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It was like a sixth sense. A preternatural ability to sense a tragedy seconds before it became a reality. “What’s happened to my son, Detective LaPlata?” Ike asked, already knowing the answer. Knowing it in his bones. Knowing his life would never be the same.
But time was a river made of quicksilver. It slipped through his grasp even as it enveloped him. Twenty became forty. Winter became spring, and before he knew it he was an old man burying his son and wondering where in the hell that river had taken him.
Tears ran from his eyes and stung his cheeks. Tears for his son. Tears for his wife. Tears for the little girl they had to raise. Tears for who they were and what they all had lost. Each drop felt like it was slicing his face open like a razorblade.
Life sends us down some strange roads on our way to our destiny.
“When you go to bed tonight and you’re praying your boy didn’t hate you, listen real close. You’ll hear him asking why you didn’t do something to make it right. When you ready to answer him, you give me a call. If you don’t, then I guess you should cover that lion up with a big fat pussy,” Buddy Lee said. He stomped out of the cubicle.
“Yeah, you can’t hide that you’re Black. But the fact that you think I should hide who I am proves my point. Like Dr. King said: an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,”
“Nobody ever knows the last time is gonna be the last time until it’s too late. You ain’t alone in that. That’s what makes living so damn terrible sometimes,”
Buddy Lee thought, We been running around breaking people’s fingers and tipping over fake cakes, then we ended up grinding a boy into manure, then we got in a fight at a gay club. Shit, Ike needed a break? Truth is, we’re both old and we’re both tired as hell. I need a break just as much as he does.
“It’s easier to keep your head in the sand than it is to try and see things from somebody else’s point of view. There’s a reason why they say ignorance is bliss,” Ike said.
When the people you love are gone, it’s the things they’ve touched that keep them alive in your mind. A picture, a shirt, a poem, a pair of baby shoes. They become anchors that help you keep their memory from drifting away.
“No, hate. Folks like to talk about revenge like it’s a righteous thing but it’s just hate in a nicer suit,” Ike said.
This time they didn’t feel so much like razorblades.They felt like the long-awaited answer to a mournful prayer for rain.
