Dukkha Unloaded. Loren W. Christensen
her desk blotter of her with two black women, all dressed similarly. Afrocentric.
Regardless of whether it means anything, she would have to be a good cop to be assigned to Intelligence for the last few years.
But there was the blatant way she looked into my eyes when she came into the office, along with the ol’ up-and-down appraisal. She’s done it twice more since we’ve been talking. She sizing me up as a potential father of her children, the ones she has now, and the new ones we make together? Nice for my ego, but even if Mai wasn’t in my life, this kind of attention could be a problem.
“I’m going to talk with a guy today who lives just above Old Town,” Angela says. “He’s not an official snitch; he’s a second cousin of mine. He’s been away for about four days and he’s back at work today. I want to see if he knows anything about the lynching. You want to go with me?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m kinda swamped, and all.”
She smiles. “Grab the second set of keys from the right on the board next to BJ’s office and let’s go. You drive, rookie.”
* * *
We’re three blocks back from the main intersection at Second and Burnside. I’d like to hang a left onto Burn but traffic is at a standstill. In fact, traffic is a mess everywhere in the area, including the side streets where drivers are trying to get through the jam or trying to get away from it.
“Listen,” Angela says, turning up the FM station. “The news guy said to stay away from the area of Third and Couch. There, hear him? Said there’s some kind of police action going on there.”
“Info we could have used three minutes ago,” I say, cranking a hard right onto Pine and heading toward Tom McCall. “I’ll shoot north and then cut back to get us up to Twenty-First. Wonder what’s happening there. Probably a shooting or a knifing. I worked the area for a few months way back when I—”
“There,” Angela says, pointing at the police radio this time. “A unit said something about a struck pedestrian. Fatality.”
“Ooooh, okay. Getting run over is considered a natural death down there with all the drunks staggering around.”
“So sad,” Angela says, sounding like she means it. No dark humor for her, I guess. She looks over at me. “You up on Ocnod?”
“Oc … The guy who was lynched?”
She nods. “Street name Ocnod. His real name was Qasim Al-Sabti. The Fat Dicks think he was from Iraq because they found a famous artist with the same name listed in Google, a long-dead painter who lived in Baghdad. Our Ocnod has lived here in Portland for fifty years.”
“Wait a sec,” I say, cranking a left, which at least gets us heading toward Twenty-First. “So the guy lynched wasn’t black?”
Angela shakes her head. “Not an African American and not black the way the GP has been led to believe.”
“So the general public thinks he’s black because of what the police told the media?”
“Yup, but it wasn’t a lie at the time. He didn’t have ID on him and he looks like an African American. It wasn’t until yesterday the Fat Dicks learned his name was Qasim Al-Sabti.”
“Oh man. So our perp killed a man he thought was African American, but he was really a Middle Easterner. Oh man!”
“Yup. Still a hate crime, though. Deputy Chief Rodriguez told BJ to tell us to keep Ocnod’s real ethnicity hush-hush.”
“I can imagine the African American community is … concerned.” I was going to say upset, but Angela might think it’s a feeble word given the gravity of the issue.
She snaps her head toward me. “You think they might be concerned because a black man was hung from a fucking light post?” At least she restrained her volume.
“Hold on, Angela.” So this is what Clarence and the Deputy Chief Rodriguez were talking about. “Sorry I used the wrong word, or at least one you think is wrong. I was out of the country when this happened so I’m trying to play catch-up here. What I know is a black man was found lynched and there have been protest marches. In my experience, racially motivated crimes in the black community almost always lead to marches. So that’s why I was asking.”
I break our stare down first so I don’t crash us into a parked car.
“All right,” she says softly. “I give you that you’re trying to play catch-up. What do you make—”
“Wait. You ‘give me?’” I say meeting her eyes again. “‘Give me’?”
She keeps looking at me until I have to look back out the windshield again. Twenty seconds pass. “Wrong word choice. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry about my wrong word choice too.”
Another twenty seconds pass. She looks over at me. “All right then.”
“All right then,” I say back. We smile at each other and the tension eases. Thing is, I don’t care how sensitive she is to racial issues, I refuse to tiptoe around her. I’m not a racist so I have no reason to watch my every word.
“What I was going to ask, Sam, as someone just learning all this, what do you make of the fact he was lynched and ‘nigger’ was carved into his chest?”
“At first blush, I’d say hanging him might be a message, same with the N word scratched into him. Hanging someone because of their color or ethnicity is pretty unusual, although they used to do it down in the South. The KKK and similar ilk. But around here?”
“I see,” she says, her voice tight again but not angry. Maybe she didn’t like me saying ‘N word.’ What the hell am I supposed to say? Naughty word? Not going to happen. “I agree with one part and disagree with the other,” she says.
“Which is which?” I ask.
“I think lynching the man and the carving, oh, by the way, the word wasn’t ‘scratched’ into his skin. The ME said it was cut all the way into his sternum. Anyway, I agree those things were a message. I disagree lynching black folk was only done in the past. Last year in Chicago, a black man walked into what he didn’t know was a big-time racist bar. The next morning, Chicago PD found him hanging from a roof overhang in the alley out back. Last Fall in Boise, Idaho, some teenage white boys raped a pregnant black woman, and then hung her from a tree.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah, damn,” she snaps.
I hang a left on Tenth and look over at her again, and say pointedly, “I didn’t know about those hangings, Angela.”
She looks back at me. “Okay.”
I’m not accepting her ‘okay.’ “My point, Angela, is my not knowing about them does not make me a bad guy and it doesn’t give you a reason to snap at me.”
“I never said you were a—”
“You implied it by your tone.”
“I—”
“Here are a couple of things about me. One of the reasons I agreed to work on hate crimes is the very thought of someone getting hurt because of their sexual preference, ethnicity, race, skin color, religion, or whatever, pisses me the hell off. Secondly, you’re black and I’m white. I don’t have one iota of a problem with this. Do you?”
It’s called putting the turd in the other guy’s pocket.
“What? No, I don’t,” she says defensively, her eyes impossibly wide.
“Good, now tell me where we’re going.”
My eyes back on the road, I hear her take a deep breath as if she’d just been smacked in the face. Maybe no one has called her on her attitude before. “Hang a left up there. It’s on the east side of the street.”