The Lost Brother

by Rick Bennet

  Both officers crack up, laughing.

  Hank Thomas is called the Black Detective. He was first promoted into an office that already had a detective named Thomas, a white man, and so callers forgetting his first name, when asked which Thomas they wanted, sometimes referred to him as the black one, the black detective (there weren’t many black detectives at all then). The white detectives had been happy to call him “the black one.” Now everyone does.

  He looks around the Jameses’ living room. Not at the dead bodies. At the live ones. The lieutenant, the captain, the two assholes from the Chief’s office, who are really from the Mayor’s office. The lab techs. The MEs.

  He sighs. As the primary investigator on this homicide, he theoretically could get them out of here, but that’s on the same page as the one that says a detective will be judged only by the quality of his work.

  His lieutenant comes up. A reasonable man. White man.

  “At least it’s indoors,” the lieutenant says, commiserating. “At least the press isn’t videotaping all this shit like they did with the Simpson scene, so they can nitpick us in court. We got uniforms outside keeping them back, and the rest of the homicide squad out canvassing. Hopefully we can get neighbors before they leave for work.”

  The Black Detective nods. Looks around. Sees what he presumes is the Jameses’ video camera. It’s on. He makes a note to check the tape.

  He looks at the walls. Covered with blood. The letters LTC have been painted on in wide swaths.

  “What’s LTC?” someone asks.

  “League of True Colors,” someone answers. “White supremacist group.”

  They hear a pop. Another. A third. Gunshots, from outside the house. Distant.

  Homicide detective John Mallory, fifty, dark-haired, well tanned, handsome in a slick way, fit, not too tall, steps out of an alley, hands up, badge in one hand, gun in the other, signaling to the uniforms rushing over that it’s okay, don’t shoot, put your guns away, God damn it.

  Report: A block and a half off, checking an alley, a Dumpster. Sees a suit jacket covered with blood. Hears a noise. Turns. Sees a white man in pants that match the bloody jacket. The man’s shirt is bloody. The man is nervous. Mallory pulls his gun. The man pulls one too. Mallory shoots, three times because the man didn’t seem fazed by the first hit.

  Woman Host: Well, good afternoon, brothers and sisters, good afternoon. Welcome to Black Talk Radio. Let’s get right into it. Hello?

  Caller: Hello?

  Host: What’s the word, brother?

  Caller: I want to talk about that James murder.

  Host: For the people who haven’t heard yet, Henry James and his white—excuse me, slip of the tongue there, like fag for Frank—Henry James and his wife were found murdered this morning.

  Caller: You know what the word on the street is?

  Host: You’re the street. This is the wire. Put it out.

  Caller: That’s his punishment.

  Host: How do you mean?

  Caller: That’s his punishment because Whitey lost the Simpson case, and they mad. They mad at all these house-nigger prosecutors they got.

  Host: But he’s not the one who lost that case.

  Caller: No, no, he didn’t lose the case personally, but I’m saying The Man is pissed off, so he whacked Henry James as a lesson to all the other black prosecutors. The Man set it all up on O.J., all that fake evidence and all, but the good people on the jury saw through it, and so The Man is all mad.

  Host: That’s a point, that’s a point.

  Caller: You understand what I’m saying? And I don’t even care. I got no sympathy for Henry James, marrying a white woman and working against his own kind.

  Host: Well, I don’t know I go that far. He was still a black man, our brother, and even if he was a lost brother, we all end up in the same black heaven with our African Father of All and our Lord Black Jesus.

  Next caller, you’re on the air, Black Talk Radio.

  Second Caller: I want to say, that James murder, it got to be a fix. That white detective, Mallory, he’s been caught before fixing things, and here he is again, this time killing the man who supposedly killed Henry James. How we know that man did it? Dead now!

  Host: Ain’t that something, sister?

  Caller: I mean, I’m sorry the people got killed, even if Henry James was an Uncle Tomfool. But you know it’s the devil’s work and they going to say there’s blood evidence. I say that’s all DNA voodoo.

  Host: That’s fresh. DNA voodoo.

  Caller: You understand what I’m saying? They call our traditional science voodoo, so I call their science voodoo. You know those forensic scientists say whatever the police tell them to say They all lie. Try to say there’s DNA evidence against O.J., or proof that we genetically less intelligent. Don’t none of it mean nothing, because those scientists, they just find what they told to find. They all lie. They all a bunch of Mark Fuhrmans.

  Host: I’m okay with that, thank you. Next caller, you’re on the air.

  Third Caller: Sister, how you?

  Host: Talk to me, fine woman.

  Caller: I want to say, first, to all the brothers out there, you know we love you. Host: We do, we do.

  Caller: But you all keep messing with white women, you got to know what it leads to. Host: Tell it, sister.

  Caller: You got the finest women in the world, but you let yourselves wander right into the devil’s trap.

  Host: Ain’t no one here going to argue with you.

  Caller: But I got to say, I don’t care about Henry James or his wife.

  Host: Oh, sister, you have to find it in you.

  Caller: No, because they gone. My concern is with the living. I’m talking about the boy.

  Host: Yes! Let me tell the listeners who might not know, but the Jameses got two children, and the little boy is missing. The girl spent the night with her black grandmother, so she’s all right, and we appreciate the symbolism of that. But her brother was home, and he is gone, and God knows what happened to him.

  4

  A BLACK MAN, SITTING ON THE BED in a cheap hotel room, intently watches a news show on television:

  Host: We’re here with Mr. Jimmy Close of the League of True Colors. Mr. Close, the alleged killer of Henry and Jessica James has now been identified as a Richard Ells, most recently of Charles Town, West Virginia. Your headquarters are located just a few miles from there, in Harpers Ferry, and as you know, Ells used the victims’ blood to paint the letters LTC on the walls. Yet you deny any connection with Mr. Ells.

  Close: We have checked our records, which are computerized, and found that his sole connection to us was that he attended one of our meetings, where he signed the guest sheet.

  Host: But he had LTC literature in his pockets. Close: He probably picked it up at that meeting. Host: It isn’t this show’s purpose or ability to investigate the depth of your connection with Richard Ells. We’re here to ask you whether there isn’t at least a philosophical connection.

  Close: None.

  Host: No connection between a philosophy of racial hate and the murder of an interracial couple?

  The black man in the hotel room turns off the set. Lies back on the bed, his hair grazing the headboard, his feet hanging over the other end. He’s six feet ten. When he gets up from chairs, he seems more to unfold than rise; when he walks down streets, more to flow than step. He is slender but clearly strong; his forearms ripple at slight movements. His deep-furrowed eyes seem always to be glowering, and it has been true of his life that, without trying, he intimidates. It has also been true of his life that he has often deliberately intimidated. It is true that even as a child he found he could get things from people by pressing their fear of him. And it is true, he thinks now, that he was thus seduced into that part of the world where the fear he inspires is an asset, not a handicap. Drawn into that part of the world because to belong to the broader world meant a constant effort to dispel fears, a constant effort to prove himself “safe,�
� a constant effort to apologize for what he was born to look like. And it is true that once he set down that other road, there was no turning back. As a teenager stealing cars, dealing drugs, robbing dealers, and finally killing in what was effectively, if not legally, self-defense, he earned himself a sheet and a rep.

  His mother, good woman, English teacher, taught him to read and write, to appreciate literature, to speak clearly if he wanted. His stepfather, good man, was too late and too different to teach him manhood. His natural father, Raymond Ray, Ray Ray, was a small-time hustler, numbers runner, and pimp, whose sole act of fatherhood after conception was to look at the baby and pronounce him long. Long. Long Ray.

  Long now is in this room in this downtown hotel. He’s spent the last sixteen years in prison; he has spent much of the month since his release in this room, carefully working his way back into the world. He reads. Goes to McDonald’s. Watches television. Goes to the movies. He’s afraid to do much more. If he goes for a walk in the city, old friends might see him, buy him drinks, get him high, suck him in; old vendettas could flame. But if he goes outside the city he’ll be a giant, harsh-looking black man with a record, walking around a white suburb, having to convince the cops who’ll find a pretense for stopping him that he’s just out for a stroll. He wouldn’t believe him if he were them.

  He takes a shower. Sits under the water for forty-five minutes, appreciating the freedom to do that.

  Then, still naked, he sits by the window overlooking the busy afternoon street, watching the people. He’s fascinated by the variety. By the presence of women and children. By the freedom. But how do they stay free? How do they not find themselves tested, pushed, trapped, threatened into violence?

  But he doesn’t blame anyone else for his own life. He doesn’t blame society, or his absent natural father, or whites, or God. He sees life as a tree and all the differences between us as branches splitting off until you end up with people as leaves, some of which get a lot more light than others.

  If you asked him what he is, where someone else might say sales clerk or carpenter or engineer, Long would say motherfucker. What are you? I’m a motherfucker. What are you good at? Being a motherfucker. Tell me, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Who do you blame? No one. What do you want? To stay out of prison. To not have to work at a teenager’s job. If someone were to describe you in one word, what would it be?

  He dresses. Blue jeans, black sneakers, yellow sweatshirt.

  He goes out. Down to the Mall, to watch the sky change colors as the sun sets. He listens to music through headphones, which is how convicts are used to listening to it.

  The sun goes down and he stands up, heads off, walking because he knows it’s useless for a man who looks like him to flag a cab. Even the black drivers won’t stop for him. He wouldn’t stop, either, if he were them.

  Moving through the city, he’s haunted by the life he might have had. He sees it in a woman’s kind eyes, in the gentle smile of a father out with his children. He’s seen it on television, read about it in books, thought about it in bed. He doesn’t cry about it anymore. That wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t meant to be.

  He stops to eat at a steak house, where first the young black hostess and then the gay white waiter eye him suspiciously, force pleasant, cold politeness into their voices. Seated in the back, he sets a hundred-dollar bill on the table to calm them down. Orders his steak and fries and salad and dessert. Takes his time eating, wanting to enjoy the taste. He read once about how waiters, white and black both, didn’t like serving black customers because they didn’t tip. Long became furious when he read that. But that was then. Now he tries—his release resolution—to see himself through the world’s eyes. Here, through the eyes of a waiter who works for tips but finds one type of person consistently underpaying him; of a hostess who maybe has been abused by a man as fierce as Long looks to be. He counsels himself to feel what it’s like to deal with someone—him—who could kill you with his bare hands. Or rape you or rob you or beat you. Someone who can be counted on to refrain from taking what he wants from you only by laws and guns. That most brutal of realities dominates his relations with the world: he can take what he wants, and the world knows it. That those with physical power may abuse it is the most primal of human fears, of human evils. Power sometimes corrupts. Physical power sometimes physically corrupts. Long has sometimes been corrupted.

  He finishes eating. Pays. Tips. Finishes the walk to his destination, his mother’s house. There, he looks around. This is a marginal neighborhood, but it’s not the criminals he fears; it’s the police or the press. He walks down the street, staying in the shadows as best he can. Checking the parked cars. He sees no one. So he walks backup the street and at his mother’s row house takes the three steps to her porch in a single bound.

  The first floor is dark, but there’s a light on upstairs. He rings the bell. Hears the second-floor window open. Sees his mother’s head lean out. Steps back so she can see it’s him. She does. She shakes her head, stunned. Ducks back in. A moment later the door opens. He moves quickly inside. She shuts the door behind him, and they hug, he stooping way down to take her in his arms.

  They move through the dark living room, seeing by the light of the bulb at the top of the stairs. They sit on the couch. He peers out the front window, checking the street.

  He pulls the curtain tight. Turns on a table lamp. Looks at his mother as she looks at him.

  “Henry told me you got out a month ago,” she says.

  “I guess he’d know.” Long hesitates. Says, “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  “It’s okay. I know you got to do things in your own time, your own way.”

  “No, I mean about Henry.”

  She takes a deep breath. A tear falls down her tired face. She nods. “Is that what brought you by?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you wouldn’t have come otherwise?”

  He shrugs that he doesn’t know.

  “Are you sorry for Henry or for me?” she asks.

  “You.”

  “And no part of you is sorry for him? Or Jessica?”

  “I never met her. I never understood him.”

  That’s not true. Long had understood Henry. Henry the bookworm boy. Henry the can’t-ran-or-jump boy. Henry the don’t-call-them-spics/kikes/faggots/bitches/honkies boy. He had understood Henry.

  “He didn’t hate you,” his mother says.

  “I didn’t hate him. We just didn’t have anything to talk about.”

  “You know he was behind the library expansion down there?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think he thought it was the one thing he could do for you.”

  “Good thing he didn’t try anything else. He put away half the guys on my cell block. That’s why I couldn’t let you visit or call. You Ve gone to so many of his trials, sitting there so proud of him, that everybody knows you. Good thing he took your husband’s name and not our father’s.”

  Her husband, Long and Henry’s stepfather, moved them to D.C. from East Saint Louis when Henry was ten and Long sixteen. He found work at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, she taught in the public schools. Henry took the stepfather’s name. Long did not. Long got arrested his first week in the city because, as a new kid, he hadn’t dared say no to the idea of stealing a car when the local corner boys had asked him along. He was released and arrested again two days later, then sent to reform school, and upon release from there lived on his own, unable to get along with a stepfather who insisted he live right or get out.

  Mrs. James sighs from deep within herself. Long takes her hand. “His death hurts you, and I’m sorry for that. Are you mad? Mad it wasn’t me?”

  “No.”

  “It should have been. I’ve been shot twice and shanked three times. I’ve done every drug you can think of and had sex with the most disease-ridden women you can imagine. But here I am.”

  “Thank God,” she says.

  “God’s got nothing to do with
my life.”

  Mrs. James is a churchgoer, but she lets Long’s statement go.

  A shadow moves over them. Long looks up. Sees a child peering out at him from between the rails, framed by the light at the top of the stairs.

  “Come here, girl,” Mrs. James says.

  The girl comes down.

  “You’re my uncle Long?” she asks, disbelieving, eyes wide.

  “Yeah,” Long answers, nervously. He isn’t comfortable around children. He hasn’t known any since he was himself one, and they seem foreign to him. Especially a beautiful girl like this.

  “Are you going to eat me?” she asks him. He laughs at her seriousness. Says, “No.”

  “An uncle is a father’s brother,” she says. “And the daughter of the father is the uncle’s niece.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you a bad man?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mommy said you weren’t really bad, just got in trouble once and couldn’t get out of it.”

  “She said that?”

  “She said that’s why it’s important not to get in trouble to begin with.”

  “She’s right.”

  “She said that you had to be some good, though, because once, when my daddy was little, some big kids were hitting him and you came running over and beat them up, and there was a hundred of them!”

  Long smiles at the memory. “Five of them. Anacostia boys.”

  “So then you’re really good!” the girl says.

  She moves to stand very close to him. He looks back at her, appreciating how fragile the world must seem to her now. He tries his best to soften his face.

  She looks from him to her grandmother and back again, and back again. Then she jumps into her grandmother’s hugging arms, crying, saying she wants Mommy and Daddy. Mrs. James rocks her, tells her they’re in heaven, she misses them too, but they’re with God in heaven.

  Long has seen a lot of violence but rarely cared about it. He’s committed violence; suffered it. Not often thought about it as right or wrong, only as being. Often it’s been fun, exciting. That’s what the citizens don’t understand about the street. The excitement of crime and chase. The drama.