Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  He thought about this all the way across the street, watching the woman argue with the clerk. Was this a trap? Was this too good? He thought it could be, but sometimes you had to take chances. Jimmy ran ahead a step, too anxious. Krush moved up and they made the streetside of the burgundy Buick together. Jimmy turned to cover the street. Krush got a hand on the latch and tugged it. Something huge flew up at the window from the dark interior of the car. Eighty pounds of dog crashed against the glass. The car rocked, and even through the Detroit glass Krush and Jimmy could hear the yammering of the thing. It dropped away and launched itself at the window again, droplets scattering on the glass. Jimmy stumbled back into the street. Headlights caught him in a glare and now the sound of rubber was louder than that crazy motherfucking dog. Krush was still holding the door, not tugging it, not thinking anything right now. He was fascinated by that thing in the car. It was every man’s nightmare out of the basements, out of every dark alley and every ruined building. Nothing to see of it but those goddam yellow eyes and the spit running, and those teeth coming out of all that pink wet mouth, teeth like whale ribs on a shore, like fucking dinosaur ribs. The car jerked again as the dog hit the window. Jimmy came back to Krush and literally ripped him away from the car as the whole street came alive with horns and cabbies yelling. Krush let Jimmy pull him away from the Buick, and as they stumbled back across the street Krush could see that white bitch in the store, the gold heavy on her wrist, shining in the light; he couldn’t believe it—the white bitch was waving at him. Bye-bye, she was waving, and she had a smile on worse than her fucking dog. New York women, he thought. Strange bitches. Jimmy dragged him around the corner onto 55th, into the darkness of the cross street. Jimmy was half-crying, half-laughing, still racing away down the street with Krush loping along behind him, being hauled away like a blind man. Krush could think of only one thing.

  “Man,” he kept saying to himself, “gonna get me a pet too!”

  Jamie sat in the audience at the Pussycat Theater on Seventh Avenue like a Saul struck by God on the road to Damascus, a man confronted by a revelation. There was nothing in Buffalo—there was nothing on the planet—that could get a business major ready for something like this. All around him, in witless raptures, sat other men, black guys, white guys. Jamie could see a Chinese guy a few seats away and it came to him as a kind of jolt that even Chinese guys liked to look at pussy. It gave Jamie a nice feeling. There’s hope for the world, he thought, when men of all races can sit down together and ogle some pussy. And what pussy this was: twenty feet wide in living color and Dolby stereo, looking for all the world like the entrance to paradise complete with gates of wrought-gold and copper and an endless vision of soft pink clouds billowing away to a flush of deepest rose. Like a sunset, thought Jamie Spiegel; blond pussy is like a sunset in heaven. All around him the men in the room stared at the screen like prisoners freed, a wet sheen on every forehead, every bottom lip shining too. And the sound? “Like surf,” said Jamie, half aloud, into the luminous, flickering dark, as he tugged at his zipper.

  Jimmy and Krush ran into some home boys at Broadway and 53rd. There was Ronnie Holloway, a myopic albino who called himself Ahmad Khan on the street. Ahmad Khan? Krush hated that phony Africa Muslim shit. What the fuck was Africa to Krush? His own name, the name his mother called him by, the name his father gave him, was Dennis McEnery, and Krush had a pretty good idea that he wasn’t born wherever the McEnerys came from. So it was a slave name, or the name some white man had given his grandmother when she came up to live in Harlem. Krush was his street name down here in The Deuce, and with some of his friends back on 116th Street. He was known by other names in other blocks. Now and then he took the IRT to the Melrose area of the South Bronx along with some of the bloods from his way. They’d take out a bodega, or fiend a few housewives shopping along Third Avenue. On these runs Krush’s name was Skate. Jimmy Jee called himself Velvet. They took names from cartoon shows, from dimly perceived and distorted versions of black success in America. Krush’s brother called himself The Duke because he thought The Duke of Earl was a black king of Louisiana in the Civil War. The Civil War was the war where the black soldiers fought all the cracker sheriffs down in Dixie after a cracker assassin killed Mister Lincoln. Dixie was any place south of Baltimore. The South, when they thought of it, was a place full of snaggle-toothed skinny white trash who rode horses across endless fields of okra and black-eyed peas. They lived in shacks and they all had guns. They had licenses to hang niggers on the Fourth of July. The Duke’s only friend on the street had given up crime after The Duke’s death and was now making money collecting dollars from home boys and their mommas to buy a huge black homeland in Liberia, which Krush had been told was an island in the Pacific where black men had built a free nation after the Second World War.

  Up in Morningside Heights the older blacks used to sit around and call Krush Denny-boy and talk to him about what Harlem had been like when they were kids. The stories were told in soft voices, the talk going back and forth on slow summer nights when it was too hot to stay indoors, too hot to sleep. The block would be full of little kids playing seven-up and soccer in the road. Ladies would hang out of windows, leaning on blankets, calling to each other. Somebody would put a radio out on the ledge; they’d tune it in to a bop station. The notes would go out from roof to roof and cover the street with a cloak of music. Here and there on the stoops Dennis could see the glow of cigarettes and pipes being smoked in the dark. The bottoms of beer bottles would flash in the streetlights. Older kids would dance under a lamp post. The people would all come out, even the oldest ones. Everybody would stroll from stoop to stoop, talking in low voices, telling stories about who was seeing who, asking what happened to that kid who used to play the piano at The Palm, and how was your daddy’s heart.

  There was a kind of courtliness to it, a civility and grace that Krush could hardly remember now. People on the street said “Good evening” and spoke in clear voices. Nobody swore or cursed out in front of the older folks. Kids went and got things, and carried them back without spilling them. Daddies would call out across the street for their kids to leave off that fussing with those cans, you get back here now, you don’t want a whipping. And when he went back he could smell pipe smoke from the dark corner of the stair where his uncle always sat, puffing away on a bowl, smoking Old Virginia that came in a red wrapper. The man seemed too old to live but he was still there whenever Krush went home, and the same pipe burned all the way down on the side where he held the match to it, his cheeks going in and out and the smoke coming up in blue clouds. Uncle Ray used to claim that there was a time you could sleep over in Morningside Park, nights it was too hot. The people, they’d just leave the doors open and they’d stroll over around midnight with a sheet or a blanket, up into the low green hills where the grass was still cool. People would spread their blankets and pass around a bottle of brandy or sherry. The married people, or the ones who were going together, they’d go off a little ways, into the darker places, and you could see the lights of their cigarettes and hear their low talk carrying in the quiet. Uncle Ray said sometimes there’d be two hundred people all sleeping around, babies and little children. Uncle Ray said it was summer camp. Krush heard this story often, and every time he heard it he’d listen to it and think, shit, I ain’t never gonna get so old I sit around talking dumb shit like this. You go into Morningside Park with a sheet nowadays and the thieves and the faggots would run like hell. Think you be a ghost. Sleep in the park? Leave your door unlocked? Shit.

  The little albino who called himself Ahmad Khan was bragging to Jimmy Jee about a hit the boys had just made. Ahmad was a front man for a jostle operation. He could still look like a kid if it was dark enough, although he was nineteen. His crew consisted of two other boys, The Scoop and an asthmatic by the name of Franklyn—called, on the street, Chokes. They had spotted a pair of poppy loves, an older white couple, obvious tourists from one of the hotels, coming out of that dago trap called Mamma
Leone’s, off Eighth. They were strolling along 48th Street, looking at the marquees for Broadway shows, not paying any attention to the crowds around them. Ahmad had cruised by once, checking them out for gold chains and getting an idea of the woman’s grip on her handbag. It was a big leather satchel, still open, and Ahmad had seen a lizard-skin pocketbook inside. Rather than simply fiend the couple, a risky undertaking in the well-lit street, the crew had decided to lift that lizard-skin purse.

  Ahmad was the blocker. His job was to get a little in front of the couple as they walked, timing this part just right. He wanted to be two paces ahead of them when they got to the traffic light at the corner. He was too small to be seen as a threat, even if this couple was alert enough to check him out. It was funny how the vics handled themselves on the street. There were more than 40,000 incidents of petty robbery, mugging, and jostling on the streets of New York last year. Yet all the vics figured it would happen to somebody else. They wandered along like people in a daze, never looking hard at the people around them, never thinking ahead. Krush thought they were soft and stupid. They were asking to be hit.

  Ahmad had gotten into the blocking position without drawing any suspicion from the poppy loves. Chokes was already in place, across the street on the far side, coming back in Ahmad’s direction. The light was red now. Scoop would have gotten close up behind the couple. The hit would take place when the light changed. Only tourists and poppy loves ever stopped to wait for the green. Everybody else in New York paid no attention at all to the color of traffic lights. When the light went green, Ahmad stepped off the curb about one pace in front of the vics. He watched Chokes getting closer. When Chokes was ten feet away, Ahmad faked a trip, catching his toe on a section of asphalt. The vies walked right into him. Ahmad fell flat on his face, striking the road with a flat palm to emphasize the impact. The vics, horrified, got all tangled up with each other, the woman gasping, the man reaching down to help the little black child up. Apologies were everywhere and the man dug into his pocket for a dollar at exactly the moment that Scoop lifted the lizard-skin pocketbook out of the open satchel like a man taking a French fry out of hot oil. Scoop held the thing no more than two seconds. It went into Choke’s brown Bloomingdale’s bag as he went past. Scoop stepped around the vics and Ahmad. Ahmad was smiling up at the couple, saying no harm had been done. It was his fault. Yeah okay well he could use the dollar and thank you sir. You have a nice day now. The vics walked off thinking they were lucky they hadn’t been attacked by a gang of black panthers for assaulting a crippled child. Ahmad, Scoop, and Choke had an American Express Gold Card, seventy-nine dollars, a Connecticut driver’s license, a bunch of photos of grandchildren, and, so Ahmad claimed at the top of his shrill street voice, a red rubber condom with ticklers on it.

  The crew was going back home to Harlem to get some smoke from Carlos and then they were going over to Lenox to hang out and put the moves on some women. It was always a good idea to get off the street once you’d made a hit. The cops would get the 10-22 pretty soon, and there weren’t a lot of crazed nigger albinos out on The Deuce. Cops would stop and frisk anybody who looked “hinky.” Getting caught with a Gold Card was a ticket to Central Booking for the night, and then off to Manhattan Criminal, to be released on their own recognizance in the morning. Chokes always got asthma in the tank, so they were getting out now. Ahmad offered the card to Krush for fifty, but Krush had no intention of carrying a stolen card this early in the night. Still, the success of this home crew put a knot in his stomach. Seventy-nine dollars would buy Krush and Jimmy much food. It came into Krush’s mind to fiend Ahmad and his crew right here, and he was halfway into a move when a blue-and-white with a pair of jakes pulled up to the curb and called to them. Krush went north; Jimmy went west along 53rd; Ahmad, Chokes, and Scoop went everywhere else. Krush heard later that the jakes had caught Ahmad in a stall at the Show World Center. The black chick in the ticket booth had fingered him to a beat cop when the two jakes in the radio car had put out a call to the whole Midtown South patrol area. Why the hell did the cops work so hard to snag one nigger thief?

  By the time Jimmy and Krush hooked up again at their usual spot at the north doors of the Port Authority on 42nd, the fun was going out of the evening. They were getting hungry, they’d been jerked around by a white bitch, and that little yellow fucker had already gotten paid. It was late and somebody was going to give it up fast or bleed.

  Jamie Spiegel was getting tired. He had been in and out of every porn shop he could find since the show had ended at the Pussycat. A live sex show up on Eighth had cost him $25. That had been one awful experience, Jamie decided. A bored black man and a skinny white chick had done some pretty athletic things on the stage under one of those ultraviolet lights. The hall was painted black and red, the chairs were sticky, and the place smelled like a basement. Some creature with a bony face and orange lipstick had come up close to Jamie in the dark and run a hand over his crotch, asking him for money, offering to blow him in the seat. The thing had been in a skirt, the thing had breasts—or something like them, since Jamie had been flashed briefly—and it had long hair, but there was too much hair on wrists that were just a little too thick. The voice was wrong too. Jamie had been at a loss for words until the thing had pulled the tank top off and shaken two perfect breasts in his face, reaching deeper into his lap. Jamie felt himself getting hard and was on the brink of saying what the hell when the stage lights came up for intermission and he’d seen the bulge in those transparent bikini panties under the leather skirt. Then he’d pushed the creature away and gotten the hell out. It was laughing at him when he reached the curtain under the red exit sign.

  The air out on the street felt as if it had come straight in off the sea. Another one of those things, a white one this time, had caught his wrist outside and asked him when it could have some of that sweet dick. Its arms were scabbed all along the inner forearm, and the eyes, rimmed in dead black, were unfocused and yellow. Jamie wrenched his hand away and stepped back. It called him a faggot motherfucker and turned away to a Spanish-looking hardcase, who had then followed Jamie all the way from 46th Street to 42nd. Jamie had found a couple of beat cops under a marquee featuring a flick called Hunt Them Down and Kill Them. The cops told him to stay off the side streets. He knew he had TOURIST PERVO WIMP tattooed on his forehead. He could see the two baby cops thinking about who he was and what he was doing down here. They had their crisp blue hats pushed back on their heads. The one who was twirling his night stick had to be younger than Jamie. They grinned at him and walked away.

  Jamie thought how nice it would be to have one of those guns on his belt. He’d go find that greaser and scare the shit out of him. Or the guy would take it away from him and shove it up Jamie’s nose. He saw the Show World Center sign on Eighth and headed for the brightly lit store. A black girl who looked like a cheerleader took five bucks from him and gave him a stack of bronze tokens for the video booths.

  Down in the basement there were rows and rows of cubicles, like metal lockers, only they were big enough to stand up in. Each booth had a red light over the door, like a signal, to tell you whether the booth was empty or not. A card told you what kind of video short was showing inside. Jamie found something called “Two On One Breakaway,” dropped in a token, and stepped inside the metal cabinet. The door had a twist lock, and Jamie felt better when he got his back up against it. The film ran on a panel of aluminum set into the door, and Jamie stood blinking into the projector for thirty seconds, dazed, while two men in Hawaiian shirts shared a woman on his chest. When he realized he was leaning against the screen, he moved away and laughed and started to relax. He had to keep feeding the box tokens or it would shut the film off every five minutes. Where the hell did they find guys built like that? And how could the chick do that? It had to be hell on the back muscles. Oh, God! Not both of them at once! Yeah, she was going to give it the old college try. Jamie stood transfixed at the sheer madness of the exercise, when all hell broke loose
outside the booth.

  Somebody very heavy was running across the floor. Now everybody was yelling at once. Somebody crashed against the door of Jamie’s cubicle. It clanged like a breadbox. Jamie jerked open the door and spilled out into the crowded hall. What was it? A raid? There were cops all over the place. Three of them—one beefy number in stripes and two fullback types—were kicking at a booth. Guys were standing around the room. Jamie saw one old man standing in an open door with his slacks rumpled around his feet. The cops got the booth door off. A porn flick played across their blue shirts for a second or two as they reached inside and dragged out a little albino kid.

  Shit, he was just a kid. Jamie was going to say something to a cop near him. You didn’t bust babies in Buffalo, cop or no. But this was New York. Then Jamie got a good look at the kid and he could see he was right out of control. He came out of the booth kicking and howling. The sergeant tried to put a lock on his thick little arm but the albino’s head came around and he clamped down on the man’s wrist. Blood came out around those strong white teeth. The cop bellowed and a night stick came out of the tangle. There was a hollow thwock, like a rim shot on a snare drum. The albino let go as the stick cracked him across the cheek.