of the nightmare or an update on the last two hours. “No news, Brenda.”
“They didn’t find him?” Her voice was a metallic croak.
“No.”
Brenda stared at Ben. “Good morning,” he said, sliding a juice glass a few inches in her direction.
“Where’s the detective?” Her fingers snagged in her hair.
“He’s probably letting you sleep.”
“He took my painkillers. Oh!” She lowered her face into her padded palms. “Oh God, Cody. I had this dream.” Jesse reached for her notepad without taking her eyes from Brenda. “I had this dream.” Brenda’s face came away from her hands wet and raw. “There were nine Codys, I had nine Codys. Each one was like a half a year younger than the next one—like, two years old, two and a half, three. I mean, you know, at this age you turn around, you go away for a weekend or something, you come back and they’re like an entirely different person, but this was, like, they must’ve popped out of each other and become separate people, you know, from a baby to a four-and-a-half-year-old. And all of them were doing different things, you know, for their age, and they weren’t playing with each other. There were nine of them, and it was like each one was all alone, and I couldn’t help them, I couldn’t bring them together. I just wanted them to be friends and not be lonely, but they were, like, orbiting around my bed. It was so sad, I just wanted them to protect each other, you know, to love each other, because…” She faded, pummeled by her own visions.
“It was a dream, Brenda,” Jesse said, scrawling blindly.
“I can still smell the baby’s scalp.” She wiped tears with the corner of the blanket. “Jesse, is there any smell in the world like the smell of your baby’s scalp?”
“None,” Jesse said carefully. She didn’t think Brenda would have remembered her name and she found the sound of it in Brenda’s mouth unnerving.
Ben poured two cups of coffee. In addition to Jesse’s smokes, vitamins, and makeup, he had brought up a fresh T-shirt, jeans, and a change of underwear, all of it folded neatly on the floor next to her chair, a toothbrush and a comb crisscrossed on top. Sometimes Ben gave her the creeps.
Brenda sat up on the couch, trying to gather focus.
Ben took a red plastic bag from the kitchen, came around the cutout, and carefully fanned out a dozen CDs on the foot of the convertible. “I got Solomon Burke and Don Covay. I couldn’t get ahold of the others, but I called some people and the general consensus was that if you liked that kind of stuff you’d probably go for these here too.” He gestured to the discs: Linda Jones, Joe Tex, Johnny Taylor, Z. Z. Hill, Chuck Jackson, Doris Troy.
“‘Just One Look,’” Brenda said, mostly to herself.
“One guy I asked used to live in Memphis and he said these here should be right up your alley.”
Brenda stared at the CDs, blinking, then looked up at Ben. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Anything else I can do for you?” Brenda weakly tossed off her blanket and made it to her feet. Three steps from the bed, her legs gave out, but Ben caught her before she could hit the floor. “I got you,” he said, in a light, encouraging voice, holding her by the elbows, his face suddenly blanched with exhaustion. Still holding her, he turned to his sister and gave her what Jesse assumed was supposed to be a reassuring wink but which, in his present state of fatigue, came off more like a facial spasm.
Unsteadily, Brenda twisted out of his grip and made it to the bathroom on her own, closing the door behind her.
Ben dug in his pocket and handed his sister two phone numbers printed on Post-its. “This one’s the downstairs neighbor’s, the Cromarties—they don’t really know her—and this is her mother. I don’t know how you want to play that one.”
“You OK?” Jesse considered asking Ben how he had gotten ahold of the music so fast, same for the mother’s number, but knew he would take great pleasure in going all cryptic on her.
“I’m good,” Ben said, passing a hand across his sweat-fringed forehead. “It’s hot today.”
“Drink my juice.”
“I’m good.”
“Can you still handle downstairs?”
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t like neighbors.”
“I got you.” He moved toward the door.
“Ben, where’d you get the CDs?”
He shrugged. “The favor bank,” he said, trying not to smile, proud of himself. He opened the apartment door, ducked his head out, came back in. “Hey, Jess?” His voice was lower now. “Twenty bills says she knows more than she’s saying.” As he closed the door behind him, Jesse considered dialing Jose on the cellular but thought better of it, fearing Jose’s ability to coax a story out of her before she was ready to give it up. She knew all too well how easily 9:00 A.M. gospel could turn into 6:00 P.M. horseshit.
Brenda came out of the bathroom, face and fingers dripping. Jesse attempted to give her a hard read but Brenda seemed to pick up on it, meeting Jesse’s eyes with an assessing gaze of her own. Jesse turned away as if shy or embarrassed, telling herself it would keep.
An hour later, sitting on the toilet in Brenda’s apartment, Jesse heard voices directly over her head.
“Anybody talk to the brother?”
“Don’t know.”
“How ab
out the father?”
“He’s in the wind somewheres. Costa Rica?”
“How ’bout Grandma?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Who’s in there with her?”
“Some runner from the local rag.”
“Shit. Where’s the apartment?”
“I think it’s right under us.”
Jesse looked up. The voices were coming from the roof, traveling down to her through the overhead exhaust vent.
Runner, Jesse bristled, thinking, Least I got through the door, roof boy.
Returning to the sealed and roasting living room, she saw Brenda peering around the drawn shade. Coming up behind her, Jesse looked down on the loose collection of shooters and neighbors on the street below. A few of them were calling up, as if they wanted Brenda to come out and play, and Jesse turned up the volume on the CD player to drown them out.
“Come away.” She put a hand around Brenda’s waist and steered her back to the bed.
“What do they think of me?” Brenda asked.
“They think you’re going through hell. What else could they think?” The question was purposeful, but Brenda didn’t take the bait, just sat on the edge of the convertible and sang along in a whisper—something about the greatest love, the greatest hurt.
“When’s the detective coming for me?” Brenda rolled into the question as if it were a discordant line in the song, making it sound like Lorenzo was an executioner.
“He’s just letting you rest. He’ll be here, believe me.” Jesse could have raised him on his beeper but was seized with a powerful anxiety herself. The new day terrorized her as much as it did Brenda: Lorenzo’s arrival would signal the end of her monopoly. In a rush of panic she felt the urge simply to ask Brenda if she knew where her son was, yes or no. “You know, I have to tell you. When Lorenzo does get here? He’s the best, but you should prepare yourself, because if they haven’t found your son yet he’s probably gonna ask you some difficult questions.” Jesse left it hanging, watching her.
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