Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Jonah yelled over the deafening sirens. “Pure madness, Mule. Dancing in the streets!” His face shimmered, at last up close to whatever he’d been looking for. Two thousand rioters swept past. Four steps ahead of me, Jonah slowed to a walk. All I could think, with hell erupting all around, was, He’s too light to be here. He was a frail, vulnerable boy, listening wide-eyed to the Valkyries riding through our radio.

Jonah hovered, turning to inspect the flames that shot up fifteen feet to his left. His hands cupped unconsciously, lifting from his sides, beckoning to the roving packs, cuing their entrances and attacks. He was conducting. Beating time, phrasing the chaos the same way he always did when listening to the music that most moved him. I came alongside him; he was humming. At his command, a drone rose up behind us, pitched but variable, matching his throb, a hybrid of rhythm and melody. The sound multiplied through the spreading human mass. I’ll remember that sound until I die.

The police concentrated their power on making sure the violence didn’t spill over into white neighborhoods. The firemen were getting the worst of it. They gave up extinguishing the overturned cars and focused on containing the burning commercial buildings. The blast of hoses and the hissing crowd fused into a single chorus. Jonah watched, deep in some interpretation I couldn’t make out. The stress intoxicated him. Total collapse: lives ricocheting past us, handmade explosions going off, all the rules of reason worse than flaccid.

He stopped in front of a pawnshop, where half a dozen children were slamming a mesh garbage can through the plate-glass door. They threw and ran back, walked up, threw, and ran back again. The entrance fell in a hail of shards. One by one, the looters disappeared into the cave. Jonah stood still, waiting for revelation. After a sickening moment, the excavators returned, carrying a television, a stereo, a brass floor lamp, new hats for all, and two handguns. Three centuries’ worth of reparations.

I stuck to myself, two shops away. Jonah was out ahead of me, twenty feet from the door. He stood with his feet spread, leaning into the chaos. He watched the actors run out of the store, as if all history depended on their grabbing these denied goods, here at the denouement. From out of the synchronized dream, one of the newly armed boys saw my brother staring. He ran toward Jonah, waving his snub-nosed gun like a Ping-Pong paddle. My body turned worthless, fifty yards, a continent away. I tried to yell but couldn’t find my throat. The boy shouted as he ran. His words broke in the air into harsh, incoherent rivets. His scattering friends turned to meet the challenge. The other armed boy began waving his own gun at Jonah. It weighed down his arm, too heavy for him, a bad prop.

“What you want here?” The first boy reached Jonah, who stood dead, his arms lifted from his sides. “Get the fuck out. Ain’t no place for white.” The boy waved the barrel side to side, charming a snake. His hands shook. Jonah just stood the way he did onstage, draped on the crook of an imaginary grand piano, ready to launch into a huge song cycle. Winterreise. He stood as though I was right behind him, at the keyboard.

The second boy was on them in an instant. He fell out of orbit, slamming into Jonah’s flank and knocking him to the pavement. My brother crumpled in pain, then lay still on the concrete, his arm scraped open.

“Motherfucker hurt you?” the second boy shouted at the first. Both boys stood over him, aiming, shaking, jumping. “Back to the Hills, motherfucker. Back to Bel Air!” As if that were where even death would send this intruder.

I found my voice. “He’s black. The man’s a black man.” I was too far away. They couldn’t hear me over the riot. My voice cracked and broke. I never did have much projection. “The man’s my brother.”

The two armed boys stared up at me. One aimed his gun in my direction. “This? This ain’t no brother.”

“The man’s a black man.”

Jonah, picking his moment, as if the largest part of him really did want to die, relaxed his head onto the pavement. He looked up into the smoking sky. His lips began to work. He might have been pleading with them, praying. No sound came out of him but a weird monotone moan.

I knew then that one of the shaking boys would shoot him. Murder here would be nothing: one more randomness at time’s end. Jonah worked his lips, moaning, preparing his finish. But that burst of monotone, coming from that body stretched out on the pavement, unnerved his assailants. The two teens backed away from the voodoo wail. Behind them, their friends with the television and stereo screamed for them to scatter. The Man was here, and shooting. The two gunmen looked over at me, down at Jonah, even up in the air at the stream of funereal smoke that my brother sung to. Still staring, they turned and ran.

I fell to my knees on the pavement beside him, sobbing and pulling at his ripped shirt. He nodded. My relief flooded over into rage. “What the hell are we doing here? We gotta get out. Now.” It took all I had to keep from kicking Jonah in the ribs, where he lay.

He looked up at me, in shock. “What?” Blood seeped up his sleeve and down his arm. The scraped-open skin filled with cinders. “What? Practice, Joey. Rehearsal.” He snickered, wincing.

I sat him up, still shouting at him. I wrapped his arm in a piece of shirt. “Jesus Christ. They were going to kill you.”

“I saw.” His jaw was trembling, out of control. “Right there. But you told them, didn’t you?” His throat closed and his breathing shut down. He laughed and tried to apologize. But a choking fit prevented him.

I got him to his feet and made him walk. Two hundred yards to our left, a line of police advanced against a makeshift emplacement of stone-throwers. I took Jonah to the right, doubling back west past Albion, where we’d entered the inferno. The air was a kiln, and the concrete under our feet melted into tar. Jonah’s breathing worsened. We had to slow. He pulled up at a corner and put out his hand, reassuring me, staving off suffocation. “Keep walking; keep moving.”

I leaned him up against a wall so he could catch his breath and slow his heart. While we stood, Jonah bending forward and me holding him, a light-skinned middle-aged man walked past and brushed our backs. I spun around and saw the gray-haired man walk placidly away, carrying a can of house paint and a brush. On Jonah’s bare back, and on the tails of my shirt, he left a spotty brown stripe. The man disappeared into the crowd, leaving his brand on anything that held still long enough.

Jonah could see my shirt but not his back. “Me, too? He got me good?”

“Yes. He got you.”

His breathing eased. “We’re all set then, Mule. Passport stamped. Visa. Safe passage.” He started up again, humming. I took his good arm and walked him on. He felt even more wobbly than reality. We headed west along 112th Street, to safety. But we’d never be safe again. From two blocks away, I saw the police perimeter we’d crossed on our way in. It had thickened. A line of officers three deep fought back the rushing stone-throwers. Burning bottles arced upward and fell to earth in splashes of flame. Watts was trying to spread the pain to Westmont, Inglewood, Culver City. Someplace where the fires had something expensive to burn.

“Come on, Mule.” He sounded drunk. “Keep going. We’ll talk our way through.” By then, he could barely form a sentence. I knew what the police would do if we got even close. Nobody was getting out across this line. The whole township was ringed by a thousand policemen, herding it at gunpoint. Behind the police wall was the National Guard. And behind the Guard, the Fortieth Armored Division. We were sealed off, trapped inside the permanent pen. My brother was too light to survive inside, and I was too dark to get us out.