The Between

  Raul shouted and jumped from his seat as the Heat grabbed a skillful rebound from a missed O’Neal shot. The noise coiled around Hilton’s earlobes, and he shook his head to clear it. No, he would never again drink on an empty stomach. He needed to find a hot dog, or he’d doze through the rest of the game. He tried to remember if he’d dreamed that Raul was wearing the Mets cap, but he knew he hadn’t.

  He could still see the blue corduroy fabric and orange logo waving in Raul’s hand. That part had been real.

  The Heat never made up the dozen points, and the gap had widened to fifteen by the time the final horn sounded. O’Neal had been in amazing form, a treat to watch from so close. Hilton forgot his troubles through the end of the game, but he was still irritated with Raul as they made their way out and found the line for the men’s room, by an unspoken understanding that they both needed to piss.

  Raul had an excited conversation with a Spanish-speaking man ahead of them in line, then he bumped his shoulder back against Hilton to get his attention. The sound of flushing urinals and toilets from the stalls echoed against the walls, making it hard to hear him.

  “You say you’re not sleeping? Why not?”

  Hilton shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

  “Dreams?”

  Hilton met Raul’s reddened eyes, which were concentrated on him as though the sober therapist inside had snapped to life. Hilton only nodded.

  “Bad ones?”

  “Just like before.”

  “Shit,” Raul said.

  As they always did, they had both chosen a parking lot blocks from the arena because it was cheaper, so they joined the stream hurriedly making its way through the glass-littered streets of the Miami ghetto where the incongruous pink arena had been built. The homeless and the nameless lingered in shadows around them, their eyes studying the well-off intruders who lit up their unhappy streets with headlights and laughter so late at night.

  “How long?” Raul asked.

  “Couple weeks.”

  “You feeling okay?”

  “It’s getting to be a strain. I’m wired at work from not getting enough rest. Dede wanted me to talk to you about it. Maybe I should come in.”

  Raul made a thoughtful sound but didn’t speak.

  “What?” Hilton asked.

  “Call me Monday. I have a name for you.”

  “A name of what?”

  “A therapist. She’s good, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  Hilton stopped walking, stunned, and Raul fell ahead of him by three paces before Hilton jogged to catch up. “No thanks. I’m not going through this whole routine with somebody new. Let me just come in for some hypnosis or something, man.”

  “Lo siento mucho . . .” He shook his head.

  “What are you talking about? You know me.”

  “Exactly. I know you as a friend. You’re not my patient, Hilton. That relationship is over now. I cannot work that way.”

  “What we did before worked, Raul.”

  Raul shrugged. “If it had worked, I don’t believe you’d still be having the dreams. You have some unresolved issues.”

  Hilton laughed. “You sure sound like my shrink now.”

  “Call me. I’ll give you her number, and I’ll give her your file. If therapy is the route you want . . .”

  “No way. If it’s not you, no therapy.”

  “You may not need it. It may just be stress.”

  The elderly, sallow-skinned parking-lot attendant yawned, seeing them, and unlocked the padlocked fence to allow them to walk inside. Raul greeted him in Spanish, and the man responded grumpily. From what little Hilton could understand, the man said he was ready to go home because it was too cold outside. Hay mucho frio, he said. Raul drove a red 1970s Mustang convertible he kept immaculately shined, and it glistened beside Hilton’s beat-up old Corolla. Hilton knew he needed a new car, and he’d always said he couldn’t afford it, but the truth was that he hated to let go.

  “How’s Dede?” Raul asked while they lingered beside the Mustang, and Hilton recognized the veiled inquiry into the state of his marriage. Raul couldn’t help being a counselor, even when he tried.

  “Good. Very good.”

  “What about work?”

  “You’re not charging me by the hour for this conversation, are you?” Hilton asked.

  “Fuck you,” Raul said, turning to fit his car keys into his door. Hilton laughed, watching him fumble to open the lock.

  “You okay to drive?”

  “You’re asking me? You’re the one who passed out during the game. I can drive fine. I live right across the bridge in Little Havana. This is not drunk. You’ve seen me drunk.”

  “I know that’s right.”

  Hilton still stood beside the car while Raul started his engine and the car roared flawlessly to life, as though it were new. Hilton was sorry the night was over, that he’d have to find his way home and crawl into bed beside Dede to face his simultaneous desire to sleep and to remain awake, the two yearnings that fought within him each night. Right now, he simply wished he could sleep. He wished Raul could pop him into a quick hypnotic trance and make his problem disappear.

  “Any undue stress in your life?” Raul asked.

  “Well, a weirdo sent a death threat to Dede’s office a couple of weeks ago. Called her a nigger and said he wanted to kill her and her family. We’re having the police look it over.”

  Raul nodded, pursing his lips, then he smiled at Hilton. “Two weeks, you say? It sounds like that’s enough to give anyone nightmares. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  He was right, of course. That was the simplest answer. Yet it wasn’t the right one, Hilton believed. He wished he could explain why he felt that way, but he couldn’t explain that any more than he could explain how he’d seen Raul wearing his Mets cap when he insisted he’d left it at home, and he wasn’t wearing it now.

  There was simply too much, lately, he couldn’t explain— even to Raul, whom Hilton had hoped could give him answers. He hadn’t realized how much he’d hoped for Raul’s help until now, with his hands grasping the cold metal of Raul’s car as though he were afraid to release it. dead-cold

  He felt afraid of everything tonight; afraid to drive through the grim, skeletal streets of Overtown; afraid of facing the empty stretch of U.S. 1, which had been blocked by fire engines and ambulances from a nasty accident earlier that night. He could still see the fresh image of a man with a bloodied shirt being pulled gingerly by paramedics from the driver’s side of a crumpled Honda; he’d stared so long, trying to see the man’s face, that the line of cars behind him blared a symphony of horns.

  Most of all, he was afraid to sleep, and going home meant sleep would come. If he were still in therapy with Raul now, Hilton realized, he would be breaking the primary rule. He was holding back. He wasn’t being honest. Short of begging, however, there was nothing left to say, and the cool air was uncomfortable. The old parking attendant was right to complain. It was a bad night.

  “It’s probably the letter,” Hilton said. “You’re right.” “You see?” Raul said, winking. “That’s a hundred bucks. I’ll mail my bill. Buenas noches, compadre.”

  “Yeah. Good night,” Hilton said, his spirits lower than he could remember in a long time.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Hilton! You get back here, boy. Do you hear me?”

  A sharp voice he knows pierces through a cacophony of rhythms playing in his brain. He tries to open his eyes. He will answer her this time instead of hiding. “I’m coming, Nana,” he says.

  He sees nothing except fluid spots of every color swimming before him in a broth of darkness. Tiny voices fly at him in flurries, tickling his ears. Nana’s aged voice is no longer with him; the voices he hears now sound like sinister mimicries of his own. They hurt his ears, and he tries to bat them away.

  “How many times,” says one voice, fading in and fading out from one ear to the other, “do you think you can die?”

  Another voic
e explodes in a cackling scream that comes from everywhere. “Do you think you can keep dying forever?”

  He covers his ears, but the flurry of voices penetrates his flesh as if he has none. He doesn’t know where he is. “All I want is peace,” he says. “Please just let me have peace.”

  The flurries race through his head, and the spots swimming before him lurch into a mad dance. He is taunted by old voices, young voices, strangers and loved ones, the remembered, the forgotten. The last voice is a kind one at last, Nana’s: “Hilton, there’s no peace where you’re at,” she says, her words laden with the sadness of a dozen lifetimes.

  “Child, you done swum out too far.”

  PART TWO

  Even a spirit looks after his child.

  —Ghanaian proverb

  CHAPTER 11

  Question: What do you call a baby nigger?

  Answer: A niglet.

  Question: What do you call Dede James’s two little niglets?

  Answer: Dead.

  I hope you’ve studied for your final exam. I am your judge, Your Honor. My sentence on you won’t be commuted by a wall made of coral or a nigger house built of bricks. I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.

  “Where are the kids?” Curt asked Hilton quietly, slipping the plastic-encased note back into Hilton’s hand. This note was neatly typed like the rest, but it was worse than the others. It had been delivered in person.

  “They’re at Dede’s mom’s,” Hilton answered gloomily. “We told them Grandma Kessie wants them to spend the night. Kaya knew something was wrong, though.”

  The two men stood in the doorway of the Dade state attorney’s systems researcher’s office at the timeworn justice building downtown. Dede, uncharacteristically still sporting her black judge’s robe, sat across from a gray-haired man taking patient notes while she spoke to him in a voice very unlike her own, shaken and small and frightened. The prosecutors’ offices were deserted except for the four of them. There was a somber hush here tonight.

  “Are you and Dede spending the night at home?” Curt asked.

  “We haven’t talked about that yet,” Hilton said.

  This note, the fifth in two months and by far the most cryptic, had been delivered in a business envelope addressed to The Honorable Dede James in her chambers two floors below in the justice building. When she called Hilton earlier, she’d told him she happened to see it on her secretary’s desk just before she planned to leave for the night. Hil, he might have been right there when I was alone, Dede said. He slipped in somehow. This isn’t some nut upstate anymore. He’s come back to Miami.

  The bailiff hadn’t seen anyone, and the secretary had left at six. Dede called her at home, and she said she didn’t remember seeing a letter or its carrier before she left.

  “Baby, do you want some water or a Coke or something?” Hilton called during a pause in her discussion.

  “There’s coffee,” offered Jerry, the white-haired analyst, whose accent was more reminiscent of Brooklyn than of Miami. Practically everyone in the city was a transplant from somewhere else.

  “I’m okay,” Dede said, but she didn’t sound or look okay. Her eyes were red, her voice was nearly gone, and she was kneading her fingers under Jerry’s desk.

  Watching her, Hilton felt so angry he imagined himself choking the letter’s author to death bare-handed. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and Curt patted his back.

  “So what are we looking for here, case-wise?” Jerry asked Dede. “We’ve pulled files for all the major crimes you’ve been on since ’90. What else do we need?”

  “Everything,” Dede said firmly. “Every case.”

  “Every case? You were here twelve years. When you started, you were on fifty-odd cases a week.”

  “I only want the cases that went to trial,” Dede said.

  “No,” Hilton spoke up urgently. “Plead-outs, too. Anyone who did any kind of time.”

  Jerry whistled, scribbling on his yellow legal pad. “What I’ll need to do is write a computer program. I’ll key cases using your name. That’s easiest. So tell me what I’m looking for.”

  “Every case, misdemeanors and up. Convictions and acquittals. Men and women. Whites and Hispanics. We don’t need to look at blacks. Hilton? Do we?”

  “It’s a white male,” Hilton said, stepping closer to her.

  “I want to look at everyone,” Dede said in that same tired, scraping voice. “Can you group them according to their expected release dates, major crimes first, white males first? I’ll just prioritize them.”

  “Sweetheart, I can do anything you want,” Jerry said.

  Dede’s eyes were anxious. “How long on this, Jerry?”

  “I can have a written request on the state attorney’s desk Monday morning. I need permission to run a program like this.”

  “I’ll call her at home for you right now,” Dede said.

  Jerry smiled back at her warmly, cocking his head to peer closely into her eyes. “Dede, I know you’re shook up, but listen to me. I’ve been here fifteen years. I’ve heard guys screaming you-motherfucker-this and I’ll-rip-your-balls-off-that right in the courtroom. Sure, they’re pissed at the person trying to send them up. You know how it goes. And judges get it worse than ASAs. But not once has anyone followed through, or even tried. Not once.”

  “I know,” Dede said, nodding with closed eyes.

  But there’s always a first time, Hilton thought to himself. He stood behind Dede and began to rub her shoulders, then rested his chin atop her soft Afro. “We’ll get him, baby,” he promised.

  Wall made of coral. Hilton didn’t want to panic Dede, but he thought of something he knew he would have to share with Curt as soon as they were alone. He’d smelled an overpowering stench of urine on the front porch the week before; they all had. Dede thought a neighborhood dog or cat had tried to claim their house as territory, but now Hilton understood the urine had been human. The racist bastard had pissed on their porch, probably while they slept, only a few feet from Jamil’s bedroom window. Maybe he’d wanted them to know he’d been there.

  “You two going home tonight?” Curt asked.

  Dede didn’t answer. Hilton rubbed Dede’s shoulders harder, to fortify her. “Nobody’s chasing us away from our home,” he said.

  “Great fucking way to start the new year,” Jerry sighed.

  When Dede and Hilton pulled up to their house at nearly nine o’clock with Curt trailing in his Metro Police car, a blue-striped white Miami Police car was already parked at the curbside with the drivers side door open, a faint light illuminating the faces of a black woman and blond-haired man inside. As Hilton climbed out of his car and Dede snapped off her Audi’s headlights, he could hear the beeps and squawks from the parked car’s police radio. He sat with Dede on the coral wall while Curt and his police cousins exchanged words. No one unusual in sight, they said. All quiet.

  The cold night air seized Hilton and made him shiver with the utter unreality of it all, seeing the police car parked beside the covered aluminum garbage can that sat at his curb each Friday night and had sat there long before this madman began stalking his family. This simply couldn’t be.

  Hilton invited Curt inside, ostensibly for hot cocoa, but under the pretense of admiring the way they’d decorated in the year since his last visit, Curt casually surveyed the house. Curt wasn’t Hilton’s closest friend, but he knew about wiring and had helped him install lights and an electric garage-door opener (which was rarely used, since the garage was buried in clutter) in exchange for beer and laughs some time back. They were both Alpha men, both sons from middle-class families, both committed to hard work to try to make life in Miami better for black people. Curt was obsessed with protecting the innocent, and Hilton wanted to save lost souls. That combination and chemistry worked between them. Even if Curt did hate the Dolphins.

  Curt commented on their closet space while he peeked behind clothes, then he moved on to peer out through the sliding glass
door at their patio. He glanced inside each bedroom. By the time he sat to drink his cocoa in the living room, every light in the house was on. For the first time in hours, Hilton felt safe and back in control.

  When Dede excused herself to call her mothers house from the kitchen, Hilton told Curt about the urine on the porch. Curt laughed, wiping cocoa from his moustache. “Well, white folks been pissing on us all these years. No sense stopping now, I guess.”

  “I’m telling you, man,” Hilton said.

  “You need a twelve-gauge. That’ll really give the SOB something to wet his pants about.”

  “That’s what Dede was just saying. She wants a gun.”

  “And I told you about that security dog my cousin is getting rid of, right? He had some K9 training, but he didn’t cut it. He’s antisocial but smart as hell. And loyal to whoever’s got the bag of Gravy Train.”

  “That’s what counts. Lemme know when we can look at him.”

  After Curt left with a promise to call the next afternoon, Hilton sat on the living room couch while Dede stretched out with her shoes off and lay across the length of the couch to rest her head on the soft of his thigh. He draped his arm across her shoulder, rubbing her forearm gently. He’d put a Marvin Gaye CD on the stereo, but they weren’t hearing the music. All they heard was the silence of Kaya’s and Jamil’s absence. It seemed an invisible intruder had entered their home.

  For a long time they did not speak. Hilton couldn’t remember why they had argued at breakfast, and he had forgotten all of the work on his desk that had seemed so urgent right before Dede’s call. Only this mattered now, and it would probably be like this for a long time to come.

  “My first weeks on the bench . . . I’m already so overwhelmed, like I have to prove something because people are just waiting for me to mess up,” Dede sighed. “Now this. Why is this happening now?” She sounded like a little girl.