Them (30 page)

Eventually, Wendell took a few steps toward Barlowe, then stopped. He looked like he was trying to figure out what to say and where to begin.

Barlowe peered into the crowd. He saw Miss Carol Lilly staring back.

Finally, standing amid the gathering, Henny Penn raised a hand. Dressed in a brown suede jogging suit, topped by a leather jacket, he wore dark sunshades. He had on new sneakers, and there was an unlit cigarette stuck on one ear.

“S'cuse me, Slim. That was a nice li'l bullshit speech, but I got somethin to say!”

Barlowe waited.

“I know you a good man and whatnot, but I thought you had more sense than that! You ain't makin no sense, man!”

“You got your opinion; I got mine,” snapped Barlowe.

Henny Penn took a few steps toward him. “I don't kere what you say! This ain't our fault! We ain't do nothin! How you gon stand up there wit a straight face and blame us!”

He pointed toward the house where the white people lived.

“What you protectin
them
for?! They don't kere bout you! You can jump up and down all you wont, but it is what it is, bro. It is what it is, and you cain't blame us!”

A few people in the crowd nodded in agreement. Somebody toward the back shouted, “Thas right!”

They nodded and nudged each other, then looked to Barlowe for a response. Barlowe opened his mouth to speak, but he held his tongue. That feeling came back. That feeling in his chest returned, and he struggled to get it under control.

Henny Penn spoke again: “Out chere protectin white folks! I tell ya what! You better be careful!
They
got theirs comin! If you ain't careful, you might git what they git!”

Before he could finish, Barlowe lunged at him. He cuffed Henny by the collar and yoked him once. Henny tried to pry himself loose, but he couldn't. Barlowe's hands were too strong.

After some struggling, Wendell and a few others pried them apart. When he was free from Barlowe's clutches, Henny Penn stepped back and straightened his clothes. A few of his boys closed ranks around him. One of them stuck a hand inside his shirt and peered at Barlowe.

Barlowe glared back. “You got somethin for me?! Huh?! What you got?!”

By now, Henny Penn had collected himself. He shrugged and waved off his bodyguard. “Truth is truth, bro! Thas all to it!”

Barlowe said nothing. He stood there breathing hard, his fists still balled in a knot.

Mr. Smith came over and placed a hand on Barlowe's shoulder. “C'mon, son. C'mon. Don't get dragged into this.”

Barlowe scanned the crowd. His eyes landed again on Miss Carol Lilly. He wondered what was going through her tangled mind. Her gaze dropped to the ground.

Other people began walking away. One by one, they departed. A few stayed, waiting to see what might happen next.

“Cmon, boy,” said Mr. Smith. “Les go on home.”

He steered Barlowe away from the block. Some folks stood back and watched, mumbling among themselves as the two men left.

Somebody shouted after them: “Don't blame us!”

Mr. Smith shook his head sadly. “This is how it always happens. This is how it always happens.”

Barlowe said nothing. He kept on walking. Mr. Smith patted him on the shoulder again. “You did the right thang, boy. You did the right thang.”

Barlowe kept quiet. He seemed baffled, and a little ashamed. What had gotten into him, anyway? He didn't know. All he knew was things were getting out of hand.

When they reached their end of the block, the old man inspected the sidewalk in front of his home, looking for litter to pick up from the ground. Barlowe said a grateful good-bye and headed up the walk toward his house. He paused near the curb and studied the spot where he had found Viola's body.

Maybe she's in a better place,
he thought.
Maybe she ain't cryin inside.

 

The evening dusk had faded into blackness now. The streets of the Old Fourth Ward were deathly quiet, except for the creaky sound of Ricky's grocery cart. As usual, the cart stopped midway along Bradley Street. As usual, Ricky stood in front of 1712, the modest one-story blue frame house.

There were lights on, and people inside. A man with a thick mustache and slanted eyes parted a curtain and peered back at him. Ricky looked down at his feet, checking to see if he might be standing too close. He pushed the cart across the street, to the exact spot he had marked with a hammer and chisel some years ago.

A hunnerd feet
. He was safe now.
A hunnerd feet
. They couldn't run him off.

Seeing Ricky move away, the man peering through the window disappeared.

Ricky stood there, staring, barely moving. While he watched, a light blinked on in a side bedroom. Ricky closed his eyes tight and ran his mind from top to bottom, through every inch of that room. He knew the approximate height of the windowsill. He knew the exact location of the single closet. He even recalled the annoying bedroom door, which, set on slanted hinges, always swung closed on its own. The door led out to a narrow hallway and to the other rooms—all warm repositories of Ricky's fondest memories.

Ricky was born in that house. The old folks said the midwife who tended his mama mistakenly left behind a swatch of his umbilical cord. How else to explain his lingering fixation on that place, even after his family moved away?

Ricky was fifteen when his family left for Mississippi. He ran away twice, each time returning to the Old Fourth Ward. After the third trip to Atlanta to retrieve his son, Ricky's daddy gave up trying. He couldn't afford to keep him put.

Old-timers in the ward said Ricky had always been “slow.” So it came as no surprise that he had trouble accepting that a new family lived in his old house. One night, the new family, seeing the stranger yanking on their doorknobs, called the cops and had Ricky arrested. A judge ordered him to stay at least one hundred feet away from the house.

Later, Ricky went straight back to the house and stood at the curb. He placed one foot before the other and counted off one hundred times, then marked the spot to establish where he could legally stand.

The people who lived there made peace with Ricky's strange obsession, once some old-timers assured them he was no threat.

Now Ricky usually went past the blue frame house twice a day: once in the morning, when he left the ramshackle outdoor tent settlement he shared with homeless friends, and once in the evening, after returning from collecting his garbage loot.

Mostly, he paused only briefly, as if to confirm the house was still there. This night, after the trauma of his near-arrest, Ricky came seeking the comfort of a familiar place. He stood there for a long while and stared. A single tear filled his eye.

A
fter Ricky Brown's near-arrest, relations in the Old Fourth Ward grew testier. Whites there took some of the hardest hits. Bricks were flung through several more windows; a few tires were slashed. An attempted burglary set off a house alarm. And two other mailboxes were set aflame.

The troubles led whites to press forward with Greg Barron's plan to hire private security patrols. When neighborhood blacks bucked the plan, whites hired a company anyway. The security patrols operated much like the paper boy, delivering services to individual subscribers. They provided round-the-clock surveillance at specific houses—numbers 1022, 1271 and 1650 on Randolph Street. Numbers 1220, 2023 and 2409 on Howell Lane. It went on like that for several blocks until most white families were covered.

Whites weren't the only people feeling pressure in the ward. In time, the tension wore on black folks, too, so much so that some began to turn on one another. As more real estate changed hands, blacks began to speculate about who among them would be next to collaborate with the enemy; who among them would be the next to sell?

William Crawford came to the house one day to remind Tyrone that it was past time to get rid of the pigeons. Crawford had set a one-month deadline and made sure Barlowe knew it was
his
deadline, too. Tyrone cursed Crawford's name to the highest heavens and refused to speak to him after that. He insisted that he had already begun taking steps to get rid of the birds.

“Look,” he told Barlowe one day. “The cage is wide open. They can go free, but they act like they don't even know it. They won't leave.”

When he left to take a shower, Barlowe gave it a try. He went to the opened cage door and coaxed one of the birds onto his finger. He waved an arm, hurling the creature into the air. It fluttered wildly, then returned to the cage. Barlowe tried shooing the two other birds away. They flitted to the Gilmores' fence, then returned to the back porch when Barlowe went inside.

Later, Tyrone came out of his room all dressed up. Barlowe sat in the living room, reading the paper.

“Hey, chief.”

Barlowe looked up from reading.

“I'm goin to see this honey I met.”

“Winn-Dixie?”

“How you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Nice girl,” Tyrone offered. “Real nice. She got religion, too…”

Barlowe said nothing. He had noticed something peculiar about Tyrone lately. On Saturday afternoons, he sometimes got dressed up in a suit and tie and disappeared.

Tyrone turned to leave, then stopped in the doorway. Shifting from one foot to the other, he looked like there was something he wanted to say but hadn't figured out how to put the thought together.

Barlowe watched him squirm. “Whas up, Ty? Whas on your mind?”

“I heard about what happened wit Ricky Brown.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. People been talkin, Unk.”

“What they been sayin, Ty?”

“They sayin you been actin kinda strange since that white gal showed up next doe.”

Barlowe folded the newspaper. “Whas actin strange, Ty?”

“Actin like you done gone Republican or somethin.”

Barlowe nodded and kept his eyes fastened to Tyrone.

“You think I'm gone Republican, Ty?”

“You my unk.”

“Yeah, but do you think I'm gone Republican?”

Tyrone shifted on his heels again. “I jus wont you to be careful, thas all, man.”

An uneasy silence followed. Then: “Ty?”

“Yeah?”

“What would you think if I wasn't your uncle?”

“I don't wanna get into that, man. I jus wont you to be careful, thas all.”

Barlowe stared at him. “I'll be all right, Ty. I'll be fine.”

Tyrone went out the door.

Barlowe left the house early for work the next morning. Before he reached the car, he sensed there was something wrong. It was the car itself, sitting out front. Its balance and symmetry seemed off-kilter. He leaned down on one knee, near the curb and inspected the two right-side tires. Then he got up and rushed around to the other side. He cursed and stood there awhile.

All four tires had been slashed. The car rested on its rims.

He looked up and down the street, like he half-expected to see somebody running away. There was no one in sight, except Clarence Sykes. Clarence walked toward the bus stop on Irwin Street, headed to work. He walked with the reluctant shuffle of a man being led to a prison cell.

Barlowe also had to get to work. He had an important print run scheduled. He left the car and trailed Clarence to the bus stop. Somebody shouted to him from across the street. “Yo! Yo! Yo!”

A man dressed in loose-fitting African garb and dark sunshades sat atop a big boom box. “Yo! I got the latest R. Kelly!” He held up a bootleg CD.

Barlowe ignored him and got on the bus.

After work, he caught the bus back home. When it reached his stop, he got off and headed in the opposite direction, away from the house, toward the other end of Randolph Street. He walked the few blocks and stopped in front of the Purple Palace. There were two people, a man and a woman, standing on the porch. They appeared to be arguing.

Across the street, a group of teenage boys played basketball, while older men sat around in chairs, playing Spades. As Barlowe approached, somebody flicked a lit cigarette on the ground, near his shoe. Barlowe panned the card players and settled on Henny Penn, who at that same moment was studying him.

“My
main
man!” Henny lit another cigarette. It dangled loosely from his mouth.

Barlowe nodded. “Henny.”

Henny Penn's eyes narrowed. “You gon be makin any pretty speeches taday?”

“Naw,” said Barlowe. “No speeches.”

“Good. I toldja, I got no use for pretty speeches and whatnot.”

Henny dabbed the cigarette, then played a card. He glanced again at Barlowe, then cut his eyes to a pouch resting on a chair nearby. Barlowe took a few casual steps forward and stopped between Henny and the pouch.

Henny tried to appear unconcerned. After a long moment he glanced, almost pleadingly, toward one of his bodyguards. The fellow had turned his back to flirt with a prostitute passing by.

Now there was silence, except for the sound of cards slapping the table. Henny glanced at Barlowe, then frowned, confused by the strange look on his face.

They say a lion wags its tail slightly before it strikes. At that moment, a smile, barely perceptible, formed on the corners of Barlowe's mouth. Henny noticed the smile and shifted uneasily in his seat. He stretched his arms, pretending to yawn. Then he made a move to stand and stretch his legs.

It was too late. Barlowe pounced. In one quick motion, he sprang forward, reached down and smacked Henny Penn across the face. He hit him so hard that Henny's head jerked sideways. Barlowe followed with a flush punch that knocked him out of the chair. Henny Penn spilled to the ground, still clinging to his cards. Both feet shot straight up in the air.

Startled by the sudden outbreak of violence, the other men sitting nearby stood or pushed back from the table, knocking over chairs.

Henny Penn's bodyguard looked at him, awaiting instructions on what to do. Henny moaned, turned over and rested a moment on all fours. He had a bloody nose, and his lip was busted. He flexed his jaw, testing for broken bone. He struggled to get to his feet and slumped back down.

The bodyguard ran over to help. He slid Henny into a chair, then turned to Barlowe. “What you do that fo?!”

Barlowe kept his eyes fixed on Henny. “He knows.”

The others stared, content to stay out of the fight. They would have ganged up on anybody else. But they knew better than to take on Barlowe Reed. Conflict with Barlowe might bring more unwanted attention from police. Since the mailbox fires, the cops had been harassing Henny and his band of thugs in and around the Palace.

With some effort, Henny Penn tried to clear his head. Barlowe backed slowly away, keeping an eye locked on him. Henny spread his legs apart and shook his head, still trying to toss off the fogginess. He leaned toward the pouch in the chair nearby.

Before Henny could get to his feet good, Barlowe had already disappeared.