“No,” he said, pausing before adding, “My son’s the same age, though.”
Lorenzo nodded, not knowing what to say next.
“Lorenzo … let me ask you.” Danny hesitated. Lorenzo knew what the question would be; it was the one he wanted an answer to himself. “Lorenzo,” Danny started again, then, his voice husky with strain, “What do you think about my sister?”
“What are you asking?”
“You know what I’m asking.”
“Hey you know. I got to explore all possible avenues.”
“Just answer me.”
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth.” He arched his fatigued shoulders. “She’s your sister. What do you think?”
Danny took a while before answering. “She’s a fuckup, but she’s got a good heart.”
A figure appeared, heading up from Hurley Street at the bottom of the Bowl, marching on a diagonal. It was Hootie Charles, striding with a bouncing step, a shopping bag in each hand, the cops in plain view but seemingly of no consequence to him. Danny had to rise and call “Hey!” to even get him to look their way. Without slowing his pace, Hootie changed course, heading to their crate with unblinking, crack-stark eyes.
“Where the fuck did you come from?” Danny asked.
“I was in the park.” Hootie put down the shopping bags and shook out his arms.
“You just come from the park? How the hell did you get in?”
“I walked.”
Lorenzo and Danny scanned all the entries, fully guarded.
“How the fuck did you walk in?”
Hootie looked at Danny, confused. “Like, how you walk.” He turned to Lorenzo. “What’s he asking me?”
“Don’t you see those police cars there?” Lorenzo twirled a finger over his head, taking in all points of the compass.
“You know everybody’s been looking for you?” Danny said.
“For me? For what?”
“Where you been last night?”
“Me?”
“You back to jackin’ cars?” Danny lit a cigarette.
“Me?”
“You jacked my sister’s car?”
“Me?” He turned to Lorenzo again. “What the fuck’s he talking about. Who’s his sister?”
“Where were you last night?” Danny asked again.
“Me? I was at a repast for my father.”
“A what?”
“A repast, at the…” Hootie snapped his fingers rapidly. “What’s the name of that… the Camelot. He died, so we had a repast. Oh!” He barked so abruptly that both cops jumped. “She got carjacked? Yeah, I heard about that. How she doin’?”
“What’s this?” Danny nodded to the shopping bags. “Let me see.” Reluctantly Hootie opened one of the bags. Lorenzo spied a plastic-sealed gross of Hall’s Mentho-Lyptus drops.
“You must got one hell of a sore throat there, boss,” Lorenzo said, looking in the other bag: another sealed gross. “Conrail having a sale?”
Danny stared into his empty coffee cup, then tossed it in one of Hootie’s bags.
“Naw, man. I found this.”
“Yeah?”
“In the park. Look at my pants, man.” Hootie jiggled his pockets, making the cuffs dance. “That’s mud. That’s park mud. I don’t go near them trains.”
“This is what I got.” Danny flapped out the police sketch. “Who’s this?”
Hootie took the sketch. “Nobody I know,” he said, giving it back. “This for the carjack? Shit, name I heard on that was Army Howard.” Hootie said it out the side of his mouth, as if a murmur would somehow finesse the fact that he was dead center in the middle of the projects talking to two cops in the middle of the otherwise deserted Bowl.
“Where’d you hear that?” Danny asked listlessly, Army Howard being a whole different animal.
“At my father’s repast. Somebody said it but I can’t remember who. Damn, who said that…”
When neither cop spoke for a long moment, Hootie picked up his shopping bags to leave, but Danny grabbed his wrist. “Buster,” Danny said, using Hootie’s Gannon tag. “This is my flesh and blood. We’re talking a lifetime pass, you understand?”
“Well, shit, then.” Hootie put the shopping bags down. “In that case you can call me Tonto, ’cause I’m headin’ into town and getting the information.”
Hootie took up his bags again and marched off. The cops sat, broodingly silent. Lorenzo could feel the tendons in his knees yawning for release.
A few minutes later Leo Sullivan appeared, walking in from the Gompers exit, a folded New York Post in one hand. When he reached the crate he crouched down before them, holding the paper by the top edges so that the front page unfurled like a proclamation.
Lorenzo stared at a half-page photo, taken last night in Armstrong. It was Brenda, hunched over as if pleading with someone, her face clenched in grief, her bandaged hands raised in supplication. In the background, a dozen project tenants looked at her or at the camera with flashlit eyes, and there was Danny, partly cropped out of the frame, the camera freezing him in the act of waving her off. The headline, in Pearl Harbor–sized type, read:
FROM THE DEATH OF MY HEART
The first heavy drops of a brief but intense shower rattled the newspaper and starred the ashy dust of the Armstrong Bowl. Leo Sullivan took off for the nearest breezeway but neither Danny nor Lorenzo made the slightest move to get out of the rain.
Seven in the morning was not the greatest hour to cruise JFK for snitches, but Lorenzo agreed to give it a whack with Danny riding shotgun, mainly to cement the new truce. “My men’s group,” Danny muttered, indicating a half dozen noddies clumped on the steps of a synagogue turned Pentecostal church.
Lorenzo smiled meaninglessly and rolled on. He always liked the boulevard early in the morning. The soft light and silence graced the harshly painted storefronts and abandoned buildings with a stately, melancholy air that to Lorenzo revealed a deeper truth about this street than did all the restless activity evident at any other time of the day or night. Most of the people up and about on the verges of JFK were already on the case. Cops and civilian volunteers, roughly one to a block, taped flyers of the jacker to lampposts and boarded-up store windows, to paint-flaked shingles and rolled-down riot gates.
At the beginning of the boulevard, deepest into Dempsy, all the secret hand jive and short pull-over conversations were directed at Lorenzo, mournfully sincere smoke for the most part. As the car crawled toward the city line with Gannon, Danny started getting some customers too—off-duty Gannon cops who had volunteered to help with the posting and some Dempsy street people with whom he shared both a history and an understanding.
To Lorenzo’s ear, Danny’s side of the conversations seemed halfhearted. He sensed that Danny was just going through the motions, fending off some hard-to-absorb speculations about his sister.
“Pull over,” Danny said, nodding toward a seven-foot ghost who was furtively trying to flag them down. One hand fluttering at knee level, the guy was looking everywhere but at the two cops in the unmarked car.
“Luther,” Lorenzo drawled as he turned off the drive and parked halfway down a side street. He and Danny sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting for the guy to make it to the car from the long way around the block. Lorenzo was sullen: of all the jugglers, Luther Ingram was the one he most hated to see out here. Fifteen years ago, Luther had been an all-county center at Saint Mary’s high school. A year after that, he got arrested in a police sweep of Las Vegas crack houses. It was during his first term at some junior-college basketball factory, and his life had been a greased pole ever since.
“What’s up, brother?” Danny squinted blearily at the guy, who had to bend so low to rest his elbows on the window frame that his spine wound up arching a foot higher than the nape of his neck. “What do you know, what do you say.”
“Yeah, I just want to thank you for that thing you did for me with my son, Danny,” Luther said.
Lorenzo looked out
the driver’s window, giving Luther the back of his head. Up the boulevard, he saw Rafik Aziz, doctor of Islamic nutrition, opening up his Child of God Cafeteria and Black History Museum. Rafik’s precise jawline beard and brocade kufi made him look like a sorcerer. He was a jailhouse Muslim, a proselytizing, self-educated Afrocentrist whose stated mission was to wean the inner-city black man from his suicidal palate. He was also one of the angriest men Lorenzo had ever met.
“How you doin’, Big Daddy?” Luther suddenly asked loudly goofing on Lorenzo’s cold shoulder.
“I’m good,” Lorenzo said slowly throwing him a tight, humorless smile. “How about you?” Luther shrugged. The first few times Lorenzo had had to arrest Luther for juggling rock, they had talked about his getting back into shape, maybe taking a crack at semipro ball or going back to school and getting into coaching. Lorenzo went so far as to arrange a tryout with the New Jersey Ruffnecks of the North American Basketball League, but Luther had been a no-show in the gymnasium that day, and, in thirteen subsequent arrests, there was no more real talk of sports or education.
“So Dion, he’s back in school?” Danny asked, popping his thumbs.
“Yeah, it was nothing but a experiment in ‘Who I am,’ and I believe, I hope, the experiment was a failure, so—”
“I gave him a little one-on-one tour of County, he tell you that?”
“We don’t talk individually. I had just heard he had been fuckin’ up from his mother, so…” Luther stood straight, rolled his head a few times, then stooped to the window again.
“Lorenzo, you know Luther’s kid, Dion?” Danny asked, stifling a yawn.
“Oh yeah,” Lorenzo grunted, looking Luther over. The guy looked dope-sick—swollen hands, cloudy-eyed, on his way out.
“A little wanna-be gangster man, right, Luth?” Danny went on. “He was out there rollin’ deep on Willow and Parkway, it’s like 2:00 A.M. Luther comes up to me, ‘Yo, Danny, do something,’ so I get out, pull him away from his crew, pat him down. He starts gettin’ all chesty on me. You know: ‘I got my rights’—”
“So here’s a left to go with your rights,” Lorenzo mumbled, looking away again. He spotted Eight-Ball walking the boulevard, taping up flyers.
“Exactly. Kid’s on his ass. ‘Yo, what you hit me for? I’m only thirteen.’ I say ‘Oh yeah? You was a full-blown man two minutes ago.’”
Lorenzo could hear the forced bravura in Danny’s retelling of the tale, the guy trying to inflate his own listless, troubled spirit with a little war story.
“‘I got my rights,’” Luther said, chuckling. “That’s Dion.” He dropped his forehead to his wrists but came up, still smiling, a few seconds later. There wasn’t a cop in Dempsy County who hadn’t cut Luther a break at one time or another. No one really wanted to lock him up, given the broken promise of his talent and his gentle melancholy demeanor.
Luther extended a hand into the car. “Yeah, so I just want to thank you about that, ’cause you know I was afraid he was goin’ my way, like, wantin’ a piece of the rock, you know what I’m sayin’? And that would be, like, a tragedy, because my son, he’s got a lot of potential, he is not unintelligent. However… he is what I call underintelligent. He is not in full command of the intelligence God has given him, you know what I’m saying?”
“How ’bout you, Luth? What are you?” Lorenzo couldn’t help it—the guy just pissed him off.
“Me?” Luther sucked what teeth he had left, looked off down the street, opened his mouth to answer, then thought better of it, addressing himself to Danny. “Anyways, I do believe he got the message, so I thank you.” Danny took the offered hand and held on past the moment.
“Luther.” Danny held out the police sketch. “Who’s this?” Luther made a noise like escaping steam. “What do you hear?”
“What do I hear? I hear Army Howard, but you didn’t hear it from me.”
Danny turned to Lorenzo. Lorenzo nodded—I got it covered—automatically reciting Army’s beeper number to himself. Softly thumping the roof of the car in farewell, Luther walked off. Lorenzo was surprised he hadn’t hit them up for a few dollars.
Back up on the boulevard, Eight-Ball was working his way toward the Child of God, taping the jacker to telephone poles and store windows. Rafik was still out there, too, sweeping clean his three squares of storefront pavement. Lorenzo saw Rafik finally notice Eight-Ball, take in what he was doing, grip his broom tight as the posters crept closer and closer to his place of business. Lorenzo, transfixed, felt like he was watching a slow-motion collision.
By the time he and Danny pulled up to the Child of God, Eight-Ball and Rafik had already locked horns. Eight-Ball was cherry-faced, waving a fistful of flyers; Rafik stood spread-legged, like a genie, his arms folded across his chest.
Lorenzo eased out of the car and strolled up to the face-off as if he were just coming around to shoot the breeze. Danny stayed put, staring into the middle distance, his eyelids drooping and his head jerking.
“I don’t understand you.” Eight-Ball tapped his temples with the flyers. “What, you want this guy out here? I thought you were this big community man.”
“What guy.” Rafik’s eyes gleamed like ball bearings.
“This guy.” Eight-Ball whapped a flyer with the back of his knuckles.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” Eight-Ball barked. “That’s why we’re doing this.”
“Exactly,” Rafik barked back. The conversation was taking on a brutal seesaw rhythm of mutual loathing, and Lorenzo inched forward, looking for an opening to slide himself in.
“Exactly,” Eight-Ball repeated with disgust. “I don’t understand you.”
“I know you don’t.” A few early risers started to gravitate to the scene, curious, frowny
“Let me ask you something,” Eight-Ball said more intimately, turning sideways, lowering a shoulder, and taking a step closer to Rafik. “If this motherfucker was a white man you’d let me tape this up in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?”
“Yo, Nick.” Lorenzo forced a laugh, addressing Eight-Ball by his real name, and finally wedging himself between them. Both men stepped to the left to keep each other in their sight lines.
“Hold on.” Rafik cocked his head, studying Eight-Ball. “You that Deputy Dawg cracker that took out the Hispanic brother last year, right? What’s your name? One-Ball, right?” Some kids in the know cracked up, repeating, “One-Ball,” Lorenzo thinking, Time to go.
“You mean the Hispanic brother who shot the two black brothers? Yeah, that was me. What the fuck were you doin’ that day, my brothuh.”
Lorenzo looked back to the car; Danny was dead asleep.
“Man, you a redneck racist from the door.”
“I’m the racist? Why don’t you bring out some of them Jew pamphlets you got back there in the hate museum.”
“You a got-damn hillbilly-ass pine-top motherfucker, and everybody knows it. How many civilian complaints you got filed against you, huh? How many?”
“You know what I do all day?” Eight-Ball spoke through his teeth. “I’m in that fuckin’ project every day. You know what I do? I lock up drug dealers, I lock up shooters, I lock up wife beaters. What the fuck do you do? Who the fuck are you?” He cast a contemptuous glance at the hand-lettered Child of God Cafeteria sign. “Allah’s dietician?”
Rafik went ear to shoulder, his head cocked at that D-Town matador angle. “You lock up brothers for walking too fast, you lock up brothers for not kissing your ass, you lock up brothers for hanging around in front of their own homes ’cause they got no jobs, no money, no recreation, no place to go.”
“Tell it!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” Eight-Ball said, inching ever closer. “You want to lock assholes with me? Bust a move, you mope. Please, by all means, bust a fuckin’ move.”
Lorenzo saw two police cruisers and a news van about four blocks away, everybody smelling blood now. “Nick.” Lorenzo put a hand on Eight-B
all’s shoulder, felt his bunched rage like a buffalo hump under his shirt. “Nick.”
“Please,” Eight-Ball whispered to Rafik, wanting this fight so bad that Lorenzo saw his eyes tear up with desire. “C’mon, you bogus bullshit motherfucker. Bust a move.”
“All’s you got to do is take off that shield.”
“Don’t let that stop you.”
“Take off that shield.”
“Don’t let that stop you.” Both men were trembling, spraying each other, the only thing holding them back an innate awareness of postfight consequences.
Finally Lorenzo compressed his own shoulders in order to put a palm on each chest, parting them in a breaststroke, pushing Rafik into the shadows of his store and Eight-Ball out to the curb. “C’mon, c’mon, take five,” he told Eight-Ball, bumping him away from the store with studied clumsiness.
“Don’t you fuckin’ ‘Take five’ me. This your idea of backup?” “You’re goin’ off, Nick.”
“Bullshit.”
Rafik disappeared inside and emerged a moment later holding an eighteen-inch-long lead bat. Eight-Ball eyed the weapon with contempt, then turned to Lorenzo. “How dare you take his side…”
“Hey, lookit.” Lorenzo gestured toward the news van, just now double-parking. “You want to be Pig of the Month? It’s your ass I’m saving, not his.”
Eight-Ball paced in a tight circle, working it out. Turning, Lorenzo pointed to the fish priest in Rafik’s hand. “And you best make that disappear.”
“Yeah, that’s right, Uncle Cecil,” Rafik spat, “save Lil’ Abner’s ass.”
“Hey,” Lorenzo said, stepping forward. “I guess you don’t know me after all, ’cause if you did you’d keep your mouth shut.”
Rafik dismissed him with a flick of the hand and sauntered back inside.
Furious, Lorenzo stood there glaring into the doorway for a few seconds before he could recover himself and return his attention to Eight-Ball.
“C’mon, take a ride,” he muttered, feeling like bashing both their skulls together.
“Hold on.” Eight-Ball spun around Lorenzo’s body block and faced the storefront again. “Hey! You don’t want to hang this baboon?” Eight-Ball squawked. “No problem.” Before anybody could stop him, he flipped his whole load of flyers through the doorway; hundreds of jackers rained down on the tables and counters. “I’ll just leave a few in case you change your mind, ah’ite?” He brushed past Lorenzo and stormed off down the boulevard, toward the center of Dempsy. A half block away he turned and, walking backwards now, bellowed, “Pick a color, Council. Black or blue.”
Freedomland Page 19
