Vanishing Acts Read online

  "You can't do this," I say, my whole body starting to shake.

  "I do whatever I want," Concise snaps over his shoulder. "Go on, get lost. You supposed to be good at that."

  I am off the bunk and on top of him before he can even finish his sentence. He is, in that instant, Sticks and Flaco and Elephant Mike and every faceless man and woman out there in the world who has passed judgment on me without hearing all the facts. He's younger and stronger, but I've come from behind to surprise him. I am able to knock him to the ground and pin him with my weight.

  "You fool. You know what happen if the DOs find out you sellin'?" Concise grunts. "It's a criminal investigation. It's time on top of the time you already gonna do."

  That is when I understand: Concise doesn't want to end this alliance between us; he wants to protect it. He is trying to save me before I can be implicated along with him.

  At the altercation, a small crowd has gathered around the front of our cell--Blue Loc, poised to jump in and pull me off Concise, a small knot of White Pride boys who are cheering me on, and Sticks, who stands with his arms crossed, an inscrutable expression on his face.

  One of the detention officers pushes through. "What's going on?"

  I relax my hold on Concise. "We're good."

  The DO's eyes hone in on the cut on my neck, still bleeding.

  "Cut myself shaving," I say.

  The guard doesn't buy a word of it. But the spark that could ignite this pod has dissipated; he's done all he needs to. As he pushes at the other inmates, getting them to disperse, Concise gets to his feet and shakes his clothes straight.

  "I helped get you into this," I tell him. "I'm not leaving now."

  *

  The next day is my last day for jury selection, and Concise's first day of trial. We are both headed over to the courthouse at the same time. "Bet you got yourself a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt," Concise says.

  As a matter of fact, I do. "What about it?"

  He grins. "Chemist, Brooks wasn't no brother."

  "I suppose you think I ought to go to court wearing pinstripes and spats."

  "Only if you're Al Capone." Our conversation is interrupted as Twitch flings himself into our cell. "I ain't conducting business now," Concise says tersely.

  The addict's eyes dart wildly. "I'm doin' you a favor, man," he says. "Thought maybe you'd do me one, too."

  What he means is that in return for whatever information he thinks he can provide, we might give him a free teener. Concise folds his arms. "I'm listenin'."

  "I heard one of the DOs talking when I was up in the infirmary this morning--they're using the Boss Chair," Twitch says.

  "Why should I believe you?"

  Twitch shrugs. "I'm not the one with a bullet up my ass."

  "If I come back from court and what you said is true," Concise says, "I'll give you what you want."

  At the promise of another hit, Twitch nearly floats out of the cell. Concise turns to me. "We got to hide the bullet in here."

  I look at him like he's crazy. If we're both leaving the cell, and there's no one to watch over the prize possession, then our modus operandi is to take it with us. "If Twitch ain't bullshittin', then today we ain't just gonna get strip searched. They gonna sit us down on a metal detector chair, too."

  Concise wriggles under the bottom bunk and starts to scrape the cement between the bricks. A few minutes of digging creates a hole deep enough to house the .22. He backs out from under the bed and starts rummaging through his personal items for toothpaste, and Metamucil. He mixes these together in the sink; scoops it into his palm. "Keep an eye out," he says; and he creeps under the bunk again, this time to grout.

  Concise and I are handcuffed together for the trip back from the courthouse to the jail. He is quieter than usual, almost haunted. The sad fact about being in jail is that no matter how bad you think it is there, the reality of what you face in court is worse. I am only beginning to taste that bitter future; Concise has swallowed it whole today. "So," I say, trying to lift his spirits, "you going to pull an OJ?"

  He glances over his shoulder. "Oh, yeah. I got them eatin' out of my hand, man."

  "But can you get a bloody glove over it?"

  Concise laughs. We are buzzed in through the level slider, and strip searched once again before being allowed back into our pod. I follow him upstairs to our cell and fall onto the lower bunk. Distantly, I am aware of one of the DOs beginning his security walk. Late afternoon, the general noise level is at a high hum--guys hollering to one another across the common room or slamming a hand of cards down on a metal tabletop when they get gin, televisions blaring, toilets flushing, showers running.

  Concise sinks down onto the stool, his hands between his knees. "My lawyer says I'm looking at ten years," he says after a moment. "By the time I get out, my boy's gonna be as old as I was when I got jumped into the Crips."

  There's nothing to say; we both know that no matter how we try to convince ourselves we'll outrun our past, it always crosses the finish line first.

  "Hey," he says. "Do us a favor and check the goddamn bricks."

  I get down on my hands and knees and start to crawl under the lower bunk. But I can smell it before I can even see the telltale hole: the pungent mint, the ground powder that dusts the cement floor.

  Then there is a shot.

  *

  It is louder than you think. It echoes against the walls, and leaves me deaf. I shimmy out from underneath the bunk and catch Concise as he falls off the stool. His eyes roll back; his blood soaks me. "Who did this?" I scream into the crowd that has already gathered. I try to find the shooter, but all I see are stripes.

  Concise falls on top of me in a heavy tangle of limbs and desperation. What is black and white and red all over, I think, a joke Sophie once told me. I cannot remember her punch line, but I know a different one: a black man dying in jail; a white one watching him go.

  I hear the crackle of a radio, and the jail comes alive with a web of response: Officer needs assistance in three-two B pod. Man down. All officers on levels two and three respond to three-two B pod. David two, did you copy?

  David two copies: Ten-seventeen.

  Inmates in B pod, lockdown.

  Steel scrapes as the cell doors are shut.

  I am dragged away from Concise. Someone is asking me if I'm hurt and looking at my arms and chest--places where I am covered in Concise's blood. I am handcuffed behind my back and led to the ghost town of the East Dayroom.

  In the middle of all this, no one has bothered to turn off the television. Emeril's bursts of instruction are interrupted by the RN shouting to call 911; by a deep voice saying, "More pressure"; by the jangling arrival of the Phoenix Fire Department paramedics.

  "This is hot hot hot," Emeril says.

  They will take Concise to Good Samaritan Hospital, the closest trauma center. "Hey," I yell out, as he is carried past on a stretcher. "Is he going to be okay?"

  "He's dead," a voice replies. "But then, you already knew that, didn't you?"

  When I look up, I see a tall, well-dressed black man with a detective's badge clipped to his belt. He stares at my uniform, covered with Concise's blood, and I realize that, like every other black man in the Madison Street Jail, he believes I am a killer.

  The Homicide Division Offices at the General Investigation Division are near Thirty-fifth and Durango. I am kept waiting while the detectives systematically interrogate everyone else in the pod--from the officers and the blacks who say that just days ago Concise and I were fighting, to Fetch, the young white boy who watched me vomit out the bullet after the rec yard fight.

  Whoever did this knows that no one will believe a white man and a black man in jail might forge a friendship. Whoever did this knows that the blacks will assume I was the one who killed Concise--after all, everyone knows it is my bullet that went into him. The whites, for once, will agree with them.

  Whoever did this was trying to punish both of us.

  Detec