I went to Bible study every day. When we finished reading Scripture, we’d say Amen, and then Big Ike, who ran the group, would ask, “Who’s got court tomorrow?” Usually, someone would say they had a preliminary hearing or that the arresting officer was testifying or something like that, and Big Ike would say, “All right, then, let’s pray that the officer don’t throw you under no bus,” and he’d find a passage in the Bible about redemption.
Twinkie was the black kid who was my age. We talked a lot about girls, and how we missed hooking up with them. But believe it or not, we talked more about the food we craved on the outside. Me, I would have committed a felony for Taco Bell; Twinkie only wanted Chef Boyardee. Somehow, it didn’t matter so much what color his skin was. Had I met him on the streets of Hartford, I would have kicked his ass. But in jail, it was different. We’d team up when we played Spades, cheating with hand signals and eye rolls that we made up in private, because no one expected the White Power guy and the black kid to be working together.
One day, I was sitting in the common room with a bunch of White guys when a gang shooting came in on the midday news. The anchor on the TV was talking about how the bullets sprayed, how many people had been hit by accident. “That’s why if we ever go at it with the gangs,” I said, “we win. They don’t go target shooting like us. They don’t know how to hold weapons, look at that death grip. Typical nigger bullshit.”
Twink wasn’t sitting with us, but I could see him across the room. His eyes sort of skated over me, and then back to whatever he was doing. Later that day, we were playing cards for cigarettes, and I gave him a sign to come back in diamonds, because I was cutting diamond spades. Instead, he threw clubs, and we lost. As we were walking out of the common room, I turned on him. “What the hell, dude? I gave you a sign.”
He looked right at me. “Guess it’s just typical nigger bullshit,” he said.
I thought: Shit, I hurt his feelings. Then: So what?
It’s not like I stopped using that word. But I’ll admit, sometimes when I said it, it stuck in my throat like a fish bone before I could cough it free.
—
FRANCIS FINDS ME just as I put my boot through the front window of our duplex, pushing out the old casing so that it explodes onto the porch in a rain of splinters and glass. He folds his arms, raises a brow.
“Sill’s rotted out,” I explain. “And I didn’t have a pry bar.”
With a gaping hole in the wall, the cold air rushes into the house. It feels good, because I’m on fire.
“So this has nothing to do with your meeting,” Francis says, in a way that suggests it has everything to do with the last half hour I’ve spent at the local police department. It was my next stop after the hospital. I’d dropped off Brit, who crawled back into bed, and drove straight there.
My meeting, really, was not even a meeting. Just me sitting across from a fat cop named MacDougall who filed my complaint against Ruth Jefferson. “He said he’d do a little research,” I mutter. “Which means I’ll never hear from him again.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That that bitch killed my baby.”
MacDougall didn’t know anything about my son, or what had happened at the hospital, so I had to tell the whole sorry story over again. MacDougall asked me what I wanted from him, as if it wasn’t evident.
“I want to bury my son,” I told him. “And I want her to pay for what she did.”
The cop asked if, maybe, I was just overcome with grief. If I had misinterpreted what I saw. “She wasn’t just doing CPR,” I told MacDougall. “She was hurting my baby. Even one of the other doctors told her to lighten up.”
I said she had it in for me. Immediately the cop glanced at my tattoos. “No kidding,” he said.
“It’s a fucking hate crime, that’s what it is,” I tell Francis now. “But God forbid anyone stand up for the Anglos, even though we’re a minority now.”
My father-in-law falls into place beside me, ripping a piece of flashing out of the window cavity with his bare hands. “You’re preaching to the choir, Turk,” he says.
Francis may not have talked publicly about White Power in years, but I happen to know that in a locked storage facility three miles away from here, he is stockpiling weapons for the racial holy war. “I hope you’re planning on sealing this up,” he says, and I pretend he isn’t talking about the window.
Just then my cellphone rings. I fish it out of my pocket but don’t recognize the number on the screen. “Hello?”
“Mr. Bauer? This is Sergeant MacDougall. I spoke with you earlier today?”
I curl my hand around the phone and turn away, forging a wall of privacy with my back.
“I wanted to let you know that I had a chance to talk to Risk Management at the hospital, as well as to the medical examiner. Carla Luongo corroborated your story. The ME was able to tell me that your son died due to hypoglycemic seizure, which led to respiratory and then cardiac arrest.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Well,” he says, “the death certificate’s been released to the hospital. You can bury your son.”
I close my eyes, and for a moment, I can’t even find a response.
“Okay,” I manage.
“There’s one more thing, Mr. Bauer,” MacDougall adds. “The medical examiner confirmed that there was bruising on your son’s rib cage.”