The Lynching Tree Read online

  I was thinking, Why aren’t these kids home? I was thinking, Why did we have to get this call at 11:45? Fifteen more minutes and I’m home and it’s a new year. I was wondering, black kids or white kids here by Bryant?

  The kids were in a pack, swerving smoothly. Skinny as fish, in and out of the lights, flashing. There were four or five of them in wool caps. A few of the bigger kids were out front.

  I put on the blue lights to scare them.

  No one stopped.

  Butras gave a shot on the siren. He should have run the car right at them, up the curb, over the blacktop, trying to press them, in the headlights, up against the school wall. Full speed. Scare the little bastards to a stop like deer.

  Two fell back and one stumbled turning the corner of the school building. The last one stopped in a shadow. Must have thought he was out of sight. Invisible.

  There was no such thing as a normal traffic stop anymore. Everyone drove without a license or registration; a lot of people had guns under the seats and in the glove compartments. It took about fifteen minutes to learn this. And there was no such thing as a normal kid.

  When we came to a stop, our headlights intersected the glare from the floodlight that hung from the side of Bryant School. The last kid from the pack stood at the edge of where the two lights aimed and collided in brightness. The kid stood in the dark, a shadow on the edge of the light. As I got out from inside the car, the air was cold and quiet, except for a gritty scraping.

  The kid was approximately twenty yards away from the car. I had reason to believe that a kid like that, even one so small, but one who had been running in a pack away from a police car had a weapon. Still, I couldn’t judge his age, the shadow was so small. I couldn’t see clearly from that distance. The nearby street lamp had a burn-out bulb. There was no traffic on Lincoln or Hillside.

  The top of the kid’s head was the perfect curve of a ball because of the hat. A perfect round target. He was only moving a little. I heard the scraping again. I thought it was an animal sound, maybe a squirrel. But the scraping was coming from the kid. The kid could not keep his feet still.

  That was the problem of the night: not knowing who’s there and at the same time having to put together why they’re there. I came out of the car with my gun drawn. I aimed where the lights aimed. Right at that line between the darkness and the light where the kid had stepped out.

  I was going to be twenty-three years old in two weeks. I had never shot at a person although I’d thought about it a lot since becoming a policeman, really since I was a boy, my toast bitten into the shape of a gun. If that kid didn’t move there’d be no need for me to shoot. There had been a few times in my life when I’d been angry enough to want to kill someone. Wasn’t that true for everyone?

  I didn’t believe people who said they never wanted to kill someone. They were liars. Sometimes people have to lie.

  I was struggling for breath. I couldn’t get my breath. I wanted to talk, call, scream, but I couldn’t.

  My throat closed and it felt as if only vomiting would open it again.

  10

  The details of New Year’s Eve will always come back to me in ways that it won’t to those reporters who must have arrived early the next morning trying to get the full story, making the mistake of thinking they could get the whole story. Forgetting how strange some stories can be. Forgetting that some stories don’t make sense.

  Every thought I have is shaded by guilt and rage. I feel as if I owe that kid or myself something, but I don’t know what. I can’t catch the shape of what I owe, only the feeling. But I need to know. Or maybe I’m just deceiving myself.

  My mother died in a room like this one. My father, whose silence was devotion, was with her. How many deaths have there been in this room? I don’t know how Clarise will do her medical work, being so close to death every day.

  My mother used to say I was like her father, because I never made any trouble. Growing up, when things went well for me, she would tell me about my grandfather, dark-skinned and wrinkle-headed, a man I never met. I was left-handed like he was, same color, same quizzical expression, like I was always looking for answers, she said. During a visit home three years ago when she first got sick, I told my mother I’d gotten an A in Criminology. “You could never even write a term paper in high school, you remember? Didn’t have the interest. But thank God. Goes to show, you got a passion, you do the work,” she said, smiling. “You will be some good policeman Officer Gambell. Fits your disposition. Asking everyone except yourself questions.”

  She meant it in fun, of course, so I answered her in the spirit of fun, “You know better than anyone that I already got all the answers.” I knew it would make her feel good when I became a detective, like her brother, her father’s son.

  11

  On Wednesday December 3rd, we were touring the Lincoln Hill area, when a black BMW ran a stop sign at Berry and Appleton.

  “Watch this,” Butras said. “He shouldn’t be driving wildly in this neighborhood. I mean, I don’t like that. There are kids around and what have you. I’m gonna scare the shit out of him.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take notes. You can do the next one.”

  Butras put on the flashing light and accelerated, taking a left onto Appleton. The houses were close together on either side, hoops over garages, front doors open, parents coming home at 7 PM. There were a few little dips in the road and the guy probably didn’t see us until we were right up on him. He was doing about 30 in a 15 zone.

  “He’s a yuppie,” Butras said. “He’s probably not that bad a guy, but I’m gonna have to shake him up because I can’t have him driving around here like that.”

  Butras gave one pull on the siren and the guy looked in his rear view coming up out of a gully and pulled over where the road levelled.

  “I’ll leave my door open and talk loud so you can hear how it’s done,” he said and got out briskly.

  The driver was already rolling down his window and through the dusk I saw the resigned look on his face.

  Butras got up to his car and stopped short of the driver’s window and asked for his license and registration I could tell, but I really couldn’t hear anything else with our car still running and the twenty feet between us. When the guy handed over his papers, Butras moved up next to him and bent over and talked close to his face for a moment, then came back toward our car and got in.

  “You heard me, right?”

  “No. The motor was on,” I answered.

  “The guy lives around here. He’s not a bad guy, he’s not too much of an asshole. He’s a resident here. He says he was just rushing home to see his family. He says that he hasn’t seen them in a few days and he didn’t notice anyone coming when he went through the sign. I explained to him that there are kids around here and it’s pretty dark and you got to move slower, and I think he’s pretty upset; he feels pretty bad. He was real apologetic. So I’m not going to give him a ticket. Why ruin his life?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Why should I? Why should I be a jerk? This way he’ll think police are OK. You’re good to people, they’ll be good to you.”

  Hanging around the station I learned pretty fast that there are cops who when they’re out of uniform are different from the way they are in uniform. And you have those cops who are the same in and out of uniform. Butras was the first kind; he was actually friendlier in his uniform, a little sullen out.

  12

  Clarise insisted that I talk about my mother’s death. Her urgency made me pull further away and I’d end up working on my motorcycle instead of speaking—blue metal, silver in my hands—knowing that Clarise was studying my back. Being watched by her brought me pleasure, but there was tension in the silence.

  My mother’s brother Harold taught me about bikes, riding into town on one fifteen years ago. Uncle Harold wore his hat, his preacher get-up; underneath, a shaved skull; he had a magnetic field for me, everything bent around him, he was a moo
d shifter. I was reluctant to tell my mother how I felt about Harold, just as I was reluctant to talk to Clarise about my mother.

  Harold’s Harley had a sticker: “Blame nobody. Expect nothing. Do something.” He was a detective in Detroit, and he defined my mother for me—freeing her, tapping into her creativity when he came to town. The first time I met him (I was eight) after his thousand mile ride to New Jersey, Harold said, “Hotshots call me so many vile names that it’s almost respect,” and I had to ask my mother what vile was. She laughed like mad, the way she did when Harold was around. My father stayed in his study and worked. He had no use for Harold and his motorcycles.

  Harold sent me books when I was in high school, sensational police cases. When we spoke on the phone, he told me to snatch the paperback murder mysteries my mother was always reading and to try to solve them. He read them along with me, half a continent away, and we’d go over the clues together. Harold knew that my father would never be resigned to having a cop for a son, he knew that my father thought it was a waste, that thirty years ago things had been different for Harold than they were for me now. Harold talked to my father when he knew I was serious.

  “You want me to be a cop?” I asked Harold, senior year of high school.

  “If it fits,” was all he answered.

  Four years later, Harold didn’t understand when I told him I couldn’t come out to Detroit where he wanted to get me started. Clarise was starting medical school in New York, I said, and I was going to stay around her, take a job in Pompan, hoping for a patrolman’s job in New York where there was a 2-year wait list for the Academy. Harold had been married three times. He believed bad luck came in threes, and a cop never put a woman first.

  There was never a time I imagined being anything other than a policeman. And so when I was one, I thought the secrets of policing would be quickly revealed to me only because I’d already imagined them, thought I’d seen them in Harold.

  13

  The night after the lynching, I called Ethan instead of my father. I thought to myself: If Ethan hasn’t been changed by the lynching, then Pompan hasn’t been changed either. He was the one guy from high school days I kept up with who still lived in Pompan. He and his parents lived behind us. Growing up, I’d head out our back door, pass the crabapple tree that supplied us with ammunition for spring-time fights, cross our back lawn and cut through the hedges to play ball on the Bing’s driveway.

  He’d given me the nickname Cage when I was nine years old, saying that when he saw me in the screened-in porch at the back of our house (where we ate dinner in the summer), it looked like I was in a cage.

  His father had coached him into the third best 14-and-under tennis player in the East. Ethan, this little black kid with skinny legs and this wild, sliding forehand, was a tennis star when we were growing up. I remember him walking around the court telling himself back then to “hit the ball at five o’clock. Hit the ball at five o’clock.” He saw the ball like the face of a clock and he told me that he wanted to hit every forehand on the outside to spin it into the court. I never got what he was talking about because I didn’t play tennis, but I saw him play plenty of times, winning the town tournament against all the grown-ups, getting to the state finals. I rode along with him and his father to some faraway tournaments at these fancy clubs where everyone was white and wore white and drank iced tea with mint, where the clay was swept between sets with a long, two-handled broom, and Ethan, wearing his game face and black skin, was treated like visiting royalty.

  But he stopped growing at age 13. At 5 foot 5 inches his serve didn’t continue to pick up speed and his father rode him mercilessly trying to make up for size with drilling. Ethan started losing to kids he’d always beaten and his father stopped driving him to tournaments. Ethan had never been one to laugh much, but now he was demoralized and shamed. He quit the high school team and his father stopped talking to him. He started missing school and I never saw him much, even on weekends.

  When I went to Rutgers, Ethan stayed home. His mother had seizures and Ethan had always been the one to care for her. Despite taking medicines, she was prone to relapses. I saw it happen only once. I was 12 or 13 and it was near dinner time on a fall evening as I was coming through the hedge. I saw Mrs. Bing carrying two brimming A&P bags in her arms when she fell and lay on the ground shaking, the red milk container splitting open into a white puddle that settled around her at the base of the basketball pole. At the sound of her bags ripping, I saw Ethan and his father come to the back window overlooking the driveway. I remember Mr. Bing’s face, weirdly angry and discouraged. Only Ethan came out for her, a rag in his hand. He knelt beside his shaking mother, put his left hand under the back of her head, and tried to stuff the rag into her chattering mouth. I knew he missed a tournament once because his right hand had been badly bitten during one of her attacks.

  I’d always believed Ethan thought of himself as his mother’s only hope for a cure. When I met up with him during college, we’d shoot around in his driveway and he’d ask me about school in this quiet voice, but not say much about himself. I knew he was in trouble in some large sense, and he knew it too. My advice felt useless and he seemed to be expecting some terrible resolution to his problems. Still, I always called him at Christmas and for his birthday.

  When I got him on the phone the night Bob Esah told me about the lynching, Ethan talked cautiously, as if I were a threat. It wasn’t Christmas day or his birthday.

  “You heard about the lynching?” I asked. I assumed everyone had, but I could never be sure with Ethan.

  “Couldn’t help but hear, you know,” he said.

  “What’s the word around there on it?” I asked.

  “I don’t hear much.”

  “Anyone we know get a visit from the FBI?”

  “I don’t know anyone,” he said.

  He sounded drugged and I didn’t pursue the subject. I asked about his Mom and if he’d been following any sports, then our conversation wound down.

  “Why are you calling me, Cage?” he finally asked.

  “Just checking up,” I said. I was worried about him. Bad things had happened since he dropped out of sight. He had gotten spinal meningitis, and his aunt was killed in a commuter airplane crash.

  “That’s good of you,” he said.

  14

  In the first days after the lynching, plenty of theories were rolled out. The victim was a drunk, a derelict, a pervert. It was a drug hit. The killing was done by a violent wing of the Nation of Islam. It was group of white militia who thought the hanging man had been a black-lover and so they left him out next to a black mannequin to teach him an eternal lesson. It was some radical black group that was setting itself up as a new inverted KKK; now the targets were white people. This last theory was the one that lingered.

  “Any leads on the Pompan story?” I asked Bob Esah a few days after the lynching. I thought he would have inside information from working on the Rutgers Daily.

  “Police there don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” Bob said. “This murder was way over their heads. They’re just a bunch of half-educated hometown guys looking to have a quiet life and then retire. Of course they all want to figure it out. Be a hero. But here’s the problem. They’re all white. And the lynching was done by blacks.”

  “That’s the word?”

  “That’s what a lot of people, including me, think.”

  “No proving that though?”

  He ignored me. “You probably know some of those cops. Boys from your school days.”

  “Probably.”

  “It hasn’t been that long since you’ve been gone.”

  Bob didn’t know that as a boy I worked at all varieties of trouble around Pompan. Even then, Pompan was expanding into the Meadowlands, gas stations and Burger Kings rising on landfill. The southern part of town became directly connected to the Garden State Parkway so drugs entered easily. I stayed away from crack but high on marijuana I once stole animals from their classro
om cages and let them go into the onion grass of Toca Loca Park. I snapped off the side mirrors of cars. Petty stuff, and there was never an eyewitness. Even then, I knew you could get addicted to trouble if you weren’t careful, that sooner or later you’d get caught.

  “You’ve had a photograph of that hanging man up since the night it happened. Everyone’s a little worried about you,” Bob said.

  “Good picture, huh?”

  The photo of the hanging man (taped below one of Clarise and one of my mother on the refrigerator) had become a dominant presence in my life in those days. There’d been no capture or explanation. The Mayor of Pompan hinted in print about the FBI’s arrogance and ineptitude.

  In the picture, the man was hanging in a square marked off by police tape like he was an animal in a zoo exhibit. I imagined him helpless and disoriented and beaten just before he died. I imagined his death to be like what happened to Mrs. Bing during her seizures. Then all he was was an empty stare at the ground and a hopeless weight. Bugs finding their way into his body.

  I thought of the rope like a leash on an animal. He was heavy with flesh, gravity pulling at him.

  If I looked for too long at the picture, it made me feel sick.

  Some days I looked at the picture and thought, If I don’t go home something awful will happen again there.

  People who came by the house my best friend Cedric and I shared at school glanced quickly at that photo. It must have had them worried, two black men with a picture of a lynched white man in the middle of the kitchen. I felt some eyes stay on me longer than they used to, eyes that turned away when I stared back. I felt I had to maintain my composure in the face of outrage; how could they just look at that man and say nothing? Why didn’t everyone have this picture up?

  Maybe they were just thinking: why does that photo get at Gambell so bad? To this day, I don’t know exactly, although I know it only reinforced my desire to go back to Pompan. It wasn’t that I had a fascination with horrors in general, only with that lynched man. The more I think about it now, the more I realize that my interest in returning to Pompan came from the feeling that my memory had betrayed me. When I thought of my life in Pompan not so long before, I recalled a pretty good childhood, not one broken by fears, but one that included some foolish things, some romance, some crazy nights out with the boys. Nothing hopeless or hateful. No lynching.