“No we’re not,” said Malcolm. He spoke with a cold resolve. “And you know that, too.”
Pym stared at Malcolm for a long moment. In the sudden silence, Malcolm heard the sound effect for a state pinwheeling and looked up to the screen in time to see Pennsylvania deposit itself in the column beneath the unsmiling Barack Obama. The Illinois senator had 80 electoral votes. His opponent had 39.
Pym turned his back on them. He laid the gun on the table within easy reach, sat down, and focused his attention on the news live-streaming to his computer. Malcolm could no longer see the screen—Pym’s bulk precluded this—but he could hear the states spinning and the white-haired anchor commiserating with conservative pundits who analyzed the developments in tones that could only be described as morose, if not downright funereal.
Bob’s breathing was labored and Malcolm wondered how much longer he could last. From overhead, the buzz of traffic from the highway drifted in. From outside, there came the hiss of an aerosol can as McLarty sprayed paint on the armor plating. He was idly humming a happy song.
Malcolm seethed with frustration. Pym was just sitting there, no gun in hand, his broad back unprotected. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was the best one they were ever likely to get. But Malcolm was chained, Janeka’s feet were bound, Bob was shot. The only one who had the opportunity to make some crazy, desperate play for freedom was Amy. A glance told Malcolm that was not going to happen. She sat on the floor with her knees under her chin, eyes seeing nothing, drawn up inside herself and shivering as if naked in a blizzard. She would not try anything.
“You really met my mother? You’re not just bullshitting?”
Pym spoke without moving. His voice surprised them. It seemed to issue from some desolate cave within him.
Amy glanced up, surprised to be addressed. “Yes,” she said. “She has a very nice house with flowers out front. She lives over on Baxter Street. All your school pictures are lined up on the mantel. Up above on the wall is a big portrait of you and her together. You don’t look too happy, but you can tell, Mrs. Funicelli really loves her son.”
Pym grunted. “Yeah,” he said. “Never did like taking pictures on account of my size.”
A silence intervened. Then he asked, still without moving, “You got any kids?”
“I have two,” said Amy. “Daughters. Cynthia and Ella.”
“You’re a good mother?”
“I try to be. Probably work too many hours.”
“You got a husband?”
“Anthony. He’s a corporate lawyer. Out of town on a business trip. Though I expect he’s probably rushing home right about now.”
Pym nodded. The silence fell again.
Janeka spoke. “What about you?” she asked. “Do you have any children?”
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” said Pym.
Janeka looked up at Malcolm. The whites of her eyes glistened in the shadows cast by the battery-operated lantern.
Time passed.
On the computer screen, the sound of states spinning and changing colors continued every so often, mixed with the drone of talking heads analyzing numbers. Janeka cooed softly to Bob, who drifted in and out of consciousness, occasionally grunting with pain. From the alleyway outside, McLarty continued to hum as he painted his armor and tinkered with his bomb.
Malcolm barely heard.
He closed his eyes. He hung his head.
He walked the streets of Memphis again, 20 years old again, angry again, crying “Black power!” again, a gun sitting heavy in his pocket again, just waiting for some cracker, some whitey, some honky, to give him an excuse to use it. He stared at them again, convinced again that they were fundamentally different from him and that whatever they had of humanity inside them was a flame too small, too flickering, too fleeting, to matter. He watched them watching him, seeing him but not seeing him at all, seeing him but really seeing whatever it was that came up in their minds when they plugged in the tape marked “nigger” and let it play. He watched them and knew that they were beyond redemption. And he was glad he had his gun.
This was the man he had been. But then life had happened, as life will.
And he had grown away from that rage, away from that unfocused fury toward a faceless them, had come to accept as true the old axiom that hatred corrodes the vessel that carries it, and this had made him a better man. He had seen 40 years pass and in those years, he had married and mourned a glorious woman, raised two children, and lived a celebrated life. Yet all of it had only brought him to last night, and to writing an angry column that said, “I am sick and tired of white folks’ bullshit.” He had announced that he had given up on the idea that white people might ever be redeemed. He had told America to go to hell. It was as if he had lived those 40 years thinking he was going forward, only to find he had simply traveled in a great wide gyre to become again that angry 20-year-old walking the streets, loaded and ready.
Malcolm’s disappointment with his own life was matched only by his sense of estrangement from American dreams.
Not only had he traveled 40 years to become again who he once was, but had not America done the very same thing? Look at all the young black men in jail or shot to death just for being black. Look at the poverty rate. Look at the unemployment rate. Look at the achievement gap. And look at these two, this ridiculous, delusional pair who fancied themselves an army of redemption, this raggedy little meth addict and his giant companion whose hatred, whose burning sense of birthright stolen, whose conviction that they had been done wrong by all the forces of history and change, was so palpable and deep they might as well have stepped into this warehouse straight out of 1953, 1921, or 1878. Looking at them, how could you believe time had passed? How could you believe progress—any progress—had been made?
So what good was any of it? What good were Malcolm’s years of writing columns, seeking by the force of his reason and the excellence of his words to cajole and convince white America? For that matter, what good were King’s speeches, what good was Malcolm X’s fire, what good were the NAACP’s court filings, what good were Jesse’s singsong rhymes or Stevie’s brotherhood songs, if at the end of it all, 40 years later, you wound up chained to a chair pleading for your life with a giant misanthrope who called you nigger in one breath and in the next cited to you events from the legend of Michael Jordan?
What good? What good? What damn good?
The question covered him like ground fog on tarmac. The realization did, too: Malcolm had wasted his life. It had all been for nothing.
“Looks like this is it.”
Pym’s voice tried to tug Malcolm up out of himself. He did not want to come. What was the use of opening his eyes only to bear witness to some new obscenity or insanity? What was the point of being in the world if the world was only going to shit on you and disappoint you and make you feel like a goddamn fool for ever having dreamed or believed? Malcolm did not want to open his eyes.
He opened them anyway.
Pym was standing, his hand cupping his mouth, calling to McLarty. “Dwayne, you might want to see this.”
A moment later, McLarty came in, wiping his greasy hands on a greasy rag. “What’s going on?” he said.
“They’re about to call the West Coast,” said Pym. “I think this is it.”
Malcolm looked at the screen. He blinked. He blinked again. Obama had 207 electoral votes, McCain, 135.
The white-haired anchor faced the camera. He looked drawn and sad, like a surgeon after a long night in the operating room about to tell a mother that her son has died on the table. “With results coming in from some key western states,” he said, “we are now ready to make a projection. Polls are closed now in California, Washington and Oregon and it appears—”
The screen went black.
The screen went black!
Malcolm caught himself straining toward the dead computer. “Fix it!” he told Pym.
“Battery died,” said Pym with a shrug.
The
two of them stared at one another helplessly, silently.
Then Malcolm heard it. It was a sound so faint that at first he wasn’t even sure it was a sound, wasn’t sure it wasn’t just his mind playing tricks on his ears. Then he saw Amy’s eyes and Janeka’s eyes, saw Pym looking meaningfully at McLarty, and he knew they all heard it, too. Distant and dim but real, carrying across the night and through the door of the old warehouse.
A roar of delirious joy lifted from Grant Park.
In that moment, something rose inside Malcolm that he had not expected and could not name. Something proud. Something with gnarled roots and feathered wings. He felt unexpected tears massing behind his eyes. He felt the painful warmth of dawn breaking behind his sternum. He saw Janeka, tears wetting her face, put her forehead to Bob’s and whisper something Malcolm could not hear. From somewhere deep within the cavern of his own suffering, Bob smiled.
It had happened.
Holy hell, it had happened.
Barack Obama had won the election. Barack Obama was going to be president. Of the United States. A black man, president.
Holy hell.
“I guess that settles that,” said McLarty. “No turning back now. Time to do this time to do this time to do this. Go get the suits, Sergeant. Let’s get dressed. Let’s do this with style.”
Pym did as he was told, using his lantern to light his way to the other side of the cavernous room.
McLarty lifted his own lantern, casting harsh light upon his four captives. He grinned a malignant grin. “I guess you niggers and nigger-lovers are happy now. You got what you wanted. Your socialist nigger was elected. Old Hussein Obama goes up on the wall next to Ronald Reagan and all those other great men. Well, I wouldn’t celebrate too much if I was you. Because tonight is the night white Christian America finally wakes up and starts to take its country back.”
“Here’s your suit.” Pym had come up behind him. In one hand, he carried the two white suits in their clear plastic garment bags, in the other, the two top hats.
“Good job, Sergeant.” McLarty accepted the smaller bag and hat. “Let’s get dressed.”
“Where are we going to change?” asked Pym.
McLarty gave him a surprised look. “Right here, of course. Right here right here right here.”
“You mean, here…in front of…right where they can…?”
“Yeah. What do you expect? We’re going to go over there in the corner and give one of these bitches the chance to go running for help? ’Course, we wouldn’t even have that problem if I’d gone ahead and killed them like I wanted.”
Pym was still hesitant. “What about if I go over in that corner behind those pallets and change first while you watch the prisoners, and then you can—”
“We don’t have time for your bashfulness, Sergeant. We’ve got a timetable here. Ol’ Barry Hussein Soetoro is probably already on his way to the park. Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”
Pym gazed around him with the glassy eyes of a man trapped inside his own nightmare. Malcolm had the sense he wanted to run. There was a moment when he thought the big man might do it. Instead, Pym dutifully unzipped his garment bag and pulled out the white suit. McLarty did the same.
The smaller man was quick and matter of fact about it, stripping out of his windbreaker and jeans down to his tighty whities, which were in fact not tight, but sagged on his bony, drug-withered frame. His movements brisk and businesslike, he stepped into the pants, pulled on the shirt—his filthy hands left black smudges on each—fastened the cummerbund, and fixed the clip-on bowtie.
Pym, by contrast, stood there for a long moment with his great head falling almost to his chest, his eyes downcast. He didn’t begin tugging at his T-shirt until McLarty was mostly dressed. The little man stood there tapping his foot to show his impatience, but Pym would not be rushed. He peeled off the T-shirt as if he were peeling back his own skin. Malcolm wondered if Clarence Pym had ever undressed in front of another human being before.
Then the shirt came over his head and Malcolm saw. Pym’s flesh dripped off him like wax from a burning candle. It tumbled down, hanging in great rolls, creasing itself in deep crevices. There was simply too much of him, a fact of which Pym, with his dazed face and slow movement, seemed freshly and painfully aware as he stripped in front of these strangers. Slowly, he pulled down his pants to reveal the red boxer shorts hanging like a flag from his massive behind.
“Come on come on come on!” snapped McLarty.
Still Pym ignored him. With the same dazed and deliberate movements, he pulled on his tuxedo shirt. His hands were so big he fumbled with the buttons, but eventually, he managed. He pulled on the pants next, got them zipped, sat down and stuffed his feet into patent leather shoes the color of snow. With slow, awkward hands, he clipped on the bowtie. Finally, he shrugged on the coat. Then he stood next to McLarty, his head still down. “About time,” McLarty said. “About time about time.”
McLarty donned his top hat. Pym followed suit. McLarty tipped his hat to the side. “Well, how do we look?” he asked Malcolm brightly.
They looked ridiculous. Pym, in particular. He looked like a sad polar bear in a top hat. But for some reason, Malcolm could not make himself say that. He settled for saying, “You look like you’re going to the prom.”
“Didn’t go to no prom,” said Pym in a baleful voice. “But you probably already guessed that.”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” said Malcolm.
“What the fuck do I care what you were trying to do?” said Pym. “You think I give a shit what you think?” But his eyes carried wounds.
“Come on,” said McLarty, speaking to Pym but looking at Malcolm, “let’s get him hitched up to the front of the van. I’ll get the ordnance. You bring the prisoner. When we get him hitched up, then I’ll come back and take care of these others.”
“I don’t want to kill them,” said Pym. “This guy, he’s enough.”
McLarty’s eyes were windows of his disgust. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I knew you were going to do that. I knew it I knew it I knew it.”
Pym’s head was still a weight, sitting heavily upon his chest. “Let’s just leave them here, Dwayne,” he said. “The white woman there, she’s got kids. And the other guy, he’s already been shot. He probably won’t live anyway.”
“You know, Clarence, I was afraid you were going to pull some shit like this. Here we have a chance to really make a mark, really do this with some style, and you’re too fucking pansy to go through with it. What we do right here, this could ignite a movement.”
“I don’t want to hurt them is all,” mumbled Pym. “I don’t see the reason.”
“The reason is because I say so, dummy!”
Pym’s head came up. “Don’t call me that, Dwayne.” He was no longer mumbling.
“What else can I call you? What else what else what else? You’re worried about killing three people? If this mission goes like we plan, we’ll kill 300. Maybe even 3,000!”
“Yeah, but we won’t see any of those people. It’s different. These guys, it’s more…personal.”
“Personal? Personal? Personal? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s always personal when you kill somebody, Sergeant. You can damn well bet it’s personal to them if nobody else!”
He paused, disgust blowing out of him in great angry gusts. Finally, he said, “Okay, you don’t want to lay a hand on the other three, fine. Can we at least take care of this guy?” He thrust an index finger toward Malcolm. “That’s what we got him for, isn’t it? Can we at least do that? Or is that also too much for your poor tender conscience?”
Pym shrugged. “I guess we can do that,” he said.
“Well, halle-fucking-lujah,” said McLarty. “Bring the prisoner. I’ll get the ordnance.”
McLarty went to the van to retrieve the guns. Pym snatched the pink pistol from the table where he had laid it while pulling off his T-shirt. He also picked up the handcuff key. He handed that to Amy, w
aving her over to Malcolm with the pistol. “Let him loose,” he said.
Amy rose to do as she was told. With a crisp click, the cuffs around Malcolm’s ankle sprang open. Then the cuffs around his wrists did the same. Malcolm ached in too many places to count. His joints were solid like something forgotten in the back of the freezer. He could barely make himself move.
“You.” Pym was pointing one thick finger at Amy. “You wait until we’re gone, you hear? Then you can leave and call for help. But you don’t move til we’re gone. You understand that?”
Amy nodded briskly.
“Don’t do this,” Janeka pleaded. “Those people in that park, they’ve done nothing to you.”
Pym wasn’t listening. He looked down at Bob. “Hope he makes it,” he said. “That’s a hell of a thing he did, finding us here when even the cops couldn’t. He must really like you.”
Then Pym’s attention turned to Malcolm. “Get up,” he said.
“Hold on,” said Malcolm. “I can barely move.”
“Oh, and I guess I’m supposed to come over there and help you and you’re going to jump out of that chair and stick a thumb in my eye. Is that how you’ve got it planned?”
“No, I…”
Pym swung the pistol around. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”
Malcolm put both hands on the chair and pushed. It was agony. He came off the chair slowly, joints and tendons screaming curses and protests. With an effort, he stood upright.
Pym motioned with the gun. “Walk,” he said.
Malcolm complied as best he could, his gait shuffling and slow, favoring his right leg. Behind him, he could hear Amy crying. Ahead of him, he saw the little meth freak standing at the door, an assault rifle in each hand, grinning his maniac’s grin.
Malcolm went back to Memphis. He went back to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Martin Luther King stood there in the gathering twilight, feeling pretty good for a change, bantering with his men, getting ready to go to dinner, sensing Malcolm coming up on his left, about to turn and smile in greeting. And across the street, the window opens. And Malcolm sees it, sees the snout of that rifle, that Remington Gamemaster 760, poking through.
Grant Park Page 42
