The Laws of our Fathers kc-4

by Scott Turow

  Nile's daddy, he be shakin his head the whole time Core spoke. 'Not if he talks, Ordell. Not if he gives them you.'

  Core very nearly busted a cap in Eddgar right here. Like to took his own dogs and beat the motherfucker dead. Only he needed time for that. He needed to think.

  'No,' Hardcore said, 'you sure enough right about that. He beef me out, ain gone be life, no parole. Only gone be fifteen, no parole. That all the minimum mandatory. He could kill somebody's ass and get out sooner. Ain you one them mothers thought that shit up? That be the law, man.'

  'Ordell, for Godsake, do you know who I am? If I get on that telephone, the PA himself will be on the other end. You really think I can't work this out? It's not the same for me as it is for you. You know it, Ordell, and I know it. So let's not kid ourselves. Because we're both too intelligent for that.'

  That was it. Too much! He told Bug to get him out. He sighted Eddgar down the length of his finger.

  'Head up, motherfucker: Yo ass here any more, you gone have a dead ass. I ain talkin no shit here. Word up.' Motherfucker come in his crib and do him like that. Be a dead motherfucker now, and he don 't know it. Motherfuckin owner ofthe motherfuckin world!

  Core had Bug call Nile at Probation. Took him three whole days to get hisself there, but he come. Hardcore knew he would. He jumped in his shit soon as Nile was out his ride. Ripped him right there on the street.

  'Man, what the fuck you done and done?' he asked. And Nile, this silly Opie motherfucker, with all that greasy hair and shit, hippie motherfucker or somethin, he like he got whooped in the gut, he can't even talk.

  'Core,' he said, 'I just told him, man. I had to.'

  'Had to what? So he kickyo butt? Man, I don't fall to none of this shit. I don't compre-hend it. You know? My daddy, man, he just some fool on the corner, man. I see him, I book. What kind of shit you puttin down here? "Had to tell him. " ' Core worked his mouth around to spit, then did it, a long glob to the dirty, broken walk. This was just some unbelievable shit, Nile and his daddy, like to make him wanna smoke them both. 'That daddy yourn, man, he piss off the Good Humor Man. You hear me? He one of them uptight motherfuckers think he always runnin changes onyou. See? You know, like he be fuckin Charlie Chan or somethin, you know? Number-one son, all that shit. He a cold, deadly motherfucker. Stand right up on me and say he gone snitch me out. Ain't no motherfucker on the street down me like that. I kill they ass soon as look at them.' Core walked a few paces in pure agitation and turned back to Nile. 'So you gone beef me out, motherfucker?'

  'Of course not.'

  'So what-all gone jump off here then, huh? You hate this motherfucker or what?' 'Eddgar?'

  'Fuck yeah. Charlie Chan. You hate him? You gone let him do you like that?'

  'No,' Nile said mildly. 'But I mean – ' He got dumb like he do, can't even think to talk or move. 'I mean, what choice do I have?'

  On the street, man, standin round chillin, every dude say he a man. Every bro is down for his. But it ain but half strap up. And in the joint, you see the same. All these proud, tough motherfuckers claimin Goobers, whoop them some and they be beggin, 'Don't do me like that, I ain representin no one.' But Nile, man, he was the lamest, the weakest. Like to think he was a punk, but the stiff-dick motherfucker busy now with this skinny little ho, she suck you dick, man, ain no better than she polishin you shoes, but Nile, he like that too.

  'Straight down, man. You tell that daddy of yourn this. You tell him, Core say you be here 6:15, tomorrow mornin. Gone meet in the street, man.'

  'For what? What are you going to do?'

  'Gone tell him the word, man: Ain no foo'. He ain even think, that motherfucker. He think he the owner of the motherfuckin world, man, and he don't even know I got plans of my own. What kind of dumb motherfucker he think I bein? Man, you insurance now. I got you fingerprints and all over all that dope money, man. I been savin that shit up like in the bank. I dime on you, man, PA gone call me 'sir.' Best do like I say. And he be sayin, you gone beef on me? Bullshit. What proof got?'

  Nile made a face. 'Don't be an asshole, man. We been cool. You don’t have to dis me like that.'

  'I ain dissin. I ain hissin or dissin. I ain fuckin you momma. This just how it be, man. It cold, man. Thass all I'm gone tell yo daddy. Tell him, ' 'Daddy, man, it's too late. Too late. Trust me or bust me, man, and you ain gone bust me.'' Hear?'

  Nile looked at him, those lame eyes, skittering like bugs. Hardcore could hardly stand it.

  'Listen up, dude. You hate this motherfucker worse than I do. Ain that straight shit, now? Ain nothin gone happen here you wudn't done youself. You do like I'm sayin. Ain nothin for you to do after that. Hear?' Core took Nile's chin. He made him look at him, like he hated to do. 'Listen here,' he said. ‘I be you daddy now.' June

  Fear and danger. Well, she'd been here before. Driving, June felt her pulse stirring in unlikely places – above her elbows, in her neck beneath the points of her chin. Anxiety, danger, always had divided her. A fat old woman, cheerful and controlled, gripped the wheel of Eddgar's Nova, careful not to let the needle of the speedometer drift even a mile over the limit. Shrunken down inside her was someone else, ready to sing out in terror. She'd been here before, her hair roots, her nipples, herfingertips juiced with adrenal output. She tuned in Dusty radio for a second, hoping for some great old tune, and then thought, No, no, too much, way too much, and laughing at herself drove on, into DuSable toward Grace Street. The large forms were somehow shocking after the low, soft shapes of the prairie. How could humans live like this, exist at such close quarters, with the sacred, saving earth, from which life sprang, paved over beneath their feet? A kid who looked to have been up all night gunned by in an old jacked-up blue deuce and a quarter, mouthing dirty words in Spanish, the decorative fringe of an old bedspread shimmying in his rear window.

  Were those the best years, she wondered suddenly, those years of danger? How could they be? She had been so miserable by the end – frightened of everything, of Eddgar and of herself, of what she had done. She was the one who demanded they look after Michael. She parted from Eddgar to do it, insisting they could not simply leave wreckage in their wake. How could it seem so wonderful now? She asked Eddgar a few years ago, when she was in town, apropos of absolutely nothing, she asked, 'Do you ever think about that time?' He answered, 'No.' Not an instant's hesitation. No. It was gone. It could not be reclaimed. It was gone, like his childhood, like their marriage, like the many events of everyone's past that meant something when they were happening but would never return.

  When she looked back to those years, the years with Eddgar -from the start to the end – there was always a universe of stalled feelings inside her. At the planetarium here in the city, you could sit and watch the stars turn about you as the earth moved through a season, a year. Living with Eddgar was like that. It always seemed as if he were the single point around which the whole moving panorama of the sky turned – him, and her because she was beside him. She never spoke to anyone about Eddgar. There was never anyone else who understood. Not now. Not then. Perhaps she did not understand herself. In bed with various men years ago, she sometimes mentioned his problems, as if trying to save somebody's opinion. It was always the same routine, lying there, smoking cigarettes, watching the ceiling, because she did not want to think about who in particular was next to her. And in this mood of celestial detachment, she would remark how Eddgar had been more or less incapable since Nile's birth. Did she want them to know she needed less than they might think? Of course, in those days, she would have laughed at the word 'unfaithful.' Doctrine forbade chattelizing any relationship. She was not Eddgar's possession. It was a piece of regressive patrimony to say that her pleasure was not her own business. But she remembered all of that, sleeping with his colleagues, stretching her body against a dozen men she did not know well, allowing them inside her – she remembered it with shame, because Eddgar was there anyway, and they both knew it.

  She had never loved anyone the same way. Not
before or since. Thank God. Thank God. He was a divine, beautiful thing when he started out; she loved him in the illusion-haloed manner of a teen, this beautiful young man with incredible eyes who spoke about God with an unnerving intimacy. She'd been raised in a religious home. Her mother passed hours on the veranda, with an iced tea and the Bible on her lap. She died rocking and trying to decipher the same verses she'd read her whole life. Secretly, from childhood forward, June had believed none of it. And yet when Eddgar spoke, she believed she had met the man – there had to be a man – to take her to the greater life out there. It was some variant, she supposed, on the idea of heaven, that there was a better life here on earth, too. He was inspired, on fire with the rage to make that better life. Teach me! she thought. Share it! She was so jealous of his faith, the more so when she realized years on that the only real expression of Eddgar's passion was for the people who were not close to him. He loved the poor like puppets, like dolls, a love that left him in complete control. For Nile, for her – 'impotent' was the right word. But his passion was like the heat of the sun. She always knew it was really the love he wanted to feel for them.

  In the years since, Eddgar and she had both come to assume, without ever saying it, that their demise was her fault. She'd wanted his faith and could not have it. She could not believe what he believed and so she took it from him. Believe something else, shesaid, something I can share. Rev-o-lution! Oh, she had believed in that. Sanctified by revolution. Reformed by revolution. Everything errant in her life would be corrected. She challenged poor Eddgar. Because he was always her example. How much can you believe? she wanted to know. How much faith can you have? Are you still pure? If I let other men inside me? That was her challenge. And he took it up in his own way and eventually invited himself into those beds. Not in the lurid sense that he ever wanted details. But her love affairs, her animal needs, had to serve the revolution somehow. And in that way, Eddgar, with his stillborn loving, remained, in the way he always had to be, supreme.

  'I think this could be dangerous,' Eddgar had said, holding the car keys this morning.

  'He's my son, too.'

  'I'm not questioning your devotion, June. I don't think it's safe. I know it's not safe. Ego and self-esteem are what really move the folks down there. I think we should do what I told Ordell we were going to do. We should take Nile and go to the PA. I know him.'

  'Eddgar, stop. Stop the heroism. And the scheming. It's no answer. That's a disaster. For you. And especially for Nile. Even Michael will be jeopardized if you're not careful. That's asking to destroy everyone. You should speak to a lawyer before you do anything, and you shouldn 't do that until I've talked to this fellow now.'

  'June. It's dangerous. I wouldn 't be surprised if he's got half a mind to kill me. Maybe more than half. This is too dangerous for anyone.'

  'It's not as dangerous for me as it is for you. I'm a fat old woman. I'm not going to threaten anyone. Give me the keys. I'll call as soon as we 're through.'

  So here she was again, on one of Eddgar's missions. God, the places she had gone in this life. She thought about the Panther safe houses to which Eddgar used to send her. What a crazy scene. With the guns all over. The automatic weapons, fully loaded, leaning against the wall, much as a farmer would lean his hoe, bandoliers of rounds in full metal jacket looped over the rifle barrels. The windows were newspapered so the cops and FBI could not see inside. Near the end, after the Oakland Armory raid, there was military issue about: M-16s and M-79s, ammunition boxes, blasting caps piled into a green duffel marked by stencil company a, 92nd engineers and the M-18 smoke grenades and C-4 plastic explosives. Sometimes there was cocaine piled up on a table like flour. And always women, and babies crawling under foot, among the men in berets and boots.

  Eddgar had nearly been shot half a dozen times in those places. Someone was always pulling a gun on him, angered not so much by his opinions as by his manner. He looked down the barrel of the gun, implacable. She – everybody there, everyone but Eddgar – saw the same thing in him, a Southern boy refusing to bend to their rage. But Eddgar would not flinch. He thought about his death, the need to die for the revolution every day. And he never let those incidents pass. He believed in discipline. When poor Cleveland was released from the Alameda County jail, when they bailed him after he had snitched out Michael, Eddgar could barely wait to get to the inevitable denouement. He made a show of good cheer, but the last time they saw Cleveland, the morning he was killed, Eddgar took a.44 and fired off a round and laid the muzzle, hot enough to burn, right against Cleveland's temple. He left a mark and didn't say a word, even as Martin Kellett and two Panthers grabbed Cleveland. The mark of Cain, she thought now. It was all so crazy.

  About much of it, about Cleveland's death, for example, she had been too sorry since to live much of a life. She had gone down, fallen helplessly into the chasm. She had made a silly marriage to a handsome, empty man, a man who was even somewhat cruel. He gave her drugs, and she took that for love. They broke up. She took the cure, but started drinking again seven years ago, and now she drank too much every day. She sat up nights, lapping up cheap Bordeaux by the liter and playing computer solitaire.

  Now she made a right and came closer to the projects. She could see the blunt towers looming over the rows of industrial buildings, the final structures before the blocks of wasteland around Grace Street. There were old foundries with smokestacks, like arms raised in warning, warehouses with huge gantry doors, all the buildings guarded by razor wire atop their fences. What was in there to steal? The few faces on the streets now, as the early morning dark was starting to dissolve, were black, and in her present mood of recollection she thought of Mississippi in the old days and the God-fearing simple people they wanted to help, people who were so good, so radiantly good they seemed almost angelic, suffering their life of deprivation and toil. Lord, she loved to leave the churches, the meetings on Sunday nights in summer. The Southern air hung like a damp sock and the broken light of the moon silvered the trees and the bosks of the heavy landscape. She loved to hear the singing voices rising, gathered together and holding, like the voice of history, to a single note. How could we have gone from there to here with so little gained? she wondered. How could we have raised up these despairing children, dispossessed, who felt from their first moments there was no place on earth for them, who were untouched, unsaved by any tradition of human nobility? How could this have occurred? We were right! she thought, suddenly, desperately. We were right. That was why she was here now, in the cold hand of danger. She was doing what she'd done a hundred times before, saving him, saving Eddgar, this beautiful passionate boy, because she had to save everything he believed in, because she had no faith herself. But oh, oh, she had believed in him, in revolution, and she claimed some fragment of that surging feeling now as she swung onto the street. She rolled the window down and smiled absurdly.

  'Lady,' a young woman said, a perfectly beautiful young woman with flawless chocolaty skin. She had a stocking cap tugged down over most of her face. 'Lady,' she said, 'you in the wrong damn place.'

  APRIL 2, 1996

  Seth

  So this is how it happens, Seth thinks. You hassle the guy inside your head for twenty-five years and then you walk up to his door on a Tuesday morning and knock and here he is, holding his half-frame glasses and today's newspaper. Eddgar is stock-still behind the screen door.

  'Is this about Nile?' he finally asks. 'Is he in more trouble?'

  ‘I hope not'

  Eddgar undertakes another instant of visible deliberation, his face obscured in the deep shadows of early morning. Seth waits on the tongue-and-groove porch that wraps around the front of the old frame house.

  ‘I was about to make a cup of tea,' Eddgar finally offers and nudges the door open a few inches. The interior architecture is baffling. The corridor goes on forever, and the air is heavy with the scent of frying oil and gathered human smells, a little like a barracks. 'Have you heard from him?' Eddgar asks when t
hey reach the small kitchen.

  Seth removes the paper Hobie gave him last night, the microfiche from the delivery company showing Michael's address. Eddgar puts the kettle on to boil and replaces his glasses before taking up the record.

  'Am I being threatened?' he asks then.

  'I'm trying to put some things together, Eddgar. It's not a threat.'

  'Quite certain? Not planning any reunions with the FBI? No confessional in your column? You see, I want to be sure we aren't going to have another act in that morality play in the courtroom. The Revenger's Tragedy? Isn't there a drama of that name? I believe June studied it.' Eddgar coughs at that moment, a rattling attack on his lungs. He holds a fist before his mouth. 'But I suppose your impulse for vengeance is well satisfied at this point.' Eddgar smiles solely for his own benefit. 'What is it you want to know, Seth?'

  'The truth? There was a lot of lying in that courtroom.'

  'Surely not by me,' says Eddgar. 'It was your friend Tuttle who distorted the facts.' He stands somewhat stiffly and returns to the whistling kettle, casting about the kitchen to find a second cup. When he opens the refrigerator for milk, it is largely bare, holding only a dairy carton, a gallon jug of water, and a single green olive and a red pimento, separated and floating in half a jar of greenish juice. 'Is he crazy or melodramatic?' Eddgar asks.

  'Hobie? More a performance artist. That's how I think of him. The word as gesture.'

  'He's a treacherous person.' Eddgar shakes his head at the thought and places both cups, curling steam, on the table. 'I'm sure you had a good time watching Hobie play with my life. I assume you felt it was appropriate. Because you think I played with yours.'

  'Didn't you?'

  Eddgar takes his time with that. Across the table, he folds his hands carefully.