The Between (20 page)

Hilton explained the precautions he’d been taking after the more recent notes, and the agent nodded his approval. “Looks like you knew what you were up against,” he said.

“I don’t take chances with my family.”

“Smart man.”

They agreed on a time he and Dede would visit the local FBI office to make a formal statement and complaint, and the agent warned Hilton that his office had already gotten calls from the press. A story was likely in the next day’s paper, he said.

“I’d better get on the phone with my wife and let her know what’s going on before she sees it on TV,” Hilton said. “Listen, I can tell her you all are going to get this guy, right?”

The agent exhaled, glancing back toward the trailer. “He’s slippery, Mr. James. But whether or not we can ever charge him, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about any more threats.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“Well, between his military record and his FBI file, I’m hoping we can pull up some evidence to link to those threats. The rest may be up to Mr. Goode.”

Following the agent’s gaze, Hilton noticed a shadow from where Charles Ray Goode stood behind his curtains in the trailer window, parting them slightly to gaze outside at the trio. His features were obscured in front of a lamp, but Hilton was almost certain he could see his eerie, empty eyes.

we’ve found someone to do our weeding

No, Hilton thought as a sharp breeze tinged with the scent of salt water tripped into his nostrils. The rest may be up to me.

MIAMI—The FBI confirmed Monday that it is investigating death threats against newly elected circuit court judge Dede James, the county’s only black woman criminal-court judge.

“There have been a series of threats delivered to Judge James in writing,” said Miami FBI spokesman Lance Kinnebrew.

Although Kinnebrew refused to be specific, he did disclose that the threats have been racial in nature.

James, 37, won a close race last fall against former circuit court judge Phillip Reedman.

James spent 12 years as a prosecutor in the Dade state attorney’s office, and is most recognized for her role in convicting the so-called Kendale Lakes Rapist in 1990.

Kinnebrew would not confirm or deny that the FBI has a suspect, but he said the threats are being taken seriously.

Bonita Dandridge, president of the civil rights group Miami Action Coalition, said she was disappointed and saddened.

“No matter what your accomplishments, there are always these reminders that racial hatred lives on,” she said.

James lives near Coral Gables with her husband, Miami New Day Recovery Center director Hilton James, and their two children.

She could not be reached for comment.

Hilton is a boy again. His shoulders cannot reach the top of the barbed-wire fence as he walks on the gravel road. He is carrying a book called
Spelling Primer
in his hand, slapping it against his thigh. Though the heat feels like midafternoon, a strange fog is settled everywhere, making it hard to see. His house is at the end of the street; he sees the pointed tip of the slanted roof poking through the mist.

A strange man, a white man, is standing in the doorway with his arm leaning across the door frame. He wears jeans and a white T-shirt. He is waiting.

“Who are you?” Hilton calls out in his child’s voice.

The fog breaks around the man’s face, revealing his grin. Charles Ray.

“Get out of my dream,” Hilton says.

“This is
my
dream,” Charles Ray says in a rasp that rakes Hilton’s tiny spine, like ice water. Charles Ray nods his head toward the doorway. “You’re late. Come on in. You know the way. Goddamn, it stinks in here. Something’s burning.”

Hilton, nervous, walks past the three-wheeled red wagon sitting in the patch of grass he plays in. He trudges up the creaky wooden porch steps, keeping his eyes on Charles Ray’s.

“Come on along, little niglet,” Charles Ray coaxes, his grin trembling as though he can barely contain himself.

Hilton glares at him, then walks beneath Charles Ray’s raised arm into the living room. He smells the sharp musk of Charles Ray’s deodorant. Is this real, after all?

He is at home. Yes, this is home. Nana’s pink robe is crumpled on the couch, covering the spot where the couch is frayed most badly. He walks across the woven straw mat on the floor and looks up at the wall, where he sees the portrait of Jesus. Next to it, taped to the same wall, he recognizes a fan from church with an image of Martin Luther King. He remembers this fan.

Nana has been writing hymns. On the table, he sees her handwritten sheet music with the heavy lines she has drawn for staffs, scattered with delicate-looking notes. This hymn, he reads from Nana’s coarse script, is called “Glory Home.”

“Glory Home!” He remembers this one. In his mind, he hears Nana’s humming to follow the words he reads: My Lord has made a bed for me . . . in my Glory Home . . .

Charles Ray snatches the music from the table and scowls as he reads, shaking his head. “If there’s one thing you all got, it’s religion. You steal everything in sight on Earth, and you’ve got your eye on heaven, too.”

“That’s mine,” Hilton says, but Charles Ray holds the pages above Hilton’s head, out of his reach. Then he tosses the pages into the air and they vanish. Hilton gasps.

“Toldyou, boy. It’s my dream,” Charles Ray says. He pulls a pack of Marlboros out of his breast pocket, clamps a cigarette between his teeth, and slides it out of the pack. Then he finds his matches and strikes one, making a brilliant flame as he leans close to light it. Smoke floats upward, blending with the fog-

“You like it so far?” Charles Ray asks, tossing the burning match to the floor, where it quickly extinguishes against the wood. “The best part’s coming next.”

Hilton is shaking. He doesn’t know why. His bare knees are trembling until he wants to sit down. It’s thin smoke, not fog, that fills the room. And the burning smell all around them isn’t coming from the match or the cigarette. It’s from the kitchen.

“You know what?” Charles Ray says. “I’ve been cooling my heels here for quite a while, and I haven’t seen that old bitch around. Now, what kind of a hostess is that? I wonder where she could be.” He sniffs the air. “Well, I’ll be damned. I believe
somebody’s cooking. Do you like your food well-done?”

Hilton runs past Charles Ray to the open kitchen doorway. Suddenly, everything is loud. A pot is boiling over on the stove, and the lid is clanking up and down like machinery. Smoke from a blackened frying pan is rising to the ceiling, and he can hear the hissing of burning meat.

Hilton covers his eyes, afraid to look at the floor, but then he peeks between his fingers. Nana is there in her flowered dress, her head wrapped in a white scarf, as though she curled up and decided to take a nap on the hard wood. Her face is damp, her lips drawn into a grimace. Her eyes are closed. Maybe she just fainted. It’s so hot in here, of course she could faint.

Hilton kneels beside her. “Nana?”he asks.

He touches her arm but moves his hand away with a jolt. Her skin is cold. Dead-cold. Hilton screams, jumping to his feet.

He has to run. He has to get help.

Charles Ray blocks him in the doorway, still grinning. “I’ve got a joke for you: How do you spot a good nigger?”

Tears are running down Hilton’s face. He cannot speak.

Charles Ray nudges the tip of his boot against Nana’s calf, making her leg jump until the rubbery flesh falls back into place. “Here’s one here,” Charles Ray says. “She’s dead. Get it? A good nigger? Think about it, boy. It’ll come to you. You’ll wake up at two in the morning laughing yourself silly.”

“She’s not dead,” the Hilton-child sobs.

Charles Ray gazes at him with mock pity, his eyes wide as he nods up and down. He talks without moving the burning cigarette from his mouth, so his words sound slurred. “Oh, she’s dead, all right. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you. This is the way it’s supposed to be. Just like it would have happened if the bitch hadn’t fought so hard. She ain’t fighting now, is she?”

Hilton stares down at Nana’s frozen face.

Charles Ray sighs, his eyes searing down into Hilton’s. “Now, if she’s dead . . . ” he begins, pulling the cigarette from his lips, “where does that leave you? Who’s going to save you from drowning? Huh, boy? And who’s going to spawn those
little niglets of yours? This changes things, doesn’t it?”

With a cry, Hilton lunges toward him, but he flies into thin air through the open doorway and stumbles across his feet to the floor, where his head knocks against the wood. Charles Ray is gone, just like the sheet music. Hilton’s jaw is scraped and he feels dazed. He cannot see Charles Ray, but he hears his satisfied laugh all around him.

From nowhere, a lighted match falls in front of Hilton’s nose. “Say good night, Grade,” Charles Ray’s voice says.

In an instant, the match is a tower of flames.

The grace period was over. The lines for battle were once again drawn in the James household. The shouting had begun the first night, when Dede demanded to know why she hadn’t been told about Charles Ray Goode’s history as soon as Hilton knew. “Instead, you’re out playing cops and robbers like a young boy,” she chastised while Kaya and Jamil listened in uncomfortable silence from the dinner table in the next room. “What were you thinking? When did you graduate from the police academy?”

That quickly deteriorated into complaints about his mood-iness, rumors she’d heard that he was slacking off at work, questions about how he spent his time when he wasn’t in bed with her at night. “How do I even know you’re at home? Tell me that.”

Hilton didn’t fight back. Half of him didn’t trust himself to control his anger, half couldn’t blame her for the way she felt. He hadn’t been a husband to her in so long, he couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love. And there had been Danitra, whether their encounter had been real or an elaborate fantasy. He knew Dede could sense Danitra’s intrusion in his silences.

That weekend, the accusations followed him around the house as he busied himself buffing the living room floor, clearing out the garage so both cars wouldn’t be left vulnerable in the driveway, and polishing and loading the shotgun.

“Don’t you touch that gun when I’m talking to you,” Dede said. She cornered him in the doorway of the study, which he’d transformed into his bedroom and had become as cluttered as he felt. A mess. Both of their antique mahogany desks were buried beneath dirty clothes and piles of papers, and the room smelled musty. “It’s unnatural, you and that gun. Put it down.”

Hilton hesitated, rolling his eyes upward to look at her as he ran the cloth up and down the handsome black Remington’s steel barrel. He answered for the first time that day. “Why? You think I’m going to shoot you?”

“God only knows what you would do. Look at you. You look like the devil, and act like him the rest of the time. Only a fool would be as sick as you and refuse to see a doctor.”

Hilton had wearied of her voice too much to listen. “If I’m sick, you made me that way,” he retorted. “Why do you think I’m doing all this? You think I like living in a goddamned prison with some psycho trying to kill us? What the fuck do you expect?”

And then the long silences followed, sometimes for hours. Kaya and Jamil weren’t allowed to play outside or go to the mall or movies with their friends—period—so they were sulking. There wasn’t anything good on TV, they said. It was hot, they said. Jamil ran down the street when he heard the ice-cream man’s bell on Sunday and was greeted at the door by Hilton with a leather belt.

“But, Daddy, I said I was— ”

“What did I tell you about leaving the house? Huh?” Hilton asked, thrashing Jamil’s bottom with swift lashes through his denim jeans. Jamil, who hadn’t earned a whipping in years, sobbed. “You go on and cry. Next time, goddammit, you’ll listen to me.”

New walls were erected throughout the house, walls of resentment, pain and doubt. Dede was beginning to sound like a broken record: Is all this really necessary? Didn’t the FBI already have a tail on Goode? Do we really have to crawl on the ground to check the car for a bomb every time we drive to the store? Aren’t you taking this too far?

Too far. As if there were such a thing.

No point in talking to her, trying to make her understand. No point in paying any attention to Kaya s and Jamil’s immature complaints. The more they resisted, the more Hilton felt driven into his own thoughts, his own routines. No one greeted him when he came home from work in the evenings. Eyes darted away from him when he walked into a room.

Fine. He didn’t need their fucking thanks. Goode was making them like this, and he’d be stopped soon enough. Goode’s time would come.

A tense week passed after Hilton first met Goode and his eyes, and Hilton was certain they were both waiting for something. Then, sure enough, the time arrived. Goode finally came on a Friday.

Charlie had been restless in the front yard since nightfall, tugging against his chain and whimpering toward the sky. Hilton sat with him on the cool grass, rubbing the dog’s sleek fur and massaging the graying hairs on his chin. Hilton watched the traffic passing on the busy thoroughfare three blocks east, a red haze from brake lights righting their way in the last of the rush hour. His street was calm, silent. All of the neighbors were already inside, their lights and television sets on, and a circle of darkness surrounded Hilton from the peripheries of his security lights. Charlie whimpered again, then licked Hilton’s ear in a rare display of affection. Hilton sensed suddenly that he should not be sitting outside without his gun, as good as naked. He must go inside.