The Street Sweeper (11 page)

They walked through Union Square and he thought he might be in love with her. He’d never paid so much for food in his life. If only Michelle could see him now. He would look into making a down payment on a vehicle of his own. The bigger the vehicle the more it could haul but the more it would cost to run. He thought he might be in love with her. His grandmother would be pleased.

Look at all those other people walking or driving past. For once he could just look at them and not have to drink them in. Maybe as he and Chantal walked by there were people drinking
him
in;
him
, the man with her. How did they look together? Michelle would like it. She’d like the look of it. Maybe they would get married one day, have a cousin for Michelle’s little girl, Sonia, to play with. He leaned in to hear Chantal as they talked and walked. He had to. She didn’t lean in to him. It was the same crowd, same noise for her too. She faced the same thing. But she was younger. Perhaps her hearing was better than his? He didn’t notice this imbalance too much. Not too much. But his self saw it. He tried to banish the observation, to deny he’d made it. A random smile of hers ultimately enabled him to convince himself that she just really hadn’t heard what he had said to her. Maybe everything will pay off, maybe everything will work out? It could, he thought to himself.

Michelle would have seen the inequality in their body language, an inequality that might have suggested the young woman was just visiting Lamont’s life. Their grandmother might have seen it too. But there was something more eventful his grandmother wouldn’t have seen that Saturday night. Lamont was again staying with her while he looked for an apartment to replace the one he’d been living in, which was being torn down. His grandmother wouldn’t have seen it because Lamont’s bedroom door that night was closed in a way that let out less light than usual. And she wouldn’t have seen it on the Sunday morning because she had gone to church, something she had long since given up trying to get her grandson to do. She had tried to talk to him about God when he was a boy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested but just that he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She clearly liked it very much – God, Jesus and the Church. But he didn’t really get it so he hardly ever accompanied her, not even when he was a boy. He particularly did not join her that Sunday morning. Instead, he smuggled Chantal into his room the night before and joined
her
. That was the time their daughter was conceived. Not long after she was born Lamont got his own van.

No one could ever take that night away from him, even if later it seemed they could take his daughter away from him. That was still to come. First there had to have been their night together at his grandmother’s house, and the dinner in the steakhouse, and their walk through Union Square and how the men had looked at Chantal. It was the way men looked at her at the Visit Center at Woodbourne Correctional Facility a few years later. He was sharing a cell with a man named Darrell and he made the mistake one night of confiding in Darrell about the way he felt when he saw the other men look at Chantal. It had been a couple of months since she had visited Lamont but Darrell too had seen her then and, perhaps in an attempt to mitigate Chantal’s absence or perhaps merely to amuse himself, Darrell painted a picture with words that seemed to hang in the dead night air of their cell.

‘She got a life to lead. I don’t wanna hear ‘bout your innocence no more. Every dumb-ass nigga innocent in here. Think of
her
. Think of how things are for
her
. You leave anything behind for
her?
She the mother of your daughter but you left nothing behind for her. She gonna need more
money as the kid gets older. She
had
a job when you went in but maybe she
lost
her job. She need take care of the little girl, your daughter. You in here. They out there. If she don’t have anything to eat she gonna have to go to welfare. What do they wait there – forty-five days, sixty days, to get somethin’? You say she live with her mother but maybe she
don’t
no more. Her
mother
want more babies?

‘What she gonna have to do? Listen to me, once you go to prison, people gonna look at her, especially her – she a fine lookin’ woman – you know, different. Now they look at her
different
. The guy in the store, the guy in the bodega, the super – everybody. Now she has a
need, not
because she wants to get out,
not
because she wants to party. She has needs, many needs, and you ain’t satisfyin’ none of ’em. You know what I’m saying? So she needs twenty dollars for milk and shit, kids’ stuff. So she gotta go see the landlord. So she gotta go see the super and you gotta live with this knowledge. You don’t know the “whens” and the “whos” but you know why.
You
did this. Lotta guys in here go crazy; call their wives “bitch”, “whore”. I hear ’em. I seen ’em. The woman’s wrong, the landlord’s wrong. Everybody wrong but you. Your daughter’s growin’
all
the time. A good mother do whatever she has to. Credit will kill you. You know it. So think on it. How long you think it take ‘fore she reach an accommodation with the man in the bodega? An’ I
seen
her. All them things you first like about her back in the day – they speed up this man’s thinkin’.’

This was the same man, Darrell, who on another occasion talked into the night about the joy he felt at seeing his own daughter when he came out of prison the last time. She was eight years old when Darrell was last out, about the same age Lamont’s daughter was as he made his way home after day four of his six-month probation period in Building Services at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Darrell described the scene of that homecoming. His daughter’s school bus was slowing down to the stop at which she got off but Darrell knew it had to go a little past her aunt’s house first, the house where she’d been living, in order to get to the stop. As chance would have it she was looking out of the bus window and the look of surprised delight, of unadulterated joy, on the little girl’s face when she saw him waiting outside the house was something Darrell said he’d never forget. Then, he said, she ran from the bus stop towards him
with her heavy bag, ribbons in her hair and eyes wide as the moon. She called out, ‘Daddy!’ and gripped him tighter than he’d ever been gripped; including the time the police caught him again a few months later. They caught him in an alley, having chased him from his daughter’s aunt’s front porch with his daughter chasing him too and the police between them. She had called out, ‘Daddy!’ then too. He was running and saw only what was ahead of him. So he didn’t see her face then. But the look she’d had when she saw him from the school bus the day he came back the previous time and the grip she put on him, Darrell said the memory of it was what kept him going. That was what you lived for.

Lamont already knew what he lived for. When he got out of prison he was going to find his daughter, be with her and be a father to her. He was going to get a job and stay out of prison, he told Darrell, who took offence the way other people breathe, autonomically. He shot back, ‘Yeah, that’s right, you the smartest
nigga
ever drove the getaway car.’

But Lamont had to talk to someone. His stream of visitors was drying up. Chantal wasn’t visiting him at Woodbourne any more and there was no one else to bring his daughter to see him. At first Michelle did come. She even brought her husband once or twice, the professor. On one occasion he came on his own, explaining that Michelle had wanted to come but had had to take care of Sonia, their daughter, who would have been about eight by then.

Perhaps it hurt Michelle too much to see her younger cousin in prison. Perhaps she was angry with him. Maybe it had just been too hard to get to Woodbourne, too unpleasant getting there or too unpleasant just being there. She was a social worker. She had to see people like this all day, five days a week. But this was Lamont and he hadn’t always been someone like that, a case or a ‘client’. He had been a little boy without parents living with his grandmother, a little boy who had loved her so much, looked up to her, listened to her. No wonder she didn’t come.

There was a part of Lamont that hadn’t wanted her to come, hadn’t wanted her to see him like that, like the people she tried to help every day. If she came would someone tell her not to bring her husband or her daughter or her disgust or disappointment? Or the Shogun Warrior action figures? Instead, tell Danny Ehrlich it was a misunderstanding.
Tell Mr Shapiro there really
were
horseshoe crabs by the Hutchinson River. And bring our bikes. Bring some hope, if you come to the Visit Center. Would someone tell her, if she decided to come, not to bring that part of her that believed the prosecutor’s version of the events of that night when Michael and some new friend of his went into a liquor store, robbed it and ruined his, Lamont’s, life. He had always felt that she hadn’t believed him when he’d said he hadn’t known anything about it. Almost nobody believed him, not the jury, not his attorney, and not Michelle either; that was the worst. But if she ever did come he knew he wouldn’t be able to refuse to see her.

It was best that she concentrate on her own life, on her husband Charles, her daughter Sonia, her career. Charles, the professor, was an important man, no doubt a busy man, whom Lamont barely knew. There was no reason the professor should trek out to Woodbourne to see his wife’s cousin. It was good of him to have ever come. But it was natural he wouldn’t keep coming. Lamont’s grandmother came as often as she could. But she was elderly and it hurt her too much to see him there. He knew that and didn’t blame her for not coming more often.

Michael’s younger brother came to Woodbourne though, just a few times in the early days. They had never really known each other very well. What was he doing there?

‘How you doin’, Lamont?’

‘Fine, I guess.’

‘I could look in on your grandma sometime. You want me to do that?’

‘Sure, I guess. Thanks.’ What was he doing there?

‘You want me to look in on Chantal … and the baby?’

‘She’s two.’

‘What?’

‘My daughter is two … almost two and a half.’

‘Sure.’

Lamont heard Darrell’s voice in his head and the words stayed there like a bad song, a stupid song that takes you prisoner. ‘Once you go to prison,’ Darrell had said, ‘people gonna look at her, especially her – she a fine lookin’ woman – you know,
different
. Now they look at her
different
. The guy in the store, the guy in the bodega …’

‘You want me to look in on Chantal … ?’ Michael’s brother had asked. Maybe she would have stopped coming anyway. He’d tried to remember and thought she’d already stopped visiting by the time Michael’s brother started coming. But as the months passed it became harder and harder to be sure of anything outside the prison or of anything that had happened outside the time he was in prison. Maybe they had overlapped once, come on the same day, taken the same bus. Who the hell knew and what did it matter any more?

‘You don’t know the “whens” and the “whos” but you know why,’ Darrell had said. Woken one night by the echo of someone screaming in a distant cell in Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a not unusual occurrence, Lamont tried to think of happy times. His mind went to Union Square, walking around, floating, blowing around like a tumbleweed, watching himself with her, Chantal, only a few years earlier. Chantal. Look at her! Look at that woman! She was hot. She was smokin’. She didn’t ever lean in.

Darrell gave him the good news and he gave him the bad news. The good news was that there were facilities at Woodbourne to help him trace his daughter. There was a prison library, other prisoners who knew the law and even programs of visitors, qualified well-intentioned people who come and help you. You give them your daughter’s name and they’ll check the local hospitals for records of her. Start with the hospital at which she was born. If she doesn’t get sick or isn’t taken to hospital, it’s still possible to find her. Check the schools around the neighbourhood her mother lived in. It is possible to check school enrolments in other states. You can check school enrolments all over the country, if you have to. That was the good news.

The bad news, as Darrell also explained, was that if Lamont’s daughter was too young for school, he was going to have to wait till she was of school age before getting any news of her. That’s if her mother didn’t want the girl to have any contact with him and it seemed that this was precisely what she wanted. So Lamont tried to keep his nose clean, tried to be a ‘model prisoner’, promising himself he would find his daughter as soon as she was of school age. He was successful in one respect. He
was
a model prisoner and the success was marked by a transfer to
Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. It was less violent there. Prisoners there could almost ‘see the street’ so they tended to behave better.

By this time Lamont’s daughter was of school age. He could have started to try to track her down. If Chantal had married and given their daughter her husband’s name it might well be impossible. But if that
hadn’t
happened, now that she was at school it was at least possible for him to find her. It would have been possible for him at least to look for her. But where this would have been possible at Woodbourne, it was not possible at Mid-Orange. He hadn’t realised that when he was transferred – the transfer being regarded by his fellow prisoners as an enviable improvement in the circumstances of his incarceration. He hadn’t realised that just as his daughter was reaching school age he would be transferred to a prison from where it would be virtually impossible for him to locate her even without Chantal marrying some other man and taking her new husband’s name for Lamont’s daughter. Mid-Orange didn’t have the facilities to help him track down his daughter that Woodbourne boasted. Things were tight for the Department of Correctional Services, resources stretched. They always were. Mid-Orange didn’t really need these facilities, it was said, because by the time you got to Mid-Orange you could almost ‘see the street’.