The Lynching Tree Page 8

  Now I can talk plainly about all that happened.

  I am already past my time with Frank Butras.

  I sing to myself in this white room—half song, half prayer. In the tapping of the radiator I hear the hard blows of my mother’s funeral—shovel stabs, door slams. I feel the momentum of tears.

  I have never minded being alone, and I have never minded hard work, but when the 8 PM nurse leaves I am alone and work to remember the details of New Year’s Eve. My memory has had practice. There can be nothing like this bed to bring self-awareness and clarity. The angel of reality visits here. Each moment stands out in my mind, and I take for granted that I need to see each moment again so that some day I can remember a time when I did not yet know about being a policeman.

  If I chose to speak I would repeat the words my father said each morning to my sister and mother and me as he came into our sleepy kitchen in Pompan for his bowl of cold fruit, “It’s a great day to be alive.”

  But I keep silent. If anyone knew I could speak, the questions would begin and never end.

  I am now wise enough to know that there are actions which can only be explained in part, even in hindsight. Looking back after everything, my decision to return to Pompan—a place that at one time I’d been sure I would never revisit—makes perfect sense to me. I knew many people, people who would help me in my new job. Yet soon after I arrived, I found that places I’d been to hundreds of times as a boy left me shaking my head in wonder. The people I met were not as I remembered. In Pompan, there was the familiar, but also a strangeness.

  I am not bad and I am not dangerous and I have brought this trouble on myself. My story is not that simple and I won’t, even in the months ahead, give in to such a self-destructive formula. That’s too familiar a tale for young black men like me.

  I’ve tried to see the truth about myself. I will answer only for myself when the time comes. And I will lash out at convenient theories about people who are too easy for me to judge, and hope that these people will resist judging me as well. The scenes I flash back to, scenes in which I played a part and are like burrs caught in my memory, are easier to consider after so many visits to them. But in my position, it is not hard to keep secrets.

  50

  I saw the news conference on television from this hospital bed New Year’s Day. Captain Cuvin, as formal as I ever saw him, with a blue cap afloat on his white hair, in front of the cameras:

  Officers Frank Butras and Donald Gambell responded to a call from the Bryant School area this evening. As you are aware, there has been a rise in robberies and assaults in certain areas of Pompan and surrounding communities over the past year. The Department has increased its patrols to ensure the public safety in this area. These officers were patrolling in their squad car when they pursued from the corner of Cedar and Hillside, a group of perhaps twenty or twenty five teens. In front of Bryant school, the two officers got out of their vehicle to pursue the assailants on foot. There was gunfire. The victims were taken to Holy Word Hospital. There is no word yet from the hospital as to the conditions of the victims.

  The lieutenant didn’t give those reporters the whole story. But they knew there was more and they started scratching around as I would have. They came for me, the jackals.

  There I was, on the local news, the photograph from November’s story in The Record.

  When the lieutenant was done speaking, I thought of how, before coming home, I’d always expected life to continue as it was, but with enough possibilities open that when I decided on one, I could develop it in my own way. As I had learned from my father who taught that all things are possible.

  I look down at my hands and see them shaking. Beyond my hands, at the end of my hospital bed, I see my father, whom I hadn’t expected to see. I’ve spent far more time with him than I thought I would, and I have forgiven him in certain ways, or at least adjusted my feelings of resentment.

  My father always counted on things turning out in his favor in the end, but I wonder how that is going to happen for me.

  51

  In my sophomore year of college, I went to a party at a girl’s house off campus. It was spring with a just a few buds on the trees, and I had the feeling the mud on the ground could still freeze over-night. The house was about a half mile out of town and three seniors were sharing it. There were bikes lying on the neighbors’ lawns and at dusk when we got there, we heard dishes clinking. The place was a typical student house with a peeling yellow linoleum floor in the kitchen and a dishwasher that leaked, leaving a gray puddle sitting in front of it. The kitchen was the only room I saw; everyone was in there cooking chili and eating cornbread out of flat tin pans.

  I sat on a bench in the kitchen and a girl sat down next to me. It was Clarise, who lived there.

  “How much you think this meal’s worth?” she asked.

  I looked at her and smiled, a little confused. She had the scent of baby powder and she was wearing a blue leather skirt. She had a dimple in her chin and fine ankles.

  “’Cause you’re not leaving till you pay.”

  I picked up on it. “I’m not gonna pay if I gotta sit next to you to eat it.”

  “You have never been so lucky in your life,” she said.

  That was Clarise. I liked her from that first minute. We went out for the first time that next weekend.

  The next year I started tracking her. For almost a year, I followed her without her knowing it. I’d meet her for lunch and we’d say goodbye and go off to different classes and I’d double back to see if she really went where she said she was going, or if she was meeting some other guy. I’d watch her go into her class and fifty minutes later come out and talk to friends, or walk with them back to her house. If I saw her talking to a man, saw her flirting, saw her tongue teasing out at him, I’d just register it in my brain, although I wanted to jump out and fuck the guy up. While there has always been some impulse in me to erupt, there’s been another impulse telling me to hide.

  I’d call her that night and ask what she’d done that afternoon, who she’d seen, knowing full well what she’d been up to. But I wanted to hear her say it to see if she was telling me the truth. If she told me when she was going out with friends, I’d follow them to see if there was another man. I’d sit behind them at movies; I would check where they had dinner.

  She was always honest, but I tracked her anyway.

  Cedric knew about my following her and said it was dangerous, said I was going to lose her because of it. But I wasn’t going to lose her.

  She would disappear for weeks at a time without telling me. I didn’t know about Carl yet. I stopped following her after I listened to her speak to the “authorities” about Carl—to the Chicago police, a hospital nurse, a social worker—“There’s nothing more I can do from New Jersey. He’s gonna be in trouble.”

  “He thought he was Jesus last Christmas too.”

  “Yeah, he told me he did that.”

  Her face stiff and awkward, she sat in her living room on a big-pillowed couch plenty of nights dealing with her brother’s illness.

  52

  The nausea came up so fast under my tongue it pushed me backward. Or was it the buck of the gun I had fired more than once?

  I just kept squeezing. I kept shooting and shooting until everything in the clip was gone. Everything in me was gone. I was cold. How crazy I’d gone with a gun in my hand.

  I was trying to make myself think clearly. My body was tensed and I could hear myself breathing loudly.

  I was the one. I was the one who shot a kid in the dark.

  How did it feel for the kid? Had my bullets lifted him into the air before he fell? Had he just buckled over? My thoughts seemed logical but detached.

  Far off, I heard the breathing of traffic. The sky was a flat gray like a sky seen in water. Where had I hit him? How bad?

  It was a mistake. I was a policeman-in-training, in my first month, and mistakes might be expected.

  When my first bullet went o
ff into New Year’s Eve, it was like a brilliant messenger.

  For a second I remembered seeing Snoop Doggy Dogg on MTV in an interview, how he made a little motion with his hand, how he said, “That’s all. Boom.” And the interview was over, the screen jumping to some lollipop yellow color.

  I felt something like a shudder. I knew immediately, instinctively, that I could only live with the knowledge of having done something horrible by refusing to live with it. It seemed like I was in front of Bryant School, but I was in some unreal world.

  I would go and see what I had done and get the kid to Holy Word hospital.

  53

  I spoke with Cedric nearly every night on the phone during December. Mostly about Butras and sports.

  “You see the Knicks last night?”

  “Knicks couldn’t beat Nigeria,” Cedric said. “Remember that skinny seven-six dude Barkely took out in the ’92 Olympics? Bam! Elbow in your chest, skinny African motherfucker. He’d never been hit like that in the African Basketball Association.”

  “I was surprised he didn’t quit right then.”

  “Then Barkely started talking to him.”

  “Probably making fun on his shoes.”

  “He was probably wearing old converse All-Stars.”

  “Remember those?”

  “Duck shoes.”

  “You’d be wearing them if Michael Jordan was.”

  “Fucking baseball. Thought he could do baseball too. Can you believe that guy.”

  “He’s retired and he’s still taking Nike’s money.”

  “Just do it.”

  “I hate that, man,” Cedric said. “Nike Ghetto talk. Racist scam. It’s like: Just steal it.”

  “Knicks have been fucking up.”

  “They need a guard, or two guards.”

  “They need the Pacers to have themselves a big, fiery plane accident. Can’t even beat Indiana. How they gonnna beat the Western teams?”

  54

  The kid was down. There was the sound of gray wind, a rushing, a filling. I smelled the sewage smell we sometimes had coming over from New York or up from southern Jersey. My brain flashed. I heard a bottle rolling and some final, dry leaves. The wind came and spoke with its stink.

  Everything was one color as I looked at the box of light the kid lay half in, half out. Everything was gray: pavement, school windows, doorways, trees, clothes.

  Ice T singing in my head:

  Violent? You could call me that.

  You think I’m crazy? You ain’t seen shit yet.

  The kid was down, a shadow letting out blood. Head, round in its stocking hat. The kid was dead for sure and there was nothing between me and the room of bright light that the body lay in, there was nothing between me and the child, and I felt weak and helpless.

  Bryant School had cut-out paper snowflakes in the windows of the second floor. Leftover Halloween stuff from two months earlier on the first floor: gravestones, flying witches, ghosts, pumpkins.

  Just before I shot, I had been gripping the butt of my gun so hard that the metal digging into my skin left parallel lines on my palm.

  My hands were cold and the gun felt warm before I fired; I was cold without my jacket, but my palm was sweating.

  The gun stuck to me.

  I heard myself praying. I had stopped going to church when I was fourteen. I went twice after I heard my mother had breast cancer. In the cold night air I heard myself say, “Dear God, help me.”

  “Dear God, I need you.”

  55

  Wounded, but they could save him, I thought.

  Like Michael Green in high school. He had tried to jump a train one night and missed. His foot got caught under the train wheel and was sliced off. They took care of him at Holy Word hospital.

  I hadn’t visited Michael in the hospital even though I’d known him all my life, living around the corner from him. I kept trying to imagine Michael and his foot separated: Michael, foot. Had he seen it lying there next to him? Was it knocked twenty feet down the track like you always heard about with train accidents? Where exactly had it been cut off, and would he even have an ankle left on that side? Had he seen his own blood, had he lain in it, or was he immediately in shock, unaware of what had happened?

  I collected details from other people who saw him. He was the talk of the school. Our class was undecided whether he was stupid or just unlucky. It was actually sort of cool to hear that he’d been taking night rides on the trains for months. Hanging out in another state then hopping a ride back.

  When I thought of him in his hospital room I was overwhelmed by pity. He’d never run again. People would always be staring at his feet, or at the fake foot he’d have to wear in place of the one that was gone.

  After a week or so, most of the students had turned on him, had lost their pity. They figured he deserved to lose his leg for reasons that were never exactly clear.

  56

  Butras had been in a good mood, the holiday spirit. There were private parties happening all around town and he was doing some overtime, working weekend afternoons. People would call in to inform the station about their parties and if over a hundred guests were expected, they’d have to have their street closed down for a few hours. Once police barricades were up, someone needed to be there, to direct traffic and control the scene, and the party-givers would have to pay the overtime bill. Butras took as much overtime as he could.

  He had worked a party on Sunday the 21st, the last night that I was with Clarise,

  “How was it yesterday?” I asked him when our shift started on the 22nd.

  “A wedding. A guy I used to know, Bruce Jansen. I like crowds, you know.”

  “You’ve said that.”

  “The Jansens have some money over there on Forrest Avenue. That’s one huge house.” He was always impressed by people who had money and made a big show spending it.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “A hot romance. Bride and groom only knew each other 4 months.”

  “Won’t last,” I said.

  “When you have money, things last.”

  “Everyone coming up, saying hello to me. Offering me drinks. Hard to refuse standing out there in the cold. But you got to turn them all down.”

  “How late did it go?”

  “About 1 AM They left in a limousine. The whole town watching them get married and I’m watching the whole town.”

  “How much you make?”

  “Three bills, counting tips.”

  57

  Everyone always looks at cops and wonders about them. Just like everyone always looks at stewardesses and wonders about them. Maybe it’s the blue uniforms. A stewardess in navy blue walks by and every set of eyes moves with her, men and women, wondering: does she want our eyes to follow her? Is that why she took the job? If she wants our eyes, what else does she want? She has to know that we are watching.

  The same with cops. The uniform attracts attention. Everything hanging down outside the clothes, overloaded, weapons apparent.

  But now I know that it’s a strange and haunting paradox: certain we know them, without knowing them at all.

  58

  My sister never really left Pompan. She even went to college here, Kerr College, over in the brick towers by the river, the huge bronze abstract sculpture at the front gate, enough foreign students to have a first-rate soccer team for a small school. Brenda immersed herself in the landscape of Pompan. When she was not working at the school department, she stayed in and cooked, and ate. Her apartment always had a smell of food.

  Pompan was full of women like her, it seemed; she had plenty of friends. Brenda was a big woman with tiny, shrewd eyes. She had hunched shoulders and a bad temper. She liked small men. When she first met Cedric, she asked if he had a girl.

  When I told Cedric about her interest, he said, “I don’t need that much womanly warmth. What am I going to do with a woman bigger than I am, wrestle her?”

  My father never needed anything from anybody, as far as
I could tell. That’s why it was sad to see my sister circling him. That’s why I was sorry to hear she’d broken with her boyfriend Howard. I avoided all invitations to the weekly family dinner. My father and Brenda facing each other over her healthy food. Life in the suburbs. What could they talk about?

  On the 23rd, Brenda called to say our father had been spotted “slumming” again. A friend of hers had seen him in her restaurant with his lady friend. My sister spoke to me in a tone of conspiracy, but I really didn’t care who our father was dating. I felt detached from my father before this latest call from my sister, and I wondered again why I’d come back to Pompan.

  “Can you imagine him dancing with someone else, talking close?” my sister asked me. “Can you imagine some woman laughing at his jokes?”

  I knew she wanted to say: Can you imagine a white woman laughing at his jokes? But she didn’t say it because such words would disrespect him. I knew she was beside herself with anger though.

  “Why not?” I answered, trying to make her say he was a weak man, that she was ashamed of him. I was confused by my father’s interest in this woman. Maybe he was trying to find someone as different from my mother as possible.

  “Because your mother died twelve months ago.”

  “I know.”

  “Now’s not the time.”

  “Says who?” I asked. But I knew she was right.

  “Says people around Pompan who knew mom. They’re talking about him. They’re shocked, wondering if he’s okay.”

  “Who’s said anything to you?”

  “Your old neighbors, the Bings.”

  “Ethan?” I asked.

  “Mr. Bing. You know Ethan was in the hospital for a few days. A breakdown or something.”

  I didn’t know and felt bad that I hadn’t talked to him since I’d been back.