“Grab me the three-oh-five,” Honeybun ordered, sensing the potential for story intrigue but at the moment more beguiled with the scene’s aesthetic, the strange and elegiac figure the old woman was cutting against that roiling, glooming, Book of Revelations sky. Within a minute he had the camera shouldered and was filming Mrs. Dooley’s slow-motion approach. Arriving at the front of the Harris house Mrs. Dooley didn’t pause; she just crooked her walker to the left, making a sharp, smooth Pac-Man turn, and scaling the curb she started up the front walkway.
“Howdy,” Honeybun can be heard calling to her on the footage. Without acknowledging the greeting or turning her head or even her eyes Mrs. Dooley asked, “Cameron Harris inside?”
“Sure is,” came Honeybun’s answer. Then to Casey he hissed, “Run and mike her.”
“She released?”
“She’s released, get a mike on her.”
Casey approached her warily, perhaps intuiting her reaction to him trying to pin a tiny microphone to her housedress: She swatted at him as though he were a gargantuan horsefly. When he tried again, bargaining with her as a nurse might bargain with a patient refusing a medical test, she rammed him with her walker to continue on her way. Casey threw a comically flummoxed shrug at Honeybun before Honeybun waved him out of the scene. Two thirds of the way up the walkway Mrs. Dooley came to a stop and, as if addressing the front door, asked again, “Cameron inside?”
“Yes he is,” answered Honeybun.
“Y’all go fetch him for me.”
Honeybun motioned for Casey to do this without entering the camera frame, sending him scampering into the house through the side door. Half a minute later the front door opened and out came Tanya, still in her oversize nightshirt, with Cameron trailing behind.
“Mrs. Dooley?” said Tanya, in her voice a mixture of confusion and diffuse concern and the residue of interrupted sleep. The way Casey had roused her and Cameron from the couches had been abrupt and mildly alarming, an evacuation order.
Mrs. Dooley said, “I want to talk to Cameron.”
“He’s right here,” Tanya said, as Cameron slipped past his sister to where Mrs. Dooley stood parked behind her walker. On his way he flashed a peeved look at the camera, unsure why this unscheduled visit was being filmed, and then glanced up the street toward Mrs. Dooley’s house on the corner, gauging the distance she’d traveled in her house slippers and what on earth that could mean. Then he looked down at her, noting a tremor on her lip and a redness spidering her eyes. “Something wrong?” he asked.
She took a deep, pained breath. “I want to know,” she said, “did you pray for my grandson?”
Cameron Harris has been acquainted with Eula Dooley his entire life, and he could tell, from the seething tightness in her voice, that she was upset. He knew what the musk of her anger smelled like, from her having thrashed his bottom sixteen years earlier, and he was smelling it now. But…her grandson, him praying? “Do what?” he asked.
“I says, did you pray for my grandson? Like I asked you.”
“Like you asked me?” His face was slack with bewilderment.
“Right after you risen,” she told him. “I asked you to pray for him for me. To tell Jesus he needed watching over.”
Cameron nodded, his memory apparently jogged. “Then…yeah,” he said. “Of course I woulda.”
Mrs. Dooley loosened her grip on her walker and rocked back on her heels, as though satisfied, but not soothed, by this answer. Her gaze drifted down to Cameron’s no longer spindly legs and after a while she let out a thick grunt. “Just look at you now,” she said, far from admiringly. Her tone felt more suited to someone addressing a drunk crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell. “Yes, sir. Look at you now. Jesus worked a wonder on you, didn’t he?”
“Yes ma’am he did.” Cameron’s face was registering even deeper confusion. “He sure did.”
“Yeah,” she said, drawing it out, her red eyes narrowing as she assessed Cameron’s legs once again. “Jesus worked a sure-enough wonder.”
By this time Scott T. Griffin had arrived outside from the kitchen, where he’d been editing on his laptop wearing earphones and had therefore missed Casey’s call to action. His mood was foul from not knowing what was happening and because whatever was happening was being filmed without audio support. (The production’s sound mixer, Austin Kroth, wasn’t scheduled until two.) In the footage he can be heard whisper-shouting at Casey why nobody was miked.
By this time, also, Tanya had joined her brother on the front walk. Cameron felt her hand on his back as she said to Mrs. Dooley, about the grandson, “That’s Antwain you was talking about, right? He still up in Chicago?”
Mrs. Dooley nodded with her chin, looking to the ground and then up again. Her bottom lip shook. “Antwain got shot last night.”
“Shot?” Tanya’s shoulders sank. “How?”
“Coming out of a store, just like our store there.” She waggled a finger toward the Biz-E-Bee. “Police was looking for someone held up another store. Said he pulled a knife. Boy didn’t have no knife.”
At this point Griffin slipped into the frame carrying three sets of lavalier microphones, the same kind of miniature clip-on mike that Casey earlier had tried clamping onto Mrs. Dooley’s dress. Untangling cords, he said, “Ya’ll just hold for a second while we get these on…”
“The police shot him?” Tanya was asking Mrs. Dooley.
“Just hold up,” Griffin barked.
“My daughter,” Mrs. Dooley said, ignoring Griffin who was threading a wire underneath the back of Cameron’s T-shirt, “she called me from the hospital this morning, thinking he was gonna make it. I says yes he’ll make it. I says we got some heavy prayers on our side, Jesus himself’d be in that room with ’Twain, with my own eyes I have gazed upon his wonders. I did. That’s what I told her.”
“I really need a pause here, folks,” said Griffin as he wedged himself between the Harrises and Mrs. Dooley and began stringing a mike toward her.
Cameron’s hand shot out to grab Griffin’s forearm. “Leave her be,” Cameron said. Firmly and articulately, he lowered Griffin’s arm then released it. A stunned look passed across Griffin’s face that was quickly replaced by a pinkish glower. On the footage Tanya can be seen startling then shrinking back, as though catching a darkly familiar frequency in her brother’s voice. Cameron said, “This here ain’t got nothing to do with what happened to me.”
“That’s actually my call,” Griffin snapped back, making another attempt to pin the mike to Mrs. Dooley. She lifted her hand to swat him, as she’d swatted Casey, just as Cameron grasped Griffin’s wrist and this time held it.
“This ain’t your story,” Cameron growled, screwing his eyes into Griffin’s, squeezing his wrist, that big neck vein of Cameron’s throbbing. “Remember?”
Tanya, her mouth forming a circle of shock, placed a hand on Cameron’s shoulder. This was to placate him, but must’ve also seemed, to Griffin, a signal of her support, leaving Griffin no one to whom he could appeal. Wriggling his wrist, the pink flush of his face gone crimson hot, Griffin opened his mouth to respond but apparently thought better of it. Once Cameron let go of his wrist Griffin wound up his arm as though to whip the mike and its cords to the ground—but apparently thought better of that, too. He kept his eyes trained on the lawn as he went stomping out of the camera frame, the mike cables trailing him like empty leashes. “Can we just put a fucking boom on them?” he ordered Casey.
None of the three acknowledged what’d just happened with Griffin, Tanya resuming the moment Griffin’s back was turned their way. “Is Antwain okay?” she asked, fearing the answer.
Mrs. Dooley shook her head.
Cameron said, “He didn’t make it?”
Mrs. Dooley’s head was still shaking.
Tanya slid a hand over her mouth and Cameron turned his head away from th
e camera and toward Division Street, where a car was pulling into the Biz-E-Bee—maybe for a cold six-pack, maybe for some life-saving grace. He was just starting to understand Mrs. Dooley’s anger, that cold-ass way she’d regarded his legs, and it both stung and confounded him. Him walking had nothing to do with Antwain dying: nothing. And him praying…prayers didn’t stop bullets, he thought, they weren’t a Kevlar vest, they weren’t insurance, they were wishes, coins you flipped into a fountain, they got heard or they didn’t get heard, and nobody knew what they did no matter how much they all claimed to know. In the meantime, as Cameron stood there in a contemplative funk, Tanya kept lobbing all manner of questions at Mrs. Dooley, Tanya-style, trying to map what’d happened.
The official story, per the Chicago Police Department, is that Antwain Custis, thirty-four, was confronted by officers seeking a suspect in a recent armed robbery. When Custis turned belligerent and attempted to flee, one of the officers fired on him with a nonlethal beanbag round, striking Custis in the leg. At this point Custis allegedly reached into his coat pocket, which suggested to the officers that he was reaching for a weapon; one of them opened fire, shooting Custis in the abdomen. Eleven hours later Custis died from the wounds. Inside that pocket, police said, were narcotics and a knife. A later inquiry, however, revealed the narcotics to be a single joint (which family members believe Antwain was probably trying to get rid of when he reached into his pocket) and the knife to be the same box cutter he used in his job as a receiving manager in a South Side liquor-distribution warehouse.
“I got three great-grandbabies lost their daddy today,” Mrs. Dooley was saying. “That boy, he was good. I raised him right here and he was good. He had his struggles but…well, y’all remember.” Whether she stopped herself due to the camera’s intrusive presence (Honeybun was still filming, roaming a half-circle beside them), or because she simply didn’t wish to dwell on Antwain’s struggles at the moment, is unclear. Fact is, however, Cameron didn’t remember. Not even Antwain’s name, which he was grateful to Tanya for supplying. Antwain had been eight years older than Cameron, and thus, by the time Cameron was old enough to explore the avenue, a teenager and then an adult—an unknowable figure for a kid riding a Big Wheel, never mind the racial divide. All he really remembered about the grandson was that he always wore a droopy Lakers jersey and sometimes sat out in his car listening to Lil’ Bow Wow and OutKast and David Banner with the bass cranked so high that every window on the street thrummed and fuzzed and Cameron’s mother’s little porcelain figurines would tap-dance on their shelves.
After a while Mrs. Dooley leveled another stare upon Cameron, this time as if waiting for him to say something—as though he hadn’t answered a question she’d asked, or that as a representative of twisted fate he had an obligation to weigh in. The first of the afternoon’s raindrops splatted his forehead. “I hate the prayers didn’t save him,” was all Cameron could think to say.
Her stare got harder and narrower, reminding him of the way she’d surveilled him as a child, pointing that crooked finger at him as though to say she knew what he was thinking, she knew what he was plotting, that she’d always be onto him. “How come praying can do this,” she finally said, this being Cameron up on his feet, “but it can’t save a child from bleeding?”
“I don’t know,” Cameron said, falling silent for several beats as the raindrops multiplied. “You know I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Dooley was nodding expressionlessly up at him, raindrops seeping down the canyons of her wrinkled face. She looked to be running some kind of calculations through her head, valuations and probabilities and the gut algebra of moral justice. Then her gaze widened to take in the broader tableau: Honeybun’s face scrunched behind the big black camera lens, Griffin and Casey rubbernecking from the driveway, all the audiovisual equipment heaped in the open garage, enough cable to lasso the moon.
“This rain’s fixing to come down,” Tanya said. “Why don’t I carry you back in the car and I’ll sit with you awhile?”
Mrs. Dooley’s focus returned to Cameron. “Cameron going to walk me back,” she announced.
Cameron looked to Tanya, who nodded, then eased himself closer to Mrs. Dooley. She swiveled her walker around, in a many-pointed turn, and without acknowledging the crew or even Tanya began shuffling back down the walkway. “I’ll still come on over in a few,” Tanya called after her. “I just got to throw some clothes on.”
For the first few minutes Cameron trailed a few feet behind, silent except for the order he gave Honeybun and Casey to stop following them. Mrs. Dooley clicked herself forward down the street so slowly that Cameron found it difficult to keep pace with her—his legs, once motionless, begged indifferently for a longer, faster stride.
About halfway down the street Mrs. Dooley asked, somewhat accusingly, “What them people do in there all day?”
“They’re making a show. You know that, Mrs. Dooley.”
She grunted half-heartedly. “Ain’t no one told me what the show about.”
“It’s about what happened to me,” he said. “About everything I been doing since.”
She glanced over at him, for the first time on their walk, asking, “What’s that you been doing since?”
Cameron’s response took a while—a half-dozen slow steps, at least. “Making a show,” he finally admitted.
“Huh,” she said.
They shuffled along for a time.
She asked, “People going to watch that show?”
“That’s the idea, I guess.”
“And what they going to see?”
When Cameron failed to answer, after another half-dozen steps, Mrs. Dooley answered her own question. “I’ll tell you what they going to see.” Her tone made unclear whom she was addressing: Cameron, herself, the asphalt, Jesus. “They going to see nothing.”
Cameron winced, and Mrs. Dooley, glancing rightward again, seemed satisfied at the sight. “You don’t think I see you back there,” she said about the backyard, her taut voice rising but studded with heavy breaths, “acting like you still got cause to do nothing, be nothing?” She shook her head and snorted, grief and disgust crammed into one nasal honk. “Still pouting like someone done sucked the red off your lollipop. Jesus give you a fortune and you acting like you don’t know how to spend it.”
Maybe I don’t, Cameron wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he peered down at his dragging feet, uncertain why he deserved this but persuaded that, whatever the reason—he did.
They were at her house now, the raindrops multiplying.
“Jesus didn’t do what he did so’s you could join the circus,” she said.
This stopped Cameron, and as Mrs. Dooley turned to ascend her front steps Cameron stood there sagging, his wettening T-shirt beginning to cling, rainwater glazing his face. “What—what am I supposed to do?” he asked of her back, and waited.
“That between you and Jesus,” was all she said, fumbling with her screen door, and she was almost inside before Cameron, dazed and slumping, thought to say how sorry he was about Antwain. Her head dipped, but she spoke no reply.
Scott T. Griffin didn’t try to speak to him when Cameron returned inside, which was good, because Cameron was in no mood to talk. He holed up in his bedroom, smoking so fulsomely and unceasingly that Honeybun, passing the bedroom door on the way to the bathroom, noted curls of smoke oozing from the top of the door.
Did you pray for my grandson. Like I asked you. Right after you risen. Cameron didn’t believe it mattered, certainly not to the fate of Antwain Custis, but while he remembered Mrs. Dooley asking him to pray for her and her grandson, he couldn’t remember ever doing so. Thing was, he hadn’t prayed at all that first night, right after you risen—he hadn’t done anything that night besides dumbly reel from what’d just happened to him, stupefied by the aftermath of an unfathomable magic trick. The reactivation of his faith lagged days
behind the reactivation of his legs—and by then, well, by then his head had gotten crowded, by then it felt like half the world was begging for his blessing—by then he’d just forgotten.
He’d failed her, he thought. He’d failed her, and then, just now, he’d lied to her. But she’d seen right through the lie, hadn’t she?—had peered directly into the void that he wasn’t supposed to have anymore, then called him out on it. It didn’t make a lick of sense, of course, that him praying could’ve changed even a stray molecule of what’d happened to Antwain up in Chicago—that a prayer of Cameron’s could’ve cauterized the bleeding or redirected the bullets or given Antwain the wits not to reach into his pocket with cops training their guns on him. That made no sense at all. Yet as he sat there on the side of his bed, sucking cigarette after cigarette, his own legs seemed to be speaking to him in a language of twitches and trembles that he couldn’t help but translate as: Sense, circus freak? What the hell is sense?
Scott T. Griffin, for his part, sat holed up as well—in the kitchen, fuming, pecking aggressively at his laptop. The clash with Cameron had snapped something inside him, his last mental shoelace. For four months he’d been working sixteen hours a day on a show that was increasingly bearing little to no resemblance to the earnest and scientifically rigorous show he’d intended to make. The deadline that Bree Winterson had set for him, silly to begin with, was now making no narrative sense whatsoever, was just a zombified marketing gimmick chasing Griffin in his sleep. His marriage had come unglued over the holiday shooting break, his affair with Kaitlyn Douglas exposed by an ill-timed text message, and for all intents and purposes he was currently homeless. Moreover, his relationship with Douglas, which’d bloomed under the excruciating heat of the production’s deadlines, was now wilting from that same heat. (As one crew member would later say, “When you’re shooting with a skeleton crew, like we were, your P.A.’s main duties can’t be flashing the showrunner and giving him backrubs.”)
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 24
