Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

The impact, the thud of a body landing forty feet below, didn’t penetrate very far into the square stone room. It barely disturbed the resting stillness, didn’t echo at all past the golden Buddha in the middle of the floor. The statue lay on its side on a smooth dry stone tile, beside a backpack full of other statues. Except for the statue and the backpack, and the single panel removed from the skylight, nothing was out of place. The calm silence in the room continued, and would continue once the statues had been replaced in their proper spots by the museum’s new director.

She would be pleased that something had scared off the thief, though greatly saddened that he’d fallen to his death over the railing at the terrace. As advised by the police, she’d add an alarm to the skylight. She had much to do, as she was all the staff the museum had. She guided visitors, and also sold the tickets, the ticket lady having retired years ago. She didn’t mind the work. She was hoping, even, to soon reopen the meditation caves, to perhaps make the museum not just a serene spot, but a useful one, as it once had been: a beacon for poor souls with troubled minds.

I learned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Roadshow . I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.

“You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.

Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to school in the suburbs with real rich white people, while her French teacher at Central High was a black man from Georgia. Despite the fact that I had no true friends at my school and hated most things about my life, she was in a one-sided social competition with me. As a result, I was subjected to Aja’s peacocking around about things like how her friend Jess, who lived in a massive house down on Cedar Avenue, had invited her to go swimming with her family.

“Come off it, Aja. I just said I didn’t know about it.”

“I just think if you live right here… maybe your mom knows about it?”

“Look, is there a story here?”

“Well, it’s crazy. There’s this wooden gate with a towing sign on it like it’s just a parking lot, but behind it is this massive pool and these brand-new lockers and everything. And it was so crowded!”

“Any black people there?”

“Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”

“Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”

She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”

“Janitor?”

“I think he was the security guard.”

I snorted.

We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.

“Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”

“So ghetto,” said Aja.

“Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.

“He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”

“Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.

“Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”

I laughed and then she did too.

“So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.

“Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.

“You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.

“Not that sewer,” I said.

“Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”

“Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.

Dahani, who used to have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.

“You been there?” I asked.

“Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.

“So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.

“I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.

My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here . But she rallied. “You liked that one, didn’t you, Zingha?”

I looked at Dahani. “Sure, watch Wesley Snipes do it with a white woman and stick me with the dishes.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of the dishes,” my mother snapped, managing to make me feel petty. Turning to Dahani she asked, “How is Jason?”

“Just fine,” Dahani said, in a tight voice. I followed his eyes to the clock above the refrigerator. “Movie starts at seven.”

My brother kissed my mom and left, just like he did every night since he’d come home in disgrace. I went upstairs so I wouldn’t have to listen to the pitiful sound of her cleaning up the kitchen. After that she would doze in front of the TV for a couple of hours, half waiting for Dahani to come home. She always wound up in bed before that.