The wind isn’t blowing as hard as before. I like that better.
Anyone can see I have no business being here. I should be thousands of miles away, paying off my debt. She said sending me here was a form of punishment, too, and even if saying that was in her self-interest, she wasn’t all that wrong. She’s had her fair share of hurt. I’m alone with my shame, with my memories I remember perfectly. Alone with pain as sharp as a sword, and most of the time there’s nothing to distract me from it.
With weather like this, the boy won’t be coming to see me. I figure he’s really coming to see Cornelia, any kid’s more excited to see a dog than an old man. Back when I was his age, I liked animals too. Having one, though—that was out of the question. One mouth too many for my mother to feed. To take my mind off of that, she took me to services every Sunday and, after school, forced me to go spend time with old folks older even than I am now, who had so much hair in their ears it gave me the shivers to imagine looking like them one day.
I spent my life trying to live up to both my mother’s expectations and the Lord’s teachings. Even when I passed the police entrance exam and started on my first job in Miami—even when cops who missed the old days when the only way a Black man was coming into a police station was in handcuffs tried to pick fights with me—I never lost my cool or my faith. I didn’t hate them. What use would it be? They’d been raised that way. And most of them hadn’t been through ’Nam, or at least not how I had. The chief, though, he’d been through the same damn war. He knew we were both part of the same special club, the club of men who couldn’t sleep at night anymore and who looked over Saturday-night gunshot wounds subconsciously comparing them to the ones made by Kalashnikovs, wondering just like back then: Did they die on the spot, or did they watch their guts spill out and try to shove them back in before taking one last breath?
In this city, all I saw was a bad copy of the violence and fear that I’d been through years before, when I was just a youngster. It was like a cheap imitation of what had once been, with no life in it. I got out of that hell better than most. I didn’t drown my sorrows in booze, I never looked away from a messed-up body, I didn’t blink twice when I had to declare a death—didn’t even wobble when some lady punched me in the gut with all the rage she had at losing her man because she couldn’t put words to her hurt.
All that just got me remembering things again: the family of Samuel Uhlman, one of the few friends I had in Vietnam, when I gave them his ID tag in Queens, since I couldn’t bring them back their son. The way his mama had stroked this twisted bit of metal, brought it to her lips as she sobbed over this little thing, barely any longer than a lighter and no thicker than a subway token. It was the only thing left of her son, an object that had stayed close to his skin until he died. She grabbed me in her arms the way only mothers can, and I felt like a fake because I’d survived.
Now I’m watching over something still alive and I’m keeping my promise. After this, God can send me all the torments He wants: I won’t put up any fight. I’m too tired for that.