There were people all around but most of them stayed back.
Three sirens wailed not far away.
“It’s okay, ma’am,” I was saying. “I stopped the bleeding now.”
“Am I bleedin’?” she asked. “Am I bleedin’?”
“No,” I said. “I stopped it with this bandage.”
“All right now, back away!” a voice said.
Two white men dressed all in white except for their shoes ran up.
“Two, Joseph,” one man said. “A stretch for each.”
“Got it,” the other man said.
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The nearest ambulance attendant took the torn shirt from my hands and began speaking to the woman.
“What’s your name, lady?” he asked.
“Alicia Roman.”
“I need you to lie down, Alicia, so that I can get you into the ambulance and stop this cut from bleeding.”
There was authority in the white man’s voice. Alicia allowed him to lower her onto the asphalt. The other attendant, Joseph, came up with a stretcher. This he put down beside her.
The lanky woman was helping Nate to the back of the ambulance. She was plain looking and high brown, like a polished pecan. There was no expression on her face. She was just doing her part.
I looked down at my hands. Alicia’s blood had trailed over my palms and down my forearms. The blood had splattered onto my T-shirt too.
“Are you hurt?” a man asked me.
It was a policeman who came up from the crowd. I saw three other policemen directing traffic and keeping pedestrians out of the street.
“No,” I said. “This is her blood.”
“Were you in their car?” The cop was blond but he had what white people call swarthy skin. The racial blend hadn’t worked too well on him. I remember thinking that the top of his head was in Sweden but his face reflected the Maghreb.
“No,” I said. “I ran into them.”
“They ran the light?”
“No. I did.”
A surprised look came into his face.
“Come over here,” he said, leading me to the curb.
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He made me touch my nose then walk a straight line, turn around, and come back again.
“You seem sober,” he told me.
The ambulance was taking off.
“Are they gonna be okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Put your hands behind your back.”
t h e y t o o k a w a y my belt, which was a good thing. I was so miserable in that cell that I might have done myself in. Jesus wasn’t home. Neither was Raymond or Jackson, Etta or Saul Lynx. If I stayed in jail until the trial Feather might be kicked out of the clinic and die. I wondered if Joguye Cham, Bonnie’s African prince, would help my little girl. I’d be the best man at their wedding if he did that for me.
I finally got Theodore Steinman at his shoe shop down the street from my house. I told him to keep calling EttaMae.
“I’ll come down and get you, Ezekiel,” Steinman said.
“Wait for Etta,” I told him. “She does this shit with Mouse at least once every few months.”
“ c i g a r e t t e ? ” my cellmate asked.
I didn’t know if he was offering or wanting one but I didn’t reply. I hadn’t uttered more than three sentences since the arrest.
The police were surprisingly gentle with me. No slaps or insults.
They even called me mister and corrected me with respect when I turned the wrong way or didn’t understand their commands.
The officer who arrested me, Patrolman Briggs, even dropped by the cell to inform me that Nate and Alicia Roman were doing just fine and were both expected to be released from the hospital that day.
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“Here you go,” my cellmate said.
