Now You See Her

by Cecelia Tishy

  She’s more grateful than she should have to be. “I owe you, Reggie. If ever—”

  “Try now. There’s one condo up for sale at Eldridge Place. I want to see it as soon as possible.”

  “You’re thinking of moving from Barlow Square? From a townhouse to a high-rise? Why?”

  “A modern building has advantages. I just want to see the condo at night, after ten.”

  “Ten p.m.? I don’t know if Stu works that late. That’s Stu Albritten, the listing agent.”

  “Tell him I’m nocturnal. Tell him your client’s a vampire.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Something else, Meg. There’s a new condo project, Eldridge Place II. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s just off the drawing board. A colleague in our office will be an authorized agent. We’ve got the prospectus.”

  “I want to see it. I also want your best info on the major players. I want to know who sold and bought the land. I want to follow the money.”

  Meg’s laugh is brittle. “So do we all, Reggie. So do we all. Stand by. I’ll see about Eldridge.”

  Right now I’ll see about Big Doc. Odds are, Nicole knows more than she told me. The upcoming fashion show has potential for a swap of services between me and my boss, so I grab a tuna sandwich and work on the Newton fashion show script, then make a beeline to StyleSmart and hang up blouses while Nicole reads my printout. “ ‘StyleSmart for Success!’ I like it, Reggie. You got a gift with words. Oh, look at this. ‘Dress today for tomorrow’s career… compound interest in this versatile four-way suit…a dash of decorum makes this ensemble a big step up the job escalator!’ Girl, you are good.”

  Great, she approves. But when I ask about Ernest Frynard a.k.a. Big Doc, she stonewalls me. “I love your write-up for the show, Reggie, but forget about Ernest.”

  “Big Doc.”

  “Don’t ‘Big Doc’ me. Ernest Frynard’s granddaddy would turn in his grave if he knew what became of that boy, the Lord rest his soul.”

  “Nicole, he might know whether a man serving time for murder is really guilty or innocent. I need to talk to him.”

  “Reggie, if you want to waste your time on a Washington Street corner when he rants and raves, that’s your business. Rasta or no, you don’t know whether to be scared or laugh at the man. Mostly, you want to cry and run. He’s out of his mind. Don’t you be going after him. He’s a false prophet among the people, and his ways are pernicious. He has a vile temper.”

  “I only want to talk for a few minutes.”

  “And don’t be fooled by that gang in the Zorro getups. They look like Halloween, but they’re mean, they’re cold as ice. Every one’s an example of what can happen to our black boys and men in this day and time. Folks need to wake up. Ernest was smart in school. He got lost.”

  “So you won’t help me find him.”

  “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  From StyleSmart, I pick up Biscuit, head to lower Washington Street, and circle deep into rush hour. On the corner where Doc preached, a ring of young break-dancers draws a small crowd. Are they his opening act? No.

  Nor are Wednesday’s Peruvian reed flutes. Nor Thursday’s gaunt guitarist, who is chased off by a sudden cloudburst. On a drizzly Friday at 3:30 p.m., it seems certain that Big Doc and his crew decamped long ago. I’m wasting time and gas. Beside me, Biscuit gives baleful stares. “One last loop, Biscuit, and we’ll head back to Barlow Square.” She woofs and thumps her tail.

  As I drive off, my rearview mirror shows a huge old smoking Buick with dark-tinted windows. It swerves and stops against the curb. The doors and trunk lid pop open, and a six-man squad in black jumps out and starts to set up the oil drum, the placards, the sound system. It’s them.

  Four lefts get me back to Washington, where Doc’s crowd has already materialized. As before, it’s a motley mix of young and old, male and female, and mostly dark-skinned. It’s as if they know the schedule. So far, there’s no sign of Big Doc himself.

  Should I keep circling the block? The drizzle gets heavier, and I turn the wipers on. Three more loops, and there’s Doc himself exiting the passenger side of an SUV two cars in front. He looks the same: the dreads, the hulking shoulders and quarter-acre crimson robe. Facing the crowd, he opens his arms wide as if to embrace vast assembled multitudes. The mike is presented as if it’s a scepter, and his voice booms through my window glass. “Poisons and corruption, O children of JAH.”

  I look for a parking spot. The SUV and Buick have driven off. It’s seriously raining, and the crowd starts to thin. A few umbrellas appear, and Doc himself retreats into a Payless shoe store entryway. His squad wrestles plastic sheeting over the sidewalk setup, but the plastic billows in the wind. I’ll doublepark, approach him on foot, and make my pitch at the Payless doorway.

  The Buick suddenly careens from behind, cuts in front of me, and rides up over the curb. Shrouded in plastic, the black squad guys shove equipment into the trunk. Car and truck horns blast behind me, though I stay put. Doc swoops into the Buick front seat. The others cram into the back. Doors slam. They’re off.

  At first, it’s easy to follow. Downtown Boston at rush hour is a bumper-to-bumper choke hold, especially in the rain. I edge in and out to keep them in sight. We cut and dart, the Buick driver lays heavy on his horn, and I hope against hope he—they—won’t notice a tailgating Beetle.

  Within a mile, certain lanes open up, and I’m now in a Boston racetrack amid Jeeps, dump trucks, motorcycles. Where am I? City street names flash—Wensley, Lamartine, Roanoke. Isn’t the Franklin Park Zoo out this way? The Arnold Arboretum? I have a near miss with a seafood truck and slam into a pothole the size of a pond, then barely glimpse the Buick’s rear end disappear around a corner. Really, it’s the car’s smoking exhaust I follow to a block with houses and a storefront whose windows are painted over in green, dull gold, and red. Rastafarian colors.

  The Buick has stopped before the storefront, and Big Doc gets out and disappears inside. So do all the others.

  I pull up to read a lettered sign over the entrance: “House of Spirit and Health.” Except that it’s spelled “Helth.” Is it a clinic? No, more like a church, a house of worship. Doc’s? Is he the minister?

  Do I dare go in? “Biscuit, you stay here for a little while.” I park between a pickup truck and a battered station wagon, crack a window, lock up, and dash for the door and knock. Nobody answers, but the latch gives, and I step inside.

  Odors of old wood and plaster mix with food. Ginger? Yes, and coconut too. My eyes adjust to low light, but I see no one. Down at the front stands a grove of potted palms. They look yellowed and dry. The side walls show pictorial murals. They aren’t religious, not to my eye. On the right rise deep green mountains capped in chalky mists; on the left, stubby fishing boats bob on a turquoise sea. The ceiling features whitewash clouds. The palm grove links up with coconut. The ginger is Jamaican. Worshipers are supposedly transported to the Caribbean.

  How many parishioners come here? This sanctuary—if it actually is a sanctuary—might hold two hundred, but the seating looks haphazard, a mix of benches, folding chairs, and one outsize oak pew that looks hacked with a saw or ax. I call out, “Hello,” and walk forward. “Hello, hello,” I say louder, but my voice sounds muffled. “Is anyone here?”

  A man appears suddenly from behind the palm grove as if it’s a curtain. He’s wearing the mariachi uniform, and the squish of his shoes says he’s been out in the rain, doubtless on Washington Street and in the Buick.

  “I’m looking for Doc. Is he here? My name is Cutter. Your door was open. I tried to knock.”

  “No service today. Try tomorrow.”

  “I heard him preach a couple of weeks ago. It’s important.”

  “Important to you on your personal schedule.”

  “I… it’ll take just a few minutes.”

  “Minutes, seconds, hours—the time of life chopped into pieces. Do you see
a clock in this House?” He starts toward me. “Do you see a calendar on these walls?”

  “No.”

  He’s six feet away, then five, closing in. I wish Stark were here. “Time is infinity and eternity across latitudes. Time is of the stars and oceans. Time is cosmic rhythm.”

  We’re face-to-face. His tan skin is sallow, his jaw tight. “This is the House of Spirit and Health, not filth and sin. But welcome to all who enter. Welcome.”

  He motions me to a seat. Wafting from him is an herbal odor, like oregano, like marijuana. Are they all smoking in a back room? High as kites? I sit down on a folding chair. He pulls another up close, spins it like a top, and straddles it. A buck knife is sheathed at his belt. Our faces are inches apart. “Spirit and health rule here. Ours is the kingdom of spirit and health.”

  “Is Doc the minister?”

  “From ancient times, the leader comes.”

  “I believe he has certain knowledge—”

  “Wisdom.”

  “Information.”

  His eyes narrow, and he rubs the bone handle of the knife. “Reborn into spirit and health under the Lion of Judah. He who never was but truly is.”

  “Can you just ask him to see me for a few moments?”

  He taps the knife handle. “The House of Spirit and Health,” he says, “does not live by bread alone. Not bread alone.”

  Money. He wants money. I reach into my pocket. How much will it cost to get out intact?

  He says, “We favor Benjamins.”

  Benjamin Franklin, the face on the hundred-dollar bill. “I have a twenty. And a five.”

  He scoffs, but his fingers wrap around my two bills. We stand. I’m getting out of here. I reach for the door latch as he says, “Minister Doc is here in the House. He will see you. He’s a busy man, but he makes time for those in need.”

  My mind seesaws. Grab the latch and get out—to the rain, to my car, the dog, back home safe and dry. The smart thing to do. No one even knows where in the city I am, not even me. At this moment, I’m surely Henry Faiser’s fool. My own fool too. Is Doc sitting behind the sickly grove of potted palms in this faux Jamaica? What price to find out? Or not to?

  “Are you ready?”

  My throat wants to shut. I swallow hard and hope my voice doesn’t quaver or knees buckle when I nod, turn around, and say, “Yes.”

  We march zigzag down the aisle, behind the palms, and then left to a badly lighted steep stairway leading down to utter darkness. To Doc’s underground?

  “Wait, I don’t think—”

  “Watch your step. I’ll help you.” The stairs are rickety, and there’s no railing. The squad man grips my elbow—in order to prevent my fall or to secure a hostage? The pressure of his fingers hurts my elbow. Descending, I count seventeen steps. This is stupid.

  Basements have windows; cellars do not. We enter a chamber turned into a cellar by blacked-out windows. Four squad men range about on sofas smoking cigarettes, one of them holding a big rusty metal lid. The air is thick with marijuana smoke. A kerosene lamp on a small table lights the leader’s dreadlocks like a dingy halo. Before me, Doc sits enthoned in a recliner in his red graduation robe. He puffs on a corncob pipe.

  “House of Spirit and Health greets all who enter.” He nods at a squad man, who tosses a sofa cushion to the center of the cement floor. Am I to sit? To kneel?

  I stand, my “escort” directly behind me, blocking the exit. “I have a few questions.”

  “Spirit and Health answer all questions, sister.”

  “It’s about Eldridge Street, years ago.”

  He jabs the stem of the pipe at the cushion, a signal to lower myself. I drop to one knee and repeat, “Eldridge.”

  “Satan, Moloch, and corporations of the Sphinx—these are false gods. Poisons and death. Health is here in the herbs of JAH and Judah. Ganja”—he holds out the cob pipe—“and maize.”

  “Thirteen years ago you lived on Eldridge Street.”

  He meets my gaze. Smoke wreathes his head. “Long season of corruption and outer darkness.” He inhales. The others smoke in silence. “It was a time,” he says slowly, “of great testing.”

  “The auto body shop, B&B Auto, it burned to the ground. Your house burned too.”

  “Fire of night.”

  “Bodies were found.”

  “Not of our people. Not of our knowledge.”

  “A man named Carlo worked there.”

  He blinks and pauses. “Flames of hell,” he says at last, then inhales deeply.

  My eyes begin to water. “A young man was shot dead on Eldridge that same day. He was about twenty years old.” His response is to pass the pipe to a sofa squad man, a taut figure who looks coiled for a fight. The cob pipe in turn is passed to each of the others, who set cigarettes aside to share it, weed upon weed. My head begins to feel light. “Who was the blue-eyed boy?”

  “Pale wanderer. Lost child of despair.”

  “Was it Peter Wald?”

  “Tunnels of waste and poison. The City on a Hill, a sewer of death.” He falls silent as I recall that these were his very words on the Washington Street corner. But my thoughts feel cloudy, and my head is starting to float. Doc leans down in my direction and says, “Wood and rock.”

  “ ‘Peter’ means rock. And ‘wald’ means wood.”

  “The blue-eyed boy was a child of death, begotten of death.” Everything starts to sway, my vision now breaking up like time-lapse film in this smoky air. Suddenly, a scratching sound begins from the sofa. “Peter Wald,” I say once again, though my tongue feels thick. “A man is in prison for his murder. He may be innocent. Henry Faiser is his name. He lived in your house.”

  “Warehouse of innocents. But the summons will come, and blood will cleanse the poisons.”

  “He’s sick. He needs help. An African-American man wasting away in prison. If he’s innocent—”

  “Innocent, yes. Poison sewers drowned him, but this House of Spirit and Health is clean.”

  As I watch, Doc’s damp robe brightens to a cherry red, and the fire of the cigarette tips flash like red starbursts in the night sky. The scratching sound amplifies, then changes to plinks like beautiful raindrops. I get it—the metal lid is a steel drum, and the man is polishing it. It’s for reggae, Rasta music.

  I am woozy. The cushion is inviting, and it takes all my strength to rise and stand up. “Thank you for your help.” My mouth feels stuffed with cotton. A sofa man laughs in a guttural scoff. Two others elbow one another in the ribs, and the tense one looks ready to spring. “I must go.”

  But the sallow one with the knife blocks the stairway. Doc grins when I touch the wall to steady myself. Everything flashes. Strobe lights? No, it’s from the marijuana smoke. Dizzy, I’m so dizzy. “No hurry,” drawls Doc. “Stay. I say stay.”

  He sounds like a master talking to a pet. I cough, phlegm rising, eyes streaming. “No, I must leave. Someone expects me back.”

  The room whirls, and colors shift. “You will stay.” The sofa squad stands up. Doc yanks the lever on the recliner and snaps forward to sit upright. One of the squad fingers a length of tire chain. The knife behind me—is the naked blade exposed?

  “We have matters between us. We must bargain,” Doc says. Does he want more money? “We must get personal. The House of Spirit and Health is person-to-person, heart and skin.”

  Meaning assault? The chain clanks, and the men stand at attention as the drummer hammers with his knuckle, bone on steel. It takes every particle of my being to look into his dilated pupils and speak. “I must go. Someone expects me.”

  “I expect you.” The huge red-robed arms open like giant wings, the long nails like talons. “Doc is master here.”

  I hear a click—a gun cocked? My gorge rises, and I swallow to fight the nausea. “Whatever you say. But I feel sick. Do you have a restroom?”

  “This lady wants to rest.”

  “For just a few minutes.”

  “Ganja is JAH’s way.”

>   “It makes me… sick. The kerosene—”

  “Take her up.” Doc leers, his pupils huge. “Then bring her down.”

  The knife man grips my elbow, and it’s helpful because I’m reeling. He doesn’t look so steady himself. We climb the stairs together, each keeping the other from falling. My knees are rubber, my head spinning. We stumble down a hallway, reach a door. “In there. I be out here.” He snaps a light switch on and gives me a little shove inside. I latch the door from within, then noisily raise the toilet seat and cough and gag and run the taps and look around.

  Thank God, a window, just big enough to crawl out of, though painted over like all the others. I steady myself against the sink, open the clamshell lock, and push up. It doesn’t budge. It’s the thick paint. It’s painted shut.

  “How you doin’ in there?”

  “Dizzy, sick.” I stick my middle finger down my throat and gag and retch as though I’m turning inside out. Then I grab the commode handle and flush and flush again. My one hope is this window. Should I break it? Kick it out? No, he’d hear it shatter, and the jagged glass would cut me to ribbons. Dizzy, light-headed, I tell myself to focus. I open both faucets until they gush and make a big noise, then I bang both hands against the sill. Still stuck.

  “You comin’ out?”

  “In a minute.” I pull out my car key, and as I retch and heave and brace my hip against the wall, I dig the key into the hardened paint.

  “Come on out of there.”

  “I’m throwing up. Got to puke.” Which is almost true. I retch and flush again and gouge at the paint. The key slips, and I nearly fall. The door shudders. The knife man is yanking the doorknob.

  “Come on, move on out of there.”

  “It’s your fault if I puke on Doc.”

  This gets me maybe two minutes. The taps run, the key digs, the thick paint and rotten wood start to splinter. Then the window frame gives, rises. The window is up, and warm, wet air rushes in. Rain splashes my face. I pocket the key. It’s maybe eight feet to the ground, and there’s a stockade fence down below.