The night felt claustrophobic. He felt entombed by it, the city closing on him like a coffin lid. Was it really just three days since he had arrived back here and proclaimed himself glad to be home?
Melvin had been right, more right than he could have known. This city had changed.
Its streets were piled high with garbage, yes, and though the weather had been cool and that muted the smell, it was not hard, if you took a deep enough breath when the wind turned just right, to taste the moldy bread, fish heads, and old soup cans piling up and overflowing, waiting for this thing to be over.
But it wasn’t just the garbage. It was the sense that something had come undone, some sense of white people’s prerogatives, some sense of black people’s place, some sense of the way things were supposed to work.
Everything was up in the air. It wasn’t just a labor arrangement that was being renegotiated here.
You saw the recognition of this in the flinty eyes of those white men looking across at those black ones—and in the way the black ones ignored their hateful stares and laughed together as if, for the first time, they themselves were enough for themselves. And you saw it in the newspaper accounts of the strike, in the frantic way the reporters and editorial writers cheered on the mayor and pleaded with him to stand firm until, if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought Henry Loeb was facing off against the very forces of hell and not a group of rough-hewn men asking for a slightly higher starvation wage and a place to shower the muck off at work. You saw it, too, in those same humble men, marching in circles, singing their gospel songs and carrying their signs that declared the self-evident as if it were the revolutionary.
Malcolm arrived at the Holiday Inn coated in a light sheen of icy sweat. He pushed open the door behind the reservation desk marked Employees Only, wheeled his bicycle down the hall, and opened the janitor’s closet. He pushed the bike in and pulled the big floor buffer out. His supervisor, Mr. Whitten, would be looking for him on the fifth floor in about ten minutes. He had said he would teach Malcolm to operate the big machine, after which Malcolm would be left to polish the elevator lobbies throughout the building. It would be numbing, mindless work, but Malcolm thought he wouldn’t mind. He thought he would enjoy the solitude.
Then he heard a woman’s voice. “No, Mr. Pruitt! Stop that! Please!”
What…?
It came from across the hall, the employee lounge. Malcolm pushed open the door. What he saw stunned him.
On the far side of the room the sister, Lynette, was wrestling with Rupert Pruitt. He had her pinned in a corner and was nuzzling her neck, laughing a little as she tried to ward off his big, flabby arms with her little skinny ones.
At the sound of Malcolm’s entrance, Pruitt looked around without interest. “Close the door, boy, and get out of here,” he said, turning back to Lynette. The words were mush. He was drunk.
“Get off her!” ordered Malcolm. “Leave her alone!”
His tone got the white man’s attention and he came around slowly. “Told you to get out of here!” he cried in his bleary voice.
Malcolm’s body moved without his mind. He closed the space between them in two steps, grabbed the white man’s collar and pulled him away from Lynette. Pruitt was heavy, but Malcolm was furious. He gave the white man a shove that landed him on the tattered employee couch.
“You leave her alone, hear? You leave her alone, or I will personally whip your ass!”
Pruitt’s face was livid. “Who the hell you think you are, boy? Who the hell you think you are?” He worked himself up from the couch, came unsteadily to his feet. “You think you can put your hands one me? Just you wait. I got somethin’ for you.”
And so saying, he wobbled out of the break room and opened the door of his office across the hall. Lynette grabbed Malcolm’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get out of here.”
Malcolm yanked his arm away. “No,” he said. He was seething. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Be damned if this honky makes me run.”
And then Pruitt closed the question altogether. He tottered back into the break room with a double-barreled shotgun held loosely in his grasp, pointing to the floor. “Now,” he said, “let’s see you put your hands on me again.”
Malcolm should have felt fear. He knew this. But somehow, he did not. Instead of flinching away, he walked straight up to Pruitt, and saw Pruitt’s eyes grow large as the space between them shrank to little more than a foot. The gun never came up, still threatened only the floor. Pruitt swallowed. Malcolm said, “Big man with a gun, huh?”
The white man gestured the rifle toward the door. “You’re fired,” he said. His voice broke like an adolescent boy’s. “Go on, get out of here.”
Malcolm burned the man with his eyes to let him see how much of a damn he gave about being fired. Only when he was sure that his point had been made did he leave the room. Lynette followed as he went to the janitor’s closet and retrieved his bicycle and jacket. She stood there waiting as he rolled the floor buffer back in and closed the door. Pruitt watched them the whole time with those large eyes, the rifle hanging down. When finally Malcolm wheeled his bicycle down the hallway to the lobby, Lynette was at his side.
“Thank you,” she said. “Good thing you came when you did.”
“Are you all right, sister?”
She nodded. He was not convinced.
They crossed the lobby, stepped outside into the cool March evening, and paused beneath the carport. “You don’t have to wait with me,” she said. “My father will be here any minute to pick me up.”
“I’ll wait,” he told her.
She lit a cigarette with quivering hands, exhaled a jet of smoke. “I’m sorry you lost your job because of me,” she said.
“Forget about it.”
“Might be all right, though. Pruitt, he forgets half the stuff he says when he’s been drinking. Might not even remember he let you go.”
Malcolm waved it away impatiently. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “What about you? You want to call the police?”
“Police?” She chased the word with a bitter laugh, sucked at the cigarette. “What am I going to tell the police?”
“What do you mean? Tell them what happened.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Be our word against his. And he’s a white man. ‘Call the police.’” She made a noise of derision. “You know better than that.”
“He pinched you the other day. I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It wasn’t the first time. He’s not the only one. So?”
“So he has no right.”
“White men do a lot of things they have no right to do. Men period, you want to know the truth.”
“But you can’t just do nothing.”
“It’ll be all right,” she insisted. “He gets like that when he’s been drinking. He always apologizes when he sobers up.”
“So this is a regular thing?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I mean, he’s put his hands on me before, yeah. But he’s never pinned me in a corner like that. But he’ll apologize. He always does.” Another laugh, bitter as her cigarette smoke.
She took a seat near a big stone planter. Malcolm sat next to her. “You don’t mean to say you’re coming back here?”
She snorted. “What else am I going to do? Jobs are hard to come by. I got tuition to pay.”
The anger rose in Malcolm so hard he actually trembled. “To hell with that,” he said. “There’s got to be something else you can do.”
“It’s my problem,” she told him.
“You’re a black sister,” he told her. “That makes it my problem, too.”
“Sister,” she said. A fatigue older than rivers rode the curve of a closed smile. “That sounds nice. That sounds…noble. But what you gon’ do for me, ‘brother’? You gon’ protect me? You got some way to make that white man in there leave me alone? If I raise too big a stink and he fires me like he just fired you, a
re you going to pay my tuition? Are you going to help me put food on my parents’ table?”
Malcolm had no response.
She touched his hand. “I thank you for the thought,” she said. “I do. But that’s all it is, isn’t it, a thought? All it ever can be. Whole reason I’m going to school is so I can learn something and better myself, so I don’t have to live here and I don’t have to put up with this kind of shit anymore.”
Still, Malcolm struggled for words. There had to be something he could do. There had to be something. But for the life of him, Malcolm Toussaint could not name it. The inability made him feel…impotent. So that was the way it was? A white cop could gas you, a white man could try to rape a sister right in front of your eyes, and there was nothing you could do about it, nothing you could even say?
For some reason, he thought of Pop and that pitiful sign. I AM A MAN. Malcolm almost laughed. How could you be a man if you couldn’t even protect a woman? What was left if they took even that much away from you?
She seemed to read his mind. “It’s my problem,” she repeated.
A pair of headlights raked over them before Malcolm could respond and an old Chevy rumbled up the driveway. A tired-looking man was behind the wheel. Lynette stood. She dropped the cigarette and mashed it out with the toe of her shoe, began smoothing her blouse and skirt.
“That’s my father,” she said. “Do I look okay? I mean, do I look like anything happened?”
“You look fine,” said Malcolm.
“Don’t say anything to him, okay? Don’t tell him what happened.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he finds out, he’ll act just like you. Worse, since I’m his daughter. He’ll feel like he has to do something, because he’s a man and that’s how men think. But there’s nothing he can do. Same as you.”
She was gazing hard at him, waiting for his answer.
“Yeah,” he told her after a moment. “Same as me.”
She squeezed his hand. “Thank you,” she said.
For what? he wanted to say. What the hell had he done? But then, all at once, Lynette became someone else. This new Lynette wheeled around and trotted toward her father’s car, waving excitedly, her face lit with a smile light as cream, a smile that knew nothing of care, much less of almost rape. The tired man’s face lost its fatigue in a smile as she slammed the door behind her, leaning over to kiss his cheek. They spoke for a moment, then the car rumbled off. Lynette’s father gave Malcolm a quick once-over and a noncommittal nod as he passed.
“Been lookin’ for you,” said a harsh voice from behind. “Might have figured you out here chasin’ some tail. All you bucks the same.”
Malcolm turned. Ronald Whitten was a stocky man who stood not much more than five and a half feet beneath a brush cut the color of rain clouds. “You were supposed to get the buffer and meet me up on five,” he said. “Or did you forget?”
“I don’t work here anymore,” said Malcolm.
“What are you talking about?”
“Pruitt fired me.”
“Fired you for what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Hell it doesn’t. I’ve been asking for help on the nightshift for a month and he finally hires somebody and now you tell me he fired you? Fired you for what?”
Malcolm sighed. “He was drunk. He was trying to rape that girl, Lynette. I pulled him off her. I may have told him I was going to kick his ass if he laid a hand on her again. He went and got a shotgun and told me to get out.”
Whitten shook his head. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed.
“Yeah,” said Malcolm, lifting a leg to straddle his bike. “So anyway, I don’t work here.”
Whitten said, “Wait.” Malcolm looked at him. “Look, I’ll go get the buffer—probably not a good idea for you to go past his office right now. I’ll meet you up on the fifth floor.”
“But I’m fired,” said Malcolm.
“No, you’re not,” said Whitten. “I’ll talk to him. It’ll be fine. He gets in his cups sometimes and says stupid things, does stupid things. Half the time, he doesn’t even remember afterward.”
Malcolm was not at all convinced he even wanted the job. Whitten seemed to sense this. “Look,” he said, “you’re not fired. Just trust me on this. I promise I can make it okay. Now, I need somebody to work this shift and unless I’m mistaken, you need work. So what’s it going to be?”
Malcolm considered for a long moment. “Trust me,” the man had said. And Malcolm had almost laughed. Because he had lost something three days ago on Main Street and finally, in that moment, he knew what it was.
He had lost trust. No, he had lost faith.
Faith in the idea that white people would ever really see black people, ever really accept that Negroes were human, too. This would never happen. They would never change. They could never change. He knew that now.
It was as he had told Nanny Parker. There was no reaching those people, no persuading them. They understood only power. Negroes needed power. Malcolm needed power. And suddenly, he knew what he had to do.
So he burned a half dozen responses away in the incandescence of a smile whose falseness he knew this man would never see. “Okay,” he said.
Whitten gave a tight nod. “Good,” he said. “Put your bike behind the desk. I’ll get that buffer and meet you on five. It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Malcolm worked that night. He worked the next night, too, and saw Lynette, who told him her prediction had been right: Rupert Pruitt had left her flowers. He saw Pruitt, too, in the hallway outside the break room. Pruitt stopped him. “Look,” he said, “last night, we both said some things, did some things, we probably shouldn’t have done…”
Malcolm waited out this speech, nodded when Pruitt got to the part about leaving it all in the past, said okay, and then wheeled his mop and pail away to go clean the women’s restroom in the lobby. He was aware of the questions in Pruitt’s eyes as they followed him down the hall. He ignored them.
Malcolm worked, and the days passed. He worked the night after Pop—Pop!—was arrested at a City Hall sit-in. He worked the night somebody set garbage fires and angry black boys hooted at firemen who tried to knock the blazes down. He worked the night Pruitt patted Lynette on the ass as she walked by him, balancing a tray of hamburgers and french fries. He pretended not to see this. He worked. He buffed floors. He emptied ashtrays. He cleaned toilets. All this he did scrupulously and without complaint. He smiled when Whitten told him to do something. He nodded when he passed Pruitt in the hallway. He kept his head down. He did his job. He worked the three weeks until his first payday. When he got his pay envelope, he took the check and cashed it at a liquor store, then rode the bus to a freestanding stucco building he knew with a neon pistol hanging over the door.
He walked in. He did not bother looking at the display cases. He went straight to the man behind the counter, a longhaired white guy in an old Army coat, who stood there regarding him as if he had been waiting for Malcolm all along, as if he had been expecting him all these years. Malcolm tented his fingers on the glass of the counter and met the white man’s eyes.
“I want to buy a gun,” he said.
nine
Once upon a time, he had been a soldier.
Corporal Willie Washington was someone trusted to handle important information, make life and death decisions, get things done. In fact, his heroism in the battle for Quang Tri City had won him the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Not exactly a Medal of Honor, but not nothing, either, and when he had received his honorable discharge, he had gone home to a life pregnant with expectation.
This was the plan: finish college, get a job, start a career, live a good life. Or so he had thought. But somehow, it never happened. Somehow, he managed to return to the world and yet, not return to the world, hunkering instead in a fearful, shadowy place out on the margins, where every string of firecrackers popping off on the Fourth of July might be a firefight, every helicopter choppi
ng the air over a gridlocked freeway might be a Huey hitting a hot LZ, every child with Asian features running in your direction might be some kid the gooks had rigged to explode. He would look around him in amazement that other people did not react to these things. He wondered what was wrong with them that they didn’t understand what he understood, didn’t see what he saw.
Then, on a sunny afternoon at a barbecue in his mother’s backyard, the voices started talking to him. And they would not stop.
It got worse after that. He cried a lot. He stopped shaving. He stopped eating. His wife tried to get him to see a doctor. A head doctor. He told her no. She insisted, following him down the hallway outside their room. “Willie, we can’t go on like this. You have to see somebody to help you with your problem.”
Problem?
He slapped her.
“I am not fuckin’ crazy!” he screamed, spittle spraying off his lips.
That’s telling the bitch, one of the voices said.
“Damn right,” he replied.
Her hand to her bloodied mouth, Pam had stared at him, a dozen emotions competing for primacy on her face. Awe incredulity anger shock sorrow…pity.
When he saw that last one, it was like a hammer hit him in the heart. She pitied him? His shoulders rounded and he went back into the bedroom. He didn’t leave it for two weeks.
Once, he had been a soldier. But that was a long time ago.
Now, he was a homeless drunk, and he wasn’t even quite sure how that had happened. All he knew was that one day, Pam said she’d had enough; one day, she’d told him she couldn’t put up with him anymore. And then he’d gone from their home to his old room in his parents’ house, and then, after a couple of more years, to a friend’s couch, and then to his own car, and then to the streets, slipping, frictionless as a child on a playground slide, down the path to uselessness.
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