The Lynching Tree Read online

  I had just given everything away. I had shot a boy and all I would know from that point on would be urgent and troubling.

  Then I thought: when you point a gun and pull the trigger, you’re a murderer. Whether you’re in a uniform or not.

  Then other words intervened:

  Accidental.…

  Self-defense.…

  Anyone would have.…

  89

  It was a Sigsauer nine millimeter with a night sight. It held eight shots and a back-up clip.

  Along with the uniform and the gun, they’d also given me an asp. The asp was a metal rod that extended like a telescope when you shook out your wrist. Butras called it “nonlethal force,” and he showed me how to use it like a club. I also received a cylinder of mace. Butras said they gave out the mace last because they didn’t think it was important, but anyone who had been out on the street knew it was all you needed to do the job most of the time.

  At the academy they told us you needed to ensure three conditions before you shot: the ability, the opportunity and fear for your life.

  90

  I knew I had killed a little black boy. It made me sick. It made me think of Cedric and all the times he had warned me I was going to get in trouble. It was a little black boy lying dead in that hole in the dark.

  Cedric would tell me again what he had learned as a boy: if you’re black there are different rules. Be careful. Figure out the rules.

  I had seen the kid in the hat reach for a gun and I shot. But until Butras came back with it in his hand, I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was a gun. The kid was in the dark and all I saw was a hand moving and a reflection which could have been a button. Maybe the kid was brushing something off his coat. I was surprised to see hands moving and I’m sure I screamed out, “Police, freeze.”

  And then I fired. I aimed and fired. I had been trained in less than a month to separate good from evil.

  Even though I saw that small body fall, I did not immediately recognize what had happened, what I had done.

  I thought only: I have to save my life.

  91

  As Butras was coming back toward me, coming back from the wall of Bryant School and the body that lay half in the shadows and half in the light, I was ready to meet him. I looked forward to seeing his face again, thankful he was with me that night. I knew we had the same purpose. But I was also alert and tense, and watching him, I was concerned that he wasn’t paying attention. He wasn’t protecting himself from what was out in the night, from others in that pack who would come back to see what had happened. Others who had guns aimed at us. I had to protect him.

  He came at me with the swaying walk of a wrestler and I was ready to hear what he had to say. Everything Butras said seemed final and I was ready to let him help me, let him take over and things would be all right.

  I was already thinking: How am I going to explain this to my father, to Cedric, to Clarise? I thought of Ethan.

  It was the first time during the month that I remembered seeing Butras’ breath. All the cold days we had and only then I saw the little clouds coming from his mouth, sailing off his teeth.

  When he got close, I could see that his eyes were angry, but I understood. I had done something that would be with us the rest of our lives.

  From ten feet away I saw that Frank Butras was not looking at me. No. In his eyes it was as if I were a phantom whom he could make vanish. It was as if he couldn’t believe I was there so he made me disappear.

  Butras was a small man, and his blonde hair looked almost white against the sky. His right arm looked long, as if the gun he was holding were dragging the ground.

  In his left hand he had another gun. When I saw the other gun, I knew he had taken it from the boy on the ground. It was the gun I’d seen flash when the shadow had moved. The gun that had forced me to shoot.

  I knew that I would be all right.

  Butras’ eyes were up, fierce on me. I was looking at him but also over his shoulder and around behind him, alert. He didn’t seem to care about who or what was behind him. He was walking slowly. His guard was down. Whoever might be around, whatever remained out there in the night was no longer his concern. I knew this from his face because I had never seen him look so tired, so beaten.

  The shots I had fired were still loud in my ears, so loud I couldn’t hear myself cough. I coughed when I was nervous. Between my throat and my ears, the sound of my cough disappeared although I could feel my chest and shoulders shaking.

  Butras came closer. Suddenly he was up close, flying up at my face, like we were in the center of a ring.

  He said, “You stupid, fucking nigger.”

  I had not shot because I had simply forgotten a better way to handle things. I had not shot because I knew that some people submitted only to aggression. I had shot because I thought he was reaching into his pocket for a gun. The dispatcher had said someone had seen a gun.

  Everything smelled of gunpowder.

  I remembered shouting a warning: “Police.”

  It seems a long time ago.

  92

  On the way from The Plaza to Bryant School we passed the country’s largest American flag. Some people said it was just the largest flag outside of Washington, D.C. It was whipping in the wind, a good hundred feet up a pole. The flag itself must have been eight by fifteen yards. Everything around it looked off-scale. The pole itself looked like a twig. The flag was above the treetops, but if it had settled on the top branches of one of the maples, it would have covered all the leaves. It seemed out of place, a flag that size. Who made it? Why was it in the middle of Pompan?

  So much else in Pompan appeared regular. It seemed to me, after I had been to every neighborhood fifteen times (seeing them now as a policeman), and inside more dining rooms and kitchens (mostly false alarms) than I cared to remember, that most of the houses in town were the same. Two or three bedrooms, automatic garage door opener, frosted glass door to the shower, stainless steel sink, garbage disposal. Houses filled with people born in Pompan. Blue collar, lower white collar, steady jobs. They were houses that were empty during the day; kids in school, parents working in New York City or out at the malls in Paramus.

  The golf course was away from everything, surrounded by piney woods. The lynched man in the photograph reminded me of the fish Cedric brought back to the house, a line looped through its jaws.

  93

  In the hospital’s explosion of overhead lights, waiting to go to surgery, I was thinking about how Bob Esah would report the events of this night if he were still at Rutgers and was the reporter sent to cover the story, if he asked me for my side of the story.

  There was no way to get it right. I heard no scream, no syllable of hurt. But there was no mistaking I’d hit him, the boy heaped on the sidewalk, half in darkness. I’d wished he had gotten up, I’d urged him to.

  On TV Captain Cuvin was saying, “The teenager was hit by 3 of 8 shots fired at him beside Bryant School at about 11:50 PM. The police officers had confronted the boy after they were alerted to a report of an armed gang rampage.”

  Half in the light, the boy kept moving, as if he could crawl away. There was no accusation from the boy, no look of disappointment or shock or fear.

  He was as silent as the lynched man.

  In the explosion of lights I was thinking of how Cedric divided people. Hot and confused, I was thinking of how when I look in the mirror I see a black man. I was thinking about whether being a black man made any difference that night, whether my bringing up Butras’ drinking or his brother made any difference. Then I went to sleep.

  I now think of how, nine months ago, I carried a pen instead of a gun, and how I’d come to hate people I didn’t know because they could do me harm, because they did do me harm. “You are the master of your own life,” my father used to tell me. But it wasn’t true.

  I’m still raw, trying to understand the sensation. My life is not past, but most of what will happen to me probably has already happened. />
  The reporters will ask questions. What do other policemen do when they walk about in the night? The reporters will need an answer. They will want my unconscious motives, my psychology. They will also want evidence of my humiliation.

  My father told me when he picked me at the police station he sent me to 8 years ago, “The easiest person to convict is a black man. We’re already guilty. They don’t even need evidence.”

  I will offer no answers to reporters although my mind works clearly now. I can hear the sounds for things I’ve already seen in my mind forty times. I pluck incident after incident from my memory now and these little explosions keep me going. I remember more and more of what I saw, and when. I listen to my pulse.

  94

  Butras shouted, “You stupid, fucking nigger,” and he held the second gun out toward me. It lay in his left palm, small and snub-nosed. It was gray and had no sheen to it and was the smallest pistol I’d ever seen,

  Butras’ face was furious, inhuman.

  “It’s a starter’s pistol,” Butras said. “That’s all. For a race.” He threw it at me. Then he approached still holding his own gun in his right hand. Close-up his breath was foul. Although I was stronger, if he had announced that he wanted to hurt me I would not have protested. Butras closed his eyes like he was resting, saving up until he felt strong enough to open them again.

  Then all at once he grabbed my shirt in his hands, and he shook me. I didn’t have the courage anymore to talk, to tell him to stop, and we struggled and staggered. He threw his full weight against me and we fell. Because he’d been a wrestler, both his hands went under my arms.

  Maybe he meant for the gun to go off then and maybe he didn’t. There is no knowing what he was thinking.

  I can’t work out his feelings as much as I try.

  Is it possible that he has an explanation?

  95

  I was shot.

  A surprise.

  It was a close, unremarkable noise and I didn’t know where it came from for a moment.

  My eyes were pinched by the light, Butras bearing down on me.

  When you’re shot, you feel all your warmth gather in the place you’ve been hit. All the blood in your body moves there and the rest feels cold.

  And at the same time, you feel you’re invisible. You don’t know the borders of your own body anymore.

  Every man knows that absorbing pain, is what makes you a man. Pain meant you’d faced a challenge and even if you were scared, you couldn’t pull away. You suffered.

  I called on my secret courage.

  And then I had pain. I would behave like a hero, I thought. On foot patrol sometimes, I plotted ways that I was going to take the pain that was sure to come. I imagined ways to escape without serious damage.

  But I was too small to fight the pain. It was the desperation, laziness and horror all adding up that kept me pinned. I felt flickering movements within, but not enough to move myself. I wanted to say: that’s enough pain.

  My fingers locked and went stiff: Like knives.

  Home, I thought. I want to rest. I was floating.

  Vaguely, I was aware of how quiet it was.

  Pain replaced my body.

  Flat on the ground, I felt off-balance. But I didn’t know why.

  I thought: I have been shot.

  I thought: I must keep a cool head.

  I thought: I must recover.

  I was rubbing my chest with a steady rhythm and my hand was getting hot. I was calming myself. I was rubbing myself in circles like I was clearing fog off a windshield. But I knew if I pressed too hard the windshield would break. I was testing my muscles to see if they worked.

  It was a terrible pain.

  It was a joke, man. Call off the joke.

  I held my body rigid and I screamed. I pretended to myself that this scream was something important, that it would heal me.

  96

  When it’s going well, I don’t notice anything during the set. I think about where I’m feeling it. I think about the pictures of the muscle groups in the anatomy book that Clarise gave me. The deep layers of the back. This is my hand, my bone, my skin. I work each muscle against the weight until it slowly and powerfully contracts. I feel huge and blood-filled. The breath’s caught in me, then that weight is gone. I feel my breath and my eyes. But also a peacefulness that comes along out of my violence. I’m wide awake, tense, nerved-up. The hurt seems valuable. There are no limits, no physical limits.

  I worked out on the 31st, 2 to 2:30 at the Y. As usual. Picked up my things, went home, got into my uniform, my shiny black shoes.

  97

  “The boy’s dead,” my father tells me at some point, standing over my bed here, knowing I probably won’t answer, thinking I can’t answer, that I’m still “in shock” as the doctors have told him.

  He gets close to my face. I sense his reprimand.

  Noises come from my mouth unbidden.

  “Dead?” I want to say in confusion. The suddenness of the shooting replaced by the suddenness of this death news.

  I am startled, although he cannot tell.

  My body, holding its own bullet, is now the burden of my family.

  I once heard my father say to another lawyer on the phone, “Every man’s got something to incriminate him. That’s the way men are.”

  98

  I had never had such pain. I couldn’t bear it; it was terrible. That the pain could change, that it could get better or even disappear did not occur to me as I lay on the ground near Bryant School. If you have ever been hit as a child and remember that pain, you will understand what I was feeling. Disbelief and lack of understanding become part of the pain and added to it. And I was scared.

  As you’re taught when you’re a child, I began to apologize. To no one in particular; to everyone. I just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  When I was quiet and listened more closely than I ever had, I heard the screeches of far-off cars, the wind, a loose gate, a dog.

  My blood smelled like oiled steel, like my motorcycle. The air was damp from the rains earlier.

  It was too late to cry. It won’t help, I thought. I was shaking with anger, anger at myself and those who hired and trained me.

  A burn and a clamminess.

  99

  I envied Clarise’s life in the city. The last night I was with her, we watched TV. Clarise had a limitless appetite for television shows about inner-city kids. Violence was what happened to them. There were those kids who could show you the scars on their legs and chests from four different shootings they had survived. There were the paralyzed victims of crossfire rolling around in their motorized chairs and typing with their teeth. There were the kids who had given it all up, who no longer were hanging with their homeboys. It was endless and pitiful and Clarise got depressed watching, but she did anyway.

  “I don’t know. I can’t help it. It’s fascinating,” was all she said, when I asked her why. She was appalled by the violence that no one could escape or understand. But she was an optimist and she believed that if she watched enough she could understand it. She thought that health care would never be a success until violence was controlled.

  I wanted to see basketball or a sitcom. I had no interest in shows about kids and cops.

  100

  On the ground, I only wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep on a bench in the sun on a warm day as I had done once upon a time with Clarise in the city, my head on her lap.

  I could feel my wound slide open.

  The feelings did not come to me in sequence, but all at once, rage, regret, a certain sort of giddiness.

  I had a hole in me. I was incomplete and bleeding. Drained, like I had just finished a workout.

  I wanted the weight off me, the wet weight pulling me down like the gravity I felt when I was a boy jumping off the big, split boulder in the empty lot near my elementary school, the weight of my whole body pulled into my legs, my knees filled with water.

  In this world, m
any people have been shot.

  I had just shot someone.

  But now I had a hole in me from Frank Butras’ bullet.

  My clothes were quickly covered with blood, drenched with it. I thought of the wounds of animals and the flies crawling in.

  When I was going down I thought: if people had seen me just a month before, they would have seen an ordinary black man who could disappear into a crowd of black men, no problem.

  101

  Terror produced its own antidote; I was suddenly willing to die. I remembered wanting to date a white girl in high school. She was a friend, but she refused to date me, and when I asked her why, all she said was, “You know.” And my mother told me when I got home, “As long as your friend thinks of you as black, you don’t have a friend.”

  I thought of my father and his white lover.

  I remembered Clarise in this tropical tank top she wore with nothing under it. When she lifted her arms and I was standing at her side, I could see in. And I could reach in.

  A storm had landed on my chest. I was a breath past panic. The trees were gray, the sky was gray.

  On the ground, I looked around, turning my head slowly toward my left shoulder, my right shoulder. Was anyone else there? Who was watching? Was our back-up nearby?

  My mother used to tell the story of her mother visiting when we first moved to Pompan, and we were the first black family on our block. Her mother used to call us “the ocean.” She said, “People will drive miles to see you, to talk at you, to throw stones at you—like the ocean.”

  It was Butras who shot me. The unremarkable noise had come from his gun.

  I had never concentrated so hard. I knew that my survival depended on keeping my eyes open, maintaining the narrow vision of what was directly in front of me. I squinted. I obliterated everything except what I was seeing nearby and concentrated on staying alive. My face felt as if I had slipped a tight stocking over it. Something a thief might wear.