Shella (20 page)

I thought back to the juvenile institution. The training school, they called it. “I think so,” I told him.

“From now on, you carry the gun. Don’t bother with a holster—just find a comfortable place to carry it. Walk around with it, so the weight goes inside your space, understand? So it don’t show …”

“Okay.”

“They have a joint in Uptown. Not far from us. Just a storefront. They hand out their leaflets, make speeches through bullhorns, crap like that. That’s gonna be the hard part for you.”

“What?”

“Talking. You watch television?”

“Sometimes.”

“Read books?”

“No.”

“Okay, no problem. We got a VCR over at the apartment. I’ll bring you some tapes. You watch the tapes, you’ll see how they talk, what they say. You don’t have to be no undercover expert for these boys … they got that acid test, like I told you.”

“How do I …?”

“You do the
work.
Probably on the street, it all goes down right. Sooner or later, probably sooner, they’ll take you inside. To the compound. Take some time, get you alone with the head man. Then you do him. We know where the compound is, but the head man never goes out on the grounds. We watched for a week, once. You get in, we’ll be watching. They got all these boys in their camouflage gear on the perimeter. We can go past them anytime we want—they’ll never see us. Soon as you do the work, you just step outside. Tie a rag around your head, like this.…” He took a red scarf out of his pocket, flipped it into a long, thin piece, tied it around his head. He looked even more like an Indian, the kind you see on TV. “You step out with something around your head, we start shooting. Just run for the perimeter … run out of the compound. We’ll be there, take you away.”

I nodded. I guessed they could just shoot me at the same time, but it didn’t feel like that.

“You got any questions for now?” He lit a cigarette, gave me one. I smoked it, thinking.

“That woman, Ruth. The guy who’s in Marion, she says that’s her brother. Is that her brother like he’s
your
brother, or …”

“You mean, did they have the same mother and father?”

“Yes.”

“They did. But we’re all… together. The same as blood. Okay?”

“Okay.”

We drove for a long time. It got dark out. They never stopped for gas—there was a pump on their farm. The driver kept right around the speed limit, staying with traffic.

“You need ID,” the Indian said to me.

“All right.”

“The crazy man, he can fix you up with a whole set. And you need a legend too.”

“Legend?”

“A history. Like where you came from. I figure, you were in prison, right?”

“Yeah. In Florida.”

“What for?”

“Manslaughter.”

“Good. Okay, tell them you killed a nigger down there. They’ll like that. Tell them as much truth as you can. Whatever name you were under, tell them it was a phony. Your new ID, that’ll be the real you. You never said your name.”

“My name?”

“What do people call you, friend?”

Monroe called me Ghost. Shella always called me John. Like a joke, her joke. Said I was the only John she ever had. Like I was a trick.

“John,” I told him. Thinking about something I saw on TV once. A man signing a motel register. “John Smith,” I told him.

One of the Indians in the front seat laughed. It was the first time I realized he’d been listening.

I didn’t know what he was laughing at, but it didn’t feel like it was me.

The Indian brought me a whole stack of cassettes for the VCR the next day. I watched them over and over again. With the sound on. It was mostly news stories, long ones sometimes. “The Face of Hate,” stuff like that. People showing off for cameras, wearing costumes. I’d heard all this stuff before. In prison, there were a couple of guys, in there for killing an old black man. Stomping him to death. Just to be doing it. They had a lot of tattoos. The only one I remember was a spider web on one guy’s elbow. When he made a muscle pose, you could see it.

They even had a tape of the head man—the one I was supposed to do my work on. He was giving a speech. Kept talking about race like it was everything. He used dog words. Mongrels, mutts. White people were pure and other people made them dirty, he said. Just being around them would make you dirty.

I heard all that before. Niggers will only fight if they’re in a crowd. One-on-one, they’re cowards. That’s what they told me, the first time I was locked up. I didn’t know if it
was true. I didn’t want to fight anyone—I was afraid of them all. Never hit a nigger in the head—you can’t hurt them there. I found out that was a lie. Maybe it was all lies.

“Try and find something in there that’s you,” the Indian told me.

The Indian brought some more stuff one day, watched the tapes with me for a while. A bunch of college kids raped a black girl. They took turns, and they did it together too. They called her names while they were doing it. One of them made a videotape of it, and the cops found it when they searched the fraternity house. They showed some of it on the news, with pieces of it covered up with black patches, but you could tell what was going on. The girl was all messed up. Drunk, or high. Just sort of laying there.

The college boys said it was a party.

“They say they hate niggers so much, why would they want to have sex with them?” the Indian said. The way people say things when they don’t expect you to answer them.

Anyone who’s ever been in prison could have told him.

I kept watching the tapes. Watching and listening. One of the shows had interviews with kids. Skinheads. I watched the tape a lot. The older guys, the ones in the organizations, they talked about the skinheads like they were an army.
But the skinheads seemed wild. They were mad at everybody, not just blacks.

Like nobody wanted them, and they knew it.

“What do you see? Just before you go to work on someone, you see anything?”

Nobody had ever asked me that before, not even Shella. I looked at the picture of the head man. The mug shot they gave me. I didn’t see anything.

“Not from a picture,” the Indian said. “When you’re right there.”

I closed my eyes, slowed everything down so I could see it. When it happens, it’s so fast. I slowed it down. Back to that first time. Duke. He was lying on his back. It was dark in there, but I could see him. I could see … his skeleton. Bones underneath his skin. His skull inside his head. “Little dots,” I told the Indian.

“Red dots? In front of your eyes? Like when you’re mad?”

“Black dots. Not in my eyes. On the body. Not like … measles. Just in different spots. All over.”

I closed my eyes again. Saw Duke. Touched my face. Between the eyes, the bridge of my nose, a spot on the neck.

“Laser dots,” the Indian said.

“You ready to go?” he asked me a few days later.

“Yes.”

“Tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I talked to the crazy man. Anybody checks, the guy who did time in Florida was John Smith. It’ll all match. We got a room for you. Once you move in, you’re on your own—you won’t see us again until you finish the work.”

He came back that night. I had everything in my duffel bag.

“Let me see the piece,” he said.

I handed him the gun. He opened the cylinder, looked down the barrel. “Dusty,” he said. He sounded disgusted. He took out a handkerchief, twisted up the corner, poked it through the barrel with a pencil, then pulled it back and forth. “Do that every day, okay?”

I said I would.

They drove me to the Greyhound station. I gave him my car keys. He gave me a ticket stub.

“You came from Atlanta,” he told me. “You left around eight in the morning. The trip took about eighteen hours, stopped once in Cincinnati. The ticket cost ninety-eight bucks and change. You got in around two in the morning—just about now. Tonight you stay at this place on Madison. Don’t hang around the station—you get picked up with the piece, it’s gonna waste a lot of time. Tomorrow, you start out for Uptown. Take the A Train to Sheridan and walk from there. Get a room on Wilson, just off Broadway. It’s a wood-frame house, blue front. Then you’re on your own.”