Slow Motion Riot (33 page)

Richard Silver was lying on his
back in the Connecticut house.

The place was beautiful, he had to
admit that. There were vistas almost everywhere you looked. A skylight overhead
revealed a bright sun and a cloud formation that looked like the Hindenberg.
The window on the right led your eye to the swimming pool. The window on the
left opened onto the woods. Something was stirring behind the trees.

Richard Silver rolled to his side.
The problem with being able to see everything was that then you didn't feel
like going anywhere.

This is what life was for, Jimmy
Rose used to say. You made money so you could get away from all the things you
hated in the city. The noise. The pollution. The guy coughing phlegm all over
you on the subway. The half hour wait for a table at The Palm. The hoodlums on
the street. The indictments. The probation officer who he'd been talking to.
The investigators from the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago who Larry said
were going around asking questions the last week or so.

Somebody was talking.

Better not to think about all that
now. What was the point of coming up to a place like this on a weekday unless
you were going to relax? Through the window on the left, he could see that
something definitely was moving behind the trees. Maybe a deer. He started
feeling hot. The skylight above him was a magnifying glass on the sun. Why
didn't anybody think of that when it was put in?

He opened another button on his
blue Paul Stuart shirt. It was funny the way they made these things without
buttons on the wings of the collar. He remembered the blue cotton oxfords from
Brooks Brothers he used to wear in the sixties. There was something kind of
earnest and preppy about them, but they had a slightly rougher texture, which
made them look good with jeans. You could honorably wear one to a community
meeting in Harlem and then grab a tie out of the glove compartment and go to
City Hall if you had to. A Bobby Kennedy kind of thing to do. Bobby was always
good with the "out in the streets" bullshit. You had to give him
that. And the girls.

He remembered wearing a shirt like
that when he walked the streets over the long, hot summers in Harlem. He could
still feel the fabric sticking to his back when he got all tired and sweaty. Of
course in those days, when he tucked his shirt in, it was like a bed sheet
stretched tight over the firm flat expanse of his stomach. Now it was more like
a ship's sail billowing in the wind. He had to get back to the gym soon.

He hadn't worn a shirt like that
since he threw his lot in with Jimmy Rose on the Sullivan Houses deal in
Brooklyn. Lose the Young Democrats look, Jimmy told him, you make me nervous.
Get yourself some wing tips and a manicure.

It'd been years since he'd thought
about any of that. The Hindenberg cloud moved on and the sun got stronger. He
heard something rustling outside again. This time he stood up to see what was
coming through the trees. Twigs snapped and branches parted. It was the guys
coming to clean the pool. Suburban scum in T-shirts and jeans. One of them was
carrying the long pole with the net on it. The other was dragging that
filtering machine that made all the noise. He'd forgotten this was their day to
come in. He wouldn't have bothered driving up if he'd remembered.

Richard Silver decided he might as
well turn on the television again and find out what was going on in the city.
He was never going to get any peace now anyway.

"All right, spread
"em!" says Darryl King.

"Open his mouth! SOMEBODY get
his mouth open!"

At least four pairs of hands are
frisking me now as I lie down flat on the floor, hands behind my head. Only
people who've been arrested and slapped around by police all their lives could
have this much enthusiasm about playing cops.

"You have the right to an
attorney," says one of them.

"Somebody please open his
mouth," says Bobby, the big one with the H's in his hair, who's standing
right by my head. A little bit of blood is leaking through the side of the
shirt he just put on. Now he's furious and waving a gun at me like he knows
just where he'd like to put it.

The rest of them ignore him and take
my gun, cigarettes, Silly Putty, and my bulletproof vest. I happen to look over
and see a bunch of other people sitting over on the couch, watching television,
like what's going on here couldn't possibly be as interesting.

Darryl is crouching over me,
pointing my gun right in my face. And as he holds the power to end my life in
his hands, what he says to me is: "Yo, blood clot, what's up?"

I used to have a very immature idea
of what death would be like. Somehow, I thought that all the people who'd mistreated
me in life would jam into a great synagogue somewhere, bow their heads in
unison, and say how sorry they were that I was gone.

I never dreamed it would end in a
poorly maintained Harlem housing project, with a group of bored-looking black
people sitting around watching white people do aerobics on TV while a
belligerent crackhead grinds his broken yellow teeth in my face.

I suddenly have a vision of myself
lying facedown on the green carpet with a bullet in the back of my head and a
spreading stain where I've lost control of my bladder. One of those forsaken
corpses you read about sometimes in the newspapers. Darryl steadies his aim
with the gun and I start to get really scared.

My throat feels dry and my contact
lenses are poking me again. I dearly don't want to die. But I know that if I
show any emotion, I'll lose all control.

"Over here," someone
says.

They bring me over to a chair in
the middle of the room and surround me. I guess they want to make sure nobody
can take a shot at any of them without the risk of hitting me, but they need me
close enough to the window so the outside world can see I'm in immediate danger.

A heavy mingled aroma like burned
meat and crack hangs in the air. So far, I've counted about a dozen people
floating from room to room here. Most of them still aren't paying much
attention to me. One of them gets up and changes the TV channel to The Price Is
Right. A couple of the others stare listlessly out the windows, like the people
in a mental health commercial. Two small children are roughhousing in one of
the back bedrooms.

A couple of quieter minutes pass
and I start to wonder what they're doing outside. The last thing I heard was
something that sounded like bodies being dragged away in the hall. I hope
Bill's not dead. It gets me thinking about the way he looked lying on the floor
with the gunshot wound, and my features start moving around my face. I have no
idea what it looks like to anyone else, but Darryl clearly doesn't like it.

"Don't be looking that
way," he says. He shoves what used to be my .38-caliber service revolver
right in my face. "You remanded," he says.

I can't tell if that's supposed to
be a joke or not. Beyond the sights of the gun, his face is a death mask with
its hollow eyes and rictus grin. Looking at it, its hard to believe that this
is where I wanted to be. Dealing with Darryl in Darryl's world on Darryl's
terms. I'd ask myself what I've done to deserve this, except that I was the one
who insisted on coming here.

With the hand not holding the gun,
Darryl begins to play with himself, fumbling with his genitals in a grim,
unconscious kind of way. After a while, he gets tired of it and starts fooling
around with an old-fashioned flip-top silver lighter. I think of the lighter I
snatched off the bar last night when I was with Andrea. At the time I wasn't
sure why I took it—a momentary larcenous impulse, I guess. But now it reminds
me of Andrea and I feel a little ripple inside because I'll probably never see
her again.

Then I start missing things I never
even liked before. Like walking to work from the subway in the morning. I used
to hate that walk before, because it took me under that scaffolding with filthy
water dripping down. But now I miss that walk like crazy. I wonder what I
could've done differently. Maybe if I'd kept the window open the night it
rained a couple of weeks ago, I might've caught a cold and been out sick today.

Darryl's voice jolts me back into
the present tense.

"Get your legs under the
chair," he says, putting one of my cigarettes in his mouth and setting it
on fire with the lighter.

"Why?" There's hardly any
room.

"Just do it," he says.
"My house, my rules."

He keeps flicking the gun's safety
catch on and off, finally leaving it off and turning the gun sideways to
examine its chambers. When he's satisfied that everything's where it ought to
be, he points it straight ahead so that its muzzle is less than six inches from
the bridge of my nose.

"Darryl, what're you
doing?" his mother asks, like she'd just caught him raiding the refrigerator
before dinner.

"What it look like?"

"Well, I just hope you don't
think you're gonna shoot that man right here now..."

I keep my eyes shut and take deep
breaths.

"Darryl," his mother
repeats. When I open my eyes again, I see she has her hands on her hips. She's
as thin as her son, but she seems drained by heroin, not crack. "Don't you
try and shoot that man..." she says lazily.

"Why not?"

"You shoot him, what's gonna
happen to us? You ever stop and think about that?"

"No," Darryl says barely
acknowledging her.

"That's 'cos you stupid, like
your sister said." His mother opens a can of diet Slice orange soda and
takes a long drink. Her elbow forms a jagged angle off her body. "The only
reason they ain't come through that door already is 'cos we have a hostage."

"I know what time it is."
Darryl's face contorts and he takes two steps back and punches the wall,
leaving a crushed-in mark. The other guys surrounding me with guns look at each
other like they're truly impressed with his ability to express himself.

"What's the matter with
you?" his mother asks.

"You called me stupid."

She reconsiders. "Well, I
don't think you stupid," she says with a sigh. "You just smoke too
much shit and you don't think straight sometimes."

"Well, all right."

Darryl's mother looks at me.
"What's his name again?" she asks Darryl like she's inquiring about a
new household pet.

"Mr. Baum." Mr. Bomb, it
sounds like.

"Is he Jewish or
something?"

"I dunno." Darryl cocks
his head to one side as he looks at me. "Are you Jewish?"

"Yes," I say, and
immediately regret answering.

"See?" says Darryl's
mother.

"What?" I say.

"Nothin'." She finishes
her soda and goes back to the kitchen.

A single bead of sweat slides down
my face and a truck sighs outside. For the first time, I'm aware of people's
voices coming through the windows. There must be hundreds of cops and emergency
service people downstairs, making plans and waiting to see what's going to
happen. Darryl shifts the gun over to his right hand and puffs away on my
cigarette. It looks like a bomb's fuse burning down in the corner of his mouth.
After three long last drags, he spits it out on the floor and looks after it.

"Fuckin' Marlboros, man,"
he says. "How can you smoke that shit?"

Darryl left Aaron to guard the
hostage and went into one of the back bedrooms just as the noon news was
starting on television.

His mother was lying on the charred
mattress he'd accidentally set fire to when he fell asleep smoking crack a
couple of nights back. With her eyes closed like that, she looked dead, and
watching her, he got sad. It started him thinking about the foster home again
and how it was being away from her. He kicked at the balled-up newspapers and
matchbook covers lying on the floor. Then he noticed she didn't seem to be
breathing and he began to panic. For a couple of seconds, he stopped breathing
too.

His hand went back down into his
pants. But nothing much was happening there, so he grabbed the crack pipe off
the night table under the window and tried to light it with his propane torch.
The spout was broken, though, so he had to use the silver lighter he'd found
before. His hands were almost shaking too much to keep the flame steady, but
soon the strong blue crack smell filled the room and woke his mother. She
rolled her bloodshot eyes from the TV to Darryl taking long hits off the stem.

"Look like you suck on a glass
dick," she told him.

One of the TV ladies was on the
screen. She was the type that looked fine sometimes, and not too good other
times. Today she was okay. She was standing outside by a red brick wall while a
posse of kids were jumping around behind her and waving at the camera.

" "S a long day,"
Darryl said.

His mother sat up slowly and
blinked her eyes. She looked so much older all of a sudden. He wondered if just
having the probation officer in the apartment had aged her. When Mr. Bomb had
first shown up like that this morning it was like a dream coming true. Now it
was turning into a nightmare.

"What time is it?" his
mother asked him.

"I don't know." Darryl
just looked at her.

The lady on the television was
saying something about a standoff and the police. The sun was hitting one side
of her face and a shadow fell over the other side. One of the homeboys jumping
around behind her looked like he was about to grab the microphone out of her
hands and do his own personal version of the news.

"I like to change my
clothes," said Darryl's mother. "I been sleeping in these."

Through the doorway, he could hear
the sound of the probation officer asking Bobby for something.

"I don't even remember the
last time I had my hair done," his mother said, pulling on the lank part
in the back.

Darryl didn't hear her. He was busy
trying to recognize somebody on the television screen. A little kid he'd seen
running around the hallway outside. Now the kid was jumping around near the TV
lady and the brick wall. He looked again and thought he saw Ernie, the car
washer, lingering around the edge of the scene.

He started watching more closely to
find out how Ernie got to hang out with the TV lady. Maybe Ernie dropped a dime
on somebody or something. Slowly, he began to recognize the brick wall on
television as the one downstairs. They were doing the show right now, right
outside the Charles J. Stone Houses.

"Again, all our information is
very preliminary," said the TV lady, who had on a lot of lipstick and
small earrings, "but we understand at least one field officer is being
held hostage in the apartment."

Darryl's mother opened her mouth a
little. The TV camera swept slowly around the courtyard outside, showing
hundreds of cops standing ready. They looked like they were about to go to war
in a science fiction movie. Most of them had on riot helmets and carried
Plexiglas shields. The TV lady said they were just waiting for the order to go
ahead and break down the door of the apartment.

"Don't believe the hype,"
said Darryl.

But then the camera began to rise,
passing all the people hanging out the windows, and finally pointing up at the
roof. More than a dozen guys wearing SWAT team caps and carrying high-powered
rifles were scurrying around for position up there.

"Now look what you done,"
said Darryl's mother.

"What?"

"I told you, you should've
talked to the man who called before to negotiate."

"Ah, he was another
sucker," Darryl said.

He heard another siren going down
the street outside. A split second later, the same sound was coming out of the
television.

"We should've done Mr. Bomb
when we had the chance," Darryl mumbled, taking another hit off the pipe.
He put it down on the table, next to the ether tank he'd been using to get rid
of the impurities in cocaine.

"Then they just come right in
and kill us all," his mother said once more. "Like at Attica."

He didn't know what she was talking
about. He had a lot of friends who'd been upstate at Attica Correctional
Facility and it didn't sound any worse than Auburn or Greenhaven or any of the
other prisons. It was mainly being locked up. Like he was now. He asked his
mother what was so special about Attica.

"Don't you remember?"

He shook his head, but kept his
eyes on the television.

"I guess that was before your
time," she said. "The brothers had themselves a uprising there and
took some hostages."

"Yeah? So what happened?"

A cloud seemed to pass in front of
her face. "Well, I don't remember all of it," she said vaguely.
"I think the police went in and killed a whole mess of the brothers. Like,
I think your uncle Willie was there."

Darryl shrugged. He never even knew
he had an uncle Willie.

"Anyway," said his
mother, sounding more sure of herself now. "After the police went in, they
took the rest of them inmates that they didn't kill and made them strip
buck-naked and crawl through the mud."

She nodded, relieved she had at
least part of it right. Darryl just stared at her.

"That's fucked up," he
said.

" 'S why I don't want that to
happen to us," his mother told him. "I already been to prison."

Darryl looked over at the
television. They'd cut back to the studio where a guy, wearing a tie and a lump
of curly hair on his head, was saying they'd have more on the hostage situation
later. He also said there'd be a report about whether that cop was going to get
indicted for shooting Jamal Perkins. A commercial came on with a lady in a
white headband drinking a cup of tea.

"That's all it is,
Darryl," his mother said. "When that man calls back to negotiate, you
all better have something to tell him that won't get us throwed back in jail.
Because I cannot stand it."

"Fuck, Moms!" He made a
move to punch the wall again. "What'm I supposed to do?"

"Get a holda yourself. I
always said your temper was going to get the better of you," his mother
said sharply. "Now get on outta here. My program is coming on. The Young
and the Restless. That bitch Nina be doin' it again."