Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

The circus behind me was still playing in all four rings as I started mentally assembling a timeline of the morning’s events.

My house had been blown up at the same time Miss B’s place had been doused and lit ablaze. That seemed to be the first wave of attack, and it hit around seven-thirty. The second wave, which came during the eight o’clock hour, was the go-go bar being torched and Booker T detonating.

So, obviously, my two pyromaniacs preferred different methodologies: one knew what to do with a stick of dynamite; the other was a gas man-slosh it around, throw the match, run like hell. Each had effectively destroyed whatever evidence might have been left in their respective locations. I thought about distance between the sites and the time it might take to make the necessary arrangements. The timing fit nicely.

I had just worked it out when I heard the scuffling of Tynesha’s furry slippers behind me.

“You!” she thundered. “This is all your fault!”

Her voice had been loud enough to attract the attention of all ten cameras-not to mention the firemen, the sidewalk loiterers, and the traffic stopped on Springfield Avenue-and I suddenly found all those eyes and lenses focused on me.

“That’s right,” she hollered, even louder. “Put his picture on TV. It’s all his fault. Put his picture on TV under a thingie that says ‘bastard.’ ”

Tynesha was staring at me with her arms crossed. The cameramen quickly arranged themselves to form a wall on one side of her, standing at enough distance to be able to catch a wide-angle shot of the dancer and the recipient of her ire. They clearly didn’t have a clue what Tynesha was talking about, but they recognized potentially great footage when they saw it.

“Uh-huh!” she kept railing, her head bobbing from side to side as she spoke. “ Bastard . Oh, he act like he’s a nice white boy who takes a girl to the Outback Steak house and plays all friendly. And then the next thing you know you wake up and all your stuff’s on fire.”

Tynesha glared some more, challenging me to answer. But I wasn’t saying a word, not with all those cameras rolling. I know how that stuff gets cut. If I said, “It’s not like I’m guilty as sin,” what would go on TV is me saying, “I’m guilty as sin.” Plus, making the six o’clock news for arguing with an exotic dancer in front of a go-go bar was not a career-enhancing move.

The Smurf from Channel 7, undaunted by his ignorance, pointed his microphone at me.

“This woman seems to be saying you set this fire,” he said. “Do you have a response?”

I sighed and shook my head but kept my lips clamped.

“Aw, hell, he might as well have set it,” Tynesha proclaimed, walking over to the Smurf and snatching his microphone, then using it like it was hooked up to a loudspeaker system. She wanted to be heard. All the cameras instantly readjusted so their shot wasn’t screwed up.

“He didn’t strike the match but he put it in the hands of the guy who did,” Tynesha declared, emphasizing every couple of words like a Sunday-morning preacher who has gotten on a roll.

The Smurf just stood there. His journalistic wits were apparently at their end-plus, he was impotent without his microphone-but the guy from Channel 12, the one who couldn’t spell, was determined to apply his hard-nosed-reporter’s instincts to get to the bottom of this important story.

“Are you an accomplice?” he asked me, with all due drama. “Are you a coconspirator in some way?”

I slapped my hand to my forehead and finally just couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “No,” I said. “No, no, no-”

“That’s right!” Tynesha crowed. “That’s exactly what he is. He’s a Coke conspirator and a Pepsi conspirator and everything else!”

The hairdos stayed straight-faced, but I could see the cameramen smirking. Nothing like a little malapropism to make everyone’s day.

“Look, guys, I’m a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner, ” I said. “I didn’t set any fires. I wrote a story, that’s all I did. You can turn your cameras off. There’s no news here.”

I thought it sounded like a reasonable request but, of course, I wasn’t thinking like a TV person. Of course there wasn’t any news. But there was controversy-which is far better than actual news.

“You keep those cameras rolling!” Tynesha commanded, still gripping the Smurf’s microphone. “He put my friend Wanda’s business out there. And now all my stuff’s burnt.”

“Tynesha, can we please have this conversation somewhere else?” I asked.

“No way. We’re having it right here. All my stuff’s burnt and you don’t want to talk about it with all the cameras? Why, because it don’t make you look good?”

“It has nothing to do with looking good,” I countered. “There are some things I need to tell you. In private.”

The hairdos had not yet put A (that Tynesha was talking about the story I had written in that day’s Eagle-Examiner ) together with B (that the places I had written about were under attack), so I could only assume they thought they were watching some kind of bizarre lover’s quarrel. The cameras had started swiveling back and forth between me and Tynesha, as if they were covering a tennis match.

“No, I’m through with your crap,” Tynesha bellowed. “Why didn’t y’all just put a map in the damn newspaper, maybe some directions, too. I’m going to get me a lawyer and sue the damn hell out of you and your newspaper.”

I finally lost my patience.

“Tynesha, look, I’ve lost everything, too, okay?” I said. “Whoever did this threw a bundle of dynamite through my living room window this morning. He blew up my house. He blew up everything I own. He even blew up my cat.”

I hated to play the cat card, but I needed to invoke a little bit of sympathy-if not for me then at least for Deadline.

It didn’t work.

“Serves you right!” she snapped. “You just wait until I tell Miss B what happened. She ain’t gonna give you no pie. She ain’t gonna talk to you no more. She ain’t going to answer the door when you knock.”

“Tynesha,” I said as quietly as I could, turning my back to the cameras in the hopes they couldn’t hear me. “Miss B’s place got burned, too. She’s not. . she’s not looking too good.”

Tynesha came at me with fresh rage, fists flying.

“You bastard!” she screamed, veins bulging. “You bastard! You killed her, you killed her!”

She was flailing at me more than she was punching me. I was able to hold her off easily enough-long arms are nice sometimes-though midway through the attack, the belt on her robe slipped loose. With her breasts flopping everywhere, I had to be a little more delicate about the manner in which I restrained her.

Tynesha either didn’t know or didn’t care that her goods were being aired for public consumption-perhaps mass public consumption. She just kept screaming obscenities at me until the big blond Russian grabbed her. Eventually, Tynesha allowed herself to be corralled away. She had been choking back sobs so she would still have breath to berate me, but she couldn’t hold them forever.

“You bastard!” she shrieked one more time, then collapsed into the Russian, who offered her a protective, motherly embrace and shot me a Siberia-cold glower.

The cameras had, naturally, caught the whole ugly thing and they stayed trained on Tynesha and her grief. That left me alone with my thoughts. If I had felt like rationalizing, I could have told myself I was only doing my job, that I hadn’t set anything on fire or blown anything up, that I was just as much of a victim as anyone else.

But knowing the ruin my article was causing-even if the ruin wasn’t my fault-I couldn’t help but think Tynesha right. I was a bastard.