There was only one place to go right now, and that was Armstrong. Jesse knew that her brother was too self-effacing, too polite to say that he was scared, to grant himself the right to say, “No way.” Although she was afraid herself, she couldn’t really help him out, because building in her all night long—from the tension of the presser, to the tour of the pregnant streets, to the reviewing of the shock troops—was that gnawing demand, that sweeping need to both lose and find herself in the big picture, to Be There. For tonight, Brenda was over. Brenda was about writing. Armstrong was Now.
They could smell the projects before they got there. It was a dull, penetrating stench that Jesse was unable to identify until she came within sight of the Bowl: a good number of the refrigerator crates planted out there were now on fire. Propelled by her own mandate, Jesse marched into the site through the high end, the Gompers Street outlet. Ben had no choice but to follow. From the nearest breezeway that of Two Building, she could see five separate conflagrations on the slope of the Bowl, the tenants standing in jagged clusters around the burning crates and refrigerators, yelling at one another, crying, shouting indecipherable bulletins. Jesse identified at least a dozen black and Latino cops, all in civilian dress, trying to deal with it, calm everybody down. Some tenants looked heartsick, walleyed with despair, while others looked as if they’d just as soon level the entire site.
An ad hoc work crew of cops and tenants, their faces contorted by the heat and fumes, was busy putting out the flames with handheld extinguishers. Ben moved in to help but turned back, not wanting to leave his sister unguarded. Jesse waved him on. Then, struck with the realization that it wasn’t against the law for her to lend a hand, she followed him. But before they could get to the nearest crate, they were inadvertently blindsided by Lorenzo. Holding a skinny twelve-year-old by the back of his neck, he barreled out of the shadows, charging across the Bowl toward a burning refrigerator as if to fling the kid into the flames but coming to a halt inches from disaster and shaking the boy like a kitten.
“What you do that for!” Lorenzo bellowed, his pendulous lower lip hanging open, eyes bugging behind his glasses, the sheer volume of his rage quieting the Bowl down so that the soft crackle of flame-licked wood was the predominant competing sound.
“What you do that for!” Lorenzo was crouched over, going eye to eye, people inching closer. “That’s yours, you stupid motherfucker!” he said, flinging a hand to a destroyed refrigerator. Jesse read the kid’s heavy-lidded nonreaction as paralysis. “That’s for you! That’s for your family!” Lorenzo maintained his close-range glare and bellow, the kid’s eyes peeking out from behind tiny slits. Lorenzo waited for a response, but the kid, still speechless, answered with a small shrug.
“They’re laughing at you!” Lorenzo roared into his dreamy face, Jesse overhearing someone say, “Who’s they.”
The kid finally managed a small protest: “No they ain’t.”
“What?” Lorenzo got down even lower.
“They ain’t laughing at me,” he managed to murmur, looking at Jesse and Ben—white Dempsy. “They scared.”
Jesse, off balance, vaguely embarrassed, turned away from the scene and took a few steps down the slope. From where she stood, she had adequate elevation to overlook all of Martyrs Park at the bottom of the projects and see a little into Gannon beyond the tree line. Although both the pocket park and that end of Hurley seemed peaceful, even deserted, there was something off down there. Jesse needed a long moment to nail what was throwing her. It was the absence of a Gannon cruiser in the abandoned mini-mall across the city line. Tonight, for the first time in years—tonight, when Gannon needed to guard its back more than on any other night in recent history—the Watch had been abandoned.
“That’s, whoa…” Ben said, reading her mind.
At the refrigerators, someone had found either sand or cement mix and had trucked it to the Bowl in a wheelbarrow. Lorenzo, along with a number of others, was snatching up the grit in double-handed scoops and dumping it directly on the smoking crates. The kid Lorenzo had manhandled earlier was now seated in the dirt, his face calcified into a blank mask, his hands cuffed behind his back.
“I want to go over there.” Jesse gestured to the mini-mall across the city line and began heading down the slope to Martyrs.
“Jesse, no.” Ben reached out for her, laughing nervously. “No, Jesse.”
But she wanted the mini-mall, and Ben, once again, had no choice.
Hitting Hurley Street at the base of the Bowl, they came up on a crew of teenagers who had been obscured from view back at the fires, five hard-core-looking kids hanging in the breezeway of Three Building, the high-rise closest to the park. These kids scoped them out with the almost leisurely assessing glare, cold and impersonal, that she and Ben had received all over town on their postpresser cruise. Scowling at his shoes, Ben muttered, “Shit,” as if disgusted with himself, as if previewing the inevitable.
Jesse, musing on how much of her fear at times like this manifested itself as self-consciousness, felt incapable of pulling an embarrassing about-face. Briefly eyeing those who were openly eyeing her, she forged on into the leafy black mouth of the park, her brother dutifully bringing up the rear.
Inside Martyrs, the overhead lights were out, the park reduced to a humped silhouette of shrubs, swings, and slides. Only the sneakers, tied together and thrown into the trees bolo-style, were identifiable as such, swaying in minute arcs against the sky.
“It’s fuckin’ dark,” Jesse hissed, too hyped to be scared anymore. The breezeway posse was out of sight and out of mind, her focus now the mystery across the city line.
“Just keep moving,” Ben said with anxious heat, then, reversing the command, “Hold on.” He seized her shoulder, cocking an ear, squinting back along the path to Hurley Street. “Just keep going,” came a third command, as he gave her a weak push toward Gannon, then headed back alone toward Armstrong.
Once again on edge, not knowing what Ben was up to, Jesse stood her ground, listening, waiting for him to return along the path. All that could be heard from within the stillness was the distant shouting of the volunteer firemen up in the Bowl, the occasional slap of tires out on Jessup Avenue, Gannon-side, and the slow rolling crunch of rubble, as cars pulled in or out at the open end of Hurley.
The bronze memorial plaque of Martin, Malcolm, and Medgar that was bolted to a stout tree trunk gleamed dully but, without a light source, seemed to gleam from within, as if the three men in profile were reacting to what was going on around them. It scared the hell out of her. Overhead, above the trees, she could see the random grid of lighted windows in all five towers of Armstrong. Behind each one, lived a story, Jesse told herself, in an effort to calm down—a major goddamned story.
“Where she go to?” The voice was blunt, all business, and Jesse turned to stone. Standing motionless off the paths, she decided that whatever was to happen to her now would be both earned and just. Her behavior with Brenda, her lies and verbal weaseling, her almost predatory reportage—whatever was about to go down, she informed herself, was deserved.
But no one came. Jesse scanned the murk and envisioned Brenda, forty-eight hours ago, somewhere within a few yards of here, down on her knees, ramming glass and metal under her skin—Brenda, as selfish, as uncaring, as predatory as any heartless hunter ever produced by these towers, as heartless as those blank-souled psychopaths who were probably stalking Jesse right now. Brenda, setting the world on fire to cover her own crimes, her own failings. Jesse, standing rigid, was finally filling with the loathing for her that had come so easily to everyone else in this city, feeling like the one who was conned, manipulated, sacrificed—standing here now, waiting to pay her tab.
But no one came. Wrestling herself free from her paralysis, she found her way to the skimpy playground enclosure a few dozen yards off the path—monkey bars, monkey barrels, a swing with no seat, a slide with only one climbing rail, seven cement Disney dwarfs, paint-flaked, useless. Perched on a
dwarf, sweating, scared, her arms folded across her chest, Jesse said, “This is no place to raise a child.” She said it out loud, and the responding crackle and crunch out on the footpath filled her chest with ice.
“Jesse?” It was her brother’s voice, light-toned, OK. She flew out of the playground, intercepting him on the footpath. “Hey,” Ben said, grinning, in shock, a slash running in a straight line from the edge of a nostril to the peak of a cheekbone. Jesse gawked, counting stitches. “So let’s go,” Ben said.
Lively, out of his mind, walking briskly ahead of his sister, Ben led the way out the Gannon end of the park. They crossed Jessup Avenue, a four-lane roadway that wasn’t quite a highway, Jesse bringing up the rear, her own rattled mental state allowing her, for the moment, to consider Ben’s dissociated peppiness as acceptable. They stood in the crusty bust-ass mini-mall parking lot, staring dumbly at nothing, at the absence of a police car. Jesse was the first to snap out of it.
“We have to take you to the medical center.”
“No, I know,” Ben said lightly, mopping his cheek with a raised shoulder, his blue shirt coming away purple with blood. “Anytime you’re ready.”
“Like now.” Jesse took a step toward the roadway, then, faltering, unable to give it up, she came back and said, “Just give me thirty more seconds, OK?” Ben shrugged, took off his shirt, wadded it into a compress, held it against his opened face, and prepared to wait for her.
Quickly walking the length of the six vacant storefronts, Jesse turned the corner and saw nothing but a fly-buzzed Dumpster. She walked on, turning the next corner, and there they were: had to be seventy-five Gannon cops, with batons, Plexiglas shields, visored helmets, and what she assumed were plastic-pellet-filled shotguns. Everybody was smoking on this side of the city line, too, but maintaining complete silence; even the radios were turned down. The cop nearest Jesse pressed a finger to his lips, then chucked a thumb, telling her to blow.
Forty-five minutes later, in the overcrowded surgery room of the Dempsy Medical Center ER, Jesse, fascinated, watched a natty, fine-boned East Indian doctor, his name tag reading Chatterjee, sew up the side of Ben’s face as casually as if he were lacing a boot.
She couldn’t tell how many of the other punctures, gashes, slits, and discolorations waiting their turn along the walls were a result of tonight’s presser, but one person she knew for sure, a Puerto Rican cop she had seen earlier, calming people down around the Armstrong Bowl. The guy was now holding a plastic bag of ice to his braised onion of an eye, a contrail of cement dust from the chunk that clipped him still lying in a powdery mist above his temple and down the blood-browned left side of his T-shirt.
Fucking Brenda, Jesse marveled to herself, recalling Jose’s challenge over the phone: “Are you in love?”
“Helen of Troy, huh?” Chatterjee said, obviously to Jesse, although his eye never strayed from his embroidery. Ben remained glassy, oblivious.
“Excuse me?” Jesse said tentatively. But the doctor was distracted by a technician entering the room with an armful of readouts.
Across the room, Jesse spied a copy of tonight’s Dempsey Register: SHE DID IT. The header was Jose’s call, out of her hands. Buzzed about getting the wood, scoring the front page, Jesse scooped the paper up and skimmed her graphs—not great, not bad, just the reasonably objective facts, dressed in a gray suit of neutral prose. Although the headline was inaccurate—wasn’t, strictly speaking, true—it filled Jesse with the hum of completion, made her think, It’s this I love.
27
Since snatching up the first young firebug a few hours earlier, Lorenzo had made two more collars around the Bowl, one a sixteen-year-old boy the other a sad-looking teenaged girl. He had no intention of processing these arrests, just wanted these kids immobilized for the duration. But the sight of the three of them sitting in the dirt with their hands cuffed behind their backs, was inflammatory, so he wound up herding them into the housing office and securing them to the desks in Longway’s inner sanctum.
This vexing task took him less than fifteen minutes to perform, but when he reemerged from the building things had changed, the action having shifted from the Bowl to Hurley Street. The fires were more or less extinguished, the slope nearly deserted, but there were two Dempsy squad cars parked now at the open end of Hurley, the eight cops inside sporting flak jackets and visored helmets, the presumptuous riot gear like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everybody was going crazy down on the cul-de-sac, most of the volunteer cops and the tenant leaders trying both to move the agitated mass back toward the Martyrs Park end of the street and to break up the crowd itself into smaller clusters.
Lorenzo, attempting to speed-read the situation, sensed something else going on, some in-house distress that was pulling people into face-to-face turmoil even without the visual provocation of the police cars. He tried to decipher this inner rumble by picking up on the voices and the physical flow, but the energy was too diffuse, a cacophony of taunting shouts and heated conversations, people abruptly flying in and out of the crowd like couriers in a combat zone. Decoding the street from where Lorenzo stood was like trying to map the movements and motives of fireflies.
Lorenzo grabbed some kid racing down the slope to Hurley. “What’s happening.”
“They, they locked up the Convoys, man, the brothers? Raheem Wallace too.”
“For what.” Lorenzo peered into the crowd again and keyed in on Raheem’s mother, Mary a bird-small, round-faced woman in a housedress, pop-eyed and sweat-slick, standing at the heart of it, furious, loud, pumping people up.
“Arrested for what?” Lorenzo asked again, but the kid had booked.
Heading for Hurley, he had to drop into a quick squat as something arced over his head, something thrown not at him but at the cop cars behind him, whatever it was landing wet and lumpy on the windshield. The driver used his wipers to clean the view, his straight-faced reaction either fear or cool—Lorenzo couldn’t tell which. Making his way to the undulating front line of the crowd, Lorenzo joined the brace of volunteer cops and tenants who were holding back some of the others.
“They locked up the Convoys?” he asked the cop to his right, who was carefully leaning into some kids, goofing with them about it but pushing them back.
“That’s the word,” the cop answered tensely.
“They got my son too,” Mary Wallace bawled at him as she plowed through the crowd, her hyperthyroid eyes accentuating her rage.
“For what?” Lorenzo asked, calmly taking her measure. He was more concerned right now with her incandescent anger than with her son, cooling his heels at Juvie.
“They say he started a fire,” she said, louder than necessary, talking as much to the crowd as to Lorenzo.
“Fire in here?” Lorenzo glanced up the slope, at the smoky, stinking Bowl.
“No, not in here,” she snapped. “That’s the point. They say he did something in the Heights,” she said, turning to the crowd full-on now.
“How many fires got started up there,” she said, gesturing to the Bowl. “Nobody gets arrested. Nobody. Why? ’Cause it’s in here, it’s just us. They don’t give a fuck what we do in here, right? But a child kicks up over in some white neighborhood? They throw away the goddamn key on him.”
Lorenzo had to get her the hell out of here.
“They just want some black kid to take the place of that jive-ass carjacker.” She addressed the crowd like she owned them.
“They the ones who started shit. They the ones who fucked up, and now they just want to turn it back on us,” she said, in a raw staccato growl. “It’s like, even if we didn’t do it, we did it.”
“Mary—” Lorenzo reached out to her.
“And if they think they can take my son,” she continued, “and make him their goddamn scapegoat for that bitch.” Teary now, she wiped her nose with a quick flash of her palm, people grunting in sympathy, in anger. “If they think I will give them my son.” Lorenzo itched to snatch her away, but he couldn’t. “If
they think…”
Some kind of missile took off from the crowd, a rock, a ball, something fist-sized; a few seconds later, a dull, metallic crump came from behind Lorenzo’s back, the projectile most likely having landed on the hood of one of the police cars.
“Hey!” Lorenzo used the action to cut Mary off, reaching into the crowd as if to grab someone, coming out empty-handed, then taking over. “You want them coming in here?” he said, addressing the middle ranks.
“Fuck it,” someone said, an invitation. Lorenzo couldn’t quite get a fix on the voice, ignored it.
“Because I am telling you. I am telling you, you do not. Those two cars over there? They are nothing. That’s like the tip of the iceberg. There’s more police on call out there tonight than you got tenants, and you do not want them coming in your door.”
“Fuck it.” That same voice, but Lorenzo had everybody’s attention and was not willing to lose it by going one-on-one.
“Now I’m gonna find out what’s up, try to get them to back on out, because I don’t want them here any more than you. But if anyone starts something?”
Lorenzo retreated from the crowd a few steps, shrugged in an exaggerated gesture of helplessness, then reached in at the last second to snag Mary Wallace by the elbow, catch her off balance. “Me and you we got to talk.” He marched her out of the houses via the Hurley Street exit, Mary overwhelmed by his mobile mass, trotting on tiptoe to keep up.
“Why don’t you guys back up out of sight,” he called to one of the riot-clad drivers, without breaking stride. “You’re gonna make the trouble you think you’re here to stop. Don’t you see that?”
“Hey, Council,” the driver tossed back, “ask me if I want to be here.”
“Then call your boss,” he said, hustling Mary around the bend and beneath the Conrail trestle, “before it’s too late.”
Freedomland Page 55