The Lynching Tree Read online

  My life in Pompan was lonely. As I pushed, I screamed out in frustration at the blank walls. I’m a different person in the gym, my body on fire, rigid, my nose filled with my own sweet odor. I crashed through the weights. My muscles locked and unlocked. I thought about Clarise and how remote she was sometimes. My fists clenched, my arms curled, my legs pushed. Forces took possession of me. I liked the heat, my sweat overflowing. I tried to crush the weights, annihilate them. At the end, I felt dizzy from exhaustion.

  As I drove back to my apartment, I was thinking about how I still cared about the way my father had treated me long ago. I felt as if some part of me, maybe my secretiveness, maybe my narrow, careful view of success, maybe my problems with Clarise, was due to my father’s treatment when I was fifteen. I wondered if he remembered what happened as clearly as I did.

  I suddenly remembered Butras from high school. I was a freshman when he was a senior. He was county champ at 156 pounds. A wrestler. A wrestler’s mocking walk, a walk that meant contempt, that he could fight. I remembered Butras as a teenage wrestler, as a blonde, five-foot-seven-inch boy who wasn’t ever going to grow any more, neatly dressed with no acne and perfect teeth, always looking a little tanned, dark skin, a serious face, alongside Gwen, tall thin Gwen, fine beautiful Gwen. White boy’s dream. Everyone knew she was beautiful, even the people who didn’t like her, and there were only a few of them. She laughed when Butras laughed, in the halls, outside class, but you weren’t sure how much she liked him. You had the sense that she knew this was just for high school and that she would leave him for college and law school. She must have sensed some weakness in him despite his walk.

  I never said a word to Butras back then. We were three years apart and lived only a few blocks away from each other. I never spoke with Gwen either.

  32

  When I got out of the car in front of Bryant School at 11:50 on New Year’s Eve I thought: I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. What made you think you could handle this?

  A voice in my head said, Watch carefully. Do nothing. This will take care of itself. The person in front of you will run. This person will run and be gone. This is nothing. You will handle it. Stay still.

  The kid stepped out near the edge of the light.

  My gun was up and I shouted, “Police.”

  It was insane to take this job. What made me think I could do it?

  I’m sure I shouted, “Don’t move. Keep your hands where we can see them.”

  I aimed at the wall, between the shadow and the light, and I knew I must show no fear.

  33

  Both of us would have admitted that it had been a bad start. Sometimes during those first weeks of December just getting into the squad car together led to disagreement. The tension was like a physical property; we pulled it back and forth. When we could, we stayed out of the car, patrolling by foot, on opposite sides of the street.

  We walked our district past the white brick mansions on Lloyd that looked like convents with their circular drives and canvas-covered shrubs. As a boy I had summer jobs mowing lawns on Lloyd. Back then, if I walked in the all-white neighborhood chances were I was going to be stopped. I knew the drill. Cop would ask where I was going. I’d give him the name of the family who hired me. Cop would ask me the address. I’d give it. As a parting shot he’d say, “Don’t be out here too late.” I got the message.

  Butras and I passed the bungalows on Taber with their dog-run wire fences and Virgin Mary statuettes, past the hospital where you could always hear weeping and see the plain silver crucifix hung over the electric Emergency room doors like a dagger about to fall, under the highway where the sidewalk was white from bird shit and the cars overhead wailed around the curve that sent them heading north past our old high school on the right, massive and gray-faced.

  I remember the date exactly, December the 11th, when Butras asked at four-thirty in the afternoon, “You like donuts or not?”

  “Middle of the road.”

  “I take Boston Creme, just in case you’re buying.”

  “Got it.”

  “You like women who shut their eyes or ones who don’t?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “You like music. Ever been to an opera?”

  “No.”

  “Ever want to go?”

  “Not even once.”

  “How come you’re so clean and scrubbed? You look like everyone’s favorite baby sitter. You ought to work for some quiet law firm, smoke a pipe.”

  I couldn’t tell what Butras wanted. But he had never asked me anything personal before, if that was what he was doing. “My father’s a lawyer,” I told him.

  “And you’re police? Is your head screwed on right? My dad’s retired. A retired investigator.”

  “A cop too.”

  “No. He worked for Aetna. Insurance fraud. You know, like a guy disappears on the Jersey shore and no body appears. My father goes out to find the body. Sometimes he also worked as a bodyguard for the president of the company, for extra cash and what have you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Worked right here. Grew up here too in the good old days of Pompan. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. Hurt his back, had surgery, retired. Now he’s a track and field judge. Got a certificate. Starts local races, judges tight finishes. Says it’s relaxing.”

  “You mean you don’t consider these the good old days?” I asked.

  “Let’s get things straight. Out in the open, OK. Issue One: What do you think of welfare? You for or against?”

  That was like Butras, changing the conversation, pushing at me. Turning the tension up a little. I never knew which way things were going.

  He didn’t give me a chance to answer.

  “I look at it like this,” he said. “I got a friend who works probation in the city. ‘Were criminals, always will be criminals,’ he says. Don’t want jobs. Don’t want them. His people say: a two week vacation? Nine to five? Gotta come in everyday? Naah. Not for me, that kind of work. It’s a calculated business decision. Don’t mind going to jail if I live the way I want the rest of the time. That’s how they think. Get their welfare. So they decide their job is to rip people off. Fuck ’em. If they want Reeboks, let them go get a job.”

  All of a sudden, he was screaming. I didn’t know what to make of Butras’ anger. Was it even anger?

  “Forget it! You and my father are interested in this lynching, the two of you,” he said.

  “I ought to talk to him about it. Why’s he so interested?”

  “You’re not talking to my father and my father’s not talking to you.”

  I left it alone.

  34

  When I called Cedric, I went on about Butras as usual. Cedric said, “The guy’s talking codes, that’s all. You got to read the codes.”

  Cedric said some wonderful things and some ugly things, but to me he was energy. He was all focused. He examined everything his own way, and there was always drama. He told me better stories than I ever read in the paper. I don’t know where he got them. “You ought to write your own personal newspaper,” I used to tell him.

  Christmas three years before, I brought Cedric home and my mother asked me, “He’s not going to curse in front of your father, is he?” She’d heard my stories. “Because he’ll be thrown right out of this house.”

  “No, he’s not,” I told her. “Don’t worry about that. It’s just hard for him not to. You know. But he understands it’s not cool to say his things today.”

  Cedric was generally on good behavior with my parents.

  On the phone he told me, “Your partner’s talking code. You are hearing the fears of white America. You are hearing the fears. You’re a policeman now, my man. That means pretty soon you’re also gonna understand that violence is neither right nor wrong. It’s just a question of who has the power. It’s not right or wrong to kill. Killing goes on.

  “Fourth time in a year, last week, that police killed an unarmed black man on the street. Ne
ver seems to happen the other way around, does it? A white man minding his own business ends up dead from the police.

  “Only some weird cases where white men end up dead. Like your lynched man. A white man who didn’t like him killed that hanging man,” Cedric speculated. He’d held to that theory since the first day we put the picture on our refrigerator.

  “For what reason?” I asked.

  “Practicing.”

  35

  Police work took us to odd places—graveyards, hospitals, inside peoples’ homes, restaurant kitchens—it was an endless adjustment to different surroundings. It was mostly car work, though. On Saturday night the 13th, we got gym duty, keeping control of the basketball game at Pompan High. There’d been some fights between rowdy fans from opposing schools the last few games and the school had called us in. We made sure beers weren’t smuggled in, made sure no fights got started.

  At the game, I felt nostalgic, and in disguise. I was only five years older than the seniors, but there was now a barrier between us, with me in my uniform. They looked at me hard, trying to understand how I had come to be in that uniform. They had no idea.

  It was the first time I’d been back at the gym: tight bleachers that pulled out and always seemed to be slipping back and about to crush someone, the too-hot lights, sweat smell, the shellacked-wood court, the glass backboards, ceiling bulbs that splashed three rings of light on the playing floor, the ropes you could climb to the ceiling off in a corner, the janitors who stopped working and stood by the rear door watching. When I drank from the water fountain just outside the gym, the water was as warm as it had always been.

  As if he had been thinking about it for a long time, Butras said to me, “You went to this school, right? I don’t remember you.”

  “I was three years behind you, I believe,” I said.

  “That’s what someone told me,” Butras said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t like old Pompan High much.”

  “I wrestled a black guy once. Pretty good wrestler. I think he was on the Rogers team. Know him?” Butras asked.

  “What was his name?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I didn’t know anybody over there. You remember your matches, huh?”

  “I nearly killed him. I was trying to fucking kill him. He was a big mouth.”

  36

  The light in this white room is always dim. The question I now have time to consider is: Did I participate any more than simply being present at a moment of violence?

  Brenda was here today, smilingly tired. My father too, eyes bloodshot. They look away quickly; they can’t stand to look straight at me for too long.

  I knew when I started on the force that I had to be cautious. There was trouble waiting to rub off on me in my hometown, a town that now claims a lynching to its credit. The lynching, from the beginning, had the feeling of mockery to me, cruelty out of the blue.

  Just as my mind returned to the lynching each and every day of December, now, December gone, no matter where my mind wants to go, it returns to the wall of Bryant School. The nearby, fallen-down fence; the empty sidewalk, not a pedestrian to be seen; the wind carrying trash and a turned-out umbrella. I hear myself screaming in pain. I should stop but I can’t. A scream that enters my spine and moves down my legs. A scream that has the smell of blood. The whole bloody lamplit scene dwindling away. I overvalue memory.

  37

  My father kept a rifle in his bedroom closet when I was growing up. It was issued to him in Vietnam. It stood upright in a long felt pouch, the butt down behind his shoes and the barrel mixed into some suit jackets. When I was a child, my father showed me how to clean it. There was a long, thin pole with a soft end that we used to clean the barrel, a skinny version of what they stuffed cannonballs into cannons with during the Civil War. If you held it away from you and looked down the barrel it was like looking at a movie camera.

  In my memory, I have always mixed up the smell of cleaning the rifle with the smell of shining my father’s shoes, where I also used a felt rag to rub in the polish.

  On the force, I learned quickly that guns were the thing. I hadn’t expected that from so many of the men. But they were young men like me, and they really enjoyed taking their guns out, holding them in the station. Few of them had ever come close to firing one, except at the range.

  As a cop, the first question you tried to figure out in any situation was who else had a gun. I learned early on: sure you could go ahead and care if a guy had stolen property on him, but you bet your ass you’d care if he was also carrying a gun. Not because he might shoot the next person he robbed, but because he might shoot you.

  The first time I held the pistol on the day they gave it to me at the Academy, it felt too short. My hands remembered holding my father’s rifle.

  Butras was always playing with his pistol in the car as we drove. On December 15th, when I asked why he always had it out, Butras said, “Grow up, will you?”

  Butras told me his story about joining the Pompan police five years earlier, how he hadn’t done well in school and tried college for a year, how he was carrying on the family tradition, how he liked being involved in the business of Pompan and had seven commendations to back up his reputation. When he informed his younger brother (who was then only nine years old) that he was becoming a cop, Larry said, “I dare you to arrest me.”

  “My little brother, Mr. Tough guy,” Butras said. “My scrawny little brother thought he knew all about guns. At nine he couldn’t even do a pull-up and he knew about guns.”

  “The gun’s a big deal,” I said to Butras.

  “It’s what makes you a cop.”

  38

  When four inches of snow fell in the space of two hours during the early evening of December 16th, something changed between Butras and me. Maybe it was merely that we found out we shared at least one thing: neither of us slept well. Maybe it was the steady blowing outside the car, the extravagance of the weather, that woke us up to each other.

  “This happens once a year, snow like this,” Butras said. “What time do you get up in the morning?”

  “I get up at three and five and I get up for good around seven.”

  “What do you mean three and five?”

  “I wake up during the night. That’s all.”

  “Me too. One and five. I oughtta call you.”

  “I’m home.”

  “You watch CNN?”

  “If I can’t get back.”

  “I usually try to catch a little news while I’m up. I watched the whole Gulf war in the middle of the night. I saw all the fireworks before anyone else.”

  My waking at night drove Clarise crazy. She liked her eight hours; she was a late riser. She thought I actually liked getting up at night. But the next day my sleeplessness sometimes made me feel aimless and a little sad. In the morning, I craved sleep. I was tired most days, although after years of this schedule, I’d grown used to it.

  Butras said to me, “Soon enough you’ll know that when you’re in uniform, you’re an asshole to everyone.”

  “That happens?” But I knew he was right. When a couple of kids came up and asked me a question, the moment they left they were talking about me. Just like Butras had said would happen.

  “You’ll see,” Butras said.

  “Maybe it’s just you.”

  “If I did something that needed to be done, I don’t mind being an asshole,” Butras said. “What I mind is that they can call you an asshole and you still have to smile.”

  It was a small town and some people came up to say hello and I didn’t know who they were. I thought that I’d find nearly all my work comfortable, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Because Pompan was small, it didn’t take long to feel as if I couldn’t find a place to relax, other than inside the car. Walking the street, people just came up to us, asking directions, asking about robberies in their neighborhood, reporting suspicious activity. To escape, I even drank my coffee in the car, and I felt bad about it
sometimes.

  39

  At the beginning of every shift, Butras picked me up at the station (he often kept the squad car in his driveway during the day) and we picked up Joey Ip at Plasticast where he was coming out at 4:10 from a day’s work. Joey was a blind guy who Butras had grown up with. From what I could tell, Joey worked with his hands at the end of a factory line molding plastic and he always smelled like turpentine when he got into the car. Joey hated buses, so Butras picked him up at work and the three of us drove to Bagels Up on Oak Lane where we dropped Joey off. Joey sat behind the screen in the back.

  Butras rarely said more than, “Hey, how’s it going?”

  Joey rarely said more than “Another day, another dime,” but it was a ritual for them. I had the sense that Joey just liked being in a police car getting a lift.

  That was the start of our shift every week day, Joey getting out at the curb and tapping his way into the bagel shop, getting in line wearing all black like he always did, a crow with dark glasses. Butras would wait until Joey got inside safely, like Joey was an old woman or something. As Butras and I drove off, I’d look over at Joey standing inside the shop, tipped a little to the left, waiting for his sesame seed and his coffee.

  40

  On the 17th, we got a radio call at the start of our shift that a man with a gun sticking out of his boot was spotted at Almacs. We put on the lights and got over there quickly. The dispatcher said that the man was about 50 years old and was walking with his hand guiding the elbow of a woman who was approximately his age. They were moving very slowly through the store and had not threatened anyone.