Fire in the Streets (18 page)

“Then you'll talk it out right now. With me,” she says. She shoves their shoulders one by one, steering them toward the back room.

“Maxie, hold down the office. Don't let anyone back here until we come out.”

I
SAVOR THOSE WORDS AS MUCH AS MR. CHILDS'S.
“
Maxie, hold down the office.”
It's the stuff of dreams, of course.

The guys grumble their way to the back room, but I can already tell that Jolene's right to make them sit down and work it out, like Patrice's mom does if she catches us girls fighting over something. It's ugly for a while, while the arguments are all out in the air, but later it's easy to swallow the whole mess with no aftertaste.

Jolene unprops the back room door and closes it firmly. I'm left standing alone in the Panther office. This has never happened before. I've been in here with a crowd, all the way down to one or two people, but never alone.

I'm not sure what to do with the sudden burst of power I feel. There are about a million things that come to mind. Dial the phone. Peck on the typewriter. Look in the file drawers. But none of those things are truly off-limits to me. The thing that wins is the most mysterious.

I glide toward the gun rack on the wall.

Who knows what holding down the office is supposed to look like? But right now it looks like me lifting a shotgun off the wall, just to see how it feels. Heavy. I'm very careful not to set it off, because I know that it is most likely loaded.

The gun feels huge. I don't know that they will ever let me be a policer, because I'm so small. Policers are supposed to be scary and tough. At least I can be tough. And maybe I'll grow.

I put the weapon back in its place on the wall. I don't know how long I'll be alone, and knowing the Panther office, not that long.

At home that night, I think about the feel of that shotgun. I'm lying on the bed staring at the ceiling when Raheem pounds into the room. He sees me, stops. Everything stops. His movement. My breath.

The look on his face, it stills me.

“Heem?” I roll to my feet.

There's a lot that passes between us unspoken. Something that comes from breathing the same air in our sleep for so long. I look at him and know something has wrecked him. It's not my place to try and touch that, though. I've tried before and come away aching. Nothing doing. I can't get to him in this place, where he's wounded. Not at first.
Only after he's started in on whatever he's going to do to make it worse.

Last time I saw this look on his face was the morning of Steve's funeral. I came from the bathroom and he was sitting there on the edge of his bed. Frozen like a statue, only trembling head to toe. This gun on his knee, balanced beneath his gently arcing fingers. Curtain open, like he was inviting me in, so I went over. Lay my hand on top of his to stop it from shaking. All I got for my trouble was a lot of yelling. He slid the gun into his belt and stormed out.

We had been to our share of funerals, but that one was different. Steve was a better person, a younger person, a closer person to us. And stolen in such an ugly way, it still makes me shudder at least once a day. To be shot by a pig like that for doing nothing, well, it's happened to Panthers before, just not anyone I know. No one who's touched my skin or called my name, or given me advice on how to be a good girlfriend. I say I'm not scared of what could happen, because no one else is, and Steve wasn't. But it's awful. Everything that happened to Steve and a lot that happened after. We're still caught in the after, at least Sam is, and Raheem.

I step toward him now, toward the untouchable space around him. Can't help it. Something draws me there. Raheem looks at me, an icy, trembling gaze. Don't come any closer.

“What?” I say, dropping it into a space not meant for words.

“Stay out of it,” he snaps, retreating to his half and drawing the curtain. Bed springs creak. Then silence.

I go to the kitchen, stare into the icebox. It's not eating time, but I'm upset by what just happened. Something is going on with Raheem, but I shouldn't think about it. I want to run in and shake him. “Did something happen? What's going on?” I'd say.

I can count on one hand all the times I've seen Raheem's danger face. The first time was when our real dad left, and Mama had to stop Raheem from sitting up each night, waiting for him to come home. After that, it was over some nameless guy who came up in the house all drunk and wailing on Mama. There was a third time, after I burned the living room rug—at least, I tried to. And then it happened after Steve.

I know what happened the day of Steve's funeral. Sam told me later. The hard truth of it. Why he left the graveside service early, Raheem's hand on his shoulder and Steve's gun in his belt. That Raheem took him to kill the cop. In the end Sam couldn't go through with it; even his love for Steve, his grief, couldn't turn his blood that cold.

For a day or so after, we thought Raheem might have done it himself. He disappeared with the gun and didn't
come home. But there was nothing in the news, and Raheem showed up in the small, dark morning hours. No blood on his hands, but broken. I was awake, of course. I didn't sleep for days after Steve died. Raheem stumbled in and dropped onto the edge of my bed. He let me put my arms around him and dropped his head low. I didn't know what to do with him for crying so we just sat there until it passed.

I always knew what the danger face meant before, where it came from. This time, I don't know. If it's Ma, or the shooting, or the close call from earlier, or some other thing altogether.

I close the fridge. Nothing much in there anyway, and the air is starting to chill me. I close the fridge, and as I do it I think about doors. Opening them, closing them, passing through them. My mind turns backward, spurs me to dash to the front door, tug it open.

Raheem tries to be clever, but he's not clever enough. My fingers go up and I pick at the scraps of clear tape on the wood. He tries to hide things from me, but I always figure them out.

I run back inside and peer into the cabinet under the sink, where we keep the trash. Beneath a banana peel, I find the evidence Raheem tried to destroy. Scraps of yellow paper, torn small, but not small enough to disappear. Thirty days before the landlord comes and kicks us to the curb.

C
HERRY LEANS AGAINST THE
brown-papered windows. Smoke from her cigarette curls around her hips. She taps off some ash and raises it to her mouth.

“They put in fresh glass?” I say. The plywood sheets are stacked and leaning against the brick.

Cherry raises a shoulder. “I don't know what's the point. We're just going to sandbag it.”

I touch it through the paper. It's like a wall to the touch, but now we know better. So thin, so fragile.

Sandbags or not, it seems obvious to me why the windows had to be replaced. We could have left up the plywood, I guess, but we have to show them we heal. We move on. Business continues as usual in spite of their best efforts to bring us down.

“Here comes Hamlin,” Cherry says, stubbing out her cigarette on the bricks. She squeezes my upper arm. “Better get your muscles on, girl.”

Hamlin's truck rolls up, weighed down in the back with a load of sandbags. He waves through the window at us.

Rocco, Slim, and Lester pop out of the office. Lester brings down the tailgate and says, “Line it up, ladies.”

I end up between Rocco and Cherry in the bucket brigade. Slim takes a place on the other side of Cherry. Can't help but notice how he's watching her the whole time. When he cracks a joke, he laughs along louder if she laughs too.

Slim pinches Cherry at the waist, wearing a teasing smile.

She smacks his hand away. “Don't touch the merchandise. 'Less you want to lose a hand.”

Slim grins. “Long as I got a handful of that sweetness when it goes.”

Cherry bites back a smile. “Dumb as a rock, but willing to go down swinging,” she says to me out the side of her mouth.

“Hey,” Slim cries, acting all hurt. “I may be dumb but I ain't deaf.”

Rocco laughs. “Give it up, man. She's never going to go for you.”

Cherry looks at me with this secret woman-smile. I'm flattered to receive it, and surprised I know exactly what it means. She likes Slim, doesn't want him to know it yet. And I think about how, for all the times I've seen guys looking at her, I've never seen her really with anyone.

My arms ache from passing the sandbags. By the time we get inside, my limbs feel like mashed potatoes, and it's only making me hungry. Between Slim's jokes, Cherry's flirting, and Rocco's deep belly laugh, the time flew by, but now I can feel how hard we've been working.

I lean against the desk, staring at the sandbag wall we've built. From outside it was easy to make light of everything, to joke about the grunt work and to be grateful when it was done. Inside, it's a different story.

Lester's outside tearing down the brown paper; we don't need it anymore. Light comes in through the top third of the windows; the lower portion is completely obscured by sandbags. They're stacked like cozy little molded bricks. Lining our space with protection it never needed before. Turning it from an office into a bunker.

Looking at it, I feel all over again what has happened. I feel it as hard as I did the moment when the bullets were flying. I love it, hate it, want to run my fingers over it, want to tear it down. It's right, though. It matches. The space has been transformed.

“We're in the paper,” Hamlin says. “Did you see?”

“No.”

He cuts the twine off a bundle of the fresh issue, and I take one off the stack.

“Page three.”

Flip it open.
CHICAGO OFFICE ASSAULT
. The picture is stark in black-and-white. The flatness is what strikes me most, and the stillness, because the memory in my mind is alive with depth and motion. The image they've chosen is of Rocco, his arm bandaged and bloody, stepping out of the wreckage of glass and spent bullets. He advances toward the camera, pistol held low in his hand, while at the other side Hamlin has his back turned, surveying the damage.

I'm not in the shot. Not sure where I was at the moment it was taken. In the back, or already on my way home. I lay the paper open, smoothing it onto the pockmarked desk.

“You see they got my good side,” Hamlin jokes. He heads into the back room.

I tuck my finger into the groove of a bullet streak on the desktop. I'm strangely relieved to see that things can't just go back to business as usual. The office is scarred. It tells the story, as much as or more than the photograph.

Raheem comes through the door. I look up just in time to catch him walking in, as if I knew he was going to appear right then. His gaze flicks toward the sandbags, then to me.

It's one of those times when he pretends not to even know me. He rolls by me and hits up the rifle rack, slinging one over his shoulder. Starts talking to Rocco. They must be going out to police.