The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  Leroy stood before the Zuluz, demanding the respect they gave Luke. “My name it’s Priam and now we be the Trojans.”

  “This some trickeration?” Spider asked.

  “You challenging me or you wanna be my warlord?” If Spider was still warlord, Priam figured, he’d only have to earn Spider’s respect.

  “From appetite to asshole I’ll call you Muhammad Ali if it gets you on.” Spider pointed to the bitches lining the wall. “Leader chooses his woman.”

  “The biddy.” Priam pointed to Silvy Thomas, the only one who looked close to him in age.

  -6-

  Stilts knew when to give Mabi space, when to make small talk, when to crack jokes, when to talk serious. Space was what Mabi needed as he waited for Beaujolais’s telephone call. Blackbird’s was empty now, the other drinkers having suddenly lost their thirst. Still, Mabi’s mind wandered, back now to the first dawn after Bumper Sullivan’s murder. Mabi had watched the eastern sky begin to lighten on the rooftop of his building trembling like an addict suffering withdrawal. He had watched Silvy home from that rooftop, then dreamed again the dream, another comic book dream, he first had the night he offed Luke Shaw. In that dream, he had climbed the fire escape to the roof of his building and leaned against the chimney watching the fog settle on the rooftops. Jim Ed had appeared among the television antennas. Mabi had tried to speak, but Jim Ed held out one hand and the words stuck in his throat.

  “Listen up,” Jim Ed said. “Two gates link our worlds, a gate of horn providing easy passage for true souls and a gate of ivory providing escape for false dreams.”

  Two gates materialized among the rooftop antennas, one bone yellow like a ram’s horn, the other alabaster white like an elephant’s tusk. He moved toward the yellow, but Jim Ed blocked his way and pushed him through the white, off the roof-top, back into the bedroom where in his dream he awoke, his bedding so damp he wondered if he’d pissed the bed. Layers of fat engulfed his heart, so heavy it pinned him to the mattress.

  Priam, as Mabi called himself at the time, tried to escape this heaviness by making the Trojans the most powerful street gang in Boston. Block by block, they expanded their turf, doubling it once, then again. When he decided to drive competing drug pushers out of business, he used Tales of the Trojan War for inspiration, slaying one pusher with a bow and arrow, another with a spear through the heart, stoning a third to death, dragging a fourth through the streets tied to the bumper of a car. Still, the nightmare continued, night after night, Jim Ed pushing him through the ivory gate, the fall further and further each time, until he awoke, sweating, pinned to wet bedding by a heaviness that centered in his heart and spread throughout his body as if it circulated with his blood.

  At home, he and Gideon and Hannah argued about school and calls from the truant officer. “School didn’t save Jim Ed from dying in Nam,” he told his parents.

  “There’s a witch riding that boy,” Gideon said to Hannah. “You should tie his shirt to his underwear with black thread.”

  Mabi, then Priam, punched the frizzly chicken hanging from the door jamb. Feathers drifted to the floor. “Leroy’s dead. Buried in Jim Ed’s empty grave. All your praying and conjuring won’t resurrect him.”

  “Maybe,” Gideon said, “the devil what stole his body should be moving on. Leroy he’ll always have a home here, Priam never. Your things in boxes by the curb.”

  He fought the impulse to attack his father. He gasped for words, but had none. Gideon drank coffee as if he weren’t there and Hannah, erect in her chair, lips frozen shut, stared at him as hard as anyone ever had. He searched her face for some sign she’d take his side. He bent to kiss her, but she turned away and his lips brushed her hair. “Someday,” he said, “you’ll be sorry you let him do this.”

  “Satan’s a liar,” she said, “a conjurer, too. You better watch out, ’cause he’s conjurin’ you.”

  Through the fall and winter after he had moved out, he didn’t see Hannah or Gideon except from a distance or scoping out the house to make certain things were right. He slept on the floor of Trojan headquarters, dubbed Ilion from the comic book, that was still in the basement of the tenement where Gabe Tucker once lived. Somewhere in that basement, rolled in a tube, stored in an unpacked box, was the Bill Russell poster, a relic waiting for someone to hang it on a ceiling or garbage it away. The nightmares continued. The Trojans did not raise up the weight off his heart; nor did seizing control of the drug trade throughout the city. The money, the power, the fear, the respect–nothing lifted the heaviness.

  Winter dragged, hanging on like a child clinging to its mother’s leg. That April he tried to make peace with Hannah on the anniversary of the burial of the empty coffin in Jim Ed’s grave. He arrived first, accompanied by the Trojans, bearing flowers stolen from a fay florist. Hannah ignored him, them. She removed sewing shears from her purse and clipped the tall grass around the stone.

  Dead grass surrounded all the graves in Nigger Heaven as white municipal workers called that section of the cemetery, which languished as unkempt and uncared for as when it was a potter’s field except for a few neat, well-trimmed sites tended by families who cared. Although a federal judge ordered Boston to desegregate its cemeteries, most of Boston’s blacks were still buried among the remains of anonymous white paupers that had accumulated during the city’s three hundred fifty years. For all the unmowed weeds in summer, unraked leaves in fall, unshoveled snow in winter, unwatered shrubs in spring, the gravestones themselves, shining in the hot sun like bleached-white bones, survived, vandalized only by rain, wind, hail, and snow.

  Blade by blade, Hannah cut the grass and piled it in neat mounds, then wiped dust from the recessed letters chiseled into the granite with a threadbare cleaning rag. She took a flower, the delicate violet edges of its petals tinged brown, and placed it above where Jim Ed’s head should have been. Doubled over by the weight of her memories, the strength of her fears, she seemed old and weak and abandoned by God. She mustered enough strength to say some words.

  “Almighty and eternal Father . . . ”

  “All right!” the Trojans chanted in reply.

  “ . . . source of all life . . . ”

  “Yea, Lord.”

  “ . . . we love those summonsed away unto Thee . . . ”

  “Be with us, O Lord!”

  “ . . . and we thank Thee for their memories . . . ”

  “You be truth telling.”

  “ . . . which comfort us earthbound mourners . . . ”

  “We listening.”

  “ . . . and keep us trusting in thy righteous wisdom . . . ”

  “Gawd, she testifying.”

  “ . . . we mourners lift up our heads to Thee . . . ”

  “Again.”

  “ . . . yea, we do lift up our heads to Thee . . . ”

  “Bring me over!”

  “ . . . and we do consecrate our lives to Thee . . . ”

  “Our lives.”

  “ . . . in tribute to our dead who are bound to Thee . . . ”

  “Have mercy.”

  “ . . . He do have mercy . . . ”

  “Sing out!”

  “ . . . if we magnify . . . ”

  “Preach it.”

  “ . . . and sanctify . . . ”

  “I swear I do.”

  “ . . . our faith in His love . . . ”

  “His sweet love.”

  “ . . . Yea, His sweet love which links one generation to the next . . . ”

  “I’m over! I’m over!”

  “ . . . so Lord, we praise Your holy name and I say amen . . . ”

  “Say it again.”

  “ . . . Amen! I say amen!”

  Like a pilgrim who knew her age would keep her from the Promised Land, Hannah walked at a pall-bearer’s pace, head erect, eyes forward, out of Nigger Heaven toward the distant gates of the Nigger Hell known as Boston.

  Kneeling, Priam gathered the dead grass as if he were harvesting it. I ain’t got no more roots t
han this grass, he thought. He placed the longest stalk along the top edge of the stone for the bro he lost, the next longest for his nameless self. He added two more for Hannah and Gideon, whether they were his real blood or not, and another for Silvy, sweet Silvy. A short stalk for Silvy’s bro Badger, a handful for the Trojans. He laid a solitary stalk across the top. He struck a match against the side of the grave. The grass leaped into flames, flared, then blackened into ashes, coloring the bright white of the stone the way Boston’s blacks colored the city. His entire life was trapped inside that stain.

  Spitting into his hands, he tried to scrub it away, spitting and scrubbing, spitting and scrubbing, until his spit came out dry and a gray smudge remained. He rose and walked toward the gates of the cemetery, past the graves of Boston’s anonymous white paupers, past the graves of Boston’s blacks, out of Nigger Heaven, into Nigger Hell.

  -7-

  In Blackbird’s, the phone remained silent. Spider and Scorpion, like Stilts, gave Mabi his space. Mabi’s mind continued to wander. Again, he was on the rooftop of his building on the morning after Bumper Sullivan’s murder.

  As the eastern sky continued to brighten that morning, the city began to stir and awakened Mabi from his dream and he thought about the last time he had gone to church. It was the Sunday of al-Saffah’s guest sermon when he accompanied Silvy and Badger to the New World Primitive Baptist Church where Silvy taught the preschool class in Bible studies and Badger, when forced, attended a scripture class. Black children, shouting, singing, laughing, some whining, some fighting over toys, filled the classroom.

  “Priam! Priam!” A small boy, Jesse, tugged at his leg. “Let’s make a clay man.” He gripped Mabi’s baby finger and led him to the clay table.

  He gouged out a hunk of clay and rounded it into a ball, flattening the top with his thumb. “This the head,” he said. He rolled four pieces into thick snakes. “The arms and legs.” He molded a torso from a large chunk, pinching it at the middle to create a waist, and joined the limbs to the torso. Three spitballs of red clay became the eyes and a nose and three thin snakes, two short and one long, became a grin and a pair of eyebrows. “What you naming him?”

  “Trojan,” Jesse said. “He can save my place ’til I be growed.”

  “Better take Trojan home then.”

  “You made him,” Jesse said. “You take him.”

  “I be standing him right ’side my bed.”

  A bell rang and one of the aides led the children upstairs to the sanctuary.

  “You’re poisoning these kids,” Silvy said.

  “I’m awe inspiring ’em.”

  “Only the good Lord awe inspiring.”

  “You saw how the good Lord awe inspired my brother. And what’s sweet Jesus done since then? No change in Boston. Shit, no change anywhere. The man still lynching us. He just not using rope no more. No awe inspiring in that.”

  “You want inspiring, come to the service. There’s a guest sermon. A mullah.”

  He did attend that service, did become al-Saffah’s disciple, did allow al-Saffah to circumcise him, did allow al-Saffah to change his name from Priam to Mabi, and, under al-Saffah’s thrall, did carry out mission after mission to fulfill al-Saffah’s goal of creating a holy war in Boston.

  “How I get away with so much so fast?” Mabi asked when al-Saffah explained the missions, each escalating up the ladder of hatred. “Heavy jail time I be caught.”

  “Have faith,” al-Saffah replied.

  The first mission occurred the night before the first Thanksgiving after Mabi’s conversion when he used fertilizer to burn a cross into the grass of a Jewish cemetery. When Mayor Charlie denounced anti-Semitism at a news conference on Thanksgiving morning, Mabi replied that night by burning a Star of David into the lawn of a Catholic cemetery. When this produced nothing more than a flurry of ecumenical statements from politicians and religious leaders, Mabi heisted five gallons of blood from a slaughter house and defaced the white marble expanse of Temple Israel with gargantuan swastikas; then, later that night, he vandalized the crèche in front of St. Patrick’s and decorated its gray gothic curves with three bloody Ks.

  Quickly, the soft voices of ecumenism rose into angry demands for justice. Fingers pointed. Catholic and Jews asked, first privately, then publicly, whether the other might not be responsible. Late on a Saturday night in February after a blizzard drove the temperatures into negative numbers and wind-drifted snow buried the streets, Mabi firebombed the homes of Rabbi Joseph Esrael and Father Dominic Ponichtera. Both burned to death because the fire engines and ambulances could not overcome the weather conditions and the unplowed streets.

  “You are a true disciple,” al-Saffah had said at the time, his voice reverential; and at the time Mabi had felt truly blessed.

  -8-

  Later that day, no longer able to wait for Beaujolais’s phone call at Blackbird’s, Mabi left a message for her with Stilts and returned to the Trojans’ crib where he sat in judgment over Brother Ambrose for stealing from the Trojans. Ambrose was a mule, a courier who delivered drugs to the addicts, collected payments, and remitted the money to the gang. Spider prosecuted. Two Trojans wrestled Ambrose into the defendant’s chair in front of Mabi’s desk and stationed themselves on either side like police officers guarding a convict appearing in court on a habe. “Where them skates with the orange wheels?” Mabi asked.

  “They’s my first Tuesday skates,” Ambrose said. “Purple’s my today color.”

  “How many colors you got?”

  “One for each day of the month.”

  “Didn’t know the rainbow had so many colors. How you paying for them fancies when you ain’t paid the Trojans in . . . how long, Spider?”

  “From the jump.”

  “That long.” Mabi said.

  “Longer.”

  “Man,” Ambrose said, “you know I’m good for the green.”

  “If you’re so good for the green, where’s it be?” Mabi nodded at Spider.

  “You into Quall for almost ten large,” Spider said. “Horses, dogs, football, numbers, the works. Quall ready to tan your black ass.”

  “Man, the eagle it fly tomorrow,” Ambrose said.

  “How about it flying right now? I don’t want Quall thinking he eats first.”

  “No bird flies so high so fast. Two hours.”

  “By ripping off the packy?” Mabi asked.

  “One hour.”

  “If the bloods see you fucking with us, they’ll fuck with us and before you change your skates only old lady whites be fearing the Trojans.”

  Scorpion rushed in. “Beaujolais waiting downstairs real authority looking.”

  “Spider. Dance Ambrose with Mr. D., then spread his fancy skates ’round the hood. Kids deserving easy rides.”

  “I ain’t no sell-out,” Ambrose cried.

  “Say what?” Spider said. He turned to Mabi. “Hangin’ him from a streetlight send the message real clear.”

  “Fuck shit no!” Mabi snarled. “Too many lynchings of too many of our people for us to be lynching each other. OD him so he go out smiling.”

  Beaujolais, sporting the gang colors of a Boston cop, marched in and replaced Brother Ambrose in the defendant’s chair.

  “Badger’s too good a collar and Ugolino he ain’t dealing. ‘Less you pay extra, he’s busting you too.”

  “For what?”

  “For what he fucking busted Badger for.”

  Mabi removed a nine and a Glock from the desk’s center drawer and laid them on the desk pointing at Beaujolais. “Tell Ugolino if Badger ain’t home for supper tomorrow he’ll be celebrating summer eulogizing at police funerals, starting with yours. Come September he’ll be starring in his own. Tell him I’ll fuck him so bad he’ll go down in a closed coffin. Tell him it’s the fire this time.” He waved her out of the room.

  “We should do a cop now,” Spider said, “so they know we’re serious.”

  “I said home for supper tomorrow. Give her a chance
to deliver the message.”

  Outside, Cealy and Silvy intercepted Mabi on the tenement’s front stoop. “Where’s my baby?” Cealy demanded. “How come he ain’t freed yet?”

  “Tomorrow,” Mabi said. “I said he be bailed tomorrow. It’s still fucking today.”

  “Don’t be talking to Cealy like that.” Silvy slapped at his face, but he deflected her hand with his forearm.

  “The Lord’s giving me no inducement to serenity until my Badger comes home,” Cealy said. “I always thought you were right with the Lord the way you cared for my Badger after his daddy sent off, but now I can’t help but think you a Satan sent man. I’m not budging ’till Badger be brought forward.”

  “Make the stoop your bed for all I care. Just don’t shit on the stairs.”

  Maybe, Mabi thought as he retreated back inside, I shouldn’t have used Badger on no missions. He recalled the night he had sent Badger to intercept Rabbi ben Reuben on the overpass above the Charles Street rotary near the Charles Street Jail. Mabi had fidgeted that night, waiting for Badger’s safe return on a stool in Ta-Kome Pizza’s back room, hidden behind two stacks of cardboard take-out boxes.

  Demand for pizza had wilted in the Afric heat and the ovens at Ta-Kome Pizza, which sold Sicilian pizza by the square operated by the Trojans to launder drug money, were turned off to save the cost of electricity. Mabi didn’t nickel and dime, but he counted pennies. If he saw one on the sidewalk, he stooped to pick it up. Bad luck to pass it by, he said. Or, never too rich, never too proud. Hexed up like your father, Silvy said. If it was from his birth year, he saved it in a piggy bank Gideon gave him on his fourth birthday, a rocket launcher which shot coins at a slot in a sphere sporting the bumps and bruises of the moon’s craters and mountains. Dimes easily made it through the slot into the sphere’s hollow interior, quarters rarely, nickels and pennies about half the time. The slot was too narrow for half dollars. Mabi didn’t know Gideon had stolen it from the bus company Lost and Found, but there were a lot of things he didn’t know about his folks. That’s one reason why he was now Mabi, formerly Priam, no longer Leroy Wallaca. No easy pages in Allah’s book.