On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (41 page)

A white male doctor in his early thirties walked past the desk at that point and asked
if I needed directions, offering to walk with me to the NICU. It was now after 3:00
a.m. We walked together through closed and empty wings, and I realized that I wasn’t
scared of white men if they were wearing a lab coat. I explained to him that my cousin
had been shot in the head. We moved through a bunch of security doors and into the
NICU, and then right to the door of Chuck’s room.

Chuck lay in the raised bed, his upper body covered in casts, a brace closed around
his neck. His face was propped up high, elongating his neck, and thick white bandages
covered his head. His face was bloated and his expression unfamiliar, like it belonged
to someone else. The
small TV on the wall played commercials and he was propped up to face the screen,
as if he were watching them. The doctor gave me his card, saying that if I needed
anything I should ask for him.

As soon as the doctor left, the nurse told me I couldn’t be in the room; Chuck’s condition
was very critical. She explained that the family spokespeople were his uncle and grandfather,
that she could release information only to them. I said okay. But nobody told me to
leave, so I stayed an hour, then another, there in the hallway outside Chuck’s room.
Like I was standing watch.

At around 6:00 a.m., a flood of people rushed in with machines and tense expressions,
and someone asked where the number to the family was. I yelled that I had it, and
then a nurse picked up a speaker and yelled, “Code Blue.” A man came in and said he
was from the organ-donor program. He told me that Chuck was brain-dead, his brain
not functioning, the bullet had gone in and split into a dozen pieces, too much blood.
Chuck had no heartbeat and they were trying to get it back, but only for harvesting
the organs because his brain was dead. I wondered: Like a coma? Can’t they keep him
alive with that? I called Miss Linda, Chuck’s mother; I didn’t know whether Chuck
was dead, and if he was I didn’t want to be the one to tell her. So I handed the phone
to the organ guy. He told her that he was very sorry, but Chuck’s brain was dead,
too many pieces of bullet. He asked her if she’d like the organs to go to people who
needed them, and she said, as I told him she would, that no part of his body would
be going to anybody else.

I was asking to see him and they were telling me no, and I was crying, squatting on
the floor among the medical staff, and then a guy told me that Chuck’s heart had stopped.
I was texting Mike that he was gone and that no, they weren’t going to revive him;
his brain was dead, it was just the organs they were hoping to save. Mike said, “Don’t
move. I’m on my way.”

At this point it occurred to me that I’d snuck through a great deal of hospital that
night, and had absolutely no business being there. I asked Mike via text if Miss Linda
was mad that I’d stuck around. Mike said no, and left it at that.

One of the nurses said I could go into Chuck’s room, so I crouched on the floor beside
his bed. He’d been cleaned up again, the casts removed, the blood no longer oozing
from his head. I put my arm over the rail and
held his hand. I cried to him and told him that I loved him. I told him I was sorry.
A kind male nurse came in and gave me a chair, offered apple juice. I sat with Chuck
for an hour, maybe more. I noticed his watch lying on a white paper towel on the bedside
table, and I remembered the day he got it, and how much he liked it, even though it
was very plain, and I took it and put it in my purse, in the little pocket, and didn’t
tell anyone.

I was still there like that when Alex and Chuck’s on-again, off-again girlfriend,
Tanesha, entered the room. I immediately gave up my spot next to Chuck, in the chair
the nice nurse had brought in. Tanesha was talking to him, and telling Alex and me
what she saw: how he moved his arm because he was fighting, he always was a fighter;
how she had followed the ambulance here. How could he leave her and leave his girls?
She noticed that his body was beginning to grow stiff. Her legs were shaking and she
was crying softly, saying she couldn’t go to work today. Said, “You are my baby, why
did you leave me?” She said she should have stayed last night. She told about how
she had found Chuck on the ground with Tim on top of him, how Tim had phoned her and
said come here, so she pulled back around and saw Chuck on the ground. Tim still at
the station, held for questioning. And his brother dead.

Later, the detectives came in: three white guys in plain clothes. Hearing that I hadn’t
been at the scene when Chuck was shot, they rolled right past me, taking Tanesha and
Alex outside the room for questioning. Alex, who didn’t even live on 6th Street anymore,
who now had a regular job and hadn’t been anywhere nearby when Chuck was shot.

By this time I didn’t know exactly who’d killed Chuck, but I had a pretty good idea.
We’d spent much of every day together in the months before he’d been shot, and I’d
also been around for the previous war. I was thinking I certainly could’ve helped
narrow it down for the police, if they’d bothered to ask me. But they didn’t, and
so I was alone again in the room with Chuck. I held his hand. I talked to him. Mike
texted me that the detectives grabbed him as he walked into the hospital, before he
could even get up to the room.

Then Tanesha walked back into the room with the detectives, and said if she heard
anything she would tell them. They gave her their card. They asked her if she thought
that Mike knew the shooter’s identity, to go with her gut. She said she didn’t know.
They left.

Mike got released from questioning and came up to the room and stood by Chuck’s bed.
He looked at Chuck and gave a firm nod of his head and said, “It’s cool, it’s cool,”
meaning: this will be handled; your death will be avenged. Then while looking down
at Chuck, Mike cried a heaving, breathy cry. The sound of a person without much practice
in crying, I thought.

Sitting in the room around Chuck’s bed, we talked about bringing Reggie home from
county jail on a funeral furlough. I said that if Reggie came home, all he was gonna
do was go shoot someone, and Alex said, “Please—somebody gon’ die regardless,” and
Mike nodded his head in agreement, and Tanesha, too. Alex counted one, two, three,
four with his fingers. The number of people who would die. Then we talked about where
the hell Chuck’s baby-mom Brianna was. We thought she might have been on a trip out
of town, because Chuck’s mom had the girls at her house for the week. Had anyone gotten
in touch with Brianna? Did she know?

More of Chuck’s friends and neighbors have come in the room at this point. We didn’t
think Chuck’s mother would come to the hospital—Miss Linda didn’t like to leave the
house except for her son’s court dates, and in her state of shock and grief, she likely
wouldn’t make it over. After a couple of hours, some medical person came in and told
us they’d have to take the body away. I walked outside with this guy and explained
that we were waiting on Chuck’s mother, and that they couldn’t move the body until
she arrived. He agreed to keep Chuck in the room for a couple more hours.

In the end, Miss Linda did come, accompanied by four young men from the block. She
walked into the room and said quietly, “Let me see my son.” I was in the waiting room
across the hall with Alex, who by that time was snoring loudly. He’d been up since
six o’clock the morning before.

Then Reggie called my phone from jail.

“Reggie, do you know?”

“Yeah, I know. I got to come home to see my brother go in the dirt.”

I went into Chuck’s room, now crowded with people. Miss Linda was sitting on the bed
holding her son’s hand, whimpering softly and rocking back and forth. She got on my
phone with Reggie and said, “Uh huh,
uh huh, uh huh, no, it was one bullet,” then the phone died, and she passed it back
to me. I pictured Reggie sitting in his cell grieving for his brother. I was squatting
on the floor next to Chuck’s neighbor, who was sitting on the chair. I’d asked the
kind nurse to bring in apple juice and more chairs. Tanesha was on the other side
of the bed, another neighbor sat on the floor, and two other guys perched on the windowsill.

Miss Linda lay on top of her son and moaned, “Oh baby, oh my baby.” She held his hand
and repeated, “Squeeze my hand, baby. Chuck, squeeze my hand.” She rubbed his arms
rapidly and forcefully, as if to warm his body. This made me cry and Tanesha cry.
Then abruptly Miss Linda got up and walked out. I followed her and held out my arms,
and she wept loudly into me. Tanesha came out and got on the other side of her, and
the two of us held her up. Miss Linda said she wanted to go. Tanesha offered to drive
her, and asked me if I would walk them down to the car. We were still holding Miss
Linda up on either side. Miss Linda then asked if I would come immediately to the
house. I said yes.

I’d meant to follow Tanesha in my own car, but somehow I couldn’t seem to leave Chuck.
After putting quarters in the meter, I came back to his room in time to see them putting
him into the body bag, folding him to one side then the other, a tag on his big toe.
I waited for an hour down at the ER to try to get his stuff back, but they told me
that his belongings had been brought to the police station, held for evidence. Because
of the nature of his death, they would be taking Chuck’s body to the city morgue.

I charged my phone in the car, and as soon as it turned on, Miss Linda called and
asked if I was on my way. I said yes. She said that if I couldn’t be there, I should
give the money I’d promised her for Pampers to Tanesha, who was looking after Chuck’s
daughters until their mother came back. She was worried about Chuck’s daughters. She
was without any of her sons. Reggie at CFCF on $10,000 bail. Chuck dead. And Tim,
fifteen, who had seen him die, still held at the police station. Did he even know
yet that Chuck hadn’t made it?

In the car I fought my own anxiety, the anxiety that always came with large social
gatherings on 6th Street. I remembered Mike telling me that I couldn’t stand with
the guys on the corner outside the hospital, and going into the ER to work out some
alternate role, to be helpful
in my difference. I remembered Chuck’s girlfriend throwing daggers at me with her
eyes, clearly suspicious about our relationship but unwilling to come right out and
ask me about it. What right had I to be at the hospital, the only person permitted
to remain through the night? And also the only one to escape police questioning? Chuck’s
thirty friends and relatives had been sent away, and his fifteen-year-old brother,
who had seen him fall, and who loved him like a son loves a father, held for hours
and hours at the police station. Had watched him fall, had crouched over him screaming
before running away, Tanesha said. But I couldn’t leave Chuck alone at the hospital.
I wanted to be there if he made it through the night, and I wanted to be there if
he died.

Late that afternoon, the police released Tim. He told us he hadn’t eaten or slept
in the full fourteen hours they’d held him. For the rest of the day, he barely spoke,
his eyes far away. In the evening we gathered on Miss Linda’s porch steps, and Tim
sat down and looked out at nothing, tears slowly pooling and rolling down his cheeks.
He brushed them away the same way he brushed away flies. Later, Tanesha and Mike and
I took him to a diner for pancakes and cheese grits and turkey bacon. As we were leaving,
I passed him the watch, its face now quite scratched, and he nodded a silent thank-you
and put it on his wrist.

.   .   .

In the days leading up to the funeral, Miss Linda phoned me to come sit with her at
the house and sometimes to stay the night. But she kept having to defend the presence
of a white girl to the larger family and to people from out of town, and for this
I felt ashamed and sorry. Chuck’s father’s family demanded that Miss Linda get the
house fumigated before the funeral so the guests wouldn’t be subjected to the cockroaches
and flies lining the walls while they ate and mourned. When the fumigator guy arrived
with his tank of insecticide, he demanded to know outright what a white woman like
me was doing in the house, prompting Miss Linda to yell what had become her usual
answer: “That’s my fucking white girl. Is it a problem?” Chuck’s smallest daughter,
only six months old, was happy to get passed from woman to woman, but instantly began
crying when I held her, prompting massive embarrassment on my part and a mixture of
sympathy and curiosity from others.
Didn’t I know how to take care of a baby? Or was she scared to be in a white woman’s
arms? Another child—the daughter of a cousin whom I’d never met before—spotted me
and immediately leaped onto my lap, then clung to my leg for the rest of the evening.
Her mother tried to pull her off, which made her start to cry, prompting her mother
to sheepishly acknowledge: she likes white people.

Compounding the disturbance of my sheer presence were the mistakes I made in the weeks
following Chuck’s death. The first error was hugging Chuck’s father when I saw him
at the house. He’d left his wife and kids to grieve with Miss Linda, an act she regarded
as a strong sign of his continued attachment to her, as well as of his love for his
firstborn son. She’d banished her longtime boyfriend during his stay, though he did
attend the funeral.

On the first night of mourning, we were sitting around the table outdoors, and Miss
Linda was handing out the Rest in Peace T-shirts she had purchased from a kiosk at
the Gallery, a downtown mall that caters to less affluent Black and white residents
of the city. The T-shirts showed Chuck’s smiling prom picture from the job training
program on the front, with dates of his birth and death below it, along with the words
“Gone but Never Forgotten.”

I saw Chuck’s father walk through the door. We both began to cry, and as he approached
I got up and hugged him. Not a long embrace, a quick hug of sympathy.