Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  “My father’s boss. A few white people live in my building and they’re nice,” Billy said. He was shaped like a string bean. “And a few cops, but I don’t know them. And when I went to camp one summer there was the head of the camp.”

  “I don’t know any white people!” Afa said.

  “I guess me either!” Billy said.

  “We’re sixteen fucking years old and we don’t know any white people,” Afa said.

  “How about your neighbors?” Antoinette said to Billy. “You said one minute ago that you knew your neighbors.” She was starting not to like it that Afa was in charge of conversations among the three of them. They were in Afa’s room like they always were, sitting in front of her fish tank. Afa kept beautiful African fish because her father knew the owner of the pet store. One time, Afa’s father brought home a turtle as big as the dining room table, but they didn’t know what to do with it, so they just brought it back to the store, but not before Afa scratched “A+B+A” into the shell.

  “But how well do I really know my neighbors?” Billy said. “And I only met my father’s boss two times!”

  “Don’t tell him what to do,” Afa told Antoinette.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Antoinette told Afa. “Us, I mean.”

  “Why are you always belittling us?” Afa told Antoinette. “You think you’re better than us.”

  “Me?” Antoinette said. “I do?” Antoinette looked to Billy.

  But Billy looked down, whether in agreement with Afa or not to get involved, Antoinette didn’t know.

  Afa smirked in Antoinette’s direction. It had been unspoken between Afa and Antoinette that Billy was out of bounds. That Antoinette would ruin everything if she tried to be Billy’s girlfriend. He was very tall and very black and very smart and very nice and very shy and very clumsy and not at all funny, and he was awkward around adults, and he would have probably made a bad boyfriend anyway. She was so angry to be called belittling like that. And they were getting too old to hang out the three of them together all the time. So Antoinette went to a party that night and dressed up as sexy as she could and went over to a group of kids and was as friendly as possible and became one of their girlfriends and was pregnant within a month.

  When she thought about that time in her life later on, it was that conversation about white people she remembered. The drinking and drugs she did after wiped other stuff away. Pot, mostly, but other stuff, too. Cocaine a few times. The real reason she didn’t have an abortion was because she didn’t want to tell anyone she was pregnant and she didn’t know where to get one on her own. It was too late when her aunt noticed. Her mom flew in from Chicago. Afa and Billy dated for seven years after that.

  Antoinette wanted to be clean once she knew she was keeping the child. Not get clean, only. Be clean. So being saved wasn’t a hard decision. It was what her mother and aunt wanted for her, and without Afa and Billy who looked down on her first because of the pregnancy and drugs and then because of the religion, it gave Antoinette new friends. She wanted to strip all that dirt off her. She wanted to cleanse herself of all that liquor and those drugs. Jesus was the cleanest thing there was. Clean clothes. No drugs. Clean friends. Clean songs. Forgiveness. No drinking. No parties that felt dangerous. No judgment, after she came clean. After she was saved. She got a tiny place of her own and took in other children whom she could raise along with her boy, Teddy. Only people’s kids from the neighborhood, so she couldn’t charge much at first, but she could charge enough for an apartment of her own. And she was only eighteen. So that was it. Monday through Friday with her Teddy and three or four other babies and toddlers from the neighborhood. Then Saturday in church. And Sunday was prayer dance. She never graduated high school, but she got her equivalency—that wasn’t difficult. And after a few years running the center on the down low out of her house, she paid the fifty dollars to Sittercity.com as a specialist in multiples who had run a day care and received all sorts of job offers immediately. This was once Teddy could start preschool.

  But it wasn’t enough for her. Being saved once. The baptism and the new set of friends. It had been almost a decade, and the shine of it, the fresh new glaze, had worn off, so now she needed to take another, deeper religious step this time without a white skinny Jesus staring down at her constantly demanding her forgiveness.

  • • •

  They were throwing bricks now, and windows were cracking. There were bars on the downstairs windows, not the upstairs ones where Antoinette was, in Aaron and Amelia’s bedroom, and if Antoinette guessed right, it was only so long until they started to climb higher up the trees. What Antoinette knew about this type of situation came half from zombie TV and half from what she heard from friends back in Jamaica in 2010 when Dudus Coke barricaded Hannah Town with trashed cars and barbed wire. Antoinette had long since been in New York, but she’d followed it very closely. She was nannying by then. Dudus Coke spun trucks on their sides and dared the cops to enter. Dudus Coke lasted hours, but then again he had all sorts of weapons and trucks to spin on their sides, and he was the head of the Shower Posse that killed thousands of people and now he was in jail for life. Antoinette’s great-aunt had loved the man. Still did. Said Dudus Coke’s people gave her ten US dollars every couple of months. He set up community centers to help the children.

  But Dudus Coke was offering what the government in Jamaica couldn’t. America was different. There were already medical centers in Brooklyn. They weren’t pristine, but it wasn’t as bad here as people claimed. They didn’t know any different. She had good work with a fine boss. And when her boy got sick, he got good medicine. In Jamaica, the clinic only had what it had. Here the Rite Aid had whatever the doctor said you needed.

  Antoinette looked down at all the brown faces, and it kind of looked like Hannah Town, and it kind of looked like The Walking Dead, but mostly all those faces gawking up looked like what earth was supposed to look like before the coming.

  Before the rapture. The swarming locusts of black people surrounding a house with their hands rising high, and what confused her was that sometimes these people were the remnant, the ecstatic welcoming Jesus. But at other times they were the dead souls acknowledging their death and understanding that they’d be left behind. Some of them were begging whoever was inside for one more chance, others were cursing those they knew would never let them in. Sometimes they were the good souls rising to heaven, the good black people who’d lived hard, good lives. And other times the people she pictured with their hands upraised shouting and tearing down other people’s lives were the evil ones who lived dirty, lowly, drug-filled, violent lives that poisoned the lives of good people.

  But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead. Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed by. See, the Lord is coming out of his dwelling to punish the people of the earth for their sins. The earth will disclose the bloodshed upon her; she will conceal her slain no longer.

  Sometimes those with their hands upraised were raising their hands up to God in praise and gratitude, and other times they were sinners experiencing the first of their damnation.

  All Antoinette had were the shutters, cardboard, a white boy executioner in the basement, Amelia who was as scared as Antoinette was, and Jesus Christ, who might or might not have abandoned her for her plans to abandon him for Islam.

  “Do you want me with you?” Antoinette called up the stairs to Amelia. “I will help you fight where you need help.”

  “I’m doing this,” Amelia called back. “I can do this, too.”

  A brick came through the window glass—Antoinette jumped—which cracked and splintered the wooden shutter in Aaron and Amelia’s bedroom window and popped out the cardboard where Antoinette had just taped it up. So she doubled the cardboard and quadrupled the tape. She went downstairs
to prepare herself for battle. She would fortify God’s side against any fallen angel that might come for her or for the baby in her care.

  Chapter 40

  The subway stopped at Utica. It was just after two o’clock. Aaron was scared there’d be gangs waiting to ambush him when the subway stopped. He was scared the subway wouldn’t stop. He was scared his life would be like an action movie from now on. He had tried to stretch. Between Kingston Throop and Utica he had tried to stretch his arms and legs as though he was about to play tennis, but he’d tried to do so covertly, as though there had been a gentleman’s agreement between the gang of black teenagers and himself that they were going to play twelve-on-one mixed doubles and no one was going to stretch because that’d be cheating, but Aaron, because he knew twelve-on-one tennis wasn’t fair, and because the outcome of the match would determine the life and death of his family, needed to stretch, so he stretched, though if he was seen stretching, what might happen? He’d be embarrassed? They might stretch, too? They might beat him to death?

  Chest to the sliding doors—half to get out quickly and half to turn his back on the lady who’d told him she hoped his house burned to the ground—Aaron, relieved that the subway stopped at Utica, took the steps up to the street two, three at a time. He was prepared to maneuver through crowds, beg police help by the entrance—even in times of relative stop-and-frisk normalcy there were always cops around the mouths of the Utica subway entrance—and ask for an armed pathway to his house, and then for an armed pathway out for his wife and son. But there were no cops there. No one was there. No cops, no kids. There was trash, blood, some police tape, a broken police barricade, wood chips, some trampled autumn bushes the parks department had planted a week before, and signs of chaos—shattered glass, beat-up chained-up bicycles, torn clothing, broken chairs and desks, and the remains of an upturned ices cart.

  But no people. Then people emerged—the few who followed him off the train—and their whining and despair. But Aaron wasn’t paying attention to them. He wandered up toward his house, found his arms stretching across his chest. The dozen black kids passed him—paid him no notice on the way to his own house. He sped up, heard chanting before he could understand what they were chanting. He heard sirens from fire alarms and fire trucks blaring to the south, but all his plans to jump fences and to use his keys to his neighbor’s house to climb up on roofs and then down into his own now seemed insane. Seeing the hundreds of men, women, and teenagers surrounding his home shouting and chanting made him want to slow down, want to be part of the crowd. They didn’t seem violent, though some kids, Aaron could now see, were hoping to push things in that direction.

  Aaron was a block away from the edge of the mob. They were chanting, “No justice! No peace!” What did that have to do with his house? It didn’t make any sense. Others were smashing up specifically Aaron’s front stoop and taking chunks of concrete (long ago painted to look like brownstone) and throwing them at the parlor windows. Why his house? Aaron thought. It must be a racial thing. Projectiles were bouncing off the black iron bars, some smashing the glass windows, but people themselves weren’t attacking the house, maybe because of the iron bars. Aaron became light-headed. He became dizzy. He started praying. He was trying to communicate mentally with his wife and son.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked a young woman, twenty, maybe, with a friendly face.

  “White people, no offense,” she said, looking at Aaron. “White motherfuckers in there killed a kid. Took out a gun and killed a kid. There’s his body there,” she said.

  There was a body, Aaron saw. It was the body of a boy. There was space around it—enough space so people could see it by crouching down or standing up on tippy toes. Women were tending to it, and his T-shirt was covered in blood.

  “Why is he just lying there on the street?” Aaron asked. “His body? The boy?”

  “Ambulances aren’t coming,” the woman said.

  “There are no guns in that house,” Aaron said.

  “What?”

  “There aren’t any guns in there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s my house,” Aaron said.

  “What do you mean your house?” The woman spoke English the way Aaron did. Her clothes were like Amelia’s.

  “I own that house. I live there. My wife and baby are inside. That’s my house.”

  The woman looked at Aaron in his suit. Her face hardened. But then it softened again. Her face betrayed a failed attempt at shutting Aaron out.

  “This guy lives there,” the woman said. “It’s this guy’s house!”

  Chapter 41

  Antoinette had rejoined Daniel on the first floor along with the baby, who needed to be fed and put down for a nap. She’d left the baby in the Pack ’n Play. And he lay there, not screaming, not sleeping. He just lay there on his back, breathing quickly. Antoinette sighed. She felt her moment coming. Where she would have to take Simon’s side against a representative of sin. The Islamic word for sin was haram. Antoinette liked that. Liked that it was in the name Boko Haram. Liked thinking of herself as fighting sin, fighting haram.

  Simon could sense the evil mounting around him. He could feel the devil in this house. “He didn’t make one sound?” she asked Daniel.

  “No. Just like this. He’s keeping watch. He’s going to be a man one day.”

  “Nothing good about lying there like that on his back,” Antoinette said. She sat down in the TV room with a warmed bottle from the microwave and tried to feed him and then let him lie against her chest. But he wouldn’t eat. His lips didn’t move. The bottle’s nipple just dripped into his uninterested mouth.

  Daniel wasn’t sure what she was doing, because whether the baby slept or ate wasn’t important. They had to either help Amelia upstairs or find a way out for themselves and the baby. But really there was no rush. The bars on the windows and doors would hold. Daniel was confident now. The mob seemed to be throwing chunks of cement at the windows with decreasing frequency. The windows were shattered. It was hot inside. Maybe that was what was wrong with the baby. But no one was getting inside. Soon the police would arrive. There were still kids up front throwing rocks at the windows. But the people behind those kids didn’t know what they were doing there. Last time Daniel had checked through cracks in the cardboard, they looked some combination of angry and apologetic. Like they could be angry at the house, but not the people in it, until they reminded themselves of the dead boy and the possibility that Daniel was the killer. Daniel was the killer. But the crowd would disperse. Or Daniel and Antoinette and Amelia could wait the crowd out.

  He should help Amelia, but he wasn’t doing so. He was staying down here with Antoinette and the baby. He was in charge down here, and it was where he wanted to be anyway, and he had just killed someone.

  Daniel looked over at Antoinette and Simon in the TV room. He had turned the TV off. There was nothing more vulnerable than a woman with a baby on her chest. He didn’t want to leave them, but his presence there meant there was no one in the parlor overlooking the street.

  “Calm down,” Antoinette said. “Daniel? We need you to be calm.”

  “I am calm,” Daniel said.

  “You’re scaring the baby,” Antoinette said. “He’s not eating.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  When all this was over, he’d take Thela and they’d leave. If it wasn’t too late, he’d apologize to Thela and tell her she was right. That lately he’d been all fucked up in the head. Spending days in bed. Eating beans and rice. His skin needed vegetables. People’s skin needed vegetables. Otherwise you look British. He’d figured that out himself when he was ten and it had stuck with him. He had turned into a man waiting for death. He didn’t want to wait for death. He wanted to embrace life. He’d have to go on trial. But he’d be acquitted. He’d tell the truth. The kid had a gun, and Daniel’s guns were registered legally, and the kid had pointed his gun at Daniel after shooting and killing Jupit
er—there must be ten bullets in Jupiter—and Daniel had only fired twice. It wouldn’t be like Eric Garner and Michael Brown because he wasn’t a cop. He was just some guy who’d had a gun pointed at him. He wasn’t a cop, and that kid had killed someone. This situation had nothing to do with those situations.

  Had he pointed his gun at the kid, first? No one would ever know.

  “Just have a seat,” Antoinette said. “Put the gun down, Daniel. It’s not doing anyone any good you holding it like that.”

  Daniel complied.

  He and Thela would get out of Brooklyn. He hated Brooklyn. He hated New York, but he really hated Brooklyn. He would get out of academia. He wasn’t even in academia. He had a part-time job at a second-rate art school, and he wasn’t even teaching art. He was only working a couple of hours a week. He’d always resented that Thela thought he was lazy, even though she never called him lazy. But he was lazy. He worked a couple of hours a week and that was all he did. He was barely employed. He was barely married. He complained about how little money he made, but the truth was that his brother worked three or four times more than he did, and the work his brother did was probably ten times more strenuous. Four times ten was forty, so if Daniel made twenty grand a year, forty times twenty thousand was eight hundred grand, which was probably what his brother would be making soon if he wasn’t already, and which was totally fair. He had to forget about his brother. He hated his brother. His brother didn’t give a shit about Daniel. Except to worry about how much money Daniel was making. It would have been better if his brother had died. No, that was too much. But now Daniel had killed someone, too. Daniel had killed someone, too! Now they were even. Everything was different now! They could meet on even footing. Daniel had a story. Daniel had the experience. And he hadn’t done it the artificial way where he ran away to the Middle East and terrified everyone he knew on purpose. “Look at me! I’m going to go do Something Extraordinary! Something for Our Country!” Daniel’s brother did some EPCOT Center version of experience where you prepare yourself and you go for some set amount of time and then you come back with what it was like. Daniel had just done the real thing. He was living his life prepared. Daniel had been ready for the moment, and when the moment came he seized it. Daniel took another man’s life because he was ready, because he was Daniel, and now he was going to apologize to his wife for being a shitty husband. He would leave his brother and this disgusting city and start over.