Chapter 3
Stepping into the house at eight in the morning, Billy came across his father and his two sons seated at the dining table eating Eggos, Billy Senior in his pajamas, the boys, as usual, in full Enduring Freedom gear from dog tags to child-sized paratrooper boots.
“See, at the college, the students, they took over two buildings, one by the blacks, you know, the Afro-Americans, the other the white radicals, the Suburbans we called them,” his father said. “I don’t think they trusted each other, or at least the blacks didn’t trust the whites. And Charley Weiss, my boss in the TPF, after two days standing around waiting for the go-ahead, he finally gets on the bullhorn, says, ‘You have fifteen minutes to vacate the building or we’re coming in after you.’”
“Dad,” Billy said.
“Now, the, the Afro-Americans, they been around the block a little more, and they know we mean what we say, so after a little trash talk from the classroom windows, they pretty much come right out. But the Suburbans? They never had any dealings with the police before, so it’s all a big adventure for them: ‘Come and get us, pigs.’”
“Pigs?” Carlos looked up from his waffle.
“Dad.”
“And whenever we had to go in someplace, Charley Weiss always put me in the first wave, ‘Send in the Big Guy,’ he used to say. Riots, blackouts, demonstrations—‘Send in the Big Guy.’”
“The Big Guy,” Declan whispered, his face shining.
“And so we went in, and we went in swinging. It was ugly, and some of us were sick about it after, but we cracked some heads that day . . .”
“Dad . . .”
“Some of those kids were crying and begging us to stop, but you get to this place in yourself, you’re so pent up with all the damn waiting, your heart’s pumping so hard . . .”
“Hey, guys . . .”
“I put one kid down who tried to snatch my radio, rammed him in the ribs with my baton like they taught us, it hurts like hell, let me tell you, he’s laying on the ground, looks up at me, says, ‘Mr. Graves, stop, please stop . . .’ I take a good look at this kid, I’m . . . You got to be kidding me. Turns out he was the son of the people who we bought our house from when we moved out to the Island. Nice couple. Nice kid, too. Last time I’d seen him was about four years earlier, he must’ve been fourteen, fifteen, but we recognized each other that day, we surely did.”
“Did you feel bad, Grandpa?” Declan again, the story a little over Carlos’s head.
“Yeah, I did. I started yelling at him, ‘What the hell did you grab my radio for?’ He says, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ I get him up, march him out of the building, take him around the corner to Amsterdam Avenue, and I tell him to go over to the St. Luke’s ER, just get lost.”
“My mom works at the ER,” Carlos said brightly.
“I tried to tell myself that these kids had it coming, that they were trying to bring us down as a great nation, but yeah, I felt bad. That day I felt bad.”
Knowing the worst was over, Billy finally retreated into his coffee, marveling, as always when he heard this story, that when his father finally retired, twenty years after those bloody sit-ins, his first job as a civilian was director of student safety at the same university.
“Anyways,” Billy Senior rising, “I have to go pick up your grandmother at the bank.”
Declan looked to Billy, then back to his grandfather. “Grandpa,” he said not unkindly, “Gramma’s dead.”
Billy Senior stopped at the door, turned to the table. “That’s not a very nice thing to say, Declan.”
Billy watched his father go out to the driveway and get in the keyless sedan, knowing he’d sit there until he forgot why he was sitting there, then come back inside.
Up in the bedroom, Billy stashed his Glock, stripped down to his boxers, and fell into bed. Fighting off sleep, he stared at the ceiling until he could hear Millie’s muffler-shot old beater coming down the street, signaling the start of her workday, which consisted of impersonating a housekeeper and, more importantly, watching daytime TV with his father. She would sit as close to Billy Senior as she could without jumping on his lap, while constantly touching his arm and commenting on the screen action, all in an effort to keep him in the here and now, which was becoming an increasingly demanding job.
In the way of these things, Billy’s father had become his child, and he was determined to parent him in the manner in which he had been parented himself—with patience, amusement when he could manage it, and an infinite tolerance for the weakness of his mind. Growing up, Billy’s mother had been just his mother, doing her duty as required, not exactly indifferent to him but more focused on raising and training his sisters, two out of three children, in her eyes, job enough. As a father, Billy Senior had been low-key but there, not much more demonstrative than his wife but a powerfully comforting presence in his son’s life nonetheless. When he was home, he was home all the way—a skill Billy had yet to master with his own family—and no fool when it came to wading through his son’s alibis regarding everything from flunking Spanish and Biology, to adolescent beer benders, to a brawl in a White Castle parking lot. He rarely punished and, in a neighborhood where half the parents seemed to treat their screw-up sons like pi?atas, never with his hands. But most important to Billy, his father attended all his football games, from peewee and sandlot through varsity, without ever once shouting red-faced from the sidelines or criticizing his son’s play. In the Nassau County Youth League, when Billy had quarterbacked his team to a 3–0 midseason mark only to have his coach replace him with his own athletically inferior son, he remembered his father that Saturday morning trying to reason with the guy, but when he realized that the conversation was futile, he just shrugged and walked away, his eyes shining, on the edge of tears.
At Hofstra, which Billy attended for two years on a football scholarship, his father continued to show up in the stands, making it to the majority of the Pride’s away games, including overnight trips to Orono, Maine, and Burlington, Vermont, until it all came to an end in the spring of his sophomore year, when Billy was busted for selling weed in the dorms. His father used whatever connections he had with the Hempstead PD to prevent Billy from being formally arrested, but he made no effort to intervene when Hofstra booted him off the campus. And when Billy came home the day of his expulsion, crushed and too ashamed to ask for his parents’ forgiveness, his father, deciding that his kid’s self-laceration was punishment enough, simply asked him what he intended to do with his life. When Billy couldn’t come up with an answer, either that first night or the next, then and only then did he suggest the police academy.
When Billy came back downstairs at three in the afternoon, he was surprised to find Carmen’s younger brother, Victor Acosta, and Victor’s husband, Richard Kubin, standing together in a corner of the kitchen. Only two years younger than his sister, Victor looked barely old enough to vote, an effect, Billy thought, that had less to do with his short stature or his absurdly buffed physique than with his permanent expression of readiness—wide, alert eyes beneath arched, nearly triangular brows, lips slightly parted—making him appear as if he were perpetually attempting to pick up a distant voice bearing important news.
“Hey, what’s up,” Billy mumbled, embarrassed to still be in his pajamas.
“Hey,” Victor said flatly, shaking his hand without meeting his eyes.
“You all right?” Billy asked, his brother-in-law coming off uncharacteristically grim, a photo negative of himself.
“Fine.”
“Hey, how are you?” Billy extending his hand now to Richard, older, less eager-eyed, an easygoing enough guy—no gym for him—who tended to fade into the background when it came to Victor’s family.
“I’m good,” Richard saying it like he wanted to leave but didn’t want to offend anyone.
“Where’s Carmen?”
“Here.” A third flatliner heard from, his wife standing behind his back in the opposite corner of the room, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes fixed on the floor.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” Carmen said without looking up.
“Nothing?” Victor said sharply.
“What happened,” Billy addressing the men now.
“We’re adopting,” Victor said. “That’s all.”
Carmen exhaled through her nose, studied the tilework.
“We just came by to share the good news,” Richard added, his voice so even-keeled that Billy couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.
“No, I’m happy for you,” Carmen said, her gaze shifting to the backyard. “I am.”
Billy followed the men out to their ancient Range Rover in the driveway.
“So wow, adopting,” he scrambled. “Where from?”
“Brazil,” Victor said.
“Brazil, huh. Boy? Girl?”
“One of each.”
“Twins?”
“Can’t break up a set,” Richard said, unlocking the driver’s-side door.
My husband . . . Billy had never thought of himself as having a problem with gay marriage, but he still couldn’t quite wrap his head around another man uttering those two words.
“Did you tell your sister it’s two?”
“I would’ve,” Victor said, “but I was afraid her heart couldn’t handle the joy.”
“Anyways, that’s terrific, really great,” Billy said, then added by way of apology: “You want us to throw you a baby shower or something?”
At least that got them smiling.
When he returned to the house, Carmen was still standing wedged into her corner of the kitchen.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Heather has two daddies,” she muttered, looking away.
“I don’t get it, your brother comes over with such big news, you couldn’t even give him a hug or something?”
“Guess not,” she said defiantly but starting to tear up a little.
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
“Why does something always have to be going on with you?” she snapped, then walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
And that’s where they left it. That’s where they always left it when it came to Victor and, if he thought about it, so much else.
At five in the evening, Billy walked into Brown’s Family Funeral Home, on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The chapel, a glorified living room, fluorescently lit and lined with folding chairs, was standing room only and awaft in dope smoke. A twenty-two-year-old banger tagged Hi-Life, who had been shot dead in retaliation for an earlier retaliation, lay in his coffin in a front corner of the chapel facing his people, most of whom were wearing oversized rest-in-peace T-shirts silk-screened with a photo of Hi-Life sitting on a stoop. A second laminated RIP snapshot on a bead chain hung off their necks like a backstage pass.
Walking down the room-length particle-board partition that divided the chapel from a line of office cubicles, Billy passed Redman’s elderly father in the first cubicle, Redman Senior leaning back in his chair playing computer poker. In the second cubicle, Redman’s twenty-three-year-old fifth wife, Nola, was lying on a daybed reading a book in her C?te d’Ivoirian accent to Redman’s seventh or eighth son, Rafer, a toddler with a gastrointestinal feeding tube inserted into his stomach. And then finally, in the last cubicle, was the man himself, all six foot five of him, hunched over his desk slurping lo mein from a take-out carton, the spindly wire bookcase behind his back filled with unclaimed cremains in cardboard urns going back to the 1990s.
“There he is,” Redman said, extending an absurdly long-fingered hand but remaining in his chair due to the bullet that had drilled him through both hips five years earlier.
“Christ,” Billy said, waving away the chronic in the air.
“They pay like everybody else.”
“You ever hear of secondhand smoke?”
“That’s just a story they tell you.”
“A conspiracy, you mean.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Like seat belts?”
“Government can’t tell me to buckle up. I break some bones, that’s my problem.”
“Don’t tread on me.”
A toddler wearing a Hi-Life T-shirt down to her sneakers wandered in, then wandered back out unattended.
“How was dinner last night?”
“Not to be funny,” Billy said, “but it was like a funeral.”
“Not over Bannion, I hope. You all should have been Riverdancing up and down the block.”
“What can I say, the whole thing was just off.”
“I heard he was exsanguinated?”
“Never seen anything like it. Apparently he just bled out in midflight, came down like a shop sign.”
“Exsanguinated . . . Makes my job easier.”
“Not mine. I had me a blood trail long as a Nantucket sleigh ride.”
An elderly woman, also in a Hi-Life tee, wandered the hall while coughing up her lungs. They both watched as she pulled back a heavy curtain drawn across the end of the corridor and found herself staring at a legless body lying on a prep table like a three-hundred-pound mound of pancake batter, a nine-inch steel syringe jammed into the jawbone through the side of the gape-locked mouth.
“Oh.”
“Bathroom’s near the front,” Redman said. “The other way.”
“Oh.” She turned and wandered off without looking at them.
“Got to get a door put up,” Redman said, resuming his dinner.
Rafer, now in a wheeled Elmo activity baby walker, came flying into his father’s cubicle and had to be intercepted before he crashed into the cremains stand.
“Slow your roll there, Little Man,” Redman said, wincing from the sudden movement.
It pained Billy to see him so fragile; back in the early days, Redman had once saved his life by catching him one-handed after he fell from a corroded fifth-floor fire escape while they were trying to hit a dope apartment through a bedroom window. Redman, coming up behind him, had been one story below, and he had snagged one of Billy’s arms on his way down and held him like that, Billy’s feet pinwheeling forty feet above the sidewalk, until he could grab onto something with his other hand. The memory of that aborted plummet could still make him shoot up in bed at four in the morning.
“Is he getting any better?” Billy asked, nodding to Rafer and unconsciously touching his own gut.
“No.”
Redman had never been one to countenance blather, so Billy was at a loss for something else to say on the subject.
“See that shine-head nigger in there?” Redman pointed out a trimly built middle-aged man seated in the chapel sporting a bow tie and an inexpensive but impeccable white suit, his shaved scalp gleaming under the cheap chandelier as if Turtle Waxed. “Antoine Davis-Bey. That’s the eel that got Sweetpea Harris out from under the rock.”
“I fought the law and the law lost,” Billy said, bracing for another Sweetpea diatribe.
“You know, I saw him last week, Harris. Came right in here for a friend’s funeral, had the gall to come up to me at my desk and ask me how I’ve been, you believe that? ‘Detective Brown! That leg still hurting you?’” Redman rearing back from his dinner in disgust. “He’s been locked up a few times since killing Salaam, but I heard the last time he was smart enough to claim he had a drug problem, avoided jail for rehab, although some people would say sitting in a group circle eight hours a day and getting yelled at by every idiot and their cousin is worse than six months on a prison barge.”
In Billy’s estimation, Redman, for all his unrelenting focus on bringing Sweetpea Harris to justice, was less obsessed with his homicidally peevish White than he was with the victim, Salaam Pridgen. Like Redman himself way back when, Salaam had been a fifteen-year-old high school phenom already being courted by college scouts, a too-skinny kid with cheetah speed who, as Redman would tell anyone who would listen, owned the most explosive first step to the basket he’d ever seen. A detective in Harlem at the time of the murder eight years earlier, Redman had been watching the boy play since ninth grade, for Rice, for the Gauchos, and even, now and then, in pickup games, anywhere from Marcus Garvey Park to some random one-hoop half-court attached to the ass end of an elementary school.
Redman had no trouble talking about these things to one and all, including the mute bodies he daily prepped for Homecoming, but only Billy and a few others knew that in addition to his interest in the kid, he had been sweet on Salaam’s mother. In between wives at that time of his life, Redman had struck up a casual friendship with her while going to her son’s games. For a while it looked like the friendship would lead to something more, but then her son’s death turned her from a smart and vigorous woman with an appetite for the world into a dead-eyed stutterer who took forever to turn to the sound of her own name.
“You repped this piece of shit too?” Redman grunted to Antoine Davis-Bey, who had materialized in the doorway of the cubicle.
“Black and poor,” Davis-Bey said, winking at Billy.
“Black and poor, huh? That’s a eight-thousand-dollar casket, and his people paid in cash.”
“You’re up, you’re down. See how they’re doing six months from now,” tossing Billy a second wink, as if getting Redman’s goat was everyone’s idea of fun.
“You know what they call four hundred lawyers chained up and thrown into a volcano?” Redman said.
“Hey, guys,” Billy said.