T r u e L i e s
(Click Cover to Order)
By
Margaret Johnson-Hodge
Copyrighted by Margaret Johnson-Hodge. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt
During the day Leonardo’s Coffee House on Sutphin Boulevard was a pit stop for lawyers, judges and everyday people who had business at the courthouse down the street. Night time drew a different type of clientele: women who plied their trade in the cover of darkness, the homeless who had scrounged up enough change for a cold soft drink against the humid summer night.
There were the bleary-eye workers who had put in that extra shift, cleaning women with swollen ankles and stiff ashy hands. The eatery held it’s share of club hoppers gathered in huddles, the excitement of the night ahead, surrounding them like acoustic confetti.
All people just trying to get from Point A to Point B, Dajah found herself one of them as she sat at the counter. The bell over the door jingled, drawing her attention. City, was her first thought, taking in the white shirt, the assemble of patches on the arm.
Law enforcement, her second as the holstered gun glided into her line of vision.
She saw the body tight and fit beneath the long sleeve white shirt, the way the belt gathered around the slim waist. Dajah caught the fine rise of behind inside the dark blue slacks, the snug fit of the belt, as he moved by.
Not a cop, she was thinking, as he settled on the stool next to her. A knee bumping her leg. Her head turned anticipating apology. It came with eyes, that despite a weariness, shone with such intensity they looked back lit.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, looking away. “Hey Joe, let me get a root beer and a burger rare.” The voice did not go with the body, one that suggested power and depth. The tone that left him was soft and tender, gentle as a Maxwell ballad.
His knee hit her leg a second time, but he was lost to some other place. Dajah shifted on the stool, took up her cup of ice and soda, sips through the straw bringing a gurgling sound. Empty. She looked down at her plate, no food there either.
It was time to go.
A glance at her watch said it was past midnight. Eyes towards the window told her she was eight miles from home. For the first time since she’d left the subway fear claimed her as the knee made contact a third time.
“You want me to move over?”
“What?”
“I said do you want me to move over.” She pointed to the space between them, his knee flushed against her thigh. “Your knee keeps on touching me.”
“Sorry. Rough shift.” He drew it away.
“Shift?”
But he didn’t seem to hear, his eyes drifting off. Dajah looked into her empty glass, felt the awaiting darkness. A tingle of anxiety tap danced her spine, settled as she eased off the stool, adjusted her pocketbook, tugged at the hem of her suddenly too tight, too short blouse.
Then she was out of things to adjust and her next breath became the too revealing blouse, the anticipatory darkness and her fear. She forced her mouth open. “Not NYPD, right?” The City of New York had a slew of law enforcers, everything from the Fire Department down to The Department of Sanitation. And though the arm patch would tell her, it was on the other side.
“No.”
“What then?”
“Corrections.”
She nodded, looked out towards the glass windows. He followed her gaze, felt something in her. Asked where she was headed.
“Home.”
“Where’s home?”
She laughed, a fragile sound that revealed her fears. “About eight miles from here.”
“Driving?”
She shook her head no.
“Bussing it?"
“Kinda.”
His expression changed from concern to disappointment. “Kinda late in the night for you not to be knowing how you’re getting home?”
“The train went out of service, so I ended up here.”
“Where you headed?”
“A hundred and sixty-ninth.”
“You‘re walking?”
“Bus probably.”
“Blue bus?”
“Yeah.”
“Want company?”
“Aren’t you on duty?”
“Doing a double. Have to take the bus back to Riker’s.”
“Island?”
“Yeah. Where I work.”
Riker’s Island, a major penitentiary for the best and worst of New York felons. Criminals big and small were sent there. Dajah had never been there, but she had friends with family members who had.
“So, you want that escort?”
He was a stranger, but he was of the law. Better to have him with her as she waited than not. “That would be great.”
He leaned towards the counter, “Joe. Hold that order,” eased off the stool. Pointed towards the door. “Let’s go.”
They hit the sidewalk, heading towards the closed HSBC Bank, the lawless scattering in the approach of the law.
Dajah laughed, a sound only half bent on being shared. “You have them scrambling.”
“They need to.”
“I’m Dajah,” she offered as they by passed the subway entrance.
“Rick.”
“As in James?”
A smile came, the first since they’d met. “Yeah. See my Jherri Curl and guitar?” He studied her. “What you doing out here anyway?”
“I came from a concert in the city. The train went out of service at Sutphin. I didn’t feel like standing down there waiting for another one.” She lied a little. “So I came up to get a bite to eat.”
“All by your lonesome?”
“I’m a big girl.”
“That much I can see, still, kind of uncool to be taking mass transit by yourself this time of night. Where’s your car?”
Who said she had one? But Dajah took that thought back. Most woman her age living in the borough of Queens did. “I left it home. I’m one of those fools who still enjoys the subway.”
“So you went all the way to Manhattan by mass transit and you have a ride at home?”
“Yeah.”
“Takes all kinds.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the subway.”
“Tell that to the victims.”
They reached the bus stop. Not another soul there. “You’re the first C.O. I’ve ever seen running around in uniform without some prisoner hitched to their wrist.”
“Suppose to have been a straight run, but I got hungry. I’m doing a double. On ‘til eight.”
“In the morning?’
“Something like that.”
“Night shift?”
“Just for today. Normally I work the four to midnight…overtime.”
A bus turned the corner. It was the right color, but the wrong number. Rick looked at his watch. “Should be here soon.”
They waited, red lights going to green, fast cars zipping by tossing out loud flashes of too much bass and the lyrics lost to them. They stood, silent, and separate, eyes from each other. Affected.
“I thought you were somebody else at first.”
She was glad to hear him break in the silence, she feared it would go on forever.
“Who?”
He shrugged. “Not important.”
“We look that much alike?”
“Same shape face, same height, same shape. Hair’s different, eyes not quite the same, but yeah, you look like her.”
“Her got a name?’
“Not important.”
She felt him draw back and instantly regretted her words.
Four minutes passed, the bus nowhere in sight. Rick looked at his watch again. “I’m going to have to get back.” Dajah sensed that. She knew that he could not stand there with her forever. She appreciated the time he had spent with her so far.
He unclipped a portable canister of mace from his belt, handed it to her. “Anybody ask, you found it.”
“Don’t you need it?”
Rick shrugged. “I can get another one.”
“I can give it back…tomorrow or something.”
His brow raised. “Or something?”
“Yeah. I mean, I probably won’t even use it and what’s the sense of buying another one.”
There was something in her eyes, something that said it was about more than the mace, or, could be. Time bent the law of physics, one second becoming ten as Rick took his time in responding “There’s something you have to know.”
“What?”
“Besides not wanting to see anything happen to a fine sister like you, and liking very much what I’m seeing, my life, where I’m at is complicated.”
“Like how?”
Rick looked off, shifting the fit of his hat back off his forehead. He looked back at her, needing her to fully understand. “My situation…got a daughter, four. Her name’s Kanisha and I love her. She’s my heart. Nobody comes before she does. Me and Kanisha’s mother? Complicated.”
“Together or apart?”
“Both.”
She nodded, heart fluttering.
“So if you still want me to come over and get the can of mace tomorrow I’d be more than willing to. If you don’t, I understand.”
Dajah looked at the canister held so many times the lettering had worn off. Looked back at Rick, a super hero to her night of misfortune. Searched her bag for scrap paper. Asked to borrow his pen.
“You sure?”
“I’m not offering twice.”
Rick slipped the pen out of his shirt pocket, eyes drawn to the butternut brown face, the shoulder length braids. He appreciated the mouth painted in shades of sienna and gold, the cheekbones that suggested Native American heritage.
Pretty and bubbly, that’s how she looked, like the letters and numbers she wrote on the scrap paper. “I get off at eight in the A.M. I can be there around quarter to nine, too early?”
“I’ll be up.”
“Tomorrow then.”
Dajah nodded.
“Be safe,” he offered, prayer soft, turning and head up the street. Dajah watched until he disappeared around the corner of the bank. Clutching her mace like a precious gem, she kept her watch on the corner, relief filling her as her bus lumbered out of the darkness.
* * *
The canister of mace lay on Dajah’s night table, in the space between her lamp and her alarm clock. She had stared at it for a good five minutes before she forced herself to roll over, get comfortable, and tried to go to sleep.
It was trouble, everything in her gut was saying so. She was just trying to make lemonade without the benefit of sugar or water. Rick was involved and that was not a game Dajah played.
Dajah didn’t share — an affirmation she had had since the age of thirteen when her father told her she didn’t. Thirteen, when her first real maybe-I can-go-with-you crush on a boy arrived and he asked her out and four days later she spotted him with a lanky arm around somebody else.
It wasn’t always easy to adhere to that rule and moments came when she wasn’t willing to do the foot work, but not even the dazzling eyed, muscled bound, five inches taller than me Rick could make her.
So he could come and get his canister. She wouldn’t even let him inside. She would make him stand in the hallway when she handed it over. Send him on his way.
This is what Dajah decided by the time her doorbell rang the next morning. This was what rode her brain, her breath and her heart as she swung open the downstairs door, testy and decisive. But when she caught sight of him, it all slipped away, vanishing like a magician’s trick.
Injured.
It was the only word that came to her as she took in the man she had known for less than twenty-four hours seeing the dirt-smeared shirt, a nasty nick on his cheek. Those eyes, haunted and glazed.
“You okay?”
Rick nodded, brought his hands to his face. He worked the flesh with his fingers, as if to rub away old skin. Looked up at her, a brief explanation leaving him. “A fight.”
“A fight?”
“Yeah, in cell block Nine. We almost lost one.”
Nine words so heavy with danger Dajah had to swallow hard just to digest them. Nine words so impacting she forgot she wasn’t suppose to care.
“You almost lost one?” she managed, closing the front door.
“Yeah, a CO. The prisoners nearly got him.” His whole body shuddered, fresh with the memory. He looked beyond her, up the stairs, in need of comfort, any kind he could get. She followed his gaze, debated with herself. Nodded her head. Told him
“Come on up.”
They took the stairs, Dajah in the lead, Rick behind her. She opened the door and he moved through it, taking refuge on her thick lush sofa. She had no plans on sitting next to him, no plans on invading his tempered private space. But in a heartbeat she was there beside him. Close.
“One time I needed my mace,” his voice fell off, heavy, leaden.
She eyed the canister still in her hand. “You gave it-,”
“Yeah, to you.”
“Rick I am so sorry.”
“Not your fault. That’s how life goes, right?”
She wanted to tell him no but everything about him said he was all ready a full fledge convert. She waited for more words to come but he was tucked away somewhere so she sat there, eyes on her large Charles Bibb reprint, feeling him.
The lithograph reminded her of who she was, and all that she wanted to become. The woman, drawn large, looming, loving, had become a visual mantra. I am fierce, I am strong, yet tender. I am the love that has set the world in motion, the love that can never be denied.
This is what the painting reaffirmed in her as Rick huddled in his silence. She wasn’t certain how much longer he would stay that way but opened herself to the intensity of his presence.
The air shifted, broke up, scattered. Rick came back, tilted his neck, unloosening a kink. “I’m all right.” He looked around him, the horror, once real, fading as his reason for coming arrived. “My mace?”
She handed it over. Watched as he hooked it onto his belt. His eyes suggested secrets as they found hers, as he uttered, “Guess that’s that.”
She felt it then, the tender soul harbored beneath the sullied uniform. Felt as if she had just climbed into his heart and was drawn to all that she’d found. He was a good guy, a bona fide do-right man. She found herself wishing they had met sooner.
She wanted him to stay, but she couldn’t ask because share wasn’t a part of her game plan. Still an option left her, words she’d never spoken or considered. “If you’re ever free…”
Rick nodded and headed back down the stairs.
* * *
If I’m ever free?
Had he ever been? Wasn’t there always some chaining, some claiming, something holding him back, keeping him tethered? Even as a child he had been in servitude to his parents. High school and Bridget had only added more shackles. Free? Rick could not even begin to comprehend what it would feel like.
He could feel Dajah though, feel her as he walked down the stone pathway and opened the gate. He could smell her, a mixture of hair oils and perspiration as he got into his car.
It was more than her looking like the first woman to ever own her heart, more than her street savvy, the apartment kept neat and straight. It went beyond the desire he sensed from her, the unspoken reluctance at seeing him go.
She was his equal.
About the same age, no doubt the same level of education, he could tell it in the way she said things, the expressions that elongated her face. Rick could tell by the empathy that poured from her like rain on a summer day.
Intuitiveness. Rick had never realized the importance of it, had never respected the merit of it until five minutes ago. He hadn’t understood that Gina lacked it until Dajah showed him it existed and it took a certain type of person to possess it.
Had he ever felt that with Gina?
Rick tried to remember. Tried to find one moment in their lives where Gina knew him without him saying a word. In the beginning she had. The day they’d met in the park, she had possessed the same canny insight but that had been too long ago to count.
Lately any concern or consideration she gave was affixed to some personal need, like fifty dollars to get her hair done or going to another party without him.
Gina had become a planet onto herself, rotating in a personal orbit, oblivious to everything else. But Dajah was different. She came off like the moon and the stars, a visible comfort but just too far, in that moment, to reach.
* * *
The next night Rick pulled his Navigator into the metered space, unable to believe his luck. Normally he had to park as far as two blocks away, but there was a spot right in front of his building.
After midnight, in a few hours he would have to start feeding the meter quarters, but that was the price he had been willing to pay to live here. He used to have a love affair with the apartment building he called home, but the residents had gone from good to not so good and the same young men he had seen locked up in Riker’s often crossed his path as he came and went.
Day to day, hour to hour, he never knew if Gina was going to be there or if she decided it was time to go. This night was no different as he left himself into his apartment.
“Gina?”
He clicked on the hallway light dispelling the darkness. He tried to sense subtle changes as he made his way through. He poked his head into the kitchen and saw dishes in the sink. Dirty dishes meant Gina had been there to eat. And if she took time to cook, perhaps she was still around.
Rick moved to the living room, saw his daughter’s collection of Power Puff dolls on the floor. Going to the first bedroom, he stuck his head in. There before him looking like a true gift from God lay his daughter Kanisha, fast asleep and more beautiful than any angel conceived.
Rick closed the door, headed to his bedroom. Found Gina, clothes on, fast asleep across the bed. Quietly he took off his clothes, shaking her, telling her to get in. She sat up, eyes dazed, blinking a few times.
“‘time is it?”’
“Quarter to one.”
She scratched at a lay of weave against the back of her head with a long acrylic nail, smacked her lips and squinted. “Damn.” Standing, she dragged herself to the mirror, unhappy with the sight. Straggling off to the bathroom, she closed the door hard.
Gina came back, still more sleepy than awake, but her hair was fixed, her clothes rearranged and Cool Water filled the space about her. “You got a twenty?”
In truth he had it and a lot more, but he did not want her going out tonight. He was looking forward to having her beside him. “One o’clock in the morning Gina.”
“And? Look, I’m already late. You got a twenty?”
He took in the black Gap Khaki’s hugging her hip, revealing the still firm flesh of her waist, the inny of her navel. He took in the white tee shirt two sizes too small hugging her round high breast that had no benefit of a bra. Took in the eyes, witchy and riddled with sleep. Wanted her.
“I got to go Rick. Come on now, damn.”
Despite it all, he understood. She was young and just because he was too tired to go somewhere didn’t mean she wasn’t. If he didn’t give her the money, she’d go anyway. “Look in my wallet.”
Gina turned, giving him a nice view of rump. She went through his wallet like a thief, snatched up her keys and left.
There was no sense in asking where she was going, she never told. Just that she’d be back later, a time span that encompassed the world.
* * *
Pink Lotion.
It was a gooey slick concoction with a odor that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be sweet or oily, but it tamed the wildness of Rick’s daughter’s hair and made the two pony tails doable.
“Ouch!”
“If you hold still, it won’t hurt.” It was a lie, but it was all Rick had as he eyed the clock, seeing he had five minutes to head out the front door. He was going to piss his mother off, again.
Hours after Gina had raided his wallet, snatched up her keys, and headed out the front door, she still hadn’t returned and The New York City Department of Corrections didn’t care. Rick was expected in his assigned cellblock in a little under an hour, which meant once again he had to take his daughter to his mothers.
The first time he had dropped Kanisha off because Gina hadn’t come home and he had to go to work, the dismay his mother’s voice had over the phone vanished at the sight of her grand baby.
By the eighth time not even the kiss Kanisha gave could banish her ire. Rick knew he wasn’t about to score any brownie points with another drop off, but he had no choice.
“Hold still now,” he said too harsh for even his own ears. He worked the brush gathering loose strands. Placed a rubber band around the hair, fluffing out the end. With a sigh, he began the other.
He glanced at the clock seeing what he already knew. He had exactly two minutes to get out the door.
Kanisha’s clothes still had to be ironed but there was no time, which meant his child would be showing up at his mothers in rough-dried shorts. It was another demerit and at some point Rick knew he would stop counting, but for now it mattered. Mattered a whole lot.