Walter Mosley: All I Did Was Shoot My Man

As it was, he left our family to go off and fight in the Revolution when I was twelve. My mother died of a broken heart, and Nikita and I were separated by the so-called child welfare system. Word came to me that my father was dead when I was sixteen, but I already knew... And then one day, within the last year, it turned out that he was alive, that he survived the South American guerrilla wars and had returned to New York decades ago without ever telling his sons.

Nikita was in prison for robbing an armored car, and I was so bad that the law hadn’t caught up with me — yet.

Since I found that Tolstoy was alive, going by the name William Williams, I’d sent out a few feelers but my attempts had been halfhearted at best. I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss or kill my father; find or forget him.

For a long moment I was off in the ether of passionate ambivalence. Tolstoy was the joker in the deck stacked against me. I hated him for existing. Hated him.

And then I was back in the Port Authority again, with Sweet Lemon looking at me, waiting for an answer.

“Who’s this Morgan guy?” I asked as if I were standing there with him rather than reliving an entire life of spite.

“That’s my girlfriend, Morgan Lefevre. She’s from this rich Boston family. They been here since before the Revolution.”

“So have our families, most probably,” I said, ever a good student of my father’s rants.

“But these folks got the papers to prove it.”

“You meet ’em?”

“Stayed at her aunt’s house up in Concord, Mass.”

“They know about you?”

“What’s there to know?”

“Three felony convictions that I know of, more misdemeanors than a savant could count, and twelve years’ hard time. And then there’s the things that you were never caught for.”

“I’m straight now, LT.”

“You still talkin’ to Luke,” I suggested.

“That’s just information. I don’t get involved no more.”

I had to hand it to him, as much pressure as I brought to bear, he was still smiling and nonchalant.

But the proof was there, in the fact that our language had taken on the quality of the street. That’s how close we both were to dropping the pretense to a straight life.

“What about you bein’ here?” I asked.

“Where?”

“Here. Port Authority.” I waved around indicating the impossibly high ceilings of the main hall.

“What about it?”

“Ain’t this where you did that bag switch con for so many years? Ain’t that why the cops watchin’ us right now?”

“They watchin’ you, Mr. McGill. They know the only reason I’m here is to push the NYLT.”

“The what?”

Lemon reached into his jacket and came out with a professional-looking, triple-folded brochure. The image on the front was a daytime scene on Broadway around Times Square. Famous writers were superimposed here and there among the crowd. I recognized Mark Twain and Langston Hughes. There were others, though, mostly in black and white, among the four-color mob of tourists.

Hollowed-out letters over the pictures said THE NEW YORK LITERARY TOUR.

“We go from Djuna Barnes’s old place on Patchin Place down in the Village to Langston’s brownstone up in Harlem. We cover the whole city, talkin’ about poets, essayists, playwrights, and novelists. You know, it takes three full days just to show everybody everything. We hit all five boroughs. It’s not just literary; we give a full account of New York — past and present.”

“You do all this?” I asked, finally impressed.

“No, not me alone, LT,” Lemon said with his patented grin. “Morgan, along with her exes, Lucian and Cindy, they lead the tours. I drive the van on Tuesday through Thursday and hand out these brochures on the days I get off. I also advertise readings that they put on.”

“Lucian and Cindy?”

“Morgan’s what you call a, a, a bisexual. You know. She loves who she loves no mattah who or what.”

“Damn, Lemon. How long have you been out of prison?”

“I haven’t even been arrested in three years. You know Morgan was teachin’ a prison class in poetry and I took it ’cause they said how pretty she was. I already knew how to read and she the one figured out my conduit thing. I come to see her the day I got out and we been together since that night. She put it right out there that if I wanted to keep on gettin’ that sweet sugar that I had to give up my criminal ways.

“Now, what man in his right mind gonna argue with that?”

I was grinning broadly. Lemon Charles was like a magic trick that enchanted me with its unexpected transformation. The hapless crook had disappeared and a new man stood in his place. The prestidigitation made sense but was impossible, still and all.

“Mr. McGill?” someone said.

I turned to see that the police had performed a magic trick of their own — they had multiplied from two to three uniformed officers.

“You can go,” the new cop, Asian and female, told Lemon.

For the first time Lemon’s smile faded; it didn’t evaporate, just weakened as the light waning at day’s end.

“You go on, Mr. Charles,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be the reason you got that sugar knocked off your rind.”

He looked me directly in the eye and nodded, took in the cops as if to say that he saw what had happened here, and then backed away.

As I watched him go I saw Charlene coming down the escalator. She had in her hand a bottle of what looked like Coke Zero.

“What are you doing here?” a tall milk chocolate — colored cop was asking.

“Came to meet the nine forty-seven bus in from Albion. It didn’t get in till almost ten though.”

“What for?” his partner asked. That cop was white, a bit shorter, and broad of shoulders and chest.

“Somebody told me that women coming in from the prison are open to persuasion... if you know what I mean.”

“You don’t seem to have that sort of company,” the lady policeman commented.

“I was misinformed.”

“What are you doing here?” the black cop asked.

“Talking to you, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“No,” I agreed.

“What do you have in your pockets?” the white cop bid.

“Whatever the Constitution says I can carry.”

“This isn’t a game.” The white cop had brown hair and eyes the same hue but a little darker. He had a stripe on his shoulder and three freckles over his left cheek.

I turned to my left and walked away. That was the only option I had outside of assault.

They could have come after me.

They didn’t though.

I wondered why.

I was used to being stopped by the police. My face and name were well known among the law enforcement crowd. They suspected me of everything from contract murder to armed robbery, from kidnapping to white slavery. I had been rousted, arrested, and thrown before more courts than Sweet Lemon Charles knew existed.

Before last year I had my own private cop — Carson Kitteridge. He dropped in on me once a month or so and made sly innuendos. If anyone would ever cause my downfall, it was Carson. But he had stopped contacting me, and police all over the city, even though they still gave me a hard time, seemed to be holding back.

I didn’t know what had happened or why, but I had decided to accept it as a temporary gift from the Patron Saint of Thieves, whoever he or she was.

More important to me, as I ambled up Tenth Avenue, was Lemon Charles. He had taken the life of a habitual criminal and turned it around, if only for a brief span of time. He wrote poetry, dealt in it, slept with a poet at night, and was asked politely to leave by cops that saw him as a tourist guide rather than a petty con.