can’t see her—and says, “They apparently want to drive the crowd back far enough—they’ve got to get the teacher—Estevez, we’re told is his name—he teaches civics—they’ve got to get him out of the building and into a police van and place him in a detention—”
“Estevez!” Lantier said to Ghislaine in French. “Civics class—that’s Philippe’s teacher!”
“—but won’t say where. Their big concern right now is security. The students were dismissed just about an hour ago. Classes are suspended for the day. But this crowd of students—they refuse to leave the school grounds, and this is an old building that was not built thinking about security. Police are afraid students will try to reenter the building, and that’s where Estevez is being held.”
Lantier said, “Good luck getting him out of there! The police can’t hold back a mob of kids like that but so long!”
“Papa,” said Ghislaine, “this is a re-broadcast! All this happened five or six hours ago, it must be.”
“Ahhh… yes,” said Lantier. “That’s true, that’s true…” He stared directly at Ghislaine. “But Philippe didn’t say anything about… any of this!” Before Ghislaine could respond, the TV voice rose… “I think they’re gonna try to bring him out now. That small door there, at ground level—it’s opening!”
The camera zoomed in… looked like a utility door. As it opened it created a small shadow on the concrete surface… Out came a police officer looking this way and that. Then two more… and two more… and yet two more… then three came squeezing out of the little—no, they were not three policemen but two policemen gripping the upper arms of a burly, balding, light-skinned man with his hands behind his back, apparently handcuffed together. Even though the hair on his pate was getting scarce, he must not have been more than thirty-five. He walked with his chin high but was blinking at a terrific rate. His chest bulged out against a white shirt whose shirttails seemed to be hanging outside his pants.
“That’s who it is!” said the TV voice. “That’s the teacher, José Estevez! A civics teacher at Lee de Forest High School. He’s now under arrest for punching a student in front of an entire class and then dragging him to the floor, we’re told, and all but paralyzing him with some sort of neck hold. The police have closed in around him in a sort of—uh-uhhh—phalanx to protect him until they can get him inside the police van.”
—a squall of yowls and howls and gullet-ripping epithets—
“They’ve figured out that’s him, Estevez, the teacher who assaulted one of their schoolmates about two hours ago!”
“What is that shirt?” says Lantier, in French.
The teacher and his army of cop bodyguards are pulling nearer and nearer to the camera.
Ghislaine answers in French, “Looks like a guayabera to me. A Cuban shirt.”
The TV voice: “They’ve almost reached the van… you can see right there. The riot police have done an amazing job, holding back this big and very angry crowd of students—”
Lantier looks Ghislaine squarely in the face again and says, “Philippe comes home from school, from the same classroom where all this happens, an army of cops occupies the schoolyard, and there’s a mob of his own schoolmates ready to hang his teacher from a tree if they can lay hands on him—and Philippe doesn’t want to talk about it, and his Neg pal Antoine doesn’t want to talk about it? If that had been me, I’d still be talking about it after all these years! What’s going on with Philippe? Do you have any idea at all?”
Ghislaine shook her head and said, “No, Papa… none at all.”
7
The Mattress
::::::Do I exist?… If so, where?… Oh, man, I don’t live… anywhere… I don’t belong anywhere… I’m not even one of “my people” anymore, am I.::::::
Nestor Camacho—remember him?—was evaporating, disintegrating, coming apart—meat from bone, turning into Jell-O with a beating heart, sinking back into the primordial ooze.
Never before could he have possibly imagined himself attached to… nothing. Who could? Not until this moment, just after midnight, as he emerged from the locker room of the Marine Patrol marina and started walking to the parking lot—
Officer Camacho!
… and now he was hearing things. Nobody but cops coming off the shift were out here at the midnight hour, and no cop was going to call him “Officer,” unless it was a joke. Himself alone, on a too warm, too sticky, too soupy, too sweaty, too dimly lit dusky September night in Miami… had he ever had the faintest