CHAPTER TWO THE RUG
The police came. They came slow. I was already dead, so I did not feel the slowness, but Wanda felt it, and the neighborhood felt it, and the difference between how fast they came for a shooting on the Boulevard and how fast they came for a shooting in Buckhead was a number that anyone out here could have given you without a calculator.
The detective in charge was a man named Royce.
Sergeant Wade Royce, out of the Zone Four precinct.
Royce was the kind of detective the Boulevard had learned to dread more than the shooters, because the shooters at least were honest about what they were.
Royce wore a gold watch he could not afford on a sergeant’s salary.
He had a fishing cabin up on Lake Lanier that he never talked about at the precinct because a man does not buy a fishing cabin on what the city pays.
He took money from the Saints for years.
Not from Curtis. Royce thought Curtis was a clown.
He took money from Darnell, because Darnell was a businessman and businessmen understand that a detective is just another kind of expense.
Royce stood over my body in the parking lot while the coroner’s people bagged me. He did not cover my face. He looked at my face and he did not know me, because Royce had never come to a single one of my meetings, and the only Black men Royce could pick out of a lineup were the ones who paid him.
The case was open for three days. In those three days the city paper ran one story.
The headline read MAN KILLED IN CROSSFIRE ON BOULEVARD, and in the sixth paragraph it mentioned my name, and in the seventh paragraph it mentioned that the police had not ruled out that the victim may have been the intended target.
That sentence. May have been the intended target.
Eight words. That is all it takes. You put those eight words next to a Black man’s name on the Boulevard and the city does the rest of the work for you.
The rumor started before I was in the ground.
The Boulevard had a long memory and a short imagination.
A man is shot on the Boulevard, the man must have been in it.
The Saints and the Jackals were known to run drugs and girls, and here was a man shot in their parking lot, and the people who did not know me did the math the city had taught them to do, and the math came out wrong, and the wrong answer was easier to believe than the truth, because the truth was that a good man can be standing in the wrong parking lot at the wrong time and the world does not care what he was carrying home for his children.
Wanda heard the rumor. She heard it at the church, at the grocery, from a woman at the school who asked her, with a softness that was worse than cruelty, whether Darius had been into something.
Wanda said no. Wanda said he was coming home from a speech.
The woman did not believe her, or she believed her and did not care, and the difference between those two things is smaller than people think.
The funeral was on a Saturday. It was big.
The Boulevard came. My mother came from Macon.
Wanda’s father came from Birmingham. The convention center sent a man to read a statement.
The mayor did not come. The police did not come.
Royce did not come, but Royce did not need to come, because Royce had already closed the file.
He had written the words NO LEADS, COMMUNITY UNCOOPERATIVE, and those words are a locked door, and behind that door a case dies, and behind that door my name stayed dirty.
Wanda buried me in a suit she could not afford because the insurance company had told her the policy had lapsed, which was a lie, and she did not have the money or the knowledge to fight an insurance company in the year after her husband was murdered, and so she wore black and stood at the grave and held Trey’s hand and held Maya’s other hand and the three of them were a small island of grief and the city moved around them like water around a stone.
The kids stopped sleeping. Trey drew the same picture over and over for a month: a man at a door with a bag, and a bright light above him.
Maya stopped talking at school. Wanda went back to work at the hospital billing office three weeks after the funeral because the rent does not care that you are grieving, and the light bill does not care, and the people who held the note on the house did not care, and so she went back, and she sat at a desk and entered codes into a computer and at night she lay in the bed where I had been and she did not sleep, and she did not sleep, and she did not sleep.
I watched all of this. That is what I can do now.
I put my attention on Wanda and I was in the room with her, and I could not touch her, and I could not speak loud enough for the living to hear, and I watched my wife learn to carry a weight that was never hers to carry, and I watched the city forget my name and remember the rumor, and I felt something in me that was not sadness.
Sadness is what you feel when you are alive and you have lost something.
I was past sadness. What I felt was a thing with teeth.
I did not know yet what I could do. I only knew that I was angry, and that the anger was not going away, and that the men who had killed me were still on the Boulevard selling crack and running girls and sleeping in their beds, and that the detective who should have found them was wearing a gold watch bought with their money, and that my wife was awake in the dark and my son was drawing the same picture and my daughter had stopped talking, and that the world had decided this was acceptable.
The world was wrong. And I was going to show it.