Details at Ten

by Ardella Garland

  “Okey-dokey! No problem. See ya!”

  I faked a call or two, treading water until Zeke’s call came in. I wasn’t going to set up squat unless it was about Butter.

  Within the hour I heard a rumbling up at the assignment desk. I saw a couple of the managers get crazy, concerned looks on their faces. Clarice looked up and across the newsroom at me, smiled, then dropped her eyes back to the computer in front of her. I saw the managers each take a phone. I heard their voices rise. I saw Bing come out of his office and stomp right up to the assignment desk and start a powwow.

  I started singing to myself “Respect,” by Aretha-know-she-can-sang-Franklin. I only made it through two “sock it to me’s” when . . .

  “Georgia!” they called out.

  I’d gotten my story out of the pit bull’s mouth. I wondered what the pit bull, Brent Manning, was going to say?

  T W E L V E

  This is bullshit! Bullshit!” Manning was shouting on the phone inside the news truck. Even with the windows rolled up I could still hear him bellowing and berating and victimizing whoever had the sorry-ass luck of being on the other end of the line.

  A courier had driven me out to the location so I could hook up with my crew, and the courier would drive Manning back to the station. A courier’s job is to transport for the station: pick up packages, take tapes to a crew, drive reporters to one location or another. Transport. That was the plan. But there was just one little lump in this bowl of grits: Brent Manning didn’t want to go. He was still in the live truck. The cartoon section back at the TV station didn’t call Brent ahead of time and tell him that they were pulling him off the story. They wanted to avoid his wrath until the last possible moment.

  “You pull me now,” Brent threatened, “then don’t put me back on this story ever! I’m not a yo-yo—I’m the best talent in the city of Chicago. I will not be treated otherwise.”

  Zeke was standing on the driver’s side of the truck leaning on the hood laughing his butt off. Brent had locked him out of his own unit because he’d figured out that Zeke had dropped a dime on him back at the station.

  I was on the passenger side waiting for Brent to give me the tape he shot during the cop ride-along, which I’d need as an element in my version of today’s developments.

  Finally Brent Manning hung up the phone and got out of the truck. He walked right past me, got into the courier’s car, and slammed the door. Brent was trying to take the tape with him and leave me hanging. You got the wrong one, baby. I ran up to the window and banged on the glass as hard as I could. “I need the tape, Brent!”

  He said something to the courier and the car started rolling back in reverse.

  “Brent! C’mon, gimme the tape!” I shouted and hit the glass again.

  By now Zeke was standing on the street on the driver’s side and the poor courier just threw up his hands and put the car in park. Brent rolled down the window, tossed the tape out, and rolled the window back up.

  “Wheee-doggy!” Zeke laughed as we watched the courier car speed away. “Testy jack-off, ain’t he?”

  Channel 3 and Channel 10 had their trucks parked outside. “Bet it’s crowded in there,” Zeke said, looking over at Butter’s house. But I barely heard him. My mind was on screening Brent’s tape to see what was on it because I’d have to write around it for my two-minute story. But since it was so hot and would be even hotter sitting inside the truck playing the tape, I got Zeke to fill me in.

  “Georgia, it’s just standard stuff . . . knocking on doors handing out flyers. The beat cop talked about how dangerous it was on the street, how quiet it had been, and how he knows that something’s going to pop soon.”

  “Great. It’s no biggie then.” I was confident that I could write to the video cold, so we headed up to the house.

  “Hey!” Trip said, answering the door. Butter’s cousin peeped around Zeke and me with a hateful expression on his face. “That white man gone?”

  “Hey watch it! I’m a white man!”

  Trip’s eyes narrowed, then he kind of pouted. “You okay though.”

  Zeke smiled at him, then rubbed the back of his neck. Trip giggled at the sign of affection.

  Inside, I recognized two reporters from the other stations. They were good reporters, competitive but fair. One was interviewing Miss Mabel and the other was talking to Kelly.

  The living room was crowded with everyone’s gear. It’s expensive and heavy. The camera costs about thirty grand. The other accessories—tripod, lights, battery belt, case, Beta tapes—another twenty-five grand. Zeke was lugging around about forty pounds worth of stuff and the heat wasn’t helping a bit. Zeke wearily added his equipment to the pile because I told him we needed to hang tight. Why piggyback off the comp? Naw, that’s stale. I’d wait until they finished and do my own interview. The lights added a heat inside the front room that set me to sweating. I asked Trip, “Can I have a glass of water?”

  Trip grabbed me by the hand and started pulling. “C’mon!” He led me back into the kitchen.

  “Where’s Reverend Walker?” I asked.

  “He talked to them other reporters and left when he heard Aunt Kelly talkin’ to you. Said he had somewhere else to be.”

  Uh-huh, he knows he was wrong. Reverend Walker obviously didn’t want to face me after the way he bulldozed Doug’s plan and got that story in the paper.

  “I’ll getcha a glass!” Trip said, opening up one of the low cabinets. Inside there were six plates, rose patterned, old and chipped, but sparkling clean. And there were six clear glasses and four yellow plastic tumblers. Trip grabbed two tumblers. “I don’t mess wit’ them glasses, Grandma crazy ’bout them glasses.” He handed the tumblers to me and said, “Bugs. Rinse.”

  I let the water run and it came out pink.

  “Rusty pipes,” Trip said. “Keep running it.”

  I continued to let the faucet run. Soon the water was clear, but I just didn’t want to drink it. And I didn’t want to embarrass Trip.

  I said, “Hey, how ’bout instead of just plain old water to cool us off, why don’t we get some ice cream?”

  “Yeah!” Trip’s eyes got wide and a grin opened up from one side of his face to the other. “Eskimo bars!”

  “Let’s go, my man.”

  August in Chicago is nothing to play with. Outside, the blistering white rays were putting a real hurting on everything they touched. Trip and I stood on the shady porch for a couple of minutes trying to get up our courage to venture out farther.

  Next door a battle of checkers was going on. Both men were sitting on plastic milk crates, their skin a deep chocolate brown. Both were bald, one by nature, the other by razor. The older man had a neat, ice white beard and he wore blunt-legged khaki shorts and a sleeveless cotton undershirt. As he studied the board, he squeezed the ends of a white terry-cloth towel that was roped around his neck.

  His young rival had on long-legged shorts four sizes too big belted as low as they could go on his hips to show off the waistband of his white Calvin Klein briefs. He was shirtless and looked too cool given how hot it was.

  Trip spoke to the young brother. “You beatin’, T-Bob?”

  T-Bob smiled and touched his chin.

  “Don’t you got something to do, Trip?” the elderly man barked. “G’on to it.”

  Trip grinned at me and said, “Let’s go!”

  Two steps outside of the front gate and both of us were using the back of our hands to wipe away the sweat from our faces. We were only walking three blocks to a corner store but the heat bench-pressing against our bodies slowed us down considerably.

  People in the neighborhood watched us walk down the street. The few people sitting outside were stretched out beneath double awnings or large trees.

  “Butter. . . .” Trip pointed at a Xeroxed flyer with his cousin’s picture on it. Handwritten below the picture were the words: MISSING GIRL and a brief description of Butter. The flyer was taped to a light pole. Everyone was helping to look for
Butter.

  “The folks around here must really love Butter.”

  “Yep,” Trip responded, then waved at a group of little boys around his age.

  They shouted, “Where y’all goin’, Trip?”

  “Sto’!”

  “Cobs!” one of the boys yelled, the South Side slang for “gimme some.” “Man, cobs on whatever it is you get!”

  “You got enough money for ’em? They’re my friends.”

  “Sure,” I said and placed my hand on Trip’s shoulder. He shook it off and looked up at me. “Sissy stuff.”

  I got the sense that Trip was trying very hard to be a man before his time. “You like living here, Trip? I mean, are you scared sometimes with all the shooting and stuff that goes on?”

  “Scared! I ain’t scared of nothing and nobody. Ain’t no sissy walking with you.”

  “Trip, it’s not sissy to be afraid. Sometimes it’s smart. Fear can tell you when to stay away from something. Fear can keep you safe sometimes. If you’re afraid of something or somebody, it’s best to get away from it as fast as you can.”

  “Sounds sissy to me. I’ve gotta watch out for my mama, grandma, auntie, and Butter.”

  “That’s good, and you have to study hard in school, that’s a way of helping, too, making sure you go to college and . . .”

  Trip shrugged, then started throwing punches in the air. “I’ma be a boxer like Holyfield or some of them. I can beat anybody ’round here my size or a little bigger.”

  “You still need to hit those books,” I said, and playfully grabbed Trip around the neck. He smiled.

  “Say, you know Oprah?” Trip asked. “I wanna have dinner with Oprah—but real food, not that diet stuff she always talkin’ ’bout.”

  “No, I don’t know Oprah.” Everybody in Chicago thinks everybody else in TV knows Oprah. “But I can get you tickets to see one of her shows, how about that? When this is all over, how ’bout that, huh? Me, you, Butter . . . all of us will go, huh?”

  That cheered Trip up, and we finally made it to the store. Thank you, Jesus! Trip opened the big white freezer nestled against the tan metal counter and a gush of arctic air made us both moan with exhausted relief.

  “I could climb in there now and just go to sleep,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Trip agreed. He grabbed a box of Eskimo bars. “Six in here. Umh, there’s Grandma, Auntie Kelly, Zeke, you, and two for me! Get another box for my friends, that’s theirs, okay?”

  “Done.”

  We left the store, each carrying a box, but just as we cleared the doorway, Trip stopped suddenly. The boy didn’t move and his face drained of color as he clutched the box of Eskimo bars.

  “Trip? What is it?”

  Then I knelt down and followed his line of vision across the street to an abandoned building. And there I saw what he saw and a question popped into my head as I tried to calm down Trip. Where had I seen that T-shirt before?

  T H I R T E E N

  I saw two people in the doorway. One of them wore a black T-shirt with white letters that said BE something. Where had I seen that shirt before?

  Trip was running toward the doorway, staring straight ahead, not even blinking, clutching the box of Eskimo bars he was holding.

  I reached for him and missed. “Trip!”

  The two people, a man and a woman, were huddled together, hunched over in the doorway. The wooden beams obstructed their faces by creating a black fan of shade. The woman leaned back to reveal the full lettering on the back of the shirt: BE NO. 1 it read.

  I reached the doorway a few steps behind Trip, panting as the heat billowed steam from my lungs and sweat dropped down my chin. Then the woman turned and looked out, the sunlight catching her face. It was Trip’s mother, Angel, wearing the T-shirt Butter had won at the spelling contest. She was sitting cross-legged with her head bobbing slowly. Angel was high as a telephone pole.

  The man with her had on a torn button-down shirt with a long piece hanging down in the back that was shaped like the closing flap of an envelope. His hipbones jutted out just half a palm’s length beneath the tiny spiral bands of his rib cage. A salty crust of mucus rimmed his nostrils as he periodically looked up and down. He was high, too, but apparently not as waxed as Angel.

  “Why you gotta be wearin’ Butter’s favorite shirt, doin’ your dirty business?” Trip yelled at his mother.

  Startled, Angel’s hands shook and she looked up at Trip and moaned groggily. “G’on Trip!”

  The man turned toward Trip and said firmly, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

  That’s when I saw the eyes that I knew, the ones that had made me giggle with my girlfriends at the pep rally over how cute he was. . . . The ones that had looked understanding but disappointed when I refused to cut class and go home with him for my first sexual experience.

  “A.J.?” I asked. He looked so bad, my heart ached for him. A.J. used to be fine and the smartest boy on the block. “A.J., it’s Georgia.”

  “Hey, girl,” he summoned up after he looked at me for a long time without blinking. “How’d you get out of the TV set?”

  I winced. “A.J., what-what . . .”

  “I’m cool. I’m just hanging out here with Angel. Everything is cool.”

  Trip was now begging his mother, “Let’s go home, Mama! Let’s go home!”

  Angel was shaking her head no. A.J. spoke to me: “Georgia, I see you. You’ve done good. Mama watches you all the time.”

  “Thanks, A.J. What can I do to help you, huh?”

  “Mama, get up and let’s go, Mama!”

  “Give me some money,” A.J. said. “I don’t have nothing.”

  “I can’t give you any money, A.J., but here, take my card and if you want to get some help for this drug thing, call me. You’re better than this, A.J.”

  A.J. took the card reluctantly. Good, there’s hope. Then he began picking his teeth with it. I dropped my eyes.

  At first Angel only seemed to see Trip, and then her gaze included me, and her face melted into this mass of hatred. Trip backed away and stood directly in front of me. I felt his back against my stomach. The box of Eskimo bars I held cracked, and I could feel their coolness through the paper box.

  “Don’t you look at me!” Angel yelled at me.

  But how could I not look? Her face was ugly with the scorn it was showing, uglier than any of the keloid tissue covering her drug-scarred arms.

  How could I not look? She had Trip’s eyes. And was wearing Butter’s favorite shirt, which she had won at the spelling contest.

  How could I not look? Even though I’d done stories, been on the street and knew I was no novice, the emotion and fear, anger and helplessness of this woman was more real and more personal to me than anything I’d ever reported.

  A.J. touched Angel’s arm. “Quiet, baby. Quiet down.” But she yelled at me again, “Don’t look at me!”

  The gooey, sticky wetness of the melting ice cream pressed against my hands. I started pulling Trip away, backing out of the doorway.

  “That’s right, take my baby on home.”

  I pulled him away and forced him to walk down the street. “Forget it. Let’s just go, Trip.”

  Trip mumbled as we walked away, “Messin’ up Butter’s stuff.”

  And that’s all he said as we walked back to the house. Our silence was as dense as the heat around us. I looked back twice at A.J. This man was wasted, his life off course.

  I looked down at Trip and wondered about what he could be. I didn’t want the same ugly thing to happen to him. I wanted to help Trip but I knew he wouldn’t accept that from me. I didn’t know him well enough right now to really reach him.

  “Hey, man, cobs!” the group of boys shouted at us as we neared the house. “We already said it, cobs!”

  Trip played them off cold-bloodedly. He just kept walking.

  I handed the boys the box of Eskimo bars I was carrying. They tore it open and one of the boys yelled, “They busted!”

>   “Shut up before I bust your head!” Trip yelled over his shoulder as he went through the gate and back into the house.

  I stayed a few steps behind, trying to give Trip his mental and physical space.

  Zeke was all set up for the interview, his lights in place. “What’s wrong with Mighty Mouse?” Zeke asked as Trip blew right past him.

  “Nothing, just the heat,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell Trip’s business. If Trip wanted outsiders to know, let him tell them. Miss Mabel and Kelly looked at me; they knew. I didn’t have to say. Neither did Trip.