After (9 page)

“Of course not,” Doris shoots back defensively, her face bunched in horror at the question. “But why is it always us? And it doesn’t make it any easier that Carson is Black and that young man was too. In fact, it makes it worse.”

“He’s not a killer.” Bunny announces this with a firm voice bristling with conviction as she turns from the sink to look at her mother. Doris casts her own gaze away from the withering condemnation she sees on her daughter’s face and takes another sip of tea.

Praying silently that her mother will find it impossible to forge ahead in this line of rumination, Bunny runs cold water over the potatoes, now in an aluminum bowl. She puts them in the refrigerator, washes her hands, and removes her apron before grudgingly sitting down across from Doris.

“Bunny, just hear me out,” Doris pleads, placing her warm palm on Bunny’s folded hands. “It just seems that something happens when they put on that uniform. I told you about Jacob, that boy in my choir at church. Stopped for going through a red light. Sure, he was wrong, and he admitted that to the officer, but by the time the stop was through he’d been handcuffed and slammed on the ground, and my gracious, he’s a big boy too. You met him at my church picnic two summers ago. He’s almost six feet tall and plays on the basketball team at his high school, and he ended up with a broken arm. His parents filed a complaint with the citizens’ review board. Didn’t make a bit of difference. Sure, they investigated, but what happens? After a year, a whole year, they got a letter from Internal Affairs telling them that the police officer had used reasonable force. Reasonable force—I never heard of anything so outrageous. We’re the majority in what used to be a county that was a hotbed for the Klan, and damn near every time you read about somebody getting shot by the police, it’s one of us. Now tell me, why is that? Bunny, I’m not the only one asking that question. You know you’ve asked it too. When you married Carson I prayed he’d never be mixed up in anything like this.”

“Where’s your sympathy for Carson? For us?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t mean to sound harsh. But you got to admit, it looks terrible. At the beauty parlor the other day some of the women, wives and mothers, were so concerned, saying the same things. You remember that case with Bobby Washington.”

“Oh, Mama, have you lost your mind? That was over twenty years ago.”

“But people still remember it.”

Bobby Washington was a fifteen-year-old sophomore at DuVal High who, on the night that he and two other boys were picked up for stealing a car, shot and killed two White officers ten minutes after being taken into a room for interrogation. The case struck all the racial nerves of the county, pitting Blacks, who believed Bobby Washington’s account of being beaten at the hands of the two cops, against Whites, who saw a crazed, violent Black youth who had murdered two veteran officers. Bunny was a sophomore at DuVal who knew the abiding fear that many of her friends, especially the boys, had of county police officers. She also had heard stories about Bobby Washington, the skinny, waiflike boy who, according to her classmates, tortured animals, beat up his own brothers, and was hauled out of the cafeteria one lunch hour after calling the principal a peanut-head motherfucker to his face.

Community activists marched to keep Bobby from getting the death penalty. He was given a life sentence. And when he had rehabilitated himself in prison, after serving seventeen years, getting his GED and a degree from a respected correspondence school, and writing articles on the need for prison reform published in progressive journals, there was agitation for his release. A Black federal appeals court judge released Bobby from prison. He married, got a job as a paralegal, and then inexplicably robbed a bank and was killed on the scene when he aimed his gun at an officer.

Bunny had believed Bobby’s story during the trial, that he feared for his life at the hands of the police officers who were brutalizing him. But she and Carson had discussed Bobby Washington many times. “Sure, maybe they were roughing him up,” Carson would say. “But do you know how mad dog he had to be to shoot two officers? Not one, Bunny, but two?” And Bunny thought about the widows of the officers, who each time Bobby Washington came up for parole had testified about what had happened to them because of what he had done. When she read accounts in the newspaper of their tearful pleas before the parole board to keep Bobby Washington in jail, Bunny saw in them the woman that she could easily one day be.

“You’ve never been on our side. You’ve never believed in Carson.”

“Bunny, I’m just speaking the truth. You know I am.”

“The truth isn’t so simple to me anymore. No matter what you say, it’s just not black-and-white.”

The twins
were seven. Carson and Bunny heard the nervous but shuttered whispers coming up from the basement when they came in from a quick run to Blockbuster to rent videos. “Let me hold it,” Roslyn peevishly insisted, words that made Carson and Bunny exchange a worried glance and head to the basement. Standing on the bottom step, clinging to Carson’s shoulder, Bunny saw the girls huddled in the center of the basement standing over his workbench, enthralled by an object neither Bunny nor Carson could see. But Bunny knew what it was. The burning in her stomach, the leaden silence of the basement, told her the twins had found Carson’s second gun. The girls were so intent, so absorbed, they had not heard Bunny and Carson’s footsteps over their labored, puzzled breathing.

“Roslyn, Roseanne!” Carson called out to them harshly, their names a verbal blow designed to scare them into moving away from the object neither parent could see but both dreadfully envisioned. When Roslyn jerked around to face her parents, Carson’s second Beretta lay in her small, trembling palms like an offering.

Bunny gripped Carson’s arm, holding him back from rushing over to the girls. “Carson, you’ll frighten them,” she whispered, straining not to scream.

But they were already frightened. Roseanne stood beside her sister with her arms enveloping her body, staring at the floor, rocking back and forth. The weight of the gun seemed to have paralyzed Roslyn as she stood, her small body teetering on the edge of crumbling. Finally her first whimper cracked the silence. “Daddy. Daddy, help…” Carson and Bunny took breathless, hushed, tiny steps toward the girls. Then in a voice lulling and firm, soft but insistent, Carson talked the gun out of Roslyn’s hands.

These are Bunny’s brooding, insistent thoughts as she watches Carson undress. She’s in bed, a hardback copy of Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
on her lap. Bunny rereads the book once a year but has found the memoir suddenly as impenetrable as the newspapers and magazines she’s abandoned since the night of the shooting. Nothing can compete with the current narrative of her life. Evenings when she would normally read, she watches television, an unaccustomed habit, reveling in the surrender of her will to laugh tracks and commercials and the inexhaustible supply of channels, faces, and situations, grateful that she can erase a tragic ending or an outcome she rejects simply by pushing a button on the remote.

But on every channel there is news of the war in Iraq, now official since the invasion and despite ten million people all over the world marching in protest. George W. Bush has his war, with body counts and death tolls making it real, despite the television rendition that presents it as a sophisticated video game. Over dinner the children had asked about the war and she and Carson struggled to explain why the war was wrong, unjustified, why the president wanted to wage a war over oil and water and vanity and belligerence and pride. “But my teacher told us Saddam Hussein is a bad man, that he wants to kill us with nuclear weapons,” Roseanne told them.

So much violence, so much crime
, Bunny thinks as she grazes the channels some nights now and sees, in addition to footage of bombs falling in Baghdad, which she feels landing in her soul, an endless procession of dramas that begin always with a dead body discovered, a murder within the first thirty seconds, autopsies, investigations, serial killers, rapists, crime scene investigations, lawyers, judges, law and order and guilt and innocence and blood, always blood.

But tonight she would read. That’s what she thought, anyway, but she sat thumbing disinterestedly through the now-familiar text when the flashback to the incident with the girls and the gun sprang from her unconscious.

Carson sits on his side of the bed with his back to her. He’s bending over, and although she can’t see his hands, Bunny knows from his movements that he’s unstrapping his Beretta from his ankle.

“Why do you still wear that?” she asks in an urgent whisper.

“You know why. I’m duty bound to carry it at all times,” Carson says, turning abruptly to face her.

“Don’t you think…?”

“No, I
don’t
think what you think.”

“We can’t even name what you were going to do. We can’t even say the word.”

“We won’t have to if you just let it go. If you’d forget it.”

“How can I?”

“I told you, I wouldn’t have killed myself.”

Bunny crosses her arms in front of her chest, purses her lips, and looks away from Carson.

“You didn’t fire that gun, but it feels like you did,” she says, aiming the words not at him but at the ceiling. Still, they hit their mark. “I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do. It’s as if a part of me feels widowed, betrayed by what I saw sitting in the car with you that night. I’m grieving, but I don’t know what for. Maybe I’m as scared of saying what we’ve lost as I am of saying out loud what you almost did.”

“Do you think I like wearing it? But if I don’t and I’m in public and there’s an incident, Bunny, I’m still a cop. My reflexes will kick in. I’d take action and I’d be ineffective. No way I’ll go down like Madison over in the second district. Didn’t like wearing his weapon when he was off duty. Gets carjacked one night in front of an ATM, locked in the trunk of his own car, driven from District Heights over to Oxon Hill by some kids out stoned and joyriding. Officers caught the kids, saw them speeding and going through red lights. One of the kids, a fourteen-year-old, had a gun—that’s how they forced Madison into the trunk. He hasn’t lived that down yet.”

He’s lying again. The weapon weighs on his lower leg like a tumor. He can hear it ticking like a time bomb in the glove compartment of his car. The gun is part of the pretense that he’s still capable, competent, the ultimate symbol of the facade required to remain in good standing, even on administrative leave. He’s told Bunny that his reflexes would kick in. He can’t tell her there are probably thugs gunning for him. That he can’t risk not wearing his weapon. He’s arrested too many drug dealers, been aggressive in arresting thugs who’d relish the chance for payback if they found him parked alone somewhere, anywhere, day or night. But he’s absolutely certain he’d freeze, think twice, delay, if he had to use his gun now. The Beretta is a fig leaf that barely covers the truth nobody in the department can know.

He watches Bunny refusing to look at him, closing the book in her lap, and reaching to turn off the halogen lamp on her nightstand. “Bunny, please, don’t make me wish I’d pulled the trigger that night. I can’t lose you too.”

6

Carson worries
about his children now more than he ever did before. Worries because he fears one day there must come some cosmic payback. Paul Houston was a son too. When he thinks of his son, Juwan, he thinks of the word
soft
. But there is another word that rumbles in his mind, noisily, too often, especially now that Juwan, at twelve, stands on the brink of adolescence. It is a word that fills Carson’s mind like a mushroom cloud when he watches Juwan walk, his hands and wrists poised slightly outward, his hips rolling gently with a reflexive tilt that imbues him with a rhythm that to Carson is not male, not female, but gay. He holds on to the hope that there is time for Juwan to learn to walk, to sit the way other boys do. To be like other boys are. Will he have to explain his son? What will he say when other officers make jokes about queers, fags, jokes he has made, easily, unthinking, not caring or wondering if any of the officers in earshot “went that way”? Will he stand up for Juwan? Neither he nor Bunny has ever said the word. Bunny rejects it as a label; he resists it as a fate. For his son. Will his son be whispered and joked about? Assumed, even by the most liberal and understanding, to not be quite one of God’s children?

And yet there is the boy’s art, for which he is already winning prizes, citations at school and in the classes he takes on Saturdays at the Y. Juwan’s room is almost clinically neat, the stacks of comic books, Japanese Anime, the video games (James Bond, Final Four, Need for Speed) and CDs in alphabetical order. One wall in his room is filled with his drawings—pencil drawings of Roslyn and Roseanne, the details so precise they resemble photographs, the head of Earl Mattheson’s golden retriever, a vase filled with yellow roses, all done by a hand so steady and mature that when Carson looks at them his pride momentarily extinguishes any remnant of concern about the boy, and swells his heart.

The art is a gift, a bridge he walks across into an imperfect manner of loving his son. The pictures make him almost forget, make it possible for him to sometimes pretend that what he is sure of can be changed. At twelve, Juwan is quiet, a nearly pensive boy given to solitary pursuits—stamp collecting, drawing, writing poetry—endeavors that he pursues for long hours behind his bedroom door. Activities that offer Carson no way, he feels, to enter into and shape his son’s world. Juwan’s friends are other precocious, nerdy boys in the sixth-grade Gifted and Talented program. And he is beautiful. There is no other word to describe him—the slender elegance of his frame, already as tall as Carson, the symmetry of his face, and his startling gray eyes that stun and mesmerize.

He is an affectionate boy, spontaneously reaching for Carson’s hand to hold when he takes the children to the movies or when they all go out to dinner. It is not the clammy clutching of his daughters’ hands, tense with the need for reassurance, that he feels when Juwan entwines his fingers through his, but rather an affirmative joining of his son’s tenderness with his callused flesh.

Sitting outside the house, parked and waiting for Juwan, Carson sees the boy walk down the sloping driveway. Like the obsessive thoughts about the shooting, his anguish about his son rises, unbidden, automatic, impossible to control, and, he knows in his heart even as it grips him, irrational and unfair.

Why does he always have to be so damned neat?
Carson wonders, assessing the tight, tapered jeans and the spotlessly white T-shirt Juwan wears. He sits thinking this even as he recalls with disdain the baggy, crotch-riding beltless jeans he’s seen on boys in the neighborhood. When Juwan slides into the car beside him, Carson hisses through clenched teeth, “When are you gonna stop walking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a girl.”

“I don’t walk like a girl. I walk like me.”

“I’ve told you over and over to stop carrying yourself that way.”

“That’s the way I walk, Dad,” Juwan insists, his voice a tinny screech. “I can’t help it.”

“That walk’s gonna get you in trouble if it hasn’t already.”

“How come you criticize everything I do?”

“For your own good.”

“That’s not how it feels.” Juwan reaches for the car door, angry, his eyes damp, his sniffles filling the car like muffled explosions.

Before he can open the door, Carson abruptly pulls off.

“Cut the crying game and take your hand off the door.”

They drive the two miles to the Beltway in silence, Juwan huddling protectively against the car door, sulking and morose.

“I know I’m hard on you. But that’s the way dads are. Mine was a bulldog. But he cared.”

“But I’m not walking the way I do on purpose, Dad. I can’t help it. It’s me. A couple of boys at school call me gay, but what do they mean? I’m not gay. I’m me. The kids call anybody who’s not like them gay.”

“Juwan, I don’t want you to be hurt.”

“But
you
hurt me, Dad. You do. Lots of times.”

“I want what’s best,” Carson mumbles, stunned by the accusation.

“You want me to be different than I am. Is that what’s best, Dad?”

Carson yearned for a son, to give himself a second chance to be a boy, a loved boy, and to be the father he never had. And he is not just a father. Juwan is not just a son. He is a Black father. Juwan is a Black boy. So there is more to this than love, more than legacies and hope for the future and carrying on his name. There is teaching his son to walk tall through the quagmires he will see and those that are camouflaged, all set, all waiting for him because he is Black.

His son will be profiled, suspected, guilty until proven innocent. How to prepare his son for this world? A world that expects so little of a Black man and lies in wait for him to prove that the skepticism is justified. The girls are like Bunny, able when necessary to slap some sense into the world. He’s seen both girls, even Roseanne, put their small hands on their narrow hips and face down other girls and boys on the playground, has seen them bristle with a sense of impatience at classmates who unlike them don’t make all A’s. He does not worry about his girls. It is the boy, his son, for whom he fears.

When Juwan was born it was days before Carson felt confident enough to hold him, terrified that resting the small body against his chest would reveal not all his strength but the fault line that is his trembling longitude and latitude. He was a quiet baby, his face a mirror of Carson’s. Carson’s mother, Alma, said, “No court of law could ever say this baby doesn’t belong to you.” Bunny breast-fed Juwan and before Carson left to hit the streets, he’d sit and watch her, her breasts swollen with milk, the veins flat and wide, translucent beneath her skin, shuddering as Juwan suckled. Those breasts tumbled from her nursing bra in a rush as she prepared to nurse, and Carson watched his wife and son, all three of them silently enchanted, bound by a spell.

In bed with Bunny, Carson held those breasts, kissed them, and suckled them too, the thin sticky fluid binding him to his wife, the mother of his child. Carson wanted to master everything, and he’d feed and bathe and change diapers, washing the pale brown rear end and the nub between Juwan’s fat thighs as he wriggled, his lips stretched into a smile, his eyes brimming with amazement at the sight of Carson, his father.

“If we do nothing else together, we have done an amazing thing,” Bunny whispered one afternoon as they sat together in the nursery. Juwan was asleep, his fists balled, his breathing a thin, whispering song. Carson had painted the room powder blue. Clouds were pasted to the ceiling and the wall trimmed with teddy bears, lollipops, and ducks. The shades were drawn against the mid-April sun. On that day, as on others since Juwan’s birth, Carson dreaded the impending departure for his shift, rent by a new fear that the streets might swallow him up, take him away from his son.

“I want to do this right, Bunny.”

“You will.
We
will.”

“I want to give him the childhood I never had.”

“Carson, he deserves a childhood of his own, one that belongs to him.”

“I know, but I can’t help it.”

“Don’t keep fighting with Jimmy Blake. You’ve already done that. Don’t do it in the name of our child.”

Juwan’s baptism brought Bunny’s dad, Eddie Palmer, and his wife, Madeline, down from New York. Carson was no churchgoer. Bunny attended a Baptist church in District Heights once or twice a month. Bunny used to tease Carson about hell and damnation and he’d remind her that he had already been there.

Carson hadn’t been in a church in so long that the day of Juwan’s baptism was like entering an alternate dimension of time and space. But he was back. Back in the sanctuary Alma made Carson and his brother, Richard, attend with her every Sunday until he turned sixteen, old enough in her eyes to make his own choice. Back in the hold of stained-glass windows that never felt like they offered shelter or mercy. The mottled windows of every church Carson ever attended struck him as a kind of spiritual graffiti. The service that day, long, fervent, passionate, rekindled in him memories of his past church-attending days. Days when he prayed for his stepfather, Jimmy Blake, to accept him. For Jimmy Blake to love him. Not to care that Jimmy Blake didn’t love him. Not to care that he didn’t accept him. To know who his father really was.
Our Father, who art
…

When Carson and the family were finally called forth, however, to face the congregation, to name his son Juwan Aaron Blake, he stepped forward eagerly. Even when he was sprinkled with water, Juwan hardly batted an eye.
Now,
he thought that day, looking at the boy,
I have even more to live for. Even more to lose
. But by the time Juwan turned five, Carson knew the boy was different. And his
difference
struck Carson as a purposeful act of betrayal. Juwan was not only hopelessly awkward and clumsy at sports but brutally uninterested in the ball games he tried to teach him in the backyard. Carson’s anger at the boy’s indifference thrived in the muddy swamp of his own inability to forget that for him there was no father tossing him a softball on a spring day, or gripping his hands in his as they both held the bat and he taught Carson to swing. Jimmy Blake never did those things with him.

When Juwan was younger and Bunny baked Christmas cookies with the children, Juwan excelled, his face gleeful and satisfied, obsessed as he squeezed icing from the tube to decorate gingerbread men, giving them eyes (with lashes) and lips and creamy frosting smiles. He gazed in studied, grown-up assessment of his creation. Roslyn and Roseanne, dough and icing smudged, made of the effort a game that ended with them mashing cookie dough in their ears and hair. Bunny ordered the girls out of the kitchen and tied an apron around Juwan and cleaned up the kitchen with his help. Where is the grit, the toughness he assumes a son of his should have? When Juwan was younger he preferred Roslyn and Roseanne’s dolls and play stoves to the trucks and toy soldiers Carson bought him. When Carson tried to talk to Bunny about his concerns, he got nowhere.

“He’s sensitive, that’s all. He’s bright and excels in school. Any other father would be proud of him,” Bunny said with a shrug one evening two years ago, when Juwan was ten.

“I am proud, but he needs more than sensitivity to make it in this world.”

“You want to kill his beauty. Juwan has a special nature. So he’s not macho—that’s not the only way to be male. Do you want him posturing and acting out like a little thug? Like that nonsense you see in the videos? Thank goodness Juwan so far is a Black boy in his
own
way.”

“You make me sound like a caveman.”

“Well, Carson, that’s how you sound. He’s a sweet kid. And you bully him.”

“I don’t want my son to be a sissy.”

“Sissy? Carson, nobody uses that word anymore.”

“Well, I’m using it. And you know what I mean. Anybody who hears it knows what it means.”

His son is soft, and in the world as Carson knows it, being soft gets you ignored, stepped on, or killed. The children of cops have so much to prove, to rebel against. Has he been a father or has he been a warden? If he doesn’t prepare him for the world, if he doesn’t prepare him for the worst things that can happen, then who will? A mother’s love isn’t enough. There’s got to be a father’s expectations, always a little out of reach, so that the boy has something to strive for.

The waiting for the grand jury decision has made him a father again. He’s almost used to it, for the waiting suspends him in a zone between the night of the shooting and whatever is to come.
Whatever
. A few years back, the word was favored teenage slang.
Whatever
. A defiant shrug. An indifferent pout in the face of destiny. Carson feels like that some days, but he can’t too eagerly embrace
Whatever
as a belief. He’s worked too hard. Come too far.
Whatever
doesn’t give him a fighting chance to seal his own fate. He no longer calls Matthew Frey every couple of days, asking if the grand jury has been convened. He can wait. He has to. The children are now on summer vacation, and he thinks of other things.
When he can
. Because he’s at home during the day, he and Bunny decided to allow the twins to forgo summer day camp. They ride their bikes around the neighborhood and spend afternoons in the oak tree–shaded wading pool of the family who lives behind them. Evenings, they continue a marathon game of Monopoly that’s been going on for two weeks, neither girl agreeing to call an end to it.