He concen trates on the floor in front of him, sidestepping a dirty puddle of water pooling under an AC unit stuck in the cabin’s window, thinking how easy it would be for someone to slip and fall. He follows a step or two behind his wife, watching as she pauses at the entrance to the cabin. It’s black on the other side, and she waits for Jay to go in first.
He takes the lead, stepping over the threshold.
He can smell Evelyn’s perfume, still lingering in the room—a smoky, woodsy scent, like sandalwood, like the soap Bernie used to bathe with before she got pregnant and grew intolerant of it and a host of other smells, like gasoline and scrambled eggs. The scent lets him know that Evelyn was here, that she followed his careful instructions. He feels a warm rush of relief and reaches for his wife’s hand, pulling Bernie along. She doesn’t like the dark, he knows; she doesn’t like not being in on something. “What is this?” she whispers.
Jay takes another step, feeling along the wall for the switch.
When the light finally comes, Bernie lets out a gasp, clutch ing her chest.
Inside the cabin there are balloons instead of flowers, hot links and brisket instead of filet, and a cooler of beer and grape Shasta instead of wine. It’s not much, Jay knows, nothing fancy, but, still, it has a certain charm. He feels a wave of gratitude— for his wife, for this night out, even for his sister-in-law. He had been loath to ask for Evelyn’s help. Other than his wife, no one seems more acutely aware of Jay’s limits than Evelyn Annemarie Boykins. She’s been on him for two weeks now, wanting to know was Jay gon’ get her baby sister something better for her birthday than the robe he bought Bernie last year, what cost him almost $30 at Foley’s Department Store. He couldn’t have done tonight on his own, not without his wife suspecting something. So he was more than grateful when Evelyn offered to pick up some barbecue on Scott Street and blow up a few balloons. Everything will be ready, she said. In the center of the room is a table set for two, a chocolate cake on top, with white and yellow roses, just like Evelyn promised. Bernie stares at the cake, the balloons, all of it, a slow smile spreading across her face. She turns to her hus band, reaching on her tiptoes for Jay’s neck, pressing her cheek to his. She bites his ear, a small, sweet reprimand, a reminder that she doesn’t like secrets. Still, she whispers her approval. “It’s nice, Jay.”
The boat’s engine starts up. Jay feels the pull of it in his knees.
They start a slow coast to the east and out of downtown, beads of water rocking and rolling across the top of the air-condition ing unit. The moist, weak stream of air it offers isn’t enough to cool an outhouse. The room is only a few degrees below miser ably hot. Jay is already sweating through his dress shirt. Bernie leans against the table, fanning herself, asking for a pop from the cooler.
There’s a Styrofoam ice chest resting in one corner. Jay bends over and pulls out a soda can for his wife and a cold beer for himself. He flicks ice chips off the aluminum lids and wipes at them with the corner of his suit jacket, which he then peels off and drapes on the back of his chair. Next to the cooler is a stereo set up on a card table, black wires and extension cords dripping down the back and onto the floor. Jay kicks the wires out of view, thinking of someone tripping, a slip or a fall. Ber nie soon takes charge of the music, fishing through Jay’s shoe box, passing over her husband’s music—Sam Cooke and Otis, Wilson Pickett and Bobby Womack—looking for some of her own. She’s into Kool & the Gang these days. Cameo and the Gap Band. Rick James and Teena Marie. She slides in a tape by the Commodores, which at least Jay can stand.
There’s a sister somewhere.
A mother he isn’t talking to.
Old friends he’s been avoiding for more than ten years. He hasn’t spoken to his buddies—his comrades, cats from way, way back—since his trial. The one that nearly killed him. The one that drove him to law school in the first place. He started miss ing meetings after that, skipping funerals, ignoring phone calls, until, eventually, his friends just stopped calling. Until they got the hint.
He counts himself lucky, really.
A lot of his old friends are dead or locked up or in hiding, out of the country somewhere; they are men who cannot come home. But Jay’s life was spared. By an inch, a single juror: a woman and the only black on the panel. He remembers how she smiled his way every morning of the trial, always with a small nod. It’s okay, the smile said.
After the trial, after he’d checked himself in and out of St. Joseph’s Hospital, he learned the juror, his angel, was a widow who stayed out on Noble Street, down from Bernie’s church, the same church where her father, Reverend Boykins, had loaded a bus with half his congregation every morning of Jay’s trial. They were women mostly, dressed in their best stockings and felt hats and cat eye glasses with white rhinestones. They rode to the courthouse every day for two weeks simply because they’d heard a young man was in trouble. No questions asked, they’d claimed him as one of their own. They sat through days of FBI testimony, including a secret government tape that was played in the hushed courtroom—a tape of a hasty phone call Jay had made in the spring of 1970.
The prosecutors had him on a charge of inciting a riot and conspiracy to commit murder of an agent of the federal govern ment—a kid like him and a paid informant. They had Jay on tape talking to Stokely, a phone call that ran less than three and a half minutes and sealed his fate. Jay, nineteen at the time, sat at the defense table in a borrowed suit, scared out of his mind. His law yer, appointed by the judge, was a white kid not that much older than Jay. He wouldn’t listen and rarely looked at Jay. Instead, he slid a yellow legal pad and a number 2 pencil across the table. Anything Jay had to say, he should write it down.
He remembers staring at the pencil, thinking of his exams, of all things.
He was a senior in college then and failing Spanish. He sat at the defense table and wondered how old he would be when he got out, if they gave him two years or twenty. He tried to imagine the whole of his life—every Christmas, every kiss, every breath—spent in prison. He tried to do the math, dividing his life in half, then fourths, then split again, over and over until it was something small enough to fit inside a six-by-eight cell at the Walls in Huntsville. Any way he looked at it, a conviction was a death sentence.
He remembers looking around the courtroom every morning and not recognizing a soul. His friends all stayed away, treating his arrest and pending incarceration as something contagious. He was humbled, almost sickened with shame to see the women from the church, women he did not even know, show up every day, taking up the first two and three rows in the gallery. Never speaking, or making a scene. Just there, every time he turned around.
His own mother hadn’t come to the courthouse once, hadn’t even come to see him in lockup.
He didn’t know Bernie then or her father, didn’t know the church or God. He was a young man full of ideas
