Richard Powers (62 page)

The prose sank into leaden detail: measurements, times, charred inventories. I read over the destruction of my life as written by a committee of public servants. The ten-year-old girl who’d bitten the restraining fireman’s hand while trying to break free and rescue her mother could not have survived one paragraph without outside support. I skimmed the last two pages and looked up. Ruth was staring at me, hopeful, afraid. “You see? You get what this means?”

She swirled the pages and found the one she was after. She turned it toward me, fixing the indictment with her fingernail. In so many stories about mixed-race people in fiction, their fingernails always identify them as really black. Ruth’s fingernail hung on the word accelerants . Presence of trace accelerants throughout the foundation level.

“You know what those are?”

“Oily rags. Half-empty gas cans. The kind of stuff Mrs. Washington kept in her basement.”

She wavered and glanced at Robert. She rallied. “Things deliberately planted to speed the rate of burn.”

Robert nodded. “Somebody accelerating.”

“Where… How do you…” I looked back down, reading furiously. “Nothing here says anything like that.”

Robert bit into his words. “Now that’s a fact.”

“Accelerants mean arson,” Ruth said.

I sat there shaking my head. “It doesn’t say that anywhere. This report doesn’t even—”

A one-note, mirthless laugh from Robert cut me off. I was a hopeless naïf. Worse: a classical musician.

With brothers like me, the fire would have stayed an accident forever, just like the authorities wanted it to.

“And if it’s arson…” Ruth was waiting for me to follow her. But her eyes knew this was a losing proposition.

Robert focused on a grim horizon. “If it’s arson, it’s murder.”

I looked down at the smudged photocopies for some fact to steady me. “Ruth. Listen to what you’re saying. There’s no way. It’s insane.”

“It’s at least that,” Ruth agreed. Robert Rider sat still.

Then the fire that took my mother rose up through my spinal fuse and burst in my brain. The floor softened beneath me. I reached out and braced my hands against the booth, a block chord spread across the keys but making no sound. My decade-old nightmares of Mama’s suffocation flooded back, in full, adult daylight. I couldn’t let myself think the thought. The thought I was thinking.

I looked up at Ruth. Her face smeared. She saw my animal panic. “Oh, Da didn’t have anything to do with it.” Her voice held some fraction of pity, behind the disgust. “The man’s not clever enough to know what started the fire. But he’s responsible for her death, just as if he had.”

The craziness of her words brought me back. “Ruth. You’ve lost your mind.” She stared at me with something ready to protect itself at any cost. I dropped my eyes down to the nonexistent evidence. “If the police report found evidence of arson, why didn’t they say it was arson?”

“Why bother?” Ruth looked out over the crowded room. “Nobody was hurt. Just a black woman.”

“Then why bother even to mention the accelerants in the report?”

Ruth just shrugged and stared into nothing. But Robert leaned forward. “You have to know how these people work. They put in the barest minimum of fact, so they can’t get busted if it ever comes back to them. But they’re never going to put down one single word that might turn the thing into a case. Not if they don’t have to.”

“I just don’t understand. How could it have been deliberate? Who could have wanted…”

Ruth held her head. “White man married to a black woman? Six million people in New York were holding that bomb.”

“Ruth! There was no bomb. The furnace exploded.”

“The fire was helped along by something somebody put there.”

There had been violence. Steady, lifelong. Words, muffled threats, shoves, spit: all the confusions I’d seen in childhood and refused to name. But not this level of madness. “Listen. If this was an attack against a mixed-race couple, then it was an attack on Da, as well. Who’s to say the attacker was…”

“Joey. Joey.” Ruth’s eyes filled with liquid. She grieved for me. “Why are you hiding from this? Don’t you see what they have done to us?”

Robert lowered the edge of his enormous hand to the table. “If the police had had a black suspect for this thing, the man would have fried six weeks after the crime.”

I looked up at this stranger. How long had they been working on this theory together? Where had they gotten these photocopies? My sister had said more about her mother’s death to this outsider than she’d ever shared with me. I sat rubbing water droplets off the outside of my glass. We’d been born in the same place, within a few years of one another, of the same parents. Now my sister lived in another country.

“Da collected on Mama’s life insurance.” I studied her as I spoke. I only now realized how criminal we’d been toward her. Most of that insurance money went into launching Jonah and me into performing orbit.

Ruth had gotten only a fraction, for college tuition. And now she’d quit school. “If the insurance company had even a shred of evidence to make them doubt…”

Ruth looked at Robert, their proof wobbling. I’d wanted only to relieve her. I’d done just the opposite.

Robert shrugged. “I’m sure the insurance company looked into it, as far as they were able to. They couldn’t prove fraud. Once that wasn’t the issue, they couldn’t be bothered with how the woman died.”

“Ruth. Listen to me. You know that Da would never have let this go by without an investigation. Not if there had been the smallest thing to go after. Any suggestion at all.”

Ruth stared back. I was failing her, attacking. But she still needed me for something I couldn’t understand. “The man is a white man. He has no concept of such things. He needed it to be an accident.

Otherwise, her death is on his conscience.”

And Ruth: she needed the opposite. Mama murdered, and by someone we’d never know. Someone who might not even have known us. It was the only explanation that left her anyplace in the world to live.

I lifted up the sheaf of copies, their body of evidence. “What are you planning to do with this?”

They looked at each other, too tired to enlighten me. Ruth shook her head and lowered it. Robert grimaced. “Black person’s never going to get a case like this looked into.”

I had the bizarre sensation they wanted me to get Da—some white person—to press the case. “What on earth do you want from me?” I heard the words leave my mouth and could not take them back.

Ruth pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. “Don’t worry, Joey. We don’t want anything from you.” Robert shifted in the booth. He looked down on the bench between them as if he’d dropped something. I felt a surge of admiration for the man, based on nothing but his willingness to be here. “We just thought you’d want to know how your mother…” Ruth’s voice turned liquid. She took the copies away from me and slid them back into her satchel.

“We have to tell Jonah.”

Some mix of hope and hatred rose in my sister’s eyes. “Why? So he can call me crazy, just like his little brother did?” Her lip trembled, and she bit it in, just to make it stop.

“He has a better head for… He’ll want to know what you think about this.”

“Why?” Ruth said again, her tone now pure self-defense. “I’ve been trying to tell him something like this for years. I can’t say shit to him without him busting my ass. The man despises me.”

Her mouth crumpled like a rear-ended car. Her eyes welled over and one glinting thread started down the walnut of her left cheek. I reached over and took her hand. It didn’t pull away. “He doesn’t despise you, Ruth. He thinks you don’t—”

“Last time I saw him?” She flipped her hand up toward her new hair. “He said I looked like a doo-wop backup singer. Said I sounded like Che Guevara’s diary. He just laughed in my face.”

“He was probably laughing in pleasure. You know Jonah…” I wasn’t halfway through the sentence when it hit me. “Hold on. You mean you’ve seen him recently?” She looked away. “He never told me… You never said anything!” I took my hand away from hers. She scrambled for it back.

“Joey! It was only five minutes. It was a bleeding disaster. I couldn’t say anything to him. He started shouting me down before I even—”

“One of you two might have told me. I thought something had happened to you. I thought you might be in trouble, hurt…”

She hung her head. “I’m sorry.”

I looked at her. The little girl who’d sung “Bist du bei mir” at her mother’s funeral. “Ruth. Ruth.” Another syllable and I was finished.

She didn’t look at me, but rooted around in her satchel for her wallet. Pay and run. Then she stopped and blurted, “Joey, come with us.”

My eyes widened and my right hand pointed downward: Now? I turned to Robert. His face set into that look: If not now, when? The fire—their theory about it, our argument—was just a passing item on a more sweeping agenda. “Come… Where are you going?”

Ruth laughed, a good alto laugh, from the gut. She wiped her eyes dry. “All sorts of places, brother. You name it, we’re headed there.”

A grin like the sun broke across Robert’s face. “It’s all happening. Anything we work hard enough at.”

I kept still. I was just happy, for a second, to have my sister back.

“We need you, Joey. You’re smart, competent, educated. People are dying, in Chicago, down in Mississippi. My God, over in Bed-Stuy. People dying by miles, because they refuse to die by inches anymore.”

“What are you…?”

“We’re working for the day, brother. It’s easy. We’re everywhere.”

“Are you with some kind of organization?”

Ruth and Robert traded glances. They made an instant negotiation, appraising my file and deciding on discretion. Robert may have made the call, but my sister agreed. Why should they trust me, after all? My side was clear. Ruth reached across the table and took my elbow. “Joey, you could do so much. So much for people like us. Why are you…?” She glanced at Robert. He wasn’t going to help her. I blessed the man for refusing, at least, to judge me. “You’re stuck in time, brother. Look at what you’re peddling.

Look who’s buying. You don’t even see. How can you play that jewelried shit while your own people can’t even get a job, let alone protection under the law? You’re playing right into the power-hoarding, supremacist…” She checked her volume. “Is this the world you want to live in? Wouldn’t you rather work for what’s coming?”

I felt a million years old. “What’s coming, Ruth?”

“Don’t you feel it?” Ruth waved at the plate-glass window behind me—the world of 1967. I had to keep from turning around to look. “Everything’s shaking loose. It’s all coming down. New sounds, everywhere.”

I heard Jonah singing, in a funky falsetto, “Dancin’ in the Streets.” I raised my head. “We play a lot of new music, you know. Your brother is very progressive.”

Ruth’s laugh was brittle. “It’s over, Joey. The world you’ve given your life to has played out.”

I looked down at my hands. I’d been playing some piece on the tabletop. As soon as I noticed my hands, they stopped. “What do you suggest I do instead?”

Ruth looked at Robert. Again, the warning flash. “There’s more work to do than I can begin to tell you.”

An awfulness came over me. I didn’t even want to look at the evidence. “You two aren’t involved in anything criminal, are you?” I’d lost her already. I had nothing more to lose.

My sister’s smile tightened. She shook her head, but not in denial. Robert took a chance far bigger than mine. “Criminal? Question doesn’t mean anything. You see, the law has been aimed against us for so long. When the law is corrupt, you no longer need to treat it like the law.”

“Who decides this? Who decides when the law—”

“We do. The people. You and me.”

“I’m just a piano player.”

“You’re anything you want to be, man.”

I backed into the corner of the booth. “And who are you, man ?”

Robert looked at me, ambushed, reeling. I’d gone for anger; I got pain. I heard my sister say, “Robert’s my husband.”

For a long time, I could produce no answer. At last I said, “Congratulations.” All chance of feeling glad for them was lost. I’d have played at their wedding, all night long, anything they wanted. All I could do now was accept the news. “That’s great. How long?” Ruth didn’t answer. Neither did her husband. The three of us twisted in place, each sentenced to a private hell. “When were you going to tell me?”

“We just told you, Joe.”

“How long have we been sitting here?”

Ruth wouldn’t look at me. Robert met my eyes and murmured, “Actually, we weren’t going to tell you at all.”

My back slammed into the booth. “ Why?What have I done to you?”

Ruth swung her face toward me. Her look said, What have you done for me? But she saw me, and broke. “It isn’t you, Joey. We didn’t want the news…to get back.”

“Get back ? You mean to Da?”

“Him. And…your brother.”

“Ruth. Why? Why are you doing this to them?”

She folded into the man and put her arm around him. He hugged her back. My brother-in-law. Her protection against my words. Against all that the rest of us had done to bust her ass. “They’ve taken their stand. I’m not their business anymore.”

Everything in the declaration sounded forced and wrong. From across the booth, my sister’s marriage

—I could hardly think the thing—seemed doomed before it started. “They’ll want to know. They’ll be happy for you.” I didn’t even sound feeble.

“They’d find some way to insult me and my husband both. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Don’t you dare tell them. Not even that you saw me.”

“Ruth. What’s happened? What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing’s got into me, brother. Everything was in me already. From birth.” She put her arm out on the table for me to examine. Physical proof.

“How can you treat Da like this, Ruth? The man’s your father. What has he ever—”

She tapped her satchel, the manila folder. “He knew. The man knew all about these reports, a month after it happened.”

“Ruth, you don’t know for—”

“He never said a word to us. Not then. Not when we got older. Everything was always just an accident.