Innocence

We were blocks from the finest stores, in a different kind of neighborhood, when the gunfire started.

The soaring wind and the rush of rain felt and sounded like a flock of a million birds continuously startling into flight around us, wings beating against us, as we walked a street, enchanted by the Beaux Arts architecture of the low-rise commercial buildings dating to the early years of the twentieth century. Some of those structures had been rehabilitated but others were in decline, and lights shone in one of the latter.

As we approached that place, gunshots tunneled through the white noise of the rain, and a pane in one of the ground-floor windows shattered. A door flew open, and a man came through the door into the storm, but his hair didn’t even have a chance to get wet before he was shot in the back and folded down onto the sidewalk as if he had no more substance than the suit that he wore.

Inside the building, rapid gunfire from at least two weapons continued for much the lesser part of a minute, and after the last shot, the silence in there sounded as final as the hush in a casket under six feet of freshly spaded earth. The door stood open, but no one stepped outside either to help or to finish off the back-shot man, who was lying on his side and weeping.

The street remained empty of traffic. No light suddenly bloomed in the windows of the surrounding buildings. Nothing moved except the silver skeins of rain and the wind tearing through them.

We were hooded and masked, but we could be known by our eyes alone. Although our genuine concern would surely be met with fear and disgust, we could do nothing but attend the weeping victim.

Father first went to the open door, dared to look inside, stepped out of sight, but returned quickly. When he knelt with me beside the wounded man, he said, “Five men in there, all dead.”

We were in the pooled darkness between streetlamps, but if we had been in light, the man still would not have known us by our eyes or perhaps not even if we revealed our faces. In his delirium, he saw not what lay before him but what he wished to see. He allowed my father to lift his left hand from the pavement to check his pulse, but he didn’t realize that he was in the company of strangers.

To my father, he said, “Papa Gino, where’d you come from? Ain’t seen you a long time.” Weariness and bewilderment marked his voice. Death would settle on him soon. Father asked the man for his name, so that he might say a prayer for him. “Don’t you recognize me, Papa Gino? It’s me, your own Jimmy. All grown up and done real good for myself.” Jimmy coughed, and a little blood, black in the poor light, spilled between his lips. Perhaps because my father was holding Jimmy’s left wrist, the dying man said, “See my watch, Papa? Bitchin’ Rolex, solid gold. You take it. I ain’t never given you a damn thing. I wished I could of, now I can. Take it, Papa.” When my father did not at once accept the watch, Jimmy began to sob wretchedly and asked to be forgiven, for what we could not know, and his anguish seemed greater than his pain. Twice he spat blood between his words as he said, “Please take it, Papa Gino, it’s something I can do, it’s a little something.” My father took the watch from the wrist and passed it to me, because just the previous week my secondhand thrift-shop Timex had failed. Father thanked Jimmy for the watch and called him son and said it meant a lot to him to have it. He held Jimmy’s hand in both his hands and said a prayer for him, and I said one, too, but silently.

In life, Jimmy’s face was flat planes and hard edges, but when he didn’t live in it anymore, the face changed and became soft and almost kind. His fixed eyes were dark and empty, and the rain washed the tears out of them.

It was a terrible thing when death first entered the world, and even now when it’s the way of nature, it’s terrible beyond words. Whether it comes for your mother by her own hand or for a stranger who can say nothing in defense of himself except that his watch is solid gold, standing witness to a death leaves you desolate.

We left the dead for others to find and bury, and we went away into the storm, the wind throwing shatters of rain at everything and the sky like a sea above and the whole world drowned in it. We went home from there, to our three windowless rooms, and we didn’t speak of dead Jimmy again, as if the gold watch had materialized around my wrist by the working of a magic lamp that I had rubbed.

I didn’t sleep at all that night, though Father did or pretended that he did. I worried that he might die, and I wondered how I could go on alone without him. I hoped that I might die before him, selfish though that hope might be, but as you know, it didn’t work out that way.

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