wire and suddenly realized they had some “bad dudes” in their lockup. “Niggers wanted for Murder One back East” was how one detective described the captives to a group of curious bystanders later, when Robby and Michael were being led, manacled, draped with chains, through the gleaming corridor of a Colorado courthouse.
I can recall only a few details about Robby’s last night of freedom. Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. Nobody as hungry as I thought they should be. Michael narrating a tale about a basketball scholarship he won to NYU, his homesickness, his ambivalence about the Apple, a coach he didn’t like whose name he couldn’t remember.
Johnny-Boy wasn’t from Pittsburgh. Small, dark, greasy, he was an outsider who knew he didn’t fit, ill at ease in a middle-class house, the meandering conversations that had nothing to do with anyplace he’d been, anything he understood or cared to learn. Johnny-Boy had trouble talking, trouble staying awake. When he spoke at all, he stuttered riffs of barely comprehensible ghetto slang. While the rest of us were talking, he’d nod off. I didn’t like the way his heavy-lidded, bubble eyes blinked open and searched the room when he thought no one was watching him. Perhaps sleeping with one eye open was a habit forced upon him by the violent circumstances of his life, but what I saw when he peered from “sleep,” taking the measure of his surroundings, of my wife, my kids, me, were a stranger’s eyes, a stranger’s eyes with nothing in them I could trust.
I should have understood why the evening was fragmentary, why I have difficulty recalling it now. Why Mike’s story was full of inconsistencies, nearly incoherent. Why Robby was shakier than I’d ever seen him. Why he was tense, weary, confused about what his next move should be. I’m tired, man, he kept saying. I’m tired. . . . You don’t know what it’s like, man. Running . . . running. Never no peace. Certain signs were clear at the time but they passed right by me. I thought I was giving my guests a few hours’ rest from danger, but they knew I was turning my house into a dangerous place. I believed I was providing a respite from pursuit. They knew they were leaving a trail, complicating the chase by stopping with me and my family. A few “safe” hours in my house weren’t long enough to come down from the booze, dope, and adrenaline high that fueled their flight. At any moment my front door could be smashed down. A gunfire fight begin. I thought they had stopped, but they were still on the road. I hadn’t begun to explore the depths of my naïveté, my bewilderment.
Only after two Laramie Police Department detectives arrived at dawn on February 12, a day too late to catch my brother, and treated me like a criminal, did I know I’d been one. Aiding and abetting a fugitive. Accessory after the fact to the crime of first-degree murder. The detectives hauled me down to the station. Demanded that I produce an alibi for the night a convenience store had been robbed in Utah. Four black men had been involved. Three had been tentatively identified, which left one unaccounted for. I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me.
Robby passed through Laramie briefly and continued on his way. That’s about it. I wished for more, then and now. Most of what I can recall makes the evening of his visit seem bland, uneventful, though an incident in Jamila’s room, beside her crib, is an exception. That and the moment I watched Robby’s shoulders disappear down the hallway stairs to the kids’ playroom, where a roll-away cot and some extra mattresses had been set out for sleeping. Those moments imprinted. I’ll carry the sounds and sights to my grave.
I’d been alone with my brother a few minutes in the kitchen, then in the hall outside Jamila’s room. I advised him to stay in Laramie a few days, catch his breath, unwind. Warned him about the shoot-em-up mentality of Western cops, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism of the region. How three black men in a car would arouse suspicion anytime, anywhere they stopped.
Little else to say. I started a thousand conversations inside my head. None was appropriate, none addressed Robby’s anguish, his raw nerves. He was running, he was afraid, and nothing anyone said could bring the dead man in Pittsburgh back to life. I needed to hear Robby’s version of what had happened. Had there been a robbery, a shooting? Why? Why?
In our first private moment since I’d picked him up at Laramie Lanes, as we stood outside the baby’s room, my questions never got asked. Too many whys. Why did I want to know? Why was I asking? Why had this moment been so long in coming? Why was there a murdered man between us, another life to account for, now when we had just a few moments alone together? Perhaps Robby did volunteer a version of the crime. Perhaps I listened and buried what I heard. What I remember is telling him about the new baby. In the hall, then in her room, when we peeked in and discovered her wide awake in her crib, I recounted the events surrounding her birth.
Jamila. Her name means “beautiful” in Arabic. Not so much outer good looks as inner peace, harmony. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Neither Judy nor I knew the significance of the name when we chose it. We just liked the sound. It turns out to fit perfectly.
Your new niece is something else. Beautiful inside and out. Hard to believe how friendly and calm she is after all she’s been through. You’re the first one from home to see her.
I didn’t tell my brother the entire story. We’d need more time. Anyway, Judy should fill in the gory details. In a way it’s her story. I’d almost lost them both, wife and daughter. Judy had earned the right to tell the story. Done the bleeding. She was the one who nearly died giving birth.
Besides, on that night eight years ago I wasn’t ready to say what I felt. The incidents were too close, too raw. The nightmare ride behind an ambulance, following it seventy miles from Fort Collins to Denver. Not knowing, the whole time, what was happening inside the box of flashing lights that held my wife. Judy’s water had broken just after a visit to a specialist in Fort Collins. Emergency procedures were necessary because she had developed placenta previa, a condition that could cause severe hemorrhaging in the mother and fatal prematurity for her baby. I had only half listened to the doctor’s technical explanation of the problem. Enough to know it could be life-threatening to mother and infant. Enough to picture the unborn child trapped in its watery cell. Enough to get tight-jawed at the irony of nature working against itself, the shell of flesh and blood my woman’s body had wrapped round our child to protect and feed it also blocking the exit from her womb. Placenta previa meant a child’s only chance for life was cesarian section, with all the usual attendant risks extremely heightened.
Were the technicians in the back of the ambulance giving blood, taking blood? Were they administering oxygen to my wife? To our child? Needles, tubes, a siren wailing, the crackle of static as the paramedics communicated with doctors in Denver. Had the fetus already been rushed into the world, flopping helpless as a fish because its lungs were still too much like gills to draw breath from the air?
A long, bloody birth in Denver. Judy on the table three and a half hours. Eight pints of blood fed into her body as eight pints seeped out into a calibrated glass container beside the operating table. I had watched it happening. Tough throughout the cutting, the suturing, the flurries of frantic activity, the appearance of the slick, red fetus, the snipping of the umbilical, the discarding of the wet, liverish-looking, offending bag, tough until near the end when the steady ping, ping, ping of blood dripping into the jar loosened the knot of my detachment and my stomach flip-flopped once uncontrollably, heaving up bile to the brim of my throat. Had to get up off the stool then, step back from the center of the operating room, gulp fresh air.
With Judy recovered and Jamila home, relatively safe after a two-month ordeal in the hospital, I still couldn’t talk about how I had felt during my first visit to the preemie ward at Colorado General. I was shocked by the room full of tiny, naked, wrinkled infants, each enclosed in a glass cage. Festooned with tubes and needles, they looked less like babies than like ancient, shrunken little men
