New York, 1968
46. MANSOUR’S VOICE TEARS as he screams down to Keifer from Liam’s window: “You’re costing us gigs!”
“Nigger, I put you on! Get out of here, I put you on—”
“Keep it down out here!” Liam’s interjection does no good.
“You put on you! All this jazz, jazz, jazz. It was never jazz, that was never our sound!”
“You’re not hearing me! I brought you around my wife—my family!—and the one thing I asked you to do, the only thing I asked you to do, was to never bring Gil Rodney—”
First there is the sound.
A startling pop that competes with the passing train in volume. Did a basketball explode? Was a firecracker lit? Liam peers at the dark for a clue until Keifer gasps like he’s caught a chill in his spine. One small sigh. Baby-innocent, like a sneeze. And then, as if pushed into a cartwheel by a ghost, he collapses sideways. He’s been shot.
Reflexively, Liam fires with a shaky hand into the direction of the shooter: a shadow with gray eyes. Liam goes mad with adrenaline shooting, shooting, shooting thrice, the fired gun scorching his palm.
Mansour flies down the building’s winding staircase, fighting through the screaming tenants as they flood the steps.
But he freezes on the sidewalk, at the sight of Liam backing away from Keifer’s body. Liam pulls Mansour with him, but the African resists and waits with the dying man.
Because of his stillness, his silence, Liam cannot tell if the African is mourning the American or waiting to be certain that he truly is no more.
Mansour takes the train uptown to Vanessa and stands outside the house, unable to enter. Keifer would have been twenty-seven in six days.
Mansour looks up at the house from the street. There are lights flashing through the stained-glass windows, projecting a rainbow onto the black night, and he knows that Keifer’s stepdaughters have sneaked downstairs to watch cartoons.
Carl Keifer. His second brother. Who called him nigger out of love. Who made a bed for him in his great-grandfather’s house on Strivers’ Row.
After Keifer’s body is taken, Gil Rodney sits on the bed in Liam’s apartment. Mansour stands against the front door, his arms still bearing the weight of Vanessa’s body. He lets himself slide to the ground.
He’d knocked on the side door to the house so the girls wouldn’t hear, and when he told Vanessa, she gritted her teeth, gripping his forearms deeply enough to draw blood.
“Don’t let me fall,” she’d muttered. “Don’t let me fall.” And he’d held her up. She didn’t make a sound, shaking violently in his arms, and then, abruptly, turning so stiff that he’d shouted her name. She’d forced a hand against his mouth to spare the children.
He’d cradled her on the ground, her eyes even, gazing at him with a look that was not peace but had peace’s stillness. She’d asked him what was taking the sun so long.
Now, the three men sit in silence with the lights off.
“It was the same guy who stuck me up at the subway. Same guy at the store. I think he wanted you,” he says to Mansour. “He must’ve thought Keifer was you.” There is stunned silence again.
“Did you kill him?” Gil asks, eying their apartment door.
“I don’t know …” Liam shakes his head, near tears. “I saw him on the gurney … he was bloody … he was so bloody … I don’t know.” Liam put his head in his hands.
Gil moves to the door of the apartment and slides the lock shut, listening closely to the voices from down below, in the streets. There is a crowd growing louder. He knows from experience how fast this night can turn even worse.
He looks at Mansour.
“You gotta go,” Gil says. Mansour looks up at Gil, sees his face wet from tears. “Get a plane to Paris soon as you can. This town isn’t safe for you.”
“Paris?” Liam says.
“And you gotta find somewhere else to be tonight. They’ll be looking for you.” Gil watches the crowd gathering in the street from the window, the young Irish American men patrolling the sidewalk with their baseball bats in hand.
Gil ignores the brothers’ bewilderment. This isn’t the time to explain America again.
“You can’t stay by me, but I’ll take you where you’re goin’.”
“We don’t have anywhere else to go,” Liam says helplessly.
“Find somewhere!” Gil yells. “I’ll be in the alley. You got ten minutes.”
He shuts the door after himself.
Liam looks at Mansour. It takes Mansour a second to catch on.
“No. Not her.”
“We don’t have a choice!”
They pack their few possessions in the dark. Under streetlights, Mansour and Liam rush into the alley, their duffel bags over their shoulders, but Gil Rodney has already pulled off. They chase the silver car for half a block, banging the trunk when it’s finally in reach. Rodney stops short, and the men climb inside, panting. Gil turns down his headlights.
“So what’s it gonna be?”
“His girlfriend lives at the old folks’ home in Fort Greene,” Liam says, out of breath. Mansour shoots him a look.
“I’m sorry. Do you have someone else in mind?” Liam snaps.
47. ONCE THEY’VE SETTLED IN, Liam asks after the food they can smell in Bonnie’s warm apartment: mustard greens with onion, roasted potatoes and trout, black-eyed peas and basmati rice. Lazier versions of her grandmother’s recipes that Bonnie’s prepared for herself, cooking again for the first time since Sylvia’s passing. Mansour had been by once before. And as soon as he’d entered, she’d felt like a stranger in her own house. His presence made everywhere feel wider and more playful. A freshness that still lingers about the place and has been renewed with his return.
She warms the food for them but tells them they’ll have to clean up. Mansour does not eat much, quickly going out the front door and staying away for a while. Long enough to make Liam and Bonnie uneasy. Liam seems fine at first; they debate the outcome of the Perry Mason episode while he completes his assigned chore of sweeping up. But soon, he cannot hide the way his hands are shaking so violently that he cannot grip the broom.
She helps him to the guest-room bed. When she asks him what’s wrong, all he can manage, still shaking, is, “Our pianist is dead.”
Now she is relieved to hear him snoring peacefully, loudly enough that the sound reaches her in the living room. But Liam’s disposition only heightens her worry for Mansour.
When he finally returns, hours later, Bonnie is still sitting on the living room couch. She is not sprawled but sitting up and tight on her feet like the Sphinx. The room is dark, lit only by the street and a weird glow from the television. She will not look at him.
“The dishes are waiting for you,” she says and adds nothing more. He moves into the kitchen, quiet.
After listening to him for a while, trying to come up with a way to make him talk, she goes in and sits on the counter across from Mansour, watching him dry the last bowls, hoping he’ll speak first.
He dries her bowls so expertly, in steady circles, the dish towel flung across his shoulder in between wipes. He’s organizing her sloppy cabinets in the process, fitting everything in size order.
“I’m impressed. I expected you to fail miserably at this,” she says.
“At washing dishes?” he answers without turning around, wiping down the sink.
“You really know your way around a kitchen. Do African men cook or something?”
Mansour laughs at this question, one ha and turns to face her, crosses his arms, studying her for a while.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she says.
“How am I looking at you?”
“I don’t know, like I’m the one who came to your door at 4:00 a.m. and never said a word more about it.”
Mansour’s eyes drop. He fidgets with the dishcloth over his shoulder.
She whispers, “Liam’s a wreck.”
“He told you?”
“All he said was that your pianist died. Mansour, just tell me. What happened?”
“Our pianist was murdered. And we’re not safe here anymore. We gotta go.”
“Go where?”
“Home,” he says, wiping the counter again but already miles away.
His new coldness feels spiteful, like he’s punishing her for something and she is supposed to guess what she’s done. But it is strange, the way he looks at Bonnie, a desperate, weightless expression, like he might collapse on the ground or float up to the ceiling in perfect peace.
“And what are you gonna do?” he says, wiping the clean counter again, jittery. “You told me you got fired. What are you gonna do?”
She doesn’t answer the question, gives him a piece of his own medicine. She pulls his bracelet off her wrist, extends it to him. “I forgot I was still wearing this.”
“Keep it.”
She shakes her head, keeps her arm outstretched.
He approaches her, and she feels a jolt, a little hiccup, when he stands between her legs.
“Just keep it.”
Under the merciless, off-brand bulbs of the kitchen fixtures, he appears more hardened to Bonnie than he seemed before. The muscles along his face look firm and tense. He seems to have lived a lot more life than her though they are close in years. She can tell that he’s high. And that he has erected a boundary between them. And she worries now that she has never seen him beyond his stage performance. That they’ve shared nothing more than the circumstantial banter that might occur between two strangers. How, she wonders, do people manage to truly get close?
He still won’t take the bracelet back, so she puts it on the counter and hops down, heading for the door. When he blocks her, she closes her eyes, and it feels even worse in her chest than she’d anticipated when she whispers for him to move. Head down, he does. She tells him that there’s a blanket for him on the couch. He thanks her and smiles a little smile. And then, though she doesn’t know why, she tells him to turn out the kitchen lights. Or why she rests on the wall, waiting for him to come closer. Soon an arm on the wall on either side of her. But why, instead of kissing him, does she whisper for him to keep the TV low if he intends to watch it before bed? His hot hands finding her waist in the dark as she whispers for him to double-check the lock on the front door before lying down to sleep. Grazing his arms with the backs of her hands, then the front while he watches, silently. Then she is the silent one, watching him slide his cold bracelet back on her right wrist, before she crosses out of the kitchen door, she locks herself in her bedroom, watching Mansour’s shadow give and take, give and take, give and take light from her room as it moves beneath her door.
48. TWO DAYS AFTER his murder, Carl Keifer Rodney is buried beside his grandfather. Vanessa asked Mansour to sing “Amazing Grace,” but he cannot move beyond the very edge of the burial grounds. He holds himself up on the thick limbs of the evergreens, his head tilted toward the earth as he listens to the music of the funeral: only horns, six of them, performing a medley composed by Gil that replaced any need for speeches. The four movements titled “Birth,” “Boyhood,” “Fatherhood,” “Divinity.”
As he walks with Liam through the mud back to the car, Mansour hears Gil scream. The sound never leaves him. It births his new musical direction.
In the twilight hours before they leave for their flight, Liam and Mansour return to gather their things. Bonnie lets both of them in but only speaks to Liam, and she turns sullen when Liam knocks on her bedroom door at two in the morning and says what she knew was coming.
“You should lock up. We’re heading out.”
It had been nice to have them around. The company, even at a distance, made the apartment more tenable. Despite her troubles with Mansour, she follows them out onto the Brooklyn street. In their haste to leave, they have no real luggage, just duffel bags (it perplexes her how men can wear the same things all the time), waiting for a cab they called that’s running late.
She’s standing on the steps of her building in her bathrobe, waiting with them like they’re children.
The cab pulls up, and Mansour gets in without saying a word to her. She swallows it down, hugs Liam goodbye, and walks back up the steps.
Alone, inside, she sits by the window and lets the sounds of scarce traffic keep her distracted. But that old feeling she’s known so well is growing wide and loud. Even as she’s focused and determined not to be overcome, staring away from it with all her might, that ravenous emptiness calls her inward, claiming her always for itself.
The door opens and she jumps. She hadn’t locked it. She feels the weight of his footsteps as he approaches the couch. He’s breathing hard, like he’s about to sing.
“Come with me,” Mansour says.
There’s something she needs to do before they leave. The taxi runs the meter while she packs.
“I have to go in there,” she says very quietly, staring at the door across from them. She leans back into Mansour, her ear close enough to kiss. He whispers into it.
“Was that her room?”
She nods, and he takes her hand. With his grip firm, he walks them forward. Her hand shakes as Mansour guides it to the knob and, together, they twist open the door to Sylvia’s room.
Without turning on the light, she touches everything, lets her hand slide across the teacup wallpaper, peeling off the dust that has gathered on Richard Wright and Alexandre Dumas on the bookshelf, her grandmother’s sweaters and suits, the dead plants, Sylvia’s dolls, the tall mahogany bedposts, the curtains with no lace. She sits on the bed in the dark and notices that the room has no scent but dust, but dirt, but decay. Life does end. So completely.
In a strange way, she feels relief. That her grandmother is not a ghost, not stuck in the ether, not trapped between worlds, in a scent, or hair strands, or fingerprints.
It is all just dust. And it is up to Bonnie to inhale it or blow it away.