The Man Who Came Uptown

by George Pelecanos

  Our grandfathers built this town

  Now it’s been run to the ground

  But we’re gonna stay and fight

  With one last chance to make things right!

  Terry sat up on the edge of the bed and rubbed his temples. Unlike the guy shouting those lines, he had to go to work. So did his friends. The three of them had jobs in towns outside of Frederick. Terry was a stocker in a small grocery store in Walkersville. Richard and Tommy were in an auto-body shop in Monrovia.

  They had met when all of them worked as body men in a garage in Gaithersburg, a Maryland suburb north of D.C. Terry supplied them with marijuana that he was moving in quantity with some guys he had befriended out of the Cherry Hill Road area in eastern Montgomery County. Richard and Tommy were polite with Terry but kept their distance. Later, when Terry got busted and told them about his situation, he found out why. They couldn’t abide white people who hung out with blacks. They told him that his troubles were because of the blacks. Blacks had no honor. They were inferior to whites in every way. Come court time, they would turn on Terry. Blacks and whites didn’t belong together. Terry needed to choose a side.

  After he flipped on his former friends and drew probation rather than time, Terry got some threatening texts and phone messages and began to see that Richard and Tommy were right. He’d been misguided. A white man could only trust whites.

  Terry shaved off his beard, which he used to get shaped up at one of the many black barbershops in Silver Spring. He began to hang tight with Richard and Tommy. They took him along to white-nationalist meetings outside Baltimore and to larger events, picnics, rallies, and concerts, up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the Keystone State Skinheads got their start. Gradually, Terry began to see the truth. White genocide was real. He told himself that he didn’t hate black people, but he and his friends had to do something to protect the true American way of life that had been under siege for far too long.

  When Richard got caught stealing tools from the shop in Gaithersburg and was fired, Terry and Tommy quit in an act of solidarity, and the three of them decided to rent a place up in Frederick County, where they could be among their own kind. Richard and Tommy got body work and Terry snagged a job in a local grocery chain. They rented a house together in Hillville, a secluded mountain community off Route 15 that was heavily populated by whites. There they worked day jobs as a cover for their more lucrative activities, which included all varieties of theft, dealing marijuana to coworkers, and selling cut-down Lean to gullible white kids they trolled on Facebook and Instagram. They called them Eight Milers: whites who wanted to be black. Like white people who adopted black kids, they were race traitors, and they deserved to get fucked.

  Terry dressed, left his small bedroom, and walked out into the kitchen/living area. It had a table, where they ate, and a TV that got its signal from a dish mounted on the roof. Richard and Tommy were at the table in their work clothes, finishing their cereal, about to head out to the shop. Like Terry, they were tall, six foot plus. Richard had the fancy haircut, shaved on the sides and full on top. His unbuttoned shirt revealed his ink, the usual lightning bolts and number symbols. Tommy kept his hair shorn to the scalp. Both of them were strong.

  Terry had some cereal too, and then the three of them left the house. Richard secured the front and rear doors with a barrel lock and a dead bolt. All the windows were fixed with high-impact plastic burglar bars. Richard and Tommy had their guns and other valuables in a large framed-out box under a floor cutout in Richard’s bedroom. Terry kept a pistol under the front seat of his car. He was aware of the risk of having an unlicensed gun, but the threat of the Cherry Hill Road boys was still in his head.

  They walked to their vehicles: Terry’s Charger, Richard’s lifted Cherokee, and Tommy’s Silverado, parked in the gravel drive amid tall pines. They punched each other’s fists by way of good-bye. Terry felt a swell of pride. He was one of them. He had always felt apart, in his private school, on the baseball team, and, looking back on it, whenever he was riding with those gator-baits who he thought were his friends. For the first time in his life, with Richard and Tommy, he felt like he was a part of something. He belonged.

  They drove down the winding grade to the town: a sparsely populated strip of houses, a gas station, a church, and a failed general store. They followed Hillville Road to Route 15 and headed off to their daily jobs.

  PHIL ORNAZIAN and Thaddeus Ward sat in Ward’s Crown Vic behind the shuttered general store, waiting. They had rolled the dice, hoping that the three vehicles they had seen outside the tan-siding house in the pines the night before would be headed off to work the following morning. They had met up at Ward’s bail-bond office before dawn.

  A traffic alert on Ornazian’s phone had told him that a tractor-trailer overturn on 270 North had shut down the highway, so they headed toward Baltimore in darkness and caught Route 70 in the direction of Frederick.

  “They call this the Heroin Highway,” said Ward as they hit 70 East. “State police randomly stop cars with West Virginia plates. Those boys make their pickup in Baltimore and drive the product back to their home state. Lots of heroin transactions in the parking lot of that Walmart in Mount Airy too.”

  “How do you know all this?” said Ornazian.

  “Fella I worked with in Four D, name of Burnside. Moved out to West Virginia after he left the force. You know how police do. Burnside took his tier-two retirement and put the big city in his rearview. But he never stopped being a cop. Burnside knows what goes on in all these towns up here, Maryland, West Virginia…Pennsetucky too.”

  “Did you ask him about Hillville?”

  Ward nodded. “He says Hillville is the meth capital of Maryland. Told me to mind myself up here, ’cause these Hillvillies don’t take kindly to strangers they think might be law. ’Specially the federal type.”

  “We’re not law,” said Ornazian.

  “Who don’t know that?” said Ward.

  Coming off Route 15 onto Hillville Road, they saw a sign in a plowed field announcing a pending housing development. On the sign was spray-painted the words Get out.

  They had arrived in a kind of town center—a church, a gas station and small market, and widely spaced houses. Farther along, the houses were smaller and in disrepair. Some had weed-ridden cars, trucks, and farm equipment in their yards. beware of dog signs and multiple satellite dishes were common. They came to a shuttered general store at the foot of the Catoctin Mountains. There the road wound up toward the house where Terry Kelly stayed with his friends. Ward pulled the Vic around back of the store, put it nose-out so they could see the road, and cut the engine.

  Back behind the store was a semicircle of houses so small they were nearly shacks. In the center of the semicircle was a rusted-out jungle gym and swing set. One of the houses had an open, unhinged front door. Another had windows spray-painted black.

  “Meth pads,” said Ward.

  An hour past dawn, the Charger came down the hill, followed by a boxy Jeep with oversize tires and a Chevy half-ton truck.

  “That’s them,” said Ornazian.

  “The new Klansmen.”

  “More like wannabe Nazis.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Their playbook is Mein Kampf. They carved the number fourteen into the Weitzmans’ dining-room table.”

  “And that means what?”

  “Fourteen words. The white-nationalist slogan. ‘I am a coward and a loser and I blame my failure on other people.’”

  Ward counted it out on his fingers. “That’s fifteen words.”

  “See? These guys could fuck up a wet dream. Let’s go to their house.”

  Ward drove up the hill. He passed the house with its now empty driveway and kept going for another two miles. The road ended at a county watershed area with no trespassing signs mounted on a closed gate.

  “I don’t like it,” said Ward. “Only way out is back down that hill.”

  “Always with the neg
ative waves, Moriarty.”

  “Now you’re losing me, man.”

  Ward made a three-point turn and drove down the grade. They went by a ramshackle home set improbably on a steep hill, where three young men sat on a porch and hard-eyed them as they passed. Ward continued on and parked on the shoulder of the road, just a bit north of the tan rambler set in the stand of pines.

  “We’re out of the sight lines of the other houses,” said Ward.

  Ornazian looked around at the surrounding woods and nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  They went to the trunk of the Crown Vic and opened it. They gloved their hands but did not use stockings on their faces. Ward checked his Glock, holstered it, and left his shotgun where it lay. Ornazian slid the .38 into his dip and reached for his retractable baton.

  “You won’t need that today,” said Ward. He unzipped a duffel bag and extracted a twenty-five-inch-long Blackhawk special-ops entry ram, gripping it by its top handle. There were also handles on both sides of the batterer.

  “You police love your toys,” said Ornazian.

  “This is a nice tool right here. It weighs thirty pounds. Even you could handle it.”

  “Why’s it got three handles? You only have two hands.”

  “It’s designed so right-handed dudes and left-handed dudes can use it. Dumbass.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. I’m a little sensitive right now.”

  “Is it your time of month?”

  “I hate when you blame all of my emotions on that.”

  They looked around once more, crossed the roughly paved road, and walked to the back of the house.

  “I don’t hear no dogs,” said Ward.

  The house backed to a hill of weed and boulders. The rear door was up three concrete steps, where there was a small landing. Ornazian tried the door to negative effect, then stepped back as Ward stood before it, feet planted firmly, and gripped the forward handle of the ram with his left hand, one of the rear handles with his right. He swung the ram into the jamb, and the door opened, its frame splintering cleanly. Ward placed the battering ram on the concrete landing and both of them stepped into the house.

  They were in a kitchen that smelled of garbage. A sack of it was full and open in a plastic basket, and there were dirty dishes, cups, and silverware piled in the sink. A cheaply made dining table outside the kitchen held four chairs. There was an open living area with a couch, cable-spool table, recliner, and wide-screen television.

  On the cable-spool table sat an open laptop, many empty beer cans, a bong, a bag of buds, rolling papers, plastic lighters, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts and roaches. Posters showing Aryan faces and accompanying slogans were thumbtacked haphazardly to the walls. WE HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST. FIGHTING TO TAKE BACK OUR COMMUNITIES ONE STREET AT A TIME. OUR FUTURE BELONGS TO US.

  Ornazian scanned the posters, the words, the bold fonts and art deco–style images typically found on Ayn Rand book covers.

  He went to the laptop and looked at the site that was still up on the screen, a music label promoting its product and its racist ideology. Ornazian hit one of the songs on a downloadable list, something called “When the Righteous Day Comes” by a band named Blood Duty. Growls and red-needle guitars filled the room.

  “Even their music sucks,” said Ornazian.

  “Turn that shit off,” said Ward. “What we’re looking for ain’t out here. Let’s go to the bedrooms.”

  There were three of them. Ornazian and Ward worked each room together. They opened drawers and shoeboxes, tossed closets, sliced up mattresses. In the largest bedroom, the last one they entered, boxes of a prescription medication, a combination of promethazine and codeine, were stacked on a small throw rug in a corner. Next to the stacks, lined up, sat bottles of NyQuil. Christopher Perry, the kid from Northeast, had been right. These guys were cutting their Lean with over-the-counter cold medicine.

  “Fuck is that mess?” said Ward.

  “The latest trash high.”

  “In my day, the burnouts huffed glue out of paper bags.”

  “Same idea.”

  Ornazian and Ward searched the room and found no Tiffany bracelet. There was no jewelry at all and no cash.

  “Nothing,” said Ornazian.

  “You think they already offed it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get out of here, man.”

  Out in the living room, Ornazian said, “Hold up.”

  He ripped the posters off the walls and violently overturned the cable-spool table. He grabbed a chair and threw it into the wall-mounted television set, cracking its screen. Then he unbuttoned his fly, pulled out his pecker, and urinated on the couch.

  “You finished?” said Ward. “Or you about to take a shit in their beds too?”

  “That was for my kids.”

  Driving back through the town of Hillville, Ward turned to Ornazian.

  “Guess we’ll have to come back and do it the tried-and-true way.”

  “I guess we will.”

  “They’ll be on alert now. Seein as how you trashed the shit outta their spot.”

  “You’re the one who broke their doorframe.”

  “I ain’t piss on it, though.”

  “True.”

  “We can come back,” said Ward, “but not with my car.”

  “I’ll score the SS.”

  “Where’d that Impala come from?”

  “Man named Berhanu, deals in hacks. Has a little garage in an alley off Taylor, near Kansas Avenue, in Petworth.”

  “You trust him?”

  “He’s straight.”

  “Can you get Hudson?”

  “I’ll get him.”

  “He didn’t seem too happy about being with us the last time.”

  “He wasn’t,” said Ornazian. “But he’ll come around.”

  Twenty-Three

  MICHAEL HUDSON returned home from his day shift at the District Line and let Brandy out into the backyard to do her business. Back in the empty lot, where the east–west portion of the alley came to a T, the man named Woods sat on a crate. Woods had lost a foot in Iraq after an IED detonated under his Humvee. For that, he received seven hundred dollars a month in compensation. Woods had yet to find work in D.C.

  “Hudson,” said Woods, giving Michael a two-fingered salute.

  “Woods,” said Michael with a nod.

  After Brandy defecated, she dragged her butt across the weedy yard and then came to the back steps and whined. Michael picked her up in his arms and carried her upstairs. Brandy slept at the foot of Michael’s bed while he finished Northline. He had been waiting for some quiet time alone to finish the novel.

  In the story, Allison Johnson has sought out the disfigured young man Dan Mahony who disappeared from her life for weeks and is holed up, hermit-like, in his small house. He lets her in, and, after some gentle prodding on her part, he reveals the details of his troubled past and the source of his depression. While he showers, she cleans his house thoroughly in an act of kindness and suggests that Dan and his dog walk her to the restaurant where she works. She’s trying to draw Dan Mahony back out into the world. At the same time, Allison, cautious around men after a lifetime of abuse, is letting down her guard.

  “I’d like that,” he said and stood up. He walked to a closet and got his coat. The girl put on her coat, hat, and gloves and they walked out into the yard. It was dark as they went down Seventh Street towards the casinos and the downtown lights. Dan Mahony couldn’t take control of her, she thought to herself, he could barely take control of himself. So as she walked, she felt all right with him there. Her hand fell next to his and she took it in hers and held it.

  Michael put down the book for a moment, then read that last sentence again. Then he read on. In the penultimate chapter, Allison, Dan Mahony, and his dog go to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, camp out, and sleep under the stars in the bed of Dan’s old pickup. In the end, two damaged people have found refuge, healing, an
d hope in each other’s arms.

  Michael rubbed at the cover of the book, then placed it spine-out on the shelf next to his Elmore Leonard novels, Hombre and Valdez Is Coming. His library had begun to grow.

  He took a shower, dressed in fresh clothes, and had an early dinner with his mother. Then he walked northeast, out of Columbia Heights, into Park View.

  MICHAEL WAS standing near the entrance to the rec center on Warder Street, hoping that Anna Byrne would appear. He didn’t want to lurk too close to her house. It was a long shot, but he knew she rode her bike in the evenings. Sure enough, soon she was pedaling toward him on her machine. Upon seeing him, she slowed to a roll and braked with one foot. She was surprised, but the look on her face was not displeased.

  “Michael…”

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Okay.”

  “Actually, I walked to your neighborhood. I was hoping to get up with you.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. I just wanted to see you.”

  She stared at him and he didn’t look away.

  “I’m about to go for a ride,” she said.

  “I get it.”

  “No, listen. Give me an hour. We can meet up when I come back. If you don’t mind me being sweaty.”

  “I don’t mind. Where?”

  “You remember that beer garden on Georgia?”

  “Next to that bookstore. At Morton.”

  “One hour,” said Anna. “I’ll see you there.”

  Michael clocked her as she headed downtown. When she left his sight, he walked through the rec center gates and had a seat on the bleachers by the field. Watched some dudes playing a soccer game; looked like they were serious. He could tell they were El Salvadoran by their features. Since he’d been on the job, he’d learned to distinguish the countries of origin of the folks in the kitchen. It was cool to know who your neighbors were and where they’d come from. They were D.C. too.