Shoedog

by George Pelecanos

  As Jasmine finished her business, Lorenzo pulled gently on her leash. They passed the home of Joe Carver, another of Lorenzo’s old neighborhood running boys, now living with his aunt. Joe’s pickup, a red-and-white F150 of mid-nineties vintage, was not at the curb, which meant he was already gone for the day. Joe had been getting steady work as a bricklayer since he’d come out, a trade he learned in the Federal facility in Kentucky. He’d been on a construction site on North Capitol, south of New York Avenue, for the past six months.

  Lorenzo walked past Park View Elementary, where he had attended grade school. The summer school kids had just begun to arrive, some holding the hands of their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts. He passed the mural of successful black folks, Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver and the like, which covered an entire wall. They’d had pictures of folks like them in just about every classroom Lorenzo had ever been in, but the pictures hadn’t stopped him or anyone he knew from going down to the corner. Lorenzo realized that people meant well, but still.

  At Warder, the wide, north–south street that paralleled Georgia Avenue, Lorenzo cut left, then hung another left on the east side of the school and went down Princeton Place, where his grandmother still lived in the home in which he’d been raised.

  A little girl he recognized, a six-year-old named Lakeisha, came toward him on the sidewalk, swinging a clear book bag by its strap. Right behind her was her mom, a pretty young hairdresser named Rayne. Rayne was a single mother who undoubtedly led a stressful life but seemed completely devoted to Lakeisha and always kept herself looking good. She and her daughter lived next door to his grandmother, in the row house to the south.

  Lorenzo stopped to let Lakeisha bend down and pet his dog. She had a pretty smile like her mother’s, although it was nearly toothless, and cornrows with tiny seashells fitted on the end of her braids.

  “Jazz Man’s her name?” said Lakeisha.

  “Jasmine,” said Lorenzo, looking at her fondly, barely knowing her but loving her, as she reminded him of his baby girl.

  “Is she good?”

  “Most of the time.”

  Lakeisha touched a finger to her own chest. “Does she love people in her heart?”

  “Yeah, she loves people. ’Specially little princesses like you.”

  “Bye, Jazz Man,” said Lakeisha, abruptly standing and going up the hill toward her school.

  “Thank you, Lorenzo,” said Rayne, smiling shyly.

  “For what?”

  “For being so nice to my baby.”

  “Ain’t no thing,” said Lorenzo, smiling back, puffing his chest up a little and laughing at himself for doing so. Wondering how she knew his name, then remembering he had made a point to find out hers from his grandmother. Maybe she had done the same.

  “I better catch up to her,” said Rayne.

  “See you around,” said Lorenzo.

  Down the street a bit, Lorenzo entered a pedestrian passageway between the school playground and a neighborhood park that was surrounded by a fence but accessible through an always open gate. He walked onto a playing field covered in high grass. This was the usual morning route for Lorenzo and his dog. Jasmine stopped in the middle of the field, put herself back on her hindquarters, and defecated in the grass.

  Lorenzo looked around, slightly embarrassed, as he always would be, at what he was about to do. He retrieved the plastic bag from his pocket, slipped his hand inside it, formed a glove, then reached down and picked up Jasmine’s feces. He turned the bag inside out and tied it off. He and Jasmine left the park, exiting by the south-side steps, and went back down Otis the way they’d come.

  Passing Sixth again, he could see Nigel, now standing outside his car, talking to the ones on his payroll. Nigel had on a nice, powder-blue Sean John warm-up suit, with a simple gold chain hung outside the jacket. One of the young men, wearing an Oakland Raiders cap sectioned like a pizza pie in alternating black and white, turned and looked at Lorenzo, made a comment to the tall boy next to him, and laughed. Lorenzo could only imagine what was said as they looked at him, a square in a uniform, working for rent money and nothing more, holding a bag of shit in one hand and the leash of a dog, and not even a fighting dog at that, in the other. Time was, Lorenzo Brown would have laughed at the sight of his self, too.

  Nigel Johnson said something to the young man who had made the comment, and the young man’s smile vanished. Nigel nodded at Lorenzo with an uptick of his chin. Even from this distance, Lorenzo could still see the boy in Nigel’s eyes. He nodded back and went on his way.

  Lorenzo left food and water for Jasmine, turned down the stand-up fan so that it blew directly on her carpet bed, and exited the house. He got into his Pontiac and went down to Georgia, where he drove north, toward the office. There he would clock in, check his messages, and take one of the white trucks out for his calls.

  Up around Ninth and Upshur, in Petworth, he stopped to pay Rodel, the man who cut his hair in the shop set in that commercial strip that ran along the avenue. He’d been light at the time of his last shape-up, and Rodel had let him slide. Coming out of the barbershop, he saw a big man with a dog, a muscular tan boxer, out on the sidewalk. The man, broad of shoulder and back, was turning the key to his business, which had that sign with the magnifying glass over its front window. That sign was always lit up at night. Man had been in business there Lorenzo’s whole life. You’d be driving down Georgia at night, from a party or club, or from laying up with a girl, and you’d see that sign. You knew you were close to home. Lorenzo heard the man coached kid’s football, too, held practices on the field of Roosevelt High. Joe Carver’s boy was in the program. Joe had told him this man was all right.

  “Pretty animal,” said Lorenzo, to the man’s back, as he passed.

  “First time anyone called Greco pretty,” said the man, turning his head, lightly salted with gray, checking out Lorenzo in his uniform. The man pushed on the door of his business. “Well, let me get on in here and do some work.”

  “I heard that,” said Lorenzo. “I got to be off to work my own self.”

  “Have a good one,” said the man, the boxer following him inside the shop.

  Off to work, thought Lorenzo, as he got behind the wheel of his car. Feeling a kind of pride as he turned the key.

  GEORGE PELECANOS is a screenwriter, independent film producer, award-winning journalist, and the author of eleven novels set in and around Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife and three children. For more information visit www.georgepelecanos.com and sign up for the George Pelecanos eNewsletter at www.twbookmark.com.