“All right.” Lorenzo, fighting down a hit of panic, said the words almost daintily, a small, tense smile on his face.
“You ever ride shotgun on something like this?”
“Not really.” Lorenzo gave him that small, overwhelmed smile again.
“It’s like this…” De Lauder took a breath, as if to set himself. “This gig, it’s kind of like a walleyed gig. Like, you ever see a hammerhead shark? Got his eyes coming out the side of his head where his ears should be? You got to be kind of like a hammerhead shark, ’cause you got to be looking right and left, at the same time. You got to be eyeing our people on the inside, and you got to keep an eye on their people watchin’ us go by. And I tell you, you just hope the police over there are on the job tonight, ’cause without them helping out, what we got to deal with is always just this side of too much, you know what I’m saying? I mean, shit can and will come from anywhere.”
“All right,” Lorenzo said softly, his chest rising with every breath.
“Like on the inside? Our people? You keep an eye on the young people, check out their hands, see if they’re carrying anything. Could be a brick, a sap, a kitchen knife. Worst thing is a lightbulb. You hear a lightbulb pop, you think it’s gunfire and it’s on. So you’re always watching their hands. Pat ’em down if you have to, give ’em a warning up front before we get out the gate. I ain’t worried about hurtin’ people’s feelings, because this is life and death. The other thing is the juicers, can’t abide the juicers. You smell liquor on anybody’s breath? See it in their face? Out they go. Out they go. Last thing we want to do is pour alcohol on a flammable situation.”
“I hear you,” Lorenzo said faintly, recalling Millrose Carter’s liquored eyes, knowing he didn’t have the heart to bounce the guy from the march.
“Now outside? The Gannon people? Not much you can do. Like I said, shit can come from anywhere. You want to keep an eye on the windows, the rooftops, so you can catch that chunk of cement, but basically, and this is what I’m saying, you got to hope the local cops are on the case.
“Now, the locals right up on the sidewalk? The sidelines? You know, the nigger shouters, the watermelon wavers, the spitters—you just ignore them ’cause they’re showing all their cards up front. The watermelon waver, he’s doin’ his thing. The spitter? He’s busy spittin’. The nigger shouter, he’s busy shoutin’ nigger. What you got to keep an eye on is the quiet ones. You keep an eye on the ones who’s pacing us, like, ducking behind the front lines and keeping parallel to us. They might have something in their back pockets or under their shirts and just be waitin’ for the right time. It’s hard. This ain’t no Macy’s parade and just because you’re paranoid don’t mean someone’s not out to nail your ass, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, I do.” Lorenzo was wheezing a little, wondering if his suddenly labored breathing was asthma, anxiety, or both; wondering if it would pass once they were all on the move or if it would hobble him every step of the way.
As De Lauder began corralling his people, Lorenzo scanned the crowd. There had to be at least three hundred people here, maybe more, many people he didn’t know—Lorenzo looking for new crews, potential trouble, and then seeing her, Brenda, leaning against the stone retaining wall under the Conrail fence.
The way the woman was standing, he couldn’t see more than a quarter profile, but it was her, pale, thin, rumpled, leaning into the wall as if for support, as if she were too weak to stand on her own. Brenda, Brenda—Lorenzo palming his heart—he would swear to it.
“NO JUS-TICE …,” an unseen voice cried out, expectant, demanding.
“NO PEACE,” half the crowd responded.
“NO JUS-TICE…”
“NO PEACE.” Everybody in on this one.
“WHAT DO WE WANT …” Again, that long, trailing, muezzin-like call.
“JUSTICE!”
“WHEN DO WE WANT IT…”
“NOW!” The word was like the basso exhalation of a nation. The Reverend Longway was assisted to a flat ledge of shale six feet above the cul-de-sac, a natural platform jutting out of the eroded earth that climbed from the asphalt of Hurley Street to the breezeways of the lower buildings.
“You know.” Longway grinned his “I’ve had it” grin, his voice strong enough, despite his illness, to project out over the entire assemblage. “The police department of Gannon, they say they came in here because there was a child’s life at stake. They say they were operating on the information they had, received. That, that perception comes before hard information. That, that time was of the essence…All good and well, all good and well.” The reverend shoved his glasses up his nose with a thumb. “But let me propose to you… another situation. And you tell me if it sounds, plausible.”
Scoping out the rev’s listeners, Lorenzo spied Curious George standing apart from everyone else, talking to himself, unhappy, Lorenzo feeling sorry for his profoundly apolitical ass.
“Can you imagine, can you imagine if, if a black child, a black child from Armstrong, had been abducted, was said to have been abducted somewheres in the city of Gannon…Can you imagine the police department of Dempsy raiding that city in an effort to save that child?”
“No!” The word barked sharp, over and over, like scattered shot on a pistol range.
“No.” Longway nodded emphatically. “No. You most definitely cannot.”
Lorenzo spotted Jesse and saw that she was grinning, closely following Longway’s words with an amused smirk on her mug, and he had no idea what to make of that.
“The police department of the city of Gannon, they come into these houses the way they did, do you know why?”
“Why,” the crowd responded.
“Do you know why?” Longway was pumping it. “Because they knew, that they could. They saw us as, defenseless. They saw us as, helpless. And they knew that they could. But do you know what? I don’t see no defenseless people out here tonight.”
“No!”
“I don’t see no, no helpless people out here tonight.”
“No!”
“They came in here, because they knew that they could, and this city, our city, said, ‘Come on in. Come on in.’”
People cried out “No,” “Yes,” and other, less articulate sentiments. Lorenzo checked out De Lauder, a mirror image of Lorenzo himself, ceaselessly eyeballing the crowd, immune to the rev’s words, working.
“You know, my mother,” Longway continued, downshifting, “was a great, believer in courtesy.”
“Yess…” A lone voice, expectant, hanging in the air.
“And one of the courtesies, that she believed in honoring, was that if someone came a-calling to your house, it was only right, that at the appropriate time, you return the visit.”
“Awright…” people called out, some clapping in appreciation of the metaphor to come.
“See, my mother would not have approved of the Gannon police, because when they came a-calling here, they didn’t even bother to knock, they just shouldered their way through the door like a push-in mugger, but now we are gonna be more dignified than that. We, are gonna be in control of ourselves, our passions, our, physicality. But nonetheless, a visit’s a visit, and now it’s time for us to return the call.”
Lorenzo finally found himself clapping, appreciating the artful way Longway had said it: Watch it, don’t fuck up.
“NO JUS-TICE…” That unseen muezzin was calling out again.
“NO PEACE.” Hurley Street rumbled out the refrain in a tight huff, Lorenzo moved by the power behind it, the coordinated passion.
The JNL security ushers more or less took over, beginning the task of shaping people up six across, pushing, pulling, arranging people in the order of their significance to the tale—the injured, their families, the high visibles up front; De Lauder’s other bus people, knowing the drill, automatically lining up single file on either side of the Dempsy people; the JNL security guards then flanking the flankers, everyone pumped, ready to roll.
&
nbsp; De Lauder came up to Lorenzo, passed him a JNL armband, saying, “You should wear this,” then jogged off.
Lorenzo, feeling a little light in the gut, bunched the mustard-colored fabric in his fist and started on his own trot up and down the line, ducking in here and there, all the time with one eye on the hard bright blue that winked at him through the trees.
“WHOSE STREETS …”
“OUR STREETS.”
As the marchers, their progress cadenced to the call and response, began working their way around the benches and playground fixtures of Martyrs Park—some reaching up and touching the bronze plaque of Martin, Malcolm, and Medgar, as if for luck—the motorcycles that had been fronting the city line neatly parted into two rows, which then flowed out into Gannon alongside the emerging procession. The guzzling rumble of the choppers almost drowned out the one-two call-out of the marchers, and this unsolicited police escort, combined with the furiously crab-scuttling and back-stepping presence of the shooters, nearly doubled the width of the march.
The protesters, about three hundred strong, marched on Jessup Avenue toward the heart of Gannon.
At every cross-street for the first few hundred yards over the city line, more choppers appeared, melding into the motorcade, lengthening it, loudening it. And at the first major intersection, a Brinks-like Emergency Services truck cut in front of the advance guard of backtracking shooters and the oncoming, arm-linked reverends. This fortress on wheels then slowed to a crawl in order to maintain a steady twenty-foot distance between itself and the front lines.
The sector of Gannon that abutted Martyrs Park was the neglected northern end of Jessup Avenue, a bleak urban plain, four lanes wide, flanked by sex and dope motels, third-tier fast-food franchises, and discount gas stations. The more vital residential and retail districts didn’t begin for a good half mile deeper into the city, and so, with at least ten blocks of hoofing it until they hit their target area, the protesters already found themselves completely boxed in by police, heading for downtown like an imprisoned yet mobile millipede.
Concerned about Longways heart, Lorenzo periodically jogged up to the front to take an eyeball read, but there was just too much static in the air for him to make any kind of meaningful assessment. The rev was positioned dead center in the front row, his arms linked tightly with the ever-miserable Curious George on one side, Tariq Wilkins’s grandmother on the other. He plowed ahead like a fullback without moves—his face set in cement, mouth a pugnacious line—marching tensed and bunched as if, any second, he would have to smash his way through a physical barrier.
Lorenzo, by contrast, continued to dart, working out his anxiety by worrying the length of the procession like a sheepdog, darting forward, darting in, darting out, ignoring the motorcycles, focusing on the innermost rows of marchers, trying to key in on those who weren’t chanting along with the rest. He first eyed their hands, their clothes, looking for bulges, then their faces, tracking their gazes—who was looking at who, was there any silent communication going on, were there any secret game plans in the mix. Lorenzo put a mental dog-ear on a few people, but it was hard to know without straight-up bracing them, and the momentum of the crowd made that nearly impossible now.
The motorcycle cops were coming off fairly serene, but the pedestrian pace they were forced to sustain made for some fishtailing in order to maintain balance, and Lorenzo envisioned someone’s foot getting run over, envisioned all kinds of accidental shit.
The march followed Jessup Avenue until it reached the northern edge of central Gannon. Now they could see the locals waiting for them, beginning about four intersections down the line, where the retail district began in earnest, block after block of Laundromats, bars, travel agencies, and dry cleaners, all the way to the bay. The locals were out there, the sidewalks dense with humanity.
A whoosh of anticipation fired through the marchers, and Lorenzo could literally see a corresponding ripple surge through the figures in the distance, a rooted undulation, like the effect of heavy surf on ocean-bed vegetation.
“NO JUS-TICE…”
“NO PEACE”—the sight of Gannon waiting for them provoking a tighter, deeper response.
But something was wrong down there on the sidewalks of Jessup, Lorenzo taking the better part of a block to figure out what was bugging him, then nailing it: there were no placards among the spectators, no homemade signs. The marchers were fairly bristling with oak-tag sentiments held high, pennants of anger, but there was no corresponding artwork, there were none of the written counterpoints he had been expecting. As they came within two blocks of the hot zone, still too far away to pick up any vocalizations, counterchants, catcalls, he saw something else that made him want to dig in his heels—beach chairs, collapsible vinyl and aluminum beach chairs, dotted the curbs, some occupied, others vacant, the kind you would drag out on a hot summer day to watch the circus come into town.
When they finally came within earshot of the locals, all that could be heard was a conversational murmur, people talking to one another rather than addressing the intruders, rude but not enraged. The locals leaned against storefronts, sprawled in those low-slung chairs, tilted out of second- and third-story windows, forearms propped on pillows or towels, faces sullen. There were no epithets, no profanities, nothing coming back to the marchers. Lorenzo felt both relieved and unnerved, Gannon seemingly handling this situation by giving Armstrong the silent treatment, the cold shoulder, offering the cameras nothing but hard stares.
HEY, GANNON,
HAVE YOU HEARD
ARMSTRONG AIN’T
JOHANNESBURG
Lorenzo settled into the center of the right flank, one eye on Gannon, the other on the marchers, the rumble of the motorcycles making it hard to focus.
Occasionally one or another of the motorcycle cops would wave to someone on the sidewalk, exchange a friendly word with a buddy or a neighbor, even the security detail treating this march as a non-event. He saw Jesse drift out of the procession and slip into the truculent crowd, presumably to check out the Gannon mind-set. Lorenzo caught her eye, and Jesse, as if reading his thoughts, returned his gaze with a shrug of bewilderment, Lorenzo thinking that he truly liked Jesse, always had.
“WHAT DO WE WANT.”
“JUSTICE.”
“WHEN DO WE WANT IT.”
“NOW”
Walking backwards, Lorenzo almost tripped over a shooter who was also walking backwards, but in the opposite direction. Regaining his balance, he returned his attention to the marchers, keying in on hands, eyes, noticing a young muscular kid in matching striped shirt and shorts holding a brown paper bag folded tight against itself—could be a sandwich, a brick, could be anything. Lorenzo also spied a leather-bound sap peeking out of another kid’s shirt, the black-stitched business end nesting in his back-turned palm, the grip running up the length of his forearm, hidden by the long sleeves of a sky-blue Carolina Panthers jersey Lorenzo made a move to cut into the crowd, have a word with the kid, but he was distracted by one of the motorcycle cops chatting up the JNL teenager marching nearest to his wheels.
“Yo, how much you pay for that Tommy Hilfiger? My kid wants that.” The boy looked at the cop, then looked away.
Donald De Lauder, whirling, walleyed, spun past Lorenzo on his way to the front.
Peering into the crowd of marchers again, Lorenzo couldn’t find either the kid with the sap or the other kid with the tightly wrapped paper bag. On the sidewalk, someone let loose with an explosive sneeze, Lorenzo whipping his head to the noise, taking in the people sitting splay-legged on those beach chairs, then catching movement on a roof—pigeons—then seeing John Mahler, the Gannon chief of police, standing in the crowd, arms folded across his chest, talking to Jesse, shrugging about something, a surly C’est la vie kind of gesture.
“Come on, yo, how much that set you back?” the cop still ragged the kid.
“Hey, whyn’t you just cap yourself a nigger tonight, get one free, OK?”
“Now, now,
” the cop said, waggling a gloved finger.
And then Lorenzo saw her again—Brenda, about ten rows ahead of him, walking on the opposite flank. He still couldn’t see more than the curve of her cheek, the jut of her jaw, but that chopped shock of hair, that knotted rope of a spine climbing to the nape beneath a small, low-slung army-green backpack.
In his frazzled state, Lorenzo thought it made sense, her being here—that she would be here on an issue like this—then caught himself, his dizzy ruminations abruptly supplanted by dread: the backpack. What was in that backpack.
HEY, GANNON,
HAVE YOU HEARD,
ARMSTRONG AIN’T
JOHANNESBURG
This time the chant came from a group of Gannon teenagers draped on a stoop, the kids chanting it again, fists in the air, then, in harmony, bellowing, “Fight the power!” They were fucking with people, drawing some hard stares both from the other spectators and from the marchers. The shooters came to life, finally having the makings of an incident, Eric Convoy drawling, “Yeah, you be fightin’ the power in a minute.” Gannon’s white homeys, hearing this, arching eyebrows high, saying “Yo, sorry brother, sorry,” then cracking up again, Lorenzo tense until a Gannon bookie stepped over to have a word with them, the kids finally going quiet.
That backpack. Lorenzo sliced into the march, getting close enough to hear her voice, faint and listless: “No peace.” Reaching past people to get to her, he rested a hand on the small of someone’s back for support and felt a gun—this marcher packin’. Lorenzo kept his hand on the piece, his other hand now on the guy’s right arm.
“Hey,” Lorenzo said softly in his ear. The young man—dashikied, bearded, bespectacled—reflexively gripped the wrist of the hand that rested on his gun, wheeling around.
“Easy easy,” Lorenzo murmured, engaging the hand that seized his. “What’s with the gat, boss?”
Freedomland Page 61
