MIDAFTERNOON AND THE PANTHER OFFICE is cool, with a cross breeze from the propped-open front door and the alley window in the back room. The plate-glass windows are in place, all fresh and shiny. I personally wiped them clean of handprint streaks and dust earlier this week. It brightens up the place to have light streaming in.
Not too many people around right now. We’re smack in the lull between the daytime bustle and the evening bustle. Leroy took off about an hour ago for a meeting across town with Fred Hampton. Slim rolled through a few minutes ago, then farmed right back out on a supply run. Lester Smith is napping on the couch.
I’ve been here awhile. Nowhere else I want to go, really. I’ve washed the dishes, cleared the desks, put lots of papers into files. All afternoon I’ve been feeling useful, feeling good. Now there’s nothing left to do that I can think of.
Hamlin and Rocco are hunched over a desk drafting some kind of strategy memo, reading each other lines and blurting phrases and echoing each other, taking notes and editing. I hover around them for a while, but I don’t really know what they’re doing, so after a while it just seems like I’m in the way.
I sit down close to Jolene, watch her calculating numbers with the little adder. It churns out a thick strip of white paper stamped with little gray numbers. The output curls up against the machine. Her right hand rests gracefully arched against the buttons while she traces the lines of the ledger with her left.
“I could read you the numbers,” I say. I think I can do it. It’s mostly words that trip me up.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve got it.”
The baby cries from the back room. Jolene glances my way. “Honey, would you get her?”
I slide off the stool. I’m trying to be useful. Every little bit helps, Leroy always says.
Little Betty’s raising a medium ruckus by the time I get in there, but she takes a breath and gurgles when she sees me. She stretches her fingers up over the edge of her box, releasing another giant wail. I lean down and scoop her up, hold her all baby-warm against me. “Shhh. It’s okay.”
She lets me soothe her, which is a giant relief. I’m good for something, I guess. I walk her to the window, but she doesn’t look out. Instead, she snuggles against me, flopping her tiny face against my neck.
I talk softly to her, put a gentle sway into my motions at the rhythm she likes. Betty’s perfect for me, really, because she listens to everything without answering back, apart from a few small hoots. I’m grateful that Jolene has started leaving Nia with a neighborhood mama who watches several Panther kids. It’s too much for me when they’re both here; a toddler has to be watched at every single moment, plus Nia and I spend all of our time trying to figure out what the other is saying. Little Betty always understands me, somehow, whereas Nia simply does not.
When Betty’s awake and calm, I give her a bottle, sitting in the tall-backed chair and holding her in the crook of my arms for safekeeping. Like a treasure. Her pretty, round baby face angles up at me and her mouth bubbles over with milk, and it’s only a matter of time before my heart melts and I bend to kiss her forehead. Her little fingers clamp on my wrist. Jolene says it’s good practice for when I have one of my own, but that won’t be for quite a while, I’m sure. Jolene had Nia when she was nineteen, and that’s a long way off for me, plus I don’t even think I want to get married that fast. Mama was nineteen and married when she had Raheem, too, and look how that turned out. I get that things don’t always go the way you plan, but I know how babies are made, and Sam and I never did that. I used to figure we would do it sometime, after we grew up, but it doesn’t seem likely we ever will now.
Little Betty’s feet drum my thigh. When it’s just the two of us back here like this, it’s so calm and quiet, almost a respite from everything. Sometimes I whisper her some of my secrets, because I know she’ll never repeat them. I could hold Little Betty all day and all night and that would be okay with everyone, me included, but there’s other things I want to do too. When the milk is gone, I coo at her for a while, then I set her up in her box with some toys to rattle and squeeze. “I’ll come back in a minute,” I tell her. “Don’t cry.” She studies me with large eyes, kicks her fat feet in the air. We’ve come to an understanding.
I pop back to Jolene’s side. “She okay?” Jolene says. “Need me to go in there?”
“She’s fine. I gave her a bottle.”
“Thanks, Maxie.”
“Sure, no problem. What can I do now?”
Jolene glances at her stack of numbers. “Well, I’m not finished here, but I promised to show you how to use the typewriter, right?”
“Yeah.” I glance across the room at it, sitting on the desk Leroy uses. The sun through the big, clean windows glints off the silver keys. The heavy black metal body makes it seem so important. Everyone who sits behind it too. “I want to do that.”
“Get out some paper and some ribbon.” She waves her hand. “Envelopes and stuff. We have some thank-you letters to type.”
Yes! I’m so excited. Letter writing is a big deal in the Panthers. Any kind of writing that has to be done is something important. For the newspaper. For donations. To let people know what’s what and what we think about the issues.
Grinning, I bend toward the middle drawer, where the typing paper is stockpiled.
“Incoming!” Cherry’s voice, out of nowhere. “Take cover!”
Hands in the file, I pause. Out the corner of my eye I catch sight of her body arcing in through the front door, a crazy leaping flight like in a cartoon.
The air shatters around me, a blistering pulse of breaking glass. The windows. I move to see, but not in time.
Jolene’s hand cups the back of my head and together we tumble beneath the desk, her on top. The shots ring out over and over, echoing through everything.
“Three pigs on wheels!” shouts Hamlin. He takes cover behind a filing cabinet toward the front of the room. I can see him through the knee space of the desk, crouching like a cat, pumping a shotgun he must have ripped off the rack on the wall.
Lester lands hard on the floor beside us, rolls up on one knee, and starts shooting like it’s nothing to him.
Jolene’s breasts beneath the buttons on her shirt mash against my cheek, her free hand smoothes my hair even as she strains upward with her gun hand, firing through the open window. The way she covers me, I’m so small and so shut out. Terror and rage pulse through me. I struggle for breath, hoping it won’t be my last. I want to fight, need to fight, but instead I’m helpless, frozen, unarmed.
I twist myself upward to see the storefront. Let it not be said that I cowered like a child when the moment came to be strong.
Cherry screams obscenities. “Pigs!”
My head rises beneath Jolene’s. The windows are gone. Ragged shards at the corners are all that remain. The cop car rolls through the frame in slow motion. Bullets biting through the air like renegade teeth.
Hamlin pumps the shotgun. Fires. Pumps, fires. Pumps, fires.
Rocco lies flat on the ground beneath the windows, arm arced up and over, returning fire.
Cherry scrambles up from the place she landed in the doorway. Arm extended with a pistol in hand, she leaps through the shattered window as the cop car clears my field of vision.
“Stay down!” Jolene screams at me.
But I’ve already seen everything. The red stain on Rocco’s white shirt at the shoulder. Hamlin’s gritted teeth. Lester crawling on his belly like he’s back in the jungles of Nam, woken from sleep and thrust straight back into the worst kind of nightmare. Cherry, standing in the street firing after the cop car’s taillights, spitting curses on the ranks of all the pigs in existence.
Everyone’s arms, thrust forward. Armed and shooting. Everyone’s except my own.