The Lynching Tree Page 9

  I couldn’t imagine Brenda talking with the Bings about my father, or talking with them about anything for that matter.

  “You should tell Dad that you’ve heard things. That he’s self-destructing,” Brenda said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “He’ll listen to you,” she said.

  “Come on, Brenda.”

  “He will listen to you.”

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “You know I can’t understand what you’re doing as a policeman,” she finally said.

  “There are pleasures,” I told her.

  “Better be,” she said.

  When I hung up I tried to list the pleasures to myself. For me it was the hours passed in cars—I’d always liked cars—lulled by the vibration, time for private thoughts. For guys like Butras, it was a world of order and purpose and vigilance, and I was enjoying that view of things too.

  59

  We watched people walking their kids home from school. We passed the girls with ponytails and six rings through their ears, boys ignoring their parents. And all the while Butras gave me his philosophies: “Walk and talk, that’s our job. If we’re good, we’ll just insinuate ourselves into trouble and it won’t surprise us. We’re just collectors, Cage. Collectors of suggestions and complaints.”

  The man could jabber. You get used to looking at someone who sits next to you so many hours; I thought we were getting along okay. I’d gotten used to his monologues too. I was almost glad I was partnered with someone who wasn’t trying to be nice all the time. I knew his tics: The yellow tree vanilla air freshener he kept on the dashboard; the lunch he picked out of his teeth with a toothpick. All along, I thought, I can learn police work from him. But if I got too personal, his wall would go up. Sometimes we’d be driving and I’d remember Tom Prescott in the station, putting on that show for me early in the month, messing around with Butras so I could see what kind of guy he was. Prescott saying to Butras, “You know why I respect you?”

  Butras saying, “Why?”

  “Because you’re a good teacher.”

  Butras acting dumb, saying, “Really?’

  “Yeah.”

  “What did I ever teach you?”

  “How to call it a day and how to drink until you forget about it.”

  It was all a show, but it stuck in my head that Butras could teach me something.

  “Criminals sense fear,” Butras told me more than once as we drove. “They smell it like a dog. Even if you have on a uniform, they’re trying to sense fear.”

  60

  On my way out for milk on the 23rd, I passed Larry Butras walking on Jefferson Road. Like his brother he made no concession to the cold, wearing only a black T-shirt.

  I rolled down my window. “Not in school today?”

  His expression was flat. He shook his head, fished in the pocket of a shirt for a cigarette, found one crushed in a pack and lit it.

  “Not today.”

  “Something keeping you out?”

  “I’m going back tomorrow.”

  He had steady, hostile eyes.

  “You need some help? Is there someone over there I can talk to for you?” I was thinking of doing my partner a favor.

  “I don’t want you helping me. You’ll think I owe you and I don’t owe nobody nothing.” Like half the white kids I’d met in Pompan, he talked black.

  The more I looked, the more I could see they were brothers by their eyes.

  “Who do you think did the lynching?” he shot out suddenly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” he sounded like a maniac. “Homeboy like you don’t know?”

  61

  There was a moment of ecstasy. The shot. The tangy smell. I had become violent power. There was no denying that the explosion was dazzling. No one was suffering yet; there was just a wild sound. If someone had been looking at me, they probably would have been startled by my face, my distorted features. Head to toe I was trembling. Defense had become offense. I felt fierce and triumphant and lucky in the night.

  Then the blood drained from my head. I looked toward the wall and the light and the fallen shadow.

  The light killed him, I thought.

  62

  There will be an attorney. Probably a black attorney. They will hire a black attorney to take me down. That’s the way they do it these days.

  “Officer Gambell, do you believe that you have some homicidal impulse that other people can’t even imagine?”

  “No sir.”

  “Perhaps you have impulses that occur to other people, but they manage to stifle them while you can’t?”

  “No sir.”

  “Do you believe that people are masters of their own lives?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did your victim ever have a weapon pointed at you?” the prosecutor will ask.

  “No. He just pivoted and moved toward his pocket.”

  “But he never got into the pocket, did he? And he really must have pivoted quickly because you shot him in the back.”

  There will be an attorney who will say I was so angry and frightened that I lost control.

  And I will tell him I only did what I had to do in that split second.

  63

  Before New Year’s Eve, I had been to Bryant School once in December. On Wednesday the 24th, I went to show the kids what a black policeman was; they had never met one. I had received department approval for the visit after an invitation from Mrs. Ellis. Her son was in the eighth grade class. The teacher had wanted me to give a talk, but I asked to just come in while the kids were working on an assignment, say hello, get introduced and then just walk among them. It would be more natural that way.

  I arrived after lunch. I was wearing my uniform although my shift was three hours away. When I walked into that classroom everything went quiet. They were expecting me. Although they were doing worksheets, the kids stopped and stared at me. All those bright faces were interested for a moment, then wanted to get back to their noisy routine.

  I went up to one boy, kneeled beside his desk. I didn’t remember the desk being so low.

  “What kind of work?” I asked.

  “Spelling,” the boy mumbled.

  “Spelling?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You a good speller?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Can you spell officer?”

  The kid got it right.

  “Do you have any questions for me?”

  “You ever see a man shot in the head?” the boy asked.

  64

  We got a call on Christmas Eve, Wednesday, at around 5:35, that there was a wild animal in a cage spotted on the sixth floor fire escape of the Stanford Apartments. We drove over to the apartments on Greenough Street, toured around the old, white sandstone building once. We passed the green canopy that ran from the front door to the street, and then turned into the driveway that led to the parking lot behind the place. When we got out of the car and looked up the fire escape, we could see the cage but not what was in it.

  We entered through the back door and walked to the sixth floor.

  On the stairs Butras said, “This one’s all yours.”

  It was the corner apartment. When we knocked, no one answered. I said, “Pompan police,” and knocked again and when no one came, I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.

  When I opened the door, three alligators came running at me. They moved fast and low, teeth clicking. I slammed the door and stepped back into Butras’ chest.

  “What happened?” Butras asked.

  “Alligators,” I said.

  “Fuck you. In there?”

  “Check it out,” I said. “But I’d go slow, man.”

  Butras pushed open the door and stuck his head in, then pulled back. “You gotta be kidding.”

  We went downstairs and found the manager’s office, but it was empty so we called back to the station. They thought we were messing around, but we f
inally got them to call the ASPCA which took forty five minutes to get there.

  Two women in black rubber boots and green uniforms carrying long hooked poles walked upstairs with us. They opened the apartment door and when the alligators came running, they poled the animals in the face. It was impressive, like the women had been practicing their alligator flips for years. Butras and I saw their snouts roped up when we got into the apartment.

  The place was a jungle: huge ferns, hanging plants, wooden planks stretched between tubs of water, glass tanks. Wandering around the floor were eight iguanas, two more baby alligators—the longest of the captured was three feet—10 turtles, a couple of yellow and blue parrots. It was dark inside, except along one wall where there were two sun-bright tube lights. We were all sweating in the heat.

  The cage on the fire escape had a 2-foot gecko in it.

  The ASPCA people put the alligators into plastic garbage pails and took them away, but left the rest of the beasts. We brought the cage in off the fire escape.

  The neighbors who had come out into the hall to see what was happening gave us the name of the apartment owner. They said he wasn’t around much. They said they didn’t know a thing about the animals. Back inside the jungle, we left his citation on the fish tank nearest the door.

  “The people in this town have gotten crazier since I’ve been gone,” I said to Butras.

  “They’re fucking nuts,” he said.

  65

  I felt badly about not seeing Clarise on Christmas day. She was at church and I had refused to go with her. I’d been arguing with her about church for years. At Rutgers, she drove to the First Baptist with her friend Gina every Sunday morning. They liked the minister there, Reverend Peeson, who Clarise described as slow-moving. Nearly every Saturday she’d ask me, “You want to come with me tomorrow?”

  “It’s not my thing,” I told her.

  “It’s a beautiful place.” She liked the bells ringing, she liked the singing and the organ and the tambourine playing. When she started going she didn’t know a soul, except Gina, but after a while she’d met a few people in the congregation.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t have faith,” I said. “I just can’t sit that long. Makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t know. I get solace from the cross,” Clarise said.

  “You can pray to God without being in a church,” I said.

  She looked disappointed but defiant. I could never quite put together her wildness and the desire to go to church. It seemed hypocritical to me, in a way.

  Some Sunday mornings, I watched her get ready. She wore a long blue dress that was concealing, one that took a long time to put on. She needed my help to zip it. She wore low black heels, and around her neck, a thin gold necklace her mother had given her. She carried a tiny black handbag.

  I was sorry that I couldn’t go with her, but I couldn’t.

  “Only the old men go anymore,” she said to me. “Maybe you’ll go when you’re an old man.”

  “Maybe,” I told her.

  “You like it, don’t you,” she said sadly.

  “Like what?”

  “Your police work.”

  “No baby. I like being in bed with you.”

  The day after Christmas Clarise dropped underground again, wouldn’t answer the phone. Problems with her brother I assumed.

  I was supposed to see her New Year’s Day.

  66

  Whatever you did had to be done perfectly; that was my father. This rule applied whether I was making my bed or cleaning my room, or talking to a relative. Sometimes my father would come up from behind and show me how to do it better. He even thought he could crack an egg better. As a boy, if I brought home a 98 on a test he asked, “What happened to the other two points?”

  The man grew up in rural Virginia. He was an orphan at age five, raised by an older sister and an aunt Gloria. He started taking pay jobs at eleven.

  There was one story he told over and over. It was about a teacher he had in ninth grade. She was a tiny woman with curling arthritis who used crutches to get around. He showed up for a math class unprepared and the lady saw that he had not done his work and called on him to answer problems for the next forty five minutes. He left the room determined never to go back and was walking down the hall when he got tapped on the shoulder by one of the crutches. He was a big guy, a halfback. She came right up close to him, pressed him against a wall and said, looking up into his face, “You think I humiliated you because I wanted to? You humiliated yourself. Don’t ever come back to my room without knowing your work. I will help you. Otherwise, get out of here and be a bum.”

  My father was a serious man, a good thinker. My father had contempt for some people and wasn’t good at hiding it.

  I never protested in my father’s house, not even when I came back as a policeman. There were rules.

  67

  “The Butras family knew that lynched man real well,” Brenda told me the day after Christmas. She’d been doing some hunting.

  “You’ll make detective before I will,” I told her. “What’s the latest?”

  “Next door neighbor of theirs gets her hair done where I go. Been asking around for you, you know. Seems that the lynched man and the younger Butras boy were in some bad business together.”

  “What business is that?”

  “The lynched man had been stealing things forever. Then the brother started stealing things with him. Even stealing from the boy’s father.”

  I wondered if the FBI had this information. Were these things brought out into the open when they were in town? I wanted to give Harold a call in Detroit to ask him how to pass on these facts without seeming simple if the FBI knew them already.

  “Your partner’s father had a soft spot for the lynched man, used him as a fix-it man, knew him when they were in Pompan High School together. Lynched man was like some genius with machines, even though he was drunk half the time. When the father found out that his son was criming with his grade school buddy, he threw the man out, sided with his son. The lynched man and the boy stopped talking around then. A simple case of falling out among thieves.”

  “So who killed Wilbourne?” I asked her.

  “You’re the police. Aren’t you supposed to tell me it was Wilbourne’s son, beaten once too often by his old man? Isn’t that the official story? All I know is the lynched man was one nasty piece of work and nobody around seems to care who killed him.”

  “The unofficial story is that one night when he was picked up drunk, he punched a cop in the face, knocking out some teeth and after that everyone on the force hated him,” I told her.

  “Those men hate everyone.”

  68

  “You married?” Butras asked on the 26th just after we dropped off Joey Ip.

  “No. How about you?”

  “No. Why are you wearing a silver bracelet on your wrist then?” Butras said what he was thinking, straight out.

  Clarise had given it to me. Brought it back from Gambia. A hunter’s good luck charm. Butras must never have seen a man wearing a bracelet.

  “I just like the way it looks,” I told him. “I thought you were married? Didn’t I hear that?”

  “Used to be.”

  “When?”

  “Didn’t last long. A year. After high school. It wasn’t much to speak of.”

  “You see her anymore?”

  “Never. She’s gone. Gone, goodbye. She never liked my father or my brother or how close we were. Good riddance.

  “Hey. Happy Christmas,” Butras said. “I remembered this morning that I forgot to tell you that yesterday.”

  “Merry to you,” I answered.

  69

  “You remember Justina?” Cedric asked on the phone that night. Most nights we talked after I came in from my shift at one. I appreciated the chance to unwind with him. He always had something to say. I could just lay back and listen to him go on.

  “Of course I remember Justina. Short, real dark, big nail
s, nice legs, ass like a coffee table with two cups on it.”

  “You know I used to like her, right?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “She’s marrying a white guy.”

  “So?”

  “So I saw her the other day, she’s working downtown, and I told her, ‘Why would he be marrying a black girl like you? So you got a college degree. So what?’ ‘The man loves me,’ she says. ‘There’s no benefit for him marrying you. Why’s he even thinking about it?’ I say to her. ‘You racist asshole,’ is what she says to me. Can you believe that?”

  “What I can’t believe is you saying what you said to her.”

  “What am I supposed to say?” Cedric asked.

  “You’re supposed to say Congratulations when someone you know is getting married.”

  “Fuck that. She’s getting herself fucked over.”

  “Says who? You need some help.”

  “Why do you want to go through your life wanting to be the first black this, the first black that? Who wants to be worrying about that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s like Spike’s always saying: You got to take care of the brothers first.”

  “Spike’s making television commercials.”

  “That’s just a job for Spike.”

  “Spike’s making some money.”

  “Spike’s just keeping his name public. I’ll tell you one thing though. Spike wouldn’t be the first black policeman in some white suburb. No, not Spike.”

  “Fuck Spike. You know how tired I am of hearing about Spike?”

  70

  As I came into the station to change clothes at my usual 3:30 on Saturday the 27th, I heard some of the guys talking. I had stopped outside the locker room to pour myself a coffee. They were always talking, standing around with their stories, but I’d never heard my name mentioned before. I couldn’t make out who was who through the closed door.