The Lost Brother (3 page)

Long now is in this room in this downtown hotel. He’s spent the last sixteen years in prison; he has spent much of the month since his release in this room, carefully working his way back into the world. He reads. Goes to McDonald’s. Watches television. Goes to the movies. He’s afraid to do much more. If he goes for a walk in the city, old friends might see him, buy him drinks, get him high, suck him in; old vendettas could flame. But if he goes outside the city he’ll be a giant, harsh-looking black man with a record, walking around a white suburb, having to convince the cops who’ll find a pretense for stopping him that he’s just out for a stroll. He wouldn’t believe him if he were them.

He takes a shower. Sits under the water for forty-five minutes, appreciating the freedom to do that.

Then, still naked, he sits by the window overlooking the busy afternoon street, watching the people. He’s fascinated by the variety. By the presence of women and children. By the freedom. But how do they stay free? How do they not find themselves tested, pushed, trapped, threatened into violence?

But he doesn’t blame anyone else for his own life. He doesn’t blame society, or his absent natural father, or whites, or God. He sees life as a tree and all the differences between us as branches splitting off until you end up with people as leaves, some of which get a lot more light than others.

If you asked him what he is, where someone else might say sales clerk or carpenter or engineer, Long would say motherfucker. What are you? I’m a motherfucker. What are you good at? Being a motherfucker. Tell me, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Who do you blame? No one. What do you want? To stay out of prison. To not have to work at a teenager’s job. If someone were to describe you in one word, what would it be?

He dresses. Blue jeans, black sneakers, yellow sweatshirt.

He goes out. Down to the Mall, to watch the sky change colors as the sun sets. He listens to music through headphones, which is how convicts are used to listening to it.

The sun goes down and he stands up, heads off, walking because he knows it’s useless for a man who looks like him to flag a cab. Even the black drivers won’t stop for him. He wouldn’t stop, either, if he were them.

Moving through the city, he’s haunted by the life he might have had. He sees it in a woman’s kind eyes, in the gentle smile of a father out with his children. He’s seen it on television, read about it in books, thought about it in bed. He doesn’t cry about it anymore. That wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t meant to be.

He stops to eat at a steak house, where first the young black hostess and then the gay white waiter eye him suspiciously, force pleasant, cold politeness into their voices. Seated in the back, he sets a hundred-dollar bill on the table to calm them down. Orders his steak and fries and salad and dessert. Takes his time eating, wanting to enjoy the taste. He read once about how waiters, white and black both, didn’t like serving black customers because they didn’t tip. Long became furious when he read that. But that was then. Now he tries—his release resolution—to see himself through the world’s eyes. Here, through the eyes of a waiter who works for tips but finds one type of person consistently underpaying him; of a hostess who maybe has been abused by a man as fierce as Long looks to be. He counsels himself to feel what it’s like to deal with someone—him—who could kill you with his bare hands. Or rape you or rob you or beat you. Someone who can be counted on to refrain from taking what he wants from you only by laws and guns. That most brutal of realities dominates his relations with the world: he can take what he wants, and the world knows it. That those with physical power may abuse it is the most primal of human fears, of human evils. Power sometimes corrupts. Physical power sometimes physically corrupts. Long has sometimes been corrupted.

He finishes eating. Pays. Tips. Finishes the walk to his destination, his mother’s house. There, he looks around. This is a marginal neighborhood, but it’s not the criminals he fears; it’s the police or the press. He walks down the street, staying in the shadows as best he can. Checking the parked cars. He sees no one. So he walks backup the street and at his mother’s row house takes the three steps to her porch in a single bound.

The first floor is dark, but there’s a light on upstairs. He rings the bell. Hears the second-floor window open. Sees his mother’s head lean out. Steps back so she can see it’s him. She does. She shakes her head, stunned. Ducks back in. A moment later the door opens. He moves quickly inside. She shuts the door behind him, and they hug, he stooping way down to take her in his arms.

They move through the dark living room, seeing by the light of the bulb at the top of the stairs. They sit on the couch. He peers out the front window, checking the street.

He pulls the curtain tight. Turns on a table lamp. Looks at his mother as she looks at him.

“Henry told me you got out a month ago,” she says.

“I guess he’d know.” Long hesitates. Says, “I’m sorry, Mama.”

“It’s okay. I know you got to do things in your own time, your own way.”

“No, I mean about Henry.”

She takes a deep breath. A tear falls down her tired face. She nods. “Is that what brought you by?”

“Yes.”

“And you wouldn’t have come otherwise?”

He shrugs that he doesn’t know.

“Are you sorry for Henry or for me?” she asks.

“You.”

“And no part of you is sorry for him? Or Jessica?”

“I never met her. I never understood him.”

That’s not true. Long had understood Henry. Henry the bookworm boy. Henry the can’t-ran-or-jump boy. Henry the don’t-call-them-spics/kikes/faggots/bitches/honkies boy. He had understood Henry.

“He didn’t hate you,” his mother says.

“I didn’t hate him. We just didn’t have anything to talk about.”

“You know he was behind the library expansion down there?”

“Yeah?”

“I think he thought it was the one thing he could do for you.”

“Good thing he didn’t try anything else. He put away half the guys on my cell block. That’s why I couldn’t let you visit or call. You Ve gone to so many of his trials, sitting there so proud of him, that everybody knows you. Good thing he took your husband’s name and not our father’s.”

Her husband, Long and Henry’s stepfather, moved them to D.C. from East Saint Louis when Henry was ten and Long sixteen. He found work at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, she taught in the public schools. Henry took the stepfather’s name. Long did not. Long got arrested his first week in the city because, as a new kid, he hadn’t dared say no to the idea of stealing a car when the local corner boys had asked him along. He was released and arrested again two days later, then sent to reform school, and upon release from there lived on his own, unable to get along with a stepfather who insisted he live right or get out.

Mrs. James sighs from deep within herself. Long takes her hand. “His death hurts you, and I’m sorry for that. Are you mad? Mad it wasn’t me?”

“No.”

“It should have been. I’ve been shot twice and shanked three times. I’ve done every drug you can think of and had sex with the most disease-ridden women you can imagine. But here I am.”

“Thank God,” she says.

“God’s got nothing to do with my life.”

Mrs. James is a churchgoer, but she lets Long’s statement go.

A shadow moves over them. Long looks up. Sees a child peering out at him from between the rails, framed by the light at the top of the stairs.

“Come here, girl,” Mrs. James says.

The girl comes down.

“You’re my uncle Long?” she asks, disbelieving, eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Long answers, nervously. He isn’t comfortable around children. He hasn’t known any since he was himself one, and they seem foreign to him. Especially a beautiful girl like this.

“Are you going to eat me?” she asks him. He laughs at her seriousness. Says, “No.”

“An uncle is a father’s brother,” she says. “And the daughter of the father is the uncle’s niece.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you a bad man?”

“Yes.”

“My mommy said you weren’t really bad, just got in trouble once and couldn’t get out of it.”

“She said that?”

“She said that’s why it’s important not to get in trouble to begin with.”

“She’s right.”

“She said that you had to be some good, though, because once, when my daddy was little, some big kids were hitting him and you came running over and beat them up, and there was a hundred of them!”

Long smiles at the memory. “Five of them. Anacostia boys.”

“So then you’re really good!” the girl says.

She moves to stand very close to him. He looks back at her, appreciating how fragile the world must seem to her now. He tries his best to soften his face.

She looks from him to her grandmother and back again, and back again. Then she jumps into her grandmother’s hugging arms, crying, saying she wants Mommy and Daddy. Mrs. James rocks her, tells her they’re in heaven, she misses them too, but they’re with God in heaven.

Long has seen a lot of violence but rarely cared about it. He’s committed violence; suffered it. Not often thought about it as right or wrong, only as being. Often it’s been fun, exciting. That’s what the citizens don’t understand about the street. The excitement of crime and chase. The drama.

He looks at this girl crushed by her losses, and part of him, bitterly, thinks, So what, she’s crying like a baby, like a spoiled child who thought—what?—that it couldn’t happen to her? That she was somehow special and protected? That she was better than him?

But also, part of him sees only a child, maybe one he’d not have been so different from, if he’d grown up in different circumstances; a child hurt as he himself was, even if he never admitted as much.

He reaches out. Puts his tremendous hand on her shoulder.

She turns. Looks at him. Stops crying.

For the first time in his life, he recognizes the face of innocence when he sees it.

She says, “I even wish my brother was here. Even if he’s mean to me, I wouldn’t care. I just wish he was here.”

Long nods.

“Will you find him for me? Hey, Grandmommy, maybe Uncle Long can find him! You said the police might be bad, so maybe Uncle Long can find him!”

Mrs. James says, softly, Maybe.

Long looks at her. At his mother. At the pictures of Henry and Jessica on the end table.

Mrs. James takes the girl back to her room, puts her to sleep. Long looks around his mother’s living room while she’s gone. At the knickknacks. The nice, well-kept furniture. The painting of a white Jesus. The photos of family. None of Long. He told her to take them down because he didn’t want anyone who visited her to find out Henry had a brother and start asking questions. Long told her to take his pictures down, to not visit or call him in jail or prison, to not come to his trials. He wanted her to forget him. Bad enough he hurt himself.

He looks around the room and thinks for the millionth time how different his life is from everyone else’s, in the little ways, in the physical objects surrounding them.

His mother returns; invites him into the kitchen for tea. They sit there a moment before Long asks, “What’s going on with the boy?”

“I don’t know. The police were here for hours, asking questions.”

“What did you say to them?”

“There’s nothing I can tell them. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know if I can trust them. I know Henry didn’t.”

“Mr. Law Enforcement himself didn’t trust the police?”

“Not since the Mayor got reelected. I think Henry was handling a real big corruption investigation into the Mayor’s office and the police and all.”

“Ain’t no shortage of shit in this city. Was he working with the FBI?”

“Was Henry? You know, he didn’t talk to me much about these things, but once in a while he’d say some little thing. I remember him once saying that the Mayor was a thief and had the police in his pocket, and when I said I bet the FBI was looking into it, Henry got a funny look on his face and got real quiet.”

She sets a cup of tea on the kitchen table in front of Long. Sits across from him, not drinking anything herself. Long sips from his cup. She cries silently.

“I can’t sleep,” she says. “Can’t eat. Knowing that boy might be out there somewhere. Dear God.”

“They got the guy who killed Henry.”

“Yes. They say so.”

“Is there anyplace the boy might go besides here?”

“No. That’s why I’m so scared. He knows how to get here. It’s only a mile. If he didn’t come here, and he wasn’t at the house, and if the killer didn’t take him, then I don’t understand what could have happened.”

“Is there a friend or someone he might have gone to?”

“No. The police have questioned all his classmates and friends.”

“And they’ve searched the neighborhood. I saw that on television.”

“We had the whole congregation out looking too.”

Long shakes his head. He wants to give her hope. But he has none himself.

“The one thing I can think of,” she says, “that I didn’t tell the police, because it didn’t come to me then, the one name, is a man called Chavez. Arcides Chavez.”

“Spanish?”

“From El Salvador.”

“All the same to me.”

“This man, his wife got raped and killed last year, and Henry prosecuted the case. Lost. He almost cried about losing that case, the evidence was so clear. But you know how things are with city juries. That’s been going on a long time now, even if it wasn’t publicized before O.J. Anyway, when the defendants heard they were free, oh, they high-fived and cheered and laughed. One of them looked Chavez in the eye, grabbed his crotch and licked his lips. But Chavez, I remember watching his face when the verdict was read. Chavez, he had pride. And he told Henry thank you. Henry was saying how sorry he was, but Chavez said it was okay, thank you, you are a good man. Then, later, Chavez had something to do with Henry. I don’t know what. The boy told me, one night when he and his sister were sleeping over, that Chavez was working for Henry, or doing something. And I remembered this afternoon, because I was thinking about everything, that the boy said Chavez wasn’t afraid of anything. I think he said that Henry said Chavez was a hero, or people like Chavez are heroes. And he also said something about going to Chavez, or calling Chavez, or something, if he got in trouble.”