Derrick’s voice grew very low, yet it sounded so harsh that James wanted to close his eyes. “If the city or the cops come around my house again, I will know it was you that turned me in, bitch, and I will come get you. So you’d better pray they never show up. You understand that?”
She nodded dumbly with eyes that had doubled in size. Derrick stomped back across the street, and James felt a little faint with the relief of not having to face the gangbanger’s violence after all. Mrs. Clark hurried back into her house and didn’t come out again the rest of the day.
Still, James thought, the neighborhood was not so bad. Derrick’s mom had moved her family out here to get away from the gang violence. She brought it with her in the form of Derrick, of course, but he went up further north with his crew much of the time. The gang tags at the stone wall by the liquor store on the corner warned casual troublemakers that this block was Bloods territory. Now, that wouldn’t help if another gang decided to move south and invade, but it kept the day-to-day criminals and punks that hung around the places Scotty worried about on Troost from coming down the street looking for trouble.
Not that James was going to tell Scotty he was relatively safe because he was under gang protection. He could imagine how Scotty would take that.
* * *
Weeks went by quietly. The heat grew worse and worse. Scotty called on weekends, and they danced around each other, unable to get back to their old relationship and unsure what relationship they had now. Another little victory for Mrs. Clark, James supposed. She had returned to her front-yard athletic phone conversations. She was always fully clothed, however, so Derrick had made some kind of impact.
On a heat-danger Friday, James took the mail from the mailman and sat on a weeding bench to look through it. He found a summons to housing court. He could pay a $210 fine, or he could show up in court to try to fight the accusation of a nuisance yard. He could even go to jail.
James sat with the paper in his lap for a long time. He was seventy years old. He could call the TV stations and let the city arrest him on camera. How would that look?
Mrs. Clark’s voice snagged his attention. On her damned cell phone. James turned toward the sound and found his fist clenching. He wanted to do just what Derrick Kappell had done. He wanted to march up to her and bellow and make her shake with fear. But how likely was that?
James read through the summons again, including all the fine print. That was where he found out they were going to bring in contractors to mow down his garden and charge him large fees to pay for it. It was like telling him they were going to execute him and bill him in advance for the headsman. Celeste’s garden. Clear-cut to the ground. His hands shook, and the paper rattled.
He sat in the sun and heat for hours, full of rage and mourning, until he was light-headed. Until a plan formed in his mind.
He took his car from the garage. Scotty wanted James to dump the old Taurus but it had everything he needed. He couldn’t turn to Scotty. No, James had to follow his own plan.
He drove around trying to find a working pay phone, somewhere beyond the neighborhood. Finally, he spotted a fairly secluded phone over in Kansas, near a white folks’ tennis club.
He put in his money and dialed 311, the city call center. Holding his handkerchief over the mouthpiece of the phone and making his voice as high-pitched and feminine as he could, James made an anonymous complaint about Derrick Kappell’s unlicensed car and about the unrepaired wooden steps to Derrick’s screened porch.
He hung up quickly, feeling sick to his stomach. When he got home, he was so dizzy from the heat that he went inside and slept restlessly until the next morning.
The dangerous heat wave stuck around. James only ventured into the garden in the early morning and late evening. Even Mrs. Clark reserved her outdoor phone promenades for those cooler hours. The weekend came and went.
Late Wednesday afternoon, James heard shouting and arguing coming from Derrick’s house. He saw Derrick leave when some of his gang picked him up. James decided to stay inside, but he couldn’t help keeping watch at the window.
At about eight o’clock that evening, a strange car with a rumbling muffler and no plates raced down the street. Someone within fired automatic rounds at Mrs. Clark in her front yard. The Clarks’ front windows exploded, their door ripped by bullets. And Mrs. Clark lay bleeding as the car zoomed off. Mrs. Boll ran from her house, screaming at her husband to call an ambulance.
James went to bed, feeling more than a little ill. All he wanted was the blessed blankness of sleep, but he thrashed around, replaying the scene over and over.
The next day, a police detective came to the door. He said he’d heard James was always out in the yard and would have a good description of the car. James told the detective he hadn’t gone out because he was sick from the heat. The guy looked at him pityingly and said James didn’t have to be afraid, that the police could protect him. James knew the cop was seeing a helpless old African American man frightened to death of his bad neighborhood. James kept repeating that he had been sick and had stayed indoors.
He really was sick. For days, he could hardly get out of bed. On the weekend when Scotty called, James told him he would sell the house since the city was going to destroy the garden anyway. Scotty was happy to hear his decision and told James to go to the doctor.
On Monday, the temperature reached above one hundred again, breaking a ninety-year-old record. James didn’t have the strength or heart to go out in the garden, so he sat in the house until the phone rang.
“You were responsible for the death of Jarene Clark,” the voice on the phone said.
James could see Clark that first day as he looked up into the man’s cold blue eyes and tried to shake his hand.
Jarene? It didn’t seem to fit that energetic, irritating woman.
“I didn’t have anything to do with her death,” James said. “She angered some rough men in the neighborhood. I imagine it was one of them.” James was pleased that his voice didn’t waver.
“I know who killed her,” said Mr. Clark. “He’s already been taken care of. But you were responsible. You set it in motion.” He paused a second. “Nice plan.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” James heard his own voice flinch, but thought that could be put down to the natural fear of an old man.
“I tracked down that complaint. I’ve heard the tape. Definitely an older man’s voice disguised as a woman’s. I found the pay phone and the security camera at the tennis club that covered the parking lot. I had the time and date of the phone call. You were on the tape, making that call.”
James closed his eyes. He had forgotten that sometimes there were worse things than the Bloods.
“What do you want, Mr. Clark?”
“I’m coming for you. You won’t know when or how. But I’m coming.” He hung up.
James set the phone down with trembling fingers. He couldn’t very well call the police. He thought about calling Scotty, but to say what?
Goodbye? I’m a guilty man? I’ve been given the death penalty? It’s revenge, but it’s also justice?
He walked outside, ignoring the heat warnings, and started to pull out the chickweed that had invaded his purple coneflowers the way the Clarks had invaded his life. You could try everything to get rid of it, but the only thing that worked permanently was spraying. If you did that, you were guilty of poisoning the earth and contributing to the death of birds and insects. He watched the butterflies and fat bumblebees flitting among the coneflowers and mints.
In September, there were goldfinches. One tiny bright-yellow bird to each coneflower’s seed head. Celeste, at the end, had loved to watch them from the dining room window, each making its flower bob back and forth as it pecked for seeds.
There would be no goldfinches for James this year. No September. Heat or no heat, black ops husband or no black ops husband, James would stay right here. In the garden. With Celeste.
BY
J
OHN
L
UTZ
West 8th Street
There was smooth trumpet music wafting from big rectangular speakers hooked up to a CD player. Sounded like Miles Davis.
“This is anybody’s idea of odd,” said Kansas City homicide detective Rodney Small. Small was six foot five and 250 pounds.
His partner, Eddie Jarvis, was much smaller and had been a middle-weight Golden Gloves boxer. “Killer” Jarvis, though he’d never killed anything larger than a roach. He had cauliflower ears, and a ridge of major scar tissue over his left eye that made him look perpetually doubtful.
“Count me in with the anybodys,” he said, gazing down at the dead woman who’d been butchered with a sharp knife that lay nearby. There was a red-stained white handkerchief next to the knife; most likely it had been used to wipe the weapon clean of prints. The victim had obviously been tortured all over her body with the knife before being disemboweled. Some monster’s sick idea of fun.
But it wasn’t the body on the floor that got to Small and Jarvis; they’d seen plenty of brutalized murder victims in their years as cops. It was the man on the sofa who made them wonder.
Small was looking at something else. “What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing. “That a note?”
Earlier, in St. Louis
Esther Clyde saw her child make a gesture precisely like that of her long-dead grandfather, and that creeped her out. Little things like this sometimes tipped the balance.
And just like that, she decided she’d finally had enough.
Her marriage to Seth, who worked for the state of Missouri in some low-paying job she didn’t understand, had long since crumbled. They were no longer living together. Hadn’t been for six months. Two-year-old Randy could go live with his father, who’d lost a long court fight for custody, claiming Esther wasn’t right in the head. (Like
he
was.) Well, Seth could have Randy now. Esther was going to hit the road with her friend Jenine Balk.
Jenine had suggested as much several times. She hated her boss at Hunter’s Tales restaurant, where she was a hostess and the walls were festooned with what taxidermists had made of various dead animal parts. There was a rabbit with a tail like a fish, and a squirrel that had wings, to name a couple. Esther didn’t blame Jenine for wanting to get out. The damned place was difficult enough to eat in, much less work in.
It was hard to switch jobs in St. Louis, because it was hard to find jobs in the first place. After a brief phone conversation, Esther had easily convinced Jenine it was time for them to leave together for other, possibly greener pastures.
Kansas City beckoned. It was way on the opposite side of the state, if not the world. Esther had been there a few times, walked around Country Club Plaza, visited a few blues joints that weren’t just tourist attractions, learned what good barbecue was.
Goin’ to Kansas City
… That was what Esther called running away.
When Esther phoned across town to her mother and told her what she was about to do, her mother said, “I hope you know what you’re about to do, Esther.”
“Nobody knows what they’re about to do,” Esther said. “Not really.”
“You said a mouthful there,” her mother shot back, and hung up.
Esther drove her old Ford SUV over and dropped off Randy at Seth’s place. She took a few minutes to say goodbye to the kid.
Seth said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Esther.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Esther told him.
Different strokes
, she thought.
When she drove away, she didn’t look back. The past was gone, and only the present and future mattered.
That was the plan.
* * *
Right off, she traded in the Ford for an older but snazzier red Plymouth Sebring convertible. The guy she gave the Ford to was going to sell it for parts, and for a little extra cash Esther talked him into going ahead and letting the state think the car had been junked out. It had old Alabama plates anyway. Seth would say she didn’t legally own the car if she didn’t transfer the title, and she’d paid way too much. She didn’t care. Let him try to find her through her car. She had her mysterious ways and reasons.
She drove the car to her apartment with the top down even though the sky looked ready to bust open and rain.
It didn’t take her long to pack. She jammed her single Samsonite suitcase into the car’s trunk, then swung by and picked up Jenine at her place.
Jenine was waiting out front with
her
single large suitcase. Esther was pleased. The two friends had pledged to travel light and were sticking to it.
“Nice wheels,” Jenine said. She was a little on the tall side, while Esther was short. Jenine was blond. Esther was a brunette. Though slender, Jenine was shapely. Esther was slim from top to toe. Jenine wore a constant smile and looked pleasantly distracted. Esther seemed always to be concentrating on some elusive mathematical equation. An insensitive person who used the one-through-ten scale for women would put them both down at about seven. Jenine figured they were a collective six. Esther thought closer to nine, if Jenine would drop a few pounds.
Jenine hoisted her suitcase onto the backseat and climbed into the convertible without opening the door. “You notice it’s starting to rain?” she said.
Esther nodded. Said, “Don’t the two of us just remind you of that movie,
Thelma and Laverne
?”
“That title don’t sound quite right, but yes, we do,” Jenine said.
“Okay,” Esther responded. “I’m Thelma and you’re Laverne. Our new selves.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jenine—Laverne—said. “Only I ain’t sure about the name.”
“Get sure.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Laverne grinned and saluted. “Where we goin’, Thelma?”
“Kansas City, here we come.”
“Amen!” Laverne said, though not with religious conviction.
The rain picked up. Within a few seconds it ran in rivulets down Thelma’s forehead from her short, naturally curly hair.