Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A (5 page)

Fifteen months.
Only
fifteen months. God.

It was – unusually – still shirtsleeve weather in this the darkest hour before the dawn. Since his duplex didn't come with a garage, he'd wound up parking in the nearest spot – four blocks away – and by the time he hit his block he was almost shaking from fatigue. But still, in no hurry to get home. He never was anymore.

There was a sliver of moon through the trees in the Presidio – the morning was dead still and his footfalls echoed. He realized he hadn't heard a siren since he'd started walking. That knowledge didn't fill him with any hope. He knew what it was – he knew what false hope was and he wasn't going to indulge anymore. Today would be hotter than yesterday, and today it would all break loose.

Behind him as he turned up the sidewalk a bus rumbled by on Lake Street. Turning, he saw that it was empty except for the driver and a passenger sitting alone way in the back.

His wife Flo had always wanted a real house. Their plan was to have Flo stay with the kids until the youngest, Orel, got into junior high, which would have been, would be, the next September. At that time Flo would have gone back to teaching and they would have saved for a couple of years, maybe moved out of the city, got their house.

Would have, should have ...

Putting it off a minute longer, he stood in front of the cement stairs leading up to the second floor. The light over the door had blown out or Rita, his live-in housekeeper, had forgotten to leave it on. It was a long twelve steps to the landing – his own self-improvement, one-day-at-a-time program.

Inside, there was the old sense memory – the familiar smells, the shadows. A tiny bulb burned over the stove in the kitchen and he quietly made his way back. When they had first moved in eleven years ago he and Flo hadn't been able to get over the spaciousness of the place – two bedrooms, study, living room, dining room, kitchen. They had only had the first two boys then – Isaac and Jacob – and they had put them in one bedroom, used the other themselves, and still had an adults' room where they kept files, wrote checks, locked the door when they needed to get away. After Orel came around (they called him O.J. back then – they'd since dropped the nickname), the older boys shared a bunk bed until they finally had to acknowledge there was no room for three of them – their beds and all their stuff – in the one ten-by-twelve room. They had given their eldest, Isaac, the old study as his own bedroom.

Now, with Rita living on the premises, space was an issue. Half the living room, the area around the couch set off by a changing screen, was Rita's. The only place to sit was at the kitchen table. Glitsky's barco-lounger was still where it had always been in the living room, but it was awkward sitting there while Rita was trying to go to sleep across the room.

So he went and sat at the kitchen table, made tea and was drinking it, feeling the ghosts.

Glitsky usually wore his gun, even at home, but tonight for the call-up he had left his holster hanging in the closet in his bedroom, so when he heard the 'chunk' he grabbed a butcher's knife from the block on the drain and switched on the light in the hallway leading back to Isaac's room.

Where all was quiet.

He stood in the open doorway, pumped up, breathing hard. After all that had gone down already tonight he was ready to explode. If anybody touched his home ...

The only light came from the hall, but Isaac's room wasn't much bigger than a bread box, and all of it was visible. His son was completely covered by his blankets – Glitsky could see them rising and falling.

The back door was locked. He told himself it could have been a raccoon getting into the garbage, dropping the lid on the cement. It surprised people to hear it, but there were lots of raccoons in the city, big and fearless as mastiffs, breeding like rabbits in the brush of the Presidio.

As he passed Isaac's door again Glitsky decided to take another look. Still covered. In the past, whatever time he got in, he'd always check the boys before he went to sleep. Not that they ever needed it. It was just a habit he'd acquired – walk to their beds, look at their faces, check their breathing, make sure the blankets were over them. Dad stuff.

In three steps he was by the bed. Leaning over, planning to gently pull the covers off his head, he saw the shoes sticking out from under the blanket. Ike didn't normally sleep in his shoes.

'Hey,' he whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed, laying a hand on his son's shoulder. 'Nice try.' For another few seconds the form was still. Sighing, Glitsky lay the knife on the desk, crossed his hands, elbows on his knees.

The blanket moved. Glitsky pulled it down. His oldest son – seventeen next month – had been crying. He was also fully dressed.

Glitsky tried to pull the boy toward him, to get an arm around his neck and hold him there against him. 'Come here.'

But he jerked away. 'Leave me alone!'

The first time Glitsky had heard that from him, it took what he'd thought was the last unbroken piece that was left of his heart and stomped on it. Now, he wasn't used to it, exactly, but he'd heard it enough that it had lost a little of its hurt. 'All right.' He got to where he knew his voice would sound controlled, nonchalant. 'You been out?'

No answer.

'Do me a favor. Don't go out. It's bad out there.'

Still no answer.

'You heard all the sirens? They lynched a black man tonight, not ten blocks from here. It's not safe out there.'

Isaac was one-fourth black, with light skin and his father's kinky hair. But everyone with an ounce of visible black knew the reality – you were white or you were non-white. Black.

Glitsky was looking straight into his son's eyes, which were doing their best to avoid his. He saw enough of that at the Hall every day. He wasn't going to lose this boy, or his brothers. But he believed that the way to keep people's respect was demand that they keep some for themselves. He moved ahead. 'The rules committee has a meeting and didn't invite me?'

'The rules committee is a joke.'

The rules committee was something Glitsky had implemented in the first months that he and the boys were all trying to survive after Flo. It was made up of all of them, including Rita, the housekeeper. The adults had two votes, the boys one each, and so if there was unanimity between them they could outvote either Glitsky or Rita alone.

The rules committee had navigated them through some rough seas – when the boys had felt that there was no order, that life itself was precarious. Glitsky believed it gave them some sense of control. It also caused a lot of fights – but fighting was all right. Glitsky could take fighting. Just don't give him silence.

Which was what he was getting now.

He stood up. 'Look up here, Ike, look at me.' The son moved out of the light so he wouldn't get the glare from the hall light. He raised his eyes – red.

'You weren't home. When I heard you go out—'

'They've got an emergency downtown, Ike. All over the city. They called me. I had to go.'

'You always have to go.'

Glitsky ran a hand through his hair. 'I know,' he said. He was too tired to go into it. It was true, but so what? 'I don't want you going out there, Isaac. Not for a couple of days.'

'You're grounding me? The middle of summer you're grounding me?'

'I'm saying I don't want you boys to go out.'

'For how long?'

'I don't know. Maybe a day, maybe two. I don't know. It's not safe out there.'

'Oh, but it is safe for you, huh?'

Glitsky hated the tone but it was his house and his sons were going to obey his rules and that was that. 'Don't give me any grief, Ike. We can talk about it in the morning.'

He felt the need to reach and touch his boy, soften it somewhat, explain, but didn't dare try. It would just escalate, like everything else. He stood up. 'Sleep tight.'

Closing the door behind him, he walked out.

Rita was asleep. Glitsky heard the regular sibilance of her breathing on the other side of the screen as he lowered himself into the old lounger on 'his' side of the living room.

Closing his eyes, the events of the night came racing up at him – from Isaac to the Cavern Tavern to the meeting with the mayor and the brass downtown. Then suddenly, to Elaine Wager – why had
she
been there?

Oh yes, of course. Her mother.

Loretta Wager.

Startled by the unexpected clarity of the memory, he opened his eyes. The quiet room. The deep shadows. That was all. Suddenly, his brain exhausted and his emotions frayed – perhaps he was starting to doze in dawn's first light – there was the vision of Loretta Wager again, as she'd been back in college, the first time, in her apartment with the Huey Newton chair and the dominating wall posters: for Eldridge Cleaver's
Soul on Ice
and the other, of Martin Luther King's face with his dream and the crowd in front superimposed.

She'd invited Glitsky up to go over some of the San José team rosters and choose likely candidates they could recruit for the Black Student Union, the BSU.

Glitsky had pretended that it was innocent – hoping it wouldn't turn out to be, but not daring to admit that. They were in her bedroom, looking over the lists, when she excused herself for a minute and went out to get a coke. Then she called out his name.

At twenty-two, she was near-perfect in form, a goddess reclining naked with her legs parted on the couch in her living room, the slanting rays of the afternoon sun streaking her, her fingers stroking herself, asking him if she scared him, if he wanted her and had the balls to take her—

He sat up, opening his eyes. This, he thought, was pathetic indulgence, stupid, recalling an adolescent encounter, getting half-tumescent on his barco-lounger across the room from his children's nanny as she slept and the city burned.

Disgusted with himself, he pushed himself up and went into his bedroom. There was Flo's picture on the dresser, smiling at him. He turned off the overhead, got undressed in the half-light and fell into bed.

He didn't want to see Flo smiling. Or fantasize about some romanticized past with Loretta Wager. Especially, he did not want to think about what was going to happen in a few hours, when the sun came up again, as it always did.

He tried to force himself to sleep, to forget, to ignore.

He was still hard.

After finally forcing himself to get out of bed an hour after the sun had come up, Kevin Shea had stood at his widest back window taking in his view. Nothing in his vision resembled an area struggling with poverty. His apartment on Green Street backed onto Cow Hollow, whose artery in turn was Union, San Francisco's yuppiest mile. Beyond Union were the upscale Fort Mason and Marina neighborhoods. To Shea's right, looking east, he could catch a glimpse of Russian Hill and the glittering bay beyond. To his left, the green expanse of the Presidio provided a lush foreground to the red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This morning seven distinct columns of smoke rose in an arc through the panorama. Opening the window a crack to look further around, he heard a constant wail from sirens, dopplering nearer, then farther in the streets below. He closed the window and lowered the blinds, darkening his living room.

In the kitchen he fumbled for coffee beans, half of which he spilled before he got them into the electric grinder. He got some water over one of the burners, then turned on the television.

He was beginning to hope he had only dislocated his arm. It had regained some mobility and in certain positions didn't hurt so much, and he thought if it was broken that wouldn't be the case. His ribs, on the other hand, hurt like hell in every position.

A mug normally intended for beer was full of coffee. Slumping nearly horizontal in a stuffed chair of worn, cracking, yellow faux-leather, he was too low to see over the ledge of any of his windows, and anyway the shades were drawn.

Melanie on the phone had started out being convinced by what the television was saying about his role last night and that really worried him. Did she
really
think that he had somehow been a ringleader in the lynching? She should have known he was incapable of anything like that. But if even
she
thought he'd been involved, he had bigger problems than a few broken ribs.

In his hungover daze he had managed to ask her how she could think what she was saying was possible?

'You've got to see the picture,' she had told him, and then had hung up.

The television cast its muted glow back into the half-lit room. Shea, hunkered down in his chair as though against an onslaught, sipped his coffee. The screen filled with a close-up of an anchorman as the morning news came on the air:

'The lead story here and across the country today is the lynching of a black attorney by an all-white mob here in San Francisco last night and the devastating escalation of violence and rioting that has swept the Bay Area and is already being reflected in other major cities – New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, DC and Los Angeles.

'Here in San Francisco Mayor Conrad Aiken has called for a dusk-to-dawn curfew and has asked the governor to declare a state of emergency for the city and county. Property damage is already estimated at some two hundred fifty million dollars and that figure is certain to go up, perhaps into the billions. The Red Cross and other relief organizations are setting up tent cities and emergency medical centers in Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, Marina Green and several other locations around the city for those who need shelter or assistance, and even at this early hour people are flooding to these areas. Our News Center crews report nineteen fires are still burning in several areas of the city, including the site of the lynching itself. We're going to take you there now, live ...'