Small Great Things Read online

  "When I was beating him unconscious."

  Again, I felt like I was being given a quiz, and I must have answered correctly, because Mitchum kept talking. "You've started your own crew, and by many accounts, you're the best recruiter on the East Coast. You took the rap for your second in command, and then taught him a lesson as soon as you got out of jail."

  "Just doing what needed to be done."

  "Well," Mitchum answered, "there aren't too many like you, nowadays. I thought honor was a commodity that was going extinct."

  Just then, one of the other little boys snapped the neck off the pinata, and the candy cascaded onto the grass. The kids fell on it, grabbing up sweets in their fists.

  The birthday boy's mother came out of the kitchen carrying a platter of cupcakes. "Happy birthday to you," she started to sing, and the children crowded around the picnic table.

  Brittany stepped out onto the porch. Her fingers were blue with icing.

  "Back when I was running a squad," Mitchum said, "no one in the Movement would have been caught dead being a junkie. Now, for the love of God, Aryan boys are teaming up with redskins on reservations to make meth somewhere the feds can't intervene."

  Happy birthday to you!

  "They're not teaming up," I told Mitchum. "They're banding together against common enemies: the Mexicans and the blacks. I'm not defending what they're doing, but I understand why they might be unlikely allies."

  Happy birthday, dear Jackson!

  Mitchum narrowed his gaze. "Unlikely allies," he repeated. "For example, an old guy with experience...and a young guy with the biggest balls I've ever seen. A man who knows the former generation of Anglos, and one who could lead the next. A fellow who grew up on the streets...and one who grew up with technology. Why, that could be quite a pairing."

  Happy birthday to you!

  Across the yard, Brit caught my eye and blushed.

  "I'm listening," I said.

  --

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, everyone comes back to the house. There are casseroles and pies and platters, none of which I eat. People keep telling me they're sorry for our loss, as if they had something to do with it. Francis and Tom sit outside on the porch, which still has some shards of glass on it from my window project, and drink the bottle of whiskey Tom's brought.

  Brit sits on a couch like the middle of a flower, surrounded by the petals of her friends. When someone she doesn't know well comes too near, they close around her. Eventually, they leave, saying things like Call me if you need me and Every day it'll get a little easier. In other words: lies.

  I am just walking the last guest out when a car pulls up. The door opens, and MacDougall, the cop who took my complaint, gets out. He walks up the steps to where I am standing, his hands in his pockets. "I don't have any information for you yet," he says bluntly. "I came to pay my respects."

  I feel Brit come up behind me like a shadow. "Babe, this is the officer who's going to help us."

  "When?" she asks.

  "Well, ma'am, investigations into these things take time..."

  "These things," Brit repeats. "These things." She shoves past me, so that she is toe-to-toe with the cop. "My son is not a thing. Was," she corrects, her voice snagging. "Was not a thing."

  Then she turns on her heel and disappears into the belly of the house. I look at the cop. "It's been a tough day."

  "I understand. As soon as the prosecutor contacts me I'll be in--"

  He doesn't finish his sentence, however, before the sound of a crash fills all the space behind me. "I have to go," I tell him, but I'm already closing the door in his face.

  There's another crash before I reach the kitchen. As soon as I step inside, a casserole dish flies by my face, striking the wall behind me. "Brit," I cry out, moving toward her, and she wings a glass at my head. It glances off my brow, and for a moment, I see stars.

  "Is this supposed to make me feel better?" Brit screams. "I fucking hate mac and cheese."

  "Baby." I grasp her by the shoulders. "They were trying to be nice."

  "I don't want them to be nice," she says, tears streaming down her face now. "I don't want their pity. I don't want anything, except that bitch who killed my baby."

  I fold my arms around her, even though she stays stiff in them. "This isn't over yet."

  She shoves at me so hard and so unexpectedly that I stumble backward. "It should be," she says, with so much venom in her words that I am paralyzed. "It would be, if you were a real man."

  A muscle ticks in my jaw and I ball my hands into fists, but I don't react. Francis, who's entered the room at some point, comes up behind Brit and slips an arm around her waist. "Come on now, ladybug. Let's get you upstairs." He leads her out of the kitchen.

  I know what she's saying: that a warrior isn't much of a warrior when he's fighting behind a computer. True, going underground with our movement was Francis's idea, and it's been a brilliant and insidious plan--but Brit's right. There's a big difference between the instant gratification that comes from landing a punch and the delayed pride that comes from spreading fear through the Internet.

  I grab the car keys off the kitchen counter, and a moment later I'm cruising downtown, near the railroad tracks. I think, for a heartbeat, about finding that black nurse's address. I have the technological expertise to do it in less than two minutes.

  Which is about as long as it would take the cops to point a finger at me if anything happened to her or her property.

  Instead, I park under a railroad overpass and get out of the car. My heart's pounding, my adrenaline is high. It's been so long since I've been wilding that I've forgotten the high of it, unlike anything that alcohol or sports or even falling in love can produce.

  The first person that gets in my way is unconscious. Homeless, he's drunk or drugged or asleep on a cardboard pallet under a mountain of plastic bags. He's not even black. He's just...easy.

  I grab him by the throat, and he startles from one nightmare into another. "What are you looking at?" I scream into his face, even though I have him pinned by the neck, so that he couldn't be looking at anything but me. "What the fuck is your problem?"

  Then I head-butt him in the mouth, so that I knock his teeth loose. I throw him back on the pavement, hearing a satisfying crack as his skull meets the ground.

  With every blow, I can breathe a little easier. It has been years since I did this, but it feels like yesterday--my fists have a muscle memory. I pound this stranger into someone who will never be recognized, since it's the only way to remember who I am.

  WHEN YOU ARE A NURSE, you know better than most anyone else that life goes on. There are good days and there are bad days. There are patients who stay with you, and those you can't wait to forget. But there is always another mother in labor, or delivering, who drives you forward. There is always a new crop of tiny humans who haven't even written the first sentence in the story of their lives. The process of birth is such an assembly line, in fact, that it always surprises me when I am forced to stop and look twice--like when a baby I helped deliver seemingly yesterday is suddenly my patient, about to have her own child. Or when the phone rings, and the hospital lawyer asks if I could just come in to talk.

  I am not sure that I have ever conversed with Carla Luongo. In fact I'm not sure that I knew the hospital lawyer--pardon me, risk management liaison--was named Carla Luongo. But then I've never been in trouble before. I've never been a risk that needs to be managed.

  It's been two weeks since Davis Bauer's death--fourteen days of me going in to work and doing my business hanging IVs and telling women to push and teaching them how to get a newborn to latch on. But more important, it's been fourteen nights when I've awakened with a start, reliving not that infant's death but the moments before. Playing them in slow motion and reversing them and erasing the edges of the narrative in my head so that I start to believe what I've told myself. What I've told others.

  What I tell Carla Luongo, on the phone, when she calls.

  "