The Lynching Tree Read online

  I explained the whole structure to him, the forty people on the force, including two women, a chief, a deputy chief, 6 sergeants, 4 detectives, 1 court officer, 1 safety officer and the rest patrolmen.

  “And you’re the first nigger,” Cedric said.

  “Is race always on your mind?” I asked Cedric. I knew the answer.

  “It’s always in the air.”

  “Really it’s not.”

  “Mostly it is.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Nigger, for one thing,” Cedric said.

  “You hear that much where you are?”

  “Oh yeah, in New York City. Word is everywhere.”

  “Well, not here.”

  “Course not,” Cedric said. “Just lynchings.”

  23

  Most days, I was quiet with Butras. I was learning; that’s what I was there for, to watch and listen. I’d only recently completed the twelve weeks at the Academy. The role-plays, the reaction to violence classes, the constitutional law seminars at Rigan Community College. The sessions out on the farm the Academy owned in the northwest corner of the county were where we learned to drive like policemen, to chase and avoid, learned to plan an escape route when the car in front of you freezes and you have to hit the brake and spin out toward your escape side and while you’re fishtailing, accelerate, because if you don’t you’re dead.

  After five years on the force, this stuff was natural to Butras.

  Still, I felt superior to Butras. I felt superior to all of them. Brenda said I had too much attitude, too much “psychology.” They were going to be street cops in Pompan, New Jersey for the next thirty years; I was going to move up, move into New York.

  “They all seem a little dull,” I told Clarise on the phone. My phone bill was soaring; I was talking to her every day.

  “Dull?”

  “Not stupid. I mean tired. They all have gripes and old injuries and they keep talking about a better life. But what’s a better life for them? Getting to watch hockey on TV 24 hours a day?”

  “Men who watch hockey. I have some of those in my medical school class.”

  I knew what they were saying about me down at the station: that I’d rather work out or see Clarise than go out for a beer, that I rarely sat down for a cup of coffee with my fellow officers. In the station they kept their eyes on me. Whites who don’t spend a lot of time with blacks like to watch us, half from distrust, half from interest in our ways.

  I told Clarise that sometimes I was amused by Butras, but also a little irritated that I had drawn as my teacher someone who was always going to give me a hard time. When I looked over, I saw a short guy who was in shape, a guy with a thick wrestler’s neck who was balding fast, the blonde hair on top thinning. You could see through to the pink scalp. And when he smiled, his teeth had a sharp, clean look to them.

  December was a 31-day month and it was a long way to my first paycheck. In the beginning, I felt apart from Butras and his comments. I wondered why Butras had become a cop, but I didn’t ask. There didn’t seem to be much joy for him outside his work, but he was always saying there was no job he’d rather have.

  24

  On Friday the 5th, Mrs. Ellis brought her son by the station at the start of my shift. He was small for his age, maybe 5 foot 2 and dark-skinned. He didn’t like having his mom carting him around and I didn’t blame him. But he had something close to hatred in his eyes.

  “Put your hand out,” Mrs. Ellis instructed him. “Show some respect.”

  “Gambell.” The way he used my name, the way he said it looking at the stencil on my shirt pocket, rubbed me wrong.

  I saw who he was and squeezed his little hand until I felt the bones shift. Then I pulled him a few steps away from his mother.

  “Brother got to be hard to make it in this hard world,” I said.

  “You here to figure out that lynching?” little Ellis asked, taking a step back toward his mother.

  “Who do you think did it?” I asked him. Everyone had an opinion, I’d learned since coming back. Except Butras. I’d talked to plenty of people about it and the subject made people hopeless or merciless. Someone had written to the Record just that week suggesting all the trees in town get cut down so it didn’t happen again. There was a desperate sense in the air that things could never be fixed.

  I remembered Ellis’s age: a state of contradiction—people loving me and hating me—a bitter taste in my mouth every day.

  “Someone had a reason,” the boy said.

  25

  That night, I tried again with Butras. We were driving past the golf course, past the tree where it happened. There were six poinsettas in silver foil-wrapped pots next to the bronze plaque that was sunk in the ground.

  “Who do you think did it?” I asked.

  “A crazy person. A sicko,” he said.

  “Why don’t you think anyone was caught?”

  “Whoever did it didn’t live around here. Came in, went out.”

  “Why’d they come here?”

  “No idea. Why not? Quiet place.”

  “No suspects from Pompan?”

  “There were plenty but you asked me what I thought,” Butras shut me down.

  “I don’t hear much talk about it at the station.”

  “No reason to. Nothing good to say. Unsolved mystery.”

  “Nobody gets killed for nothing.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with that case. Stay focussed on the routine stuff we see everyday.”

  “How many detectives are still on it?” I couldn’t leave the hanging man alone.

  “It’s an FBI priority, not a department priority any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ask the chief.”

  “I hear the dead man had a lot of enemies.”

  “The hanging was a surprise, but finding Clarence Wilbourne dead didn’t make one person around Pompan blink.”

  26

  I met Cedric for dinner in the city on December 6th, cheap Chinese at House of Lotus. One week of experience under my belt. I told Cedric all I could remember about my first week with Butras.

  I told him how Butras never complained about the stress of the job, or its toll on him, about the paper work or the latest regulation. The Chief had passed down the word that we were all supposed to write two traffic tickets a day. If not, overtime pay would be docked or we might get a reprimand. During the day with plenty of drivers out, it was pretty easy to find two tickets; on the night shift it wasn’t so easy. The best place to find a broken headlight or a loud muffler, Butras said, was in the poorer section of town, in the black section, southwest.

  “He’s just getting the job done. Butras talks trash. He’s used to talking trash,” I said. We were eating shrimp lo-mein, my favorite.

  “Cage, the only time you’re not black to them is when you’re in your bathroom stall and all they can see is your dropped pants,” Cedric said.

  I changed the subject when Cedric started that routine. “You hear from Clarise?” I asked. She’d dropped out on me again for a few days, not returning my calls.

  “She’s your girl.”

  “You know her too.”

  “Some of the time.”

  “Same here.”

  While I wanted to see Clarise all the time she didn’t always want to see me. That wasn’t new. I knew what was going on: her younger brother had checked in. Carl was a street person in Chicago, a schizophrenic who’d gone in and out of mental hospitals for years. The first time I heard about Carl was in Clarise’s room during our senior year. (I’d been seeing her for over a year at that point and I knew then that she kept her secrets well.) I saw her face get all stiff when she answered the phone: Carl was calling saying he had a shotgun up to his mouth. “I’m gonna put you out of your misery and kill myself,” he told her. I sat next to Clarise for three hours as she begged him not to shoot himself. She begged him and begged him and when she hung up, she cried for three more hours not knowing what was going to hap
pen. The next morning she flew to Chicago where she met her father and they went looking for her brother who they found through the social worker at his regular shelter.

  Most of the time I wasn’t there when she got one of these calls from Carl, but I knew when Carl had contacted her because she disappeared. She didn’t want to see anyone she was close to; instead she’d hang around with people she didn’t know well, who didn’t know about her brother. Then a week or so later she’d call me up and apologize.

  27

  Butras’ favorite hour of the day was five to 6 PM and by the second week he got me liking it too. We did the rush-hour crossing at Oak Lane. Commuters were coming home up Lincoln, shoppers were choosing dinner at the A&P, people were buying hardware at Whittier’s, getting their dry cleaning, picking up a pizza. We parked in front of the Floss (a sports bar and restaurant with lots of wood paneling) and helped men in ties, spike-headed teenage boys who wore only T-shirts in thirty-five degrees, young married couples gripping each other against falls, tiny Filipino nurses getting their buses for home, and children in long stocking caps to cross the street. In cars, businessmen waited, tie clips still closed, giving hostile, bewildered looks at the pedestrians who slowed them down.

  Butras considered this important work—important for public relations—and we spent an hour there just waving the traffic onward and stopping it when a mass of people had collected on the curb. He let drivers turn left out of the A&P lot, and asked high schoolers walking home how the wrestling team was doing. People he’d known since he was a kid came by and asked how his father was, how his brother was.

  For this hour, Butras was upbeat, springy, delighted to be at his job. He had become a policeman for this it seemed, to guide, instruct, make order out of a busy intersection. At least for this hour, he controlled the day for his community.

  On the eighth, I ran into Roy Verin, an old classmate from Pompan High who I recognized from fifty yards away by his twitching, tipping walk. While I expected to see many faces I recognized when I moved back to Pompan, I didn’t. Catching up with Roy was a surprise. His complexion was still bad, cheeks thin and sunken.

  “When did you move back to town?” he asked when he recognized me. He kept his face partly lowered when he spoke, just as he had when he was younger. He was looking my uniform up and down.

  “Started about a week ago,” I said.

  “I remember hearing that.”

  “Big change,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you. It’s good to see you back, man. And in uniform. Damn.” He let out a short whistle. Roy was the first kid I’d ever seen hit a little league pitch over the fence. Three hundred feet when he was twelve.

  “What’s happening around here?” I asked.

  “You see it. You know about the lynching. Yeah, yeah, course you do. People out of their heads over that. No one cares the dude was white. A lynching is a lynching. White this time, black the next. You weren’t here then, were you? Can’t talk with people, can’t reason with them. No one listens.”

  “And what’s up with you?” I asked Roy.

  “Same old, same old. Look man, I’m on my way somewhere. So I’ll check you later.”

  I remembered that Roy never talked about himself; he would change the subject if you asked. He’d escape.

  28

  The Beliefs of Bone, a gang that had been at the high school even in my day, had gotten rougher over the past few years. They were recruiting younger and younger kids. They were selling more drugs; they had started setting people on fire with kerosene. They had black spray-painted their “BoB’s” under nearly every overpass in Pompan. Some people suspected them of the lynching.

  When the dispatcher sent us toward Bryant School at 11:45 PM on New Year’s Eve, and we saw the kids running, we figured it was the Beliefs.

  Butras heard “Bryant School” and said, “Let’s leave ’em alone tonight. It’s New Year’s Eve. Let them kill themselves. Who gives a fuck?”

  29

  Walking the Pompan streets in my uniform those first nights made me feel that every thought of mine, every part of my body, was banging against another thought, another body part. Sometimes I took out my pen and pad and took notes on the events of the day. My mind worked hard in the cold air. I wondered if people looking at me could tell I’d only been a policeman for a few weeks, that I wasn’t really experienced. It was all a game, and I could play it as well as any other guy. I wasn’t afraid.

  I’d never spent so much time outside at night before. Slow chill, blue haze. Too tired to lean against buildings, afraid to stop moving. I would relax by thinking of Clarise, all her moods, the details of our first dates, what she wore. I tried to remember the feel of her forearms and wrists, pulling back her sleeve and tracing the tendons with my fingers. The nervous glitter of her eyes were the streetlights on windows.

  At odd moments I enjoyed the danger of it, the shadows, and not knowing what was real. But mostly it was a slow game, and it struck me as strange that I should be doing this at all. I worried that I wouldn’t be aware when I needed to be, so I forced myself to study each street, every intersection. I imagined people hiding. I imagined that I was a ghost sliding down the street and I could see them. Music that I’d heard that day hummed inside my ghost head. Sometimes I was hypnotized by the shadows and the changing lights against the gray sky.

  Sometimes I’d try to put on this mean look. A grown-up version of the look all the back-hatted little kids had.

  30

  On Tuesday the 9th at 6 PM, the dispatcher sent us to 205 Pinehurst Avenue. We arrived before the ambulance.

  A man about my father’s age—who looked like my father, but brick-brown and with more gray on top—answered the door. He led us into the den where he had found his wife on the floor when he got back from work, her blueberry muffin half-eaten, the television on. His upper lip was perspiring and he held onto the green curtain when Butras crouched to check if she had a pulse. The air in the room smelled stale. There were tulips on the table, still unwrapped, that he’d come home with.

  When the EMTs arrived, Butras put his hand around the man’s shoulder and took him out of the den. In the kitchen, I heard him tell the man that because his wife had died unexpectedly, an autopsy was needed.

  “Is there anybody I can call for you?” Butras asked.

  The man sat heavily as we heard the paramedics work behind us.

  “Can I get you a drink of water?” Butras asked.

  I wondered how many times Butras had done this; I wondered how many times Clarise would do it.

  “Could I have my wife’s ring?” the man asked.

  Butras nodded and went to the sink and took a bar of soap and then he left me and the man in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say so I looked over my shoulder at Butras in the den rubbing the soap on the dead woman’s finger until the ring slipped off. He brought it in to the man as her body was taken out.

  31

  I was surprised that my father invited me to swim with him at the YMCA. He swam a mile every morning.

  I was there on Wednesday the 10th at 6 AM, although I’d gone to bed just four hours earlier after a quiet night in the car. The pool was newly opened, the water without a ripple. My father went to work in the city before rush hour and had to get in the water early. I hadn’t seen my father undressed in years. He still had big shoulders and a big chest. Somehow I would have thought my father had shrunk a little. At sixty-one years old he wasn’t a fast swimmer but he could go far; he did forty minutes without a break in his big, old floppy blue boxer swimsuit.

  In the past, if I made it fifteen minutes in the water, I was lucky. I started looking at the clock, thinking about getting out. After eleven minutes, I began to feel as if I were sinking. The water made me tired when it was cold, which it usually was. At the end of fifteen minutes, I was always exhausted. My arms went first, heavy and achy; then my butt. It was a breathing problem, I decided. Not breathing out enough when my face was down; not t
aking in enough air between strokes.

  My father gave me some tips. Try breathing on your left and your right. Don’t go so fast at first, ease into it. He had plenty of new ideas for how I could last longer. Maybe that was why I went with him only once in December.

  There was a pleasure in going that morning though I had arrived wary of my father. No one around but men at that hour. Men with little blue bubbles over their eyes. Everything tinted blue. Slimy tiles and the thin smell of bleach.

  I liked the sauna after the pool. We talked about his legal cases, we talked about the family, uncles and aunts and dreamy unemployed cousins. We talked about the Knicks and Ewing’s bad knees. We talked about how good it was of this YMCA to have a sauna. My father was in a good mood. We had the place to ourselves. My nose tingled from the thick eucalyptus scent. It was hard to look my father in the eye sometimes. I had grown up diverting my eyes as a sign of respect. When I asked his opinion of the lynching, he was relaxed, sweating heavily into his towel, big fingers spread over his knees.

  He said, “The law doesn’t work when the police don’t want it to, and my sense is the police didn’t try real hard after the cameras went away, after the media got bored. The mood’s changed around here. People talk now about the “direction” of the town. Shop owners aren’t like they used to be. Pompan was never an over-friendly place, but it wasn’t unwelcoming.”

  “Maybe it’s been that way for a long time and you just realized.”

  “I’ve always been pleased with our decision to live here,” he said.

  After he left for work, I stayed on in the Y’s weight room which was empty except for the machines and the mirrors. When I worked out alone, I felt clumsy and there was none of the performing, the rivalry, that I was used to. Sometimes I used that emptiness to make me angry, to make me work harder. “In perseverance lies strength,” my father used to say. I have no motto for my life; my father had enough for both of us.