15
The nuns met for their evening meal. Some would eat with the students, while the others would stay in their own dining hall. Separate. Away. This made them holier, they must have assumed.
The Mother Superior stood at the head of the table. “We must pray for poor Mr. Washington, that he understands his sins and confesses them. Pray for his soul.”
I sat on an empty chair next to a quiet nun. Even in profile she looked like a man. But she wasn’t praying.
Later that night, I whispered to Sister Sixtus and she finally got up from her knees and left her room. I followed her as she passed door after door of each sister’s cell through the dark corridor, until she came to one at the end. She hesitated a long time, just standing in front of the door. I thought I would have to whisper some more to her. But she finally raised a shaky hand, balled it into a fist, and delicately knocked.
“Come in,” said the voice from the other side of the door.
She grasped the doorknob and pushed it open.
“Sister Sixtus, what do you want? It’s late.”
“I... I...”
“Yes? Are you all right?”
I whispered to Sister Sixtus of Hell and the fires of damnation, and she took a step into the room. “I... I... know...”
“You know what?” She was irritated. She was in her starched white nightgown, with a cap on her closely cut hair. I could tell she just wanted to go to bed.
“I... know what you did.”
She tied the strings of her cap under her chin. “This isn’t getting any clearer.”
Sister Sixtus took another step inside. “I know that you killed that girl.”
Sister Conception seemed to freeze. She slowly lowered her hands to her lap before she turned and rose. “That’s a strange thing to say.”
“I saw you. I saw what you did.”
Her eyes narrowed. I’d been trying to whisper to her though she never seemed to hear me. Funny thing.
“You supposedly saw what I did... but you never told anyone.”
“I’m going to tell. But I’d rather you confess it.”
She laughed. “Me? Tell what? Something you dreamed?”
“I didn’t dream it. I saw it. I can give details. Confess it before they convict that poor man.”
“He’s a colored man.”
I didn’t like the way she said that. To us, grown-ups weren’t one thing or another. They were just grown-ups. Mr. Washington was easy to pull a prank on because he never told. But you couldn’t get away with it with the nuns. They were the worst, as far as grown-ups went. You sure wouldn’t tell them your problems.
“He doesn’t deserve to die!”
Sister Conception took a step toward Sister Sixtus, who backed up. “I’m not going to confess. I didn’t do anything. That girl wasn’t Catholic and hadn’t the grace on her. It was better she was gone. Her friends did most of it to her anyway. Her own friends. They’re the ones who killed her. These are the hearts of the little heathens we have in this place. It would be better to tear the whole place down than to have these girls here.”
Sister Sixtus stared at her. I could see it all on her face. She was scared. If she didn’t get out of there, Sister Conception would get her too. Even I could read as much in her eyes. Maybe it was already too late.
Sister Sixtus spun on her heels and ran down the corridor.
I watched Sister Conception stand there in her nightgown, glaring at the open door. She was trembling in her fury, when she had been so passive as she pressed that towel to my face in that dark basement. I was dead anyway. I wasn’t going to survive that fall. She didn’t have to kill me.
She pulled the door closed and stomped to her bed. No kneeling to make her prayers. I watched her douse the light and lie in her bed, her blanket clasped to her chest, her hands like claws. She was fuming. I didn’t remember what anger was like. So I watched her to see if I could remember. Steps in the corridor. Lots of them. She hadn’t bothered to lock her door. She was too angry. The steps got closer. What was she going to do?
16
The newspapers covered Sister Conception’s trial. The Sentinel, the colored paper, wondered why Mr. Washington was still in jail. I didn’t return to the courthouse to see Sister Conception. She couldn’t hear me whisper about Hell anyway.
17
It’s quiet in the academy now. Too many families took their children out. Sister Conception was going to get her wish. They were going to tear down the school. Cut down the big magnolia trees along the sidewalk out front. It was all going to go. Build something else in its place. Los Angeles was like that. Get rid of the old. Cover it up. Build something on top of it. Until that was old...
As the years tolled on, I lost more and more of my memory, and never remembered why I was there... or even who I was. Or... if I was anyone at all...
All That Glitters
by Gar Anthony Haywood
Watts Towers
It was a strange place to work as a security guard. The fabled Watts Towers in Los Angeles. What the hell was somebody going to steal at the Watts Towers?
Before he got the job, all Eric knew about the Towers was what he’d learned in elementary school. Way back in 1921, some crazy Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia had started constructing what would eventually become, when he was done thirty-three years later, seventeen giant spires and interconnected structures on the site of his 107th Street home. He combined steel rebar, concrete, and anything else he could get his hands on — scraps of porcelain, tile, glass — to create what was now either the biggest eyesore or the greatest piece of man-made art the city of Los Angeles would ever see, depending on your taste for the bizarre.
Today, looming almost a hundred feet off the ground at their highest point, the Towers were a California State Historic Park, one that saw forty thousand visitors annually. Eric Pound was one of six people on the security staff charged with keeping the Towers safe and unmolested. Which, to Eric’s mind, was like being tasked to make sure nobody made off with the doorknobs at a Motel 6.
Not that Eric didn’t see his share of undesirables at the Towers. Like at any public space, the people who came here covered all kinds of emotional, psychological, and socioeconomic ground. Some were stone criminals and others were simple drunks. Words got exchanged, fights broke out, and sometimes blood was spilled. The Towers were situated in a patch of South Central turf the Bloods and Crips had been fighting over since before Eric was born, so it was only natural that violence would break out on the grounds from time to time.
But it wasn’t visitors intent on harming each other that Eric saw most often during his daily rounds at the Towers. It was certifiable crazies. Drug addicts, alcoholics, or clinically disturbed individuals on or off their meds, who showed up hallucinating, walking the lines to get into the park on unsteady feet as they held two-way conversations with themselves. They rarely bothered anybody but some were a nuisance requiring intervention.
The guy in the green jacket was one of those.
Today made the third time Eric had seen him at the Towers in the six months since being hired. As before, the guy had come in wearing a tired, oversized green overcoat he didn’t need for the current weather. He was a Black man with small teeth and a head spotted with bald patches whom Eric had initially thought was homeless, because he had that sad, hunched-over set to his frame and his clothes and shoes matched the green overcoat’s thrift store aesthetic. But he always had money for the park’s entry fee and when he spoke — which he did only sparingly — it was with a clarity that life on the street usually denied people over time.