talking about? Midnight. Christmas Eve. A black man. A white man. Grim reaper. Victim. When it started out you saw race. America taught you that race was always there. Race was as obvious as the weather. And harder than traffic on the 405.
Wood-paneled office. Picture of him and Lisa smiling at me.
Images of his ancestors and children on his walls.
Momma, barely dead.
I walked in that office and saw a drunken man who had been destroyed from the inside out. A pint of rum was on his desk, most of that gone. He was alone, but it looked like he was waiting for somebody.
He slurred, “What can I do for you?”
I asked, “Jason Wolf?”
“Jason Wolf is dead.”
“Who are you?”
“Jason Wolf, that’s my father’s name. I’m Jason Wolf, Jr.”
He sat back when he said that, stared at all the pictures around him. He was drunk, but he was calm. Death had walked in his door and the man sat back and sipped his rum.
He said, “My family, they keep an eye on me.”
I nodded. My momma had just died. No one to watch over me.
He offered, “Drink?”
I saw that amber-colored liquid and it was like he was offering me another memory. I shook my head. Thought he was doing that to fuck with me. He didn’t know my past pains. He seemed so small, so damn harmless. Not like a man who needed to be in the ground.
I said, “These your people?”
Wolf told me about his people, first his grandparents, then his parents, how they admired the politically correct in this country, the ones who went against social mores and allowed black people to eat in their homes. He’d come from a land that never had a black man as a slave. I couldn’t hold him accountable for what other people had done. We talked about history. About places like Philadelphia, Mississippi, about the Choctaw Nation, places where my people had come from. We talked about injustice. Civil rights being violated by the enemies of peace.
He was three sheets to the wind. Depressed. Talkative. A man with burdens.
A man had appeared in his office and he didn’t care.
I had hesitated. Had stood here with a gun ready to be pulled out, and hesitated.
People talked when they didn’t want to kill. Did the same when they didn’t want to die.
In the end he said, “You ever need a job, come talk to me.”
“Just letting you know, I have a felony.”
“It’s my company. I hire who I want to hire.”
That sounded better than the fifteen large I had waiting for me at home.
Other things were said. A lot of it I couldn’t remember.
Momma had died. Her body hadn’t turned cold yet. I didn’t want to deal with that.
Life was a fog. Couldn’t see past the next bend in the road.
Wolf looked up at me, his eyes deep red, bloodied.
He said, “Prison, huh?”
I nodded. Right then I was going to reach for my gun, end this business transaction.
Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. I’d broken most, if not all, of the last half of the rules etched in the Decalogue. Thou shalt not kill was still up for grabs.
He struggled to clear his throat, ran his hand over his hair. It was down, not in that smooth ponytail. In the voice of a dying man he said, “Tell me about your prison.”
My prison.
He said that and aroused fragments of memory. Sounds went away and I heard the batons raking against the prison bars. Anger and fear and blood in every wall. The faces. Old. Young. The innocent and guilty were all guilty. Faces lined in fear. Faces lined in hate. Some adjusted to being prisoners the same way some of our ancestors had adjusted to being slaves, not out of weakness but out of self-preservation. You either adapted or you died a horrible death.
I said, “Prison is corrosive. What it doesn’t corrode it swallows up.”
“Love does the same thing. Did you know that?”
Other things were said, his confession to having an affair, then his analogy about a woman never forgiving a man being in the middle of his rambling conversation. Think the man needed somebody to talk to. His money couldn’t buy away the burden on his shoulders.
Not long after one in the morning my cellular phone rang.
I answered without looking at the caller-ID.
No hello on her end. Lisa simply asked, “You get my Christmas present?”