The Night Gardener

by George Pelecanos

  “Mr. Guy-guy.”

  “Gus…”

  “I’m sayin, dude has name a like that, he’s gonna have some issues.”

  “He’s not the manliest fellow on the planet, I’ll give you that.”

  “And they wanted to suspend Diego for that?”

  “Insubordination. He wouldn’t give up his phone.”

  “They shouldn’t have gotten up in his face to begin with.”

  “I know it,” said Regina. “But it’s the rule. Anyway, you gotta act like you’re upset with him, I guess. A little.”

  “I’m more upset with that school.”

  “I am, too.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” Ramone leaned over the stove. “You know, you’re burning the living shit out of that garlic.”

  “Go see your son.”

  Ramone kissed her on her neck, just below her ear. She smelled a little sweaty, and sweet, too. It was that body oil she liked to wear, with a touch of raspberry in it.

  As Ramone walked away, he said, “Turn that flame down some.”

  “You can turn the flame down your own self,” said Regina, “the day you step up to cook.”

  Ramone went down the hall, the sound of the Thunderbirds and the Pink Ladies singing at his back, and up the stairs to the top floor.

  He was having more than second thoughts about the decision to transfer Diego out to a Montgomery County school, but at the time he’d made it he felt he had run out of options. Ramone and Regina had been in agreement that the District middle in their zone was unacceptable. Physically it was in a state of perpetual disrepair, and it was always short on supplies, including pencils and paper. With the school’s low lighting, many of the fluorescents and incandescents either dead or nonexistent, and the metal detectors and security personnel stationed at every working door, it resembled a prison. Sure, plenty of money got pumped into the D.C. school system, but, suspiciously, little seemed to funnel down to the kids. And the kids themselves had begun to find trouble, both in school and out. In their zone, with many parents working two jobs and others absent or just not involved in their children’s lives, some of the kids had begun to go seriously off track. It wasn’t the right environment for Diego, who was not the type of student to self-motivate and was, in fact, attracted to those on the tough side.

  Gus Ramone had discussed all of this with his wife, intensely and in private. In the end, they both decided that it would do Diego good to be exposed to a different atmosphere. But even then, when Regina herself became adamant that they make the move, Ramone was not entirely sure that his motives for getting Diego out of the D.C. public school system were pure. The thing that played on his conscience was that the kids in their neighborhood middle school were almost all black or Hispanic.

  Regardless, he and Regina had arranged the transfer. To do so, they’d set up a kind of ruse to establish residency in Montgomery County. Ramone had bought an investment property, little more than a cottage, in the then run-down downtown Silver Spring area for one hundred and ten thousand back in 1990, when Regina was teaching and they were a two-income couple. Ramone rented it to a Guatemalan roofer and his small family. He and Regina obtained a Maryland phone number for that address; the calls rolled over to their home in D.C. With that and their ownership papers on the house, they had the necessary tools to claim Maryland residence, which made Diego qualified to move.

  But from the start, it seemed as if they had made a mistake. The middle school in Montgomery County had magnet students, and most of these students were white. There was less tolerance for so-called disruptive behavior in this school than there was in Diego’s old school in D.C. Laughing or talking loudly in the halls or in the cafeteria was an offense that could often warrant suspension. So could being in the vicinity of, but not directly participating in, trouble. There appeared to be different sets of guidelines for Diego and his friends than for the kids in the magnet and gifted and talented classes. Those mostly white kids were being favored, Ramone surmised, because they were bringing higher test scores to the school. Everyone else in the school fell into the category of “other.” When Regina dug and looked into it, she found that black kids in Montgomery County were suspended, demoted, or expelled at three times the rate of white kids. Something was definitely wrong there, and though neither Gus nor Regina was quick to bring up the R word, they suspected that their son’s color, and the color of his friends, was indirectly related to the troublemaker tags they were being forced to wear.

  All of this occurred in a school situated in a neighborhood known for its liberal activism, a place where “Celebrate Diversity” bumper stickers were commonly displayed on cars. The days Ramone picked up his son at the school, he saw that most of the black students streaming out the doors hung together and walked in the down-street direction of “the apartments,” while the white students headed for their homes on the high ground. Sometimes he would sit there behind the wheel, watching this, and he would say to himself, I made a mistake with my son.

  Thing of it was, he never did know with certainty if he was doing the right thing for his kids. Those who said they did were delusional or liars. Unfortunately, the results didn’t come in until the race was done.

  Ramone knocked on his son’s bedroom door. He knocked harder and was told to come in.

  Diego was sitting on the edge of his bed, a mattress and box spring that lay frameless on the carpeted floor. The football he slept with sat beside him. He wore headphones, and as he removed them Ramone heard the sound of go-go turned up loud. Diego wore a sleeveless T, his arms thin and defined, his shoulders already as broad as a man’s. He had the beginnings of a mustache, and his sideburns had been trimmed to resemble miniature daggers. His hair, shaped up every couple of weeks at the barber on 3rd, was close to the scalp and precise. His skin was a shade lighter than Regina’s. He had Regina’s large brown eyes and thick nose. The dimple in his chin was Ramone’s.

  “Wha’sup, Dad?”

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Chillin.”

  Ramone stood over him, his feet spread in the power stance, that cop thing. Diego read it, smirked, and shook his head. He got up off the bed and stood facing his father. He was only a couple of inches shorter than Ramone.

  “Let me just tell it,” said Diego.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Today was…”

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t nothin serious.”

  “Mom told me.”

  “It’s like they’re singling me out, Dad.”

  “Well, you gave them a reason, in the beginning.”

  “True,” said Diego.

  Diego had acted out when he’d first come to the school. He’d felt that he had to show the other students that the new kid wasn’t soft. That he was tough, cool, and funny as well. Ramone and Regina had gotten several calls in September from exasperated teachers who said Diego was disruptive in class. Ramone had been pretty rough on him, giving him stern, threatening talks, putting him on restriction, and even pulling him from football practice, though Ramone had not gone so far as not letting him play his weekly game. The tough love seemed to have worked, or Diego had simply settled down on his own. A couple of his teachers had told Regina that Diego’s behavior had improved in class, and one even said that he had the potential to become a positive influence on other students, a leader. But the negative first impression he’d left on the principal, a white woman named Ms. Brewster, and her assistant, Mr. Guy, had been damaging. Ramone felt that, at this point, they were targeting his son. Diego, discouraged and unmotivated, was losing interest in school. His midterm grades were lower than they had been at his school in D.C.

  “Look,” said Ramone. “You say you didn’t know your phone was on, I believe you.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Ramone had no doubt. He and Diego had made a deal from early on: Tell the truth, Ramone said, and I won’t go off on you. I’ll only get angry if I think you’re lying. We can deal with
the rest. As far as he knew, his son had always kept up his end of the bargain.

  “If you say so, I believe you,” said Ramone. “But they’ve got their rules. You should’ve let them confiscate your phone for the day. That’s where the problem came from.”

  “They took my friend’s phone and he didn’t get it back for two weeks.”

  “Your mother and I would’ve stepped in and got it back. The point is, you can’t fight them. They’re bosses. You’re going to grow up and get out in the world and you’re going to have some bosses you don’t like, and still, you’ve got to do what they say.”

  “Not when I’m playin in the NFL.”

  “I’m talking to you serious here, Diego. I mean, I have to make compromises to bosses I don’t like, and I’m forty-two years old. It’s not just part of being a kid, it’s part of being an adult as well.”

  Diego’s lips tightened. He was shutting down. Ramone had given him this speech before. It no longer sounded fresh to Ramone, either.

  “Just try to get along,” said Ramone.

  “I will.”

  Ramone felt like they were done. He put his hand out, and Diego lightly slapped his fingers against Ramone’s.

  “There’s somethin else,” said Diego.

  “I’m listening.”

  “There was a fight the other day after school. You know my friend Toby?”

  “From football?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ramone remembered Toby from the team. He was a tough kid but not a bad one. He lived with his father, a cab-driver, in the apartments near the school. His mother, Ramone had heard, was a drug addict who was no longer in his life.

  “Toby got into it with this boy,” said Diego. “He’d been talkin mess to Toby in the halls and he challenged Toby to a fight. They met down by the creek. Toby said, Bap!” Diego slammed his right fist into his left palm. “He stole him with a jab and a right punch. One-two, and the other boy went down.”

  “Were you there?” said Ramone, perhaps with too much excitement in his voice.

  “Yeah. I was walkin home that day with a couple of friends and came up on it. You know I was gonna watch.…”

  “So?”

  “The other boy’s parents called the school. Now they’re havin what they call an investigation. Finding out who was there and who saw what. The parents want to press charges on Toby. They’re talking about assault.”

  “I thought this kid challenged Toby to the fight.”

  “He did, but now he sayin he was only kidding around. He sayin he never did want to fight.”

  “Why is the school involved? It was off their property, wasn’t it?”

  “They were both walking home from school, still carrying their books and stuff. So it makes it the school’s business.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re gonna want me to tell how Toby hit this boy first.”

  “Somebody had to throw the first punch,” said Ramone, speaking as a man and not a father. “Was it a fair fight?”

  “The other boy was bigger than Toby. One of those skateboarder kids. And he was the one made the challenge. He just couldn’t back up his words.”

  “And it was just the two of them. Nobody ganged up on this other boy, right?”

  “It was just them.”

  “I don’t see a problem.”

  “What I’m sayin is, I’m not about to snitch out my friend.”

  Ramone didn’t want him to. But it wouldn’t be right for him to come out and say so, because he had to play a role. So he said nothing.

  “We straight?” said Diego.

  “Get ready for dinner,” said Ramone with a small, strategic nod.

  As Diego put on a clean T-shirt, Ramone took in his room. Pictures of rappers cut out from the Source and Vibe, and a nice photo of a dropped, restored ’63 Impala, tacked to a corkboard; a poster from Mack Lewis’s gym in Baltimore, a collage of local fighters along with Tyson and Ali, with the saying “Good fighters come to the threshold of pain and cross it fully to achieve greatness” printed on the lower border. On the floor, homemade CDs burned on the house computer, a CD tower, a portable stereo, copies of Don Diva and a gun magazine, jeans and T-shirts, both dirty and clean, Authentic jerseys from various teams, a pair of Timbs, and two pairs of Nikes. On his desk, rarely used for studying, an unread copy of White Fang; an unread copy of True Grit, which Ramone thought his son would like but that he had never cracked; sneaker cleaning solution; photos of girls, black and Hispanic, in tight jeans and tank tops, taken at the mall and presented to Diego as gifts; a pair of dice; a butane lighter with a marijuana leaf inlaid on its face; and his loose-leaf notebook, with the name Dago written, graffiti-style, on its cover. A cap decorated with his nickname and the numbers “09,” his alleged graduation year from high school, hung on a nail he had driven into the wall.

  Even with the variation in styles, the advances in technology, and the changes in culture, Diego’s room looked much like Ramone’s room had looked in 1977. In fact, Diego was very much like his father, in so many ways.

  “What’re we having?” said Diego.

  “Your mother’s making a sauce.”

  “Her sauce or Grandmom’s?”

  “Go on, boy,” said Ramone. “Get washed up.”

  TEN

  HOLIDAY WASN’T DRUNK. It was more like he was tired. He had sweated out most of the alcohol with Rita on top of the sheets. His vision was good, driving down the toll road and then the inner loop of the Beltway from Virginia into Maryland. He felt a little foggy, but he was fine.

  He listened to the classic rock station on the satellite radio as he drove. He was not much of a music guy, but he knew his ’70s rock. His older brother, whom he’d once idolized, had played his records in the house when they were growing up, and this was the only period of music Holiday still paid attention to or knew. A live track from Humble Pie, Steve Marriott shouting, “Awl royt!” in a slurred cockney accent before the band broke into a heavy blues-rock riff, was playing now.

  Holiday didn’t see his brother anymore, except when Christmas came around, and that was just so he could visit his nephews, let them know their uncle Doc was still in the world. But the nephews were getting up to college age now, and Holiday suspected the once-a-year visits would be soon coming to an end. His brother was in mortgage banking, lived out in Germantown, drove a Nissan Pathfinder whose only path was the 270 corridor, and had a wife that Holiday wouldn’t fuck with the lights out. His brother was far away from the long-haired, cool teenager he had once been, spinning Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, and Clapton in their parents’ basement between bong hits blown out the cracked casement windows. His brother now checked his stocks on the hour and studied Consumer Reports before every purchase. Holiday wanted to scream in his face, but it wouldn’t have brought his brother back to life.

  With his sister long gone and both his parents dead, Holiday was alone. The one thing he had had to get up for, the one thing that had made his eyes snap open in the morning and driven him from the bed, had been taken away. He had been a cop, and then he wasn’t. Now he wore a stupid hat, made conversation with people who did not interest him at all, and jockeyed luggage in and out of the trunk of a car.

  All because of a fellow cop who wouldn’t cut him any slack. A rule follower, like Holiday’s brother. Another guy with a stick up his ass.

  He didn’t feel like going back to his place just yet. He exited the Beltway at Georgia Avenue and took it south into D.C. He still had time to catch one, maybe two, at Leo’s before they brought up the lights.

  THE RAMONE FAMILY ATE dinner at a table with ladder-back chairs situated in the open area between the kitchen and the rec room. They tried to eat dinner together every night, though this meant many late meals, due to Ramone’s erratic schedule. Both Regina and Ramone had come from families who had done so, and they felt it was important. The Italian in Ramone believed that sharing good food was a spiritual thing that transcended ritual.

  “Good
sauce, Mom,” said Diego.

  “Thank you.”

  “Tastes a little burnt, though,” said Diego, his eyes lighting on Ramone’s.

  “Your mom put a flame thrower to the garlic and onions,” said Ramone.

  “Stop it,” said Regina.

  “We’re playin, honey,” said Ramone. “It’s real good.”

  Alana had her face down near her bowl, trying to suck up a forkful of spaghetti. She was an intense eater who thought and talked about food often. Ramone liked to see a grown woman enjoy a meal, and he loved it in his little girl.

  “Want me to cut that up for you, Junior?” said Diego.

  “Uh-uh,” said Alana.

  “Make it easier to eat.”

  “Nope.”

  “You eatin it like a pig do,” said Diego.

  “Does,” said Regina.

  “Leave her alone,” said Ramone.

  “I’m just tryin to help.”

  “Worry about yourself,” said Ramone. “With those sauce stains on your shirt.”

  “Dag,” said Diego, noticing the splatter marks on his wife-beater.

  The talk turned to Diego’s homework and his repeated claim that he’d done it at study hall. Then the Laveranues Coles trade and Ramone’s assertion that Santana Moss was a sideline receiver only, as he tended to drop passes in the middle of the field when he heard footsteps. Diego, who had a jersey with Moss’s name on the back of it, circa the Jets, disagreed.

  “Who’s Ashley?” said Regina to Diego, apropos of nothing.

  “Just a girl at school,” said Diego.

  “I saw her name on the caller ID,” said Regina.

  “That a crime?” said Diego.

  “Course not,” said Regina. “Is she nice?”

  “What’s she look like?” said Ramone, and Diego chuckled.

  “Mom, she’s a girl I know at school. I don’t have no one special, okay?”

  “Anyone,” said Regina.

  “But you are saying,” said Ramone, “you’re saying you do like girls.”

  “Go ahead, Dad.”