“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.”