“I just asked you where he was,” she protested. “You two been thick as thieves lately. See one, you always see the other.”
“Clarence is…busy. We’re working on this project.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
“We are,” he insisted.
“What kind of project could you two losers be working on?”
“I can’t tell you, Ma. But you’ll see.”
“Oh, I will?” Her eyes sparkled with a merry malice that infuriated him.
“Why do you always do that?” he demanded.
“What?” she protested, the very soul of innocence. “What do I always do?”
“You always act like anything I do is shit.”
“Well,” she replied, “it isn’t like there’s a whole lot of reason to believe otherwise. Look at you. Your hair looks like somebody took garden shears to it, your mouth is all messed up from that crap you smoke. What else should I think, Dwayne? You tell me.”
She glanced to a picture sitting on her nightstand in a cheap frame. A dark-haired, flinty-eyed man stared back, unsmiling. “I’m just glad your father didn’t live to see,” she said. Earl McLarty, Sr. had been killed holding up a gas station 11 years before.
“Ma.” Dwayne was reduced to pleading. God, he hated coming here.
She was sniffling now, dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled piece of Kleenex. “We just had such high hopes for all our children,” she said. “We thought you all would do such great things.”
“You just wait, Ma. When you see what happens tonight, that’s me. It’s me and Clarence. You remember I said that, hear? When you see what happens, you remember, okay?”
He waited for her response. Needed it. Finally, she looked around from the picture of his sainted father, the dead stickup man. “I have to pee,” she said, still sniffling. “Help me out of this bed, would you?”
Dwayne felt himself deflate, the air going out of him like a blow-up toy with a slow leak. “Sure, Ma,” he said.
He took the hand she proffered. It was weightless. With his free hand, he braced her arm and she climbed gingerly down from the bed. She seemed unsteady on her feet and he moved to walk her to her bathroom, but she swatted his hand. “I’ve got it,” she snapped as he pulled his hand away.
Ma grabbed the handcart with the oxygen tank on it. “Me and my shadow,” she muttered as she trundled across the room. Then the bathroom door closed behind her with finality.
It was, Dwayne suddenly realized, a blessing in disguise. He had meant to ask her for the use of her pistol. But how could he have done that now, after going on and on about his big project with Clarence? She would have been suspicious. She would have asked questions he could not answer.
No, he realized, it was better this way. Now all he had to do was steal the gun.
The decision made, Dwayne crossed to the other side of the room. He opened the top drawer of the nightstand and there it was, right where she always kept it, the pistol his father had given his mother one Christmas many years ago.
It was, Dwayne had always thought, a ridiculous gun. For one thing, it was a .22, which meant that if you shot somebody with it, you were as likely to piss him off as to do any damage. Even worse, it was pink. Every visible surface—the grip, the slide, the trigger guard, the trigger, and the barrel—were the color of a Barbie Corvette. Also the color of Pepto-Bismol, which Dwayne felt was probably fitting, since the idea of carrying this damn thing around made him sick to his stomach. Instead of scaring somebody, this gun might make them fall over laughing.
But any port in a storm, he reassured himself. Whatever it looked like, it was a gun. It would shoot and it would kill. And that’s all it needed to do.
Dwayne plucked the weapon out of the drawer and checked the magazine. As he had expected, it was fully loaded.
“An unloaded gun,” his father had always preached to his family, “is like tits on a bull. It’s interesting to look at, but it don’t do you a damn bit of good.”
Dwayne shoved the gun into his pocket. Now that he had what he had come for, he couldn’t wait to be out of there. One more minute with Ma, he was sure, and he would be ready for the funny farm.
He came back around the bed, leaned close to the bathroom door. “Ma,” he called, “listen, I’m going to take off. I’ve um…got an appointment I’ve got to get to. So um…I’ll see you later, okay?”
She didn’t answer. Ordinarily, Dwayne would have been happy to take that silence as a victory and get the hell out of there as fast as he could. But as he moved toward the hallway, it struck him: this was probably the last time he would ever see her, these were the last words she would ever hear from him. That deserved to be marked somehow, didn’t it?
So he went back to the bathroom door. “Okay, so um…you take care of yourself and do what the doctor says, okay? Don’t give up, Ma. You never know what could happen.”
Still there was silence. Dwayne tried one more time. He rapped the back of his knuckles lightly on the door. “Ma, I…I love you, okay?”
Silence. Then he heard the toilet flush. Dwayne left the room, closing the door behind him.
In the hallway, he breathed. It felt as if he hadn’t done so for an hour.
In the living room, he went straight for the door without a word. “You have a nice visit?” trilled Daryl.
Dwayne stopped, one hand on the knob, the other in the pocket of his windbreaker, curled around the grip of his mother’s gun. He tried to think of reasons he shouldn’t whip out that stupid pink pistol and shoot his brother right in his mocking mouth. In that moment, he couldn’t think of any, but he knew there must be at least one. So he turned the doorknob instead and contented himself with flashing a malicious grin. “Fuck you very much,” he said.
He went to the truck at just less than a trot, started it up, and pulled out so abruptly that a guy driving by in a Chevy had to slam on the brakes. The guy leaned on his horn. Dwayne leaned on his own horn. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor.
By his watch, it was 12:30. He still had time to kill before he had to be at the editor’s house. And he knew just where he wanted to go.
The realization of where he was headed made him think, guiltily, of Clarence towering over him this morning as they parted, not wanting to use the actual words, but reminding him—begging him, really—not to use while he was out.
But goddamn, what a day it had been. And it was the last day, after all, the very last either of them would ever know. What could it hurt if he got a little something to steady himself, ready himself for what they had to do tonight? He needed this. Hell, he deserved it. The more he thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make.
Yes, Clarence would be disappointed. Yes, Clarence would stand there with that hurt puppy dog expression on his face. Yes, Clarence…
Shit.
Clarence.
Dwayne checked his watch again. 12:30? God, he’d been gone for more than two hours. Clarence must be worried sick wondering what had happened to him. The mission had gone operational, which meant, according to their plan, they were to observe strict radio silence. The Secret Service, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the NAACP, they all had means of spying on electronic communications, and he didn’t want them swooping down on him and Clarence.
But surely it couldn’t hurt if he just made one little call to Clarence’s cell, just to say that he was okay. He could use code. “Papa bear is still searching for the honey tree,” or something like that.
Dwayne reached into his hip pocket for the prepaid cell he had bought the last time he bought cigarettes. What he pulled out shocked him. Cracks spider-webbed the screen, the buttons were askew, the plastic casing was in two pieces. Thunderstruck, Dwayne stared at the mangle in his hands with such intensity, he almost ran through a red light. He slammed the brakes.
What had happened to his fucking phone? Dwayne had no idea. Then he knew. When he was knocked down by that crazy bitch with the black belt in kung fu, he had landed on his back
side, right on the pocket where he carried the phone.
Damn, he thought. He turned his hand sideways and let the pieces of the ruined phone fall into the passenger seat.
Damn, damn.
But what could he do? Clarence would just have to understand.
Dwayne shook his head in disbelief. What a day he was having. Thankfully, it was about to get a whole lot better real soon. The light changed. Dwayne hung a quick left, cutting off drivers in the oncoming lane. A chorus of bleating horns followed him as he took the ramp down onto the expressway.
Twenty minutes later, he was walking into a bar on Lake Street, the El train clattering by overhead. The air inside was damp with stale beer, bitter with the smoke of too many cigarettes. From the jukebox, some morose country singer serenaded a sprinkling of drinkers who sat quietly handling their business at the bar and in the booths. It occurred to Dwayne, as it did every time he came through the door, that this place really lived up to its name, even though the owner had probably intended it as a joke. Misery, the bar was called.
Dwayne waved off the bartender and walked to the last table in the back, just the other side of the men’s room. Sal looked up at his approach. He had been nursing a ginger ale—Sal didn’t drink—and squinting over a copy of the Post.
“You see the shit this nigger wrote in the paper this morning?” he asked without preamble. “He’s tired of white people’s bullshit? Un-fucking-believable. Somebody needs to haul his black ass out from behind that desk and teach him some manners.”
“Maybe somebody will,” said Dwayne. He was bursting to say, but he tried to be enigmatic. He’d already said way too much to Ma.
“Yeah, from your lips to God’s ear,” said Sal. He folded the paper, creased it, and laid it aside. “So, D, long time. What brings you to my place of business? Can’t be what it usually is. You ain’t doing that shit no more. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Let’s just say I changed my mind.”
“Changed your mind? No, son, that ain’t what I heard. I heard you went and got religion.”
“Come on, Sal. Don’t break my balls.”
After a moment, Sal leaned back and grinned. He had a movie star grin. “Okay, kid, no more breaking balls.”
Sal was maybe 30, three years older than Dwayne. He called everybody kid.
Dwayne lowered his voice. “You got any of that Go Fast?”
“You know me,” said Sal. “Always got what you need. Big party? Small party?”
“Small party,” said Dwayne.
A knowing look. “Chippin’ a little, are you? Easin’ your way back in?”
“No,” said Dwayne, “this is my last time.”
“They all say that,” said Sal.
“No, I really mean it,” said Dwayne.
“They all say that, too.”
Dwayne gave up. There was no way to make Sal understand without telling him. And he couldn’t do that. “I’ll just put it like this,” he said. “When you see the news tonight, that’s us, me and Clarence. Remember I told you so.”
Sal’s expression creased. “What am I going to see tonight, kid?”
“You’ll see. Just watch.” Dwayne went into his pocket and fished out a crumpled $20 bill. It was his last money. He pushed it across the table to Sal. “Got to go,” he said. “Let me get my shit.”
For a moment, Sal simply regarded him with the same dubious expression. Then he plucked up the $20. His smile was slow. “Okay, kid, be that way. I’ll keep an eye on the news.”
“My shit?”
“Keep your shirt on.” With a furtive glance around the bar, Sal stood. When he was satisfied with what he saw, he lifted the seat cushion upon which he had sat and turned it over on top of the table. In the hollow beneath, secured by tape, were a dozen Baggies of various sizes. Some held pot, some held rocks of cocaine, and the small one Sal removed and handed to Dwayne contained Dwayne’s drug of choice, shards of what looked like cloudy broken glass. He thought of it as instant well-being.
God, he loved meth.
It was hard to explain to someone who had never been there, who had never known the hard clarity, the endless energy, the simple ability to get shit done, that could be found in a few pulls on a meth pipe. “You need to quit using that shit,” Clarence had told him so many times. “That shit’s going to kill you.”
And finally, Dwayne had agreed, finally said yes, if only to shut Clarence up. That was two weeks ago. But Clarence, he had come to realize, simply didn’t understand. Nobody did until they had been there for themselves.
Yes, Jesus, he loved meth.
Dwayne tucked the little baggie into his pocket. Now that he had it, he was itching to be away, find some place to park so that he could sit with his pipe and let the sun shine in. “All right,” he said.
Sal replaced the seat cushion and sat back down. “Nice doing business with you,” he said. “See you next time.”
Dwayne barely heard him. He floated out of the bar on wings of sheer anticipation back into the lattice of sunshine and shadow beneath the El.
“Hey.”
Dwayne turned. A big man, squinting in recognition, was coming toward him at a quickstep, some frowsy orange-haired woman sprinting along behind. The fact that the man seemed to know him confused Dwayne, froze him to the sidewalk.
Who was this guy? Dwayne didn’t know this guy.
Then he did. In fact, Dwayne recognized him in the same instant the man’s right fist came out of nowhere and smashed into his jaw. Same fucking spot the crazy bitch had hit him, but harder. Way harder.
Dwayne dropped like a bag of gravel. Lights flashed purple and white. A low, throbbing sound filled his mind. Cars passed, driving upside down.
The woman grabbed the man’s bicep. They, too, were upside down. “Come on, Carl, leave him alone. He’s just some asshole.”
Carl leaned up from the sky and poked a finger thick as a kielbasa at Dwayne through flashes of the white and purple light. “Who the fuck do you think you are, giving the finger to my wife?” Dwayne got the sense the man was screaming, but he could barely hear him over that deep, almost electrical thrumming. “Next time you’ll get worse, do you hear me? Next time I’ll really kick your ass.”
He kicked Dwayne in the ass one time for emphasis, then allowed the woman to lead him away. Dwayne could do nothing but writhe on the sidewalk, waiting for the world to come back. He heard shoes clicking and scuffling around him. The El rumbled overhead, metal singing against metal.
After a long moment, Dwayne pressed his hands against the sidewalk and pushed against it. He was on his knees. Then he was on his feet. He stumbled back. The side of the building caught him.
Dwayne held his jaw, eyes screwed shut against the light. Blood filled his mouth. He spat some of it on the sidewalk. This only freshened the pain. God, he was having the worse fucking day of his life.
twelve
Martin Luther King was coming to Memphis.
The word leapt from pulpit to pew to pool hall. The great man had heard about the plight of the sanitation men, how you could be crushed to death like the garbage you hauled and the city didn’t even care. But the great man cared.
“I’m glad he comin’ to see about us,” said Malcolm’s father when a television reporter stuck a microphone under his nose and asked for his thoughts. Pop and Sonny watched this at the house that night. Malcolm, shrugging on his work shirt, stood behind them. His father was a dual image on the beat-up old black-and-white TV, a grainy shadow of himself standing next to himself in front of a group of strikers, holding their I AM A MAN signs down in front of them.
But his voice, thought Malcolm, buttoning his shirt, was certainly clear enough. Comin’ to see about us. As if his father thought the barrel-chested Baptist preacher was Jesus himself. As if King were not so much flying in to Memphis as descending upon it.
The white television reporter seemed to feel the same way. He did not bother to hide an indulgent chuckle. “And what,” he ask
ed through that snigger, “do you expect him to be able to do for you?”
At this question, the two Mozell Wilsons on the television brought their eyes up and in them was a sudden, disconcerting directness that had not been there before. “He ain’t gon’ do nothin’ ‘for’ us,” he said, and was that actually scorn Malcolm heard at the edge of his voice? “We men, so we got to do for ourselves. But Dr. King can help us get the mayor and the city to see that we are men and we ain’t gon’ go for nobody treatin’ us like we ain’t. Not no more. Them days is done.”
And he looked at the white man as if to dare him to ask another question.
Sitting there in his ratty chair, Malcolm’s father allowed himself a barely there nod of satisfaction as he watched surprise register on the reporter’s face. The white man looked like he had swallowed a hot pepper as he said, “And there you have it. This is Ken Simpson, reporting live from City Hall,” and threw back to the studio anchor.
Sonny erupted in a high-pitched laugh, slapping Pop on the back. “You got him good,” he trumpeted. “Oh, you got him good!”
The expression on his father’s face loosened into something that was pleased, if not quite a smile. “That’s what he get for askin’ that damn fool question.”
“So when Dr. King coming to town?” asked Sonny.
“Next week, way I hear,” said his father.
“You goin’ to see him speak, right?”
Malcolm’s father looked at Sonny as if he were a fool. “’Course I’m goin’,” he said.
“What about you, youngblood?”
Malcolm had been leaning into a wall mirror, brushing his close-cropped hair into place. He looked back at Sonny. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
Sonny was incredulous. “Maybe?”
“Junie don’t have no use for Martin Luther King,” explained Pop.
Malcolm returned to the mirror. “I don’t have anything against King,” he said. “I think he wants what we all want. But if you ask me do I see the point in marching around carrying signs and letting some whiteys beat you upside the head…no. I’m sorry, but that don’t make sense to me.”
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