Michael Fine 6905 words

348 Gleaner Chapel Road

Scituate, Rhode Island 02857
M1fine@aol.com
401.617.4780

IMMIGRATION

By

Michael Fine

At about nine thirty in the morning of April 28, 2015, James Otis awoke in the basement

of a house in Mount Vernon, New York, and reached under the couch on which he was sleeping

to make sure the .40 caliper Smith and Wesson he bought on the street the day before was where

he had left it, wrapped in an old laundry bag. Inside the bag were also a dozen plastic cable ties

hed bought in the Radio Shack on 233rd street two days before for $5.99, a purple Pittsburg

Steelers watch cap, a cheap flip phone with fifteen dollars of minutes still on it, and a

camouflage imitation down vest.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 2

Otis had slept in his clothes, in a yellow tee shirt and jeans. He went to piss in the

bathroom at the back of the house.

When he came back, he reached into the bag under the couch, pulled out the cell-phone

and opened it to check the time. There was a half empty can of warm Pabst Blue Ribbon on the

bar in the kitchen of the basement apartment and Otis drank that. Then he lit a cigarette, his

hands shaking, and he began to pace from the living room of the disheveled apartment into the

kitchen and back again, back and forth, back and forth. He looked at the time on the cell-phone

again.

There were ash-trays full of cigarette butts, beer cans, and pill bottles on all the tables and

end tables and on the bar that separated the kitchen and the living room, and there were single

unlaced sneakers and womens underwear scattered about, and half eaten boxes of take out

Chinese and Kentucky Fried on the tables in between the beer-cans and the ashtrays.

A blue Pegasus gym bag lay open on a chair near the couch.

No one else in the apartment or in the house above the apartment was awake yet. The

others came in between four and five in the morning and slept until early afternoon.

Otis looked at the cell-phone on more time.

The Smith and Wesson had come up from Trion, Georgia, where it had been stolen from

a house in 2013, and worked its way up the East Coast from Atlanta to Richmond to Prince

Georges County Maryland to Baltimore to Philly and from Philly to the Bronx. Everybody

knows the best thing you can do with a piece is to stash it where nobody has it or to just keep it

moving north. Nobody can find whats moving north as long as it keeps moving.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 3

You take what you want. Nobody gives you nothing in this world.

That white bitch thought she was in charge. You take what you want.

When James Otis left the lockup the last time, he got what they give everybody. Jeans

and a long sleeve shirt. Underwear and socks. A sweatshirt and a cheap used cloth bomber jacket

and a purple Pittsburg Steelers watch cap because it was January. Fifty-six bucks that was left in

his necessary account and a ride to the middle of Detroit where he was busted. They gave him

the clothes he was busted in, jeans and a tee shirt from Port Angles Dragons, from Port Angles

Washington, in a paper sack. They knew he was one crazy muthafucka, and they was glad to see

James Otis go. They wrote out some papers with some kind of release plan. The address of a

shelter in case he needed a place to stay. The location of the unemployment office, which was

supposed to help him find a job. A list of his medicines and a weeks worth of no account pills.

The address of the food stamp office so he could stand on line for a day, maybe two, if he could

find a bus to bring him there.

James Otis had flattened his bid so he was a free man. No parole. Nobody watching him

now. They opened the back door of the white van that drove into Detroit every single day. Three

other freaks walked out of that door with him. Then he was on his own, just one more black man,

ready to make his own luck.

There was wives or girlfriends or mothers or sister or brothers waiting on the other three

freaks but they had all done short time. No one waits on James Otis. He was his own man inside

and he was his own man now.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 4

You dont look left or right when you come down from that white van. You just start

walking. Where was home? He said Detroit. So they let him off at the bus station, but he just

booked it down Michigan Avenue. After eight years inside even the bus exhaust smelled sweet,

and he drank in the music of the cabbies leaning on their horns that beat-boxed with the rumbling

trucks squealing into gear when the lights changed, and Otis timed his steps and his breathing to

the back beat of those sounds.

You do what it takes to get over. The women, they just give it up to him. You find one in

a bar sitting on her own.

Women is easy. They all wanting it. You be there, and let them talk, and they think you

are talking to them. Then they put their hand on your arm when they be talking, just to make a

point, just in passing, and you know that you are in.

You know what you want. You take what you want.

James did what he needed to do.

Ten days later in his own time he got himself on a bus. Nobody knew and nobody needed

to know where James Otis was, who he was, where he was, or what he was. He had paid his

debt. Now James Otis was a free man, and he would take what he needed, when he needed it,

and leave the past behind.

The world is set up for white dudes with cars and cell-phones. There isnt much space in

it for anyone else. Standing on line and taking the bus isnt much different from being inside.

You got to take what you can get. Nobody gonna give it up for a black man in the US of A.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 5

Detroit. Cleveland. Youngstown. Pittsburg. Harrisburg. Baltimore. Philadelphia. Newark.

New York City. New York City. The home of real people. You keep movin and groovin. By the

time the man figures out to look, you be gone. Black man leaves his mark in other places. Needle

in a haystack in New York.

James Otis wasnt no homeless person. He just didnt have a place, not yet.

By January of 2015, the Arab spring had turned into a debacle, a catastrophe for

democracy and for the liberation of millions of people who lived inside the fist of tyrants and

oligarchs.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in late 2010, when a fruit seller named Mohammed

Bouazizi set himself on fire after a run-in with a corrupt local official who confiscated his

pushcart and only means of earning a livelihood because he hadnt paid the appropriate bribe.

Bouazizis martyrdom galvanized the resistance of millions and the hopes of a whole generation

of young people, a generation who were technology savvy, educated and connected by social

media, who believed that new technology, which gives the appearance of being democratic that

is, which appears to give equal access to all who use it and thus gives the appearance the equal

right are created simply by equal use of a device -- would help them practice democracy, and

this belief lead to the belief that all those millions of young people could create democracy

simply by practicing it. In this way, the Arab Spring was similar to the other periods of great

opening that have occurred -- in 1776, in the American colonies of Britain; in 1798, in France; in

1848 in Europe; 1871, in Paris; in 1902, in Rhode Island; 1956, in Hungary and in 1968 in
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 6

Europe and the US and other places around the world; in Chile in 1970; in 1988 in the former

Soviet bloc; and in 1994, in South Africa. Periods of opening have doubtless many occurred

other times around the world and throughout history as people and cultures around the world find

each other and awake to possibilities that flow from democracy and unity, in those moments

when violence and the greed of the some crystallize the hopes and dreams of the many, the hopes

and dreams that have made us the people and the cultures we are today.

By January of 2014, the hopes of the Arab spring had been dashed everywhere except in

Tunisia. Libya was in chaos, with parts controlled by ISIS. The democratically elected but not

democratic president of Egypt had been overthrown, and the generals reinstalled themselves as

the heads of state. Syria was in the middle of a bloody civil war, which produced millions of

refugees, untold human suffering and no political change, other than allowing ISIS to take half

the country and unify it with a disintegrating Iraq. The uprising in Bahrain had long been

suppressed by the Saudis who had given cash payments to their own people and started to talk

about letting women drive and even vote as a concession to the urge for freedom, but hadnt ever

thought for one second about loosening the stranglehold the King, his brothers and cousins have

on the state and its riches. The Israelis had not flattened Gaza again yet, but they would, seven

months later, after the Palestinians in Gaza returned to their habit of showering missiles on Israel

for no apparent reason other than to show the world which mostly wasnt watching that they

could.

All the Arab Spring had accomplished was to create a new wave of refugees.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 7

Eight years is a long time but not that long. James Otis had been away from New York

twelve years. Twelve years is a long time.

Most of his people were gone, and the neighborhood had changed. Still Black people in

the Bronx, but different Black people. There was now a Starbucks in the Hub, and one in

Parkhurst. The empty spaces left from them taking down the El on Third Avenue had filled in

with Easy Lubes and donut shops and Churches Fried Chicken, and there where rows of houses,

little houses with little lawns on Bathgate and Washington Avenues, where there had once been

only crack-houses and bulldozed lots. Like the Bronx was the suburbs now. Who woulda thought

it?

His momma gone. The projects on Washington Avenue had a security guard now and

cameras over the door. They didnt know him, and they didnt know nobody by his mommas

name.

Charissas momma gone. They tore that building on Fulton Avenue down, and they were

building a new building where that one used to be. Charissa was what, 15 now. She wouldnt

know him. Probably didnt know he existed.

He had boys who used to be in the playground in the park just below Yankee Stadium,

who looked out for each other. But they had gone and torn down Yankee Stadium, and built a

whole new one, all white concrete with white walls and flags flying from the roof that looked

like an ocean liner ready to sail.

James Otis kept seeing his people from the side or from behind as he walked by stores

and into subway stations. But he called out to them and they didnt hear their names, or they
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 8

turned and hed see that the person he was seeing wasnt the person he knew or remembered, not

even a little bit.

He slept one night on a waiting room chair in the Port Authority, getting rousted from

time to time by the transit cops and the regular cops, telling him to move along. Sometimes he

moved from one chair to the next when they woke him.

Early in the morning some young Puerto Rican dude come by, stocky guy with bushy

hair and white shirt and a tie, wearing a cheap suit, who looked like one of them Christers who

was wanting him to go get saved. The dud in the suit laid a brochure on the chair next to James

and stood next to him for a while until James opened one eye.

Go the Thirtieth Street and First Avenue, the man said. Theyll get you a place to

sleep. In New York, there is a place to sleep for all of us. And call us if you want to talk.

That man left a cheap little cell-phone with a hundred minutes on it in a plastic bag on top

of the brochure. And he walked over to a woman who was sleeping on the floor surrounded by

shopping bags and laid the same rap on her.

Refugees have been using boats to escape places of poverty and oppression as long as

there have been boats and poverty and oppression, and as long as people believe that things are

better someplace else. Jews fled Hitler and Europe before and immediately after World War II

in rickety steamers bound for the US, Turkey, South America, and Palestine to where-ever

would take them and towards many places that would not. Cubans have been fleeing by boat
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 9

since the Cuban revolution in 1957. More than a million Vietnamese people fled the communist

takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. So it is no surprise that people from Syria and North Africa

would flee the chaos that has ensued after the collapse of the Arab Spring, or that people from

elsewhere in Africa would look for a better life by trying to cross the Mediterranean in boats

even more rickety as those used by the Jews, the Cubans and the Vietnamese.

Tunisia is only 70 miles from Lampedusa, the southernmost island in Italy. Libya is a

little further, but because there is no functional government in Libya at the moment, there is no

one to stop the migrants from leaving on ramshackle boats, rafts, and rubber dingys. The boat

people crossing the Mediterranean by the thousands are from Syria, Eritrea, Mali, Nigeria, The

Gambia, and Palestine, places beset by war and poverty. Hundreds drown but thousands get

across, and all are ready to risk death and the violence of the boat smugglers, knowing that those

risks pale beside the risks of staying at home where death from violence, starvation, and disease

is likely and where suffocation by poverty and by politics is more likely yet.

The Europeans who become home to the migrants who survive struggle with how to

approach this phenomenon. Europeans have a reasonable degree of social order which they

associate with the ethnic and cultural makeup of their populations, so they are unsure about the

impact new cultures and new populations will have. Northern Europeans in particular have

struggled with integrating Muslim minorities and exist in an uneasy truce with those populations,

the largest number of whom become law abiding citizens of the countries in which they live and

active participants in the life of those places, but some of whom have become disaffected and

have reached out to Islamic militants; some fewer of whom have gone to Syria to fight for ISIS;

and some fewer of whom yet have carried out acts of terror on European soil. Some people

believe that the migrants are willing to come only because the European countries are willing to
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 10

offer safe haven once the surviving migrants arrive. Other Europeans rue the disorder left behind

by the Arab Spring and wonder about the role of the European Community in encouraging the

resistance of the young people. Still others worry about the process of rescue, and wonder if they

arent encouraging more migration by being willing to rescue people from boats that are not

sea-worthy after all. Some Europeans think Muslims and people of color are other races, unlike

Europeans, and should chose to live or be moved elsewhere. Still others worry about the loss of

life at sea and think Europe could do a better job assisting boats in trouble.

Few Europeans believe that they can or should fix the internal problems of nations that

are falling apart.

They sent him up to a shelter Bronx Boulevard which is like in the middle of no place,

almost Mount Vernon, almost Westchester. A bus and a train. More than an hour from Thirtieth

Street. At least a half hour, probably 45 minutes back to the real Bronx, the part James Otis

knew.

Those people in that shelter on Bronx Boulevard woke him every morning at six AM. Six

AM. The joint all over again.

The street is hard when you dont got your own place. They put you on the street,

carrying your own stuff, every morning at six forty-five AM. Its cold on the street corners in

the morning muthafucka and really cold in the winter before the sun rises and cold by one

oclock in the afternoon when the sun begins to set. They dont let you even line up again until

five-thirty. The rest of the day you are on your own.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 11

There was a woman there with auburn hair. Auburn hair and green eyes. White woman,

talked Spanish.

One day James Otis was waiting on the five-thirty line and she was the unlocker. Five-

thirty come, and she unlocked. The boys, they shuffled in.

He tripped over one slow boy in front. The unlocking woman caught him under the arm

and kept him from falling. Put her hand under his arm to catch him. Be careful, Mr. Otis, she

say.

The unlocking woman was one of them bitches! Her hand under his arm. He stood and

looked at that bitch. You wouldnt know it. His eyes locked on her eyes, and she didnt look at

him like that but she didnt look away. She couldnt hide nothing. She was one of them bitches.

She was wanting it.

Then after every time she seen him she called him by his name. Good afternoon, James

Otis. Good evening James Otis. Good morning, Mr. Otis. She was wanting it bad.

James Otis was not homeless.

The argument for housing the homeless is like the argument for sheltering migrants. It is

is an argument for compassion, for tolerance and kindness, the argument that all human beings

deserve food and shelter, that life comes first, and that there but for fortune, any of us could hit a

run of bad luck and end up like on the street needing only a hand up, a meal, a roof over our

heads for a couple of nights, and a pat on the back so that we can dust ourselves off, get back on
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 12

our feet and get going again, should we fall down as any of us can do. We mean only to do good

when we shelter the homeless. It is holy work, the lifting up of the widow and the orphan and the

least among us who have not the resources to care for themselves, holy, because we ascribe that

kind of compassion to God more than man, and no one person can profit caring for others and

because our society and our community is a stronger and better place when we exercise

compassion and when we provide for every human being.

The argument against housing the homeless and sheltering migrants is that emerging

people, struggling people, will misunderstand the intention of the kindness, and will come to

depend on that kindness, withering their own initiative and will eventually bite the hand that

feeds. Murderers and rapists will live among the homeless, and we will support them so that they

can continue to rape and kill. Migrants will bring different cultures and difference mores to

places that were once orderly, and, taking advantage to the kindness of strangers, will bring the

same chaos and violence they left behind to places that are now calm, humane, and orderly. Or

worse, we fear that terrorists will come to new places, slipping in among the refugees and using

that cover to sow murder and mayhem. The human project, which always favors love over fear

and selflessness over self, is about our struggle to preserve compassion in the face of its risks.

Perhaps the fundamental human struggle is to the struggle to hold two conflicting ideas

at once compassion for the suffering, and adherence to the rules that allow us to live together

in dynamic tension. We can feed the hungry and house the homeless, but only a little bit, so

people remember that they need to learn to survive on their own, to stand on their own two feet.

We care for the least among us, the disabled and the poor, but we also must guard against

exploitation of our kindness by people who are on the take. We will rescue the boat people when

and where we can; we will not encourage them by making passage easy, but we can never solve
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 13

the problem of politics and social organization for them at home. They can and must do that for

themselves. We may forgive James Otis, but we must also constrain him. We are always missing

the mark, but we are about aiming for it. Will we ever get the balance right? How do we make

sense of our mistakes?

James Otis stood in line for four months and for four months he keeps his cool, more or

less. The lines was bad but the on-the-street at six forty-five carry-what-you-got was crazy.

James Otis worked it out, though. He found a dumpster that stood next to a wall in the parking

lot of a little metal plating factory that didnt have a gate about three blocks away, on East 235th

and Furman. Nobody there till seven-thirty. Everybody gone by five. Dumpster got picked up on

Thursday. Leave your shit wedged between the dumpster and the wall, and you good to walk like

a free man all day. Go to Woodlawn Station. Hustle the fare or jump a turnstile and you be in.

Go to the hub or downtown, the places where there was always a little action, there the ball was

always in play. Nurse a cup of coffee for two hours at a Dunkin Donuts or even at Starbucks, and

let the shit come to you.

He found her on a Thursday. He was on his way to stash his shit for the day. She was

coming to work. She parks her car. Late model green CRV. New York plates. She didnt see

him. They was four blocks from the shelter, maybe five. She finds a spot, backs in real smooth,

locks the car and is gone, so when she walks up to the shelter, maybe it looks like she walks to

work. The same bitch. Parking far away so no one at the shelter makes her car. But James Otis is

on top of his shit. Now she is his.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 14

In his shit is three or four ballpoint pens, and a pencil or two. He spends a minute shifting

through the other shit in the shopping bag, and finally comes up with a pen and a pencil that has

no point. The plate is RBF 1760. He writes it on the shopping bag but the pen quits after RBF 1,

so he pulls out a $1 folding knife he keeps in his pocket, and starts to shave the wood to get a

point he can use, but the blade is crap. The lead in the pencil comes slow but it comes, and he

writes 7 in pencil before the lead breaks to back under the wood. Then he grinds the pen on a pad

of paper he pulls out of the bag, back and forth, back and forth, and after five or ten strokes, the

ink flows again, and he writes 60 where he was writing on the back before, and then RBF 1760

on the pad and RBF1760 on his hand. She is his.

Maybe a week later, James Otis is standing on the platform at Woodlawn. Cold morning.

He had a coat but no gloves and not hat. He used a Metrocard they give him at the shelter, and

bought himself a cup of coffee, which he hunched over, the hot from the coffee keeping his

hands warm but the wind blowing down Jerome blowing through the platform and blowing right

through him, right up into the small of his back. Then a voice says, James. James Otis.

It is Wakim, from the park next to where Yankee Stadium used to be. Wakim has seen

better days. Wakim used to be tall and wiry, and a monster under the net. Now he is shrunk down

and trembling. There is bags under his eyes and his skin is loose and grey.

They catch up quick, because there isnt much catch-up to do. This one in the joint. That

one moved to Atlanta. Another one out in Jersey, driving a bus. Then Wakim tell him about the

three-quarter hustle. You get into a program, and they bust you out of the shelter, and you get a

place. It aint pretty but it is a place.

James Otis is gone from the shelter in two days.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 15

Gone but not forgotten. He keeps that bitch in his mind. She never let herself be in a

place where he could hit on her. But she always calls him by his name. James Otis this. Mr. Otis

that. No white woman ever called him by his name before. She playing him.

But James Otis, now he knows the car.

This should be the story of the last minute conversion, of James Otis getting religion and

throwing the gun away, or of the magic words spoken as James is about to do the deed, the

magic words that bring him, the woman he is about to kill and us back from the abyss. But this

story is fiction, not fantasy. The world that is is the world we have made. Each system produces

the results it was designed to produce. Water seeks its own level.

So James Otis awakes on the morning of April 28, 2015, and takes the gun and the plastic

ties wrapped in a laundry bag, puts them both in the Blue Pegasus gym bag, and puts on the

camouflage vest and the Pittsburg Steelers hat and then finds a long black coat that is thrown

over a chair, and puts that on as well. And then he leaves the house.

There is time to kill.

First the car.

James Otis walks to Bronx Boulevard, maybe a mile maybe more, and then does the

streets around, back and forth, back and forth. Springtime. Air cool. Good breeze off Long Island

sound. Just the usual car and truck noises of the city, the clanging of metal, the crunching of

gears, the groaning of springs and the blasting of the backup warning buzzers as trucks bounce
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 16

over the potholes and are backing up to load and unload, people honk their horns, and jets fly

overhead.

The car is on Bullard, two blocks away.

Its now 12:38. But the bitch doesnt finish until five or six. So James Otis walks up to

Nereid Avenue, hangs a left and walks over the Bronx River Parkway. Five or six blocks away is

St. Barnabas High School and he walks around it a couple of times, not right next to it, but like a

block away, so down East 241st street, left on Martha Avenue, right on East 240th street, then

back to Nereid Avenue, a couple of times, nice and slow like he belongs there, just minding his

business until a couple of them girls come out, booking school. Catholic school girls. Three

together. Two colored girls, one white girl, maybe Spanish. Headed down Nereid Avenue. One

in a grey hoodie and black jeans that are a little tight but not tight enough. One with a very nice

ass in pajama bottoms and a green windbreaker. One, small and very hot, with a green top, long

grey sweater and a grey pleated skirt that sways when she walks.

He follows them for a block. They laughing together.

You ladies, he calls out.

They walking and dont hear him.

You ladies. You hot ladies, he says. And he walks faster so hes now maybe thirty feet

behind them.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 17

One half turns her head and sees him.

Creep, says the one in the pajama bottoms and grey windbreaker.

Its a toad with HIV, says the little one with the pleated skirt. They laugh. They dont

know what he has in the gym bag.

They duck into a pizza joint.

He walks by.

Just before the bridge are the woods next to the Bronx River Parkway. James Otis ducks

into the woods.

He sits on a picnic table to see if someone will come by, a jogger or a dog walker or

someone. But it is early spring and midday and there is no one out. So he jerks off, three times in

quick succession, so he will be ready, so he doesnt come too quick when he doing her, so he can

do her long and deep.

The sun is strong and then the sun is weak.

James Otis moves out of the woods. It is almost time.

He walks out of the woods and hangs a left onto Nereid Avenue, and walks across the

bridge, cutting across the roadway diagonally from north to south so hes ducking cars as he
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 18

crosses. Some assholes honk at him, some slow down to let him pass, and theres a gypsy cab

that tries to make like it doesnt see him and is going to run him down, but he gets across, taking

his time. The bridge crosses the Bronx River Parkway, the Bronx River itself, and then the

railroad tracks. There arent leaves on the trees yet, but the buds have broken open, so there are

lime green stems on the branches, and green and brown leaf casings hanging from the stems, and

the stems of the brush below the trees is now red and green and ready to leaf out, and there are

birds flitting about, and calling as they hop from branch to branch, or swoop overhead. A silver-

blue train barrels north on the tracks.

James Otis takes the first street on the right, onto Bullard Avenue.

The car is waiting on Bullard, a block and a half down, on the near side of the street,

across from the trees overlooking the Bronx River. He can stand between the trucks parked on

the far side of the street closer to East 237th Street and wait. Shell come down the hill on 237th,

and make a right on Bullard, so she wont see him in the trucks. Shell be getting her keys out of

her purse, and thinking about being in her car. Or he can break into the car, and be waiting on the

back seat, but its still light out, and the smashed window will alert her. Or he can go hang on

Bronx Boulevard, where everybody hangs, and pick her up as she comes out of work. Its late so

everyone is lined up already, but he can still stay in the doorway across the street. Shell leave

work and cross Bronx Boulevard headed to her car and she wont see him in the doorway,

because shell be thinking that all the freaks is lined up and in the shelter already, and shes in

the clear.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 19

He starts on Bullard, hanging between the trucks parked on the street where she cant see

him but she isnt coming so he walks back and forth, back and forth, on the other side of the

street from the green CRV looking down on the railroad tracks the river and the Parkway. He lay

the blue Pegasus bag on the lift-gate of one of them trucks and he open it. Then he unwrap the

piece and lay it on top. He take out those plastic ties and he break the plastic cinch that hold them

together so they are loose in the bag lined up next to the gun. He lay the laundry bag over the

piece, loose, so you cant see what is underneath it, but so you can slip you hand right under it

easy. He leaves the zipper of the blue Pegasus bag open.

She not coming yet. Bitch.

Then he walks up the hill on 237th, goes left and enters the doorway of the building

across the street from her office. White concrete. Blue Awnings. Flower beds from last year that

were overgrown with last years dried-out weeds.

Most of the people who work in that building go at four-thirty or five. State workers,

mostly. The stragglers push past him and they are thinking maybe I should call somebody when

they see him. Cant have these vagrants hanging in our doorway. These homeless. These bums

from the street. But the office peoples day is over, and they are just out of here. They call

somebody if he is still there in the morning and they have to push past him on the way into work.

But he be long gone by then.

And then she come out.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 20

She walk across the street just like he thought she would, on a diagonal, walking to East

237th Street. Looking straight ahead, so she dont see him.

He waits until she is on the side walk, his side of the street. Then he starts after her,

maybe a hundred feet behind.

She walking fast. She got a pocketbook, a big bag, slung over her shoulder. Her car keys

is already out, clutched in her right hand.

James Otis walk her speed. No need for her to see him, to sense him. Not yet.

She turn the corner on East 237th, and start down the hill. James Otis let her disappear

behind the building on the corner for a minute, so she cant see him if she turn back to look.

Then he turn the corner and pick up his pace.

He fifty feet back when she hit the corner on Bullard and turn up the street to her car,

which is still half a block away.

There an old brick warehouse on the corner, but she must see something out of the corner

of her eye when she start up Bullard, because she stiffens, and starts to walk faster.

James Otis stays with her. He reaches into the blue Pegasus gym bag. That piece be cold

to the touch, but the handle is warmer, and it slips into the palm of his hand real pretty.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 21

She dont look back. She know he there. But she walk faster, like that car gonna protect

her if she can get to it before he get to her. She crosses the street to where her car is parked. She

still half-thinking maybe this aint real, maybe its just someone walking behind her on the street.

Bullard is a one-way, and the driver side door be next to the street.

She turn to face him as he sticks the piece in her ribs.

James Otis, she says. She has green eyes and long eye lashes. Her skin be rough but she

got it made up to be pretty.

James Otis, she says again. Her voice is soft, not angry or even scared, like she

somebodys mother who loves her kid. She has that little bit of foreign, that music in her voice,

that got him so turned on that one time when she put her hand on his arm and said his name. She

be his bitch now.

Get in. James Otis says.

He grab her hand and stuff the key in the lock. The piece stays in her ribs. He throw the

blue Pegasus bag in, over to the passenger seat. Then he get in and pull her in after him so she

sits in the drivers seat and he is next to her, the piece pushing in the skin and flesh right under

her ribs.
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 22

You dont need more trouble, she says. You had trouble all your life. You dont need

this.

Drive, bitch, James Otis says. Then he hit her across the face with the back of his right

hand. Hit her hard, so her head jerks back on her neck.

She drives.

They go half a block.

There, he says. On the other side of the street there is space between two trucks on the

ridge overlooking the railroad tracks, the river and the parkway. There is no one coming. No cars

on the street. It is dusk. The trees are just coming into leaf. They are thin and twisted, and there is

a rusted chain link fence just to their right, in front of the trees. That fence is broken off or down

in some places and the cars on the parkway now have their headlights on, a long stream of cars,

flowing like the river.

Get out, James Otis said.

He held her by the right wrist while she opened the door, and he climbed over the drivers

seat, twisting to stay with her. Left the plastic ties in the Pegasus bag on the floor behind him.

No time. No need. She wants it. Wants it bad.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 23

I started to write this story, which is the obviously the fictionalization of a real event, in

the spring of 2015 just after the brutal murder of Ana Charle but before the plight of Syrian and

other refugees from the Middle East and Africa to Europe had entered the popular mind as a

problem, opportunity, or threat. The murder of Ana Charle had received scant attention a page

eighteen story and then two follow-up stories in the New York Times and I wanted to think

more about Ana, who I knew only from the news reports, and her murder, and her murderer, and

to hold this event up to the light, because I thought it was a story we all needed to know and to

struggle with. We need to recognize goodness, and honor people who are brave and good when

they walk among us, because those people and the values they live by allow the world as we

know it to continue to exist. We also need to look evil in the face, and understand the people

who do others harm, understand their devils, their voices, their hatreds and their fears if we are to

defeat those devils, voices, hatreds and fears before they spread through our communities, and

destroy us all.

In June of 2015, at this point in the story, I quit working on it. I had other projects, to be

sure, but what I am about to describe was so painful that I had trouble convincing myself to go

forward. It was too painful to think about. No one wants to re-live this kind of violence. Bad

enough that it happened, I thought. Leave it alone.

And the Paris murders happened.

Its November 15, 2015, two days after 129 people were murdered in Paris, and almost

400 hundred were injured. Seven men killed themselves or were killed, doing this. There is a

story that one of the murderers slipped into Europe as a refugee and a wave of anti-immigrant
 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 24

rhetoric is now sweeping Europe and the US. In the US, we have proposed to accept 10,000

refugees, but there are millions of people on the move, fleeing war and poverty. If Europe closes

its borders, and if the US, a nation of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants allows anti-

immigrant passion to consume us, then millions of people will be caught in a vise, trapped

between the suicide bombers and warlords coming after them, and the eighteen foot walls we are

trying to build, blocking their escape. Another genocide. Which we will regret, bitterly, if we

allow it to happen.

Every time I am in New York, I try to drive on Bullard Avenue, which is a one way

street. There is a little shrine on the east side of the street next to a concrete block wall, which is

the place that Ana Charlie died. There are flowers and a few toys, a few notes, a few stones.

People remember. A few people.

I cant keep looking away.

It is not possible to know what James Otis says to that bitch, or what she says to him.

They are in the back of the car. She is naked. He gets naked. He is about to get some of that

sweet white ass, just about there, when she kicks her door open, and then is on the street, running

up Bullard. You dont fuck with James Otis. You dont leave me. Not when I gotta have it. Not

ever.

He grabs the piece and then is in the street, right behind her.

One. Two. Three.

The piece tugs up with each shot.

 IMMIGRATION, Fine, 25

She stiffens and falls.

Fuck her.

James Otis gets his clothes out of the car. Gets dressed. Grabs the Pegasus bag from the

front seat. Puts the piece inside it. And then he walks away.

Just one more black man, making his own luck.

Fuck her.