Fire in the Streets (22 page)

“I got it from Raheem and now we match!” I stretch up on my toes and kiss him. Sam's eyes cloud as I pull away, and I realize what I said may have sounded not so nice to him. I got a jacket from my brother, and so did he, but not the same way. It seems like no matter what happens, there's always going to be that difference between us. And no way of talking about it is ever going to sound exactly right.

But nothing can spoil my excitement today. “Where are you going?”

“I'm—uh—nowhere. I just wanted some fresh air, I guess.” He turns back toward the clinic. “Do you want to come in?”

“I'm not sick,” I say. “I want to walk around. And show them at the office,” I admit.

“It's cold,” he says. His jacket is unbuttoned. I guess he
really did just pop out for a minute. “I'm going back in. See you later?”

“Later,” I reply, heading off down the block. Looking around as I go, I notice that not all the parked cars on the opposite side of the street are empty. In one of them—a plain gray sedan just a few spaces down from the clinic—a white man in a trench coat and hat is sitting in the driver's seat, staring my way. I look directly at him, not on purpose. He averts his eyes.

What is someone like him doing here, I wonder. Strange. I peek over my shoulder again as I walk away. He's not looking my way anymore; instead, he's watching the clinic.

I
N THE DROP-DEAD WINTER, NO ONE WANTS TO
be outdoors. Not even me. I spend more and more time in the Panther office, and less and less time with the girls, who often go to one person's place or the other to hang out after school. I miss them. But I can see why they don't miss stamping envelopes and making phone calls.

I'm quite used to the phone at this point. It doesn't seem as special as it used to, although it's always fun to dial. Leroy hates talking on the phone, he informed me, and he was delighted to know that I enjoy it. Now I get to make as many calls as he lets me. Nothing too important for party business, but I do things like confirm deliveries and remind volunteers when they're supposed to show up for stuff.

He even had me call the newspapers and the TV news one time when there was a bunch of unusual cop activity in the neighborhood. Lots of cruisers rolling through. We were afraid something was going to go down. An hour later,
a camera crew rolled up in a van and started filming, and wouldn't you know it, the cop cars started leaving the area, one by one. Leroy goes, “Log that trick in the books. We may need it again. Nice work, Maxie.” I felt important, for a change, and it felt good.

Today, Sam is helping me stuff coins from the newspaper sales into the little paper rolls that Leroy can take to the bank and turn into paper money. We have separated them into piles of quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. Now I am stacking the quarters and Sam is sliding the paper sheaths on. Below the desk, he occasionally toes me with his foot and vice versa. Above the desk, we are being very professional.

It's business as usual. Cherry's on a heated phone call with someone from the office across town. Leroy and Jolene are bent over the accounting books, running her adding machine, and figuring out how much cash we need to get through the month. Behind us, Hamlin and Lester are getting each other riled up over talk about Cold War politics and the plight of the worker in the global economy. I could follow the debate for a while, but now it's well over my head, plus I'm occupied with counting. Some neighborhood ladies in the back room are meeting about the upcoming clothing drive.

Things are quiet, until they aren't.

The door slams open. Gumbo runs breathless into the office. Everyone turns at once, pausing everything. It's that kind of entrance.

“Trouble,” Gumbo pants. “Pigs got Rocco and Slim. We only just got away.”

Coming in behind him, Raheem says something too, but it's drowned out by the explosion of questions and reactions to Gumbo's outburst.

My fingers tremble, spilling a stack of quarters. Rocco? Slim? A stab of ache strikes my stomach. When someone goes in, there's always a chance he won't come back out. What would things be like around here without Slim's constant joking and Rocco's laughter to lighten the mood?

My eyes cut to Cherry as she fumbles the phone back onto the cradle and rises to her feet, looking horrified.

“Simmer down,” Leroy shouts over the din. “First off, are you guys all right?”

Gumbo nods. “Skin of our teeth, man.”

Raheem looks shaken. He drops onto the couch and rests his head in his hands. He doesn't even stop me from coming to sit by him and putting my hand on his shoulder.

“What happened?” Hamlin asks, coming forward.

Raheem remains silent. Gumbo takes the lead. “Nothing, far as we can tell. We were meeting up to police. They were just standing by the car waiting for us, and boom.”

Raheem lifts his head. “I was coming round the corner. Running a few minutes late. I saw it happen.”

“I was half a block behind him,” Gumbo says. “Jogged to catch up and I was all joking like if two of us is late, they can't get mad. They was cuffed and halfway in the car 'fore I got the whole sentence out.”

“What was the charge?” Leroy says.

“We didn't ask,” Raheem says. “We got the hell out of there.”

“The way those pigs came up on them,” Gumbo says, shaking his head. “It was a planned arrest. They didn't do anything. We thought they'd haul us in too.”

“It's okay,” Hamlin says. He lifts the phone from the desk beside Cherry. Dials. “We'll get our lawyers down there right now to deal with it.”

“No kinda warning. They just took 'em down.” Gumbo grits his teeth. “Shit, we shoulda been there on time. Maybe we coulda stopped it.”

Raheem lowers his face into his hands again. I squeeze his shoulder, thinking,
No, then they might have gotten you, too.

L
EROY GOES AND STANDS IN FRONT OF THE
office door, with his back to it, like he's going to block people from entering. He surveys the faces in the room, nods, then orders Lester to close the back room door. “Leave the ladies to meet in peace,” he says, but his voice is tight, and there's more going on.

All eyes are on him. “I need to understand exactly what's happening here,” Leroy says. “And everyone in this room needs to hear why.”

“Let's talk it through, point by point,” Hamlin says. He knows where Leroy is going with this. Suddenly, so do I.

“Why didn't you meet up at the office before your shift?” Leroy says.

Gumbo shrugs. “Sometimes we leave from here, but sometimes we meet other places.”

Leroy knows this already. “The reason for that is
unpredictability,” he says. “If it was a planned arrest, I want to know how they knew where to find you.”

“We're never that hard to find,” Gumbo says slowly. “We follow the pigs.”

“But you weren't following them yet,” Hamlin interjects. “The guys weren't even in the car, you said.”

“Exactly.” Leroy begins to pace.

“It's riskier for them,” Sam says. “Pulling people out of a car. Things go wrong.” There's a moment of respectful silence, due to how well he knows how badly a cop stop can go wrong.

“And by then we're armed,” Lester points out. “We could fight back. But if a couple of guys are standing around, waiting for their shift to start . . .”

“Okay,” Leroy says. “Now the timing makes sense. So how did they know you would be there?”

Raheem's shoulder tenses under my fingers. “What are you saying?”

Leroy stops, looks out over all of us with that stage presence of his that sometimes comes out of nowhere. “We need to be more careful about how we share information. And we need to be vigilant about who's around us, and who might be watching and listening.”

Tension in the room. Everyone seems frozen. Surprised. Upset. Leroy continues. “Everyone in this room, I would
trust with my life. We have to trust each other with our lives. Every day. But the Panthers are gaining new members by the dozens, and we need to be vigilant.

“The pigs are working, finding ways to get close.” Leroy sighs. “And there may be a traitor among us.”

I
T'S HARD TO GO ABOUT OUR BUSINESS AFTER
that. Hamlin leaves to meet the lawyers at the police station and everyone tries to settle back into work, but there's a heaviness about the room. Cherry drags a cigarette out of her purse, lets the smoke cloud around her face to hide the fact that she's crying.

Raheem storms out in a huff of anxiety and I know better than to follow him. Let him breathe at his own pace. If he needs me, which he will never admit, he always knows where to find me. I'm grateful he wasn't caught today, but thinking that makes me feel guilty, especially because of Rocco. He acts like my big brother, too, in all those sweet, annoying, protective ways, and I love him a little bit for it. I hope he had his newspaper clipping with him,
WHAT TO DO IF YOU'RE ARRESTED
. I hope he has it memorized, too, in case they take it away.

“Come on, Maxie.” Sam nudges me. He's waiting to fill another tube with quarters and here my mind is floating.

“Okay, sorry.” I get back to work. But as I do I catch sight of Sam's leather jacket, which reminds me of my own new jacket, which makes me remember that I've seen something recently, something that made me curious. Something that would have made me think
Be vigilant
if I had known to think that at the time.

“No, wait,” I tell Sam, sliding out from behind the desk. “Leroy,” I call. “I have to tell you something. It might be important.”

“Okay, Maxie. Come in back with me.” He holds up his hands, showing me the ink he's got on them from changing the typewriter ribbon. I follow him to the kitchen sink.

“I saw something suspicious the other day. A white man sitting in a parked car, watching the clinic.” I describe the man I saw. “He looked like a cop. Do you think he was watching us?”

“Maybe,” Leroy says thoughtfully. “That's the kind of thing I'm starting to wonder about. Thanks for telling me.”

I nod, glad to feel useful in the wake of feeling helpless over Slim and Rocco's situation.

“Actually, Maxie,” Leroy says. “This is a good job for you. Keep your eyes out when you're around the neighborhood, okay? You can be my eyes on the street. No one's going to see a threat when they look at you. You might notice something that the rest of us would miss.”

I
TAKE LEROY'S TASK TO HEART. I WALK THE
streets in the afternoons, keeping an eye out for trouble. It feels like real Panther work, policing the police in my own way. Except I don't like the part where he said no one's going to see me as a threat. Like I'm not tough, or like I won't be noticed. As usual.

I know he meant it to be nice, that he was trying to tell me I can do something no one else can, but it hurts my feelings anyway. Because I don't want to be the invisible worker girl anymore. I want to be in the lineup. I try to tell myself I'm a good undercover agent, but it doesn't ever soothe the feeling that I'll never, ever fit.

As it turns out, I do catch a pig monitoring the Panthers. He's a different man than the one I saw outside the clinic, but I see him twice, in his car. Once in the early morning, close to the schoolyard during the lineup. The second time, he's parked down the block from the office
with a notebook, probably watching who comes and goes. I look right at him while he's talking into his dashboard radio. He doesn't try to hide it from me. I guess Leroy's right. No one thinks I matter enough to make a difference.

I continue around the block so I don't draw any attention to myself, just in case. I'll report the cop sighting to him when I get back to the office in a few minutes.

“Cherry.” I wave, skipping toward her. “Be careful. There's a cop watching the office.”

Cherry waves her hand. “I never met a pig I couldn't charm.”

“But why would you want to?” I joke.

She laughs. “You're a funny kid.” Her use of the word “kid” grates on me.

I stop walking, annoyed. “I want my lipstick lesson now,” I declare. It's time to make a change. I want to look like a woman. I want to walk down the street and have everyone take notice and know I mean business and they'd better stay out of my way.

C
HERRY PICKS ME UP OUTSIDE MY BUILDING
in her car. It's long and white and very clean-looking. It smells like cigarettes and perfume inside. It smells like Cherry. Perfect.

She drives me downtown and takes me to the department store she likes. We walk the aisles of the cosmetics section. Several of the clerks seem to know her.

I'm attracted to the heady floral scents at one counter in particular. The salesgirl has twin blond braids on either side of her head, which sway as she bends forward to show me the selection.

“You have to work your way up to perfume,” Cherry tells me. But she lets me sniff the samples and she smiles as I pick my favorite. “That's a nice one. Try to remember the name for later.” I don't see how I could forget. The salesgirl dabs my wrists with it, and the scent follows me. I feel like an elegant lady.

At the makeup counter, Cherry dabs samples on the back of my hand, until she narrows down the good shades. Then she rubs one on my lips.

“What do you think?”

I think it elevates me to some other place. I think it's perfect. “I like it,” I say coolly, because reality has started to sink in.