Leaving Brenda behind him, he tripped down two flights of stairs to Longway’s floor. Longway’s room was unoccupied, although littered with signs of the rev’s presence—a Walkman, imperfectly hidden under the pillow; a pack of Kools; a plastic liter of Coca-Cola; a Kangol cap, resting at the foot of the bed; and a pair of orthopedic shoes, moon-walk shoes, one atop the other in front of the small closet.
Out of reflex, Lorenzo ducked inside, tucked the Walkman out of sight, and removed the Kangol to the night table, a hat on the bed being a bad sign. Intent on hunting down Longway, Lorenzo stalked the corridors, so pulled into his own anxieties that he didn’t notice Chatterjee until the doctor laid a hand on his arm.
“Hey,” Lorenzo said flatly. “What you doing up here, hidin’?”
“Exactly,” Chatterjee murmured.
“They driving you crazy down there?”
“I’ve had four reporters come in as patients today. Did I think she was faking it. What did she say. What did she do. What did her injuries look like.”
“Yeah, huh?” Lorenzo’s eyes were drawn to the flow of hallway traffic.
“My favorite? Do you think she’s pregnant.”
“Doc. I got to find the Reverend Longway. He’s not in his room.”
Beaming at Lorenzo for a long, teasing moment, Chatterjee finally took him by the elbow and walked him back the way he had just come, then around the corner to the adjoining corridor, the air filled with the astringent snap of alcohol. He brought him to the threshold of a ten-bed room, the barely restrained expression on the doctor’s face that of someone ushering a birthday boy to a surprise party. “Look,” he said, pointing to the far wall, to a patient laying immobile in a slash of sunlight. “They picked him up last night from the Randall Street shelter. I was going to call you, but here you are.”
The offering was not Longway, as requested, but Mookie, killer-nephew of Mother Barrett and Uncle Theo, and the sight of him left Lorenzo light-headed, the rev momentarily fading on him as he began pacing the corridor, attempting to throw Mookie in the mix, clear his head for Mookie, old business abruptly rescued from a fading, disgruntled memory by a rush of blood and adrenaline.
Oblivious to the flow of the hallway, Lorenzo paced in a circuit that grew tighter and quicker, then tighter and quicker still, until, as if launching himself, he abruptly entered the sickroom, not convinced he was up for this, wondering if he could pull off some miracle of trickery right now. Coming up to the bedside, his mind a brimming blank, he saw Mookie’s concave chest as revealed by the V-shaped furls of his unbuttoned pajama top—saw the purple lesions there, planted on the lusterless skin in a random scatter, like monstrous enlargements of what, in Lorenzo’s imagination, Mookie’s doctors had seen under the microscope.
Slowly turning his head from the light streaming through the window, then facing Lorenzo at the shadow side of his bed, Mookie took a few seconds to complete a blink of the eye, Lorenzo thinking that he probably had more dope in him now than he had ever had on the street. After another prolonged moment, Mookie finally nodded in recognition—a glacial bob of the head that ended a fifty-three-week nonconversation—then, touching one of his trilobite-shaped sarcomas, whispered, “He died for us.”
Lorenzo thought the reference was to Uncle Theo, but then Mookie added, “Have you accepted him in your heart?”
Lorenzo gave it a beat, wiped his dry mouth. “Look at you,” he whispered soothingly, struggling to keep the tremor out of his voice. “Look at you. You did it, boy. You just beat the system. No more jail. No more…You done got over, boss, you done got over.” Mookie turned his head to the sunlight again. “Tell me you did it,” Lorenzo whispered. “Tell me you did it.” He decided in that moment, that, like the hat on the bed in Longway’s room, coming on Mookie today was an omen, a tide changer. If he could just get Mookie to come clean now, then out on the streets tonight, the dove would prevail.
“Tell me you did it,” Lorenzo murmured, a love call. Mookie closed his eyes. “C’mon now,” Lorenzo cooed. “You talking to me about Jesus. Right now you’re gonna meet the man with blood on your hands, don’t you see that? C’mon, man, nobody’s gonna mess with you now. You got over with it. Just tell me you did it.” Mookie opened his eyes, closed them again. “Tell me you did it.” Then, “C’mon now.” Lorenzo was hovering. “C’mon now.” Waiting, his legs trembling with renewed fatigue. “C’mon now…”
Mookie’s lips parted, then hung there. He was asleep. Grinning like a good sport, Lorenzo straightened up, then began walking back through the room. He got as far as the door and, wheeling, charged back to Mookie’s side. “Fuck you,” Lorenzo hissed, leaning over him again. “You AIDS-ass motherfucker.”
Filled with a murderous despair, avoiding the dying eyes on either side of him, Lorenzo finally stalked out of the room and headed for the elevator banks. As he passed the fifth-floor visitors’ lounge, he caught sight of the Reverend Longway sitting in his bathrobe, talking with two other ministers, the lay activist Donald De Lauder, and Curious George Howard.
De Lauder and the ministers coming by for a hospital visit didn’t necessarily signify anything, but the presence of Curious George, this week’s poster boy for racial injustice, was the closer. In Lorenzo’s mind the march was a done deal. Standing in the doorway now, like an enraged cuckold, Lorenzo glared at them, Longway throwing him a weak wave, saying, “Speak of the devil.”
“It’s like this.” Longway sat hunched over himself in the corduroy chair. “It’s like, let’s go over to their house, let’s go barge in through their door, see how they like it.”
Lorenzo tipped his chair back until his shoulders were gently bobbing against the wall. He regarded the Reverend Longway in his slippers and bathrobe, his sick-man skin the color of cigarette ash. The only others present now were Donald De Lauder and Curious George, who still bore the facial wounds from his go-round with Danny Martin. Hunkered down low on the couch, as if to duck the conversation on either side of him, George looked to Lorenzo as miserable in here as he did the other day, cuffed to the desk in Gannon.
“See, all this, this rage out there,” Longway said. “If we don’t, channel it? You know, make it articulate? It’s just gonna be more self-destruction.”
“Firing up those refrigerators at Armstrong,” Donald De Lauder said, “that’s like people getting mad at the landlord so they burn up their own homes. That’s convict mentality, and that kind of thinking has got to be rerouted.”
Lorenzo nodded in tentative agreement. Even given De Lauder’s martyred history he never felt comfortable around the guy. Perhaps unfairly Lorenzo didn’t trust anyone who had ever been shot; being that close to death permanently changed people, he believed, in unpredictable ways. In addition, De Lauder’s personal trajectory was all over the psychic map. After surviving injuries from that raid on the Panthers headquarters back in the sixties, De Lauder sued the city of Newark, retired from the force, became a serious juicer, and, two years later, was arrested for armed robbery. He came out of jail four years after that—sober and pissed. Not one for public speaking, he had nonetheless created a mobile army of followers, the Justice Now League. A sort of quick-response team, a loan-out cadre working both sides of the Hudson, they were willing to bolster the local presence in the wake of any incident, exposé, or revelation perceived as racist in nature.
“Now nobody wants anyone hurt around here,” De Lauder continued with his pitch, “but we want their anger. We can work with their anger.”
Lorenzo bobbled against the wall, thinking, I’ll give you anger—the people in this room suiting up in gasoline jackets to attend a bonfire. “Yeah, but like nonetheless, people could get hurt, right?”
“People are getting hurt.” De Lauder shrugged, playing with his wedding ring. “And it’s all that freelance improvising out there that’s doing the damage.”
“Why does it have to be tonight?” Lorenzo asked, beginning to find his voice. “You giving yourself next to no time to get
it together.”
“Why?” De Lauder again, Longway looking bad, slack-faced. “Because tonight’s gonna be worse than last night. I mean, you got to know there’s no way the police are gonna stand down again like that. Plus you got all those cameras out there, all those reporters. You got to strike while the iron’s hot.”
“While the iron’s hot,” Lorenzo said, starting to fume. “What if someone gets hurt?” Then, realizing he had already asked that, he added, “Some kid.”
“Then they’d be gettin’ hurt in front of the cameras.”
“And that’s gonna make it OK, because it’s for the greater good of the community, right?”
“Look.” Longway came back to life. “All I want, is Gannon acting like their natural selves.” He rose to his feet, struggling to maintain his balance. “I want, I want them on TV screaming ‘Nigger’ at us. I want them waving watermelons. I want, I want them to show the world who they are by how they react to us. I don’t want to do nothing on our end but show up, as advertised, and walk the walk.”
“We’re going to the zoo but that don’t mean we got to act like the monkeys,” De Lauder said, reaching up and gripping Longways forearm to steady him. “Let the monkeys act like the monkeys. We’re just going there to, to let the world see what our presence is gonna bring out in the people of Gannon. And you better believe the world will be watching, because this situation is a lot bigger than just Dempsy County. You gotta know that. I mean the stuff that happened here, that’s like up and down the pike, that’s endemic.”
Curious George hissed like a radiator, threw Lorenzo a desperate get-me-out-of-here glance, much as he had two days earlier in Gannon.
“And like I told the reverend here, before you came in,” De Lauder said, shaping his words with his hands. “Given the, the, high visibility we’re gonna get on this, it’s imperative that we do everything we can to make sure this thing goes off without a hitch on our end, all right?” Lorenzo held his peace, waiting. “Now, I am in no way shape or form looking to, to take over here, but I can offer you considerable help in your two greatest areas of potential liability, numbers and control.
“See, because from where I’m coming from, I think it would be a goddamn shame tonight if you had something like seventy-five people show up. I mean, you’re gonna have more newsmen than that. But I’ll tell you, historically? Dempsy’s got a numbers problem. Dempsy County has always had a hard time getting black people to show up, to get their behinds on the line.”
Curious George mumbled something about a phone call, stood up, and without waiting for anyone to clear out of his way he clumsily slid around the chairs and headed out, Longway and De Lauder watching him go.
“What’s George gonna be,” Lorenzo asked Longway. “Exhibit A?”
“You best believe it,” Longway responded without irony.
“Yeah, well good luck on that.”
“All right, like I was saying.” De Lauder turned them back to him. “Numbers… I’m going to deliver to you one hundred and twenty-five members of my organization, eighteen to eighty years of age. They believe, they’re experienced, and they know how to conduct themselves in a situation like this. They are disciplined. Which brings us to the second issue. Control…Now, I have every confidence in my own people being able to, to maintain, no matter what provocation is thrown in their path. We even have our own, what we call security ushers. But on your end, you’re not sure who’s gonna show, and you don’t know why they’re gonna show. Some might be there to stand up and be counted. Beautiful. Some might show ’cause they like all the TV business. And some, might be two, might be a dozen, they’re gonna be there ’cause they want to set it off. They want to bust it up, they want to light it up, and those brothers, as far as I’m concerned, might as well be wearing white sheets for all the damage they’re gonna do us. But that’s why I’m so glad to see you here, Lorenzo.”
Lorenzo leaned back, crossed his arms.
“See, I don’t even know how you feel about this march tonight, whether you approve or disapprove. My guess is you’re kind of on the fence, and I know what your job is in the world, especially visá-vis this particular situation, so if you said to me, to us, ‘Back off,’ I would have no choice but to respect that. But if you did decide to come on board? Well, then I can’t think of anyone else be better to help us on the X-factor end of things. Can you?” he asked Longway, who was eyeing Lorenzo as if amused by his resistance. “And I’m not even referring to the symbolic significance of having the arresting detective on this marching along with us,” De Lauder said. “I’m talking about straight-out nuts-and-bolts crowd control. Because experience tells me it’s gonna be harder for any of the local knuckleheads to act up if they got someone they know ridin’ shotgun on them.”
“Where the hell did George go?” Longway abruptly sat up. “He best not have flown the coop.”
“Fuck George,” Lorenzo blurted, embarrassing himself and drawing mild stares from the others. “I’ll go get him,” he muttered, and left the room—basically, to leave the room.
George was down the hall, squawking into a pay phone. “I said, where my motherfuckin’ tape at,” he sputtered, spraying the receiver. “What you mean you lent it to Keisha. Where you come to lent out my got-damn tape… Naw, naw, naw.” He cast an anxious glance back to the lounge he had just escaped from. “Well I’m gonna come get it right now …Right now… Well, you best go get it then… You best go get it or I’m gonna jump in your motherfuckin’ chest, you hear me?” George slammed down the receiver and bolted for the stairs, Lorenzo making no move to stop him.
Returning to the lounge, Lorenzo found Longway by himself now, De Lauder having left for parts unknown. They sat in the cool of the room, each waiting for the other to kick it off.
“George in the wind?” Longway asked, as if not interested in the answer.
“How come I got to hear about this secondhand,” Lorenzo said sharply.
“I didn’t want to put you on the spot.”
“What spot.”
“You being the detective that broke the case. I didn’t want to put you in a awkward situation.”
“Bullshit.”
Longway shrugged, done with it, and the silence resumed, Lorenzo momentarily lost again in the fog of his own worries. “This thing comes off,” he asked the rev in a less emotional tone, “what do you think you’re gonna get for it?”
“Hey.” The rev raised and dropped a floppy hand. “You get what you can get. You know how it goes. Citizen review board, more black cops, more jobs, a goddamn basketball tournament. You get whatever you can get. You know how it works around here.”
Lorenzo envisioned promises, getting promises. Maybe some figurehead review board. Useless. Worse than useless, because then the powers that be can point to that and say, “See what we did for you?”
“So you coming on board?” Longway asked.
“I don’t know. If I do you’ll see me there.”
“All right.”
“How the hell you gonna lead a march tonight. You look sicker than shit.”
“Are you kidding me? I been waitin’ my whole life for something like this.”
“I,” Lorenzo repeated reproachfully, but Longway ignored it.
“And I’ll tell you,” the rev added, “if something does go wrong and someone gets hurt? I hope to God it’s me.” Lorenzo shut his eyes and palmed his face. “What…” Longway demanded irritably.
“Naw, I hear what you’re sayin’.”
“How come most times people get ready to make a move around here, you always go to grab the backs of their shirt for them.”
“Well, look,” Lorenzo said, feeling a little more focused, “there’s moves and there’s moves. Most times I got to roll a body is because someone thought they were making a move.”
“Aw c’mon with that crap.” Longway waved him off. “How could you not step up in a situation like this.” Lorenzo felt himself sinking, physically, mentally. “What is it, L
orenzo?” Longway asked almost tenderly—the pastor now, the old friend—and, moved by the quiet earnestness in his voice, Lorenzo felt himself unclench.
“I just want to keep people safe,” he said, his voice almost sensuous with conviction.
“Safe.” Longway leaned back in his chair, let his hands flop on his thighs. “Safe for what?”
Leaving the hospital, Lorenzo was surprised to see Bobby McDonald in the lobby the presence of his boss here, at this particular time, putting him on edge.
“Hey.” McDonald smiled. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Lorenzo said, waiting.
“How’s the rev?”
“OK. Getting discharged today, I guess.”
“Good, good.” Bobby squinted into the sun. “You gonna finish up the arrest reports today?”
“On my way in.”
“’Cause I should’ve gotten them yesterday, but I understand, you know, it’s like one thing on top of the other here.”
“They’ll be done today.” Waiting.
“Excellent.” McDonald coughed into his fist. “So let me ask you, what do you think of this march tonight?”
There you go. “It’s better than burnin’ down the house,” Lorenzo said, shrugging.
“Yeah?” His boss sounded like he truly wanted to believe that. “Are you taking, are you participating?”
“I might, you know, like to help keep things under control.”
“Yeah, huh?” McDonald winced. “I don’t know. I just, I had a feeling that…” He exhaled heavily. “I don’t know, Lorenzo, you did such an ace job closing this out, trying to keep everything in check last night. I mean, whether you know it or not, you made a lot of new friends out there.”
“OK.” Waiting again.
“I mean, it’s a free country and all, but… I don’t know, brother, there’s like two seconds left on the game clock here. Why would you want to throw shit in the mix now?”
Lorenzo remained in the lobby until McDonald was gone, then headed out to the parking lot. Once inside his car, he decided to blow off the promised reports and return to his mother’s apartment for a few more hours of sleep. He was unable to sort himself out right now, except to understand that he had finally shot his wad and should not be around people. There was no more give in him, no more flex, and he knew without a doubt that if he didn’t take himself out of circulation for a while, he would most definitely go off and that, when he did, the eruption would probably be directed at the wrong people.
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