Run (23 page)

I’m sayin I only carry you so far, bitch.

Bangers start to back off, leaving High Boy the High and Dry Boy.

You foolin, star. Foolin on High Boy.

Doctor D turns his back on him.

You no-good fuckin stoolie, he says to no one in particular. Then he says to Jinx:

Take my four-nickel and shoot this bitch.

Doctor D hauls a shiny chrome .45 out of his belt and hands it to Jinx. There’s something here but it’s something I’m missing. The way that Doctor D looks at Jinx, it’s all wrong, and there’s a moment of near hesitation as Jinx takes the pistol. Nobody notices but Doctor D and me.

Jinx wants to say something, but he cocks the hammer instead. That’s when High Boy starts the whine. I hate it when they whine. This is what he whines:

You don’t wanna be doin this, D.

The guy can’t even beg the right way.

D? Jinx? You don’t wanna—

Jinx shuts up High Boy the hard way. He plugs the guy in the left kneecap, knocking him down. High Boy screams, then eats some concrete. After a while he goes quiet, curls into a fetal nerve that just sort of shudders inside a widening pool of blood.

Doctor D shakes his head, looks at Jinx, looks at his set, looks at me, says:

Snitches get stitches. Fuckin FBI must think I’m stupid. That’s no nigga.

Nigger or not, this High Boy guy isn’t going to walk right again. At least not on this earth.

Doctor D takes the shiny .45 from Jinx and says to his crew: This here my real nigga Jinx. Shoots my chrome-plated four-nickel thing. Shoots it bad. Ain’t that right, homes?

Jinx gives him the wolf grin, but it’s not all there. Something’s missing.

Smart shot, Doctor D says to Jinx, his voice gone soft, just between the two of them—and me. Don’t want to be killin us a Fed, now do we? he says. Least not yet.

And there’s that something again, and I wonder what it is that Doctor D knows, that Jinx knows, that I don’t.

Levon, says Doctor D.

A guy in fatigue pants and a heavy blue sweatshirt steps up, starts to pull his strap.

No no no, says Doctor D. You and Lil Toby, I want you to drop this bitch out front the Animal Rescue League. Let them sew up what’s
left. Ever step he take for the rest of his fuckin life he’s gonna remember the USC.

Then we’re taking steps of our own, down the right fork of that waterway, through more mud and shit, and after a long while there’s a pipe, it’s almost five feet tall, and we’re ducking and scuttling into that pipe for a hundred yards, maybe more, and then there’s another pipe, and then there’s a ladder and we’re up the ladder and inside another tunnel, but it’s not a tunnel, it’s a corridor, we’re inside a building, vents and cables running with us to a short flight of stairs and we’re up the stairs and into this place of grey brick and dust and rusted metal, some kind of waterworks, part of the old Navy Yard, and the point man pulls up short, then squats, and everyone’s down, kneeling, alert, and I see Ray-Ban whispering something into a cell phone and it’s cool, it’s clear, everyone is up and smiling, tucking their pistols, easing off with their AKs and burners, and that’s when I hear the whistle. Some kid is whistling, and he’s whistling a song, and I know the song, I know the damn song, but I can’t remember its name.

Aw’ight, Ray-Ban says. Do what you got to do, we don’t got much time.

The U Streeters fan out across the warehouse floor. Large crates and several cars are stashed beneath netting like forgotten stowage. It’s the smell that gets me, though, the sharp smell of fresh paint, and that’s when I hear Ray-Ban say:

Yo, Jimmy G.

So the one who’s whistling, this Jimmy G, he’s all of nine, ten years in the world, dressed like an MTV gangsta with the watch cap and ropes of gold chain, the deep blue sweats and wild thing Nikes, and he’s got a can of spray paint in each fist and he’s hosing the wall with the left one, some kind of wet red spaghetti that coils its way out of
JUAN E LUV
and into
MOPES
before spilling into this strange sort of sideways
S
, and I’m standing too close to the wall to take in what he’s done, so I move deeper into that place and I see he’s done it not just today but for days, weeks, months; that Jimmy G or somebody like him has been spinning this intricate web of patterns and pictures in which these words, these names, fade in and out, and that sideways
S
repeats and repeats, always in this spiral of blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and it takes
me a while but I think I get it, I think I understand, it’s infinity broken and it’s a
U
and an
S
and a
C
all at once. It’s the symbol of the U Street Crew.

And no one needs to tell me about those names. Not
JUAN E
or the one he’s painting now, the one that spells out
MALIK
. These are the names of their dead, and there are many of them. Too many to count.

In front of the spray-painted names and symbols is this weird scattering of tennis shoes and boots, forty-ounce malt liquor bottles, lots of chain, a boom box, a rusted pistol, a leather jacket, and all of a sudden I feel like that Neil Armstrong guy, the one who went to the moon, like I’m walking somewhere nobody’s gone walking before. At least nobody white.

Get goin now, Jimmy G. It’s Ray-Ban talking. You be comin back tomorrow now, okay? Gemstone, maybe Billy, be down to see you. More work to be done, son. MJ’s dead, and Debbie too. Maybe more.

There’s a certainty to the way he says those last words. He knows there is no maybe. But the kid gives Ray-Ban a look that’s long on knowledge and short on surprise.

Your momma’s an Arch Deluxe, the kid says, and rattles those cans of paint like he’s shaking dice, sprays one last something on the wall, and whistles up that tune again, strolling off to wherever those Nikes take him.

And what I’m thinking is what Jinx says to me.

What you’re thinkin, Jinx says to me, is that this kid, he’s a nice kid, he’s a cute kid, he’s a smart kid, he’s a talented kid. But you’re thinkin, you give the kid another couple years, and what? He’s one of these guys here. Well, you think that.

The kid is what you make him, white man. The voice of Doctor D bores into me. He’s at my shoulder, and he’s looking at that wall and he’s saying:

Look around you. This ain’t the capital of the USA, this is fuckin Beirut. Woke up here one day, I was twelve years old, listenin to my grammie tell me to go on to school and walkin round the projects and comin home and watchin that TV instead.

That’s what did me. The mothafuckin TV. But it wasn’t the crime,
the violence, all that shootin on the TV that did me. It was the shit between the shootin, man, the pictures of all the stuff, all the toys, all the cars, all the pretty girls, all the shit I didn’t have, wasn’t never gonna have.

So I’m sittin in front of that TV, smokin weed and listenin to some old funky music, and one day what happens out front of Dunbar High but my cousin Walon goes down. Some nobody’s crew potshots at some punk and shoots my cuz instead, so what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Well, I’m gonna go over to Virginia and see me a white man, and I come back to the block with a .38 roundhouse and I perf that G and I fuck up two of his homeys but good.

You do that one time, ain’t no way you goin back to readin-writin-and-rithmetic. No fuckin way. Because if you gonna do somethin, I say do it good.

Then Doctor D is past me and he’s stepping in front of that wall and there’s a forty-ouncer in his hand but it’s not open, he’s holding it by the neck and he spins around like a discus thrower and he slams that bottle into the wall. Malt sprays across the wet paint, and the blues look like tears and the reds look like blood.

Fuck you, Juan E, he says, and he waves the broken neck of that bottle like he’s some kind of renegade priest who’s blessing the pavement.

Fuck you and you and you and you, he says.

Shards of glass fall from his hand but Doctor D has gone somewhere, someplace I don’t want to go.

Rest in peace, Doctor D says, and he comes back from that place with a gleam in his eye and that shiny .45 in his other hand.

And that’s what I’m sayin to you, white man: Rest in mothafuckin peace. Ain’t nobody livin happily ever after. We don’t get out of here but one way, and that’s dead. So what the fuck are you doin here? Tell me that, and tell me now.

You want the company? I tell him. You want UniArms? I’ll give you the company. I’ll give you the guys who killed Juan E and the rest of your people. The guys who killed Gideon Parks. But you got to give me what’s mine.

I’m listenin, says Doctor D.

You can do whatever you want with his boys, I tell him. The guys who pulled the trigger. But the old man? Jules Berenger? The man’s mine. Him … and the one they call CK.

Fool wanna blast me, Ray-Ban says, I’m gonna blast back.

I hear you, I tell him, but it doesn’t work that way. And he doesn’t work that way. I say it again, straight to the face of Doctor D: The man is mine. We got a deal?

Yeah, Doctor D says. Deal.

It’s that simple, and that’s what revenge is all about. Something very simple. Getting back what’s yours. But you can’t bring the dead back, can you? You can’t do a goddamn thing about the dead except make more of them.

I say to Doctor D: Who rigged that little surprise back at the house? The kid?

Ain’t no kid, the Doctor says. That’s my nigga Yoda.

Well, I need to talk to him. Blowing up a house is one thing. How’d you like to light up a whole city block?

I’d like it just fine, he says.

Well, see, I got a place I got to be tonight. I got an invitation. I was thinking you might want to go with me. All of you.

Tell me when and where, he says.

I’m talking about a wedding. The boss’s daughter is tying the knot. Seven-thirty tonight. Over in Alexandria. At St. Anne’s Cathedral.

Fuck, man, Ray-Ban says. That’s whiter than white. That’s whiter than Tide can get you. That’s the North fuckin Pole.

Yeah, I tell him; then I get back to the Doctor: Which is why, when you and your guys show, you’re gonna be invisible.

What you mean? Ray-Ban says.

Jinx cuts him off: Will you shut the fuck up and listen to him?

I say to Doctor D: I mean that you’re gonna walk right into that church and no one is gonna blink an eye.

I’m listenin, Doctor D says. This is the part where you tell me why.

You’re gonna be what those people think you’ve been for the past couple hundred years. You’re gonna be the help.

Doctor D does something amazing: He smiles. Then he offers me his right hand. Shards of bloody glass shimmer in his palm.

I take his hand and squeeze for what it’s worth, let the glass cut me, and like the album cover says: Let it bleed.

Then Doctor D says to his crew:

Let’s get strapped.

Over the river and through the woods, but there’s no grandmother’s house at the end of this road, just a two-bedroom bungalow in one of the lesser neighborhoods of Alexandria. We’re going home.

Jinx doesn’t like the idea, but that’s too bad. I’ve got to do this thing, I’ve got to get Fiona, and if Doctor D wants what he wants, Jinx is going to have to do it too.

This is about love, I tell Jinx. I don’t need to mention it’s about bodies getting stuffed into the trunks of cars. Headless bodies. Or the many other fine things that have crossed my mind.

This is bout gettin yourself killed, Jinx tells me. But I don’t think so, and anyway, I’m starting to feel like Doctor D: I don’t care.

We ride out of Dirty City in one of the Doctor’s less conspicuous sedans, a dusty Saturn, and this time I’ve got the wheel. There’s one hell of a traffic jam consuming I-295 but we cross the Wilson Bridge and we exit north on Telegraph Road, and that’s about all it takes. The Potomac is like a great divide between chaos and calm. The sky here is clear and blue and you can see the sun, fading away over Alexandria, where this whole thing started and where it damn sure better end.

I drive to my neighborhood, and I drive the cross streets, once down either side. Nothing doing, so I drive to the local 7-Eleven and I call
Diamond Cab. Then I drive the cross streets again, and I take a left two streets south of my block and I do a slow cruise of that street. Nothing doing, so I park the car and we start walking between the houses. That happy old sun is setting on another suburban Sunday, and a lot of folks are probably glued to the TV watching the Reverend Gideon Parks die, over and over again.

Across the next street and the next yard, we circle a hurricane fence and I’m looking over a couple garbage cans at the back of my house. Our house. Home.

The shades are down, and so are the lights. Fiona’s CRX is parked in the driveway; I can see its silver tail. There’s another car parked at the curb, it’s a new one to me, and it’s blue and it’s boring. Maybe it’s Trey Costa, though if I was Trey and I was sitting in the middle of this thing, I wouldn’t have parked there. So maybe it’s no one, a friend of a neighbor. Or then again, maybe it’s someone.

Here comes the cab. Yellow and black, with the red diamond on the door. The cab slows, slows, stops in front of my house.

Nothing doing.

We wait, and the cab waits, a couple minutes. Then the cabbie honks the horn.

Nothing doing.

The cab pulls away, and Jinx starts to move but I tell him: Hang on. So we wait some more, and the cabbie, who’s circled the block, pulls up to the house again. It’s a little game called ring-around-the-rosy. Like the kid’s song. Somebody told me one time that the song was about death, so it fits.

We wait, and the cabbie waits.

Nothing doing.

Then, bless the guy, he gets out of the cab and he goes to the front door.

We can’t see what’s happening but we hear him knock, then knock again. Then he’s walking back to the cab. He shakes his head, climbs in, and after he chews on his radio awhile, he drives away.

So it looks real good or it looks real bad and, as usual, I vote for the bad. Probably we got a couple guys out there on the rooftops with long
guns and night vision scopes who are going to pop our heads like balloons the moment we walk out into the yard.