From the NewYorkerArchive: a short story about a Black Korean War veteran who, at the urging of several family members, begins investigating a cold-case homicide.
“Talked to Freddy, and he told me say hi,” my mother said. My older brother was studying to be a lawyer. She offered her cheeks and I kissed them, her face wrinkle-free. “I’m guiltless,” she once said to me. Her dark cheeks were lightly rouged. As a rule, my mother wasn’t demonstrative. She lived in a sphere all her own, where few things could intrude and hurt her anymore.
That could be true about women. Even Sheila Larkin had said it that last time, when I told her we were finished: “God knows I don’t ask for much from you, man.” Maybe in Alaska I could learn something new about women and become a different kind of veteran. My mother opened her pocketbook and dropped her gloves into it and, while looking at me, one of her two living children, snapped it shut. That sound was all the room had.
I got a chair for Miss Agatha. Once seated, she pulled out her hat pins and took off her hat, a modest thing with a veil pulled back over it, black like her dress and black like her old-lady shoes with Cuban heels. A woman’s boy child deserved more than one year of mourning. “You know a lot more than them fools at No. 2,” Aunt Penny said. Working in Sam Jaffe’s office, I wanted to say, wasn’t the same as finding a killer. Sam, a lawyer, did some private-detective work, and I sometimes went along with him when I wasn’t filing. But mostly I just filed. A veteran doing ABCs.
It was my mother who came up with the idea of the three of them leaving Alabama. It was late evening of the day she and my aunt had beaten the white man. He still lay in the woods, alone except for what animals came, sniffed, and walked over him. All the Negroes who had any business knowing knew what had happened, but not a white soul knew.
I called my brother, whom Sam had encouraged to become a lawyer. He might know where I should start to look for a murderer. His wife, Joanne, told me he was out. Joanne was pregnant. A root worker had had Joanne throw ten hair pins up in the air and have them fall on one of Joanne’s head scarves. Examining the pattern of the fallen pins, the root worker predicted that Joanne would be having twin girls. The news excited my mother like nothing else I’d seen. I didn’t care.
“Still going, but I have to do a few things fore I leave. Yall member Ike?” Blondelle nodded, and Mary drank some Coke. “Miss Agatha want me to find out who did it.” Blondelle said to Mary, “Oh, you know the private-dick people don’t like using mother wit. That would be too much like right.” A cheap snapshot of Ike and Alona was taped to the icebox. In the picture, sepia, torn at one corner, Alona was smiling, but Ike, wherever they were, looked sombre. Alona had a determined look. Perhaps she had been trying to get Ike to smile.
Miss Agatha gave me sweet-potato pie when I went back up. Alona was also at the table, holding the child. “Hi hi,” the kid kept saying to me. The pie was good, but it wasn’t reward enough for having to put up with that child. “You deserve braggin on, child,” Miss Agatha said. “You know how much I believe in you, honey.” She said to me, “Alona’s my future.”“I haven’t decided,” she said, and she looked a bit dreamy-like, like a man thinking about all the gold in his pockets. “I’ll decide down the road. Won’t I, sweetums? Won’t I, sweetums?” She stood the child up on her lap and kissed her face until she collapsed in laughter. After a bit, the child got down from Alona’s lap and scurried off to the living room.
I sat on my bed in the upstairs back room and drank the last of some whiskey a friend had given me, listening to WOOK all the while. On Sundays WOOK was full of religious shit, and it always depressed the hell out of me. But I didn’t change the station.. I put some water in the empty bottle to get the last of the juice out of it. Then I took out the booklet on Alaska and turned to page 6, the one with “little known facts about our northern neighbor.” Alaska was not even a state.
México Últimas Noticias, México Titulares
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