“You forgot to say ‘Peace.’ ”
“Oh yeah,” Juice added: “Peace.”
Juice’s beeper went off.
“Better go check on my father.”
A white Plymouth was parked in front of Juice’s dad’s apartment. The headlights were on and they glowed like the eyes of an alligator gliding through a storm in the night. Leonard took an automatic from the glove compartment and looked at me once and stuffed it down his cummerbund.
“What are we gonna do?” I asked Leonard Compton.
We had parked the limousine on the side of the building.
“We ain’t gonna do a damn thing, Toby Sligh. You’re gonna stay here while I check on my father.”
“What if Det. Thomas is up there with a gun?”
Juice checked his automatic to make sure it was loaded.
“Think I like to play with automatics, Toby Sligh?”
“What if Thomas comes for me while you’re up there with your father?”
“There’s another automatic hidden underneath the dash.”
Juice produced it, loaded it, and handed it to me.
“I get sick to my stomach holding something like this.”
“Would you feel any better holding a wreath?”
The rain started falling and Juice switched off his beeper— the noise of it was something we had sort of gotten used to.
Juice said, “Should’ve known from the moment you told me. Should’ve known that that bastard would come after my daddy.”
Juice gave me the keys to the limousine. Then we switched positions. I was in the driver’s seat.
“You stay here, Toby. You keep the engine running. If I’m not out with my pops in five minutes , or if you hear gunshots, you call the police.”
Juice had his hand on the door to the limo and was about to step out when he stopped and looked at me.
“Hey, G., it’s me. It’s your old buddy, Leonard… . I been your friend, ain’t I?”
I nodded; he smiled.
“You follow in after me, Toby? I’ll shoot you. I’ll put a bullet through you ’fore yo’ ass is in the door.”
After five minutes I honked the horn twice, left the limousine idling, and zigzagged through the storm. I had called the cops, like Juice had requested, but unlike he’d requested, I wouldn’t wait for them. As I approached the stairwell where I had left Donna, my knees buckled. But I got back up again. And I couldn’t help thinking about Leonard Compton running with that parachute strapped to his back as I crept up the stairs, and I stepped down the hallway, and I stopped at Leonard’s father’s door and pressed my ear against it. I could make out two voices—Det. Thomas’s and Juice’s. And then I heard a third. It belonged to Juice’s father.
“You know where she lives!”
“I ain’t got no idea.”
“I’ll shoot the old man!”
“Do I care if I live?”
“Where’s Toby Sligh!”
“G., how should I know?”
“You tell me where she lives or—”
“Do I care? Think I care?”
I knocked on the door.
“Leonard! It’s Toby!”
The voices went quiet. I unpocketed the gun.
“Leonard! It’s Toby! I’m coming in, Leonard!”
I turned the knob slowly and entered the apartment.
Det. Thomas was sitting on the couch with Leonard’s father, the barrel of a pistol pressed to Leonard’s father’s forehead. Leonard’s father sat with a phone in his lap and was dialing Juice’s beeper number over and over. “I have to call Leonard,” Juice’s father was saying. “I have to call Leonard … he’s such a clever boy.”
“Take the gun from Toby,” Det. Thomas ordered. Juice took my automatic and tossed it in a corner. “Hello,” Juice’s father said, smiling up at me. He was shaking and a crackpipe stuffed with crack lay before him. Juice stood beneath a naked light- bulb in a corner. “Do I care if I live?” Juice’s father was saying. “Do I care if I live? Do I care? Think I care?”
“Maybe you can tell me where Compton’s stash is hidden,” Det. Thomas began, and tapped his finger on the trigger.
“Tell him what happened, Toby Sligh,” Juice said.
“Juice ate it. It was phony. And the money was bogus. There’s a hundred thousand dollars in the limo, if you want it.”
“That’s not what I want, Toby Sligh,” Thomas said. “Tell me where your mother is.”
Mr. Compton started speaking: “Valilian Compton, you’re a beautiful woman… . Will you dance with me, Valilian? Will you marry me?”
“The drugs aren’t there! I told you, Juice ate ’em!”
“That wasn’t the deal—”
“But the drugs aren’t there!”
“Tell me where your mother is,” Thomas said evenly. “Tell me where your mother is or I’ll blow this old man’s brains out.”
“Do I care? Think I care?” Juice’s father was saying. “Do I care? Think I care?”
He was reaching for the crackpipe.
“I told you you never should’ve come here, Toby.”
We could hear sirens.
Thomas smiled, “Those for me?”
With the gun to his forehead, Edward Compton lit the crack-pipe, sucked it till it sparkled, and collapsed back on the couch.
“We can call him Leonard. How’s that sound, Valilian? He has his mama’s looks, but he’s got his daddy’s brains!”
“Did you phone the police? Tell the truth, Toby Sligh.”
Thomas aimed the gun at me; I nodded.
“Naughty, naughty.”
“You got all A’s? Let me see your report card! Eddy, don’t be jealous! You had your share of glory!”
“Compton is right. You never should have come here. And now we’re gonna make another deal, Toby Sligh.”
Thomas rose from the couch. He aimed the gun at Juice’s father. He was moving toward a catwalk beyond an open window. “I’m gonna count ten, and you’ll tell me where your mom is. If you don’t”—he yanked the phone cord—“Leonard Compton’s father dies. And if you end up giving me a bogus address, I’ll find your father, Toby, and I’ll shoot him. Understand? One—”
Juice said, “He’s a coward, Toby Sligh.”
“Two—”
“Jesus, Juice!”
The sirens were approaching.
“Three—”
“Don’t, Toby! He’s a coward and a liar!”
“Four!”
Thomas drew a bead on Juice’s father’s head.
“Five.”
“I’ll call Leonard. … he’s such a clever child.”
“Six.”
“Look at E-Eye! E-Eyes lyin’ on the ground!”
“Seven!”
“You’re too good! You’re too good for me, Valilian!”
“Eight!”
“Do I care? Think I care if I live?”
“Nine!”
“Someday, Leonard, you will make us very happy!”
“Ten! It’s your last chance!”
And I gave him Mom’s address.
As soon as I had, Thomas leapt from the window and Juice’s father crumpled in a pile on the floor. He was fighting for air, and clutching his chest, and Leonard screamed and lifted him and held him aloft in his trembling arms. Outside it was storming and I got the automatic and the sirens that were singing in the night had passed us by. “Go to your mother, Toby Sligh! Warn your mother!” And I left Leonard standing there, cradling the body, rocking his father in his arms: “God, I’m sorry!”
As I hurtled down the stairwell I heard shots exploding, and when I got to the limo the windows were shattered and the engine was on fire and the tires were destroyed. I rescued Juice’s money—Thomas hadn’t touched it—and stuffed it and the automatic down my cummerbund. On the cellular phone I got through to 911, then I fished Peaches’ telephone number from my wallet and rapid-fire dialed her and begged her to hurry. “Keep your pants on, Tiger, I’m r
ight around the corner!” She arrived at the same time the paramedics did. “Toby!” she hollered. “Take a look at that limo! Who the ambulance for?” “It’s for Leonard Compton’s father.” “You know Leonard’s daddy?” she asked. I nodded. “Here,” I said. I gave her the $100,000. “This money’s dirty,” Peaches said, and wouldn’t touch it. “My mom is in danger! I need your taxi, Peaches!” Peaches was looking at the burning limousine. “I’m Leonard Comptons friend! You gotta believe me!”
She shouted out the window at the paramedic driver: “Apartment 2B! Hurry up! Someone’s dying!” Then she jumped from the taxi and handed me the keys and said, “Be careful, white boy,” and she hustled for the stairwell. In the rearview mirror I saw her turn around: “Toby! Come back! I forgot something, Toby!”
But Peaches was too late; Toby Sligh was gone already.
I took the expressway that cut across town and threw the gun and Juice’s money in the blanket-strewn backseat. I thought I heard a noise like an animal crying, a faint dreamy noise. But I was just imagining.
Wont’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause they he all I’ve ever had
Redemption songs… .
The storm was beginning to cataract now as I passed a jacaranda bleeding on a median. It was a beautiful tree, top-heavy with flowers, and the blossoms made a carpet of violet on the highway. I was thinking of my mother, and my father, and Ian; I was thinking of Juice with his father in his arms; I was thinking of Angelina dancing in the library; I was thinking of Grace and her anonymous friend; and I was thinking of Eli alone, at St. Osyth’s, and the promise I had made, and the things that we had said. I listened to the rain and pulled the beeper from my pocket—the beeper St. Osyth’s had given to me. Only then did I see that someone had switched it off—that it had been switched off, in fact, the whole evening. So I switched it back on and shoved it in my pocket, and almost immediately it began to beep; and as I left the expressway and arrived at my mother’s, I turned down the stereo and drew from my pocket the weathered brown bag Ian Lamb had given to me. In it was a rose and an artificial eye. The petals were withered. The eye had been smashed.
Full fadom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
These are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly rings his knell:
Ding dong.
Hark now I hear him — ding-dong bell… .
As I Walked up the drive to my mother’s apartment, past the white Plymouth, which was sideways in the yard, I did not pay attention to the Polaroid photographs strewn on the ground, and in the bushes, and in the trees; I did not pay attention to the photos of the three of them taken together seventeen years before; I did not pay attention to the picture of my parents kissing either cheek of a young Det. Thomas; I didn’t pay attention to the picture of my mother sandwiched in between their naked bodies in bed; I didn’t pay attention to the picture of my father, younger and handsomer and wrestling with Thomas in the frontyard of a house I had never seen till then; I didn’t pay attention to the picture of my mother standing on the shoulders of Thomas and my father with her hands on her hips, at an unknown beach; I didn’t pay attention to the photo of my mother kissing my father in the backseat of a Chevy; and I didn’t pay attention to the photo of my mother kissing Det. Thomas in the same backseat; and I didn’t pay attention to the picture of my mother, now slightly pregnant and staring at the camera while a thumb, swollen with whorls, obtruded on the photo and hinted at more than the photographer’s identity. I only paid attention (Ian’s bag in my pocket, the gun and drug money abandoned in the cab) to the pictures of Ian woven through the weeping willow, yearbook photos threaded onto slender willow branches—a younger Ian, probably no more than fourteen, standing in a swimsuit beside a man who looked like Scarcross, a younger, haler Scarcross with a staff and gorgeous robes. I only paid attention to a sound like a machine, as if God were wandering the world devouring metal. Jimi Hendrix was playing on the white Plymouth’s radio, the volume cranked and booming out across the cringing night:
You jump in front of my car
When you know all the time
That 90 miles an hour, girl,
Is the speed I drive.
You say it’s all right,
You don’t mind a little pain;
You say you just want me to
Take you for a drive! …
My mother was crying on the side of the house, her head in her hands, as I approached unseen. Her wedding dress was muddy in a puddle at her feet, and her shotgun lay broken and empty of shells. At the threshold to the door I spied the loaded pistol Thomas had held to Leonard Compton’s father’s forehead: it too lay open and empty of bullets—as if, out of honor, all guns had been relinquished. The efficiency was empty, except for cardboard boxes which lay packed and neatly stacked beside the doorless frontdoor. As I passed through the apartment, the pounding sound of metal clashed with Jimi Hendrix in the deafening night:
You’re just like
Crosstown traffic!
So hard to get through to you!
Crosstown traffic!
1 don’t need to run over you!
Crosstown traffic!
All you do is slow me down!
I’m tryin’ to get on the other side of town… .
Then, through a hole in the devastated plaster, I spotted my father opposite Thomas, naked from the waist up, crouching with a sledgehammer, reducing Christ’s Chevy to a twisted heap of metal as Thomas, also shirtless, matched my father blow for blow. Dad would look at Thomas and obliterate a windshield; Thomas would respond by walloping a taillight. They circled each other like the cats in the storm, like the toms I had seen the day I got ill, with no intent to kill, just orbiting each other, engaged in a violent and meaningless dance, taking out their anger on the abject Chevrolet which received their rain of blows with tortured shouts of mangled metal. Their bare feet shuffled unharmed through shards of glass, their white eyes were livid with something like love, the night was thick and dank as sweat sweltered off their bodies, and they could hear my mother in between their hammer blows while Jimi Hendrix sang to the sirenless night:
I’m not the only soul
Who’s accused of hit and run;
Tire tracks all across your back —
I can see you’ve had your fun;
But, darling, can’t you see
My signals turn from green to red?
And with you I can see a traffic jam
Way up ahead! It’s just like …
When at last Mom emerged from the side of the house, she was holding the gun I had stashed in Christ’s Corvair. Mom gripped the handle. She was fingering the trigger. And she saw me and shouted, “Get the hell out of here!” When Det. Thomas saw me he abandoned his hammer, and my father dropped his: and they landed on each other. They were rolling in the glass beside the crucified Chevy, their tumbling bodies indistinct and glistening with blood; and my mother was watching them, trying to decide when to shoot, if to shoot, who to shoot, what to shoot. Then Thomas did something and my dad stopped moving, and Thomas rose above my father and looked at Mom and me. “You’re mine!” Thomas roared. “I’ve waited too long! I love both of you! You’re mine! And I’m sorry… .” And his face pale and weeping, his body drained and trembling, the muscles of his chest and torso fluttering with tics, Thomas swayed a little in the heat, as if faint, as if something were devouring him from the inside, and he shut his twitching eyes, and he lifted his chin, and with barely the strength left to raise the sledgehammer, he raised it; and my mother dropped the gun and said, “I can’t!” So I picked up the firearm and pointed it at Thomas, who stood with the hammer poised above my father’s head. “You can’t, Toby Sligh! You wouldn’t if you knew! We shared your mother, Toby! We’ll always share your mother! I
’m the one who’s searched for her for seventeen years! I’m the one who’s dreamed about the son he never had! I’m the one who’s lived a life of loneliness and lies! Aren’t I entitled to the truth? Don’t I have a right to answers? Unless —! Unless—!” Thomas swayed and drew a breath. And just as he was about to bring the sledgehammer down, my father paralytic in a scattering of glass, we all heard a voice, a tiny voice cry, “Jacaranda!” and we turned to see Donna, Peaches’ stowaway cousin, stumbling toward us, a lost look in her eyes. In one hand she held a gun, in the other she held money; and she left a trail of bills in her sleepy, awkward wake. “Jacaranda!” she shouted, and aimed the gun at no one, and I grabbed the weapon from her, and I took her by the hand. “C’mon, Donna,” I told her. “Let’s get outta here… .” And as we turned our backs I thought I heard a branch breaking—a sharp protracted crack, like a shattering limb—and I turned to see Thomas collapse across my father. He was having convulsions, and my dad had awakened, and he and my mother steadied Thomas in their arms. “Your uncle’s diabetic,” my mother explained. “Uncle Thomas, Toby—he’s hypoglycemic. There’s some O.J. in the icebox. Would you put some sugar in it?” And when I returned I knelt down between them and lifted the juice to Thomas’ lips, and my father held the body of his brother in his arms, and Donna was afraid and looked away; but I didn’t. When Det. Thomas at last came to, he pressed his ringfinger to my father’s gory chest, and he brushed away the bangs from my forehead with his free hand, and drew an upside-down cross, and whispered, “L-I-E.” I didn’t know if my uncle was my uncle or my father. In fact, I didn’t care. Everybody was alive. And as we drove in Peaches’ cab to St. Osyth’s Hospital, Donna in the frontseat laughing at my beeping beeper, and as I helped the brothers stagger in the E.R. arm in arm, my mother already heading for the interstate, I thought to myself, I have two fathers: one who loves, and one who lies. I’ve got one of each kind.
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