Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

Dead Men’s Shirts by Julie Smith

Born in Savannah, Julie Smith’s first job was in New Orleans, as feature writer for the Times Picayune. But it was the 1960s, and San Francisco beckoned. There she would work for the Chronicle, and start writing fiction. She returned to NOLA, the city where her novels are set, in 1996. She’s an Edgar Award winner (and a P.I.!) whose new book is P.I. on a Hot Tin Roof.

For Pig Man Latrelle’s funeral, they had a horse-drawn carriage driven by a distinguished gentleman in tails, top hat, and white tennis shoes. They had the Rebirth Brass Band, but not playing dirges, only party stuff. And they had the damn Dead Men’s Shirts, now offered as part of a package deal by the funeral homes. In recent years, they’d been renamed “Memorial Shirts” as if they were something respectable. Pig Man’s whole family was wearing them, all his little nieces and nephews, every single member of his posse, the P-Town Soldiers, all his little girl-friends, and every one of his babies by different girls (definitely not women — Pig Man was only nineteen).

Pig Man’s T-shirt had his picture on it along with his birthday under the label “Thug-in,” and also the day of his death, “Thug-out.” In addition, it sported a legend informing the world that “Real Soldiers Don’t Die — Now I’m With God, Up in the Sky.”

The Reverend Ray Turner Thompson, who officiated at the service, was pretty sure Pig Man was actually burning in hell and he wasn’t sure he wasn’t damning himself as well just by delivering the eulogy. But he managed to pull out some pap about there being good in the worst of us and God loving all his children, and then he recalled Pig Man — whom he called by his given name, Jermaine — as a cute little kid the reverend used to see at neighborhood barbeques. Lately, as neighborhood “soldiers” fell like bowling pins, he’d gotten good at that kind of thing, but it never failed to turn his stomach.

Just about everything about Pigeon Town turned his stomach these days. The violence was at the top of his list, but not the very top. He hated the glorification of it even worse. Sometimes the Dead Men’s Shirts said “Thuggin’ Eternally,” as if the good Lord had a separate heaven he kept for criminals, who got to sell drugs and blow each other away even after death. And the reverend knew these kids knew what was in the Bible; he’d read it to them himself. What the hell was wrong with everybody?

Well, he’d had to keep his mouth shut at Jermaine’s funeral for the sake of Pig Man’s mama, who’d had two sons gunned down in as many years, both of whom probably deserved what they got. But just wait till Sunday, he thought. I’ve been sitting on my hands way too long.

As soon as he could peel himself away from the crowd of teenage murderers and drug dealers and gangsters who shot up the neighborhood and then had the nerve to come into his church like they belonged there, he went home and began composing Sunday’s sermon. On the one hand, he knew the people he wanted to reach wouldn’t be in church to hear it; they only came for funerals. But on the other, he had to get some dialogue going, some buzz started. Some things off his chest.

The thing was, he was fifty-five years old and a graduate of Dillard University as well as a respected Baptist seminary. Furthermore, he was the son of a preacher who was also college-educated. Education was what happened in his family — and also in the recent past, if he remembered correctly. People worked hard and lived good, productive lives. What had happened to that?

How dare you come into my church, he wrote, wearing shirts that proclaim eternal thugging? Who gave you the right? And as for you parents, who gave your sons and daughters the right? This is still a house of God, and God, if I understand anything about this life, does not condone even earthly thugging, much less eternal thugging. Thugging and drugging and shooting and murder. Rape and violence and revenge. No! These things are not of God. Where is your respect, people? Where are your values? What are we teaching our children these days? LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING — BILL COSBY IS RIGHT! WE ARE FAILING OUR CHILDREN! WE ARE FAILING THEM AT EVERY LEVEL.”

He stopped to imagine the way he’d bellow out those last few lines, doing it now in his mind and finding it entirely satisfying. He needed a bridge to Cosby, though. Well, maybe old Bill didn’t belong in this sermon at all. Poor parenting actually seemed minor compared to what was happening in Pigeon Town, which was a turf war between the P-Town Soldiers and a gang a neighborhood over, in Hollygrove. Jermaine Latrelle was only the latest casualty and judging by what the reverend knew about him, at least he was an actor in the drama.

Not so all the victims. So far, two innocent people had been killed as well as three gang members. The killing continued because every witness so far — and there were quite a few — either refused to come forward or recanted after being threatened. The threat was as real as Pig Man’s dead body, too.

But this had to stop somewhere. Somebody, somehow, needed to get some cojones. The reverend changed focus on the sermon, made it even stronger.

Are we going to stand by and let our innocent sons and daughters be gunned down in broad daylight?

We must trust in the good Lord that we’ll be safe. The good Lord and the tip line, brothers and sisters. Those who are afraid, phone in anonymous tips — and pray for the courage to come forward into the light. Those who are not afraid, come forward now if you dare!

We’ve come to a time when Miss Ella Fauntleroy down there in the front row can’t even sell her homemade frozen cups to the neighborhood kids. Yes, Miss Ella, I’ve seen you, poking your old arm out through your door, holding those frozen Kool-Aid cups out to any kid brave enough to come up on your porch, too scared even to show your face.

And I know the Boudreaux family reunion’s been canceled for fear somebody’s going to come shoot it up. Yes, Brother Boudreaux, I know. Y’all have every reason to be scared.

But somebody’s got to speak up. This killin’s got to stop.

He delivered the sermon Sunday, complete with the references to the Dead Men’s Shirts, and there was hardly a dry eye in the house. True, there’d only been about twenty people in church that day, most of them — except for his daughter and his grandson — as old as the reverend himself, but he saw them nodding along with him, he heard their shouted “Amen”s. He’d touched a nerve and he knew it.

That afternoon, just a few hours after church let out, four men in a white pickup fired into a crowd on a porch, wounding three more people and killing a three-year-old girl. Then the pickup rolled on down the road and killed two other men sitting in a car.

When the reverend heard the news, he wept. Just put his head in his hands and cried like a baby. His wife Maureen came in and held him, no need to say anything. After thirty years of marriage, they were practically telepathic. She knew exactly what was wrong with him.

The next day, Monday, a young girl who’d been on that porch came to him for pastoral counseling. She knew who did it, she said, she’d gone to high school with those boys, and one of her cousins was among the wounded. But she had a baby and the baby’s father had been killed in a previous shooting, and even though she knew the right thing to do, she didn’t think she could come forward. Was there some way he could intervene for her? Maybe tell the po-lice, but withhold her name?

Damned if he knew what to tell her, except that he could intervene and he would. But he didn’t add that that wasn’t going to get the shooters convicted, that the police were going to need her testimony. Confronted with a real person with a real problem, that was just something he couldn’t bring himself to do. So what did he believe, he asked himself? Was he just an old bag of wind when it came down to it?

He talked to Maureen about it and then he talked to God. And he realized that what he really thought was, things were so rotten in Denmark — meaning Pigeon Town — that he didn’t really know where to start. Because this was all about the drug culture getting out of hand, so out of hand it had spawned the hip-hop culture, which told innocent kids that the thuggin’ life was the cool life, the good life. That differentiating yourself from white people was the primary virtue of the ghetto, even if it meant you couldn’t get a job because you couldn’t speak good English and had no education and wore jeans so baggy you looked like a clown. In fact, that you didn’t need a job because selling drugs was the “black” thing to do.

But who in Pigeon Town was going to buy that? Who under fifty, anyhow? Saying something like that would make him an object of ridicule, a black man pandering. That was the thug’s-eye view, and it was so pervasive no one dared disagree. Only thing to do, he decided, was to tackle the problem from the bottom up. Start with the kids. He’d announce an outreach program he should have started long ago. He’d distance himself — for the moment — from pleading for cooperative witnesses; he’d focus on the only people in the neighborhood whose minds were still supple. Because Bill Cosby was right about the way kids were brought up these days, the twisted things they believed. Baggy pants and bad grammar didn’t make you a man or anything at all except a clown. He liked that line. He put it in his next sermon, and it went over. Everything he had to say was just dandy with the over-fifty crowd.

It’s gotten to the point, he said, that if you’re going to teach English in a black neighborhood, you’d better teach it as a second language. And I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, he wound up, we’re going to do exactly that! Ain’ no kid in this hood can get a job long as he talk like a thug. He paused for everyone to get the joke and then he said, Hey, don’t go away — y’all know what I meant.

That got him a laugh.

First thing he was going to do, he said, was start a class in standard English, right in the church, as an after-school program. And not only that, he was going to teach the class himself.

That actually got him applause.

But on Wednesday, the day of the first class, exactly one student showed up, his own seven-year-old grandson, Darnell, wearing baggy thug pants and a sullen face. “Mama said I had to bring him,” his daughter D’Ruth said. “So here he is. Just don’t tell his daddy, you mind? Marcellus finds out, he’ll kill me.” She meant her husband, the reverend’s worthless son-in-law.

“Why?” the reverend asked.

“You know why, Daddy. It’s not his scene.”

“You telling me he’s got some problem with educating his son?”

D’Ruth answered with a shrug.

The reverend stifled the urge to ask her why she’d married him, anyhow, and turned to Darnell, who wasted no time in asking, “Why I gotta do this?”

“You mean, ‘Why do I have to do this?’, don’t you?”

Darnell looked at him suspiciously. “Whassup wi’ dat?”

It took the reverend a moment to realize the boy wasn’t smarting off, he really didn’t know. So there was hope here. Ignorance beat attitude by a mile in his book. He ended up spending a reasonably pleasant hour with his grandson, and wished he’d thought of this before. Maybe it wouldn’t keep the kid off the streets, but it was bringing the two of them closer, anyhow.

So he preached about that on Sunday: the rewards of working with your kids, of helping them with their homework. All the gray heads nodded, but except for D’Ruth and Darnell, gray heads were all there were. This was going nowhere.

That Tuesday there were two more shootings, which meant another funeral at his church. This time, the reverend noticed, the Dead Men’s Shirts announced the victim’s dates of birth and death with the labels “Dude-rise” and “Dude-set.” This kid, Le’devin Miner, was also going to be “Thuggin’ Eternally,” if the shirts were to be believed.

The reverend didn’t keep his mouth shut this time. He told the story of his older son, Thomas. There used to be a famous drug dealer lived in these parts, named Rafael Conway, y’all remember Rafael? When my boy Thomas was fourteen years old, he just had to have a certain pair of shoes. What’s so important about shoes? I ask you. How’d a thing like sneakers get to be a symbol of how rich and important you are? Well, my boy Thomas wanted a pair of forty-dollar Dr. J sneakers and we were too poor to buy ‘em for him.

So Thomas asked a kid he knew worked for Rafael if he needed a little help selling pot. The kid said he’d get back to him, and the very next day, who you think came to school to pick up Thomas? In a big ol’ purple Cadillac. Rafael Conway himself, that’s who. And Rafael said to my boy, “Thomas Thompson, I catch you selling drugs or even talkin’ about selling drugs, I’m gon’ put a whippin’ on you.” Everyone under thirty-five gasped. No one expected that.

Rafael Conway said, “You play football, don’t you, Thomas? I’m gonna give you ten dollars for every sack you make this season.”

So Thomas says, “Why you do dat?” Now if he’d been speaking proper English, he’d have said, “Why would you do that?”, but Thomas was just like all of y’all, thought it made him more of a man to talk like he’d never been to school a day in his life. So he said, “Why you do dat?”, just like he didn’t have a day’s worth of education, and you know what Rafael Conway says?

He says, “Listen, man, you’ve got a way out of here, and that’s sports. Me, I’m stuck. Either I’m going to die before I’m forty or I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail.” And then he popped open his trunk and handed Thomas a brand-new pair of Dr. J’s.

And his prophecy proved true. Five years later, he was gunned down in the courtyard at the Iberville. That was the year my boy Thomas was a freshman at Dillard.

Now the point of all this is: That’s the story not from me, not from your mama, not even from God. That’s the story straight from the horse’s mouth. From the biggest drug dealer this town has ever known. And the story is this: If you’ve got a way out, you take it; if you haven’t, you make one for yourself. I wish — He paused here, looking very sorrowful — I just wish I’d’ve been able to tell Le’devin Miner that story. Maybe we wouldn’t all be here today.

Then he got even more sorrowful before he said, “Let us pray.”

Maureen, who’d cried while he was telling the story, congratulated him later on having the courage, but D’Ruth just looked sad at him, and Marcellus looked like he’d like to hit him with a baseball bat. Other than Maureen, nobody mentioned his sermon, except for young Junior Heavey, who came up to him (wearing pants so baggy he had to hold them up) and thanked him for it. “By the way,” Junior said afterward, “I think I remember Thomas. How’s he doin’ now?”

The reverend made himself smile and nod. “He’s fine. Lives out of town now.” Yeah, he was out of town, all right — doing ten to fifteen at Angola. He’d gotten good advice and hadn’t taken it. But all the same, the story was true, and the reverend fervently hoped somebody took it to heart. Darnell in particular.

But Darnell already knew where his uncle was. He said, “How come Uncle Thomas so smart he in jail, Paw-Paw?”

Even later, nobody called him about that sermon, not a soul spoke to him about it, not a single person except for Junior Heavey, and he was pretty sure the kid was taunting him. Maureen said they just weren’t ready to hear it, but the reverend thought maybe he might have gone too far for a funeral, maybe Le’devin’s people didn’t want to be reminded about how their son had died, but that was still denial in his book. He was sorry if he’d hurt their feelings, but he still felt it had to be done.

Nobody new came to his outreach program, either, but Darnell’s mama kept bringing him because her own mama would tan her hide if she didn’t.

And the turf war continued. People kept on getting killed, no matter how much it hurt the reverend to realize he couldn’t do a thing about it. At his wit’s end, he preached again about the need for witnesses to come forward, and thought he saw some people nodding in the back row. But not in agreement this time — they seemed to be falling asleep, all except Darnell, who was smiling and saying little “Amen”s.

Nevertheless, that sermon — the one about the witnesses — brought Marcellus over to the house, Darnell in tow and happy to hang with Maw-Maw while the two men talked. As usual, the reverend silently bemoaned his fate at having such a son-in-law. Marcellus wore gangster clothes, talked ghetto talk, and had twice been in minor scuffles with the law. He worked as a bartender at the Pussycat Bar, one of the meanest joints in town, and D’Ruth had to work at City Hall to keep the family together.

“Daddy Ray, you’re makin’ waves,” he started out.

“Good!” The reverend made a fist and banged it on the arm of his chair. “That is exactly my intention.”

“No, Daddy, you don’t get it. Some dangerous folks out there — real dangerous. They don’t like you gettin’ up in their business.”

“Their business! This is neighborhood business, son. ‘Case you haven’t noticed, we’ve lost eleven people in two months. Somebody’s got to stand up.”

“Way the P-Town Soldiers look at it, they own the neighborhood — they own me, and they own you, and they got the guns to back ‘em up.”

That infuriated the reverend so much he took the Lord’s name in vain. “Marcellus, be a man, goddammit! We sign it over to them, we’ve lost. Lost the neighborhood, lost our souls, man. You got an ounce of backbone or not?”

He was so mad he’d mostly just been spewing, but now he saw that when his son-in-law spoke, his face was slightly twisted — in some kind of pain, maybe. Or fear. The younger man’s skin looked gray and splotchy. “Daddy Ray, this is somethin’ you just don’t understand.”

Suddenly the reverend did understand. He felt the blood draining from his own face. “They threatened you. That’s it, right? You’re here because they made you come. What’d they say? They’d kill me if I don’t shut up? They wouldn’t say they’d kill you — then you’d have to come here and beg for your life and you probably wouldn’t do that. So they’d have enough sense not to put you in that position. They said they’d kill me, didn’t they?” He could see by Marcellus’s face that he was right. He was starting to have new respect for his son-in-law, even a little affection.

He softened his voice, put a hand on Marcellus’s shoulder. “Well, son, I appreciate your coming like this. I know you mean the best for your family and D’Ruth’s. But I can’t knuckle under to that gang of lowlifes. I’ve got to do what’s best for this community, and if that’s the end of me, so be it. I’ve had a good life, and I’ll go when the good Lord’s ready for me. You better go home now. Darnell’ll be getting impatient.”

Marcellus bowed his head in agreement. “All right, then, we’ll go. Mind if I use the bathroom first?”

While Marcellus used the facilities, the reverend called the boy and the three of them went out on the porch to say goodbye to each other. The reverend meant what he’d said, and he knew Marcellus knew that. His son-in-law had done his duty by delivering the warning. He ought to be relieved now, but he still looked tense. Sorrowful, really. The reverend was trying to cheer him up when he saw the white pickup, and saw who was driving it — Junior Heavey. Somehow, he didn’t know how (unless it was the echo of the white-pickup murders), he knew what was coming. He leapt for Darnell just as Junior opened fire, felt himself hit the floor, the boy underneath him, and felt Marcellus fall on him.

He also felt fire in his side.

For a while there was nothing but silence — the shock of shattered peace. And finally Darnell began to cry. A woman began to scream, Maureen, he thought. Gradually, people began to come out of their houses to sort out the mess.

When they pulled Marcellus off the reverend, and the reverend off Darnell, it became clear that not only was the reverend hit, but also Marcellus. The reverend had gotten to Darnell fast enough, and Marcellus had done for him what the reverend had done for his grandson, fallen on him to protect him. But he’d been too late.

The reverend himself, he realized, was the target, exactly as he’d deduced earlier, but, ironically, Marcellus seemed to be the more severely injured. The younger man was unconscious, but the reverend could talk a little, enough to try to reassure Darnell, though that took most of the fight out of him. He closed his eyes with the effort, thanking God that for the moment the family had averted tragedy.

Or at least averted death. Because there is more than one form of tragedy, the reverend thought. It was tragic when one relative betrayed another, bestowed, so to speak, a Judas kiss. The reverend knew it was no accident that Marcellus had used the bathroom right before they went outside. He must have called Junior and told him he was leaving, that they’d all be on the porch in a minute. In other words, he’d set his father-in-law up, but at the last minute put himself in the line of fire.

That would explain his tenseness, the tragic way his face twisted. He didn’t want to do it, the reverend concluded, but the gangs had threatened him, possibly threatened D’Ruth and Darnell. The reverend didn’t fault him for it. On the contrary, he quite literally felt Marcellus’s pain, on that account, and a lot of his own, a whole lot of his own because he knew what was going to happen next. He remembered Darnell in church with those little “Amen”s.

The white police were going to be here soon and Darnell knew Junior Heavey, had certainly seen him driving that truck. If someone didn’t stop him, he was going to do what his Paw-Paw had been preaching about for weeks now.

The reverend’s heart sped up, probably, he thought, pumping the blood right out of his body. But that was the last thing that worried him. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He was only afraid he wouldn’t live to undo what he had done.

“Darnell,” he said, “listen to Paw-Paw. Listen, now...” Though the boy was looking at him, he didn’t respond.

The reverend knew he was speaking — he could feel his lips moving, he could see Darnell looking at him, could feel Maureen’s arm around his shoulder — but somehow, hard as he tried, he couldn’t seem to make the sound come out.

Copyright © 2006 Julie Smith