The guy had his hands in his jean pockets and was moving with deliberation, not fast, not slow, just a dude walking, not a person of interest.
He might be armed. Very possible. He’d brought a gun to a party whose guest list leaned more NPR than NRA. You had to wonder what his friends made of him.
Classic Dane! Ha ha ha.
Now that he was wanted for murder?
I don’t carry an off-duty firearm.
I’d come without my vest. I was trying to blend in.
Was I imagining it: a bulge at the small of his back?
I strained to see.
The phone in my hand, blank.
Where was Nwodo?
We were without backup.
If she couldn’t find me or reach me in time, I was without any backup whatsoever.
I’d given the guy a healthy head start. If he jumped into a vehicle, I’d lose him.
A bicycle, I’d lose him.
I walked faster.
The phone shook.
“Where are you?” Nwodo said. She was breathing hard.
“Clay.”
“Where are you?”
Grasping her confusion, I said, “Clay Street. By the convention center. Eastbound.”
“Any sense of where he’s going?”
A gust tunneled through. The man leaned into it and picked up his pace. I matched him, my bad knee starting to stiffen. “BART, maybe.”
“There’s an entrance on Eleventh,” she said. “I’m gonna cut him off. Stay on the line.”
It’s a long block to Broadway. I sped up to a jog, pulling within twenty yards. Leg nausea coming on: bones grinding, tendons and cartilage getting shy, curling up.
Fifty feet from the corner he reached into his back pocket for his wallet. I could see him fiddling with it, taking out his BART pass.
As he moved to replace his wallet, he checked behind and saw me gaining ground.
He took off.
I shouted into the phone: “Coming your way.”
Up ahead Nwodo appeared from around a raised marble plaza. We had him sandwiched. But I had spoken too soon, or too loudly, alerting him to her presence; she had revealed herself too readily; and the fifty feet of play enabled him to veer across the street, toward the Marriott, the frontage of which sits at an angle, a shortcut that collapsed our advantage.
“Stop,” Nwodo yelled.
We converged on Broadway, running side by side.
He banked to the right, like he meant to turn down 10th, then juked back along Broadway, passing a series of quaint storefronts, Victorian façades restored or reimagined. Downtown was having a moment, it would have its moment any moment, Oakland was the City of the Future, look at all the excitement it had to offer.
“Asshole. Stop.”
My long loping stride, hampered by the retching sensation in my knee, wild protestations lighting up my nervous system. The fuck did he think he was going?
I assume he didn’t realize there was a police station, two blocks ahead.
Or perhaps he did: he bolted left, across six empty lanes, down 9th.
We rounded the bend, Nwodo pumping her fists. She tucked her head down and then, with an astounding burst of physical impatience, an unspoken Enough of this shit, she exploded ahead like a funny car, leaving me goggling at her sudden disappearance, one instant beside me and in the next a shrinking silhouette, eating up the gap.
He felt the heat on his back.
He had barely enough time to turn around before she caught him by the neck and gave him a nice hard sideways shove, a bit of encouragement that, combined with his own momentum, pitched him face-first into the roll-shuttered entrance to a Vietnamese market.
He caromed off, reeling backward, tripping over his own feet, one eye scrunched in bafflement and mouth a black tunnel, whirling and flailing to remain vertical, and just as it seemed as though he might right himself, as his mind began to embrace the fantastic hope that he could still get away; as his waist began to corkscrew and his arms to seek freedom; it was right about that moment that I caught up, and, lowering my shoulder, crushed into his midsection.
Hit through the guy. That’s what football coaches tell linemen. Make the object of your wrath not the opponent but a space two feet behind him. Hit that.
Never my game, football. Still, good advice is good advice.
Down we went, tracing a steep and vicious curve, like the line of a fourth-rate economy in free fall. His body reached the pavement first, followed by his head, damp crack and then silence. For a second I worried I’d hurt him badly. Then I felt his limbs fluttering beneath me, his breath humid on my face.
Nwodo was right away by my side. Together we rolled him onto his stomach.
“Shit,” he moaned. “Oh God.”
“You got a gun on you?” Nwodo said.
“God. Shit.”
“Shut up. You got a gun?”
“Shit…”
She patted him down. No gun. He did have a pocketknife in his boot. She tossed it aside. He was clutching his BART pass in his right hand and his wallet in his left. He hadn’t had a chance to put them away. I had to give him props for hanging on.
Nwodo pried the wallet from him and took out his license.
She flipped it around to show me. She leaned over, smiling, to look him in the eye. “How’s it going, Dane.”
* * *
—
THE POLICE STATION was two blocks away.
It took twenty minutes for a cruiser to arrive.
By then Dane Jankowsi had recovered enough of his wits to start bitching.
“I’m gonna sue you fuckers.”
He was lying on the sidewalk. I had my foot on his back. Nwodo had lit the votive candle and placed it on the ground nearby.
“Go right ahead,” she said.
“Both of you. Fuckin police brutality.”
“Tsk,” I said. “It’s terrible.”
“Keep your hands behind your head,” Nwodo said.
“It fuckin hurts,” Jankowski said. “You hit me.”
“I believe it was the ground did that,” Nwodo said.
“The shutter,” I said.
“That too.”
“You see how he tripped?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Nwodo said. “Clumsy.”
“Fuck you both.”
“That’s very original, I’ve never heard that one.” She looked at me. “You ever heard that one before?”
“Nope,” I said. “You should copyright that shit.”
“Fuck you.”
“Where’s your gun, Dane?” Nwodo asked.
“I don’t have any gun.”
“You ditch it? Where you been staying, this last week?”
He did not reply.
“Don’t be stupid,” Nwodo said. “Either way, you’re going down.”
A black-and-white pulled up.
“Last chance,” Nwodo said. “Where’s the gun at?”
Jankowski cursed and spat. The uniforms tossed him into the cruiser, where he gave up the posturing and heaped against the door.
“Well,” Nwodo said, cricking her neck, “that was fun.”
“We’ll see how I feel in the morning.” I looked at her. “You got jets.”
“Nah. You’re just slow.”
We shared a chuckle.
I hesitated, then said, “The film crew.”
She nodded. “I’ll check it out.”
She didn’t appear offended by my suggestion. We were still basking in the glow of a shared win. I almost offered to help her out. But that felt a step too far.
“Listen,” I said, “it might be best, when you write this
whole thing up, I’m not part of the story.”
“Why’s that.”
“From a jurisdictional point of view.”
“Not cause you don’t want to get sued.”
“They never do.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He seemed pretty mad.”
“Yeah, cause you embarrassed him,” I said. “Anyhow, take my word. I don’t need it getting back to my boss that I’m out running around chasing people down.”
A plastic bag rattled along the street.
“While conducting surveillance,” Nwodo said, “I observed an individual acting in a suspicious manner. A closer look revealed that this individual was identical with Dane Jankowski, whose face I recognized from the BOLO. I pursued the suspect, and when he did not yield to my requests to stop, I detained him, subduing him in accordance with department-sanctioned guidelines for the use of force.”
“I appreciate it.”
She nodded and left to talk to the uniforms.
I went home to ice my knee.
CHAPTER 14
Tuesday, January 1
7:36 p.m.
Funny: my knee felt fine, that night and over the next few days. Better than usual, in fact, less junky. I mentioned to Amy I might take up sprinting.
“That’s definitely the logical conclusion,” she said.
“I was reading that short bursts of intense exercise are easier on the joints than prolonged low-intensity activity.”
“Reading where.”
“Online.”
“Mm,” she said.
“I feel like you’re not supporting me in my fitness journey.” I scooped rice. “You should have seen her, though. It was unbelievable. Like we’re in a video game and she powers up. Foooosh.”
“It’s cute that you have a crush on her.”
“What I am,” I said, “is an admirer of human achievement and athletic prowess.”
“Is she hot? You make her sound hot.”
“She’s pretty hot.”
“Is she taken? Should we set her up with someone?”
“No ring, but I don’t know.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Why would I know that?”
“Well, try and find out.”
“I can’t do that. That’s super awkward.”
Amy smiled, checked the oven clock. “What time are you supposed to be there?”
“Eight.”
“Stay safe, okay?”
“Luke? He’s not going to do anything to me.”
“I meant driving around there.”
She was one to talk. Her clinic is located in the Tenderloin. The sidewalk outside the building is a syringe graveyard.
I stood up, wiped my mouth, kissed the top of her head. “Love you.”
“You too.”
* * *
—
MCCLYMONDS HIGH SCHOOL sits at the base of a seedy triangle defined by San Pablo, Peralta, and Grand. Crossing the parking lot, I saw the gymnasium lights burning. No dribbling or yelling that I could hear, though, and it was a white silence that greeted me as I walked the hall, feeling the riven linoleum through my sneakers.
Taped to the gym doors, a paper sign, Luke’s floppy handwriting.
LATE NITE BALL
The door let out a loud pop, and several of the bodies spread out on the hardwood twitched. That’s how I knew they weren’t dead. For all appearances, I’d stumbled upon a massacre: thirteen black adolescent males, flat on their backs in a circle, and sitting cross-legged at the top, the keystone, my brother.
He smiled at me and put a finger to his lips.
One boy had risen up on his elbows to stare. Luke motioned for him to lie down. After a wary moment, he did.
“Just keep riding the waves of your breath,” Luke said.
His voice was unrecognizable.
I tiptoed to the grandstand.
“What’s on your mind now?” Luke said. “Where has it gone?”
The boys were fourteen or fifteen years old, but in their limp vulnerability, I perceived them as younger. Absent the rolled shoulders, the bulletproof carapace of indifference.
“Wherever it’s got to, that’s okay,” Luke said. “Look at it. Hold it in your attention. Breathe with it, and accept it. And then, without judging yourself, let it go, and bring your attention back to your breath.”
In that short span—without any real attempt on my part—I found myself lulled, tuned to the sensations percolating around me: the green shriek of the indoor floods; floorboards ticking, whir and wheeze; sweet ancient sweat. My own paced inhalations, growing shorter and shallower, until a chime lanced the stillness.
I sat up, blinking, alert.
The high warble faded to nothing. Again Luke touched the bells together.
The boys began to stir.
The third chime disappeared into chatter and the eager chirp of sneakers. Somebody lugged over a decrepit ball cart, and the air began to vibrate with thuds.
Luke tucked the bells in a drawstring bag and ambled over to me.
“You came,” he said.
“I said I would.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “Right on.”
Cupping his mouth, he called: “Okay. Let’s get warm.”
* * *
—
NORMALLY THEY PLAYED for three hours, broken up by occasional drills. Seeing as they had an authentic baller in their midst, Luke asked me to spend a few minutes talking to them first, describing what it takes to compete at the highest level.
I wasn’t far into my thumbnail autobiography before a runty kid in a Kevin Durant jersey raised his hand and asked who I had played for.
“Cal Bears,” I said.
“Ain’t no Bears.”
“It’s Division One.”
The boy huffed derisively. “You said the highest level.”
Luke said, “He went to the Final Four.”
The degree of shit not given was impressive.
“You know what,” I said, clapping, “I think we’re good here.”
* * *
—
THEY RAN FIVE on five, three waiting for next, knees treadling like a row of sewing machines. Luke acted as coach and referee, dashing up and down the sideline, leaping in to adjudicate a burgeoning altercation, pinwheeling his skinny leglike arms and exhorting them to pass, pass, find the open man.
He settled a traveling call and trotted over to join me on the bench.
We watched mini-Durant jack up a three-pointer from six feet behind the line.
Cries of airball.
“Swear to God,” Luke said. “What’s with all the threes?”
“It’s the Steph Curry effect,” I said.
“Okay, but they pass, too. That’s what makes it beautiful to watch.”
His attention to teamwork amused me. The Luke I knew and played against was a notorious hog.
Later we ran them through some layup drills, rebounding drills, passing drills. When Luke told them to line up for most-in-a-row, protest broke out.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said.
A stocky boy lay down on the floor.
“Marcus,” Luke said. “Up.”
“I’m tired.”
“You can’t make free throws when you’re tired, you lose. Up.”
Marcus got up. He made a big production of it, flopping his limbs around, but he did it.
First to shoot hit four without a miss. His successor made three; a couple of kids managed five. Six was the number to beat when Marcus stepped to the line. Under a barrage of mockery, he calmly drilled eight straight before clanging one off the back iron.
“
Told you,” he said. “Tired.”
“Yo Division One.”
Kevin Durant had retrieved the rebound and was addressing me.
He tossed me the ball.
I said, “It’s been a while, guys.”
“Bitch shut up and shoot.”
“Hey,” Luke said. “No.”
The speaker rolled his eyes.
I came forward, spun the ball in my palms.
My first attempt muddled its way in. I was shooting from a cold start. But once out of the gate, I relaxed and found my stroke.
Two, three. Five. Seven.
“Shit.”
Eight.
“Division One.”
Nine.
“Shit.”
I figured ten was a good place to stop, but Luke waved: Keep going.
I ended up with seventeen.
The boys had fallen silent.
“Respect,” Marcus said.
* * *
—
AFTER THE BOYS had gone; after they’d cleaned up, and filed out, bumping Luke’s fist, one by one—Coach, Coach, Coach—after a cavernous hush took up residence in the rafters, like some exhausted giant settling in to hibernate; my brother and I sat inches apart, surveying the vacant waxed floor, soldiers returned to their beachhead, half a century on.
Luke said, “You missed on purpose.”
I shrugged. “You want us to be here all night?”
He laughed. “For the record,” he said, and said no more.
Summer evenings in Siempre Verde Park, playing till sundown, our friends drifting off to dinner, till it was just the two of us, heedless, bashing against each other, wet shirts heavy as leather. The stars came out and we shot free throws in the dark. Most-in-a-row.
Forty-three my best.
Forty-five his.
I nodded slightly, conceded slightly.
One ball had gone overlooked and was crouching in a pile of orange agility cones. I pushed up on my knees and went to retrieve it. “You do a good job with them.”
A Measure of Darkness Page 12