He told Vera that even though the cane was crucial it wasn’t enough to explain every last thing. You could say that at night the cane could have glinted. You could say Nola Waters usually used the cane. You could say the glinting cane might not have been under Nola Waters’s bed, as police said it was. You could say Nola Waters’s .22 was black, which was hard to see at night. You could say that such a dark gun wouldn’t have glinted. You could say Nola Waters might have left the dark gun in the drawer where it always was, and she didn’t bring it to the door to greet the police. You could say the police shot her because they saw a glinting cane and mistook it for a gun, which normally does glint, but the police claimed Nola Waters had a gun in her hand, because then she was a fatal threat to them. Shooting an old lady brandishing a cane was embarrassing. But you couldn’t prove any of these things. They were conjecture.

That fall at Howard, Vera had a new calling. Counselors insisted her timing was off; she’d picked “an industry in its death throes.” But she landed an internship for gifted urban minorities at D.C.’s alternative weekly the following summer, then another at the Washington Monthly magazine the next. After graduation and a tryout, this paper, one of the best papers, hired her full-time. She got assigned to Stanley Belson.

Vera couldn’t imagine there was a black person on the paper’s staff who didn’t know Stanley was one of them. But, yes, she had to admit, not one of them seemed to get it, just as he’d told her. To her eye, he was a raisin through and through. She’d confirmed this in the paper’s basement smoking room, because both of them were offenders in that regard. The smoking ballerina, Stanley called her. Tonight he looked at her patiently, waiting for an answer to his question. He always wanted, for some reason, to make sure she was still dancing. Why, she wasn’t sure. There were many things about Stanley she didn’t completely understand.

“I’ve been dancing,” she said.

“And smoking too,” Stanley said. She promised each morning to quit. Each noontime, she relented. She had some kinds of discipline, but not all.

They went to the elevator and walked down the long cement hallway. On the way to the smoking room, he began to tell her about the pilot.

HORMUZ   OCTOBER

4.   NO PLACE FOR ME
OUTSIDE OF PERSIS