It was the terrified look on the mugger’s face that made me decide to kill him. I was outraged that a man who made his living robbing others would not be brave enough to face the consequences of his crimes. His cowardice negated any claim to clemency.
I was just about to shoot the mugger when a bright light flashed, a siren chirped, and a magnified voice called out, “Drop the weapon! This is the police!”
In that moment I argued internally about the action I should take. One side of my mind said that the mugger should die, no matter what some bright light and bullhorn said.
“No, cousin,” Sherman argued. “You got to live for Titi and for me too. You could have killed him, but now you got to drop the gun, get down on your knees, and put your hands behind your head.”
As Sherman said these things, I did them.
The mugger stayed on his feet, trembling.
The policemen, two of them, hurried over — their guns drawn, their eyes searching for trickery and deceit.
“Don’t say anything, cousin,” Sherman whispered. “Not a word.”
They took us, me and the man that tried to rob me, to the precinct station. I was put in a small interrogation room and handcuffed to a metal hook anchored in the wall. A cop in a suit tried to question me, but I wouldn’t so much as look at him.
A long time passed. During that period I thought about Sherman and the words he had spoken years before when talking about what he’d do if he were caught in some crime. I realized that he had been teaching me how to survive after he was gone.
When the door came open again, my cousin Theodora entered. She was the last person I expected to see, hastily clad in blue jeans and a long turquoise T-shirt. Her hair was wrapped up in a nylon stocking, and there were bags under her eyes.
She stared at me with a confused look on her face. Then, slowly, the answer to the riddle of who I was and who they thought I was, came to her.
She squatted down in front of me, her face not two inches away from mine.
“Stew?” she whispered.
I couldn’t speak.
“Why you had Sherman’s wallet on you?” my cousin asked.
“Titi,” I uttered softly.
Theodora understood.
“Listen, Stew,” she murmured. “They found me as the contact in Sherman’s wallet. They think you’re him. Tell me what happened, and I’ll try and get you outta here.”
“Man tried to mug me, and I grabbed away his gun.”
Theodora was well known at the precinct. They looked up the mugger’s records and Sherman’s to find that my mugger, Chris Hatter, had been arrested for violent crimes many times. That, and the fact that his fingerprints and the ones on the bullets matched, got me released.
Titi let me come live with her.
Sleeping in Sherman’s bed, waking up each day and putting on his clothes, made me feel... different, more and more so each day. I began reading his library of college books and the thirteen volumes of the detailed journal he’d kept since the age of ten. And, slowly, I made a plan for my future.
I applied to college, saying in my essay that I wanted another bachelor’s degree, one in English literature because I wanted to teach.
Six months later I was in Greenwich Village at one of eight NYU registration tables. The table I stood in line for was specified for people with last names that started with letter A, B, or C.
I stood there thinking about the police captain who harangued me for not telling the arresting officers that I was the victim of the mugger I had disarmed.
“...and we might have let him go,” the captain said. “By keeping quiet you could have put a dangerous criminal back on the street...”
And now I was at the front of the line at registration.
“Name?” a blond girl with a wide face and rimless glasses asked.
Instead of responding I gave her the driver’s license from my wallet.
She took the card and read it, looked up, and said, “Sherman Cardwell-Brownley?”
I sighed, smiled, and nodded. She smiled back and started going through a box of large envelopes sitting next to her. The young woman — her name tag read “Shauna” — found the name and handed me my schedule for the fall semester. I had been given a dorm room, a roommate named Lucian Meyers, and a laminated card with the photo of a face on it that looked a lot like mine.
Otis
Crash Martin, christened Percival by his parents, left school in a hurry when he thought the truth had come out. The Martin family lived in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, in a three-bedroom apartment, with rent control grandfathered in through his father’s father, both named Reginald, upon the elder’s death in 1999. While Reginald Jr. had been born in that apartment, Mathilda Poplar-Martin, Crash’s mother, hailed from Portland, Maine, and still owned her family cabin on Monhegan Island, population seventy-three.
“There are twenty-seven artists, forty-five fishermen, and me,” she’d say of her island home away from home, “when I’m there.”
Crash had an older sister named Albertha, a fraternal twin brother called Brother, and a cousin named Bob. Bob’s parents had died in an automobile accident on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Claudia, Bob’s mother, had been talking to Mathilda on her cell phone while Bob’s father, John, drove the family from Santa Barbara down to LA. Mathilda didn’t care much for her brother’s wife or for him, for that matter, but she felt that it was providence that she was talking to them when they died and so told Reginald Jr. that Bob had to come live with their family.
Of the six residents living in the fourth-floor apartment on Gay Street, only seventeen-year-old Albertha had her own bedroom — for obvious reasons. The unlikely twins were both fifteen, and Bob was eleven, though he insisted that he was twelve. The three boys slept restively at night in their bedroom, which was also the smallest proper room in the apartment. Crash and Brother had mattresses set upon box springs in opposite corners, while Bob slept on a shelf Reginald Jr. had installed to make room for a study desk that only Crash used.
The study desk was Crash’s province, because Brother was dyslexic, which Crash understood as not liking to read, and Bob had ADD, meaning that he could not concentrate on any one thing for very long. But even though Crash had the desk to himself, he didn’t use it often, because his brother and cousin made loud noises at odd moments that would shock and distract him.
So Crash used his sister’s desk, even when she was in the room, because Albertha didn’t seem to mind his presence, and the noises she made were both consistent and benign. Albertha talked on the phone to her friends most waking hours.
“...and then Billy said that Principal Rivers knew that Mr. Eagles had been arrested for bein’ drunk, and he said that Principal Rivers didn’t get him fired because Eagles knew that Rivers had had sex with Mrs. Longerman’s wife, Betty, before Betty realized that she was a lesbian...”
Albertha had long riffs of interpersonal explanations that went on and on and on. For Crash it was kind of like white noise playing in the background. While he wrote and read, Albertha explained the only things that were important to her and maybe her friends — what A did or didn’t do with B, either against C or behind C’s back.
The only thing that confused Crash was why his sister never stopped to listen to her friends, most of whom were girls. He decided that her friends were, like him, doing their schoolwork and found it soothing to hear his sister’s soft chatter while delving calculus or unveiling the disturbing mysteries of biology.
Schoolwork came easily to Crash. His brother, Brother, cousin Bob, and Albertha all went to public schools, but Crash had a scholarship to Horatio Preparatory School, grades six to twelve. There were only 218 students at Horatio, and the education, everyone said, was one of the best in the nation.