The Turnaround

by George Pelecanos

  “I’m here.”

  “Not all the time.”

  Raymond had been stressing about recent incidents in the neighborhood, cars of white boys driving through, yelling “nigger” out their open windows, leaving rubber on the street and then speeding back up to the boulevard. It had happened more often in the past year. In one way or another, it had been going on for generations. Their mother had been the recipient of such a taunt a few weeks earlier, and the thought of someone calling their mother that name had cut James and Raymond to the heart. The only white people with reason to be in this neighborhood were meter men, mailmen, Bible and encyclopedia salesmen, police, bondsmen, or process servers. When it was drunken white boys coming through in their jacked-up vehicles, you knew what they were about. Always driving in quietly and turning around at the dead end, then speeding up around the market, where folks tended to hang in groups. Yelling that stuff and driving away fast. Cowards, thought James, ’cause they never did get out their cars.

  James handed Raymond the bag of chips. “Do what you want. Just remember: Charles and Larry, they ain’t headed no place good. You and me, we weren’t raised that way.”

  “I hear you, James.”

  “Go on, then. Mind the time, too.”

  James stayed on the porch of Nunzio’s as Raymond went down to where Larry and Charles still stood, the bag of Carlings under Charles’s arm. They talked for a little bit, Charles nodding as Larry lit another smoke. Then the three of them walked slowly down the block, turning right at the next intersection.

  James kept his eyes on his brother. When he could see him no longer, he dropped the empty soda can in a bin and headed home.

  RODNEY DRAPER stayed with his mother in their old house on the other east–west-running street of Heathrow Heights. This street, too, dead-ended down by the woods.

  Rodney lived in the basement of the house, which was small and boxy, with asbestos siding. The basement took in water when it rained and got damp at the threat of rain. It always smelled of mold. He had a double bed and a particleboard chest of drawers and an exposed toilet that he and his uncle, a handyman and odd-jobber, had plumbed in themselves back by the hot-water heater. His mother and sister lived upstairs. Rodney’s setup was not luxurious, but his mother did not charge him rent the way many parents did when their children turned eighteen.

  Rodney, nineteen, had a thin nose with a small hump in the bridge. He was skinny, bucktoothed, and had knobby wrists and large feet. His nickname was the Rooster. He worked at Record City, on the 700 block of 13th Street. He loved music and thought he could combine his passion with work. He spent most of his earnings on albums, receiving a small employee discount. The new stereo had been bought “on time,” a revolving-credit thing, a small-print contract he would be paying off for years.

  Rodney was showing off his stereo to Larry, Charles, and Raymond. Larry and Charles were sitting on the edge of his bed, drinking beer, watching without apparent interest as Rodney pointed to the components the way the white, long-haired salesman had done, presenting them piece by piece.

  “BSR turntable,” said Rodney, “belt drive. Got the Shure magnetic cartridge on the tone arm. Marantz receiver, two hundred watts, driving these bad boys right here, the Bose Five-Oh-Ones.”

  “Bama, we don’t give a fuck about all that,” said Larry. “Put on some music.”

  “All that gobbledy-goop don’t mean a motherfuckin thing,” said Charles, “if it don’t sound good.”

  “Tryin to educate you, is all,” said Rodney. “You drink a fine wine, don’t you want to read the label?”

  “Black Label,” said Larry, holding up his can, grinning stupidly at Charles. “That’s all I got to know.”

  “Stereo looks real nice, Rodney,” said Raymond with a smile. “Let’s hear how it sounds.”

  He put America Eats Its Young, the new double album from Funkadelic, on the platter and dropped the needle on track 3, “Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time.” It was a number that started off slowly and built to a kind of gospel-like fervor, and it got Larry and Charles to bobbing their heads. Larry studied the album cover, which was a takeoff on a dollar bill, with a zombied-out Statue of Liberty, her mouth a bloody mess, cannibalizing babies.

  “This shit is wild,” said Larry.

  “Paul Weldon drew that cover,” said Rodney.

  “Who?” said Larry.

  “He’s an artist. Black artists making their mark in this country, and not just on record covers. We had a woman living here in the nineteen twenties whose work got showed at a gallery downtown.”

  “Man, fuck a history lesson, all right?”

  “I’m sayin, we got a rich past in this neighborhood.”

  “We don’t care about that,” said Charles. “Just turn the music up.”

  “Sounds good, right?” said Rodney.

  “I heard better,” said Charles, unable to give Rodney full respect. “My cousin got a stereo make this one be ashamed.”

  Later, Larry, Charles, and Raymond sat on the government fence, a barrier painted yellow and white at the end of the street. Rodney had politely asked them to leave, saying he planned to meet a girl he knew, a customer he had met at the record store. Raymond suspected that Rodney just wanted Larry and Charles out of his basement and had made up the date.

  Larry and Charles had grown more belligerent behind the alcohol. Larry got louder, and Charles had become quiet, a bad sign. Raymond had taken them up on their offer to join them and was drinking a beer. He was three quarters done with it and could feel its effect. He had never had more than one, and he didn’t really care for the taste. But it made him feel older to drink with these two. He kept an eye out for anyone who might tell his parents that they had seen him drinking beer in the afternoon.

  They talked about girls they’d like to have. They talked about the new Mach 1. As Larry had done many times, he asked if James and Raymond were related to Earl Monroe, and Raymond said, “Not that I know.”

  There was a lull in the conversation while they swigged beer. Then Larry said, “Heard some white boys came through, couple weeks back.”

  “White bitches,” said Charles.

  “Heard they talked some shit to your mom,” said Larry.

  “She was walking home from the bus stop,” said Raymond. “They weren’t sayin it to her, exactly. She was passing by the market when they were callin out, is what it was.”

  “So it was to her,” said Larry.

  It wasn’t a question, so Raymond did not reply. His face grew warm with shame.

  “Anyone did that to my mother,” said Charles, “they’d wake up in a grave.”

  “My father say you got to be strong and shake it off,” said Raymond.

  “Hmph,” said Larry.

  “It was my mother, I’d go ahead and shoot the motherfuckers,” said Charles.

  “Well,” said Raymond, hoping to put an end to the embarrassment of the conversation, “I got no gun.”

  “Your brother got one,” said Charles.

  “Huh?” said Raymond. “Go ahead, man, you know that ain’t right.”

  “I heard it from the man who sold it to him,” said Charles. “A revolver, like the kind the police carry.”

  “James got no gun,” said Raymond.

  “I guess I’m lyin, then,” said Charles, staring straight ahead. Larry chuckled.

  “I ain’t sayin that,” said Raymond. “I guess what I’m sayin is, I didn’t know.”

  Larry lit a cigarette and tossed the match out into the street.

  “He got one,” said Charles, looking into his beer can, shaking it to see what was left inside. “You can believe that.”

  JAMES MONROE liked to keep a clean red rag hanging from his back pocket when he worked the full-service pumps up at the Esso. Once he got the gas going into the car, he’d wash the windows, using the long-handled double-edged tool that sat in a bucket filled with diluted cleaning fluid. When he was done scraping the excess fluid off the win
dshield and rear window, he pulled that rag and wiped softly at any smudges or residue. Didn’t matter if it needed to be done or not. The act showed the customer that he took pride in his job and cared about the appearance of their automobile. Because of this one little thing he did, what he liked to call his “finishing touch,” he would occasionally receive a tip, sometimes a quarter and sometimes, around the holidays, fifty cents. Didn’t matter if it was only a dime, really, or even just a look in someone’s eye that said, That young man cares about his job. When you got down to it, it was about respect.

  James had been the first black, to his knowledge, to be hired at the station. In his mind, he was not breaking a racial barrier but rather changing a tradition they had up at this particular Esso. In the past, the proprietor had always hired neighborhood white boys and their friends. James had been persistent, going back many times to talk to Mr. George Anthony, the station owner, a stocky, bearded man whose eyes crinkled around the sides when he smiled. Mr. Anthony had not hired him straightaway, but James’s persistence had paid off one day when Mr. Anthony said, almost as an aside, “All right, James. Come on in at eight tomorrow morning. I’ll give you a try.” Later, when Mr. Anthony had seen what James could do, how conscientious he was about reporting for work on time, never calling in sick, even when he was sick, Mr. Anthony said, “You know why I hired you, James? You kept on asking me for the job. You didn’t give up.”

  James did good work, but he could only get part-time hours up at the station. Mr. Anthony tried to be fair to all the young men he employed and give them the equal opportunity to earn some coin. James took home about forty-two dollars a week. Not enough to move out of his parents’ house or buy a car on credit. But he did have a plan: he wanted to be a mechanic, like his father, Ernest Monroe. James thinking, Maybe I’ll have my own gas station someday, make real money. Enough to buy a house for myself in the city, and help my mother and father find one near me, too. Live in a place where redneck white boys don’t drive by my mother when she’s walking home from the bus stop up on the boulevard after getting off work. Calling my mother a nigger after she’s been on her feet all day, wearing that cleaning uniform of hers. She who has never judged anyone.

  He felt his blood quicken, thinking of his mother taking that abuse. He had recently bought something, something to show in case that kind of thing happened again. Just to scare those punks, was all it was. To see the looks on their faces when it was them eating dirt.

  He didn’t like to feel this angry. He moved the image of his mom from his mind.

  As far as the ownership thing went, James realized he was dreaming, but there wasn’t anything wrong with thinking ahead. He had to concentrate and work to get to where he needed to be. He had signed up for the mechanic classes through Esso. They had a kind of training program set up for their employees, the ones they thought could cut it. Mr. Anthony had urged him to do it and agreed to pay for half the course fee. Working on cars was not a bad way to make a living. When you fixed something, you made someone happy. A car came in broke and it left out of there in running condition. You had accomplished something.

  A career as an auto mechanic would separate him from boys like Larry and Charles, who he felt were already done. He’d get Raymond up here, too, teach him how to work, to get along with people outside their neighborhood, the way he, James, got along with the white customers and the white boys who worked at the station. Raymond had been in a little trouble lately, a shoplifting thing up at Monkey Wards and, more serious, getting caught for throwing a rock through the window of a house in that high-onna bring in somclass neighborhood near Heathrow. Mr. Nicholson, the man who owned the place, had paid Ray less than they had agreed for yard work, saying Raymond had not done a thorough job, and Raymond had gone over there one night for some get-back. The police, sent by Nicholson, had come to their house straightaway, and Raymond had admitted what he’d done. They gave him an FI for that, meaning no arrest or court if he paid for the damages, but now he had something on his record. One more thing like that, the police said, and he’d be in some real trouble. Ernest had given James the task of keeping Ray on the straight, looking out for him, reining in his violent impulses. He was just a kid, jacked up with too much energy, was all it was. The boy did have anger inside him.

  James had been like that himself when he was younger, with big resentment and distrust, mainly of whites. That feeling had softened, somewhat, when he and the other kids from his neighborhood had been bused to the white junior high and then the high school on the rich side of the county. He didn’t run with those white kids at all, but at least they weren’t any kind of mystery to him, as they had been before. And most of these white boys he worked with at the station, he found them to be all right. Not that he hung with them outside the job. They were what they were, and he was from Heathrow Heights. But at work they were all young men, dark blue pants and light blue shirts, their first names written in script on oval sew-on patches. You could be the best of them or you could be average. He wanted to be the best. He wanted respect.

  “Yes, ma’am?” said James, approaching the open window of a white-on-white Cougar, an oldish blond lady under the wheel.

  “Fill it up,” she said, not looking him in the eye. “Hightest.”

  “Right away,” said James, pulling the nozzle out of its holster in the pump. “I’ll go ahead and get those windows for you, too.”

  THE MONROE home was, at a glance, as modest as the other homes in Heathrow Heights. The house was a two-bedroom with wood siding, a storm cellar, and a front porch. Ernest Monroe, being a mechanic, was handy, and he kept the place maintained and right. He had taught his sons the smooth stroke of a paintbrush, the proper swing of a hammer, and the use of glazier points and putty in the replacement of broken windows, a frequent occurrence when boys and baseballs were around. Ernest knew that a fresh coat of paint every two years was the difference between a shabby-looking home and one that told others that a steady workingman lived here and cared about what was his. Didn’t take money to achieve that impression, but rather a little bit of sweat and pride.

  Ernest worked hard, but he also looked forward to his relaxation time. After dinner, his nights were all about sitting in his recliner, watching his bought-on-time twenty-five-inch Sylvania console color TV, drinking a few beers, and smoking his menthol Tiparillo cigars. Once he got in that chair, the late edition of the Washington Post in his lap, he didn’t move except to make trips to the home’s sole bathroom. Ernest would watch his CBS action shows, occasionally reading aloud from the newspaper when something got his attention or amused him, sometimes getting a response from his wife, Almeda, or his sons if they were around and listening. This was entertainment, to him.

  “Y’all keep your voices down for a minute,” said Ernest. “I want to hear the song.”

  Mannix, his favorite detective show, was about to come on. He enjoyed the opening, where they played the music over split-screen shots of Joe Mannix running, drawing his pistol, and rolling over the hoods of cars.

  “Da-dant-de-da, da-dant-de-da-daaaaah,” sang James and Raymond in unison, cracking up and giving each other skin.

  “Quiet,” said Ernest. “I’m not playin.”

  Ernest Monroe was a medium-sized man with ropy forearms built from years of turning wrenches. His thick mustache and modified Afro were flecked with gray. In the evenings his hands smelled of cigar smoke and Lava soap.

  “Da-dant-de-da, da-dant-de-da-daaaaah,” sang James and Raymond, now almost in a whisper, and Ernest grinned. When the music did come on, they stopped the game and let their father hear the song.

  “Work good today, Jimmy?” said Almeda, a thin woman, once pretty, now handsome, in a sleeveless housedress. She was seated between her sons on a worn couch that she had worked on with needle and thread to keep nice. She was fanning herself with a Jet magazine. The house had no air-conditioning and stayed hot in the summer. It didn’t even seem to cool down much at night.

  �
�Work was all right,” said James.

  “He was pumping Ethyl,” said Raymond.

  “Raymond,” said his father.

  “And where were you this afternoon?” she said to Raymond, pointedly ignoring his off-color comment.

  “Just around,” he said. Raymond had been chewing on wintergreen Life Savers up until dinner, hoping his mother and father would not smell beer on his breath. It had been hours since he’d had it, but, being inexperienced as a drinker, he did not know how long the stench of alcohol lingered.

  The opening credits ended, and the network went to a commercial. Something caught Ernest’s eye in the newspaper and made him smile.

  “Listen to this right here,” said Ernest. “Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm visited George Wallace in the hospital today . . .”

  “He still over at Holy Cross?” said James.

  “They did some operation,” said Almeda, “trying to get the bullet fragments out of his spine.”

  “See if they can get that cracker to walk again,” said Raymond.

  “That’s not very Christian of you, Ray,” said his mother.

  “Anyway,” said Ernest. “Shirley Chisholm is walking out the hospital, and some reporter asks her why she is visiting this man. Does this mean that she would support him in a presidential election if he moderated his views? You know how Shirley Chisholm responded? All she said was, ‘Jesus Christ!’ ”

  “Heard Wallace gonna get the sympathy vote if he runs again,” said James.

  “From who?” said Ernest.

  The show came back on. The boys chuckled at the story line, which had Mannix being blinded by the powder of a close-to-the-face gunshot, then, still sightless, spending the rest of the hour going after the man who did it.

  “How he gonna find the dude if he blind?” said Raymond.

  “Peggy gonna help him out,” said Ernest, cigar smoke streaming from the side of his mouth.

  “Your father likes that Gail Fisher,” said Almeda.

  “I don’t like her like I like you,” said Ernest.