Southland (30 page)
Something else occurred to Jackie. “Mr. Conway, do you know how my grandfather met Curtis?”
“Sure. Through his mother, Alma.”
“So he knew Curtis through Alma—it wasn’t that he met Alma through Curtis?”
“No, no. Frank and Alma were friends for a long time.”
“She’d always been a customer, right? Since Curtis was little?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose, but they went back further than that. Her family moved to Angeles Mesa before the war. Had a house right over on Olmsted.”
Jackie tried to keep her expression from changing. She heard Lanier breathe in sharply. When she spoke again, she did so slowly, making sure she had control of her voice. “But I thought the Martindales lived in Oakland. I thought they didn’t come down to L.A. till after Curtis was born.”
“The
Martindales
, yeah. I’m talking about the Sams. Alma lived in Oakland and met her husband up there, but both she and her sister Althea grew up down here. They came out from Texas to live with their aunt, and their parents moved here just before the war got started. The girls didn’t go to Oakland until
after
the war. Althea was in school with us and Alma was in middle school, I think.” And she was a fireball, he thought. Salt and vinegar. Trying so hard to make up for her brother. Tried after her boys were born, too, and after they died. And he’d liked Alma, admired her even, but he couldn’t see how all that trying was going to save her.
“Are you sure they were here that early?” Jackie asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Conway answered. Then he looked at both of them and lifted his eyebrow. “Why, does it make some kind of difference?”
“No, no,” Jackie said, shaking her head. She looked at Lanier now, saw the same alarm in his eyes, and the same need to play things down.
“No, not really,” Lanier concurred, looking back at Conway. “But it does help shed some light on why Frank was so attached to Curtis.”
Conway nodded. He didn’t know why they were all in a fuss about how Frank met the boy, but he could see that they had questions about Frank and Alma. So did he. The way Frank looked at her. The way he said her name. His reaction when she moved back to Oakland again, after both of her sons had died. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “He loved that boy. And he would have done anything for Curtis’s mama.”
Jackie couldn’t sleep that night. She sat on the couch and looked at the photo of her grandparents standing side by side, not touching, in front of their house. They were smiling in the picture, though; they always seemed happy to her. But how much of their lives, of her grandfather’s life, was not as it appeared? His constant dealings with the public, his openness, had created a smokescreen for him, behind which he might have had an entirely different existence. Had he known Alma Martindale since she was a teenager? Had he been secretly involved with her? And if he was, when did it happen? When did Alma move to Oakland? And why did she leave L.A. in the first place?
Jackie finally fell asleep around five a.m., but got up three hours later to go to school. There she filled Rebecca in on all the sightings of Nick Lawson—but not about her suspicions regarding Alma and Frank, she somehow felt protective of that. She and Laura had a strained but civil night—neither of them wanted to make up from their fight, but they also lacked the energy to continue it. After a night they each spent safely on their own sides of the bed, Jackie drove home to wait for Lanier.
He had gone to his mother’s place in Carson on Friday to see if he could dig up any information on Alma and Bruce. He showed up just after noon, and Jackie let him in, sat him down, and poured him a cup of coffee before she finally gave in and asked if he’d found anything.
“Part of something. Maybe.” He opened a manila folder and showed her a clipping. It was from the
Sun-Reporter,
an old black newspaper out of San Francisco, dated November 10, 1946:
Martindale—Sams
Mr. and Mrs. Donald Sams of Los Angeles, California, announce the marriage of their daughter, Alma Clarice, to Bruce Henry Martindale, son of George and Patricia Martindale of 231 Sperry Road in Carson. Miss Sams is employed by the Stevens-Forrest Paper Company. Mr. Martindale is employed by the Corson Watch Manufacturing Company. A November 17 wedding is planned in Oakland.
Jackie held the yellowed scrap in her hand, turning it over as if more might be written there. Then she looked at Lanier. “This is interesting. Did your mother go up for the wedding?”
“No,” Lanier said, shaking his head. “That announcement, as you can see, came out really close to the date. And she told me last night that my uncle sent it down
after
the wedding.”
“So she wasn’t there to see if Alma was…”
“No one was there, at least from my family.”
She paused, turned the clipping over again, and looked at Lanier. “How old did you say that Curtis was when he died?”
“Seventeen or eighteen.”
“But
which
?”
“I’m not sure. And you’re right. It starts to make a difference now.”
“Well, do you remember when his birthday was?”
Lanier thought for a moment. “I seem to remember it was some time in the spring.”
“But you don’t know the year.”
“No, but I’m thinking that Angela Broadnax would know.” Jackie thumped a fist on her knee. “You’re a genius.”
She left Lanier with the phone in the living room, and then picked up the extension in her bedroom. Lanier dialed Angela’s number, and the phone rang once, twice, three times. On the fourth ring, someone picked it up.
“Yeah,” said the impatient young voice on the other end.
It took Lanier a second to remember her name. “Renee,” he said finally. “Hi, is your mom there?”
“Yeah,” she repeated, and then she dropped the phone and yelled out, “Mama!” In another few seconds, the phone was picked up again, and Angela Broadnax said hello.
Lanier identified himself and asked how she was. She inquired about their efforts and he told her it was looking good, they were getting close to approaching the District Attorney. Then he said, “Listen, I’m wondering if you could help me with something. When exactly was Curtis’s birthday?”
“March twenty-fourth.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yeah—same day as my oldest brother. Why?”
“We’re double-checking the boys’ ages, to make the case against Lawson look as bad as possible. So Curtis was born March twenty-fourth, nineteen forty…”
“Seven.”
“Great,” said Lanier, and he and Jackie did their calculations. “Thanks. I couldn’t find anyone else who remembered.”
“Well, he was born up in Oakland, you know. His mother moved up there to live with her sister, and that’s where she met his dad.”
“Right,” Lanier said again. “The sister was Althea, right? Do you know where she is now?”
“Curtis’s aunt? No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
They made small-talk for a minute or two about the people they knew in common, and Lanier assured her once again that they were tightening the noose on Lawson. When they hung up, Jackie ran back out to the living room.
“March twenty-fourth, 1947,” she said.
“And Alma was married in November of ’46.”
“So she was four or five months pregnant when she married your uncle.”
“Yep. But we can’t get too excited. I mean, she could have been pregnant by Bruce.”
Jackie paused. “You’re right. We need more. Is there anyone else who might know about it?”
“Well, Alma’s sister, I’ll bet. Althea.”
“But she’s got to be dead by now, right? She was older than Alma.”
“She was your grandfather’s age.” He smiled. “And I happen to know she’s alive.”
Jackie had just sat down, but now she stood back up. “What? Really? Where?”
“She’s in a nursing home somewhere in Oakland. I don’t know which one. But my mother said that Bruce still heard from her sometimes, and she wrote him again a couple years ago, not knowing that he’d died. Her married name was Dickson, I think. My mother’s going to find out for sure.”
Jackie clapped her hands once, loudly. “Should we call the nursing homes up there? Try to find her?”
Lanier put the wedding announcement back in his folder. “We could. But see, there’s this other thing. My friend Allen called again yesterday. He had someone look through the pension records at the LAPD and found the address for Oliver Paxton, Robert Thomas’s old partner. He’s living up in East Palo Alto now. And I’m thinking that even if Hirano’s not fit to testify and Thomas is covering up for Lawson, Paxton might be willing to tell what he knows. And I’m sure he knows something, Jackie. I don’t think he just left the force by chance.”
“I thought he moved back east,” said Jackie, thinking, pacing.
“I did, too. Maybe he came back out to California.”
“Or maybe Thomas was trying to throw us off-track. Have you tried to call Paxton yet?”
“No. But he lives in East Palo Alto. Althea Dickson, or whatever her name is, lives in Oakland.”
Jackie considered him for a moment. “What are you saying?”
Lanier leaned back, cupped his knee with his hands, and smiled up at Jackie. “Wanna go on a road trip?” he asked.
I
T WAS the palm tree that did it. Not the soft swell of calf, which was what he saw first, or the white dress, summerthin, that curled around it. When Frank turned the corner that morning, headed for the store, she was leaning against the palm tree by the curb. She was young, he thought, no more than seventeen, and she was waiting for somebody. His eyes took in the brown calf, and then moved over to the other leg, which was tucked behind her, sole pressed flat against the bark. She had one smooth arm wrapped around her side, the elbow of the other arm resting on top of it. Fingers slowly stroking the back of her neck. Frank saw the combed-back hair, which was glistening, restrained, and when she turned her head toward the street for a moment, he saw how it was gathered into a small curved bun, a dark seashell on the back of her head. The curve of her jaw made a dry spot open at the back of his throat. And as he drew closer, walking in smaller steps in order to extend his view, he saw how the tree had changed for her, framed her, stooped down so she’d be protected. The rough, peeling skin of the tree made hers appear softer; the shifting sound of the leaves betrayed the tree’s pleasure. This palm tree, removed from its brothers near the ocean and set down in the midst of bungalows and concrete, had never looked so beautiful, so proud. And the girl, the way she leaned there, at ease but not relaxed, small and thin but not delicate. Her body was tightened, taut, and despite the dress and the tree and the sunshine, Frank could see in her the trap ready to spring, the lit fuse, the coiled tension.
He kept walking, and just as he was about to pass, she turned away from the street and looked at him. Her eyes were brown, large and liquid, but sharp beneath the long, graceful lashes. The familiarity, the matter-of-factness with which she considered him, made him wonder if he was imagining things or if he really knew her. Some of his old friends had little sisters; he tried to match her features with those of Barry and Don, but quickly realized that they had never met. He lifted his thumb and first two fingers to tip the hat that wasn’t there, nodding beneath his raised hand. And when she pulled her hand from her neck and smiled in reply, he felt something shift in him that would never shift back.
He was late that morning. His mother had a fever and he’d stayed a few extra minutes to press a cold pack to her head, but when he walked into the store, his breathlessness was not because of hurry. For the first twenty minutes, he straightened the shelves and piled the fruit in tight intricate pyramids while Old Man Larabie worked in the office. In that time, a customer came and went, and then another. The bell jingled again, a few minutes later, and because Frank was balancing a pile of oranges, he didn’t look up right away. Then he heard the high, solid voice, which pulled him toward it by the collar. “I’d like half a dozen of those,” she said.
Frank looked up, and his grasp on the two oranges in his hands loosened, softened; he caressed the cool fruit with his thumbs. “Weren’t you waiting for somebody?” he asked. Her arms hung at her sides now, and he saw the small, square shoulders that his hands itched to cover and touch. He saw the soft convergence of collarbone and neck, like two wishbones set down to face each other, containing all the world’s wishes.
“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t matter, though. Never get what you wait for, anyway.”
He smiled, pulled a paper bag from underneath a table, and chose the plumpest, brightest fruit to place inside. As they walked toward the counter, Old Man Larabie came out, said hello to the girl, and kept moving toward one of the aisles. Frank felt watched now, and pulled himself up straighter. He rang up the oranges, took the money she held out, and let his hand linger, just a moment, beneath her touch. “Come back, now,” he said, and he watched as she left, dress clinging to the curves of her hips.
Old Man Larabie, who usually caught everything, didn’t wonder why his young employee looked like he’d swallowed a whole piece of fruit. “How’s your mama?” he asked, tugging his pants up to contain his growing belly. “Still got a fever?”
“Doing better. It’s down to a hundred now.” Then, looking down at the counter, pretending to wipe something off: “That girl who bought the oranges. She ever been in here before?”
Old Man Larabie turned toward the doorway, as if the girl might still be standing there. He shook his head slowly and seemed to be thinking about something more than the young man’s question. “Don’t think so. She’s a Sams girl. Family’s had some rough times. Her daddy started drinking a couple years ago, after what happened with his boy, Reese. One day in boot camp he just went crazy—shot five members of his unit and then ended up shooting himself.”
Frank shook his head. He’d heard of men losing control like that, and he almost understood. He knew what it was like to be completely overtaken by fear; he knew the urge to strike out at the earth, the enemy, your friends, yourself, in order to prove you were still a man, you still existed. He thought of the girl now, her tightness, her power. “What’s her name?”
“Alma.”
“Alma,” Frank repeated, and he took the name into his mouth, held it on his tongue, carried it there all day.
Alma, that morning, wasn’t waiting for anything; she’d been on her way to Tracy’s house to show off her new white dress. But then the sun, the breeze, the tree had beckoned, seemed to say, “Wait, if you stay here with me, I’ll give you something.” She wasn’t usually partial to palm trees—they were nothing like the thick, cool, sheltering trees down home—but this one seemed so lovely, and, in the light of the sun, she knew both she and her dress would look irresistible resting up against the trunk. When the man had turned the corner and come walking down the street, she knew the tree was fulfilling its promise. He walked toward her, against the backdrop of white and yellow houses, and the green lawns seemed to part like waters before him. His hair was in a crew cut and was shiny blue-black; his skin brown and toughened by the sun. His pants were loose, but as he walked, she saw his firm thighs, the muscles expanding and contracting against the cloth. He moved with confidence and quickness, and the slight, rolling hitch in his step suggested experience to her, not damage. His white sleeves were rolled up to reveal his strong, muscled forearms. And when he passed her and tipped his imaginary hat, she saw the hands, which were square, strong, and beautiful. There was a silver watch on his left wrist; his left hand was missing half its middle finger. She couldn’t help but smile at him, this offering, this stranger, and when he walked on she watched the muscles of his back.
She was seventeen then, and just out of school. She had plans—to study more, become a teacher. This was 1945 and the war was over, and the country that allowed black soldiers to die would surely let a black girl go to college. But her family didn’t think she should try to—not now, not yet—and they needed her to work, so they found a whitewoman, Mrs. McDermott, over in West L.A., a friend of Mrs. Tucker, her mother’s boss. For twenty dollars a week, two meals a day, and hand-me-down clothes, Alma bore the indignation of having to be polite to a woman she hated; of washing her husband’s stinking clothes; of being searched every night for stolen goods before she left for home. And although they didn’t say so, her parents also encouraged her to work for the McDermotts because they wanted her close by—because of Althea running away, and because of what happened with Reese.
What happened with Reese. The Sams children moved out to live with their father’s sister when Alma was eleven, Althea fourteen, Reese just turned sixteen—because they had a chance here, their parents said, to do something more than work someone else’s land. The L.A. kids had laughed at how they talked, at their easy, slow-moving ways, and their aunt Sophie, denying all traces of the south she believed had made her family ignorant (the children had another aunt, back in Texas, who had killed her own husband), was not especially happy with their presence. But at the start of the war, Alma’s parents had moved out, too, renting a house off of Crenshaw. And so the family was reunited, but fragmented—like distant relatives forced by circumstance to live with each other; like lovers, once separated, trying to recapture what was already lost. In Texas, all the Sams, adults and children, had gone out to the fields together—the scathing hot sun, their aching backs made bearable by the presence of the rest of the family, by the songs they all sang while they worked. Alma had picked cotton from the time she was five, but the hard hours, the heavy sacks of harvested blossoms, seemed very far away to her now, the only proof of her family’s sharecropping days the small scars on her hands from the sharp, hidden parts of the cotton plants. To be sure, no one missed the work itself—the pain, the extreme heat, the soul-shaking cold, the frozen cotton balls like ice cubes when they finished picking in December. But after they moved to L.A., her parents did miss seeing their children. Mr. Sams now worked at the toy factory all day, Mrs. Sams downtown for the WPA. Alma and her siblings were off at school, and afterward they disappeared into the social lives they’d mysteriously created for themselves in the two years away from their parents. The only time the whole family saw each other was on Sunday, at church, where the parents, so intense was their hunger for other people, went with the same excitement the children reserved for the county fair. Sundays they were a family; Sundays were good. Maybe it was the other six days of the week that they lost sight of Reese, although whether his departure was gradual or sudden Alma still didn’t know.
Alma had been in California for two years, and was just beginning to feel like she belonged there, when the war started and her brother was gone. And then, just six months later, the news from Mississippi. Reese had gone into his own barracks and started firing his rifle, calmly loading and reloading while the screams and pleas rose up all around him. He had killed five people. He had spilled the blood and brains of five black boys, and seriously wounded seven others. Then he’d put the muzzle of the gun in his own mouth. And although Alma and her family hadn’t told anyone, word had traveled, in stops and starts, in twists and permutations, across the entire country and back to L.A. And suddenly Alma saw the whispering, the heads bent together, the eyes lowered and then turned away.
“Isn’t she the one whose brother…?” “All black boys, too. At least he could have killed white…” “Must run in the family. They have an aunt who took a knife…” “Better stay away from her. She and Reese were tight, and who knows what kinds of things…”
They
had
been close, which was why her brother’s crime, and death, haunted her more than it ever haunted Althea. She should have felt it, Alma thought. She should have known. Her parents, especially her father, put themselves through a similar torture. They went to church the first few weeks after the news had reached the coast, but they couldn’t keep it up; Mr. Sams was drinking constantly now, taunted by the whispers. Worse, his faith was slipping off of him like clothing he could no longer fill. He shut himself away in the house except to go to work, commencing a self-imposed exile that would last the rest of his life. And for Alma, there was also this: If Reese could do such a thing, if he was capable of such murderous brutality, then what did that say about
her?
She was the one most like him, everyone said. The intense one, whose inner workings no one else could figure out. And look what that had meant for her brother. So now, Alma held her fear and shame outside of her, but they clung to her like shackles. And instead of pressing anything—tears, talk, grief, anger—out, she directed it in. She pushed herself to work, to succeed. Always a good student, she became a great one, working hours each night on schoolwork although the resentful and uninspired teachers at her school did not see fit to give assignments. She organized a walkout to protest the paltry number of math books (six for thirty-three students, and most of those missing half their pages), and was rewarded with a new set of textbooks for all her classes, and by the administration skipping her up a grade. She took over the care of her family’s home, cleaning it, cooking for her mother and father, constructing and fulfilling lists of tasks and groceries. If she just succeeded, she thought, in everything—if she was unparalleled, unbreakable, like all the other strong-backed women in her mother’s line—then maybe she could prove she was different from her family; maybe she could even pull them up along with her.
At seventeen, she had dated a few boys, but had never known a man. That morning, when Frank tipped his imaginary hat and walked on to the store, she knew she had finally found one. Nevermind that she didn’t know him, or that he was Japanese. Nevermind that she saw herself as always alone, despite the many people in her life. She leaned against the tree for what seemed like a good amount of time, feeling the sun on her face and on her chest. Then she walked to the store, two blocks away, where she knew the man worked. She watched his arms against the rolled white sleeves, the tan skin, the light covering of hair. And she watched the firm hands as they worked with the fruit, stacking, positioning, confirming. She longed to find out what else those hands knew; to feel them lift and open her. And she yearned to touch and kiss the blunted finger. He turned toward her then, and she saw his face head-on—the strong nose; the dark, firm lips; the high, prominent cheekbones; the black, just-now-softening eyes. “Weren’t you waiting for somebody?” she heard him ask, and the low, layered voice went through her ears and settled down in the bottom of her stomach. What she said out loud was different from what she answered in her mind. Yeah, I was, she thought. I just didn’t know it.
They met nighttimes, after Old Man Larabie had left for the day. They both claimed work as the reason for their late arrival home—Frank saying he had inventories, accounts to add up, Alma blaming her boss, Mrs. McDermott, damn heifer made me cook for her and wash the dishes, too. Alma would come around back to the door on the alley side, knock twice, and run her fingers over the place her knuckles hit the wood, thinking of Frank’s tight skin. He always asked who it was even though it was always her, and then he’d open the door, and lock it behind her, and follow her into the office. He loved those few seconds between the door and the office, when he walked in back of her, watching, without her seeing him look. She still wore her white work dress and scuffed black shoes, sometimes a light sweater if it was cool. She was loose-jointed, liquid smooth, but there was something hard in her, efficient and precise. He loved the contradiction—the easy and tight, the quick and slow. The muscles in her calves and thighs were firm and apple-round; when they were wrapped around him, he felt enclosed by them, contained.