Confrontation

Photo by Michael Muthee on Unsplash

When the cops showed and shot the kid they made their best explanation, crafted with the finest excuses and burnished with a hint of truth. The kid was wrong they said and the rest understood. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong race.

Later the neighborhood gathered outside the precinct with signs and anger until the chief of police came down from city hall and spoke of the need for peace and calm and good intentions all around because what the people saw wasn’t what happened.

It happened fast, the chief said. And there wasn’t nothing to be done. Kid had a gun. Now go home with our apology bloodied and have a wake and eat some home cooking and forget about it.

Sweep it under the sheets. Cops covered bodies until the morgue men surfaced. It was standard. People should keep their knees on the ground.

And on the ground some bodies stayed for hours that kissed days as one death followed another in the city of hard justice. Rioters got sold to the highest bidder of prison walls. All was part of the deal that cops made with themselves known by undercover names such as community service and that which must be done.

John Baptist, mega man with a cursed leg, told the chief to make the truth known to all or suffer a fall. Chief called it a threat and the troops gathered.

Troops had gear from last year’s clearance sale, black helmets and all size of boots and body armor and a few dozen explosive devices in case they couldn’t climb a wall or knock a door. Nobody sat on the bench for this game. It was all hands on the street to meet a challenge to their authority.

Chief yelled through a bullhorn to come out and make peace with shackles and jail but John Baptist doubled up his voice from inside the tenement and said no. He wasn’t coming out to be shot down and he wasn’t backing out of his promise.

John had rallied his own troops who gathered in halls and looked out from windows at the force the cops had mustered in the street. Cops had gas and large shafts of light they said fell down from heaven upon their goodness. They were forever right and not only that, had the weight of the law behind them.

The law was golden and shined when rubbed sideways. Law was supreme and adored and to question it a crime named resistance. The cops, born with decrees in their eyes, couldn’t see the irony of rules so loved they needed to outlaw opposition.

Another bullhorn blew the chief’s voice into the size of a man and his bloat enlarged even more as he said they were coming in with fire to burn out the rats who sat in the garbage of their lives and claimed to be kings.

And it was so. Cops spat long flames from black barreled throwers but John Baptist fled out the back doors with his friends as the tenements burned. The fire killed the sky, filled it with smoke from cribs and books left behind.

John climbed down into the tunnels beneath the city and came up again in stealth behind the cops. If a street fair, they would be sitting ducks but in the reversal of fortune, the cops were cows to the slaughter.

As backlash, institutions flexed their recruits who had sworn allegiance and John Baptist became a most heinous wanted man. All the high sayers told their minions to find him upon pain of expulsion from the club. John Baptist must die.

He made it easy and entered their courts on his own, a thing they didn’t expect. John Baptist raised his hand and swore to the tell the whole truth if they would admit his testimony. An old judge peered down at the world from his bench and told John his guilt was preordained and his days were short numbered. They put him in a hole and later placed his neck under a great falling blade.

It was too late to stop the idea, though. Word spread from ghetto to ghetto, and one by the one, all the false cops fell down.

All the false bosses of false faces renounced their position or suffered stones. Money men boiled or disavowed their greed.

In the end it all came around again, though. The wheel turns.

It turned for John Baptist as it had turned for others before him. Yet each time it rolled, the cycle of goodness grew longer and longer. And one day, from the sheer weight of crushed cruelty, the wheel may stop turning altogether. Then justice can finally cease its trembling.

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Thanks for reading Dynamic Creed. This piece first appeared in Bull Magazine.

Yours in solidarity,

Victor David