Run (21 page)

Jinx pulls up short. He smells it too.

I read the station and it’s clean. Looking good. So I say to Jinx:

I got to get to a phone.

There’s a bank of pay phones over there, but I don’t think so, I think I ought to walk outside, to the Metro station across the way and I see a telephone kiosk and I find a free phone and I feed it my quarters and I call Fiona. The number’s bugged, I don’t give a damn, they can hear whatever I say, and it’s not what I’m saying that counts, it’s what I have to hear.

On the second ring I realize I’m sucking on a breath. On the third ring she answers.

Hey, who’s there?

Fiona, I tell her.

Fiona who? she says. Just like I told her to do when I called and spoke her name. Unless there’s a problem. So: Everything is cool. Everything’s fine.

I’m breathing again.

Then she laughs and she says:

Hey, baby. You coming home?

Wait, wait, wait, I tell her. You okay?

Yeah, she says. What—

Any of the boys come round?

Birdman, she says, what is going on?

Honey, I tell her. Not now, okay? Just tell me—

Trey’s here, she says. Been here since … I don’t know when, baby. He was here when I got home, sitting out front in his car. He won’t tell me why, he said to wait for you. So are you going to tell me? What is going on?

Okay, okay, I tell her. Look, just take it easy, okay? I’ll be there before you can whistle.

I can’t whistle, she says. But hey, Birdman. You got a great horoscope today, did you know that?

No, hon, but—

It’s something about … wait, here, listen now, it says, um: Bright light shines where previously was dark. Emphasis on direction, motivation, partnership, marital event. Business outing proves fascinating, productive. Isn’t that nice, Burdon? Isn’t that—

That’s nice, hon. Nice, but—Fiona? Put Trey on the phone, okay?

Just a sec, she says. Things start to break up. She’s using that damned portable phone. Then: Trey?

Hang on, she says.

I cover the mouthpiece with my hand, say to Jinx: Trey Costa is there.

Jinx says: Who the fuck is Trey Costa?

My other man, I tell him.

How do you know he’s still yours? How do you know he ever was?

I don’t know, I tell him. But what does anybody know? I believe in this guy. That’s what counts, isn’t it?

Another burst of static. Shit, shit, shit, I say. Then: Trey?

He’s in the garage, Fiona says. Wants to know where you keep the, the—

Strange sounds. I don’t quite realize she’s crying.

Burdon? she says. What is he doing here? He’s got a shotgun. He keeps looking outside, like, like— What is going on, hon? Where are you?

Fiona, I tell her. Listen. Listen real close, baby. I’m where I should be, and so are you. I’ll call you again, inside the hour, okay? Then … now listen to me, hon—and I speak a little slower—then I’m coming home.

That’s when I pause, and I say for the guys who are listening, those fucks, I say: I’ll come in a cab. A Diamond cab. You see anything else, there’s a problem, okay? Make sure Trey knows too. A Diamond cab, right? Okay?

Burdon—

Sssh. Everything is fine. Okay? And listen, Fiona. If I’m not there by the time your show’s over, you get out of the house. You tell Trey to take you to see the world. You tell him that. He knows what to do. Okay?

You tell him that.

Burdon, listen, I—

When your show’s over. See the world, hon. Okay? Now I got to go.

Burdon?

I got to hang up the phone and go now, okay? I love you, baby.

I love you too.

And I try not to listen, I just hang up the phone, and I look at Jinx and I tell him what we both know:

I got to go get her.

Right about then we get a screech of tires and somebody’s laying on a horn, honk honk honk honk, like it’s never going to let up, and Jinx lets a laugh out and across the parking lot is a fucking pimpmobile, a platinum Lexus convertible with a noose of gold chain choking its rearview mirror and these evil black Doublemint Twins in the front seat, straight
out of the life, living so large that their license plate ought to read gang
RELATED
, in neon lights.

Yo yo yo, Jinx! says the guy on the driver’s side. My man! He pops out of the door and does the swing-and-sway, coming our way.

Subtle, I tell Jinx. Why didn’t they drive a white Bronco?

Jinx says: You in another world now, Burdon Lane. Startin now, we be doin things my way.

Yo, Jinx, the guy says, cruising in close. Like I’m not there.

Yo, QP, Jinx says. QP Green, my man.

There’s some of that hand-slapping jive shit and this QP Green guy doesn’t even look at me. After they press enough flesh, the QP Green guy says to Jinx, he says:

Yo, nig. See you got yourself a cracker.

Then, at long last, QP Green slides his eyes toward me. They’re dull, tired. He’s toking. Or maybe he’s had a long day too.

Polly want a cracker? QP Green says. Then: We gonna take a ride now. In my Lex.

Says who? I tell him.

With a grin out of midnight, QP Green says: Mr. MAC. And damned if he doesn’t slip one of those fine compact autos, a MAC-10 machine pistol, out from under his sweatshirt. He rocks the action, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Like it’s some kind of toy he’s showing me. Right there at the station. In the open. In what’s left of daylight. And no one’s paying any attention.

I shrug and say: Guess we’re going to U Street.

Guess so, says QP Green.

Which is when Jinx says: Yeah. And hey, Burdon Lane … welcome home.

He points toward the horizon and I look and I smell and I see.

That’s my town, I mean, our town—the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.—in the distance. Smoke curls up from the horizon into storm clouds.

Something’s burning.

QP Green weaves that Lexus through the highways and the byways of the Maryland burbs until everything fades to a grey that’s as dirty as the sky. We cross inside the Beltway and wiggle on and off New York Avenue, heading south, I think. The geography around here is all screwed up, but we’re into the District of Columbia, that’s for sure, what with the ragged pavement and the broken buildings and the abandoned cars and abandoned people and a funnel of smoke that’s brewing ever closer, and sooner or later QP Green is saying Hey hey hey hey hey, and my pal Jinx says to me:

Get your fuckin head down.

That sets his homeys to laughing and I see the intersection ahead, and there’s a crowd on the street and the windows of a liquor store go smash and fire climbs the side of the brownstone next door and I decide to get my fucking head down. Jinx sort of leans over me and QP Green puts that Lex through a hard turn and does corners and more corners until it crosses a bridge, the Anacostia River maybe, and finally it stops, I don’t have a clue where, and Jinx is telling me to get up and get out, and the next thing I know I’m standing on a street corner and Jinx is standing next to me.

QP Green is saying something to Jinx, and it’s a number, that’s all I
catch, a number, and then Jinx is saying it back to him, like it’s something he’s memorizing, and QP Green is shaking his head up and down, right, right, yes. Then Jinx slaps my arm and says to me, he says:

Okay, plain vanilla. Time for our appointment with the Doctor.

QP Green yells out something, sounds like do or die, while he cranks the volume on that tape deck, and some loudmouth rapper is walkin, walkin in his big black boots, and it’s boom boom boom as the Lex speeds on out of sight.

I start to wonder if this makes a lot of sense, the two of us strolling around some lost part of Dirty City, but Jinx catches what’s on my mind and sends it right back to me:

People be thinkin bout you and me, they think we five-oh. Police. Ain’t that the shits? Tells you somethin bout how many white guys you see walkin round with black ones. Especially down here.

But hey, he says, and he nods on down the street to our left. This is a good place, you know? Good people here.

And he’s right. I have no idea where we are, but it’s a neighborhood. A nice neighborhood. Detached houses lined close on each other in neat rows. Perfect place for a safe house, a crib, whatever. I was expecting a broken-down crackhouse, some litterbox in the South East badlands, but this is so serene it’s almost middle class. And it’s almost, just almost, any other day. If it wasn’t a sad day. There are kids outside, and they’re riding bikes and shooting hoops and skipping double dutch. There are mothers and aunts and sisters, looking pained, looking at the sky, looking out for their children. And there are guys, too, fathers watering their lawns and pulling at the weeds and talking in quiet voices. A dog barks, gallops across the street and into the arms of a teenager on his porch. Picket fences, and damned if they aren’t white and painted. Garbage trucks making their way down the street. It’s hard to believe that, over there, beneath those grey clouds, is that restless and rundown place called Dirty City.

This is it, Jinx says. We stop in front of another nice house on this nice street in this nice neighborhood. He shoves me hard, fingers into my bruised back. Get em up and out. And do you and me a favor and shut that mouth of yours.

I bring my hands wide as I follow the little concrete path and wobble up the little porch to the house. It looks like every other house on the street, except for the desperate face and the barrel of an AK-47 peeking out an upstairs window.

Jinx steps around me, opens the front door, and hustles me into the dim interior.

Fuck all, he announces. Then he kicks the door shut.

The inside of the house is another deception, a foyer and a hallway that are wallpapered and decorated in a prim and feminine way, but then, down the hallway, waits a large room that’s straight out of an industrial park, painted dirty white and scrawled with more graffiti than a bus station toilet. The room has been torn apart, furniture dumped over and pushed aside to make way for opened crates. Inside the crates are guns: Kalashnikovs and Uncle Sam’s favorite, M-16A2s. War guns. On the walls are posters of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, looking down on the madness like martyred saints, and who knows if they really are. Now there’s a place on that wall for the Reverend Parks, too.

A guy in a Kangol cap waltzes by, a Sig .40 in each hand. Folks are pissed off and wanting to get busy. The fireplace is burning and a lot of paper is going into its throat. There’s this scrawny runt sitting behind a school desk; his head is too big for his body, and his fingers are like pencils, and they’re doing these frantic jabs into the keyboard of a laptop computer, and the computer is jacked into a phone line and whatever the runt guy’s doing, he’s doing it for real.

Looks like the U Street Crew is getting out of here and getting out fast.

I know the whole thing in one look, which is all I get, since Jinx pulls me like a bad dog through that room and into the next one, the remains of a bedroom.

Hey, ghetto star.

A guy with a beret high-fives it with Jinx.

Heard you livin, the beret guy tells Jinx. Nobody but you, man. Nobody but you.

The truth, homes. Where’s the Doctor?

Counselin, the beret guy says. With Ray-Ban and Cue Ball. You just in time. Lookin like war, man. Lookin like war.

The beret guy decides to notice me. He gives me a sneer. So this is the white meat?

Yeah, Jinx tells him. Then to me:

Wait here. Don’t fuckin move.

He follows the beret guy into the next room.

So I’m alone in this empty place. No, no, not alone, it’s not empty at all. I hear before I see, tucked in the shadows between a bureau and the far corner, two women, girls, really, holding babies tight to their chests and looking back at me with suspicious eyes, angry eyes. One of the babies swivels her little head and her mouth is open in a sweet laugh that hurts me to see.

Then it’s loud voices and heavy footsteps, and here’s the guy wearing the same beret and the same sneer he left with, and a guy wearing shades, and there’s Jinx and he’s in this other guy’s face, and the guy is a black Buddha, a hulking heavyweight whose head is shaved, and he’s got to be, just got to be, Cue Ball, and the beret guy is talking the talk with Cue Ball:

The shit was crazy, man. Tag Juan E and my nigga Jinx with killers. Fuckin white devils. Tried to tell you but you wouldn’t be listenin. Tried to—

His words disappear into a sudden silence. A shadow walks across the wall, the ceiling, and onto me, and I feel a gremlin whispering in my ear but I stand in, I stand tall, as the shadow walks into the room and solidifies into a man.

There is only one Doctor D, the King of U Street, the King of South East, the King of Dirty City for all I know or care. The newspaper photos don’t do him justice. The guy gives new meaning to the word ebony. He’s beyond black, he’s darker than dark, and he’s not cold, he’s not ice, he’s fucking Antarctica.

Jinx says the one thing that no one needs to say:

This is Doctor D.

So what do you do? Just what the fuck do you do?

I stick out my hand and I tell him:

Burdon Lane. Pleased to meet you.

Doctor D looks at my hand and then he looks at me like I’m a fly, no, a fly turd, something so small he wouldn’t spend the time to wipe me off his boot. Then:

If you know me, he says, you owe me.

The guy’s voice is absolute power. It could convert the dead.

The guy in the shades wanders over, dances his hands around inside my suit coat, leaves the Glock in the Bianchi holster but yanks the one from my armpit.

Boy, the guy in the shades tells me, you gots to be the only white meat inside a mile, cept for police and fire and EMS. Are you crazy? he says. Then he pushes the Glock into the hollow of my throat. Or are you Jesus?

He lets his finger curl onto the trigger.

Bang, the guy in the shades says, and he starts laughing like a loon. He slides the Glock up to my chin before he drops it away. Then he says:

Cause nobody else this white come to visit the D.

Hey, Ray-Ban. The guy with the beret is tugging at the elbow of the guy in the shades. Hey, Ray-Ban, bro, what you sayin? Jesus was
black
. He was a black man. You know that.