Bridge of Sighs

switchblade before. When Gabriel pressed the button and the blade flew open, locking into place, he said, “Hey, do that again.”
    Gabriel, proud of the knife, obliged, folding the blade back into the handle expertly, after which my uncle took it from him. “Give that back here,” Gabriel said, astonished that a man who’d just admitted people were no good would do him like this.
    “I tell you what,” Uncle Dec said. “Let me hold on to it for a while. You can have it back in the morning.”
    Gabriel blinked at him. “How my gonna cut his gizzard out with my knife in your damn pocket?”
    Two police cars pulled up at the curb just then, disgorging angry cops, and a moment later they had the little black man facedown on the concrete, his hands pinned behind him. “Careful,” one of the cops said, “he’s got a knife.”
    “No, he doesn’t,” Uncle Dec told them.
    But the cops had been warned about the knife and couldn’t be dissuaded. They pulled his pants down around his ankles so they could inventory the contents of his pockets, and Gabriel was not, according to my uncle, wearing underwear. By then Murdick’s patrons had begun spilling out onto the sidewalk. “I thought them people were all supposed to have big dicks,” one man said when Gabriel was pulled to his feet before the assembled crowd. One of his front teeth had been knocked out in the struggle, and blood dripped down his chin, onto his shirt.
    Uncle Dec suggested that the speaker drop his own pants for the sake of comparison, but the man demurred. The only person still inside Murdick’s was Johnny Kozlowski, who took the opportunity to make himself a free gin and tonic, after which he sat back down on his barstool until last call, growing more and more convinced that the world was rank with injustice.
             
     
    T HAT S UNDAY AFTERNOON I rode my bike out to Whitcombe Park, hoping Gabriel might be there, but of course he wasn’t. I knew he’d been arrested but thought he might be out of jail by then. I knew the small outbuilding where he kept the thick black lacquer and found the section where he’d left off, and I set to work painting, first one side and then the other, imagining Gabriel’s surprise when he returned. If he thought about it, he’d figure out who’d been helping and be grateful.
    But by midweek he still hadn’t returned, and on Friday when I arrived home with black paint on my clothes, my mother asked what I’d been up to. Normally, I went straight to Ikey’s after school, but this week I’d barely put in an appearance. When I told her I’d been painting Gabriel Mock’s fence while he was in jail, she sighed and said she wished I’d said something sooner. Gabriel had been let go from his job on Monday, so it wasn’t even his fence anymore. When I asked why, she said, “Because black men don’t threaten white men with knives.”
    “But Uncle Dec had it,” I protested. “When they searched him—”
    “People saw it, Lou. He’d threatened a white man.”
    “But that’s not fair,” I said, feeling young and helpless and stupid.
    “Of course it isn’t,” my mother said. “Do you think it’s fair that man should spend his whole life painting and repainting a fence that belonged to a white man who owned slaves? Do you think it’s fair that if we hired Mr. Mock to work at Ikey’s people would stop coming to the store?”
    The way she said this made it clear that she and my father had already had a conversation about this, one I had no difficulty reconstructing. She would feel more deeply than he about the injustice done to Gabriel and his son, and she’d want to help if she could. But she was also what she liked to call a realist, and she, not my father, would’ve calculated the cost of offering a job at Ikey’s to a Negro. To some of our neighbors, it wouldn’t matter. Others would claim it didn’t, but then would quietly take their business to Tommy Flynn or drive to the A&P when they ran out of milk or bread. Despite our renovation, my mother knew Ikey’s was still a marginal business, and she understood just how little it would take to tip us out of slender profitability and into red ink. A tiny black man could maybe do it.
    Naturally, my father would disagree with her reasoning on both counts. In the face of her fury, he’d admit that Three and Gabriel had been victims of injustice, but for him it didn’t necessarily follow that it was our particular responsibility to