A Visible Darkness (5 page)

6

B
y 10:00
A.M.
I was back in my truck, sitting at a four-way stop in an old, unincorporated section of Broward County, Ms. Jackson’s address in my hand. The streets were numbered in progression to the west. The neighborhood was several blocks north of Sistrunk Boulevard, which was considered the main commercial strip in the community. It was here that the black merchants built thriving businesses at a time when separation was still a way of life in the Old South. The street had eventually been named after Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk, one of the first African-American doctors in the county, who practiced when blacks were still banned from being treated in white hospitals on the east side.

I eased the truck onto Northwest Seventeenth Avenue and started looking for numbers. The asphalt street was a dull gray in the high morning sun. There were no sidewalks, and the graveled swale that ran along both sides was a dusty white in the glare. Small, single-story block houses sat back off the roadway. The front lawns were dry and bare. There was a distinct lack of trees on the front lots, but I could see a line of spreading ficus and an occasional poinciana swelling up above the shingled roofs in the back.

There was one such tree on the corner of the next block, and three men were gathered in its shade.

The two standing were young, in their late teens, and their heads turned my way as I rolled up and then snapped the opposite way as if my arrival might automatically bring a squad car from the other direction. The third was sitting in a metal folding chair, his legs splayed out, one hand dangling down, the other folded in the vicinity of his crotch.

He faced the street, and although there were three or four other bent and rusted chairs empty around him, the other two remained standing, their hands in their pockets, their backs turned to the street and to me. As I passed, the sitting man checked me out using the torsos of his boys as bad cover for his surveillance. It was a scene being played out on thousands of corners all over the country, I thought. At Third and Indiana in Philly, at the Triangle in Miami. But unlike the open markets of the 1980s, when the sellers would put their faces in any car window that rolled down the street, the new breed were far more careful. They didn’t sell to strangers, at least not on the first pass.

I drifted through the intersection and in the rearview all three had turned to watch me. Farther down the block I spotted the set of numbers I was searching for and pulled into the driveway behind a new four-door sedan, deep green and freshly waxed. My knock on the door brought a response from deep in the house.

“Just a second, baby.”

The small porch was barely covered by the overhang. A pair of women’s shoes was lined carefully on a rough mat. There was a white plastic chair and matching cocktail table with a cheap Japanese fan folded and resting on the yellowed top.

The woman was halfway into another sentence when she opened the door and looked up into my face, stared for a fleeting second, and then blushed.

“Oh. Excuse me. I was…Well, you must be Mr. Freeman. Correct?”

“Yes, ma’am. Max Freeman,” I said, offering my hand.

“Please come in Mr. Freeman. I’m Mary Greenwood. Mr. Manchester told me you would be coming by,” she said, losing the flush quickly and becoming formal.

She was a stout woman. The light brown skin of her face was smooth and unblemished. She could have been thirty or fifty. She led the way through a darkened living room crowded with heavy upholstered chairs, an ancient standup piano and lamps with tasseled shades. The walls were crowded with shelves of photos and ceramic knickknacks with religious themes. An oil painting of Jesus dominated one wall. A portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., another.

“This was my mommas house,” she said, moving into the small kitchen. “Shared it with my father for his last years and refused to move out after he passed.”

She moved to the counter and started working at an old ceramic coffeepot, white with a blue cornflower pattern.

“Coffee?” she said, taking the lid off the stemmed metal basket and spooning a dark blend out of a glass container.

“Thank you,” I said. “The paperwork Mr. Manchester had said your mother was eighty-four?”

“That’s right.”

“And she passed away sleeping in her bed, what, eight years after her husbands death?”

She was silent. She’d heard the rationalizations from the medical examiner, the prosecutor’s office, the police investigators. Too many times from too many officials.

“Since you said yes to the coffee, Mr. Freeman, let’s us go on out back and I will tell you about my momma and why I do not believe the Lord called her this way.”

“A pleasure, ma’am,” I said.

She brought the coffee out onto a back porch, a slab of concrete set up with the same plastic furniture as the front. The backyard was shaded by the row of trees. A ragged ficus hedge gave the lawn a small privacy. The fanned-out poinciana, its leaf pattern as intricate as a doily, spread out over half the yard, and blooming jasmine spotted the deepest corner with yellow globs of color.

Philomena Jackson’s daughter settled into one of the chairs, looked out onto the yard, took a deep breath of the garden air, and began.

“My momma was a prideful woman, Mr. Freeman. She moved to Florida with her family when she was just a little girl. Her father, my grandfather, was a strong, intelligent truck farmer from Georgia. He could read and write and was good at organizing men of his own color and had little trouble finding work in the bean fields of west Pompano Beach.

“He could roll through the rows of vegetables in the heat of the day like a big ol’ iron machine, momma said. He could pick and stack as much as three men and smile and hum his way through the gospel dawn to dusk. His family joined him. My mother was in the fields at age seven. Right next to her own momma.

“It wasn’t long before my grandfather’s organizing talents were recognized, and in the early 1920s he was made a foreman. He knew how to drive a flatbed truck and, starting with his own family, would pick up a dozen or more folks along old Hammondville Road and get them to the fields by sunlight. At the end of the day he would assist with the counting and ledger-keeping so my momma and grandmother would walk back home on the dirt track all the way back to their house and get to making dinner. They made fifteen cents a bushel picking.”

She paused to refill my cup. I was still considered a newcomer to South Florida, but under Billy’s pushy tutelage, I’d become a fan of the area’s short, barely one-hundred-year history. Ms. Greenwood told the stories with a flawless memory forged of repetition, bedtime recreations and dinner table discussions. I could not see McCane sitting here, with a middle-aged black woman, listening with any form of discerning ear.

“One day, when Momma was only nine, she and my grandmother went to a store near the railroad track to shop. They’d gone there for years but this day a new owner had taken over. When they got to the front door the man looked up from his counter and said, ‘Ya’ll go round back and they’ll take care of you.’

“Momma said grandmother just stopped and stared, not uttering a word. The man looked up again. ‘They’s new management now. Ya’ll coloreds got to go round back.’

“Momma said she could feel grandma’s hand tighten around her own, but nothing came from her lips and finally it was my momma who turned her eyes to the man and said ‘No, sir.’ And they both turned and walked, hand in hand, back to their house.

“When they told my grandfather, who was by now a respected foreman, he said he’d take care of it. But the women had something else in their heads. In a month they’d set themselves up a wooden building right along the dirt road that led to the fields and stocked it with flour and coontie and molasses and bags of processed cane sugar. Their store was one of the first black-owned businesses in the area and no one, black or white, ever went around to the back door.”

She looked out in silence into the greenness of her late mother’s yard, then spoke to whatever vision she was seeing there.

“My momma was not a weak woman, Mr. Freeman. She did not hold much to depending on others. I suppose I should have been strong enough myself to make her come live with me instead of letting her stay in this old house, but she was hardheaded. Too hard- headed for me.”

I shifted my chair, using the scraping sound to bring her back.

“Did she ever mention this life insurance deal to you? Explain why or how she came to sell it?”

A wry grin came to the corner of her mouth and she slowly shook her head.

“I’d like to say I should have known, but I didn’t have any idea such a thing could be done. About three years ago, I must have been whinin’, tellin’ Momma about trying to get the money together for my son’s freshman year at the university. I was probably grumbling about wages at the hospital, cryin’ about the mileage on the car. She took it in, like she always did. When we were kids, she’d tell us to shut up and be thankful for the things we did have. But you know, somehow, a little something extra would show up for a birthday or at Christmastime. That was her way. So then about two years ago, out of nowhere, comes a bank note. A present, she says, for her grandson’s tuition, $20,000 to get him through four years. She hands it to my son and then to me she gives a $18,000 cashier’s check and says ‘Here’s your car, baby. You got to pick it out.’

“Now, we always knew Momma hoarded and saved money. She was the one who somehow paid my first year to nursing school. This time she told us it was money from insurance, but she said it was from a policy on my father, and that she’d kept it since he died. She wanted to give it to us. She felt it was an important time in our lives to have it and it was important to her that we did have it.”

She stopped and looked me in the eyes. Her own were tight and dry.

“Only half of her explanation was the truth, Mr. Freeman. But when she got her mind made up, you didn’t argue with Momma.”

“And you didn’t find out about her selling her own policy until after her death?” I said.

“We had Mr. Manchester go through her things. He found it.”

“But you were already suspicious?”

My question forced her lips into a hard sealed line and I could see the muscle in her jaw flex.

“My mother was not in good health, Mr. Freeman. She had cancer and she knew it was coming. But she was not ready to die. When I walked into this house it did not smell of death, it smelled of violation,” she said. “When I found her on her bed I could not feel peace. I could, in my bones, feel anguish. I don’t care what the medical examiner says. I will go to my own grave believing my mother was killed.”

All I could do was nod.

“Yes, ma’am. I can appreciate that.”

She did not offer more coffee and I was relieved not to have to decline. We both pushed back our chairs and she led me around outside, past the old-time Florida room, to the front of the house.

“I hope I have been of some help, Mr. Freeman.”

“Yes, ma’am, you have,” I said.

We cleared the front corner and I saw them over her shoulder, the three men from the corner. They were in the street at the end of the driveway, hands in their pockets, heads bent together like they were in some loose football huddle.

When she spotted them Ms. Greenwood raised her voice.

“Beans, what you want?”

The middle one, the leader, stepped out.

“What up, Ms. Mary?” he said, his eyes acknowledging her and cutting to me to define his question.

“This is Mr. Freeman. He’s a friend of Ms. Philomena. He’s helping me.”

All three of them took me in, head to toe, as if they could judge the truth of her statement by the cut of my clothes.

“Alright, Ms. Mary. You say so,” the leader said and led his troop back toward the corner.

I turned back to her as I unlocked my truck.

“Neighborhood security?” I said, motioning to their backs.

A grin, part amused and part deprecating, pulled at the corners of her mouth.

“Respect,” she said.

Again, any response would only show my own ignorance. I climbed in the truck and backed away.

7

E
ddie was leaving the west side dope hole, his business with the Brown Man done.

Eddie knew all the dealers near his neighborhood, had done business with them, and those who proceeded them, and those who proceeded them. When he was a kid he was a huffer, getting high on glue shoplifted from one of those craft stores and then squirted into a plastic sandwich bag. Breathing in the fumes he could make it through the days just floating, not ever hungry, always moving, never in one place, just drifting through the streets, becoming invisible.

He’d picked up the huffing habit by watching. Kids behind the ficus hedges at the bus stop, older dropouts in the alley behind Murcheson’s Gas Station. He watched, his face down and eyes probing. When they left he’d inspect their trash, figure out their methods and find out a way to get his own, because Eddie was not stupid. Eddie could always find a way.

When he got older he moved up to smoking weed, drinking whatever booze he could steal from his mother’s house or find discarded in the backstreet bins. The day he watched a young white couple being taught by one of the neighborhood dealers to smoke cocaine from a tiny metal pipe, was a turning point Eddie never saw coming.

Crack.

The first time was a wonder to him. The high soaked into his head and body like a huff of glue gone wild. It burned his insides with a tingle and a rush that rolled him back on the milk crate he was sitting on and turned the whole alley into a soft place racing with a warm fire. And when it passed, Eddie wanted more, and more.

He would get ripped off in the early days. He’d scrape together the money, steal when he could, run his routes through the northwest neighborhoods picking up aluminum and metal to recycle for a few bucks, and then head for the dope man. The early ones would overcharge him, or give him bad shit. They’d give him chunks of soap and even ground bones to pass for crack. But Eddie learned from his mistakes. His mother had taught him early not to let anyone take advantage of him, and unlike so many junkies, the drugs did not diminish Eddie. By the time he was seventeen he was thick and strong and the deep tunnel of his stare caused most of the dealers to simply give him his due and get his unsettling presence off their corners.

But the crack finally scared him. Eddie did not like the way it blinded him. He would find himself in places he didn’t know, trying to recognize people he should have known. The randomness of it unsettled and scared him. Eddie liked routine, it was how he survived. His discovery of heroin was his savior. A drug he could use and still move through the night streets, feeling painless, carrying out his work, keeping his eyes tuned. His routine was his cloak and his slow dark visage did not carry a reputation off the streets. He remained quiet, silently invisible to most of the world.

Today the Brown Man had been equally silent when Eddie came for his heroin. The dealer had seen him two blocks away, pushing his shopping cart along the edge of the street, one defective wheel clattering and spinning wildly each time it lost purchase with the concrete. The Brown Man swept the area with a knowing eye for any hiccup in the routine and then, satisfied, elbowed his new runner.

“Bundle,” he said, and the boy looked expectantly down the street and then wrinkled his face at the lack of traffic.

“Go on, nigger,” snapped the dealer, cuffing the boy with the back of his hand and scowling after him until he’d disappeared around the fence. As Eddie rattled closer, the dealer reached into his pocket and took out a gold dollar coin and started flipping and rolling it in his hand. He had worked the street for two years, dealt with the meanest motherfuckers in the biz. Been tightened up by the cops a dozen times and just swallowed the blood in his mouth and stayed cool. But the trash man always made him nervous. Those got-damn eyes lookin’ up at you like dark holes that you couldn’t escape.

The boy came back just as Eddie slowed to a stop, his cart inches from the Brown Man’s hip. The runner started to offer up a warning to the old junk man but the dealer hushed him. The Brown Man took the thirteen dime bags of heroin from the boy and dropped them casually into the cart. In exchange Eddie passed him a crisp, folded hundred-dollar bill. Neither man spoke a word. Eddie shuffled on and the boy’s eyes rode his rounded back until he was out of earshot.

“They’s a man you don’t fuck with,” the Brown Man said when the runner turned. “His moneys always good, and you don’t never try to cheat his ass. You always give him the good rate, hear?”

The boy nodded. He was new, only on the street a week, but he had never seen such deference from the Brown Man, even when the packed-up low riders or the sedans with white men pulled up. Maybe it was the junk man’s eyes, the boy thought. He’d never seen eyes so hollow.

Five blocks later Eddie heard the girl behind him. He’d seen her peeking out of the alley when he went by. He knew she would follow. Now she was hanging back, scared but unable to stop herself. Eddie went left, around the chain link fence at the back property of the old newspaper printing plant and pushed his cart a few blocks through the alley. He turned onto a rutted trail leading into an overgrown weed lot. There was an abandoned cinder-block shack squatted down near the back of the lot. It had once been some kind of electrical substation, but once it had gone unused for a month, it was stripped of anything that could be used, exchanged or sold. Eddie hoped no crackheads were using it. He could hear the girl moving in the grass behind him. He pushed the cart against the outside wall of the blockhouse and ducked through the doorway.

Inside the single room a torn, filthy mattress lay on the floor. Piles of wadded trash—greasy food wrappers and empty cellophane bags—were kicked into the corners. Something scurried away when Eddie sat down on one corner of the mattress and took out his tools.

Inside his coat was a spoon from his mother’s kitchen, a small bottle of water and a syringe that he had stolen from her diabetic supplies. Eddie knew the value of a clean needle. Sometimes he could barter the ones he had hoarded in exchange for dope when times were tough. But times had not been tough. Eddie had money now. He carefully poured the water into his spoon and then mixed in the powder from one of the thirteen bags. He wondered what was taking the girl so long.

When the heroin was ready, he took out a small piece of cotton from his shirt pocket and rolled it between his thumb and finger into a small ball. He dropped the cotton into the spoon and set it on the floor while he took the orange cap off the syringe and then she was there.

“Hey baby, you got some sugar for me, too?”

The girl was leaning into the doorway, the toe of one shoe pointed carefully inside. She had finger-brushed her hair back and used some kind of cloth to wipe her face clean. When Eddie looked up she straightened her back, pushing her small breasts out against the worn fabric of a dingy cotton blouse. Eddie could see the tremble in her fingers.

“I seen you stop off at the Brown Man’s so I was wonderin’ maybe you want some company,” she said, trying to hold her voice steady. Eddie went back to his spoon and slipped the needle into the soaked cotton and drew the liquid up into the syringe. The girl stepped over and sat next to him, folding her long, washed-out skirt under her. From somewhere she came up with a thick rubber band and without asking wrapped it around her bare upper arm. Eddie looked into her face but she was staring at the needle, a small pink tip of her tongue showing at the corner of her mouth.

“You get what you want. I gets what I want,” Eddie said.

Question or order? The girl couldn’t distinguish the statement. But she knew how to handle his kind. She’d been on the street. She’d get the sweet shot and slip the junk man without giving anything up.

“Sure, baby. I know what you want, big man,” she said without looking up from the needle. The veins in her arm had popped like thin worms under her bruised skin. She nodded and the tip of her tongue moved to the other corner.

Eddie watched the girl accept the dose of heroin into a thin vein. He watched her eyes roll up and the smile play at her face. He liked to watch them. It made him anxious for his own hit, but he liked to see them smile first. She hummed through the high for a few minutes and then her eyes drifted open.

“Go ’head, baby,” she slurred. “Get your own self some of this.”

Eddie knew the girl would wait until he was half conscious with a dose and then either rip him off or split. He shook his head.

“Now I gets what I want.”

The girl’s eyes opened wider and she pulled herself up.

“Okay, baby. You gonna get yours. But I gotta pee first. Know what I mean?” She was now on her feet. Yeah, Eddie thought, I know what you mean.

She took a step and he had her by the wrist before she could turn. She kicked at him but Eddie caught her ankle and like a rag doll tossed her back on the mattress. Eddie had been cheated too many times by women. When she started to scream Eddie had her instantly by the throat. No yellin’. Ain’t no yellin’ in this house, his mamma always said. His grip on her throat tightened until she was quiet and he went about his business, getting what was his.

When he was through, Eddie let loose and sat back against the cool block wall. The girl stayed quiet while he mixed his own package from the bundle and got himself high. She was still quiet when he got up to leave. She was still lying there when he ducked out the doorway and started pushing his cart back to the streets.