Cemetery Road

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  ‘Yeah, well, you can say that because neither of you niggas saw what that motherfucker did to the child that night. If you had seen her face, her little arms . . .’ He tried to shake the memory out of focus. ‘Just ’cause he didn’t kill her doesn’t mean he didn’t try.’

  A single tear escaped from the corner of his right eye and slid down the side of his face. He let it be.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

  ‘What, you don’t know? Mr “Undercover Brother”? Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  I’d been trying to put it all together for days now and I still couldn’t do anything more than speculate. ‘You and R.J. were lying when you told Excel and the woman that the girl wasn’t in the house. She was either still in the bedroom where you’d found her, or hidden somewhere else, maybe out in R.J.’s car; Excel and I hadn’t stopped to look on our way in. McDonald came back from wherever he was after R.J. and I left—’

  ‘No,’ O’ said, his voice a jagged knife of irritation. ‘R.J. didn’t know anything about it. Up until about a year ago, he thought the girl was dead, too.’

  ‘Then you were alone when you found her?’

  ‘No. No! It wasn’t like that.’ He scrubbed his face dry with both hands, let out a long, heavy sigh. ‘McDonald and Sienna were gone, just like I said. I’d searched the place myself and the only sign of either one was all the blood on the bed where she’d been sleeping. I thought sure the child was dead.

  ‘But then McDonald came back to the house, just before I put a match to it, and he had her with him, all wrapped up in a sheet like a mummy. He’d gone out looking for either a hospital he couldn’t find, or a place to bury her like we thought, till he realized she was still breathing. I never talked to him, so I can only guess. But wherever he’d been, he brought her back. Alive.’

  ‘When the fire department showed up, they found him unconscious out in the yard, bleeding from a nasty knot on his head. You?’

  ‘I heard him coming in through the front door and caught him with the butt of my gun before he had time to hit the lights. When I saw what Sienna looked like, I almost killed the sonofabitch right then – but then I realized that would be a mistake. I couldn’t frame his ass for Excel and the woman, and the fire I was about to start, if the man was dead.’

  ‘So you dragged him outside, went back for Sienna, and then torched the house and split.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  His voice had a tinge of disgust in it now, but I couldn’t tell for whom it was meant.

  ‘How long, O’? Did it come to you right away, or did it take a while?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The idea that the girl could be worth a lot more to you dead than alive.’

  He bristled at the accusation. ‘Go fuck yourself, Handy. I may not be the altar boy you’ve always thought yourself to be, but I’m not the calculating piece of shit you like to think I am, either. When I left the house that night, my only thought was of Sienna. I was gonna take her to the first hospital I could find and drop her off out front.

  ‘But then she came to in the car and started crying, and it freaked me the hell out. I figured I might have a shot of leaving an unconscious kid in a hospital carport without somebody seeing me, but a hysterical one? So I stayed on the freeway until I could calm her down and talk her back to sleep. It took a long time.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘By then I realized something I hadn’t before: She wasn’t as bad off as I thought. She was bruised and in a lot of pain, but she wasn’t dying. It occurred to me that maybe a hospital was an unnecessary risk. Brenda was a nurse, and I could trust her to treat the girl without saying anything to the police.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my original question,’ I said.

  He let several seconds go by, just to keep me writhing on the hook. ‘It was a long ride back from Simi. I had a lot of time to think, to go over everything that had happened that night. I remembered how you and R.J. had been acting earlier, before we’d even driven out there to try and find Sienna. Both of you were already talking like her father’s money was tainted, like we’d all burn in hell for eternity if we touched so much as a penny of it. And now you thought the girl was dead for sure. There was no way you were gonna want to keep that bread.’

  ‘Unless we found out she was still alive.’

  He nodded, clearly taking no pride in the memory. ‘The money was right there with me in the car, 140 grand, and the more I looked at it, the more ways I could think of to use it. I had plans for my life, things I wanted to accomplish, and it was all gonna take money to get done. Forty-six thousand would’ve been enough to get started, but 140 would’ve put me on a whole new timetable.

  ‘And hell, Handy, what were you and R.J. gonna do with forty-six Gs? You never wanted the money in the first place, and R.J. would’ve pissed his share away inside of six months, no matter what we told him about spending too much too soon.’

  ‘So you took Sienna to BeBe and asked her to take care of the girl for a while.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she ended up doing it for the next twenty years.’

  ‘More or less. She fell in love with the child. After a week, I couldn’t have taken Sienna from her if I’d wanted to.’

  He told me the rest of it in fits and starts, how all the paper we’d burned that day in his mother’s garage was mostly prop money he’d bought off some brother who worked on the lot at Columbia Studios, mixed in with just enough real cash to sell the illusion. Then, after I was gone, he and his sister gave Excel’s little girl a new name and the phony papers to go with it. They cut her hair to change her appearance and sent her to schools out in the Valley where R.J. was unlikely to ever come across her, all the while raising her to believe that Brenda and her late husband Herman Evans were her biological parents.

  ‘She didn’t remember her real mother and father?’

  ‘She didn’t remember anything prior to that night in Simi. The traumatization of her kidnapping and beating had wiped out her memory completely.’

  ‘What about now?’

  O’ got up from his seat, walked over to a bookcase to lift a photo from a shelf: a pre-teen Sienna/Iman in a green and white soccer uniform, beaming into the camera with a soccer ball as a prop. ‘As far as she knows, her name is Iman Evans. BeBe’s her moms and I’m her Uncle ’Neal. And you know what? She’s happy, Handy. We gave her a life she would’ve never had otherwise. Blow this thing up now, and you throw that all away.’

  ‘And her real mother? Excel’s woman? What kind of life did we give her, O’?’

  ‘Vicky Jackson? A drug dealer’s ho’ with two other kids, and from everything I ever heard about her, a crackhead to boot. With Excel around, she might’ve still found a way to be a good mother to Sienna, but without him, she would’ve been no better for her than McDonald himself. I wouldn’t waste a whole lot of time trying to raise my sympathies for her, Handy.’

  ‘OK. How about your sympathies for R.J., then? Not only did you cheat him out of his share of a hundred and forty grand, you let him go twenty-six years thinking he had the death of a four-year-old girl on his hands.’

  ‘I thought he could handle it. It was a mistake.’

  ‘But a mistake you were happy to live with until he found out Sienna was still alive. After that, I guess, all bets were off.’

  ‘I smell coffee. You want some coffee?’

  I looked at him like he’d lost his mind, the thought only now occurring to me that that could in fact be the case.

  ‘Sure.’

  He went out to the kitchen. I could hear him rummaging around in his sister’s cabinets, searching for clean cups. ‘How do you like it?’ he asked.

  ‘Lots of sugar, no cream,’ I called back.

  He returned a few minutes later, two steaming mugs in hand. He passed one to me, then sat back down with the other, and somewhere in between, he found a blue-steel semi-automatic that he set down easy on the right armrest of his
chair, nozzle turned more or less in my direction.

  ‘That isn’t really necessary, is it?’ I asked, blowing on my coffee to cool it down.

  ‘You just accused me of being a murderer, Handy, so your state of mind’s a little questionable. Let’s just say the hardware’s only there to discourage you from doing something we might both be sorry for later.’

  ‘You want to set my mind at ease, O’, try convincing me that what happened to R.J. wasn’t done on your orders.’

  This time, judging from the mayor’s expression, I was the one who was crazy. He shook his head, said, ‘Jesus, man. Talk about leaving police work to the professionals. You’ve been pokin’ around this thing for what, almost a week now, and you’re just as ignorant today as when you started.

  ‘I didn’t kill R.J., Handy. Hell, I did everything in my power to keep him alive! I got him his job at Coughlin. I loaned him money when he said he was strapped. Ever since you tucked tail and hauled ass to Minnesota, I’ve been trying to keep that nigga from puttin’ a bullet in his head, or throwing himself in front of a goddamn train. But not for the reason you think. That’s something else you’re wrong about.’

  He glanced at his coffee cup and gently set it down, hand shaking too much now to risk dropping it at his feet.

  ‘Sienna was foremost on his mind all that time, of course. But she wasn’t the only thing ridin’ him.’

  He paused to see if I could go the rest of the way without him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, feeling the hairs at the back of my neck come alive with dread.

  ‘I’m talking about the second big mistake I made, after deciding to let that damn fool go on thinking Sienna was dead. I split the money with him. I didn’t think I had a choice.’ He finally looked away from me, affecting the mannerisms of a man squirming in the cramped confines of a confessional booth. ‘Burning up a pile of phony money was a trick I might’ve got R.J. to believe, but you?’ He shook his head. ‘You would’ve never bought it.’

  I let my mind drift back to the day in question, sifting through the details. ‘Unless I saw somebody else check the cash first.’

  He nodded.

  All these years later, my memory of that day was as vague as a ghost, but there were some things I could still remember distinctly: the smell of tar from across the alley; the suspicion R.J. kept voicing that O’ was looking to run a game on us; the bundle of bills he tossed for me to look over personally while he inventoried the remainder of the bag, until I, like an idiot, called him off . . .

  ‘Goddamn,’ I said.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better, it took a while to talk him into it. For all the bitching he used to do about you, he really held you in high esteem. But once I reminded him that everything that had gone down and gone wrong had started with you, and the fucking, inexplicable hard-on you had for Excel Rucker, he came around to seeing the justice in it. You had the shit coming, Handy. If not for you, there would’ve been nothing for any of us to feel guilty about.’

  I wanted to take his words and ram them down his throat. He was telling me that I had earned every sleepless night I’d ever endured, that all the tears I had cried and self-loathing I had suffered were nowhere near the actual punishment I deserved. Paris McDonald was in prison for life because of me. Linda Dole lived her days and nights in a wheelchair because of me. Excel Rucker and Noreen Phillips, Darrel Eastman and the three people Rucker had killed himself, they all were dead because of me.

  R.J. Burrow was dead because of me.

  I tried to move from my chair, to lift my hands or turn my head, but I couldn’t. I could only sit there and sink, farther and farther down into the empty hollows of my conscience.

  ‘I’m not completely blameless myself, of course,’ O’ said. ‘What we did, I allowed to happen, there’s no gettin’ around that. But while you were off in St Paul making a new life for yourself, I was here trying to make up for my part in what we did, spending damn near every minute of the last twenty-six years looking for ways to keep R.J.’s guilt from ruining us all. But it just wasn’t possible.’

  O’s eyes flared, suddenly enraged. ‘It was like trying to save a drowning man who keeps taking you both farther and farther away from shore. First it was the armed robbery that landed him in the joint, then it was his goddamn crack habit. He went back to the safe house in Inglewood and made a project out of “saving” Linda Dole’s son, hangin’ out with the boy and counselin’ him like a parish priest or somethin’. There was nothin’ I could do to stop him, Handy. Talking was just a waste of time.

  ‘So I finally did something desperate. Something I thought would bring him down, but only made things a thousand times worse.’

  For once, he didn’t have to wait for me to understand. ‘You introduced him to Iman Evans.’

  ‘I was a fool. He lost his mind. I didn’t know until you told me that he’d written to McDonald in prison, but I wasn’t surprised to hear it. He was that far gone. So, naturally—’

  ‘Get up.’

  He’d been too preoccupied with his confession to notice that I’d left my chair. I stood over him, rocking on the balls of my feet, unable to see anything else in the room but the man seated before me.

  ‘Oh, what – you’re gonna kick my ass now?’

  His right hand made a move for the gun on the armrest and I kicked him in the face with the heel of my right foot, sending chair and occupant both tumbling backwards to the floor. He tried to roll to his feet before I could get there, the semi-auto in his fist, but I surprised us both by reaching him in time to kick the weapon from his grasp. As it clattered off to some unknown corner of his sister’s living room, he barreled into me waist-high, reducing the left I threw at his face to a mere gesture of a punch. Legs churning, head down, he drove me backward into a credenza against one wall, then hit me with a right hand across the bridge of my nose that instantly flooded my eyes with tears.

  Amid the spray of knick-knacks and mementos flying off the credenza shelves behind me, something heavy tumbled down my right arm and, half-blind and spitting blood, I instinctively snatched it out of the air to swing it at O’s face. The crystal swan lost part of a wing as it slammed against O’s left eyebrow, stunning him just enough to stagger him momentarily. I tried to follow up with what was left of the glass bird in my hand, but he threw up his left forearm to block the attempt and swung another anvil-like right that landed just under my jaw. I stumbled backward, feet flailing away for balance, left arm reaching behind me for something to latch on to that might keep me upright – a wall, a floor lamp, anything.

  But O’ wouldn’t wait for me to find it. As I glanced off the armchair I’d been sitting in only moments before, he launched himself toward me to hit me again, this time with a left that seemed to cave in the whole right side of my face. I went down like an old woman, taking an end table and everything on it to the floor with me, and all at once I could see us reverting to form. This was how it had always been when I was foolish enough to try O’Neal Holden. The superior athlete versus the more righteously indignant. It was like trying to stop a moving forklift with willpower alone.

  I came up on my hands and knees, dog-like, and tried to catch my breath, staring down at the carpet I was staining forever with blotches of dark red. O’ kicked me under my right arm and rolled me over again, then stood there watching as I tried to gather the nerve to go on fighting. The crystal swan had opened a deep cut over his left eye, which was half-closed and bathed in blood, but compared to me, he looked as fresh as a daisy.

  I could have easily quit right then. Pressing on seemed to hold no other promise but more of the same – humiliation and pain. Left alone to decide, I think I would have just closed my eyes and let O’ do as he pleased, unable to recall what motivation I could have possibly had to ever care this much about R.J. Burrow.

  But then O’ put a sharp, needless spear into my side: ‘Get up, you stupid old fool.’

  So I did. I came up quick, caught his ri
ght foot with both hands when he tried to kick me down again and torqued it to the left, hard, like a frozen water valve I was trying to force open. O’ let loose a scream and went down without any further help, clutching at his leg as if I’d snapped it in half and tossed him the pieces.

  I got to my feet, prepared to do the man more damage if he required it, but I could have been a painting on the wall for all the attention he was paying to me now. He was in that much pain.

  ‘Manual versus Dorsey, homecoming game our senior year,’ I said, spitting a wad of blood on to the floor near his head. ‘You ran for a hundred and eleven yards in the first two quarters, then tore up your right knee just before half-time. Doctors weren’t sure you’d ever walk again. Funny, the shit an “old man” remembers, isn’t it?’

  ‘Goddamn you, Handy!’ He had to pause before going on, sweat rolling down his face in wide rivulets from all the effort it was taking just to remain conscious. ‘I need a doctor,’ he said, anger slowly dying to a mere ember, because anger, too, required energy he no longer had to burn.

  I looked around for the gun he’d lost and found it on the carpet a few feet away. I brought it back to where he lay, loaded a round into the chamber and aimed at the center of his face. ‘How much you want to bet this one will work when I pull the trigger?’

  ‘I did that for your own protection, you dumb-ass. I didn’t want you shooting somebody who meant you no harm.’

  I laughed. ‘That right?’

  ‘I’m talking about Fine, not Eastman! I had him watchin’ you, just like you thought. But only to have your back, not to kill you.’

  ‘Just like Doug Wilmore was supposed to have R.J.’s back. Is that what you mean?’

  Wilmore hadn’t confessed to anything when I’d visited his home that morning, but in his clumsy, liquor-impaired refusals, he had said all I’d ever need to know about his relationship with O’Neal Holden, and the feelings of resentment he had toward Sylvia Nuňez and the co-worker she’d chosen over him to have an affair with.