by Randy Alcorn
“Merry Christmas to my family,” Obadiah said, bouncing suddenly back to the moment, lucid and sharp, as if his empty tank had been refueled. “And Happy Kwanzaa too,” he added, looking at Harley, who still gazed at a Tribune article.
“These Republican crackers won’t be happy until they crush the last black man,” Harley said, throwing down the paper. “White devils.”
Geneva glared at her brother-in-law for ruining the mood.
“There’s some white devils all right, brother, and some black devils too,” Clarence said. “How many whites you seen comin’ in here from the suburbs to blow black heads off? Most of our crime is black on black, and you know it.”
“And I know who it was,” Harley said, “that taught blacks their lives were worth nothin’. I know who robbed them of their African heritage and taught them to hate what they are and to hate each other. Whites poured toxic waste into our black sea for hundreds of years, and if some of them don’t dump quite as much waste on us now, that doesn’t do anything to clean up the toxic mess they made. You don’t have to pull the trigger to be responsible for a death.”
Obadiah held up his hands, and Clarence and Harley restrained their tongues. “Both of you has a point. Trouble with you, Son,” Obadiah said to Harley, “is when you trace your roots back, you stop too soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“You go back to Africa,” Obadiah said. “Well, Africa ain’t far enough. Keep goin’ back, back to Noah and his sons, back to Adam and Eve. Go back to where we all come from the same stock, whatever color their skin was, and I don’t care if Adam was green and Eve was purple. It’s right there in Acts 17 and 26: ‘From one man God made every nation of men.’ We’re the same race, human race. We got the same problem, sin. We got the same solution, Jesus. Black Republicans, White Democrats, Hispanic Chinese American Indian Independents, it just don’t matter. Sin’s sin and the Savior’s the Savior. Your generation seems to always forget that.”
“All due respect, Daddy,” Harley said, “but my generation didn’t roll over. If we hadn’t fought for our rights, we wouldn’t have any. When it comes to racial justice, we were the pioneers.”
“No, Son, you weren’t,” Obadiah said, determined to stack up his third-grade education against Harley’s Ph.D. “Harriet Tubman was takin’ three hundred slaves to freedom a hundred years before you was even born. Sojourner Truth was refusin’ to leave white streetcars a hundred years before Rosa Parks. Frederick Douglass was writin’ books about justice and gettin’ stoned by crowds who thought he was an uppity nigger. And a lot of us in betweens was doin’ all along what we thought we could. So don’t act like black folk didn’t do nothin’ till you smart young blacks come along in the sixties. It just ain’t so.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Harley said, “your conservative churches weren’t the solution, they were the problem. They let Bibles and prayer in their schools, but they wouldn’t let black children in. Don’t forget, Sophie spent six months at one of your evangelical colleges. She heard them talk about ‘Martin Luther Coon.’ Tell them, Sophie.” Clarence braced himself. He knew what was coming—he’d heard the story before, though not for years. He didn’t want to hear it again and especially didn’t want his children to hear.
“We were watching an old black-and-white TV in the dorm lounge.” Sophie’s voice was reserved and hesitant, like someone having to open an old wound. “That’s when the newscaster said, ‘Martin Luther King has died in a Memphis hospital.’ All of a sudden a bunch of the students clapped and cheered. Those white Christians celebrated when they heard Martin had been murdered. Next day I left that school, and I never looked back.”
Clarence always found it easier to battle ornery Harley’s anger than sweet Sophie’s pain.
“You knows how sorry I is for that, Sophie girl,” Obadiah said. “Breaks this old man’s heart what happened that day. No excuse for it. But it wasn’t the spirit of Jesus you saw, it was the spirit of the devil, and he can get admitted to any college.”
Obadiah hung his head, as if groping for what to say next. “Well, family, now’s not the time for such words. I thanks God for every one of you. Pray with me, will you?” He bowed his head and nearly all the family followed his lead. “Tonight, Lord, as we celebrate your Son’s birthday—and our African heritage—touch the hearts of everyone in this great family. Show ’em how much you love ’em. Teach us how much we needs you. And Father, tell your son Jesus ‘Happy Birthday’ from Obadiah Abernathy and his kin.”
Harley and Clarence went into the kitchen to get seconds on tater pie. Keisha and Celeste and two of their cousins, Marny’s girls, came up to Geneva and whispered in her ear.
“The girls want to sing for us,” Geneva said. The four girls stood out in the middle of the living room. With exuberant faces they looked up toward the ceiling.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Jesus, happy birthday to you.”
Dani, Ruby, and Felicia looked on. They’d heard every story and every argument and sung along with every song. Now as the Christmas dinner faded from the portal, Dani hugged her mother and daughter tightly. They all three felt the joy of seeing their family and the pangs of missing them. They felt an incompleteness made sweet by anticipating the Great Reunion.
Dani now sensed two hands on her shoulders. She turned around. “It’s you,” she said. “You knew and you came.” Without reservation, she and Ruby and Felicia threw open their arms to welcome him into their hug. They cried together, all four of them, until the tears ran their course into smiling and laughter, which was always the other end of tears in this country.
While keeping her arms around him, Dani loosened them just enough to lean back and look him in the eyes. She smiled broadly and said, “Happy birthday”
The children had the day off from school due to teachers’ in-service, but Celeste was at afternoon kindergarten as usual. Geneva, Jonah, and Keisha sat down to lunch together. Before praying over the meal, Geneva said to the kids, “We need to pray for your father.” Jonah nodded.
“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Keisha asked.
“You know how he hasn’t been himself since Aunt Dani and Felicia died. And now that people are saying … some bad things about him, well, he just really needs our prayers.”
“What bad things are people saying about my daddy?” Keisha asked.
“I’ll try to explain, honey, but it’s hard. Anyway, right now could we just pray for Daddy?”
The mid-December cold became a dense choking fog on Portland’s streets, swirling, clinging to the skin. The fog climbed up railings and stole into homes through window cracks, as if in Dickens’s London. It tingled the spine and took the breath away not to know, even in mid-day, who might be standing in an open alley only ten feet from you.
“It’s time we paid a visit to Shadow,” Ollie said to Manny.
They arrived on Moffat Street at one in the afternoon. Shadow’s mother came to the door. “Davey’s not here now. Don’t know when he be back. Comes and goes as he pleases.” Her eyes looked vacant.
“All right, Mrs. Williams,” Ollie said. “We just want to talk with him, that’s all. We’ll be back.”
Ollie and Manny returned to their unmarked precinct car.
“Okay” Ollie said. “Let’s check out the crack house over on Robins.”
“The abandoned church?” Manny asked.
“Yeah. Gang division says Shadow spends a lot of time there.”
Ollie and Manny drove the four blocks to Robins and pulled over to the curb in the low fog. They watched the building a minute but saw no activity. They got out of the car, both looking like well-worn professionals, suits wrinkled. They knocked at the door of the old church, most of its windows boarded up. No response.
“Police,” Ollie said. “We want to talk with Davey Williams—Shadow.”
A rapid sequence of explosions erupted from within. Splinters flew off the front of the door, one of the
m gouging Manny in the cheek and drawing blood. Ollie and Manny ran from the line of fire, pulling their weapons from their shoulder holsters as they ran, and ducked into a three-foot crawl space behind a dumpster.
“You okay?” Ollie reached out to his partner’s bloody face, from which Manny was extracting a piece of the door. “They must think it’s a drug bust. We need the SERT boys for this one.”
“They’ll ghost by the time we get SERT here,” Manny said.
“That cell phone’s just sittin’ in the front seat, right by the radio,” Ollie said. “I’ve got to get to the car. Cover me.”
Just as he was about to start running, the muzzle of an automatic weapon poked out between two boards over a window of the old church. Twenty rounds flew off, making wild popping noises as they ripped into metal. The rear window of Ollie’s car exploded, and both tires on the passenger side gasped out their air in unison. Ollie retreated behind the dumpster. The partners crouched next to each other, talking strategy in high-pitched tones.
“What’s going on?” The loud deep voice came from behind, catching both cops by surprise. They whirled around, instinctively training their weapons on the intruder.
“Clarence? What are you doing here? Get down,” Ollie said.
Clarence hunched low next to them. “I was headed home on MLK and thought I saw your car pull up by the crack house. I turned around to see what was up. Then I heard the gunfire. What’s happening?”
“Just paying a little social visit to Shadow,” Ollie said. “The homeboys acted like we were invading Cuba or something. Criminy. Man, they’re packin’ heat today!”
Ollie was bundled up thick for the cold weather, looking even more rotund than usual. Crouched down, he cut a memorable image—the Pillsbury Dough Boy in a dark-blue snowsuit. In other circumstances Clarence might have laughed.
“We need backup,” Ollie said.
“What do you want me to do?” Clarence asked.
“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner.” Ollie pointed back toward MLK. “Go get me three or four cops.”
“Very funny, Ollie.”
“I just need to get to a radio or a phone,” Ollie said.
“I’ve got my phone in the car,” Clarence said. He pointed back fifty feet down the street, now wondering if he’d parked too close to the war zone.
“All right,” Ollie said, speaking in machine gun staccato. “All the shooting’s come from the front of the building. I can’t tell if they’re looking through those boarded windows on the side. If they are, I don’t want to give them two targets. Both of you stay put. I’m going to run for your car, Clarence. It’s unlocked, right?”
The detective half stood to get circulation back in his legs. Then he ran from behind the dumpster, his back to the crack house. Six rounds burst from the lower side window. Clarence watched in horror as Ollie flew forward, as if released from a slingshot, then lay motionless on the concrete, twelve feet away.
“Ollie!” Clarence yelled and ran toward him.
“No, Abernathy, stay down!” Manny said it too late.
Shots rang out at Clarence, and Manny opened fire on the window. He heard Clarence groan and saw him reach for his shoulder. Manny gambled, running out to Clarence, whose left cuff was already red, blood dripping down his arm from the shoulder wound.
Clarence dragged Ollie backward toward his car, his hands locked in the detective’s armpits. Manny tried to lift his partner’s legs to help carry the load, but Clarence was hauling the 260 pounds so quickly Manny couldn’t grab hold. Clarence stared at the two bullet paths ripped through the back of Ollie’s suit and shirt. One looked like a lung shot, the other appeared close to the heart. Either looked fatal; together they left little room for hope.
“Get him in the back,” Manny said as he ripped open the front door and faced the crack house, establishing a shooting position behind the door.
Clarence laid Ollie on his stomach in the backseat, while Manny jumped in the front, picked up the phone, and called 911. “Emergency, Code zero. Police officer down. Need ambulance at 540 North Robins. This is Officer Manny Domast. Detective Domast. I have no access to police radio. Repeat, 540 North Robins, the crack house, the old church. Repeat, 540 North Robins. Officer down.”
Manny punched in a direct call to the sergeant’s desk in uniformed where he’d worked until ten months ago. By force of habit he spoke as if on radio rather than phone.
“This is Detective Manny Domast. Code zero, officer down. Detective Chandler has been shot. Need EMT. Dispatch SERT unit to 540 North Robins. Gangsters, heavily armed, firing from crack house.” Clarence heard something unfamiliar in Manny’s voice—panic.
“Ollie. Ollie!” Clarence begged for response, but none came. Clarence’s hands fell on Ollie’s back, now soaked with blood. Manny’s voice faded to the background as Clarence’s fingers reached to Ollie’s wrist and groped for his pulse. He couldn’t feel anything.
Dani watched from above, seeing fallen angels surrounding the crack house, bombarding young men with images of madness and evil. She watched the boys mindlessly loading and shooting and congratulating themselves for the pandemonium. She witnessed an ancient evil using these boys to act out his blasphemy, intoxicating them with a primordial lie he used in corporate boardrooms, on college campuses, and on the street—a false claim of dominion, the belief that they could be as God.
She watched righteous angels courageously wield their swords, fighting to regain turf that had once been theirs, twenty years ago before the inner-city church closed its doors and moved to a nicer part of town. The angelic presence had once outnumbered the demonic here. But not in recent years.
Dani watched and prayed as Ollie was shot and slammed to the ground. She watched as Clarence charged out from behind the dumpster and a bullet headed to the center of his back. She anticipated rushing to the birthing room to greet her brother. But as she watched, the sword of Clarence’s guardian took on physical properties just for an instant, visible only to those who see with the eyes of eternity. The sword caught the bullet in midair, only three feet from Clarence’s back, deflecting it so it only grazed his left shoulder.
The portal closing off, Dani gazed across a great gulf, seeing in the far distance a surreal world of gray—the fringes of hell. It struck her that as heaven was better than the most wonderful dream, hell was worse than the most horrible nightmare. Heaven was the city of God; hell, the trash heap of man. She did not find herself wondering how God could allow people in hell. That was obvious. It was exactly what all people, including herself, deserved. What struck her as amazing was that God could allow people in heaven.
She saw on earth people living between Eden, a world that had ended, and Jerusalem, a world that had not yet begun. As she saw the events on the city street, she understood with breathtaking clarity that earth is the walkway between two kingdoms, heaven and hell. Earth’s most wondrous dreams were of heaven; its most horrible nightmares, of hell. Hell was the worst of earth multiplied a thousand times; heaven, the best of earth multiplied a million times. Earth was a place to preview both, to sample each, and to make the final unalterable choice between them.
“Heaven and hell were both at my elbows every day,” she said to the Carpenter, who sat on the throne far away, yet whose undivided attention was upon her now. “Every choice on earth casts a vote for heaven or for hell. How clear it all is now. How cloudy it often was there.”
Clarence had been detained only an hour in the hospital emergency room. His injury was superficial. It had drawn a lot of blood and still hurt, but they’d patched him up and let him go. He was glad Geneva was at her mom’s for the day and didn’t need to know till later what had happened. He’d dropped by the house to pick up a few things. Now he sat in his car three houses down and across the street from Shadow’s, waiting and watching.
He saw Shadow arrive at his crib with two homies. Clarence studied Shadow. His hair was cornrowed to the back, with some nuclear waste thrown in
, and over it a blue bandanna. He wore gray work gloves that sent a message, “Don’t mess with me. I mean business.” Shadow slapped hands with his homeboys, and then they disappeared around the corner, leaving alone the new leader of the Rollin’ 60s.
Shadow sauntered up to his porch, looking at a magazine that had come in the mail, while Clarence got out of his car and approached him briskly from behind. The young man heard Clarence’s footfalls on the stairs. He spun around, and his eyes dared Clarence to make the next move.
“Hey, Shadow,” Clarence said. “Don’t reach for your heat or you’re history, you hear me?” Clarence lifted his right hand from his suit pocket, showing Shadow his Glock 17. He tilted the gun up slightly, the red light focusing on Shadow’s chest, causing him to freeze. Clarence walked behind Shadow and yanked a Sig Sauer 9 mm out of the gangster’s waistband.
“Chill out man,” Shadow said, scoping out the hood, hoping some 60 would see what was comin’ down.
“You’re going to take a ride with me.” Clarence forced Shadow toward the Bonneville. When they reached the car, Clarence searched him, removing a knife from inside his right sock. He shoved him into the passenger seat.
Clarence pulled out into the street, heading to MLK, where he turned south toward 1-84. “You killed my friend,” Clarence said, “the cop who came to see you at the crack house. Yeah, that’s right, I know it was you. He just wanted to talk to you, and you killed him. And I think you killed my sister.”
“No man, didn’t kill her. I swear it.”
“Dani Rawls. September 2. Forty rounds. My five-year-old niece too. Comin’ back to you now?”
“Heard about it. Didn’t do it. No reason to kill your sister, man.”
“But you did pay off Gracie Miller to lie about me, didn’t you?”
“No way, man. Wasn’t me.”
“Well, we’re gonna find out. I’ve got a friend who has a nice little cabin twenty miles outside the city,” Clarence said. “I know where he keeps the key.”
