Niagara Motel (17 page)

“We have to get out,” Meredith said. “They're shooting at the truck.”

I couldn't move. My legs were heavier than twenty-seven tons of sand.

“Come on, we have to go!” She pushed the door open, grabbed the hatchet, took my hand, and dragged me out of the cab. We ran across the intersection to a gas station and laid on our stomachs behind a sign for diesel. I felt dizzy and nauseous and sick. The whole world blurred around me.

“I can't see!” I said. “
I can't see!
”

Meredith put her hand inside the sleeve of her sweatshirt and wiped my eyes.

“Oh,” I said.

“Shh.”

“We have to get Reggie. We have to help him.”

“We can't.”

“But who's going to help him? Nobody's even
helping
him!”

“Look,” she said. We watched as Reggie, head covered in blood, his white T-shirt stained red, struggled to get to all fours. He pushed his hand out in front of him again and again, like he was waving us away. His long hair fell in front of his face, streaked red with blood. He grabbed hold of the running board, staggered to his feet, and leaned against the open door of the cab for a few seconds. Then he started to crawl into his truck. A black lady ran to him and helped
him get inside the truck. We could see Reggie's work-boots poking out the door as she laid him across the front seat. Then a black man and woman drove up in a little blue car. The man got out and the woman spun the car around so it pointed away from Reggie's truck, which was slowly creeping forward. Another big black guy ran up to the truck and hoisted himself into the driver's seat. The guy who came in the blue car stood outside on the running board, hanging onto the side mirror. The truck started and they drove away, pulling 80,000 pounds behind them.

“Do you think he's okay?” I said.

“No,” Meredith said.

“This wasn't supposed to happen,” I said. “It wasn't supposed to be like this.”

“I know,” she said.

“Was that our fault?”

“No. No way.”

“We should have …”

“We couldn't,” she said.

“Do you think he'll die?”

“I don't know,” Meredith said.

25

Hundreds of people ran by us screaming and yelling and smashing bottles in the street and throwing bricks and rocks at cars and shop windows. Cars full of men waved sticks and bats and guns as they drove past, shooting bullets up into the crystal blue sky. Tires squealed, cars crashed into each other, guys ran after cars and hit them with bats and sticks and rocks, reaching through the drivers' windows to take purses, wallets, cans of soda. Six guys picked up a white Buick and flipped it over and someone fired shots at the red news helicopter that hovered above the intersection.

“This … this is …” I had trouble getting my words out.

“This is a riot,” Meredith said.

“Usually people say that when they're having fun.”

“Not today,” she said, her eyes scanning the intersection.

People ran around, smashing everything in sight, chanting, “
Rodney King! Rodney King!
” I knew who he was; he was the man on the video who was driving too fast and those cops had beat him up, and now, I guess, the cops weren't going to jail for it, and all of Los Angeles was going insane. People ran out of a liquor store across the street carrying bottles of wine, cases of beer, arm-loads of alcohol. Guys were shaking up beer bottles and spraying them over each other and laughing. They smashed the windows of the liquor store with steel bats and the glass crackled away. Someone set fire to a rag sticking out of a bottle and threw it into the liquor store and then the liquor store was on fire and we could see the smoke begin to build and flames licking around the edges of the broken window. You could hear the glass bottles that were still inside exploding in the heat. Then a white delivery truck stopped at the intersection and the same guys who had beat up Reggie surrounded the truck and one guy opened
the door and pulled the driver out of his seat. They started beating on him, kicking him in the nuts, in the knees. He had brown hair and wore a grey T-shirt and jeans and he held his hands above his head, but they kept on kicking him until he fell. Once he was on the ground, they kicked him in the head over and over and over again. The same guy who had dropped the concrete slab on Reggie ripped the stereo system out of the truck and threw it at the driver's head. Another guy pulled out a Swiss Army knife and tried to cut the truck driver's ear off. He held up a little piece of flesh, dripping with blood, and waved it above his head like it was a trophy. I was shaking all over and the ground was wobbling and everything was wrong. A guy came up and took the truck driver's wallet out of his back pocket. Then he and the guys who had beat up Reggie started ripping the truck driver's clothes off. First his shirt, then his shoes and jeans and underwear, until he lay naked on the ground, covering his head with his arms. Another guy came up with a can of black spray paint and started spraying the truck driver's chest and his body and his privates black. People were laughing and pointing and taking pictures and some people ran up and kicked him and then ran back to their friends. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen and there was nothing I could do about it. I closed my eyes for a minute and told myself not to throw up. But it didn't work. I did throw up. A lot. Then Meredith was rubbing my back and saying, “It's okay, it's okay.” And when I opened my eyes again someone was pouring a jerry can full of gasoline all over the truck driver and dumping it right into his face and mouth and eyes and people were still throwing bottles and rocks and trash at him and no one was doing anything to help him and someone in the crowd was videotaping the whole thing and I said, “It is
not fucking okay
.”

“You're right,” Meredith said. “It's not.”

Then a black man went over to the truck driver and you could tell he was a priest because he was wearing the black suit and the white
collar that priests always wear, and the priest said, “Stop! Stop this!” but people still kept throwing rocks and bottles at the truck driver who lay unmoving on the pavement beside his truck while people took everything out of the back of his truck like furniture and instruments and stereos and whatever else he was hauling. Then the priest spread his arms wide and he held a book in one hand, probably a bible, and he hunkered down over the truck driver and covered him with his own body and yelled, “Kill him, and you'll have to kill me too!” Then the crowd booed and someone else threw a bottle that landed right beside the priest's head and a green shower exploded in his face, but the priest just shut his eyes and shook his head, and then across the street, someone threw a brick through the window of a convenience store, and you could hear the tinkle of glass and the sharp pops of gunshots a little further up the street.

I don't know if the priest did that because God told him to or if he did it because it was the right thing to do, maybe the
only
thing to do, but I was glad that there were people like that priest in the world, and I wished that I had been able to do that for Reggie.

Then people started flooding into the gas station and filling their cars and filling up jerry cans and bottles with gasoline. They were going into the store and taking whatever they wanted. People came out with bags full of chips and pop and cigarettes and magazines. One guy held a stack of lottery tickets in his teeth. A fat, pale man with light-brown hair stood across the street talking into a microphone and someone else was videotaping him, a blond guy. We watched as a group of people came at them and one guy took the microphone out of the news reporter's hand. “Hey,” he said, “I'm a reporter.” And the other guy started hitting him in the face and head with the microphone and yelling at him, “Get out of here! Get the fuck out of here! You don't belong here!” Then the cameraman dropped the video camera and took off running down the street and a bunch of
people followed him, hurling rocks and bricks and bottles at him, and the reporter cowered, shielding his head and crying out until a big white van that read
KTLA NEWS
pulled up and opened its back door and the reporter hurled himself into the van and it sped away. A white Toyota Corolla drove through the intersection and someone threw a garbage can at it and it cracked the glass. The car stopped and some guys ran and pulled out the driver and it was a tall lady with red hair and she covered her face and screamed, “Don't hurt my baby! Don't hurt my baby!” and the crowd started whipping all kinds of things at her like beer cans and stones, and she got down on the ground and covered her head with her hands and a guy ran up and kicked her in the stomach and she rolled under her car so the guy opened the door of the car and a little kid crawled out, a little redheaded baby, it just plopped out onto the road and started crawling down the street, crying. Then a bus stopped on the corner and an Asian guy stepped off the bus and a mob of five or six people surrounded him and clobbered him, bashing in his face, punching him all over, and he tried to get back on the bus, but the bus closed its doors and drove on.

“What should we do?” I said.

Meredith pulled her hood up over her head and dug around in her backpack and pulled out a green bandana and tied it around her face so that only her eyes were showing. Then she took out a black toque and handed it to me. “Put this on,” she said. “Pull it down low over your face.”

“Why?”

“Because we're white.”

I took out my knife and cut eye holes and a mouth hole in the toque so I could see and breathe. Meredith got to her feet. She took my hand and pulled me up, and together, we ran.

26

We didn't make it too far before someone threw a shopping cart at a car, the car spun out of control and slammed into the front window of a shoe store and a hundred people climbed over the hood of the car to load up on Adidas, Nikes, and Reeboks. Guys destroyed abandoned cars with tire irons and bats, and windshields lay in smithereens all over the road, bottle rockets sailed through the air, and car tires screeched like cats in the night. I could hear gunshots and glass smashing all around me and then Meredith was pulling me inside a little hot dog stand that was painted blue and white and said
ART'S CHILI DOGS
. There was no one inside, but all the food and drinks were there. Meredith closed the door and locked it and we sat on the floor. She pulled her bandana down, and I took off my toque.

“Are you hungry?” Meredith said.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Thirsty?” she handed me a cream soda from the cooler beside us and took a Coke for herself. “I don't know when we'll be able to eat or drink again.”

We could hear the crowd rage on outside. I drank the cream soda and tried to think. “I don't know what to do,” I said.

“We have to get out of here,” she said. “We could die.”

“What about finding my father?”

“If he
is
here, he's probably trying to get out too.”

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I had come all this way, I had done all the right things, and I
still
didn't get to meet him. It wasn't fair. There's nothing fair about life. Not one single thing. You just have to get through it the best way you know how.

I put my head in my hands. We could hear people outside
screaming, “
No Justice, No Peace!”
over and over and over again. “No Justice, No Peace!” Then we heard a big
whoosh
and a
POW!
and we both lay flat on the floor and covered our heads.

“What was that?” I whispered.

“Probably a car exploding,” Meredith whispered.

“Meredith?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm scared.”

“Me too,” she said.

Then we slowly sat up again and she skooched closer to me and gave me a hug. “Oh,” she said, looking at my pants.

“What?” I looked down. There was a big wet spot, like I had peed. It smelled like pee. But I didn't remember peeing. Or thinking that I had to go. But there it was, darkening my jeans, running down my leg. “I can't believe it.”

“Don't worry about it,” Meredith said. “It doesn't matter.”

And as completely humiliating and totally awful as it was that I had peed my pants, she was right. At that moment, it didn't really matter that much. I pressed my eye up to a crack in the door. “There's a payphone right outside,” I said. “We could call Gina.”

“Gina's in Niagara Falls,” Meredith said. “She can't help us.”

She was right, of course, but I still wanted to talk to Gina at that moment more than anyone had ever wanted to talk to another person in the history of the world.

Then someone threw a brick through the window of Art's Chili Dogs and glass shattered all over us.

“Fuck!” Meredith said, shaking out her hoodie.

A guy peered through the busted-out window and saw us and turned his head and yelled to someone else, “Hey, there's white people in here! Get over here! We'll get 'em,” and he started climbing through the window. We stood up, then the guy's friend ran up and
looked at us and said, “Those are just kids, man,
shit
.” And the other guy said, “Who cares?” and started coming for us. I opened the door and pulled the toque over my face and Meredith put her bandana back on and she held the hatchet up high and we ran. We ran and ran and ran and ran and ran.

Everywhere I looked, people were doing the wrong thing. People threw bricks through the windows of stores and cars, and people pushed and shoved and trampled over each other to get inside and take whatever they could. I saw someone drive a Jeep through the front doors of a furniture store and people come out carrying couches, mattresses, and bedside tables. I saw two men knock sledgehammers through the windows of a Radio Shack and people load TVs, ghetto blasters, VCRs, video cameras, and computers into shopping carts and the backs of trucks and cars and haul them away. I saw a bunch of kids pour out of a party supplies store. They carried a unicorn piñata and threw sparkly confetti all over each other. I saw a man wrecking a red Volkswagen Beetle with a golf club. I saw a lady pushing a piano down the street. I saw a brown UPS van turned on its side, burning in a parking lot. I saw people coming out of a grocery store with chips and cereal and melons and so many diapers. I saw three little kids roll burning tires down the street. I saw Asian men with shotguns up on the roofs of their stores, shooting at people who tried to break in. I saw a man set fire to a bus bench. I saw two little boys run out of a costume shop wearing rainbow-coloured clown wigs. I saw four teenagers stagger under the weight of a refrigerator. I saw a woman pulling a rack of clothes from the drycleaners down the sidewalk. I saw three guys rip an ATM out of a wall. I saw four white nuns in a black Cadillac speeding down the street. I hoped they were praying in there, praying for all of us. A black man stood outside of his tobacco shop, screaming at the crowd. “Why are you doing this? Why do you gotta wreck
my
store?” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
“I'm
with
you! I'm from the ghetto
too
. I tried to
make
it! I tried to
give
you something, give you a store. It's not
right!
It's not
right
what you're doing! I'm like
you!
I'm not
the man!
Why you have to steal
my
computer? Wreck
my
store? I tried to make it.” His voice was cracking and tears sparkled down his cheeks. We kept running. Waterfalls of glass crashed over us as we passed a thousand angry faces. We tripped over splintered husks of plywood. The air was thick and oily. Chunks of ash and embers fell all around us. Everywhere I looked, buildings and cars and tires burned, sending black pillars of smoke up into the clear blue sky.

“Stop,” I said, tugging Meredith backwards by her shirt.

Her hair flew crazily around her head from the wind of the chopper blades above us. “What?” she said.

“I can't run anymore. My throat … I can't breathe.”

“Come on.” She pulled me into the doorway of a barber shop and we leaned against the plywood that was boarding it up. Someone had spray-painted it,
BLACK OWNED
in huge black letters. White piles of broken glass lined the street. There were steps in front of the barber shop and we sat down on them to rest for a minute.

“Oh, shit,” Meredith said.

I looked down at her lap. A dark puddle spread across it and leaked out onto the steps.

“You peed too,” I said, half-laughing.

“That's not pee,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “
Shit
.”

She grabbed my arm. “We have to get somewhere safe. Inside. Right now.”