Harlem Hit & Run

by Angela Dews

  “Seriously. I want you to come now. What are you going to bring? Not any statues and flags I hope.”

  “A bell.”

  “Cool. The sound will allow us to focus.” He smiled. “In fact, what about a siren? That way they can feel the stress you’re going to talk about.”

  I didn’t laugh and thought about it. “Interesting. Do you have one that’s not so loud? I’m interested in how sound figures in your world, actually. Thank you for the idea.”

  “It’s not my world. You live in it too. You just don’t have to notice from your faraway Hollywood place.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When I got over to Seventh Avenue, I walked up to Ruthie’s and caught Riley and Joseph standing outside.

  “When Mister Bell gets back, please tell him I need to talk to him. Tell him it’s about Viola.”

  “Why don’t you wait for Marcus at the repast?” Joseph asked. “We’re going to pay our respects over at Elizabeth’s house.”

  Riley said, “We didn’t make it to Bentas. Don’t like looking at dead people. You want a ride over?”

  They waited for me as I walked around Riley’s green Chevy van. I read the stickers on the windows from University of South Vietnam, School of Warfare; two ribbons, one yellow and one black; and a bumper sticker announcing, Vietnam Vet, Proud to Serve.

  In the center of the back window was a badge, crimson and gold for U.S. Ordnance Corps with text that read SERVICE TO THE LINE, ON THE LINE, ON TIME.

  I took Riley’s arm as he helped me climb in and let him close the door, kind of like stepping through a time warp to some other place where gentlemen live.

  In the Miller’s parlor, the mourners were eating and talking with their hats and shoes off, still waiting for those who were about the business of burying Cecelia. They were many generations. They were black and white and other. The men had established their own separate space in the back parlor. Women were in the front. Children were everywhere—some restless, some crumpled on laps or upholstered furniture.

  I ate a little something.

  C H A P T E R • 38

  * * *

  The phone was ringing when I got home, but it stopped by the time I unlocked and got in. I deposited my keys on the table by the door, turned on the small light and kicked off my heels. I walked across the parlor floor and picked up a beaded bird from South Africa, my gift to Daddy, appreciating the sweetness of the familiar.

  I started to fix a drink and thought better of it and walked over to the dining room table where I sat for a minute before the phone rang again.

  I let it.

  Four generations of my people used to sit down to holiday dinner at this table when it was let out with the extra leaf. The earliest ancestors of the clan were staring down from frames on the walls. They were the subject of familiar tales I had heard for 40 years and I had expected one day to pass on to my own children.

  The next time the phone rang, I picked it up.

  Obsidian said, “I’m out of the hospital and I don’t have any food in the house and I’m guessing you don’t either. I thought I’d order us up some dinner.”

  “Thank you. But I’m not feeling like coming back out. It feels so good to be home.”

  “I caught you. You said home.”

  I laughed and relaxed a little. “I ate something at the repast.”

  “Then you can keep me company. Stay put. Give me an hour. Then we can finish our conversation.”

  “You should not be running around.”

  “I didn’t say I was running over.”

  He lied. It was more like 30 minutes. And I barely got out of the bathtub in time. I arrived at the door completely covered in a jumpsuit.

  His bomber jacket was draped over a sling and he placed his bag of Chinese food on the little table in the foyer. “Come here.”

  I fought against the thing in his eyes and lost. One arm was enough, as it turned out, for him to pull me close enough to kiss. Maybe not as much to pull, as to guide me, since I was already moving toward him until my mouth met his mouth and without a thought in my head, achieving my goal, as I felt him against me for a moment before I had to turn away.

  “Does it hurt your face?” he asked.

  “A little, and we have to talk.”

  “Yes, we can talk, first.” He sounded as breathless as I was.

  “It’s not that funny.”

  It wasn’t, but laughing is what all that feeling turned into.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I asked him.

  “Are you?” He touched the bandage on my face.

  “I am. I always am,” I said, feeling a little sorry for myself. “Sit down. I’ll get us some real plates and utensils.”

  “Can we have a fire?”

  “Sure.” I started over to the fireplace.

  “No. Let me.”

  “Can you build it with the sling?”

  “Ha. You will be surprised at what I can do with this sling.”

  My refrigerator was barren now that neighbors had stopped dropping off the after-funeral covered dishes.

  I piled plates and silverware and napkins on a silver tray and added two beers. I put the tray on the carved Haitian table, put Miles on the box, and arranged myself on the couch. And from there I watched him. A sight he was too.

  It turned out he could make a fire with one good arm. Then he scooted me over to sit with the good arm next to me, and while I fixed our plates, his fire caught and blazed up.

  “I see you’re still a vegetarian.”

  “Yes.”

  “It must be hard to reconcile believing it’s wrong to kill animals, and yet, you’re a cop.”

  He put his chopsticks down. “I’m against killing people too.”

  “But, once you sign on, you’re one of them. How can you stand it?”

  “Can you do this tomorrow?” he asked. “I’m not bringing you in to meditate with my people as an outsider who is judging them.”

  “I’m not going to talk about the politics of the thing. I’m going to show them a practice.”

  “The shift changes at 4. You can start at 3:30.”

  “Which reminds me,” I said. “We need Al to put out the special edition of the paper tomorrow. Can you get him out?”

  “We’ve picked him up twice in the past two days.”

  “He didn’t really do anything, except he was at the wrong place when the bootleg gang was busted and he took Heavy in when he needed to hide and the fool brought the drugs in.”

  “Heavy needed to hide because he killed someone.”

  “How come you arrested Heavy at the collapsed building and couldn’t figure out he was the one driving the hit-and-run car? Don’t you guys take fingerprints?”

  “There was no reason to compare those prints. And processing fingerprints is labor intensive. Takes weeks. Only way we get it done quicker is if it’s a big case. They’ve started a process to put them on a computer so we can compare prints. But the crime lab still has to hand-compare inked print cards. And they were partials, which makes it harder.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said. “It’s faster in the movies.”

  “You all make that shit up. You need to get back your results and bust the bad guy before the credits roll.”

  “I need to get my notebook,” I said. “This is important. I don’t want to get this wrong.”

  “You are not going to quote me.”

  “No. I wouldn’t. It’s background.”

  “I want to stop talking about it for a minute.”

  C H A P T E R • 39

  * * *

  “Stop talking?”

  I was thinking he meant we would just look at the fire. But maybe I knew what he meant.

  His mouth was so sweet. But I had to pull away from him.

  “Does it hurt to kiss me?” he asked. “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t hurt. But I can’t breathe through my nose.”

  “Me neither, he said. “Help me. Why do you
have on all those clothes?”

  I stood up and unzipped the jumpsuit which I must have put on to make it hard to do this thing. I stepped out slowly and he watched me.

  I was careful, remembering his shoulder, but compelled to move onto his lap as though we were magnetized. And once there, there was no way I should have been able to feel the heat from his hand brushing my body so gently like that.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “I’m leaving again; you have someone. What do you want from me?”

  “Do you want to hear that I love you? Do you want to hear that I have thought of little else except this since I saw you again?”

  I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted to hear. But my body was responding.

  He shifted a little. “You always fit right there. It’s where you belong.”

  I needed to look at his face in the firelight with its angles. The little break in his hairline marked a wound, years old. The small scar in his eyebrow was new.

  I kissed him again.

  “You’re going to have to help me with this,” he said.

  “I kind of like having you a little helpless.”

  “I’ll show you helpless.”

  I got to undress him and we ended up on the rug with soft wool and chenille throws, in the arc of warmth from the sighing, popping fire.

  “I’m really going to need your help now,” he said and opened his good hand with a condom in its wrapper in his palm.

  I was hungry for his textures and tastes and smells and sounds. I was careful of his shoulder, but his hand and his mouth made me careless about everything else.

  Then, I felt him playing with me, touching me, then backing away. He had me too close to pay attention then and without thinking about his shoulder or any of the other things I needed to worry about, I was on top of the sweetest . . . and slowly down and back up again. And I watched him, loving that he was mine at that moment.

  And, finally, I remembered this man, the memories becoming waves rushing into places so deep they had not been touched since the last time. Then, when I was happy, yes, laughing, with the remembered joy of him, I heard myself gasp as the waves touched new places, and what was water became fire, then became clear, pure light.

  And when I noticed again, he was pulling the throw over us.

  He said, “If you want to say something, you might say, welcome home daddy.”

  “No. I can’t. That hurts. I don’t get to say that ever again. My Daddy is dead.”

  Then I broke down. Finally. I was not heaving and gasping and trying to close the space where my father was supposed to be like I did when the grief first hit me. But he was slipping away. I could feel the place that was as wide as the ocean emptying of anger and everything else. And I was surrounded only by love. It’s where a boy lived who was not my Daddy, and then he was, and he did the best he could do, and he loved me and he learned to mother me. And I was feeling all of the sweet, sweet sadness of it.

  And Obie was holding me and I was holding on.

  “I’ve got you,” he said and his voice broke.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I woke up in bed to feel his arm pulling me closer to him, and when I looked, I discovered he was still asleep. I loved that he wanted me closer in his sleep and I snuggled against him, wrapping one leg over his, and dozed off again.

  The next time I woke up he was sitting up.

  “Good morning. How is it now?” he asked.

  “Me? I’m spent. Empty. Cried out I think.”

  “It was beautiful to feel you feel your father. The deep sadness in your eyes makes them smoky.”

  He ran a fingertip just beside my lips.

  “Thank you. I thought I couldn’t let it happen, couldn’t feel it without being swept away. You kept me safe. How do you feel? Are you in pain?”

  “I took a pill. It’s okay. I can take it,” he said. “Come here.”

  I looked away.

  “You can’t regret this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I think our lovemaking may be foreplay,” he said, “to reestablishing the intimacy of our long friendship.”

  I laughed. “I think I love you because of how your mind works, maybe even more than because of how your body works,” I said.

  “Speaking of how my body works,” he said and kissed me. But then he moved away. “What time is church?”

  I looked at the clock. “I’m going to hear what Reverend Garrison has to say at the 10 o’clock service.”

  “What do you expect? Some homily about the money lenders?”

  “I don’t know. But I have some questions that will be part of the bank story.”

  I stood up and wrapped my mess of hair into a twist, which I secured with a barrette.

  “I like it wild,” he said.

  “I noticed.”

  “No. I mean your hair.” He stood up. “Let me go first.”

  I kissed him when he came out of the bathroom, and I went in and locked the door behind me. I scared myself in the mirror. It was going to take some doing to make myself presentable. Not for Obsidian. My lover knows me. But the church folks expect Sunday-go-to-meeting.

  When I opened the door, he was almost dressed.

  “You’re in a hurry? Do you have time for coffee? Or, are you going to church with me?”

  “You locked the door,” he said.

  “I have used up almost all the flexibility in my schedule this morning,” I said. “I need to take some notes before I interview Gary while he’s captive in his church and can’t run away from me.”

  “Had I been allowed in the shower with you, you would not have been out of there perhaps before noon. Do you remember our shower scenes?”

  “Yes. And I remember baths in your mother’s decadent tub.”

  “Mmmm. Yes, there was that. But I was imagining you standing up and feeling the skin on your back, wet and slippery and fragrant against me.”

  He turned away and I smiled. I had the advantage of keeping secret the effect his words were having on me.

  “You aren’t using enough makeup to cover your eyes?” he asked.

  “I have shades for church. But I think this look is perfect for our meditation at the precinct.”

  “You might be right. But it’s going to take more than a black eye to fit in with my men.”

  “I’m not trying to fit in because I’m wounded. I’m fitting in because we’re all in this together. I believe we’re interconnected.”

  “Please don’t preach to my guys.”

  “Trust me.”

  We walked together downstairs and embraced at the door.

  “You’ve got 30 minutes starting at 3:30. I’ve told them you were coming. You’ll get a chance to make a pitch to grab a few more. But right now, you’ve got 4.”

  “Four is a good start. Thank you. This is important. Thank you.”

  I watched him walk away.

  C H A P T E R • 40

  * * *

  I had to stand at the back of the church up the hill and wait for the processional to enter. I watched the good sisters turn to follow the right reverend as though he was the light.

  The man who will always be the church’s second in command led the service, while Reverend Garrison sat to the side of the pulpit, which had been his father’s before it was his. But when it came time to preach, he’s the one who got up. I took out my notebook, making one part of the rustling sounds of the church settling in to hear him.

  Gary was acknowledging the elected officials, sports figures and entertainers who had shown up. He also asked visitors to stand and asked those who were visiting from foreign countries to stand again. There was a horde of them; most came in the long buses parked on the wide street or the narrow avenue outside.

  “The offspring of slave-holders are expecting us to hold a funeral today for our bank. They know how we love to sing songs about home-going. I preached such a sermon yesterday for our good sister Cecelia Miller, and I’ll preach such a one Wednesday for our good broth
er, Clarence Jackson. Clarence was one of the talented young people who we have been trying to rescue from the war that’s going on out there. We can’t afford to lose any more of our future.”

  “This community is too familiar with the abomination of parents burying their children. Marjorie and Ephraim Jackson are here and Elizabeth Miller is here. Be sure to show them your love. But today, I’ve got something for the progeny of slavers. I’ve got a sermon about self-sufficiency and a message about fight-back.”

  “We call on everyone of goodwill to provide financial and heart support in this effort to save our bank, our Independence National Bank. At this time, in this moment, we have come together and will resurrect the dream of First’s founders who solicited early deposits door to door. Our bank has risen from the ashes more than once.”

  He looked strong, in charge, a knight well-suited to fighting for our good cause. The chinks in his armor didn’t matter in the fortress of his church.

  “We must now also admit we have taken our bank for granted. But at this time, I remind you, urge you, no entreat and provoke you, to support her, to call and write and fax Washington DC. Let the people in government know this community is behind its bank and we demand they give us time to bring her back. The fax numbers and phone numbers are on the lists we will pass out as you leave the church.”

  He waved at the ushers at the top of the aisles.

  “We only have one more day. Make sure to sign the petitions and take some with you and get them signed and bring them back by early tomorrow afternoon. We will get them to our Congressman’s office to make our demands in the name of our congregation and our community.”

  On this Sunday, Gary’s church was the place to be, and the press was broadening his audience in the packed church beyond the congregation and the tourists.

  Then he yanked me back.

  “Before we close, I want to say the name of one of our long-time heroes, Charles Washington. Charlie told the truth and made things happen. His daughter Pearl is here. She is doing the work of her father. Give her some love.”

  At the end of the service, I walked through people I knew and people I didn’t, making connections, hugging and hand-holding.