Chapter 61

The day Lizard was packing to head home, Joe came to his cell and shoved a torn piece of paper at him. “Come look for me when I get out.”

“When’s that?”

“Thirty days.”

“I will.”

“All right then,” Joe mumbled and hurried away.

* * *

On Lizard’s first day back home, his eldest sister cornered him, pressed him for details about brawls and shanks.

Lizard balked. “Shanks? Where in the world did you learn that word?” He assured her that he didn’t have any stories like that to share. And the ones he did have, well, he knew his sister would just gaze at him like a stranger.

“So,” she ventured, socking him gently on the shoulder, “are you a hardened criminal now?”

Lizard shook his head. He wasn’t hardened at all, and no more a criminal than he was before he’d gone in. The truth was, the experience had split him in two and laid him wide open.

* * *

Thirty-one days later, Lizard boarded the first of two streetcars that would take him to Joe’s home located in the northwest section of the city in a neighborhood known as the Ville.

On the second streetcar, a woman, the last white person (besides Lizard), rose from her seat and looked expectantly over at him. “Aren’t you getting off here, young man?”

“No ma’am, I’m riding this till the end of the line.”

The woman gawked at him in bewilderment.

* * *

He got off on St. Louis Avenue, a treelined street with modest homes and respectable front yards. As he walked along, children stopped their games to stare. One young mother called to him from her doorway, “Hello? Hello, are you lost?”

“Yes ma’am, I believe I am. I’m looking for 304 Sarah Street.”

“You are?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Who you going to see at 304?”

“Joe Brown.”

The woman knew the Browns. After a moment she pointed up the street. “Well, uh, just keep straight another three or so blocks and you’ll walk right into Sarah.”

“Thank you.”

Lizard could feel a hundred eyes watching him.

* * *

When Ella Brown opened her door and found Lizard standing there with that black kippah on his head, she was stunned. She looked over his shoulder, down the street, and then back at Lizard. Her eyes slanted suspiciously. “Yes?”

“Hello,” Lizard waved, “I’m here to see Joe.”

Ella folded her arms and arched her left eyebrow. “Joe who?”

“Joe Brown,” Lizard said confidently.

“And who are you?”

“Leo Rubenstein.”

She tilted her head back and groaned. “Wait here a minute.” Before the door closed completely, Ella’s voice boomed: “Frank, there’s a Jew on my porch!”

When the door opened again, Joe was standing there with a huge grin plastered on his face. “Hey, Leo!”

Lizard raised his hand in greeting. “Told you I’d come looking for you.”

“Come on in.”

Inside, Frank and Ella Brown stood shoulder to shoulder at the center of their tidy living room. A pair of matching eight-year-old boys were seated on the powder-blue sofa, bug-eyed, mouths agape.

“Leo, these are my parents. Mom, Dad, this is Leo.”

“Hello, sir, ma’am.”

“Hello,” they chimed together.

Joe pointed at the boys. “And these here are the twins, Hal and Clement.”

“Your brothers?” Lizard said.

“Yep.”

Lizard offered the gobsmacked boys a cheerful “Hey!”

“Hey,” Hal and Clement chirped back in stereo.

Joe looked at his parents. “This is the guy I told you about. Remember, the one who picked up on the guitar real quick?”

Frank and Ella nodded like wooden puppets. The twins continued to stare.

“Is it okay if we go up to my room for a while?”

Again, Frank and Ella bobbed their heads. Clement and Hal looked at each other and then over their shoulders at their parents.

Halfway up the stairs, Joe chuckled. “S’cuse them. They ain’t never had no white people in the house before.”

* * *

Lizard continued to make weekly visits to Joe’s home, and by the time his parents realized that he had been lying about his whereabouts—playing baseball, at the Jewish Community Center, the library, down the street reading the Torah to old, blind Mr. Horowitz—Lizard had become a part of the Brown family.

It was at 304 Sarah Street that Lizard first experienced barbecued ribs, fried shrimp, grits, collard greens, and candied yams.

Turned out, every member of the Brown family was musically inclined. Ella’s voice was her instrument, Hal and Clement played piano and guitar, and Frank was a master on the trumpet and clarinet.

The family encouraged Lizard to try his hand at each. He was an easy study, a natural musician, and it seemed there was no instrument he couldn’t play. In the end, though, the trumpet stole his heart.

When Lizard wasn’t playing the trumpet, he was thinking about playing the trumpet, dreaming about playing the trumpet, closed up in his room playing the air like a trumpet.

Lizard wasn’t just smitten with the trumpet; he was downright sick with love.