Inside a Silver Box (13 page)

The police moved off a few feet to huddle. The one female cop, a Latina, watched Ronnie and Lorraine while the strategy was planned.

“Is it always like this?” Lorraine asked.

“What you mean?”

“Do they just stop you on the street and go through your clothes like that?”

“Whenever they want to. When I need to carry sumpin’ somewhere, I usually get a bitch, I mean a girl to do it for me. You learn to hide shit where you can get at it when you need it.”

“That’s wrong,” Lorraine said loudly.

“Uh-uh,” Ronnie said, shaking his head as he studied the conferring cops.

“What do you mean no?”

“It’s no different with that bear on the yellah dirt road or the Laz when it had Ma Lin. Just one more thing you got to deal wit’.”

“It’s humiliating.”

Ronnie heard the words but couldn’t process them. It was as if she were talking about people in a book or on some TV show about some other country, where they spoke another language and prayed to a different God.

“We’re going to be watching you, Mr. Ronnie Bottoms,” the sergeant said. He had come up on them when Ronnie’s thoughts were very far from the plight of his old life.

“Yes, sir,” Ronnie replied, looking down at the turf beneath his feet.

“And you, young lady,” the cop continued. “You should make better choices about who you’re kissing.”

She wanted to kick him in the temple. She knew that she could do this and that her speed would cause serious damage. But she held back—and hated herself for doing so.

*   *   *

“I
T’S NOT ONLY
Ma Lin and that dude I was gonna mug,” Ronnie said when the two emerged from the park onto Fifty-ninth Street.

“What do you mean?” Lorraine asked.

“You tried to murder me.”

“You deserved it.”

“Maybe I did. But if you went to the police and told them where your body was at and who did it, then they would have grabbed me and punished me by law. Instead you wanted me to save your life even though you were alive in the Silver Box like Used-to-be-Claude and Ma Lin.”

“You’re the murderer,” Lorraine said.

“Ain’t nobody dead, nobody except for maybe Ma Lin, if you listen to what he says.”

“You killed me.”

“I almost died bringing you back.”

Lorraine stopped short on the busy street. Pedestrians moved around her, snarling and cursing under their breaths.

“Let’s make a deal,” she said to Ronnie’s broad back.

He turned.

“Let’s not blame each other anymore,” she said. “I’ll forgive you for what you did and you can stop pointing out all the things you see in my actions.”

“No, baby,” Ronnie said, shaking his head and turning away. “Uh-uh.”

“No?” she said to his back.

She hurried to his side and said, “What do you mean no?”

“When you tell me I killed you,” he answered, “you’re tellin’ the truth. That’s what you do. I can see it clear as mornin’ when you say it. But I also know that you beat in the Vietnamese guy’s head and that you expected me to die after makin’ me come save you. I’m just sayin’ we cain’t hide from shit like that. The Silver Box says that he destroyed whole worlds full’a peoples. He don’t only blame the Laz for what he did. They
are
to blame, but he still the one did it. Don’t matter if he didn’t know guilt when he did. What mother would forgive that? What jury would say not guilty?”

“So we’re supposed to feel guilty forever?” Lorraine whined.

“How you feel don’t mattah. If I killed your brother and then said I was sorry, that don’t change nuthin’. But if you take care’a his kids or stand up for what he believed in, then you got a start. And ain’t none of us innocent anyway. It’s like if you eat a hamburger and then say you didn’t kill the cow. Still somebody killed that cow for you.”

Lorraine was wondering where Ronnie’s ideas had come from. When she’d first met him, he was just a brute; a stupid man who only wanted to hurt. And now he was delineating her flaws like many of her philosophy professors did to public figures throughout the history of ideas. He, Ronnie, was making sense and showing her that her life was down on his level.

Once again she hated him.

TWENTY-TWO

“C
AN I HELP
you, Miss Fell?” asked the broad-shouldered, dark-skinned doorman of the Van Dyne building on Fifth Avenue somewhere between Forty-second and Forty-seventh.

He was looking at Ronnie as he spoke.

“No, Mr. Jeffers,” she said lightly. “This is Ronnie Bottoms. He’s going to be staying here with me for a while.”

“Is that so?” Mr. Jeffers moved so that he came between the young woman and the brawny man in the shark gray pants and dark red shirt.

“Hey, brother,” Ronnie said to this human, all-too-familiar roadblock.

“It’s all right, Travis,” Lorraine said. “He really is with me.”

She was peeking around the burly doorman’s left arm, looking up at his face.

“They told us that you were missing,” Travis Jeffers replied. He was standing stock-still, almost as if he were stuck in that defensive pose.

Ronnie could feel the absence of anger in his own breast. Where had it gone? he wondered.

“I was attacked and I lost my memory for a while,” Lorraine said. “This man found me and helped me remember.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to bring him home with you,” Mr. Jeffers argued. “Just give him a few bucks and he’ll be fine.”

“He don’t want me here, Lore,” Ronnie said, looking into the sentry’s dark eyes. “That’s okay. I could go find someplace else and see you later.”

“No.”

Lorraine Fell moved completely around Travis Jeffers and instinctively took Ronnie’s scarred hand with her left. She placed her right palm against the doorman’s chest.

Travis felt a tingle where the girl’s hand pressed against his uniform shirt. This sensation was unexpected and therefore uncomfortable. Travis moved backwards at an angle, making room for the two—a look of confusion on his face.

They walked across a wide hall that had high ceilings, artfully pitted gray stone floors, and pink marble walls. She pressed a button for the elevator.

Ronnie turned to look back toward the entrance.

Travis Jeffers was standing there, glaring at them.

*   *   *

T
HE DOOR TO
2307 opened onto a broad room with thirteen-foot ceilings and a picture window across the far wall, fifty feet away. The floor was pale wood. On one side, there was a quartet of blue sofas making a square, facing each other over a table made from a three-foot-thick block of ebony wood. To the right of the sitting area was a long oak table surrounded by eight chairs, all fashioned in the same style but made from differing types of wood.

Ronnie saw that the one room was like two. This design made him smile.

“What?” Lorraine asked.

“You rich, huh?”

“My father is.”

“And he hates me?”

“I guess. You want something to drink?”

“Water.”

She walked toward the wide wall of a window and then veered right past the table and chairs. She went through a plain white door that swung open when she touched it.

Ronnie walked up to the window-wall and gazed down on Fifth Avenue. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people on foot, bicycles, skates, and in cars and buses. They were in a valley of their own making, Ronnie thought. This brought to mind what Ma Lin had said, that life was like a landslide, an avalanche making little sense and going nowhere but down.

Like that waterfall,
Ronnie whispered to himself.
You don’t have to be goin’ nowhere to be beautiful.

“Who the hell are you?” a man’s voice said.

Ronnie turned. A few steps away stood a twenty-something white man in red sweatpants and a violet T-shirt. The youth had a baseball bat clutched in his right hand.

“Ronnie,” the former street thug said of himself.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Lore, I mean Lorraine invited me.”

The young man was somewhere around Ronnie’s age, fit, and tall. His eyes were blue and his hair fawn brown. He lifted the bat higher and demanded, “Where is she?”

“Right here, Lance.”

She was standing there in the blue dress they’d bought in the thrift store what seemed like a millennium before. Lorraine had a water glass in each hand.

“Lore!” Lance shouted. He dropped the bat and ran to her, knocking the glasses from her hands, spilling and shattering them on the pale wood floor. He hugged Ronnie’s victim, lifting her from her feet.

This expression of love brought a smile to Ronnie’s lips that he wouldn’t have been able to explain.

“Honey!” Lance exclaimed. “What happened to you?”

He swung her around twice and actually lifted her up by her armpits.

“Put me down, Lance,” she said.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

“Didn’t my parents tell you that I was back?”

“Where were you?”

“Why don’t we clean up this mess first?”

“I’ll do it,” Ronnie offered. “You two can sit and talk.”

*   *   *

H
E FOUND PAPER
towels, a broom, and a dustpan in the kitchen closet. It was a big kitchen with two gas-burning stoves set across from each other, making a kind of cooking corridor. At the end of this aisle was a long ledge replete with cutting boards, a sink, and drain. There was no window in the kitchen proper but there was a table made entirely from chrome with silvery metal chairs that had no cushions or pads.

The kitchen made him feel the absence of his mother. She would have loved this room with its fancy furniture and stoves. Elsie was a hole in this new reality. There was sorrow in the space where she wasn’t.

*   *   *

R
ONNIE CLEANED UP
the water and glass, intent upon the job, trying not to overhear what was being said on the sofas.

“What do you mean?” Lance said loudly at one point.

Ronnie could not hear Lorraine’s hushed reply.

“What about my things?” Lance asked some time later, when Ronnie had returned from discarding the shards.

He, Ronnie, was sitting in a walnut chair, leafing through a book from a shelf that was page after page of photographs of horses when Lorraine raised her voice to say, “Things have changed, Lance. I can’t help that.”

They had both gotten to their feet.

And then suddenly, without any warning, Lance slapped his ex with a powerful backhand.

Ronnie tensed but stayed in his chair. He didn’t want to hurt the young white man if he didn’t have to.

Lorraine put the fingers of her left hand to that side of her face. Lance looked so surprised that, Ronnie thought, if he’d just heard the slap, he might have thought Lorraine had hit the man.

While Ronnie wondered if the Silver Box was watching this exchange, Lorraine slapped Lance once, twice, thrice, and even a fourth time so quickly that even Ronnie could barely see her hand moving. Lance was falling but not fast enough to avoid the blows yet to come.

Ronnie leapt across the space, grabbing the enraged young woman around the waist and swinging her out of range before Lance went the way of Ma Lin.

“Let me go!” Lorraine demanded. “Let me go!” Her arms and legs moved like a waterbird flapping its wings and kicking to take off from the East River.

“Calm down, girl,” Ronnie said. “You’ll kill him if you don’t.”

Suddenly the strength went out of the coed. She slumped in Ronnie’s bear hug and he could feel the anger depart. He put her down on a blue sofa and went to Lance, who was sprawled across the plank table.

“You okay, man?”

“What? What did she hit me with?”

Ronnie helped the handsome young man to his feet. “You okay?” he asked again.

Lance’s eyes cleared. “Did you hit me?”

“No, brother, no. She hit you … four times upside the head. Must’a found that sweet spot.”

Lorraine was going through a door on the other side of the sofas.

“I hit her,” Lance said, incredulous.

“That you did,” Ronnie agreed, quoting another nameless man who might have been his father. That one hadn’t died—as far as Ronnie knew.

“I have to go apologize.” Lance took a step toward the door Lorraine had gone through, but Ronnie detained him by laying a hand on his arm.

“She mad right now, blood. Call her up later tonight and tell her when she cools down.”

Pulling away from the hand, Lance said, “Are you fucking her?”

“If I was,” Ronnie said softly, “you’d be one dead mothahfuckah aftah hittin’ my woman. We just friends, man. Now, go on, get outta here and let her calm down.”

Lance looked at the closed door through which his just-now ex-girlfriend had passed. A dark bruise was rising on the left side of his face, just under the cheekbone.

“I’ll tell her to call you in two hours,” Ronnie added. “I promise.”

Looking at the young man staring at the closed door, Ronnie could almost see the hope of love fading. He felt bereft for this loss.

“She been through some shit, man,” Ronnie said. “You got to let her get it together before she can talk to you.”

There was an infinity of sympathy inside the black youth’s mind. It was as if, he thought, while Lorraine’s body had died, he had come into the mix with a dead soul but then as some kind of celestial backwash to the resurrection, he had been granted a new life too.

*   *   *

A
MINUTE AFTER
Ronnie closed the door on Lance, Lorraine came out.

“I hurt my hand,” she said in a vulnerable tone.

The hand was swollen to half again its size. Ronnie reached out to hold the bruised extremity with both his hands. As he closed his fingers around the injury, she and he felt something like a cold bracing wind blow over them.

“Damn,” Lorraine said. “It’s better than sex. All you have to do is touch it and the pain is gone.”

TWENTY-THREE

T
HEY ORDERED TWO
pizzas: one everything-vegetarian and the other everything-meat. Lorraine ate all of hers and most of Ronnie’s. It was late and they were sitting side by side on the blue sofa facing the picture window. Every light in the condo was on and so all they saw were nighttime city lights behind their own reflections.