And Sometimes I Wonder About You

51

I slept on the train ride back from Boston that afternoon. Twill set up the electronic Go board and I may have placed a tile or two but then everything slowed down and I was having a dream about my father when I was ten and Nikita eight.

Along with my mother we were staying at a vacation cottage in western Long Island that the Communist Party maintained. It was a simple house with three bedrooms and a kitchen, living room, and bathroom with a shower. But Nicky and I loved it because we were only six blocks from the beach. Every morning we got on the communal bikes left by Comrade Hastings, the man who owned the house, and tore out for the water. We spent hours there ripping and running, swimming and exploring.

Nicky usually came back before I did because he’d get really ravenous. I was hungry too but one of my father’s lessons was that a true revolutionary could overcome any physical feeling that controlled his actions. So I stayed longer gazing at the water while my stomach grumbled and Nicky was eating apple pie.

One day I was coming back from the beach alone, proud of my hunger. My father and Nicky were in the front yard. Nicky was squatting down in a corner of the lawn near the curb watching something with intensity. All he wore was swimming trunks.

Back near the front porch my father was looking down at the green hose. The nozzle was pushed into a hole in the soil.

Looking at them, I remembered that my father had promised Comrade Hastings, an old white man who smelled like vitamins, that he would take care of his gopher problem. The home owner said that he wasn’t a Nazi and wouldn’t condone the use of gas. My father told him that all he’d have to use was water.

I was rolling to a stop on my too-large three-speed bike. My father and Nikita were maybe a dozen feet apart with their backs turned to each other. My hunger blended with the hatred I’d learned to feel for the Nazis.

“Hello, Mr. Gopher!” my brother yelled happily.

I saw something small, brown, and maybe struggling at the patch of ground my brother watched.

Suddenly my father yelled, grabbed a hoe that was leaning against the porch, and ran to my brother’s side, where he slammed the sharp edge of the tool down on the struggling brown head.

Nicky fell back on his butt screaming and crying. He jumped to his feet and ran for the house shouting, “Mama! Mama! Mama!”

My father brought the blade down again and again.

My mother came out onto the porch and knelt down to embrace Nicky.

“He did it!” my brother said, pointing at Dad. “He killed Mr. Gopher!”

I woke up with a start. From the looks of it Twill and Celia had just finished with a kiss. She’d come along with us because there were things at her apartment that she needed.

“How long?” I asked, the panic I felt tamped down under my groggy demeanor.

“Ten, twelve minutes from Penn Station.”

I took up my phone and made the call.

“LT?” he answered on the second ring.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been trying to get to you for hours. Where’s Twill?”

“Here with me on the train. Why?”

“We did it. We busted the whole fucking crew. There’s not enough jail cells to hold them all. We got almost everyone except for Jones and a couple or three others. Just when the busts were going down one of our techs intercepted a message that referred to Twill and you by name. I sent cops to your place. Your wife and that friend of your father were there. We moved them out. It’s not going to be safe until we have Jones.”

“Have you identified him?” I asked.

“No.”

I disconnected the call.

“Can you put up Twill here at your apartment until I call to say it’s okay?” I asked the ex-stripper.

“No problem,” she said. “Of course.”

I entered A-U into my smartphone and then hit the Call icon.

“Leonid?”

“You home, Aura?”

“Yes.”

“I need to drop by and pick up something.”

It was 10:00 at night and I was coming home at last. I had dropped by Aura’s to retrieve a heavy-duty .45 caliber pistol I had put there some years before. Black men in my position, from gangbangers to hit men to NRA fanatics, learned that it was best to have a woman somewhere holding your piece.

We kissed at the door. Maybe it was the shootout at the Tesla or just the proximity and the metaphor of the gun. But once we started kissing it just wouldn’t stop.

“Will you be coming back, Leonid?” she asked when I was leaving for real at 9:30.

“I think so,” I said as honestly as I could.

When I opened the door to the vestibule of my building my mind was already up the stairs and in my office trying to figure out if it was finally time to run. As I was reaching for the door of the stairwell they came out of the super’s tool closet — fast.

Two men, each grabbing an arm and pushing me toward the back door of the first floor. That led to the back of my building’s property.

“Open!” one man shouted as they slammed my face into the door.

A second later the portal opened and I was dragged in.

I struggled but these guys were big and had some training. Together they were stronger than I and they kept me off balance by shaking and pushing me and kicking me in the legs.

The door opened into a hall that was like a connecting room to another door that went outside. In front of that door was a very large man in a big knee-length coat. He had a full and fake auburn beard. His eyes, open wide, were some kind of false blue created by badly made contact lenses. In his right hand, held high above his fedora-covered head, was an angry-looking fifteen-inch butcher’s knife.

“No one defies Jones!” the madman ejaculated.

That was the moment that I should have died. The puppet master was all facade except for the blade that was about to find my heart. The men that grabbed me were plenty strong at first but they had not done a proper study of adrenaline and its power of multiplication.

With renewed strength I, my brother’s friend the gopher, turned into that honey badger again. I jerked to the left in the narrow passage, slamming the man on the trajectory side into the wall. I didn’t have to worry about the man on my right because Jones’s knife plunged deeply into his chest. The sound he made was so human, so mortal, that even in my frantic state of mind I noted it.

As the knifing victim grunted and groaned I turned like a dervish throwing the left-arm man into Jones. The cult leader roared out and lunged at me with his blade. I went low and moved so that we exchanged places in that room too small. Before facing Jones I delivered a blow to the forehead of the last standing minion with the heel of my right hand against his forehead. The back of his skull slammed into the wall and he crumpled to the floor.

Jones roared again and I produced my .45.

“The math is not in your favor,” I warned.

He lowered the knife and bowed his masked head. If I hadn’t spent thousands of hours over dozens of years studying the referee’s line protect yourself at all times, I might have died then, because Jones suddenly delivered an upthrust of the blade. He pierced my left shoulder but that didn’t stop the bellow of my gun.

I knew that I must have been frightened because I shot the madman six times.

After it was over I didn’t know what to do. I held on to the gun even though it was empty. I didn’t want to go out of the door because who knew what might be out there?

I was weak and getting weaker when the door to the vestibule flew open. Two uniformed cops rushed in, their pistols aimed at me.

“Drop the gun!” one of them commanded.

Gun?

I looked at my left hand and saw that there was blood dripping from my fingers. Then I looked at the right. There was a gun in it. I tried to let it go but the hand refused to respond.

“My hand,” I said. “It’s not working.”

One of the cops, a brave young white man, swatted my hand and the revolver fell.

“Come on out here and sit on the stairs, Mr. McGill,” a man said.

“Why?”

“That knife in your shoulder.”

I saw the haft of the blade. I thought that it was so deep that it might be sticking out of my back. Jones had come close to my heart; like Marella, like Aura, like...