The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  A half hour later, Mabi and Badger had vaulted the low wall behind the Chelsea synagogue, which housed the remnants of Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben’s congregation, the congregation where Levy once made up a minyan, and lowered themselves into its tiny back-yard. Jimmying the lock on the back door, they entered the small social hall immediately beneath the sanctuary.

  “Make sure the water’s steam hot,” Mabi ordered Badger.

  In the sanctuary, Mabi mounted the stage and located what Professor al-Saffah had called the Ark. From behind its curtain he removed a set of scrolls which he stripped of its silver ornaments and velvet cover. Untying the sash that bound the scrolls, he unrolled them down the aisle past rows of empty pews. The paper was thick and coarse, the pages sewn together by hand. The letters reminded him of the Hebrew letters on the graves in the cemetery he had vandalized, on the synagogue walls he had spray painted with swastikas, on the tablets beside the lions in the African Meeting House, page after page of tiny black letters. He ran his fingers over a few lines, feeling the texture of the ink. Fucking old, he thought, maybe as old as al-Saffah’s chess set.

  “Yo! Hot water,” Badger said.

  “I don’t see no steam rising.”

  Badger’s excitement drained from his face like life from a junkie swimming in the sweetness of another fix. Returning minutes later, he asked, “Steamy enough for you?”

  “No, but we ain’t got time to fuck around.” Mabi gave him a brush and stencil. “Mix in the blood, then do like I said.”

  Mabi perched on a window sill and peeked through a curtain to check the street. He sensed a higher presence in the sound of the brush rubbing against the stencil. He felt as pumped, as invincible, as the night he’d killed Luke Shaw. From Luke Shaw to Bumper Sullivan, he had murdered, pushed drugs, led the Trojans, at first without regret, then with an occasional second thought, at last without guilt because it had been decreed, all he had done. The power lording over him, he now understood, was not the power of the book or the power of belief; it was the power of his name. When you name something, you own it; and Allah had soul-bought him by naming him Mabi. Gideon and Hannah, Silvy, the Trojans, they only made demands. He had given them a chance, hundreds of chances, but only his name gave him what he needed, a past, a present, a future. Revelation’s book was all. Its pages turned fast, faster than ever before. How many more to the end?

  “Done,” Badger said.

  “The fire next time it’s now, little bro, and you helped light the kindling.”

  Now, a few hours later, back at the crib, he and Spider had been tallying the week’s drug receipts in the money room, stacking Hamiltons, Jacksons, Franklins, smoking dope, siggin’ each other and everyone else in the fucking gang. The money room had been built to Mabi’s specifications in the tenement basement where the coal bin had once been: cinderblock walls lined with sheets of lead, poured concrete floor and ceiling, solid core steel door with inside hinges, a keyless lock, an old-fashioned walk-in safe. Every Sunday, Mabi and Spider reviewed the books and divided the week’s profit among the gang, equal shares for everyone, a double share for Mabi, a share for a rainy day fund.

  “We’re going to butter the bread real thick this week,” Mabi said.

  “Check out Brother Ambrose,” Spider replied. “I think he’s putting our cut into them fancy roller skates.”

  “Maybe we should have a sit down.” The intercom buzzed and Mabi unlocked the door for Silvy Thomas, his woman, Badger’s older sister.

  “Badger’s been arrested. Middle of the night. Six cops with a paper.” Silvy slapped him across the face with it. “They busted him right in front of me and Cealy for that Chelsea shit.” Cealy was Silvy’s and Badger’s mother. “Anything happen to Badger I’ll kill you dead.” Mabi put his arms around her and let her beat on him until she exhausted her anger. “That’s why I won’t never become Mrs. Mabi.”

  “Tell Cealy,” Mabi said, “he be bailed when the courts open come morning. Trojans they take care for their own.”

  “He ain’t your own to take care of.” She spit in his face.

  Later, after Silvy left, after Spider divided the week’s green into shares, after the Easter morning sun rose on the desolation that once was a Jewish street in Chelsea, Mabi no longer felt pumped, no longer felt invincible. “Everything has a fixed term of life, an endpoint, an ajal,” al-Saffah had preached. “Your life, my life, the life of the universe, the desecrations and corruptions of Christianity and Judaism, everything has its ajal.” He feared Badger’s arrest was the first page of his ajal, the first page of the Trojans. Alone, his ajal haunted him like the shadows in his bedroom and the noises made by the radiator that had kept him awake at night when he was a young child.

  Hauling his doubts the way slaves once shouldered bundles of cotton, Mabi visited Badger at the Charles Street Jail. “What you doing here, you fucking punany?”

  “I lost my bracelet. When I undressing at home, I seen it missing.”

  “You facing all kinds of juvie shit. Remember. Fifth Amendment. They can’t make you talk.”

  “My grille be sealed tighter than a nun’s cunt.”

  “It fucking better be or you’ll be Mushi Badger at every chink joint in Chinatown.”

  -2-

  The night of Badger’s arrest was not the first time Mabi felt trapped inside a light bulb he couldn’t turn off. He had felt the same way the night of Bumper Sullivan’s murder as he made his way from Capablanca carrying plastic bags of Bumper’s blood in a supermarket shopping bag to the apartment of his mullah, his sage, Professor Husam al din al-Saffah, an imam from the Disciples of Abraham Mosque who disguised his true identity by posing as a professor of Islamic studies at the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts. That earlier night, the air, too hot to breathe, seared Mabi’s lungs and boiled his brain. Visions of things not there obstructed his vision. The stink of rust, so strong he could taste it, wafted from the supermarket shopping bag and clung to the lining of his nose, souring his stomach. His sweat blackened the supermarket logo–“Purity Supreme As Fresh as Tomorrow”–and bonded the shopping bag to his arms and chest. His heartbeat sent waves pulsing through Bumper’s blood. In his ears, the sound of those waves echoed. He struggled to open the door to the lobby of al-Saffah’s apartment building. Inside the lobby, the heat, frenzied from being caged all day, feasted on him. As he climbed the stairs, the temperature climbed with him. With each step, with each vision of things not there, each smell of rust, each roar of waves crashing, he had relived Bumper Sullivan’s murder and the chess game that preceded it.

  At the Capablanca Chess Club, Mabi had maneuvered Bumper into a chess game by calling out Pete Kelly, the Club champion, for refusing to accept Mabi’s challenge to a match. Kelly had urged Bumper to “put that damn nigger in his place,” Kelly’s voice loud enough for Mabi to hear. Mabi let the slur slide. The words of infidels mattered not.

  Mabi knew Bumper had a key to Capablanca. He knew Bumper often lingered in the library after the Club closed at 9:00 p.m. to study the games of the international grandmasters. He knew because he had staked out the club several times that at eleven a cab chauffeured Bumper home, a cab, Bumper had bragged time after time that was owned by a company dependent on his dad for taxi medallions. He knew he had a window of about ninety minutes after Virgil, the janitor, locked up before the cab came. Ninety minutes. Enough time for two endgames, maybe three. He would only need one.

  Mabi had worked the clock and ran a drag past the Club’s 9:00 closing. As much as Bumper loved showing off, he knew Bumper would never risk losing in front of an audience, especially to him, an uppity black who, in Bumper’s eyes, didn’t know his place. If the game finished after hours Bumper would proclaim victory regardless of who won. No one would believe Mabi calling out Bumper for his bullshitting.

  Now, in the penetrating heat in the stairwell of al-Saffah’s apartment building, Mabi relived the last two hours of Bumper’s life minute by minute. The clock had chim
ed the hour, 9:00, and he had said, “I guess Bumper man we be finishing our game some other time.”

  “Come to the service door after the janitor leaves,” Bumper had whispered. “He’s gone by nine-thirty.”

  Mabi had exited through Capablanca’s heavy front doors into the heat. The soles of his shoes had stuck to the driveway blacktop. He slipped into the shrubs and bushes landscaping the perimeter of the Club grounds. His alibi depended on not being seen. Concealed by the foliage, he kept in the shadows as he worked his way to the far side of the building where thickets of leaves shielded him. Desperate for a drink, he wiped his forehead with a leaf, then sucked his own sweat. Its saltiness made him thirstier. He felt like Q roasting on the spit. Time slowed, its passage mired in the heat. Interior lights shining through windows in the apartment building adjacent to the Club chess-boarded the grounds. Sounds from those windows open to catch a night breeze irritated him–the Bruins playing the Canadiens in Boston Garden, a husband and wife arguing about the checkbook balance, another husband trying to wheedle his wife into sex, a bedtime story being read aloud, Little Red Riding Hood. He should be home, curled up with Silvy, sweet Silvy, making love ’neath the air conditioner. Why wasn’t that written in Allah’s book?

  “Allah’s book?” Mabi had asked the first time al-Saffah had mentioned it. “Not the Prophet’s?”

  “Did Moses write the Ten Commandments?” al-Saffah had replied. “It is not a book in the way the Koran is,” al-Saffah had continued. “There are no pages, no words, no sentences, just your future. This future is revealed to you by what you do as you do it. You may think you have free will, but you do not. If you were to die tonight, it is because your death was written in Allah’s book.”

  “Stop mind-playing me.”

  “Think of it this way,” al-Saffah said. “What does a superstar athlete do after making a game-winning play? What does a movie star do after winning an Oscar? They praise God and thank Him for their victory. Why do they thank Him? Because they believe He ordained it. What do Jews pray on their new year? That their god inscribe them in the book of life for another year. The book what’s called predestination.”

  Mabi furrowed his brow.

  “Fate,” al-Saffah said, “prescribed in advance of its revelation.”

  “God’s will?” Mabi asked.

  “When I say what you will do is written in Allah’s book, I am saying it is fated to happen. You don’t reveal your future by reading it in a book; you reveal it by what you do, when you do it.”

  “Action speaks louder than words.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “So, if I be offing you tonight,” Mabi asked, “that be written in this book?”

  Al-Saffah nodded.

  “What if there be more than one book? Mine says I off you. Yours says I don’t. Who be reading true?”

  “We all read from the same book,” al-Saffah said.

  “I’m not sure I be taking this text.”

  Don’t need to. Just do your thing and all will be revealed.”

  The muthafucka of all alibis, Mabi thought.

  Now, a clock chimed the quarter hour, 9:15. The hockey game was between periods. The husband and wife now argued about who overdrew the checking account. The other husband yelled words like “frigid” and “cockteaser” at his wife. The mother reading Little Red Riding Hoodnow recited bedtime prayers. To take his mind off the heat, Mabi threw it into the future; first, a few weeks when the heat wave would break and his brain would stop cooking; then, two, three, four years when he’d have enough bank to live on for nine lives. But which life was he on? Six to go if three names, three identities–Leroy, Priam, Mabi–used up three lives. Which life would Silvy share? The ninth, he hoped. He’d cut the most bank for that one. What about four, five, six, seven, eight? What’s that book say ’bout them? He wished he could skip them over, go straight to number nine.

  The exterior lights of Capablanca went dark and Virgil’s ride drove up to the service entrance. A clock chimed the half hour, 9:30. Mabi retrieved the supermarket grocery bag he had hidden in the bushes behind the Club and knocked on the service door, softly so no one in the apartment building would hear, once, then again, before Bumper opened it.

  Bumper led him to the library on the second floor which housed the treasures of Capablanca, its antique chess sets, oil portraits of grand masters past and present, books on the theory and gamesmanship of chess-many rare and out of print-and two mahogany chess tables with inlaid chess boards, the black squares made of obsidian, the white of moonstone. He had never been in the library before because at the foot of the staircase the Club had posted a “Whites Only” sign that was visible to his eyes and no others. Bumper had reproduced the layout of the game with a hand-carved set of chess men whose white pieces were the army of King Richard Coeur de Lion and his crusaders and whose black pieces were Saracen and his Muslim believers. Mabi turned his white king to face Bumper’s forces.

  “What’s in the bag?” Bumper asked.

  “Potato chips. Hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  32. KR-QB1

  Using standard chess notation, Bumper entered Mabi’s move, the white rook on the king’s side to the first rank of the queen’s bishop file, in the spiral notebook in which he recorded each of his matches. The library clock chimed the quarter hour, 9:45. Bumper licked potato chip grease from his fingers, then moved his bishop in the King’s file to the fourth rank.

  32. ..... B-K4

  33. K-Q3 R-R1

  In his mind’s eye, Mabi clapped his hands. You fucking blew it, he thought. If Bumper had moved his bishop to the fifth row of the bishop’s file, he would have been forced into moving his rook to the second row of the bishop’s file, permitting Bumper to capture his queen with a rook, eventually leading to his king being checked by Bumper’s knight. He would be defenseless. Now, Mabi could force a draw with an elegant end game, maybe win if Bumper made another mistake.

  “I gotta take a leak,” Mabi said. He hastily toured the Club to make sure Virgil had closed the windows and drawn the curtains. After he returned, the next moves came quickly.

  34. R-Kt6 ch Kt x R

  35. P x Kt ch K-Q2

  36. Kt-B5 ch K-K2

  “Any more?” Bumper crunched the empty potato chip bag into a ball and tossed it at Mabi who swatted it away.

  “Something tastier.” Mabi positioned the shopping bag between his feet and pulled several lengths of rope from it. Bigger and stronger, a man overpowering a boy, Mabi lashed Bumper’s left arm to the armrest of the chair. Bumper’s legs kicked and flailed. Mabi easily sidestepped them. With his free hand, Bumper punched at Mabi, his fist sliding off Mabi’s forearm. Mabi let him flail away, then pinned and lashed Bumper’s right arm to the other armrest. Fear twisted Bumper’s face into knots. Was this how black faces looked, Mabi wondered, as they were dragged to the lynching tree?

  “I can’t write a ransom note with my hands tied.”

  “Nothing to ransom.”

  Mabi skipped the gag. Let Bumper beg. Scream. Cry. Payback for all them blacks who begged and screamed and cried when whitey tightened the noose. Fuck Allah! Fuck al-Saffah. This be for Medgar Evers and Emmet Till, Dr. King and James Chaney, the Scottsboro boys and four little Birmingham girls in their Sunday finest, and for all the unknowns who got no tombs for laying on flowers. And for my brother Jim Ed, wherever his body may be.

  Mabi dumped syringes, tubing, and ten plastic blood bags, all stolen from the Red Cross, on the floor. A person weighing one hundred thirty pounds would fill the ten bags. Bumper would fill five and part of a sixth. Shock would set in after the loss of about twenty percent of his blood. He would pass out while the second bag filled, die during the third. Not instantaneous like in a lynching, but a slow fade into oblivion, his mind fearing, fearing, fearing. How’d whitey miss this trick? The clock chimed the hour, 10:00.

  37. R-K1

  Mabi entered his move in Bumper’s spiral notebook.
He wanted to have a complete record of the match, a souvenir, something to shove in al-Saffah’s face the next time al-Saffah dissed his chess playing. Bumper inhaled and exhaled rapidly, then started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Mabi asked.

  “Niggers never win.”

  Mabi whipped the black queen at Bumper. Its crown caught the side of Bumper’s head where a cushion of hair shielded his skin.

  37. ..... R-R6 ch

  Mabi connected the syringes to the plastic tubing and the tubing to the plastic bags, two complete systems, one to use, one for back up. He tied a length of elastic rubber around Bumper’s right arm at the elbow. With his fingertips, he located a pulsing protruding blood vessel and inserted a needle, then taped it to Bumper’s arm. He drew back on the syringe and watched the blood flow.

  Bumper flexed his arm, but the cord bit into his flesh and held him tight. He leaned forward, straining against the rope, stretching, stretching, but couldn’t reach the syringe with his mouth. He pushed against the chess table with his legs, but the chair was too close, too heavy, the carpet too plush, to give him the leverage he needed to topple over backwards.

  “You as stuck as a pig on a spit.” Mabi twirled his king, then moved it.

  38. K-B4

  Like watery ketchup, Bumper’s blood traveled through the plastic tubing, curving to the left and then to the right, flowing uphill and then sliding down, passing the arm and leg of the chair, up the leg of the table, until it reached the plastic bag where at first, drop by drop, then in a trickle, and finally in a slow, steady stream, it accumulated, puffing out the sides of the bag and rising like a tide, deep red and rich with oxygen. Bumper stared at his blood. He tried to rest his head on the palm of his hand, but the rope restrained him.