Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “Wonder what fool said that?”

  She smiled and did not reply.

  They chose not to eat at the diner in town. This decision was made without either of them speaking it or even needing to speak it. They both simply knew. So they got into Bob’s car and drove. As they reached the edge of town, passing a little church with a Negro cemetery in the back, headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. Without meaning to, Bob caught his breath and held it tight, old headlines of brazen racial murder looming up in his thoughts.

  He did not breathe again until the headlights were right behind him and he realized the vehicle was a delivery truck. The rush of air when he inhaled again almost made him dizzy as the truck, with its Hamm’s beer logo on the side, swept into the oncoming traffic lane and roared past, the little Corvair rocking a little in its wake.

  “You okay there?” asked Janeka.

  Bob’s grin felt unsteady, as if it seesawed on his face. “Yeah,” he said. “For a minute there, I just thought—”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I know. Me too.”

  He looked over at her. They both laughed.

  “Well, other than that,” he said, “how did you like the movie?”

  “I loved the movie,” she said. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  They laughed again and the silence that fell then felt companionable as the car raced along the darkened road through the fields and trees of the Delta. Half an hour later, they passed through the front gates of their campus, and a few moments after that, they pulled up in front of the girl’s dorm. Bob had been rehearsing this moment in his mind all day. He would go around and open her door for her, of course, but then there was the big question: to kiss, not to kiss, what to say, how to say it.

  He turned toward her now, still not knowing what he would do. And Janeka shocked him. She placed her hand over his and kissed him on the lips—or at least, very near the lips—a quick peck that was over before he even knew it was happening, then bounced out of the passenger’s side door while he was still fumbling to register that the kiss had actually happened.

  “Thanks again for the movie,” she said now, leaning through the passenger side window. “I had a great time.” Pause. “You want to have lunch together tomorrow? Say at noon in the cafeteria?”

  “Sure, that sounds great. I’ll see you then.”

  Or at least, this was what Bob wanted to say, in an easy, carefree voice. But he realized to his horror that he no longer had a voice, easy, carefree, or otherwise, because his throat had constricted to a tunnel the approximate circumference of a pinhead from which no intelligible sound had a prayer of escape. So he nodded instead—vigorously. He nodded as if nodding were a power source, as if his head were a pump handle in the desert, as if he got paid by the nod.

  And she gave him a dubious look, then a dubious smile, then said, dubiously, “Well, okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He waited until she had opened the door of her dorm building. She waved. He waved. He started the car. It floated him home.

  Forty years later, the memory was still good for a smile as Bob drove past Stymie’s Steakhouse on Michigan Avenue and began looking for a place to park.

  Fifteen blocks north on the same street, Amy Landingham pulled into a parking slot in the garage beneath the Chicago Post building. She climbed out of the van—her “mommy bus,” girlfriends called it when they made fun of her for being 27 years old and already having two kids. Amy beeped the lock, feeling rather pleased with herself.

  Mission accomplished. She had gotten the interview. Or at least, the promise of an interview. She would go upstairs now and get the cops out of the way, spend half an hour repeating the particulars of a 30-second encounter until they finally realized she knew nothing of value, then hop in the van and zip back out to Bob’s. Maybe, if the cops didn’t detain her too long, she’d have time to interview Lydia and Doug before she left. The more reporting she got out of the way now, the more time she’d have to massage the piece tonight before the desk started screaming for copy.

  This was an important story—and Bob was right, it was a great opportunity for her, too. She wanted to get it right.

  Amy was 27. She knew that logically, she should be strategizing a transition into television news—or better yet, the Internet. That’s where the future was, and everybody knew it. When people her age found out what she did, they tended to look at her the way you would a two-headed calf. The old heads in the newsroom called people like her “true believers,” meaning Gen Y kids who somehow missed the memo that a thing was not worth doing unless it was done digitally. The term was not uttered without fondness.

  Sometimes, she wondered if she were not really a 58-year-old reincarnated inside a 20-something body, but Amy couldn’t help herself. She loved print. She also loved black and white movies with Henry Fonda and Bette Davis and vinyl record albums by Marvin Gaye and the Beatles.

  Humming a little, at peace with the world and her place and prospects in it, Amy moved away from the van—and got hit by a speeding bus. At least, that was how it felt. Something hard and heavy came from the left and smashed into her jaw. Her glasses flew off her face. She went down hard, too stunned even to brace her fall. Her head banged off the concrete.

  The pain was unimaginable, ferocious. Amy held her jaw with one hand. That whole left side of her face felt crooked, felt…misaligned. She would have sworn her bottom teeth were where her uppers should have been. And her mouth was filled with the coppery warmth of her own blood. Amy writhed on the concrete, eyes squeezed tight, trying to scream, but unable to get her mouth to work. The best she could manage was an outraged growl that rumbled deep down in her throat.

  Then, she felt a hand reaching into her jacket pocket.

  Amy’s eyes came open. It was the guy, the weird-looking guy with the dopey haircut who had been in the lobby. She grabbed his arm, buried up to the wrist in her pocket. He swatted her hand.

  “If you’d done what I told you to do, bitch, none of this would have happened. I was watching you. You didn’t give it to him.”

  She tried to tell him she was going back to see Bob this afternoon, but she still could not get her mouth to work. Somehow, her teeth were in the way of her tongue and the sounds she produced were unintelligible.

  The man pulled his arm from her pocket, the computer disc in his hand. He regarded her with a sneer. “Could have saved yourself some trouble,” he said. And he turned to walk out of the garage.

  Something happened to Amy Landingham then. Something got into her. It simply infuriated her that this skinny, scabrous nobody with his doofus haircut and glassy eyes had sucker punched her, had put her down and then had the unmitigated gall to lecture her while he violated her person searching for some stupid DVD. Something got into her. She didn’t know its name, but in that instant, it drove out pain, drove out weakness, drove out fear.

  Amy Landingham, all of 5’3” tall and 125 pounds, rolled to her feet, came up with fists clenched, and went after the man who had hit her.

  He heard her coming. He whirled around, his eyes bulging. “You get back now! You get away! Don’t make me hurt you!”

  He was sidestepping back from her, one palm up, retreating as if from a snapping dog. His other hand lifted his windbreaker and Amy saw the butt of a pistol in his waistband. He reached for it, but mishandled it in his panic. The gun slipped into his pants and he chased after it, plunging his arm into his crotch up to the elbow. But the gun would not be had. He lifted a pant leg and shook it. A moment later, the pistol clattered onto the concrete.

  Amy had stopped. She had been too amazed to move. Now, as the man reached down for his weapon, she closed the distance between them. She hit him with a solid punch to the jaw that tore skin from her knuckles and radiated agony all the way up to her shoulder and caused her to realize, distractedly, that hitting people was a whole lot more painful than it looked in the movies. But the blow had the desired effect. It put the man on his back pock
et. He cradled his jaw in his right hand and gave her those bulging eyes again.

  “Fuck this,” he said. “You are one crazy fuckin’ bitch!”

  He scrambled backwards then, found his feet, and took off running. Amy chased after him. Through the garage they went, past Chevys and Toyotas, up the driveway, out into the pale sunlight of a midday in November, the small woman chasing the panicked man.

  And that’s when whatever had gotten into Amy suddenly went out of her. That’s when reality finally caught up with her. As they reached the sidewalk, her steps slowed, then stopped. She wobbled, then had to lean against a lamppost for support. The world seesawed about her. Nausea bubbled in her esophagus and she was afraid she might retch. A dull, heavy pain throbbed her skull.

  “Miss, are you all right?”

  “Lady, do you need some help?”

  “Look at her, she’s been hurt!”

  The voices came from all around. She tried to answer them, but she couldn’t. She saw that the skinny nobody was running away from her, getting away through the crowd, and she wanted to scream for somebody to stop him, but she couldn’t do that either.

  The world went gray, then black. Her legs turned to air. The last thing she felt was some stranger’s hands, lowering her gently to the concrete.

  eleven

  Pym stood slowly. The body lay crumpled at his feet like dirty laundry.

  “You killed him.” Malcolm could not suck in enough breath. “You crazy bastard, you killed him.”

  Pym’s chest heaved like a bellows. His eyes jittered and glittered in their sockets. He looked around and seemed not to know where he was. Finally, when they had gone everywhere else they could go, his eyes fell upon the disheveled heap at his feet and he stared hard as if waiting for it to move, as if willing it to do so. There was a long moment.

  Then he said, “Didn’t mean to do that. Sorry. Didn’t mean to do that.” The words were spoken in a mumble so soft, Malcolm could barely hear. He couldn’t tell whether the big man was apologizing to him or the corpse.

  There was a long moment. Finally, with dull resignation, Pym reached down, clutched the collar of the dead man’s ratty green jacket and, head bowed, dragged him off. The only sounds in the world were the thin scratch of voices from the laptop computer streaming cable news and the lonely rasp of the dead body sliding across the floor, pulled into a dark corner to repose out of sight.

  After a moment, Pym wobbled back on unsteady legs. He landed heavily in the metal folding chair, which bowed with his weight, reached into the Styrofoam ice chest, and came out with a beer can. He held it against the side of his face.

  “You killed him,” said Malcolm, again. His throat was full of hot glue. His eyes burned.

  Pym didn’t look at him. “Stop saying that,” he said. His voice seemed to issue from a deep cave.

  “You killed him,” said Malcolm, defiant.

  The giant shook his head slowly, wincing at the pain. “You should have told me he was behind me,” he said.

  And that was amazing enough that Malcolm fell silent.

  “God, this hurts,” said Pym. Voices still chirped from the laptop. He slammed it closed. “God, it hurts,” he moaned again.

  He pulled the beer can away from his face. The scar was livid and dripping blood. It ran in a ragged line from temple to jawline on the left side of his face. The toilet tank lid had gotten him good. “How bad is it?” Pym asked. “Probably need stitches, huh?”

  Malcolm stared at him. He did not respond. He felt a tear trickling on his cheek. The little homeless man had proven so valiant at the end. He wished he knew the man’s name.

  “Dwayne’s going to be so mad at me,” continued Pym. “He’s going to be so mad. And my head hurts like a son of a bitch, too. Little bastard cracked me good.”

  Malcolm gave him more silence.

  “First time I ever killed anybody,” said Pym. “Always knew I’d kill somebody someday, though. Was always scared of that.”

  And this, finally, was too much. “Scared of it?” Malcom cried. “Scared of it? You just said you plan on killing Obama and probably thousands of other people in Grant Park tonight. How in the hell are you ‘scared’ of killing someone?”

  The giant shook his shaggy head and paid for it with a bolt of pain that screwed his eyes shut. “Not talking about that kind of killing,” he said through a wince of agony. “I mean killing with these.” He lifted his great hands, one of them still holding the beer he was using as an icepack. “Always knew I’d kill somebody with these,” he said. “They used to always tell me to watch myself, watch my temper, ’cause on account of my size, I could hurt someone if I lost my temper. And I always did real good with that, until now.”

  He rested the beer against his temple again and repeated himself. “You should have told me he was coming.”

  “Are you crazy? Why would I do that? Why would I help you?”

  Pym looked up. His expression was that of a lost child. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I swear I didn’t. I just lost my temper.”

  Malcolm met his eyes. “Yeah? Well, you did kill him,” he said. His voice was cold and bleak. “You’re going to kill a lot more people if you keep this madness up. You have to end this. You have to let me go.”

  Pym appeared to consider this for a moment and Malcolm was foolish enough to hope. Then Pym said, “No, can’t do that. Dwayne wouldn’t like that. Him and me, we made a promise to each other, to take our country back. You know, from the niggers and the fags and all. We swore an oath to see this thing through.”

  “Let me go!” demanded Malcolm.

  “Can’t,” said Pym. “But it’ll be okay. I won’t lose my temper anymore.”

  “Fuck your temper!” roared Malcolm.

  “Wish I could,” Pym said after a pause, “all the times my temper has fucked me. Kids giving me shit, calling me fat retard and stuff, and I’d pound ’em good. But every time I done that, it just made matters worse. Get suspended and go home and have to tell the folks what I done. My old man’d get so mad he’d get that stick of his and go upside me every kind of way. Man, was I glad when he walked out on us.”

  Pym laughed. It was a rueful sound.

  “Let me go,” said Malcolm. His tears were falling freely now. The realization shamed him.

  Pym regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. “Can’t,” he finally said. “We’re in too deep now. There’s no way to turn back.”

  “There’s always a way to do what needs to be done. Didn’t Jordan show us that? Remember the flu game? Nineteen ninety…” Malcolm racked his brain frantically. “Six,” he said. “Nineteen ninety-six. They’re down by 16 and they’re on the road and Jordan is half dead with the flu, but he brings them back. He scores 38 points, shoots 48 percent. Remember that?”

  Malcolm fell silent when he saw the pity in the big man’s smile. “Nineteen ninety-seven,” he corrected. “June 11, 1997, Game 5, in the Finals against the Jazz.” Pym paused again, then turned away. “But this ain’t a basketball game, is it?”

  “Let me go,” said Malcolm again.

  Pym ignored him. “You want to know how we’re going to do it? Dwayne said not to tell you til the end, but what the hell—I’ve told you this much. You might as well know the rest. Just don’t tell him I told you.”

  He reached over for the backpack, rummaged in it for a moment and brought out a first-aid kit, a white plastic box with a red cross on the top. “So anyway, you want to know how?”

  To his surprise, Malcolm felt himself nodding dumbly.

  “We’re going to do it like McVeigh,” said Pym, “on account of Dwayne really loves that guy.” He pulled out a pad of cotton gauze, used it to shield his eyes, and then with his free hand, groped for a can of over-the-counter antiseptic. He sprayed the wound on the side of his head. “Ouch. Shit! Fuck!” he hissed.

  “McVeigh?” prompted Malcolm.

  “Yeah. Only we’re going to do it with style,” said Pym. “Dwayne’s real big on that,
doing things with style. So we’ve got the van armored, you see? Like Clint Eastwood did in that old movie from the ’70s. Spent all day yesterday welding the armor plate on.

  “Then, of course, there’s the bomb.” A nod toward the metal drums near the door. Malcolm’s gaze followed him, disbelieving. Pym grinned. “We built a good one,” he said, “but I don’t mind telling you, that thing was a bitch to put together, what with mixing all those chemicals: nitromethane and ammonium nitrate fertilizer and what have you. I kept messing up—I never was good with science—but Dwayne, he was real patient with me.”

  He used scissors—ridiculously dainty in his hands—to cut the gauze into two rectangular strips. “We’re going to ram through the barricades, and they’re not going to be able to stop us. Get as close to the stage as we can. Then we fall out of the van shooting and yelling, ‘White Power’ and like that. And the fuse goes off and this fertilizer bomb like the one McVeigh used in Oklahoma City blows up behind us. Like I say, we’ll probably get killed, but what a way to go, huh? And if we’re lucky, it’ll take ol’ Hussein Obama with us.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Malcolm.

  This brought a wry look. “Yeah, we expect a lot of people to say that, especially the left-wing media elites. But the right people, they’ll understand what we’re trying to say. And they’ll pick up after us. You’ll see. And you know the cool part?”

  Malcolm just stared at him. Pym laughed. “I’ll show you,” he said, putting the gauze aside. With a grunt, he lifted himself to his feet and lumbered off, the side of his face shiny with a smear of antiseptic and blood. A minute later, Pym returned, grinning and lifting high a garment sheathed in a clear plastic bag. It was so big and so blindingly white it could have been a bed sheet.

  Then Malcolm registered what he was looking at. Pym’s grin broadened. “That’s right,” he said. “White tie and tails. That’s how we’re going to be dressed. Both of us. Had to have mine tailored special on account of my size. Cost a shitload, but like Dwayne said, you only die once. And check this out.”