Cemetery Road (2 page)

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ I said. ‘But then, I didn’t think
I
was coming, either.’

‘Yeah, I hear you. I wasn’t sure I was coming myself until I got in the car. But hell, it was R.J. What else was I gonna do?’ He gave me the once-over, said, ‘I damn near didn’t recognize you. I was expecting big changes – gut like mine, male pattern baldness, a mouth full of false teeth. But hell, man, you might look better now than the last time I saw you! What, they don’t have red meat and cheese where you come from?’

‘Red meat costs money and dairy wreaks havoc on the blood pressure. Weight’s not much of a problem when your income and your doctor have you eating apples and oatmeal.’

‘Yeah, but what doctor where? What part of the world you call home now, exactly?’

‘Minnesota. St Paul,’ I said, accepting the fact that I was either going to give him this information, or hear him ask for it in a dozen more, and increasingly indiscreet ways.

‘St Paul, huh? Damn. What line of work you in up there? Something mechanical, right?’

‘I own a repair shop, yeah.’

‘Let me guess: TVs, computers, vacuum cleaners . . .’

‘A little of all that, but mostly I just fix junk. Things too old and obsolete for anyone else to be bothered with.’

‘I like it. It suits you. Now – you wanna guess what business
I’m
in?’

‘You’re a city mayor. Down in Bellwood, I think it is.’

‘“Where LA business goes to work.” That’s right.’ He flashed his discomfiting grin again. ‘You like that? “Where LA business goes to work”? I came up with that.’

I nodded to be kind.

‘Hey, come on, brother, let’s go. We’ll run by the repast for a hot minute, then drive out to my fair city, finish catching up over a big, fat-and-cholesterol laden dinner. What do you say?’

‘I’m not going to the repast, O’. My flight home’s at seven, I’m going back to the motel before I miss it.’

‘You’re going back tonight? You came for the funeral and that’s it?’

He’d been working on my nerves for a while now, but I’d finally reached my limit. I set my jaw and said, ‘I don’t feel particularly safe out here, to tell you the truth. Call me a victim of an overactive imagination.’

‘Say what?’

‘My thinking what happened to R.J. might have had something to do with us, I mean.’

He let out a small laugh, said, ‘You aren’t serious?’

‘They shot the man four times and left him in the trunk of a car, O’. You gonna tell me you haven’t been thinking the same thing?’

‘Man, that’s bullshit. That’s
crazy
.’ He checked to make sure we were alone, then lowered his voice anyway. ‘What happened to R.J. was all about R.J. He was doing what he always did, looking for trouble where you or I wouldn’t even think to try, and he got hurt. End of story.’

‘You sound awfully sure of that.’

‘I am sure of it. But before you ask—’

‘Had you seen him recently?’

‘—the answer’s no. I hadn’t. We had a deal, remember?’

‘I remember. But deals change. People change. Agreements get renegotiated.’

O’ shook his head.

A pair of groundskeepers were busy setting R.J.’s casket in the grave, apparently in a race to beat the oncoming rain. It wasn’t much of a distraction, but I let my eyes drift over in their direction as if it were.

‘It was good seeing you again, O’. If you go on to the repast, offer the family my condolences, will you?’

‘Handy, Jesus Christ . . .’

I turned to walk away and he let me go, down the hill toward the taxi I hoped was still waiting for me at the chapel.

‘You can stop running now, Handy,’ O’ called out after me. ‘Nobody’s chasing you, and nobody ever was!’

I wanted badly to believe him. He had charged me with cowardice in this way once before and I was still trying to convince myself he was right, that all my reasons for being afraid were nothing more than smoke. But I couldn’t. Just as I had the first time, I fled Los Angeles hoping to never see it again.

Unable to shake the absolute certainty that it was either that or die.

THREE

O
ne of life’s greatest mercies is the impermanence of memory.

Some memories lose their shape and form faster than others. Details dim and disappear, forever out of reach of the conscious mind. Settings shift and grow vague, while the people in them perform all nature of tricks, morphing into others and moving about at will, either imposing themselves upon a time and place in which they played no part, or vacating one that holds little meaning without them. Six men in a room become two, three become five. The variations are endless.

Other memories, meanwhile, prove themselves to be indelible.

The smile of an old girlfriend; the sound of a car crash; the pain of a knife wound at the very instant the blade invades your flesh.

For me, it has always been a voice.

It is the voice of a child. Small, female, infused with dread. When she comes to me in my sleep, she never utters more than a single word, yet the inflection she places upon it is something I have been unable to shake for going on three decades:

Daddy
.

It is a plea for mercy not intended for me. I am not the child’s father. But I am the only one there to hear her, and to see the flames of a raging fire threatening to engulf her, so I am the one she is left to implore.

Her name is Sienna.

She has fair skin and dark brown hair that radiates in curls around her face like silken ribbon. Her eyes are wide, the color of a golden sunset, and her cheeks are aglow with youth and untested innocence. She is the most beautiful black child I have ever seen, and she is only four years old.

Daddy
, she says.

She is not my responsibility. I have never laid eyes on her before, and her father is all but a stranger to me. If I reach out to save her, I am as doomed as she, because the fire is not the only danger such an act will require me to face. I know this, and I am paralyzed by the thought. But I eventually go to her nonetheless, diving into the white-hot halo surrounding her with arms outstretched, fingers beckoning.

Then, suddenly, smoke floods my lungs and fills my eyes, and the girl is no longer there to be rescued. I am alone in the fire, and it has me in its full and immutable grasp before I can even open my mouth to scream.

It is all a false memory, of course. The fire is of my own invention.

Still, even with my eyes wide open, I can sometimes feel its tendrils peeling the flesh off my bones just the same.

On the street in Frogtown, the St Paul community I call home, people call me ‘Handy’, exactly as they did in what was then called ‘South-Central’ Los Angeles over twenty-five years ago.

I can no longer recall exactly how or when I got the name, but it refers to the penchant I have always had for fixing things others have declared either beyond all hope or unworthy of repair.

Growing up, I was one of those kids who like to take things apart just to see how they work – toys and clocks, bicycles and radios – and this habit has followed me right into middle-age. My gift, if you can call it that, is an innate comprehension of machines and the mysteries they present, the cause and effect of levers and switches, motors and drive belts. It is a talent which has never earned me anything approaching wealth, to be sure, but it has at least managed to be sporadically profitable.

For the past nine years, after leapfrogging from one dead-end job and ungrateful employer to another, I have made a meager living working for myself, juggling small jobs almost anyone else could do with larger ones few others can or will take on for themselves. The small jobs, I perform in great number and on the cheap – rewiring old table lamps, installing cards and upgrade components in home computers – but the big ones I take on selectively, and for a considerable fee. The people who bring me the simple stuff are generally lazy individuals who lack the initiative to read a user’s manual, but those who hire me to tackle more challenging projects almost always have nowhere else to turn. I am the only person they’ve been able to find with either the expertise or patience the work they want done requires.

The objects of these latter exercises tend to be old and mechanical: manual typewriters and wind-up alarm clocks, belt-driven turntables and telephones with rotary dials. It is not always clear to me why their owners prefer to have them repaired rather than replaced, but I suspect they are motivated more by sentiment than common sense. There is a magic in old-school devices that newer, more technologically advanced versions of same do not possess, and sometimes, just the sounds these machines make alone are enough to render them irreplaceable to their owner.

Such as it is, I ply my trade out of a little storefront on Rice and University I share with ’Ploitation Station, a video and memorabilia shop that specializes in the movies of the 1970s Blaxploitation era. Under a constant, period-appropriate soundtrack of Motown, Stax and Sound of Philadelphia R & B, Quincy Hardaway rents out copies of
Cleopatra Jones
and
Black Gunn
on the east side of the shop, while I tinker with things that are broken on the west side. Quincy is a very fat and effeminate black man in his early thirties who would starve in a day if he were dependent upon the shop to eat, but its proprietorship is really just a hobby for him; the business was a footnote to a large estate he inherited from a wealthy aunt many years ago, and he keeps it going at no small expense primarily as a gesture to her memory.

Ordinarily, I pay little attention to the ebb and flow of Quincy’s business, especially when the object of my day’s work holds a certain fascination for me. Consumed by the challenge and nostalgia of some projects, I can sit at my bench and listen to Quincy jabber without actually registering a word he’s saying, both of us laboring to the accompaniment of the music of my youth, the hours slipping by like a train on greased rails.

It should have been this way for me with Andy Loderick’s mini-bike. When Loderick first wheeled the home-made, motorized two-wheeler in for me to see, I almost took the job of refurbishing it for free. He said he had built the thing himself over thirty years earlier when he was just fourteen, using an old bicycle frame and a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine in accordance with some mail order plans he’d ordered from an ad in a comic book, and now that his mother’s passing had brought him home from Pennsylvania where he’d gone off to college and remained, he’d hauled the stout but rusted little bike out of her garage in the hopes that I could recondition it for the entertainment of his two sons.

I told him I would do exactly that, or die trying.

Unfortunately, the bike had come to me less than twenty-four hours after R.J.’s funeral, and O’Neal Holden’s final words to me at the cemetery were still rattling around in my head. I
was
running scared, and I had been for a long time.

O’ thought I had no reason to run, any more than he did. He had always been steadfast in this opinion, and I had never been able to decide whether that made him the smartest man I knew, or the most oblivious. Either way, before I’d picked up the phone less than a week ago to hear the news of R.J.’s death, I’d been capable of acknowledging the possibility, however remote, that O’ was right and I was wrong. It was the only hope I had worth living for.

But no more. Now, R.J. was dead, murdered in a cruel and gratuitous fashion that reeked of malice, and I had come home from Los Angeles with renewed confidence in both my right to be afraid, and my need to run farther still.

For three days, I strove to go about my normal business, barely able to concentrate on the work I had before me. My distraction made mild annoyances out of things I usually have no quarrel with – Quincy’s choice in music, the smell of oil and solvent that always lightly permeates my side of the shop – and heightened my awareness of the people entering and exiting my peripheral vision. For this reason, it was I who looked up first when two young bucks sauntered into the shop just before noon, moving with the leisurely pace and unsettling silence of encroaching death.

The older and larger of the two couldn’t have been much more than seventeen. He had jet-black skin and a head crowned with a white Yankees cap over a red bandanna, the cap’s visor turned at a right-angle to his slitted eyes. His younger, fair-skinned homie wore a mushroom cloud Afro and a giant ski jacket festooned with logos on the back and along the length of both sleeves. Both boys were otherwise dressed in the standard urban uniform of oversized baggy pants and sports jersey, gleaming white tennis shoes barely visible beneath pant legs that scraped the ground in a dozen folds of excess material.

None of this by itself was cause for alarm, of course; the clothes and the attitudinal gait, even the big kid’s sneer were all too commonplace for young people today. But the younger boy, the one with the big hair and benign facial expression, had brought a distinctive aura into the shop along with his shadow, and I knew what it was even before the door had completely closed behind them.

Quincy did too. He watched the pair slink around between his racks of precious videos for a full minute, Yankee-boy fingering through the cases as if he actually knew who the hell Fred Williamson was, then said, ‘Can I help you boys?’ Asking the question in that way salespeople always do when what they really want to know is,
Why the fuck did you pick
my
place to jack?

‘We just lookin’,’ the big kid said.

His friend said nothing, but both of them continued to inch along their separate aisles, patiently and all-too conspicuously working their way toward Quincy and the counter he stood behind, right beside the cash register.

The boy with the Afro was just slipping a long-barreled revolver out from under his jacket when I eased up behind him and jammed the snout of an old .38 Beretta into the back of his left ear. He and his older dog never saw me coming because they didn’t think I could move that fast, or would care to even if I were somehow capable. They’d given me a passing glance at the door and seen little more than a sad-eyed, middle-aged black man with a salt-and-pepper beard sitting at a workbench, a meaningless screwdriver in his hand. I knew that was all they’d seen, because that was the man I often saw myself, gazing out from the mirror while brushing my teeth, or reflected in the glass of a storefront window as I passed. I couldn’t blame them for not expecting much.