South Philadelphia
It’s Saturday at three a.m. and I’m coming off a hellish shift at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar. It’s pouring rain, no taxis in this part of town, and the 23 bus runs about every two hours now. My feet hurt from standing and my mood is black after spending most of the night serving a crowd of out-of-towners-a group of prickish frat boys slumming it and cracking racist jokes. I let them get good and drunk, even send a few shots of Jack their way, and then, when one of the jerk-offs slaps his Am Ex on the bar, I add $100 to the tab.
I know they are too drunk and too cocky to eyeball the final tally. Good thing, too, because they leave behind a five-dollar tip and some change. When one of them asks for directions to Washington Avenue to hail a cab to Center City, I send him south instead of north, deeper into darker territory not so friendly to their kind. But hey, they said they were looking for an authentic Philly experience. I am just making sure they get what they asked for.
So, I’m standing at the curb, weighing my options, when a car pulls up, splashing filthy rain water over my sneakers.
Now, I know better than to jump into a car with a near stranger, but it’s raining hard, in the way only a summer night in Philadelphia can deliver-appearing out of nowhere, flooding the sidewalks, sending Styrofoam cups and discarded cheesesteak wrappers from Pat’s careening in a river of water down the curb. Lightning cracks the sky like the end of the world is right around the corner. And I see from his crag-nosed profile that I do sort of know this guy-he’s the uncle of a kid I used to sleep with. Uncle Tony (one of many Uncle Tonys in this part of town). And a former regular at Ray’s before Lou, Ray’s son and the owner, banned him from setting foot in the place ever again.
He sits in his big maroon Chevy Cadillac, a fat man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut wearing a too-big, shiny Eagles T-shirt. The passenger window rolls down. “Hey, doll,” he says. “Get it the car. You’re soaked.” I hesitate. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, don’t be stupid. It’s not like I’m some douche bag from Trenton you never met before.”
I check the street again. The back of my T-shirt smells like a cigarette butt after eight hours of serving cheap beer and shots. It sticks wetly to my back. What the hell. I get in the car. He has the heater running full blast, which I appreciate. The interior is a deep plush maroon and stinks of stale cigars and cheap cologne. “You South?” he asks.
“Yeah, just drop me at 8th and Morris, and I’ll hop out.” A rosary hangs from the rearview mirror with a sad-looking Jesus dangling forlornly on the end.
“Hey, let me ask you something.” The car idles. “You hear what happened to my nephew Johnny?”
I shake my head. I haven’t seen or thought of Johnny in a couple of weeks, not since I kicked him out of my bed.
“Smashed by the 147. No helmet, not that it woulda mattered. Run him over while he was on his bike. F-ing SEPTA buses.” He drums his pudgy fingers on the steering wheel. “No chance even for any last words.”
“Jesus, sorry, Tony.” Too vain to wear a bike helmet. I am starting to remember more about Johnny now. His long curly hair was one of his best features. Though I could be remembering one of the others. They blur together after a while.
“Yeah, well, what can you do?” Uncle Tony doesn’t seem that busted up about it. “He left his journals behind though. You ever read them?”
“No.” I am starting to think it’s time for me to take a pass on the ride and be on my way.
“He ever talk to you about a key? He leave one at your place? I’m wondering, because in his journals he hints a lot about where this key might be. It’s the one that opens that garage across the street. Where he stores his bikes, right?” The car begins to feel a little too warm. I see that I’ve made a mistake accepting this ride. Maybe a big one.
I grab the door handle. The automatic lock clicks shut. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you lunatic. Let me out of here.” I remember now why Lou banned him for life from the bar. He’d started a brawl one night about the lack of paper towels in the men’s room. After getting no response from Lou, he hurled a bar stool at the big-screen TV behind the bar. He missed the television, but busted the neon Bud Light sign. That was his last night at Ray’s. He was crying and wailing, “But I’m a Mummer!” when they tossed him out onto Passyunk Avenue.
“Listen, just tell me where the key is and I’ll take you home like I said,” he pleads.
I reach in my purse to take out my pepper spray. He lunges forward, and, for a second, I think maybe he’s going to kiss me. He takes my face in both of his hands and whacks my head hard on the dashboard. Then it’s lights out.
I wake up to the tickle of something licking my ankle. I’m sitting on a cushioned chair with my hands tied behind my back, feet bound together by what looks like a dog leash, and duct tape covering my mouth. The something washing my foot is a fat brown dog, one of those pugs with the curly tails and popped-out eyes. It wears a fancy pink collar. I jerk my leg. The dog looks up at me, eyes rolling stupidly and blackish tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth.
At least my clothes are still on; all except for my shoes.
I struggle against the ties and look around. I’ve descended into the middle of South Philly grandmother-land. My best guess is that it’s Tony’s mom’s house. It’s an old-school Italian living room with thick, pink shag carpet, a blue leather sofa and matching armchair covered in plastic. The surfaces are decorated with doilies and throw pillows with fluffy white kittens stitched in needlepoint, along with afghans, Virgin Marys, and multiple Jesuses-Jesus and a lamb, Jesus on the cross, Jesus flashing the peace sign and looking like a hipster. The best is a picture featuring the holiest of holy-Jesus, John F. Kennedy, and Pope John Paul II. How they got the three of them together for that photo op is anybody’s guess. Underneath it all is the trapped-in smell of old lady. Part Jean Naté body wash, part pancake makeup, and part getting closer to death. No wonder Johnny never brought me here. He had mentioned he was crashing at his gran’s for a while, but didn’t say he was living with an old-fashioned stereo as big as a spaceship, giant fake flowers in an even bigger shiny vase, and a crappy oil painting of the family hanging in a gold frame above the couch: Grandma, Tony, and Johnny. Another unholy trinity.
I’ve got to make sense of this somehow before the lunatic returns. I am starting to recall a little bit more about Johnny.
I don’t usually chat up customers, but Wednesdays are slow at Ray’s. He wore low-slung jeans and a white T-shirt that stretched tight across the muscles of his chest and back. I was new to the joint-the first female bartender, but I didn’t need to prove myself. Lou, Ray’s son, was a friend of my dad’s. I just wanted a job where I could get paid in cash and stay off the radar of the IRS for a while.
He looked just like all the white, angst-filled hipster dudes you see there or at the Dive or Pope’s-in their grungy T-shirts from Circle Thrift and skinny girl jeans with one leg rolled up so that they can get around the city on their beat-up, expensive vintage bikes. Chain wallets, ironic tattoos, and multiple piercings. I can’t say that he was any different, except he said “please” and “thank you” when I set the PBRs in front of him and he was writing in a red spiral notebook-like the kind you’d use in high school. His wrote feverishly and I imagined it was a screenplay about a misunderstood twenty-something, or a proposal to City Council for a more sustainable Philly, or song lyrics for his Flaming Lips sound-alike band so that they could get another gig at Johnny Brenda’s.
We started talking about what he was writing. He had a rough voice, the voice of a smoker who’d picked up the habit with a vengeance in junior high, though he couldn’t have been too far into his twenties.
He told me he’d always kept a journal. “I know, I’m a pretentious prick. No poetry though,” he added. I asked him what he wrote about. “Deep, dark secrets,” he said. He didn’t look like he’d lived long enough to have anything worth hiding, so I figured he was making shit up. “I write descriptions about places. Like this dirty little bar and that old man over in the Elvis shirt with his head on the table. I wrote a paragraph about you.” He read it to me. He was generous.
I took him home to my latest cheap house on one of those narrow one-way streets without trees-this shitty apartment next to the JC Chinese restaurant. I go to sleep and wake up smelling chop suey. It’s the kind of street where you hear Mexican music playing and jacked-up cars revving at all hours. I don’t mind. I usually sleep through anything, like a dead person. Junk lines my street-crushed Red Bull cans and empty Corona bottles, dirty diapers, and abandoned condoms. Like the rest of the city, South Philly changes from block to block and I happen to live on one where the shades are always drawn shut with yellow miniblinds and the windows sport signs reading, Se cuarta a renta. But the apartment is dirt-cheap and I have lived in worse places.
Johnny had a bike of course, and insisted on taking it inside with us. He didn’t stay the night, which I appreciated. He came back to the bar the next night. I took him home again. He had a tongue ring, which I also appreciated. This went on for a while, not long, maybe three weeks, and always with that stupid Raleigh bike, and then one night when he wasn’t at the bar, I brought someone else home and Johnny showed up at my door, ringing the bell again and again until I answered, and bleated, “But you don’t understand. I love you!”
I told him to get real, get lost, and get a new dive bar to hang out in-try the Royal or Pope’s-not Ray’s anymore. He called me a fucking bitch. I pushed over his bike and he squealed like an adolescent girl, picked up the bike, and pedaled furiously away in his high-top Converse sneakers, never to be heard from again.
Except he had come back.
I consider my next move. I imagine the Inquirer headline: Stupid Bartender Murdered by Moron. As if on cue, the moron walks in.
Tony has changed into yet another Eagles jersey. He seems glad to see me awake. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you, but I figured we’d get lots more done if you wasn’t running loose.” His eyes are bloodshot, but instead of smelling like booze, he smells like Old Spice.
He turns on the big-screen TV plastered next to the family portrait and turns it to the classics sports channel, the one that replays old football games where you already know how it all ends and who wins. “Now, I’m going to pull off this tape and it’s going to hurt, so I’m sorry about that. Don’t scream.” He rips the tape off in one quick motion, taking half my lip with it. I scream. “You’ll scare the dog!” he says. The dog is stretched out across the floor on its back, snoring. He pushes the volume up on the TV so that Howard Cosell’s nasally voice booms out into the room. I am going to die listening to Cosell announcing a bygone two-point conversion. “My ma is down the shore, but she’ll be back before too long, so we got to figure this out quick.”
Maybe if I stall long enough, Granny’ll rescue me. That’s assuming she isn’t an accomplice in whatever this mess is. I’ve seen plenty of these South Philly old ladies, sweeping up the sidewalk in front of the house early in the morning with their teeth still sitting in a jar by the bed. Cross them, and they’ll cold cock you in a second with the broom or whatever else is handy.
Tony picks up a red spiral journal from the doily-covered coffee table. “Johnny wrote a lot about you. I just need to know where the key is. He writes that he’s left it with someone he trusts. Well, I can’t find it here, and believe me, I’ve looked under every doily and cookie jar in the place.”
“I barely knew the kid. We maybe hung around once.”
He frowns. “Oh yeah? Does this sound like you?” He flips to the middle of the book and reads a description of my apartment with the rusty kitchen sink and the rats scrabbling in the walls. He describes what I look like in bed and the color of the mole under my right arm. Tony snaps the books shut and pushes up the sleeve of my shirt. “What a coincidence! This shit about you goes on for pages and pages. I know Johnny told you something more about where the key is, didn’t he? If I can find the key, I can get to the money, and if I get to the money, you got nothing to worry about.”
In fact, Johnny may have mentioned a key of some kind. He was a Chatty Cathy. Problem is, I’m not much of a listener. Still, I would’ve remembered money talk.
“He wrote about you like you was his girlfriend,” Tony says, waving the notebook under my nose.
“We were fuck buddies, that’s it.” His eyes flick to the Jesus on the wall. “We weren’t going steady or anything. He didn’t hand over his old high school letter jacket from St. Nick’s. I don’t know about any of this.”
“You know the A &M garage across the street from Ray’s? He keeps his bikes in that place. You know that?” I nod. “You ever wonder what else he might have tucked away in there? You ever wonder why he was delivering office paper at two in the morning?”
Working as a bartender teaches you pretty quick that people will eventually spill whatever it is that’s gnawing at them. All you have to do is wait. And so I wait. And keep telling him that I don’t know anything about a key. And wait some more. Repeat my innocence. Then shut my mouth, praying he doesn’t beat the shit out of me or worse.
He paces the room. I notice he’s not any wearing shoes, just long white athletic socks pulled up to the knees. I suppose we’re both shoeless so the carpets don’t get messed up. He explains the “sitch.” Johnny was a drug courier-some of his friends were too, but he was the head honcho, the numero uno courier. The drugs were shipped from New Jersey to Johnny’s storage place at A &M in bicycle frames. Johnny would then distribute the bikes to his other courier pals to take apart so they could peddle their wares to various eager customers far and wide across the City of Brotherly Love.
I am starting to have a little more respect for the dead kid.
Tony doesn’t elaborate on his role. “I was just the connector, mostly, with these guys in Jersey. I never touched the bikes. I never even seen the bikes. I just arranged for the shipments. To tell you the truth, I had no idea what was really going on until the thugs in Jersey contacted me and told me.” His voice is stiff, like one reserved for false testimony in court.
And then, it seems, Johnny got greedy-maybe he needed some new guitar amps or fancier pens-and he started keeping a portion of the proceeds locked away in the storage center along with the bikes. And then the Jersey guys, these “bicycle distributors,” wanted to know where their money had gone. They didn’t want to hear about how Tony couldn’t get to it or how Johnny had taken the secret to his grave. They just wanted to get paid, and fast.
“They been here twice already,” Tony says.
“What does your ma say about this?”
His thick, caterpillar-looking eyebrows fly up in surprise. “She don’t say nothing. She just grinds up beans for coffee and gives them cake.”
I don’t believe him, but I don’t say that either. I bet Granny’s grown used to the perks the money brought in; the status she earned for the extra church tithes; maybe she even bought a few wigs made out of real hair or new plastic covers for the furniture.
“How about if I make you a deal? You let me out of here and we forget about this whole thing. I’ll talk to Lou about you being allowed back in the bar. You know, we’ll start with Tuesday-night karaoke. You can sing Johnny Cash or Britney or whoever the hell you want. But you gotta let me out of here first.”
“They’ll be coming back soon,” Tony says. He actually wrings his hands, like an old lady. “And now I got you to deal with and no key and no money either.”
“I’m telling you, I’ll put in a good word with Lou. No problem. I bet he’d even help you out with the money if I ask him nice. And talk to these Jersey thugs. He’s a popular guy. People love him.”
Tony gives a big, long sigh. “Give me a second.” He paces some more and then says, “You need anything? Like a glass of water?” I nod and he disappears into the kitchen.
The dog looks up at me as though we are old friends, then jumps on my lap, landing on my full bladder. Her collar jingles. It’s an ornate thing with a name tag and other assorted doggie bling. She starts licking my face. “Get off!” I try to shake her from my legs.
From the other room Tony yells, “Get down, Princess!”
A church bell rings from some distant street, signaling the approach of dawn. I recall something else about Johnny.
Like every other hipster kid, his skinny, undernourished body was plastered with tattoos. Nothing too strange, no Tweety Bird or names of ex-girlfriends drawn in Gothic lettering. He did have an awful tattoo on his ankle though. I spotted it the first night because of his rolled-up pant leg. A dog. A pug, to be exact.
“What’s that?” I’d asked.
“That’s Princess,” he said. “She holds the key to my heart.”
I told him to stop talking like a Danielle Steele novel and take off his tightie-whities already. Which he did.
Tony comes back into the room, holding a glass of water etched with daisies. It looks as though he’s reconsidered the situation. “Aw, shit. Aw, Christ. Look, I really just wanted to talk to you, but you bartenders are intimidating.”
I make my face as blank as possible. He sets the water glass down very carefully on one of the doilies.
“Listen, you can think about it, but I have to pee,” I tell him. “I have to pee right now and if you won’t let me use the bathroom, I will piss all over this velveteen cushion. You know how hard it will be to clean? I bet these are antique chairs. I bet this fringe is from the old country. Irreplaceable. How would you explain that to your ma?”
He shrugs, trying to shake off his look of concern. “The dog coulda done it.”
“That little thing?” The dog scratches itself, fancy pink collar jingling, and then begins grooming its private parts in earnest. “There is no way the amount I have to piss could come out of that runt. Trust me. I don’t know what time it is exactly, but I would guess I haven’t used the powder room in a good four hours.”
He looks torn, but finally he begins to untie me. I wish the knots were in the front, so I could kick him in his fat face.
When I’m free, I say, “We’ll work this out.” I try to walk casually and not bolt for the door.
I close and lock the bathroom door. I figure I have about one shot at knocking him out. I search the room. A toilet plunger isn’t going to do the trick and neither is a plastic lady torso whose skirts cover the extra toilet paper rolls. I could Aqua Net him to death or stab him in the eye with a bobby pin.
I catch sight of my face in the vanity mirror. I’ve got a nice purple shiner and a crust of blood on my upper lip. If I make it out of here, I’m going to treat myself to a real haircut, not one of those ten-dollar Chop Shop hatchet jobs.
Then I catch sight of it in the reflection of the mirror. A heavy-duty Virgin Mary statue with her hands outstretched as if she’s saying, Don’t look at me. It’s not my fault. She’s propped up in the bathroom window, surrounded by cotton balls and Max Factor makeup. Hail Mary, full of Grace. I tuck her under my arm.
Tony hovers outside the door. “Okay, listen, you’ll talk to Ray then?” He sees what I’m carrying. “Hey, what’re you doing? Put that back! Ma will kill you!” I walk into the living room. He follows. “No kidding, don’t be smart.”
I put a little distance between us and then, with the VM held out in front of me like a bat, I spin around and smack him as hard as I can across the head. The statue stays in one piece. His head does not. He gives a little “Oh” of surprise and touches his temple in disbelief. He staggers and bleeds all over the plastic on the furniture. He looks more horrified about the mess he’s making than he does about losing his life.
When he sees the blood spill onto his Eagles shirt, his legs accordion and down he goes. I’ve never seen anyone bleed quite like that. We’ve had two guys drop dead at Ray’s, but neither were bleeders. The cut isn’t going to kill him, but it will buy me enough time to get out and make it to the storage space. I’m sure the money is there along with one or two of Johnny’s stupid bikes. The Jersey jerks will get to Tony soon enough. Or his own mother when she sees what he’s done to her living room.
Hey, I’m not a murderer, just an opportunist.
The Virgin Mary statue lies on her back on the pink shag carpet, staring up at the ceiling, still looking as if she’s just an innocent bystander. Except she’s not. In fact, she may have just changed my life. Now, I’m not going to start genuflecting and hanging out at the doors of St. John’s. I don’t believe much in that Catholic shit, but you never know. Maybe I’ll even buy a Virgin Mary night light from the Italian Market after I get the money and move out of my shitty apartment on Morris and into a slightly less shitty one further west.
I take hold of Princess’s collar-rabies vaccine, heart-shaped name tag, and a key. I remove it and slip it in my pocket.
I consider leaving the animal. It’s not like she’d be much of a watch dog for me. She doesn’t seem at all concerned that I cracked Tony in the head and he’s now bleeding on the carpet.
I look at the dog and she looks back at me with her poppedout googly eyes. She wags her stubby tail half-heartedly as though unsure about the deal too. “You’re not much of an accomplice,” I tell her. I could dump her on the streets. Some sappy grandma would take her in. Or she’d get hit by a bus just like Johnny. “All right, Princess, let’s go.” I pick her up. “You can stay with me,” I say. “For now.”
SCARRED. BY SOLOMON JONES
Strawberry Mansion
Thunder clapped, and the street went black as if God had blown out the candles. A single flash of lighting streaked across the sky. After that, the only sound was the rain.
That kind of quiet was rare at 33rd and Cecil B. Moore, the North Philly corner where a hodgepodge of crumbling housing and new development met the orchestrated greenery of Fairmount Park.
Most autumn evenings, the corner rumbled with the sounds of the 3 and 32 buses, danced with the laughter of children at the water ice stand, and banged with the clatter of tools at the used tire shop. There was music to this corner, and the tunes went far beyond the rhymes of Li’l Wayne or the gospel of Kirk Franklin. The music had a distinctive rhythm, like the jazz of John Coltrane, who’d once lived a block away.
But just like Coltrane’s house, the streets were empty and the rhythm was off, because the storm and the blackout had snatched the life from the streets, forcing everyone and everything indoors.
The occupants of the new lofts who’d arrived with the long-gone real-estate boom were huddled in darkness, just like their impoverished neighbors. As rain poured down and lightning flashed, their differences no longer mattered. They all waited nervously for the lights to come on, because somewhere deep down, they understood the power of the heavens.
But Richard and Corrine weren’t afraid. In their rehabbed three-story home at the end of a ramshackle block, the only power that mattered was love. And heaven? Heaven was between them, in every whisper, every kiss, and every touch.
As the storm raged outside their window, the newlyweds welcomed darkness into a bedroom that overlooked the water ice stand. While neighbors shut their eyes against the blackout, the husband and wife christened their new home, joining themselves like instruments in a symphony of passion.
The driving rain struck the windows as they poured themselves into one another, and as their bodies gave in to the moment, their whispers of love became shouts of joy. The harmony reached perfection. The symphony climaxed and ceased. Then their voices faded into the blackness of the night, with gasps and shudders and moans.
Afterward, they lay in each other’s arms, listening to the rain fall. Corrine reached up and twisted Richard’s blond hair around her fingers. Even without light, she knew every part of his face. His pink lips were thin and sculpted. His jaw was square and strong. His blue eyes were set wide on either side of his sharply pointed nose.
Her features were the opposite: cinnamon-brown complexion, silky black hair, eyes brown and bottomless, skin the texture of a ripened peach.
They were an odd couple-the thirty-year-old white war veteran and the slightly older black nurse. At least it looked odd from the outside. But Richard never found it to be strange. They’d clicked the first time they met, when he saw her working in the physical therapy unit at the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center.
He’d asked her out for coffee after finishing his appointment and they went to the hospital cafeteria to drink cappuccino and speak of their pasts. He told her that he was a Special Forces soldier whose third tour in Afghanistan had been cut short by a roadside bomb. She told him that her only brother-a twenty-one-year-old grunt who was barely out of boot camp-had been killed by a grenade in Iraq.
As the few minutes they’d intended to spend together stretched to hours, she told him that she hated working at the V.A. because of the misery and apathy she often found there. But she stayed in the hopes of helping other soldiers the way she wished she could’ve helped her brother. While doing a job she despised, she hid her pain from everyone around her; everyone, that is, except Richard.
He instantly recognized her grief because it mirrored his own. It was the same emotional pain he’d hidden when he’d seen his comrades gunned down near Kabul. It was identical to the pain he’d suppressed when he returned home and found himself isolated. It matched the grief he felt whenever he thought of his past. That’s why it was so easy for him to see Corrine’s hurt crouching behind forced smiles. He knew he had to make her pain go away.
For months, Richard and Corinne comforted each other, slowly drawing out bits and pieces of the things war had taken from them. Corrine told him that she’d lost her joy. Richard admitted that he’d lost his compassion. They both said they’d lost opportunities to love, and vowed not to lose one more.
Slowly they began to leave war behind. Richard allowed his military high and tight to grow out until his hair reached his shoulders. Corrine’s sad demeanor gave way to an easy smile. Their whirlwind courtship led to marriage, and when they bought the house on the corner of 33rd and Cecil B. Moore, rehabbing it with their own hands, the imperfect neighborhood was just like their lives. It was somewhere between the horrors of war and the safety of peace. The direction they took from there would be up to them, or so they hoped.
On this night, as they lay in each other’s arms, waiting for the blackout to end, they both realized that some things were beyond their control. These things included the scars they’d suffered in the past. They’d already dealt with the emotional ones, but for Richard, especially, some physical scars remained.
As Corrine lay in his arms, she reached for one such scar. It was ugly and purple, and it knifed down the left side of his powerful chest. When her slender fingers touched it and lingered there, Richard braced himself for the inevitable question.
“Where did this come from?”
“We’ve been over this, Corrine,” he said, gently moving her hand away from the old wound. “It happened in the war.”
“I know that, but-”
“Look,” he said with an edge to his voice. “I told you about every fight we won, every guy we lost, and every civilian who died. The truth is, I don’t remember where this scar came from and I don’t know if I want to. But I do know I love you, and that should be the only thing that matters.”
“You’re right Richard. It’s just that…”
“What? You think I’m hiding something from you?”
She lay back and ran her palm along his face, searching in the darkness until she found his eyes.
“Yes, I do,” she whispered playfully as she wrapped herself around him. “And you’re going to make me use everything I’ve got to get it out of you.”
Richard leaned back and looked at her, trying to see her face beyond the shadows. Then lightning flashed, filling the room with brilliant blue-white light. She smiled and he buried his face in her hair, whispering her name as only he could.
“Corrine.”
She giggled and reached for him as the rain smacked against the windows. But just as their lips were about to touch, the soothing sound of the downpour was interrupted by shattering glass.
Corrine sat up in bed. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Richard answered, reaching down to grab his pants from the floor. “Stay here.”
He got up and walked briskly down the hall. Then he descended the steps two at a time, his feet padding silently on the hardwood floor. When he entered the kitchen, he saw that one of the windows over the sink was broken.
“Probably the wind,” he said to himself, and reached up into a cabinet for a candle.
He lit it and searched the cabinet. When he found the roll of duct tape he was searching for, a shadow crept across the wall. The shape of it was unmistakable. It was a man.
Richard didn’t look up. Instead, he reached down into a drawer as his eyes darted back and forth across the room. He released the tape, wrapped his fingers around a kitchen knife, and hoped that he’d imagined what he’d seen. But when he turned around, he knew that it was real.
The man crashed through the kitchen door, lunging as Richard brought the knife down with all the force he could muster. The man yelped, like a dog, and stumbled back onto the counter as the blood from his wounded arm soaked through his shirt.
“Richard!” Corrine yelled from the bedroom.
“Stay there,” Richard managed to bark out as he slashed the man’s cheek with a sideways stroke of the knife.
The man ducked when Richard swung the knife back in the other direction. His fist pounded Richard’s kidney, knocking the breath from his body and forcing him back into a cabinet. The man rushed toward him. Richard gripped the knife with both hands and swung upward. The man grunted, and warm blood flowed from the ragged gash that extended the length of his stomach.
A second passed, then two. Richard’s heart beat wildly. The weight of the dead man pressed against him, pushing him into the cabinet as the blood saturated his clothes. The wind moaned and whisked through the broken glass in the kitchen. The rain fell in a thousand tiny drumbeats, tapping out its own timeless percussion.
As Richard pushed the man’s body to the floor, another sound tore through the house, biting into him like nails against a blackboard. The sound was Corrine. She was screaming.
“Help me!” she shrieked, and the wind seemed to fade into the echo of her voice.
Richard turned and ran toward the bedroom, slipping on the blood-soaked linoleum of the kitchen floor. He ran, pushing himself toward the sound of his wife screaming. He ran, forgetting the body that lay in his kitchen, the pain shooting from his side, the blood covering his hands. He had only to get to Corrine. And when he did-when his feet had carried him up the steps and into the bedroom-all he could see was a shadow in the darkness, straddling his wife as she struggled to free herself from its grip.
Richard charged into the room, slashing into the back of Corrine’s assailant with the knife. The man rolled onto the floor, arching his back against the pain when Richard brought the knife down again. Corrine joined the fray, her tiny fists striking the man’s head angrily. Richard pushed her away and raised the knife high into the air-a madness playing in his eyes as he delivered the killing blow.
A split second passed. Then something whistled through the air. Richard was momentarily blinded by a white flash of light as a burning sensation gripped the back of his leg. He dropped the knife and grabbed at the bullet wound, then turned around to see yet another shadow coming toward him.
Corrine screamed when the shadowy figure aimed a gun with a silencer. There was another whistling sound. This time, the heat glanced Richard’s shoulder. He reached for Corrine. There was a final silenced shot, and as the shooter lowered his weapon and retreated down the stairs and into the windswept rain, Corrine’s blood spilled onto Richard.
He wrapped his arms around his wife, and as her eyes went vacant, Richard’s mind went to a place he thought he’d forgotten. It was a place with bullets flying, people running, tires screeching, and a hell-bound cloud of black smoke filling the air.
He winced, not at the pain he was now experiencing from the wound in his leg, but at the pain he had once caused. Then he pulled a T-shirt from his drawer and wrapped the wound tightly, clenching his jaw while he tried to ignore the pain of the present and the past.
Suddenly, he saw a light penetrate the darkness. He looked down slowly and realized that his iPhone was glowing through his pocket as a text message came through. The light was like an alarm, awakening something that Richard had long since laid to rest. He watched it blink for a few seconds more. Then he pulled the phone from his pocket and saw his memories come to life.
No matter where you go, we’ll always find you, the message said. We’re attached, Richard. We’re family. Now leave the houseand come out through the back door. We’ll be waiting.
There was no number. The text was from a private caller. Not that he needed a number to know who they were. After eight years, they’d found him, just like he’d always known they would.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and kissed his wife’s cold lips. “Goodbye, Corrine.”
Richard took off his wedding ring and placed it gently against her breast. Then he rooted under the bed for the 9mm Ruger he’d always kept, waiting for this day to come.
He snapped in a clip and chambered a round, quickly throwing on a T-shirt and sneakers. He took a deep breath and told himself it didn’t matter if he made it through the night. By daybreak, his past would be buried, one way or another.
Richard held the gun at his side and crawled down the steps to the kitchen. The dead man who’d crashed through the window was still slumped against the counter. Richard made his way over to him the way he’d been taught, flat against the ground and pulling himself forward with his forearms.
Quickly, he searched the body. In his right pocket, there was nothing. In his left, there was a Glock 9mm with a silencer. Richard took it, then crawled to the stove, extinguished the pilot, and turned the knob.
“Richard!”
The voice calling from outside his house was familiar. It was a sadistic verbal smirk that was at once arrogant and deadly.
Richard didn’t answer.
“Come on out, Richard,” the man said. “We can talk.”
Richard knew that talking was the last thing they would do. He had crossed the line with them. And once you crossed the line with people such as these, there was no turning back, there was no statute of limitations, and there was no reprieve. They could never allow him to live. He knew it, and they knew it. So as the kitchen filled with gas, Richard ripped a piece of cloth from his pant leg and wrapped it around his face. Then he knelt down next to the dead man and hoisted him up from his seat on the floor.
As his wounded leg began to throb, sweat dripped down into his eyes. The rain seemed to tap harder against the broken glass. The wind whipped up angrily. He counted to three. Then he was up, running toward the door and bursting through it as he held the dead body like a shield.
Bullets whistled from muzzles equipped with silencers. A barrage poured in through the kitchen window, sparking a blast that ignited the house and lit the night sky.
Richard dropped the body and leaped to his left, running across 33rd Street and into the park. The rain poured down thicker, and as four men emerged from the gutted school bus at the old tire shop across the street, they lost sight of him for just a second. It was long enough for him to disappear.
“Okay, he’s in the park,” said the hefty man with the smirk in his voice. “My guess is he went southwest, but I think he’s hit, so he couldn’t have gotten far. Tyson and Robinson, you two take the right side of Reservoir Drive. Me and Montgomery will search the woods on the left.”
“And if we find him before you do?” Tyson asked.
“Try to take him alive.”
The men fanned out and melted into the shadows of the blackout while Richard disappeared into the park. He passed by the driving range with its dilapidated caddy shack and ancient golf cart. He moved through the heavy foliage surrounding the Frisbee golf course. He heard sirens from fire engines and police cars blaring in the distance.
As the pain from the bullet wound in the back of his leg intensified, he stopped with his back to a tree, panting and looking over his shoulder at the flames from his burning house. He imagined Corrine, trapped inside without him, her body being consumed by the fire. The thought of it was grisly, but he’d gladly trade places with her now, because the hell of living without her was far more severe than the flames that were cooking her flesh.
He looked away, his bitter tears mingling with the rain. In that instant, the grief she’d spent months helping him to overcome rushed back. A moment later, the grief was gone, and it was replaced with an emotion he knew all too well-anger.
Richard checked his pockets. He still had the phone. He had his Ruger, and he had the Glock with a silencer he’d taken from the dead man in the kitchen.
He looked out from behind the tree once more and saw dome lights whirling outside his house. If he were anyone else, he could’ve tried to make his way back to the house. He could’ve told the police that the same people who’d killed his wife had tried to kill him. He could’ve clarified that he’d acted in self-defense. But Corrine was right. Richard had something to hide, and it all began with the scar on his chest.
Chambering a round in the Glock, Richard stuffed the Ruger into his waistband. A second later, his phone buzzed and his pocket glowed as he received another text message.
For a moment, he considered ignoring the message and leaving the phone behind, but he wanted his pursuers to use the phone to track him. That would bring them closer, and make them that much easier to kill.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the phone, cupped it in his hand, and read the message while the rain pelted the screen.
We know what happened in the mountains at Tora Bora, the text said. Surrender and you might live.
A chill went through Richard’s body as he reread the message and checked the source. The text had come from a phone number with a 202 area code, which meant they weren’t trying to hide their identities anymore. They were CIA, just like the teams he’d fought alongside in Afghanistan.
He’d learned two things about those teams during the war: the only thing that mattered to them was the objective, and they didn’t care how they reached it.
Pocketing the phone, he crawled through the slippery, leaf-strewn grass to the edge of Reservoir Drive-the road that snaked through the park from 33rd Street. Then he limped across and climbed a rain-slicked hill until he reached a chain-link fence.
The faded sign on the fence said, No Trespassing. Property of the Philadelphia Water Department. He ignored it and scaled the fence, squeezing past the barbed wire that topped it. There was a reservoir on the other side of the fence, and the water inside was rapidly rising.
Richard lay on his stomach on the reservoir’s concrete embankment and held onto the fence with both hands. He was flat on his belly and the rain pelting his wounded leg felt almost soothing. Then the fence rattled, and any comfort he felt disappeared.
Sliding into the water, Richard flipped onto his back and allowed himself to float while holding the Glock he’d stolen from the dead body. When the first of two men came sliding along the slippery embankment to see if he was alive, Richard remained still. When the man got closer, Richard opened one eye. When he was almost upon him, Richard sprung into action.
He flipped over in the water, raised the Glock, and fired, hitting the man three times. Before his victim fell into the water, Richard submerged and swam hard to his right. Ten bullets bored into the water around him, but none of them found their target. By the time he surfaced, he was nearly fifty yards away, and the man who’d shot at him was frantically searching for him in the darkness.
Richard climbed the gate and fell on the sloping grass, wincing at the pain in his leg as he rolled to the bottom of the hill. He looked up and saw the man who’d shot at him climbing the gate about forty yards away. Then he heard footsteps running around the bend.
He’d lost the phone and the second gun in the water, but there was no time to lament. Richard got up and hobbled across Reservoir Drive, heading toward the old mansion at Smith Memorial Playground. He crouched as he passed orange construction barriers near the massive house that was buttressed by scaffolding.
Richard’s limp was more pronounced than it had been just seconds before, and when he reached the mansion, bullets struck the metal scaffolding. Richard aimed his gun at the lock on the door and fired a shot of his own. A second later, he was inside.
He could see the dim outlines of tricycles and hobby horses strewn about the floor, and the shape of a giant sliding board in the back. The newly painted walls bore pictures that were barely visible in the darkness.
Richard crouched low and ducked into a room thirty yards ahead, knowing that the trail of blood from his wound would lead them to him. But he wanted them to find him now. He wanted it to be over.
The doorknob twisted and three men moved in, spreading out to either side of the room.
“We’re here!” said the leader. “Are you?”
Richard recognized the voice now. It was Joe Miller, the same man who’d led the CIA team in the mountains of Tora Bora. Miller was the kind of man others followed. It wasn’t because he was especially intelligent or threatening. Nor was it the fact that he’d been a Special Forces major prior to joining the agency. There was just a force about him-a feeling. He had only to speak in that world-weary, cynical growl, and it was enough to make lesser men submit.
Richard was not a lesser man, and he had no intention of submitting. “You know I’m here, Miller,” he said as he slid along the wall, his legs even weaker than his voice. “And you know all of us won’t be walking out.”
Miller used hand signals to point to the area where Richard’s voice had come from and his men moved in that direction. “It’s hard to know anything when it comes to you, Richard. We thought we knew where you were in the mountains, and we were wrong, weren’t we?”
Richard moved toward an opening in the wall that led to another room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said as his pursuers moved closer.
“I’m talking about Afghanistan, Richard. I’m talking about the reasons you kept going back.”
“I wanted to fight,” Richard said, sliding down the wall and easing the gun around the corner.
“That’s what we all thought at first,” the squad leader said as he got down in a prone position and turned on his weapon’s laser scope. “And with all the intelligence we gathered and got to you guys in Delta Force, we figured the fight would be easy.”
“It should’ve been,” Richard said. “But it’s hard to fight a war with the CIA in the way.”
“It’s even harder when one of your best soldiers is a traitor,” he said in an effort to hold Richard’s attention. “I have to admit, it took us awhile to figure out how you did it. The simplicity of it was pure genius.”
Suddenly, one of the men flew around the wall. Even with his bleeding leg and dimmed senses, Richard was too fast to be caught off guard. He turned and fired one shot from the silenced gun, hitting the agent in the temple. The man was dead before he stopped moving.
Another flew around the wall and was upon Richard, who grabbed his arm and twisted it until it broke. There was a scream and a muffled gunshot, and the agent’s last breath came out along with the contents of his bowels.
Richard pushed the body away with a grunt, and when he did so, Miller was standing over him with his gun pointed at Richard’s head. His face was just as Richard remembered it-red and pockmarked with a bulbous nose and a mouth that was fixed in a scowl.
“Drop the gun,” Miller said, his tone low and angry.
Richard did as he was told. With the blood he’d lost since being shot in his leg, and the energy he’d expended fighting them off, he was too tired and weak to do otherwise.
“I should kill you right now,” Miller said.
“Yeah you should. So why don’t you?”
“Because I need to hear, from your own mouth, why you helped the enemy in Tora Bora.”
Richard was parched. He was finding it difficult to breathe, let alone talk. The house seemed to be getting colder. Still, he wanted to tell him why, because in a perverse way, Richard needed to hear it from his own mouth too.
Richard ripped open his T-shirt, revealing the ugly scar on his chest. “I did it because of this,” he said.
Miller looked at him curiously.
“Fighting the battle at Tora Bora was like getting this scar all over again,” Richard said wistfully. “It was like reliving ethnic cleansing.”
Miller furrowed his brow. He was clearly confused.
“I’m Bosnian. I grew up in a mountain village where you could look out and see minarets from four-hundred-year-old mosques poking through the clouds. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was home. Then the war started.
“I was eleven years old when the Serbs came to our village. They stripped the men and paraded them in front of their wives before executing them. Then they raped the women. I was lucky, I guess. They just sliced my chest with a machete and left me to die.”
Richard looked up at Miller, who’d been struck dumb by the story. “I saw my mother and sister violated. I saw my father humiliated. I saw all of them murdered. And the only thing I had to remember them by was this scar. Even after I got adopted by a nice American diplomat and his wife, even after they changed my name from Mujo to Richard, even after I learned to love this country, I never forgot what happened to my people. I couldn’t, because I had this scar to remind me.
“I never thought when they trained me for Special Forces and put me in Delta Force that I’d end up fighting Muslims in those mountains in Tora Bora. But when I did, something snapped, and it was like I was that frightened, angry little boy back in Bosnia.”
“So you sent a radio transmission to make them think you’d been cut off from your unit,” Miller said matter-of-factly. “Then you went over a mountain pass and killed enough Afghan militia to let the mujahideen escape.”
The house was silent except for the sound of Richard’s increasingly labored breathing.
“Did you realize who you were helping?” Miller asked.
“I realized I was helping Muslims who had the ability to fight back. That was more than my family ever had.”
“But you knew that the man commanding those Muslim fighters in Tora Bora was Osama bin Laden. Didn’t you?”
Richard closed his eyes and smiled. It was a joyless gesture-one fraught with all the contradictions that had plagued him all his life. “Of course I knew. That’s why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I wanted to make up for it by doing my duty for America. But when I couldn’t atone for my sins, I wanted to forget I’d ever committed them. That roadside bomb that hit my Humvee was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to come home and forget Afghanistan. It allowed me to come here and marry Corrine. At least for a little while, I had something beautiful again. But you and your men took that away too.”
“Actually, they didn’t.”
Richard’s eyes snapped open at the sound of that voice. It was velvety, feminine, and familiar. It was Corrine. As she walked into the room, Richard tried to make his mouth form the question, but it wouldn’t.
Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the blood loss and the resultant dementia. Or maybe he was already dead, and Corrine was meeting him in paradise.
“You did a good job, Agent Miller,” she said to the squad leader who’d captured Richard. “We lost five men, but at least we got our subject, and we got him alive.”
“Our subject? What are you talking about?” asked Richard.
“The same thing you were talking about a few minutes ago,” Corrine said as she wiped the fake blood from her chest. “Doing my duty for my country.”
“But you can’t be real,” Richard said, laboring to breathe as he began to hyperventilate. “You can’t be one of them. You died back at the house. They killed you.”
“Funny what a little red paint and a lot of imagination can do, isn’t it?” Corrine replied with a wicked grin.
“But you said you loved me,” Richard said as his facial expression went from hurt to sadness to outright devastation. “You married me.”
“And you married me too, even though you knew the CIA could come after you one day for what you did. You valued your happiness more than you valued my safety, and you never trusted me enough to tell me what happened in Tora Bora, no matter how many times I asked you.”
“I kept that from you to protect you,” he said as a tear rolled down his cheek. “I kept it from you because I loved you. Not that it matters. This was all just another operation for you. The marriage, the house-everything.”
“Marrying you was the only way to get close enough to find the truth,” she said coldly. “We had to know if you were part of a larger cell or if you acted of your own volition. The fact is, I did it for the same reason you helped bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. I love my people, and I wasn’t about to watch you or anyone else hurt them.”
Richard leaped forward and grabbed Miller’s weapon from his hands, but before he could fire, Corrine pulled a gun from the small of her back and pumped three rounds into his chest.
The gun slipped from his fingers as blood bubbled up in his mouth. He looked at Corrine for the last time before closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall.
At that moment, everything went quiet and Richard was afraid. But it wasn’t the numbness in his body or the sensation of blood spilling down his chest that frightened him. It was the silence.
As Richard fought through the depths of unconsciousness to reach back toward life, it was the silence that enveloped him like a shroud, pulling him down into the tomb his life had become.
He was tempted to surrender-to lay his head upon the breast of silence and allow it to rock him to sleep, the way his mother had rocked him as a child. What, after all, did he have to live for? Who would shed tears if death folded him in its arms and held him there forever?
Richard was a scarred man in more ways than one. He wasn’t connected to a home, or to a family, or to a wife. Not anymore. He’d been severed from them all, like the silence was severing him from life. Even now he felt it, sliding up through his ears and into the recesses of his mind. He felt it pouring over his body, slow and thick and sweet, like syrup. It was silence, and as his eyes closed for the last time, Richard reached toward it with his very soul, hoping at last for peace.
West Philadelphia
I learned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Road-show. I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.
“You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.
Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to school in the suburbs with real rich white people, while her French teacher at Central High was a black man from Georgia. Despite the fact that I had no true friends at my school and hated most things about my life, she was in a one-sided social competition with me. As a result, I was subjected to Aja’s peacocking around about things like how her friend Jess, who lived in a massive house down on Cedar Avenue, had invited her to go swimming with her family.
“Come off it, Aja. I just said I didn’t know about it.”
“I just think if you live right here… maybe your mom knows about it?”
“Look, is there a story here?”
“Well, it’s crazy. There’s this wooden gate with a towing sign on it like it’s just a parking lot, but behind it is this massive pool and these brand-new lockers and everything. And it was so crowded!”
“Any black people there?”
“Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”
“Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”
She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”
“Janitor?”
“I think he was the security guard.”
I snorted.
We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.
“Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”
“So ghetto,” said Aja.
“Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.
“He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”
“Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.
“Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”
I laughed and then she did too.
“So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.
“Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.
“You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.
“Not that sewer,” I said.
“Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”
“Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.
Dahani, who used to have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.
“You been there?” I asked.
“Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.
“So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.
“I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.
My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here. But she rallied. “You liked that one, didn’t you, Zingha?”
I looked at Dahani. “Sure, watch Wesley Snipes do it with a white woman and stick me with the dishes.”
“Oh, I’ll take care of the dishes,” my mother snapped, managing to make me feel petty. Turning to Dahani she asked, “How is Jason?”
“Just fine,” Dahani said, in a tight voice. I followed his eyes to the clock above the refrigerator. “Movie starts at seven.”
My brother kissed my mom and left, just like he did every night since he’d come home in disgrace. I went upstairs so I wouldn’t have to listen to the pitiful sound of her cleaning up the kitchen. After that she would doze in front of the TV for a couple of hours, half waiting for Dahani to come home. She always wound up in bed before that.
I went up into my brother’s room. I didn’t find my things, but I helped myself to a couple of cigarettes I knew I’d never smoke, and an unsoiled Hustler magazine.
It happened after I had done the deed with a couple of contorting blondes who must have made their parents proud. I had washed up for bed and was about to put on my new headphones, which would lull me to sleep.
I realized that my Walkman was gone.
Understand this. I did not care about the mother-of-pearl earrings from my aunt that even my mother admitted were cheap. I did not care about the gold charm bracelet that my mother gave me when I turned sixteen-the other girls in my class had been collecting tennis racket and Star of David charms since they were eight. And of course the future value of nonfunctioning Swatches was just a theory. But Dahani, who had once harangued my mother into buying him seventy-five-dollar stereo headphones, understood what my Walkman meant to me.
Every summer since eighth grade, the nonprofit where my mom worked got me an office job with one of their corporate “partners.” I spent July and part of August in freezing cubicles wearing a garish smile, playing the part of Industrious Urban Youth. This summer it had been a downtown bank, where the ignoramus VPs and their ignoramus secretaries crowed over my ability to staple page one to two and guide a fax through the machine. If you think I was lucky I didn’t have to handle French fries or the public, you try staying awake for six hours at a desk with nothing to do except arrange rubber bands into a neat pile. It was death.
Most of the money I made every summer went for new school uniforms and class trips. The only thing I bought that I cared about was the most expensive top-of-the-line Walkman. I had one for each summer I’d worked, and all three were gone. I turned on my lamp, folded my arms, and decided that I could wait up even if my mother couldn’t.
The next day I hovered around the living room window waiting for Aja to appear on my block and also hoping that she wouldn’t. I needed to tell someone about my brother. But on the other hand, Aja had the potential to be not so understanding. She had two parents: a teacher and an accountant who never drank beer from cans. They went to church and had a Standard Poodle called Subwoofer. It was true that sometimes we were so lonely that we told each other things. I had told her that I liked my brother’s dirty magazines and she told me that she didn’t like black guys because once her cousin pushed her in a closet and pulled out his dick. But whenever we made confessions like these, the next time we met up it was like those mouthwash commercials where couples wake up next to each other embarrassed by their breath. Besides, I didn’t want her to pronounce my crack-smoking brother “ghetto,” not even with her eyes.
He lied, he lied, he lied. Dahani, who used to make up raps with me and record them, who comforted me the one time we met our father, who seemed bored and annoyed, and once, back when we were both in public school, beat up a little boy for calling me an African bootyscratcher. That brother, said calmly, “I didn’t take any of your stuff, Nzingha. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking: what the hell is going on? I’m thinking: where are my Walkmans? I’m thinking: where are you all the time?”
“I’m out. You should go there sometimes.” He laughed his high-pitched laugh, the one that said how absurd the world is.
“Okay, so you supposedly went to the movies tonight, right? What happens to Gator at the end of Jungle Fever?” I asked.
“Ossie Davis shoots him.”
“That’s right. The crackhead dies. Remember that,” I said.
“Crackhead?” Dahani sounded his laugh again. I didn’t realize how angry I was until I felt the first hot tear roll down my cheek.
I stomped out, leaving his door open. That was an old maneuver, something we did to piss each other off when we lost a fight. But then I thought of something and went back in there. He wouldn’t admit that he’d taken my things. But he agreed that if I didn’t say anything to our mother, he’d take me to the pool. He could only take me at night after it closed, and only if I kept my mouth shut about going.
That night, a Friday, we made our mother’s day by convincing her we were going to hang out on South Street together. Then, as it was getting dark, Dahani and I walked silently toward 47th Street. A clump of figures looked menacing at the corner until we got close and saw that they couldn’t have been more than fifth graders. We slowed down to let a thin, pungent man rush past us. Even though the night air was thick enough to draw sweat, the empty streets reminded me that summer was ending.
“Is anybody else coming?” I asked finally. “Jason?”
“I haven’t seen that nigger in months. Ever since he pledged, he turned into a world-class faggot.” Jason, my brother’s best friend from Friends Select, the only other black boy in his class, had started at Morehouse the same time my brother had gone to Oberlin.
“So it’s just going to be us and the security guard?” I had worn a bathing suit under my clothes, but felt weird about stripping down in front of the character Aja described.
“Look,” my brother said, “be cool, okay?”
“Cool like you?”
“You know, Nzingha, this is not the best time of my life either.”
“But it could be. You could go back to school,” I said, teetering on the edge of a place we hadn’t been.
“It’s not that fucking easy! Do you understand everything Mom’s done for me already?”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Let’s just go where we’re going.”
We passed under a buzzing streetlight that could die at any moment. I had a feeling I knew from nightmares where I boarded the 42 bus in the daytime and got off in the dark. In the dreams I heard my sneakers hit the ground and I thought I would die of loneliness.
We finally reached the tall wooden gate with its warning about getting towed. In a low voice that was forceful without being loud, Dahani called out to someone named Roger. The gate opened and Dahani nearly pushed me into a tall, skinny man with a tan face and eyes that sparkled even in the near dark.
“Hey man, hey man,” he kept saying, pulling my brother in for a half-hug.
“What’s up, Roger?” said Dahani. “This is my sister.”
“Hey, sister,” he said and tried to wink, but the one eye took the other with it.
I looked around. It was nicer than the dingy gray tiles and greenish walls at the Y pool, but to tell the truth, it was nothing special. I’d been going to pool parties at Barrett since sixth grade and I’d seen aqua-tiled models, tropical landscaping, one or two retractable ceilings. This was just a standard rectangle bordered by neat cream-colored asphalt on either side. There were a handful of deck chairs on each side and tall fluorescent lamps. This is what they were keeping us out of?
A bunch of white guys with skater hair and white-boy fades drank 40s and nodded to a boombox playing A Tribe Called Quest at the deep end near the diving board. Then nearby enough to hover but not to crowd, were the girls, who wore berry-colored bikinis. I thought of my prudish navy-blue one-piece. There was a single black girl sitting on the edge of the pool in a yellow bathing suit, dangling her feet in the water.
“Aja?” I called.
“Nzingha?” she replied, sounding disappointed.
Then I recognized Jess, who seemed not to see me until I was practically standing on top of her. Actually, this happened nearly every time we met. “Hey,” she said finally. “I thought that was you.” She always said something like that.
“What are you doing here?” Aja asked.
“My brother brought me.”
“That’s your brother?” Jess gestured with her head to Dahani, who stood with his hands in his pockets while Roger pantomimed wildly.
“You know him?” I asked.
“He’s down with my boys,” she said. I tried not to wince. “Speaking of which, hey, Adam! Can you bring Nzingha something to drink?”
We looked toward the end of the pool with the boys and the boombox. One of them, with a sharp-looking nose and a mop of wet blond hair sweeping over his eyes, yelled back: “Get it for her yourself!”
Jess’s face erupted in pink splotches. “He’s an incredible asshole,” she said.
“And this is news?” said one of the other girls. She had huge breasts, a smashed-in face, and a flat voice. Suddenly I remembered the name Adam. Aja had a flaming crush on him for nearly a year, and then Jess had started going out with him on and off. Last I heard they were off, but now Aja liked to pretend she’d never mentioned liking him.
“I don’t want anything to drink anyway,” I said.
Aja asked if I was going to swim and I don’t remember what I said because I was watching my brother walk down to the end of the pool where the boys were, trading pounds with wet hands. He reached into a red cooler and pulled out a 40. Roger stayed at the tall wooden gate.
“They think they’re gangsters,” Jess said, rolling her eyes in their general direction. “They call themselves the Gutter Boys. All they do is come here and smoke weed.”
“That’s not all,” the girl with the smashed-in face said with a smirk.
“Is my brother here a lot?” I asked.
“I’ve only seen him once. But this is only the third time I’ve been here, you know, after hours.”
My brother didn’t seem interested in swimming. I didn’t even know if he was wearing trunks. Instead he walked with a stocky swaggering boy toward the darkness of the locker room. Don’t go back there, I wanted to scream. But all I did was stand there in my street clothes at the water’s edge.
Adam cried out, “Chickenfight!”
“Not again,” said smashed-in face. “I’m way too fucked up.”
Adam swam over to us. “Look, Tanya, you’ll do it again if you wanna get high later.”
Tanya’s friend murmured something to her quietly. Tanya laughed and said, “Hey, Adam, what about this?” Then she and her friend began kissing. At first just their lips seemed to brush lightly, and then the quiet girl pulled her in fiercely. I stepped back, feeling an unpleasant arousal. The boys became a cursing, splashing creature moving toward us. “Dayummm!” called Roger, who began running over.
“Keep your eye on the gate, dude!” yelled one of the boys.
“Okay, you big lesbians get a pass,” said Adam when they finally broke apart. Then he turned to Jess. “What can you girls do for me?”
“I think we’re going to stick with the chickenfight,” said Aja, giggling. She still liked him. I could not relate.
While they sorted out who would carry whom, my brother emerged from the locker room. I waited until he and the stocky boy had parted ways before I began walking over.
“Dahani,” I called in a sharp voice.
“You ready to go?” he asked. I examined him. He didn’t seem jittery and he wasn’t sweating. This was what I knew of smoking crack from the movies.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
I glanced back at the pool, where Adam, laughing, held Jess under the water. Aja sat forlornly on the shoulders of a round boy with flame-colored hair waiting for the fight to start. “I’m ready to go,” I said.
When Roger closed the gate the pool disappeared, and though “Looking at the Front Door” sounded raucous bouncing off the water, I couldn’t hear anything at all.
“Are you smoking crack?” I blurted.
Dahani came to a full stop and looked at me. “This is the last time I think I’m going to answer that dumb-ass question. No.”
“Are you selling it?”
He sighed in annoyance. “Nzingha. No.”
“But something isn’t right.”
“No, nothing is right,” Dahani said. “But this is where I get off.” We had reached my mother’s house. He kept walking up the dark street.
It wasn’t until a couple of nights later that Dahani didn’t show up for dinner. My mother, who barely touched the pizza I ordered, kept walking to the front window and peering out.
When it began getting dark, I slapped my forehead. “Oh my God!” I said.
My mother looked at me with wild round eyes. “What?”
Without biting the inside of my cheek, I said, “I totally forgot. He said to tell you he wouldn’t be home until really late.”
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
My mother folded her arms. “Thanks for almost letting me have a heart attack.”
“Mom, he’s a grown man.”
“Nzingha,” she said, “what is this thing with you and your brother?”
I didn’t answer.
“You don’t seem to realize that he’s having a really hard time. I mean I’m the one stuck with loans from his year at college. I’m the one supporting his grown-ass now and I’m the one who’s going to have to take out more loans to send him back. So what’s your issue?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Can I go upstairs?”
“You really need to change your attitude. And not just about this.”
“Can I go upstairs?” I said again.
My mother and I sometimes had strained conversations. It was she and Dahani who had fireworks. But now she looked so angry she almost shook. “Go ahead and get the hell out of my sight!” And I did, hating this.
That night I wasn’t sure if I was sleeping or not. I kept imagining the nightmare bright scene at the pool, those girls kissing, my brother disappearing into the back. Night logic urged me that I had to go back there. After my mother was in bed with her TV timer on, I climbed out of bed and dressed. Then excruciatingly, silently, I closed the front door. I plunged into darkness and walked the three blocks as fast as I could.
“Roger,” I called at the gate, trying to imitate my brother’s masculine whisper. I tapped the wood. There was a pause and then the tall gate wrenched open.
“Where’s Dahani?” Roger said, waving me inside. His clothes were soaked and he was in stocking feet. “Oh God. You didn’t bring Dahani?”
I felt my legs buckle, and only because Roger’s sweaty hand clamped over my mouth was I able to swallow a scream. I had seen only one dead body in real life, at my great-grandmother’s wake. Though with her papery skin and tiny doll’s limbs, she’d never seemed quite alive. I’d never seen a dead body floating in water, but I knew what I was seeing when I saw Jess’s naked corpse bob up and down peacefully. I ran to the water’s edge near the diving board. There was a wet spot of something on the edge of the pool that looked black in the light.
Roger began pacing a tiny circle, moaning.
“Did you call 911?” I asked him.
“It was an accident. They’re gonna think-”
“What if she’s alive?” I said.
Roger suddenly loomed in front of me with clenched fists. “No cops! And she’s not alive! Why didn’t you bring Dahani?”
In the same way I knew things in dreams, I knew he hadn’t done it. Not even in a Lenny in Of Mice and Men way. But I needed to get away from his panic. I spoke slowly. “It’s okay. I’ll go get him.”
“You’ll bring him here?”
Before I let myself out through the tall gate, I watched Roger slump to the side of the pool and sit Indian style with his head in his hands. I took one last look at Jess. Later I wished that I hadn’t.
I found myself at Aja’s house. It was after midnight, but I rang the bell, hoping somehow that she might answer the door instead of her parents. I heard the dog barking and clicking his long nails excitedly on the floor.
Aja’s dad, a short yellow man with a mustache and no beard, answered the door. “Zingha? Now you know it’s too late. Does your mom know-”
“Mr. Bell, I really need to see Aja.”
“Are you serious, girl?” Then he started pushing the door shut. The dog was going crazy.
“Aja!” I screamed.
Her mother appeared. She grabbed Subwoofer’s collar with one hand and pulled him up short. He whimpered and I felt bad for him. All I’d ever known him to attack with was his huge floppy tongue.
“Shut up and get in here,” she said.
Aja’s father moved off to the side but he wasn’t happy about it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.
“Quiet, you!” she responded. She was nearly a head taller than he was, with eggplant-colored lips and very arched eyebrows.
“Look, Nzingha,” she said, “Aja’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”
I shook my head frantically. “We have to find her! You don’t know what’s going on. There’s a-”
“Stop talking and listen,” she said, getting louder. “If anyone comes around asking where my daughter is, tell them the truth. That she has disappeared and that we are very worried. Mr. Bell will walk you home.”
Mr. Bell fumed as he escorted me. “I guess there’s no point in any more stupid fucking shit happening,” he muttered. I didn’t answer; he wasn’t talking to me.
I let myself in as quietly as I had left, shocked by the thick silence of the house. I tried not to imagine Jess’s closed eyes, her blood on the asphalt. I had to remind myself that she was dead, so she couldn’t be as cold as she looked. I tried to tell myself that her floating body, Dahani, and Aja were in another world.
But the next morning I learned that my mother hadn’t been home. She’d been down at the precinct with my brother.
By the time the police had arrived at the pool, Roger was nearly dead. He had tried to drown himself. He couldn’t answer questions about Jess from his coma, but the police knew he hadn’t done it.
It seemed to me, from what I managed to read before my mother started hiding the papers, that Jess’s death had been an accident. But her dad was a lawyer and Aja was dragged back from an aunt’s house in Maryland to do eighteen months in the Youth Detention Center. I went to visit her once that winter, in the dim, echoing room that reminded me of the cafeteria at our elementary school. I didn’t tell my mother where I was going. She hadn’t let me go to the trial.
Aja and I made painful small talk about how the food was destroying her stomach and about her first encounter with a bed bug. She said fuck more than usual and her skin looked gray.
Then she blurted, “I didn’t do it.”
“I know,” I said.
“Things just got crazy.” She told me about that night. Everyone had been drinking, including her, and Adam called for another chickenfight.
“First I fought that girl Tanya and I beat her easy. Then it was me and Jess. But I had won the time before, the night you came, you remember?”
I nodded, though I hadn’t seen her victory.
“So she was really getting rough. And then she fucking-”
“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” I said, trying to be the sweet girl my mother remembered.
“She pulled my top down. I kept telling them I wanted to stop. But they were yelling so loud. And Adam was cheering me on. It was so-” Aja’s voice seemed to swell with tears, but her eyes remained empty.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and we were quiet for a moment. The din of the visiting room filled the space between us.
“But Jess was my best friend,” she said. I had come to be good to her, yet I wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her teeth chattered.
My brother was able to convince the police that he hadn’t done it. But he not only needed an alibi, he also had to rat out the Gutter Boys, with whom he’d apparently tried to go into business. Tried, I say, because he was such a crummy drug dealer that he had to steal to make up for what he couldn’t sell. Dahani told the police what he knew about the small operation, and after that, a couple of Jeeps slowed down when he crossed the street, but he didn’t turn up in the Schuylkill or anything. He got his old job at the video store back, but he got fired after a couple of months, and then our VCR disappeared. After two weeks in a row when he didn’t come home, and my mom had called the police about sixteen times, she changed the locks and got an alarm system.
Sometime after that she looked at me over a new tradition-a second nightly beer-and said, “Nzingha, I know we should have talked about this as soon as I knew what was going on with your brother. But I didn’t want to say anything because I know that you love him.”
The scandal didn’t break the pool. They held a floating memorial service for Jess and hired a real security company. The scandal did, however, break the news of the pool to the neighborhood. But at $1,400 a year, none of the black folks we knew could afford to join it anyway.
Grays Ferry
Since Charlie died, I’d been spending a lot of time at Johnny Izzard’s. I’d walk through the front door of his tailor shop and that bell he still had hanging over the door would ring and Johnny would look up from behind the counter and smile out of the corner of his mouth. I’d told him more than once to keep the door locked at night. Point Breeze alone seemed to be averaging a couple murders a week. But he didn’t listen.
He’d be fiddling with a pair of trousers on a wooden hanger, running his hands gently down one leg at a time, the soft cool fabric sliding between his bony fingers as he adjusted the hem with a few straight pins between his lips and his glasses sliding down his nose. I’d lean on the counter and watch him work and when he was done, he’d pull out a bottle and a few glasses and start to pour. We’d pick up where we left off, the conversation always turning to our old friend Charlie Melvyn and the barber shop he had on Tasker Avenue and the way he died and whether he was better off dead than alive.
The barber shop had been boarded up like many of the storefronts in that neighborhood. Since then, I’d been getting my hair cut at the Gallery Mall by a twenty-something girl with breast implants, a tattoo of a snake on her neck, and a man’s haircut of her own, parted on the side and trimmed neatly around the piercings in her ears.
Johnny’s tailor shop was a little farther up on 25th and tonight we were celebrating his eightieth birthday. Johnny’s son had been trying to get him into one of those assisted living places out in Delaware County, get him a nice clean room with a view of the Lexus dealership across the street and a rotating shift of nurses and aides to take his pulse and do his laundry and wipe his ass. I think he was actually considering it.
“Look what the cat dragged in. My, my… another Irish cop with a bad attitude. You come to roust me, officer, or just steal my liquor?”
“Ex-cop, Mr. Izzard. With a capital X. I’m not playing that game anymore.”
“It was fun while it lasted, though. Wasn’t it?”
“It had its moments.”
“You smell nice. You got a date?”
“Meeting an old friend.”
“A woman?”
“She asked me to do her a favor. That’s it. It’s not what you think.”
“It never is.” Johnny’s eyes lit up, a greenish tint coming through the clouded glasses like dusty emeralds. He unplugged a hot iron that sat on an ironing board behind him. Next to that was an old sewing machine that rested on black iron legs with a heavy square pedal the size of a sewer grate and a black spinning wheel and a sewing needle secured to a silver arm like a glistening metal spike. Johnny ran his hand over his bald, chocolate-brown head, wiping away a layer of cold sweat. The wrinkles around his eyes smoothed out as his smile softened.
“He was like a father to you, huh?”
“Yeah, he was.”
“Still ain’t over it?”
“Are you?”
“We lookin’ at the same thing, right? But we don’t see it the same.”
“How do you see it?”
“After Chawlie died, I was angry. We both were. But I’m trying to think what Chawlie would want us to do?”
“Charlie didn’t die, Johnny. He was murdered.”
“And you think I don’t know that. But if he’s looking down on us right now, what’s he thinking?”
“He knows I’d like to catch the guy that shot him.”
“And do what with him? Lock him up? And for how long? What good will it do?”
“Maybe I’ll save the taxpayers of Philadelphia the expense of a trial.”
“You don’t mean that, son.”
“I’m starting to think I do, Johnny.”
“And what if it turns out to be some sixteen-year-old kid?”
“So be it.”
“You changed that much? You really that hard? What, Chawlie Melvyn gets killed and suddenly there’s no hope left in the world? You know, son, when I’m talkin’ ’bout carryin’ out the wishes of the deceased, I mean more than just buryin’ him next to his mother or crematin’ him and dumpin’ his ashes into the Delaware River or puttin’ a tombstone on his grave the size of the goddamn Washington Monument.”
“I heard George Washington had over two hundred slaves. Did you know that?”
“Don’t change the subject, son.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Only two hundred?”
“Maybe more.”
“What I’m sayin’ is that Chawlie didn’t die in vain. He didn’t believe that and neither should you. That’s the truth.”
“If you saw his blood on the sidewalk, Johnny. It was there for days, like a black stain.”
“Chawlie was fightin’ a war, Seamus. Like a lot of us are. Like you are. Otherwise, we’d pick up and go. It’s a war of attrition, son. Chawlie was just hangin’ on and then he saw the chance to do somethin’ real. He died savin’ a bunch of kids who’d never have learned what Chawlie Melvyn was all about. He put himself in the line of fire. It wasn’t an accident, what he did. He saw a gun and chose to shield those kids. He was willin’ to die saving someone else. That means somethin’.”
“You mean he’s a martyr?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, the cemetery is full of them, Johnny.”
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, not looking at each other but aware that we were both thinking the same thing. Charlie’s barber shop had instilled itself in our common memory, a dream of a better time when the old men sat around that place telling stories about how great Philadelphia used to be, about South Street in the summer, about the fish market and the Phillies and the old singers that stopped coming around and the prostitutes on Lombard and how many more dead cops there were with each passing year and that if they didn’t get out of Grays Ferry soon, they’d end up dying there, and how nothing would ever be the same unless someone did something about it.
I raised the glass of whiskey and held it up in front of me. Johnny did the same. We nodded and drank. I wished him a happy birthday and went out the door with the bell ringing in my head.
I took 27th Street through the heart of Point Breeze and onto Grays Ferry Avenue and then onto 30th, where I pulled into the lot at St. Gabe’s. There was a church, a monastery, and a school, all made of redbrick and jagged gray stone, the three buildings surrounding a parking lot and a deserted playground. At night, the shadows from the old church spread across the lot and the nuns would creep to their second-story windows and peer out at the sun sliding behind the gray skyline, and in the darkness it wasn’t unusual to see a car pull in and park at the far end of the lot. St. Gabriel’s seemed to be looking down on the entire city of Philadelphia with a weary eye.
Millie Price had asked me to meet her there at ten. I was early.
I looked across the lot at the flimsy wooden backboard and the rusty rim clinging to it. The metal pole swayed in the cold wind. The concrete that held it in the ground had long since turned to dust and been blown away. A wall of chain link made the whole place look like an old prison, where inmates might have come out into the cold air once a day and stared at the broken basket and laughed like crows at a rankled scarecrow. And the crooked weather vane sitting at the top of the arched steeple of St. Gabe’s would point down at them and laugh back.
The diocese had planted trees along a narrow strip of lawn bordering the playground. Thin dogwoods that bloomed in spring, the delicate white flowers emerging shyly for the first few years and then going into a kind of permanent hibernation, the dried bark peeling away and exposing the speckled, wind-blown skin beneath. They stood like that year after year, leafless and gray, their thin, petrified branches frozen in place.
I’d pulled my ten-year-old Jeep Cherokee into the lot. It was navy-blue, with an exhaust system that made it sound like a tank. The front wheels grinded as I circled toward the back. It had been making that same noise for two months. I’d taken it to Eddie’s garage earlier that day and he’d told me it needed bearings on both sides. It was a three-hundred-dollar job, the same amount of money Millie Price had offered me to take an old boyfriend off her hands.
“He just won’t take no for an answer,” she’d said.
“He’ll scare easily,” she’d said.
I turned the key and the Jeep went suddenly quiet. It was a sound that made me nervous. It made most cops nervous, and though I wasn’t a cop anymore, there was nothing like a quiet night to start me thinking. I’d put my time in with the Philadelphia Police Department, most of it spent right here in the 17th Precinct. I’d paid my dues and all I had to show for it was the Jeep and a pension that qualified me for food stamps and Section 8 housing. I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. I imagined Father Kane up there in the rectory sipping a hot toddy and thinking maybe he should call the cops about the guy in the lot, sitting in his car and chain-smoking.
My father had grown up in the same parish and he’d told me there had been a shallow pond in the small courtyard between the monastery and the old cathedral. The priests had kept swans there. On Sunday afternoons the parishioners would stand around the pond as solemnly as if they were still in church and watch the swans glide effortlessly over the clear water. Some of the women would bring stale bread from home to feed to the hungry birds. They’d keep it wrapped in a napkin in their purses until after mass when they’d tear it into small pieces the size of a host and watch as the long curved necks of the swans bent for the soggy bread, their heavy-lidded black eyes almost haughty as they fought for every scrap.
It’d been like that for years, my father had said, since before he’d joined the force, young mothers pushing their babies in strollers along the narrow path, the babies pointing with their chubby little fingers at the swans floating across the glassy pond. The kids would all be wearing red baseball caps, as if everybody expected their child to be the next great third-baseman for the Phillies. Even the old folks came out to see the swans, congregating around the pond when it was warm and sunny and the glare from the sun off the water brought them to tears.
But it wasn’t very long before the Inquirer ran the story of the dead swans. Some people in the neighborhood were calling it murder, as if killing a swan was the same thing as killing a person. To some it was worse. I guess it depended on who was doing the killing and who was getting killed.
Someone had come in the middle of the night with a crossbow and killed the swans, every last one of them, leaving their blood-stained bodies, impaled with arrows, for the children and young mothers and old folks from the neighborhood to find the next morning. Their white feathers were the color of rust, their wide staring eyes like glass.
My father had been the first responding officer and he’d called the detectives in as if it were an actual homicide. They never caught the guys and for a lot of people in Grays Ferry, including my old man, it was the last straw, time to get out. They could have dealt with the beer cans in the park and the dog shit and the garbage lining the streets and an occasional strong-arm robbery and the sirens at all hours of the night, but they couldn’t deal with butchered swans, not even in Grays Ferry.
That was the first time I’d heard my father refer to our square patch of neighborhood in Grays Ferry as Devil’s Pocket. I wasn’t sure what it meant back then. I am now.
A week later he was killed responding to a domestic dispute on Christian just off 25th and I knew we weren’t going anywhere. Devil’s Pocket would always be my home. They drained the pond and filled it in with gravel and turned it into a rock garden with a small fountain and a statue of St. Francis with the pigeons flocking to his outstretched arm and the water rolling gently off his back.
I went through four or five more cigarettes when I began to think that maybe Millie wasn’t going to show. It shouldn’t have surprised me. From what I remembered, she never was known for her punctuality. She wasn’t usually too hard to find though. There were only a couple places to look. I decided to hang in there a little longer, nurse one more cigarette and then take off. Millie had my cell number and could have called if she was going to be late. But Millie was never known for her consideration either. She’d been working behind the bar at the Arramingo Club for a long time. She lived only a few blocks away on Catherine. That’s where I was headed.
I parked in front of a vacant lot on 24th and walked the rest of the way. I’d grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment and tapped it against my palm and peeled it open and lit up a cigarette as I walked down the dark street. I passed a couple of black-haired Asian girls leaning against a brand-new red Camaro. Their short skirts and high heels and red lipstick matched the car perfectly. They were a little out of their territory, I thought, and I wanted to say something to them. I wanted to tell them what could happen to a girl in a miniskirt and high-heel shoes and naked legs leaning against a red-hot Camaro. I wanted to tell them all that I’d seen but I knew it was no use. I’d never really been able to speak their language, and even if I said something, they wouldn’t listen.
Millie Price lived in one of those buildings where you ring the doorbell and they buzz you in. The problem was there were rarely any names under the mailboxes in the vestibule, and even if there were, it was often too dark to see. I struck a match and noticed that someone had wedged a crushed beer can into the door jamb. I pushed through and into the dark hallway and started up the stairs. I remembered Millie lived on the second floor but I wasn’t sure which apartment was hers. The door on the left had a peace sign spray-painted on it in a fluorescent yellow. The door on the right hung open a few inches.
I was starting to get a bad feeling. It was the kind of feeling cops get just before something bad happens, an intuition you develop after a few long years on the street. Some guys are just born with it. Either way, if you don’t develop it sooner or later, you might just find yourself dead.
And that’s how I found Millie Price, in a heap on the floor just inside her front door. She was wearing a thin leather jacket and jeans as if she was just about to go out. She probably heard the knock and opened the door and the gun was the only thing she saw. She was lying on her back with two bullet holes in the Snoopy shirt she was wearing under the jacket and a dark bloodstain spreading over two well-formed breasts. She was still as beautiful as I remembered.
I looked down at her, at the blood on her chin where it had spilled from her mouth and the blood pooling on the floor beneath her, and I felt a little ache in my own chest. I was thinking I should have felt something more, and maybe I would have if things had been different between Millie and me all those years ago. Now, she was just another corpse in an apartment on the border of Grays Ferry and Point Breeze, where stray corpses were becoming more and more common.
I phoned it in and Detective William Trask showed up in record time, only about an hour after the first uniformed officer arrived and handcuffed me in the backseat of his cruiser. I showed him my retired Philly Police badge but it didn’t seem to change his mind. It was for his protection and mine, he said. I didn’t think I had anything to fear from the police, so he must have been protecting me from myself.
While the steel bracelets were cutting into my wrists and my fingers were going numb, I thought about Millie, up there growing cold on her living room rug. She’d be going rigid by now. They could probably stand her up and lean her against the wall and fit her with the perfect size body bag and walk her down the stairs. I wiggled my fingers and fidgeted on the hard plastic seat, thinking now of all the prisoners I’d had in my backseat and how many times I’d told them to shut up and sit still and how many times they’d puked and pissed themselves along the way.
Just then, the door opened and Detective Trask yanked me out of the car, spun me around, and unhooked my wrists. He didn’t look happy, but as I remembered, William Trask never looked happy.
“What the hell, Seamus! How are you involved in all this?”
“Her name’s Millie Price. She’s an old friend.”
“Sure. How about the rest of it?”
“There’s nothing else to tell, Bill. You saw what I saw.”
“So you were paying a surprise visit to an old girlfriend and when you get here, she just happens to be dead. Shot to death with two large-caliber slugs at close range.”
“There’s a little more to it than that.”
“I’m listening.”
“She was supposed to meet me earlier tonight outside St. Gabe’s. She’d called me this afternoon, asked me to do her a favor, said an old boyfriend was hassling her. She wanted me to scare him off. Said it wouldn’t be a problem that he’d scare easy. She was going to pay me three hundred dollars.”
Trask pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. He lit one for himself and then mine with the same match.
“I think she got her money’s worth.”
Two techs from the medical examiner’s office carried Millie down the stairs in a gray body bag. They swung her onto a flimsy metal stretcher and wheeled her to the back of a darkblue van with tinted windows and a municipal license plate. One of the techs opened the door while the other rammed the stretcher into place. I thought I glimpsed the shadows of other black bags neatly packed inside the van. At least Millie would have company.
“Any idea who the boyfriend was?”
“None.”
“You wouldn’t be holding out on me now, Seamus Kilpatrick? You know better than that.”
“What reason would I have not to tell the truth?”
“That all depends on the nature of your relationship with Miss Price.”
“I haven’t seen her in ten years.”
“And before that?”
“We were friends. I knew her from the neighborhood.”
“For God’s sake, Kilpatrick, she was a stripper. What do you expect me to believe? You were members of the same book club. You met at the library every Tuesday afternoon.”
“She’s been out of that business for a long time.”
“She used to be married to Billy Haggerty? I suppose you knew that.”
I drew hard on the cigarette, letting the smoke drift and blow away like a bad dream.
“Of course I knew. That was over a long time ago too.”
“We’ll see.”
A young cop in a brand-new pinstripe suit came out and handed Trask a collection of crime scene photos. He thumbed through them as if they were a deck of playing cards, his face expressionless as he stared down at the lifeless body of Millie Price. He slid them into a manila envelope and pointed its sharp corner into my chest.
“You and I never had a problem, Kilpatrick, not when you were with the force and not since you left. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Am I free to go?”
“If you find something out, I’ll want to hear about it.”
I took one last drag on the cigarette and threw it past them into the street. I could feel the eyes of the detectives on my back as I walked away.
The Aramingo Club didn’t look like much from the outside. It was on the corner of 30th and Tasker, with a front door painted a dingy white and a lot of burned-out neon over blacked-out windows. It was the end of the line for aging strippers with a few good teeth left and maybe a set of implants they’d conned off some old horny gangster who didn’t want his wife to know he could still get it up. It was getting late and there wasn’t anybody collecting at the door and not many drinkers hanging around for last call.
I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, slid the pack of cigarettes in behind it, and waited for the bartender to notice me. She was a petite blonde in ’80s spandex, black and tight from her neck to her ankles. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a glass ashtray, doing her best to ignore me as her fingers moved the dead cigarette around in the bed of gray ash. When she was satisfied the cigarette had stopped smoldering, she took the long walk down to my end of the bar.
I ordered a beer and she put the glass down on a clean white napkin and I slid the twenty in her direction and told her to keep the change. She still wasn’t smiling but her eyes had grown a bit larger as if some of the meanness had been squeezed out of them.
“Big spender.”
“In exchange for some conversation.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Millie Price.”
I took a sip of my drink and looked at her through the glass. She had the body of a twenty-year-old and the face of a woman in her fifties, a woman who’d walked some hard miles. She looked like she could stand up to just about anything.
“She’s not your type.”
“Says who, Billy Haggerty?”
“What are you? A cop?”
“Not anymore. Millie asked me to meet her tonight. She never showed. I’d like to know what happened to her.”
“What makes you think something happened to her?”
“She’s dead. Shot twice. I found her in her apartment. The cops are there now and I don’t doubt they’ll soon be on their way here.”
She started crying. Not hysterical crying, no moans or loud sobs, just tears escaping from her reddened eyes and rolling down her face. Her mascara ran in a spiderweb of black lines under her eyes and she dabbed at it with a napkin from the bar. I offered her a cigarette from the pack and she took one with a trembling hand. She held it to her lips and I lit it for her and the smoke seemed to calm her nerves.
“What about the baby?”
“What baby?”
“Millie had a baby, a little boy about two years old.”
“I never knew. Where’s Billy Haggerty?”
“He’s not the father.”
“Then who is?”
“A guy named Nathaniel. He lives down in Point Breeze.”
“Millie’s boyfriend is from Point Breeze?”
“Yeah. Billy was furious when he found out. He’s still furious. It’s one thing when you find out your wife’s been running around with another guy. It’s another thing when you find out he’s black. I thought something like this was going to happen.”
“Where does this Nathaniel live?”
“Twenty-second and Moore over the laundromat.”
“Do you know where Billy is?”
“Haven’t seen him all night. If he’s not here, he’s at the Golden Rose.”
“Thanks.”
The tears began to flow again and she reached out and took a long drink from my glass. The cigarette had gone out and she drew on it, frantically trying to bring it back to life, and when she couldn’t, she threw it down on the floor.
“You know, I talked to Millie last night. She said she talked to a guy she used to know a long time ago. She said he was real nice and that they might have had something together once and maybe they could get it back. She said that when she spoke to him she heard something sweet in his voice like maybe he was hoping for the same thing. She wanted to get away from this place, away from the Arramingo Club, away from Grays Ferry, away from Billy Haggerty, away from this whole life. She was hoping he could help her. She said he used to be a cop.”
She turned her back to me and lifted her eyes just high enough to see my face in the mirror behind the bar. “Now would you please get the hell out of here.”
I parked behind Lanier Playground and hurried across the crumbling asphalt. As I ran across it, I couldn’t help but think that this had become a wasteland, a memory of a long abandoned dream for so many kids that would take a miracle to resurrect. It was dark, the spotlights broken by those same kids-they used them for target practice, throwing pieces of broken pavement like stones from a slingshot until the area was in total darkness.
I got halfway across when I heard them, five or six figures silhouetted against the concrete ledge, the light from the Golden Rose casting distorted shadows over the sidewalk. Haggerty was there, strutting back and forth like an alpha male while his pack of wolves sat before him, tuned to his every word, his every move. He saw me too and a snicker of recognition snaked across his lips as I emerged from the darkness.
“Seamus Kilpatrick. What the fuck are you doing here? Did someone call a cop?”
His gang laughed in unison, up on their feet now, the rusty chain-link fence like an iron curtain between us.
“Did you have to kill her, Billy? Was it because she went out and got herself a boyfriend? Was it the kid, Billy? Or was it because she came to me for help?”
“You think I killed her? Jaysus, Kilpatrick. You are a piece of work. You think I give a shite about that whore, Millie Price? She could have taken that kid of hers and gone down into the gutter to live. That’s where she belonged.”
“Where’s the kid, Billy?”
“How the hell should I know? You got it all wrong, as usual, Kilpatrick. You’ll never learn. Trying so hard to be something you’re not.”
“And what’s that?”
“A fucking martyr. A pathetic fucking martyr. But even a dumb shite like me knows there’s no such thing as a live martyr.”
I came around the fence and Haggerty’s gang circled us. I recognized most of them. Jimmy Connors and Chris Dougherty looked inseparable, as if they were still sixteen and just snuck out of the house with their father’s quarts in their pants. Denis McNulty was the biggest of the crew, leaning against the fence with the fingers of one meaty paw hooked onto the chain link.
“I don’t presume to judge you, Billy Haggerty. But don’t expect me to agree with your way of thinking.”
“You always pick the wrong side. Don’t you. Deny your people, your family. This is your fucking home, Kilpatrick, and you won’t lift a finger to save it. Just don’t get in our way. We’ll show you no mercy.”
“You can’t build a wall down the middle of this neighborhood, Billy.”
“Watch me.” His finger was pointed at my chest as if it were a loaded gun. “And one more thing you’d want to know before you leave. I have from a reliable source that not only has this rooster Nathaniel Jeffers been banging my ex-wife, word is he’s the trigger man what put down your old friend, Charlie Melvyn. Now ain’t that a kicker, boyo?”
Chris Dougherty crossed himself and they all laughed and my fists went white at my sides. I looked at Billy Haggerty and our eyes locked and at that moment it was like no one else in Grays Ferry mattered, like it was just the two of us and we were telling the whole world to go fuck themselves. Not knowing where else to look, I turned my gaze to the Philadelphia skyline in the distance, the dark sky behind it like a black veil.
“One more for the road, boys?”
They all shuffled back inside the Golden Rose and left me alone on the deserted sidewalk.
I walked a few aimless blocks until I found myself in front of the twenty-four-hour laundromat with its fluorescent lights shining through the glass and the dryers whirring inside and a fat old black lady thumbing the pages of a worn newspaper on the bench. The stairwell to the second floor smelled like piss but it didn’t matter. I reached around to the small of my back and pulled out the Glock that had been gathering dust in a drawer since the day I left the Philadelphia Police Department. I took a deep breath and kicked in the door.
I was face-to-face with Nathaniel Jeffers. He didn’t move. He was younger than I thought he’d be but not childlike in his appearance. He had short cropped hair over a broad forehead and a thin mustache and the body of an athlete. I pointed the gun at his chest, holding it with two hands, my arms thrust out in front of me, my grip beginning to tremble. The look in his eyes seemed to say that he knew why I was there, that he knew it wasn’t because of Millie Price or their son or Billy Haggerty or all the bullshit that defined him as black and me as white. It was because of Charlie Melvin, and Nathaniel Jeffers knew it.
“Did you kill Charlie Melvyn?”
“Who?”
“The old man in front of the barber shop.”
His lips were sealed firmly across his face but I had my answer in the way he stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and the way he shrugged his shoulders and ground his teeth. He was a typical Philly liar, I thought. The truth made him squirm.
My fingers curled around the trigger and the hammer slowly lifted from its seat, and in my mind I heard the voice of Johnny Izzard telling me how once I pulled the trigger, everything would change, my legacy with the Philadelphia Police Department, the reasons I became a cop, and the reasons I left. But it was too late to think about regrets. I owed this to Charlie Melvyn.
I adjusted my aim and fired. The blast stung my ears and Nathaniel Jeffers jumped back onto a dingy yellow couch. The sound of that single gunshot was so loud I thought it would wake the entire neighborhood. A door opened in the hall and out stepped the boy as if the sound of gunfire was a sound he’d become accustomed to. He had waves of curly black hair and sleepy eyes and caramel-colored skin. He ran to his father and dropped into his arms.
I’d fired wide and the bullet had lodged in the wall, a crack in the plaster spreading from floor to ceiling like a fault line. I heard the sirens already, wailing in the distance, coming closer with that sense of urgency like they knew what they’d find when they got there.
“You better take the boy and get out of here. Billy Haggerty is coming for you.”
“This is my territory, my house. He know better than to come down here.”
“No, I don’t think he does.”
I turned and went out the door and down the steps and onto the street, the gun still in my hand. Billy Haggerty and his boys were on the corner. They were drunk and Denis Mc-Nulty had a large rock in his hand. He wound up like a Major League pitcher, took a couple of steps, and hurled it through Nathaniel Jeffers’s second-floor window. The sound of breaking glass on the street accompanied the crescendo of blaring sirens. Three squad cars converged from different angles and the officers jumped out with guns drawn. A crowd was forming on both sides of the block.
I was pointing with my free hand at Billy Haggerty and his thugs, trying to tell the cops what was happening, but they wouldn’t listen. They were screaming at me to drop the gun and then I felt the first bullet crease my shoulder, the initial burn, my collar bone shattering like a broken twig. The next bullet caught me just above my left hip and spun me around and knocked me to the ground.
I lay on my back, staring up at the clear night sky and the flashing red and blue lights from the police cars, and suddenly, there was Johnny Izzard. He’d heard the sirens and was now emerging from the crowd on the corner, ignoring commands from the police to get back. My legs were numb and I tried to lift my head and I felt Johnny take my hand. I heard him call my name and his voice seemed to come from a long way off, as if I was dreaming and couldn’t shake myself awake. And in the dream I saw myself in the early days with the department and even before that, at the vigil over my father’s casket at St. Gabe’s and the baseball games he’d taken me to at the Vet, climbing all those stairs up into the nosebleed seats. “Just us and the pigeons,” he’d say. And then I saw the blood-soaked body of Millie Price and the sleepy eyes of her son and I felt like I was floating and I felt a sudden shudder of cold.
I opened my eyes and Johnny was still there, his bony grip harder on my hand; he was saying my name but I couldn’t hear him. I saw his lips moving and I tried to smile, that awkward, boyish, embarrassed smile I had, and Johnny was shaking his head and saying, “Seamus. Seamus. Seamus.”