Dominion

by Randy Alcorn

  It was late Thursday afternoon, two days after the funeral. The temperature had dropped from the eighties to the sixties. Clarence returned from a hard bike ride and took an extra long shower. When he got out, Geneva joined him in their bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

  “Dr. Newman called,” Geneva said meekly.

  “The shrink? What’d he have to say?”

  “The psychologist felt it wouldn’t be good for the kids to stay out here in the suburbs, at least not now.”

  “That’s what he felt, huh? Why?”

  “Too much change, too much stress. He said loss of a loved one was worth so many points of stress, and more for Celeste since she was in the room where it all happened. He said when you add moving and a new kindergarten and isolation from friends, it’s too much, the stress goes over the top.”

  “So he knows how many points everything’s worth? Smart guy. No wonder he costs a hundred twenty bucks an hour.”

  “Plus there’s the racial pressure.”

  “Of transferring to a white school? How many points is that worth?”

  “The kindergartens out here are decent, and Barlow’s a good high school. But we’re talking what, a dozen black kids out of sixteen hundred? Celeste would withdraw, and Ty would…Who knows what Ty would do? It would be hard to adjust.”

  “Our kids have adjusted,” Clarence said.

  “They’ve lived here since they were born. They’ve made friends. It still hasn’t been easy. But Ty and Celeste would have to start from scratch, move from a black world to a white one. Dr. Newman thinks it’s just too much after losing their mother. I agree.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?”

  “I talked with Hattie,” Geneva said. “She’s like a grandmother to them. She’ll keep them as long as we want her to. Since she’s right across the street, it would be the closest thing to home.”

  “Closest thing to where their mom was murdered. The neighborhood’s the problem, not the solution.”

  “I told Dr. Newman about Hattie’s offer. He said given the limited options, the pros probably outweigh the cons.”

  “That’s encouraging. If somebody else gets killed will he take responsibility for it?”

  “You have another solution? I’m listening.”

  “Okay.” Clarence sighed. “I’ll talk to the kids.” He walked down the stairs to the family room where Celeste was reading the Berenstain Bears with Keisha. Ty, looking like a caged animal, paced in the far corner, talking quietly on the portable phone.

  Celeste seemed to be doing amazingly well, all things considered. With Ty it was hard to tell. Clarence sat down with them to explain the options.

  “You could stay here with us or go back to your neighborhood for awhile, stay with Mrs. Burns.”

  “Don’t want to stay here,” Ty said. “Need to get back to my friends.”

  Celeste’s big brown deer eyes, identical to Dani’s, peered up at her uncle.

  “What do you want, Celeste?”

  “I want to stay at the hospital with Felicia.”

  “I know, but we can’t do that. But we’ll keep visiting her every day till she’s better.”

  “We could move your house to our hood,” Celeste said. “So we could still be with you and Aunt Geneva and Keisha and Jonah.” She smiled broadly, having come up with the perfect solution.

  “We can’t do that either, sweetie. But we’ll figure something out.”

  Clarence heard the doorbell ring, warning of an intruder. He listened from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Jake!” Geneva exclaimed. “Hi. Come on in.”

  Clarence bounded up the stairs. “Hey, Jake. What’s up?”

  “Nothing, really. GI Joe’s has a big sale going. Thought maybe we could check out fishing rods or tennis racquets or whatever.”

  “Sounds good. Let me change. Just take a minute.”

  “No need, Clabern. You look fine. It’s not Club Med.”

  Truthfully, Clarence in his designer jeans and classy Green Bay Packers sweatshirt was almost overdressed for GI Joe’s, especially compared to Jake in his faded Levis and stained gray sweatshirt. But that was one of Clarence’s peculiar habits, Jake had noticed. They’d gone to a mall together a few weeks ago on a hot sweaty day and Clarence had dressed up like he was taking a brief to the Supreme Court.

  “How is he?” Jake asked Geneva, knowing he’d get a straight answer from her he wouldn’t get from Clarence.

  “He’s really struggling. But he’s pretty good at pretending. I’m glad you dropped by. He came up those stairs with a spring in his step that hasn’t been there since… everything happened. He needs a friend.”

  “Yeah. We all do.”

  Clarence reappeared in slacks, sweater, and a tie. As he walked past him and out the front door, Jake stared at him.

  We’re headed to a sporting goods store, and Clarence looks like he’s going to close a deal with Bill Gates at Microsoft.

  Jake looked back at Geneva for an explanation. None came.

  Sunday morning Clarence’s family drove to Covenant Evangelical Church in Gresham, where they’d been attending the last few months, their third church since moving to Gresham ten years ago. Ty had been painfully uncomfortable, the only black teenage boy in the church, the only black at all besides Clarence’s family. Clarence insisted he go to the high school Sunday school class and peeked in to be sure he followed through. He saw him sitting sullenly in a corner, defying anyone to reach out to him. As far as Clarence could tell, no one did.

  After steaks and salads at the Road House Grill, Clarence and his family took Ty and Celeste to Hattie Burns. Hattie showed Celeste her own little cot, miraculously missed by the spray of bullets, tucked up next to Hattie’s big bed. The little girl stood there and stared at it. Hattie had prepared her sewing room for Ty. It once belonged to her two boys, one of whom was now a successful welder with a strong family, the other serving time for armed robbery.

  Why did people growing up in the same home turn out so different? Clarence thought about his brothers, Harley and Ellis—Harley the professor at Portland State, Ellis having spent almost as many years in prison as out of it. He tried to tell himself it would work out, Ty living under Hattie’s roof. But he wondered how she could possibly give him the discipline he needed.

  “The boy needs a father, Antsy,” a familiar voice said inside him.

  While the children moved their things into their new rooms and Geneva talked details with Hattie, Clarence wandered out the front door, over to Dani’s house. He stared at the riddled siding and the boarded up bedroom window. He looked down on the tattered porch where the bullet casings had lain, highlighted by those forty yellow markers.

  He peered through a crack in the board and noticed much of the room’s contents had been removed. Hattie had a key. She’d moved Celeste’s cot. Maybe she’d taken care of the rest too. Lying in the corner was Felicia’s cot, what was left of it. At least the blood had been cleaned up. He saw the little lunch pail and stared at the giraffe, focusing on the hole in its head.

  Clarence made it to the Oregon Tribune building before seven Monday morning, an hour earlier than usual. He wasn’t about to put himself on display by walking into a room full of people.

  As always, he carried his brown soft leather briefcase, so habitually overstuffed that on a low-load day, such as this one, it looked like a relaxed trumpet player’s sagging cheeks.

  Clarence came up the elevator to the third floor, walked out briskly, and headed to the right, toward sports. He carefully avoided eye contact as he bypassed the southern fringes of the newsroom.

  The place buzzed with motion, the harmony of steady routine punctuated by the melody, the excited bursts of breaking news. The air smelled of paper and ink, copy machines, fax machines, laser printers. Paper was everywhere. Pieces thumb-tacked to corkboard, taped to computers, hung on walls. Blue, green, red, and gold paper, much of it in the form of little Post-it notes, desperately vied for att
ention.

  Clarence glanced at the vast spread of 120 low-partitioned cubicles linked together—cookie cutter workspaces. All that distinguished one from the next were photos, knickknacks, and various degrees of disorder. A zoo with barless cages. Being a journalist required a practiced ability to ignore the commotion around you and preferably to feed on it.

  His walk to sports made him wish for the old days when he worked for the Oregon Journal, before it was bought out by the Trib. Sports was its own self-contained world then, glassed off in a corner, on the north side, right by its own elevator. You could park, come up the elevator, go to work in sports, and never interact with a single non-sports person. The news reporters were just bodies in the distance, scurrying around dealing with inconsequential events such as assassinations and plane crashes and moon landings, while the really important stuff—whether the Portland Trailblazers were beating the Seattle SuperSonics—all happened in sports.

  Back then, Clarence imagined one day his desk would be alongside the news reporters. He dreamed of writing stories about regular black people—good salt of the earth, hard-working, family-loving, church-going folk. Stories unrelated to sports, entertainment, poverty, discrimination, protests, or crime. He’d take one of those photographers, take him where he’d never been, and reveal to the people of Oregon black life as they’d never imagined it. He’d show them the black community had a whole different face, a much bigger one than the isolated and slanted glimpses they caught in news stories. That vision once fueled him, energized him.

  Clarence finally arrived at the archipelago of partitioned desks that comprised the sports section. He sat down in his semi-private columnist’s cubicle. It wasn’t an office, just a self-contained space enclosed on three sides, with partitions rising three feet above the desktop, rather than the standard eighteen inches. He’d never felt comfortable with those eighteen-inch dividers any more than with those obnoxiously low partitions in some public restrooms. His work station was adjacent to the main maze of partitions. People could see his backside, but by journalistic standards it was private. He could almost ignore the hum of the newsroom, even if it required popping in his foam earplugs when deadline loomed.

  Clarence settled into his desk, figuring he was somewhat safe. The guys in sports weren’t the touchy-feely type, and there were just two women on the sports beat. Not that he didn’t like women. Just that he didn’t want to be blubbered over. The guys wouldn’t know what to say, so they’d either talk business or stay away. Either was fine with him. The last thing he wanted was to have some sensitive man of the nineties come over and tell him he understood his pain.

  He wasn’t too worried about the women. Penny was a third-year reporter, still getting throwaway assignments. Laurie was a seasoned twelve-year vet who recently moved to sports columnist to take up some slack for Clarence’s transition to general. He hoped they would act less like conventional females than jockettes and refrain from picking the scab of his grief.

  Sure enough, for his first hour back at the desk it was just a few hands on the shoulder, a few “I’m sorrys,” a few “Good to have you backs,” and more hushed conversations than usual. But at least nobody sat down to walk him through the fourteen stages of grief.

  On his desk lay expressions of sympathy, one signed by the marketing department, another by the guys down in production. He tried not to be moved by them, but set them carefully in his briefcase to show Geneva.

  Clarence made a quick rendezvous with the sports section coffeepot, where the coffee was always stronger than anywhere else in the galaxy, as if sportswriters needed the extra kickstart since they’d probably gotten home from a late ball game the night before and stopped for a few beers after logging their stories. He poured in the creamer, swirling it into his coffee, the black and white disappearing into each other, producing a mellow brown.

  The newsroom had a feel to it, a superior feel. From here you stood and looked down at the goings on of the world in a way that let you imagine you were above it all—until you got mugged or diagnosed with terminal cancer or your child died. Journalists are a cynical lot, Clarence long ago had decided, and over the years he’d become more cynical than most. It always surprised him how many journalists remained liberals, since liberalism’s assumptions about the goodness of man were daily disproved in most stories you worked on.

  Journalists had to pry beneath the surface of apparent goodness and show the corruption that usually lurked underneath. Thus, the vice they originally found repugnant became their bedfellow, especially as they tried to compete with television news. They seethed with righteous indignation but became addicted to that indignation as Type A’s become addicted to their own adrenaline. Hence their consuming attention to the titillating morbid lives of the world’s Amy Fishers, Lorena Bobbits, Menendez brothers, Tonya Hardings, O. J. Simpsons, and an endless parade of social misfits and afternoon talk show guests.

  Like most seasoned journalists Clarence had long ago cast aside the idealistic notion he could change the world. If you couldn’t change the world, the next best thing was to judge the world. To become its resident critic in a way that put it at arm’s length, so you could imagine you weren’t part of the problem. Whether you were a political writer, a sportswriter or a movie reviewer, you were first and foremost a judge, a magistrate who adjudicated the mortal multitudes.

  Sports had always played an important part in his life. He remembered his first baseball mitt, how Daddy had taught him to oil the leather glove, how he’d worked it in, put a baseball in the middle, drawn it tight with a few lengths of twine to make the best pocket. He remembered how he and Daddy would throw and hit the ball for hours on end. He remembered watching Aaron hit it out of the park and Mays chase down a fly ball. He’d listen to his father’s stories about the old Negro Leagues and wish he’d been able to see his father play. But Obadiah was forty-four when Clarence was born, and Ruby thirty-five. When she had her last child, Dani, she was thirty-nine, worn ragged by the years of sharecropping and the hard life of Jim Crow but with a fire in her eyes her youngest son had inherited. Yes, his parents were old when he was born. Old? His mother had been seven years younger than he was now, his daddy only two years older. How could that be? The notion struck him as too strange.

  Clarence had lots of calls to make. He looked up Portland police in his Rolodex for the first and most important one.

  “This is Clarence Abernathy at the Trib. I’d like to talk to a homicide detective, first name’s Ollie. Forget his last name. Big guy.”

  “Ollie Chandler?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Just a moment.” As he waited, Clarence sorted through three-by-five cards, narrowing down ideas for his next column.

  “Ollie Chandler.”

  “This is Clarence Abernathy. Dani Rawls is…was my sister.”

  “Yeah. I remember meeting you.”

  You don’t sound too happy to hear from me.

  “I was wondering what’s happening with my sister’s case. Have you guys just given up on it?”

  “No, we haven’t.” Chandler sounded defensive.

  “Then…what’s happening?”

  The detective sighed, then paused. “Tell you what, Mr. Abernathy. Why don’t we get together and discuss it? Have any time tomorrow? Maybe one o’clock?”

  “I could be free by one-thirty.”

  “One-thirty tomorrow it is. Justice Center. Fourteenth floor.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Careful not to look to either side or appear less than busy, Clarence sat quietly in his cubicle, the memories falling upon one another like dominoes. He’d been raised on his daddy’s love for baseball, and when he felt drawn to a career in journalism, the idea of combining sports and writing seemed an incredible dream. Sports was about choosing sides, affirming loyalty to colors. It had the thrill of combat without its fatal consequences. It wasn’t like when men gave their lives to hold up the colors in battle, to be riddled with bullets r
ather than let the red, white, and blue touch the ground. You could celebrate Packer green and gold, Dolphin turquoise and orange, Forty-niner red and gold, and it didn’t require that anyone die.

  That’s what he loved about sports. Great passion without real consequence. You could love your team, cheer them on, rave about them, be disappointed in them, even boo them. You could leave them, but they would never leave you. Of course, with player free agency and especially franchise free agency, it wasn’t like that now. When the Browns left Cleveland it proved even the most loyal fans couldn’t keep the team in town. The players were changing teams year to year. The guy you cheered for last year comes in and you boo him this year. Pretty soon all you were loyal to was jerseys. Cheering for laundry. Rooting for colors.

  Between baseball strikes and football franchise moves and basketball scandals, Clarence’s idealism about sports, about the love of the game itself, had been tempered. Maybe it wasn’t sports that had changed so much as he had. While he still loved a good game, especially football, maybe he’d just outgrown his unbridled enthusiasm, maybe he was less naive about life. For years he’d wanted to make the jump to general columnist, to leave sports as a career behind him. He’d thought it would be impossible, given his conservative politics. But things had changed at the Trib. A year ago he’d been allowed to shift to one general column a week, keeping two sports columns. Just five months ago they’d moved him to two general and one sports.

  Jake Woods had been the only non-liberal in-house columnist, coming down moderate or conservative on most issues. There’d been the predictable negative responses, but mainly positive ones to Jake. Many readers thought the Trib was becoming more balanced. Next thing he knew, Clarence stepped through the door Jake opened. In fact, Jake had lobbied to get Clarence in there.

  As Jess Foley, managing editor, often reminded them, newspapers were fighting for survival all across the country. They’d once had a monopoly on the delivery of information; they’d been the gatekeepers and hadn’t had to listen to their critics. But with fewer people reading news and more looking to the network tabloid fare, the trashy pseudo-news, the Trib had been forced to make sure it did less to alienate its constituency. The radio talk show phenomenon at both the national and local levels had bypassed the gatekeepers of the media elite and brought conservatives out of the closet. Many of them dropped their subscriptions to the Trib. As Jake put it, “That drew the attention of management like getting hit with a two-by-four draws the attention of a mule.”