5

A month earlier, on the last afternoon of November, one of the black reps from the Pompan City Council, Mrs. Ellis, came over to meet me at my father’s house. It was a Sunday, sixteen hours before I started as the only black patrolman in Pompan. My father sat on the brown couch under the window, his hands stiff on his knees and Mrs. Ellis sat on the blue chair next to him. My sister Brenda stood near the CD player, staring out the front window over the evergreens, and I stood beside her, overheated, one hand on the bookcase. Mrs. Ellis was about 40 years old and wore an expensive gray suit. She had long straight hair and glossy tangerine lipstick. My father didn’t know Mrs. Ellis (she lived across town in a predominantly black neighborhood) and he reported to us before she arrived that he hadn’t voted for her in the last Pompan run-off.

My sister gave her a big smile. My father quietly finished his coffee.

“I hear good things about you. Rutgers, right?” she said, giving me a low, sidelong glance, after quickly checking over at my father. “My nephew goes there, my older brother’s boy. I guess he’s not a boy anymore. Well, I just wanted to welcome you back to Pompan.”

“I’m looking forward to starting,” I told her. I was respectful but wasn’t about to give her much in conversation. I could tell she had not come to meet me; it was her chance to introduce herself to my father, one of the few black lawyers in town. He was heavy-set and bald with a little patch of gray over the ears. I used to tease my mother that we were the only people who had ever seen my father outside a three-piece suit. He had an elegance; he dressed like a minister.

It was so cold the squirrels had stopped running across the electrical lines. The clouds were thin and low and yellow leaves stuck to the curb across the street. On the sill our cat Ajax played with a weak fly he had batted out of the air. Watching his lazy paw made me think of how well I knew this house: the one soft white linoleum square in the kitchen by the back door, the triangular chip missing from the bottom of the bannister that left me with a scar on my chin; the far corner of the living room where the gray carpet peeled up; the hoop attached to the garage, the edges of the backboard now overgrown by vines growing down from the roof. I’d just come in from shooting out there, and under my Carolina baby blue jacket (like a thousand others on campus, I bought it when we embarassed them in the NCAA’s two years before), I was slippery with sweat.

“It’s wonderful to have one of us working with the police. Especially with all the bad feelings around in some corners,” she said, becoming serious. “Since the lynching the air has changed. People don’t care about anyone but their own anymore. I’ve noticed it. People staying in, trying to hide, turning away quickly in public.”

I saw that even champions of Pompan like Mrs. Ellis were disturbed. She smiled again. “Most places nobody really notices who the police are. But you’re going to be a celebrity.” She sipped the Diet Coke my sister had brought her.

“I sure hope not,” I answered Mrs. Ellis. If I was lucky, the small attention I was getting would disappear. It embarassed me. Watching my father I remembered things about him that I hadn’t thought of since I left home. When I was ten years old, I dropped one of my father’s Duke Ellington 78s. Slipped right out of the fraying cardboard jacket and hit the floor with a loud crack. Two halves lying there, perfectly aligned, an inch apart. My father didn’t talk to me for three days. Said he didn’t talk to careless kids.

“No, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had an invitation to dinner at someone’s house every night of the week,” Mrs. Ellis said.

“That’s good. Save him from his own cooking,” Brenda answered.

“Your father tells me you’re getting your own apartment.”

“And not a moment too soon,” my sister interrupted, and we all laughed, except my father.

I held back from saying I was tired of living in my father’s bleak house the day I returned to it. During school holidays in the last year I hated going home. I challenged his cigars, his television programs, the noise when he ate. It was a haunted house.

When my mother died 14 months before I inherited her heavy wooden box with a metal hinge in which she’d stored an assortment of candles she used to read by. She preferred the flames of two long candles to the lamp beside her bed. In a bowl, she kept a supply of matchbooks she had taken over the years from restaurants. “There is no light better than fire,” she said. By 5 PM, when I got in from my day at the Academy, it was dark outside. I’d light a candle in the room I’d grown up in. The rice paper shades I’d put up glowed white from the flame. The fire gave off a sour smell. In the mirror across the room I studied myself, a tall man with high cheekbones and slanting, wide-set eyes, a pointed chin. The weight of the belt, the stiff crease at the knee.

I don’t think I’d recognize myself now.

“I’d like you to meet my son when you get settled,” Mrs. Ellis said.

“Be glad to. How old is he?”

“He was just thirteen.”

“A little man.”

“A big man if you ask him. Big for his age. Wants to run with the tough crowd. I hope they won’t have him.”

“I’d like to meet him.” Ajax, hungry from his slow play, leapt down and headed toward the back door. He was also thirteen years old, still a troublemaker, a bird killer. My mother had rescued him from the ASPCA, and he stayed outside longer and longer since she died. Only I could make the clicking noise my mother used to bring Ajax home on days as cold as this one.

“I’ll see if I can bring him over some time,” Mrs. Ellis said. “Meantime, I was glad to see that you got a little publicity in The Record. You’re big news around here for certain folks. Make your father and sister proud. You write that story yourself?”

“Almost seems like it,” my sister told her.