“You speak up at the meeting, say anything, for or against the strike?”
“No, sir. I only been in the union a year now. I can’t even remember when there was a Brotherhood. It’s only ever been one union, far as I’ve known. This ain’t a black or white thing for me. I just want to get a little extra money in my pocket, you know, hold on to a girlfriend for more than a couple of weeks.”
Jay nods, as if he completely understands, as if these were his only concerns when he was Darren’s age. The kid starts in on his second Dr Pepper.
“And you saw them at the meeting, the men who jumped you?” Jay asks.
“One of ’em at least. He was standing right outside the hall, in the doorway, catching a smoke. I remember ’cause he looked at me kind of funny when I was walking out to my car.”
He runs down the rest of the story for Jay:
He left the meeting, must have been about a quarter to nine because he remembers thinking he was going to be late clock ing in at the bakery—it’s almost thirty minutes to get out to his second job at the Meyer Bread factory. He was heading west on Harrisburg. He was gon’ pick up 59 and carry that to I-45.
But of course, he never made it that far.
There was a pair of headlights in his rearview mirror, not even a couple of blocks from ILA headquarters. He says he knew right away that he was being followed. How, Jay asks. Just a hunch, a feeling, the kid says. He tried to duck the car, speeding up, then slowing down, but the lights were right on his tail the whole way. Jay nods; all of this sounds eerily familiar. The kid admits he made a pretty big mistake. He took a sharp turn down a side street, thinking he could lose them that way. But he ended up at a dead end. The car behind him, a truck, it turned out—A truck, Jay asks twice. You sure it wasn’t a car? A sedan, like a Ford?—the truck pulled sideways and parked across the road, so that when the kid turned around trying to get onto Canal Street, they blocked him in. Two of ’em jumped out with baseball bats. The one driving stayed behind the wheel. Darren locked both his doors, but the men broke his driver-side window, yanking him out. Looking at Darren’s lean frame, Jay acknowledges that this was possible, but still the kid must have been cut up some thing awful.
Yes, sir, he says.
He never got up after the first blow, a mean lick across the back of his neck. It was two against one, plus the dude in the cab of the truck. One of the men yanked Darren’s arm behind his back, pinning it there with his boot, which is how the bone broke. The other one made a few kicks at Darren’s face, spit ting at him the whole time about how a vote to strike would mean trouble for him and his family. From the ground, Darren couldn’t see much but tar and concrete. There were lights on inside some of the houses on the street, but no one dared to come outside. He doesn’t know if there were any witnesses.
Except for the dude sitting in the truck.
He was behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette out the win dow, watching the whole thing, sometimes offering direction to the other two. “Telling them to twist my arm a little harder. He seemed like the ringleader,” Darren says.
“What’d he look like?”
“A white guy, ’bout your age, I guess, maybe older.”
“Blond or brown hair? Was he wearing it short or long?”
Darren shrugs. “He was wearing a baseball cap . . . and glasses.”
“What kind of glasses? Like sunglasses?”
“No, like regular glasses.”
“And you’re sure it was the same guy you saw at the meet ing? Even though it was dark out, and he would have been at least a couple of yards away from where you were laid out on the ground?”
“The one who was looking at me funny when I left the union hall, that guy was wearing a baseball cap too, just like the dude in the cab of the truck. It was red on white . . . just like the dude in the truck.”
“If you see him tonight at the meeting, you point him out to me, all right?” Jay says. “Let me handle the rest.”
“Yes, sir,” Darren says, smiling through his chipped front tooth.
They leave the port in different cars, agreeing to meet in front of the union hall a few minutes before eight o’clock. The ILA park ing lot is overflowing, and Jay sees at least two press vans parked by the curb out front. At a pay phone by the doors, he calls over to Evelyn’s and asks to speak to his wife. Without making a big thing of it, he had asked Bernie to stay out to her sister’s for the night. After what happened the other day, he doesn’t want her home by herself. Of course, the story he cooked up for her had something to do with a concern that she could go into early labor and he wouldn’t be anywhere around. Bernie agreed. But now, on the phone, she sounds tired and ready to go home. In the background, Jay can hear Evelyn cackling at George Jefferson on television. He asks Bernie to hold out for a few more hours. He’ll come get her before ten.
Darren shows his union card at the door, introducing Jay as his lawyer; they let Jay in without a fuss. The hall is already at full capacity. Some of the men are starting to spill out through the double doors. Jay squeezes through a wall of bodies to get inside. The room is hot and packed, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the stench of grown men’s fears, men who have families to feed, rents and mortgages to pay. They are at least four hundred deep in the hall, black and white and a few brown, their skin tight and leathery, cured by the sun and the salt of the Gulf. They’re chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping free coffee and nibbling at iced cookies wrapped in paper napkins, their work caps tucked under their arms. They stand idle, staring at the stage, where a lone microphone waits.
Jay follows Darren to the black side of the room, over to the left. He recognizes some of the faces. Men from the church meeting, men he met on the night of the shooting on Market Street. They pat him on the back, offer extended hands in his direction. Donnie Simpson is standing against the back wall, drinking black coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. Jay asks about his family, how the kids are holding up. Donnie says the kids are fine, but his wife hasn’t slept good since the shooting. It’s a couple more paydays before he can fix the broken window, and in the meantime they’re sleeping with a thin sheet of plywood between them and the outside world. He offers to get Jay a cup of coffee. Jay waves him off, says he’ll get it himself. Can he get Donnie a refill?
He takes Donnie’s empty cup and cuts across the room, scan ning every face, looking for one that’s familiar to him. Through the smoky air, he studies every beard and mustache, every hair cut, the cut of everyone’s collar.
