"But a great American nonetheless."
"In a manner of speaking, I suppose."
"Hello Billy, are you a great American as well?"
Thugs living a thuggish dream. Yet they seemed to bear me no particular ill will, so I remained quiet. The car cut west on Twenty-third Street, nosed onto the West Side Highway going south, where they turned off the television, and rode it down the tip of Manhattan, around Battery Park, then north up the east side of the island on the FDR, slow in the traffic, then around the top of the island on the Harlem River Drive, then south down the West Side.
"How long are we to do this?" Denny asked.
"However long H.J. says."
"I'll need a bog."
"There's a McDonald's at Thirty-fourth and Ninth."
A few minutes later we pulled in. One by one they went to use the bathroom.
"You?"
I shook my head. Too scared.
We circled the island one more time, and by then, almost midnight, the men were bored.
"Fucking H.J., man."
"This is the job. When you're for hire, this is the job."
"You guys bribable?" I asked. "You can take me to a cash machine, clean out my account, let me walk away with a little pocket money, go buy myself a drink."
The man on my left laughed. "You're all right."
Then a cell phone in the car rang and the three men straightened up. The man on my left answered.
"Okay," he said, lowering his voice, "we'll be right there."
We rolled into the West Twenties, not so far from where I lived. The limo eased along the curb and I was escorted up the steps of an old factory building. The men kept close to me now, urging me along, one tight hand under my arm. I thought about running, knew it would be futile. We approached an unmarked black metal door.
"This is where we get off," one of the men said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"The likes of us are not welcome in there." He looked at me, eyes mirthful. "Not that you will find us complaining, though."
The door opened. Four black guys in good suits stepped out. I was passed to their firm control. The door shut quickly behind me. Inside I heard rap music pounding, and it became louder as I was hurried through a dark hallway constructed of painted plywood. We passed several young black girls giggling outside a door marked PRIVATE and I knew that the sight of a middle-aged white man there was shocking to them, anomalous, as impossible as a reindeer. Next the hallway became tinted with red lights, the smell of pot lingering. We passed a stairwell where two black men were casually beating a third. They turned in surprise when they saw us.
"Chill," murmured one of my escorts.
"He's a cop?"
They pushed me along, up a set of stairs. At the landing we came upon a crowd of black teenagers watching a pit bull hanging three feet in the air from a thick, knotted rope. The dog had the rope in his jaws.
"Yo," said one of my escorts. "How long?"
"Nine minutes."
The dog's eyeballs rolled around and he shook his head savagely, a froth at the edges of his teeth.
"What's the record?"
"Twenty-six."
We climbed another flight of stairs, passing promotional fliers, pictures of rap artists, and framed album covers. A large black woman in gold lamé and sunglasses passed. "Hi baby," she murmured. We came to a glass door with HANDJOB PRODUCTIONS stenciled on it.
"Inside, yo."
Inside was a small office with a black glass window overlooking the club's dance floor. The men followed me, pulling the door shut behind them. To one side lay a panel of unused mixing equipment, turntables and tape decks, and to the other sat an enormously fat black man in a red silken robe and security headset. He had on gold sunglasses, the lenses coated with some sort of shimmery hologramic stuff. His chair was elevated so that he had a bird's-eye view of the dance floor. Next to him stood a two-hundred-gallon oil can with a slit in the lid. Around us, and up through the floor, came the heavy thud of the bass. Occasionally a scream of excitement. Below on the floor, hundreds of bodies moved in an undulant mass, spotlights strobing crazily across them as a rap group spun through its stylized, chain-swinging, crotch-grabbing moves.
"Yo, H.J., this is the dude."
H.J. pointed at a chair for me to sit and waved away the other guys.
"We'll be right outside, bro."
He didn't bother to look at me. Instead he watched the dance floor for a few minutes and talked into his headset. "See what them niggas is doin' over by the red couch." He leaned forward, watching. "No, the dude in the green— yeah, him. He bitin' my style. Tell that nigga I'm in his mind. All right… be cool. Yo, Antwawn? Antwawn, I want that box up here right now. Bring it up."
"Hey," I said. "You want to tell me why I'm here?"
"Don't talk when a man is doin' his business," came the response. "Antwawn, I want to see yo ass in like—" He turned around. "What'd you call me? You call me 'Hey'?"
"I asked you why you had me here."
A giant smile under the sunglasses. "White man, you got an improper education. My name is H.J."
"Pleased to meet you," I said. "Now tell me why I'm here."
The door opened. A young man with dreadlocks and a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his arm carried in a lockbox. This, presumably, was Antwawn. He looked at me. "Who that?"
H.J. ignored the question. "Open it."
Antwawn unlocked the box and tilted it toward H.J. Even from where I sat I could see it was full of cash. "Okay?"
H.J. opened the box, removed a short stack of bills that he put in his pocket, then took a roll of masking tape and wrapped the box about five times. "That's enough," he told himself. He signed his name over the tape with a thick felt marker. "Put it in the safe."
Antwawn knelt under the console, opened a door, placed the box inside, closed the safe.
Down on the dance floor they were screaming. "How many girls you got out there?" H.J. asked.
"Nineteen, plus Serena at the register."
"You got LaQueen on tonight?"
"Yeah." Antwawn smiled. "You want her?"
"Tell her come up here, show me somethin'."
As Antwawn left, another man in a velveteen shirt came in. He had a bad scar across one forearm. He looked at us. "Who this white dude?"
"He just visiting. Let's see it."
The man with the scar pulled out a small silver pistol.
"Good. He fight at all?"
"Not really, boss."
H.J. dropped the gun into the slit in the oil can. He pulled a fistful of bills out of his red robe, gave it to the man. "Here." They tapped their fists together and the man with the scar left.
Now he turned to me. "You work for that Jay Rainey?"
"No."
"That's bullshit."
I shrugged.
"My aunt say she talked with you today."
"With Rainey, mostly. I just happened to be there."
"What she want?"
"Money."
"That's right. But she made one mistake."
"What?"
"She got the number wrong."
I said nothing.
"I said she got the number wrong, she got it too low."
"I heard you."
"You disrespectin' my people?" he asked, lights strobing behind his head.
"No."
"You hate black people?"
"No."
"You think they should stay poor and get AIDS and shit?"
"No."
"You think black people stupid?"
"No."
"I think you do. I think you got ideas about black people."
"I'm sure you've got a few ideas about white people."
"You hate the black man."
"No."
"You hate his superiority."
"No."
"You hate his sexual prowess."
"No."
"You hate everything about him."
"You hate white peo
ple?" I asked.
He breathed through his nose. "Yes."
"You hate the white man?"
"Yes, indeed I do."
A girl poked her head inside. Her lips were the color of taxis. She was wearing high heels, a thong, and a fringed top. All the color of taxis.
"Come here, LaQueen."
"Oh, I know what you want," she said in a high, happy voice that suggested little pills that gave people high, happy voices. She saw me. "Who this?"
"He just some white dude who don't know what the fuck he doin'."
"You want some fun?"
"Come here. Like my daddy used to say, girl, you look better than a government check."
She glanced at me playfully. "Don't look, mister."
I looked. She knelt down between his huge jellied thighs, spread the red robe. But all I could see was the lovely dark violin of her back, her ankles together, heels sticking out.
"Slow, baby." Then he lifted her face off of him. "You love that thing, don't you? You love my monster."
"I do, baby."
"Say it, say I love your monster."
"I love it, H.J. You my diesel nigga."
He pressed her head back onto him. Then he looked up to address me, over her bobbing head. "My auntie tells me you— you sent my Uncle Herschel out into cold weather and he had— a heart attack. Everybody who know Uncle Herschel know he got a bad heart."
"I don't know what happened to him. He was working for Jay Rainey."
H.J.'s feet were tapping a kind of slow rhythm. I saw a gun strapped to his ankle. "You're takin'— money from him, it's the— same thing."
"That's not exactly what—"
H.J. looked at me, showed his gold teeth. "You want my blow job?"
"No thanks," I said, coolly as I could.
" 'Cause you lookin' like— like it looks good to you. I seen your eyes." He glanced at the girl's head. "Looks tasty."
"No thanks," I said.
"What— something wrong with my woman?"
"No," I said.
"Not good enough for you?"
"I didn't say that."
"Maybe she too black for you."
"No."
"See, the white man like you, he scared of the black woman. And the white woman, she want the black man. And the black woman, she ain't interested in the white man. They all want the black man, see. Same for the Chinese and the Spanish. Once they go black they never go back!" He let his hand fall on the girl's head, rubbed it, and smiled at me hatefully. "Maybe you need to learn to appreciate. You know, I ask LaQueen—she'll do you, after me. She may not want to but she will. Ain't that right, baby?"
She nodded, made a humming, filled-mouth affirmative.
"So then you could see for— yourself, boy."
I said nothing. We were living in different movies, both terrifying. H.J. whispered to the girl, "LaQueen, go easy there." He lifted his freaky sunglasses up to his forehead and stared at me with oddly small and sensitive eyes set on his large cheeks. "My auntie, she say they found Herschel's ass out on the bulldozer, frozen. Frozen! How you let a black man freeze, boy? That don't go down, you know what I'm sayin'? Something wrong in all this, and we gonna find that Poppy or Popeye or whatever the fuck he called!" He reached down to his ankle and pulled out his gun, pointed it at me. "That make a man feel murderous! White man never pay Uncle Herschel shit! He work that land for somethin' like thirty years, never saw nothin'!" He let his hand rest on LaQueen's shoulder, holding the tempo. "I want repairation! You got to pay the repairations! We heard that land got sold for fourteen million dollars!"
"You heard wrong."
"Shut up! I want three hundred—"
"You're talking to the wrong guy."
"— thousand dollars. Don't think so, Mr. Wyeth. I think we got exactly the right muthafucka! We watchin' you, we know where you hang out, we know where this guy Rainey's new building is. We got it covered, boy."
Some of this was bluffing, I hoped. "You've got to take all this to Rainey," I said.
He moaned and rolled his head and looked upward in anticipation. "Go, LaQueen, do it, sista!" The girl was working harder, faster. "Give me the booty!" he screamed. He pushed the girl deeply onto himself, holding her head all the way down with both of his hands, making her feet kick a bit in gagging panic, the gun next to her ear, his knees shaking with the pleasure, and when the moment came, he lifted the gun over his head triumphantly—"Oh, you fucka!" he screamed— and fired into the ceiling, then again. I flinched. "Oh, sista!" he cried, collapsing backward and pushing the girl away to reveal a giant wet black penis that leapt from between his thighs. He tipped his head forward, inspected himself, then looked up at me looking at him, at it. The girl lay her head on his thigh, licked his softening size with obligatory reverence, her eyes on mine, coldly dismissive. The room smelled burnt. H.J. grabbed his security headset. "Antwawn, come up here and get this white boy outta my face." He aimed the gun at me. "You get me my money," he said, stroking the girl's head as she sucked him in and out. "Lawyer-man, you get me that goddamn fuckin' money or I'm goin' find you and fuck up whatever shit ain't already in your pants."
Five
THE NEXT MORNING was blue-skied and excellent—
— if you weren't freaked out. Which I was, coffee-jittery, anxious, driving a rent-a-wreck too fast away from the city toward Jay Rainey's old farm, my terrorized heart pattering, It's bad, they're bad, it's bad. Like anyone, I prefer to forget that I am to die, not be reminded, prefer to think of my last breath as a far-off event, the years measurable in, say, the unit of time it takes to discover, test, refine, approve, and market a major new pharmaceutical. Yes, give me two or three of those epochs, a couple of new brain-boosters and cartilage-thickeners, and I'll be fine; the romping American society I die in will be unrecognizable to me. But meanwhile, the passage of days is ominous. I feel the past dropping away an inch behind me, a dark wind sucking coldly at my ears, yanking on the shorthairs of the back of my neck, gurgling like a suffocating eight-year-old boy. Yesterday is not yesterday, it is lost and gone forever, collapsed, rotten, moaning in the graveyard. Day by day I see that my future holds far less than does my past— ever fewer pieces of chocolate cake, clean shirts, fresh newspapers, hot cups of coffee, the milk swirling in a beguiling cloud. Yes, I scare much more easily than before. I freak more easily. I take threats very seriously. I believe, for example, that when an insane black guy with no pants on pulls out a gun and fires it, then that threat is real. When that happens, you run.
Yes, you run and stumble and have people yell at you and you see the pit bull still hanging from the rope, and you hear kids pointing and laughing and saying Mister! Yo! And you stumble whitely out into the cool air of the street and run with no wind and little form as fast and as far as you can before hailing a cab, which is what I did, arriving back at my miserable apartment and high-stepping it up the stairs to my door with great gratitude for the peeling paint and bald carpeting, the half-clogged sink, the soft-sagged bed— my shithole deluxe, the most wonderful place in the world.
And that was where I'd slept not at all, wondering in the dark if I should go to the police. H.J.'s thugsters had kidnapped me and he'd pulled a gun on me, after all. Many beautiful, time-honored laws had been broken. On the other hand, what was my proof, given that I was unharmed? And no doubt H.J. could produce any number of people in his club who'd say that never happened. And then he'd mention his dead Uncle Herschel and that would point any interested policemen toward the question of his body. And that I didn't want.
But was H.J.'s outrage linked to Marceno's complaint? After all, whatever Herschel had been doing with the bulldozer had occurred before he died. And H.J.'s rage stemmed from the fact of Herschel's death on a bulldozer rather than why he was on the bulldozer. By this analysis, the two problems were potentially unconnected. But I was troubled. I was troubled in the way that makes you sit up and turn on the cheap light by your bed and pick at your fingernail, wondering why Mrs. Jones ha
d seemed to dispute the reason why Herschel was on the bulldozer in the first place. Or why H.J., while ranting at me, had said that he or his people were looking for Poppy. Which was interesting. And maybe logical, given that Poppy had called the ambulance upon "finding" the body of Herschel. But Mrs. Jones had said she'd been pointed toward Jay's building by Poppy. How was this possible? Why would Poppy know the address of Jay's building unless Jay had told him? And why would Jay do that? Poppy was apparently just a longtime farm laborer with damaged hands. Why would he need to know the address of a specific building in downtown Manhattan? And, for that matter, how did H.J. know that the old Rainey farm had even been sold? Well, maybe because the new owner, Marceno, or his workers, had arrived the day before, the morning after the sale. But H.J. didn't seem like the kind of guy to be messing around on an old farmstead. He had a hip-hop club to run. Which meant that someone, probably Mrs. Jones, had told him. But she'd arrived at Jay's building early enough the morning before, around 10 a.m., that it was likely that she'd left the North Fork too early to see the arrival of the new owners, especially if they were driving out from the city at the same time. Which suggested she'd made a subsequent call to H.J. after threatening Jay in front of his building. Yes, that made sense, that was how H.J. had known what I looked like so that his men could follow me. Mrs. Jones, one hundred pounds of righteous determination, had described me to him.
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