The Waking Read Online Free Page B

Then he cruised the drive-through of a McDonald’s because I guess the service was slow inside and snuffed a Romanian student whose family left Romania because of some oppression over there. The Romanian’s mama said she had a couple thousand knives in her stomach when she found out that her son was dead. I know I got more than a thousand in my gut just for living on the Hill for twenty-nine years.
    Then when the cops cornered Dante, he told them to kill him or he’d kill himself because he didn’t want his mama to see him in prison for the rest of his life. The man was already dead inside. Why not grant his last request?
    And now he’s going to die of lethal injection. Some of us just get the needle and drift around like birds on Centre Avenue, while others of us go out in a blaze of glory to get the needle from a rigged jury. Ten whites and two blacks. So what if Dante wouldn’t cooperate with his white psychiatrist. I wouldn’t have either. What would a white psychiatrist know about being angry and black? They said Dante lived in a “psychotic storm,” yet they found him sane enough to die. That means, at least to me, that he was nuts when he pulled the trigger but sane when he decided to carry a gun.
    Or something like that.
    And then the rallies, the concert in Schenley Park, the marches, the protests, the “Not in Our Town” folks. White people die, and folks march. If Dante had killed black people, none of that would have happened. He’d be doing life on the inside, maybe even have a book out about himself, probably a best-seller, and no one would have questioned whether he was sane at the time of the killings. You’re only crazy if you kill white folks, but you ain’t crazy enough to be found not guilty by the insanity caused by white folks.
    They called Dante a “nice young fellow” and a “brooding loner,” and the judge said, “I hope you suffer greatly while waiting to die.” Too late for that. Dante had already suffered. They said Dante had a crummy home life with his mama waiting in anticipation for his daddy to come home. I felt that deep inside me because my mama did the same thing for a while until—
    Oh man, it’s raining.
    When I mess things up, I go all the way, and I can’t even self-destruct on a sunny day or a starlit night. Lightning forks the sky, lighting up the Hill like fireworks I saw once from the Duquesne Incline with Mama before … before the world changed.
    Before my world changed.
    And they say the incline is haunted.
    They ought to take a look inside of me.
    I stab my little postage stamp of flesh with what I hope will be my last shot and toss the syringe toward the Circle of Heroes. Once I feel the rush, I stumble and fumble like a pinball down the Hill in the general direction of Mary’s house on Dinwiddie as the rain tears my clothes to shreds. That’s one of the problems in Pittsburgh. There’s not a straight road in sight, and when you’re not yet right, you can get lost. I have to tell myself to keep the downtown neon to my left, and I’ll eventually end up at Mary’s.
    But when I get there and the door opens, Mary’s mama is standing there looking fiercer than usual.
    “ What you want?” she says.
    “ I need to talk to Mary.”
    “ She don’t want to have nothing to do with you, so get on.”
    “ We have to talk,” I say in a half-whisper. I’m almost right, but my voice is too sleepy, and my skin is so hot it ought to be steaming in the rain. “Let me see her.”
    “ No.”
    I look past Mary’s mama down the hall to the back stairs where Mary, still barefoot, sits on the bottom step. “Mary, please, we need to talk.”
    “ You done enough,” Mary’s mama says. She closes the door until it’s just her nose in my field of vision. “Now go on.”
    “ I have to see her.”
    “ And I ain’t letting you. You done messed up my baby’s mind so much she still thinks you can be saved.”
    She still thinks … I can be saved. “Could you …