The Dying Ground (23 page)

I could tell she enjoyed keeping me waiting. It wasn’t very often that she had my full and undivided attention.

She gave me a wicked gleam. “I told my sister I had a little bit of you myself.” She ran a vulgar tongue back and forth across her lips. “Me and you did the nasty.” She winked. “Keep it all in the family.”

“What?” The thought of Alixe knowing about my indiscretion with Chantal made my stomach hurt. “Why would you do something like that?”

“Just to fuck with you.” She sectioned her hair off and used her fingers to work in the small clumps of pungent lye. “I didn’t tell her nothing till she came in here talking all about you. But let me warn you, brother man, my sister ain’t at all what she seems. She ain’t homegrown so you gonna have problems. Trust me.”

“You throwing salt in the game?”

“It don’t change what I said.”

“I’m not trying to hear all that ying-yang.”

“Whatever. All I’m saying is that sister-girl is notorious for getting in the cut when thangs gets rough. If you looking for a female to watch your back through the rough-and-tough, she ain’t the one.”

“It ain’t that deep.”

“And it ain’t gonna
get
deep, you keep rollin’ with ballers. There ain’t an ounce of ghetto in that girl.”

“That’s a positive.”

She shook her head. “Ghetto ain’t all bad, baby. It give you coping skills.”

“She’s coped with a lot.”

“White people shit. What you dealing with, despite your bougie-siddity-high-yellow family, ain’t the same. We both know it.”

“You finished with your lecture?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard ya.”

“Good. Don’t get blinded by that big old booty of hers.”

Scottie wandered into the kitchen then, so Chantal cut her lecture short and stuck her head under the running water in the kitchen sink. Her words hadn’t found a place in my head anyway. I figured that anything Chantal had to say about Alixe was laced with jealousy.

“When we going to the park to pitch? ’Member I talked to you about that?”

“I remember.”

“When?”

“I got some things going on. I’ll get wit’ you after that.”

Scottie looked at me with reservation but decided to give me the benefit of the doubt. “Alright. Don’t keep me waiting, though.”

Alixe walked in dressed in her nurse’s uniform as Scottie exited. I hadn’t bothered to ask her if she was working. I was sorry I’d interrupted her sleep before a shift.

Alixe held her nose. “It stinks in here. What’s that smell?”

“All of us ain’t got that half-Japanese hair.” Chantal shouted from the sink.

Alixe turned to me and smiled. “Did you just get here?”

“A couple of minutes ago.”

“Everything alright?” Her words brought Holly and Cissy back to my mind, and I grimaced. She took the bait. “Let’s get out of here then.”

She waved to Chantal, who pretended not to listen but waved back, dismissively.

“Remember what I said.” She looked me in the eye before returning her head to the running water.

On the way down the stairs, Alixe turned and slipped both arms around my shoulders. She gave me a hug with her full
body and held on to me so long I almost forgot my troubles. Almost.

Chantal’s voice blasted me back into reality.

“Maceo! Y’all out there?”

Alixe sighed. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy.”

“Yeah, I’m right here. What’s up?”

“Cissy. Your Aunt Cissy is on the phone.”

“Tell her I’ll call her later.”

I grabbed Alixe’s hand and tried to hustle her down the stairs.

“She said it’s an emergency.”

I hesitated.

“She’s crying.”

I gave in and walked back toward the apartment. I grabbed the phone from Chantal, who looked genuinely worried. Before I had the receiver to my ear I could hear Cissy’s sobs.

“Cis, wassup? What’s wrong?”

“Maceo. It’s Holly.”

I steeled myself. It couldn’t be possible to lose two friends in one week, but logic had stopped being part of my reality long ago.

“What happened?”

“They picked him up.” She took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. I saw visions of Smokey, even the White boys, until she said, “Noone. He picked him up.”

“Why?” At least he was still alive.

“Jorge. Jorge the Mexican is dead and somebody fingered Holly.”

“Damn!”

Chantal and Alixe searched my face for clues. I noticed that Alixe had remained near the front door, as far away from me as possible. Maybe Chantal was right.

“Where are you?”

“At the Tombs.” The Tombs was the nickname for the city lockup at the base of downtown Oakland.

“Alright. I’ll be there in a minute.” I hung up the phone and headed for the front door. Alixe stayed put. “I’ll call you later” was all I could manage as I raced down the stairs.

T
he Tombs had the dour gray walls of most government buildings, moldy green windows, and the lethargic movements of employees on a city payroll. Cissy looked out of place in that environment and for a quick moment, when I caught my own reflection in the glass walls of a trophy case, I realized that I did too.

Cissy was sitting between two disgruntled women, women familiar with the air of despair and the patronizing attitude of the people in charge.

One of them was a young mother, nineteen maybe, with gold braids that swirled into a beehive and twin boys who used her as a scratching post. She stared angrily ahead and ignored their kittenish whines for a bottle or, at the very least, affection.

On the other side of Cissy, a bedraggled older woman, also Black, fingered a string of grimy rosary beads and mumbled to herself.

And above them all Huey P. Newton, the once formidable
leader of the Black Panther Party, glared down at them in youthful defiance. He was perched famously in the rattan chair, beret at a rakish tilt atop a beautiful Afro, a rifle in each hand.

Newton was a Louisiana boy, named for a former corrupt governor, but he rose to power in northern California with a battalion of committed brothers at his back.

Who knew back then that he would take himself out of the game? Huey P. Newton’s pathetic demise on a West Oakland street corner in August was representative of where we were and all that was yet to come for us. The night of his death he was out searching the streets of Ghost Town for drugs at a dangerous hour, in a dangerous city with a dangerously short memory.

Cissy jumped up when she noticed I was there. Her pretty gray eyes were rimmed with red and her nose ran unchecked while she tried to tell the story. Her wild head of curls, which had been pulled back in a ponytail, had come undone on one side. It was the most unkempt I had ever seen her.

She wrapped her arms around my neck and cried for a full three minutes before letting go. Over her shoulder I saw the young mother roll her eyes in irritation. Why the hysterics? her eyes said. Shit happens.

I edged Cissy across the aisle and sat her down.

“What happened?”

“We were together.” She looked sheepishly at me but I ignored her discomfort. “And we were leaving Holly’s house when four police cars surrounded us. They dragged Holly from the car. They made me lay on the ground after they pulled me out. Noone was with them, but he acted like he didn’t know me. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t say anything.”

“Did you call a lawyer?”

She nodded. “I called twice. He should be here soon.” She looked toward the empty front door.

“Did they book Holly?”

“I don’t know. They asked him about Jorge, though. I heard them. Him and Sera were killed yesterday.” She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath to still the hiccups that peppered her speech. “Were y’all up there?”

I nodded. “For a minute.”

“Did Holly and Jorge get in a fight?”

I flashed back to the quick flurry of fists on the roof. Jorge’s broken nose would have been obvious to all his boys when we came down from the chicken coop. “Shit,” I muttered. Any one of them could have set the police on Holly. Or on me.

I jumped out of my chair like it was on fire.

“Watch it, son.”

Winston Lamb. I shook his hand, glad Holly’s lawyer was in the building. Lamb was famous throughout the Bay Area, as much for his clientele—career criminals in high-end tax brackets—as he was for his style. No shame in his game. He had left a prestigious teaching post at Boalt law school to practice criminal law and enjoy the financial good life that went with it.

He looked like a Black Garfunkel, hair-wise, which made his appearance somewhat cartoonish, two nappy puffs three inches straight out from his ears, and bald as a globe in the center. He wore expensive suits, though always a little too tight, and was openly gay—not a big deal for San Francisco, but Oakland was geographically on the moon in that category.

“Mr. Lamb, I’m Maceo Redfield, Holly’s friend, and this is his girlfriend, Cissy Redfield.”

I saw Cissy look at me sideways but she didn’t correct the introduction.

“Pleased to meet you both.”

“Do you know anything?” Cissy interjected.

“My client is here for questioning.” He said the word as if it were a discarded tampon, useless. “That means they don’t have anything solid, but they want to play with him.” His manner indicated that the idea was absurd.

“Can we do anything?”

“Not here. Let me handle this, and if I need you I’ll call.”

“Can I wait?” Cissy objected to leaving Holly behind.

“Come with me, Cis. Holly will call when he gets out.”

“I think that’s best.” Lamb put a comforting hand on Cissy’s shoulder. “Trust me. It won’t take long. You’ll see him in no time.”

Lamb moved past us, ready to do battle. The desk sergeant, encased behind bulletproof glass, looked up and shook his head as the lawyer approached. Lamb was a familiar sight at the Tombs.

“Let’s go.” I grabbed Cissy’s hand, then dropped it. The poster of Newton still played on my mind. I walked across the aisle to the young mother with two kids. I was curious, after Newton’s death, to find out what he meant to people. Young people.

“Hey, girl, you know who that is?” I pointed to the poster.

She didn’t bother to look up. “Yo’ mama.”

I left it at that.

“T
hey brought you over herein a police car?”

Cissy and I stood in front of the police station and tried to ignore the circumstances and that I knew about her and Holly.

“Yeah. Noone wanted to question me too. I guess it was all part of his act.”

“This is what you want, huh?”

“Don’t start with me, Maceo. Not tonight. I can’t deal with defending me and Holly right now. Not now.”

I gave a dismissive snort. “You and Holly.”

“Yeah, me and Holly. Holly and me. You got a problem with that?”

“Do you? You the one keeping secrets.”

“It’s not about secrets. It’s about the two of us being sure about how we feel.”

“That’s what y’all tell each other.”

“Maceo.”

“Secrets.”

“Maceo, not now, okay? We can get into it tomorrow, whenever, once Holly gets home.”

“How long this been going on?”

She didn’t answer. She walked away from the station, looking for my car. “Where are you parked?”

I stood my ground. “Answer my question.”

“I’ll catch a cab.” She walked toward Fourteenth and Broadway, the city center where cabs congregated.

“You’d rather catch a cab at eleven o’clock at night than answer the question?”

“Maceo, I’m tired. I just want to go home.”

“Damn, Cissy, it’s been that long?”

“Six months. Since April. The last time you went out to Louisiana. We hung out together a little bit and then we just kept hanging out.”

“You didn’t feel like you could tell me? Holly neither?”

“We knew you wouldn’t want to lie to Daddy, and neither one of us wanted to put you in the middle. You understand that? As long as it remained between the two of us we could contain it, control it. Daddy loves Holly, but he’s not going to love him with me. You know that! You remember how he put Holly out of the house.”

“Daddy Al loves Holly.”

“Not with me, Maceo. It’s like your mother, Ellie, with your father, like Celestine with Earl Ray. It’s too much for him. He doesn’t act like it, but he’s an old man. I didn’t want to put you in that position. I didn’t want to put myself in the position of defending Holly. Not yet. Okay?” She reached for my hand. “Okay?”