Loving Day (28 page)

“Biracialism buys into racism!” I can hear the black side chanting now. “Segregation is wrong!” is yelled from the white side, without any hint of irony.

“She did great!” One Drop says, walking over to me. “Of course, she’s got home-court advantage, man. She’s one of
us
now,” he says, and then goes and joins in with all the other
us
-es in drowning out the world beyond the gate with cheers of their own.

“A donkey, without stripes, is not a horse!” the Mulattopians chant. “A donkey, without stripes, is not a horse!”

Tal is not one of them. Tal is not even one of me. Tal is whoever the hell she finds out she is eventually and even that must change with time. So I go to Sunita’s empty trailer and push the non-suicide note under the door where she can see it and no one else can. Then I go to burn the house down.

—

There’s an invisible line in the grass. If I cross it, this thing is going to happen. I want to step over it casually, but instead I just push into it. Invisible, but I can see it in my head, yellow and rubbery and I pull it when I go past, all the way around to the back of the house. I lean against my father’s car and the line is wrapped around me, waiting to pull me back to sanity, insisting I haven’t crossed it yet.

I pause for a second. Because I can’t do this. I can’t
really
do this. I will turn back. Give this up. This is crazy. This is not the proper course. Then, from beyond, I hear the saccharine stylings of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” echoing across Germantown via loudspeaker. I get the lighter out of my pocket and the invisible yellow line snaps in two retreating strips when I test the flame.

The tank on top is the only one I need. I lift it up, so it’s sitting upright on the pile. I breathe. I don’t think. I unscrew it. I smell…nothing. I but I can hear the gas spilling. There is still time to turn back. This is still my window of sanity. I think again. There are other ways of
doing this. Less literal. Less dangerous. Requiring more bravery. More patience. More time. So much more time, and I have it but I don’t know if Tal does. I look at the back wall of my father’s house. It’s not a bad house. It’s just a house. It is history given form. It is Europeans trying to build a dynasty. But where are they? Their descendants? They’re across the street, red-faced, yelling like babies for a bottle. Here, it’s just me. The Afro-Celt. Not even half of the right kind of honky. But it’s mine now. My inheritance. Tal’s too. And then, while I’m looking, I see a whole new foundation crack in the façade. Unknown of before because I never bothered standing here, looking at it, for so long. I reach my finger out, poke my pinky’s tip right inside it. This is the house they think they can just cut up, and move twenty yards? While I still own it. While Tal actually still owns it. I put two fingers into the crack, concrete crumbling down around them as they wiggle. It’s a trap. It’s always been a trap, since first construction.

I light the fire.

I actually see it. The air becoming flame. It doesn’t come to me in a moving image, but instead in three comic-book panels. The first is of a line of orange fire, one as long and seemingly solid as my own arm. It shoots out past my lighter like a ray of sun late to get somewhere. The second image is of a cloud, one that must have always been there invisibly, but now blares into light, connecting each billowing segment, taking over the space all around me I thought was reserved for oxygen. The third image is the simplest. Just flame. The last thing I see before I close my eyes. Before sound is the only sense I can handle. Before even the pain which, as I lie now on the ground, I know will come, because my face has been bathed in the fury. Unless I die, in which case I’ll be spared.

That sound, it doesn’t make a bang. It’s a pop. The sucking of air inward, into whatever portal in the universe I’ve opened. My hand starts to hurt, and I realize I’m gripping the grass. I am blind. No, I just haven’t opened my eyes. I do, and they even work, somewhat. The tears make it hard to see, but I do. And I look to the house. There is a black scorch above the space where the tank once rested. It looks like it
hurts. My face hurts so much, surely the house must too. But there is no inferno. I can hear the flames, smell the burning now, but looking at the house, I see no fire before me. Not even inside the window. And I see no top tank. I have exploded the tank. I look at my body. For the pieces of it. For the unfelt shrapnel. The evidence that I am actually going to die now. I see none of it. But I hear the fire. I think to turn to look to the sound of the fire.

There’s an inferno coming out of my father’s Bug.

Such a big flame, such a tiny car.

—

When they find me, I’m still trying to pull the propane out from where it’s lodged under the rear bumper. The heat is so strong, I try to kick the tank, but only manage to stick it farther in there. My hands are already burnt, and even though the flames are reaching up to twice my height over the back engine I am certain I can just reach in there, on the bottom, and pull the metal cylinder loose. I feel someone pulling at my feet so I just kick back and keep crawling. As I get closer to the car I am entering a reality where every molecule of my body wants to dance fast enough to become a gas. There is pain but life is pain so I reach out for the tank and get just enough that I send it rolling out and away as my hands fuse to the metal. But they don’t because I’m pulled back again before the torch shooting from the tank’s now whirling spout can bless me. At my legs, there is still normal feeling, and I know from uneven grips that a different person is pulling on each leg. I feel the grass under my chest, and the roughness of the soil as I scrape along it. And then there is air again, and the relative coolness of a late spring day, and the clouds are so thick and beautiful. I just look at them. Like when my dad was driving the Bug and I would lie down on the backseat and stare up through the window. In the blissful era before mandatory seat belts.

My eyes still blur, but I can see who saved me. I knew it would be One Drop, from the strength of the grip. The monstrous One Drop, who is reaching out to my face, and then seeing the shape I’m in, he
pulls back like this might do more damage. I get the sense from this that I don’t look too good. And the other ankle puller. It’s Sun. It’s Sunita Habersham.

Sunita Habersham. She squats down. She puts a hand to my face, where it stings. She has the sense to ask, “Baby, are you okay?” and I lack the sense to say anything but, “Oh yeah. I’m fine. I’m chilling.” To prove this, I go to get up, which turns out is a hard thing to do after your hands have been barbecued. But I rise, still. And Sun hugs me, and I realize she called me baby, which was very nice, yes. I’m in a lot of pain. And there are all the other people. They are all around us, the whole camp, everyone. Tal is there, Spider is there, almost everyone I know now and all the faces I know who have names attached I’ve never bothered to remember. But look at them. They look so concerned. And not about the blessed car, because that’s gone now, I can accept that. And not the house, because the house has not altered its trajectory in the slightest. They look at me. They care about me. My unintentional community. They stand at a distance, sure, crowding together and leaving us in the epicenter of their circle, but I think this is a gesture of respect for the emotions of the moment. And also, yeah, because of the car being on fire.

Still embracing Sunita Habersham, I turn her gently, so I can look back at the ruining of my father’s car. This accidentally aims her gaze toward the mansion. Sun just saw the house, I realize, when she pushes me away. She saw the house, and what I did to it.

“Baby,” I start to try back at her, but the slap she hits me with, it really hurts. Emotionally. But largely, physically. It’s very sobering.

“How could you do this to us!” is screamed at me. Sun is pointing. I follow her finger, to the damned house façade. The fuse box, it pops. Too late. The sparks not even remotely close to the blackened mark of the first flames climbing up the wall. Jumping to the conclusion of arson would makes no sense, out of context. But Sun has context.

“Which
us
?” I ask, and my general confusion at the moment, my blurry vision, the growing distraction of the intense biting pain emitting from large portions of my epidermis, would seem to add to my
clueless innocence. But not to Sunita Habersham, who slaps me again. Who then takes me with two hands by the front of my shirt.

“I can’t believe you could actually be so stupid,” she whispers, her nose almost touching my own.
But you burn pictures
, I want to say, but don’t.

“I didn’t do anything.” I didn’t. The house is still there. The house will always be there. They can try to move it a couple feet; it doesn’t matter. The house will always be here. It’s not my inheritance, or Tal’s, or my father’s. It’s history itself. It is its own legacy.

“I know what you did. What you tried to do. You did this to
us
,” she says, before letting go of me and walking away.

“This was
my
releasing ceremony,” I yell. I start to stomp after her until George makes my momentum halt.

“What the hell is going on?” he wants to know. I don’t know why he’s here, on the other side of the wall. I turn to look at him and see the massive black smoke cloud still coming out of my father’s dying car, so yeah I kind of know. The sirens, I can hear them coming too, getting closer, and that makes more sense, so I push George’s hand off my shoulder. And I start running toward Sun before she can get to the crowd and this is all over.

“I asked you a question. Don’t just walk away,” he demands in full cop voice.

“No. I’m running,” and I take off full speed for Sunita Habersham.

George is running too. He tackles me from behind, and I go down. I’m on the grass once more. On my face first, and then on my back when he flips me over.

“You need to calm your ass down.” George’s hands hold my wrists, his body’s weight seals my pelvis to the earth. I try to lift them, to get him off me, but his move is practiced, time-tested, without counter.

“Sun!” I yell. I lean my head back, try to see her. I do see her, the back of her once more, walking beyond where the crowd has spread for her. “Sunita Habersham!” again, but nothing.

Then, into the gap in the crowd, strolls a vision. A vision as exotic and out of place as all of us. An animal. A
zonkey
. A real life zonkey.
Stripes in the front and the back all white ass. It strolls up, into the gap in the crowd. And it looks at me. Confused. Then gives up, bends over, and starts chewing the grass in front of Roslyn’s feet. The older woman stares past the beast to the house, looking genuinely pained when she looks back in my direction. She pulls on the zonkey’s rope and walks him off as if she’s protecting his innocence.

“You reek. You’re drunk, aren’t you? Is there nothing you don’t screw up?” George leans in, seemingly waiting for me to give thoughtful answers. “I know about you and Natasha,” he whispers. “After all that time waiting for your chance, you even fucked that up.”

“That’s my father.” The voice is so calm, measured, that both George and I turn in surprise. Tal stands there, high above both of us. I can’t see her features because of the glare of the sun above. I can make out enough, though, to see that she reaches out and puts a hand on George’s arm. I feel a warm drop hit my face. It’s George’s sweat, and it’s disgusting, but for a second it creates the only place on my face not burning.

“Miss, you need to take your hands off me and step back.”

“You need to get the fuck off my pops,” my daughter says to him.

George takes his left hand off me to remove Tal’s grip from his arm.

That’s when I punch him in the mouth.

THE 14TH DISTRICT
Police Department holding cell is actually not so bad compared to the City of Philadelphia Detention Center, which is where they take me when the alcohol wears off and the pain can occupy the vacated neurons and I really start feeling the fullness of my situation. I spend the first night handcuffed to a bed. There is metal on my wrists. Bonds. But I’m actually fine with this, because in exchange they handcuff the other eighty-seven guys in the room to their beds as well, and these men worry me more than slavery metaphors.

During my booking, I am unable to provide adequate fingerprints, due to the fact that my tips have blisters on them. After much discussion about this, I am given a pen and paper to provide a handwriting sample in the meantime. My mug shot, however, goes over like gangbusters, and is viewed by not just George, who is clearly already enjoying himself immensely, but by several of his colleagues, whom he calls in to check out my portrait on the screen so that their day may be brightened. On being returned to my prison hospital bed, George, his jaw clearly swollen from where I popped him, takes me aside so that I can view the masterpiece myself.

Looking at the photo, I don’t recognize this man. He has no eyebrows. His skin is red and shining from the ointment applied by the nurse that afternoon. His eyes are dulled by painkillers. He is trying to smile his cracked lips, but his cheeks hurt so much that his grin comes off as a grimace. Gone too is the hair on my head, and I reach one gauze-covered hand to feel that my hairline has been burnt back past my ears.

“You look like the Red Skull,” George tells me.

“Come on, man. I’m sorry. You gotta let me go.”

“Actions have consequences,” George tells me, smiling, pausing enough for me to take in the message privately even though there are two others in the room. Then, “This is how it works. You assaulted an officer.”

I didn’t assault an officer, intentionally. I assaulted a George. I explain this to Sirleaf Day, via his answering machine, which tells me in response that he is “out of the country pursuing investments, leave a message and I’ll be sure to get back to you.” After three days, I’m not so sure, so I then explain this to the public defender before my arraignment and urge her to bring up this backstory to the judge, but she is not really interested in hashing it out at this time. My assigned attorney is more focused in setting bail, aiming for a reasonable $20,000. I question her strategy when the bail comes in at $100,000 instead, due to the seriousness of my crime and the fact that I’m a flight risk. I also get a trial date. In a month.

The last time I see George is when he stops by my table after the judgment to say, “I’m taking Tosha to Sandals Jamaica tomorrow, so don’t expect any visits. You enjoy your vacation too.”

Sunita Habersham is not going to rescue me. I know this. And I know why. And I understand, too, although I desperately want her to, although I fantasize about it, although once a nurse comes by in flipflops and I think it’s Sun for enough seconds to be crushed by the truth. When Tal doesn’t appear, I know why as well. Because she knows what Sun knows now. That I tried to burn her beloved house down. And Tal might even know why I tried to do it, that it was for her as much as
anything, but I know she doesn’t forgive me. Forgiveness comes later in life, after you’ve created enough disasters of your own. The biggest revelation, I’m surprised, is how many other Mulattopians join in the silence. No Roslyn with her army of lawyers, not even to gloat. No Spider. Because they all know. That much is clear by the third day, when they release me to the general prison population and no one comes to bail me out. They all know. About my intentions. About the house. I know that they all know.

But I know more than this. Because when the charges are listed—Assaulting an Officer, Resisting Arrest, Burning without a Permit—that not one of them told my story. Because for days I wait for the real charges to hit: First Degree Arson, Attempted Arson, Destruction of Historically Protected Property, and so on. But they never come. The mulattoes never snitch on me. They protect their own.

—

My cellmate, Héctor, doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. He doesn’t talk too much, which is a good thing, because the cell is too small to navigate through awkward conversation. His is the top bunk, and there he cries every night, which really frees me up to start doing the same if I’m so moved. Besides the one morning he says
“La vida es triste,”
and shrugs, we don’t talk about it. I like it in the cell better than in the lounge, which is much too communal for my tastes. The scary black dudes, the scary white dudes, and the scary Latino dudes all hang in their own sections of the hall, surrounding a loose collection of just plain scared unaffiliated dudes who sit in the middle waiting to see which tribe is going to victimize them. I try to hang over by the black dudes, but get the look that tells me I’m a racial suspect, so go sit on the edge of the Latino section a noncommittal distance from Héctor. In the great American mulatto tradition, I pass myself off as a Puerto Rican. By the end of the first day, this proves to be a wise decision, and the only cost is the sacrilege of lying about both my dead parents’ entire ancestral lines. Which is not a small cost, and hurts every time I repeat it in my pathetic high school Spanish. It hurts more than later, when one of the
guys calls me the “Crimson Coconut,” a name which sticks in the ward across cultural lines, even though the burning redness on my face is already starting to fade away. But it’s worth the humiliation to be allowed into even the outskirts of a tribe.

My first visitor comes two days later. It feels like much longer, so much so that when I get called up, I tell them my name again, because I think they have the wrong guy.

“Someone, they love you,” Héctor says from the bulge of the top bunk. He sounds slightly surprised.

Sunita Habersham sits in a crowded cafeteria-style room at a round table, and doesn’t look up at me even when I sit down across from her. In front of her, a stack of comic books sits in a perfectly organized pile, but even still she adjusts the corners of it with her hands, identifying some invisible lack of symmetry. When I say hi, she says, “I got you this week’s pull list, and last week’s; I don’t think you read them. I could have brought in more but Spider chickened out. He’s scared of prisons. He’s waiting in the car.” Sun’s voice trails off at the end, and then she finally looks up. And then she stares straight at me. And we’re not talking.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and in doing so realize while I truly need to express these words, and am completely and eagerly willing to say them, they are also utterly inadequate.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Sunita asks me too loud, but nobody else in the place turns around, because that is not just an appropriate question in this room, it is the whole theme. It should be painted in ornate gilded letters on the wall. But Sun knows what I was thinking. And the only addition I could add would be offensive: that I thought I could pull it off.

“Tal wants to come, to see you. I told her not to—I don’t want her to see you like this, Warren.”

“Me either. But please tell her I love her. Tell her I’ll talk to her when I get out.”

“We can try to get the cash for the bond, but that amount…Jesus. I know Roslyn has it, but she’s been bugging since Loving Day. The
protesters are still there, you know that right? The white protesters—the black ones left, I think they had to go to work. Somebody got the city to serve eviction papers this morning, now they’re saying all the propane tanks constitute a fire hazard. Roslyn’s told everyone to kill their cell phone service, instituted a ‘media blackout.’ She’s even telling people you tried to destroy the ‘sacred house.’ ”

“To be fair, I did try to destroy it.” I have to admit.

“Yeah, but she’s acting like that shit hole is the Temple Mount. All this while the construction crew has started chopping it up.” Sunita starts laughing, covers her mouth when she can’t stop. I smile but am silent. I want to laugh too but am in jail and that isn’t funny. “I can’t deal with all this. Your court date isn’t for weeks, but I think I have to get out of there. Tal’s fine, has everyone around her. But I need a break. Spider’s going down to work a zydeco festival in Louisiana next week. I’m thinking of going, but I don’t want you—”

“Go.”

“I went on your computer, emailed your friend Tosha. She said she thinks she can get her husband to drop the charges but I don’t know how soon—”

“Go on the trip, get a breather,” I tell her. “I’ll wait here till you get back.” And Sunita Habersham starts to smile a bit at that too, as I intended, but looks at me again and stops.

“Wow. You really fucked up.”

“Yeah. I do that sometimes.”

“Yeah, me too,” Sunita Habersham tells me, then pushes the comics across the table.

It won’t be for another hour, when I’m be back in my cell on my mattress, that I’ll open the first comic on the pile,
The Manhattan Projects
12. It will take until then for me to see the note that I’d forgotten I’d even written to Sun, as it falls out onto my coarse blanket.

Thanks for leaving this. Love you too
, it now says at the bottom in Sunita Habersham’s handwriting.

—

I finally manage a successful career in comics, both as a merchant and an artist. The comic books I read to the point of memorization, I sell. Their market value in cigarettes and stick deodorant proves to be so high that I use that boon to trade for pencil and paper to start drawing daily comics of my own to cash in on the boom. The result is really some of my best work; it’s like printing money. Thursday’s full-page spread of our local representatives from the Latin Kings portrayed as superpowered mutants goes to the highest bidder for three breakfast muffins and a mini-tube of Aquafresh. Some of the black crew are so impressed by it that they’re even talking of claiming me now.

Ten days later, the guard comes to my cell and gives me three minutes to gather my things and get out.

“Holy shit, the mutts bailed me,” I say when he leaves. Héctor hears me.

“ ‘Mutts.’ This gang you say you hang with, what’s up with that?” Héctor hits me with this as I’m rushing around, gathering my remaining illustrations in a pile.

“They’re just a bunch of mixed people. Half-black and -white folks. African and European. A little Indian. They got a kinda club.”

“So, they like Dominicans or Puerto Ricans or something?” Héctor rolls to a sitting position on his mattress, and from my bed I get a good view of his hairy beige feet.

“No. They’re American. Just black and white. And Indian, sometimes.”

“But yo, how is that different?” Héctor bends over, so I see the tips of his little dreads and his eyes staring at me, confused.

“I don’t know. They speak English,” is all I can think to offer.

“I speak English too, bro,” Héctor says, lying back on his bunk, finished with the discussion.

The mutts didn’t bail me out. There is no bail. There is no bail because there are no more charges. There is no one waiting for me but a clerk from my public defender’s office, who delivers this news and no more. As I walk back on the street, though, I decide to read my release as a silent gift. From Tosha. And I silently thank her as I rush toward Suburban Station and the way toward home.