“No, see, no,” said Kevin. “They can’t do that. She can get punished, but—no, capital punishment…no. There’s laws. Laws…”
Wishful thinking. I thought it but did not say it. There are laws. There are rules. Violent slavery is against the law. But rules are forever being broken. Guards get carried away. Workloads get dangerous. Franklins get bribed; Franklins are sloppy; Franklins don’t give a shit. A surprising number are former guards. When I was ten or eleven years old I knew a PB called Cat’s Eye who used to call a certain working white, whose name was Dickie, he used to call him Dickweed and say, “Oops, sorry ’bout that,” and every time he got punished, and then he’d do it again. Then one time he was working in the tannery, and he fell into the vat. Industrial accident; these things happen. Working whites somehow missed him going in, and so did the guards, and even the Franklins—three yellow jumpsuits in the room and nobody noticed until it was time to fish out what was left of him with the long curved stick they kept hung on the wall in there. The stink of it filled the building so severely that the first three Families who worked that room afterward had to work it with rags tied around their mouths, even after it had been closed for a week for fumigation.
“Yes,” said Cook. “Sucks, man, I know. It sucks.”
“Yeah,” said Maris.
“It is God’s will,” said Barton, “because now you are free…free to tell us—”
But Kevin had had enough after “It is God’s will.” God’s will was more than he could bear, and he thrashed and brought his knee up into me, which I was not expecting, and maybe I didn’t want to stop him, maybe that’s why he had the chance to twist around, knee me in the side of my leg, grab the gun from my hand, and aim it at Father Barton.
“Monster,” he shouted, and Barton said, “I am not the monster, son, I—”
A pair of pops, one after the other, pop pop, barely audible over the river rush—pop pop—ricocheting and overlapping each other, and everybody was moving at once in every direction. Barton jerked as if hit, but he had not been hit, only me, a sudden appearance of pain in my shoulder. I saw as I fell backwards with the bullet that it was Maris who’d fired, Maris, with Cook’s gun, scrabbled up from the ground, and Kevin had taken the other shot, right through the chest: I fell, and he fell on top of me, and he was dead.
He should not have died, but he had died, and there I still was.
I should have died.
I should have died in Bell’s Farm in a rainstorm and a swamp of blood, and I should have died on a Chicago sidewalk. I should have fought against the men from the vans until they were forced to shoot to kill.
And now here beside this gray churning river I should have been the one who got shot, but there I still stood, and still I wanted life.
The sun continued on its rise. A wash across the scene, blood splatter on the shallow rocks, scuff marks on the scrub. And all the anger and confusion turned upon me. Maris and Cook wheeled toward me, and Maris was still holding the gun.
“Gimme my gun back,” said the cop. The sun caught his class ring. Class president, homecoming king. All of us just a bunch of people out here, stumbling around down by the river.
“I will return it to you when I’m through,” Maris said to him, and then to me, steely-voiced, cool: “Stand up.”
I stood up.
“Raise your hands in the air.”
Barton was kneeling in the low run of the water, with Kevin’s head cradled in his lap, praying. Or silently cursing. Or, as he stroked the side of that dead child’s face, trying to bring out the information that he wanted so desperately, bring it up to the surface by conjure or caress. Maris advanced toward me. It seemed wild to me that they would do it here, here with the morning traffic already rumbling past within earshot. Barton was holding the boy, and Maris was coming closer with Cook’s service pistol.
“Wait; wait.” Cook was in motion, moving fast. Putting himself between Maris and me. “Hold up.”
The cop crouched down by the priest, and they huddled together, their heads just touching, the two of them an arch spanning Kevin where he lay, in and out of the water. Cook was whispering into Barton’s neck, and the priest began to nod, fire coming into his eyes.
“What?” said Maris, and then louder. “What?” Impatient, nostrils flaring. Anger fuming off his forehead. This monster, this government man, me—I needed to die, right then. It was so clear.