That week’s assignment was the simple interrogative: Why are you here in prison?
I was interested to hear their excuses, but first someone had to volunteer.
The silence stretched into discomfort.
We waited.
“Harris,” Tempest said finally. “Come on, man. I know you got sumpin’.”
Next to me Tempest was the oldest man in the room; his body, and his life, were both thirty-nine years old. The rest of the students were all under thirty and the guards weren’t much older.
Harris Maraman was twenty-four years old.
“Do you have something for us, Mr. Maraman?” I asked the handsome, diffident young man.
“Um…well,” he said.
“Come on, brother,” Tony Anthony said, “let’s hear it.”
When the men turned toward Harris their chains tinkled like wind chimes under a light breeze.
“We live in a house on Stanton Street,” Harris said, reading from his lined notepaper with no preamble or introduction. “Me; my mother and sister, Lafisha, and brother, Zarryl; and my mother’s boyfriend Warren; and my sister’s child Rolanda and her little brother, Charles. They had turnt off the water and the electricity and the steam. My mother, Amelia, went to the City but they said that they were busy and that she would have to come back later. That’s when Warren left and I robbed a white man in New York City for three hunnert an’ fi’ty-six dollahs. My mother was so happy she could feed my sister and her kids that she didn’t even ask where the money come from. Warren came ovah for dinner but I sat down at the head of the table. I started goin’ ovah to New York from the Bronx ev’ry other day just about and jump on men and women and take their money an’ hit’em if they said no. They arrested me this one time but my lawyer, a white lady named Charlene, said somethin’ to the judge about the way they arrested me and they had to let me go. I was happy at the time but now that I think about it it would’a prob’ly been bettah if I had got put in jail then and then maybe I could’a had this class and got my GED an’ got a job where I didn’t have to hurt people. But then I was home again and my mother and my sister’s kids was cryin’ and Warren had a new girlfriend that bought his clothes. So I robbed a couple’a people and then I tried to rob this one man named Samuel somethin’. I knocked him down and took his money but that crazy white man got up an’ jumped on me. He grabbed at that money and I got mad. You know that money was for my fam’ly and I felt like he didn’t have no right to try an’ rob it back so I beat on him like a dog. A dog.
“That was five years ago, when I was nineteen. Now I got seventy-nine years left on my sentence. My momma’s still on Stanton Street but my sister’s gone. Nobody knows where to. Warren come up to see me now and then. We don’t really talk but I guess I like it that he comes.
“I know what I did was wrong but when I think about it I don’t know what else I could’a done. So I’m here in Mr. Angel’s class learnin’ how to write down what happened so that maybe one day I could understand it.”
I looked out the window. Three of the black-and-white cows were staring at me. I turned my gaze back in the room and saw Tempest watching my eyes.
It dawned on me then that Tempest didn’t have to plan his arguments with me. He was like a shark whose dialogue is the ocean. All he had to do was have me in the drink with him and the paradoxes and contradictions of mortality made themselves evident.
—
We, the class and I, wrote Harris’s essay on the blackboard, sentence by sentence and phrase by phrase, correcting the misspellings, grammar, punctuation, and run-on sentences. Harris copied down the composition with great intensity as if there was some kind of answer in the amended thesis.
Tempest was smiling full-out by the time the class was over.
We were allowed a few minutes to meet after the class, alone in the room with the window.
“What are you so happy about?” I asked him.
“That Harris knows things that he don’t even know he know,” Tempest replied.
I understood what he meant.
I had lived in human form for far too long.
—
On the bus ride home I made a decision: I would continue to work at getting Tempest to recognize his sins and the validity of his punishment but first I would free him—by any means necessary.
Money
Cyrus Lumpin was the assistant warden at the penitentiary. Mr. Lumpin had agreed to allow Tempest and me to meet for two hours once a month—in private. The excuse for this meeting was for us to discuss his work with the students in my prison literacy class. Tempest was my aide and I claimed that I had to be briefed by him now and then to organize my course to work most efficiently.
We did discuss the students but we also got in a talk about the nature of his sins at some point during the meeting, which was held in a small, bare room off to the side of Lumpin’s office.
—
“…no, Angel,” Tempest was saying to me that particular Saturday afternoon, “even if a man intends to hurt somebody an’ makes him suffer, that don’t necessarily mean that he have evil in his heart.”
“If someone were to beat you and wound you, wouldn’t you feel that you had been wronged?” I asked.
“But maybe not so much so as to say that that man was a sinner.”
“The intent of doing something wrong is the definition of sin,” I said, feeling that I was getting a leg up on our game.
“That might be true in heaven, Angel,” Tempest said. “That might be true where you got all the time in the world and so you only have to think about one thing at a time but down here, where time is always runnin’ out, things get more complicated.”
“Wrong is wrong,” I said, feeling that I was winning and losing, winning and losing—all at the same time.
“But what if you got a child that you love,” Tempest said, “a child that loves you? But you know that that child is wrong on the inside. He do things that he can’t help and he’s your blood and you love him. Maybe he rapes children or kills whenever the lust come up in his mind. He’s wrong and he’s yours. He loves you and you, him. But in the end you have to put him down because no matter what he did you can’t leave him to end up in a place like this where nobody loves him but you do. You have to put him down because if you don’t, innocent people will suffer and it’s your fault. And then you end up in here because you committed a crime and they fount you guilty but you know in your heart that you did right and you hate yourself for it too.”
Tempest’s questions quelled my desire to argue further. I was well aware of the intricacies of sin but it was not until I had achieved human form that I truly experienced those complexities. It seemed right to me that corporeal mud somehow tempered the understanding of the soul.
But I wouldn’t tell Tempest that.
“I went to see Dominique Hart,” I said.
“Ezzard’s old girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“Fredda Lane called me.”
“Ezzard’s other old flame? Damn, Angel, you a playah, man.”
“It was nothing like that,” I said. “Fredda wanted to give me a stack of letters to return to you, or to Ezzard. Since you broke it off with her she’s felt bad even though she’s happy because she and her boyfriend have decided to get married and she’d’ve had to stop making the conjugal visits anyway.”
“Damn,” Tempest said ruefully, “that was one fine woman.”
“I read the letters.”
“You read my private mail?”
“It’s not yours. It belongs to Ezzard Walcott, who is deceased.”
“But I got his body. I had his girlfriend too—still would if you hadn’t made me feel guilty about makin’ her come up here when she was in love with another man.”
“There was a letter from Dominique Hart in the bundle,” I said. “It spoke about a briefcase that Ezzard had given her to hide.”
It was Tempest’s turn to sit back in mute awareness.
The question was in his eyes.
“She had hidden the briefcase in her stepfather’s house,” I said. “The same house Ezzard used as a hideout while he was avoiding capture.”
Tempest glanced around the room, looking for spies.
“Her stepfather had died from a coronary and the mother has moved down to Miami to live with her sister.”
“How you know all that?”
“I went to see Dominique like I said. I asked her about the briefcase. I told her that I believed that you would be interested in retrieving it.”
“Why?” Tempest asked.
“There was something reticent about her letter.”
“Reti-what?”
“The words seemed furtive, as if she were afraid to write them. I think she understood that the contents of that piece of luggage represented something sinful.”
“Somethin’ sinful? Angel, you got sin on the brain, man. You know I been thinkin’—St. Peter, or whoever he is, is the most sinful man evah been.”
“What? You call the Guardian of the Gate a sinner? How could you possibly stand behind such a ludicrous claim?”
“You said it yourself, man,” he sang. “A sinner is the one who makes other peoples suffer. And who have caused more sufferin’ than the man sent ten billion souls to hell?”
“It is the sinners themselves who brought on the sentence,” I said. “The Guardian simply saw them on their way.”
“You sayin’ it but you know it ain’t true, Angel.”
“You claim to understand the thought behind Eternity?” I said, forgetting all about Dominique and her well-founded fears.
“This here prison is like a hell on earth, ain’t it?” Tempest asked.
“We agree there.”
“And if that’s true, then you have to be sayin’ that the men in here brought on their own sentences.”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“But half the men in here say they’re innocent and the other half say that they had reasons for what they did.”
A thrum of fear played across my chest as if my rib bones were the notes on a partially muted xylophone.
“I said no to Peter and he couldn’t do a damn thing,” Tempest said. “But the men in here cain’t say no. The people Peter sent to Bob cain’t say no—or they can but they don’t know it. But if you can say no to your judgment, then maybe, just maybe you don’t deserve it—like the man in the cell next to mine who killed his own son because his son had murdered five women and would have killed more. He in here but you know what he did was right not wrong.”
“ ‘Vengeance is mine,’ ” I quoted.
“It wasn’t vengeance but mercy,” Tempest said and a pall of silence settled on us.
After a while there came knock. A moment later the oak door came open. Cyrus Lumpin stood there. I had seen the man maybe eight times. He’d worn three different suits over that period and the one thing they all had in common was that they were varying shades of green.
Lumpin was a slight man with a pencil-thin mustache. His eyes were hazel and his posture vain.
“Time’s almost up, Mr. Angel,” he said. There was the hint of a query in his tone because he didn’t really understand why he was letting Tempest and me meet in his side room. He didn’t know that my angelic voice had interrupted his usual pattern of refusal and denial.
“We’ll be right out, Mr. Lumpin,” I said. “There’s just one more thing we have to discuss.”
The question made its way to Lumpin’s eyes but he could not articulate it. He smiled, nodded, and then backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.
“I broke into Dominique’s parents’ home,” I said.
“What did you say, Angel?”
“I said—”
“I heard you. I heard what you said but what I’m askin’ is ain’t that some kinda sin? Some kinda covetin’?”
“I found what Dominique had hidden. It was in the basement behind a freestanding cinder-block wall.”
“Okay. I’ll bite.”
“It was more like a small suitcase than an attaché case. It was blond and woven. There was $104,379 inside.”
“Cash?”
“There was blood on some of it,” I said, nodding.
“What you do with all that money?”
“It’s in the bottom drawer of my desk at work.”
For a time again we were quiet and then I said, “You don’t belong in here, Tempest.”
“You say I belong in hell, Angel. If I don’t belong here then how could I belong in hell?”
“This is no time to quibble,” I said. “I plan to use the money to hire a new attorney that might secure your freedom.”
“You gonna save me from the penitentiary so you can send me to hell?”
“I follow my destiny where it leads.”
“Even if that takes you down the same path as me?”
Instead of answering him I said, “Fredda told me that Ezzard knew a successful lawyer named Stuart Noble. I intend to go to him and ask him to represent you.”
“And you plan to pay him with that blood money?” Tempest asked.
“If you agree.”
“What’s gonna happen to Lenny Johnson?” he said then.
“Who?”
“Lenny Johnson,” he said. “The man who killed his son to stop him from killin’ and keep him from jail.”
“I don’t know.”
Tempest smiled then and shook his head. It looked as if he were feeling sorry for me.
“Okay, Angel,” he said—doing me a favor. “I’ll let you try it. At least I could maybe get out to the courthouse again. Maybe if I’m lucky, you can sneak me in a hot dog.”
Noble Cause
The waiting room was situated on the fifty-ninth floor of the Midtown Carter-Owens Building. The west wall was one solid window that looked far out over New Jersey. The floor was made from tiles of pinkish-red Italian marble and all of the furniture—chairs, tables, and even the standing chest of drawers—were carved from smooth alabaster stone. The walls were tiled in onyx. There was no softness in the room, only the austere beauty of formed stone and sunlight.
I was seated on a white stone chair—waiting.
A young woman had met me at the receptionist’s desk and brought me to this space of cold opulence.
“Mr. Billings will bring the client in to confer with you,” the lovely raven-haired aide with eyes that could have been actual emeralds told me, “as soon as he arrives.”
“Ezzard?” I said. “Here?”
She smiled but did not answer, turned and left me to wonder.
—
Nearly an hour later the door, which was made from flat, black slate, swung open.
“Angel,” Tempest said, smiling as he entered. “This is some kind’a great, huh?”
I stood and we shook hands. Over my charge’s shoulder I saw the bull-like form of our legal contact at the firm—Cato Billings.
Billings was a tall white man but didn’t seem so because of his extra-wide, bulging shoulders. His suit looked to be sewn from ship-sail canvas but I was sure that it was actually raw silk.
Billings’s big head was also wide as was his smile. The blond-colored eyes were rather close set and his hair was the red brown of uncured cow leather.
“Mr. Angel,” Billings said grabbing at my hand and squeezing it mightily. “Well, here we are. Sit, sit.”
With little strain Billings turned one of the heavy chairs around so that it was facing its sofa mate. Tempest and I settled next to each other. A grinning Cato Billings sat opposite, framed and darkened by the bright sun behind.
“This is where it all happens,” he said.
“How did you get Tempest here with no guard and in civilian clothes?” I asked.
Tempest was wearing dark green slacks and a yellow, square-cut sports shirt.
“We’re all civilized up here, Mr. Angel. The court knows that when we make a promise we keep it.”
&n
bsp; “What promise? And what does the court have to do with our meeting?” I asked. “I thought that I came here to be introduced to Stuart Noble?”
Billings’s helium smile brought him up out of the chair like a grotesque and weighted balloon float in a small-town parade.
“I have to be going,” he said. “Another meeting on the fortieth floor.”
“But—” I said.
He cut me off with a hand gesture and replied, “Your answers will come in a few moments, Mr. Angel.”
With these words he moved the rough-silk-wrapped bulk of his body toward the slate door and out.
I stood up to watch him go.
Tempest sat back and smiled.
“What are you grinning at?” I said peevishly.
“You treat a brother right, Angel,” he said. “Assistant Warden Lumpin came to my cell at four thirty this mornin’ and said that they were transferring me for a new trial. They brought me these civvies and even took me out for a breakfast at IHOP. You know I had six orders of sausage.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I just delivered the money yesterday afternoon.”
“Money talks,” Tempest said with fake sagacity. “It walks at a good clip too.”
“The love of money—” I began.
A voice finished the sentence for me, “Is the root of all evil.”
We hadn’t heard the slate door open but there in its frame stood a man, tall and slender. His suit was black and so was his skin. He looked more like an African than an African American, the features were so pure—maybe Nigerian or Malian. He was a young man with old, dead eyes. His smile was uplifting, however, and the grace he showed walking into the room was that of human perfection.
Tempest rose to meet our host.
“Mr. Angel, Mr. Walcott,” he said in greeting. “My name is Stuart Noble.”
He shook both our hands and then took the seat that his brutish minion had vacated.
Tempest and I both sat. I stared into Noble’s expressionless eyes and speculated.
“You gentlemen have met your side of the bargain and I will now meet mine.”
“How did you get Tempest out of prison?” I asked.
He hunched his shoulders and smiled easily.
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 6