Trip Wire_ A Cook County Mystery - Charlotte Carter [2]
And then there was the convention, Chicago’s local sideshow that turned into a world event and made Richard J. Daley a bigger star than Jane Fonda.
But I had my own list of upheavals, events in my personal life that shook me down to my shoes, things that were changing me, shaping me, making me for better or worse into someone else—
—Number one, I’d been witness to an ugly murder, and very nearly a second victim. Woody’s nephew had been knifed in the old neighborhood, just minutes from my grandmother’s Forest Street house, and I had watched him die.
—Then, too, a beloved friend had disappeared on me, doing nothing less than altering the course of my life along with his.
—Another change revolved around loss, too, but it had nothing to do with war or death. Quite the opposite. Contrary to my long-held belief that I’d go to my grave without ever getting laid, I finally did. A fellow named Melvin had deflowered me under some pretty harrowing circumstances. But that didn’t stop me from loving it.
Melvin was long gone. But openhearted, decent, handsome, ironic Wilton Mobley truly liked and understood me, wanted to be my friend. The feeling was ever so mutual. When he invited me to move in, it looked as though I’d fallen into a honeypot. It just seemed natural that Wilt and I, two Afro-American freaks, would get together, maybe even build some kind of life that would outlast our time at the commune.
My luck is strange, though. I have this giveth-and-taketh-away thing going with the gods. Wilton never became my lover. Instead he was devoted to a lissome white girl named Mia, whose complexion was something out of a Vermeer and whose disposition and heart were so lovely, you almost expected to see sparrows tweeting in formation around her head. Mia Boone was the mothering, pie-baking, herb-gardening, homemade-soap, meat’s-no-good-for-you, mantra-chanting, candle-burning heart of the commune, and she and Wilton were so much in love it made me feel dirty to imagine either of them with another partner.
As I was doing most days as of late, I had blown off my classes, telling myself I’d read like crazy long into the night and be caught up with everything by the end of the week. And for the nonce, I was whiling away the afternoon with Wilton, smoking his excellent weed. The new heater was doing its thing and we were doing ours.
Then, through my laughter, I heard Mia call from the kitchen, “Lunch, guys!”
At the sound of her voice, Wilton’s ears pricked up like a devoted Great Dane hearing his master’s step on the gravel path.
“You better get a move on, Wretched, or there won’t be any delicious vegetarian tacos left,” I said.
I started calling him Wretched because it was taking him so goddamn long to finish reading Fanon’s book. The dog-eared paperback had been gathering dust on the TV table for months. After a while, he began calling me Wretched, too. It was a bit of conspiratorial silliness. But I took a childish thrill in the easy, telegraphic way Wilt and I communicated. I knew it probably made the others feel excluded sometimes. And I knew it wasn’t worthy of me. But it was fun.
I heard a child’s voice out in the hallway, too. It belonged to little Jordan. Who rarely missed a meal at our place. The ten-year-old son of a junkie couple up the block, he spent the bulk of his time in our apartment. In the journal I was keeping the first few weeks I lived here, I referred to him as the feral boy. That sounds snotty and heartless. I didn’t mean it that way at all. I actually kind of like the boy, and God knows I feel sorry for him. But until I got to know him a little better, I was almost afraid he would bite me if I approached him. That’s how bizarre he was.
Jordan