The Black Kids(70)

The blue and red of the cop car’s lights flash across the deep lines in her brown face.

The cop looks over at her. “Ma’am, I don’t want any trouble.”

The elderly lady keeps coming closer, unsteady in her steps but steady in her resolve. “I know that boy ain’t done nothing wrong. He’s a good kid.”

“Ma’am,” the cop says, “step back.”

“She’s hard of hearing,” LaShawn says to the cop.

The cop looks around like she’s trying to decide what to do.

“Miss Violet, you know where my family went?” LaShawn yells at Miss Violet, who cups her ear toward him.

Miss Violet yells, “What?”

Another neighbor, a middle-aged man in a white tank top and denim shorts down to his knees, walks to his front gate in his white socks, shining one of those big yellow flashlights out into the dark at the officer. “What’s this here about?”

“Sir, please turn your flashlight off,” the officer says.

“With all due respect, ma’am, the lights are out,” Tank Top says. “Can’t see nothing otherwise.”

LaShawn’s neighbors don’t just see us on the ground, they do something.

“This man lives here?” the cop asks Miss Violet.

“What man?” Miss Violet shouts. As she turns, I get a glimpse of a big-ass “nude-colored” hearing aid.

“Ain’t no man. That’s a kid. They kids. Look at ’em,” Tank Top says. “And yes. He lives there. That’s his home.”

“Get up,” the officer says to us.

Miss Violet and Tank Top don’t move from where they’re standing. The police officer keeps her weapon pointed at us as we slowly get up off the ground. Blades of grass stick in the tulle of my dress.

The officer puts her gun back in its holster. She straightens her ponytail.

Tank Top and Miss Violet stare at her.

“You alright, baby?” Miss Violet says to me or LaShawn.

We both nod.

The officer says, “You kids shouldn’t be out right now. It’s not safe.”

We say nothing in response.

“You’re very lucky it was me and not another officer,” she says, and waits for us to respond.

Lucky.

I think about what Kimberly said about my being black and getting into colleges: “You’ve got it made, Ash.”

The officer looks around as though she’s trying to figure out her exit. The lights from her car are bright across our faces now, blue and red, like two moods in quick flashes, sad, then angry.

“Have a good night,” she says finally as she gets into her car and rolls the window down a little bit. “Just doing my job.”

I wrap my arms around my body. I can feel the goose bumps along them, the fear still under my skin.

“If they did they job, we wouldn’t be in the middle of all this right now,” Tank Top mutters under his breath after the cop car turns the corner back into the night.

“Thank you, Mr. Freeman,” LaShawn says to Tank Top.

He grunts an acknowledgment in our direction and heads back inside his house.

Miss Violet looks like she’s about to topple over, and LaShawn rushes to her side to steady her.

“Do you know where my family went?” he yells into her ear.

Miss Violet grabs hold of his arm, and the two of them walk up her front steps while I trail behind. “To your auntie’s, I think. She the one out in Covina or wherever?”

“Yes ma’am,” LaShawn says.

“Y’all can stay here if you want,” Miss Violet says. “I can make you hotcakes in the morning! You like hotcakes? Everybody likes hotcakes.”

She reminds me a little of Miss Doris from the nursing home, eager for the company. I wonder what it must be like to get that old and have friends, family, everyone you care about pass away or move on. I kinda want to take her up on the offer.

LaShawn considers it for a moment and then shakes his head no. “Thank you, Miss Violet, but I gotta get her back home safe. Take you up on those hotcakes another day?”

“Mi casa es su casa, as they say,” Miss Violet says before her security door slams shut with a loud metal clang.

Uneasy palm trees loom over us as we walk quietly back to Trevor’s dad’s car. Palm trees belong to the ghetto as much as anywhere else in the city, maybe more so. They peek their heads up over the top of the 110 same as they hover over the mansions on Rossmore. Everybody thinks they’re native to LA, but they’re not. Missionaries started putting them in around the same time they started taking out the natives. Then rich people got in on it. Then the city thought, Well, hell, that looks good, why not? and used palm-tree planting as a way of making work for the unemployed during the Great Depression and before the 1936 Olympics. We studied it in our section on California history last year. They’re starting to die off now, those palm trees planted by that generation before the greatest one. Every so often you’ll hear about a dead one falling onto a car, or a building, or a nice man out on his morning walk. I don’t want to die by palm tree, but maybe I’d deserve it. LaShawn grabs my hand; both of us are still trembling.

“Breathe,” LaShawn says.

I open my mouth in a wide O like a fish and swallow the night.