The Gettin' Place

by Susan Straight

Genres: African American Historical; Family Life

Synopsis

In the third novel by the author of Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, the Thompson clan tries to deal with the chaos after their family patriarch finds the burning bodies of two white women on his property and is then accidentally gunned down by police. Tour.

Release date: June 27, 1996

Publisher: Hyperion

Print pages: 496

Sample

The sweet, blood-laden smoke, clinging with the sheen of hair oil and soot, reached into the dark room of his dreaming, and Hosea saw the ruffled-thin mouth of the boy who had hit him with the rifle butt. The wood was meant for his temple, but Hosea had ducked and the shoulder blow had sent him into the dirt road where the pale boy came down hard, full on his flat hand with the heavy boot, grinding, pushing the sharp cinder deep inside his child-soft palm.

Hosea didn’t open his eyes. No, he told himself calmly. Not Tulsa. You on your own place. Rio Seco. You smellin somebody’s campfire in the riverbottom. Your fireplace been out—feel cool enough in here that you ain’t gotta look.

In the small coldhouse he and Salcido had built of river rock forty-one years ago, when Hosea was thirty-five and just married, he slept each night near the fireplace he’d added for himself much later, after his fifth son was born and he’d begun to escape from the night-mingled breaths and baby cries in the main house. No smoked hams or dried chiles or olive jars crowded the hollow spaces in the stone walls now. It was a warm house for him in winter. The plum wood he stacked outside was so hard and seasoned that one thigh-thick burl would burn hard, subside into gray, and often leap back into flame long after midnight, startling him from sleep.

But he heard no heat glistening in the ashes now, and no waves of warmth breathed onto his right side. He felt the pleasant morning cool prickle his face. Not like Oklahoma—that bone-chalking chill on his grandfather’s farm, scraped-thin flannel rags around him at night, afraid to move his nose an inch from the mask he’d made of an old shirt.

He blinked, but the film of dawn and dreaming began to cover his irises again, and in the shifting gray he saw smoke rising from burned foundations of houses, wreathing the iron bedsteads that crouched like spiders in the rubble, and he felt the throbbing heat in his shoulder where the boy had poked him again with the rifle to make him walk. He followed the raised hands of the men in line before him, trying to look sideways for his father among the sprawled figures on the ground, some with ashes piled on their charred coats.

Without shuddering, without blinking now, he breathed in the faint smoke drifting from the burning Tulsa dream through the slit of open window above his bed. Hosea closed his mouth, pulled the smell fast into his nostrils, and turned his good-hearing ear, the left one, toward the tiny window. A pair of voices spiraled thin somewhere among the trees on his land.

Propping his hand on the cool stones, he stood quickly, listening, and then he pushed open the heavy door to see the house where his wife, Alma, her grandmother, and the grandchildren were sleeping. In the half-moon’s light, the deep turquoise star shape on one of the adobe walls still made him blink; Alma had been talking about painting the house a few months ago. The dark-blue patch looked like a gaping hole. But no smoke rose from the chimney, and no glow lit the windows in the purple night that was almost finished.

It was too early for his two oldest sons to be gathering for coffee, smoking Swisher Sweets while they pried open their eyes. And the other men, the mechanics and rim polishers and talkers, wouldn’t come for hours. Behind the trees dangling with chains to lift engines, the huge stone barn across the yard was dim and gray, the metal sliding door still shut.

Hosea rubbed his forehead, feeling the almost morning moisture rising from the nearby riverbottom. It was not yet dawn. The coyotes’ whirling messages were long finished, and the crows hadn’t started their early arguments. The wafting smell must have been the dream again, the dream of Tulsa burning, the same ashen days he’d been seeing in his sleep for… He pressed hard fingertips against the bones of his temples. Seventy years.

He’d seen fires in the riverbottom last summer, and nearly a year ago, the Rio Seco sky had turned black from the huge Grayglen blaze. Last month, a cigarette ember flipped by a speeding commuter had ignited the palm fronds woven into his chain-link fence. Right by the front gate, where the men parked, the dry fronds had blazed into a fringed wall of licking red, and everyone had run from the barn with fire extinguishers and hoses. The fence was charred, bare mesh now.

The voices were so faint that Hosea couldn’t make out the direction. Could be his two middle sons, who usually slept in the trailers near the olive grove. Hosea wondered if he should walk the fences. He wouldn’t get back to sleep now anyway; he seemed to need less sleep each year. Sometimes, when the mockingbirds or coyotes woke him, he built up the fire and sat in the coldhouse staring at the embers until morning. Sometimes he saw his friend Lanier, who needed less sleep now, too, since his wife had passed and he’d moved to Treetown. Lanier had been wanting a small piece of Hosea’s or his brother’s land to raise a few pigs.

He tried to see across the shallow ravine to the olive grove, but mist hung lightly in the branches—not fog that would shroud the whole city, but airy wet that swirled along only on the wide riverbed, cloaking the trees. His five acres were covered with trees, and he liked the veiling mist in winter, the steady, softened drip of rain, and the deep shade in summer. He looked up into the huge pepper tree, where the chains swung gently in a breath of wind. Back at the coldhouse, Hosea pulled his dark-green work jacket and huge key ring from the wooden chair and then knelt beside the bed, pausing. His wife’s grandmother, who spoke only Spanish, had been trying to describe for him strangers she’d seen in the hills nearby, and Hosea knew she didn’t mean the homeless Vietnam vets who’d lived in the riverbottom for years now, because she didn’t circle her ear with her tiny brown forefinger. He reached under the narrow bed for the old .22 rifle.

The older tow truck was parked on the other side of the barn, where he’d always kept it so that the rumbling start of the engine wouldn’t wake Alma and the kids on a night job. But now Demetrius, his oldest son, had the newer flatbed tow truck parked at his house, and he took care of all the night calls. Hosea stopped beside the barn to turn up his jacket collar, the gun cradled in his bent arm. He remembered the Proudfoot boys, the ones around Demetrius’s age, and how they had called themselves Midnight Auto Supply. Back then, in the seventies, Hosea had patrolled the yard and storage lot with the rifle, trying to keep the Proudfoots and their hoodlum friends away from fenders and batteries and Pinto doors.

He let himself smile when he walked down the wide dirt road he’d cleared years ago. About ten Proudfoots lived over there in Olive Gardens back when it was farmworker housing, back when he and Alma had lived there, too. And Demetrius and Octavious, his two oldest, had fought them all, fought every boy in Treetown at one time or another. Now Demetrius had a new house across the riverbottom, and he needed more money. He wanted Hosea to get Arrow Towing on the police rotation, advertise in the Yellow Pages, not with one line but with a picture ad.

But Hosea knew that the cops remembered Octavious from his most famous fight, the one with a deputy’s son, in high school. And he knew too many police who hated Oscar, his only brother, who ran a barbecue joint next door to him.

The breeze pushed at his face again, coming off the hill, and he knew a stronger wind would blow all the moisture from the air after the sun came up. He headed left, toward the rear of the five acres where the ancient olive grove slanted up the base of the hill. His wife’s grandmother often sat in the old stone olive shed, where the curing vats were, even after the season’s olives were sold. Abuela was past ninety, and she slept as lightly as Hosea did, but he knew she hadn’t gone to the grove this early because he always heard the creak of the wooden kitchen screen door and then her hesitant shoes on the gravel.

On a small flat clearing before the road reached the trees were two old Airstream trailers, camouflaged silvery in the mist. Julius and Finis, his third and fourth sons, were meant to be guarding the property when they slept here, but they weren’t capable of much. Finis had burned up his brain with a drug-soaked cigarette years ago, and Julius only used his brain fully when trying to get some jelly roll. Hosea figured that’s who the higher, nervous voice could have been just a few minutes ago: some woman arguing with Julius about what he had or hadn’t promised her. Jelly roll. Oscar sang about jelly roll late at night, when most of the women had gone home and only the men sat in his barbecue joint, drinking and thinking about quivering, rubbing thighs.

Hosea couldn’t hear voices now, and no music came from the trailer where Finis usually slept. Finis needed music to breathe, and his radio drumbeats usually made Julius leave the woman in his trailer to stalk across the dirt with a pair of Walkman headphones. Finis lost headphones weekly, and people knew that if they came to the tow yard to trade something with Julius, a rim-polishing job or spare car part, they should bring headphones.

Julius must have been sleeping at a woman’s. Hosea looked at the two trailers, shuttered tight and ringed all around with eucalyptus that dripped their long, gray leaves onto the curved rooflines.

He leaned against the cool metal walls for a moment. Who the hell knew where Finis was sleeping? The man was over thirty now, and stopped in the head at eighteen, when that chemical smoke had dropped a gauzy red film over his eyes and loosened drumbeats in his skull. But some of these crazy Treetown women still must have let him sleep somewhere.

Hosea held the gun loosely, breathing in the fragrant oil of eucalyptus. The noises must have been coming from Oscar’s place. The wide eucalyptus windbreak, beginning with these huge trees, separated his land from Oscar’s, along with the six-foot stone wall Hosea had built after the coldhouse. When Hosea walked into the closest gap between the pale trunks as thick around as two men’s ringed arms, he thought that maybe the smell had come from there, too. He pushed at the iron-barred gate.

The barbecue joint and attached house were in the front of the property, and way in the back, among more eucalyptus and some wild, abandoned olive, Oscar brewed liquor—hard stuff and the thick brown choc beer he’d learned to make back in Oklahoma. But Oscar only sold it by the glass, inside the house, and he had his own men who watched the place. Hosea paused at the edge of his brother’s land, half-hiding behind a tree, scanning the folding chairs and barbecue pit. He’d thought Oscar might have been up and cooking early, sending some strong pig smoke through the breeze and working on extra cases of ribs for the Friday-night crowd.

Back toward the steep hill that bordered their property, the long ridge of rocky land separating them from downtown Rio Seco, was the thick stand of eucalyptus where Oscar made the choc. Hosea stared at the trunks nearly glowing under their mist-garlanded branches. The choc beer used to be murky and dark in the huge glasses his father drank from, back in Tulsa; his father would take him to the tiny house off Greenwood where men sat close at small tables, each pouring a heaped tablespoon of sugar into the quart jars until the beer came frothing to life.

The trunk near his face was as smooth as skin, the shed bark under his shoes crackling long strips. Hosea remembered how strange these trees looked to him when he came to Rio Seco. In Oklahoma, the tree trunks were rough and dark—oak and pecan and sycamore. Then he’d followed Oscar to Los Angeles, where there were only palms, it seemed, among the tiny stucco boxes where he’d rented rooms. Palms that swayed, distant above postage-stamp plots of grass and wavering heat and hard faces. The first time someone had told him about Rio Seco, out in the country to the east, he’d thought that the man, a welder at the assembly plant where Hosea worked, was talking about more palm trees, a scrawny forest of bare trunks in desert sand. But when he came to Treetown and saw the orange groves lush and blooming, the olives and eucalyptus shimmering silver, and the pecans and cottonwoods along the riverbottom, he felt the cords in his neck loosen and he breathed the strange, shaded scents.

Sound traveled thick and caught in the wet mist when it clung like this. He heard the voices again, and the strongest one, when he turned his head and held his lungs closed to let it register, was white. He walked quickly from the trees and back to the trailers, to the road leading down to his storage lot. The only white people who came around this part of Treetown were commuters or dumpers.

The stream of commuter cars that had begun two years ago when all the new developments were built outside the city wasn’t yet whining along the street this morning. Every weekday, they tried to avoid downtown freeway congestion by racing down Pepper Avenue, screech-slipping to a stop at the sign on the corner by his place, then accelerating like hundreds of bees to speed down the riverbottom road toward a distant on-ramp that took them to the bridge, toward all the new developments, then farther west, toward Los Angeles.

Hosea stopped at the bare welter where the trail to the olive grove and the wider, tire-packed road to the car-storage lot made a gravel-strewn crossing. He spat morning thick from his throat and listened again. He’d heard his youngest son, Marcus, do perfect white-man voices, playing around on the phone or making his brothers laugh. But Marcus lived downtown.

The dumpers came out at night, broke people who left couches and concrete and cats along the riverbottom road or on the bench of earth along his fence because they didn’t want to pay the high county dump fees, and because the law turned its back on trash in Treetown. Or maybe the voices were white teenagers drinking beer and playing that chainsaw music in the riverbed. But when he started down the slope toward the lot, he heard a laugh, a huh-huh-huh boy laugh, and then a muffled scream.

If the short, thickened call had been a wounded owl or even a dog—but mist-dulled dawn wasn’t the time for hunting. No sharp sound rent the air again, but he thought he heard a faint rustling, a popping.

He ran into the thick stand of pepper trees cresting the slope. On the faint trail cushioned by leaves and pepper berries, where none of the kids ever ventured to hide now, he stared ahead, listening for the direction of the scream. By the time he’d reached his rusted chair, from where he could see the whole riverbottom laid out in a darkened belt of cane and cottonwoods, the shots punctured the mist, two rounds ringing close and small-caliber.

The shots hadn’t come from Oscar’s place. And the Olive Gardens low-income apartments, where gunfire frequently pocked the night and echoed all over Treetown, were blocks eastward across Pepper Avenue. These shots were near the storage lot. Maybe a Mexican down there huntin wild pig, Hosea thought. Maybe one a them Vietnam vets gone wild in the cane. He moved slowly through the trees toward the slope.

The smoke gathered heavier when he descended the slope, and he saw the glow when he rounded the bend near the huge cottonwood and ancient Apache truck marking the edge of the storage lot. Crouching behind the chalky hood of the Apache, he thought, Why some fool light up a car? He want it, and he think he gon get by the boys, why he didn’t take it? Ain’t nobody stole a whole car in a good while, and who the hell start a fire?

He lifted his head cautiously over the big truck hood, blinking in the fierce light of the burning car, and heard the sheeting roar of flame. The frame was barely visible through the leaping tongues of red and orange. The ’78 Ford Granada, the car closest to the gate—that’s what he thought it was. He came around to the road, cutting through the patchwork of cars, still crouching, and the scrape of metal parts—someone starting an ignition—shrieked through the fence. Hosea ran to the wide gate, the .22 raised, but he stopped abruptly, his forehead tight. The gate was still locked. Fanning the keys with his fingers, he popped the lock. When he swung the gate toward himself, he heard the engine roar, and a sharp, pearly elbow hung from the passenger window of a black Jeep that raised dust as it swung around in the field across the riverbottom road: a male elbow, slightly bulbous above the wide bone. Hosea saw a fringy tail of yellow hair slapping the Jeep’s roof, flipping out the open window when the tires spun.

Hosea crouched and looked through the diamond loop of wire his grandfather had taught him to fix on the target. He shot three times while the Jeep fishtailed again and came past him, rounding the road’s curve at the hills and heading toward the freeway, leaving only the sound of flames cracking door and roof and bone.

He could smell the people inside the Granada. The scream—had he heard a woman? Pressing his tongue hard to the roof of his mouth, he forced himself near the fire for a moment, slitting his eyes, but even then the heat forced his head down long enough to see a glint of gold in the dirt near the passenger door. He squatted, snatched the necklace, and the flames, too high and thick now to reveal anything in the car, drove him back across the asphalt to the field.

No gas in the tank, he thought, breathing hard. Car been there for years. But the fire gon spread to the other cars, get on them palm fronds and head all up in the trees. Everything dry as hell from the drought. He fingered the gold chain without taking his eyes from the car, shielding his face now from the rippling heat, the glistening smell. No water down here to put it out, he thought, turning to run through his lot and up to the house to call emergency.

When the roaring sound of a powerful engine came from the other way, around the corner from Pepper Avenue and hurtling along his fence line, he froze against the blank space of field, and as the headlights swept up close, he raised the .22 again, looking for the head behind glass. They comin back for me, they goin out, too, he thought. I’ma take one with me this time.

But the wide roof was as black as slate, the white door gleaming, visible now, and the thick wrists behind the police-issue .357 were the last thing he saw before he raised his head, before the bullet tore into his shoulder and threw him into the soft wild oats.

When the scent of the flowering apricot tree brushing against her bedroom window mixed with the milk-pearled breath of her new grandbaby, Alma would lie half-awake before dawn and dream that Sofelia whispered into her dampened neck.

Her baby girl. Sofelia murmured about the boy she’d fallen in love with, the one who’d taken her away, a boy who buried his long fingers in the thick, wavy hair at her nape that Alma had combed each night and who cradled her head on his chest now.

Her last baby, her only girl, and Alma had always slept beside her, half-dreaming and half-vigilant for the chills or mosquitoes or dreams that might harm her. And when Sofelia had finally asked to sleep in her own bed, it seemed it was only months later that she’d disappeared.

When Alma heard the faint, hoarse cry somewhere outside, distant and short, she nearly wept at the silence trailing behind.

Alma knew her new grandbaby Jalima’s breath was regular and warm near her elbow, but every morning when her ears turned empty and her eyes sifted out the dark, the loss she felt made her breastbone into a brittle chalk stripe.

She waited for the stinging to rise into the base of her throat, as it always did, and to distract herself, she whispered, “What you gon cook today?” Was she asking herself? Or Sofelia? Then she heard the metallic reports pinging through the lessening dark, and she thought her own grandmother must have already gotten to the kitchen, settling full, cast-iron pots onto the burners to ring sharp like hammer beats. Alma sat up on the edge of the bed, tracing the line of ache in the long bone over her heart.

The three loud pops sounded like backfires from the old trucks Hosea’s friends drove, and she patted the pillows around the bed’s edges so the baby couldn’t fall, thinking she’d better make extra sausage. She opened her bedroom door, pulling one of Hosea’s old shirts around her. He hadn’t slept in this room for a long time, since Sofelia, but she liked the smell of his cigarillos and coffee and skin. Then she noticed that Abuela’s door was still closed; if her grandmother was up and about, the door was always propped open with a basket of dried rose petals.

Alma started down the white-plastered hallway, trailing her hand along the cool walls even though she knew this glowing tunnel by heart, and at the last bedroom door, her oldest grandson, Kendrick, stood. “Somebody shootin, Gramma,” he said, his hands clenched to fists near his sides.

Alma frowned. “You think so?” she asked, peering past him to see his younger brother Jawan, who was only three, still wrapped in blankets. Then she heard an echoing, louder report that seemed closer.

“Shot,” Kendrick insisted, following her into the long living room, dark and shadowed. Alma stood looking through the lace panels over the big window, but she saw no one in the gravel yard that sloped down to the fence and front gate and Pepper Avenue. The living room’s formal back faced the avenue, and its glass-paned doors led out to the courtyard.

“Go get your papa,” Alma told Kendrick. She wondered if Hosea was awake. Kendrick’s fingers were long and ginger gold on the lace curtains, all of him longer and taller since he’d turned ten, and she saw him bite his lips. He think his daddy’s in trouble again, Alma thought. Julius made plenty of men angry at how easily women followed him home, and sometimes the women were enraged that they couldn’t stay in the silver trailer forever.

When Kendrick came back, Alma was still standing there clutching the shirt around her, somehow remembering pot lids clanging roundly onto bubbling and laughter. “He ain’t in his house,” Kendrick said, and Alma heard shouting, faint through the trees.

She opened the front door, standing on the damp gravel in her bare feet, hearing the distant whine of a helicopter racing toward her. The faint outline in the lightened eastern sky looked like a tiny electric mixer, its handlelike tail stiff, sparks flashing from silver beaters.

An accident on Pepper Avenue, she told herself, seeing the beam knife down onto the riverbottom road and the helicopter begin to circle as if rotating in the grip of a giant hand. She and Kendrick began to run.

When they reached the corner of Pepper and the riverbottom road, she saw skeins of red twirling among the pepper branches: three sirens, sitting atop carelessly parked sheriff’s cars, the pulsing lights looking festive and toylike. When she saw Hosea, his boots pointing to the branches, his arm lying outstretched in the sandy edge of the road, his head hidden in the weeds, she began to scream, tearing off the shirt as she ran so that she could hold it over the spongy bloom of blood.

Two of the men whirled around with guns drawn, but she kept running, even when she heard Kendrick cry out and drop to the ground, the light thud of his chest on the roadside like a moth against glass.

When the stiff palm rested against her collarbone, stopping her forward movement, she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see the official face at arm’s length from hers. Alma waited, hearing the harsh voices mingle with the spitting radios. An officer moved his shoes on the asphalt: “I thought it was a fuckin gang banger, baggy-ass khakis and big jacket. Shit, it’s a fuckin old guy.”

“That’s his wife,” she heard a softer voice call, and she recognized it, the voice she’d been praying for, Salcido’s boy, who was a policeman.

“It’s okay, son, get up,” Tony Salcido said to Kendrick, and then his hands were on her back, helping her forward to Hosea.

His neck was ashen. She crouched in the tall weeds. His mouth was carved tight, and the sound of sirens trailed down Pepper Avenue while she tried to wad the shirt over his bloody shoulder. Another policeman squatted beside her. “He can’t be moved, now; you shouldn’t do anything till the EMTs get here, ma’am.”

The ambulance men kneeled then and lifted Hosea on a stiff board. Alma gasped, and the Salcido boy’s hand was at her back again. “He’s just injured, Mrs. Thompson; that’s how they transport someone injured.”

Alma saw the burning car now, the jack-o’-lantern glow of fire through the windows and the fire engine pushing near. Men trained hoses onto the car, which faded to black.

Alma told them she’d heard only the shots. Yes, she and the injured man were married. No, he hadn’t been asleep in the house. He had his own place. No, they hadn’t argued. He hadn’t argued with anyone. No, she didn’t know anything about his gun. Or the fire. Alma looked up from the distant jimsonweed where she’d fixed her eyes. She saw smoke lingering over the storage lot, men walking along the fence line, and one figure bent near the smoldering car. He stood and shouted, “Hey, we got two bodies here! Goddamnit, Salcido, call EMT back. This looks like coroner’s OT.”

Alma’s knees loosened like a doll’s when she heard him, and she thought, Julius, Finis, somebody done got em from the trailers. God, what them boys did? She felt Kendrick pull away from her, and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

The deputy walked toward Salcido, holding his hand over his mouth, then rubbing his bent-back wrist around his forehead. “Looks like women,” he said. “Two women burnt all to hell.”

The stairways were dim and steep, the night smell of cement still trapped by shadow, but when Marcus reached the courtyard of his apartment building and glanced back at his window, knowing he’d forgotten something, the wind had begun to clear the mist from the huge arched panes.

He hesitated near the curved wrought-iron railing that lined all the stairways. He’d already been to the gym when it opened at six A.M., walking the two blocks in the darkness. When he’d come back, his red message light flashed, and he’d known it could only be one of his brothers calling that early. Damn sure wasn’t a woman. He was fresh out of females since Colette had moved back to Chicago. When he’d pressed the button, his mother’s voice was, as always, uncomfortable on the machine. “Marcus? Marcus,” she said. That was all she ever said to the empty space before she hung up.

Then he heard his oldest brother, Demetrius, after another beep. “Marcus. Marcus! Shit.” His voice was ragged and impatient, as always, and he hung up, too.

Marcus didn’t want to call either of them back. He was heading over there now anyway. And walking, goddamnit—he couldn’t believe it.

He leaned against the railing for a moment. He’d left Demetrius’s navy work shirt on the bed, the one he’d borrowed last week when he’d changed the oil on the Lexus at his father’s place, more for show than anything else. “Hell,” Marcus said softly, turning toward the courtyard. “I had that bad boy dry-cleaned just so Demetrius wouldn’t talk shit, but I’m not carryin it all the way to Treetown.”

He smiled at the thought of chemical creases and plastic wrap on the Dickies work shirt. Now Demetrius couldn’t say, “Why you bring me back a dirty shirt and make more work for my wife, man?” Demetrius still loved to call Enchantee “my wife” in front of Marcus, even after eight years, because Marcus had loved her first. Marcus rubbed the razored line of his fresh-cut fade, remembering Demetrius dressing to go out, back when Marcus was in junior high and Demetrius was grown. The silky, long-pointed collars lay on the bed like bent wings, and Demetrius would spit from the doorway, “Don’t let them grubby fingers touch nothin, boy. Only lady fingers touch them shirts.” Marcus would watch the shimmering Qiana patterns stretch across the wide shoulders, feeling his own bony elbows hang from the plain white T-shirts all five boys usually wore. Marcus was the baby boy. That was what their lips popped scornfully all day: “Ba-by boy. Sissyfly. Go head on and bawl.”

But when you thirty and he’s almost forty, ten years ain’t hardly nothin, Marcus thought, smiling again. Three negatives. Our favorite way to use em; that’s what Brother Lobo used to say. Africans always emphasize.

He walked along the curving cement wall. Brother Lobo’s black history class at Rio Seco High had changed his life, altered the way he saw everything from his father’s chicken coop to his friends’ insults. Lobo had been his idol for years, even after Marcus had come back from college to see him nearly blind at forty-five from glaucoma, barely able to play dominoes at Jackson Park. If Marcus didn’t get any class assignments next week at Rio Seco High, where he’d only been teaching for a year, which of his flat-eyed freshmen would even remember him?

It could have been one of his students who stole the Lexus, for all he knew. He crossed the darkened courtyard, where the slow dawn hadn’t reached through the three giant palms growing from circles cut in the cement. Las Palmas was the best apartment building in this historic downtown district. Marcus