We ate stir-fried potatoes, egg omelets and gulped down orange juice for breakfast. We took the Broadway-7th Avenue local at 79th to 137th and City College. It was a crisp fall morning in West Harlem and we walked a few blocks east to her studio apartment.
It was dark and she lit thick candles, taking out two duffel bags and began jamming stuff into them.
"That's the yuri," she said, pointing at it standing upright in the corner. She held up a kerosene lantern to see. "No need for electricity." Her curtains drawn, light kept at bay, as if she expected a drive-by. Rip had a death-grip on her.
I asked how she would take it to my place without raising suspicions.
"I'll carry on the train like an objet d'art. Riders will know it's a museum piece. Trust me."
Across the aisle, a black man, well dressed in a white sport jacket and white tie, a black flower in his lapel, stared at the spear in her hand. He looked at Roxy, smiled, and gave the power fist, then the peace sign.
"I like your black bat flower. Where'd you get it?"
"A florist sold them on Lenox Avenue. Nice, uh."
"Very rare. It means everything works out for the best."
Silently I watched Roxy's tight grip around the spear.
Back at my place, she pounded nails in the wall and placed the spear on them. We sat on chairs, their cushions sagging, admiring it.
"You know, Pending, I really did kill that man. 1970, just five years ago. It was radical politics then. Extremes fascinated me but not now." An accomplished woman, I thought.
"What do you want these days?"
"Equilibrium. He kidnapped ten-year-old Marcus after I escaped from his townhouse. My bullets were aimed at Rip."
"You could've chanced it and called his bluff." Her expression told me that was idiotic.
"If I pressed charges, Rip would've told the police everything he knew about the murder. He has vast connections. And he might torture Marcus and drop him in a Dumpster."
"Still, you planned the administrator's murder. Why kill that man rather than Rip?"
"Marcus might've been hurt or killed in the crossfire. Rip has all sorts of weapons."
"So now kendo replaces that hate and fear."
"In '70 I channeled it through what passed for revolutionary political change. I had to strike back and chose the administrator. I'd lived in a dungeon's cage."
"If you wanted to kill you could've picked me." What an altruist I was.
"Imagine champagne bottles, carrots, whips, shackles, rope, urine, horse penises, blood, duct tape, ball gags, reeking old men, teenage boys and girls, many men's sperm dripping from my face, choking me with two dicks slamming into my mouth until I gagged and spit out vomit. And there were hundreds of others exploited."
Her voice faroomed through me, jumbling my brain, disorienting any assurance of security, but I rebounded, saying:
"I feel we should dance, listen to Frank Sinatra songs, our bodies swaying, how people were so free from harm once." If I were more human, I'd head for the toilet and heave my guts out, knowing how false that remark was. "Lies are always safer."
"I'm sleepy," she said, yawning.
She went to the bedroom. It was four-thirty. I should call in sick but hadn't ever felt at ease with protocol; etiquette sickened me too, so I didn't.
"Drop dead, punk," I said as the black teen fought to gain purchase on the window ledge outside the living room window. I grabbed the spear, ready to run him through the back. He profiled his face in his effort not splatter below. It was Marcus. I opened the window and pulled him in.
"How the hell did you know where I live?" I hadn't bothered asking why he made the climb. Sherpas would rather climb Mt. Everest than this building.
"Rip's outside. I walked across the roofs from Amsterdam. The leap from the last building to the ledge was tricky. I wanted to warn you." My building was four feet away.
Roxy burst out of the bedroom, hearing her son's voice. She hugged and kissed him, holding him tight.
"Rip's outside in the BMW," Marcus told her.
He grabbed the spear from my hands.
"That door couldn't keep out a pussy cat," Marcus said. I felt I had sunk into a dark pit: I wasn't reliable. "He forgot to lock it. I leaped out when he drove me to a john ‘s place."
I saw the working end of a crowbar pry open the door. It took a few seconds. He had the build of a professional wrestler without the theatrics.
He couldn't see Marcus holding the spear in a small room to the left. Roxy decoyed him, the kendo raised as if she'd attack him by swinging it against his head. He stepped farther in the apartment. Marcus drove the spear into the side of Rip's heart, yanked it back, blood pouring out of Rip. Marcus thrust the spear again, and again into the wound.
Rip turned and watched Marcus's grin. He took one step towards him and Marcus pierced him dead-on through his thick neck.
The three of us dragged the body into the living room. Then I carefully cleaned up the mess. I had enough household cleaning supplies to do the job.
Roxy drove the BMW to the townhouse on the Upper East Side. I sat in the back with Marcus in front.
Marcus showed where Rip's office was and found stacks of cash in his desk. Plush to say the least; I was envious. Marcus got his clothes and two handfuls of books.
"For a spell, these books walled off the hell men did to me. I helped make Rip a rich man."
"How could you read in a dungeon?" I said.
"Sometimes he let me out. Rox had her own cage before she escaped. Where should we go, Rox?" Marcus's face changed from jubilance, standing over Rip's dead body, to fear.
"To my place. Then we'll think about the future."
We drove to the Harlem apartment. After two weeks she gave me cash when we decided it was too cramped for three. I shook hands and then they hugged me. I decided to leave the city.
Years and years later, I look for drudgework, mostly from one dishwashing job to another. I travel east and west, north and south, roads and highways taking me across the country. Peace comes with sleep. Its darkness saves my life.
Drop dead, America.
George Sparling says, "I live on the North Coast of California. I like the death of rain, each drop blood from the Void. I'm currently reading Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling. Suffering and pain bleeds on every page. My real life is the space between words on a page, a blank. Though an atheist by default, I have a print on my wall by John Martin, a 19th Century painter of "The Great Day of the Divine Wrath," fiery red flame, its dark, catastrophic clouds cracking earth apart, relief at last that our stinking entrails have sunk into oblivion."
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