Judging Time

23

Liberty writhed in the dark. Street sounds—fire engine, police siren, people screaming outside and in the hall—instructed his dreams of bloody death. "You a dead man, fucker." Whine of a siren. "Weeeaaweeeaaweeaa—" The sound of someone moving around outside the door dragged him back from hell. It was cold in the room. He pulled at the thin coverlet and realized he was still wearing his clothes, wasn't at home. Groaning, he turned over on the sagging mattress and heard the sound again—boots tramping on a bare floor. He cracked an eye. A sliver of gray light squeezed through the slit between the peeling window frame and the blackout curtains of purple velvet covering the glass. He didn't know exactly where he was, but knew he'd have to get out of there in a few minutes.

He was awake now, his anguish blossoming into a full-blown panic. He looked for his computer. It was still there on the wicker rocking chair beside the bed. In the pale light he could see a fringed piano shawl like his grandmother used to have thrown over the back of the chair. Like hers, this one had holes in the flowers and was minus the piano. He was in a shabby shithole somewhere in Harlem, but the computer was safe. He looked for a phone jack, didn't see one. His shoes were on the floor, by the bed. He closed his eyes to recapture an earlier dream. In the dream Merrill had worn a blue robe with white stars. It looked like the robes the dancers called gypsies in Broadway shows handed down to the winner in their version of the Tonys. She wasn't screaming anymore. She'd won the prize, the robe of heaven.

He whispered to her, "I'm sorry, baby. Come back."

But she didn't seem to see him. She was talking to an audience, telling them in her lecturing voice how black people were in America before the Mayflower.

"The first baby born in the New World was a Moor. They had no word for black or white skin then. The baby was baptized William. There were free blacks in the North, right here in New York, long before there were slaves."

The robe Merrill wore was wide in the sleeves and sweeping at the hem. Like an angel, she argued Liberty's past.

"Rick, you could be one of those indentured servants, a trader from the Middle East, a descendant of Cleopatra or an Ethiopian king. You could be a founding father of America. A free man all the way back to the beginning of time."

"Never was so, baby," Liberty told her in his dream. "Uh-uh, my grandmother on my mama's side was the daughter of a slave, black as night." Nothing free about his past. His father had died in the Korean War. He'd been a member of the last segregated unit in the armed forces, the one that was officially branded in the army's most recent rewriting of history as the "Coward's Brigade."

The man his mother claimed was his father looked dark in his pictures, but Rick had never known him. There was no way to be sure that the dark-skinned dead soldier, who was a musician before he was drafted, was in fact his real father. Rick himself had no musical abilities. For all he knew his real father had simply taken off when he was born, or even before. Could even be his father was a white man. It wouldn't be the first in his family. No matter who he was, Rick had always felt abandoned by him, fatherless in the most profound and unsettling way because he could not get solid information about the man who'd sired him. And what he'd been told didn't add up. His grandmother's skin was dark, his mother's was almost white. His own skin was closer to his mother's than her mother's. And somehow it had been easier for his grandmother to accept her daughter's light skin than his. Even when he was a small child, his gramma had studied Rick's fine, nearly Caucasian features with anger and didn't like to touch him. When his mother had given birth to his younger sister, his grandmother rejoiced because she was dark. And although there were always men around in the fringes of their lives, neither his grandmother or mother ever married.

"Honey, let's have beautiful golden children and go to the Caribbean to dance in the sun." Merrill's robe faded to black and she disappeared.

Pain sliced through Liberty's brain. He opened his eyes. The dream was gone and he needed a bathroom. He smelled coffee. His sweater and pants were rumpled and sweaty. He slipped on his shoes, grabbed his computer, and reached for the doorknob. The spindle came out in his hand, knocking the knob off on the other side.

"Yo, what's up?" The woman in the living room turned at the sound and examined him coldly.

Liberty stared at her. Marvin had told him a friend of his hung out here but hadn't said it was a woman. She hadn't been there last night when he'd come in.

"What's the matter wit you? Ain't never seen a sista befo?" The woman's hostility almost sent him back into the bedroom.

He held out the knob and spindle. "Your door handle is loose," he said.

"Yessir, I took the screws out. I ain't keeping no strange nigger in mah place widout takin some precautions. Coffee?" she offered.

Liberty turned toward the aroma. The kitchen was a corner without a door that contained a refrigerator, tiny stove, and sink. The woman was sitting at a table in front of it with a cup in her hand. She followed his gaze to a sagging sofa and two more wicker chairs and the milk cartons filled with books that served as coffee tables and bookcases.

"Around here, you better have nothin'. worth stealin'," she said coldly. "So I don't."

Rick needed to urinate and wash his face.

She jerked her chin toward a closed door. "Bathroom's in there."

"Thanks." Rick crossed the room and opened the door. The sink was brown with rust. The toilet was old and the tank had deep cracks. It smelled. Rick closed his eyes as he urinated. He gathered his friend Marvin had some message in mind when he'd left him here late last night. Marvin always had a message. The mirror was shadowy with age and had a crack in it. The mirror had a message for him, too. His hair had not one or two gray strands. It had become grizzled, as if he'd been fried in the night and all that was left was ash. His beard gave his face a gray covering, too. He stared at himself, shocked. He thought of the electric chair, but then remembered they didn't kill that way in New York State anymore.

The woman put another cup of coffee on the table and moved back toward the wall, putting the table between them.

"Yo, nigger," she said. "Don't know why you in my place, but I owe Marvin. You register that? I'd do whatever, don't matter what he say. I'd do it, you understand? He wants to hide out some nigger killed a white woman in my place—" She spread the shapely fingers of one hand in the cool sign and shrugged. "Maybe that nigger had a good reason."

Rick opened his mouth at the word killer, but she didn't give him a chance to speak.

"These the house rules. No drugs here. No weapons of any kind. No drugs, no weapons. That's it. I can smell it before you can open it. I can smell it in the hall. One sniff an' I'll call the cops. 'Nother thing, dude, you try to rape me or hit me or come on to me in any way—verbal or otherwise—you try to touch me any place on my person I'll kill you. Got that?"

Rick scratched the side of his gray face to keep from smiling for the first time since Merrill died. Here was a militant sister of some kind, wearing a cloth twisted around her head in a turban, heavy boots, several layers and colors of sweaters, vest and skirt down to her ankles. African trading beads and heavy metal necklaces on her chest. Lecturing him about drugs and sexual harassment.

"I don't look like it anymore. But my name's Rick Liberty," he said. He didn't offer to shake her hand.

She shook her head vehemently. "I don't give a shit who you look like or who you be. Don't care if you famous, or rich as Croesus. You touch me and you a dead man."

Rick closed his teeth over his lips. The situation was ridiculous. Black humor in the extreme. Marvin had some sense of humor. He kept his mouth closed, didn't want to insult her by laughing.

"Oh, you think it's funny? Marvin knows I has friends in the community. I has lots of friends. I told him, this nigger touch me, and he's a dead man. Won't have no more problems with his image."

"Are you a nigger—?" Rick said softly, pulling out a chair and sitting. "Ms. . . . ?"

She eyed him suspiciously. "It's Belle. You dissing me, man?"

Rick shook his head. "No, Belle. Nobody in his right mind would dare to dis you."

"What's your point then?"

"Thank you for your hospitality last night. It wasn't my plan to intrude on your privacy."

"Black folk gots no privacy," she said flatly.

Now there was a position he wasn't going to touch. "Well, thanks anyway. I have to go."

"Drink your coffee."

Rick considered the coffee.

"Ain't nothin' about us good enough for you?"

He wasn't going to touch that either. Rick picked up the cup, swallowed the coffee. Who was—the community? He thought of his own community, of Merrill. Numb, he put the empty cup down. "I have to go."

"How you gonna do that?"

"Taxi."

"Ain't no taxis here."

"Fine, I'll call a car."

"With that blockade out there?"

"What blockade?"

"They stop the cars, ask them what they doing here, run a warrant check on the passengers."

Rick frowned, trying to take that in. "The police have a blockade in the street and stop the cars?"

She nodded. "Uh-huh."

"Why?"

"They do it in the buildings, too. Anybody don't belong here gets arrested for criminal trespass."

"Why?" he asked again.

"They sweeping the hood. . . . You got a warrant out?"

"No," Rick said. "I haven't done anything wrong."

"That's what they all say," Belle muttered under her breath.

"What?"

"I gots to go to work. If you hear screaming and arguing in the hall, don't open the door. It's just the police doin' a vertical." Belle smiled for the fust time, revealing a perfect set of small even teeth. "I think the guy they looking for is on the six floor. All the arrests stop right here." She smiled some more. "I told you black folks gots no privacy."

In a closet without a door, she found a few more layers of clothes. She put them on without looking at him again and left the apartment.

Rick heard her lock the door from the outside in several places. After a few minutes he found the phone under a pillow on the sofa and set up his computer.

A few minutes later a commotion in the hall distracted Liberty as he concluded a long E-mail to Jason Frank. His heart thudded at the sound of boots on

the stairs. He got up to look out the window facing the street. There was no squad car in front of the building. Still, he broke into a sweat when the steps stopped in front of his door.

"It's has to be this floor or the next one," a harsh voice speculated.

"Yeah, this is four B." Another voice, higher. A woman. A third set of boots clomped up the stairs to join them.

Liberty panicked. Was this four B? His mouth was dry. His heart thudded. If they were cops, they could break down the door and throw him out the window. Claim he'd jumped. He read stories in the paper every day about the brutal deaths that resulted when people ran from the cops. No way to find out what really happened. Any fatality could occur when the police appeared on the scene and the world would believe whatever lies they told. His heart felt too big for his chest, as if it had swollen up and was about to burst. He was alone. Merrill wasn't there. Tor wasn't there.

Someone banged on the door with a heavy instrument. Could he jump? Not five floors. He looked around for a weapon to defend himself. There were some books in the cartons, the phone, the chairs. Nothing else. The sound came again.

"Police! Open up!"

It wasn't this door. It was the door across the hall. Still, his heart wouldn't slow down. It pounded harder than it had in any game, as hard as it had back in Princeton when the cops thought he'd mugged and beaten that poor woman. They never bothered to check and confirm that her purse and all her money were there at her feet. He was amazed to find himself trembling and clammy with sweat. After all these years, he'd forgotten what it felt like to be afraid.

"Police! Open that door! Now!"

His heart continued to throttle up as the pounding on the door continued. The tightness in his chest made him wonder how Tor had felt when he knew he was dying. That son of a bitch had been so helpful, had saved Liberty's life years ago only to destroy it now. Liberty let the anguish of Tor's betrayal grow and intensify in his chest until the treachery itself took over. It felt as if double-bladed knives were slashing him open from the inside. Liberty felt dizzy from the image of the knives slicing his arteries, dizzy from the iron smell of blood and the sense that he and Merrill might have been one, after all. It occurred to him that the greatest irony of all would be that his life was over with hers. The tightness and pain in his chest made him fear he was dying. It also made him think that dying of a heart attack in Harlem might well be the best outcome he could hope for.

"Police, open up."

Chains rattled outside the apartment as a door was unlocked. Then a melodious voice sang out, "Praise the Lord." The voice sank to a whisper.

Liberty's eyes drifted back to his computer. He clicked "Send Now" on his E-mail to Jason. Then he began to pull himself together. He had things to do.