Chapter 1.2 The Basement
Continuing Rainwood House Sings serialized Movement Mystery
Quick recap: Demetrius wakes up to a child’s off-key singing and finds himself in an unknown basement he stumbled into while running from a police helicopter in the middle of the night.
Demetrius presses his sneakers against the cement floor to anchor himself, but this doesn’t stop his mind from dissolving into the hazy, reverberating air. The low thrumming filling his brain sharpens into the young voices of the Lilydale Street Krew.
“I wear what I like when I feel like it!”
Q’s shrill words had reached Demetrius’s ears as he approached the crew’s alley hangout the night before, at Eleventh and Lilydale, across from the Liberated Zone1 Center. Another step toward the mouth of the alley revealed Q spot-lit under the amber streetlamp, as if in a tiny theater-in-the-round. “Our Krew colors are free speech!” Q’s elbows jutted from her narrow hips. “Cops can’t stop us wearing them!”
Knuckle, the sturdy fifteen-year-old crew leader, leaned against the alley wall with studied nonchalance. “Q, you know we said cover up our colors till the jump-outs die down. You girls always ignore our decisions.”
“We did not ignore them! We made a different decision!”
At that point Demetrius had stepped into the narrow alley. Accustomed to his usual Saturday evening check-ins, the kids instantly turned to him. “Tree, Jane says democracy means we all get to…” Q began indignantly, as Knuckle said, “Tree, you see how these girls always try to…”
Demetrius held up his hands. “Peace! Listen for a minute. I’m going out-of-town tonight and I really need you all to show up tomorrow to do our final weeding of the season and put the worm box inside the Center, out of the cold.”
All heads turned to glance across the street at the old rec building, which now housed the Liberated Zone Center, although in the dark they couldn’t see their garden on the far side. “Poor wormies,” said Teara, mock-tragically. “Now they’ll just get store-bought scraps till we grow more fresh veggies next spring.”
“Girl, you love those worms more than your family!” Marcia, Teara’s cousin, teased.
The affectionate ribbing made Demetrius hope he’d defused the earlier argument. “I’m proud I can trust you guys with the garden work,” he said. “We’ll discuss other topics next Saturday at our–.”
Just then, Malik and little Emmanuel careened into the alley, breathless and furious, yelling, “They trashed our garden! Smashed the plants! Kicked over the worm box!”
All the kids sprang forward in alarm.
“Look!” Malik flung a kerchief onto the dirty pavement. “They left this on a tomato cage they broke!” Everyone stared down at the glint of silver on black–the unmistakable colors of their arch-rivals, the Eleventh Street Krew. “A cop over there in a squad car said he saw them run away!” Both boys gestured wildly toward Eleventh Street.
“Chill for a sec!” Demetrius tried to seem casual as he leaned an elbow against the wall to block their exit from the alley. He dreaded a clash between the crews. Kids could get hurt, but also, a fight could derail their upcoming youth peace summit, which Demetrius and the twins, along with other neighborhood activists, had been painstakingly organizing for months. He’d felt such pride when both crews finally agreed to attend, and when the Lilydale Street Krew took charge of promoting the event, stapling hand-made posters to telephone poles with the words: “This community is ours to fix, all together in 2006! Neighborhood Youth Summit at the Liberated Zone Center, 3 pm, Nov. 30.”
As he struggled to appear cool and keep the kids from charging out to confront their rivals, Demetrius heard tires on the pavement. He glanced over his shoulder as a police car pulled up. A beefy blond cop alighted from the vehicle.
Demetrius’s gut twisted in alarm, but relaxed when he recognized Officer Merle Larsen, their unlikely ally in the peace process. “Hola LZ Zorros!” Larsen called out with a smile. That was his nickname for Liberated Zone, the community group that the Lilydale Street Krew, along with Demetrius, his cousins Jane and Michael, and some other neighbors, had founded early that spring following the Great Plywood Battle, when they’d saved the old rec center from being condemned and boarded up by the city.
Larsen strode across the street and stepped into the orange glow of the streetlamp as another officer got out on the passenger side.
“That’s my new partner, Bennett.” Larsen had pointed a thick arm back towards the cop beside the vehicle. “He put his foot in it just now, alarming you all by saying the other crew messed up you guys’ garden. He didn’t think.”
Larsen’s face was so disapproving, Demetrius actually felt a twinge of sympathy for Bennett.
“I told him,” Larsen went on, “not to sow mistrust and hurt the peace process.”
Demetrius nodded. “We’ll patch things up,” he’d told Larsen confidently. “I’m sure if Jane talks with both crews we can–”
A blast of sound cut him off. Police cars swooped in from both sides of the street, sirens screaming, lights whirling. Vehicle doors burst open, disgorging men bristling with canisters, batons, and guns.
Behind him, Kuckle gave a quick shout. Demetrius heard the pounding feet of the kids as they fled into the darkness of the alley. At the same moment, Larsen, in obvious surprise, turned toward the street as a loud crack split the cacophony.
Demetrius feels his throat close and has to gasp for breath. Staring at the jumble of stuff he crashed into hours earlier, he inhales dank air to keep hold of the present. But he can’t suppress the image of Larsen turning toward the cop cars. Then the loud crack, Larsen’s eyes going wide, and his large body pitching backwards, hat flying off as his head slammed the pavement. Nor can Demetrius stop remembering the distorted face of Larsen’s partner lunging forward, slicing his flashlight beam across Demetrius’s eyes, his voice screaming, “You shot him!”
And then, his own panicked dash through the unlit alley with gunshots blasting behind him.
“This is just PTSD or whatever,” he whispers soundlessly to himself, gripping the edge of the hard slab he’s sitting on as he tries to quiet his breathing and pounding heart. “It’s not happening right now.” But he can’t stop the scene unspooling in his head: seeing, feeling, himself racing into the blackness, skin crawling in expectation of a bullet in the back. Then, diving into one of the alley’s pitch-dark side legs and burrowing under the mountain of trash piled between two overflowing dumpsters.
Curled up tight, he’d willed himself to silence his ragged breathing and keep perfectly still. Confused sounds reached him: muffled shouts, sirens, doors slamming, a distorted bullhorn blaring, worried voices from apartment windows, wails of a baby roused by the commotion. A helicopter buzzing. More sirens.
“Over there!” A harsh voice and heavy footfalls sounded barely yards away. Savage kicks bashed the metal dumpster. Demetrius held his breath as somebody opened one of the dumpster lids, then slammed it shut. More shouts. Violent rattling of the bins. Loud creak of a hinge, another slam. A stick prodded ferociously into the bags surrounding him, stabbing the sturdy box he had wormed beneath. Through the cardboard and thick hood of his sweatshirt, Demetrius felt it jab his head, but kept utterly still, even when a vicious kick at the bin next to him stopped his heart. Then the voices and boots moved away.
He lay in suspended animation under the garbage, barely breathing, until the press of slimy plastic against his face became unbearable and his body rebelled at the cramped position and foul smell.
Finally, he crept out from under the heap into the uneasy silence.
Note: “Liberated Zone” is the name of the collective publishing project of our Activist Fiction Writers’ Circle and also of the fictitious community organization in Rainwood House Sings. I was thrilled last Spring to see the students at Columbia University and many other campuses give that name to their encampments set up to call on their universities to divest from genocide. Not that they got it from us! Rather we coincided in giving this name to spaces where participants in movements for justice and peace create innovative communities to sustain and protect their movements.
Great entry, can't wait for the next!