Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (17 page)

Keith and Jimmy were egging the girls on, and Jonathan wasn’t saying a word.
I wondered if he was listening to Lacey and me.

“Lace,” I said, “if you continue to ignore your dad, you could get into real trouble.”

“I don’t get into trouble, Uncle Bill,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

At thirteen.
Sure
she did.
But what could I say?
I hoped that Althea had told her about condoms, but I doubted that she had.
And I couldn’t figure out a way to do so.

The voices behind me continued.
I turned onto the Grimshaws’ street.

“Lace, listen.
I know you think you’ll be all right—”

“Uncle Bill, I will.
Honest.”

“But,” I said, “if something should happen, if some guy hurts you or wants you to do something you don’t want to do, you come see me, okay?”

She looked at me, surprised.
Apparently no one had ever said anything like that to her before.

“Okay,” she said, sounding confused.

I pulled up in front of the house.
She had the door open before the van had fully stopped.
She was slipping off her high heels and hurrying
,
barefoot
,
across the sidewalk toward the porch.

The back doors opened and the remaining Grimshaw children spilled out, chorusing their good-byes.
Only Norene took the time to wave at me — her braids askew, like they always were this late in the day — before she ran toward the house.

“Come up front, Jim,” I said. “I’m not chauffeuring you home.”

He liked riding in the back of the van, able to lie flat and read or sit with his back against the wall.
We’d had arguments about that before.

This afternoon, however, he didn’t argue.
He slammed the back doors closed and slid into the seat Lacey had just vacated.

“How come you’re so worried about Lace?” Jimmy asked.
“She just wants to dress the way she likes, not the way Aunt Althea thinks is right.”

“There’s more to it than that,” I said. “Things Lacey doesn’t understand yet.”

“You mean like my mom?” Jimmy asked.

I looked at him, glad I hadn’t started the van.
He was looking at his hands.

His mother had been a prostitute. She hadn’t known who Jimmy’s father was.
For a while she had tried to raise her sons alone, but she was never reliable.
I remembered seeing Jimmy on the street when he was as young as three, begging for food.
I used to take
him to nearby restaurants for warm meals. That was when I learned that his mother would take off for weeks at a time, leaving him in the care of his older brother, Joe.

Joe eventually joined a gang and started dealing drugs, abandoning Jimmy too. And when he got evicted from his apartment for lack of payment, I helped him find a foster home.

That might have worked, if it weren’t for Martin’s assassination. Jimmy had been across the street, and he’d seen the shooter, a man who wasn’t James Earl Ray.

That’s when I took Jimmy, left Memphis, and came here.
From that moment on Jimmy was my son, and he’d remain mine until the end of my life.

But we’d never talked much about his mother.
He hadn’t said much and I hadn’t asked, thinking he’d talk to me when he wanted to.

“What do you mean, like your mother?” I asked gently, glad I hadn’t started to drive away yet, so that I could pay attention to Jim.

“My mom, she used to dress like Lace when she went to work.” He said that so matter-of-factly.
“I been wanting to tell Lace, but I can’t
,
since you said we can’t say nothing about Memphis.”

I nodded. So that was Jimmy’s dilemma.
Of all the children I’d just had in the car, he was the only one who understood why Lacey’s path was dangerous, and he had no way to talk to her about it.

“She wouldn’t understand,” I said. “She thinks you’re my biological son.
We’ve always said your mother is gone, which is true, but most people think that means she died.
Lacey can’t imagine a woman like your mother.”

“I know.” Jimmy was still looking at his hands. “You don’t think Lace’ll end up like my mom, do you?”

I put a hand on his shoulder, suddenly understanding his fear.
My fears for Lacey were bad, but his were worse.

“She won’t end up like your mom,” I said. “She has too many friends and family for that.
But she could get hurt.”

Jimmy raised his head and looked at me, his eyes wide. “Some trick’ll hurt her?”

The word stopped me, but only for a moment. “Some boy’ll hurt her.
He’ll think that she wants to do what your mom used to do. Lacey won’t understand and—”

“He’ll just do her.
I know.” Jimmy sighed.

I felt out of my depth.
Sometimes I couldn’t even imagine what this boy had seen.

“We can’t talk her out of dressing like this,” I said.
“We’ve been trying for nearly a year.”

“Uncle Franklin took her makeup away, but she just borrows it from the girls at school,” Jimmy said.
“Even Jonathan says she looks awful.”

“She’ll do what she wants,” I said, hoping my tone at least would reassure him.
I was trying to keep my voice as steady as possible.
“But if she does get into trouble — if she starts crying a lot, or acting really angry for no reason, tell me
,
okay?”

“What if she don’t want me to?” he asked.

“Tell me that too.”

“Feels like tattling,” he said.

“If someone just — does her — ” I hated that phrase, but he obviously understood it from his past
“
t
hen she’s not going to want to tell her parents.
Maybe she’ll tell me.
We can make sure it won’t happen again.
We’d be protecting her, Jim, not tattling on her.”

He nodded.
Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.
“Even my mom said it was nasty when some guy didn’t listen.
And she said she usually liked nasty.”

I clenched a fist against my thigh.
She had no right to say things like that to her son.
To her nine-year-old son.
She hadn’t even been around for Jim’s tenth birthday.

But she had a point.
And for the first time, her words were helping me with Jim.
I wasn’t going to take that understanding away.

“I’m sure Lacey’s parents will keep trying to talk to her,” I said.
“But keep an eye out, Jim.
If the talking doesn’t work, she’s going to need all the help she can get.”

SIXTEEN

The conversation with Jimmy left me shaken up.
I remained awake long after he went to sleep, wishing I could wipe that hideous childhood from his mind.

I had no idea how it would affect him in his teen years.
I hadn’t wanted to think about how his mother’s behavior would influence his own when his hormones took over his body.

I often mentally criticized Althea for not having the right talk with Lacey, but I hadn’t talked to Jimmy either, and I wondered if I was running out of time.

At ten o’clock, I turned on the local news, hoping to distract myself with the weather.
I settled onto the couch, noting that the springs were nearly gone, and put my feet on our scarred coffee table.

The lead story was about the rally in Grant Park.
I was startled to learn that less than one hundred women had gathered there.
On film, the entire thing looked ridiculous: a group of young women wearing crash helmets and biker suits carried clubs over their shoulders like they were cave
women.
Apparently their mission had been to go to the Army Induction Center and “free” the poor draftees, but no one made it out of the park.

The phalanx of police officers along the edges of the park reminded me of the groups I had seen a year ago during the convention — police in their riot gear, lined up like they expected trouble — and if it didn’t start, they might help it along.

It was only a matter of time before more people got hurt.
After the melee the night before, Governor Ogilvie had called out the National Guard.
Shades of Memphis during my last few weeks there.
I never did get used to the Guard patrolling the streets in tanks, guns slung over their arms like they intended to use them.

I’d learned there — and it had been repeated all over after Martin was assassinated — that young men with guns always looked for an excuse to use them.

A shiver ran down my back just as the report switched.
The anchor segued away from the Weatherm
e
n, talking about the groups of young people who did not support them, including a whole other branch of the SDS called the Revolutionary Youth Movement Two.
I was beginning to think I would need a scorecard when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton appeared on my television screen.

Hampton was standing in front of the Panther headquarters on the West Side, wearing some dark glasses that made him seem older than a young man barely out of his teens.
He also looked burlier than I remembered
,
or maybe that was just what the cameras did to him.

The anchor sounded surprised in his voice-over as he informed Chicagoland that the Black Panthers did not support the Weatherm
e
n.
In fact, the anchor said, the Weatherm
e
n’s actions were too violent for the Panthers.

“We believe that the Weatherm
e
n’s action is anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic,” Hampton said, in the church rhythms that made Martin so easy to listen to.
“It’s chauvinistic, it’s custeristic, and that’s the bad part about it.
It’s custeristic in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred.
And they call it revolution.
It’s nothing but child’s play.
It’s folly.
We think these people may be sincere
,
but they’re misguided, they’re muddleheaded, and scatterbrained.”

He sounded scared to me, and I remembered what someone had said, that Hampton believed the police (and now the National Guard) would take out their frustrations on the black community, not on the suburban white kids who were starting it all.

I wondered if he’d considered the effect of having the Black Panther leader say that the Weathermen were custeristic gave the Weathermen even more power.
They suddenly had a validation that they hadn’t had before.

They even scared the Black Panthers.

I was certain Hampton had continued with his speech, maybe even discussing the effects of the Weathermen “actions” on the black community, but of course the local newscasts didn’t air the rest of his comments.

The news segued into a story about four society women getting Judge Hoffman to let them into the gallery of the Conspiracy Trial.

I sighed, got up, and turned the damn thing off before the weather, just as the announcer told me that Joe DiMaggio was going to Vietnam.

As if a baseball player could stop a war.

Or society women could view the trial of the century as if it were a show put on just for them.

Or a black man could say something sensible and expect fair press coverage.

I wandered off to bed, knowing I would lay there for a long time, wide awake, worrying about all the things I couldn’t change.

SEVENTEEN

That morning, LeDoux was the one who added to our wardrobes.
He came out of the hotel carrying a box under his arm. When he got to the van, he motioned me toward the back.

The box was full of cheap cotton gloves.

“I
special
-
order
them,” he said.
“They become essential in my line of work.”

He preferred the latex gloves that some hospitals used, but those were expensive
, s
o he hadn’t brought any to Chicago.
But his office in New York had shipped these, and they had arrived yesterday.

He handed me several, urging me to stuff extras into my coveralls so that I could touch things without worrying too much about destroying the evidence.

He gave me specific instructions on how to use the gloves, and then gave me some plastic sandwich bags to store each pair in when I was done.

“Don’t wear the same pair in different apartments,” he said. “Mark each bag with the apartment number, so that I know where the gloves came from.
You might acquire trace evidence that we don’t get any other way, and I’ll need that.
I might also have to eliminate some cloth from the gloves in the fiber evidence, should I collect any, and I’ll want to see if your gloves are ripped or torn.”