Bad to the Bone (9 page)

Tilley said, “Which makes the Hanoverians the only people on the Lower East Side who aren’t.”

“Excuse me,” Rose stood up. “If you’re gonna talk shop, I’m gonna check on the kids.” Not that she wouldn’t like to talk about her own profession, but she was an accountant and there was just no way to make her job in New York City’s Department of Sewers and Waters very interesting. Rose was trying to transfer to the comptroller’s office, which at least promised greed and corruption.

“Wanna hear the latest?” Tilley continued, ignoring the jibe. “PURE. It’s a joke right? There’s a new brand of dope on the Lower East Side. Everybody wants it. Junkies and cokeheads both. PURE. Maybe they wanna be virgins again.”

“So what’s the big deal about a new brand name for dope?” Moodrow called. “Smiley D, Blue Thunder, Beam-Up…Every dealer on the street has a cute name for his drugs.”

“This is a little different, Stanley. This comes in vials, like crack, but it’s a powder, not rock. The vials are sealed with different colored caps according to potency. The seal proves that the dope is pure.”

“Have the narcs seized any of it?”

“We got a few empty vials from a snitch, but whatever was inside them, wasn’t heroin or cocaine.”

“What was it?”

“When I find out, you’ll be the first to know. The junkies seem to love it, but the word is there’s only a little bit of it on the street.”

Moodrow, a stack of plates in one hand, half a cheese cake in the other, marched into the kitchen. Betty was standing by the sink.

“I know that kid’s alive,” she said. “Michael Alamare.” She looked sideways at Moodrow, not wanting him to be teasing or even tolerant, and found him composed and serious. “I think the cult has him and he’s in trouble. I see him as a prisoner, as a caged animal.”

Moodrow stood over the garbage pail, patiently scraping the dessert plates. He and Betty could barely fit into the tiny room. “I once had a supervisor who kept talking about ‘trust your instincts, trust your instincts.’ What I found out is that sometimes my ‘instincts’ were nothin’ more than a bullshit ego trip. Not all the time, but enough so I made a decision to check
everything
, no matter what my instincts told me. You have to do all the little things right, because if you leave anything out some Legal Aid lawyer’s gonna shove your search warrants so far up your butt, you’ll be able to read them without your glasses.”

A
BOU JEFFERSON WAS STILL
in a sulk. Scrunched down behind the wheel and not saying a word even though he usually never shut his face. That was all right, though. Wendell Bogard could understand that. All those years wearing rags and eating with the roaches. Abou wanted no part of driving his old man’s shitbucket when he could be toolin’ down the boulevard in the red Benz or the black Samurai with the black windows and the Pyle Driver pushing out beats at 700 watts per channel. Shaking so loud even the cabbies turned to look.

“Hey, Abou, we havin’ a good time,” Wendell said, business being, after all, nothing but business. “This here shit is chill, man. Like these faggoty rags and takin’ yo daddy’s old Buick, ’stead of the Benz. We playin’ like James Bond. Y’understand what ah’m sayin’?”

What Abou wanted to answer was “you ain’t payin’ me to drive my daddy’s shitbox car. If I wanted to drive my daddy’s shitbox, I wouldn’t be puttin’ my ass on the line every goddamn day.” But nobody played that shit with Wendell Bogard, because Wendell Bogard would pull your ticket in a minute and he could
think
, too. That’s why Wendell was sitting in the backseat and Abou was driving and saying, “Oh, man, ain’t this some fly shit? I ain’t wear these rags since I been singin’ in the reverend’s choir.”

And that was that. Now it was official: they were having a good time. Something very important was about to happen to Wendell Bogard, something that might move him as far ahead as he’d already come. He had to keep his mind free of bullshit like Abou’s sullen expression. That was how he’d busted loose of the projects. By out-thinking the b-boys who thought a nine was the answer to every problem. “Man get hissef in
mob
way, Ah jus’
serve
his cherry ass.”

Only thing was, the violence kept on coming back to chill
everybody’s
ass. Your nine would roll on one night. Your enemy’s 47 would roll on the next. The first night you serve him. The second night he serves you. The corners were always there. The corpses were always there. The dealers milled about, looking over their shoulders for crime cops and competitors. Only things that changed were the faces.

Wendell remembered the faces who’d come up with him. Come up and gone back down. Bozo White catching a case that equaled life plus twenty years in Attica. Essy Freeman capped thirty times from a van. (The 47s had
smashed
his body; in the coffin, he looked like he’d come through the window of his Benz and the mortician couldn’t put his face back together.) Little Milton Thomas paralyzed in a wheelchair and talking about the Reverend Farrakhan. Using his one good hand to pop the pain killers they laid on him.

But mostly they’d lost by being their own best customers. Living off their fucking
product
when they knew it was the fastest way to get their asses beat back down. That they’d fall right through the dope cracks and end up sleepin’ in cardboard boxes. End up in a lot with the rats and the garbage. End up like they began.

If anybody was hip to that shit it was Wendell Bogard. He’d been on the street since he was five years old. Running from the beatings his mama’s boyfriends put on him. (And the times when his mama was out on the street and the boyfriends touched him and made him touch them. “You say shit to yo mama, Ah kill you, boy.”) Runnin’ from his mama’s beatings, too. She didn’t say anything when he left. Just kept on collecting the welfare until the case worker made a visit and she couldn’t produce her little boy.

The welfare ran him down on the street. They put him with his auntie which was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him. His auntie didn’t care what little Wendell did. Didn’t hardly ever beat his butt. Didn’t cook for him neither. Or buy him clothes. Or send him to school. Just produced him every month for the welfare, so that it got to be like making beats—them steady sending her the money every month and the bitch steady buying that wine and steady drinking it down with her girlfriends. Drank it on the same bench every afternoon, then staggered back into the projects to check out
Wheel of Fortune
on the television. Look at Vanna White’s dress and never, never get the phrase.

“Man,” Abou said, jarring Wendell, “these here maggot neighborhoods get me crazy. People lookin’ at me like I’m comin’ out they nightmares.”

Wendell chuckled appreciatively. Even though he’d given up that bullshit about dope dealers being some kind of heroes. Wasn’t no hero to it, as far as he was concerned. There was just blood and money and living large. The trick was keeping heart, mind and body alive.

Which is why he’d found his place. His place among the dealers. His place on the corner, though he never went near the corner these days. The dealers had taken him in when he first come out on the street. Like he was a pet. Feeding him when they ate, which wasn’t too often. Letting him hang loose in the shooting galleries and the crack houses where a kid could see everything there was to see about the life.

Wendell was eight years old the first time he helped the brothers drag an overdose out of a busted-up house. By the time he was ten, it didn’t bother him anymore. It was just something that could happen to people. Like the coke freaks fucking themselves into oblivion. No shame—just drop them pants and get down to it. Like dogs in a vacant lot.

Crack was sexual money. Twenty dollars or a hit on the pipe. Fuck as long as the hits keep coming. Fuck until the AIDS is ripping your body to pieces. Draggin’ crack babies. Draggin’ AIDS babies. Beamin’ up till it don’t matter. Until you get to some place where nothing matters, but staying stoned.

The kiss-ass years as a little kid on the corner allowed Wendell to see the traps before he stepped into them. Never touched drugs in his life. Instead, he found a dynamite dope connection and got himself nodded onto a crack corner where his product only improved business. Worked himself backward, into a better and better connection, then moved his own people in whenever a ‘face on the corner’ went down.

Now he was ‘livin’ large’ and the pigs were after his ass. Every time they busted a junkie from the neighborhood, they were askin’ after Wendell Bogard.

“Do you know Wendell Bogard? Can you get close to him? Will you sell the nigger out for another chance at life?”

The brothers who refused the deal came back and told him all about it. The brothers who took the deal (or pretended to take the deal) didn’t know him well enough to take him out. So far, anyway.

“Turn left here, Abou,” Wendell said. “We almost there.”

“Man, we goin’ from bad to worse. These motherfuckers so white, they invisible.”

“Abou, you’re a damn fool. Why don’t you get smart and think about what your mouth is runnin’?”

“You hard, Wendell.”

Now
the boy was sulking again. Playing that pussy shit like his feelings were hurt. Wendell wanted to remind Abou that it was the
white
man who first brought dope to the brothers. The
white
man who first brought the cocaine. Now the white man was making them a new offer. A free sample and a deal to follow. Wendell had never seen dope with the power of PURE. The junkies had gone crazy. Of course, there was only that little bit, just enough to tease. Just enough to get Wendell into old clothes and an old car, to get him out to maggot heaven. Look to see if the pennies from heaven were gonna fill his tin cup.

The motel was down at the end of College Point Boulevard, where the white man had said it would be. Abou parked the car as far from the office as he could and Wendell stepped out onto the asphalt. Under other circumstances, he wouldn’t walk into a situation like this without a dozen brothers to cover his play. But there was something about these little white boys in their gray pants and blue jackets, their ties and white shirts…you just couldn’t take it seriously.

But it didn’t turn out that way at all and Wendell was caught by surprise when he walked into room 35 to find the walls lined with little white faggots in stupid blue blazers carrying very large, very black AK47S. Calculating real quick, Wendell figured they could put about eight hundred rounds in his black ass before those banana clips were empty. Still, he wasn’t afraid, just surprised enough to laugh out loud when Abou started shaking.

“Be cool, brother,” Wendell whispered into his chauffeur’s ear. “These white boys just for show. They got no reason to dog us.”

Because that was the way it
had
to be. The white man had control of some very valuable property. No way he could do business with the brothers, unless he showed he had full intentions of protecting his property. Dress them maggots all alike and put them along the walls with their blank white faces and they looked bad enough to stand up to the street. Put them in that house on Ludlow Street and it’d be like going up against an army.

And the army wasn’t the only surprise in the room, anyway. Maybe not even the biggest surprise. The man, himself, Davis Craddock, was sittin’ on a couch with his bitch. Short and muscular, he wore a white suit and a white hat pulled down so far it nearly hid his small black eyes. The bitch was stuffed into the tightest green leotard Wendell had ever seen. No panties under or over. The leotard jamming into the crack of her ass.

“Mr. Bogard. Welcome. Davis Craddock, here.” Craddock stood up and stretched out a small hand. His nose was sharp and prominent, dominating his face. “This is Marcy Evans.”

Wendell, much to Abou’s surprise, grinned broadly and gave Davis Craddock a full-out Iowa pump handshake. It was a marriage made in heaven, as far as Wendell was concerned, because if there was anything he loved, it was a crazy white man. Mostly, the white people in his life had been welfare workers who talked shit like, “Did anybody touch you in a bad place?” Instead of, “Did the nigger make you suck his dick?”

Wendell had known some crazy white people on the street. Bad motherfuckers ready for the first asshole to get up in their faces. Didn’t care about shit like jail or pigs or even about keeping their asses alive. ‘Death Before Dishonor’ tattooed on the arm and the motherfuckers steady believin’ it.

“How are you, Mr. Craddock?” Wendell, catching the look on Abou’s face, dropped the smile and thanked the good Lord that Abou wasn’t strapping tonight. “I’m Wendell (he pronounced it wen-
dell
) Bogard and this here is Abou Jefferson.”

“Mr. Jefferson?”

Craddock extended his hand, but Abou wouldn’t even look at it. Wendell wasn’t sure whether Abou was scared or mad. Didn’t care much, either. He could feel opportunity reach out to him like all the dope-high promises that kept his customers coming. Wendell didn’t shoot dope or smoke crack. Wendell was high on success.

“Abou’s hostile,” Wendell explained, breaking the tension. “ ’Course, that’s the way the jam’s supposed to go, right?”

Craddock looked at him for a moment, then laughed. No satire in it, though. A pleasant ‘we’re all good fellows here’ chuckle. “You’re a wonder, Wendell,” he said, glancing toward the woman. “Isn’t he a wonder, Marcy?”

“Sure, Davis.”

Her eyes rose to meet Wendell’s. They promised anything but the truth. It was a game, pure and simple. Which didn’t bother Wendell. Not as long as it was crazy.

“Let’s go into the other room,” Craddock said, indicating a door connecting to the next suite. “Where we can have some privacy.” When Abou started to move with Wendell, Craddock put out his arm. “I don’t wanna be pushy, but we’re gonna talk about matters that cops call ‘incriminating.’ If we make a deal, the secret’s gonna come out. I accept that. But if you refuse, it’d be better if the rumors are unsubstantiated.”

“I think the man is sayin’ that you gotta chill out in here,” Wendell said to Abou.

“If the bitch go in, I go in,” Abou said.