Pittsburgh Noir

by Kathleen George

  STILL AIR

  BY TERRANCE HAYES

  East Liberty

  The morning after Amp got killed our neighborhood was lit up with rumors. My mother and me, we barely even made the block before someone passing said, almost with a whistle, “You hear that nigga Amp got popped by some gangbangers?” Someone else said, carrying the news like a bag of bricks, “Sad what happened to that boy who got robbed last night.” People who didn’t know Amp or his kin said, “I know his mother.” “I knew his pops.” Rumors idled in the slow drag of the traffic, the rich Fox Chapellers and Aspinwallers who drove across the Allegheny River into what was our little moat of trouble: Penn Circle, the road looping East Liberty like a noose.

  Lies, gossip, bullshit, half-truths spread out, carried in the school and city buses. Pompano heard it was two white guys, probably plainclothes cops, that took Amp out. Walking by with her girlfriends, Shelia said she heard gunshots and shouts. “Amp went out shooting shit up like a true thug,” she cackled, pointing her finger at me like the barrel of a gun. Her girlfriends laughed like she wasn’t talking about someone who’d actually been killed. I mean, Amp was dead and people was already kicking his name around like it never had any air inside it.

  This is why I never wanted anybody to give me a nickname. Well, that ain’t exactly true. Most people call me Demario, but I used to let Star call me Fish sometimes. My grandmother used to call me Fish. Her “little fish,” even though I was taller than her by the time I was fourteen. I didn’t even know Amp’s real name. Maybe I heard a teacher say it when we was in preschool at Dilworth. Anthony Tucker. Andrew Trotter. By first grade the teachers, even Principal Paul with her thick-assed eyeglasses and that belt squeezed too tight around her gray pantsuit, called Amp “Amp.” It was the only name he answered to.

  I can’t really say he was my friend, though, to tell you the truth. He was never really in class that much, and then he dropped out of high school junior year. Star said it was because he wanted to get a job as soon as he heard she was pregnant, but I think he’d have dropped out anyway. He spent his days on the corner behind Stanton Pharmacy. He was always there in jeans so new it looked like he hadn’t even washed them yet. New sneakers, pro jerseys—people said he had a Steelers jersey for damn near every player. You’d think he’d be there waving his shit in my face or calling me a clown, but I don’t think he ever even noticed me. He’d look right through me, call me youngblood even though we were the same age.

  And once he sold me a hammer, I shit you not. It was in the book bag on my shoulders that morning. Even crazier, he sold my mother a big twenty-four-inch level. How he got her to buy it, I’ll never know. But that’s what he did—or what he’d been doing for the last couple of months. Word was out and people, mostly old dudes trying to make ends doing handy work or whatever in Highland Park, would buy shit from him. He’d take you around the corner to a grocery cart full of stuff. I saw he had a cordless drill and a circular saw one day. An empty paint bucket and a couple of utility knives the next. I bought the hammer for two dollars. It was big too. Practically a mallet. I doubt Amp kept what he didn’t sell. He just wanted to get paid. Rumor was, he was stealing things from Home Depot, but I saw the shit. Most of it was used. None of it was useless but most of it was used.

  You’d find him near Stanton Pharmacy with that dog that always followed him around, some scrawny watered-down pit bull he called Strayhorn. The dog always barked at me. It’d go to barking like it wanted to bite me in my kneecaps when I passed and wouldn’t stop until I was down the street. For a long time I thought Amp was whispering sickems in the dog’s dull gray ears, but now I think he was just talking all kinds of mysterious shit to it. That’s why Star liked him. Why she dumped me for him, I guess. She said he had poetry in him.

  “I heard they killed the boy’s dog too!” my mother said to her friend Miss Jean as we stood waiting for the 71A. This is what I tried to do every morning: walk my mother to her bus. It was the only time we got to talk since I was usually knocked out by the time she came home from work in the hospital kitchen. I know it sounds like I’m some kind of momma’s boy or that I’m soft-hearted, but it was something my grandmother made me promise to do. In fact, I only started calling my mother “Mother,” instead of “Marie” like I used to, after my grandmother died. I used to call my grandmother “Mother” and my mother “Marie,” because when we all lived together in the East Mall projects, that’s what I heard them call each other. You remember the East Mall? The damn building used to straddle Penn Avenue, cars drove right beneath it. Now that that shit’s been demolished, I almost can’t believe we lived there. I mean, who puts a building right on top of the street? If Penn Circle was the moat, well, the East Mall was like one of its bankrupt castles. No, better yet, it was like an old drawbridge that couldn’t be lowered. Anyway, we were on the fifth floor so I never heard any actual traffic, but when I looked out of my window, I could see the cars going and coming 24/7. I could see the houses in four neighborhoods at once: Shadyside, Friendship, East Liberty, I could see where Penn Avenue curved up the hill to Garfield.

  If I had a better sense of Pittsburgh history, I could tell you all the stuff my grandmother used to tell me. I mean in detail. When the civic arena was built in the ’50s, I think it was the ’50s, a lot of blacks were driven from their homes in the Hill District. Some ended up in Homewood or on the North Side, some moved out this way. My grandmother could also tell you, gladly, about all the famous Pittsburgh Negroes from back in the day. Mary Lou Williams. George Benson. And Billy Eckstine, who grew up just a few blocks away in Highland Park. She would sing “Skylark,” which is a song I think he must have made. If she had the record she would have played it all the time, no doubt. Skylark, have you anything to say to me? Won’t you tell me where my love can be? Is there a meadow in the mist, where someone’s waiting to be kissed? It went something like that.

  “Yep. They killed the boy and his dog, I can’t believe it,” my mother said this time, bothering a white man with his dress shirt cuffs rolled up to his hairy forearms. He didn’t have a single tattoo.

  East Liberty had been plush once, that’s what my grandmother always said. Decorated with big unvandalized houses. But then they dropped a lasso on the neighborhood in the late ’60s. Homeowners moved across town and contracted their shabby cousins and uncles to convert their old places into shabby rental units. The living rooms were the size of bedrooms, the bedrooms the size of closets. Businesses left, the projects came. You know that little strip of Highland Park Avenue between Centre and East Liberty Boulevard that cuts through Penn Circle like the white line on a DO NOT ENTER sign? My grandmother hated it, but that’s where everybody hung out. The blackest block for blocks. After they demolished all the projects and got a Whole Foods and Home Depot and a fancy bookstore, white people started calling it the East End. Fucking changed the name of the part of the neighborhood they wanted back. We still call it Sliberty, though.

  My grandmother said the neighborhood was on white people’s minds again. White people young enough to be the grown children of the people who’d left decades ago. Contractors were called to make the apartments houses again. They’d be corralling us like a bunch of Indians, my grandmother said. She said “Native Americans” but I knew what she was talking about. Reservations and Indian-giving and shit. I rarely heard her call people their real names. I once heard her ask this Mexican lady if she preferred “Latino” or “Hispanic.” And sometimes, when she was being sarcastic, she might say “Negro,” but I never heard her used the word “nigga.” She said things like: “Look at these Negroes.” The way she said it sounded worse than “nigga” to me. She was dead with cancer before she had a chance to see me and Marie living on our own for the first time.

  “They ain’t kill his dog, it wasn’t that kind of thing,” someone said behind me. It was Benny giving me the wuzzup nod and then flipping open his cell phone.

  “People saying it was some plainclothes white cops, but
I know it wasn’t cops,” I said to him.

  “No, I heard it wasn’t cops too, yo,” he replied, assuming I’d heard it from the same place he had.

  “Pranda said they was some old country-looking motherfuckers. Some old long-hair-and-plaid-vests shit. She was ’bout to call the cops about it, but I was like, Them motherfuckers ain’t even been caught yet! They find out you been talking to the PoPo, they coming for you.” He shook his head while holding the cell phone to his ear. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or the person on the other line. “I think they were drug dealers from down south,” he said. “Some old meth heads or some shit. Naw, man, fuck no. I ain’t going back over that bitch house until them motherfuckers get caught!” He laughed into the phone.

  Marie. My mom, her bus showed up either just ahead of schedule or just behind it, depending on your perspective. It was never on time. She never said anything like, “Home right after school.” She knew I’d be there. Homework done. Learning more from television than I ever did at school. She kissed me on my face the same way her mother used to kiss me and her. Then she’d whisper, “My little fish.” I pretended I didn’t hear it. Told her, “Goodbye. Be good.”

  I was supposed to walk to school, get there five or ten minutes before the first bell. But I was going to see Amp’s people. His uncle Shag would want to know what I knew. Or I should say, if Shag heard I knew anything, I should see him before he sent someone to find me. Everybody said he was kind of crazy. He didn’t sell drugs or anything, but he’d been in jail a few years for something. Nobody fucked with him.

  I wanted to tell Shag what I knew, but first I went back to the alley where, the night before, I’d seen Amp running with the white men right behind him. There was a big old dumpster there. I let my hand rest for a moment on its lid before I opened it and looked inside. The smell crawled over my face. Black garbage bags, white garbage bags, little tiny plastic bags, muddy liquid rot, an old sneaker, a lawn chair—it was all sour. But there was no corpse. No dog, no tatt-covered body. Amp had tattoos all along his neck and arms. On the back of each of his hands was his dad’s name and R.I.P in block letters. As if the man had died twice. Or as if Amp might forget him in the time it took him to look from one hand to the other. I heard he got Star’s name tattooed over his heart as soon as she got pregnant, but I don’t think that shit was true.

  When I got to Amp’s house nobody was there. I guess they could have been at the morgue. People said they’d seen the ambulance, the body bag. Everybody noticed when an ambulance or police cars blazed through the neighborhood. I pulled out my phone and looked down the block. New houses were being built along the streets I had passed walking to Amp’s. They stood out like new cars in a junkyard next to the dumps around them. They were big odd-colored places. Light green, light blue, light red wood siding. They looked like empty dollhouses, even the one or two that actually had white people living inside. The FOR SALE signs called them Historic District houses and had prices with six digits. Like whoever was selling them wanted us to know we could never afford them. More old houses were being leveled and more new “historic” houses were being built on top of them. Construction workers, real estate agents, young families, white people were coming and going through the neighborhood’s side streets. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody was scary or threatening or anything. Sometimes we’d wave when they passed us on the street.

  And anyway, most of the guys I knew were truly minor criminals. Burglarizing the cars and backyards of Highland Park for chump change. No one who was really hardcore lasted long. Not because they got killed in a drive-by or something you see in a movie, though that happened occasionally, but because they usually got snatched by the police before they could do anything that was truly gangster. Everyone was happy when Chuck Ferry was off the streets, for example. He was just too dangerous for anybody’s good. The streets were left more often than not to a mix of loiterers, dudes like Amp, and tired old men and boys who did little more than strut along the corners and back alleys. But when I passed them the morning after Amp was killed, everybody seemed nervous. I could feel it. Everybody was anxious to have the villains off the street so the neighborhood could be returned to itself.

  “Heard ya boy got got,” a dude said when he saw me sitting on Amp’s steps. He was a few years older than me. I knew he was looking for some little bit of gossip he could take with him on down the road.

  “Wasn’t my boy,” I said without looking him in the eye.

  “Damn. That’s some cold shit to say, youngblood.” The dude stared until I looked at him. Then walked off with something like mild disgust flickering across on his face.

  I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve never even broke up a fight. I’m the quiet dude that’s always watching from the edge of the clash. Dude like me, always the first one people ask what happened. “You saw that shit, Demario? Who threw the first punch?” Usually I know, but I don’t say. The conversations go faster that way. I got no problem with bystanding. One time Star sort of hinted that was my problem. I didn’t think it was a put down at first.

  Star. She is without a doubt the blackest person I know. Which is funny because she is also yellow as a brown banana. She didn’t wear dashikis and all that Back-to-Africa shit, but she wore these white shells in her braids. And she knew everything there was to know about Malcolm X, M.L.K., W.E.B. Them famous Negroes whose names were initials. She still had an OBAMA 08 sign propped up in her bedroom window. I could see it whenever I stood across the street looking at her house. I never got, you know, to run my hands over her body and all that, but I know she had a little tattoo shaped like Africa somewhere under her clothes. She never showed it to me.

  “What you doing?” I said with a flatness I meant to sound cool when I phoned her. I knew she wouldn’t be at school. She was like eight months pregnant. She’d have the baby in a couple of weeks and be back to finish the last two months of our junior year at Peabody.

  “I can’t talk to you right now, Mario.”

  “Yeah, I know. I heard what happened to Amp.”

  She was quiet. Like she was holding her breath. I knew she’d been crying. After a long minute, she said, “I just don’t know why this is happening.” Damn. Then we were quiet a little while longer.

  “I saw the dudes.”

  “Who? You saw the dudes that did it?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of it for you.”

  “Who’d you see?”

  Amp wasn’t dead yet when I saw him, I almost told her. I thought of how they had him pinned to a dumpster in an alley off Black Street. Two wiry, scruffy men. The dog, Strayhorn, was snapping at the pant leg of one of them. The guy gave the dog a frantic kick and then kicked at Amp in the same frantic way. They sort of snatched and poked at him. Amp’s shirt had been ripped. He was bleeding. I could hear him saying, “I ain’t got your shit. I ain’t got your shit.” Declaring it, really. Like he wasn’t afraid. Like he was in charge even if they were the ones grabbing and shoving and delivering awkward blows. They could barely handle him. I knew they weren’t gangsters. But I still did nothing.

  “I’m gonna take care of this shit,” I said to Star, half talking up my nerve. I didn’t really know what I was saying.

  “Don’t go trying to be a hero, Mario.”

  “No, it ain’t like that.”

  “Just go to the police.”

  “Police?”

  “Or go by his house— Wait a minute,” she said, putting me on hold.

  I rubbed my brow. I thought for the first time that calling the police wasn’t such a bad idea. I won’t say I had plans to take care of Star, exactly. All the money I made working at the Eagle went to Marie. We lived in this little-ass apartment. My mother had been strange since her mother died. She was working long, lonely hours. She was my priority. And then Amp’s death last night, well, I told you she kissed me like her mother used to: a peck on each cheek then on my nose. Shit was embarrassing. I jerked back just a bit, but then I relaxed
. I knew she was sad.

  The phone clicked back on: “Demario?”

  “Yeah? Why you put me on hold?”

  “Listen: go over to Amp’s house and tell his uncle what you saw.”

  “I’m there now. Ain’t nobody here.”

  “You there now? At Amp’s house?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fuck is wrong with you, Star?”

  “Don’t cuss at me,” she said.

  “I want to see you.”

  She sighed. “No. You can’t see me.”

  “I’m coming by.”

  “Just stay there. Wait for Shag … Come by after you speak to him.”

  So that’s what I did. I sat on the steps with my hands in my pockets. Had there been no baby, maybe Star would have gotten back with me. Had there been no baby and no Amp, maybe she could have let herself fall for me. I ain’t bad looking. Amp was just a little taller. But he had these long dreadlocks, where I just have this little nappy afro. Not even enough to braid into cornrows. Once when we were hanging out at Highland Park, Star said she liked my Asiatic Black Man eyes. She grabbed my jaw and looked right into them like she was reading something. Fuck, I hadn’t ever heard the word Asiatic before.

  People thought my grandmother had some Asian in her. She had a pudgy face—before the cancer got at her—she had a pudgy face and these slanted eyes that made her look like she was just waking up. If you were on her bad side her face looked full of NotToBeFuckedWithness. I know dudes who just moved and nodded when they saw her walking their way. But if you were on her good side, the same face, the same expression, just seemed real mellow. She’d nod back to those brothers almost without moving her head. She really wasn’t to be fucked with, though, that’s for sure. She kept a fat switchblade in her bra. I got it now.