Fever In The Blood

by Robert Fleming

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Eddie Stevens is burning inside. . . . . .and he's burning mad at the world. He's mad at the family he lost--his parents and sisters viciously killed by a gang in their own home; and he's mad at the foster family that "rescued" him--headed up by a powerful Harlem congressman who sees Eddie as a campaign ploy. Mainly, Eddie is mad at himself, for getting caught by the cops with blood on his hands. Blood he should have washed off right away. He was sloppy this time. It won't happen again. Because Eddie knows the fever that ignites his rage is wasted--unless it's put to use. And he intends to put it to use again and again. . . Praise for Havoc After Dark "If the late jazz legend Sun Ra wrote a book of fiction, it would be like this--ingenious, way-out, probing, daring, mind-altering, leading-edge. Robert Fleming is all refined sensibilities and grim bravado. His abilities and narratives exhilarate and frighten me. They freak me out. They turn me on. They make me ask deep questions. This cat is baaad!" –Colin Channer, author of Waiting in Vain and Satisfy My Soul." Robert Fleming, a former award-winning journalist and writer, is the author of Havoc After Dark, The Wisdom of the Elders, and The African American Writer's Handbook. He also edited the anthologies, After Hours and Intimacy. He lives in New York City.

Release date: July 11, 2012

Publisher: Dafina

Print pages: 320

Sample

There was blood on my hands and I had no idea where it came from, how it got there. You know how they arrest black boys on a whim. Needlessly. So they collared me, on a bum beef. Murder, no way. I don’t think I killed anybody. I really don’t remember.

Being around white folks doesn’t seem to be everything it’s cracked up to be. It’s not a picnic. Ask them if you think I’m lying. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with me.

About this blood on my hands. Where did it come from? I don’t know where it came from. I loved death. Killing. My grandma told me that something was wrong with me and I agreed, even when I was a kid. The first corpse I ever saw was not human. It was my dog, Felix, which I buried behind our apartment building in Brooklyn. The pooch, a black mutt, was named after Felix The Cat, the cartoon. A dog named for a cat. I considered that ironic, the name. I was six. I killed Felix, choked him to death with my bare kiddie hands, until its eyes rolled back in its furry head. Wore my father’s work gloves, no fingerprints. Didn’t leave a trace.

When I next thought about the dog, it was early evening, and my father, my real father, was asking me about the mutt. Once I kill something, I never give it another thought. It’s on to the next thing, just like in life.

“Where’s that goddamn dog?” the old man asked, snarling. He wasn’t really that old, just fifteen years older than my mother. Moms was in her mid-twenties at the time, looked like a young Diana Sands, the actress. But ink black with smooth skin like satin.

I lowered my head in a mournful expression, pure Shakespeare, and lied with a straight face. “I don’t know.”

Somebody should have stopped me back then, nipped me in the bud, before the bloodlust really took hold. Before I knew the thirst. No one did. I was an apprentice killer. No monster sprouts from the dry soil fully grown, fully developed. Every tragedy takes time to stretch to its complete length, gaining power and force with each passing hour. That was how it was with me.

A person, especially a young black boy, who has spent so much of his life internally, inside himself, in his own head, is frightening, even to himself. One incident changed me forever. Maybe I was nearly ten. A neighborhood bully teased me about my father’s profession before his friends, his homies. He taunted me about my Pops being a drug pusher. What I didn’t know was his father was a laid-off bus driver. This boy teased me, then he bitch-slapped me to the ground. Everybody laughed, he slapped down the runt.

Quietly I got up, blood leaking from my nose, brushed myself off and walked a few blocks to my house and got a butcher knife. When I returned to the scene of the crime, the crowd of kids parted like the Red Sea before Moses, leaving the bully standing there in this circle. The power. The fear in his eyes. Without saying a word, I stepped up to him and slashed him the length of his face, along the cheek. The blade struck once more and I marked him across the forehead. Everybody ran, screaming and carrying on, damn, he fucked him up.

“He’s covered with blood,” one kid yelled. “You could have killed him.”

I looked down at my soaked trousers, drenched with his blood, and saw that I was hard. My dick was as hard as a diamond. His folks called the cops and that was that. Someone ratted me out. I rubbed my hands on his face, the color of it, the red, and waited for the law to come for me.

To my old man, it was just a case of “boys will be boys.” Testosterone running amok. His thing was not to back down. Be a man. At all costs. Moms did not say a damn thing when he slapped me for letting a boy steal my lunch money, for being a punk. Be a man. Get mad. A man gets mad. Show some backbone and kick that boy’s ass. Don’t come home crying or I’ll kick your ass.

The old man was full of macho beliefs like that. Never let a female shame you or a dude make you “lose face.” If other men saw you crying or whining, they wouldn’t respect you. Get hard, get tough. Never let anyone know what you’re feeling inside. Get hard. Use your pain to make you hard. Never let your voice betray you. It’s a guy thing. Be a man.

My current round of troubles started late this afternoon when an unmarked cop car pulled up sharply at the curb as I walked casually along 125th Street, the main commercial artery of Harlem. The avenue was packed with people. I was high. Two blunts after breakfast. Primo shit. Maybe I had just killed someone. The kill was so fresh that I couldn’t remember it. The rush from it still lingered with me so I paid little attention when the tires of the prowl car screeched to a halt just inches from me.

Nothing could snap me out of my vile mood. Then the voices kicked in and the officers barked at me, waving their guns. Get the fuck over there against that car. Keep your hands where we can see them. Don’t act a fool. This can go easy or hard. I let it go easy.

A crowd gathered to watch them shove me into the black-and-white city issue, striking my head on its roof before getting me all the way inside. Listen, nigger, your job right now is to not give us any trouble. Understand, black boy?

We didn’t go to the police station. Maybe because I looked so out of it, they took me to Bellevue, for loonies. Maybe because I was screaming full tilt at the three female mannequins in a shop window a half hour earlier, they took me to Bellevue. They must have seen the blood on my hands but they didn’t say anything until later.

Once in the nut ward at Bellevue, I sat there staring ahead, lost in my own world, my glazed eyes locked on the wild geometric patterns only I could see in the drab wall paint. I didn’t belong here. Still, I felt the sensation of having my head pushed underneath water. All around me was a sea of disorder and chaos, nutville, but I felt strangely calm and serene. The place was a damn zoo. I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t like the rest of these fruit cakes. The young wolf chained. I sat quietly, cuffed hands folded in my lap, no telltale sign of agitation or nervousness. A rock.

The holding room for dangerous cases like myself was not that large, almost bare, very antiseptic, with thick mesh on the windows. Several policemen mingled with the hospital staff, keeping a watchful eye on the captives. I was never too verbal. I sat quietly in my chair; I gave them nothing.

Whenever someone came into the room, I smiled politely at them, completely tame. A disheveled woman, hair all over her head, stared at me across the room. Occasionally, she wiggled her hips suggestively and ran her tongue around the rim of her thick lips. Like she wanted to go down on me or something. Most women would say that I’m quite handsome for a twenty-year-old black man, wiry but rugged, just over six-foot and very fit. I don’t eat a lot of junk. One of the cops ragged on me about the length of my hair, my short Wyclef Jean dreads, called me a fairy and a potential jail bridesmaid. My smile widened with his every word. I don’t trust them because I know bad things can happen to a black man in custody, like that brother they busted out his back door with the toilet plunger. Sick puppies.

“Edward Michael Stevens, is that your name?” asked this one cop who looked like John Candy, the dead fat comedian.

“Correct,” I answered. I didn’t volunteer any information.

The whole bunch of them resembled Dick Tracy clones, Keystone Cops, circling me like buzzards on dead meat. I didn’t like their stares. Every black man I know has had a run-in with these fools, not knowing what they’re going to do next, whether there was going to be “an accident” of some kind. He resisted arrest, he went for a knife and we had to shoot him.

“Something’s not kosher with you, Buckwheat,” a plainclothes cop with a red Irish face said. “You’ve been up to something, boy.”

They watched my eyes. Two of them moved their chairs closer to me. Close enough for me to smell the lunch on their breath, meat with a beer chaser. I sat there, smiling. Then the questions came in a flurry, so fast that it was hard to follow who was doing the asking.

“Why were you yelling like that on the street? Are you psycho or something?”

I remained mute, still smiling.

“Are you on any kind of medications? Under a doctor’s care?”

Not once did I lower my eyes. Staring right back at them. But not one word and that was frustrating the hell out of them. I finally figured out what it was, the nuts bit. Everybody has a thing about crazies, wackos, the folks minus cards in their decks. Here I was: the boys in blue with Sambo. What if Buckwheat ran amok? They felt unnerved by my eyes, my detached manner, my silence, my sense of cool, and all of them felt it. It.

Something menacing, something frightening, something disturbing but barely repressed. Like I could break out and go off the deep end at any moment.

“Where do you live?”

My grin answered for me. Bellevue. Where the elite meet and greet.

“Do you live at home with your parents? Do you work? Are you still in high school?”

I was their prisoner, wasn’t the first time either. The last time was in Brownsville, Brooklyn, four months ago, after a ruckus in a parking lot. Man backed into my car or rather my father’s car, and tried to drive off. I went ballistic on his ass. I wasn’t high but I wasn’t going to let him diss me like that. Just drive off. I punched him out, stomped him some, and somebody called the law. The cops arrested me, didn’t say shit to the other guy because he looked like he was white, a light-skinned Puerto Rican, threw me on the ground, and handcuffed me like I was Dillinger. They wanted to do a Rodney King on me but there were too many people and you never know who might be carrying a video camera. People, most of them out shopping for the holidays, stood around, watching the bust go down. They cheered when the cops jerked me to my feet, my arms ripping open from the cuffs, and slung me into the car. DUI. They read me my rights, joked a lot, and took me to jail.

“Why am I here?” I asked quietly, returning to the present. My captors chose not to answer me, instead they chatted among themselves.

“Why the hell am I here?” I shouted. My voice could probably be heard out in the hallway and everybody turned and looked at me.

“Don’t get fucking cute,” John Candy whispered close to my ear. “Mr. Stevens, you were acting strangely, menacing the public, so we got a call.”

“That’s bullshit. I was minding my own business.”

“How did you get the blood on your hands, Mr. Stevens?” Officer Candy asked, kneeling in front of me. I wanted to kick him right between the legs. Damn, was I tempted.

“I don’t know, cut myself maybe.” I stared at the cops who stared back with open disdain.

One of the other men stepped up on the side of me, out of view but close enough for me to feel his presence, his malice. “Whatcha mean you don’t know, Buckwheat? You know how it got there.”

I glanced at my hands, dried blood in the palms and on the fingers. I recalled an old memory. “My dog got hit by a car and I carried him home. He died. I didn’t get a chance to wash my hands.”

The Keystone Cops huddled, talking in whispers, motioning wildly. I couldn’t make out any of it. A member of the hospital staff joined them and the conversation became even more animated. One guy wanted to hold me overnight, another said he didn’t want to do the paperwork, and John Candy insisted he could make me talk.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the blood on my hands. Blood. I wanted to wash my hands in the worst way, feel suds on them, wash them over and over as I did back when the slaughter took place, back when I first bugged out, back when the Congressman first rescued me. Wash them over and over, which I often did at home, over and over. Forty, even fifty times every day. Sometimes I went through three bars of soap a day. Sometimes I felt like I could never get them clean, no matter how much I washed them. There were times when my hands bled from so much rubbing and wiping, the ribbons of bright red blood running down over the porcelain into the sink drain.

“Dog, my ass,” John Candy said in his wicked voice, grabbing me under the chin. “I’m not going to ask you too many more times. Where did the blood come from?”

“Hell if I know.” I was tired of their bullshit.

Before I could say anything else, Candy’s hand met my face and I tumbled back in the chair, hitting my head on the floor. The hospital guy rushed over yelling, “None of that in here!” My face vibrated and the familiar flash of blinding white light followed the thunderclap sound. In the background, the gibberish of the cops and the nutville crew sounded like the madcap crooning on one of those shitty Xavier Cugat cha-cha records that my stepmother loved so well, the sound all speeded up real fast. White noise. Static.

They yanked me up to my feet and pushed me back into the chair. I smiled warmly at them like a small kid about to give a short Easter speech in church before his family and the entire congregation.

“Where did the goddamn blood come from?” Candy pressed. “Who did you fucking kill? Where’s the damn body, perp?”

Another slap but I took this one, sitting perfectly still. My head didn’t hurt so much this time. I was the Chosen One at the mercy of the Philistines, Christ in the hands of the Roman guards, Joan of Arc held at the pleasure of her molesters, Charlton Heston in the clutches of the talking apes. Tupac in the gun sights of his assassins. But I was strong; I did not falter.

“Where did the blood come from?” Candy repeated and was about to pop me again but someone grabbed his hand.

A line of blood flowed from my left nostril into my mouth but I didn’t wipe it away.

“Why am I being held in a psychiatric ward, gentlemen?” I decided to speak.

“Where did you get the blood on your hands?”

I could be just as stubborn as them. “Why am I here? I’m not crazy.”

Candy stood over me, glaring down at me. He wanted a piece of me so bad. “You’re real cute, Buckwheat. When the officers asked your identity uptown, you gave them some off-the-wall remark. I forget what you said. It’s here in the notes. You said your damn name was Joe Tex. But that’s not your fucking name.”

I smiled at them again. “I can answer any way I want.”

Something Grandma once said to me came into my aching head. “Honey, in some seasons, madness is among our kind in full bloom. You don’t have to look hard to see it.” That’s heavy but she was always saying stuff like that. Nutville. Once Pops walked buck naked out into a snowstorm, did a couple of snow angels, not even shivering, until a neighbor yelled out the window at him. Then he came inside, acted like nothing happened.

“What were you doing earlier today?” Candy asked. “Where did the blood come from?”

I didn’t answer. I watched my hands, my bloody hands, folding and unfolding them. Another tall white man entered the room, someone with authority and rank because the others straightened up at his appearance. He had a gray face and chain-smoked the entire time, saying nothing but listening to the others. He occasionally coughed a phlegmy cough, deep in the air sacs, like he had minimum lung capacity.

“We can have a wacko skele like you locked away in a place like this for a long time, a very long time,” the tall man finally said. “We’re not buying this crazy act. You know something and we’re going to stay on your nigger ass until we get it out of you. Understand?”

“Can I have a cigarette?” I asked.

John Candy nodded, reached in his breast pocket and produced a pack. Camels. I took one in my cuffed hands and placed it into my mouth, and the fat man fired it up. The tobacco smoke felt hot and comforting as it entered my body and exited from my nostrils.

“What have you been up to, boy?” Candy started on me again.

I thought about the white man calling me crazy, bent, sick in the head. Shit, white folks think all niggers are crazy anyway. Maybe they are right. Living in this country can drive you crazy. When I thought on it, I was more mad than crazy, angry, enraged. I had every right to be. The homeboys had a term, crazy mad, someone over the top, beyond the limits of sanity and beyond the zone of insanity as well. This fit me sometimes. Sometimes I didn’t care about a damn thing. That term fit a lot of people in the Hood. However, being mad, even crazy mad, was a useless emotion unless put to use. I put it to good use. I had been crazy mad for a long time, mad at the world, mad at the family I lost, mad at the family that found me, mad at myself for getting caught. I should have washed the blood from my hands right away. I bugged out. But the cops had no body, no evidence, and I would be more careful next time.

Suddenly, another cop in uniform entered the room, interrupting the interrogation, and whispered at great length with John Candy and the tall man. I could tell by their expressions that whatever they were being told did not sit well with them. John Candy’s chubby cheeks reddened and he slammed his fat fist hard against his thigh.

I knew exactly what the deal was. “So you assholes found out who my father is.” They wanted to beat the smug look off my face but couldn’t.

“We can’t hold him,” the uniform said. “The guy’s old man is that bigshot spade congressman. Congressman Stevens. The Congressman called somebody downtown. The boy’s out of here. Somebody at One Police Plaza sent word that he walks and walks now.”

Immediately I stood up and held out my cuffed hands. The cops, including the tall man, argued with the uniform, who kept shaking his head, no. John Candy glared at me once or twice during the powwow. Suddenly, their meeting finished, the cops left the room without saying anything, no apology, nothing. I asked the hospital staffer where the restroom was and went to wash off the blood, thinking that the cops might try to get a lab sample just in case. They blew it.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in a cab, humming Queen Latifah’s “The Evil That Men Do,” en route to my apartment and a rendezvous with the half-filled cup of mango sorbet in my fridge. I was sloppy this time. I would not be next time. For some reason, a quote by this Samuel Beckett dude I read in my English class a long time ago popped back into my head. It went: “The major sin is the sin of being born.” Damn right.

One thing you can always expect when you’re a murder suspect is a quiet, efficient police escort. They’re always there, lurking to the right of your shadow. I don’t know if they bought my fable of carrying the bloody dog or not. I really didn’t give a fuck.

Keeping an eye on the unmarked car in the background, I went all over the city, even to some sinister places just to make the cops uneasy. But I did a lot of normal things too. Went to the hardware store on St. Nicholas Avenue for a length of rope, putty knife, pliers, and some nails. The car was still there. Went to an exhibit of the artists Charles White and Jacob Lawrence at the Studio Museum. Strong, dark, emotion-filled works. The car was not far behind. They stayed on my ass, especially this one Detective Bradley, short, chunky black guy with piercing brown eyes and a walrus mustache. He was right there in the car when I went to the Fairway off 125th Street for grape juice, fruit, spices, toilet paper and oregano for my visit to Grandma Timmons.

She asked me to pick up a few things. The car waited patiently in the dim light under the bridge for my exit from the store.

I remember Detective Bradley poking a long finger at me before I was released. “Niggers are the worst threat black people have. Remember when President Clinton said awhile back that violence for white people too often comes with a black face.”

“What the hell does that have to do with me?” I was really being a smart-ass.

He was adamant. “The president was talking about predators like you, but you’re even worse than that. You prey on your own kind. I will get your ass. Count on it.”

“You have nothing on me,” I said.

The detective said violence was commonplace in the Hood. I was not yet a grown-up and he knew it, offering an olive branch between us because he respected my stepfather, the Congressman. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of the politician. He tried to understand me but there was no understanding of the warped mind my family had nurtured in me. I was totally fucked up.

“What goes on in the head of a young man like you?” He narrowed his eyes at me.

“You talk like every one of the adults talk,” I said.

“We didn’t create this world. We’re just trying to live in it. It’s not like the place when you were kids. Everything is all screwed up. You made the world violent. You made the world crazy.”

He was stumped at how much sense I made.

“The world glorifies sex and violence,” I explained.

“Sex and violence are sold everywhere. We’re even violent in our homes. I was not born in money. I was born poor with guns, crime, poverty, alcohol and drug use, and violence. My parents died as a result of violence.”

“Who were your real parents?” he asked, scribbling on a notepad.

“That’s none of your business,” I smirked.

“I’ll find out. We can find out anything. Maybe that is the reason why you have an attitude. Like you don’t give a damn. What they need to do is lock your ass up and throw away the key. Once you get inside, then you’ll change your tune. Yeah man, they’ll make you into a bridesmaid in no time. A jailhouse bitch.”

I stood up. I couldn’t get away from there soon enough.

Two nights later, the lovely Xica went with me to see the film, Shine, at the Loews on 86th and Broadway and we watched it while eating hot buttered popcorn and overpriced candy. I loved her because she was the first girl I knew who had a stud in her tongue. She said she drove the guys nuts, sexually, and had a few girls on the string too. She wore her hair wild, all over her head, and had a Japanese tattoo on her neck. The characters said: honor and respect. For a couple of days, she had been bugging me about seeing the movie, saying it had hidden meaning for her, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was.

Xica cried quietly when the pianist as a young boy was abused by his oppressive father, a man trapped by his own demons. I think she was abused by her aunt. Her mother, a junkie, had dropped her off on her way out of town going to New Orleans and her father was absent so it was left to her aunt to raise her. The woman was jealous about Xica since she had this wicked body of a vixen, all curves, and baby definitely had back. Back for days. Righteous ass.

“You never cry,” Xica said. “That movie broke me up.”

“Hey, I don’t see how it was strange about what the old man did to the boy,” I replied. “People do that kind of thing and worse every day. I didn’t see anything shocking or painful about it. I’ve seen worse shit and endured worse.”

She laughed. “Hard-hearted man. Lots of thick callouses on your soul, right?”

“You got to be hard if you want to survive,” I said.

“The world ain’t about being no softie, no chump. You know that.”

“Maybe, but how could someone do that to their own flesh and blood, knowingly hurt them like that?” she asked in that low coyote rasp of hers as we left the theater. “That’s why people . . .