He’s reaching to smack the horn when, inside the Casa, a frail, slow-moving woman, wearing sunglasses and a head scarf, approaches the kid, leans in close to whisper in his ear. Her dress is denim, the kind of do-it-yourself patchwork project that might seem trendy on a younger woman but, on her rail-thin frame, looks pitiable. The woman turns, signaling for the kid to follow, which he does, to an empty spot kitty-corner from the birthday party. This new location is neither private nor hidden; from the street, through the spotty, grit-streaked window, anyone can observe the two.
She opens her purse, retrieves a paper lunch sack, and for a moment, she and Brendan simply stare at each other. The kid fumbles, producing his wallet, withdrawing a bundle of bills, and the two pause, unsure who should initiate this trade. In clear frustration, she snatches the cash before shoving the paper bag into the kid’s chest. And just like that, the deal is done. She exits the Casa, slow yet determined, counting the cash, and disappears into an alley.
The kid rushes out of the Casa, bumping the chair of the ketchup-eating boy, who begins to cry. Brendan doesn’t slow or say excuse me, but makes a beeline for the Jeep, where, once inside, he tosses the small, crumpled bag behind his seat.
Andre is stunned. Please, please say that you didn’t just do a buy out in the open for anyone to see. The Casa probably has cameras, and Andre counts at least a dozen witnesses. He’s astonished the kid would be this reckless.
“Need anything else before we head back?” The kid grins like a schmuck. “Dre. You okay?”
“Let’s just get back to the house.” Andre tries to keep his cool—rubs his own earlobe, takes a deep breath, repeats a calming mantra—but he can’t help himself. “And why don’t your dumb ass put your shit under the seat? I’m not trying to catch a possession charge for your grade-school bullshit.”
“Oh, that? Good call, Dre.” The kid reaches back, grabs and opens the paper bag. He starts pulling out little baggies and pill bottles, like a child on Halloween inspecting his own stash. Andre looks around, then snatches the bag, shoves it beneath the back seat. The kid says, “Just a couple party favors. Something to get through the final weeks. I bought enough to share. That cute girl at the rally—”
“What is wrong with you? Don’t have all your shit out in the open. It’s bad enough you bought this shit in front of all those strangers. Now you’re opening the bag, pulling shit out.” Dre points above the door. “And there’s a camera right there filming us.”
“Dre, calm down. It’s no big deal. I do it all the time.”
“Brendan. Right now. I really need for you to shut the fuck up and drive.”
Andre might as well have sucker-punched the kid, because that’s the precise expression Brendan wears. Andre expects an argument, but the kid starts the Jeep, and the two pass through Carthage in silence, the kid’s white-knuckle grip fused around the wheel. This is not the silence Andre has intended, but this silence will do for now. Andre finds his tablet, scans the radio ad copy that Chalene’s drafted. She’s written a couple lines he likes—God’s people must be as faithful to the Constitution as we are to our Lord. She’s also written lines he doesn’t like, with phrases like righteous nation and the Creator’s creation, each appearing three times.
“No.” The kid raises his knee and stomps on the brakes, hard enough to make the Jeep jerk, swerve across the median of the four-lane highway. Andre is thrown forward, tablet dropped, palms slapping the dash, eyes fixed on an approaching big rig that brakes hard, so hard that a flurry of sparks ignite, brief flashes of electric fire exploding beneath an enormous undercarriage. The truck swerves, the tractor one way, the trailer the other—Andre is certain this is how he will die—as the roar of the big rig’s engine vibrates the inside of his skin. The truck straightens, passes—a near miss—yet the big rig driver is pissed, blasts his horn as he disappears down the highway.
Andre screams, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Why are you such an asshole?”
“You trying to get us killed?”
“I deserve to be treated with respect.”
“You want respect?” Andre fears his heartbeat will never slow. “Seriously? You just hit the brakes in the middle of a highway.”
“You treat me like . . . ,” Brendan says. “I don’t understand what I did wrong.”
“Then, clearly, you are not listening.”
“Dre. I get it. I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have bought from a stranger in public. And I know that I’m probably only making it worse now, but . . .”
“But what?”
The kid fights back tears, makes a lost, defeated expression that Andre hasn’t seen since juvie, the expression of the new delinquent who just received his first public beatdown, a literal stomping from a bully, the sad yet defiant expression that says, I won’t give you fuckers the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
“You don’t trust me,” Brendan says in a soft, watery voice. “You think I’m some spoiled pretty boy. You think I’m a naive poser who doesn’t understand how the world works. I don’t know how to persuade you that I’m not that person.”
“Look, Brendan—”
“Sometimes, I think you don’t even like me.”
The silence pains Andre.
“Forget it, Dre. You’re right. Let’s get home.”
“We should get off this road quick,” Andre says. “That big rig driver will probably radio the cops, and we don’t need anyone searching our Jeep.”
The kid veers the Jeep back into their lane, passing into open country, where a lone swan sails across a pond full of lily pads.
* * *
That night, Andre paces beside his attic desk. Downstairs is silent. The kid hasn’t left his room since their return. Andre wants to fix this, needs to fix this, not because he fears the kid might call Mrs. Fitz, but because he wants to do what he knows is right. But fuck if he knows where to start. Saying I’m sorry seems inadequate. Andre sometimes forgets that Brendan’s twenty-two. All boys that age are a little dumb. A social worker in juvie said it had something to do with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.
Perhaps Andre should explain all the pressures consuming his life. But even to save his career, to make amends to a wronged friend, Andre observes limits. He will not, under any circumstances, discuss Cassie, because he values his dignity more than any friendship or career. He simply couldn’t fathom looking Brendan in the eye and admitting that most nights he dreams of Cassie and that most mornings he wakes with his face wet with tears.
Perhaps he should share the time his mother got committed and Andre moved in with Hector, who had long since left home. These days, Pershing Avenue is a hip, trendy DC neighborhood, the type of gentrified community that GS-15s adore, with farmer’s markets and charter schools and film festivals in the park, but twenty years ago, Pershing was a bona fide slum. A neighborhood at which junkies looked down their nose and where no one gave a damn about two teens, eighteen and sixteen, who lived alone.
There, on Pershing Avenue, the brothers played video games and freestyled and fucked random girls. They owned a black-masked mutt named Obi-Wan Kenobi, and they stood sentinel over a closet full of weed, which had come with the house, cellophane-wrapped bricks abandoned by the previous occupants as though they were an armoire that no one could figure out how to fit through the front door.
Hector made his living running cons on college boys, especially freshmen with Mommy’s money and Daddy’s pride. The same college boys with sagging pants and pristine sneakers who slept beneath Scarface posters, who threw around clumsy gang signs, who blasted profane rap music through the open windows of their black paid-for SUVs. The marks were easy to find, with their personalized gangsta-themed web pages. The relationship started simple. Heroin. Ketamine. E and GHB. Hector provided cheap club drugs without markup. Start with a taste. Build a rapport. Delay a small profit today for a big prize tomorrow. But selling the mark drugs wasn’t enough; you had to offer the mark a thug life. Then you
had to offer praise, plenty of it, like one would housebreak a puppy. Good boy. Who’s a good boy? You’re such a good boy. Gotta roll the college boy a blunt. Maybe let him call you his nigga. Maybe gift his dumb ass a gun. Definitely introduce him to a fine but trifling ho over there, a princess with a big ass, titty tat, and cell phone bill. But each time increase his buy. Not too much. Not too quick. Five hundred dollars. Eight hundred. Nine hundred. A thousand. Let them trust you with their money. Then you make your move.
Give me five G’s today. I’ll give you ten G’s tomorrow.
These college boys, fancying themselves part 007, part Natty Bumppo, approached life recklessly, lived each day according to a series of selfish, simplistic creeds. Bros before hoes. Survival of the fittest. You only live once. One mark, a ginger-stubbled golf prodigy who always wore his visor backward, this chump loved to say, The way I live, I only need to live once. Fool thought he was funny. Bet he wasn’t laughing once he realized that Hector had never given his real name, nor brought him to his real home, nor given him a phone number or e-mail address that wasn’t easily burned.
For sure, Dylan Miller didn’t see the con coming. That gullible Mayberry motherfucker didn’t have a clue. Didn’t have any friends, which perhaps explains why he followed Hector around like a lost pup. For six weeks, Hector worked Dylan, filled his eighteen-year-old head with fantasies. Shootouts. Big cash. Seedy underground clubs with Romanian dancing girls. Finally, when the day came for Hector to make the ask, Dylan refused to invest five G’s. No, that greedy motherfucker wanted to invest fifteen. Go big or go home. Hector tried to talk him out of it, explained that a bank might ask questions about a withdrawal larger than ten. Dylan didn’t care, clasping Hector’s shoulder. Ten G’s ain’t nothing. Trust me, my nigga. You only live once.
The next week, Dylan brought the cash in two Adidas duffel bags. Ten minutes later, Hector disappeared through the back door, a duffel bag in each hand.
Hector pulled this trick with a half-dozen college boys, each with access to a trust fund or an inheritance. The boys were smart enough never to call the police, or, if they did, the police didn’t care. Both corrupt and honest cops will root against the wealthy college boy who just got bilked for five G’s.
Fate, however, brought Hector and Dylan together six months later, when, by chance, Dylan came upon Hector outside a Wizards game. The fool thrust his forefinger in Hector’s chest, cursing, crying, Dude, you were my friend. Now, to Hector’s credit, Hector walked away, got as far as Gallery Place before Dylan grabbed his collar, stretching Hector’s favorite shirt, an expensive tee that featured a contemplative Malcolm X.
Andre’s thought a lot about Dylan over the years, and he has yet to figure out Dylan’s plan. College boy didn’t have a gun, didn’t have a friend. All those gangster movies Dylan watched, and Dylan didn’t learn a damn thing. Dylan shouldn’t have been surprised, after stretching the Malcolm X T-shirt, that Hector threw a mean-ass hook that, a doctor would later say, shattered Dylan’s jaw and knocked him out cold. Now, to be fair, the incident should’ve ended there, but instead the assault continued, and, in the next eighty-four seconds, captured on a Metro security cam, Big Brother lost control, exercising a suppressed rage—the sum of his every indignity, insult, failure, and frustration—punching, kicking, spitting, shouting, Who the fuck do you think you are, and, finally, stomping, knee raised high, heel slammed hard, with the force of a jackhammer and the wrath of a jealous lover.
To this day, Andre believes that Dylan Miller deserved to get taken for fifteen G’s. Trust me, my nigga. You only live once. But, goddamn, no one deserves a beatdown like that. A beating that left Dylan comatose for months and paralyzed below the neck.
See here, a wealthy white boy, an honors student at that, getting a beatdown, in the middle of the day, on a public street, outside the arena, on a day the Wizards won. Please, that’s some shit that decent white folks won’t abide. Local affiliates played the full eighty-four seconds, grainy black-and-white footage. Some viewers may find the following footage disturbing. Crime Stoppers posted a five-thousand-dollar reward. The mayor held a press conference, called the perp a superpredator.
Andre never learned who ratted them out, but four days after the fight, a little after midnight, a SWAT team cut the power to the bungalow on Pershing Avenue. The team stormed the house, shattering a window before tossing a flashbang inside, breaching the front door with a battering ram, screaming, scurrying, a sudden whirlwind in a small, confined space. These assholes, they put thirteen bullets through Obi-Wan Kenobi—dog wasn’t causing no trouble, dog was locked inside a crate—shoved their submachines in Andre’s face, slammed him against the floor. Thank God, Hector was in the shower, nowhere near the Glock he kept beneath his pillow. Andre lost his dog that day; he’s grateful he didn’t lose his brother.
The cops, the fucking cops, they tore up the bungalow on Pershing Avenue. Took the battering ram to the plaster walls, as though the brothers hid secrets inside, which, in truth, they did. The cops ripped up floorboards, shredded mattresses, smashed the butts of their rifles against the television, the Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, as though each act of senseless destruction could earn the cop a prize. They confiscated the guns, the cash, all the weed, and, as helicopters circled overhead, they took the brothers away in chains.
At the police station, the officers set them in separate interrogation rooms. Cops came in and out, never the same cop twice, maybe twenty, thirty cops over what felt like hours. The cops were fucking with him; of this, Andre was sure. Sometimes coming in, lighting a cigarette, blowing smoke in his face, and leaving without a word. One cop splayed across the table photos of Dylan in the ICU, saying, For fuck’s sake. Whoever did this is gonna suffer. That asshole left, replaced by another, a bald, gold-toothed man, who poked his head through the door to say, Oh you’re right, they’re gonna love his car-a-mel ass.
Round after round. Hour after hour. Men with badges and holstered sidearms. Some men not much older than him. One claimed to have eyewitnesses. Another claimed to have fingerprints. One more claimed to have DNA. And yet they never asked a single question. Andre demanded a lawyer, a phone call, permission to take a leak, and, when the officers denied him all three—Naw. That ain’t gonna happen, little man—warm piss trickled down his leg to puddle on the concrete floor.
Finally, the last cop entered, a plump-cheeked, silver-haired dowager who, if she were an actress, would’ve been typecast as a black Mrs. Claus. Ruth removed his cuffs, massaged his wrists, offered warm nutmeg cookies—to this day, the best cookies he’s ever tasted—and, when Andre complained about his treatment, how the officers murdered his dog, how he’d asked for an attorney, how they’d made him piss himself, she shook her head, offering sympathies, saying, in a sweet, sincere tone, Oh, you poor dear.
For an hour, he and Ruth made small talk: the NBA, pizza parlors, his favorite video game. Oh, that’s a good one, she said, my grandson enjoys that one too. She asked about his mother, his old life, his favorite subject in school, before, at last, saying, “I suppose we should chat about Dylan.”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“My job is simply to find the truth.”
“Truth is I didn’t do it.”
“I believe you,” she said. “Though we did talk to Hector.”
Ruth retold the story of Dylan Miller with exacting detail. She knew the original scam was for five thousand. Dylan suggested fifteen. She retold the story sympathetically: The media, they make Dylan look like an angel, but he wasn’t, was he? She knew everything, except, she said, for why the beating took place. Ruth didn’t ask why Andre beat Dylan. Instead, she played the video, all eighty-four seconds on a loop, shaking her head in dismay when Dylan snagged the Malcolm X T-shirt. Dylan shouldn’t have done that. On this point, Andre agreed. Perhaps, she suggested, the video made a case for harassment or self-defense.
“You must admit,” she said. “That person in the video looks like you.”
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“I guess.”
“Hector thought so too,” Ruth said. “He’s such a sweetheart. Smart. Helpful. We thought it might be him, you two look a lot alike, but he says it looks like you.”
“Can I talk to Hector?”
“Hector left hours ago,” Ruth said. “He told the truth, and we let him go.”
“Can I go home?”
“Once you tell the truth.”
Andre was tired and hungry and confused and reeking of piss, and now he understood that Ruth would never let him leave this room. Not until he said what she insisted he say. And, for this reason, Andre signed her confession. I, and I alone, attacked Dylan Miller. He, at age sixteen, assumed that, because he was innocent, he wouldn’t go to jail. Assumed he could straighten this mess out later. Thought perhaps, once he received a lawyer, he could clear his name. But the system conspired against him. His trial lawyer, a jackleg plea lawyer without an ounce of professionalism who wore a rumpled brown suit that smelled of cigarette smoke, who had oil-black dirt beneath his nails, this guy came at Andre straightaway—They got video and a confession, our best bet is to plea. No way Andre would trust this motherfucker. Andre asked one thing of this lawyer—track down Hector—and that simple task took months, a reunion that didn’t occur until the day Andre needed to decide whether to plea.
Hector, on the other side of glass, spoke into a phone. “You need to take these charges.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“What the fuck that got to do with anything,” Hector said. “You say you do it. You go to kiddie jail. One year? Eighteen months? You’re sixteen. You’ll be out in no time. A little in-time is good for someone soft like you. Take the plea.”
“We gotta get a new lawyer.”
“You ain’t listening,” Hector said. “Cops took our money.”
“Have you talked to Mom?”
“Shit, you know she ain’t got no money neither,” Hector says. “She also say you should take the plea.”
The Coyotes of Carthage Page 14
