“So get yourself enrolled in a community college, then transfer to a university or state school when you make grades.”
“How would I support myself?”
“You’d work, just like you do now. Work during the day and go to your classes at night.”
“That would take forever.”
“Those years would go by quick. You could earn your teaching certificate and get out there and do some good. They got this Teach For America program, where people come fresh out of college and go to work in disadvantaged school districts—”
“Nah, man.”
“Why not?”
“That’s not who I am,” said Chris. “I’m a carpet installer, Ali.”
“You could be more.”
“Okay, Shawshank.”
Ali chuckled. “Shit. That old man just didn’t know when to quit, did he.”
“Like you,” said Chris, eyeing his friend and tapping his water bottle to Ali’s.
“Well, let me go pick up those knuckleheads,” said Ali, getting off the hood of his mother’s car.
“My father’s having his employee barbecue tonight at his house,” said Chris, retrieving the van keys from the pocket of his shorts. “You gonna come past?”
“Your pops walks backward when he sees me,” said Ali.
“He asked me to tell you to come by. Even though you made him put Lonnie and Luther on the payroll.”
“Don’t forget Milton.”
“Yeah, Milton couldn’t operate the tape measure. But my old man does like you. Not that I can figure out why. Prob’ly cause, out of me and my friends, you’re the only one who’s had any success.”
“You’re doin all right, too, man.”
“Right.” Chris walked toward the white van. “Come by, hear?”
Ali said, “I will.”
LAWRENCE NEWHOUSE walked up the road in his long T-shirt, along the Barry Farms dwellings, this particular block a two-story strip of tan motel-style structures with chocolate doorways and arches. Time was, in his youth, he and his boys at Parkchester would have been beefing with those at the Farms, and he supposed the young ones still did the same, but that was past for him. People looked at him as he went along, eyeing him but not hard, like he wasn’t worth the time it took to fix a stare. At twenty-six, Lawrence was old. He had not taken care of himself, what with his poor diet, drinking, all manner of smoke, and powder when he could get it. He looked close to forty.
He had a plastic bottle of fruit punch in his hand. He had bought it at the local Korean place, having woken up, still in his club clothes atop the sheets of his bed, with a vicious thirst. He’d spent a bunch of money the night before in that strip club he liked on New York Avenue. He’d spent it on hard liquor and dancers, the usual shove-the-bills-in-the-string thing, and on a gram of coke he’d copped in the bathroom from a young man he’d met at the bar. The freeze had made him shit soon as he’d taken his first bite of it off the end of a key. That’s what he got for buying coke from someone he didn’t know. Wasn’t much more than laxative, but it kept him awake. And it got one of the dancers interested enough to come outside with him and swallow his manhood in the backseat of her man’s car. Which had cost him another hundred. He didn’t remember driving his Cavalier back to Southeast, but it was parked in his spot, so he supposed that this is what he had done.
Money went quick.
Lawrence walked across a small dusty playground with monkey bars and the rusted, spidery frame of a swing set. At the edge of the playground a steel pole with no backboard was set in concrete. Around the pole was a tribute to a boy named Beanie, a loose arrangement of teddy bears, ribbons and banners, empty Hennessey bottles, and photographs, a commemoration of Beanie’s short, fast life and death by gun.
Then Lawrence was on Wade and heading toward the Parkchester Apartments, stepping around boys he recognized but did not speak to who were grouped at one of the entranceways, and going into a stairwell holding the usual stagnant smells of things that were fried, eaten, or smoked.
He went into his place.
It wasn’t his place, exactly. It was Dorita’s, his half-sister. Dorita was on government assistance, had three children by two different men, and let him stay here. When she was short on food or needed Nikes for the kids, he gave her cash, if he had it. He had it now, but Dorita didn’t know.
Her two younger kids, Terrence and Loquatia, were on the carpet, watching a show on a widescreen plasma television Dorita had bought on time. Loquatia, eleven and already running to fat like her mother, had her hand in a bowl of Skittles, running her fingers through the colored bits. Long as Loquatia was touching food, she was cool. Her little brother was staring at the cartoon lobster on the screen but daydreaming, thinking on something called a galaxy, which he had learned about in school. He had an active imagination, and his teacher suspected he was highly intelligent. The teacher had phoned Dorita to tell her about an accelerated program available at his elementary, but Dorita had yet to call her back.
Dorita sat on the living-room sofa, her feet up on it, cell phone in hand. There was no man currently in her life. She was thirty-two, and her stretch-marked belly spilled out from beneath her tight shirt. At two fifty, she had eighty pounds on Lawrence. They had the same mother but looked nothing alike.
“Where you been at?” said Dorita.
“I went down to the Chang’s,” said Lawrence.
“And you ain’t get me nothin?”
“Wasn’t like I went to the grocery store.” Lawrence head-shook his braids away from his face. “Where’s Marquis at?”
“Mr. Carter came past and picked him up. Before you woke up. Marquis said they were going to play basketball.”
“Okay,” said Lawrence, annoyed but not fully understanding why. He appreciated that Ali was trying to help the boy, and he also resented it.
“You snored last night,” said Terrence, and Dorita laughed.
“So?” said Lawrence. “You farted.”
Terrence and Loquatia laughed.
“If you goin to the Chang’s, you need to tell me,” said Dorita. “We could use some soda in this house.”
“I ain’t no shopping service.”
“You could contribute,” said Dorita. ’Stead of just taking all the time.”
“Least my mother didn’t name me after a corn chip,” said Lawrence, saying the same tired thing he had been saying to his sister since they were kids.
Dorita did not respond, and Lawrence went to his room.
It wasn’t his room, exactly. He shared it with the two younger kids. He had strung up a sheet between their beds and his single bed to give him some privacy. Didn’t leave much space, but this was what he had. Free rent, you couldn’t complain. Anyway, he was about to be out of here.
About to be.
He pulled aside the sheet, flopped down on his bed, and draped his forearm over his eyes. Underneath the bed, the bag of money. He felt he had to keep it close. But what was he going to do with it? That was the thing that was fucking with his head.
He knew he should be looking for a nice place of his own. Maybe go to one of the Eastern Motors and trade up off that hooptie he had. But then he’d be in an apartment by himself, no one to talk to, no one to Jone on, and driving a car that was newer, that’s all. He’d already spent a couple of thousand on women and fun. Beyond that, wasn’t anything that he could see to buy that would make him happy.
What he wanted, what he’d always craved, was to have friends and pride. He’d thought that money would help him get those things. But to get it, he’d tricked the one dude who’d been his friend, the only boy who’d stepped in and stood tall for him back when he was getting his ass beat regular at Pine Ridge. And now he, Lawrence, had gone and done him dirt.
Sometimes, no lie, he hated the sight of his own self in the mirror.
Lawrence rolled over onto his side. In the heat of the room, sweat dampening his long T-shirt, he went to sleep.
ALI CARTER lived with
his mother, Juanita Carter, in a vinyl-sided duplex town home on Alabama Avenue in Garfield Heights, across the road from the offices of Men Movin on Up. The development was on the new side, the yards were still clean, and the several hundred homes that had been constructed here had replaced some problem-ridden projects that had been good for no one. Houses here were still being sold for about three hundred thousand dollars, with low-interest loans and no-money-down offers in effect. A chain grocery store, the Seventh District Police Station, and Fort Stanton Park were within walking distance. Communities such as this one, housing longtime residents and newcomers alike, had been appearing in several spots in Southeast. Only those who were unreasonably resistant to change could say that this was not a positive development. For Ali, it was a huge step up, and a world away from where he’d been raised.
Juanita Carter had not been a bad mother to Ali and his sisters in any way; she had merely been born poor. Her start at the back of the line had crippled her, and by the time she had made a family, her lack of higher education and unfortunate choices in men had put her at a severe disadvantage. She and her kids lived in the Barry Farms dwellings, and she had no choice but to raise them in that rough-and-tumble and occasionally toxic atmosphere. After earning her GED, she started taking health care classes while working on the cleaning crew at the old D.C. General Hospital. But while she was bettering herself in order to move her family out of the Farms, Ali was entering his teens, a dangerous time for a boy to have little supervision at home. Juanita blamed herself to this day for the trouble Ali and one of his sisters, who eventually was lost to the streets, had found. But Ali knew it wasn’t her. It was him, and the fact that some young men just had to touch their hand to the flame to see for themselves that fire was hot.
“Where you off to?” said Juanita, as her son entered the kitchen in his pressed jeans and a sky blue Lacoste shirt, picking a pair of sunglasses out of a bowl on the counter that held his things.
“Chris Flynn’s father is having a cookout,” said Ali. “For his employees.”
“You don’t work for him.”
“No, but he’s been good to some fellas I know. At least, he tried to be.”
“So you gonna, what, show your appreciation to this man by eating his burgers and potato salad?”
“I’ll prob’ly ask him for some more favors, too.” Ali put his hand in Juanita’s bowl of things, set beside his, and looked at her sheepishly. “Can I get your car?”
“If you say you’re not gonna drink.”
“You know I don’t even like it.”
Ali took the keys and kissed his mother on the cheek. She was a small woman of forty-two with big brown eyes and a pretty smile. It was from her that he had acquired his modest height and handsome features.
In the past, they had experienced conflicts, but as adults, they made a good team. They had cosigned for the loan on the house and together they had made it work. She was an attendant at a dialysis center on 8th Street on Capitol Hill, and had learned to budget herself, watch her purchases, and still walk down the street in relative style. He stayed with her to pay her back, in some way, for the trouble he’d caused her as a youth. Both knew he’d be gone when he found someone special and started having kids of his own. She seemed to want it more than he did.
“Any girls gonna be at this barbecue?”
“Nah, Mama. We’re all members of the He-Men Women Hater’s Club.”
“I wonder sometimes.”
“Huh,” said Ali. He had his eye on this one girl he’d met at church, but his mother didn’t need to know that yet.
“Don’t drink tonight,” said Juanita, as her son headed out the door, her car keys in hand.
“I won’t,” said Ali.
She watched him go, thinking, I’m not trying to get on you or nag. I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s all it is.
You’ve come so far.
EIGHTEEN
CHRIS CAME down into Rock Creek Park on the winding Sherrill Drive, took Beach for a piece, and came up out of the park on Bingham, the east-west cut-through his father had showed him as a child. He drove the van up the long hill of Nebraska Avenue and headed west on McKinley. Katherine was beside him in the shotgun bucket, and Ben was on the collapsible second-row bench. As he tended to do when he reentered his old neighborhood, Chris grew quiet.
They stopped at the red light at McKinley and Connecticut Avenue. To their right were the fenced-in courts of the Chevy Chase Rec Center, where Chris had played under the lights and stars in various summer leagues. Across the avenue, to the north, was the Avalon, the theater where he had smoked weed in the men’s room with his friends before movies, now an independent operation showing art films.
“See those blocks of concrete?” said Ben, pointing a long finger between Chris and Katherine at the planters on the sidewalk past the bus shelter, lined along the sloping drive-way entrance to the drugstore at the southwest corner of Connecticut.
“Yes?” said Katherine, suspecting what was coming, having heard the story of Chris’s night of crime.
“Those are, like, monuments to Chris,” said Ben. “They put ’em up there after he drove his truck ’cross the sidewalk.”
“That wasn’t me. That was some other dude.”
Chris accelerated through the intersection on the green and glanced at the concrete barriers as he drove past.
“My legacy,” said Chris, and Katherine reached over and squeezed his hand.
Driving west on McKinley, Chris pulled to the right as far as he could to allow a late-model Audi to pass. The coupe came alongside him, and Chris looked to the driver for the courtesy nod. Their eyes met. The driver, a good-looking man around Chris’s age with a salon haircut and a clean open-necked white shirt, smiled nervously in recognition.
“Hey,” said the driver, with a finger wave.
“How’s it goin, man?” said Chris, returning the smile.
Neither of them stopped. Chris’s heavy foot gave the van a bit too much gas.
“Who was that?” said Katherine.
“A kid I ran with from the neighborhood,” said Chris.
“Looks like he prosperin, whoever he is,” said Ben.
“He got out of law school last year,” said Chris. “My father says he’s with a downtown firm now.”
“You never mentioned him to me,” said Katherine.
“Yes, I did,” said Chris.
“I guess I don’t remember.”
“No big deal,” said Chris. “He’s just a guy I used to know.”
THE COOKOUT was in the backyard of the Flynns’ clapboard colonial on Livingston. Depending on the level of business, Thomas Flynn employed six to eight men, but they came to this annual event with children, wives, girlfriends, and one or two uninvited friends. The yard was not large to begin with, and it was full.
Amanda Flynn had laid out a food spread on a table set on their screened-in porch, which led to an uncovered deck, where Flynn was busy barbecuing burgers, chorizo sausages, half-smokes, and chicken breasts on his commercial-grade gas grill. Amanda and Isaac’s wife, Maria, were moving back and forth from the kitchen to the porch, putting out sides, paper plates, napkins, and utensils, catching up with conversation as they worked. Flynn had a spatula in one hand and a bottle of Bud in the other. Within reach, on the rail of the deck, was a party ball of Jim Beam and shot glasses for anyone who cared to join him. Nearby were two iced-down coolers, one stocked with beer and white wine, the other holding sodas and water.
Music was coming from outdoor speakers mounted on the ceiling of the screened-in porch. It was a mix of Spanish-language pop with dramatic vocals, which everyone enjoyed to some degree but would become a bone of contention and discussion as the night wore on. Ben had brought his Rare Essence and Backyard Band tapes, Maze’s greatest hits, and the new Wale to drop in later, when folks got loose. One of Amanda’s jobs was to keep her husband away from the stereo, especially after he’d had a few drinks. This was not the crowd
for Thin Lizzy or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and no one here, with the exception of Thomas Flynn, was into Bruce.
Renee, Ben’s girlfriend, had joined them late, after she came off work at the nail salon. In her evening clothes and heels, she was overdressed for a cookout, but she looked good. Katherine, in a sundress, her hair down, was in conversation with Renee, as Ben was spending much of his time playing with Django, the Flynns’ dog.
Also in attendance was Lonnie Wilson. Though he had not worked for Flynn’s Floors for several years, and his employment had been short-lived, Lonnie liked a party and could not pass up free food and drink. He had brought along his wife, Yolanda, and their two children. Pussy-crazy Lonnie, who had talked incessantly about all the women he was going to slay when he left Pine Ridge, had married Yolanda, the first girl he got with when he came out. Despite the fact that Lonnie had been unable to hold a job and their money problems were deep, Lonnie and his family were a tight unit.
Darkness had settled on the yard. Chris, Ali, Ben, and Lonnie stood around an outdoor fire pit, drinking beer from bottles, talking, and looking into the fire that Chris had lit using wood stacked beside the alley garage. Thomas Flynn had built the pit years ago. Flynn had leveled the dirt, constructed the base and walls with cinder block and mortar, covered it with decorative stone veneer, grouted it, and capped it with concrete he cut and mitered himself.
Chris could not have constructed such a fine piece of work. He was not a natural handyman like his father. He was not even a particularly good carpet man, though he had learned enough to do satisfactory installations. Truth was, he wasn’t suited to his current job, but it had been made available to him and was what he had.
“Look at this dog, man,” said a gleeful Ben, holding a rubber toy by its U-shaped handle, the other end death-clenched in Django’s powerful jaws, the dog pulling furiously, his rear legs dug in, his eyes rolled back in his square head. “You see pit when he’s got somethin in his mouth.”
“The ID card at the shelter said ‘Labrador mix,’ ” said Chris. “They put that tag on all the dogs, even the beagles. People want to adopt Labs.”
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