The Lynching Tree Read online

  “It’s wonderful to have one of us working with the police. Especially with all the bad feelings around in some corners,” she said, becoming serious. “Since the lynching the air has changed. People don’t care about anyone but their own anymore. I’ve noticed it. People staying in, trying to hide, turning away quickly in public.”

  I saw that even champions of Pompan like Mrs. Ellis were disturbed. She smiled again. “Most places nobody really notices who the police are. But you’re going to be a celebrity.” She sipped the Diet Coke my sister had brought her.

  “I sure hope not,” I answered Mrs. Ellis. If I was lucky, the small attention I was getting would disappear. It embarassed me. Watching my father I remembered things about him that I hadn’t thought of since I left home. When I was ten years old, I dropped one of my father’s Duke Ellington 78s. Slipped right out of the fraying cardboard jacket and hit the floor with a loud crack. Two halves lying there, perfectly aligned, an inch apart. My father didn’t talk to me for three days. Said he didn’t talk to careless kids.

  “No, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had an invitation to dinner at someone’s house every night of the week,” Mrs. Ellis said.

  “That’s good. Save him from his own cooking,” Brenda answered.

  “Your father tells me you’re getting your own apartment.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” my sister interrupted, and we all laughed, except my father.

  I held back from saying I was tired of living in my father’s bleak house the day I returned to it. During school holidays in the last year I hated going home. I challenged his cigars, his television programs, the noise when he ate. It was a haunted house.

  When my mother died 14 months before I inherited her heavy wooden box with a metal hinge in which she’d stored an assortment of candles she used to read by. She preferred the flames of two long candles to the lamp beside her bed. In a bowl, she kept a supply of matchbooks she had taken over the years from restaurants. “There is no light better than fire,” she said. By 5 PM, when I got in from my day at the Academy, it was dark outside. I’d light a candle in the room I’d grown up in. The rice paper shades I’d put up glowed white from the flame. The fire gave off a sour smell. In the mirror across the room I studied myself, a tall man with high cheekbones and slanting, wide-set eyes, a pointed chin. The weight of the belt, the stiff crease at the knee.

  I don’t think I’d recognize myself now.

  “I’d like you to meet my son when you get settled,” Mrs. Ellis said.

  “Be glad to. How old is he?”

  “He was just thirteen.”

  “A little man.”

  “A big man if you ask him. Big for his age. Wants to run with the tough crowd. I hope they won’t have him.”

  “I’d like to meet him.” Ajax, hungry from his slow play, leapt down and headed toward the back door. He was also thirteen years old, still a troublemaker, a bird killer. My mother had rescued him from the ASPCA, and he stayed outside longer and longer since she died. Only I could make the clicking noise my mother used to bring Ajax home on days as cold as this one.

  “I’ll see if I can bring him over some time,” Mrs. Ellis said. “Meantime, I was glad to see that you got a little publicity in The Record. You’re big news around here for certain folks. Make your father and sister proud. You write that story yourself?”

  “Almost seems like it,” my sister told her.

  6

  On December 2nd, We filled up the squad car at the gas station where Butras’ brother worked after school. Butras said, “My brother needs some help and I’m not the one to help him anymore.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Someone to say ‘stay the fuck out of trouble for a change.’”

  It was the first time Butras had brought me into his personal life.

  “He’s been in trouble since our mother died. Before that really. He had learning problems right off and he still can’t read right, skips words or leaves them out, doesn’t understand things. Anyway, she always helped him get through school. She read with him like an hour a day, every day except his birthday. She read to him two hours then. She died when he was 11 and he just fell apart.”

  Coming out of the office from the behind the cash register and candy display toward the pumps, he didn’t look much like his older brother. Larry Butras was 15 years old, five foot four or so, with pale skin. His eyes were dark and careless, gloomy for a kid’s. He had a round face, brown hair buzzed close, and thick eyebrows that met over the bridge of his nose.

  He went around to Butras’ side, but he looked in at me. “How much you want?” he asked as if we were strangers.

  “Ten,” Butras answered.

  He went back along the car, unscrewed the cap, unhooked the nozzle and began to do his job. Butras leaned out his window, said something to him that I couldn’t hear. The boy came over to the window.

  “You’re on me for that? Give me a break,” the boy said.

  “You’re in trouble more than you should be.”

  “You got your thing, I got my thing.”

  “I guess so.”

  I felt sorry for the boy and for Butras who only saw his brother lowering himself. I’d lost my mother too, but not when I was eleven. I had some sympathy for the kid, but I didn’t like his tone.

  “You’re a cop, I’m a gangster. If you mess with me, I’ll fuck you up,” Larry said.

  “That’s what it’s about, huh?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Being physical.”

  “If I wanted, I could play the part with you, man. Shake your hand, joke around, answer your questions. I can do that. That’s what it’s about with you and your father.”

  “He’s your father too.”

  The boy ignored Butras. “You only need to be polite. Good manners. That’s all it takes.”

  “You have any news?” Butras asked.

  “It’s none of your fucking business.”

  “Nice language,” Butras said. He and his brother were locked together forever, each in the other’s power.

  “I got friends,” the kid answered, as if he were convincing himself.

  “I heard you have a girlfriend,” Butras said.

  “I got girlfriends. Two or three. But none of them are really my girlfriend. You know. You get home, you call a girl. If she wants to come over, she comes over.”

  The kid stopped talking and just stared, daring. He had dead eyes and a thick neck.

  “Girls are whores,” he said.

  “You’re such a fucked up mess,” Butras said.

  “I’m a fuck-up? Oooh. You’re talking like me, now, is that it? Now we’re equals, huh? I keep fucking up because I’m good at it. It’s my way. I start fucking-up, I keep fucking up.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” He mimicked his older brother. “You think I’m dumb, don’t you. You’re saying I’m dumb.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how to help you.”

  “You’re driving around with a dumb, black piece of shit they put on the police force because of the lynching. That makes a lotta sense. How you doing with your new friend there?” he asked sarcastically. “This town is fucked up.”

  He turned and walked back to the gas tank, pulled out the nozzle and came back to the window.

  “Ten dollars, bro,” he said. This time, I saw there was more of a likeness between them than I first thought, a flicker in the eyes, a frown.

  As we drove away Butras said, “My father should have sent him to military school. Right off. Outta here. He should have done it when Larry was twelve.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “He must not have believed what he was hearing.”

  “What was he hearing?”

  “That his son was a bum. That his son was a criminal.” Butras told me about how his brother had been breaking into houses, stealing cars, buying things on other people’s cr
edit cards for the last few years.

  “So now what’s the plan for Larry?”

  “I got this friend and he’s always telling me you can’t help some kids. You put ’em in a room with a therapist or a social worker or a cop, what have you, and you let them try to solve their own problems, or you try to scare them. And all that happens is the kid has a good laugh. That’s my brother. I never had any results with him.”

  I said, “He’s young.”

  “He’s sunk already,” Butras said.

  7

  Getting in Butras’ face at ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve set a bad tone. It was a mistake. Getting personal, getting into his life. But when you share a car five days a week, eight hours a shift, you have a lot of time to talk, and I often got the feeling that I was asking too many questions or expressing myself too freely. Things came out, things I shouldn’t have said.

  Butras, with his seniority, had chosen the first half, four to 12 PM, starting in the sunlight and ending in the dark. That was his choice of shifts and I was with him. I would have taken mornings if it were my choice. But it wasn’t. Butras, after all, was an experienced patrolman, and he didn’t want to hear anything from a rookie. He had no interest in being a detective; he didn’t like change. He liked his job; he liked his shift. Most of the hours we spent together were in the dark, sun setting at 4:30, seven o’clock feeling like midnight.

  I never thought that Butras might become a friend. It would be easier when we worked separately, didn’t share a car. I imagined a few months ahead when he’d be in his car and I’d be in mine and we’d pull up next to each other and shoot the shit. You couldn’t be sure about Butras though, inscrutable in his intense way, not much contact with anyone; a few of the other guys had said the same about him.

  Butras told me during our first week together, “I was voted most friendly in my high school class, but I don’t really have any friends. Or maybe I just have a different idea of friendship than everybody, and what have you. I got my family and they’re my friends, friends in that deep way, the way I mean.”

  But there were moments when I felt like I could really get along with Butras. Some nights seemed intimate almost, if only for being out in the new snow. We were the first to see it come down, thick flakes, fast in the high street lamps, the sky a strange gray-orange. Some nights in December he actually stopped the car on the edge of the golf course woods to watch it fall and drift, the first storms of the season.

  Butras would end every shift by shooting back to the station on Route 6. On the flat stretch between the Bell and Cumberland Avenue exits, he’d slow to 15 miles per hour in the right lane, turn on his high beams and his siren, and try to hit 60 mph in five seconds or less. As we accelerated, the car had a current that connected us, and though I was silent during this ritual, I knew these were the moments I’d remember.

  Ten o’clock New Year’s Eve, when I spoke, I was thinking to myself: Don’t bring it up; leave it alone; maybe later, after we’d celebrated my getting my own car, after we’d had a few beers and watched some football.

  But he had gotten me involved, telling me the little he had about his father and brother, refusing to talk with me about the lynching. I said what was on my mind that night. He did the quick tip of his neck to the right, getting the cartilage to snap, his habit when things were bothering him.

  8

  I was planning to go into the city those first hours of the New Year to see Clarise. We planned to hang at some party, do some dancing like she always wanted me to.

  She was dark brown and I felt like I had to see her every day. I had this one picture of her naked, coming out of a lake, her hair all glistening and her round body beautiful. She was walking up toward me when I snapped it. There were black rocks at her feet and the water in the background looked choppy. There was a little surprise on her face, but also her assuredness; she wasn’t unhappy that I wanted her on film like that. I kept the photo in my kitchen drawer and I looked at it every night and every morning. I’d been with Clarise on and off for three years and I never got rid of that picture. I needed to look at her. It was the size of my palm but my hands got heavy holding that picture. Sometimes, when I was alone in my room, I’d trace her bones in the darkness.

  There was nothing better in the world than Clarise saying, “I like that.” The way her tongue slipped out from behind the final “t”. When I thought of Clarise, I thought of her body and my body. I thought of her stepping out of her clothes. When I thought of Clarise, I thought of her long red tongue moving in slow circles.

  When I first told Clarise that I was starting at the Academy, we were in her apartment on Ft. Washington and 171st Street, upper Manhattan near the medical school she was about to start. It was a Saturday morning and she was in her little kitchen, the size of the serving area in the back of an airplane, and we both couldn’t fit in so I was sitting in a chair just outside the door, in the living room, looking in at her over my newspaper. It took three lamps to light her living room, its one window facing the airshaft that spiked the center of the building. Clarise said I was the only person she knew who actually liked that dark room. I didn’t mind the dust that rolled up to my feet all the time, little balls that drove her crazy because she couldn’t get rid of them. The bedroom, just past the blue couch, led out to a fire escape where we’d sit and have beer in the sunshine listening to the Yankees, watching the bald heads and hat tops of people walking just below us.

  In the kitchen, she had her back to me. She’d turned her right knee in and her ankle tipped out. She was wearing a short black one-piece dress and I could see the crease behind that knee, the tip of her elbow as she poured the water. Her hair was up off her neck and I imagined licking the back of each ear.

  “You know how in college we were always talking about success, about making a name,” I said.

  “That only mattered to you,” she said. She had a low, crackling voice, a voice with glass in it.

  “I think I got the answer,” I went on.

  “You always got some answer. Go ahead.”

  “I’m gonna be a detective in five years.”

  “You know that sounds sort of funny to me,” Clarise said with a little snort. “You hardly sleep as it is. How are you going to be police and get to Atlantic City twice a month and see me?”

  “Well you know I’m not giving up on Atlantic City,” I said.

  “No,” she said sarcastically. “Wouldn’t want them casinos to go out of business, which they’d have to do if you stopped visiting with your money.”

  It was our mutual friend Bob Esah who told me about the lynching. He came up to me at the Roche library just before graduation with a photograph in his hand.

  “You’re from Pompan, aren’t you?” Bob asked.

  “Grew up there. My father is still over there.”

  “Nice place,” he said sarcastically. I didn’t know why he had that tone to his voice.

  Bob had this weird flap under his upper lip that made him look like he had two upper lips when he smiled. Once a week, he’d take off for Atlantic City. Sometimes I went with him senior year. His brother’s girlfriend was a manager at the Trump Taj Mahal. We’d stay up all night playing blackjack in the bright lights, then she’d comp us a room at 6 AM so we could sleep for a few hours before driving back to school.

  “I don’t spend much time in Pompan anymore,” I told Bob.

  “Good thing,” he said.

  He handed me the photo from the front page of the New Brunswick News. Black and white, shadowy, taken at night, it showed a figure hanging from the branch of a tree. The head had a strange droop to the left. There was a second figure on the ground next to him wearing a pointed black hat. At first, the photo looked like a Halloween window display.

  “Bad stuff,” Esah said. “Now there is one guy who’s seen better days.”

  “Looks like mannequins,” I said. Esah gave me a Don’t-be-stupid face.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Lynching. Someon
e left a little mannequin in a KKK outfit, but all dressed in black. Pompan, NJ is about to get overrun.”

  “Pompan?”

  “You bet. Your hometown.”

  “But that’s a white guy, isn’t it?” I asked. Bob was a white guy.

  “He was. Now he’s just a gray guy,” he said.

  After the lynching, Clarise never liked the idea of my going back to Pompan.

  “If you want to solve that lynching, you don’t need to be a policeman,” she said again as she turned to me in her kitchen. “Why don’t you become a reporter or something?”

  “I don’t want to solve the lynching. That’s not gonna happen, I understand that much.” I was lying; of course I wanted to find out who did it. But I knew I’d been hired in part to show people that Pompan didn’t have a race problem. Not on their police force certainly.

  “Cage, I know you’ve wanted to be a policeman forever, but you still don’t know anything about being one. You’ll have to wear a uniform everyday,” Clarise said, coming over to sit on my knees.

  “You wear a uniform everyday.”

  “I wear a white coat.”

  “That’s a uniform.”

  “Don’t be so smart.”

  “But you do wear a uniform.”

  Looking toward New Jersey that night, the moon we saw from her window was red, lodged in the space between two highrises. Clarise called it a lovers moon. Windows across 171st Street were also open to the cold, people leaning out, staring west toward Pompan toward that wild moon, and I was surprised how close the next building felt, how we could almost touch those neighbors. Someone was playing gospel music and the voices were distant and deep, as if they were coming from the sky. When Clarise touched me later in the dark I almost couldn’t feel it, because of the cold, or the the moon, or the excitement.

  9

  Everyone had been expecting snow on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t come. As we drove toward Bryant School, the car window was open for Butras and the heat was on. The air outside smelled of dry trees, frozen leaves.