“I can’t believe you could actually be so stupid,” she whispers, her nose almost touching my own. But you burn pictures, I want to say, but don’t.
“I didn’t do anything.” I didn’t. The house is still there. The house will always be there. They can try to move it a couple feet; it doesn’t matter. The house will always be here. It’s not my inheritance, or Tal’s, or my father’s. It’s history itself. It is its own legacy.
“I know what you did. What you tried to do. You did this to us,” she says, before letting go of me and walking away.
“This was my releasing ceremony,” I yell. I start to stomp after her until George makes my momentum halt.
“What the hell is going on?” he wants to know. I don’t know why he’s here, on the other side of the wall. I turn to look at him and see the massive black smoke cloud still coming out of my father’s dying car, so yeah I kind of know. The sirens, I can hear them coming too, getting closer, and that makes more sense, so I push George’s hand off my shoulder. And I start running toward Sun before she can get to the crowd and this is all over.
“I asked you a question. Don’t just walk away,” he demands in full cop voice.
“No. I’m running,” and I take off full speed for Sunita Habersham.
George is running too. He tackles me from behind, and I go down. I’m on the grass once more. On my face first, and then on my back when he flips me over.
“You need to calm your ass down.” George’s hands hold my wrists, his body’s weight seals my pelvis to the earth. I try to lift them, to get him off me, but his move is practiced, time-tested, without counter.
“Sun!” I yell. I lean my head back, try to see her. I do see her, the back of her once more, walking beyond where the crowd has spread for her. “Sunita Habersham!” again, but nothing.
Then, into the gap in the crowd, strolls a vision. A vision as exotic and out of place as all of us. An animal. A zonkey. A real life zonkey. Stripes in the front and the back all white ass. It strolls up, into the gap in the crowd. And it looks at me. Confused. Then gives up, bends over, and starts chewing the grass in front of Roslyn’s feet. The older woman stares past the beast to the house, looking genuinely pained when she looks back in my direction. She pulls on the zonkey’s rope and walks him off as if she’s protecting his innocence.
“You reek. You’re drunk, aren’t you? Is there nothing you don’t screw up?” George leans in, seemingly waiting for me to give thoughtful answers. “I know about you and Natasha,” he whispers. “After all that time waiting for your chance, you even fucked that up.”
“That’s my father.” The voice is so calm, measured, that both George and I turn in surprise. Tal stands there, high above both of us. I can’t see her features because of the glare of the sun above. I can make out enough, though, to see that she reaches out and puts a hand on George’s arm. I feel a warm drop hit my face. It’s George’s sweat, and it’s disgusting, but for a second it creates the only place on my face not burning.
“Miss, you need to take your hands off me and step back.”
“You need to get the fuck off my pops,” my daughter says to him.
George takes his left hand off me to remove Tal’s grip from his arm.
That’s when I punch him in the mouth.
23
THE 14TH DISTRICT Police Department holding cell is actually not so bad compared to the City of Philadelphia Detention Center, which is where they take me when the alcohol wears off and the pain can occupy the vacated neurons and I really start feeling the fullness of my situation. I spend the first night handcuffed to a bed. There is metal on my wrists. Bonds. But I’m actually fine with this, because in exchange they handcuff the other eighty-seven guys in the room to their beds as well, and these men worry me more than slavery metaphors.
During my booking, I am unable to provide adequate fingerprints, due to the fact that my tips have blisters on them. After much discussion about this, I am given a pen and paper to provide a handwriting sample in the meantime. My mug shot, however, goes over like gangbusters, and is viewed by not just George, who is clearly already enjoying himself immensely, but by several of his colleagues, whom he calls in to check out my portrait on the screen so that their day may be brightened. On being returned to my prison hospital bed, George, his jaw clearly swollen from where I popped him, takes me aside so that I can view the masterpiece myself.
Looking at the photo, I don’t recognize this man. He has no eyebrows. His skin is red and shining from the ointment applied by the nurse that afternoon. His eyes are dulled by painkillers. He is trying to smile his cracked lips, but his cheeks hurt so much that his grin comes off as a grimace. Gone too is the hair on my head, and I reach one gauze-covered hand to feel that my hairline has been burnt back past my ears.
“You look like the Red Skull,” George tells me.
“Come on, man. I’m sorry. You gotta let me go.”
“Actions have consequences,” George tells me, smiling, pausing enough for me to take in the message privately even though there are two others in the room. Then, “This is how it works. You assaulted an officer.”
I didn’t assault an officer, intentionally. I assaulted a George. I explain this to Sirleaf Day, via his answering machine, which tells me in response that he is “out of the country pursuing investments, leave a message and I’ll be sure to get back to you.” After three days, I’m not so sure, so I then explain this to the public defender before my arraignment and urge her to bring up this backstory to the judge, but she is not really interested in hashing it out at this time. My assigned attorney is more focused in setting bail, aiming for a reasonable $20,000. I question her strategy when the bail comes in at $100,000 instead, due to the seriousness of my crime and the fact that I’m a flight risk. I also get a trial date. In a month.
The last time I see George is when he stops by my table after the judgment to say, “I’m taking Tosha to Sandals Jamaica tomorrow, so don’t expect any visits. You enjoy your vacation too.”
Sunita Habersham is not going to rescue me. I know this. And I know why. And I understand, too, although I desperately want her to, although I fantasize about it, although once a nurse comes by in flipflops and I think it’s Sun for enough seconds to be crushed by the truth. When Tal doesn’t appear, I know why as well. Because she knows what Sun knows now. That I tried to burn her beloved house down. And Tal might even know why I tried to do it, that it was for her as much as anything, but I know she doesn’t forgive me. Forgiveness comes later in life, after you’ve created enough disasters of your own. The biggest revelation, I’m surprised, is how many other Mulattopians join in the silence. No Roslyn with her army of lawyers, not even to gloat. No Spider. Because they all know. That much is clear by the third day, when they release me to the general prison population and no one comes to bail me out. They all know. About my intentions. About the house. I know that they all know.
But I know more than this. Because when the charges are listed — Assaulting an Officer, Resisting Arrest, Burning without a Permit — that not one of them told my story. Because for days I wait for the real charges to hit: First Degree Arson, Attempted Arson, Destruction of Historically Protected Property, and so on. But they never come. The mulattoes never snitch on me. They protect their own.
—
My cellmate, Héctor, doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. He doesn’t talk too much, which is a good thing, because the cell is too small to navigate through awkward conversation. His is the top bunk, and there he cries every night, which really frees me up to start doing the same if I’m so moved. Besides the one morning he says “La vida es triste,” and shrugs, we don’t talk about it. I like it in the cell better than in the lounge, which is much too communal for my tastes. The scary black dudes, the scary white dudes, and the scary Latino dudes all hang in their own sections of the hall, surrounding a loose collection of just plain scared unaffiliated dudes who sit in the middle waiting to see which tribe is going to victimize them. I try to hang over by the black dudes, but get the look that tells me I’m a racial suspect, so go sit on the edge of the Latino section a noncommittal distance from Héctor. In the great American mulatto tradition, I pass myself off as a Puerto Rican. By the end of the first day, this proves to be a wise decision, and the only cost is the sacrilege of lying about both my dead parents’ entire ancestral lines. Which is not a small cost, and hurts every time I repeat it in my pathetic high school Spanish. It hurts more than later, when one of the guys calls me the “Crimson Coconut,” a name which sticks in the ward across cultural lines, even though the burning redness on my face is already starting to fade away. But it’s worth the humiliation to be allowed into even the outskirts of a tribe.