The Cut

by George Pelecanos

  “The million-dollar view,” said Lucas. “You walk up there alone?”

  “Most times,” she said, looking right at him. “Yeah.”

  She went inside and came out with a couple more beers and a half-smoked joint. Lucas lit the joint off one of the candles and they passed it back and forth.

  After a long exhale, Lucas said, “This isn’t stuff from that package, is it?”

  “Nope. I already told you, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Just checking.”

  “Stop working, Spero.”

  “You’re right, I should.”

  Lisa said, “Relax.”

  Her knee brushed against his and he felt an electric current run up his spine.

  They talked some more. It was easy. Lisa roached the last of the joint in the pack of matches, blew out the candles, got up, and gathered the bottles off the table.

  “You want another?” she said.

  “I could.”

  “It’s gotten a little chilly out here.” She moved toward the door and looked over her shoulder.

  “What?”

  “You wanna come in?”

  “Yes.”

  THEY KISSED standing up in her living room. Her mouth was made for it. He admired the curve of her hip as she ran her hand down his biceps. She reached under his shirt and touched the hardness of his abdomen and ran her fingers down the ladder.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  “These are nice,” he said stupidly, as he cupped one of her breasts. His finger and thumb swelled her nipple through the fabric of her shirt.

  “They hold my bra up,” she said.

  The two of them laughed.

  “I’m trippin,” he said.

  “Me, too,” she said, her eyes alive.

  “You know I can’t stay.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t stay long.”

  “That’s better.”

  She stepped forward and came into his arms.

  LUCAS WALKED out onto the street after midnight, satiated, a cocky lilt in his step. He had no misgivings or remorse. For a couple of hours, he had forgotten about Tavon, Edwin, and death. He had not thought about Constance, his brother’s inevitable comments, morality, or anything else. His father had once told him, “Don’t let anything walk past you,” and Lucas knew well what that meant. There are opportunities and adventures that are there for only a short period of time, and only available to people of a certain age. He and Lisa Weitzman understood. They’d had fun. He didn’t want to be one of those sad middle-aged guys who think about the women they should have bedded in their youth, if only they’d been less sensible. He planned to age with good memories.

  He started up his Jeep and drove over to 13th Street with the windows down. The ride home was sweet.

  TEN

  IT WAS known as the high school up on 13th Street with the fine view of the city below. It was designed in the manner of a castle, complete with crenulated battlements and clean-line walls of brick and sandstone. In the distant past, the building had been described as the jewel of the public school system, but few made that claim anymore. Many students thought of Cardozo as a kind of prison, as students of a certain age are inclined to do, wherever they attend school. Because of this, and because of its imposing structure, dramatically set in relief against the high ground, generations of D.C. kids had simply called it the Rock.

  The school sat on the steeply graded edge of the Piedmont Plateau, on the south edge of Columbia Heights, straddling the border of an area most still thought of as Shaw. For thirty-two years, when it was filled with whites of northern and southern European extraction, it was called Central High. Numerous generals, successful lawyers, committed educators, local department store moguls, and one famous FBI director were alumni. One hundred and forty-seven of its former students lost their lives in World War II.

  In 1950, four years shy of Brown v. Board of Education, Central was declared a school for “Negro” pupils. The city needed the large facility for its black students, as their schools had become severely overcrowded, while the student population in white schools had begun to fall. Central’s name was changed to Cardozo High, the moniker of the smaller, all-black high school that had been located down the street. Its white students immediately transferred elsewhere, to west-of-the-park high schools like Woodrow Wilson and uptown schools like Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt. After Brown, despite the good intent and goal of desegregation, Cardozo stayed black. Central had boasted of graduating J. Edgar Hoover; Cardozo would claim Marvin Gaye and Maury Wills among its own.

  Cardozo was not the greatest success story in the D.C. public school system. Its test scores were said to be at the top of the second ladder, behind Wilson, Banneker, and School Without Walls, and its dropout rate was too high. It was a deep-city school, with all the problems that accompanied the social conditions outside its walls. What made the news were the failures and shortcomings. But many students graduated, went on to college and beyond, and became productive and in some cases noted members of society. Their stories, for the most part, went untold.

  Leonidas Lucas knew these stories intimately. He taught English up on the second floor.

  The route to Leo’s classroom, once students and administrators passed through a main-entrance metal detector manned by private-firm security personnel, was via the stone steps in one of several stairwells. Millions of feet had traveled heavily over these steps since the building had opened almost a century ago, rendering the stone concave. Leo’s classroom windows were covered in heavy-mesh iron screens, allowing fractured, dim sunlight to enter. The room’s sole computer, donated years earlier, was ancient; its printer did not print. Pencils were hard to come by. Some of the desks and blackboards looked more than fifty years old.

  Leo didn’t think too hard on the lack of supplies, the missing ceiling tiles, the bathrooms with no doors on their stalls, the stopped-up toilets, the grim, barely lit halls, the students who did not listen, or the few students who were dangerous among the many who were basically good. He thought about his kids and why he was there. Leo was only in his third year as a full-time teacher, and he had not yet lost his enthusiasm for the job.

  He stood before the class, his ID badge hanging around his neck, pacing slowly like a yard dog on a chain, a paperback copy of Unknown Man #89 in one hand. Leo had a desk, but he rarely sat behind it during class.

  “Okay,” said Leo. “I assume you’ve all finished reading the novel. You should have, by now.”

  Leo looked out at the all-male group. He had classes with girls and boys together, but this one was newly instituted, modeled after parochial and private school setups, part of a growing public school trend. It was thought that a good deal of the misbehavior and non-participation in classrooms on the part of boys was due to the mixing of sexes. Boys had to show off for female students, or they were just distracted in their presence. Boys didn’t want to give up too much of themselves in front of girls for fear of appearing weak.

  Leo had come to feel that all of this was true, as this class was the liveliest in his schedule. The boys spoke freely here, with enthusiasm, and he allowed them to do so, for the most part, uncensored. They were seniors, and most were seventeen or eighteen years old. Men or close to it. Unless the conversation crossed a line, and all sensed where that line was, Leo let it roll.

  No one admitted to finishing the assigned pages, nor did they admit to not completing the assignment. Leo had not expected them to answer.

  “I’ll start the discussion,” said Leo.

  He talked about the author’s use of dialogue, how it illustrated character and moved the plot forward; how the central conflict of the novel was set up economically in the early chapters; how the protagonist, Ryan, struggled with alcoholism, and how his problem was handled with subtlety and grace. This led to a few of the boys talking about experiences in their family lives involving alcohol and drugs. Leo let them go with it. Inevitably this was followed by
a discourse on the sexual relationship between Ryan and a character named Denise, also an alcoholic.

  “The scene where they split a bottle of wine,” said Leo, “and then they leave an inch or so in the bottle? Neither one of them has the need to finish it. It means they’re making progress with their recovery through the vehicle of their relationship. Great scene, right?”

  “Yeah, but after? You think he’s gonna do her. You want him to hit it. I mean, they been leading up to it.”

  “They’re taking their time,” said Leo. “It’s going to happen, and both of them know it. But neither one of them wants to rush it.”

  Many boys began to talk at once. They had landed on a subject that they all felt they knew well.

  “That right there wasn’t realistic. He would’ve banged that trick right after dinner.”

  “She wasn’t no trick. Denise was cool.”

  “She wanted it, didn’t she?”

  “All of ’em want it.”

  “Mr. Lucas is sayin, it was more special to them ’cause they took their time.”

  “Why would you wanna take your time?”

  “You don’t know nothin.”

  “I know more than you.”

  “How you gonna say that?”

  “Cause I get more than you.”

  “Since when?”

  “Last night.”

  “Yeah? What was his name?”

  The space filled with taunting “ah-has” and laughter. A balled-up piece of paper flew across the room.

  “All right, that’s enough,” said Leo. He nodded to Spero Lucas, who was seated in a student chair in the back of the room. “Come on up here, Spero.”

  Spero got up out of his chair and walked to the head of the class. As he passed Ernest Lindsay, he made brief eye contact with the young man, as he had done when he’d first entered the room. Ernest had recognized him immediately, shaken his head with mild annoyance, crossed his arms, and looked away. Now his eyes tracked Spero as he threaded his way across the classroom.

  Spero stopped beside Leo, rested one hand over the other below his belt line, and stood straight with his legs comfortably apart. He wore jeans and a clean, fitted T-shirt bearing a winged wheel. His veins were wired out on his biceps and forearms. He knew that young men of this age would respect him as much for his build as they would for any of his accomplishments. It had certainly been that way with him when he was in his teens.

  “Want you all to welcome Spero Lucas,” said Leo. “My brother.”

  Spero could see the confusion that was plain on some of the boys’ faces.

  One young man who could not hold it in said, “That’s your brother, for real?”

  “Yes,” said Leo. “All my life. We shared a bedroom for almost twenty years.”

  “Separate beds,” said Spero, which got some chuckles.

  “ ’Cept when you had nightmares,” said Leo, which was true.

  Leo let the murmurs die down. He wasn’t about to explain the color difference between him and his brother. It was more fun to let the boys wonder.

  Leo addressed the class: “This is part of our Reach for Success speaker series. Spero’s gonna tell you what he’s been doing since he got out of high school.”

  Spero said, “Thank you, Mr. Lucas,” and began to talk about his life. He covered high school athletics, his stint in the Marine Corps, boot and overseas duty, and his work as an investigator for an attorney who defended homicide and high-profile drug cases. Because they were young men and the subject matter touched on danger, crime, and violence, he had their attention from the start. He told them that he had not graduated from college, but that didn’t mean that he had given up his intellectual curiosity. He stressed that the physical was as important to him as the mental. He told them, with honesty, that many of them were not going to be rich, famous, or wildly successful, and that the years ahead of them would most likely be filled with joyous highs as well as crushing disappointments. That they should try to find work they were passionate about and strive to lead productive lives. The last part sounded like bullshit to his own ears, so he knew it would sound that way to them, but he felt he had to give them something in the way of wisdom, however lame. The truth was, he was still trying to navigate his own path. He had no long-term plans.

  “Questions?” said Spero.

  “Remember what I told y’all,” said Leo. Spero knew then that they had been prepped not to ask the question they were all curious about.

  “You carry a gun on your job now?” said Moony.

  “No,” said Spero. “That would be illegal.”

  Some of the boys looked at one another and smiled.

  Another boy raised his hand. “What kind of gun you carry in I-raq?”

  “I carried an M-Sixteen rifle.”

  “Like my grandfather did in Vietnam,” said a boy named Hannibal. His peers called him Balls.

  “We had a different version,” said Spero. “The A-Two. It had an improved flash suppressor and better sights. Fired three-round bursts instead of full auto. That made it more accurate, supposedly.”

  “What about straight machine guns?”

  “There were SAWs. Fired seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute.”

  “No pistols?”

  “Some guys carried M-Nines, which are nine-millimeter Berettas. We also had mounted fifty cals, Mark Nineteens, tanks that fired one-hundred-and-fifty-millimeter shells, incendiary grenades, M-Forty sniper rifles… all kinds of cool stuff.”

  This energized the class and caused more chatter.

  “What about knives?”

  “Yeah, but not standard-issue. Guys bought their own.”

  “What the enemy have?”

  “The insurgents had AK-Forty-sevens,” said Spero.

  “Dag.”

  “Pretty much indestructible,” said Spero. “You could pull ’em out of a sand dune and they’d still fire. And they had these rocket-propelled grenades, which we just called RPGs.”

  “I seen this one video,” said a boy named Mark Norman, “where these soldiers are in the desert, and they call in the place, on the radio, where the enemy is located at…”

  “The coordinates,” said Spero.

  “Yeah, and they just vaporized ’em with bombs and stuff. Is that what it was like?”

  “Depends on where you were,” said Spero. “There was that kind of conflict. But where I was, in a place called Fallujah, it was a more direct kind of engagement. Straight-up combat. What they call house-to-house fighting. It was…”

  Spero stopped himself. He felt he had said too much. A rare silence fell on the room.

  “Why they call y’all marines,” said a young man named Marcus Murray. “I mean, marine means the ocean or somethin, right? Seems like the navy guys should be called marines.”

  “We’re called marines because we come in from the oceans and the seas. The navy delivers us to the battlefields.”

  Ernest Lindsay raised his hand. “Why’d you join up?”

  Spero cleared his throat. “Well, first of all, personally, I think I was a good fit. I already told you that I wrestled in high school. Wrestlers who are serious about what they’re doing, they don’t want to just win on points. They want the pin. They’re competitive and focused, and they’ve got a deep need to win. The recruiters targeted me, man. But I didn’t get tricked into anything. I wanted to enlist. I saw some of the guys in my neighborhood goin, and a lot of them didn’t have many other opportunities, and I thought, why should it just be them and not me? I guess what it comes down to is, I know it sounds corny, but I wanted to do my part.” Spero looked directly at Ernest Lindsay. “All the decisions I’ve made, what I can tell you is, I did what I thought was right.”

  “He’s not suggesting you go out and enlist, necessarily,” said Leo, looking at Spero out the corner of his eye.

  “Course not,” said Spero.

  “I’m goin to college,” said a young man.

  “That’s excellent,” said S
pero clumsily. “Anyone else?”

  “How much money you make?” said Balls.

  “That’s not an appropriate question, Hannibal,” said Leo.

  “Do marines get much?” said another young man.

  “Okay,” said Leo, “I think we’re about done. Let’s give my brother a round of applause.”

  The students clapped for him. It wasn’t thunderous but it was respectful. He felt he’d done all right. At least he hadn’t shit the bed.

  On the way out the door he got close to Leo and grabbed his forearm.

  “It’s a good class,” said Spero. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Proud of you,” said Leo.

  GETTING INTO his Jeep, parked on 11th, Lucas got a call on his cell.

  “Where you at?” said Leo.

  “Still outside the school.”

  “Ernest Lindsay would like to speak with you.”

  “Now?”

  “It’s lunchtime, so I’m headed to the teachers’ lounge. You two can use my classroom.”

  “What, I gotta go through security again?”

  “Stop acting like a little girl.”

  Spero got out of his vehicle and headed back toward the school.

  ELEVEN

  SPERO LUCAS and Ernest Lindsay sat at one of the long tables in Leo’s classroom. Ernest had begun to eat his lunch from a paper bag. His mom had fixed him a tuna fish sandwich and had included Cheetos, a bottle of water, and an apple she had cut into slices.

  “Thanks for coming back,” said Ernest.

  “No problem,” said Lucas. “You know I been tryin to get up with you.”

  “Sorry. I was kinda rude when I saw you on my street.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Ernest shifted his weight in his chair. “Did you read that book we were talkin about?”