The neighborhood was quiet, only blocks from the bustle of Florida A&M University’s campus, where her father was the dean of the criminal justice department. As the sky’s angry orange daylight faded, and the shadows from the pine trees stretched long, I found myself idling across the street from a one-story redbrick ranch house shaped like an L, on a street of well-kept homes.
The house had a covered porch draped in kudzu and a circular driveway, where a purple minivan was parked in front of the whitewashed door. The minivan had a Barack Obama campaign sticker and a green FAMU Rattlers vanity license plate: PROF229. The yard was on a slight incline, big and lush, carpeted with pine needles. Light shone through the closed blinds in the living-room window.
I remembered April telling me that since she and her brothers had all moved out, her parents thought their old house was too big for them. Every year, April and her brothers spent four weeks at their parents’ house—two in summer, and two at Christmas. It looked like a pleasant place to spend time.
I was about to drive off when the front door opened, and a silver-haired woman with a short ’fro and a white track suit came bounding outside with a large box in both hands. Her car’s remote control dangled from her hand. I saw her van’s lights flash as the doors unlocked.
April’s mother. She raised her knee, trying to balance the box as she opened the van’s passenger-side door. April said her mother was a one-woman machine, between her volunteer work at her church and her job as a social worker. April had mentioned more than once that she was afraid her mother was wearing herself down. As April’s mother leaned over, the box nearly slipped from her hands. It looked heavy.
Shit. My hand was on my door handle when she got the box safely inside the van and slammed the door. Before she climbed into the passenger side of her van, I got a very good look at Gloria Forrest. Her face was fuller than April’s, but so similar that it was eerie. She was April’s future, and the future looked bright. April’s mother was beautiful.
I tapped my horn and waved as I drove past, and she waved back with a ready smile I already recognized. She didn’t know me, and it didn’t matter. She was that kind of woman; the kind who would greet a stranger with a motherly smile at the end of a busy day.
As I drove away from April’s street, I hoped I would see her again.
I started out for Mercy as the sky was getting dark.
With the lights of Tallahassee fading behind me, isolation set in right away. Traffic was still clogging the lanes as commuters drove home to the nearby towns, but Mercy was twenty miles northwest of Tallahassee, so traffic thinned as I got farther out. Soon, there was nothing in sight but trees on either side of Highway 10. The Sticks, just like April had said. I stared through my windshield at the large white moon radiating above the woods from a clear sky. The starlight’s patterns hypnotized me. In L.A., it’s easy to forget what a clear sky looks like.
In my rearview mirror, I noticed a pair of bright headlights approaching me fast. A huge pickup, probably a Chevy. The truck came so close that its lights filled my rearview mirror. My ear roared. It was as if Carlyle had come back from the dead.
The truck swerved to pass me in a streak of gleaming silver. The cab was crammed with boys who looked like they were in college. Someone let down a window in back. For the first time, I noticed a large Confederate flag pasted to the bed’s door. A flashing red light in the back of my mind went on high alert. Genetic memory, perhaps.
Welcome to the South, I reminded myself, ready to hit the brakes.
A lanky white boy leaned over to yell at me from his window. I couldn’t hear him, but I saw his lips move: “Obamaaaaa!” he called, and grinned, pumping his fist.
Someone stuck out a bright orange foam finger boasting #1 from Florida University, inviting me to honk and join their celebration. I didn’t know if they had just come from a game or a political rally, but they were college kids having fun, driving too fast. Life, lived as an extreme sport. I honked twice, and three of them raised their arms while they cheered.
My foot relaxed. Did you think they were on their way to a Klan rally? I laughed out loud and called Dad to tell him the story.
“Whoa—I can’t believe you still have cell reception,” Chela said when she answered.
“Yeah, me neither. How’s Dad?”
“He’s good. Don’t worry about us. Marcela’s driving us crazy. She’s lucky she’s so cool, or she’d get on my nerves.”
“I heard that!” Marcela called from a distance, and Chela laughed. Chela would never admit it, but she was giddy about Saturday’s dance. No matter what, you have to be home by Saturday night, I reminded myself. I couldn’t leave Saturday night to Marcela.
But without Marcela, I couldn’t have left Dad and Chela alone. Marcela had agreed to keep an eye on Chela while I was gone, but Marcela wasn’t spending the night. There was nothing I could do if Chela snuck out of the house while I was gone. Or ditched school all day. Marcela was Dad’s nurse—but she was turning into a member of the family. I wished Chela had warmed up to April as easily as she had with Marcela.
But April had been different.
“Okay, well don’t stay up too late. TV off by midnight,” I said.
“Believe that if you want to.”
“Can you put Dad on?”
“He’s taking a nap.”
I was disappointed. I wanted to tell him the story about the pickup truck. I wished he had been able to make the trip with me. I had left my new partner at home.
I tried to dial Len next—I hadn’t talked to him in days—but my cell phone beeped. SIGNAL LOST, my phone read, at the same time my navigator’s British accent informed me that I had arrived at my destination. I took the exit toward Mercy.
Mercy’s exit led to a darker two-lane road, and open fields instead of trees. For what seemed like a long stretch, I didn’t see any lights—no businesses, no homes. Nothing. If not for my navigator, I would have been sure I was on the wrong road.
But lights appeared like an apparition when I turned right at the dead end, where reflective letters on a green sign pointed toward Mercy. Suddenly, I saw neon signs for hotels standing higher than the treetops on tall poles meant to draw travelers from the highway. They were chains—I won’t name them, but one had kept the light on—and both were charging more than a hundred dollars a night.
Might as well stay in town, I figured. The chains were clean and familiar. Nothing fancy, but no cockroaches either. Inside, the hotel was so new that it smelled like paint, and there was a dish of fresh fruit at the front desk. I was feeling lucky until the front desk clerk told me that my room would cost two hundred dollars a night.
“Everybody fills up at homecoming. Big game Saturday,” said the man behind the counter, who looked Indian or Pakistani. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and a beige mock safari coat, the chain’s desk uniform. “Florida University.”
I felt jacked, but my stomach was growling. I gave him cash to book a room, registering under the name John Gage, the paramedic from that show Emergency! I watched when I was a kid. Just a precaution. “Is your restaurant open?” I said.
“No restaurant, sorry. The Domino’s over in Quincy delivers.”
Shit. I didn’t want to spread a bad mood around, so I kept my voice pleasant. “What about in Mercy? Any restaurants?”
The clerk took a long time to answer, absorbed with typing my registration information. “The new Hardee’s, maybe.” He sounded distracted.
“I’m looking for some real food, man.”
“The good food’s in Tallahassee,” he said. “Boston Market. Cracker Barrel. Denny’s. You should have brought dinner with you.” He said it as if that was common knowledge.
“Nowhere in town for a hot meal?” My tone slipped two notches, to irritation.
The clerk raised his finger, an afterthought. “Unless you like barbecue.” I was afraid I’d heard wrong; the word barbecue made my mouth water. “There’s a place in town, Pig’n-a-Poke. Off of
McCormack Way. Only sign on the block with neon.”
“Is it good?”
He shrugged. “Never eaten there.”
If the place looked clean, I would try the beef ribs. Or chicken. Or both. But first, work.
My cell phone was still gasping for service and the hotel didn’t have Ethernet in the rooms, so I hit one of the two computers in the hotel’s bathroom-sized OFFICE SUITE. I’d done a property records search on Rubens, and I scanned the addresses, computing my distance on MapQuest. Man was livin’ large. Most of his property was in Tallahassee, so I might be able to check those out at the end of the day. I noticed that one of his apartment buildings was in Quincy, about six miles away. Maybe I’d start there in the morning, after I sniffed around Mercy. With so little time, I had to hope it would be easiest to find him close to home.
My plane had arrived too late for me to make it to the Florida University Library archives in Tallahassee, which had been closing up at the same time I was landing, but a librarian I reached by phone had given me a temporary password and user ID. I would have access to the university’s archives online for twenty-four hours. A trial membership, since I wasn’t a student.
The online archives, which included access to old student newspapers, went only as far back as 1983. I surfed the site, but I didn’t find much I hadn’t already seen on my previous searches. The most interesting discovery, under the Bobcats Athletics section, was a photograph from the Sunshine Bowl published by the Tallahassee Democrat in 1967. The photo looked dramatic in black-and-white, like a still from a classic sports film:
The white SoCal quarterback is nearly falling backward, the football launching from his fingertips while a swarm of determined Florida players in dark jerseys leap at him from every direction. Right behind the quarterback, a Florida player is broadsided in midleap by a hulk of a man in a SoCal helmet, whose face is knit with thunderous will, teeth gritted.
The SoCal offensive tackle was Wallace Rubens. His face was distorted except for his nose, but his nose was enough. The photo was striking because all of the players charging the SoCal quarterback were white—and the most prominent players beating back their charge were black. I wondered how that photo had gone over in Tallahassee the morning after the game.
Florida University had thirty thousand students the year after that game, in 1968, so it had always been big. And powerful. Between current students and alumni, FU had a large influence over Tallahassee and the outlying areas.
Information on the Sunshine Bowl was otherwise scant. Universities celebrate their victories, not their losses. A link in the chat section took me to a college sports blog, where an unnamed blogger had written about the 1967 Sunshine Bowl. The anonymous entry was a year old, but it was my first glimpse into the game from the eyes of an FU student.
“FU tries to pretend it never happened, but I was there,” he wrote. “Hell, I was a part of it. I was as mad as everyone else, and it swept the whole stadium that day. Don’t forget about Vietnam, folks. We’d lost Calhoun after he graduated, and nobody had recovered from that yet. (Rocket Forever!) There was a Cinderella story, rebuilding the football program after a hero falls. We’d gone in with so many expectations, and nobody thought a damn about Southern Cal back then. (LOL!) I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying we have to take it all into account. It’s easy to judge something when you weren’t there.
“But let me call it like it was, since everybody else here is too chicken: When we saw that SoCal offense, a kind of a shock went through the stands. Remember? There’d been sit-ins and all these demonstrations in Tallahassee, our parents saying we were about to lose everything, and now here was this team with so many black players—four in the offense! One of them built like a truck! Holy shi**! (Show of hands: Who had ever seen anyone like Rubins?)
“And they could play too! Run fast! Catch! Maybe we wouldn’t have noticed so much if they’d been more spread out, but they’re all on offense, like we’re being attacked on our home soil. There was this chant inside the stadium that echoed from the rooftop. Go home, Nig***! Every play, same chant. If one of them got shaken up (and let’s face it, it was open season on those guys and the referees went blind), everybody cheered. Go home, Nig***! I was there, and a lot of you were too. Class of ’67? Class of ’66? All those alums? Nobody wants to say, like it never happened. Ain’t it funny how life turns around and stares at you in the face?
“Not exactly a proud moment. But a GREAT game! Even though it hurt like hell to get our butts kicked, I kept looking for Rubins’ name to come up in the draft. Never did. Didn’t he get hurt at that game? It might have killed his career. And one of them was T.D. Jackson’s dad, so THAT goes without saying—like father, like son. (What a waste of protoplasm T.D. Jackson turned out to be, but that’s another subject). I always wondered what happened to those players. I wonder what it felt like to be one of those black guys standing on that field with so much hatred raining down.”
It felt like it was time to kill you, I thought. My teeth had clenched. Humiliating you publicly would have been a poor second best.
When I checked my watch, it was almost nine.
I hoped the barbecue place was open late.
Mercy was almost invisible at night.
There were long stretches without streetlamps, and only occasional homes with lights burning, most of them set way back on farms. Mercy was definitely rural. My headlights reflected against highway signs announcing a maze of obscure roads; not that I could have seen the roads well in the dark. Mercy’s roads were noticeably bumpy, not well paved, and my headlights warned me that they were bordered by deep gulleys. I wouldn’t be making any U-turns if I could help it. I was glad I had my navigator.
A single stoplight shone red ahead: downtown Mercy. The businesses lining the street were dark and shuttered; most of them identified with hand-painted signs: ANTIQUES. FURNITURE. HUMAN HAIR/ WIGS!!! A plantation-style colonial building in the middle of the block on McCormack Way was probably the town hall. There was a bronze statue of a horse-mounted soldier in the courtyard, probably a Civil War hero, but it was too dark to see an inscription. Mercy didn’t have much, but it was a proud of what it had.
At the gas station on the corner, Handi Mart, shopping carts and the two dozen cars parked outside told me that a lot of locals bought their groceries at the convenience store. I could only imagine what they were paying. The Handi Mart was the only place in sight that was still bustling. That, and Hardee’s—the Southern version of Carl’s Jr.
I turned the corner at the light and crossed the railroad tracks, following my navigator. Just that fast, downtown Mercy was gone. Darkness. More than a half mile down, as the clerk had told me, the barbecue restaurant was the only light at the end of the street. The sign blazed red in the dark, lighting the crush of cars parked beneath it: PIG’N-A-POKE.
The sign was about the size of a car tire, a bright red ring circling a cartoonish, grinning pink pig with a chef’s hat and a spatula. I wondered what kind of ghoulish, self-loathing cannibal pigs they grew around there. The logo made me think of Senator Donald Hankins: I’ll swear it until the day I die.
The parking lot was packed. As I bumped into the gravel lot, which bordered an overgrown field, my headlights caught a house across the street so dilapidated that I was surprised it was still standing. Its wooden walls and porch were warped and sagging. The paint was so old that it looked unpainted, and there were cracks between the planks so large that I could see them even at night. In front of the house, near the road, five older men warmed their hands around a fire in a barrel. Sparks twirled up into the night, lighting their laughing faces.
I had found the ’hood.
Nothing on the outside of Pig’n-a-Poke made me want to go inside. The long, large building was virtually windowless. A light-colored German shepherd pawing the door at the top of the concrete-block steps seemed certain he’d be invited in before long. I hated to guess what Pig’n-a-Poke’s L.A. County health code grade would
be. I could see why the hotel clerk had never made it there.
I carefully nudged past the big gray shepherd to go in without him. He gave me sad eyes.
Inside, the scent of spicy, slow-roasting ribs blew across my face like a spring breeze, and B.B. King was singing “Let the Good Times Roll” on a jukebox, working sweet Lucille like a back-door lover. I’d come to the right place.
But it’s hard not to stand out when you don’t belong. I had two days’ worth of razor stubble to try to make my features less noticeable—it’s a face women notice, and that isn’t always an advantage—but even in a denim jacket and jeans, I stood out like the neon sign outside.
Every sister in the room seemed to notice me walk in, so their men noticed, too. The room’s hum of conversation dipped down. I sat at my first chance, at a table slightly hidden by the jukebox. The waitress might never find me, but at least I wouldn’t draw stares. After the room noticed that I’d sat quietly—and alone, girlfriends acknowledged with sly grins—the conversation went back up a decibel.
The front room was boisterous, at least forty people under red-tinged lights, like a nightclub. Most of the patrons were dressed for work, whether it was loosened ties or muddied overalls. I saw women’s pressed heads of jet-black hair and exposed cleavage. Most of them had too much eye makeup, the amateur’s mistake, but their faces were prettied up. The women’s clothes shared a fashion code: tight. Nobody came to Pig’n-a-Poke to be on their best behavior.
I grabbed the plastic-encased menu from my table, wiping off barbecue sauce. I was glad there were towelettes at every table.
The décor inside was Southern sports bar, with sawdust on the floor. A buck’s head was mounted above the bar, and the walls were plastered with football banners from FU, Florida State, and Florida A&M. Above the entrance, I saw a framed chalk drawing of a huge tobacco barn.
In the Night of the Heat Page 31