by Joe Ide
“That was Isaiah!” Guda shouted. “Gimme the fucking gun!”
“No! Fuck you!”
Isaiah burst out the back door, leaped off the stoop, ran across the cement square and tripped on a crack. He fell, scrambled to his feet, but it was too late. Guda tackled him from behind and they went sprawling, Isaiah flat on his stomach. He tried to turn over but got only halfway. Guda was on top of him, rearing back to punch. Isaiah had no leverage so he reached up and clawed Guda’s eyes. He howled and his hands went to his face. Isaiah shoved him off and stood up, but Guda grabbed him and tried to drag him down. Isaiah tried to wriggle free while he hammer-fisted Guda on the head.
“You motherfucker,” Guda yelled. “You’re fucking dead!”
The hammer fists were having no effect. Isaiah was pulled to his knees. BLAM! A bullet zinged past them and whanged into a garbage can. The girl was on the stoop, aiming the gun. It wasn’t clear if she was shooting at Isaiah or her boyfriend.
“The fuck are you doing?” Guda yodeled.
“Get out of the way!” she screamed. She’d gangsta’d up, holding the gun sideways. It looked cool but you can’t aim for shit. BLAM! BLAM! The shots hit three feet from the fighters, ricocheting, powdering the cement. Dodson came around the corner of the house.
“Could I ask you to tone it down? I sleep in the daytime.” The girl shot at him but Dodson had already stepped back.
Isaiah took off. BLAM BLAM BLAM! Bullets flying as he swung over the cinder-block wall, Guda screaming, “STOP SHOOTING, YOU’RE HITTING THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR!”
“How many times do I have to save your life?” Dodson said as they drove out of the alley. “This shit is getting tiresome. If Cherise finds out I was anywhere near a gunshot, she’ll shoot me herself.”
“Guda saw me,” Isaiah said.
Dodson shook his head. “I didn’t think things could get no worse but that’s seriously fucked up, Isaiah. You don’t have a death wish, you have a stupid wish. I told you this would happen, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
“But that had no effect on you, did it?”
“No, it didn’t,” Isaiah said, “and what pisses me off? I can’t get to the Gatling gun now.”
“You already did,” Dodson said.
“How do you figure that?”
“Wait for it,” Dodson said. Five or six seconds went by before they heard the wailing sirens of every police car in the area.
Fist pound.
It was evening. Dodson stood with a bag of warm food in his arms and watched from the doorway. The beeping had stopped, the oscillating lines were still. Merrill, his wife, and some others were gathered around Beaumont. The doctor was shining a light into Beaumont’s eyes. The doctor squeezed his fingernail for a moment or two and listened with his stethoscope; everyone tense as if Beaumont might still be alive. The doctor said, “I’m sorry.”
Merrill bent low and kissed his father on the forehead. “I love you, Pop,” he whispered. “I’ll miss you.” Merrill’s wife put her hand on his back. There were murmurs: He was a good man, Merrill. He was a rock. Everybody loved him, Merrill. Your father was the best. Stronger than iron. He was a hero and nobody knew.
Dodson turned and left. He went outside, wandered over to McClarin Park and sat down on a bench. He wished he had a joint. He wished he was with Isaiah. He wished he was running from the cops and getting shot at by gangsters. He’d never been so lost, so confused, not having any answers because nobody had asked him any questions. This was like a white people problem. A crisis that was all in your head. This wasn’t real. This was bullshit. “Get your shit together,” he said to himself, “before the shit gets you.”
His phone buzzed. It was Cherise, wondering if he was still at the hospital. He told her that Beaumont had died and he’d be home in a few minutes. He gave the food to a homeless couple and heard them arguing as he walked away.
Christiana was in an isolation cell. Cement cubicle, windowless except for the meal slot in the door. It was close and dark and cold. She was sitting on the bed, wedged into a corner, holding her knees. She’d been beaten up again. Her face was swollen. An arm had nearly been torn out of its socket. She didn’t mind the pain.
The noise from the other inmates was less here, but not from the alters. There was a continuous roar of fear and anger and bewilderment. It didn’t stop, it went on and on. She could pick out Angie’s voice now, a braying, blistering screech of invective. Christiana pleaded with them to stop but they wouldn’t. She couldn’t take it, she couldn’t stand it. She put her hands over her ears and screamed, “STOP! PLEASE STOP!” And miraculously they did. The quiet was startling and felt incredibly tenuous, a mouse with one foot on the trap, another step and the spring would snap and the voices would begin and she would go mad. She waited. No one spoke. She waited.
Chapter Nineteen
Just Tea?
Nothing was happening at the church on Thursday night, TK’s footsteps sounding hollow as he went down the long hallway. No one was around. If the hall wasn’t lined with children’s drawings, he might have been in the joint, on his way to a parole hearing. He had abandoned the suit and bought a polo shirt. Grace had steered him from orange and bright yellow to dark blue.
“You mean I gotta dress like her too?” he said.
He was early. Delores was the only one there, a couple of gold teeth glinting in her wide smile. She was not a small woman. Her dress was very tight and showed a lot of cleavage, her titties so close together you couldn’t slip a putty knife in there. Her perfume smelled like a truck full of strawberry jam had tipped over on the freeway.
“Hello, TK,” she cooed.
“Hello, Delores,” he said, wondering if he’d come on the wrong night.
“Come sit over here.” She patted the chair next to her.
“Uh, well—” He didn’t see how he could refuse. “All right.”
He sat down. Delores scooched closer. “Don’t be so far away,” she said. She was still smiling. It seemed like her gold teeth had gotten brighter and they’d grown in number. It was a struggle not to look at her chest. It was like trying to ignore a mountain range as your plane passed between the peaks. “How’ve you been, TK?”
“Old and slow,” he said, his usual answer to that question.
“You might be old but I don’t know about slow,” she said. She winked, her false eyelash flapping like a bat wing.
“How’s Terry?” he said.
“My husband? He’s been dead for a year.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not,” Delores said. “I waited a long time for him to die.” She put her hand on TK’s knee. “Are you busy later?” she said. “Maybe we can go somewhere and have a drink.” She looked like she was going to kiss him, pulling back suddenly when Gloria came in. Gloria stood there in her dark print dress and her dark expression, looking at them like the vice principal of Carver Middle School. A boy and girl sitting next to each other in a room full of empty chairs. She grimaced.
“Who likes strawberries?”
Gloria brought everyone to order and the meeting began. “The book under consideration is The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Can we hear from the selection committee?” Simone and Louella spoke first. They summarized the story, gave thumbnail sketches of the characters, talked about what they liked and disliked and how they felt about the characters’ sadness, terror and cruelty. Simone was nearly in tears.
“Thomas,” Gloria said, “do you have anything to say? There has to be a consensus before we select the book.”
He cleared his throat. He felt pretty good about this. Cliff was a smart guy and he was really well organized, everything in neat little sections. “Well, the story is about a woman named Cora—” he began.
“We’ve already heard about the story and the character, Thomas,” Gloria said. “Tell us something else. What would you say are the book’s themes?” She was deliberately torturing him, he though
t. He wasn’t a prospect, he was a target.
He stalled for time. “Well, now, that’s a big question,” he said with a serious nod. “Very big. Really big.” The stuff in CliffsNotes about themes was the hardest to understand. He couldn’t remember what it said exactly except something about unifying ideas, which didn’t clear up anything.
“Big picture,” Grace had said. “Life and death, right and wrong, love and hate. That’s simplistic but that’s what a good novel does. It illuminates our humanity.” Which didn’t clear up anything either.
“Thomas?” Gloria said. Everyone had leaned over the table to get a better look at him. Delores leaned back as if her titties might impede their curiosity.
“Uh, well,” TK said. “I’d say in this case, it’s life and death.” That got no response of any kind. “Or right and wrong.” Still nothing. “Or love and, uh…” He couldn’t for the life of him remember what came next so he said, “Not love.” There was no spit in his mouth but he went on anyway. “The big picture in other words. Who humanity is and what he’s up to. Unifyin’ this thing or that, illuminatin’ and whatnot.” The silence was excruciating. The women were still looking at him as if they hadn’t heard him correctly or he’d said something in Farsi. TK had let women down before but only one at a time. It was a new experience disappointing twelve of them simultaneously. To his great relief, they looked away, somebody coughing, somebody else clearing her throat.
“Thank you for that, Thomas,” Gloria said. “The Underground Railroad has been accepted.”
Grace was waiting outside the church. “How’d it go?”
“It didn’t,” TK said, throwing the book into someone’s yard. “But the next time I see Cliff I’m gonna kick his ass.”
She offered to take him out for dinner but he refused, saying he had to get home. She felt awful. She felt terrible. This sweet old man swept aside because she was as clueless as she was incompetent. She didn’t know what to do but she was hungry. She went to In-N-Out and had a cheeseburger and a shake. The food didn’t quell the guilt but at least she was full.
Gloria had come over to babysit so Cherise could go to the movies with her friend. “How was the book club?” Cherise said, as she gathered her things.
“A complete disaster,” Gloria replied.
“A disaster? Why is that?”
“Thomas Kahill showed up.”
“You mean TK? What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, he’s only semiliterate for one thing,” Gloria said. “Can you imagine? Someone like that coming to a women’s book club? I don’t know what he was thinking. He might have been drunk or high on drugs, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“He wasn’t high and he wasn’t drunk, mama,” Cherise said. “TK is not like that.”
“Well, obviously you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” Gloria replied. “What self-respecting man brings his hussy to a church picnic. Did you see her? A white girl, no less. She was young enough to be his granddaughter.”
“Are you talking about Grace?” Cherise said.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Gloria went on. “Last night, Mr. Kahill and Delores Mason were about to do something nasty. If I hadn’t come in they would have rutted like animals right there in the church library.”
“Mama,” Cherise said. “Grace is Isaiah’s girlfriend. TK is just a friend and you know as well as I do, Delores was putting a move on him. She puts a move on anything with body heat.”
“Well why did he do something as silly as come to our book club?” Gloria said.
“He likes you, mama,” Cherise said, “and he didn’t know any other way to hook up.”
“Nonsense,” she huffed. “Why would he be interested in me?”
“Yeah, it’s got me wondering too,” Cherise said. “Being nicer wouldn’t hurt you, mama, no matter how you feel about him.”
“I don’t feel anything at all,” Gloria said.
“Give him a chance,” Cherise said, moving for the door. “TK is a good man with a good heart.”
For the last three hours, TK had been dismantling a Fiat with its front stove in. Didn’t matter much, he thought, the car looked like a garden snail when it was new. He stood in the shade of the warehouse and drank a beer. People said water was better for you but they were young and didn’t know any better. His old bones ached. He’d have to hire some help soon. The goddamn arthritis had caught up with him years ago but he’d refused to surrender. He looked around at the stacks of eyeless wrecks, the rusty, looming crane, the piles of fenders, bumpers, mufflers and engine blocks, chips of broken glass sparkling in the dirt. It wasn’t pretty, but he was proud of it nonetheless. Running a business by yourself for forty years was an accomplishment. Big companies with big bank accounts had come and gone, but he was still standing, doing something necessary and paying his taxes. Some people would say it was sappy, but it made him feel like a productive citizen, like an American, like he could hold his head up anywhere in the world.
It was good of Grace to help him but nothing was going to happen with Gloria now or ever. That was as obvious as the egg on his face. He’d never felt this foolish or embarrassed. It was time to look reality in its cloudy eyes. He was old and falling apart. There was no more romance in his future. The love he’d received so far was all the love he was going to get. He shouldn’t have waited so long. After Etta left him, he’d dated a few women but they weren’t to his taste. He supposed he could have picked someone easier than Gloria, someone who didn’t dislike him for being alive and breathing.
He knew she wasn’t an obvious choice, but there were some people you had a sense about and he had a sense about Gloria. Underneath her hard shell and harsh words there was a loving heart. He knew it like he knew the wrecking yard. He knew it when he met Grace and he knew it when he met Isaiah, two people so detached they could have been spirits, floating around among us, unseen and unheard. He knew it when he met Harry Haldeman, the belligerent, ill-tempered old man who ran the animal shelter and never had a kind word for anybody. Maybe so, but watch Harry around dogs. Watch him calm a pit bull, abused and snarling, ready to chew your arm off, Harry approaching so slowly he seemed to be stationary, talking soft, telling it his human secrets, sitting down nearby, still talking, his voice kind and soothing, and then watch the dog sense safety and an end to its loneliness, edging over, sniffing and sniffing, licking Harry’s face, eventually lying down with its head in Harry’s lap. Nobody knew it, but Harry was a loving man.
TK made up his mind about Gloria one night when he saw her on the pier at Shoreline Village. He’d gone for a walk to breathe in something besides gasoline and motor oil. Nothing like a clear night and the smell of the ocean, he thought. He was lucky. He saw Gloria with Cherise and the new baby. They had stopped to take a picture, Cherise smiling happily, holding the baby’s little hand up to wave. Cherise continued walking but Gloria stayed a moment, watching her daughter nuzzle the baby’s face while she sang a lullaby that lilted on the breeze. If you were going to build a monument to love, it would look like Gloria in that moment, so pure and certain and all-encompassing. It warmed him just to be near her.
A Prius pulled into the yard. He’d seen it before but forgot whose it was. He thought he was hallucinating when Gloria got out and walked toward him. What was she doing here? Did she want him to dismantle her car? Did she want to grill him some more about themes?
“Hello, Thomas,” she said, stiffly.
“Hello, Gloria,” he said. She hesitated, holding something back.
“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.
“Not that I can think of,” she replied brusquely. She stood there, fanning herself with a folded flyer and looking around with distaste.
“You didn’t have to drive all the way out here,” he said. “A phone call would have done it.”
“I wanted to see your circumstances,” she said. “Is this your property, Thomas?”
“Yes, it’s mine,” he said,
and for some reason he felt embarrassed.
“I see,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I understand you’d like to go out with me.”
“Beg your pardon?” He turned his head sideways so he could hear her better.
She sighed impatiently. “I said, it’s my understanding that you’d like to go out with me.”
He didn’t know whether to fess up. Maybe this was a trap. “Uh, well, now that you ask me, I’d have to say yes. Yes, I do.”
She turned and moved back toward her car. “All right, fine. Tomorrow. Three o’clock. We’ll have tea.”
That didn’t seem right. “Just tea?” he said. She said something else about Lisa or Elsie or Evelyn’s room but he couldn’t make out the rest because she’d started her car. Why did they need another woman around to have tea? he wondered. He could make it himself with a tea bag.
“That’s great, TK,” Grace said. “It’s like a real date, and the best part is, she asked you!” TK did not share her elation. He looked confused.
“That’s all we do?” he said. “Drink tea?”
Grace was at the far edge of her knowledge base. “There’s food involved, but mostly it’s a nice way to have a conversation.”
“I don’t like tea.”
“Drink it anyway. It’s simpler.”
“What do we talk about?” he asked. Grace wasn’t great at chitchatting and TK was asking for specifics.
“Oh, anything, really,” she said cavalierly. “You’re just getting to know each other.” Grace had spent most of her life walling off scrutiny of any kind. She thought about how she and Isaiah got to know each other, a torturous process between two unwilling people that only happened because of several near-death experiences.
“What should I wear?” he said. “The suit or the polo shirt?” Another challenging question. She was surprised how easy it came to her.