Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  “More like a shipwreck,” Matt said.

  “Dominus vobiscum, boy, whoever he is. Dominus vobiscum.”

  When they left the church basement Quinn said, “Do you want to die, Tremont?”

  “Not me. I want to go get a taste and then the world’s gonna look just fine.”

  “The world’s after you. You’re a wanted man and sooner or later they’ll find you. You have to surrender yourself. I talked to Lieutenant Fahey about you and your gun, and I also talked to a top lawyer who’ll represent you. If you come in on your own they treat you differently than if they find you on the street with a machine gun.”

  “AR-15 ain’t a machine gun.”

  “You want to die, Tremont?”

  “I’m gonna live to be ninety-seven like John D. Rockefeller. Me and him got a lot in common.”

  “John D. didn’t drink.”

  “Yeah, we didn’t agree about that one.”

  “All right, we get the gun and meet Doc Fahey and you tell your story. Tremont, this is a way out; or else they’ll be on you in packs. It’ll be like a foxhunt.”

  “They shoot the fox?”

  “The dogs get him.”

  They were walking on Chapel Street, half a block from the Times Union, and Quinn considered going up to the city room to brief Markson on his encounters. But another reporter was covering the Palace, and Quinn had time to write everything else for the final before deadline. If not, he’d call and dictate it. Except for Tremont’s story. Now he had to put Tremont together with Doc. A car pulled to the curb alongside them and Matt leaned out the window.

  “Hey,” he said, and he got out of the car. “Tremont, you keep disappearing. Where’d you go after Trixie’s? We looked all over.”

  “Came to the protest,” Tremont said.

  “He sang a song,” Quinn said. “They would’ve lynched him if I didn’t get him out of there.”

  Matt reported to Quinn on getting George and Vivian to the Cody concert, and the surprise arrival of his father, after being kicked out of the Ann Lee. “More payback by the machine,” Quinn said.

  “Where’s your gun?” Matt asked Tremont.

  “Down on Bleecker Street.”

  “You took it out of the locker?” Quinn said.

  “He took it and he used it,” Matt said. “Didn’t you tell him, Tremont?”

  “Never got a chance. I shot two fellas beatin’ on Rosie. Didn’t hurt ’em much.”

  “The police gotta be looking for him,” Matt said.

  “I was with the Mayor when he got a call about a political assassin at the Four Spot,” Quinn said. “But they had you wearing two-tone shoes, Tremont.”

  “That ain’t me,” Tremont said. “I got me these holy priest shoes.” He lifted his right foot toward Quinn.

  “I got Tremont’s two-tones,” Matt said. “We swapped.”

  “The priest is a sport,” Quinn said. “Listen, I set up a meeting with Doc Fahey. We need that gun.”

  “I’ll come along,” Matt said, and he told Nick Brady he was off duty as a chauffeur, and the three walked to Quinn’s car and headed toward Bleecker Street. Downtown was as empty as four o’clock in the morning.

  “I don’t like this surrender business,” Tremont said.

  “You don’t like dying either, am I right?”

  “They ever get me inside they’ll keep me there.”

  “You’ve got a sharp lawyer, Jake Hess. He’s close to the Mayor, but he’s a straight arrow, and he’s taking you on. He knows your whole story.”

  “Nobody knows my story.”

  “We’re trying.”

  “You talked to the Mayor about me?”

  “I did. I told him you were being set up. It’s out in the open.”

  “He know my name?”

  “Only your shoes.”

  “I saw Zuki at the protest,” Tremont said.

  “You should’ve told me,” Quinn said. “Roy is in jail.”

  “What happened?”

  “They arrested him at the Palace after that kid died.”

  “What kid?”

  “White kid. Hit on the head or pushed down balcony stairs by black kids.”

  “They ain’t sayin’ Roy pushed him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Roy didn’t do that.”

  “All I know is they busted him and five other black guys.”

  “Open season on the Brothers,” Tremont said.

  On Bleecker Street maybe ten men were drinking on the sidewalk in front of Hapsy’s. Hapsy never let customers linger after they made a buy. He was a supply depot—booze, wine, and sneaky pete after hours, but tonight he was the emergency room, only place open down here. Quinn parked a block away. Chloe’s Diner on the corner of Green was open, a pay phone.

  “Where exactly is that gun, Tremont?” Quinn asked.

  “I couldn’t describe it. I gotta show you.”

  Quinn parked and slid the notebook he’d been scribbling in all day into his suitcoat pocket and the three walked to the corner. Quinn went into Chloe’s and called Doc and told him where they were, then they walked up Bleecker, Tremont leading.

  “This is where Tremont shot those thugs,” Matt said. “That’s their truck.” He pointed to the corpse of the white panel truck—shattered windshield, three flat tires, holes in the hood. “Tremont left his mark.”

  “Impressive,” Quinn said, trying to calculate what this freelance shooting might do to Tremont’s surrender.

  A black Chevy with four white men came up Bleecker from Green, moving slowly, the whites looking out at the black men on Hapsy’s sidewalk through closed windows. People were sitting on the stoops of the old brick houses, some of the oldest in town, basking in tension. The light was almost gone, streetlights on now. The men at Hapsy’s were in their twenties, a few teens (Hap didn’t card people), some middle-aged, no women. Matt recognized three youths from the Four Spot. Music was blaring from a parked car and Stevie Wonder was uptight, everything’s all right.

  Tremont stopped at an alley three doors east of Hapsy’s and greeted one of the drinkers, none of whom Quinn knew, and they were not smiling. What’s whitey doin’ on this block tonight is their question. Quinn saw another car parking behind his car, no one getting out of it. Tremont walked into the shadows of the alley toward a backyard piled with trash and a mountain of cardboard, Hapsy’s bottle boxes? Quinn and Matt followed but Quinn turned back to wait on the sidewalk, and three young blacks moved toward him with querulous eyes, and now comes the game. Quinn has been walking this block for two years, writing about blacks, and who gives a goddamn? Well, a lot of blacks, some whites, a few editors, no politicians. Most people were antagonistic or skittish about what he wrote, knee-jerk racism, fear of the pols. But no amount of allegiance to black life could prevent Quinn from being a target of black rage here tonight, because he’s just another white mother. Don’t give me any progressive bullshit, shove your sympathy, get off my streets is the departure point for the future, the abiding revolutionary code, I love you, brother, but I’ll meet you on the barricades. Nothing to be done. Quinn is as color-coded as they are.

  One black youth said, “What’s happenin’?”

  “Where?”

  “In the alley.”

  “They’re investigating.”

  “What?”

  “The situation.”

  “What situation?” The man tucked in his shirttail, streamlining.

  “Nobody knows the situation.”

  “What situation you talkin’ about?”

  “There’s a dead baby,” Quinn said.

  “White baby?”

  “Nobody knows. My friend’s looking for it.”

  “Which friend?”

  “The black man.”

  “That’s Tremont,” another black said. “It’s Tremont’s baby?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why’s he lookin’ for it?”

  “Ask him. The baby means nothing
to me. It’s dead. There’s a good chance it isn’t even there.”

  Quinn continues to resurrect the dead baby that doesn’t exist: dead before a birth that never was, archetype of the meritocracy of the lost, who leave an unexpungeable stain on the imagination. Do the litany: the glass-jawed, the fallen away, the ignorant, the passive, the skeptics, the cocksure-never-sure—none of them know how to be otherwise—the color-coded, the suicidal rebels and the enraged have-nots, the martyrs and the clerics brainwashed by the mystery, the saints like King who always lose so grandly, the santeros who think they can ride out trouble on the backs of Changó and Oshun; also Bobby who might have been different for a few minutes, Hemingway at the end rediscovering how he used to lose, George and his ineluctable illusions, Gloria and Roy’s clichéd racial duet, Cody and his dying music, Max and his hot money, Matt and his declension, Renata with her entropic rebellion, her seriality, and Tremont, the only man in town tonight who doesn’t need a road map to get to the point: all members of the ad hoc collective that will not let Quinn sleep in peace.

  Matt heard Quinn talking and came out of the darkness toward the street.

  “Did you find the baby?” Quinn asked.

  “He found something,” Matt said. “Could be a baby.”

  “What you gonna do with that baby?”

  “I don’t know if it’s a baby. Could be something else. Could be a pair of shoes. Could be a machine gun.”

  Tremont came out of the alley with the gun wrapped in the burlap sack. He heard the word “baby” and put his right hand inside the sack.

  “These fellows wonder if you found the dead baby,” Quinn said to him.

  “I found a baby in a vacant lot ten years back,” said Tremont. “He wasn’t dead.”

  “Is that my gun, Tremont?” The voice was Zuki’s.

  “Any gun I find is mine,” Tremont said.

  Zuki and a young black stood behind the others. Zuki was the one with Penny at the protest.

  “You’re Zuki,” Quinn said. “Who you working for?”

  “I don’t know you,” Zuki said.

  “I’m Tremont’s biographer.”

  “And I’m his confessor,” Matt said.

  “I know who you are,” Zuki said.

  “Where did that gun come from?” Quinn asked. “Is that government issue?”

  “I got no argument with you,” Zuki said. “The man here borrowed my property. I want it back.”

  “Are you an Albany cop? BCI? FBI?”

  “I need that gun, Tremont,” Zuki said.

  “Tremont needs it,” Quinn said.

  “Tremont, what game are you playing with me?” Zuki said.

  “The dead baby game,” Quinn said.

  Zuki stepped toward Tremont and made a grab for the gun. Matt hit him with a right hand, a horizontal trajectory to the blow, 22 mph, and Zuki shuffled backward but didn’t fall.

  “Don’t touch Tremont,” Matt said. He eyed Zuki who drifted into the Hapsy crowd with his young buddy, casting glances Tremont’s way.

  The black Chevy that had passed them earlier came up Bleecker again, a second car behind it carrying five white men. The Chevy slowed as two white men hanging out the front and back windows flung Molotovs into the crowd, one exploding against the stoop over Hapsy’s, the other hitting the front wall of the next house and splashing fire on two men on the stoop. “Keep rioting, niggers,” one man yelled from the Chevy.

  Quinn saw Doc’s car turning off Green onto Bleecker and idling in the street, up from the corner near the dead delivery truck, and he grabbed Tremont’s arm. “Now,” he said, and the three quickstepped toward Doc’s headlights, Tremont clutching the wrapped dead baby.

  The Chevy driver peeled out wildly after the Molotovs, his tires screeching into a skid, his left tail sideswiping the car with Stevie Wonder. He swerved erratically, climbed the curb just past Hapsy’s, ramming a porch with three more men on it, then tried to back out onto the street. But the blacks were all over the car and pulled him out and wrestled him and his passengers into a free-for-all with tire irons, pipes, and a sap wrapped around one white man’s fist. Two women in silk kimonos came out of one house with brooms to fight a fire flaring on the porch, Trixie’s porch. Quinn saw Trixie come onto the stoop in a long black kimono and stilettos, and with a brass fire extinguisher splash a stream on the fire that was getting so much attention, and it vanished. Two whites were down in the street, being kicked, and on the next stoop two men were in flames. Trixie’s girls slapped at the blazing men with their brooms and half a dozen blacks were rocking the Chevy, trying to tip it.

  The second car, a Buick station wagon with windows down—and men with more Molotovs, unlit but ready to fly, but the goddamn Chevy’s a blockade—retreated backwards down Bleecker at rocket speed and past the dead panel truck, arriving at the corner seconds after Doc’s car arrived, another goddamn blockade out of nowhere, and rammed Doc’s left fender, twisting both cars sideways in the street. Doc and his partner, Warren Prior, leaped out of the car, billy clubs at the ready, not for the crazy whites but for a dozen black men coming at them.

  “Jesus,” Doc said, “it’s downtown Nairobi.”

  Men had come streaming out of Bleecker Street houses as the invasion force was recognized, ready to unleash communal rage not only on the white bombers, whom they outnumbered two to one, but also on Doc and Prior, whom they saw as a third element of this Bleecker Street invasion force. Black youths leaped on Doc, pummeling him, trying to bring him down, but he was an immovable 230-pound hulk in his gray suit and straw hat, the club in his right hand a whirling appendage that never stopped moving. A black man punched Prior repeatedly in the back of the neck as he tried to cope with the attackers, and Prior swung his club a hundred and eighty degrees and the black man dropped. The whites in the second car had come out fighting and Doc clubbed his way out of an attack to deck a white man reaching into the backseat of the Buick for a shotgun. “Niggerlovin’ cop,” the man said as he crumpled under Doc’s blow. Another black slapped open a straight razor in his palm and slashed Doc’s front, cutting his suitcoat, then felt the slam of the club against his throat, and down.

  Quinn, Matt (who had lost sight of Zuki) and Tremont stood out of the fray, near Chloe’s corner, no one attacking them. Tremont pulled off the burlap sack to reveal the AR-15 all of a piece. He snapped in the loaded magazine, gave a Geronimo yell as he fired a shot into the sky, then showed the muzzle of his rifle to the blacks attacking Doc. The meaning of the yell, the weapon, the shot, did not get the full attention of all attackers, but they paused long enough for Prior to club one and for Doc to reach for his pistol.

  “Way to go, bro,” a black youth told Tremont. “Waste ’em.”

  “Let him be,” Tremont said to the youth.

  “He’s a pig,” the youth said.

  “Let him be,” said Tremont.

  “Gimme that gun, I’ll do it,” the youth said.

  Tremont fired two shots into the side of the Buick and the youth backed away and the fighting stopped. Blacks rocking the Chevy tipped it into the street, a few scrambling for cover at the sound of gunfire, which had elevated the battle to another level, and the wail of a siren was heard.

  A black youth tossed a flaming book of matches into the backseat of the Buick, igniting spilled gasoline from the unused Molotovs, and everybody moved away from the car.

  Quinn stepped in front of Tremont and snatched the rifle from him. “Goddamn it, man, I told you to keep this in its case. You want to get shot?”

  Quinn handed the gun to Doc as three police cars arrived behind them and cops in riot gear fanned out over the block, the combatants black and white scattering into the deepening darkness.

  “Hey, Tremont,” Matt said, “these shoes are killing me.”

  Quinn alerted Jake to Tremont and the AR-15 being in police custody and recapped Tremont’s odyssey, plus his own role in the surrender to Doc Fahey and as a witness to Zuki saying the AR-15 was his. Jake wou
ld go to the detective office and find out if Tremont was being charged and get him bail if he was. But, Quinn said, they might think this is too serious for bail and hold him as a terrorist with half a dozen witnesses to his plot. It’s possible, Jake said, but I doubt it.

  Quinn went to the Times Union and alerted Markson at the city desk what he had in store for him. Then he draped his sport coat on the back of his chair and wrote his interview with Alex as fast as he could type, modifying the Mayor’s hostility to the Brothers but reflecting the duel between them. He wrote a few paragraphs on the frenzy in the Palace lobby and what it added to the city’s tension, as an insert for the story on the dead youth that another reporter was writing. He also wrote the protest/vigil story, leading with Tommy Tooher’s revelation that the bishop was too ill to silence Matt for his politics, and he put in two calls to Monsignor Callaghan, the diocesan chancellor, until his housekeeper said the monsignor wasn’t home and wouldn’t be and he wouldn’t talk to you if he was, so write whatever you want; a lovely touch that would further boil the pot on Matt’s behalf.

  Markson came over to Quinn’s desk. “Tell me again about the riot. You don’t have a riot story?”

  “It’s part of Tremont’s story,” Quinn said. “I can do a separate riot story if you want one, but Tremont’s the main story—his biography as an activist with Better Streets and the Brothers, and the Zuki plot to destroy the Brothers—how all this related to the riot. I’ll get the action of the riot up high, don’t worry. But the riot isn’t the story, it’s Tremont. He’s central to what’s happening in this town tonight, and Matt Daugherty is his white counterpart, the pair of them on an odyssey of Franciscan politics and leftover jazz. If you can stand it I’ll work in Trixie’s stilettos and her fire extinguisher. I also want to underpin the political culture of the twenties with Big Jimmy the floating ward leader and his progressive coon anthem from 1911, and tie in the McCall-Fitzgibbon machine’s bulldozer politics as manifested tonight by the faux assassination plot, with Tremont as its victim, a wild man with an AR-15 given to him by a provocateur who wanted him busted with it to prove the Brothers were urban terrorists, and that’s the FBI at work and I know you won’t print that, but that’s what it has to be. But we don’t need it. The victim foiled that plot, coming out of the alley where he’d hidden the gun and calming the riot with his shooting.”