Bed-Stuy Is Burning Read online

  Sirens and a fire hose. What did the firefighters think they were doing, Sara wondered, but the hose was aimed at a fire. Sara could hear people shooting guns in all directions. She could hear people laughing louder than they were shouting or crying. From the concrete sidewalk, she saw people running with furniture, food, and cases of liquor. Mike ripped a part of his T-shirt off and wrapped it tightly around Sara’s arm, which didn’t make the pain any better, but it was so nice of Mike to do it that Sara wanted to cry. She looked where her brother had been beaten, and nobody was there anymore, not her brother or mother or Derek or any police. She didn’t know why her cell phone wasn’t in her pocket, but she asked to borrow Mike’s.

  “It’s not working,” he said. Mike had very dark skin and had just been some bullshit kid before, but now had warmth or something about him that made her love him and think about her brother.

  Damien posed triumphantly with his gun up in the air, aiming at the looters in the burning school. He admired the shorn handcuffs and flexed his muscles. Sara had never held a gun before but wanted to. She had the image in mind of one of the policemen who’d run in to attack her brother. He was thin, young, and white. He was probably only a few years older than she was, and he wore a blue uniform.

  “I didn’t think that would work,” Damien said to no one. “I didn’t think I could shoot through handcuffs. Shit.”

  “What’re you saying?” Mike asked Sara gently.

  They all leaned in to listen to her, but maybe they were crazy or all the sirens or yelling down the street or the smoke was making them hear things. She wasn’t saying anything.

  “What are those, numbers?” Mike was saying.

  Sara realized she was actually talking.

  “Three eighty three Stuyvesant,” she said, “422 Macon, 371a MacDonaugh, Celestino and Saraghina restaurants, Café George-Andre. Three eighty three Stuyvesant . . .”

  Chapter 20

  Jupiter’s phone was blowing up. Texts and calls from his friends telling him that he had to come down to the school; to the Utica subway station just to check it out; that he couldn’t miss what was going down; to lock up his home; to get people over to his home to help protect it; to get down to the plumbing supply place to help put out the fire. Everyone was asking for his help providing muscle or reinforcements or advice.

  Jupiter sipped his coffee. Took a bite of cake. He hadn’t heard anything from his son. That’s what worried him. So he excused himself and went out to the front stoop to call his son’s cell while Antoinette diapered the baby. He told Antoinette not to worry, but things were hectic at work. That was why he was getting so many calls. Clients. It was a busy season for overworked electrical panels, heading into fall.

  Jupiter didn’t have anyone other than his son. And his friends. And the people on the block he tried to look after. But friends and folks on the block came and went by the decade—family was what mattered, and his only family was his son, and his son wasn’t picking up his phone, so there was no use leaving this house to go after him. Derek had long stopped enabling the Find My Friends app on his phone, so there was no way to track him down. He could be in the middle of it. Jupiter didn’t doubt he was.

  Jupiter had already taken all the precautions before leaving that morning. He’d locked his doors and windows. Boarded up his downstairs windows before sprinkling the final cocoa powder onto the flourless chocolate cake. His house was even more of a fortress than usual. He texted his son, told him where he’d be. Instructed him not to come home. To go instead to his cousin’s place in Brownsville where the nonsense wouldn’t reach. Derek had always defended the police, so Jupiter hadn’t felt the need to lecture him on respect, permission, submission. He wished he had, now. Jupiter couldn’t remember the moment when his curly-haired boy with eyes as big as cherries and a smile that lit up the neighborhood went from being considered adorable and harmless to a menace to society. Jupiter’s own father had made it simple: Yes, sir; sorry, sir; thank you, officer. No other words should ever come out of your mouth in front of one of them. But Jupiter hadn’t wanted to teach his son that lesson.

  From the front stoop, Jupiter could hear the streets south by the park, school, and projects loud with shouting and gunfire. Guns must have been pouring out of the projects. All those guns that all those stop-and-frisks had made sure never found their way outside before. Guns that Bloomberg had made it his business to stop coming into New York. They’d always been there. And now they were out in the open. Guns from Virginia and New Mexico. Jupiter heard them in the streets. All it took was an occasion and no fear of the stop-and-frisk brigade.

  As a younger man, Jupiter would have wanted to be in the middle of it. Seeing who was where doing what. This would be the most important day in most of their lives. (He heard the crack of gunfire, then silence, then gunfire.) Who took what anger out on what cops, on what kids from the block they’d always hated, and then what, with what weapons, what adrenaline . . . this was going to define some of these kids’ lives. Some would get killed. Others would kill. Reputations would be made. Men would spend the rest of their lives in jail because of this one day. And though he couldn’t see through trees two blocks down, he saw a half dozen groups of five or six kids each already spreading out doing damage with baseball bats and what looked like shards of broken off traffic signs. They were laughing and ringing doorbells at the nicer houses, throwing bricks through stained-glass windows. They were the cops now. Like that movie: “I am the captain now.” They were seeing what homes didn’t have bars on the windows. Flat-screens were coming out through doors. Bags of groceries. Computers. Football and basketball jerseys. Car alarms were going off. Trunks smashed to loot. It was difficult to riot on residential streets—the process went slowly—but these kids were giving it their best. They were laughing, pushing each other into tree beds, making each other flinch, seeing what they could get away with. One or two younger kids, maybe ten or eleven years old, were standing lookout, but no cops were coming. The sirens were all on the other side of the park along with the fires and guns.

  So at that moment, the place Jupiter most wanted to be was looking after Antoinette. He pocketed his phone, locked up. Back inside he heard sirens and car alarms, but there were often sirens in the neighborhood. Probably because all the windows in the house were closed and the air-conditioning units were going at full blast, the sirens were muted, and there was no smell of smoke. There was no street noise, no gunshots.

  “Everything okay?” Antoinette asked.

  “You’re beautiful,” Jupiter said.

  “Don’t go talking like that,” Antoinette said.

  “I mean it,” Jupiter said. “I know your lady upstairs would prefer I not be here. But I want to be here, because I think you’re beautiful.”

  Jupiter looked at Antoinette in a way that tried to get her to understand he meant what he was saying even though they’d never even touched each other’s hand for longer than it took to pass along a plate or cup of coffee.

  “Is everything okay at work?” Antoinette said.

  “It’s chaos,” Jupiter said. “But it’s okay.”

  The doorbell rang—

  “Don’t answer it,” Jupiter said.

  “What do you mean, ‘Don’t answer it’? It’s part of my job to answer it. It’s probably diapers for Simon. We’re running out of diapers. Amazon Prime.”

  “It’s dangerous out there.”

  It rang again—

  “Dangerous? Here, take Simon,” Antoinette said. “Simon says. He’ll be asleep in a few moments anyway. Just finished his bottle. You’ll like having a baby sleep in your arms. Oh, what am I talking about? You know what it’s like. You remember.”

  “I’ll answer it,” Jupiter said. He boosted Simon up so the baby’s head was nuzzling against his neck.

  “Okay, okay,” Antoinette said. “I’ll hold on to the baby. You get the door. Give me the baby back. Simon. Simon says. Simon Simon. But go get the door before the UPS man leaves.
Simon says. With the amount Aaron and Amelia do Amazon Prime, the UPS man, the Postal Service man—they come all day. And Aaron gets angry when he has to spend a Saturday waiting in line for his packages at the post office.”

  Jupiter handed Simon to Antoinette.

  The doorbell rang again—

  Jupiter took a deep breath. He crossed past the fireplace in the small, unfurnished room that all these old homes had between the dining room and the parlor. The fireplaces were all tiled in the same green field tile he had in his place.

  Jupiter crossed past the same six-inch angels carved in dark wood above the mirror, and the same ten-inch griffins below. He rarely noticed them in his own house, but it was jarring to see these creatures in someone else’s. They were angry. What craftsman decided to carve gargoyles into wood at the base of a mirror inside a row of people’s homes? Jupiter had refinished his, but somehow Aaron’s looked just as good. Aaron must have paid someone well to do his.

  The doorbell rang again, this time alongside a banging on the door.

  Jupiter could see through the window in the decorative wooden foyer door and then through the heavy glass and metal front door. He saw four or five black kids in their teens or twenties. One of them had what looked to be a piece of broken-off metal—the type that held up street signs. They seemed like kids he could control. Kids Derek’s age.

  They pounded on the door and rang the doorbell. One kid lifted a brick over his head and was about to bring it forward against the glass door. Jupiter raised his hands to indicate he was coming and they should calm down. The kid slumped back. Jupiter had the same door on his house. It was elegant but basically bulletproof. In the bad old days, a stray bullet once clipped his door at an angle and only chipped off a nub of glass. He doubted the brick would scratch it. But he didn’t want Antoinette scared.

  Jupiter put on as wide a smile as his face could accommodate. But why answer it? These doors were tough. They were safe inside. And nothing was less predicable than a pack of teenage boys.

  Which was when Amelia came traipsing down the stairs. “I’ll get it,” she said. “Who is it? Why hasn’t anyone answered the door?”

  “I got it,” Jupiter said.

  “Oh, is Antoinette busy? I’ll get it,” Amelia said. “It’s my house.”

  But then she saw the boys and the brick and the metal pole. She saw Simon asleep past the parlor, past the dining room, in the television room, in Antoinette’s arms.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “Something in the neighborhood? Protests? My Internet’s been off. I turned it off. I turned my phone off, too.”

  “I got it,” Jupiter said.

  “It’s my house,” Amelia said.

  “Better to leave the door closed I think,” Jupiter said.

  “I don’t want them to break anything,” Amelia said. “We’re two adults.”

  “Please,” Jupiter said. “Do me a favor and let the kids get bored here and go on to the next house.”

  “Please,” she said, ending the conversation.

  She opened the inner wooden decorative door wide, and then she opened the heavy glass and metal door to the street.

  Chapter 21

  Aaron splashed water in his face in the crummy Belmont bathroom. A five-grand loss was okay. It was the beginning of the day. There were more races ahead of him, and he’d been right about that horse. She had placed. He had bet her to win. But he still had it. First race in, he’d chosen a horse out of nowhere and nearly began the day thirty-five grand richer. Not bad. Could have been worse. Could have bet more. Could have bet Simon’s entire college fund, is how Amelia would have put it.

  Simon would be napping. Amelia working on Jonah Hill. Aaron washed his disgusting face in this disgusting sink. But that wasn’t true. Aaron still felt good. He still had time for a half dozen more races, and he’d win it back no problem. He liked the fifth race a lot. A lot more even than he’d liked the third. And he had nearly won the third. He felt good. He felt strong. Like after working out. Installing the workout room on the office floor had been his current psychologist’s idea—one of the ideas, anyway—for something to do when he felt like heading to the track.

  Because he liked this feeling too much. He didn’t even really feel the shame he was supposed to feel after he lost. When he lost, he just felt ready to go back to work. To earn back the money. His psychologist said that was because his work was just another form of gambling and that he really should quit his job, too. Aaron said he liked his job for the first time in his life. He was good at it. And how many people could say that?

  At work they sent around this scene of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the documentary Pumping Iron. Arnold must have been twenty-five years old when it was filmed, with long, floppy hair, giant white teeth, and fingers like sausages.

  He is sitting on an old oversized comfy armchair that somehow looks very large but is still much too small for Arnold. He is wearing a polo shirt that looks humungous but again, on him, is far too small. It is cream colored with green and red wide horizontal stripes and a thick red collar, and he is sitting in front of a giant, floppy plant.

  In his Arnold voice, he says, smiling between each sentence as though he is making one great point after another, “Lifting, pumping . . . It is as satisfying to me as coming is, you know? As having sex with a woman and coming. And so can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am getting the feeling of coming in a gym, I’m getting the feeling of coming at home, I’m getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up, when I pose in front of five thousand people, I get the same feeling, so I am coming day and night. I mean, it’s terrific. Right? So you know, I am in heaven.”

  Arnold is so excited about what he is talking about he pauses between each sentence and smiles as though to give the viewer time to compliment his latest best idea. He’s a puppy, or a little boy seeking approval, but he’s a giant, talking about coming.

  At work they laughed about how this man could have been the chief executive of a state of thirty-eight million people, but in the Belmont bathroom, Aaron thought about how this was exactly the man who should lead other men. This giant who felt good all the time. This man who felt good out in front of others. For whom sex and performance and physicality were intermingled. Who was able to talk about sex as though it was as easy as lifting weights. Who was able to lift real weight. Who had sex all the time at home as though it wasn’t a big deal. The only time Aaron felt like this was when he’d played tennis as a kid, or was asked out for that girl by her friend, or was with Amelia in the beginning and sometimes still, but mostly when he was at the racetrack. And he was at the racetrack now, so he should try to enjoy it.

  The people in his office pretended to watch the clip on YouTube to mock Arnold, but they were attracted to the confident, cuddly, boyish, sexual, charismatic, glowing giant with sausage fingers who worked so hard for his muscles to be stronger than any other man’s muscles in the world. Sure, he used steroids, but so did everyone else. He was the biggest, floppiest, friendliest cheater in the world. Usually, Aaron couldn’t understand how the two of them could both be men, he and Arnold. But he’d felt a bit like Arnold when he’d first arrived in his Belmont seat.

  He dried his face and hands on thin brown paper towels and started back to his row, vowing not to let Oranges ruin his day.

  He wasn’t betting the fourth, so he took the long walk back. He bought a lemonade and, returning Aaron’s change, the vendor said, “Good luck and Godspeed.”

  Aaron considered allowing himself to ask for God’s assistance once—a single time—on one of the races over the course of the rest of the day.

  Once, he could turn back to a God who didn’t exist.

  • • •

  Aaron was an atheist. Amelia was an agnostic leaning toward a skeptical faith in something larger than nothing, but she wasn’t particularly bothered by whether that something larger was just an extra-animal consciousness or a consciousness infused by a greater spirit that was an
other word for God. “And furthermore,” she said the night they closed on their house on Stuyvesant Avenue and moved in with a mattress, sheets, bread, beer, stereo, and bottle of champagne, “if that consciousness infused by a greater spirit was systematized to be articulated with a vocabulary of Jewish ritual and tradition that worked for my mother and my mother’s mother’s mothers for hundreds of generations, why not keep it going? Especially when I like lighting Hanukkah candles and eating matzo on Passover.”

  They were drunk, still high off cementing their winning bid on the house, and they couldn’t believe that all this was theirs. “My God!” Amelia kept saying. “My God! We pulled it off! We’ve done it! My God! My God! My God! Look at this place. Look at what we own!”

  Until Aaron finally said, “It isn’t God! It’s you, it’s us!”

  And Amelia said, “So tell me. Did you never believe? All those years? I don’t believe you! What do you think of that? I think you are so disappointed and embarrassed by what happened that you are a revisionist historian who is now claiming that you never believed. Like after a girl broke up with you, saying you never liked her anyway. You spent all those years studying and working and you never believed in any of it? I don’t believe you.”

  Aaron wanted to argue back, and he wanted to cry with gratitude. Of course he had doubted, but of course he had wanted to believe, and of course he was turning his back against the whole thing now. But still—what was the point of calling him out on it now?

  “No,” Aaron said. “Never.”

  “Then how did you spend all those years dedicating your life to it?” Amelia said. “I mean, before it became impossible?”

  “I don’t think any of them believe,” Aaron said, drinking champagne out of the bottle. “I don’t think anyone believed. Anyone in my class at rabbinical school. Anyone who came to Torah study. People acted like they did. But come on. You’ve read the Bible. It’s crazy! And after Hitler, it’s impossible. After you read enough history and Wiesel and Levi and Delbo and Beer and the rest of them, it’s impossible to believe. Maybe before, but not since.