All I Did Was Shoot My Man (11 page)

21

ON MY WAY
uptown on the A train I was thinking about one and a half percent of fifty million. So far Twill was the only operative at my agency bringing in any cash that month.

I was standing in the middle of the crowded car, holding on to a metal pole, when I noticed the blue-and-pink-haired, much tattooed woman standing next to me. She was young and white, flipping through pictures of naked women on her iPad. The moment after I noticed what she was doing she turned her face to me and smiled.

I thought about LeRoi Jones’s play
Dutchman
and the bug in the carnivorous plant that I imagined while waiting for Antoinette. I smiled back at the young woman and turned away.

I had to have learned something in all my fifty-five years.

COPPER-SKINNED
Iran Shelfly was trying to hurt the heavy bag when I came upon him in Gordo’s Gym. He was whaling away on the canvas-covered bale of cotton next to the murky window that looked down on Eighth Avenue.

I watched the thirty-something ex-con throwing body shots like a real pro. I had wanted Iran to work for me as part of my growing firm but he preferred the ambiance of the gym.

I couldn’t blame him.

There were about a dozen men and one woman warming up that afternoon. The formal training sessions would start in an hour.

“Eye,” I said.

He stopped and turned to me, sweat pouring off his forehead. He was wearing a tight yellow T-shirt and red trunks. His hands were wrapped but not gloved, and his smile was infectious.

“Mr. McGill. How you doin’?”

“If I complained, somebody might shoot me.”

“And that would only make you madder.”

“There’s a new tenant at your rooming house,” I said.

“Zella Grisham. That girl need to learn how to smile.”

“You don’t like her?”

“She okay. We talked some, but wherever she’s from she ain’t left there yet.”

“I have a special interest in her. I want to make sure that she’s safe but I don’t want her knowin’ what I want.”

“Anything you say, Mr. McGill.” Iran thought he owed me. When he got out of prison I made sure he had a job, and whenever he found himself in trouble I showed him an exit sign.

Iran was grateful for my help, and I neglected to tell him that I was the one who got him incarcerated in the first place.

“Thanks, Eye. How’s the job?”

“I’m so tired every night that I’m asleep ’fore my head hits the pillow. But I always wake up with a smile on my face.”

The odds were against an ex-con making it in the straight life, but if he learned the trick, he was the happiest man on the street.

I smiled and went toward the back of the floor-sized room.

Gordo was sitting at his desk in his cubbyhole office, making checks on a long graph-like form. In some arcane way he used these forms to gauge the progress, or decline, of a boxer’s talents. Other than the names scrawled in the upper left-hand corner, I could never make sense of these charts.

“Mr. Tallman,” I said.

He looked up and then stood.

“LT,” he said over an extended hand.

Gordo was my height and red-bronze in color. He was a mixture of all the races America had to offer and was therefore referred to as a black man. He had more hair than I did and was somewhere between the ages of seventy-seven and ninety. He was looking younger though. Beating cancer and falling in love was a fountain of youth for him.

“Sit, sit,” the impish trainer said.

His visitor’s chair was a boxer’s corner stool, where you sat for sixty seconds between rounds, getting yelled at, before your opponent proceeded to beat on you again.

“ What’s the news, G?” I asked.

Gordo’s brows furrowed, his eyes peered into mine. He could see the fever in me. Probably no one ever knows you as well as your trainer.

But I saw something too. There was a hint of sadness in Gordo’s gaze; something I’d not seen in a long time.

“ What’s wrong with you, kid?” he asked.

“You first, old man.”

The trainer sagged back in his green-and-gray office chair. His shoulders slumped down and he shook his head slowly.

“I prob’ly shouldn’t have called you,” he said.

“But you did.”

“She might already be gone.”

“ Who?”

“Elsa.”

“Gone? I thought you two were getting married?”

Elsa Koen was the private nurse that Katrina had hired for Gordo when he came to stay with us while being treated for stomach cancer. At the time we thought that he had come to us to die.

The German nurse had fallen in love with the old guy even though she thought he was nearly homeless.

“ What happened?” I asked.

“I told her about my properties.”

“Plural?”

I had always thought that Gordo rented the fifth-floor gym. There was a property supervisor and everything. It turned out that he owned the entire building; fifteen stories in lower midtown Manhattan.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got two more buildings three blocks up.”

“Fully rented?”

“Yep. Skidmore manages them too.”

“Damn. So, so you told Elsa about that and she just said she was leavin’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There had to be sumpin’ else. You want a prenup or somethin’?”

“No. I told her what’s mine is yours.”

“Damn.”

“Talk to her for me, will ya, LT? Elsa respects you.”

The full range of sadness showed on Gordo’s face. But it wasn’t the grief that moved me. Gordo never asked anybody for anything. He was a boxer that lived by the philosophy that you didn’t admit defeat—not ever. You might get knocked on your ass, but even then you used every ounce of strength you had to try and beat the count.

“Okay,” I said.

THE STAIRWAY
to Gordo’s illegal fifteenth-floor apartment had a small window at every landing. These looked west on Thirty-fourth Street toward the Hudson River. I took the steps two at a time to make up for the exercise I hadn’t done in the gym.

Gordo’s door was ajar.

I knocked anyway.

There was no answer so I went in.

“Hello?” I said. “Elsa?”

The rabbit warren apartment must have had eleven rooms but it took up less than twelve hundred square feet. The ceilings were low, and many rooms didn’t have windows.

I found Elsa in a tiny windowless chamber that contained a dirty cream-colored sofa and a portable TV. There were three pale blue suitcases sitting in front of her. She’d been crying.

“Elsa.”

She looked up at me, letting her head tilt to the side.

“ What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.

She opened her mouth but words were temporarily unavailable.

The nurse had red hair and pale skin. She wasn’t beautiful but she was fair—in every way.

I sat down next to her and she hugged me.

“Tell me about it,” I prompted.

She let go and tried to find something to do with her hands.

“I don’t know,” she said at last, clasping her palms together tightly between her knees.

She was wearing a plaid skirt and a black T-shirt, no stockings or socks, and white nurse’s shoes.

Elsa hadn’t been in her forties for very long, and she looked younger still.

“Gordo told you about his property,” I said.

“ Why?”

“ Why what?”

“ Why did he lie?”

“He didn’t.”

“He should have told me before we, we got together.”

“Maybe he should have but he couldn’t—that’s a fact.”

The words were said with such certainty that Elsa got suddenly intent.

“ Why not?” she asked.

“ When you moved away from your parents’ house it was already the nineties, right?”

“ What does that have to do with anything?”

“ When Gordo was born we were in the Great Depression,” I continued. “That was back when a black man never owned anything that a white man couldn’t take from him. Back when they could put up signs that said ‘White Only.’ ”

“So? It’s not like that anymore.”

“That’s true, things are different today. When young people like you look at the world you see trouble but not like the mess Gordo’s seen. He learned to cover up early on. I didn’t know about all of what he owned until a few minutes ago.”

“You? But you’re his best friend.”

“You can leave him, Elsa, but be sure about it. He’s a good man and he loves you. You are the only reason he survived that cancer. All three of us know that.”

22

I LEFT ELSA
pondering the pedestrian and impromptu history lesson.

One thing I know, Trot,
my father once said.
You can’t be in love with a woman and practice Revolution at the same
time.

But don’t you love Mama?
I asked fearfully.

I do, surely. But not when I’m doin’ Revolution.

I don’t understand,
Daddy.

When I’m with your mother,
he said,
she’s the only thing in the world. There is no economic infrastructure or class struggle. When it’s just me and her it’s husband and wife—that’s
all.

That was one of the many fragments of conversation that had clattered around in my head for decades. Walking down the stairs, I realized that what I learned from my father was not what he had meant. He wanted to make me a better soldier, but I, slowly and over time, came to believe that men were not only alienated from their labor, and therefore from one another, but they were also, in a similar way, alienated from themselves by the passions they felt pitted against the things they had to do.

I was at the exit door on the first floor before I knew it. I meant to stop by the gym to tell Gordo what had transpired but, at the threshold of the street, I thought that there was really nothing to say. Either Elsa was going to leave or she wasn’t. When G went upstairs he’d find out for himself. I’d talked to her like he wanted me to but there was no telling what her decision would be.

I FOUND MYSELF
walking east on Thirty-third. I was in trouble but it didn’t seem too bad. Rutgers would probably put some pressure on me but I knew how to push back.

The cell phone throbbed against my left thigh. I pulled it out and saw that it was Aura calling. I wanted to flip the phone open but my thumb refused. The vibrations ceased and the little green light of the display faded to black. It felt like watching something die.

I had stopped walking and stood there on the busy thoroughfare, feeling something close to grief over a missed phone call.

Then the screen lit up again.

It was Aura.

“Hello?” I said.

“ Why didn’t you answer?” she asked.

I tried to find the words to lie but they evaded me.

“ What’s goin’ on, babe?” I asked.

“I miss you calling me baby.”

It wasn’t just lies that escaped me, I couldn’t tell the truth either. I wanted to say how much I loved her, how that love had disappeared like it had with my father when he was being a soldier and not a husband. The feeling struck like an unconscious memory roaring into existence, necessarily unexpected and painful like plague boils erupting from glands deep in the neck.

“Um,” I said.

Aura laughed.

“Leonid?”

“Yeah . . . Yes, Aura.”

“I know that I’ve been stringing you along. It isn’t, hasn’t been fair, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was stuck. I love you so much but you scare me.”

A horn honked. For some reason that sound made me aware of a woman ranting almost incoherently on the corner a dozen yards away. People were hustling around, moving to the beat of their happenstance lives. This all seemed proper. Life was a cacophony, I’d always known it. Every once in a while there was a piece of beautiful music amid the dissonance, but lucidity was a danger in an irrational world—my father had taught me that too.

Aura made sense. She said that I frightened her.

“Leonid?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to talk?”

“. . . mothahfuckah try an’ tell me what to do,” the ranting woman cried, “but he don’t even have a appendix . . .”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, I want to but I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you love me?”

“Like seaweed loves the sunlight,” I said in free-association mode.

“I love you.”

“. . . and the niggers was cowboys and all the white men were cryin’ . . .”

“ What can I do, Aura?” I asked.

“I want you back in my life.”

A deep silence set in on me. The people and traffic and crazy woman all stopped making their noises. My mind was like an ovum and her words the impregnating germ. Nothing else could get through. Nothing else mattered.

I forgot where I was going, fought off the desire to sit down on the curb. I wasn’t sure what I wanted; instead I had become something else, transformed by a desire I thought had died.

“Leonid.”

“Yes, Aura.”

“Did you hear me?”

I nodded.

“Leonid.”

“Yes, I heard you. I hear you.”

“Am I too late?”

“If you had asked me that first, I would have probably said yes.”

“Can we try again?”

“I need seventy-two hours to answer that question,” I said. I don’t know why. “Seventy-two hours and I will tell you what I can do.”

“You have seventy-one,” she said, bringing a smile to my face.

“I’ll call you at . . .”—I looked at my watch—“. . . four-seventeen three days from now.”

“I love you,” she said.

“Talk to you later.”

THE PHONE RANG
once and he answered, “Kitteridge.”

“You called?” I asked.

“LT,” he said in way of greeting. “Good to hear from you.”

“ What’s the problem, Captain?”

“There’s somebody I want you to talk to.”

“ Who’s that?”

“There’s a short street over in Flatbush called Poindexter.”

“I know it.”

“Twenty-six is the address. All you have to say is Lethford.”

“And why am I going there?”

“Because you don’t want those kids of yours to be fatherless.”

I’d called Kit to snap me out of the daze that talking to Aura cast on me.

It worked.

“Somebody’s trying to kill me?” I asked.

“I believe that your name might be on a list somewhere.”

“ What kind of sense does that make?”

“You think you’re so innocent that no one could ever mean you harm?”

“No. What I wonder is why would you care?”

“I’m a cop, LT. It’s my job to protect the welfare of even garbage like you.”

I disconnected the call. No reason to argue or protest. I was interested at the obvious anger that Kit was feeling. He rarely showed his feelings. I didn’t much either. That’s why we might have been friends in another life.