My surprise was that he only lost one tooth.
“...right, Daddy?” Aja said.
“What?”
“Richard says that maybe a degree from a school like Beckton might not be good for getting a job, and I told him that I could, probably.”
I was still in that torture room, looking at the meal through a chink in the cinder block wall.
“What kinda diploma you got for your work, Rags?” I asked my cousin.
At first he riled, no doubt thinking that I was somehow insulting him. But when Rags went over the words in his mind he smiled and then nodded at my challenge.
“Yeah, yeah,” he agreed. “It’s the man you hire, not the diploma.”
The meal went on after that. Outside the cell of my mind people laughed and conversed, ate and shared their ideas. I wanted to join in, but once I’d begun remembering Rikers and the man I no longer am, I couldn’t change tracks. I went into jail a guardian of the peace and came out lawless, or, at least, unbound.
“Baby?” my grandmother cooed.
“Yeah?”
“You wanna come help me with the dishes?”
“We have people who wash dishes for a living,” Roger pointed out to Brenda for probably the hundredth time.
“Every man got to clean up his own mess,” she replied.
“But why does Joseph have to help? Washing dishes is women’s work.” Roger was rich enough not to have to bend to social expectations. He said whatever he felt.
“Women’s work is keepin’ fools like you in line,” Brenda Naples informed the billionaire.
“What’s wrong, Joe?” my grandmother asked while we worked our way through the dishes.
The sink was restaurant-size. There were two dishwashers, one for breakables and the other for pots and pans, and enough staff that if each one cleaned only three dishes the job would be done. But Brenda put liquid soap in hot water, donned her own personal rubber gloves, and washed each piece of tableware by hand. I rinsed and dried, a job I’d done since I was five years old visiting my grandparents’ cold-water shack in Jackson, Mississippi.
“Nothing, Grandma,” I said.
“You know a child is never s’posed to lie while doin’ his chores.”
“So I could lie any other time?”
“Answer my question, King.”
When she called me King in that tone, it meant playtime was over.
“Why you invite Rags to brunch?” I wasn’t going to spill my guts that easily.
“He’s a trustworthy soldier.”
“Doesn’t Roger have enough security with Forthright and all?”
“I called Richard for you.”
“Me?”
“Roger didn’t tell me that he was callin’ on you. That means he’s tryin’ to protect me from some danger he’s puttin’ you in. That’s why I called your cousin, so you’d see him and remember him if you get in too deep.”
“You know I’m forty-four,” I reminded her.
“Ain’t none of us could make it on our own, child.”
I’d been receiving pearls of wisdom like that from my father’s mother for all my years. That was probably the reason I didn’t embark on a life of crime like my dad and his brothers. I knew for a fact that it was from her words that I found strength in the bowels of Rikers.
“I love you, Grandma.”
We were all out on the driveway that went past the front doors of Silbrig Haus. Forthright’s people brought my Bianchina and Rags’ sand-colored CJ-5 Willys Jeep. The militaristic vehicle was a small and sturdy version of its World War II counterpart — and a perfect automobile for Rags.
Before climbing in he handed me a business card. It had been blank but Richard had jotted down his initials, two phone numbers, and an e-mail address.
“Granny B told me that you might be wanting my help with something,” he said as I read the scant markings.
“She worries too much.”
“That is an existential impossibility,” the self-educated mercenary said.
I smiled and clapped his shoulder.
Aja bundled in next to me in the tiny car.
We made it over to Park Avenue and toured down toward Lower Manhattan in no particular rush.
“You gonna work for Mr. Ferris?” she asked when we were crossing Fifty-Seventh.
“That what your great-grandmother said?”
“No. She asked me when I was gonna have a baby.”
“She did?”
“Yeah. Her sister Lottie has two great-great-grandchildren and Grandma B doesn’t want her getting that far ahead.”
“Granny B has six great-grands as it is,” I argued against the woman not there.
“Yeah, but I’m her favorite. She knows that my kids won’t come askin’ her for money.”
At that time Aja lived, with four other girls, in a fourth-floor walk-up on Bowery Street not far from Delancey. I stopped in front of her building and leaned over to hug her good-bye.
“See you in the morning?” I asked. She worked in my office, pretty much ran my life.
“I want to take the morning to finish my essay on Fanon.”
“Wretched of the Earth?”
“Black Skin, White Masks.”
“Never read that one.”
“You mean there’s a book you haven’t read?”
“I love you too, honey.”
She jumped out and ran up the stairs of her overpriced tenement. I sat in the car in front of her door a good five minutes before pulling away from the curb.
3
In order to get to Rikers Island, a part of the Bronx, you have to go through the borough of Queens. So, at 10:00 the next morning I was driving across the Francis R. Buono Memorial Bridge. Mingus played on the boom box. His smoother jazz compositions provided calm when my heart refused to slow down. And that morning it felt as if the blood pump wanted to jump out of its cavity.
I had a good deal to be worried about. Alfred Xavier Quiller, an icon of the alt-right, was being held without legal accord, by some shadowy authority, in New York City’s very own prison — the last place in the world I’d volunteer to visit. Roger had assured me that he’d greased the way for me to get to Quiller, but what if he was wrong? What if I was swallowed by shadow when I made my visitor’s request?
At the Rikers Island Visitor Center, uniformed minders took my name, looked it up on an old desktop, had a little discussion among themselves, and then sent me to a special waiting room not much bigger than Roger Ferris’s work cube. The walls were dirty gray. The blue linoleum floor was scuffed and gritty underfoot. There were three chairs and the mild scent of tobacco smoke on the air. The fluorescent lighting put me on edge, but at least it was quiet in there.
There’d been no body search, no camera monitoring my behavior. No one looked in on me. The closed door to the waiting room wasn’t even locked. These nonevents were strange for an island dedicated to the submission of its residents, their visitors, and the very concept of freedom. I could have had a weapon. I could be smuggling contraband. They didn’t know.
When the door finally opened, my watch, given me by a man named after the devil, said it was 11:07.
Two guards came in, one white and the other Black. Their uniforms were reminiscent of the NYPD. This bothered me because I was once a cop, still liked things about that job, but I hated everything about Rikers.
“Joe Oliver?” the Black guard asked.
“Yeah?”
Neither man appreciated my lack of respect.
“Come with us.”
I considered a moment and then stood.
“Where to?”
“Just follow us,” the white guard sniped as he turned to go back out the door.