The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  “What’s your move?” Mabi asked.

  38. ..... R-B6 ch

  Mabi piled the remaining plastic bags on the chess table.

  39. K-Kt 5

  The red tide continued to rise. Bumper’s head slumped forward, then to the side. His chin rested on his collarbone. He jerked back suddenly, involuntarily, his nervous system taking control of his muscles. He struggled to free himself, but couldn’t translate mental commands into action. He opened his mouth to scream, but couldn’t find his voice. The clock chimed the quarter hour, 10:15. His mouth hung open, loose and slack.

  39. ..... R-K6

  40. R-QR1

  “You the devil?” Bumper asked, his voice raspy.

  “That what they teaching you in your church? Black folks be the devil? I ain’t no devil. I’s Mabi, the prophet, revealing the divine message of Allah, the one true God.”

  “Why?” Bumper’s voice quivered as if it had aged one hundred years. His jaws moved sluggishly; his tongue lay heavily in his mouth; his chin wagged from side to side, distorting his words.

  “For your blood.”

  “You drink blood?”

  Mabi ignored Bumper’s question. He looked around for Avram Levy’s skull-cap. It should have fallen out of the shopping bag when he dumped the syringes, tubing, and plastic blood bags on the floor. He checked the shopping bag, but it was empty. Had he forgotten it? How could he have? Without it, the mission would fail. Bumper would be a murder victim, killer unknown. Al-Saffah would crucify him. Sweat accumulated on his forehead. He burrowed in his back pocket for his handkerchief. The skull-cap. Wrapped inside the handkerchief as neatly as an ounce of blow. Now he remembered: part of his precautions to make sure he did not touch it with his bare fingers.

  Where to put it? Not on the chess table. Not at the foot of the bookcase. Unlikely Levy would miss seeing it either place. Under the chair? By the right front leg? The left back? Here, there, everywhere, he positioned and repositioned it, searching for the one true place written in the book. Left back, he decided. Likely Levy would miss seeing it there. He flipped it so the name stitched in the lining faced down, then up. Right side up, upside down, inside out, he never figured revelation would be so hard.

  “How come?” Bumper’s voice strained to escape his body.

  “You not deserving any explaining the way you keep shittin’ on me and Virgil.”

  Hours earlier before the Club had closed while Mabi and Bumper were in the opening stage of their chess match Virgil had limped into the game room carrying the butt pail for emptying the ashtrays. Hobbled by arthritis, he circled the room. Struggling, he pushed and pulled furniture out of his path, bending over and around people who didn’t think it necessary to get out of the way of a black man hired as a sop to Boston’s black voters. Required to perform his janitorial duties while dressed in a tuxedo, Virgil resembled a penguin warehoused in an uncaring zoo.

  “Hey, boy, get me a soda,” Bumper had shouted. “He’d be fired,” Bumper bragged to Mabi, “if it weren’t for civil service.”

  Mabi had sat paralyzed. Virgil despised him and that hurt. In Virgil, old and broken, forced to subsist on a wage earned pandering to whites, but still able to hold his head, if not his body, erect, Mabi observed the dignity of man and the resignation of defeat mixed like clay and water, fired in a kiln, and transmuted into a fine glaze. Virgil’s eyes never ceased asking Mabi–Why you here?–and Mabi’s thoughts never stopped replying–You done paying your dues, old man.

  Several chess moves later, Virgil had returned to the game room struggling to carry a tray of sodas.

  “Look who’s finally back,” Bumper said

  “He’s moving fast as he can,” Mabi said.

  “My grandpa Sean moves faster and he’s five years in the grave.”

  Virgil gripped the tray with both hands and hobbled between the chess tables and around the chairs. His shoes scuffed the carpet and his face grimaced each time he placed weight on his knees.

  “It better be cold,” Bumper said.

  “Why you so hard-assed?” Mabi asked.

  “If he were white, you’d order him around the same. Don’t like it, lump it.”

  “Lump it? What’s ‘lump it’?”

  “Hey. You talk black. I talk white. You wanna understand me, learn white.”

  Virgil leaned forward, balancing the tray on his left hand, and handed Bumper a soda. “I said a cold one,” Bumper sneered, “not hot like it just came from darkest Africa.” Bumper slammed it back down on the tray, which crashed to the floor. Soda cans rolled under the tables and chairs.

  “Let me help,” Mabi said to Virgil.

  “I not needin’ help from a Sam like you.”

  Mabi saw signifyin sounding in Virgil’s eyes, one putdown after another, each sharper than the previous one. Since he had joined Capablanca, Virgil had been siggin’ him worse than any member. You be ridin’ shotgun for the devil in a place like this, was Virgil’s favorite. Calling him Mr. Shine was another.

  Now, hours later in the library rather than the game room, Mabi glared at Bumper and thought, Virgil’s dues just about paid up. How badass sweet it going to be. Bumper struggled to lift his head and look Mabi in the eye. Mabi squatted beside him. “Your pope he started a story in the way back days saying Jews baked Passover matzoh with the blood of Christian boys. Your church sold this story like it sold tickets to heaven. The Jew bakeries be baking matzoh soon. When you be found, your blood drained, a Jewcap on the floor, you be the next incarnation of the blood libel.”

  Bumper strained to open his mouth. His tongue filled the space between his teeth like a boulder blocking the opening of a cave.

  “Your bloodless body,” Mabi said, “will be inciting the first great pogrom in America right here in Boston. No place deserving it more.”

  “When I get to heaven,” Bumper said, his words garbled, his voice so weak a person standing in the corner of the library would not have heard it, “I’ll make God . . .”

  “Allah don’t heed the words of infidels.”

  Bumper opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Time’s running,” Mabi said. “What’s your move?”

  40. ..... B x P

  Mabi disconnected and sealed the first bag, fastening a new one in its place. Through the thick plastic, the blood warmed his hand.

  41. R-R7 ch

  As the second bag filled, Bumper’s head fell forward onto his chest, his eyes opening and closing, his vision blurring. Mabi kneeled beside him. “You hear me?” Bumper grunted. “The game it’s over. Your best move, K-K1, leads to perpetual checks. Any other move gives me mate. I gonna be able to queen my sixth rank pawn. You had me beat, but let it slip away. You be doing no better than a draw and only if you play it perfect.”

  Bumper closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. The second bag continued to fill. Mabi picked up the crumpled potato chip bag, collected the chess pieces, and wiped them with a soft cloth dipped in cleaning fluid. He returned the chess set to the shelf beside the jade set from China and pushed the chairs against the table, rubbing out the indentations in the rug with the toe of his running shoe. No one would know a chess game was played in the library on the night Bumper Sullivan died. Mabi checked the position of Levy’s skull-cap. He lifted Bumper’s head, released it. It flopped forward like the head of a brother broke-necked from being lynched. Bumper’s breathing labored. Mabi changed the second bag for a third, a fourth, a fifth, the sixth and final bag. When the flow slowed to a trickle, he untied Bumper and carried him to the couch. The clock chimed the half-hour, 10:30. Plenty of time. He held a small mirror in front of Bumper’s mouth. It didn’t fog. Checkmate.

  Hours later, burdened by a shopping bag weighed down with six plastic bags of Bumper Sullivan’s blood, Mabi kicked al-Saffah’s door.

  “Welcome home, my son.”

  Mabi thrust the shopping bag into al-Saffah’s arms and poured himself a glass of ice water while al-Saffah carefully lined up the b
ags of Bumper’s blood on a plastic tray. Mabi stared into his empty water glass. Bumper’s spiral notebook. Where was it? He thought he had put it in the shopping bag. He shoved his hands down his pockets, front and back. No notebook. Maybe he lost it. In some gutter somewhere along the way. What-if he forgot it in the library? He had sanitized the library, checked and double-checked to make sure he had left nothing behind, nothing that would point to anyone but Avram Levy. He couldn’t go back now. He’d have to wait ’til morning, ’til the Club reopened. He wished he knew the janitor’s hours, his cleaning schedule. Morning might be too late.

  Al-Saffah made space in the refrigerator for Bumper’s blood. Mabi put the water glass to his lips, then realized it was empty.

  *

  In the early morning hours following Bumper Sullivan’s murder, Mabi, queasy from the heat, let himself into his crib. Visions of Bumper’s spiral notebook danced before his eyes, ghost like, taunting and haunting. Maybe leaving it in the library wasn’t so bad. Nothing tied it to him, him to it. Wrong, said the ghosts. Notations of the last few moves rose from the page and orbited his head. Shit! He felt like he’d been chuck chumped. How could he be so fucking stupid! Maybe the cops’ll think Levy made that writing. Maybe.

  Silvy slept on the couch. The strange white light of television snow from a station long signed off illuminated the room. Silvy twinkled like a star, her glow coming from within as if her soul had escaped her body and surrounded her in a cocoon. Her skin was brown and rich and sweet, maple syrup skin, such high color compared to his, which was darker than the Kenyan coffee beans he ground every morning. He shut off the television and she reabsorbed her cocoon. She stirred. He kissed the back of her hand, then gently massaged it. He felt royal. He stroked her forehead and cheeks and patted her lips with his fingertips. She kissed them. He drew her slowly toward himself and hugged her. No maybe ’bout this.

  “Let me freshen up,” she said. I’m tasting my sleep.”

  Mabi heard the radio over the running water. Silvy always played the radio in the bathroom. It was like she had wired it into the light switch. Mabi got two beers from the refrigerator. Silvy returned from the bathroom. “As God is my judge, radio says someone offed Mayor Charlie’s kid.”

  “No shit.” He handed her a beer.

  “There’s no more safety anymore.”

  “Plenty of safety here.”

  “What’s that blood on your hand?”

  “Trojan business. No worry of yours.”

  “You in another fight?”

  Mabi’s arm spasmed as if was strapped in Alabama’s Yellow Mama and some honky executioner had zapped him with ten thousand million volts.

  “When you gonna quit them Trojans? You sitting on a lifetime of money and the Trojans not a forever run.”

  “Stop acting like a kid roofing from building to building paying no mind.” Mabi struggled to calm his voice. “You don’t watch out you be missing the next roof.”

  “What you so upset about? God don’t like ugly. One snap His fingers and He’ll put you down so fast your soul be dead before your body.”

  “My body ain’t dead yet,” he said, caressing her neck, shoulder, breast.

  “It ain’t live neither.” She pushed him away as she said good-bye.

  From the rooftop of his building, Mabi watched Silvy home. The night heat wrapped itself around him like a curse. He curled up beneath the television antennas. His arm throbbed, synchronized to his pulse. His head ached with worry about the spiral notebook. Leroy. Priam. Mabi. So many names, so many lives–all his–all perched on the rods of the antennas like vultures in trees, quiet, patient, watching, waiting, readying to fight for the juiciest feeding spot. If I died right now, he asked himself, what name they be putting on my stone? On the rooftop of his building, sprawled under the spindly arms of the television antennas that extended over him as if in prayer, the specter of a blank marker guarding his bones beside Jim Ed’s empty grave haunted Mabi. Tormented, he fell into a sleep, shallow and fitful like a heroin nod, his mind unsettled, craving something no addiction would cure, his pilgrimage from Leroy to Priam to Mabi passing before his eyes as if he were dying.

  When he awoke, the blood on his hands seemed to ooze from his pores, while dawn’s rosy fingers–a phrase Mabi remembered from the comic book–crept along the rooftop where he shivered in spite of the night’s heat, heralding a new Boston, one that had not existed less than twelve hours before.

  *

  Now, days later, Bumper boxed and buried, Badger jailed because he had lost his ID bracelet on the Chelsea mission, Mabi, still unable to sleep, lay in bed counting sheep, black sheep. Soon, he thought, the courts be open, Badger be bailed, and the world no longer be spinning out of control.

  CHAPTER 10

  MONDAY, APRIL 20, 1981

  -1-

  The blood had finally washed off Mabi’s hands and he wasn’t conjuring up blank grave markers or agonizing over ajal, his or the Trojans’, as he waited with Silvy and Silvy’s mother, Cealy Thomas, in the hallway outside the Boston Juvenile Court after Badger’s arraignment to visit with Badger before he was remanded to the juvenile cell block of the Charles Street Jail. Badger’s bail hearing had been continued one day so the prosecutor could present evidence that Badger should be held without bail because he was a danger to the community.

  Cealy Thomas, named for a grandmother who died at eighty-seven in the bed in which she was born, had dressed for court in her church clothes: pill box hat with black mesh veil, black dress, black gloves, and black parasol. In the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the women wore their hats during the worship, but in the court-room where the rules were different, she removed it because a court officer threatened to evict her if she didn’t. “Ladies don’t go bare head in public,” she protested, but the court officer cowed her into obeying him by snarling an expletive. Now, with Badger remanded to custody to await his bail hearing, nagging Mabi was Cealy’s only release. “How come they don’t free him up right now?” She poked Mabi in the thigh with her parasol. “If you stood up and told that judge Badger been at the movies with you, he’d be coming home. In jail he ain’t mixing with a high class of folk.”

  “Tomorrow he be bailed,” Mabi said. “Then he comes back for trial and he’ll be free forever.”

  “Trial?” Cealy put her hands to her cheeks as if she were feeling for a fever. “Only guilty people needin’ trials. Oh, Lord, why You testing me so hard?”

  Lawyers milling about waiting for the session to resume edged away from the bench where Cealy sat, pretending to ignore her but stealing glances as if she had a physical deformity, a wine spot on her face or frostbite scarred cheeks.

  “Don’t there be room for one more sinner in the Amen corner, Lord?”

  Silvy pulled Mabi aside. “She won’t last ‘til tomorrow. She was wailing all night.”

  “Lord,” Cealy shouted, silencing the hum of small-talk, “how come You banishing me from Your mercy seat.”

  “She’s wasting a fit over shit,” Mabi said.

  “Lord! I deserve to be sipping the cup of salvation.”

  “Stop your wailing, woman,” Mabi said. “Badger be home tomorrow.”

  “I hope you’re sitting on the right side of the Lord,” Cealy said.

  “You can make book on it,” Mabi replied.

  -2-

  Making book on it. Mabi had bet his life on making book on it, first on a comic book years before, then a policy book, more recently a holy text. He wished he had never learned how to read.

  *

  Livermore Place in Roxbury used to be an address, but now only one building remained on the block, the old Hotel Harvé which once rented rooms by the half-hour to sailors on liberty, husbands whose wives had perpetual headaches, and college students on a slut run, but was now a Single Room Occupancy where Massachusetts dumped welfare mothers and their children, one family to a room regardless of the number of kids. When Livermore Place was in its prime, the Hotel Harvé was sur
rounded by other buildings. Now, encircled by the rubble of vacant store-fronts vandalized years before, a jewelry store that used to be Siegel and Sons, a furniture store that used to be Goldfarb’s Furniture, a travel agency that used to be Dimond Travel, and a fur store that used to be Nathan the Furrier, the ground floor of the Hotel Harvé was a bar, Blackbird’s.

  Iron grates, rusted and bent, barricaded the windows. Sheet metal covered with graffiti shielded the front door. Scorch marks marred the bricks, each a memorial to the white fire companies that refused to venture into Livermore Place, the black companies that did before the Boston Fire Department was desegregated. A small cardboard sign taped to the inside of the window and illegible behind the grime cautioned “Ladies welcome if accompanied by Gentlemen.” Blackbird’s looked like a fortress which had survived a long siege because its assailants retreated one attack too soon.

  On this hot April afternoon, the afternoon after Badger’s arraignment, the afternoon before his bail hearing, the sun bathed Livermore Place in a benign light that relegated to the shadows the fears of the neighborhood: the fear fire would gut another building and spread devastation to another block; the fear of bullets, drive-bys, and random deaths Mayor Charlie only acknowledged in election years; the fear their children would succumb to the lure of drugs and the street gangs that peddled them; the fear their sons would turn to crime and their daughters to prostitution to support their drug habits, the fear of the welfare being cut off; the fear of fear itself.