“The man wants to talk to you,” the driver said.
“Here I am,” I told him, cool.
“Boss,” he said, as he climbed out of the car, holding the door open.
I couldn’t tell if he meant, “boss!” it was good I was willing to talk, or that I would be talking to his boss, but I got in. It was classy, the way they set it up. I didn’t have an excuse to refuse, because I would be the one behind the wheel, so they couldn’t take off with me as a prisoner. Besides, all their men were already standing on the sidewalk. Except for the ones in the cars at the end of the block.
The guy in the passenger seat was colored. I expected that, him being a Mystic Dragon and all. But I was surprised at how old he was.
“I’m Baron James,” he said. “You know my name?”
“I heard it,” I said. Which was the truth. Everybody in the city who ran with a club had heard of Baron James. He killed two men in a clash a long time ago, when he was real little. Baron James was famous. His name was in the Daily News, with headlines and everything. The paper said it was wrong that they couldn’t send him to the state pen, just because he was only fourteen at the time. People wrote letters to the paper, saying, for what Baron James did, they should give him the electric chair, no matter how old he was.
“You’re leader of … what’s the name of your club?”
“The Royal Vikings,” I told him, like I didn’t know he was saying that just to say we were nothing.
“Yeah. Well, then you’re the man I have to talk to. About what happened to Chango.”
“Who’s Chango?”
“All you need to know about Chango is two things, man. One, Chango is a Mystic Dragon. And, two, some of your boys jumped him two nights ago, in the vacant lot over by Twenty-ninth.”
“Not my boys.”
“Yeah, your boys. Chango’s got himself a little twist around here. She’s a PR, but she lives over in your turf.”
“I don’t know any names,” I said. “But we know a guy who flies Mystic Dragon colors has a girl around here. He comes and goes. Whenever he wants. Nobody ever bothers him.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Baron James said. “Only, it wasn’t. Chango, he’s going to make it. But he got hurt pretty bad.”
“Shot?”
“Stomped,” Baron James said. “Wasn’t no fair one, either. No challenge, nothing. He said he was just cutting through the lot when he got piled on.”
“It wasn’t any of my—”
“You Vikings, you going to pull something like that, you should’ve left those jackets at home,” he said. He reached over and rubbed the back of his fingers against where my name was. “Nice,” he said.
“Look,” I said, being reasonable, “you know a club like ours, we’d never start anything with—”
“Oh, I don’t think it was your club,” he said. “We thought it was your club, there wouldn’t be no Royal Vikings now. No, what we figure is, it was a couple of members of your club. See the difference?”
“No,” I said. I took out my pack of smokes, held it out toward Baron James—I wanted him to see my hand wasn’t shaking. I was a little surprised when he took one. I lit us both up from my lighter.
Baron James took a deep drag. Then he said, “Difference is, a club makes a move, it has to be approved, am I right? The president has to give his okay.”
“Unless it’s—”
“This wasn’t no self-defense,” he said. “Don’t even try to run that.”
“I wasn’t saying—”
“And, if it’s not approved, that means the boys went freelance. Now, if that was one of the Mystic Dragons, anybody who would try a breakaway move like that, he’d be disciplined, understand?”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s all we’re asking for,” he said. “A little discipline.”
“But none of our—”
“Only thing is,” he said, talking right over me, “we’d kind of like to do the discipline ourselves. I mean, you do whatever you think needs to be done. But, when that’s over, we get our turn. Fair enough?”
“If one of the Vikings did anything like that, I would—”
“Not one,” Baron James said. “At least two. Probably three, but we’ll settle for two.”
“Who are you saying jumped your man?”
“I just told you,” he said.
“You said Vikings,” I said. I knew, if I backed off, even a little, we were all done. “I asked you, which ones?”
“How would Chango know your boys?”
“Well, you said—”
“I said Vikings. I didn’t say which ones. That’s for you to find out. And deal with.”
“There’s no way any of—”
“This here is Wednesday,” Baron James said. His voice was soft, but it was ice cold. “We give you until Sunday night. Now, your boys, they seen us talking for a while now. Seen us talking like men. No screaming and yelling. Calm and cool, am I right? So, when you go on back, what you tell them is, the Mystic Dragons thinking about making you Vikings an affiliate club. You know what that is?”
“Yeah. But I thought you guys only took—”
“Times are changing,” Baron James said. “This color thing, it put a lot of good men in the ground. And a lot more in the penitentiary. There ain’t no money in it. The Mystic Dragons, we got plans. There’s all kinds of rackets going on in the city, and we’re going to take our place, soon enough. This is a big city, and we entitled to our piece of it.
“Now, the only way we make the right people listen is behind numbers. Big numbers. What we got to do is consolidate,” he said, like he loved the word. “We can’t be fighting each other all the time; what we get out of that? So, that’s what you tell your boys.”
“But you’re not really …”
“What I just tell you, that’s the stone truth,” Baron James said. “Everybody be doing this, you see soon enough. Even the Chinaboys, way downtown, they stepping past color when it come to business. Us, too. We reaching out to the little clubs … no offense … to bring them in. You don’t get to be Mystic Dragons, but you get to be with us; you understand?”
“I think I do.”
“But you know the rules,” he said. “And the toll you got to pay. You got to give us the boys who stomped Chango.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew more was coming.
“Sunday night,” Baron James said, “we pull up to the curb, just like now. We get out, just like now. You walk over to us, just like now. Only, Sunday night, you have two men with you. The ones we want.” Baron James looked at me. His eyes were green—I never saw that on a colored, before. “Everybody gets in the car,” he said. “The car takes off. Later, when you come back, you president of an official Mystic Dragons affiliate.”
Baron James leaned in, close to me. “Only, when you come back, you come back alone.”
5
We started that same night. First, I put out the word—all the Royal Vikings had to come in, emergency. Then I questioned every single one of the boys.
Little Augie and Bunchie helped me. Sammy, too. I knew it couldn’t have been any of those three, because they had all been with me the night Chango got stomped.
Everybody denied doing it. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was that I couldn’t tell which ones were lying, the way I usually can.
Even in our own little piece of the city, you didn’t see Royal Vikings out by themselves too often. We had our clubhouse, the candy store, the corner; that was about it. The school had dances at night, sometimes, but that was too far out of our territory for anyone to go alone. And, if you did go alone, it would take a lot of heart to fly colors. Sammy might do it, or Little Augie, but not the rest, I didn’t think.
And Baron James had said it was at least two men.
The clubhouse had a backroom. We used it for initiations, and for when we got the debs to come down. That night, we used it for the interrogations.
We all su
spected these particular two boys might be guilty. They were real tight with each other, partners, and we figured they might be plotting to move up in the organization. But even after Sammy hurt one of them pretty bad, they wouldn’t admit anything.
By Friday night, I knew I wouldn’t have anyone I could give to Baron James.
6
I got my men together, and I told them how it had to be. I talked for a long time before I was finished.
“What happens to us?” Little Augie asked. He was talking to me, but I knew he was speaking for the whole club.
“The Mystic Dragons don’t know any of our real names,” I said. “Not even mine. Just Hawk. The first thing, the jackets have to go. I mean, burn them. The Royal Vikings are done. Once this is over, the only one the Mystic Dragons are going to be looking for is me.”
“You sure you want to …” Sammy said.
“What choice is there?” I told them. “I’m not going to play Judas on guys who didn’t do anything. If we want to keep our little piece, here, we’d have to go to war against the Mystic Dragons. That’s crazy; we’d all be wiped out in a day. I’m the president; I know what I have to do. I got people in Chicago. Soon as it’s done, that’s where I’ll go.”
“The hell with that,” Little Augie said. “Just go. Tonight.”
Little Augie was a good man. I was sorry to lie to him, about having people in Chicago. But the whole club was there when I was talking, and I wasn’t sure of them all. I knew the Mystic Dragons would be around right after I took off, asking questions, and I couldn’t take a chance that one of them wouldn’t turn rat, if they got scared enough.
“No,” I said. “The way I have to do it is the only way. They’re going to get me, anyway. I might as well have a name.”
“Where are you going to get a real pistol?” Bunchie said. “Nobody around here has one to sell.”
“The same place we get our jackets,” I said. “The guy who makes them up for us, I heard, if you bring the right money, he can get you anything. Now, everybody, put up your coin. Tomorrow, I’m going shopping.”
7
I didn’t blink when the old man in the shop told me it would be three hundred dollars for the pistol and the bullets. I told him I’d leave the money with him, come back in a couple of hours. He looked at me for a minute, then he said, “That’s not how it’s done. You want the piece, you wait right here for it. Understand?”
I said I did. Right then is when I started to understand a lot of things. Like why people call a pistol a “piece.”
The old man picked up the phone and said something in Italian. I didn’t speak it, but I figured what it was about.
When he hung up, he looked at me. “You’re getting bigger,” he said. “All the time.”
“I’m almost eighteen,” I told him.
“I mean your … ambitions,” the old man said.
“Oh. Like what I just—?”
“Sure, that. A business expense. And I see you’ve been recruiting, too. Outside the tribe. Very smart. All over the city, you can see, that’s the trend among … businessmen.”
I think I knew it right then, but I gave myself a minute to make sure I was under control. Then I asked the old man, “What do you mean, outside the tribe?”
“The last bunch who came in here for your jackets, that was a surprise,” he said. “I never saw Spanish boys in your … organization before.”
8
Right after that, I straightened things out with Baron James. We agreed on the tolls. I paid them, and the Mystic Dragons never moved on the Royal Vikings.
The pistol the old man sold me worked perfect. The only way I could use it was by calling for a one-on-one, so the cops found out pretty quick it was me who aced Junta.
I thought, maybe, the Renegades wouldn’t testify against me … you’re not supposed to. But they did. By the time the court was through with me, I was doing The Book. That’s what they call a life sentence … from throwing the book at you, I guess.
When I got to prison, I came in with a name. Not just from what I did—there were plenty of guys who had a body up there. But I was the first white guy inside who had friends in the Mystic Dragons, just like Baron James promised. It made me kind of a leader in there, even that young.
I see the Board again in another year. Maybe they’ll cut me loose this time. I’ve got a perfect institutional record—I know how to do time.
I’m only forty-two years old now. It’s not too late for me to get my little piece of the city.
for Matt Kinney
SEEDING THE GROUND
A malevolent fog reduced the morning sun to a hazy, rancid-butter splotch. It descended as it always did: inexorably, until it merged with the prison walls to form a sea of the dullest gray.
The inner gates opened, and the yard slowly came to life. Convicts moved in intricate patterns; some to their own territory, others to the no-man’s-land where the unaffiliated were allowed to congregate. The boundary lines were invisible to outsiders. To the prisoners, they were as clear as the concertina wire that topped the surrounding wall, occasionally glittering in sunlight like a necklace of razors.
Domino players set up their tables, weight lifters assembled their iron, joggers started on their first circuit. A few men began limbering up on the handball court, their gloveless hands marking them as veterans of the sport.
Only the shadowy shark of sudden, explosive violence moved freely across the boundaries, swimming silently through the tight clusters of convicts. A lethal shape-shifter, never motionless, it would stop only to strike.
The yard was a border town on the edge of a frontier that few of its residents would ever cross. And now it was open for business. Bets were placed, debts collected, sex threatened, plots hatched.…
One of the last cons to enter the yard was an elderly man, so old he had become an ancient, unnoticed relic. He moved glacially, his back bent from the weight of his Life-Without term. His destination was a tiny patch of stone-hard dirt, in a corner that never saw the sun.
The old man was mostly bald, with only a fringe of bleached-out white hair remaining. The eyes behind his taped-together, steel-rimmed glasses were the color of denim after a thousand turns in the laundry.
As the old man settled into position in front of his patch, a guard strolled by, a muscular young man with a military haircut and a bodybuilder’s biceps.
“What’re you up to, Pop?”
“Ah, you know me, Rico. I’m planting my seeds, like I always do.”
“Yeah, I know. What I meant was, how are you feeling?”
“Pretty good, son. All things considered. What about you?”
The guard stepped closer to the old man. He rotated his head on his thick neck as if to get out a kink, scanning the yard in the same motion. Satisfied, he began telling the old man about how his dumb-fuck brother-in-law had gotten himself in trouble. Again. And how that made his wife so upset she wasn’t fit to live with. Again.
“But if I say one word about that useless slug, she gets mad at me. So what am I supposed to do?” the guard finished, five minutes later.
The old man nodded sympathetically, knowing no answer was expected.
The guard watched the yard with hands behind his back and his chest expanded. Playing his role. “So, you still won’t let your granddaughter come for a visit?” he said.
“You know how it is when girls come here, Rico. She’s been through enough.”
“But, Pop, I know she wants to—”
“It’s better this way,” the old man said, closing the subject. For today.
After the guard moved off, two men passed by where the old man was working. They were both in their late twenties, cold-eyed and prison-complected. One nodded curtly to the old man, as if deigning to acknowledge his existence. The old man nodded back—just a meaningless movement of his head.
The two men kept moving, walking the track around the outer yard in a leisurely circuit as they did every day. They walked i
n perfect synchronization, shoulders almost, but never quite, touching.
The shorter of the two was stocky, round-faced, with curly brown hair. His forearms were so thick with crude, prison-artist tattoos that they looked as if they’d been dipped in ink.
“You really think he knows the whole layout, like he said?” he asked his partner.
The taller man was hawk-faced, with jet-black hair worn short on the sides and long in back. “Why shouldn’t he?” he demanded. “I mean, he worked there, right? He was the gardener, had the run of the place.”
“But that was, like, what? Five, six years ago? And, anyway, he’s an old man, could be soft in the head.”
“Being old don’t make him stupid.”
“Stupid wouldn’t bother me. Crazy, that’s what bothers me.”
“Crazy people can still know things, Eugene,” the taller man said, confidently. “Anyway, you think he’s crazy just because he keeps trying to make something grow on the yard?”
“Maybe not when he first started, okay,” Eugene agreed. “But he’s sure crazy by now. That ground’s like concrete. Even if you could break it deep enough to plant a lousy seed, nothing would ever grow there—not without sunlight.”
“It’s his money. What else has he got to spend it on in here?”
“You city guys don’t know nothing about growing things,” the stocky man said. “You ever look at the packets those seeds come in? The commissary’s had them for a thousand years. They’re way too old to work. Got no life left in them. That old man’s stone lunar, Pete. Trying the same thing, over and over, like a robot.”
“Maybe he’s just stubborn.”
“Even a damn mule quits after a while, bro. But the old man don’t even have that much sense. You ever put a worm in a glass bottle, watch what happens? The worm crawls a little bit up the side, then he falls back down. Then he goes back, does the same thing. Over and over.”
“What else has the worm got to do?” the taller man said.
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