Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

For the first time the death of Chapman Lorraine took on meaning other than guilt. The landlord’s death brought Cornelius and Colette together. His blood consecrated the life of his son Christian.

At Kennedy Airport Colette and Sergeant Christo turned John over to court officers who were tasked with transferring him to Rikers Island.

Colette whispered, “Be strong in there, CC. I’ll make sure they look after you.”

He was moved from airport to van, van to prison intake. At Rikers he was photographed and fingerprinted, searched for weapons, provided with a dark yellow uniform and then brought to one of the smaller holding cells.

“Lieutenant Van Dyne don’t want your hair messed,” one guard said. “She says she don’t want the judge to feel sorry for your sorry ass.”

John’s cellmates were three men — one white, another black and a small umber-colored man who looked to be Puerto Rican.

The big black man had a smile that was both friendly and hungry.

Blocking John’s view of the other two inmates he asked, “What’s your name?”

“John... um, Cornelius.”

“Hello, John Cornelius. My name is Andre.” The big man held out a hand. When John reached out, Andre gripped hard and pulled him close.

“There’s a set of rules we live by in here, JC.” Andre’s breath was hot on the side of the ex-professor’s face. “You’re gonna be my friend and I will protect you from these other motherfuckers here. And you see over there?” Andre gestured toward an empty corner of the cell.

“That’s gonna be our private place,” the big man continued. “Whenever we’re over there you will do whatever I tell you to do. When we’re over there we will be alone, just you and me. Nobody’s gonna hear you and ain’t nobody gonna come.”

John glanced over at the other two men. The white man turned his head away. The shorter, broad-shouldered Puerto Rican watched dispassionately as if Andre and John were two competing creatures in the wild.

Andre took John’s chin with powerful fingers applying pressure until the young man’s eyes were again on him.

“Don’t look at them.” He shoved John toward the private corner. “They ain’t gonna help you. They cain’t. Now lemme see some dick.”

John wondered at what moment he would take Andre’s life. He might get beaten, even raped before the chance offered itself but the time would come... soon.

“I ain’t got all day, John Cornelius.”

“Hey, Andre,” a voice with a Spanish lilt said. “Leave him alone, man. He my homey.”

“This ain’t none’a your business, Velázquez,” Andre complained.

The much shorter Puerto Rican stood up from his cot. “I said leave him alone. I ain’t tellin’ you again.”

“Not till I get me some. You can have him then.”

“I will break your head open like a melon.”

Andre hesitated a second, two... then pushed John away. He went to the cot that the Puerto Rican had vacated and sat down heavily.

“Get your ass up from there,” Velázquez told the giant. “That’s my bed.”

Again Andre hesitated. Again he did as he was told.

“Come on, man,” Velázquez said to John. “Let’s have a seat.”

“They got me in here on murder,” the man identifying himself as Jose Velázquez said to John Woman/Cornelius Jones. “The cops say I killed this Cuban who didn’t pay his debt but I didn’t do it.”

The two were sitting side by side on one of three cots provided for the four men. Andre was grumbling to himself trying to come up with the courage to go against Jose. The white man was leaning against the cell wall looking at nothing in particular.

“They have me for a murder that happened when I was sixteen,” John said. “I did it.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be sayin’ that,” Jose suggested.

“I don’t care. I plan to confess.”

John’s savior frowned, creating creases radiating from his eyes. He said, “You shouldn’t be so serious, John. You got to remember that it’s just a game, bro. Just a game. You don’t wanna make them think you think they doin’ justice. If it was justice they’d be down here tryin’ to figure out how a kid ended up doin’ a man’s job and how that fat fuck got his ass up there to get killed. They don’t care. They want you like Andre does, on a dinner plate with your ass up in the air.”

“How do you know about my case?” John asked.

“They give us newspapers. You was in the headlines a whole week and then again when you let ’em extradite your ass.”

“That’s why you were going to fight Andre?”

“I wasn’t gonna fight him.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh.”

Jose gestured at the white man who had a receding brown-and-gray hairline. Propelling himself from the wall with his shoulder blades the lanky white man sauntered the few steps to the Puerto Rican’s cot.

“Frank Beam, meet history professor John Woman,” Jose said.

John stood and shook Beam’s hand.

“Frank here is what they call a living embodiment of death,” Jose continued. “He’s killed more people than Felix Trinidad have knocked out. Andre knows that Frank got my back. That’s why he backed down.”

Frank nodded and went back to his personal patch of cell wall.

“It ain’t what it seems,” Jose said to John. “Here we believe what they taught us in school even though we know it ain’t true. Don’t you give it up to them, bro. They ain’t worth it.”

Jose told John to take Andre’s cot. The big man complained then backed down when Frank Beam said, “Shut your fat yap.”

John considered Jose’s advice from many different angles. He knew that he was guilty. It was that last blow from the heavy wrench across the top of Chapman Lorraine’s skull. He didn’t have to kill him but he didn’t know how to stop.

The counsel Jose offered caused a resurgence of historical thinking: one had to try and maintain objectivity even though that was impossible — this impossibility was what made life meaningful. Maybe, on some basic human level, he was innocent because he couldn’t stop himself.

John dreamt about the desert. He was a coyote that died at twilight; his soul left at that shadowy time to wander the endless wasteland. Heart and body, blood and senses were canine but his mind was still that of a historian. The barren land, even in semidarkness, revealed striations in rock, bones jutting from the ground and out from the walls of great canyons. History was all that remained, measured by discrete moments rendered in stone — each one bearing the same weight, drained of passion, purpose and personality. The coyote, John Woman, with a rolling gait, moved along the edge of eternal dusk, never to see the sunrise and never to sleep.

“Cornelius Jones,” a man’s voice intoned.

John opened his eyes and sat up. Across from him Andre squatted on the floor staring wide-eyed at nothing. A large gash was open down his left cheek revealing the whitish muscle tissue of flesh under black skin.

“Yeah,” John called out.

“Come with me.”

He was taken to a conference room that could have been in any corporate office. There were three people sitting at the far end of the walnut conference table: two men and Nina Forché. The men wore business suits, one blue, the other gray. Nina had on a dress-suit in a palette of coral hues ranging from goldenrod to lush raspberry.

Nina stood when John entered.

“Take those restraints off him,” she said to his guard.

John’s keeper, a tall slender white man who gave the impression of great physical strength, looked at the black man in the blue suit.

“It’s okay, Hawkins,” Blue Suit said. “Mr. Jones has been granted bail.”