Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I like that.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “How about, Time and tide wait for no man, but Tyrone waits for us.”

  He bowed to me. “I’ll put my shit in the car.”

  Central Juvenile Hall is on the Eastside, in Lincoln Heights. The facility sits behind the massive County-USC Medical Center, sharing a dismal asphalt peninsula isolated by a freeway interchange on two sides and the Southern Pacific freight yards on the third. Leftover land for human refuse: Central Juvenile is the Big House for kids, where the hardest of the peachfuzz hardcore being tried for murder as adults are kept. There are some real mean little mothuhfuckuhs, to borrow from Etta—or, as the county labels them, unfit minors—locked up behind the block walls and barbed wire. The guards aren’t armed and kids break out all the time.

  Guido and I, lugging about a hundred and fifty pounds of equipment between us, were shown into Administration instead of the visitor center. We were escorted into a small conference room and searched until the deputy probation officers were satisfied that we had nothing that looked like lethal weapons and no keys to the front door hidden about our persons. We had already purged our gear. Over the years, and in various parts of the hemisphere, Guido and I had both been through some form of the search drill dozens of times. It can be the price you pay for access to the right subject.

  Camera, lights, sound were in place half an hour before Tyrone was led in. When he came through the door we saw, to our dismay, that he had neither handcuffs nor shackles. I had expected the deputy probation officer to stay; they usually do. But for some reason, he went out and waited in the hall. Both Guido and I winced when we heard the conference room door close behind him, leaving us alone with six feet four inches of first-time killer.

  I started with a little neutral icebreaker. “How are you, Tyrone?”

  “Tee Bone,” he contradicted, putting the emphasis on the second word so it rhymed with his name. “In here they call me Tee Bone.”

  His voice was deep, sullen. He was huge for fifteen, a muscular, sleek ebony man with a child’s smooth cheeks and an old man’s obsidian-hard eyes. I had seen his record, a steady escalation from curfew violation through joy riding, and on to crimes against people: assault, rape, car-jacking, then murder.

  The county began offering Tyrone hospitality at age seven, when he spent four months at MacLaren Hall in El Monte, the facility for abused and abandoned children, because his mother forgot to come home for a while. After that it was easy time in Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey for petty crimes on a regular basis until Tyrone began using a gun.

  At twelve the court sent him to Camp Miller in the scrub-covered hills above Malibu to serve eighteen months for aggravated assault. The ride north in the sheriffs black and white bus had been his first trip outside the central city. Apparently, the change of scene had not detoured him from his criminal path.

  Tyrone got out of Miller two weeks before his fifteenth birthday, exactly three weeks before he pumped a load of double aught buckshot into the chest of Kenny Jackson.

  I clipped a small mike to the collar of Tyrone’s coveralls. “What did you have for breakfast, Tee Bone?”

  “Corn flakes and Tang,” he said.

  I looked over at Guido, who stood hunched beside a small video monitor with an earphone in one ear. I asked, “How’s the sound?”

  He nodded. “Little echo we can filter out. It’s the cinderblock walls that do it. You look good. Tee Bone has a glow, but it’s okay.”

  That probably meant that Tyrone looked as if he was sweating, even though he wasn’t.

  “So, Tee Bone,” I said, “the questions we’re going to ask pertain only to your family and your growing up. We will not discuss your pending case. We want to keep the tone like a conversation, very casual. Forget about Guido over there with the camera. Just relax, talk as you normally talk.”

  “Yeah?” he grinned broadly, checking Guido, a little male-bonding thing. “What I normally say?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “What I normally say is this, take down my pants, bitch. Blow me.”

  I knew from experience that Guido is fast rather than strong. Under siege he can be counted on to get the camera and film out safely. Whenever possible, he keeps the camera rolling during his rapid retreat. It makes for very effective footage. Knowing this, however, gave me small comfort. If Tyrone attacked me, and that is what was on my mind as I sat there beside him, seeing the erection inside his county-issue overalls, the assault would be on the six o’clock news and Guido would be a contender for the Pulitzer. And I would be in intensive care watching it.

  The glass panel in the door was partially blocked by the deputy probation officer standing outside. I knew he was unarmed, but he was big and he was only about fifteen seconds away if I screamed. I thought that for fifteen seconds I could take care of myself. I looked down at my notes, exhaled, started again.

  “Tell me about your family, Tee Bone.”

  His answer was like a well-rehearsed recitation. “My mother? She a bitch. My grandmother? She a old bitch. My father? Well, he special. He a son of a bitch.”

  “Have you been watching the news? The district attorney is saying your father may get out of prison on a technicality.”

  “Oh yeah?” Finally I had hit on a topic that animated him. “He comin’ out?”

  “Are you close to your father?”

  He shook his head. “I never remember him. He went up when I was little. All I know is this, he never sent Etta no money for me. Where is Etta? She say she comin’ to see me.”

  “Have you communicated with your father? Maybe written to him?”

  “I only get one phone call a day and I’m not much for writing. All I know, other people tell me. He went up for killing him a cop. In my set, that’s cool, if you get what I mean.”

  “You received some extra status in your gang because your father killed a cop?”

  “It’s my inheritance,” he said, emphasizing each syllable. I wondered who had said that to him.

  “Your set is the Grape Street Watts?”

  “Yeah.” He flashed his gang’s hand sign and I saw Guido move the focus in close on it.

  To fill in information, I said, “Grape Street Watts is one of the most powerful gangs in the area that includes the Jordan Downs projects where Tee Bone lived with his grandmother.”

  “The most powerful. The most badass powerful.” Tyrone used his fist on the table for punctuation, loud enough for the deputy to look in. “Grape Street rule the city. Anyone forget that, we show ‘em.”

  “How do you show them?”

  “Anyone dis me, I blow him away.”

  “Did Kenny Jackson dis you?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Switch the topic—I didn’t want to be called in to testify against him. “The district attorney does not say your father didn’t kill that cop, only that his trial wasn’t fair. But if it turns out that he isn’t a cop killer, will you lose status?”

  “Don’t matter if he done it. He done his time.”

  “Because of your record, you’re being tried this time as an adult,” I said. “It seems to me you’ve had a rather short childhood. Your mother died when you were ten. Do you remember living with her?”

  “My mama?” Tyrone thought it over before he answered. “All I remember is this: she was stoned. You got to understand somethin’. When I stayed with her, I took care of her, not the other way around. Now and then, if she feelin’ bad, she carry me over to James to stay for a while. It was real nice over at James’s. The house was real clean, he put the food on the table, real nice. Cook it on the stove, you know? Use dishes and forks and shit. He read to me, James did, put me into the bed every night. He walk me down to the school every morning, he pick me up by the door every day. He make me come inside the house when it get dark, make me take a bath. He don’t let me take the Lord’s name and shit. He real strict, but I kinds like being there.”

  “Who is James?”


  “My granddaddy.”

  “James Harkness?” I asked.

  “No. The other one. He my daddy’s daddy. He have this market up on Central and Hunnerd-third.”

  “He still has a market?”

  “Yeah. He make me turn myself in to the police this last time. Say the police shoot me dead if I don’t turn myself in.”

  “How did you end up with Etta?” I asked, comparing Etta, who was anything but a model parent, to his description of James.

  “It was the mothuhfuckin’ police kep’ carryin’ me to Etta,” he said, showing a flash of his grandmother’s influence. “They keep takin’ me over to her. They say to her, your girl stoned, your girl in jail. Here, take the kid. Mos’ the time, she keep me a while, buy me a new shirt or something, then she let me go over to James.”

  “Why didn’t the police take you straight to James if he was so good to you?”

  “You ax me that, shows you don’t know nothin’. If one of my set kill one of your set, you gonna turn some kid over to me? Fuck no. You gonna keep him away. Well, my daddy kill one of the police’s set. They kep’ the county from lettin’ James have me.”

  “That’s how you see it?” I said. “The police are just another gang?”

  “Ain’t they?”

  I couldn’t look over at Guido because the tape was rolling. Instead, I took a breath. “You were very young to have a relationship with the police. How did the police treat you? Did they dis you?”

  “Now they do. Back then, they was okay. This officer come by all the time, see I’m okay or not. He carry me around in the car, buy me stuff to eat and shit. You know, like ice cream, shit to wear. But this officer, when I say take me to my granddaddy, he say, no, he make you into a cop killer, too, like he done your daddy.”

  The question had to be asked, “Do you remember the officer’s name?”

  “Yeah. Officer Flint.”

  I looked down at my notes again for help. I found the track I wanted, but no salve for what I was feeling.

  “According to the probation department,” I said, “you joined the Grape Street Watts before you were ten years old.”

  He shook his head at my ignorance. “No kid that little can get in, man. You gotta prove yourself, you know. Gotta be strong enough to take care of things.”

  “But you were hanging with the gang.”

  “Yeah, they let me hang with them. Like a little brother, you know? I do shit for them, they do shit for me, like if anyone try to get in my face. It ain’t safe to be out there all alone.”

  Because it was such a good line, I said nothing for a long moment while Guido came in tight on Tyrone. It is far easier to edit out silence than to edit in a reflective pause.

  “Tell me about the future, Tee Bone,” I said when Guido signaled me. “Where do you want to be when you’re eighteen?”

  Tyrone’s eyes filled suddenly and he looked away, out through the window that had no view except asphalt and a few rows of barbed wire. It took effort, but I could see the fifteen-year-old child in there beyond the hard eyes, vulnerable under the massive muscle structure. Finally he gave his full face to Guido’s lens.

  “When I get outta here,” he said, “James gonna take me away. We gonna live up in the mountains or some place. Not like Camp Miller, but far away. Get away from my set. Go fishin’ and shit. Get clean again.”

  “Your probation report says that you have two children, Tee Bone. By two different teenage mothers.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you see them?”

  “When I can. Can’t see them when I’m locked up.”

  “For a moment, I want you to picture yourself in that clean place in the mountains with James. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look closely at that picture,” I said. “Are your children there with you?”

  The question startled him like a physical nudge.

  “Are they there?” I repeated.

  “No, man. They can’t come where I’m going.”

  Chapter 14

  “Spill it,” I said to Guido when he slammed shut an aluminum case. “Tell me what’s on your mind. Don’t take it out on the equipment.”

  “I hate to bring it up,” he said, and tossed me the Tyrone videotape to stash in the insulated bag. A deputy probation officer was holding the door, impatient for us to gather our things and leave. “I’m sure there’s nothing to it.”

  “To what?”

  “Mike Flint,” he said. “It seems, I don’t know, sleazy somehow that his name keeps coming up in connection with this project. If you can still call it a project. I’ve always loved working with you because you imbue your subjects with a certain nobility; the way you handle everything. But this time it’s different. Jesus, Maggie, what are we doing? Finishing a commissioned film or trying to save Mike’s ass?”

  “It’s a great ass,” I said, holding back. “Well worth saving.”

  “That’s your answer?”

  “Part of it. But only part. If there is a nobility about my work—thank you—I believe it is because we work from a loose outline and let the story evolve organically, depend on the interviews to give it shape and focus instead of holding ourselves confined to some prefab script. That’s what we’re doing here, letting a story evolve.”

  “Which story, Maggie? The kids, or Mike?”

  I picked up a roll of masking tape and fumbled around looking for the cut end. “The complication with Mike arises because I asked him to give me some contacts. That could be interpreted as a conflict, I suppose. It’s also called networking. Mike is a great resource. He worked in the ghetto for a lot of years and he knows people. I mean, really knows people. You have to admit that what we have now goes far beyond the standard sop about ghetto youth. Charles Conklin is an evil, but magnificent catalyst. I don’t apologize for anything.”

  He wanted to scrap. “Yesterday, I felt like scum, Maggie, when I made those blow-ups for Mike. Like one of J. Edgar Hoover’s red-hunting goons. I snitched off every car on 112th Street. I gave Mike crowd pictures, too. Little old ladies in their jammies. Shit. What’s he going to do with them? Draw circles around their faces and put them in the subversives file?”

  “Why don’t you ask him what he plans to do?”

  “I don’t think Mike likes me.”

  The best I could do was to say, “Mike thinks you’re a genius.”

  Guido started humming “That’s What Friends Are For.”

  “The problem here is one of bias,” I said, taping up a coil of extension cords. “When Mike gave me Etta, he should have given me James, too.”

  “No, please, Maggie,” Guido sighed. “I’m hungry.”

  “I bet we can find some really terrific barbecue in Southeast. Somewhere around Central and 103rd.”

  “No,” he said, adamant.

  “You brought up the issue, Guido. To be fair, we have to talk to James.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said, hefting the recorder. “I don’t want to eat down there. Feed me now and I’ll be your slave all day.”

  “I’m ashamed of you,” I said. “Slavery is not politically correct.”

  I took him out Sunset to Barragan’s in Echo Park for heuvos rancheros. As I dug into the trencher-size platter the waitress set in front of me, I realized it was the first time in a long time that I’d had any interest in food at all. I more than made up for the lapse, with Guido keeping up bite for bite. As skinny as he is, he has always been a big eater. We worked through our massive entrees, the beans and rice, two sides of chips and fresh salsa, and finished off with cold flan. When there was nothing left, I let out my belt a notch, leaned back in the upholstered booth, and sighed. Guido was pouring out the last of his Corona beer.

  “Ready now?” I asked.

  “When you are,” he said, and finished his beer in a long swallow. “Fueled and happy, I am yours.”

  We drove straight down the Harbor Freeway to Century Boulevard. The morning scene was very
different from the night. The streets teemed with people going about their business, oblivious to the squalorous backdrop. Women in bright dresses or skimpy halter tops and stretch pants led flower-like little girls by the hand. Little boys, in baggy shorts and high-top basketball sneakers that were surely too heavy for their skinny legs, jived and hustled irreverently among them, laughing and teasing all the time. It was a parade. Knots of men hung out on the sidewalk to watch it pass by.

  Two churches had “Free Charles Conklin” banners tacked up over their front doors. Identical banners.

  We passed the corner on Century where Wyatt Johnson had been shot fifteen years earlier, and continued on two more blocks to Central. Three short blocks down Central we found 103rd Street, and Unity Market on the corner. I hadn’t noticed it on any of my trips to Etta’s.

  Since leaving the freeway, we had passed gutters dirty with litter, not a small quantity of human litter, too, sleeping it off in doorways, loitering anywhere there was something to lean against. In stark contrast, the immediate area around Unity Market was spotless. There were no weeds growing through the cracks in the freshly swept sidewalk, no trash at the curb or blown up against the side of the building.

  Most of the neighborhood market and liquor store owners in Southeast had plastered over their display windows and strung razor wire around any openings or vents. The Unity, however, had an open front to show off bins of fresh fruits and vegetables, cut flowers in big cans. There was a smell of fresh coffee. It all seemed to belong to a different, a gentler place.

  When Guido and I walked up from the car a man I guessed to be in his sixties was helping an elderly woman select oranges. They had a little discussion about each orange before putting it into a paper bag. The man was very patient, courteous to the point of courtliness. He was a big man, a commanding presence. He wore blue jeans and sandals, a short, colorful batik tunic, and an embroidered Muslim cap on his short, nappy gray hair.

  “Good morning,” he greeted us. “How may I help you?”