the men to see. “You try to fuck with me or my family ever again, not only will this go to the media, but I’ll come looking for each of you myself.”
There was little of what could have passed for shame on the four white faces. Earl considered for one brief moment the idea of opening up on them with the gun. But the priority for now was to get his daughter and granddaughter to safety. “Are we clear on all this?” he asked, fixing his eyes on each of the men in turn.
“What about him?” one man asked, motioning to Tarvis lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.
“I understand you’re all members of Atlanta’s finest,” Earl said. “I’m sure you got ideas how to make a body disappear, make a crime as though it never happened.”
Earl could see by their eyes they were already considering the possibilities. He backed his way to the doorway with Melon at his cuff. And with his daughter and granddaughter, he fled off into the moonlit Georgia night.
AT THE GREYHOUND bus terminal at four in the morning, Earl bought two one-way tickets to Los Angeles. His granddaughter was still docile and quiet, but she was starting to come around.
Loretta had managed to clean her up and get her properly dressed for the trip. And India herself had managed a smile.
“Take good care of our little girl,” Loretta said. “See she get a good education.”
“You sure you don’t want to come with us?” Earl asked.
“It’s too late for me,” she said, pride overriding the sadness in her eyes. “Will you be all right?”
“I’ll let you know. But I don’t think the mystery of what happened to Ray Tarvis will ever be solved. A Jimmy Hoffa kinda thing. Still, I wish the rest of the bastard boys’ club could receive some evens.”
Earl studied his daughter, feeling a certain sense of guilt-layered pride. She was a survivor, at the very least. And though he couldn’t change the past, he could give her some justice for the pain and humiliation both she and India had suffered.
Earl took Loretta’s hand and folded the memory card from his camera into it. “What’s this?” Loretta asked, looking down.
“It’s a bit of justice,” Earl said. “Put it in an envelope and send it anonymously to the
Loretta brought her eyes back to his. “It’ll stir up a hornets’ nest that could come back on you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Earl said. “I’m an old man with an old dog and just as blind as I need to be. I’ll take what comes.”
Loretta gave him a strong hug and wished him and her daughter well. Then she turned toward her taxicab parked at the stand.
Earl put his arm around his granddaughter. And together they watched Loretta gather a waiting fare from the curb and drive away.
“Been some kind of visit, eh, Melon?” Earl said to the dog at his feet. “And we got a new member of the family to share our house with.”
Melon chuffed and nuzzled India’s ankle to show his approval.
“What about you?” Earl said to his granddaughter. “You ready for a new life?”
India gave what passed for a smile and boarded the bus ahead of him.
The driver was waiting to close the door against the heat.
Earl pulled his dark glasses from his inside pocket and slipped them on. He adjusted the camera around his neck, extended his cane, smoothed the front of his poplin jacket.
He was making a show of it. And why not?
Even a blind man could see he was seventy years old and a black man back in the South.
THE GENERAL
BY JANICE LAW
Even after he went into a comfortable, if still bitter, exile in the north, the General hired only men from his own country. He trusted the loyalty of those who had been comrades and subordinates and the poverty of the others. Of the two, he regarded poverty as the surer thing, but the General was never without a sidearm, and the inner recesses of his handsome house — a glossy, glamorized version of the old stucco mansions of his homeland — held a small arsenal. He had enemies, some persistent, who had fled north a few years ahead of him. That political power was fleeting was a basic tenet of the universe.
Power of other sorts — the power of money, influence, personality — had proved more durable. Overseeing his silent, well-trained indoor staff and the ever-changing retinue of gardeners, pool attendants, and chauffeurs, the General felt as close as he was ever going to be to his old life of unquestioned authority. Dismissing a gardener for an ill-raked path or sacking a cook for a soup too cold or too hot satisfied impulses that he’d feared he was leaving behind when he boarded the plane, late and secretly, on the night the government fell.
But the north, with its labyrinth of immigration laws, had given him new levers to control his employees, and the General used them all, partly to avoid familiarity and partly for pleasure, because the General had loved only two things: power and his young son, Alejandro, a slim, dark boy of eight who reminded the General strongly of his late wife. Not that there was anything effeminate about the child, who played noisy soccer games at St. Ignatius and who could set the kitchen staff laughing the moment he returned from school, but from his earliest years, Alejandro had been thoughtful, and what he was thinking was not always transparent to his father.
Like his mother, the boy kept his own counsel, and he could be as quiet as he was noisy, spending hours reading in his room or playing one of his squeaking video games or frolicking in the far reaches of the garden and learning ungrammatical Spanish from the gardeners. He looked like his mother too, being rather pale, with eyes neither brown nor green, but a speckled amalgamation of the two. He had her nose, already quite large and angular; her full mouth; her thick, glossy black hair.
Watching him run joyously about on the playing field, the General had moments when some angle of jaw or cheek or hairline brought Maria back with a sharp, unwelcome ache. Aware of her own innocence, she had been as fearless as the boy, and she had paid for her carelessness when a motorcycle roared up to her limousine and the pillion rider loosed a burst of fire. The assailants had expected the General to be in the car, and though he’d escaped, he had known that his days were numbered.
Eventually, he fled north, where he had contacts, protection, assistance of useful kinds, and money. He hadn’t gone into either the army or politics to remain poor. Now he lived in luxurious retirement; in exile, true, and with greatly diminished powers, but with vastly enhanced safety and comfort. Alejandro would grow up to be a citizen of this new and often enigmatic country, where power of many sorts would be available to him. The General had no doubt of that.
So he was as content as a man of his past and temperament could be. He raged sometimes — though never at Alejandro. The General was known to strike his kitchen staff and even his young and pretty mistress, who lived in an apartment a mile away from his home, but he did nothing worse. The past was gone and buried, and all that he had done and seen and ordered — for the good of his country and his party — was put to rest.
With wealth, a gated acreage, state-of-the-art alarms, and armed guards, the General could be confident that his life would run smoothly. It was therefore surprising that he allowed one irritant: Manuel, the gaunt, silent head gardener whom it had pleased the General to hire after precipitously firing the last one for burning the perfect turf with a carelessly placed glass tabletop.
Manuel was, naturally, one of the General’s countrymen, an old, dark, sad Indian without papers. The General preferred illegals, whom he could pay next to nothing. But although his salary was minimal, the elderly gardener was permitted to live in the shed at the back of the yard.
Why the General arranged this is unclear, since he was cautious to the point of paranoia. Yet to save a few dollars on Manuel’s salary, dollars that the General could well have afforded, having left the capital with a suitcase full of gold bars, he allowed a stranger, and a mysterious one at that, to live within his gates and beyond his immediate oversight.
