“I’d love to come over!”
“Yeah?”
She scribbled down his address on a Post-it, then asked if there was anything he needed.
“Anything I need?” he sounded confused. “What do you mean, like things I… I need?”
“Or anything you want!” she laughed. “I don’t know, a pint of ice cream. Whatever you feel like!”
She was not a reporter this time; she could afford to be generous.
She showed up two days later to his one-bedroom apartment in Tilden Houses. A baseball game, Rays vs. Yankees, murmured on the old Sony, and James Brown records lined the shelves. There were framed pictures on every wall, mostly of his sisters and their kids. “My pride and joy,” he called his nieces—both in nursing school. His mother was gone. His little brother, gone. With the stroke having permanently weakened the left side of his face, his expressions were all half smiles, half frowns. The exception: when he spoke about his brother. Then, his face unified in a grimace—eyebrows begging, lips bowed.
“I’m a young man. You know, I had a stroke at forty-six,” he said. “But I have lived too much.”
He’d gotten better at wheeling around the house, so he took care of himself in the mornings. The nurse wouldn’t arrive until noon. Mr. William sat in his wheelchair, and Sadie perched on the edge of the brown recliner. His temperament seemed different from when they’d met in the store, and he was grateful that she’d delivered on his request: a single cannoli from Little Italy. He’d been craving one for months.
“I never met your grandfather. Mr. Wong. They said he was the landlord who wanted the buildings burned. That’s how it was back then, all the landlords burned property for money.”
“I’ve been trying to find proof that my grandfather was definitely involved.”
“I’m the proof. Take it from someone who was there in ’78.”
“Do you remember the day it happened?”
“Remember?” he scoffed. The grimace returned. “My life changed on that day.”
His mouth puckered like he’d tasted something sour.
“Because they used us. That’s how it is. Soon as you’re born, they teach you to destroy yourself. You probably don’t understand.”
Sadie closed her notebook. Folded her hands. Leaned farther back in the recliner.
“We were just kids. Me and my brother, here in the old Sneaker. My brother was just six, seven years old. A man drove up, said he’d pay us one hundred dollars if we torched two buildings. He had four milk jugs in his car trunk, all of them filled with gasoline. Told us to pour the gas in the halls of those two buildings, light them up with a match. And he picked the right boys for the job. We were always doing acrobatic shit. Dumpster diving. We had no problem jumping out of second-floor windows.
“I don’t know who that man was. Maybe Mr. Wong, or maybe Mr. Wong sent someone to do his dirty work. I never found out. Just knew this man was the devil in the garden with the apple. And we bit.
“We were in theDaily News: two Brownsville kids, William and Francis Joyner, arrested for torching Livonia. We told the cops someone paid us, but they never found the guy. Cops sent us home, enrolled us in a youth program, and that was the last time I played with fire. I couldn’t stop thinking about these people. These people who couldn’t care less if we blew ourselves up. I don’t mean Chinese people, I mean all of them—it don’t matter. They would take a Brownsville child’s innocence before they took responsibility.”
Sadie listened without speaking. Her heart was in her stomach.
He nodded to one of the medical certificates on the wall. It was his own.
“I was an ambulance driver. Twenty years on the job. For Kings County Hospital. Bullet wounds, strangulation, I’ve seen it all. A boy tried to decapitate his sister. I tell you, I’ve seen it all. But I had to. My job was to take peopleawayfrom that mess. Take them to heal. That’s why I signed up. Because at some point I realized: the last thing they want is youservingyour people.”
She nodded slowly, understanding.
“But my brother, he nevergot it. He was relieved we didn’t end up in juvie, but he didn’t know what he’d done. Just kept getting in deeper and deeper shit—thought he was impressing me. I don’t think my brother even finished elementary school. And the thing is, I did that to him. That’s what weighs on me. That and the people in the building. You know, I didn’t think. I saw that hundred dollars like it was in neon lights.”
Sadie wished she could do more than watch, wished she knew him well enough to squeeze his hand.
She touched the arm of the wheelchair.
“Mr. William, it wasn’t your fault. You were just a kid.”
His eyelids were red. She wanted to take away the weight—to take the blame on herself, even if she still didn’t know the full story.
“It was the man who paid you,” she continued. “He was arealperson. Maybe my grandfather. My grandfather did it, not you.”
