The Lynching Tree Read online

  The manager who had called in the complaint, a middle-aged guy with a southern accent in a blue-striped apron, met us at the front door and pointed to the aisle that they were in.

  Butras calmly turned down aisle six and walked right up to the man. I was a step behind. The man didn’t look twice when he saw us heading toward him. He just continued with his shopping. No one else was in the aisle.

  “Excuse me sir, do you have a license for that gun?” Butras asked.

  “Who’s he?” the man asked Butras, jerking his chin at me. He was about 6 foot 4 inches tall and had long, wet-looking hair that turned yellow over his ears.

  “He’s my partner,” Butras answered.

  “A new man, huh?”

  “You have a gun in your boot that is exposed and is bothering people in this store,” Butras informed him. “Do you have a license for it with you or at home? If not, I will need to confiscate the gun.”

  “President Clinton is taking all our guns away. He likes your minorities. I’m no fool. Look at the lynching we had not a mile from this spot. That’s why I walk my wife everywhere. I believe in my heart it’s coming, and I know they’ll be a whole bunch of people prepared like I am in case things get bad.”

  He didn’t look at me once. He was a stupid, scared guy and he pissed me off, but Butras was handling it.

  “So you have a license,” Butras said.

  “Sure I do. At my house. That’s the law, isn’t it?”

  “Well if you give me the gun for now, we’ll drive over there with you and see what you have.”

  The man turned to his wife, who was standing behind him. She was a foot shorter than he was and wore red sneakers. “We’ll have to shop later. Seems like we have to go home for a bit.”

  He reached down and handed over the gun to Butras. Butras unloaded the six shots that were in the .25 caliber, and we walked him out of the store to his car. We followed him home to a small apartment at the Western end of Pompan and waited in his living room until he showed us the license.

  “Why don’t you just leave your gun in your house for the time being,” Butras said.

  “Why doesn’t he?” the man answered, pointing at me.

  41

  Bryant School was near The Plaza. The Plaza was three blocks long, had a Sunoco and an Exxon on either end, a hardware store, Mike’s barber shop (with its antique, upward-winding, red, white and blue barber pole outside its big glass window), the Imperial Garden for chinese food, Miller’s stationery store, The Garden City Bank in clean white sandstone (which was adding a drive-thru), a watch repair place, a liquor store, a dry cleaners, a video rental store called Moviemore, and a Goodwill. The Plaza was really just a collection of stores; no one really lived around it. The neighborhoods started uphill on the other side of the railroad tracks which ran behind the stores. Lincoln Street ran through Oak Lane and a mile away, through The Plaza, then past a few medical offices and curved down hill leading toward Bryant School which was on the south edge of Pompan near the town line with Willis. Kids from Bryant got candy at Miller’s after school, crossing the tracks on their way home.

  It was 11:45 PM when the call came in New Year’s Eve and we were rolling through The Plaza for the third time, just passing Mike’s barber pole, dark and motionless for the night. Four hundred yards ahead, but out of sight on the other side of the medical offices, was Bryant School. We didn’t need our siren; there was no one on the road.

  It had already been a long night. The last call had been two hours earlier (we listened to other cars get dispatched) directing us to a car parked suspiciously and for too long near the reservoir. We had come up on it from behind without a response. We got out with flashlights and checked in the rear window and found a girl and a guy screwing in the backseat. The poor guy was too excited to talk straight once he got his pants up. Butras called him Valentine.

  “Valentine, what are you doing in there?”

  “Sorry sir.”

  “Little cold for that, don’t you think Valentine?”

  “I think so,” I answered for the kid who was too shocked to say much.

  Butras told him that such public displays of affection could land him in jail, and Butras told him about birth control: his zipper.

  Then he said, “And have a happy New Year.”

  That was worth a good laugh. Leaving, we both regretted not getting a good look at the girl through the foggy glass. We only made the guy get out and talk to us.

  42

  Butras was always talking about how he hated teenagers. He had this thing about them. He hated their clothes; he thought they didn’t have respect for anything; they ruined buildings with their graffiti.

  “Fucking kids have no sense,” he said.

  I reminded him that he had been a kid not so long before.

  “What happened between us and them?” he asked. “I wasn’t like that. You probably weren’t like that. Something’s gone wrong. Values. Where are their fucking values?”

  Teenage pranks were the reason for many of our calls, and Butras raged about them. Otherwise, he had good manners.

  “We should be public servants, but we should not be subservient.” More of his code.

  “If you’re arrogant or what have you, you won’t be any good at police work,” he told me. “Arrogance is hard to control. If you understand that, you’ll do good work.”

  Even though it was winter, teenagers were still sitting on benches over by Oak Lane, drinking beer, getting drunk, running around, getting ready to drive their cars up people’s lawns a few blocks away when we were gone.

  “Why do you always have that smirk on your face?” Butras asked me.

  “It’s a smile,” I said.

  “It’s a smirk. And I can’t tell if you’re laughing at me or you’re just thinking of something and it’s amusing you, or what.”

  “A lot of people have told me the same thing,” I told him. “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the way I look.”

  “Now give me a smile so I know what a real smile looks like on you. Go ahead.”

  I showed my teeth and squeezed open my lips. I felt like a horse whinnying.

  “Now that’s a smile. The rest is a fucking smirk,” Butras said.

  “Now what I just gave you was a fake smile,” I said. “Which I save only for special occasions.”

  “Officer, you’ve got to work on this to get anywhere in the world,” Butras told me.

  Since I was a boy I had been told that I had a difficult face to read. I thought I was smiling and everyone else said I was smirking. It made me look in the mirror a lot when I was a teenager. My natural smile remained small and was a little lopsided, just about half my front teeth showed. My eyebrows moved unevenly. My face was wide like my father’s.

  When I grew older, I liked that people didn’t know what I was thinking because they couldn’t read my face. But I also didn’t want people to think I was against them, that I was trying to act superior. Only when I was twenty, in college, did I stop worrying about my “smirk.” I realized that there was nothing I could do about it and when people got to know me they’d be able to tell my smile from annoyance. I hadn’t really thought about it much until Butras brought it up again.

  Clarise said my smile made me look “mischievous.”

  I didn’t see her enough.

  43

  I have to feel the pain when I’m lifting. And if it’s going well, I don’t hear the guy next to me grunting. I’m in a zone.

  I force my attention onto every repetition. Lifting is all in the mind. If I’m not feeling my bicep getting stronger while I’m working it, I force my attention back to the working muscle. If I’m distracted, I remind myself of that day’s plan.

  On good days, I work my sets and I can’t find anything that breaks my attention. Mental intensity is physical intensity. You have to crush the machine, hurt it, and in turn it will hurt you and make you hard. Hard as a shell. I clench myself, clench everything together.

&n
bsp; I can bring my muscle size up. I can will my muscles to grow.

  I see myself as massive when I’m lifting. I feel like I’m breaking something every second, breaking out.

  Cedric brought Clarise here today. Talk is a help for them; any words, it hardly matters. I know Clarise wants to run away when she sees me, but of course she can’t. She wants to run from her brother too.

  Not knowing what happened, she wants to understand why I was willing to make enemies in the world.

  I’ll answer her when I have something to say, when I understand, when I have a sense of control again.

  44

  Each Saturday morning we had a squad meeting. On December 20th, Butras complained to everyone about his stomach.

  On the ride out, he told me, “My fucking stomach is acting up again. I got to quit smoking.”

  “Save you some bucks,” I said. “They say if you do a pack a day and you quit and put that money away for a year, you can buy yourself a new car.”

  “Fuck it. I don’t want to quit smoking.”

  “So don’t.”

  “Sharpens my memory. Keeps me awake.”

  “I need something for my memory too,” I told him. “I can’t remember anyone’s face anymore.”

  “You think we’re getting old?”

  “Not me. I just can’t remember.”

  “I’m terrible too. Names and faces. Can’t blame that on the smoking or what have you.”

  “If you need to remember something, you will.”

  “I don’t know how I started on these fucking cigarettes.”

  “Well if your stomach’s bad, it’s probably a good idea to quit.”

  “I only smoke eight a day.”

  “That’s probably enough to turn your stomach.”

  “I guess.”

  “And you used to call yourself an athlete.”

  “Fuck you,” Butras said. “I can still kick your ass. I guarantee that. Right now. Let’s go right now.”

  For a moment, Butras reminded me of Cedric.

  45

  I could see in front of the car the only one remaining, and he was wearing a dark wool cap. The kid turned and the floodlight reflected off the zipper on his open parka. I saw his hands going for his pocket. I felt my own hands move, almost imitating the kid’s hands, as if we were sharing some secret signal.

  Not once, in the month we’d been together, had I removed my gun during the hours of our shift. I had been to the practice range a few times; you had to go twice a month. But mostly it sat in its leather pouch weighing on my right hip. The first week it had made me feel uneven. I touched it often in an absent-minded way.

  I called out to the kid and then, with no warning, there was white smoke in the black night, smoke coming off the end of my body where my hand was, like I was tossing talc on myself as I did every morning after my shower, before my boxers and the blue uniform went on.

  Then I couldn’t move my feet, my heavy feet. Shiny black shoe feet.

  I could hear Butras running off to my left, a scuffing sound on the pavement. Butras ran low. Butras was in a race, he was moving toward the lights, the victory lights twenty yards away.

  It was pitch-black and I was squinting. The bright lights from our car made the sidewalk in front of me like a ball field. The cap made the kid’s head round as a ball. I was seeing things. I was hearing voices.

  I was standing, legs apart, like I was about to dive into a pool. Like it was a race, and the gun went off, and I couldn’t lift my feet, couldn’t get into the air and over the water. On the starter’s block with shiny black shoes on my feet. I would have to climb down off the block and head home and let the others swim the race. But I couldn’t get down off the block either.

  When I pulled the trigger, I was astonished that the gun fired. There was no warning. I didn’t believe it even when my hand popped back. It was all invisible except for the white smoke. I didn’t remember lifting my arm or extending it.

  I heard, after I shot, and just before he started to run, Butras yelling out from where he was off to the left, “What the hell was that?”

  On the edge of the darkness was a shaft of light filled with a shadow that had fallen into it and seemed to be moving. The body on the ground on its belly had a rhythm. The kid was dancing in a jangling way. The black wool cap was rubbing the pavement, it couldn’t get off the pavement.

  I thought for a moment that I was looking out a window watching all this as I had once sat in our Pleasant Street house near Rutgers, looking out the kitchen window and watching the neighborhood kids play in the ragged oaks, crash bicycles, rush to make curfews. I thought I was inside a house and the kid on the ground in front of me was outside, far away.

  It seemed hours before that we had gotten out of the squad car in front of Bryant School. I heard a bottle rolling down the street and felt some wind. I heard sirens.

  The hot white smoke was going up over my head and my gun was hanging down like some long black root that I couldn’t pull up. And Butras was scuffing, full speed and low, over to the kid.

  Butras moved as if he were drunk, in a curving line toward the kid on the ground; he wanted to set a difficult target as we’d been taught. He moved in a crouch, a few steps left and few steps forward and right, as if he were in a war movie, on patrol. But his shoes were loud. Anyone could hear them. They were louder than what the kid’s shoes had sounded like.

  There had been other times I had this spying feeling, the feeling of watching from an undeclared space where no one could see me. As a boy, I used to wait for my next door neighbor to appear. A crazy woman who was fat one season and skinny the next, who came up some stairs from her basement parting some beads instead of opening a door to feed the birds. A woman who wore shawls and slippers, whose hair hung in unwashed bands. She would walk around the yard, talking to the trees, alone in the world. I spied on her, wanting to see and not wanting to see.

  I saw Butras reach the kid. Butras bent low until he was kneeling. Butras stayed like that on his hands and knees; he looked as if he were thinking. Butras touched the kid in a gentle way.

  46

  When the gun went off, my ears were ringing. I thought I heard Captain Cuvin’s voice from that first orientation at the Pompan Station. Cuvin was talking about the role of the Pompan police force in 1999. In the cold of the street, I remembered bits of that introduction:

  “… the growing ineffectiveness of police in the big cities …”

  “… the overflow of city garbage to the suburbs …”

  “… here in Pompan we make a difference …”

  “… keep an open mind but use your common sense …”

  “… the risks of action often outweigh the risks of inaction …”

  I remembered the policeman’s prayer that Cuvin gave each of us on a xeroxed page at the end of the hour: PREPARE US FOR ADVENTURE, BUT DO NOT SPARE US THE HAZARDS.

  47

  The smoke off the gun was like talc. Clarise taught me about talcum powder. She called it “ashes.” She sang when she splashed it on, “Ashes, ashes, we all go down.” She had all these smells in her room from the perfumes she mixed herself. She always smelled good.

  The braid of smoke was rising up in front of my eyes, and in the cold night I began to see things through it: Clarise, the first time we did the wild thing up in her third floor room, the white light pouring in through the skylight over the bed, blinding us, our bodies twisted in the black sheets which circled us like a nest, my eyes closed or open, unable to see anything when they were open, at noon, at lunch time, the sun directly overhead through the slightly open skylight, bouncing off the white walls I’d helped her paint, Clarise, dark and warm and wet beside me, on top of me, under me, a moving, open mouth, a thousand mouths, and I was helpless and always near the edge of the bed almost falling off, before she would pull me back with her strong legs.

  48

  The pistol kicked like a car backfiring. There was a powerful, dry smell. A lit smell. A
thousand matches struck at once, inches from my nose.

  My hand was roaring.

  The explosion was like the great storm of a human voice.

  After the noise was a silence.

  In the echo of the shot, I closed my eyes. I felt very sleepy. Almost immediately, Cedric loomed before me, scolding, but I couldn’t understand the words. We were in some enormous, dark room. A room with black curtains, maybe a theatre. There were spot-lights. Cedric came up to me, his face darkening, his fists up, ready to fight.

  Then I had the sense that I was rising, levitating, like an actor in a play being pulled up above the stage by strings. I was staring down at my stiff self and the fallen body in the light twenty yards away. Yet in the air, I relaxed.

  And up there with me was Clarise, going down on me. Both of us up in the air, floating, and she was going down on me with an ice cube in her mouth.

  I was shivering. And I was screaming.

  PART TWO

  49

  Butras bent low and gently touched the kid. Then he stood and threw his radio against the wall of Bryant School. He bent again and took something from the kid who was still squirming on the pavement. And then Butras was back beside me screaming into my face, his teeth sharp.

  “You stupid, fucking nigger. What the fuck did you do?”

  That’s where I guessed the story between me and Butras would end. There was no other way. We responded to a gun call and we got there and I thought this kid was drawing a weapon and I pulled the trigger and I will never be right again, our lives will never be the same. I knew this even without knowing another thing about the body on the ground, half in the shadow, half in the light.