The Player

by Brad Parks

  * * *

  After finishing with our interview subjects, Pigeon and I dismissed them one by one, making sure to get their phone numbers and addresses in case we needed to ask them more questions. Jackie promised us more people if we could come back in the morning, after she had a chance to round them up. I told her Pigeon and I would be back, with bells on.

  Once the last of the visitors departed, it was just Jackie, Pigeon, and I, standing in the living room.

  “So I probably should have asked you this on the phone, but: how are you feeling?” I asked Jackie. “Have you been experiencing any of these symptoms?”

  “Yeah, but only once. I don’t live here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Well, I grew up around here. I went to Shabazz,” she said, pointing vaguely in the direction of Malcolm X. Shabazz High School, a few blocks to the north. “But I live in New Brunswick now. I go to Rutgers.”

  I was impressed. For kids from the expensive private school where I received my secondary education, Rutgers was a respectable safety school. For a kid from Shabazz High School, making it into Rutgers was like one of my classmates making it into Harvard.

  “What are you studying?” I asked.

  “Pre-med.”

  “Better you than me. What year are you?”

  “I guess you could say I’m a junior and a half,” she said. “I’ll probably graduate a semester early.”

  “How’d you swing that?”

  “Summer school. I love Newark and I want to come back here someday and be a doctor—a pediatrician, actually. But for right now? I just need to be out of here during the summer. I don’t want to be hanging around on the bleachers when some whacked-out banger comes after me with a machete.”

  I got the reference. A few years earlier, four college students, back in Newark for summer vacation, had been sitting on the bleachers at a nearby elementary school, eating McDonald’s and whiling away a summer evening, when they were attacked by a group of young men who may or may not have been going through initiation to the MS-13 gang. Only one of the four kids survived, and she still bears machete scars. One of the kids who was killed had been the drum major for the Shabazz High School marching band. He would have been a little older than Jackie. They might have known each other.

  Jackie continued: “The only reason I was here so much this summer was because of my grandmother.”

  “Right, of course. I meant to ask you a little more about her. What was her name?”

  “Edna Foster.” She gave a thoughtful pause, then added, “She was the best.”

  “She sounds like it,” I said, even though I didn’t know a thing about the woman. “Do you have a picture of her by any chance?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure, hang on,” Jackie said. “There’s one upstairs. Let me go get it.”

  Jackie departed the living room and disappeared upstairs for a moment, leaving me with a slightly bewildered-looking Pigeon.

  “Why do you need to see what she looks like?” she asked, quietly.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Then why did you ask for a picture?”

  “Because every good story needs a victim, and Edna Foster strikes me as a pretty good victim. So I need Jackie talking about her grandmother in a kind, loving way. If Jackie is looking at a picture of her grandmother while she talks, we’ll get better stuff. Photos can be very evocative that way. Now do me a favor and get your notebook back out and write down whatever this young woman says next, because I guarantee we’ll end up using it.”

  Pigeon still looked to be a little circumspect—this was yet another thing that wouldn’t fit on her spreadsheet—but further conversation ended when Jackie came back down the stairs and into the living room.

  “This is her and my grandfather,” Jackie said, handing me a framed snapshot of a man and a woman who looked to be around thirty, standing on a sidewalk. The man had his arm around the woman, who was tall and thin, like her granddaughter. If I had to put a date on the picture, I’d say 1965.

  Jackie went on: “That’s a picture of them the day they bought this house. My grandmother was so proud of it. She was the first person in her family to own property.”

  I knew enough Newark history to be able to imagine the backstory. The mid-1960s was prime time for white flight and blockbusting. Whole neighborhoods changed complexion virtually overnight, thanks in part to less-than-scrupulous Realtors who roamed through neighborhoods, knocked on the doors of the white families who lived there, and said things like, “Just wanted to let you know you have new neighbors … Yes, it’s a lovely family from South Carolina with eight kids … I hear they’re going to plant watermelons out back.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Foster had probably bought this place from a nice Jewish family that couldn’t wait to hightail it to Livingston.

  “My grandfather got killed during a holdup a few years later. My grandmother remarried but he died of a heart attack. I still don’t know how she managed to hang on to this place and raise three children by herself. She was tough.”

  “What kind of work did she do?” I asked.

  “She worked for the city, in the engineering department. She was a secretary. She talked all the time about how she was the first black woman they ever hired, right after Gibson got elected”—Ken Gibson was the city’s first black mayor—“and how it was hard sometimes, but she felt like she was going to make things better for her children and her grandchildren.”

  “You sort of look like her,” I said, handing the picture back to her.

  “Everyone says I act like her, too. She was the first in the family to buy a house. I’m the first to go to college. She just had … a lot of spirit.”

  It was the word “spirit” that got her. Jackie half blurted, half sobbed it, then immediately tried to compose herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I said.

  “I just don’t know what’s going to happen now. My family is … I mean, we’re no prize. I got a cousin in jail. I got another cousin who’s bangin’ so hard he’ll probably end up there soon. But it’s still my family, you know? When we get together, none of that stuff matters. It’s just the family and my grandma and this house. This house is like our center. This is where we always gather, for holidays and birthdays. And now without Grandma, I just don’t know…”

  Jackie’s voice trailed off again. I saw out of the corner of my eye that Pigeon was getting down every word. It’s not that I wasn’t absorbed in Jackie’s story—I was—but I also remembered I had a story of my own to write. And it was in the best interests of Jackie and her sick neighbors that I write it well.

  “So had she been in good health until recently?”

  “Grandma? Oh yeah. She was like a dynamo. She finally retired maybe seven, eight years ago, but she hadn’t slowed down at all. She still gardened and walked and was really active with her church. And then suddenly, it was like everything went wrong.”

  Jackie went through the symptoms her grandmother had experienced, and it was similar to what I had heard from the other victims. The flu. The swelling. Broken leg. Broken arm. Then it progressed to kidney failure, which might have been survivable except Edna Foster was too weak to put up with dialysis. Whatever this malady was had taken all the fight out of her.

  “It just didn’t make any sense,” Jackie concluded. “And then at her funeral, people started talking, and it was like, ‘Oh, she had that? That’s strange, so do I.’ Or, ‘Oh, she had this? That’s weird, so does so-and-so.’ And maybe it’s because of all these pre-med classes I’m taking, but it just didn’t sound right.”

  “So what made you want to take this on as your cause?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess I kind of thought it was what my grandmother would have done. But she wasn’t around anymore, so now it was up to me. As I told you, I called a few lawyers, but I couldn’t get anywhere with them. But I couldn’t just give up. So I guess I was hoping that if we got in th
e newspaper and got some publicity, maybe someone would take pity on us and want to help us. A big law firm that might be willing to take us pro bono. Or a doctor. Or the state, maybe. I don’t know. Do you think that might happen?”

  “It might,” I said. “Or it might not. Obviously, I can’t make any promises about what happens after a story goes in the newspaper.”

  “I know. I know. Look, Mr. Ross … Carter … Thanks for coming. Just to listen to those people makes them feel, I don’t know, like someone actually cares. I was beginning to feel like no one did.”

  I looked at Edna Foster’s granddaughter, with her bug glasses, mop hair, and fierce pride. She was young enough and idealistic enough that when she saw something she didn’t think was right, she believed something could be done—and had to be done. And she had found a newspaper reporter who felt the same way.

  “There’s a notion in journalism that one of the reasons we exist is to give a voice to the voiceless,” I said. “People in my business tend to forget that sometimes. But I guess I try to remember it’s part of the reason we’re here. It’s really one of our highest callings.”

  * * *

  Pigeon and I said our goodbyes and went back outside. The sun was getting low and I could hear the rush-hour traffic on I-78 zooming along behind me. But there was enough light that the guys at the construction site remained hard at it, their big machines making their usual racket and kicking dust into the air. I figured if they were still working, I should be, too.

  “What are you doing?” Pigeon asked as I passed my car and walked in the direction of Hawthorne Avenue.

  “I’m taking a walk,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Just getting to know the neighborhood a little better.”

  “But … why?”

  I gave her a palms-up gesture. “Don’t know. It’s called ‘shoe leather journalism,’ Pigeon. Hopefully they taught you about that at Columbia.”

  They must have, because Pigeon dutifully joined my tour. We walked along the sidewalks, some of them new, some of them old, all of them littered with occasional minefields of broken glass. I had spent enough years in Newark that I had long ago stopped trying to avoid them. My shoes had thick soles. Besides, if you closed your eyes and pretended you were down at the shore, the crunchy feeling under your feet was sort of like walking on seashells.

  As we explored the neighborhood, Pigeon gave me the brief version of her life story. She grew up in Edison, New Jersey, in the burgeoning Indian community there. She was valedictorian at J. P. Stevens High, where she hung out with other smart Indian kids. Then she went to Yale, where she hung out with more smart Indian kids. Her parents had made it clear they hoped she would marry a future doctor named Ranjit. You couldn’t quite call it an arranged marriage; but he was Brahman and so was she, so it would sort of make everyone happy if she just went along with it. She said she probably would, even if she didn’t really have feelings for the guy.

  Yet, somewhere during this perfect, by-the-book, Phi Beta Kappa life of hers, she had been permitted one rebellion: she went to journalism school. And now it sounded like she was trying to make the most of it, in her own self-limited way.

  As she wound through her little narrative, I kept my eyes peeled for … well, actually, I have no idea. But it is my general experience in matters such as these that you never know what you’re looking for until you find it. Maybe there was some obvious source of local water contamination. Maybe one of the stoplights would be glowing radioactive orange. You never knew unless you kept your eyes open.

  Except, in this case, all I really saw was a strange little Newark neighborhood that had been chopped off from the rest of the city. Interstate 78 formed a hard border to the south. The exit ramps filled the space to the east. To the west were some old brick warehouses that belonged to long-defunct companies, vestiges of Newark’s manufacturing heyday. To the north was the McAlister Arms site and those clattering construction vehicles.

  It created a little island on the south side of Hawthorne Avenue that was perhaps five blocks long and one block deep. And all nine of our sick people—ten, if you counted Edna Foster—lived on that island.

  It brought to mind a tale I had read about in a geography class I had taken at Amherst. It was about a midnineteenth-century doctor in London who was studying a cholera outbreak. This was in the days before germ theory had been developed, so no one understood the mechanism by which cholera spread. But by putting a dot on a map for each house that had a case of cholera, the doctor was able to determine that the outbreak seemed to be centered around one public water pump that all the houses had been using to get their water. The pump’s well turned out to have been dug a few feet from a sewage pit.

  That doctor, John Snow, is considered the father of modern epidemiology. And, really, all I needed to do here is what he had done: find the equivalent of the water pump and then discover the sewage pit beside it.

  By the time we completed our circumnavigation of the neighborhood, it was getting to be that time of night when the only white people meandering into that neighborhood were the ones there to buy drugs. I wasn’t in the market for anything stronger than pale ale, so Pigeon and I returned to my car and I got us pointed back to the office. My ride is a used—and I mean well-used—Chevy Malibu with at least 111,431 miles on it, though that may be a conservative estimate. The odometer has been broken for a while. Suffice to say that if cars could win Purple Hearts, mine would have been awarded several by now. Still, it delivered us safely back to the newsroom.

  If only it could have kept me safe once I got there. I had barely stepped off the elevator when my path was blocked by the curly-headed figure that was Tina Thompson. In addition to being the managing editor for local news and my immediate editor, Tina happened to be one of the two women with whom I had recently experienced the pleasures of the flesh.

  This was merely the latest development in a relationship that had a way of making me feel like I was the last person to know what was going on. Tina had, once upon a time, looked at me as the ideal mate, in a strictly biological way. She was a single woman of a certain age—that age being the last number that still begins with the digit 3—and she had decided she was going to become a mother.

  Not a girlfriend. Not a wife. Just a mother.

  And I was to be her source of sperm. Not a husband. Not a lover. Just sperm.

  I had always balked at that potential arrangement. I have these antiquated ideas about nuclear familyhood and, besides, I actually—this is really old-fashioned, I know—like her. She’s smart and successful and passionate about life and a little nuts, all of which I found myself strangely attracted to. I tried to tell her this, though she seemed never to believe me. Instead, she tried to make herself seem tough and invulnerable, which only made me want to discover her vulnerable side that much more, which only infuriated her, which only charmed me further.

  It never seemed to go anywhere beyond that. I had this long-harbored theory that we could make a great couple. She never let me test my hypothesis. And as a result we had reached this Balkan-style settlement where everyone left the table unhappy: I didn’t get a relationship, she didn’t get a baby daddy.

  Then, without warning, she had decided motherhood, conventional or otherwise, was no longer in her future.

  Then, with the possibility of procreation off the table, and with no apparent hope for any kind of relationship, we did the obvious thing couples who want neither children nor romance do: we had sex.

  We hadn’t really discussed the implications of this act. She insisted there weren’t any and that I had been just a one-night booty call, a convenient way to fill a momentary craving. Ever since then, relations between us had chilled to temperatures not seen in Newark since the Pleistocene epoch. I can’t say I fully understood the combination of idiosyncrasies and undiagnosed disorders that was Tina Thompson, but I at least understood she liked her distance. And after our clothes-free comingling, she had decided I had gotten a
little too close. She had been making a determined effort to push me away ever since.

  Hence, my greeting from her was not, “Hello, Carter,” or, “Nice to see you, Carter,” or, “Have you had a good day, Carter?”

  It was: “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Out for a walk,” I said. Which was, technically, true.

  “Oh, go ahead and play coy if you want. I saw Pigeon scurrying away just now. You know I’ll be able to beat it out of her in seven seconds flat.”

  “Okay, so I was out working on a story. But it’s not fit for your eyes and ears as of yet.”

  “Yeah, well the same could be said for that recycling story you wrote,” she huffed. “The unfortunate thing is that you turned it in anyway.”

  “What’s wrong with the recycling story?”

  “It’s a story about recycling but it’s total garbage,” she said. “In its current form, it’s not deserving of the fifty percent postconsumer content it would be printed on. It’s in your basket with comments marked on it. And it had better be returned to me—in a lot better shape—before you even think of working on anything else.”

  She gave me a look people usually save for backed-up toilets, then departed.

  * * *

  A responsible employee—thoroughly chastened and properly ashamed—probably should have gone straight to his desk and pounded on the keyboard until his fingers were bloody. Or at least chapped.

  Me? I mostly just got thirsty for a frothy, 6-percent-alcohol-by-volume beverage, preferably one that was a nice, dark amber color—especially if I could share it with someone who might provide companionship and conversation while I drank it. And perhaps side benefits later.

  The person most likely to supply all those things was Kira O’Brien, so I wandered over to her desk to see if I could talk her into an evening with me. Not that it would likely take much convincing. If Tina is the Pat Benatar of my life—because she makes love a battlefield—Kira is the Cyndi Lauper. She just wants to have fun. That she also sometimes dyes her hair purple is just a coincidence.