We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  Polaire had been darting around the whole time, taking pictures of everything from different angles. She must have gotten a few shots of me with my mouth hanging open.

  “Stop telling stories,” I said. I didn’t know what kind of scam Uncle Ty had going, but I wasn’t going to take his lies. All that stuff about hellhounds and Devils was straight out of old blues songs, and I’d had enough embarrassment for one night.

  Supercargo grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear.

  “Don’t contradict him,” Supercargo said.

  I drew back to see his face.

  “He can’t take it, cousin.” Supercargo gestured to his own mouth. “The blood. You know he ain’t been right since the shooting.”

  The memory came rushing back. Uncle Ty and Jacques. Stopped by an officer as they walked home from work. Jacques with an outstanding warrant for not paying court fees on an expired driver’s license conviction. Jacques shot in the lung for resisting arrest. Uncle Ty attempting mouth-to-mouth but finding only his son’s lifeblood.

  I glanced at Uncle Ty, who hadn’t stopped talking to the others. He knew the truth but couldn’t face it. The murder of his son had deranged him.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Uncle Ty,” I said.

  He pointed at me. “I ain’t lying, boy,” he said. “I was in the mental hospital till last year. A woman came around talking about paying me for Hollywood rights. She wasn’t the first one. I never had so many people offering me money before all this started. Then they was coming out of the woodworks. Sneaking in and shit to see me like I was some kind of griot.”

  Uncle Ty said they let him out of the hospital because of overcrowding. He wasn’t a danger anymore.

  “I wanted to stay though,” he said.

  “I cannot believe you are real,” Polaire said.

  “I got something.” Uncle Ty dug in his pocket.

  Supercargo quickly got up. “Don’t be showing that.”

  “Did you take any of the money people offered you?” Jo Jo said.

  “Nah,” Uncle Ty said. “It didn’t seem right.”

  “I can pay you for your trouble,” Polaire said.

  “He don’t need your money,” Supercargo said.

  “Ah, here.” Polaire took a triangle from her purse. “Take this.”

  “What’s this?” Uncle Ty flipped the triangle. It was her calling card.

  “Call me,” Polaire said, “and we’ll do a proper shoot one day.”

  Uncle Ty said he’d never been the modeling type and he didn’t want to start now.

  “Well, at least give me another good shot.”

  “Okay.” Uncle Ty took a bone out of his pocket. It was a sliver of a long bone, a fragment broken from a whole. He put the fragment in his mouth.

  “Oh yes!” Polaire said. “Perfect.”

  Supercargo grabbed Polaire’s camera by the lens. “It’s time to go.”

  “Careful with that,” Jo Jo said. “It’s her art.”

  “You don’t leave now, I’ll put her art up your ass.” Supercargo turned to me. “You too. Nigel can stay. But y’all got to go.”

  12

  However, before we leave the Tiko, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t share, in these notes, an early experience from when I called the development home.

  Picture, if you will, the swarm of flies that used to gather around the garbage can at my childhood home. What if I told you that the flies were one City patrolman and the can my old neighborhood? One man orbited the Tiko incessantly, maniacally.

  Officer Dred Douglas was a hero, a myth, a legend. Judge, jury, and occasionally, hangman. A national news anchor once called him America’s top cop. He seemed to work 24-hour shifts 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And perhaps he did. It was not unusual to find him napping in his squad car, wearing highly reflective sunglasses so as to make us residents think he was watching, always watching.

  Douglas’s omnipresence was the way of Douglas. Sometimes during the ride from school in the Bug—back when it was still Sir’s—we’d see Douglas sitting in his patrol car near the entrance of the Tiko.

  “There’s that windbag cop,” Sir would say, glancing in the rearview. I wouldn’t look back for fear that Douglas was monitoring me through the side mirror reflection. Yet by the time we arrived at our building, which was about a two-minute drift into the center of the development, Douglas would be waiting at the corner, pretending to check the channels on his walkie-talkie—click click clicking from one line to the next. Douglas, in this way, could come up at the start of a sentence and also be the last word in it.

  “That guy gives me the jeebies,” Sir might say. Or “You would think they would have promoted him out of here by now.” He would then rub his forehead beneath his fedora.

  So Douglas was everywhere, and he saw everything. Like a football referee who ejected players for improper shoe lacing, no infraction—no matter how apparently insignificant—escaped his Argus-eyed view. Douglas would have made an excellent poster child for the community policing/broken windows war, if the City produced such posters. Douglas was a paragon, his light blue shirt and dark blue pants starched and creased to military specifications. In the summer, he wore a wide Stetson, and in the winter, he grew a beard that he didn’t cut until after the New Year, so that by Christmas he looked like Black Santa. But he delivered abrasions, contusions, and shattered bones all year round.

  Although he had the look of the kind of officer who might appear in a public service campaign, directing pregnant mothers to avoid live power lines, he hated children. He hated adults, too. He even hated pets—I once saw him punt a cat. Neither Sir nor Mama spoke to him. No one did because talking to him meant you’d have to make eye contact. And eye contact was highly suspicious to Douglas. As was the conspicuous avoidance of eye contact. The best policy was to maintain a distance of about five hundred yards from him at all times, which basically meant you had to stay out of the Tiko to avoid him. (This was before the City began expanding the Tiko’s fencing to accommodate new settlements for people who lost their homes in other parts of the City.) He seemed to think he was stationed in a war zone. And that if he only held out, his reinforcements would be along at any moment to shock and awe us with Daisy Cutter bombs dropped from helicarriers disguised as cirrus clouds. We were all the same to him: nurses, bus drivers, drug dealers, preachers, car thieves, and professors alike. He’d show us good when the time came, his baton seemed to say, as he paced the Tiko slapping the stick against his thigh.

  I suppose under one analysis, Douglas was a good man doing the job he was hired to do. No one could deny that he was a diligent officer of the law. He was like an overeager linebacker who blitzed on every down. It didn’t matter if he got the sack as long as he disrupted the play. And he disrupted both work and play. During the years we lived in the Tiko, I personally observed him bodily searching nearly every man, woman, and child at least once. It didn’t matter if he had a reason to suspect that some crime was being committed. No body was left unturned. Yes, all the swaggering Jeromes with their baggy pants and fitted T-shirts, but also the mothers and daughters. And if he could find them, that is to say, if they existed outside jail or the cemetery, the fathers, too. I saw it all. Elderly men with their pockets turned out. Girls dressed for parties in platform heels with the contents of their purses scattered across broken concrete. Splattered ice cream cones. Overturned red wheelbarrows. So much depends upon a man with a hatred of his own.

  13

  I stood between my open office door and the wall, where hung a three-quarter-length mirror. I had come in a few days before to find Melvin Marvin, the frumpy facilities guy, supervising some other frumpy facilities guys as they transported my belongings from my cramped space on fifty-nine to a new office only two doors down from Octavia’s on the sixty-second floor. Sixty-two was unofficially the senior shareholders’ fl
oor. Octavia had pulled a string, inviting a mere mortal to frolic among the masters of the mountaintop.

  Sixty-two was the main floor of the firm. The firm library, which still contained honest-to-goodness physical books, was here, as was the demonstrative trial exhibits room. A sky lobby looked out over the river and a winding staircase, whose elegance suggested a river flowing backward up a hill. Even the pile of the carpet was more luxurious on sixty-two. I didn’t belong here. But I could.

  Leaning toward my office mirror, I tried to tame my tie, but it refused to cooperate. The tie’s divot was crooked, and the whole thing kept bunching up under my neck like a sharp-knuckled fist. My office door swung into me from behind, pushing my face into the mirror.

  “Mfft,” I said.

  “Showtime, sweetheart,” Octavia said. I wiped the mirror made greasy by my face, but that only made it harder to see. Octavia pushed her sunglasses to her forehead. Her silver streak darkened behind the lenses. She gave me elevator eyes and chuckled. “Oh ho ho. Somebody’s ready for the prom. And maybe a little action behind the bleachers. Are those spats?”

  “Fortune favors the well-dressed.”

  I adjusted one of my yin-yang cuff links. I felt ready. Every strip of fabric, every accessory, every button and aglet projected an image and reflection. The suit as armor, talisman, lure.

  My links were from Penny. Mama had given me the tie for graduation. Crammed into the inside coat pocket was a folded sheet of paper Nigel had made when he was only five. The outer leaves said “World’s” and “Best.” It could unfold to the size of a large placemat. Although I had expected the inside to say “Dad,” the interior featured a giant stick-figure head with charcoal-shaded skin, clawlike hands, and furrowed eyebrows that lent it a pensive look. I patted my heart. The paper crinkled.

  “The executive committee is happy, sugar, so you know what that means.”

  “You’re happy?” I said.

  “You damn skippy I am. My office.” Octavia’s corner office was a crowded one, full of objects from her exploits. A dusty trophy from the year she was the fastest teenager in the state sat on a low table by the window. Exotic hand-woven rugs covered the hardwood, hardwood she installed when she became a capital shareholder. There was a painting of a woman who could have been an ancestor tilling a field in World War II England. Photos of Octavia and two different presidents, one Republican, one New Whig, hung behind her desk, near a small picture of her adopted daughter, whom I’d never met because she was a relief worker in Finland and refused to reenter America on moral grounds. Then a pic of Octavia, in fatigues and brandishing a spear, next to a wild boar she had brought low.

  Octavia unclipped the portfolio—prepared by Jo Jo and Polaire—that I’d given to her the day before. She removed a stack of glossy eight-by-tens and flipped through them, showing me each as she went. A shot of me posing with two button-nosed children. Me laughing with an elderly woman with cornrows. Me and Uncle Ty, that thigh bone in his mouth. I thought Jo Jo had destroyed that one. The copy read: “Together for a Better Tomorrow.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said.

  “Like?” Octavia asked. “This is better than I imagined. The firm will fund a full campaign around these. So I don’t have to pay out of my own pocketbook.” Octavia’s candy dish was a Punu mask turned on its face. I felt a pang of envy at the fact that she had been to the African continent a half-dozen times whereas I had never. Would never. But it was a mild pang. Even though some African Americans bought into the Garveyan notion of going back to the Motherland and others thought of it as a war-, famine-, and disease-infested land, I knew the truth: It didn’t matter whether Africa was great or awful, nor did it matter how much dark blood coursed through my veins. Africa wasn’t home. For better or worse, this vicious hamlet—where I dreamed perchance of a bright future for my son—was home.

  Octavia tossed a hard caramel from the bowl and chewed. “Pop-up ads. Billboards. Inserts for firm client brochures.” The single silver streak in her hair reminded me of our polluted river. When sunlight hit the diluted particulates just right, it was quite beautiful.

  “When?”

  “Already in motion. I’ll show you.” She explained that we couldn’t play around. Armbruster’s group was making a play for that international media conglomerate, the Darkblum Group, which recently placed a major office in the City. Octavia went to the window and pointed at the McNamara Building. It was only a third as tall as the Sky Tower, so it was perfect for a rooftop billboard. An advertisement for Blanco’s Chocolate Milk with a screen capture of that actor in elderly woman drag struggling with a cute black-skinned kid over a comically large jug. Tagline: “You bet not steal my good milks!” The ad shimmered like falling stars and shifted, winkingly, to reveal the next ad in stages: the firm logo, a forehead, the edge of Uncle Ty’s bone. I turned away.

  “What?” Octavia asked. “You don’t like it.”

  “Um. No. Yes. It’s great.”

  “Good,” Octavia said. “You’re really on your way, you know that?”

  “Really?”

  She gestured to the abacus on her credenza. The executive committee kept track of our efficiency with the Racing Form. Although any shareholder could pull the Racing Form up on their computers, it was hidden from the view of peons like me, but I knew what categories it contained: billable hours worked, billable hours written off, billable hours paid by the client, and bonus points for special work that added value to the firm. Octavia’s abacus was a physical manifestation of the Racing Form.

  Instead of beads, her abacus had rows of colored semitransparent stones, a different-colored row for each person in her group. I didn’t know who each row stood for, but Dinah was clearly the top rung, where half of the amethyst stones had already been shoved to the complete side weeks ago. As Dinah worked harder than anyone I knew, she racked up stones faster than anyone I knew. My sardonyx stones were second from the bottom. A quarter were on the complete side.

  “I’m not even close,” I said.

  “We close this PHH deal, you’re all set. Even if I have to kick in some of my goodwill on loan. Let’s go.”

  We left her office. We passed various staff people in the halls. We must have looked impressive or, at least, determined, because they nodded or smiled at us with a peculiar intensity, as if they all knew we were going hunting. I tripped on the rug in the lobby, but didn’t fall.

  By the time we exited the Sky Tower garage in Octavia’s sports car, which sat so close to the ground I could feel the pebbles in the macadam and hear the pleas of ants, storm clouds hovered above. As we reached the Personal Hill complex, the heavens let loose.

  Personal Hill Hospital occupied fifty-five acres of prime City real estate just north of the business district. It was once two hospitals. Adelaide Hill Medical Center dated back to the Civil War, when a wealthy Northern heiress moved to the City and established a hospital for injured Confederates. The Personal Clinic Corporation bought out the old AHMC. The new buildings surrounded the old AHMC building, which was punctuated by turret-like projections. The new buildings were outsize and prone to taking off at odd angles. The old building looked like a Gothic castle surrounded by a Rem Koolhaas–designed castle.

  Driving up the private boulevard that bisected the campus, we saw steel barricades that held the protesters back on either side—get back, you dogs—their placards melting in the rain. I searched for Supercargo but didn’t see him.

  The general counsel’s secretary set Octavia and me up in a waiting room, where we sat until a group of people, three men and two women, came in.

  Octavia had met with some of them in preliminary meetings before. The group was mostly white. All I knew was that the CEO was a man named Eckstein. A square-jawed, graying-at-the-temples man in nautical blazer approached with hand extended.

  “Mr. Eckstein,” I said.

  Oc
tavia shook her head and gestured at the only black person in the group. An elderly black man in an ascot with big active eyes and conked hair not unlike my own. “He’s Mr. Eckstein.” I apologized, but Eckstein shot me a fearful look. We took our seats around the conference table.

  We exchanged social lubricants. Eckstein’s son went to the same school in London as Octavia’s daughter. A red-nosed man quipped about the protesters drowning outside. We passed our materials around the table. One of the underlings gave Eckstein a brass-handled magnifying glass that he used to examine Jo Jo and Polaire’s photos. He didn’t look pleased. Then he scanned some of the text I’d ginned up to give the portfolio the semblance of substance. One section boasted statistics about cases and projects Seasons had done for the City’s poor; another explained Seasons’s efforts to recruit local minorities from a shrinking pool of applicants.

  Eckstein pushed the documents over to his assistant, who carefully rearranged them.

  Eckstein crossed his hands. “Have you ever done prison time?” He was staring at me.