Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  “You’re not married?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “Me? Shit no. Why aren’t you? Rich white lady with a kid,” Sara said.

  “That’s a good question, Sara,” Amelia said.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Sara said.

  “I wasn’t,” Amelia said. “Do you want me to answer the question or not?”

  “What question?” Sara said.

  “About why I’m not married,” Amelia said.

  “Fuck you,” Sara said.

  Amelia reminded herself of the goal here. To get the girl out of her house as quickly as possible. Or at least that’s what it had been. Now it was to make the best of a bad situation. Amelia had a gun. It was heavy, but nothing she couldn’t manage. Now she was alone, without her baby on the same floor. The room around her had been trashed by the girl she was talking to. Daniel and Antoinette could take care of downstairs without her as well as they could with her. They also had a gun.

  “Tell me again why you can’t leave,” Amelia said.

  “Because.” Sara had stifled a sob earlier, but now her voice was calmer. “Because the police beat my brother. And as far as I know my mother, too. And I was with those guys who killed Mr. Jupiter. I can’t show myself right now on the street. Because of the police and because of Derek. I’ve told you that twice now. What. The fuck. Are you going to do with me?”

  “But why did you come here originally?”

  “Because the cops beat my brother. Derek Jupiter told me about your place, and I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck the place up. So we did.”

  “Why did the cops beat your brother?”

  “Because they’re cops. That’s what they do. Fuck you. My arm’s all fucked up,” Sara said.

  “Come out and let me take a look at it,” Amelia said.

  “If you put down the gun,” Sara said.

  “No,” Amelia said.

  “How are you going to help my arm with a gun in your hand?” Sara said.

  “Come out and let’s try,” Amelia said.

  Sara grunted her assent.

  “I’ll take a step back,” Amelia said.

  The door opened, Sara joined Amelia in the office, and Amelia got her first close look at Sara face-to-face and alone. She wore black Reebok sneakers with gray laces, black sweatpants that were badly stained with dirt and blood, an oversized black hooded sweatshirt torn at the forearm, a black Nets baseball cap with a flat brim, and her hood up over the cap. Her braids teased down around both sides of her neck and she had pretty, large brown eyes. She held the rod of the bench press bar like a baseball bat; metal gleamed at her wrists.

  I have God here with me, Amelia thought.

  “What are you looking at me like that for?” Sara said.

  “Why are you holding that?” Amelia said.

  The sun gleamed off the cracked computer screen.

  “Why are you holding that?” Sara said, nodding to the gun.

  “I’m scared of you,” Amelia said.

  “Yeah?” Sara said.

  Sara flinched toward Amelia with the metal rod.

  Amelia pulled the trigger of the pistol.

  The gun recoiled and nearly knocked Amelia over.

  Sara dropped the metal rod.

  Amelia had missed Sara by a foot, high.

  The bullet struck and disappeared into the painted white wall.

  Sara cowered back.

  Amelia picked up the metal rod.

  “The fuck!” Sara said.

  “I’ll aim better next time,” Amelia said, stifling a sob.

  Then full-on crying. Tears and mucus slid down Amelia’s face.

  Amelia hadn’t wanted to do that, hadn’t planned to do that. It was horrible. She’d tried to kill this girl.

  But it hadn’t been a mistake. Amelia had wanted to pull the trigger.

  She’d seen that metal rod start to come around toward her.

  She’d seen Sara’s big eyes.

  Sara had been starting to take a swing at her, and Amelia had closed her own eyes and shot, and thank God she had missed.

  Amelia’s arms were heaving up and down still, holding the pistol facing Sara in case she had to shoot again. Amelia picked up the metal rod from where Sarah had dropped it and pressed it between her left arm and her body.

  “Sit down,” Amelia said, pointing to the overturned desk chair.

  Sara positioned the desk chair upright and she sat. This was an admission in Amelia’s mind that Amelia had done right in trying to kill Sara.

  Amelia heard someone bounding up the steps.

  “Leave us alone!” Amelia said. “We’re okay! It was a warning shot! Don’t come in here, Daniel! Don’t come in!”

  Amelia caught her breath, trained the gun on Sara, more confident with the trigger now, and with the weight of the thing. Amelia was calm. And very tired. Like in spite of the adrenaline she could fall asleep right there standing. Shooting the gun and reacting to having shot it made her calmer than she’d been since hearing Jupiter laughing with Antoinette downstairs much earlier that morning.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Sara said.

  “Nothing,” Amelia said. “You can do whatever you want. This isn’t the movies. You can leave and go wherever you want. Or if you want to stay here, you can come and have something to drink. We’re normal people.”

  Amelia was breathing crazily now. She could tell. Giving this little speech on how normal she was made her feel crazy.

  “Uh-huh,” Sara said. Her baseball cap was now lower over her eyes than it had been before, and she was sitting on the chair, legs spread wide like a man.

  “Really,” Amelia said. She tried to laugh. “I know I’m holding these two weapons. And that’s unusual. But this is an unusual situation. You really can do what you want. I want you to leave because I don’t know you, is all.”

  “You think I want to be here,” Sara said.

  “You nearly hit me with a metal bat,” Amelia said.

  “Would you rather have the gun or that metal rod?” Sara said.

  “Why are you here?”

  “You keep asking me that,” Sara said. “And I keep telling you the answer. Your house is the one that deserves being picked on. We don’t care about you. You don’t care about us. You chose this place to live thinking there wouldn’t be any consequences. Shit. You think people are just going to welcome you like they’re thrilled you moved in? What’s wrong with you people?”

  “That nice family we drove out of our house,” Amelia said. “You were talking about Briceson and Mary. The family who sold? They were nice. We paid them $1.3 million. They bought a nice house out in Jersey.”

  “Good for them,” Sara said. “I’m talking about the rest of us.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you want, Sara?”

  Sara looked around the broken room and seemed to think about the question.

  “A thousand dollars,” Sara said.

  “What?”

  “If you give me a thousand dollars, I’ll leave.”

  “I have a gun on you. I showed you I’d shoot.”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Sara said. “If you give me ten thousand dollars, I’ll leave.”

  “I’ll just make you leave.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” Sara said. “Or shoot me. I don’t have shit to live for now anyway. If you can give Mary and whoever he was a million dollars to leave, you can give me twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Get out of my house,” Amelia said.

  “Give me the money,” Sara said, “and I’ll go. Fifty thousand dollars. Final fucking offer. Or shoot me. Or drag my body down and throw me out in front of that crowd and see what fucking happens.”

  Amelia pointed the gun at Sara.

  “Shoot me and deal with it for the rest of your life,” Sara said. “I don’t give a shit. You think I care? Or let the niggas down there see you throw a black girl into the street. Or give me my fifty thousand dollars and let
me go like you say you would.”

  Chapter 43

  Most of the crowd—it had to be at least six hundred people—greeted Aaron with respect. Some of the teenage boys and girls were strangely comfortable perched in the trees, tossing around a Gatorade bottle. Down near Aaron, there were some guys wearing beat-up white sneakers with no laces. Others wore mismatched tops and bottoms of tracksuits. Some fat women wore tight T-shirts, and others had been at the original fight, Aaron figured, and they were beat up themselves or wore clothes that had been shredded or torn. But this was nothing like the scenes that he’d been expecting from the 60 Minutes reports on Tahrir Square where the crowds were full of Arab men, and the moment the cameras went dark they groped at the pretty South African reporter’s clothes, tearing away her shirt and pants, raping her, and leaving her for dead. That’s what he thought when he thought riots. These men and women nodded to Aaron. Aaron recognized one guy in a Melo jersey from the deli. They lined up outside his house, gave him room to walk. They cleared a pathway toward his house. They were all black. There was some shoving, but other people held back the shovers.

  There were actually two crowds: the back half focused on Aaron, and the front half focused on the house, and as Aaron made his way toward the house, those two crowds reconverged with their attention on Aaron, who now stood on his own front stoop. He wanted to enter the house, but he felt as though they were waiting for him to say something in exchange for the safe passage they’d proffered to his front door. The young woman with the friendly face was no longer there. Aaron looked but couldn’t find her. He had minders, though. Two men—one larger, one his size—up on the stoop with him. And whereas moments before, Aaron had been thinking about nothing other than getting to his family, now he wasn’t so sure. The individual faces that made up the crowd all looked at him as though he owed them something. He saw the dead boy off to the side—had one of these people killed him?—saw three women tending to the boy’s corpse, saw the two men who seemed to be threatening to enter alongside him if he opened the door.

  He patted his pocket to feel for the key, and the two men pressed closer toward him. He couldn’t see anyone inside. But he saw the shattered interior door and felt something inside himself liquefy. He was sure Amelia was okay. And Simon. He would know if they weren’t. He was sure Amelia and Simon were okay. And Antoinette was with them, too, taking care of them.

  He had to say something to calm the crowd enough to allow him inside alone. To let them let him go so he could be sure his family was safe.

  “May I go inside?” he asked.

  The two men looked at each other. They didn’t know. The larger one looked at the smaller one. No one was in charge.

  “I’m going to go inside,” Aaron said. “You two stay out here.”

  “You’re going to stay out here,” the smaller one told Aaron loudly. The front dozen or so people cheered the man’s confidence, and the larger man grabbed Aaron’s arm.

  “My friends,” Aaron began. “My friends. Is that what you want? I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you preventing me from my seeing my wife and son. But I’ve got my baby inside, and I don’t know what you want.

  “But listen to me, and tell this man to let me go, to give me some room.” Both men stepped away. There was shushing in the crowd. The six hundred people leaned forward to hear Aaron speak.

  “My neighbors,” Aaron amplified his voice. He had not used this voice for a few years, but it returned naturally to him. Even if he’d wanted to turn and flee into his house, now it was too late. “I have only lived here for a year, but this is my home, and I appreciate your leading me here to my wife and baby boy inside. I don’t know what you’re planning to do, but whatever it is, it’s been done. You’ve scared them, I’m sure.”

  “They shot and killed this boy!” a single voice shouted from somewhere in the crowd.

  It was obvious to Aaron that the crowd didn’t know what it wanted to do. It seemed hesitant to go from throwing stones to actually dragging bodies outside and beating them.

  “I don’t know what you think happened,” Aaron said, “but there’s no gun inside this house!”

  “Well there’s a gun here,” said a kid near the dead boy’s body. He pointed the gun at Aaron.

  “Be careful, son,” Aaron said.

  “Who you calling ‘son’?” a voice yelled out from the crowd.

  “Please, someone take that gun from that young man,” Aaron said, but no one did. “Okay then, that’s fine, if there was an accident, as there clearly was, maybe you deserve retribution. And maybe I’m the one who needs to pay it. Keep the gun trained on me. But listen. Listen to me. If that gun gets everyone to listen, then that’s okay.”

  Aaron stood on his stoop. The two men who’d been up there with him had stepped down with the rest of the crowd. Now everyone listened. The boy with the gun kept it pointed at Aaron.

  Chapter 44

  Antoinette saw herself across a table set with white linen. The cloth her mother used in Chicago. Teddy drank cold milk, and a masculine presence called from the kitchen. A masculine presence. She was toying with herself. She just didn’t want to acknowledge it. Jupiter was in his kitchen. She was at his table, set with her mother’s tablecloth. Teddy was humming a song that Jupiter had taught him. An old-fashioned song Antoinette didn’t know. Ba-daba-da-ba . . .

  She sat at a table set with proper silverware, and Jupiter leaned over to serve chicken and rice with three different vegetables and freshly baked bread. He’d prepared and plated the vegetables in the kitchen. In the kitchen, he’d wiped the edges of the plates clean so as not to stain the tablecloth.

  She lay in bed with him at night, her head on his chest, his hand at the small of her back. They were small in her bed in his house, Teddy sleeping in the room next door, maybe Jupiter’s boy sleeping down the hall. Jupiter smelled of Teddy’s father, of Billy, and of chocolate cake.

  She heard a gunshot upstairs. Snapped her focus back on the baby.

  “Seek, baby Simon, seek the Lord,” Antoinette said. “While he may be found. Now is the time. We must act now. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, for you are not wicked. And the unrighteous man—let him forsake his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, baby Simon. The Lord will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

  “You hear me, Simon Simon?”

  Nothing. No response. And that gunshot.

  Simon lay back, halfway to becoming a corpse.

  Antoinette dropped him alone in the Pack ’n Play, but Simon didn’t react. Antoinette went to Aaron’s bookshelf and took down the oldest, largest books. The books she’d been scared to disturb since she’d started the job. The ones she’d most wanted to take down from the shelf. They looked like ancient spell books, some in English and some in Hebrew. Antoinette needed to climb up on a chair to manage the heaviest down from the top, and she took them down carefully one by one, and breathed them in deeply and held them against her body.

  “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work,” she said.

  Antoinette was equipping herself for the fight with the Devil. The crowd was shouting, and the gun had gone off upstairs. Amelia could have shot that girl. This couldn’t wait any longer. Determined, but with a delicacy that frightened her, Antoinette took down God’s books one by one and placed them neatly around Simon in the Pack ’n Play. Finally, a way to swaddle the boy in God. She’d found it. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d been. She was able to begin to relax.

  She’d save both herself and Simon. She’d protect the baby and prove to God that she was worthy to keep living. He could take Jupiter, and he could take that kid outside. But not her. And not this baby.

  She’d been looking for this fight all day, and there it was in the Pack ’n Play. She saw him there. Simon was milky
eyed. His body was limp. His eyes were milky and gray. He was slack bodied and gray skinned. She opened up the largest book, over a thousand pages. It was titled Talmudic Studies: Investigating the Sugya, Variant Readings and Inscriptions and Aggada, and she placed Simon on top of the open book, then surrounded his body with more and more religious books in Hebrew and English. Simon didn’t seem to notice. She sang to Simon: “Oh Devil, God shall defeat you! Oh, you think you know the way, but you don’t know, you don’t know! Oh you think you know the way, but you haven’t met the Lord!”

  Antoinette made more and more trips to the bookshelf, returning with more and more books until the baby was surrounded and covered by a mountain of books, his arms and legs pinned down below. He breathed but didn’t scream, which confirmed Antoinette’s belief that what she did was right.

  Daniel watched, horrified, intrigued as Antoinette buried the baby under the mountain of holy books, but as he drew in closer he heard Aaron’s voice outside. Now Daniel tried to hear Aaron on the stoop below. Antoinette didn’t hear or was too caught up with Simon.

  Simon lay there milky eyed. The innocence of a baby. It wasn’t fair. So much wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that she was working so far away from everything. So far away from her childhood. It wasn’t fair that she worked so hard, every day, that Friday was Mosque, Saturday was church all day, and Sunday was prayer dance, and every minute she wasn’t taking care of someone else’s baby, she was taking care of her own. She was an adult now and no longer a girl, and then a nice man was there with her and showed motions toward wanting to take care of her, and after only a few months spending a handful of hours together he was taken away from her.

  Had she loved Jupiter?

  She had loved Jupiter.

  She had—

  “. . . Oh, you think you know the way, but you don’t know, you don’t know!” she hummed. “Oh, you think you know the way, but you haven’t met the Lord!”

  She had loved him as much as she had loved any man her entire life. Antoinette, seeing Jupiter’s goodness in Simon, focused back on Simon, surrounded by hard covers under a tent of the lighter ones bound in cheap paper and twine. She was jealous of Simon, covered in all that spiritual knowledge and guidance. She wished she was small enough to get in there with him. She could rustle around between the holy pages, feel them all over her body.