Hardball

“He didn’t belong to the Anacondas, Daddy! He helped them protect Dr. King!”

Father and daughter had clearly had this argument many times. His face didn’t move, but her lips were trembling, as if she were six, not sixty, and finding it hard to stand up to an unyielding parent.

I sat back on my heels. Lamont Gadsden with the Anacondas-no wonder Miss Ella hadn’t approved of her son’s friends. In their day, they’d been as notorious as the El Rukns. Weapons, murder, drugs, prostitution: whatever crime was happening in a broad swatch of the South Side, they could claim credit for it. In my three years with the Public Defender’s Office, maybe thirty percent of my clients had run with the Anacondas. I’d even drawn their chief once, when Joh

Merton had been furious that he had to rely on an inexperienced PD. He’d tried to intimidate me into crumpling in his presence. “You the new snake charmer, girl? You don’t have the talent to charm Joh

He’d grown coarser in his insults when I refused to flinch. I was green, but I’d grown up in the steel mills. I might not be willing to sidetrack a judge with my cleavage, but I knew about insults and in timidation. I’d kept my legal pad in front of me, writing down everything Merton said, and when he paused for breath I’d say, “Let me read your comments back to you, Mr. Merton, and you tell me if this is what you want me to present to Judge McManus.”

If Lamont Gadsden had been an Anaconda, anything could have happened to him. They didn’t like members walking away from the gang. Leaving meant you left an ear behind as a token: no one will hear you on the street now when you call for help.

I looked up at Hebert’s unblinking eyes. “What I really am hoping, Pastor, is that you can give me some names, people who knew Lamont, anyone he might have been in touch with after he walked out of Miss Ella’s house in 1967. Or if you know anyone, Ms. Hebert. I’ve been to see Curtis Rivers, and he didn’t have anything to say.”

Again came the gargling sound, and then the words choked out with difficulty. “Dead bury dead.”

“Do you know he’s dead or are you just hoping no one will stir an old pot?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything.

“When did you yourself last see Lamont Gadsden, Pastor?”

He gasped, taking in air. Still without moving his head, he said, “Stopped church. Said hell bound. No heed. Baptized, no listening.”

“Yes, you baptized him. We took him into Christ’s body together, all of us. So how could you say he was hell bound? And why should he talk to you when that was all you would say to him?”

“Drugs. Never listen me, daughter, but drugs. Saw. Know. You, woman, no pants.”

With an effort, he moved his hand to the television control and turned the sound back on. The preacher in the glass box was revealing the true meaning of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

“No pants?” I asked Rose, pushing myself to my feet. My thighs were sore from squatting.

“He doesn’t approve-our church doesn’t approve-of women wearing men’s clothes,” she said listlessly.

In Bible pictures, men are always wearing robes. I wondered if that meant women at Saving Word couldn’t wear bathrobes, but I decided it wouldn’t help my inquiry if I asked. Instead, I followed Rose back along the narrow hall to the front door.

I stopped next to the paper-covered table. “Do you think your father knows something about Lamont that he’d have told me if I’d worn a dress?”

She looked down the hall, as if the old man could hear us over the televised preacher. “He’s convinced Lamont sold drugs for the Anacondas, but I never thought so.”

“You said Lamont was angry over the injustices in your lives. What did he do about them or how did he show he was angry?”

“He was part of the group that helped look after Dr. King. You know, during the marches that summer.” She eyed me doubtfully, wondering if I came from one of the white South Side families who created the need for a protective force.

I squinted, trying to remember what I knew about the history of the summer. “Didn’t the gangs declare a truce, a moratorium against fighting among themselves?”

She was still eyeing me warily, but she nodded. “Joh

“Curtis Rivers.” I said his name involuntarily, thinking about his hostility when I was in his shop this afternoon.

“Curtis was there. Some of the other boys from the neighborhood. And Lamont. They all belonged to Saving Word, and my father denounced them from the pulpit because they wouldn’t listen to his authority.”

“But it was six months later that Lamont disappeared. It’s hard to think that was co

She looked down the hall again. A choir on TV was singing with great gusto. “Daddy forbade it. Once he denounced Lamont, he said if I went out with him I’d be endangering my own soul.”

“But you saw him, anyway.”

Her mouth twisted in a painful smile. “I didn’t have the nerve. Lamont, he stopped me when I was leaving school. I was over at Ke

She looked down at her hands. “Maybe my life would have been different-could have been different. I got my nursing degree, and I could only get LPN jobs. It was years before I could get hired as a registered nurse. I used to think about that when I saw white women hired over me, and me with just as much schooling and good job reviews and everything and still emptying bedpans. I used to think about Lamont, I mean, and wish I’d paid him more mind. But-”

A bell rang, clear even above the sound of the televised choir.

“That’s Daddy. He needs me. I have to go.”

“Are you still working as a nurse?”

“Oh yes. I used to be an oncology nurse, but I had to give that up when Daddy turned so poorly. Now I do the night shift in the ER. I put him to bed before I go on duty, get him up in the morning before I go to bed.”

“And if you’d listened to Lamont, what would you have done different? Or what would he have done different? Would he have stayed around to be close to you?”

In the dimly lit hall I thought I saw her cheeks darken with embarrassment, but maybe that was my imagination. The bell sounded again, a longer ringing, and she pushed me through the open door. I pulled a card from my bag and thrust it into the hand that was holding the door.

“You’re an adult, Rose Hebert. You couldn’t talk to Lamont forty years ago. But that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me now.”

Her lips moved soundlessly. She looked from me to the living room. Habit ruled. Shoulders stooped, she turned back down the hall to her father.