The Turnaround

by George Pelecanos

  Twenty-Five

  LADY, THE brown house dog at Walter Reed’s occupational therapy room, trotted across the carpeted floor to Sergeant Joseph Anderson, who sat snapping the fingers of his right hand. The Lab came to him and smelled his hand, licked it, and allowed Anderson to rub behind her ears. The dog closed her eyes as if in pleasant sleep.

  “She digs it when I rub her there,” said Anderson.

  “And she doesn’t even have to guide you,” said Raymond Monroe.

  Sergeant Anderson’s left forearm was flat on a padded table. Monroe sat beside him, kneading his muscles. This arm ended with a prosthetic hand that was decorated with a continuation tattoo, the word Zoso spanning flesh and synthetics.

  “I don’t like it when a woman tells me where to put my hand,” said Anderson. “I like to find that spot my own self.”

  “You’re into the challenge, huh?”

  “When they get to moanin, it’s like, yeah, I just did something special. Like the sign said: Mission Accomplished.”

  Monroe said nothing.

  “Do you think I’m gonna do all right, Pop?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With the women. Am I gonna be hittin it when I get out of here?”

  Monroe looked into the young man’s eyes. He pointedly did not look at the raised red scars crisscrossing the left side of his face.

  “You’re gonna do fine,” said Monroe.

  Lady broke off and walked across the room to a soldier who had said her name.

  “I’m not exactly what you’d call handsome anymore, am I?”

  “I’m no Denzel, either.”

  “No, but I bet you were plenty handsome when you were young. You had your strut in the sun, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. And so will you. Women gonna be all over you, boy. With that personality of yours. What do they call that? Infectious. You’re gonna do fine.”

  “We’ll see,” said Anderson. “Still, I been feeling like, you know, the best times are behind me. You ever get like that?”

  “I do,” said Monroe. “But that’s part of being a middle-aged man. You’re just getting started.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way, sir.”

  “Maybe you ought to talk to the shrink about all this.”

  “It’s easier talkin to you.”

  Monroe rubbed his thumbs deeply into the brachioradialis, the major muscle of Anderson’s forearm.

  “It’s funny,” said Anderson. “People think we were in some kind of living hell over there. Make no mistake, it was rough. But alongside the confusion of war and the general shitstorm we were in, there was also . . . well, I was at peace. Strange to say that, I know, but there it is. I woke up every morning knowing exactly what my job was. There wasn’t any doubt or choice. My mission was not to liberate the Iraqi people or bring democracy to the Middle East. It was to protect my brothers. That’s what I did, and I never felt so content. Don’t laugh at me, but that year I spent in Iraq was the best year of my life.”

  “I’m not laughing,” said Monroe. “They say men are goal oriented. You had your mission and it made you feel right.”

  “That’s what’s got me down, Pop. I should be back there, with my men. Because I didn’t finish. I wake up in the morning now and I feel like there’s no reason to get out of bed.”

  “You want to do something? Go out there and tell people your story. Say what you did. Folks in this country are so divided right now, they need good people like you to tell them that we’re one community. That we’ve got to rebuild.”

  “Don’t go putting me up on a pedestal. I’m not proud of everything I did.”

  “Neither am I.” Monroe stopped working on Anderson’s arm. “Look, Sergeant. You’re gonna realize something as you get older. Hopefully it’ll come to you quicker than it did to me. Life is long. Who you are now, the things you did, how you’re feeling, like your world is never gonna be as good as it was? None of that is going to matter as you move along. It only will if you let it. I’m not the person I was when I was young. Shoot, I had an incident today . . . Let’s just say I had to walk a whole lotta miles to learn how much I’ve changed. Whatever you did before doesn’t matter. What matters now is how you make the turnaround. You’re gonna be all right.”

  “Did you get all that off a greeting card, Pop?”

  “Aw, screw you, man.” Monroe blushed. “I told you to see a professional.”

  “I should have known a Redskins fan would be an optimist. Me, I don’t see any Super Bowls in your future with Coach Gibbs at the helm. What is he, ninety?”

  “You think he’s old? Cowboys coach wears his pants any higher, he’s gonna choke hisself.”

  “We’ll see you this fall.”

  “Twice,” said Monroe.

  He went back to his task. He turned Anderson’s arm over and worked the flexor ulnaris and radialis.

  “You know, sounds to me like you got some real depression,” said Monroe. “You really ought to talk to the house shrink.”

  “She’s not as entertaining as you.” Anderson grunted. “That feels good, Doc.”

  “I’m no doctor.”

  “You’re good as one.”

  “Thank you,” said Monroe.

  ALEX PAPPAS arrived at the nursing home on Layhill Road and found Miss Elaine Patterson in the group dining hall, not far from the reception desk where he had signed in. An orderly pointed to an old woman with thinning white hair and eyeglasses who was seated in a wheelchair at a round table with two other women her age and a woman who was spoon-feeding her. Alex had a seat, introduced himself, and got only eye contact in return. He had bought some carnations at a grocery store on the drive out, and he told her they were for her but kept them held across his lap.

  Beyond pleasantries, he did not try to engage her in conversation. He did not want to speak about the incident in front of the caregiver, an African by the sound of her accent. He wanted her to enjoy her meal, as unappealing as it appeared to be. Also, there was much noise in the dining hall. Conversations repeated, orders and requests shouted at the employees, and the sound of one woman who was cursing like a rap artist and being ignored. In a room adjoining the hall, a woman played a piano and sang “One Love, One Heart” off-key.

  Miss Elaine Patterson was in poor condition. One side of her face, collapsed and sunken by time, was obviously paralyzed, the left half of her mouth slack and heavy with drool. Her left hand was a claw, her left leg swollen and without muscle tone. Her speech was halting, with long silences between words, and slightly slurred. She must have children and grandchildren, thought Alex. She is staying alive for them.

  After the last bit of applesauce was wiped from Miss Elaine’s chin, Alex told the African orderly that he would wheel Miss Elaine to her room. The orderly asked Miss Elaine if that was all right with her, and she said that it was.

  He pushed her down a long hall, past a nurses’ station. Going by the residents’ rooms, Alex heard game shows on televisions turned up way too loud. The smell of urine and excrement was faint but unmistakable.

  Her room was private, with a view of the parking lot. He left her in her wheelchair beside the bed, and turned down the sound of her TV, which was showing a black-and-white movie on TCM. He substituted the carnations for a bunch of daisies whose edges were brown and wilted, and ran water into the vase. He replaced the vase on a stand where many photographs of middle-aged people, people in their twenties, and babies and children were on display. He pulled a chair beside her and repeated his name, which he had told her in the dining room. He told her why he was there and assured her that he would not stay long.

  “Rodney . . . called me,” she said, telling him to get on with it.

  “Then you know that I was one of the boys who came into Heathrow Heights.”

  “Yes,” she said, and pointed a finger of her working hand at his face. “Charles Baker.”

  “Right. I’m the boy who was beaten up.” Alex looked away from her, then back i
nto her black eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses. “I was on the ground, facedown. I didn’t see the actual shooting.”

  “Neither . . . did I.”

  “But in court you related what you did see.”

  Miss Elaine nodded. She used her good hand to adjust the dead one in her lap.

  “I saw you standing on the porch of the market,” said Alex. “And then you went inside.”

  “Because . . . there was going to be . . . trouble.”

  “You watched from the window. And then you turned away to call the police.”

  “To tell . . . the owner.”

  “To tell him to call the police. But what did you see before you turned away from the window?”

  Miss Elaine removed her glasses and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t stonewalling him. She was thinking.

  “I saw . . . the heavy white boy . . . get out of the car. I saw him get punched. The smaller white boy . . . you . . . tried to run. But you got kicked to the ground. One of the Monroe brothers had a gun . . . in his hand. The one with the gun . . .”

  She stopped abruptly. Alex waited, but nothing came.

  “Please, go on.”

  “He wore a T-shirt. . . . The number ten was written on it. Charles was yelling at the one with the gun. Charles was . . . always bad.”

  “What happened next?” said Alex, hearing a catch in his voice.

  “I got Sal. . . . He called the police. I didn’t see anything else. Next thing I heard . . . was the shot.”

  “You said all of this in court?”

  “Yes. I testified. I didn’t . . . want to. Those Monroe boys . . . The whole family . . . was good. I don’t know why that boy did . . . what he did. It was . . . a tragedy. For all of you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Alex, looking down at his hands, balled into fists. He opened them and took a deep breath.

  “Why?” said Miss Elaine.

  Alex could not reply.

  RAYMOND MONROE and Marcus returned from Park View Elementary, where they had been playing catch with a baseball on the weedy field alongside the school, at dusk. Marcus’s mother, Kendall, was seated at the kitchen table, reading the Post, when they entered her house.

  “Y’all have a good time?” she said.

  “Kid’s got an arm,” said Raymond, his hand resting on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Go wash up,” said Kendall, “and get your reading done before supper.”

  “It’s Friday,” said Marcus. “Why I gotta read?”

  “You do it now,” said Raymond, “and you got the whole weekend off to relax.”

  “Wizards playin tonight,” said Marcus.

  “You need to read before you watch the game,” said Kendall.

  “Gilbert got hurt, anyway,” said Marcus.

  “We still gonna root for’em, right?” said Raymond. “I mean, would you turn down a chance to go see them play just’cause Gilbert’s not on the court?”

  “To go to a game, for real? No!”

  “Do your reading,” said Raymond. “When you’re done, come see me. I got a surprise for you, little man.”

  Marcus scampered off to his bedroom.

  “You got the tickets?” said Kendall.

  “Three,” said Raymond. “Bring your binoculars, girl.”

  “Thank you, Ray.”

  Monroe washed his face and hands at the kitchen sink, then went upstairs to Kendall’s bedroom, where he had a seat at her desk and clicked the Outlook icon on her computer. He hit Send and Receive in his personal box and watched as mail arrived. He felt his pulse quicken, seeing the subject head on one of the e-mails.

  Monroe read the message. He read it a second time.

  The cell phone in his pocket vibrated. He pulled it free, looked at the caller ID in the window, and answered.

  “What’s goin on, Alex?”

  “Raymond. I’m glad I got you.”

  “Is this about Charles again? Look, man, I know it’s a problem, but I’m gonna figure out a way to deal with it.”

  “It’s not about Baker. Raymond, can I —”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to see you and James tonight. It’s important.”

  “James is working, man. Gavin’s got him on a late job.”

  “I’ll meet you both there at the garage.”

  “I would need to call James and see if that’s all right.”

  “It’s important,” repeated Alex.

  “I’ll get right back to you,” said Monroe, and he ended the call.

  He would call James in a minute. But first he needed to get downstairs and tell Kendall the news. Kenji was back at the Korengal Outpost after a long patrol. His son was alive.

  Twenty-Six

  TWO MEN sat in a gray Dodge Magnum that was facing east on Longfellow Street. They had chosen the spot because it was not under a streetlamp. The windows of the Dodge were tinted but not to a degree that would attract suspicion. They were from Maryland, but the car was a hack with D.C. plates. There were police on car patrol in the neighborhood, as the station was nearby, but the law would not bother with two men approaching middle age who were spending the early evening conversing in their vehicle. They looked unremarkable. They looked like they belonged here.

  Their names were Elijah Morgan and Lex Proctor. They were in their late thirties, broad shouldered, strong, quick, and slightly overweight. They could have been road workers or hardware store clerks. Morgan had a squarish head, Asian eyes, and a close cap of pomaded hair. Proctor was dark, finely featured, and handsome until he smiled. His teeth were false, looked it, and were cheaply made. In their home neighborhood, in a section of Baltimore south of North Avenue and east of Broadway, they were known as Lijah and Lex.

  Morgan sat under the wheel and stared through the windshield at an apartment house on Longfellow. It was a plain brick affair without balconies, its windows backed by blinds. Many of the units on the first and second floors had barred windows. Two stairwells served the building. A sign with white script letters mounted above one of the stairwell openings read Longfellow Terrace. Both of the men had already urinated once into plastic water bottles they had brought along. They had been here since sundown and were unhappy about it. Neither of them had any love for Washington, D.C.

  “How we gonna know if it’s him?” said Proctor.

  “We’ll say his name. If he react, it’s him.”

  “I’m sayin, what’s he look like?”

  “Like a straight Bama,” said Morgan. “He ain’t been uptown all that long. Dresses like nineteen seventy-five. Got a long scar on his face.”

  “And the white boy?”

  “You see many around here?”

  “No.”

  “He’s white. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Why you gotta act the bitch?”

  “Okay. The boy got a rack of pimples.”

  “On his face?”

  “Nah, motherfucker, on his ass.”

  “See?” said Proctor. “You always tryin to be funny.”

  Proctor leaned forward off the passenger bucket. The thing that was holstered and hanging across his back under his cream-colored shirt was bothering him as it pressed against the seat. He hoped it would not be much longer before the old man or the white boy came outside.

  “They got an alley behind this building,” said Proctor, “right?”

  “Every street in this city do,” said Morgan.

  “First one that comes out, we’ll take him back to it.”

  “Okay,” said Morgan, laughing deeply as a thought came into his head.

  “Why you so amused?”

  “On his face,” said Morgan, shaking his head. “Shit.”

  CHARLES BAKER was seated at the computer, struggling with the letter he was writing to Alex Pappas. He was trying to get the tone right. He was stuck on one line that did not sound correct.

  “ ‘Give me what I ask for, and you won’t never hear from me
again.’ Is that how you’d say it, Cody?”

  “That’s how you’d say it,” said Cody Kruger. “But you’d write it out different.”

  “How?”

  “Should be ‘you will never hear from me again.’ ”

  “Damn, you good,” said Baker, tapping at the keyboard, fixing the mistake. “That’s what I get for not finishin high school.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “How’d you know that, then?”

  Kruger shrugged. He slipped into his lightweight Helly Hansen jacket and put two bagged ounces of weed into its inside pockets. He hadn’t asked about the gauze bandage on Mr. Charles’s neck or the bruise along his jawline. It was just another day of misfortune for him, Kruger supposed, and he didn’t want to aggravate him any further by bringing the subject up.

  “I gotta deliver these last two OZs,” said Kruger.

  “You hear from your boy Deon?”

  “No.”

  “Now his mother ain’t pickin up the phone. No matter. We don’t need them anyway.”

  “But what’re we gonna do? I’m sayin, Dominique and them haven’t contacted us yet. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “They just figurin on how to come to terms with us, is all. But see, I get this money from Pappas, we won’t need to deal with no marijuana, anyhow. I don’t even like that business, man. I’m thinkin, I get this money, we gonna share it. Not fifty-fifty or nothing like that, but I’ll give you a taste.’Cause you been loyal to me, Cody. You my boy.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Charles.”

  “You can just call me Charles. You earned that.”

  “All right, then,” said Kruger. “I’m out.”

  Kruger left the apartment and walked onto the landing and down the steps, his chest swelling with pride. Okay, so Baker was a little bit silly and stupid with his schemes. Writing letters when he could just talk to the man face-to-face. Meeting lawyers for lunch. Trying to move in on the main weed dealer in the zip code. But Baker had thought enough of him, Cody Kruger, to call him an equal. Not fifty-fifty, but still. It meant something to be treated like a friend and a man.