Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  “Tamara’s husband was killed.” Oakland on track to break the record for murders this year. “Jeremy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re going to Jeremy’s funeral. Just last week you were BS-ing with him about the A’s.”

  “Yeah. His name’s in my book.” Everyone who talks to Teddy is supposed to write in his memory book.

  “I thought we could get some food beforehand,” I say as we walk outside into the cool, cloudy winter day.

  And a beer for me, I don’t need to add. I’m drinking a lot these days, starting earlier and earlier. It’s because of Oakland, I tell myself; the city depresses me. Jeremy and I met as visitors at the rehab center, and when he needed a lawyer for a marijuana arrest I got the case thrown out. We had a beer later and talked about Jeremy’s wife and my brother, about how it was going to be when they were home. Jeremy seemed like a normal, decent guy, not someone you’d expect to be gunned down on his way to work at the post office. But in Oakland there doesn’t need to be a reason for murder, apparently. Jeremy is my third client to turn up shot to death. All of them young black men.

  Later at the service Tamara will turn to her mother and ask in a too-loud whisper, “Whose funeral is this again?” And from the back of the church one of her teenage cousins, one of those boys about to become a man, will laugh.