Mugger Blood td-30

by Warren Murphy

  Remo watched over the boy's shoulder.

  "You're pretty good," he said.

  "Yeah, I do de best in de art appreciation classes."

  "I can see why. You almost stay inside all the lines."

  "Sometime it be hard though when de lines close together and de point of de crayon don't fit 'tween dem."

  "What do you do then?" asked Remo.

  "Ah takes a crayon from somebody whats got a sharp one and ah use dat one to fit in 'tween de lines."

  "And you give him your old crayon?"

  The boy looked at Remo, a look of confusion on his face as if Remo were speaking a language he had never heard.

  "Whuffo ah do that? Ah trows de old crayon away. You a social worker or somefin?"

  "No, but sometimes I wish I were."

  "Yo' talks funny. 'If ah were' you says."

  "That's called English."

  "Yeah. That. What your name?"

  "Bwana Sahib," Remo said.

  "You son of great Arab chief too?"

  "I'm a direct descendant of that great Arabian chief, Pocahontas."

  "Great Arab chiefs, dey be black," the boy sniffed. He knew a fool when he saw one.

  "I was on his mother's side," Remo said. "Go back to coloring."

  "It all right. Ah gots till tomorra to finish it."

  Remo shook his head. At the desk, the black woman was still staring at the cover of Essential Magazine, the Journal of Black Beauty.

  Shockley's office door opened slightly and Remo heard a voice.

  "Rat bastard," came a shriek. "You be discriminating. Dat not be fair."

  The door opened fully and a woman stood in the opening, her back to Remo. She was shaking a fist at something inside the room. The woman had big thick hams that jiggled below the flowered belt of her cotton dress. Her hips looked like a hassock with a bite taken out of it. Her flailing arms set off wave movements in the oceans of fat that hung from her upper biceps. A voice inside the room said something softly.

  "You still a rat bastard," she said. "If you didn't have dat, I show you a ting or two."

  She turned and stepped toward Remo. If hate had been electricity, her eyes would have sparked. Her lips were pressed tight together and her nostrils flared.

  For a moment, Remo considered running lest the mastodon get her hands on him. But she stopped next to the boy who was coloring.

  "Come on, Shabazz, we going home."

  The boy was trying to finish up the coloring of Porky Pig's right front leg. Remo could hear his teeth grind as he concentrated. The woman lingered only for a moment, then clubbed the boy alongside the head. Crayon went flying one way, the coloring book the other.

  "Come on, ma, why you do dat?"

  "We gettin' outta here. Dat rat bastard, he not gonna change his mind 'bout you graduating."

  "You mean your son here is not going to be graduated?" Remo said. "He's going to be left back?" Maybe there was still some sanity in the world.

  The woman looked at Remo as if he were a fried rib that had lain all night on a subway platform.

  "What you talking? Shabazz here, he de salitate-atorian. He got honors."

  "Then what's the problem?" Remo asked.

  "De problem is Shabazz gots go away on May fifteempf. And dat no good Shockley, he won't change de graduation and make it no earlier so dat Shabazz get his diploma before he go to de jail. He do de five years for de robbery."

  "That must be heartbreaking after Shabazz works so hard coloring inside the lines."

  "Dat right," said the mother. "C'mon, Shabazz, we gets outta dis motherfuckin' place."

  Shabazz shuffled to his feet. The sixteen-year-old was taller than Remo. Standing next to his mother, he looked like a pencil leaning against a pencil sharpener.

  He followed the woman from the room, leaving his crayon and coloring book on the floor where she had knocked them. Remo picked them up and put them on the small end table that held a lamp, bolted to the table with long steel stove bolts.

  Remo looked across the counter at the woman who was still staring at the cover of Essential Magazine, the Journal of Black Beauty, her big lips moving slowly as if she were trying to crush a very small guppy to death between them. She finally took a deep breath and turned the cover to the front page.

  "Excuse, me," Remo said. "May I go in now?"

  The woman slammed shut the cover of the magazine. "Sheeit," she said. "Always inneruptions. Now ah got to start all over 'gain."

  "I won't bother you again," Remo said. "I'll be quiet."

  "You do that, heah? Go 'head in, iffen you wants."

  Doctor Shockley's office was really two offices. There was the part Remo stood in, just inside the door, a skeleton of a room with three chairs bolted to the vinyl-tiled floor and a lamp that was riveted to the floor and had a tamperproof wire screen around the bare bulb.

  The other part of the office was where Shockley sat at a desk. Behind him were shelves filled with books, tape recorders, and statues of African artifacts that were made in a small town in Illinois. And between the two halves of the office was a screen, a tight steel mesh that ran from wall to floor, from floor to ceiling, effectively separating Shockley from anyone who might come into his office. Next to his desk, a gate was built into the screen. It was fastened on Shockley's side with a heavy bulletproof padlock.

  Shockley was a trim black man with a modest Afro and darting eyes. He wore a pin-striped gray suit with a pink shirt and black figured tie. His fingernails were manicured, Remo noticed, and he wore a thin gold Omega watch on his narrow wrist.

  His hands were open on his desk, palm side down. Next to his right hand was a .357 Magnum. Remo had to look twice before he believed it. The gun had notches on the carved wooden grip.

  Shockley smiled at Remo as Remo approached the screen.

  "Won't you sit down, please?" His voice was nasal, bored, and precise, the adenoidal Ivy League squeak that clips off words as if they are unworthy to remain in the speaker's mouth.

  "Thank you," Remo said.

  "What may I do for you?" Shockley asked.

  "I'm a friend of the family. I've come to inquire about one of your students. A Tyrone Walker."

  "Tyrone Walker? Tyrone Walker? Just a moment."

  Shockley pressed a panel built into his desk and a television monitor popped up from inside the left edge of the desk. He pressed some buttons on a typewriter keyboard and Remo could see the reflection in his eyes as a flicker of light illuminated the screen.

  "Oh yes. Tyrone Walker." Shockley looked toward Remo with a smile of love and beneficence. "You'll be happy to know, Mr… Mister?"

  "Sahib," Remo said. "Bwana Sahib."

  "Well, Mr. Sahib, you'll be happy to know that Tyrone is doing just fine."

  "I beg your pardon," Remo said.

  "Tyrone Walker is doing just fine."

  "Tyrone Walker is a living time bomb," Remo said. "It is just a matter of when he explodes and hurts someone. He is a functional illiterate, barely housebroken. How can he be doing fine?"

  As he spoke, Remo had started to come up out of his chair and Shockley's hand moved slowly toward the Magnum. He relaxed as Remo sat back in the seat.

  "It's all right here, Mr. Sahib. And computers never lie. Tyrone is at the top of his class in language arts, near the top in word graphic presentation, and in the top twentieth percentile in basic computational skills."

  "Let me guess," Remo said. "That's reading, writing, and arithmetic."

  Shockley smiled a small smile. "Well, in the old days, it was called that. Before we moved into new relevant areas of education."

  "Name one," Remo said.

  "It's all right here in one of my books," Shockley said. He waved his left hand toward a shelf of books directly behind his left shoulder. "Adventures in Education-An Answer to the Question of Racism in the Classroom."

  "You wrote that?" Remo asked.

  "I've written all these books, Mr. Sahib," Shockley said. "Racism on Trial, I
nequality in the Classroom, The Black Cultural Experience and its Effect on Learning, Street English-A Historical Imperative."

  "Have you written anything about how to teach kids to read and write?"

  "Yes. My masterwork is considered Street English, A Historial Imperative. It tells how the true English was the black man's English and the white power structure changed it into something it was never meant to be, thereby setting ghetto children at a disadvantage."

  "That's idiotic," Remo said.

  "Is it? Did you know that the word 'algebra' is itself an Arabic word? And the Arabs are, of course, black."

  "They'd be interested in hearing that," Remo said. "What's your answer to this disadvantage of ghetto children in learning English?"

  "Let us return to the true basic form of English, Street English. Black English, if you will."

  "In other words, because these bunnies can't talk right, make their stupidity the standard by which you judge everybody else?"

  "That is racist, Mr. Sahib," Shockley said indignantly.

  "I notice you don't speak this Street English," Remo said. "If it's so pure, why don't you?"

  "I have my educational doctorate from Harvard," Shockley said. His nostrils pinched tighter together as he said it.

  "That's no answer. Are you saying you don't speak Street English because you're smart enough not to?"

  "Street English is quite capable of being understood on the streets."

  "What if they want to get off the streets? What if they need to know something more than 127 different ways to shake hands? What happens when they go into the real world where most people talk real English? They'll sound as stupid and backward as that clerk of yours out there." Remo waved toward the door, outside which he could still imagine the woman sitting at the desk, worrying to death the seven words on the cover of Essential Magazine, the Journal of Black Beauty.

  "Clerk?" said Shockley. His eyes raised in a pair of question marks.

  "Yes. That woman out there."

  Shockley chuckled. "Oh. You must mean Doctor Bengazi."

  "No, I don't mean Doctor anybody. I mean that woman out there who can't read."

  "Tall woman?"

  Remo nodded.

  "Big frizzy do?" Shockley surrounded his hair with his hands.

  Remo nodded.

  Shockley nodded back. "Doctor Bengazi. Our principal."

  "God help us all."

  Remo and Shockley looked at each other for long seconds without speaking.

  Finally Remo said, "Seeing as how nobody wants to teach these kids to read or write, why not teach them trades? To be plumbers or carpenters or truckdrivers or something."

  "How quick you all are to consign these children to the scrap heap. Why should they not have a full opportunity to share in the riches of American life?"

  "Then why the hell don't you prepare them for that full opportunity?" Remo asked. "Teach them to read, for Christ's sake. You ever leave a kid back?"

  "Leave a child back? What does that mean?"

  "You know. Fail to promote him because his work isn't good enough."

  "We have done away with those vestigial traces of racism. IQ tests, examinations, report cards, promotions. Every child advances with his or her peer group, socially adept, with the basic skills of community interaction attuned to the higher meaning of the ethnic experience."

  "But they can't read," Remo yelled.

  "I think you overstate the case somewhat," Shockley said, with the satisfied smile of a man trying to impress the drunken stranger on the next bar stool.

  "I just saw your salutatorian. He can't even color inside the lines."

  "Shabazz is a very bright boy. He has indigenous advancement attitudes."

  "He's a frigging armed robber."

  "To err is human. To forgive divine," Shockley said.

  "Why didn't you forgive him then and change the date of graduation for him?" Remo asked.

  "I couldn't. I just changed it to another date and I couldn't make any more changes."

  "Why'd you change it the first time?"

  "For the valedictorian."

  "What's he going up for?" Remo asked.

  "It is a she, Mr. Sahib. And no, she is not going to jail. However, she is going to enjoy the meaningful experience of giving birth."

  "And you moved up the graduation so she wouldn't foal on the stage?"

  "That's crude," Shockley said.

  "Did you ever think, Mr. Shockley…"

  "Doctor Shockley. Doctor."

  "Did you ever think, Doctor Shockley, that perhaps it's your policies that reduce you to this?"

  "To what?"

  "To sitting here, barricaded in your office behind a metal fence, a gun in your hand. Did it ever occur to you that if you treated your kids as humans, with rights and responsibilities, they might act like humans?"

  "And you think I could do this by 'leaving them, back,' as you so quaintly put it?"

  "For a start, yeah. Maybe if the others see that they've got to work, they'll work. Demand something from them."

  "By leaving them back? Now I'll give you an example. Each September, we take one hundred children into the first grade. Now suppose I was to leave back all one hundred because they were unable to perform satisfactorily on some arbitrary test of learning experience…"

  "Like going to the bathroom," Remo interrupted.

  "If I were to leave back all hundred, then next September I would have two hundred children in the first grade and the September after that, three hundred children. It would never stop and after a few years I would be running a school in which everyone was in the first grade."

  Remo shook his head. "That presupposes that all of them would be left back. You really don't believe that these kids can be taught to read or write, do you?"

  "They can be taught the beauty of black culture, the richness of their experience in America, and how they overcame degradation and the white man's slavery, they can be taught…"

  "You don't believe that they can be taught to learn anything," Remo said again. He stood up. "Shockley, you're a racist, you know that? You're the worst racist I ever met. You'll accept anything, any garbage, from these kids because you don't think they're capable of doing any better."

  "I? A racist?" Shockley chuckled and pointed to the wall. "There is my award for promoting the ideals of brotherhood, equality, and black excellence, presented to me on behalf of a grateful community by the Black Ministry Council. So much for racism."

  "Where does that computer say Tyrone is now?"

  Shockley checked the small screen, then punched another button on its keyboard. "Room 127, Advanced Communications."

  "Good," Remo said. "I can just follow the sound of the grunts."

  "I'm not sure you understand the new aims of modern education, Mr. Sahib."

  "Forget it, pal," Remo said.

  "But you…"

  Suddenly it spilled out of Remo. The agonizing discussion with Shockley, the stupidity of the man who had been put in control of hundreds of young lives, the transparent hypocrisy of a man who thought that if children lived in the gutter, the thing to do was to sanctify the gutter with pious words, all of it filled Remo up like a too-rich meal and, he could feel the bile rising in his throat. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, he lost his temper.

  Before Shockley could move, Remo's hand flashed out and ripped a foot-square hole in the steel screen. Shockley's hands groped out, grasping for his .357 Magnum but it wasn't there. It was in the crazy white man's hands, and as Shockley watched in horror, Remo snapped off the barrel just behind the cylinder. He looked at the useless weapon, then tossed both parts onto the desk in front of Shockley.

  "There," he said.

  Shockley's face was screwed up in anguish as if someone had just squirted ammonia into his nostrils.

  "Why you do that?" he whined.

  "Just write it off as another indigenous ethnic experience in racist white America," Remo said. "That's a boo
k title. It's yours for free."

  Shockley picked up both parts of the pistol and looked at them. Remo thought he was going to cry.

  "You shouldna done dat," Shockley said and turned bloodhound eyes on Remo.

  Remo shrugged.

  "What I go do now?" Shockley asked.

  "Write another book. Call it Racism on the Rampage."

  "You shouldna done dat ting," Shockley said. "I gots de parents conference all dis appernoon and now whats I gonna do wif no gun?"

  "Stop hiding behind that screen like a goddam fireplace log and come out and talk to the parents. Maybe they'll tell you that they'd like their kids to learn to read and write. So long."

  Remo walked to the door. He stopped and turned as he heard Shockley mumbling.

  "Deys gonna get me. Deys gonna get me. Oh, lawdy, deys gonna get me and me wiffen no gun."

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said.

  When Remo went to collect Tyrone Walker, he wasn't sure if he had walked into Room 127 or the sixth annual reunion celebration of the Manson Family.

  There were twenty-seven black teenagers in the classroom, a limit set by state law because a larger class would have disrupted the learning experience. A half dozen sat round a windowsill in the far corner, passing a hand-rolled cigarette from hand to hand. The room reeked with the deep bitter smell of marijuana. Three tall youths amused themselves by throwing switchblade knives at a picture of Martin Luther King that was Scotch-taped to one of the pecan-paneled walls of the classroom. Most of the students lounged at and on desks, their feet up on other desks, listening to transistor radios that blared forth the top four songs on the week's hit parade, "Love is Stoned," "Stone in Love," "In Love I'm Stoned," and "Don't Stone My Love." The din in the classroom sounded like a half dozen symphony orchestras warming up at the same time. In a bus.

  Three very pregnant girls stood by a side wall, talking to each other, giggling and drinking wine from a small pint bottle of muscatel. Remo looked around for Tyrone and found him sleeping across two desks.

  Remo drew a few glances from some of the students who then dismissed him with contempt and disdain by turning away.