Melvin agreed to ask his Irish ward to find out what he could about the dead policemen, and then he jumped into his own car and was off.
I stood on the street in front of my friends’ home appreciating the hot sun on my face and hands. I had helped Etta, and in turn her husband, from thousands of miles away, had guided me. The street was empty and two cops had done my bidding because I did a favor for one of them.
Most of the inhabitants of that working-class block were at some job somewhere getting paid by the hour while they slowly, inexorably sank into debt.
It occurred to me that my debts had no dollar signs attached to them. This thought brought a grin to my lips.
Half an hour later I was sitting in my office chair, reviewing the harvest of my labors.
It was my self-imposed purpose to salvage as much of Uhuru-Bob’s life as I could. I liked the young has-been boxer simply because I understood him. He was a fool and a genius in his own way. If he was born another color he might have been recognized as something special.
It might have been my purpose to protect Bob but my first priority was to help Rosemary Goldsmith. This wasn’t because I was being paid to save her; money helped but I never worried too much about where it was coming from. No, money wasn’t the reason that Rosemary’s predicament took precedence in my work. If the white girl was to go down, then Bob would too—that’s just the way things happened. Innocence was rarely a key factor for justice in the world Bob and I inhabited.
It was a mistake to be sitting alone and thinking about the unfairness that defined my world. The only thing that would come from that line of thought was unbidden rage. And anger at injustice was the last thing I needed in my heart.
But there I was—smoking and infuriated. Why couldn’t I just walk into Chief Parker’s office and tell him that there was a conspiracy, conscious or not, against a poor black man who liked to pretend? Why couldn’t the truth be enough to keep a mostly innocent man from getting shot down in the street?
Try as I might, I couldn’t get the burr of anger out of my heart. I had a job to do but I had to quell the rage inside me.
That’s when Fate came knocking on my door.
I put my right hand on the pistol attached by wires underneath my desk and called out, “Door’s open.”
Percy Bidwell in all his coiffed glory came in wearing a gold iridescent two-piece suit. His shirt was a pale blue and the jacket had only one button.
I hated him on sight but that’s not saying much; I would have hated Black Jesus if he crossed my path just then.
The young man walked right up to my desk and looked down on me.
“Mr. Bidwell,” I hailed in false greeting.
“Call Jewelle.”
I released the pistol, sat back, then stood and came around the desk to face him.
“Say what, young man?”
“I told you to call Jewelle.”
“And why would I want to do that?” Every slight, every insult, every affront to me and all of my ancestors and his were roiling in my breast.
“Because I said so,” Percy said.
Then there came a lull in my rage. This was a bad sign, I knew, but I was beyond instructive experience at that moment.
“She told me to tell you to call her,” Percy said, somehow intuiting that his up-front approach had failed in its purpose.
“Now let me get this right,” I said, almost feeling the calmness my voice exuded. “You gonna fuck my good friend’s wife, bully her to try and bully me, then you gonna walk in my door and order me to call her. Not ask but command me.”
“That baby—” he managed to say before I hit him with a medium-hard straight right hand.
His head bounced back but he wasn’t hurt or even pushed off-balance.
He threw a left hook over my extended arm and so I lowered on my haunches and came up with both fists against his chin. This moved him half a step backward. I thought that I had hurt him but he was just bracing for his next attack, which was his right fist against my chest.
Who would have ever expected that a man named Percy Bidwell with a beauty shop hairdo would be made from stone? The punch knocked the wind from my lungs and I would have hit the floor if the wall hadn’t been there to keep me from falling.
My eyes opened wide and a wolfish grin came to my lips. When Percy bum-rushed me I tilted to the side and slammed him in the left ear with my right hand. In response he threw a right hook that only managed to numb my shoulder. I lowered my head and butted him in the jaw, then stood up and hit him flush three times.
If he felt any of it you couldn’t tell by his actions.
Arms out wide, he moved to put me in a bear hug but I pushed against his shoulders trying to shove him away. He was too powerful to be moved but I was thrown back and out of reach.
Unafraid that I might hurt him, I kicked Bidwell in the midsection. He buckled six inches, no more, so I hit him twice in the nose.
I felt something snap and blood gushed forth from the fop’s nostrils.
Percy brought his hand to his nose and then looked at it—his fingers were dripping with blood. Rage and childish fear came over his face. He was a powerhouse but untrained in the ways of battle and the self-control needed to overcome pain. So I picked up my least favorite visitor’s chair and hit him for all I was worth.
The chair shattered. Percy finally went down; not all the way but to one knee. I used the wooden leg left in my hand to hit him on the head, then I hit him again. He was sitting by then but still trying to rise.
That’s when common sense took hold and I went around the desk to take the pistol from its nest.
When Percy saw the gun he put up his hands. There was blood coming from his nose and also from the two places I had hit his skull.
“You got a hard head, Percy Bidwell,” I said. “I hope it’s not dense too. Because I wanna tell you that the only way you gonna live to enjoy that college degree is to leave Jewelle and Jackson alone. If I evah hear that you did anything to make them unhappy I will kill you. And if I don’t get to you I’ll make sure my friend Raymond Alexander does.”
“I just—” he said.
“Don’t talk, man. Don’t say a mothahfuckin’ thing. Just get your ass up and outta here. Don’t go back to Jewelle’s office and don’t talk to her. Change your phone number and forget you ever heard about any’a us.”
I pulled back the hammer of the .45-caliber pistol.
Percy rose up on his feet weightlessly, as if a higher force had reached down and grabbed him by the shoulders. He stumbled out of the door trying to stanch the bleeding with his hands.
Three or four minutes after he was gone, still standing there with the cocked pistol in my hand, I exhaled and realized that the rage I’d felt had evaporated.