Cemetery Road (3 page)

‘Give me the gun, youngblood,’ I said, and I made a point of saying it like something I only had the patience to say once.

While he thought the order over, and Quincy stood there staring at me in mute astonishment, I watched the larger boy to see how much killing was about to be forced upon me. If he was armed too, and made a move to prove it, I’d have to shoot both boys in rapid succession: first the one near me, then his dark-skinned companion. Anything less would have been foolhardy.

Three seconds went by, and I still didn’t have the boy with the Afro’s answer.

‘Don’t try me, junior,’ I said, and I screwed the Beretta’s nose harder yet into the side of his skull, my eyes still fixed upon the kid closer to Quincy. When the latter boy suddenly came unfrozen, bringing me within an inch of committing the double-homicide I’d been contemplating, his only intent was to flee. He was at the shop’s door and out of it in the time it takes most people to blink, his incredulous accomplice crying out his name in a senseless attempt to order his return.

‘Tommy!’

But Tommy was good and gone.

I finally snatched the revolver from the younger boy’s hand while the shock of his abandonment was still setting in, and then it was just him and me and Quincy, and the .38 I continued to jam into the back of the kid’s left ear.

‘Call nine-one-one,’ I said to Quincy.

As my landlord slid to the phone on the wall behind him, I told the boy with all the hair to turn around, and make sure he took his sweet damn time doing it. He did.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find on his face when he showed it to me – fear, anger, amusement – but what I got resembled none of these things. What I got was a stare as vacant as a paneless window in a gutted building, a little boy gazing at a television set tuned to a nonexistent channel. I had a loaded gun aimed at his head, and the wild-eyed look of a man he might have just pushed close enough to the edge to use it, and he didn’t care. I could do with him as I pleased; whatever fate I chose for him now, he was willing to accept without question or quarrel.

He was fourteen years old at the most and, already, life and death to him were but interchangeable, equally valueless sides of the same coin.

At this particular moment in my own life, he could have cursed my mother in her grave and not enraged me more.

Quincy had been stunned by the show of reckless bravado I’d just put on, without a doubt, but I knew it was the sight of the gun in my hand alone that he had found most incredible, because he had never seen me with such a weapon before. In truth, I’d had the Beretta in the shop with me for four days now, after not having touched it in almost twenty-six years. R.J.’s murder had changed the world for me in such a way that I preferred to have the gun close at hand over dying for the lack of it.

Quincy would say later that God had spoken to me that morning four days ago, when I’d gone up to the attic and withdrawn the Beretta from the old liquor bottle sack in which I had banished it, and that was why it was there on the bottom shelf of my workbench when our two would-be thieves stepped in on us, perhaps intending to do more to enhance their street cred than just take Quincy’s money and run. But I knew God had had nothing to do with it. God would not have put that gun in my hand knowing how close I would come to emptying it into the head of a child whose most egregious crime was his resemblance to another young fool I once knew, many years ago.

In reality, the two boys looked nothing alike. In height, weight, even the color of their skin, they could hardly have been more different. But deep inside, behind their eyes, they had one thing in common I couldn’t help but take note of: the apathy of the dead. A cool, inalterable kind of indifference that winds itself around the heart like a shield and chokes the soul down to the size of a small stone. Such inurement is the fuel of great folly, and it can sometimes lead a boy to do harm to others in ways he will eternally, and altogether uselessly, regret.

‘Handy! Handy,
don’t
!’

Hanging up the phone, Quincy must have seen a change come over my face, my fear and mild irritation giving way to something far more combustible and impossible to contain. I slammed the butt of the Beretta across the forehead of the teenage boy before me, hard enough to leave an imprint on his skull, and he dropped to the floor like an empty coat. I stood over him and watched a wide rivulet of blood run from a fresh scalp wound down the side of his face, and put everything I had into finding all the satisfaction possible in the sight, before my rage could spur me on to greater and far more unforgivable things.

‘Jesus Christ, Handy, you didn’t have’ta do that!’ Quincy cried, forcing his great girth between me and the motionless body on the floor. ‘You might’a killed the boy!’

He wanted to disarm me, but was too afraid to try. I wasn’t Errol ‘Handy’ White anymore, or anyone else he thought he knew; I was just a crazy man with two guns who might be capable of anything. In the midst of his indecision, I walked back to my side of the shop and sat down at my workbench again. I put the two firearms down on the bench where the uniforms could see them when they eventually responded to Quincy’s call and braced myself for their arrival.

As tired of being alive as I could ever remember being.

FOUR

T
he difference between a good man and a bad one often comes down to nothing more than the quality of his judgment. In making life-altering choices, his conscience may speak to him, but it is the voice of reason he ultimately adheres to, the basic math of what he has to gain versus what he stands to lose.

The two close friends I made for myself as I entered into manhood – O’Neal Holden and R.J. Burrow – were no more inherently evil than I. We took little pleasure in the distress of others, and put no effort into feigning indifference to it. But we were all brash and foolish and drunk with the power of youth, and serious consequences for our actions was a concept we scoffed at like a ghost story. We saw ourselves as invulnerable, and could not imagine how we could bring any real harm to others when we could not possibly bring harm to ourselves.

We first came together as a trio in our junior year at Manual Arts High School, where I essentially affixed myself to the pre-existing duo of O’ and R.J., who had been best friends since the third grade. O’ was a tall and beautiful ladies-magnet offhandedly involved in two sports, while R.J. was a comic with a mean streak nobody ever crossed without losing teeth. Each was fascinating in his own way, but O’ was the real draw, a beacon of future stardom I was powerless not to admire and idolize. I expect R.J. felt much the same.

O’ was born to be a mover and a shaker, a force of nature wrapped tightly if precariously in human form. No one who ever met him came away wondering what he would eventually become, because only one vocation offered him wealth and power to the extent he seemed to deserve them. Politics was O’s unavoidable destiny, and the only thing open to question was what
kind
of elected official he would choose to become: the kind whose wisdom and compassion for his constituency marks him worthy of their trust, or the kind, far more common than the other, who wields that trust like chips on a poker table for his own personal enrichment?

The O’ I grew up with was equally capable of evolving into either animal, and it was this quality of unpredictability that always made it so exhilarating – and terrifying – to know him as a friend.

R.J., by comparison, was not nearly so complex. If any of us was predisposed to a life of crime, it was him. R.J. was short and lean and forever on the lookout for any sign of disrespect, and there was no fight or challenge he would not take on with the zeal of a man possessed. His father was a closeted gay man who, in a drunken stupor, liked to beat his wife unconscious to minimize his sense of emasculation, and R.J. came to school most days relishing the opportunity to either make people laugh or make them bleed, the choice was entirely theirs. He had fast hands and quick feet, and he came at you like a blur, throwing punches you couldn’t see while deflecting all your own. Had there been an ounce of bully in him, he would have been the most feared man at Manual; as it was, he was simply the most vigorously avoided.

As for myself, I was the wildcard, the consistent middle ground between O’s lethal charm and R.J.’s brute force. Some people probably thought of me as the ‘brains of the outfit’, but brains were a non-issue. What I had over my two friends was restraint: the unremitting need to question and second-guess any action before daring to take it. O’ always equated this inclination to a shortage of courage, but it saved our asses on enough occasions that he came to grudgingly appreciate it over time.

We were petty thieves. That was the simple truth of it. Larceny was not our constant occupation, just an occasional one, something to do with all our excess testosterone until we could find more constructive uses for our time. We all had big plans for the future, and with varying degrees of effort, we pursued them beyond high school, O’ at UCLA, R.J. and I at Los Angeles City College. O’ was going into politics, I was going to be a mechanical engineer, and R.J. had ambitions toward sports writing. None of us expected to be stealing televisions and car stereos forever.

In the end, however, a little more than three years out of high school, we were still players in the game when we committed one crime too many, and only O’ had the wherewithal to survive its repercussions. It was just another rip-off, a bit larger and more complicated than most of the others we’d pulled over the years, perhaps, but like the others, it should have incurred no casualties.

That R.J. was the one who predicted otherwise still haunts me to this day.

‘Excel Rucker? Man, are you crazy?’

‘No. What’s crazy about it?’

From the other end of the couch I was slouched across, R.J. took a long, expansive drag on the blunt pinched between his thumb and forefinger, his face taking on a scowl of deep concentration. ‘That’s some dangerous shit, that’s what. Jackin’ dope dealers.’

‘It ain’t dangerous if we do it right,’ I said.

I stole a furtive glance at O’, fishing for his reaction, but all he did was sink even deeper into the red leather beanbag chair he was sitting in and stare further yet into space, happy for now just to smoke a joint of his own and listen in.

We were all hanging at O’s crib, our official base of operations in those days. It was a one-bedroom bachelor pad way out in Playa del Rey, big and clean and architecturally futuristic, and it sat just close enough to the beach that we could smoke dope and talk strategy with the illusion that we were doing so in style.

‘What you mean, “right”?’ R.J. asked.

‘I mean we find one of his safe houses and watch it for a while. See who goes in and out, and when.’

‘And then?’

‘And then we figure out a way to take it down without anybody getting hurt. Same as we always do.’

‘’Cept we ain’t always rippin’ off drug dealers. Drug dealers got guns, nigga!’ He passed me the joint, holding a lungful of smoke down tight. ‘And what about the dope? We don’t know nothin’ ’bout sellin’ cocaine, how we gonna move it without Excel findin’ out?’

‘We wouldn’t try to move it. We’d flush it. The only thing we’d keep is the bread.’

‘Say what?’

‘He’ll be looking for the drugs to show up on the street, but they never will. So all he’ll be able to figure is that it had to be another dealer who ripped him off and just rolled the product into his own inventory. ’Cause nobody else would boost the shit and not even
try
to sell it, right?’

R.J. thought about it, looked over at the man in the beanbag chair. ‘You hearin’ all this, O’? What’s this fool talkin’ about?’

O’ turned, glassy-eyed, and smiled. ‘He’s talkin’ about payback,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘Man’s got a good idea, but it ain’t about the money and it ain’t about the drugs. It’s about Olivia Gardner. Ain’t that right, Handy?’

I took a good long while to answer him because his insight into minds not his own always galled me. ‘Yeah, that’s right. It’s about Olivia,’ I said.

She was my brother’s girl, not mine. Like Chancellor, Olivia Gardner was five years younger than me, almost a child at seventeen when I last saw her alive. She had almond-colored skin and big brown eyes, and a small, girlish body that was not ordinarily to my taste. I don’t think I was ever in love with her, but she had my attention from the first time Chancellor brought her around the house.

She was the poorest person I knew. Her family lived in a little two-bedroom house just outside the northern perimeter of the Jordan Downs housing projects, and every meal they ever ate there had been scraped together with Welfare money. It was Olivia, two brothers, one sister, and their mother, all getting by on fumes and, in her mother’s case, alcohol. One look at the dirt yard out front and you knew all the dresser drawers inside were filled with clothes even the second-hand stores didn’t want, and the bathroom had a toilet that only flushed when it was willing.

Still, Olivia was a girl with the potential to escape it all. She was smarter than my brother by any form of assessment, and she had the will to fight, to make any sacrifice necessary to rise above the conditions she’d been born into. Left to her own devices, she was destined for greater things.

But lives as tenuous as Olivia Gardner’s can all too often be derailed by a single mistake. The margin for error is just too small to tolerate the kind of miscues the rest of us survive routinely without suffering any ill effect. All she did was go to a party and do a little blow, the first she ever tried, and when she left, it was in the back of a red ambulance that killed its sirens halfway to the hospital because it wasn’t worth diverting traffic for a dead girl.

It wasn’t Excel Rucker’s party, but the coke it was running on was. He was in the house himself that night, passing the shit out like a servant with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. People said later it was Excel personally who laid the white line down on the mirror in front of Olivia, but this, in my opinion, was a pointless accusation. Olivia did the blow of her own free will; she made a choice to duck her head down toward the man’s white powder and take it into her body, and the consequences of that decision were hers alone to bear.