A woman yelled “Police,” was calling “Police,” running up and down. Heads out the window, staring. A man tried to grab me but, pumping him in the mouth with my fist, I got away. I ran two blocks, not looking back, running heavily, legs like weights. A police siren somewhere. Blasting my mind, following me. I couldn’t shake it out.
I got into a phone booth and sat down on the floor to catch my breath. My chest aching. Thousands of cracks in my chest, aching, like slivers of bone out of place. I kept my head down. Something sticky under me. Orange peel. Hard to breathe without pain.
His wife lying on her back. Entering her. Digging deeper and deeper. Trapped, I watch a cop car cruise toward me, its lights flashing in reflection, its siren in my head. I think of flying somewhere. Holding my breath. The glass walls on fire. Letting go. Her hair like a veil covering my face. A blanket of her hair. God help me.
ELEVEN
THE COP CAB, its siren whining, cruised the block three times. My head between my legs at the floor of the booth.
His wife answered. I asked if I could speak to her husband, Mr. Parks. Please, Mrs. Parks. Very polite. Using my hand to disguise my voice. Put your mister on, missus.
She said he wasn’t there, didn’t know when he would be back, her breathing like whispering.
I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to talk to her.
“Is this Christopher? Curt’s student Christopher?”
It was near dark. I said I would call back later, wanting to get to my place before night.
“Why won’t you identify yourself?”
“You know who it is.”
“Why do you pretend you don’t know me?” Her voice like splinters of glass on linoleum. “Did you find another place to stay? Is that what happened? Curt and I were under the illusion — mistakenly, obviously — that you were staying with us. We kept expecting you to come back.”
“Can I come back?”
She was slow to answer, listening to herself. Too slow. “I’ll have to think about it.” She laughed.
I asked her when Parks would be back.
“If you have no other plans, why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”
“Do you know when Parks will be back? I have to talk to him.”
“Christopher, I really don’t give a good damn. Where he is is his business, isn’t it?”
I hear the cop car again, its siren. I sink, covering my face with my hands, to my knees.
I couldn’t sleep. Too heavy. The bed, triple-size, like a field. Too many possibilities of place. No spot precisely mine. Belonging to me. I spread my arms out, brought them to my sides. Held myself. No spot mine. Moved from back to side to back. Holding on to myself, afraid of falling. (Have fallen, have fallen, have fallen, have fallen, have fallen …) Why do they come after me? What do they think I’ve done? I lie on my back in the middle of the bed, my arms out.
“Go,” I tell myself. “Now. Now.” It takes a moment to get going. (I am nine and have short legs for my age.) The traffic heavy. I sense that I am not going fast enough. A steel pulley between my legs weighing me down. The cars. I anticipate the impact, a slow-motion runner (again and again I watch myself cover the same few feet of ground), but nothing happens. Some kind of providence protects me.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the good Lord for making it possible for me to spend my adult life in American sports.
My father rushing through the house with a carving knife. My mother holding the door against him, leaning her weight against it. Phyllis and I were hiding behind the sofa. We didn’t know who he was after. Phyllis crying. I had my knife in my pocket. My mother telling him to go away. Go away. He forced his way in, knocking the door against her, knocking her down. “You’re crazy,” Phyllis said. “You’re crazy,” I said, pulling away from her, yelling at him. He dropped his knife at our mother’s feet, staring at us as if he had been waked from a dream.
In the dark, my mother coming into my room, saying not to worry about anything. Not to worry. “I don’t want to die,” I said. “I’m afraid of dying.” “I won’t let you,” she whispers. “Do you think your mother will let you die?” My father calling her. “Are you all right now, my big boy? Don’t worry so much. Smile.” Tucking me in. In the night I died.
My mother and father, years younger, making time on a dark-red couch. A memory or a dream? She puts her fingers through his eyes.
“What’s the spirit of the bayonet?”
To kill.
“I can’t hear you.”
“To kill.”
“Can’t hear you. Sound off like you have a pair.”
“Kill. kill. Kill.”
This middle-aged woman was shaking me. “What are you doing here, young man? Who told you you could stay in our bed? Are you a friend of Kenneth’s?” I said I didn’t know his name.
She said unless I was gone in five minutes she was going to call the police. Her husband in the living room. Her lips as if something burning in her mouth. There was nothing to do but get away.
On Riverside Drive, wearing Parks’ shirt and pants — the clothes his wife had given me. Looking at the shiny river, sun flashing off it like jewels. My plan to hitch a ride somewhere. Get out of the city until the heat was off. A pair of red-tinted glasses on a bench stopped me. The glass hardly bigger than the eye. Really nice. I put them on, the wire pinching my ears. Everything seemed on fire. Wanting to keep the glasses, in my hurry I left my briefcase behind. When I came back there was a cool-looking Negro with a beard where the glasses were. The case gone.
I asked if he had seen a black briefcase.
He didn’t answer, puffed on his cigar. “Where did you get those tiny shades, Jack?” he said.
“You can have the glasses if you let me know where the case is.”
“Jack, are you intimating that I took your case? Shi-it. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? What every black man wants is a white man’s black briefcase in his black hand. Is that what you think?”
“Just let me have the case.”
“What?”
“I said, just let me have the case, please.”
“What?”
“I won’t call the police.”
Somebody I didn’t see grabbed my arms from behind. Taking his time, the fellow on the bench got up. The teeth of his smile like flames. “It’s not polite to accuse someone you don’t know of taking from you, Jack. Your black briefcase — you think I need that to be human. I don’t even want your gangrenous gray skin. Even if you were willing to give it up, to cut it off and hand it over, I wouldn’t take a suit of it.” Like a surgeon, he removed my glasses.
“Don’t hurt him,” the guy holding my arms said. “Just take the glasses and let him go, Omar.”
“Do you think it would give me any pleasure to hurt you?” he said, his face very close. The heat of his stump of cigar. “It wouldn’t give me the slightest bit of pleasure. Not the slightest.” He held the glasses as if he were going to smash them into my eyes.
“It wasn’t very propitious to get him mad,” the one behind me said. “A bad mistake of strategy.”
There were some people watching, the man in the hat in back, winking at me.
“What I want is to dismember you,” he said in a soft drawl. “To take you apart piece by piece, limb by limb, skin by skin, to make a white briefcase out of you to keep my important black papers in. Remember that, though I’m a nonviolent man, I want to kill you.” Like flame moving toward oil, he went back to the bench and, putting the glasses on, sat down.