“They chain me up.” He was so ashamed at the memory that he looked at the floor. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes. “They chain me, they call me nigger. They say I the song-and-dance man, dance for them. They put me on the radiator. They burn the skin off my butt, it bleed. They laugh. They say I singing for them. Then they put electricity on my manhood, they run a current. They say, ‘This nigger boy a good dancer.’ They laugh. They tell me next they gon’ cut off my manhood. So I tell them the words they want to hear, that I kill Harmony, that blessed child of Jesus.”

I felt tears spilling from my own eyes and a revulsion so strong it doubled me over.

“Yes, a pretty story, white girl, isn’t it?” Rivers said.

“And Tony Warshawski?” I managed to whisper.

“He come in the room, two times, maybe more … I’m hurting too bad to count.”

“And what did he do?”

“He tell them to stop. But they tell him, ‘Don’t act like Jesus Christ on the dashboard, Warshawski. This for your brother.’ ”

41 - ROUSTING AN UNCLE

41

ROUSTING AN UNCLE

MY LEGS GAVE WAY, AND I FOUND MYSELF SITTING ON THE floor. Curtis Rivers looked down at me without pity, but I didn’t want any. “This for your brother” … “This for Peter.” Tony watched Alito and Dornick chain a man to a boiling radiator, watched them run a current through his genitals. My daddy—my wise and good and loving father … My hands were wet. I thought I would see blood when I looked at them, Steve Sawyer’s blood, the blood of every prisoner my father had watched in Dornick’s or Alito’s custody, but it was only tears and snot.

I don’t know how long I sat looking at the dust on the cracked linoleum, watching a spider crawl along the baseboard. I wanted to lie down on that floor and sleep away the rest of my time on the planet. After I’d found Petra, after I’d found Lamont, maybe I could curl up and die.

“This for Peter.” The Christmas Eve conversation I had remembered after seeing Alito came back to me again, my father saying, “You got your promotion. That’s enough, isn’t it?” and Alito replying, “You want to see him in prison?”

At last, I pushed myself up to a standing position again. My shoulders ached.

My father had been tense all fall after the summer of riots. I didn’t remember anything about the demonstrations that Harmony’s brother had organized with Sister Frankie, but they would have been outside my dad’s station. I could picture the tension inside the station, the Mayor’s Office putting heat on them, demanding an immediate arrest.