eyes, a brother could be for given anything. Hadn’t they all been through enough as it was?
But Cynthia listened.
She said it wasn’t his fault.
“You should call her,” she said, meaning his sister.
Their phone calls started to stretch so long that some of the boys on his floor complained, and he and Cynthia took to meet ing off campus. Beer joints and taco stands, sometimes sneak ing off to the movies, something he never did with Bumpy or Lloyd. And they hit every blues hall in Third Ward. Once they saw Lightnin’ Hopkins play at the Pin-up Club. Cynthia nearly fainted from the heat, the stench of sweat and perfume, and the shots of hooch she kept accepting from a group of sisters who were having a little fun with her, playing like they were her friends, laying out sly compliments about her stringy hair and laughing at her behind her back. Jay ended up having to drive her home. It was too late to try to sneak her into the girls’ dorm, so he drove in circles around town, Cynthia laid out across his lap in the front seat of her green Ford Econoline truck, waiting for her to sober up. Near dawn, he settled into the parking lot of an elementary school out in the Heights. It was Sunday morning by then, and no one was around. Cynthia came to around dawn. She sat up and looked out the window and asked where they were. Jay had taken his coat off at some point. He’d rolled up his sleeves and was smoking a cigarette out the window.
Cynthia turned and looked at him.
He can still see her now.
Her hair was messed up and tangled . . . and it
She had mascara smudged under both of her eyes.
Still, she was beautiful, a fact he finally allowed himself to admit.
And she was, at that moment, probably the best friend he had.
“I like you, Jay,” she whispered.
He felt something flutter in his stomach then, and he was sud denly, terribly aware of how hungry he was, how empty he’d been for years.
“I like you,” she said again.
There was no way he would make the first move. She seemed to know this without anything needing to be said. When she finally kissed him, the taste was big, meaty and warm and kind of bitter, like blood. He couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He put his hands everywhere, cupping her doughy flesh, wanting to fill what he could with her. Before long they moved to the bed of the truck, lying on top of Jay’s ratty coat, his backbone pressed against the metal bed, as she (of course) insisted on being on top. There, on his back, eyes stretched past the ponderosa pines to the starlit sky above, Jay held his breath.
There were many other times. In the truck, in the basement of her dorm, and once on top of a picnic table after midnight in MacGregor Park, one of the stupidest thing he’s ever done. He never told his friends, and she never told hers. It was just between the two of them. They met in silence most nights, reaching for each other like a salve, slick, wet kisses to wash away everything past the reach of their young arms. By the time the feds killed those boys in Chicago in the winter of ’69, everyone was on the lookout for rats. The administration was cracking down. There were cops on campus, cops everywhere, it seemed. The FBI and local law enforcement had moved on to new strategies. They’d grown tired, it seemed, of billy clubs and water hoses. They were just flat out shooting people now. What had started some fifteen years earlier with peaceful sit-ins and boycotts had disintegrated into guerrilla warfare. Something ugly was happening around them. Dark clouds were moving in, marching in martial forma tion, threatening to break everything wide open.
King was dead by then, Malcolm and two Kennedys.
Death was everywhere.
Cynthia asked him once about getting a gun.
He feigned ignorance and told her to watch herself. He didn’t want her getting hurt. SNCC was falling apart, Cynthia was spending more and more time trying to get attention for her fledgling SDS chapter, getting deeper and deeper into her own rhetoric, her ideas that they should meet fire with fire. She started speaking around campus more and more, standing on classroom chairs outside the administration building, screaming until her throat was raw, always quoting Malcolm, as if the rest of them had never heard of him. She got her name in the school paper, but the
Chapter 11
The report to his father-in-law goes something like this: the mayor has expressed tremendous concern for labor instability at the docks, as well as compassion and understanding for the longshoremen’s wage struggles; she will speak to the chief of police about getting adequate protection for the dockworkers in the event of a strike; she passes on words of sympathy to the kid and his family; if he can ID the ones who jumped him, she’ll do all she can to see that charges are brought. In all, the mayor is a friend to labor.
It’s only marginally true. But Jay can see no reason to esca late the situation by repeating verbatim any of the things she said. He played his part as the messenger boy. The end of it, as far as he’s concerned.
“Now wait a minute, son. We still need you on this thing.” “Rev, with all due respect, I’m not sure you have much of a
lawsuit here. You got the mayor herself saying she’ll make sure the men are caught. The problem is, you’re saying the boy doesn’t really know who did it.”
“Not by name, but he
Jay sighs. The story seems to keep shifting.
“Meet with the boy again, hear him tell it, what those men did to him.”
“I can’t afford to take any more time away from my busi ness.”
“I understand, son, but they’re going to vote on the strike, this week maybe. They’re going to call it. Come out to the union meeting and let the boy point the man out. We’ll get his name, then take it to the mayor’s office —”
“You don’t need me for that.”
“You’re the one who has her ear. Now look, the lawsuit was just a tactic. The main thing is, we need her on
