The Dying Ground (12 page)

“Don’t let that stop you. You’d be surprised where we show up.” She said it with the admiration of someone who’d been raised in a racially sterile environment. Chantal’s wounding comment about her lack of friends probably feasted from the same wound. “You should go whenever you get the chance.”

“So Holland was your favorite, then anonymity.”

“Something like that.”

“You don’t feel anonymous in Oakland?”

“I don’t feel anything in Oakland.”

I put my hand over my heart. “How can you not feel Oaktown, baby?”

“It’s easy if you have the view I have.” I knew she referred to the carnage of Highland hospital.

“Have you traveled a lot?”

She nodded. “My father is military. I grew up with my mother in Okinawa, but I’d visit him two or three times a year, wherever he was stationed.”

“Okinawa, huh?”

She nodded.

“Not a lot of Black folks?”

She gave a short, harsh laugh. “Just me. Or at least that’s how it felt.” I could tell from her eyes the words held a host of bitter memories. “What about you? You ever leave Oakland?”

“Oh, I been known to go over to San Francisco once in a while.”

“Seriously, Maceo.”

“A little. Here and there. Mostly Louisiana, two or three times a year. Australia once with my baseball team, West Indies with some family. Nothing alone”—I pushed her with my elbow—“or anonymous.”

“Always with a crowd?”

“Always.”

She turned and looked me dead in the eye, guessing something that must have lived right there on the surface. “But you still feel alone, don’t you?” She held up a hand. “You don’t have to answer. I can recognize it a mile away.”

The doors swung open behind us and Holly, followed by Emmet, Malcolm, Clarence, and the Samoans, spilled from the bar. They stumbled out, drunk on kinship. The laughter in their words was heavy with their own heroics, the retold stories of
spectacular drug deals, enemies beat down, and police outsmarted. I watched them for a moment, feeling the aloneness Alixe had just mentioned. There was a part of Holly that despite our friendship I could not or would not touch.

He saw us in the corner and ambled over. He grabbed the water from my hand and drained the bottle. “Wassup, man? We heading out. You wanna ride?”

“Gotta close up.”

He eyed Alixe with a greedy gaze. “What about you, Miss Lady? You wanna ride?”

She blew smoke just short of his face and didn’t bother to answer. The easiness and laughter that had been present while we talked disappeared the moment Holly arrived. It didn’t have to be explained; the pure dislike between them was chemical.

Holly grinned and gunned up to taunt her but I shook my head.

He raised an eyebrow in question but let it go when I grabbed the water bottle back. He nodded toward Alixe and said, in reference to her, “You’re on a rookie mission with this one, Maceo.”

He whispered it, a stage whisper that Alixe couldn’t decipher, but she felt the animosity and aimed back.

“You look familiar,” she said to him, taking another long drag. “You ever been treated at Highland? We get a lot of gunshot victims there.”

“Can’t fuck with the witch doctors at County Hospital.”

“Witch doctor.” She looked at me. “The second time I heard that tonight. I guess Oakland is smaller than I thought. You sure you’ve never been there?”

“Positive. Maybe I just got that kind of face.”

She studied him a little too long for comfort. Holly shifted uneasily. A story with Holly as the villain hovered just behind
her eyes. “It’ll come to me.” There was absolutely no surrender in her face. I had a premonition of one day having to choose between the two of them.

He backed away from her. “Don’t hurt yourself.” He said to me, “Later, nigga.” I watched as he climbed into Emmet’s BMW. It screeched out of the parking lot with Clarence’s Mercedes and Malcolm’s Audi close behind.

“You’re a mystery man, Maceo.”

“How you figure that?”

“You’re different from them even if you hate to admit it. I can see it, and I just met you.”

“Alixe …”

She ignored me and continued. “Holly, on the other hand, is Oakland and everything I’ve grown to hate about it since I got here. And Oakland is him. But you, Maceo, you’re something else.”

“You gathered all that from a two-minute conversation?”

She snorted. “Doesn’t take much more than that.”

“A nurse
and
a mind reader?”

“You have to be sometimes. You want me to tell you what else I think?”

“No.”

“You hate the difference, even though it makes you who you are. It would be easier just to be like everybody else.”

I backed away. Her words made me feel claustrophobic. “I gotta get back inside.”

She looked at me, surprised that I didn’t welcome her reading of me. “Something about you just doesn’t jibe with the surroundings.”

She studied me for a minute, trying to weigh her next words.

“Or with Holly.” She paused. “But you’ll probably fight that fact until it kills you.” She walked toward an army-green postal
Jeep parked on the street. “What time are you off?” she tossed back over her shoulder.

I couldn’t find my voice.

She continued anyway. “Maybe I’ll come back at closing.” She climbed in the Jeep and lit another cigarette. “Tell my sister I’ll wait in the car.”

B
y two o’clock the bar was closed tight as a drum and I was ready to call it an evening. I hadn’t expected the night to end without violence, but somehow we had managed to muddle through.

I was dead on my feet as I turned on the alarm system, but I propped Soup Can up against my side. His bones were made of liquor, so he was no help in keeping himself upright. He mumbled, hiccuped, and laughed at the end of his inaudible sentences.

As I helped him into the car I looked up at the apartments that bordered the parking lot. The locksmith on the first floor was dark but above the shop an exposed bulb in a brightly painted kitchen revealed Easter Lilly in a moment of repose. I hadn’t seen her leave the bar, but I remembered pouring her two still-full brandy glasses down the drain.

Daddy Al didn’t usually allow working girls on the property, but Lilly was the exception. She used her apartment to
handle clients, and her bedroom had an unobstructed view of the Nickel and Dime. On two occasions she’d called the police, in the middle of turning tricks, to report a robbery in progress. Each time she’d saved the bar from losing money.

Above us Lilly swayed beneath the exposed bulb, the yellow walls a sad backdrop. She held a sequined red dress out in front of her while she looked for spots and snagged seams. I knew the dress. She pulled it out every Saturday for Sunday morning services. She liked to sit front and center in her bright outfit.

As she’d told me more than once, “I wear the same dress, same color, every week. You see, I’m a truthful person and that dress tells the truth to anybody who’ll listen.” Gra’mère had tried on several occasions to pull Lilly in off the streets, but she stayed put. My guess was that turning tricks was penance for an unnamed infraction.

I smiled up at her from the passenger side of the car but she was oblivious to me as she swayed to music I couldn’t hear.

Soup Can’s rheumy eyes followed mine to the window.

“That’s some kind of dress,” I said.

He sobered up long enough to answer. “That’s some kind of woman.” He tipped an imaginary hat and spilled into the car.

I watched Lilly a moment longer as she moved seductively with the dress pressed against her chest, the arms stretched out like a partner in a tango, but stopped my vigil when she turned off the overhead light.

I got Soup Can buckled into the car and closed the passenger-side door. I was backing away when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a black sedan idling on the corner.

I remembered Smokey’s gun still crammed beneath the seat but there was no way to reach it. I’d have to navigate a locked car, a drunk, and my own fear—fear that a gun in my hand would be the final bridge to the other side.

I fumbled with my keys, dropped them, and bent down to
pick them up. I noticed then that the lights of the car were off, which obscured the license plate, but I could hear the low hum of the engine. Trouble.

I made a split-second decision and rolled under my car.

A shot that sounded like a roller-coaster whiz of hot compressed air shattered the rearview mirror on the passenger side, the mirror where I’d stood a moment before. Another shot, again nearly silent, obliterated the
E
at the end of
NICKEL AND DIME.

I scrambled like a crab, then rolled, until I had cleared the width of the car and made it to the garbage Dumpster backed against the fence. I could hear my heart in my ears, the steady
thump-thump
of blood rushing through my body, and felt the sting of rising bile in my throat. Sweat poured from my forehead and obscured my vision.

I rolled over garbage, discarded condoms, broken bottles, and weeks of sour liquids that made rivers in the ground beneath me.

“Fuck!” I whispered when I realized Soup Can was left exposed. I doubted that the shattered glass had woken him from his drunken slumber.

My view was blocked by garbage and the tires of the Cougar but I was sure I heard footsteps. I edged back toward the tight space between the Dumpster and the fence, aware that—if I made it—up and over was the only course of action, then an outright sprint.

“He ain’t here. Musta jumped the fence,” I heard someone say.

I didn’t recognize the voice but my instincts were right. Trouble.

The response to my would-be killer came from across the street, muffled; I couldn’t make out the words.

“I looked under the car. He ain’t here.”

“What the hell?” The voice in close proximity to the car had finally awakened Soup Can. “Maceo? Hey, you, what you doing? Get on away from this car!”

My heart raced. Soup Can’s voice was no longer sloppy with drink. It had the definite clarity of terror.

“Shut the fuck up, old man.”

“Get away from this car!” I heard a scuffle, then saw Soup Can’s feet as he was dragged across the lot. “Hey!”

“Motherfucker.” I saw a foot connect with the old man’s ribs. He curled into a ball to protect himself. I stayed put. “Getting in the way. What’s wrong with you?”

What came next was the sickening sound of the man’s gun hitting the side of Soup Can’s head. Overhead I saw Lilly’s light come on. The attacker saw it too because he straightened up, delivered one last kick to Soup Can, and ran back the way he came.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” the gunman yelled.

The shout from across the street was clearer, definitely in command, but I couldn’t be sure who it belonged to. I heard Lilly’s window rattle open and then water splashed down, lots of water, scalding-hot water, enough to send the river of condoms rolling toward my eyes and mouth. I stayed put, regardless.

I gave up my hiding spot once I heard the unmistakable screech of tires. I rolled out and sprang to my feet just as Lilly came down from her apartment. Soup Can lay in a tight ball on the ground. The side of his face was wet and sticky with blood and vomit.

“Maceo, where’d you come from?” Lilly pulled her sash tight to cover the nakedness beneath. She tore the sleeve from her robe and held it to the open gash on Soup Can’s cheek. He was unconscious.

“I rolled under the Dumpster after they fired the first shot.”

“They was out here shooting! I didn’t hear anything.”

“Musta had a silencer. I didn’t hear it either until the mirror shattered.”

“I was just getting in the tub when I heard voices. I had some hot water on the stove, for my bath, and when I saw that man out here I tossed it out. I might have missed.” She shrugged. “I might have got ’im.”

“Thanks, Lil.” I wanted to smile but my muscles, even the facial ones, were lockdowned in fear. I could taste the salt of my own sweat. I hoped my knees weren’t visibly shaking.

Soup Can mumbled as he started to resurface.

Lilly pursed her lips. “How they gonna beat an old man like that?”

Soup Can opened his eyes. “No good reason.”

I held his hand as sirens sounded in the distance.

The sirens brought the neighbors out in various stages of undress, and it was only minutes before the North Oakland grapevine pulled Daddy Al from his bed. I saw him storm toward where I stood in the watery stew around the Dumpster.

“What happened?” he asked me.

“We’re trying to figure that out, sir.” The patrol officer stepped in between Daddy Al and me. “May I ask your name?”

“Albert Redfield. This here is my grandson. What happened, Maceo?”

I shrugged. “I was putting Soup in the car.”

“Soup? Is that the gentleman there?”

We looked toward Soup Can, who looked depleted and old under the glare of the streetlamp.

“Yes. He had too much to drink, and I was going to drive him home.”

“You work here?”

“I’m the bartender.”

“You hurt?” Daddy Al stepped around the officer and put a soft hand on my shoulder.

“I’m fine. Just some cuts and scrapes when I rolled under the car.” Behind Daddy Al I saw the wide headlights of Alixe’s Jeep swerve into the parking lot. Just what I needed.