Daddy, she says.
She is not my responsibility. I have never laid eyes on her before, and her father is all but a stranger to me. If I reach out to save her, I am as doomed as she, because the fire is not the only danger such an act will require me to face. I know this, and I am paralyzed by the thought. But I eventually go to her nonetheless, diving into the white-hot halo surrounding her with arms outstretched, fingers beckoning.
Then, suddenly, smoke floods my lungs and fills my eyes, and the girl is no longer there to be rescued. I am alone in the fire, and it has me in its full and immutable grasp before I can even open my mouth to scream.
It is all a false memory, of course. The fire is of my own invention.
Still, even with my eyes wide open, I can sometimes feel its tendrils peeling the flesh off my bones just the same.
On the street in Frogtown, the St Paul community I call home, people call me ‘Handy’, exactly as they did in what was then called ‘South-Central’ Los Angeles over twenty-five years ago.
I can no longer recall exactly how or when I got the name, but it refers to the penchant I have always had for fixing things others have declared either beyond all hope or unworthy of repair.
Growing up, I was one of those kids who like to take things apart just to see how they work – toys and clocks, bicycles and radios – and this habit has followed me right into middle-age. My gift, if you can call it that, is an innate comprehension of machines and the mysteries they present, the cause and effect of levers and switches, motors and drive belts. It is a talent which has never earned me anything approaching wealth, to be sure, but it has at least managed to be sporadically profitable.
For the past nine years, after leapfrogging from one dead-end job and ungrateful employer to another, I have made a meager living working for myself, juggling small jobs almost anyone else could do with larger ones few others can or will take on for themselves. The small jobs, I perform in great number and on the cheap – rewiring old table lamps, installing cards and upgrade components in home computers – but the big ones I take on selectively, and for a considerable fee. The people who bring me the simple stuff are generally lazy individuals who lack the initiative to read a user’s manual, but those who hire me to tackle more challenging projects almost always have nowhere else to turn. I am the only person they’ve been able to find with either the expertise or patience the work they want done requires.
The objects of these latter exercises tend to be old and mechanical: manual typewriters and wind-up alarm clocks, belt-driven turntables and telephones with rotary dials. It is not always clear to me why their owners prefer to have them repaired rather than replaced, but I suspect they are motivated more by sentiment than common sense. There is a magic in old-school devices that newer, more technologically advanced versions of same do not possess, and sometimes, just the sounds these machines make alone are enough to render them irreplaceable to their owner.
Such as it is, I ply my trade out of a little storefront on Rice and University I share with ’Ploitation Station, a video and memorabilia shop that specializes in the movies of the 1970s Blaxploitation era. Under a constant, period-appropriate soundtrack of Motown, Stax and Sound of Philadelphia R & B, Quincy Hardaway rents out copies of Cleopatra Jones and Black Gunn on the east side of the shop, while I tinker with things that are broken on the west side. Quincy is a very fat and effeminate black man in his early thirties who would starve in a day if he were dependent upon the shop to eat, but its proprietorship is really just a hobby for him; the business was a footnote to a large estate he inherited from a wealthy aunt many years ago, and he keeps it going at no small expense primarily as a gesture to her memory.
Ordinarily, I pay little attention to the ebb and flow of Quincy’s business, especially when the object of my day’s work holds a certain fascination for me. Consumed by the challenge and nostalgia of some projects, I can sit at my bench and listen to Quincy jabber without actually registering a word he’s saying, both of us laboring to the accompaniment of the music of my youth, the hours slipping by like a train on greased rails.
It should have been this way for me with Andy Loderick’s mini-bike. When Loderick first wheeled the home-made, motorized two-wheeler in for me to see, I almost took the job of refurbishing it for free. He said he had built the thing himself over thirty years earlier when he was just fourteen, using an old bicycle frame and a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine in accordance with some mail order plans he’d ordered from an ad in a comic book, and now that his mother’s passing had brought him home from Pennsylvania where he’d gone off to college and remained, he’d hauled the stout but rusted little bike out of her garage in the hopes that I could recondition it for the entertainment of his two sons.
I told him I would do exactly that, or die trying.
Unfortunately, the bike had come to me less than twenty-four hours after R.J.’s funeral, and O’Neal Holden’s final words to me at the cemetery were still rattling around in my head. I was running scared, and I had been for a long time.
O’ thought I had no reason to run, any more than he did. He had always been steadfast in this opinion, and I had never been able to decide whether that made him the smartest man I knew, or the most oblivious. Either way, before I’d picked up the phone less than a week ago to hear the news of R.J.’s death, I’d been capable of acknowledging the possibility, however remote, that O’ was right and I was wrong. It was the only hope I had worth living for.
But no more. Now, R.J. was dead, murdered in a cruel and gratuitous fashion that reeked of malice, and I had come home from Los Angeles with renewed confidence in both my right to be afraid, and my need to run farther still.
For three days, I strove to go about my normal business, barely able to concentrate on the work I had before me. My distraction made mild annoyances out of things I usually have no quarrel with – Quincy’s choice in music, the smell of oil and solvent that always lightly permeates my side of the shop – and heightened my awareness of the people entering and exiting my peripheral vision. For this reason, it was I who looked up first when two young bucks sauntered into the shop just before noon, moving with the leisurely pace and unsettling silence of encroaching death.
The older and larger of the two couldn’t have been much more than seventeen. He had jet-black skin and a head crowned with a white Yankees cap over a red bandanna, the cap’s visor turned at a right-angle to his slitted eyes. His younger, fair-skinned homie wore a mushroom cloud Afro and a giant ski jacket festooned with logos on the back and along the length of both sleeves. Both boys were otherwise dressed in the standard urban uniform of oversized baggy pants and sports jersey, gleaming white tennis shoes barely visible beneath pant legs that scraped the ground in a dozen folds of excess material.
None of this by itself was cause for alarm, of course; the clothes and the attitudinal gait, even the big kid’s sneer were all too commonplace for young people today. But the younger boy, the one with the big hair and benign facial expression, had brought a distinctive aura into the shop along with his shadow, and I knew what it was even before the door had completely closed behind them.
Quincy did too. He watched the pair slink around between his racks of precious videos for a full minute, Yankee-boy fingering through the cases as if he actually knew who the hell Fred Williamson was, then said, ‘Can I help you boys?’ Asking the question in that way salespeople always do when what they really want to know is, Why the fuck did you pick my place to jack?
‘We just lookin’,’ the big kid said.
His friend said nothing, but both of them continued to inch along their separate aisles, patiently and all-too conspicuously working their way toward Quincy and the counter he stood behind, right beside the cash register.
The boy with the Afro was just slipping a long-barreled revolver out from under his jacket when I eased up behind him and jammed the snout of an old .38 Beretta into the back of his left ear. He and his older dog never saw me coming
because they didn’t think I could move that fast, or would care to even if I were somehow capable. They’d given me a passing glance at the door and seen little more than a sad-eyed, middle-aged black man with a salt-and-pepper beard sitting at a workbench, a meaningless screwdriver in his hand. I knew that was all they’d seen, because that was the man I often saw myself, gazing out from the mirror while brushing my teeth, or reflected in the glass of a storefront window as I passed. I couldn’t blame them for not expecting much.
‘Give me the gun, youngblood,’ I said, and I made a point of saying it like something I only had the patience to say once.
While he thought the order over, and Quincy stood there staring at me in mute astonishment, I watched the larger boy to see how much killing was about to be forced upon me. If he was armed too, and made a move to prove it, I’d have to shoot both boys in rapid succession: first the one near me, then his dark-skinned companion. Anything less would have been foolhardy.
Three seconds went by, and I still didn’t have the boy with the Afro’s answer.
‘Don’t try me, junior,’ I said, and I screwed the Beretta’s nose harder yet into the side of his skull, my eyes still fixed upon the kid closer to Quincy. When the latter boy suddenly came unfrozen, bringing me within an inch of committing the double-homicide I’d been contemplating, his only intent was to flee. He was at the shop’s door and out of it in the time it takes most people to blink, his incredulous accomplice crying out his name in a senseless attempt to order his return.
‘Tommy!’
But Tommy was good and gone.
I finally snatched the revolver from the younger boy’s hand while the shock of his abandonment was still setting in, and then it was just him and me and Quincy, and the .38 I continued to jam into the back of the kid’s left ear.
‘Call nine-one-one,’ I said to Quincy.
As my landlord slid to the phone on the wall behind him, I told the boy with all the hair to turn around, and make sure he took his sweet damn time doing it. He did.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find on his face when he showed it to me – fear, anger, amusement – but what I got resembled none of these things. What I got was a stare as vacant as a paneless window in a gutted building, a little boy gazing at a television set tuned to a nonexistent channel. I had a loaded gun aimed at his head, and the wild-eyed look of a man he might have just pushed close enough to the edge to use it, and he didn’t care. I could do with him as I pleased; whatever fate I chose for him now, he was willing to accept without question or quarrel.
He was fourteen years old at the most and, already, life and death to him were but interchangeable, equally valueless sides of the same coin.
At this particular moment in my own life, he could have cursed my mother in her grave and not enraged me more.
Quincy had been stunned by the show of reckless bravado I’d just put on, without a doubt, but I knew it was the sight of the gun in my hand alone that he had found most incredible, because he had never seen me with such a weapon before. In truth, I’d had the Beretta in the shop with me for four days now, after not having touched it in almost twenty-six years. R.J.’s murder had changed the world for me in such a way that I preferred to have the gun close at hand over dying for the lack of it.
Quincy would say later that God had spoken to me that morning four days ago, when I’d gone up to the attic and withdrawn the Beretta from the old liquor bottle sack in which I had banished it, and that was why it was there on the bottom shelf of my workbench when our two would-be thieves stepped in on us, perhaps intending to do more to enhance their street cred than just take Quincy’s money and run. But I knew God had had nothing to do with it. God would not have put that gun in my hand knowing how close I would come to emptying it into the head of a child whose most egregious crime was his resemblance to another young fool I once knew, many years ago.
In reality, the two boys looked nothing alike. In height, weight, even the color of their skin, they could hardly have been more different. But deep inside, behind their eyes, they had one thing in common I couldn’t help but take note of: the apathy of the dead. A cool, inalterable kind of indifference that winds itself around the heart like a shield and chokes the soul down to the size of a small stone. Such inurement is the fuel of great folly, and it can sometimes lead a boy to do harm to others in ways he will eternally, and altogether uselessly, regret.
‘Handy! Handy, don’t!’
Hanging up the phone, Quincy must have seen a change come over my face, my fear and mild irritation giving way to something far more combustible and impossible to contain. I slammed the butt of the Beretta across the forehead of the teenage boy before me, hard enough to leave an imprint on his skull, and he dropped to the floor like an empty coat. I stood over him and watched a wide rivulet of blood run from a fresh scalp wound down the side of his face, and put everything I had into finding all the satisfaction possible in the sight, before my rage could spur me on to greater and far more unforgivable things.
‘Jesus Christ, Handy, you didn’t have’ta do that!’ Quincy cried, forcing his great girth between me and the motionless body on the floor. ‘You might’a killed the boy!’
He wanted to disarm me, but was too afraid to try. I wasn’t Errol ‘Handy’ White anymore, or anyone else he thought he knew; I was just a crazy man with two guns who might be capable of anything. In the midst of his indecision, I walked back to my side of the shop and sat down at my workbench again. I put the two firearms down on the bench where the uniforms could see them when they eventually responded to Quincy’s call and braced myself for their arrival.
As tired of being alive as I could ever remember being.
FOUR
The difference between a good man and a bad one often comes down to nothing more than the quality of his judgment. In making life-altering choices, his conscience may speak to him, but it is the voice of reason he ultimately adheres to, the basic math of what he has to gain versus what he stands to lose.
The two close friends I made for myself as I entered into manhood – O’Neal Holden and R.J. Burrow – were no more inherently evil than I. We took little pleasure in the distress of others, and put no effort into feigning indifference to it. But we were all brash and foolish and drunk with the power of youth, and serious consequences for our actions was a concept we scoffed at like a ghost story. We saw ourselves as invulnerable, and could not imagine how we could bring any real harm to others when we could not possibly bring harm to ourselves.
We first came together as a trio in our junior year at Manual Arts High School, where I essentially affixed myself to the pre-existing duo of O’ and R.J., who had been best friends since the third grade. O’ was a tall and beautiful ladies-magnet offhandedly involved in two sports, while R.J. was a comic with a mean streak nobody ever crossed without losing teeth. Each was fascinating in his own way, but O’ was the real draw, a beacon of future stardom I was powerless not to admire and idolize. I expect R.J. felt much the same.
O’ was born to be a mover and a shaker, a force of nature wrapped tightly if precariously in human form. No one who ever met him came away wondering what he would eventually become, because only one vocation offered him wealth and power to the extent he seemed to deserve them. Politics was O’s unavoidable destiny, and the only thing open to question was what kind of elected official he would choose to become: the kind whose wisdom and compassion for his constituency marks him worthy of their trust, or the kind, far more common than the other, who wields that trust like chips on a poker table for his own personal enrichment?
The O’ I grew up with was equally capable of evolving into either animal, and it was this quality of unpredictability that always made it so exhilarating – and terrifying – to know him as a friend.
R.J., by comparison, was not nearly so complex. If any of us was predisposed to a life of crime, it was him. R.J. was short and lean and forever on the lookout for any sign of disrespect, and there was no fight
or challenge he would not take on with the zeal of a man possessed. His father was a closeted gay man who, in a drunken stupor, liked to beat his wife unconscious to minimize his sense of emasculation, and R.J. came to school most days relishing the opportunity to either make people laugh or make them bleed, the choice was entirely theirs. He had fast hands and quick feet, and he came at you like a blur, throwing punches you couldn’t see while deflecting all your own. Had there been an ounce of bully in him, he would have been the most feared man at Manual; as it was, he was simply the most vigorously avoided.
As for myself, I was the wildcard, the consistent middle ground between O’s lethal charm and R.J.’s brute force. Some people probably thought of me as the ‘brains of the outfit’, but brains were a non-issue. What I had over my two friends was restraint: the unremitting need to question and second-guess any action before daring to take it. O’ always equated this inclination to a shortage of courage, but it saved our asses on enough occasions that he came to grudgingly appreciate it over time.
We were petty thieves. That was the simple truth of it. Larceny was not our constant occupation, just an occasional one, something to do with all our excess testosterone until we could find more constructive uses for our time. We all had big plans for the future, and with varying degrees of effort, we pursued them beyond high school, O’ at UCLA, R.J. and I at Los Angeles City College. O’ was going into politics, I was going to be a mechanical engineer, and R.J. had ambitions toward sports writing. None of us expected to be stealing televisions and car stereos forever.
In the end, however, a little more than three years out of high school, we were still players in the game when we committed one crime too many, and only O’ had the wherewithal to survive its repercussions. It was just another rip-off, a bit larger and more complicated than most of the others we’d pulled over the years, perhaps, but like the others, it should have incurred no casualties.
Cemetery Road Page 2
