His people. Truth was, Jones didn’t give a fuck about them. When this was done, they’d go back to their sad-ass lives. While he, Jones, would be driving south with cash in the pockets of his new outfit, maybe under the wheel of that white El D he’d seen across town. Had electric windows and everything.
He passed a brother in the street, wearing shades and fatigues, imploring some other young brothers to drop the stolen shit they were carrying and go home.
“Dr. King wouldn’t want this!” shouted the man.
Jones laughed. Now he’d seen it all.
A black man stood outside his deli, holding a pistol at his side, watching the neighborhood burn. His store was untouched. Jones passed other stores and heard dogs barking and growling viciously behind their doors. These stores, too, had gone untouched.
People ran around him and bumped and said not one thing. He coughed and rubbed at his eyes. The police had started using gas. He was sweating some, too. The fires in the buildings were throwing off serious heat.
Down by the big-men’s shop, he saw Ronnie lying facedown in the street, a sweaty white cop over him, knee down, cuffing Ronnie’s hands behind his back, other cops doing the same to some other young brothers, a paddy wagon parked nearby.
You fucked up, cuz, thought Jones. You have lost your job now, too. But I can’t help you, can I? You’ll be out in a few days, if you’re lucky, and you can put your life together then. In the meantime, I got work to do.
Down below L, past the Cavalier Men’s Shop, which had been picked clean, Jones could see a row of police and squad cars blocking off Mount Vernon Square. This was the line dividing black residents from the commercial center of downtown, white D.C. Isn’t no surprise, thought Jones. They’re protecting the master’s castle, like they always do.
Jones cut right and then right again, going north of Massachusetts Avenue. He had parked his car over here the night before. He had heard talk on the street that 7th was going to burn the next day. Funny how most everyone down here knew, when the police, they hadn’t known a thing.
THE HOUSE IN Wheaton had gone quieter through the morning and into the afternoon. Olga sitting at the kitchen table, smoking her Larks, watching the news broadcasts on the little black-and-white Philco set on a rolling metal stand. Olga telling Alethea how sorry she was for her “people,” not meeting Alethea’s eyes as she spoke. Frank lumbering around in his robe, reading the sports page, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, like it was any other day. Only their son, Ricky, had talked to her not as a Negro woman but as a woman. Asked her, also, if there was anything he could do to help her get back home.
“Your father’s going to drive me,” she said. “Thank you.”
He hugged her outside the kitchen, unselfconsciously, as he had when he was a child. She had always been fond of him. Maybe there was hope in the young. Maybe she and the Vaughns and everyone like them needed to die out before this sickness was erased. It was a shame it had to be that way. But she had the feeling it was so.
Alethea stood in the foyer by the front door, waiting for Frank Vaughn to come downstairs and drive her back home. She could hear his muffled voice coming from his and Olga’s bedroom, and the music behind the closed door of Ricky’s room.
Up in the bedroom, Vaughn slipped his.38 Special into his shoulder holster and went to the small nightstand on his side of the bed. He opened its drawer and used a key on a green lockbox. Inside the box was another gun: a cheap.32 automatic holstered in a clip-on. He removed it from its holster, checked the magazine, and palmed the six-shot load back into the laminated-wood grip. He clipped the reholstered.32, which he had taken off a pimp in Shaw six months earlier, onto the belt line behind his back. He folded a cloth handkerchief into a small square and dropped it into the pocket of his pants. He shook himself into his Robert Hall suit jacket, gray with light blue stripes, and looked himself over in the mirror.
“Why do you have to go in?” said Olga, looking at him from across the room, leaning against the frame of their master bathroom door.
“I’m workin’ a case.”
“Today?”
“Homicide never sleeps.”
“Haven’t you been watching the news?”
Vaughn formed his mouth into an O, gave Olga a theatrical look of surprise. “Why, is somethin’ goin’ on?”
“Don’t be an ape.”
“I’m not goin’ near the trouble spots, Olga. Don’t worry.”
“Promise me, Frank.”
“Okay, I promise.”
It was a lie.
“Come here,” said Vaughn.
She crossed the room and put her arms around his waist. He lowered his face and kissed her on the lips. He pushed himself against her to let her know he was alive. He thought of Linda Allen and her warm box.
“I might be late tonight, doll.”
“Call me. So I know you’re all right.”
Vaughn left the room and stepped onto the second-floor landing, glancing at Ricky’s closed door before going down the stairs. Alethea Strange was waiting for him in the foyer, buttoning her coat over her uniform dress.
“Let’s go,” said Vaughn.
“Aren’t you gonna say good-bye to your son?”
“What, you kiddin’?”
“Tell him you love him. Hug him, Mr. Vaughn.” Alethea made a motion with her chin, pointing it toward the second floor. “Go ahead. I can wait.”
Something in her liquid brown eyes told him not to protest. He went back up the stairs and knocked on Ricky’s door.
DOWNTOWN GOVERNMENT WORKERS and private-sector employees, hearing the ongoing reports of escalating rioting on the radio, getting panic calls from spouses, and seeing the smoke drifting toward them from the eastern portion of the city, began to leave their jobs in numbers. Retail employees on F Street and in the rest of the downtown district did the same. Massive uptown and crosstown traffic jams ensued. Some citizens stepped into four-ways and tried to direct cars through gridlocked intersections. Others abandoned their automobiles and walked, trying to relieve the anxiety they felt at being trapped inside their vehicles.