Because he paid you, that’s why, my secret voice advised. Because you’re in the business to do right by your people.
My people. Blacks and Mexicans, those who were too old or too young. I identified with immigrants and wage slaves, those who were confused and the ones who were too smart for their own good.
I pressed the button.
The deep reverberation of three gongs sounded through the heavy oak, emanating from the interior of the ridiculously large house. I rang four more times, just in case the people therein were late sleepers. Three minutes had passed. My left hand pushed the right-side door inward. That’s what it felt like, like my hand and not my mind decided, however unwisely, to enter the place.
The foyer was rendered in the shape of the long half of a twenty-foot oval, mimicking the lengthwise dissection of some ancient Roman gladiatorial arena. This hall was furnished with four padded chairs of blue and a stark, dark red love seat. Opposite the front door was a wide entranceway. This led to a room that went up all the three floors of that house, where a skylight, aided by well-placed mirrors, brought down a great deal of sunlight. This meant that the atrium was also a solarium, where dense plant life flourished. There were at least a hundred different varieties of flora. It was like a fancified jungle in there — rosebushes, dwarf palms, cherry and walnut miniatures, just to name a few. Two very colorful birds, not native to this continent, squawked and fluttered at the height of the room, flitting back and forth in the passion fruit vines. I remember thinking that they must’ve had a gardener working at least three days a week to keep everything watered, fertilized, pruned, and harvested.
From the sunroom I entered a sitting room that was just big enough to hold two reclining chairs and a single bookshelf. This room was heavily infused with pipe smoke. The next room was a very large kitchen that looked as if it had never been used — it was that clean.
“Anybody here?” I called. “Lutisha, Lutisha James?”
I passed through a few more rooms that didn’t have names in my architectural vocabulary. Then I finally got to a chamber that was occupied. The residents were corpses, three adults of differing ages. There was a barefoot young woman in her early thirties, clad in a T-shirt and jeans, an older man who looked to be in his eighties, and a younger man, maybe forty, who wore a burgundy housecoat that hung open. They were all white, dead, and had bled, copiously. There were marks of violence on their faces, and they had gunshot wounds to their chests. The old man had had two fingernails ripped out, telling me that this had been a straightforward torture scene.
There was no elderly white woman among them, nor some Black lady old enough to be the mother of Santangelo Burris. There was dried blood, the faint smell of gun smoke, and then there were a dozen or so flies. The ravenous little creatures’ buzzing sounded like applause. They were feasting and no doubt planting eggs.
This last revelation coincided with my decision to leave.
I strode down a long hallway, coming to a hexagonal room that would have most certainly been called the library. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves against all six walls, filled with books, mostly hardback and jacketed. All other things being equal, I would have taken a moment to investigate the literary tastes of the house.
But things were not equal, and I was more interested in an exit than in the printed word.
That’s when the ghost appeared.
A hideous scream broke the silence of the home. I turned to see a banshee running at me. It was all white, like a Klansman from hell, shrieking in a tone so high it would have been impossible for any living mortal to make. It was a vengeful spirit, intent upon rending my soul and dragging me to hell.
A second later, the spirit slammed into my side.
I felt the blow. There was no immediate pain, but I knew from the war that injuries didn’t start out with pain. That would come later. I screwed up my courage to face the demon. But then it was just a child wearing a very light blue nightgown that went down past her feet. She’d wrapped her arms around my waist, holding tight and hollering words that I couldn’t understand.
I put my hands down under her armpits and lifted her even though she struggled against me. When I hugged her close, her arms clamped down around my neck and she screamed and screamed.
10
There I was, a Black man with three dead white people two rooms away and a white girl-child, maybe nine years old, shrieking and holding me around the neck with such strength that the only way to disengage her would have been to cause injury. After what felt like a long time she stopped yelling at the top of her lungs for maybe one minute, holding tight, panting like a small animal surrounded by fire.
Then she started yelling again.
As the time dragged by, she took little breaks now and then before starting up again. If we weren’t so removed from the neighborhood, I might have worried about someone hearing her loud complaints, but the size of the mansion and the huge property itself, I felt, would swallow any sound a human could make.
After a while the sporadic spans of silence got longer.
During one of these pauses I began talking to her.
“Does anything hurt you?” I asked.
Her response was to double the volume of her complaint.
“Do you need some water?”
That time she nodded before crying bloody murder again. Carrying her in my arms, I went to a cabinet, threw it open, and found that it contained only cooking spices, then the next cabinet was filled with plates of varying sizes; the third cupboard specialized in large, probably handmade ceramic mugs. The girl was still hollering, but I paid no attention. I lugged her over to the double-basined aluminum sinks, ran water, and then held the fat vessel to her lips. She had to stop crying in order to drink, and after the third swallow she had to take a deep breath to get the right volume.
I became inured to sounds of terror, this because I was terrified myself, frightened of being discovered and lynched just for being there.
When I was a child they hanged Black people without a trial, without any excuse whatsoever. That reality lived inside me, a colony of long-toothed tapeworms writhing in my gut.
When the girl took another break from screaming, I asked, “What happened to you?”
To my surprise, she said, “My... my... my Uncle Rolfo put me in the secret room in the hall closet and said not to make a sound.”
“He did?”
She nodded.
“Why did he do that?”
“Because they broke the front window.”
“Who did?”
The child couldn’t find words and started screaming again. She wouldn’t let me put her down, so during this bout I sat on a tall stool that stood before a kitchen counter that loomed like an island in the middle of the immaculate kitchen.
When next she paused, I asked, “Are you okay?”
“Where’s Uncle Rolfo?” she whimpered.
“I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe we should call the police.”
More shouts and screams. More holding on tight.
Then, “We got to look for him,” she commanded.
“I’m too scared,” I said. “I want the police.”
More crying. This time it felt as if she might have been crying for me.
“What’s your name?” I shouted over her screams.
“I’m scared,” she answered.
“Me too,” I replied honestly. “We need the police to protect us.”
“Are the police like... like... like you?” While asking this she rubbed her small hand over my forearm, making me wonder if she was referring to my dark color.