“HOLD IT RIGHT there!” a man’s voice commanded.
Lorraine and Ronnie had just climbed down from the deceptively close cluster of boulders that surrounded an unsuspected, ever-widening nexus of the Earth and the rest of the universe. There were five policemen flanking the two from all sides.
“Five,” Ronnie stated clearly, hoping Lorraine understood how serious that was.
“We’ve been looking for you two,” a policeman with three angular stripes on each of his shoulders said. He approached Ronnie, pushing him in a way familiar to the former street thug.
The young man turned without being told to and put his hands against stone.
“What did we do?” Lorraine asked while the senior officer frisked her loved and hated friend.
“What were you doing behind these rocks?” the officer replied.
Two of the uniforms climbed up into the nest of stones.
Ronnie wondered what they would see.
“Talking,” Lorraine answered.
“Are you selling it or giving it?” the officer said.
“What?”
“It’s not like that,” Ronnie said. “It just ain’t, man.”
“Somebody saw you carrying a dead man up in there,” the policeman challenged.
“Man, if you saw me kill and carry some dude, I know you already been up in there. And if you have been, then you know ain’t nobody dead to see.”
When the cop finished his body search, Ronnie turned around.
“You have ID?” a policeman asked Lorraine.
Lorraine produced her identification from the wallet Ronnie forgot to run with after taking her life.
The sergeant looked at her picture on the driver’s license. “Could be you,” he said. “Could be your sister.”
The two rock-climber policemen came back, shaking their heads.
“You’re not supposed to be climbing up behind the rocks like that in this area,” the senior official said. “This is a family park.”
“Then why don’t you put up a sign?” Lorraine said with scorn.
“Don’t get smart with me, young lady.”
“It’s not very hard to do. You should try it sometime.”
“It’s okay, Officer,” Ronnie said before the head cop could speak again. “Lore just ain’t nevah been stopped by the police before. She don’t know how to ack.”
“Let’s see your ID,” he said in answer.
“Left it at home in my other pants.”
“What’s your name?” the lead law enforcement officer asked.
“Ronnie Bottoms.”
“Where do you live?”
“I’m stayin’ at Lore’s right now, brother. We ain’t done nuthin’, man. Really.”
There were police all around them. Ronnie could feel the anger pouring off Lorraine. He could sense the heat of her outrage and the pulse of her indignant heart. For him, the police with their truncheons and guns were like a sudden rain shower or birds on a wire. This was his atmosphere before Lorraine had sucked out his being in a vain attempt at revenge.
“We was just kissin’, man,” Ronnie said. “That’s all.”
“I could arrest you,” the policeman speculated.
“For what?”
“You might be an illegal alien.”
Lorraine giggled.
“Alien?” Ronnie countered. “You mean you think I’m from China or Mexico? Shit, man, all you got to do is hear me talk and you know that ain’t true.”
“Have you seen anybody fighting around here?” the sergeant asked, changing tactics with ease.
“No, brother, no. Lore an’ me just stopped for a kiss and we about to go on.”
The police moved off a few feet to huddle. The one female cop, a Latina, watched Ronnie and Lorraine while the strategy was planned.
“Is it always like this?” Lorraine asked.
“What you mean?”
“Do they just stop you on the street and go through your clothes like that?”
“Whenever they want to. When I need to carry sumpin’ somewhere, I usually get a bitch, I mean a girl to do it for me. You learn to hide shit where you can get at it when you need it.”
“That’s wrong,” Lorraine said loudly.
“Uh-uh,” Ronnie said, shaking his head as he studied the conferring cops.
“What do you mean no?”
“It’s no different with that bear on the yellah dirt road or the Laz when it had Ma Lin. Just one more thing you got to deal wit’.”
“It’s humiliating.”
Ronnie heard the words but couldn’t process them. It was as if she were talking about people in a book or on some TV show about some other country, where they spoke another language and prayed to a different God.
“We’re going to be watching you, Mr. Ronnie Bottoms,” the sergeant said. He had come up on them when Ronnie’s thoughts were very far from the plight of his old life.
“Yes, sir,” Ronnie replied, looking down at the turf beneath his feet.
“And you, young lady,” the cop continued. “You should make better choices about who you’re kissing.”
She wanted to kick him in the temple. She knew that she could do this and that her speed would cause serious damage. But she held back—and hated herself for doing so.
* * *
“IT’S NOT ONLY Ma Lin and that dude I was gonna mug,” Ronnie said when the two emerged from the park onto Fifty-ninth Street.
“What do you mean?” Lorraine asked.
“You tried to murder me.”
“You deserved it.”
“Maybe I did. But if you went to the police and told them where your body was at and who did it, then they would have grabbed me and punished me by law. Instead you wanted me to save your life even though you were alive in the Silver Box like Used-to-be-Claude and Ma Lin.”
“You’re the murderer,” Lorraine said.
“Ain’t nobody dead, nobody except for maybe Ma Lin, if you listen to what he says.”
“You killed me.”
“I almost died bringing you back.”
Lorraine stopped short on the busy street. Pedestrians moved around her, snarling and cursing under their breaths.
“Let’s make a deal,” she said to Ronnie’s broad back.
He turned.
“Let’s not blame each other anymore,” she said. “I’ll forgive you for what you did and you can stop pointing out all the things you see in my actions.”
“No, baby,” Ronnie said, shaking his head and turning away. “Uh-uh.”
“No?” she said to his back.
She hurried to his side and said, “What do you mean no?”
“When you tell me I killed you,” he answered, “you’re tellin’ the truth. That’s what you do. I can see it clear as mornin’ when you say it. But I also know that you beat in the Vietnamese guy’s head and that you expected me to die after makin’ me come save you. I’m just sayin’ we cain’t hide from shit like that. The Silver Box says that he destroyed whole worlds full’a peoples. He don’t only blame the Laz for what he did. They are to blame, but he still the one did it. Don’t matter if he didn’t know guilt when he did. What mother would forgive that? What jury would say not guilty?”
“So we’re supposed to feel guilty forever?” Lorraine whined.
“How you feel don’t mattah. If I killed your brother and then said I was sorry, that don’t change nuthin’. But if you take care’a his kids or stand up for what he believed in, then you got a start. And ain’t none of us innocent anyway. It’s like if you eat a hamburger and then say you didn’t kill the cow. Still somebody killed that cow for you.”
Lorraine was wondering where Ronnie’s ideas had come from. When she’d first met him, he was just a brute; a stupid man who only wanted to hurt. And now he was delineating her flaws like many of her philosophy professors did to public figures throughout the history of ideas. He, Ronnie, was making sense and showing her that her life was down on his level.
Once again she hated him.