Equals
We buried Moses in the veterans cemetery two weeks after it all happened. We weren’t sure they’d allow it cuz of what happened but they did so, that was good. His sister, LaVonne, she didn’t have any back up plan or anything so if they didn’t allow us to bury him there, I don’t know what the fuck we would’ve done. She was all stressing out about it up to the final moment sure that something would happen, that we’d get a call or an email saying the funeral was off but it was all good, nothing happened after all.
The service was a small affair, which made sense. The cops mostly stayed back, which was good. That there was any cops at all pissed people off and I thought for sure some shit would go down but there was just some yelling back and forth and some awkward staring contests and that was it. I know there were a million ways from Sunday that it could’ve gone south and been a real shit show but we lucked out. There was no twenty-one gun salute or taps or any of that. I mean, yeah, Moses had been a veteran and he’d been decorated, he’d gotten the Silver Star and a Purple Heart but after what had went down, I wasn’t surprised they skipped all the ceremony and shit.
“It’s all a goddamn waste of time! I already done told you that! What’s a bunch of signs and chants gonna’ do? They’ll just go right on killing again and again until somebody does something. Shit, if all you want to do is protest, might as well just line yourselves up for the goddamn firing squad while you’re at it!”
I’d told Moses about the planned protest. I told him we were going to be marching down to city hall, to police headquarters, that we had a bunch of groups signing up to march with us. I told him that the protest would be in the thousands, he didn’t care though. Moses had never been much for words, had never been much of a talker. If something needed doing, Moses did it, he didn’t sit around talking about it.
Before he died, Moses killed twelve cops and wounded seventeen others. I know one is still on life support all this time after and another one, this Latina, she’s never gonna’ walk again. Two of the cops he wounded were brothers, the rest were all whites or Hispanic. Two of the dead and four of the wounded were women, which, I think probably bothered Moses but it’s not like I’ll ever get to ask him about it for sure. Not in this life, anyway. He had always preached that the police were there to hold us down, that they were the white man’s way of keeping us in line. I always just took it as talk, you know the way some people do. One day, he just up and decided to do something about it.
He didn’t do it all out of the blue like. It was at the end of that summer, that one summer, the one where black men all across the country were getting shot and killed by white cops. What was there, like four of five that summer? Every time one happened, you read these stories about why it happened, how this one was different from the other ones, how this one was ‘justified’ but in the end the shooters all stayed white and the victims all stayed black so it got to where the details didn’t matter much because the basics all stayed the same.
Moses had served just under twenty years in the marines. He had made it to E-7 which made him a ‘gunny’. He quit just short of his twenty though, he told me that the military was no place for blacks, not in America. LaVonne told me stories of the shit he had to put up with from higher ups, most all of them white. He’d a good record. He’d served over in the Middle East and out in Afghanistan. Then, he was out, done, just like that. He got himself a job working at a garage across town. He’d always been a wiz when it came to fixing things and he liked the garage vibe on top of that since they pretty much just left him alone to do his work.
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He used this AK-47 he’d gotten, a Romanian version with a cherry wood stock. He had like five or six extra mags on this ammo vest he wore over his body armor. He had two pistols, 9mm ones, Glocks I think. He used them, too. Used up all his ammunition. Just shot the hell out of Downtown. One of the white officers he wounded, he walked up to and shot in the head, all execution style. They caught that on video. Played the hell out of that on the internet for months afterwards.
Moses got winged a few times. The shootout he had with the cops lasted close to a half an hour which they say is a damn long time to be in a shootout. He kept on the move the whole time, shooting from one position and moving on, scooting to another. He only went after cops and didn’t manage to hit nobody at the protest, which, with all the shots he fired is pretty fucking amazing if you ask me. I read later that his shots were all good, real precise, like they knew he’d been trained and all. He was trying to make it across a street to some cover when he went down. They said he was still alive after, after he got shot. He laid there in the street for almost an hour before they sent any medics to check him. Rumor has it that it was all on purpose, that the cops wanted him to just lie there in the road and bleed out. The police said that they were afraid he had boobytrapped himself or some shit, that they were proceeding with ‘utmost caution’, that they got medics to him as fast as they could. Didn’t matter though what anybody said because by the time the medics got to him, Moses was dead and dead is dead no matter how you try to spin it.
We got our church’s minister to come out and do the service. He was kind but he seemed unsure about doing it and seemed all awkward and shit. What do you say about a thing like that? Some of the young guys at the church, when I finally got up the nerve to go, they’d pull me aside and tried to tell me what a hero they thought Moses was. They wanted me to know that he stood up for what was right, that he actually did something, that he’d never be forgotten, you know, shit like that. I let them tell me whatever it was they were going to tell me cuz I wanted to be respectful and all that but, man, I don’t know to this day how I feel about any of it. You know?
A few weeks later, when I came to visit Moses, I noticed the graves around him for the first time. Harry Beard was the name of the guy buried next to him, just to the east. Whenever I went to visit him from then on, I noticed that this Beard guy always had fresh flowers on his grave. Moses always had fresh flowers, too, like they seemed like the only ones in their section that had that going for them. All the other graves all around them, they never had nothing or, if they did, it was a rare thing like maybe for a birthday or a holiday or something. With lots of the other graves, it was like there was no one there or, if there was whoever they’d been they’d just been forgotten about.
I looked the Beard guy up online to see if I could find out anything about him. He still had profiles up on social media even though he’d been dead like five years or something at that point. Dude had been ex-army special forces, ex-cop, had lots of different flags all over his page: the Stars and Stripes, the Confederate flag, Blue Lives Matter, an Army flag and one of them yellow ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ things with the snake. One search I did linked his name with the Klan on some message boards I from years ago. I didn’t see that he’d posted anything extreme or obviously racist but he sure as fuck had liked a lot of things on there that were both.
As I did more digging, I found this story about how this Beard guy was one of a bunch of cops who were investigated for beating some black kids they caught selling drugs. There was an investigation and suspensions but I guess nothing came of it because I didn’t find anything about him getting fired or charged with anything or anything like that.
Later, after his cop days, he was charged with shooting at some black kids who he said threatened him and his daughter while they were walking down the street. Charges I guess got dismissed on that one, too. I couldn’t find nothing more about it.
I read on one of his social pages about his dying. Folks were all posting about how great a guy he was and how sad they were. Sounded like he had a heart attack. Lots of his pictures showed him drinking, all red faced and eyes all glazed over and shit. He had a smoke in his hand a lot of times, too, so that for sure didn’t help him any. Just up and dropped dead one day I guess.
I had a beer and thought how pissed Moses would be at all that, how he’d replaced the American flag flying in his front yard that last summer of his life with that old Marcus Garvey red, black and green pan-African flag and a Black Panthers flag with a snarling big cat on it. How he’d be all pissed to be buried next to some cracker cop who beat up and shot at black kids. He’d have gotten all pissed at the pics of the dude standing in front of Confederate flags wearing his uniform trying to look all cool and shit. Whatever lives they’d each lived I thought to myself, they were equals now, wherever the fuck they were. Funny how life & death worked out like that.
