A Certain Justice

Would have, should have…

Putting it off a minute longer, he stood in front of the cement stairs leading up to the second floor. The light over the door had blown out or Rita, his live-in housekeeper, had forgotten to leave it on. It was a long twelve steps to the landing – his own self-improvement, one-day-at-a-time program.

Inside, there was the old sense memory – the familiar smells, the shadows. A tiny bulb burned over the stove in the kitchen and he quietly made his way back. When they had first moved in eleven years ago he and Flo hadn't been able to get over the spaciousness of the place – two bedrooms, study, living room, dining room, kitchen. They had only had the first two boys then – Isaac and Jacob – and they had put them in one bedroom, used the other themselves, and still had an adults' room where they kept files, wrote checks, locked the door when they needed to get away. After Orel came around (they called him O.J. back then – they'd since dropped the nickname), the older boys shared a bunk bed until they finally had to acknowledge there was no room for three of them – their beds and all their stuff – in the one ten-by-twelve room. They had given their eldest, Isaac, the old study as his own bedroom.

Now, with Rita living on the premises, space was an issue. Half the living room, the area around the couch set off by a changing screen, was Rita's. The only place to sit was at the kitchen table. Glitsky's barco-lounger was still where it had always been in the living room, but it was awkward sitting there while Rita was trying to go to sleep across the room.

So he went and sat at the kitchen table, made tea and was drinking it, feeling the ghosts.

Glitsky usually wore his gun, even at home, but tonight for the call-up he had left his holster hanging in the closet in his bedroom, so when he heard the 'chunk' he grabbed a butcher's knife from the block on the drain and switched on the light in the hallway leading back to Isaac's room.

Where all was quiet.

He stood in the open doorway, pumped up, breathing hard. After all that had gone down already tonight he was ready to explode. If anybody touched his home…

The only light came from the hall, but Isaac's room wasn't much bigger than a bread box, and all of it was visible. His son was completely covered by his blankets – Glitsky could see them rising and falling.

The back door was locked. He told himself it could have been a raccoon getting into the garbage, dropping the lid on the cement. It surprised people to hear it, but there were lots of raccoons in the city, big and fearless as mastiffs, breeding like rabbits in the brush of the Presidio.

As he passed Isaac's door again Glitsky decided to take another look. Still covered. In the past, whatever time he got in, he'd always check the boys before he went to sleep. Not that they ever needed it. It was just a habit he'd acquired – walk to their beds, look at their faces, check their breathing, make sure the blankets were over them. Dad stuff.

In three steps he was by the bed. Leaning over, pla

'Hey,' he whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed, laying a hand on his son's shoulder. 'Nice try.' For another few seconds the form was still. Sighing, Glitsky lay the knife on the desk, crossed his hands, elbows on his knees.

The blanket moved. Glitsky pulled it down. His oldest son – seventeen next month – had been crying. He was also fully dressed.

Glitsky tried to pull the boy toward him, to get an arm around his neck and hold him there against him. 'Come here.'

But he jerked away. 'Leave me alone!'

The first time Glitsky had heard that from him, it took what he'd thought was the last unbroken piece that was left of his heart and stomped on it. Now, he wasn't used to it, exactly, but he'd heard it enough that it had lost a little of its hurt. 'All right.' He got to where he knew his voice would sound controlled, nonchalant. 'You been out?'

No answer.

'Do me a favor. Don't go out. It's bad out there.'

Still no answer.

'You heard all the sirens? They lynched a black man tonight, not ten blocks from here. It's not safe out there.'

Isaac was one-fourth black, with light skin and his father's kinky hair. But everyone with an ounce of visible black knew the reality – you were white or you were non-white. Black.

Glitsky was looking straight into his son's eyes, which were doing their best to avoid his. He saw enough of that at the Hall every day. He wasn't going to lose this boy, or his brothers. But he believed that the way to keep people's respect was demand that they keep some for themselves. He moved ahead. 'The rules committee has a meeting and didn't invite me?'

'The rules committee is a joke.'

The rules committee was something Glitsky had implemented in the first months that he and the boys were all trying to survive after Flo. It was made up of all of them, including Rita, the housekeeper. The adults had two votes, the boys one each, and so if there was unanimity between them they could outvote either Glitsky or Rita alone.

The rules committee had navigated them through some rough seas – when the boys had felt that there was no order, that life itself was precarious. Glitsky believed it gave them some sense of control. It also caused a lot of fights – but fighting was all right. Glitsky could take fighting. Just don't give him silence.

Which was what he was getting now.

He stood up. 'Look up here, Ike, look at me.' The son moved out of the light so he wouldn't get the glare from the hall light. He raised his eyes – red.

'You weren't home. When I heard you go out-'

'They've got an emergency downtown, Ike. All over the city. They called me. I had to go.'

'You always have to go.'

Glitsky ran a hand through his hair. 'I know,' he said. He was too tired to go into it. It was true, but so what? 'I don't want you going out there, Isaac. Not for a couple of days.'

'You're grounding me? The middle of summer you're grounding me?'

'I'm saying I don't want you boys to go out.'

'For how long?'

'I don't know. Maybe a day, maybe two. I don't know. It's not safe out there.'

'Oh, but it is safe for you, huh?'

Glitsky hated the tone but it was his house and his sons were going to obey his rules and that was that. 'Don't give me any grief, Ike. We can talk about it in the morning.'

He felt the need to reach and touch his boy, soften it somewhat, explain, but didn't dare try. It would just escalate, like everything else. He stood up. 'Sleep tight.'

Closing the door behind him, he walked out.

Rita was asleep. Glitsky heard the regular sibilance of her breathing on the other side of the screen as he lowered himself into the old lounger on 'his' side of the living room.

Closing his eyes, the events of the night came racing up at him – from Isaac to the Cavern Tavern to the meeting with the mayor and the brass downtown. Then suddenly, to Elaine Wager – why had she been there?

Oh yes, of course. Her mother.

Loretta Wager.

Startled by the unexpected clarity of the memory, he opened his eyes. The quiet room. The deep shadows. That was all. Suddenly, his brain exhausted and his emotions frayed – perhaps he was starting to doze in dawn's first light – there was the vision of Loretta Wager again, as she'd been back in college, the first time, in her apartment with the Huey Newton chair and the dominating wall posters: for Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and the other, of Martin Luther King's face with his dream and the crowd in front superimposed.

She'd invited Glitsky up to go over some of the San José team rosters and choose likely candidates they could recruit for the Black Student Union, the BSU.