Ben had a girl now, nice woman named Renee, built low to the ground, lived over in Hyattsville and worked at a nail salon. She was easy to get along with. They stayed in mostly, had pizza delivered, sat together, and laughed. She didn’t complain about Ben watching his basketball on the TV, didn’t ask why he seldom took her to restaurants or clubs. Maybe she knew that he was uncomfortable in such places and, in general, out in the world. Renee was just cool with it. She was all right.
Ben’s cell sounded. Its ring tone was that old Rare Essence “Overnight Scenario” joint that Ben loved. He checked the ID and answered.
“Wha’sup, Chris?”
“Checkin up on you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not cryin over that bag of money, are you?”
“I wished I had it. But I’m not blown by it.”
“So what’re you doin?”
“ ’Bout to take a walk. You seein your redhead tonight?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Should I call you in the morning and wake your ass up?”
“No need. I’ll swing by and get you, same time as usual.”
Ben ended the call. He slipped Of Mice and Men, a worn Penguin edition he had bought used, into the rear pocket of his jeans and headed out the door in the direction of the cemetery. There was still an hour or so of summer light, enough for him to sit and read in peace.
CHRIS LIVED in a house that had been converted into three apartments on a street of single-family homes in downtown Silver Spring, just over the District line in Maryland. He had chosen it when he’d seen the built-in bookshelves in its living-room area, a place to house the many biography and US history titles that he read and collected. Ali had gotten him hooked with the Taylor Branch books on Dr. King and the civil rights movement, which were two volumes when Chris was incarcerated and had grown to a trilogy after his release. He liked anything by Halberstam, the unconventional takes on the world wars by Paul Fussell, David McCullough’s entire body of work, and war memoirs like E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed, which he felt was the finest book of its kind ever written. He was inspired by these extraordinary writers and their subjects, even as he was aware of and resigned to his own very ordinary life.
His place was small but entirely adequate for his needs. He did not have many possessions other than his books, and he kept a neat and uncluttered apartment. He lined his shoes up in pairs under his bed, heels out, as he had done beneath his cot at Pine Ridge. He had a small television set and bought the most basic cable package so that he could watch sports. Every morning, before he went to work, he made his bed.
The other tenants of the house were the Gibsons, a young punkish couple, the husband a rock musician, the wife a private music teacher, and Andy Ladas, a middle-aged man who kept to himself and smoked cigarettes on the porch at night as he slowly drank bottled beer. The four of them took turns mowing the lawn with regularity, and the couple went beyond the call and landscaped the yard, keeping the property in better shape than many of the homeowners on the block did. Despite this, there were rumblings on the neighborhood Listserve about keeping future renters off the street. If they wanted him gone, fine, he’d go. He’d had the sense that he’d be moving around frequently, anyway. That his would be that kind of nomadic life.
But he was feeling different lately, since he’d been going out with Katherine. Yeah, she meant more to him than the other young women he’d been with since coming out. If pressed, because he was not one to talk about such things, he’d even admit that he was in love with her. But also, he felt that this change in outlook had to do with his age. Just as it felt normal to rebel as a teenager, settling into something more permanent felt natural as he moved into the tail end of his twenties.
After a long shower, Chris dressed in Levi’s and an Ecko Unlimited button-down shirt, which he had purchased from the Macy’s up in Wheaton. Most of his peers from the neighborhood he’d grown up in shopped at Bloomingdale’s and Saks in Friendship Heights, or the Rodeo Drive–like stores that lined a block of Wisconsin Avenue across the Maryland line. Chris did not have the money to shop in those places, nor was he particularly cognizant of trendy fashion. The Macy’s where he shopped seemed to market to their black and Hispanic base in the Wheaton location, and he was cool with that. More accurately, he made do with what they offered. He could afford to shop there.
Chris drove the van over to PG County. It still held the old roll and padding, fitted between the buckets so that the rear doors would close, from the Bethesda job. He was headed to pick up Katherine at her parents’ home in University Park, a township of colonials and restored bungalows south of College Park.
Katherine’s father, James Murphy, was a tenured professor in arts and humanities at the University of Maryland. Her mother, Colleen, worked at a downtown think tank specializing in energy policy. Both were brilliant and perhaps overeducated to the point of social retardation. Their son had earned a bachelor’s degree but had no desire to go to graduate school and was working in New York as a boom operator on feature films. He was respected in his field, but his parents felt he had underachieved.
Their daughter, Katherine, had disappointed them completely. After graduating in low standing from Elizabeth Seaton, the Catholic girls’ high school in their area, she had floundered in PG Community College, dropped out, and had been working in the office of a warehouse for the past year. And now she was dating a man who installed carpet for a living and apparently had been incarcerated in his youth.
Chris understood their negativity. They were basically good people and in other circumstances they might have welcomed him into their home, but they wanted the best for their daughter. Admittedly he was not an exemplary prospect, but he cared for Katherine, respected her, and would protect her. He worked with his hands, but he worked hard and honestly. None of this was reassuring to her parents, but he was who he was, and for now it was the best he could do.
He stood on the stoop of their house and rang the doorbell.
Colleen Murphy answered. She was a tall brunette whose perpetually serious nature had taken a toll on her looks and spirit. Katherine had gotten her fair complexion and reddish hair from her father.
“Hey, Mrs. Murphy. How you doin?”
“I’m fine, Chris.”
“Is my friend ready?”
“Yes, just about. Would you like to come in?”
“Nah, this is fine.”
Chris had called Katherine from his cell when he was a few minutes away from the house, hoping she’d be waiting when he arrived, hoping to avoid this.
Colleen Murphy stared at him, looking down on him slightly because she was up a step in the door frame. He moved his eyes away from hers and looked around at the old-growth trees on the property, the azaleas framing the stoop, and a large triple-trunk crepe myrtle with scarlet blossoms. A Sunfish sailboat, covered by a tarp, was set on a trailer beside the house.
“Nice yard,” said Chris lamely.
“Yes,” said Colleen Murphy.
“Does Mr. Murphy sail?”
“Occasionally.”
Thankfully, Katherine came down the center hall stairs. She wore a green-and-rust shift with green T-strap sandals, and she had one of those black band things in her strawberry blonde hair. She brushed past her mother and met Chris outside the door.
“See you, Mom,” said Katherine.
“Take care, Mrs. Murphy,” said Chris, saluting stupidly, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Katherine kissed him on the cheek and took his hand, and they walked across the yard to his van. Chris thinking, Her mom hates me.
Colleen Murphy watched as her daughter and Chris Flynn got into the van. At that moment, she had no animosity in her at all. She was thinking of a time when her boyfriend, Jimmy Murphy, had picked her up from her own parents’ house in Burke, Virginia, back in the midseventies. How they had laughed and held hands on the way to his car, a gold Ford Pinto station wagon with synthetic wood-paneled sides. How tall he was, how s
trong his hand felt in hers, how she couldn’t wait to have those hands on her breasts and ribcage.
She turned and went back inside her house. James Murphy would be in his office, working. They would have a quiet dinner with little conversation. She would turn in early, and he would come to bed after she had gone to sleep.
In the van, around the corner from her house, Katherine told Chris to pull over to the side of the road.
“Where?” said Chris.
“Here. That house has been unoccupied for the last six months.”
“So?”
“Just do it.”
“Okay.”
When he put it in park, she leaned across the carpet and padding and kissed him deeply.
“What’s that for?” said Chris.
“My apologies. For keeping you waiting.”
She rubbed the crotch of his jeans. He placed his hand on her muscled thighs, and she opened her legs as she unzipped him and pulled him free.
Chris laughed. “Right here?”
“There a problem?” she said, working him until he could take it no longer. He moved her hand away.
“Damn, girl.”
“What?”
“I’m about to bust.”
“You afraid you’re gonna mess up the seats?”
“More like your hair.”
“Quit boasting.”
“I’m sayin, I’m a young man. I got velocity.”
“C’mon, let’s get in the back.”
“For real?”
She kissed him. “Come on, Chris.”
Afterward, they went to dinner at a pho house in Wheaton, because they liked the soup and it was cheap. The restaurant was in a commercial strip of Laundromats and Kosher and Chinese grocers. The diners sat communally at tables similar to those found in school cafeterias. Except for Chris and Katherine, all of the customers were Vietnamese. No one talked to them, or seemed to notice the sweat rings on Chris’s shirt or Katherine’s unkempt hair. At the end of the meal, Chris bought an inexpensive bottle of Chilean red at the deli next door, and they drove back to his place in Silver Spring.
They made love properly, but no less energetically, in his bed. Chris had lit votive candles around the room, with his small stereo set on WHUR, playing the old EWF tune “Can’t Hide Love.” The candles and the music were on the corny side, but Chris was a D.C. boy all the way, and Quiet Storm was in his blood. His parents had listened to Melvin Lindsay, the originator, spin Norman Connors and Major Harris when Thomas and Amanda Flynn were young and making love on hot summer nights just like this one.
Katherine, lying naked atop the sheets beside Chris, reached over and traced her finger down the vertical scar above his lip.
“Your dad finally talked to me today,” said Katherine. “Susie sort of made him. In her own sloppy way, she let him know that you and I were together.”
“Did he call you honey or sweetheart?”
“I think it was ‘darling.’ ”
“That’s my pops. He has trouble remembering names. Odd for a salesman, but there it is. He’ll remember yours now, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“My parents had a baby named Kate who died before I was born. Dad still talks about her. Like she’s going to come back and be everything that I’m not.”
“Your father cares about you, Chris.”
“Like you care for a lame dog. You know Champ is never gonna win a show or a race. But you look after him anyway, out of the kindness of your heart.”
“It’s not attractive when you feel sorry for yourself.”
“I’m not. I never do. I’m sayin, this is how I think it is from his eyes. I don’t have a problem with who I am. Far as I’m concerned, I’m doing fine. But my pops looks at me like I’m some kind of cripple. My past still eats at him, Katherine. There’s got to be a reason for the troubles I had, and he needs to know why. Look, my parents didn’t cause me to jump the tracks, and I never meant to hurt them. I was selfish and full of fire, and I wasn’t thinkin right. That’s the best way I know how to explain it. Truth is, my fuckups were mine and mine alone.”
“When I dropped out of college,” said Katherine, “I could hear my parents whispering, and then arguing, behind their bedroom door. It was all about the bad decisions they thought they had made along the way. How they should have moved out of PG County, or put me in a better high school, got me away from my friends and other bad influences. How they should have pushed me harder to get better grades. But I just plain didn’t like school, Chris. I didn’t like it when I was a little kid. Not everybody goes to college. Not everybody can get more education than their parents, or make more money than them, or live in a nicer house than the one they grew up in.”
“I hear you. But they want it for you anyway.”
“It’s natural for them to feel like that.”
“Way your mom looks at me, seems like she’s made her mind up that I’m not the right one for you.”
“My mom’ll come around,” said Katherine. She moved beside him and pressed her flat belly against him. “You know, if you weren’t an installer, if I hadn’t dropped out of school and taken that dumb job in the office…”
“We wouldn’t have met.”
“So everything’s been to the good, far as I’m concerned.”
They kissed.
“This is right,” said Chris, holding her close.
“You can feel it, can’t you. We’re supposed to be together, Chris.”
“Yes.”
He told her about the bag of money that Ben had found earlier in the day. He told her that he’d convinced Ben to put it back in the space under the floor.
“You made a good decision,” said Katherine. “I guess.”
Chris chuckled. “You’re not so sure, either.”
“Who wouldn’t think twice about keeping it? But it seems like it would come to bad if you took it. I mean, it’s not yours. Technically…”
“It’s stealing. What I’m worried about is, did I do right by Ben. At the time, I thought I did. I felt like I was tryin to protect him by leaving that money there.”
“But you’re not positive now.”
“Back in Pine Ridge, Ali told me that I was always going to be taken care of in some way, ’cause of my father and mother. And he was right. But Ben, he’s got nothin. No family and no kinda breaks. To him, fifty grand in a gym bag is a gift from heaven.”
“He’s not angry with you, right?”
“No, we’re straight.”
“So why are you stressed about it?”
Chris stroked Katherine’s arm. “I’m just worried about my friend.”
FOURTEEN
BEN BRASWELL heard a knock on his apartment door. He got up from his chair, walked barefoot and softly to the peep, and bent his tall frame to look through the glass in the hole. He sighed audibly, stood to his full height, and considered his next move.
There was little chance that Lawrence could know that Ben was home. If Ben stood here quietly, eventually Lawrence would give it up and go. Ben knew that a drop-in by Lawrence meant that Lawrence’s hand was going to be outstretched in some way. But Ben could not just stand behind the door like a coward, and it wasn’t in him to be deceitful. Lawrence, low as he was and could be, was a man. He deserved respect until it was no longer warranted. Ben unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door.
“My boy,” said Lawrence Newhouse.
Ben raised his hand warily and they touched fists. Lawrence’s eyes were pink and the smell of weed was on him.
“What you doin here, man?”
“Can’t a friend visit?”
“It’s late.”
“Night owl like you? Shit. You was always the last one asleep at the Ridge. Talkin to yourself in your cell at all hours. Remember?”
“Come on.”
Lawrence walked in. Ben closed the door behind him, leaned his back against it, and crossed his arms. Lawrence went to a chair that had been new in the 1970s and had a
seat. Ben dropped his arms to his sides and spread himself out on a worn sofa near the chair.
“I got work tomorrow,” said Ben.
“That’s good,” said Lawrence. “Wished I did, too.”
“Thought you had a detailing thing.”
“I do, but it’s slow. Gas prices go up, people don’t be drivin their cars. They don’t take ’em out the garage, they don’t feel the need to clean ’em. You know how that is.”
“You got a place of business?”
“Nah, my shit is portable, man. I bring my supplies in a grocery cart and wash and detail the whips right at the places where people stay at. Most everybody got a hose. If they don’t, I carry one with me. All my, you know, transactions are in cash, so I don’t have to fuck with no taxes. Don’t pay rent, either. I got a good thing. But like I say, right now it’s slow.”
Some business, thought Ben. But at least Lawrence is doing something halfway straight. Least he’s not shootin at anyone. Or getting his ass beat regular.
“Why you come to see me?” said Ben.
“Damn, boy, you just short and to the point, ain’t you?”
“Told you, it’s late.”
Lawrence rubbed sweat theatrically from his yellowish forehead. He head-tossed his braids back off his face. “Hot in this piece.”
“Air’s on. Maybe it’s you.”
“Hot and small. Feel like I’m in a coffin in here and shit. You know I don’t like these small spaces. Reminds me of when I was inside.”
“You free to roll out.”
“Let’s both go out. Have a drink. Little bit of vodka on a nice summer night like this?”
“I got no extra for that.”
“I got you. Bottle’s sittin out in my car. All’s we need to do is stop and get some ice-cold juice.”
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