The Lynching Tree Read online

  79

  The night of the 31st at 9:30 PM, we found Ethan Bing walking past the closed stores and silent barber poles of the Plaza. He looked tiny against the dark stores, the dark sky. I’d heard from my sister that he had taken to wandering after his mother got sicker, a prolonged seizure affecting her ability to think clearly. Despite the temperature, he was in a string T-shirt and gray sweat pants.

  Butras pulled the car up alongside him. Ethan glanced over his shoulders at us, slowed down, then finally stopped when I hooted the siren.

  I rolled down my window. “It’s me, Cage. Need a lift?” I hadn’t talked to him since I’d moved back in town, not even after I’d heard he’d been in the hospital. Brenda said he’d turned strange.

  “No,” he answered.

  “What are you doing out here on New Year’s Eve?”

  He wouldn’t look at me; he was studying his feet.

  “I needed to get out.”

  “No law against that,” Butras said. “Although there might be someday.”

  Ethan said quietly to me, “I just needed some time alone.” He sounded apologetic.

  I could tell he was hanging on to the shreds of his mother. If she died, he was done. He’d be lost entirely. Then I thought: if he dies, she’s done.

  “How’s your mom?” I asked.

  “No good,” he said.

  I realized that Ethan had an unspoken deal with me and probably everyone who knew him: If you don’t ask too much, I’ll save you from the sad details of my life.

  “What do the doctors say?” I asked.

  It seemed strange to be having this conversation out here on the street in the dark. Having stopped walking, he was cold, shuffling his feet, arms across his chest. We could have been in his living room, the big TV up in the corner over his mother’s collection of colored glass, his father’s brown Barca-lounger waiting for its fat occupant.

  “They say she’s no good and we should get used to it.”

  “Does she know?”

  “She grabs my hands and hangs on no matter what they say in front of her. They talk about her in front of her.”

  Ethan didn’t look at me and I knew he was scared of his own temper, or feelings.

  Butras nudged me. “Let’s go.”

  “We’re heading on here,” I said. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”

  He looked at me for the first time.

  “I’ve been reading philosophy, you know?” he said.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said. But I knew that I wouldn’t.

  As we drove off, I saw him start off in the direction he had been going (toward the big American flag I could see over The Plaza buildings), quickly pick up his pace, his arms swinging.

  80

  I’ve broken up with Clarise so many times and each time I miss her. The way she made me take off my shoes at her apartment door, inviting me in. How she sometimes grew her hair and sculpted it up, all beauteous, and how she’d fall asleep over a book and her head would be flat on one side when she woke up. The way she wore blue scrub pants with a little rope belt and a tight v-neck scrub shirt. “My blue uniform,” she said, grabbing at me, but at the same time telling me about her biochemistry and her pathology classes.

  When I see her at the end of my hospital bed, I’m lonely for her. Some days she shrieks with hurt and flings herself into Cedric. She cries for a few minutes and Cedric pats her hair and just holds her. He tells her he won’t be leaving for a while. She finally pulls her face away and wipes her eyes with a wrist and smiles.

  “I was trying not to do that,” she says.

  “I hate hospitals,” Cedric answers.

  81

  There was a short stretch of dirt road, running through woods, that connected Ballard Street to Maitland Avenue. It came out in the parking lot behind a small apartment complex. It was about half a mile long and rutted and was really only used as a short-cut between neighborhoods. We had been on it once or twice during the month and we drove it again at around 10 PM New Year’s Eve. I was thinking again about Larry’s call, and whether Butras drank.

  I had seen the physical resemblance between Butras and his brother, and this boy was wild, but Butras had somehow been tamed. Maybe it was beer that settled him down.

  There was not a white guy I’d ever known who held his liquor well. They were all dangerous once they started serious drinking. But Butras hid it pretty well if what his brother said was true.

  Butras and I were both sipping the Cokes that we had picked up at the RediMart on Allens Avenue after the raccoon business.

  “I gotta take a piss,” I told Butras.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said and stopped the car, leaving the headlights on to illuminate the road and the brush and halfway up the trunks of trees in a hazy arc. He got out his side and I got out my side and in the fierce cold, we unzipped and peed right there, each of us aiming our own way.

  And while we were busy, Butras said, “Is there anything better than taking a piss outside?”

  And I said, “It’s too damn cold.”

  “This is the greatest,” he said, speaking to the stars.

  I felt this itch on my neck like a fly had landed, and it made me jump a little, flicking my stream toward this small, perfect evergreen that had taken hold just next to the road. In the headlights the tree glistened and bent under the watering. I had picked a place where my piss landed quietly because comparing how long it goes is a guy thing and I didn’t want to get into it with Butras and I knew he’d be listening. But when I hit the evergreen there was a little swishing noise and Butras said, “You beat me this time.”

  He took a long time zipping up and I got back into the car fast and closed the door. Butras’ side was still open and he was stretching and shaking his legs out, enjoying the winter air.

  82

  After our piss in the woods, Butras drove slowly, as if he was bored. He appeared to be deep in thought again, and sour.

  “You’re in a bad mood,” I said to Butras. He’d been tipping his neck to make it click, a sure sign.

  “Shit. Do me a favor. I’m not interested in your opinions about my moods. You’re not a fucking counselor.”

  “See what I mean? You’re angry at me, at everyone else too.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Butras said.

  “I heard you’re drinking again.” I said it. Got personal.

  He looked over at me, his eyes frozen, like my words had come from nowhere and were going nowhere.

  “Don’t go stupid on me, Gambell.”

  “You’re drinking alcohol again, and you’re putting me in danger doing it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m wrong?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Your own brother told me.”

  “Did he now,” Butras said sarcastically. “Why don’t you get out here?”

  “No. I’m not getting out.”

  “Then don’t go talking to my brother about me,” he said.

  “Your brother and Wilbourne both got thrown out by your father, didn’t they?”

  “Stay out of my business.”

  His words hung in the air like heat, like smoke. I rolled down my window to let the thickness escape. The night breeze had grown chilly. The streets were awash in silver-blue light. Far, far away, a bell rang.

  From the time of Larry Butras’ call, it had taken four hours to ask this question of my partner. Only at 10 PM did I have the nerve.

  I realized that until I understood the lynching, nothing would satisfy me. Butras would say the lynching was in the past; I wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end to that story. I had suspicions, suspicions that were pure and simple about my partner and his brother and his father, and I wanted Butras to tell me they were groundless.

  I remember the paleness entering his face. The stern look gave away nothing. I got the feeling there was a question he wan
ted to ask. He just didn’t know if I was the one to ask.

  Butras didn’t say another word. He drove out of the woods slowly, a hard man for me to understand. I waited for an invitation to speak again or even exchange glances.

  The evening’s final call from dispatch came in at 11:45.

  83

  When I joined the force, the officer with thick, silver hair who was taking my application looked at me strangely. He said, “Why would a college grad like you, in his right mind, want this job?”

  A week into December, I knew that among cops the answer to the question was, “Beats working.” But to the officer with the silver hair I answered, “Never wanted to do anything else. My uncle is a detective in Detroit.”

  I went through the list of questions they handed me. “Ever do drugs?” “Ever been arrested?” “Ever been in jail?”

  When I was finished, the man with the silver hair and droopy lips asked, “Ever want to fuck up something just for the fun of it?”

  I didn’t understand what he was asking, but he looked me straight in the eye, a look that said: “You give me any kind of back-talking answer at all and you don’t have a job.”

  The cop was betting that I wouldn’t report him. He was betting that getting this job was important to me.

  As I was walking back from the interview, I remembered a story my mother sometimes told about growing up in South Carolina before she got away to college.

  “I went to an all-black school and once I was sent up to the white school to pick up something for one of my teachers. And I saw something amazing. All the tables in their cafeteria had bowls of apples on them. It was the most mysterious thing to me. I had never seen anything like it. What were bowls of apples doing on every table?”

  My mother was a year past breast cancer the last time she told this story, past the surgery and the daily visits for radiation that made her sleepy and had her watching television during the day. I remember coming home riding that slow, dirty train north through New Jersey in the early evening junior year to see her most weekends. She was confident that she would get better and she did for a while.

  84

  At noon on the 30th, I met Cedric for lunch in New York. A little Guatemalan place on West 59th. The decor was green and yellow like a rainforest, and it was hot. They had photographs of waterfalls. Cedric wore a Knicks T-shirt, blue and orange. We talked about how my father stayed at his job all those years, how it was comical that my father’s first floor office in our home was still off limits even when I was twenty-three years old. We talked about the new job Cedric was looking for, and the end of the first month of mine.

  “I hear it in your voice,” Cedric said. “Getting too comfortable.”

  “Police work’s not bad work. Maybe you should try it.”

  “Not my thing,” he said. “People was like, ha, ha, when I told them you were a cop in your home town.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Who?”

  “They said soon you’ll have your dog, your fence, your 2.5 kids, your six uniforms in your closet, neat and pressed. I bet that town is proud to have you. At least you don’t go round lynching their white folk. You’re just supposed to shoot the brothers who did.”

  85

  Before I moved home, I had not spoken honestly with my father in a long time. I had always tried to hide my mistakes from him so I would not have to hear the fierce control of his voice. When I was fifteen, he betrayed me. It happened the night of July 4th, 1991.

  My friend Gary and I had gone to Trygon Park to light some of the firecrackers we’d bought off of Rudy Foreman. The southwest corner of Trygon Park had a little stream running through it, nearly dry that season, and it was quiet and secluded there so we could do our business alone. Between the trees, you could make out the houses on Laurel Avenue that face the park, but most of them were dark when we got there at eight.

  Gary had some M-80s and I had some smaller stuff and we set off our supply using a Bic lighter Gary had stolen from his mother’s bag. It didn’t take long to use up what we’d brought so we started lighting some of the dry bushes. We knew they’d burn.

  We made a ring of these flaring bushes and sat in the middle and pretended we had magic skills, then we’d dash out of the circle, trying to avoid getting burned. We put out the fire with water from the stream using our hands and feet and then went to a party over at Jan Delio’s.

  That night, I told my mother about our setting the fires. She said she was disappointed in me and asked me to “think about my behavior and its impact on others.” I didn’t protest. I knew good from bad.

  The next morning, there was a story in The Record: “Vandals Burn Up Park.” It was about the fires reported by people on Laurel Avenue who had seen Trygon Park lit up in the southwest corner. Someone had called the fire department and the fire chief was quoted as saying, “Delinquents with illegal incendiary devices can cause major problems in this weather.”

  As I was eating breakfast with my parents, two policemen came to the back door. My father let them in, and I understood as they crossed our kitchen toward me that my mother had told him and he had called the police.

  I was still sitting down when one said, “We understand you were responsible for setting fires last night in a public place.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer.

  “Come with us please,” the man said. And when I stood, he guided me, with his hand on the small of my back, to their waiting car.

  “I’ll follow you down there,” my father said.

  At the police station (the new station, built two years ago, is across town from where I went that morning), one of the policeman wrote up a report and gave me a stern talk in a side room. Then he invited my father in. My father said, “The only reason that you’re not going to have a permanent police record is because I asked them to fine me instead.”

  I later learned that I was also two months too young to carry a record into my adult years.

  My father made it seem as if he were doing me a favor that day. We drove home in silence and I went to school late.

  My father had not been blind to how he had humiliated me. But being the sort of man he was, and is, he believed that he was teaching me something.

  I couldn’t forgive him.

  Dealing with my father, and my mother, forever afterward I was careful with what I admitted to.

  86

  The shadow on the ground was moving like a wrestler. Pushing arms and legs across the pavement like one person trying to crawl out from underneath another who was trying to keep him down. Arms and legs working like an insect’s. An invisible weight over the shadow, pressing down the small of the back as the hands tried to push the head up, and the legs tried to lift the hips.

  After Butras got to the shadow, without looking to his left or right, he screamed out, “Call an ambulance.”

  The word GIRL came to my mind. I thought: I’ve shot a girl. The kid on the ground was a girl. I tried to push the thought away; I understood that there was something horrible about shooting a girl.

  One minute we were driving in the car, fifteen minutes away from going home on a cold night and the next minute there was a girl on the ground in front of me, squirming and shivering convulsively.

  I didn’t know what I was doing when I fired.

  I was not a bad cop. I had shouted a warning. I had seen a reflection, a flash.

  I had shot a teenage girl who was like any one of the girls we’d passed that day.

  No, it had to be a boy.

  I remembered suddenly that conversation with Cedric when he said, “There’s no such thing as a black John Wayne. Can you see a black John Wayne? There’s no black man who’s that patriotic. A black John Wayne is a maniac.”

  John Wayne shot a lot of people.

  87

  As a boy, I never liked fighting. I have strong memories of only one fight in fifth grade where I’d gotten in a few good punches but ended up wit
h Jimmy Tuson on my chest, slapping my face around, a bunch of other guys watching, and laughing.

  There were times as an adult when I wanted to fight, when I was mad enough to fight, but it hadn’t happened. I had backed off figuring people are really crazy; they’d kill me for a nickel. Once, I had been trying to get on the highway, merging in from the right, and some guy in a black Ford pick-up wouldn’t let me in even though the highway was empty and he could have changed lanes. So when I got on behind the pick-up I gave the asshole the finger. And the black Ford began to slow down. Down from sixty to thirty, then slower, the guy’s eyes glued to his rearview mirror looking at me. The rest of the traffic was speeding past and the guy was down at fifteen miles per hour. At fifteen, it was impossible to pull out fast enough to get past him without an accident. Then the guy was signaling to the right as if to say: Let’s you and me get off the highway and have more than a talk. He was going about 5 mph, virtually stopped on the interstate. Anyone who would do that was not only an asshole but crazy. As soon as the guy pulled off the road, I accelerated, never looking back.

  I had felt like a coward, with a sick, nervous twisting in the back of my throat.

  88

  The lights converged on the body of the boy who lay half in the light, half out of the light, light like a hole in the dark. Light that tore him apart. He was larger than I’d originally thought, half-man, half-boy. I thought of the hole in him. A hole like a leak in a tire. Small. Invisible. How could such a small hole knock you down?

  I kept looking over Butras’ shoulder. I wanted to see what I had done. I was alert, but in a strange, dead way.

  Damaged, motionless.

  If you really listen to the wind, it’s uninterrupted. It must start miles away and rush when it gets near.