The Long Fall

“Damn, man. All I got is the twenty dollars you payin’ me.”

“See you.”

“... WHY JUMPER WANT you to find me?” Roger asked, admitting that he was the man I was looking for.

“His lawyer, Matrice Johnson, is a friend of mine. Professional. She asked me to find somebody who could be a good character witness for Frankie, said that it might make a difference between three and seven years in the sentencing.”

“I haven’t seen Frankie in sixteen years, man. How’m I gonna be a character witness for somebody I don’t even know no more?”

“Well,” I said, “if you’re not willing to help a brother out . . .”

“He’s not my brother. And how the hell you even know how to find me?”

“Some girl,” I said.

“What girl?”

“A friend of Jumper’s—Georgiana Pineyman. She saw you come into Berg, Lewis & Takayama a few months ago but when she tried to get to you they turned her away at the front desk.”

“Well, you found me but I can’t give Jumper a reference. I can’t. I don’t even know him anymore.” Roger was feeling some relief. His language drifted back toward the semi-sophistication of an investment advisor.

“Okay. My job was to find you and ask for your help. That’s all.”

“So we finished?”

“Goodbye, Roger.”

Ê€„

6

Just a year and a half before I wouldn’t have had the slightest compunction at turning Roger’s name over to Ambrose Thurman. Even that day, if Roger was a hood like hi/di„s old friends, I wouldn’t have been bothered.

But as things stood I had misgivings.

On the one hand Roger sounded scared, on the other the rent was due and there were no new jobs on the horizon. Aura liked me, maybe she even loved me, but she was going to do her job. I’d be on the street by the end of the month if I didn’t pay the landlord’s fee.

“Money is a chain that the worker willingly wraps around his own neck,” my father had said many a time. “It chokes him and weighs him down until finally, one day, he would kill his own brother for just a few minutes’ relief.”

Maybe if my father, Tolstoy McGill, hadn’t gone off to South America to fight the fascists or the capitalists or whoever, maybe if he’d come back and been a parent to me, I would have tried to live by the vision of his perfect world. Maybe if my mother, once she knew the love of her life was never coming back, hadn’t gone to her bed and lay there until the doctors came and took her off to the hospital to die, maybe then I would have taken a different path.

But as it was I had to make my own way in a world of chains and choking, imperfect choices and the fools who made them.

“HELLO?” AMBROSE THURMAN said, answering his phone on the first ring.

“I got all four names.”

“What are they?”

“You want ’em over the phone?”

“Yes, indeed. Time is of the essence.”

“You see, you and me got something in common there, Mr. Thurman.”

“What’s that, Mr. McGill?”

“I want my money.”

“I can’t give you your, your remuneration on the phone.” He used the word as if trying to learn it, to integrate it into his vocabulary.

“And so I can’t give you what I got.”

“I can send it to you via overnight mail.”

“I have a better idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Why don’t you come down here this evening and we’ll trade information and money across a table, face-to-face.”

I wasn’t my father or my mother. I wouldn’t run away or lie down and give up.

“Meet me at the Crenshaw tonight at nine forty-five,” Thurman said in angrily clipped wordsizeclipped.

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

THE AFTERNOON PASSED quietly enough. I logged onto the BBC website and perused the world, starting in Africa. I always start there, looking to see what the news providers of American TV didn’t deem important.

I had worked my way through South America and Asia before Twill came back to mind. I couldn’t let him know that I had bugged his IP. Not that I was worried about him getting upset but because this wouldn’t be the last intervention I’d have to make in his formative years. It wasn’t the first, either.

At the age of fourteen he had already spent six months in a juvenile facility for stealing middle school property.

“I got the idea from something you said, Dad,” he’d told me when we got home from the police station after his initial arrest.

“From me?”

“You were always sayin’ how people in Africa and other places didn’t have the tools they needed to compete, so I found out about the School Supply Fund and set up a fake office to sell computers to them.”

“How much property did you move?” I asked. The boy had been arrested for stealing five computers and three microscopes.

“A lot,” young Twill answered.

He’d organized a group of adolescent thieves at eleven schools, kids that he’d met through his sister’s Leadership Camp the previous summer. They had cleared over fifteen thousand dollars and still gave the NGO a great deal.

Luckily the authorities didn’t have enough of an imagination to delve into the depths of Twilliam’s crimes. But I was put on notice to keep him out of trouble.