"The first six or eight of them weren't anything you'd really call unusual. The first one was this little black guy. Looked like a jockey, so help me; same size and build. Like a jockey you'd see at the track."
"Or maybe on somebody's lawn," Diane said. "You know, one of those charming little iron lawn jockeys about three feet high that all the most elegant white folks used to have beside their driveways, holding out the hitching rings? They always had shiny black faces. Really, extremely attractive; lent such a festive note to the grounds."
"Nah, bigger'n that," Merrion said, purposefully ignoring her tone.
"Ottawa, he be small, but much bigger'n dat, and naturally not quite so well-dressed. He maybe would've qualified on size for a jockey job, but he looked really sloppy. Black sweatshirt with a hood, just the ticket for a seventy-six-degree night, seventy-percent humidity, after an eighty-four-degree day. That's the uniform shirt now. Teamed up with your truly-huge, baggy black sweatpants, and naturally your two-hundred-buck, National-Basketball-Association, stick-out-player-approved sneakers. Excuse me: shoes.
"These are his work-clothes; what the well-dressed young crack gourment with serious fashion jones wears to go out after dark breakin' and enterin' people's homes. The cops have suspicious minds. They see him scuttlin' 'round the back of the house, they're pretty confident the people who live there didn't invite him, tell him to drop by for a drink at any time, even if they didn't happen to be home. And when the cops find him actually inside the house, they believe he got into it this may shock you with intent to commit a felony therein. To wit, larceny of more than two hundred and fifty dollars, and he isn't picky; anything portable he can lift and carry by himself, and sell without too I much trouble to a fence for about a hundred bucks, maybe a third " what it's worth.
"Or maybe direct to upstanding, law-abiding folks like you and me, no more honest'n we should be. He runs into us in a bar where it's known you can often get a bargain and finds out wed like to have an eight-hundred-dollar video-cam, but don't have quite that much cash on hand. Slightly-used'd be okay, if it was cheaper. Just by coincidence an hour later he's back with one a friend asked him to sell; he can let go for much less. This way we get a twelve-hundred dollar video-cam for the low-low price of two hundred bucks, and Ottawa gets himself enough money to score some dope and feel real nice for a couple of days. Everybody's happy.
"Except there is some risk involved, and this time, as will happen, he got caught goin' in for the merchandise. So now he hasn't got any laces in these state-of-the-art sneaks. For wear in the lock-up, the dress code that cops enforce is the floppy look. Take their laces away from them when they're checkin' 'em in at the desk, so they can't get really nasty and vindictive, make a noose and hang themselves in the cell. Everyone gets all bent outta shape at the cops when prisoners do that. Next thing you know, you got one of those pain-in-the-ass civil-rights cases on your hands; poverty-pimp lawyers on television every couple nights for the next four years, beatin' their chests and hollering how this's typical; the cops so down on po' niggers that the first thing they do when they lock them up is torture their black asses. Made this poor boy feel so depressed, locked up in Whitey's jail with no crack to be had, he took the laces off his shoes and hanged himself, an' went home to be with Jesus."
Diane sighed and fidgeted ostentatiously in the passenger seat; Merrion elaborately failed to notice. "Uh uh," he said, 'cops want none of that shit at all. And they're heavy enough to make sure they don't get it they take the laces away. Of course you wont be surprised to learn that this humiliates the prisoners, and therefore also is a violation of their many civil rights, of which they have got hundreds, it seems like: another cruel and unusual punishment inflicted only on black guys, because of their race. By other black guys like Frank Thompson."
"Amby," she said, and then let her voice trail off.
"What?" he said.
"Oh," she said, exhaling loudly again, 'never mind, go ahead. I was going to say I wish you wouldn't talk like this, but it wouldn't do any good. Go ahead, get it out of your system."
