37
I left them on the ground, next to the bench. Nothing they might tell the police when they regained consciousness would represent any danger to me. The plastic bottles of gasoline would speak louder than any lie they might concoct, as would the swastika tattoo on the broken neck of the largest one.
This justice brought me no closer to Chica’s candle-point flame. Nor did I confuse it with an act of atonement.
But I did tell myself that I had truly begun my journey. In this, I was wrong.
I had sworn to renounce followers, but there are no secrets in a world where there is no place to hide them. My encounter with the would-be torturers was known within minutes, and magnified within hours. Within days, I had become a walking myth. But this obvious parallel to the original growth of my reputation as a teacher never penetrated my arrogance-armored consciousness.
38
“We could find that woman,” Michael enthused. “I know we could.”
“Surveillance grid,” Ranger agreed. “Stage one. Then we set up a box tail until we locate their HQ.”
I exchanged looks with Lamont. He nodded sadly. If we allowed Michael and Ranger to pursue the elusive automobile on their own, the consequences were quite predictable. And unacceptable.
“This can be done,” I told my brothers. “But only if we do not act rashly.”
“You’re the boss, Ho,” Michael said, instantly.
“I am not the—” I stopped myself from repeating what had come to be my ever-ignored mantra. “Let us go to the pier,” I finished, lamely. I never ceased my attempts to persuade the others to stop viewing my proposals as commands, but I had not yet been totally successful. Perhaps not even partially so.
39
Two hours later, Michael walked us through what he had observed. He showed us where the white Rolls-Royce had come to a stop, then began to pace off the short distance to the edge of the pier. I urged caution; the wooden flooring was badly decayed in many spots, and the footing was treacherous.
“Right there,” Michael said, pointing.
We all looked down at the oily black water.
“Those big ships used to pull up to offload right where we’re standing now,” Lamont said. “That means the water’s deep.“
“It made a hard sound when it hit,” Michael said. “Like it was real heavy.”
“But small enough to carry in her hand?”
“That’s right, Ho. In one hand, matter of fact.”
“A rod!” Brewster blurted out.
“A what?” Ranger demanded.
“A gat, a heater, a … a … pistol,” Brewster told him.
“A piece?” Ranger snarled. “Why didn’t you just fucking say so, man? What kind? Revolver, semi-auto, half—?”
“I didn’t see it,” Brewster reminded him.
“Then why did you say it was a—?”
“Brewster was surmising,” I said to Ranger, very gently. When I was a child, one of the exercises we practiced was to reach into a nest of tiny candles burning in the darkness and extinguish whichever one our teacher demanded, without disturbing the others.
“An educated guess,” Lamont explained, in response to Ranger’s quizzical look. “But it didn’t have to be a pistol. Could have been anything small and solid. A bundle of computer disks, videocassettes, even a book of pictures … Like Michael said, we’re not going to try and actually find whatever it was. We don’t need to, okay?”
“Define the mission!” Ranger snapped out.
“Well, like we were—”
“Only the commander defines the mission,” Ranger warned Lamont, his voice on the razor edge between adamant and dangerous.
Again forced by a more immediate need, I reluctantly temporarily resumed the mantle of leadership I had renounced. “It is too late to begin our search,” I said. “But, even as we sleep tonight, we can be alert to the prospect of the car returning … perhaps with search equipment. If no one appears, tomorrow we will go about our usual business. Then, when darkness comes, perhaps we could meet in Brewster’s library?”
I made the last portion of my statement into a request, bowing when Brewster nodded his acceptance. “Are we agreed, then?” I concluded.
Only Target did not respond, for which we were all duly grateful.
40
I awoke the next morning mindful of the complex task I faced. For some time, it had been necessary that Michael and Ranger be kept apart as much as possible. Ranger was a few years younger than Michael, and often pointed out that while he had been fighting in some foul jungle, Michael had been living in luxury. Michael was not reluctant to defend himself on this issue, insisting that his avoidance of conscription should be attributed to his political convictions.
Lamont seeks what he believes to be the irony inherent in all things, as if to prove that the universe consists of nothing but the random intersection of events. He took it upon himself to resolve the conflict between the two men by establishing their common ground.
Sipping from his brown-bagged bottle of wine, gesturing with his cigarette, seated on a wooden box as the rest of us watched from the ground, Lamont became a university professor, speaking from a position of authority. “Break it down, it always comes back around,” he said. “Ranger volunteers; Michael slips past the draft. On different sides of the world, body and mind. But that was then. Now you’re both standing on one tiny little spot on this planet. And how you got this close is exactly the same way you got so far apart. Only, this time, it was Michael who volunteered and Ranger who got drafted.”
“How did I—?”
“You gambled it all away,” Lamont cut Michael off. “Nobody made you do it. Maybe you expected it to turn out different, but it was your choice. Ranger, nobody made him join the Army. You were seventeen, right?”
“On my birthday,” Ranger affirmed.
“Which means you couldn’t be drafted. So you made a choice, just like Michael did. And it didn’t turn out the way you expected, either.”
Lamont looked from one man to the other. Seeing no resistance, he went on: “Get it? Michael, you volunteered to be here. With us, I mean. But, Ranger, you didn’t ask for any of this, am I right?”
“The fucking VA said I was—”
“The fucking VA drafted you, brother. Right into this war. Yeah?”
Silence came. Then Ranger nodded, not noticing that Michael was doing the same.
Since that time, an uneasy tolerance had grown between the two men. But I knew each remained combustible in his own way, and feared any attempt they made to work together could be potentially lethal. I subordinated my desire to avoid being anyone’s “commander” to the group’s need for survival.
41
I was not surprised to find Lamont waiting in the doorway of a waterfront bar he knew I would pass as I ventured forth each morning. That doorway was a safe place to rest—the bar would not open for hours. Lamont held a large paper cup in both hands. I assumed that at least a portion of its contents was coffee.
As a youth, Lamont had been the leader of a warrior tribe. As he related to me one night, “I was an OG before those little ‘gangstas’ made up the word. That was when gangs ruled the streets, Ho. Some streets, anyway. And when you went down on another club, you did it face-up. You walked over to them. They walked over to you. The newspapers called that a ‘rumble,’ but we called it what it was—a meet.“
As he spoke, I saw Chica in my mind, starting her walk.
“We always duked it out. Fists first. Then chains, blades, nailed broomsticks, sawed-off baseball bats. Sometimes there’d be a zip gun, but that’s nothing but a car antenna and a rubber band—you had to be close to make it work. Those days, you earned face when you showed face. Man-to-man.
“Everyone expected the leader to be first up, not like some faggot general standing on a hill, watching his men do battle.
“You know how they do it today? Carful of punks drive past a corner, pull their nines, close their eyes, and
hose everything down. And they think that chickenshit makes them men.“
“It does seem cowardly” was all I could offer my friend.
“I’m not talking about heart, Ho. Ever listen to Ranger when he goes off into one of his war stories? It’s like his antenna is all of a sudden picking up a clear signal, no static. But if you look at it straight, you see: no matter what people say a war’s about, it’s really always about the same thing—rep.”
“But you explained—”
“Explained? Man, I was just cherry-picking, Ho.”
Seeing the expression on my face, Lamont expanded my vocabulary. “I mean, I was telling you about the good parts like they was the only parts. You really interested in this ancient gang-fighting stuff?”
“I want to learn.”
Lamont studied my face for a long moment. I opened myself to his silent interrogation. Finally, he extended a clenched fist. I imitated his gesture. He tapped my fist with his, as if sealing a bargain. Then he lit another cigarette, and began to guide me through a world that no longer existed.
“Any club was always about turf. Like, say, Fifth Street was your block, from Amsterdam to the Park, okay?”
“But that would be—”
“Up in Harlem, when we’d say Fifth, we’d mean a Hundred and Fifth,” in response to the confusion on my face. “Anyway, it wouldn’t matter what little block it was: if you claimed it, you had to hold it. Some clubs, they claimed whole pieces of the city. You couldn’t walk through their turf unless you paid tolls. Not money,” he said, again responding to my confused look, “although, if you had any, you could forget about holding on to it. Mostly, you’d just get your ass kicked. But if you flew your colors—like wearing your club jacket—you could get yourself seriously fucked up.”
“But none of these clubs could actually own—”
“Amen, brother! You just pulled the covers off. That was it. That was it, in spades. And spics, too,” he said, chuckling at his own joke. “We never owned shit. But we killed each other to keep calling it ours, anyway.”
“If you knew this—?”
“How were we gonna know it? Who was gonna tell us? Who was even gonna talk to us? Some social worker? You want to know what’s really funny, Ho? The City had these guys—college boys, white guys, all of them. They’d put them out in the street for that social-work stuff. ‘Detached workers,’ they called them. They’d hang with you, try and talk you into going back to school, giving up bopping … like fucking missionaries in Africa. But it was doomed from jump. See, the only way a club qualified for one of those workers was behind being feared. It was like a status thing, having one of those workers. Good for your rep.”
“So, the more hotly a gang would pursue its … rep, the more likely it would be assigned a worker?” I asked. “And if having a worker enhanced the gang’s rep …”
“Full-circle,” Lamont said, smiling.
“But if every little block—?”
“I said claim and hold, bro. That’s how the huge clubs got all their power. The Chaplains, the Bishops, the Enchanters—what they did was take over a lot of the small clubs. And they did it slick, too. You tell the President of some ten-man club that now he’s a flunky, he’s got to go to war behind that. But if you show him some respect, ask him to ‘affiliate,’ his rep goes up, not down. So his little club, now it’s a chapter in a big one, you with me?”
“It is a clever tactic.”
“Double-slick,” Lamont said. “Because the big clubs, they won’t even ask unless you first show you got the stuff.”
“By fighting?”
“That was it. Nothing else would do it. And it had to be face-to-face, like I said. But once you got with one of the big clubs, then it was open season. We still had meets, only now you had clubs Japping each other in their own territories.”
If Lamont expected me to react to his association of sneak attacks with Japan, he was disappointed. But I somehow felt he was simply speaking without self-editing.
“We had drive-bys even back then, is what I’m saying. Only that was raiding, not just blasting away. It takes real cojones to light up another gang’s clubhouse. But if your club just rolled into enemy turf blasting out the windows at anything that moved, that’d bring your rep down.“
“Ah.”
“You’re supposed to get medals for killing the enemy, not for civilians. Why you think Ranger’s so fucked in the head, Ho? We flew our colors like a flag, right out there where the enemy could see them. But Ranger, he didn’t even know who the enemy was. Like he told us, they killed plenty of folks over there. Whole fucking villages. Just hosed ’em down, like those drive-by punks do now.
“I lost a pal behind that shit a few years ago. Everybody called him ‘Pogo,’ on account of he couldn’t sit still. But he was a good pal; if he scored a dime, you had a nickel. Broad daylight, some motherfuckers just opened up on a little park downtown. Four people killed. Made all the papers—a little girl was shot in the head.
“I heard on the drums that Pogo was in the morgue. In the papers, they just said ‘unidentified homeless man,’ and some description that could fit half the niggers in this city. But I knew it was Pogo. Man never missed Wednesday suppers at this church in the Village. When he didn’t show for two in a row, that was the same as Pogo’s obituary. Only one he was ever going to get.”
42
I had learned Lamont’s story in pieces, as one slowly unwraps a precious gift. He had gone to prison as a young man for stabbing a rival gang leader in what another culture might have called a duel. Because his foe had died, Lamont’s sentence had been a lengthy one.
While imprisoned, Lamont had taught himself to read. “You either kill the time or the time kills you,” he told me, as if he needed to excuse what I viewed as a most admirable achievement.
Reading transported Lamont to places he had never known existed when he was “free.” Through correspondence study, he became a college graduate, and looked forward to the day when he might become a teacher upon his release.
Such might have happened but for Lamont’s poetry. Although truly gifted, he pursued his art for its own sake, quite content with the meager circulation his work received inside the closed circle of those with whom he corresponded.
This balance was disrupted when Lamont’s poetry was somehow discovered by a wealthy woman with many literary connections. Her power was considerable, and Lamont’s first volume of poetry, B & E, was published to great acclaim while he was still incarcerated.
“I thought I was going to be the next great thing, Ho,” he told me. “I couldn’t get over myself.”
Arrogance as spirit-killer. This I understood.
“The minute I got the gate, I never looked back,” Lamont continued. “I never looked at anything but my own picture on that book jacket. And I loved those literary parties—salons, they called them, Ho.
“But then I snapped that I wasn’t a star; I was an exhibit in a traveling zoo. A petting zoo. ‘Literary circle,’ my ass. I was never one of them—I was just the fucking entertainment. They held me that high up just for the fun of stepping away and watching me crash.
“I’d faced death, Ho. And I had never blinked, not on the street, not in the joint. Death? I walked it down. Here’s what I knew: if it took me, it’d be taking a man. When they poured that ‘X’ of red wine on the sidewalk and called my name, I’d hear it, wherever I was: ‘Lamont, that boy, he had heart.’
“But those bloodsuckers did something to me I thought nobody could ever do. They took my heart, Ho.”
That was the only time I ever saw Lamont surrender to his emotions. I stood guard as he sobbed. I was greatly honored to be entrusted with such a sacred task. I felt new power surge within me as I stood with my back to Lamont. None would see my friend in his moment of shame—I would die first. And it would be an honorable death.
43
Lamont has one copy of his book left. He carries it with him everywhere. The first time he allowe
d me to read it, I was plunged headlong down a mineshaft of empathetic loss. Lamont had written his own haiku. And it had been stolen from him.
44
“Got any ideas?” he asked me that morning.
“I do not,” I confessed.
“I’ve been puzzling over it myself, Ho. There can’t be that many cars like the one we’re looking for. But we don’t exactly have access to the DMV computers, either.”
“No,” I agreed. “And a vehicle such as the one we seek would be garaged when not in use.”
“So …?”
“Would not such a car be driven by a chauffeur, rather than an individual?”
“Yeah …” Lamont said slowly, allowing his voice to trail off. “Unless …”
I waited as he took a generous sip from his cup. I noted that his eyes were clear and focused. Then I quickly reminded myself that I had often mistaken that look for sobriety.
“I keep thinking about the color, Ho.”
“White? Does that have some special significance?”
“Maybe. It’s kind of, I don’t know … tacky, like. I mean, you’re some kind of millionaire, maybe you want a Rolls to drive around in. Be driven around in, like you said. But white is just … déclassé for a car like that. White’s for something you rent, not something you own.”
“You think it might belong to a limousine company?”
“I did think that, for about a hot minute, but then something else came to me. Remember when Michael was describing the car?”
“Yes.”
“He never said it was big,” Lamont said.
“Would that not be implied, considering the—”
“Sure, there’s no such thing as a Rolls-Royce compact, that’s right. But, Ho, if it was a stretch, that’s something Michael would have picked up on—that’s from his world. His old world, I mean. The way I figure it, you’re a limo company, you’re going to invest in a damn Rolls, you go for the biggest one you can buy, get the most use out of it, see?”
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