The Way Home

by George Pelecanos

  I’m not gonna give him that gift, thought Lawrence. Let death laugh at him and walk toward him slow.

  Lawrence stumbled to the edge of the parking lot. He saw the path of wood chips and mud lined by beveled railroad ties. He made it there. He looked at his hand and saw that it no longer held the gun. He tripped and fell and slid down the hill. He managed to get back up. He saw the bench at the end of the trail, set before the ledge. He was there and he dropped onto it. He sat and looked across the treetops, down to the Anacostia. It was a wide ribbon of brown, and rain dotted its surface. He heard sirens and his vision began to fade.

  This is where I want to be.

  Lawrence stared at the river.

  When they found him, he was staring at it still.

  PART FOUR

  THE WAY HOME

  THIRTY

  ON A Sunday late in April, the family attended early mass. They then visited Ben’s grave at the cemetery and went to breakfast at the Open City Diner in Woodley Park. Afterward, Thomas and Amanda returned to their house on Livingston, changed their clothes, and put Django in the back of the SUV. They met Chris and Katherine on Albemarle Street in Forest Hills, where they all walked onto the entrance of the Soapstone Valley Trail in a tributary of Rock Creek Park.

  They went along a flat stretch, followed the yellow trail markers painted on the trees, and navigated a steep slope into the valley. They stopped to look at a tall oak. On its trunk had been carved a heart enveloping Thomas’s and Amanda’s names, and the year 1980. A smaller heart was below it, bearing the name of Darby, Chris’s childhood dog. A third heart contained the name of Chris and 1982, the year of his birth. Using her cell phone, Amanda took a photo of the tree. Chris and Flynn exchanged a look and they walked on.

  Seeing no other hikers or pets, Flynn let Django off his leash. The Lab mix immediately galloped off trail and crashed into the woods in search of the creek, where he could splash in the water. They followed him there, Katherine and Amanda walking ahead of Chris and Flynn. Chris noticed the gray in his mother’s hair as the sun, streaming down through the trees, highlighted it and brightened the water where Django played. There was a lightness in Amanda’s step.

  Flynn tripped on an exposed root, and Chris grabbed his arm before he fell. Steadying him, Chris smelled alcohol on his father and wondered when he had found the time to steal a drink. Chris made no mention of it. He felt that he was perhaps responsible for his father’s deteriorated condition. Or maybe his father would have gotten to that place on his own, without the troubles they’d had. In any case, Chris wouldn’t lecture him or question him in any way. For a long time it had seemed unlikely that they would all be back here, together and settled, as they were now.

  “Thanks,” said Flynn.

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “To prop up your old man.”

  “You’re not so old.”

  “Feels like I am. I’ll never lay carpet again, that’s for sure. I can’t get up off my knees.”

  “You’ve got Isaac and his guys for that.”

  “And you,” said Flynn. “And your boy, what’s his name…”

  “Marquis.”

  “Yeah, him. How’s he doing?”

  Marquis was a work in progress. Chris said, “He’ll be fine.”

  With some convincing from Chris and Ali, Flynn had put Marquis Gilman on. It was one of Ali’s last acts as an assistant at Men Movin on Up. His boss, Coleman Wallace, had accepted a job in the D.C. government, and Ali had taken over the top spot. Ali was frequently on TV now as a spokesperson and advocate for at-risk boys, and sometimes as a voice of community conscience when boys got murdered. Chris smiled when he’d catch him on television, at press conferences and such. It was funny, realizing that all those cameras and eyes were upon him, knowing where Ali had come from. It was true that Chris was a little envious, seeing that Ali had done something meaningful with his life. But he was also very proud.

  Flynn and Chris found a seat on some boulders in a patch of sunlight out on the creek. Amanda and Katherine were playing with Django on the bank, throwing a stick into the water, the dog’s tail spinning like a prop as he watched the prize float on the current.

  “You did good,” said Flynn. “She’s a solid woman.”

  “She is,” said Chris. “You finally got your Kate.”

  “It’s Katherine,” said Flynn.

  The stick went down the creek and neared a bend. Django waited until the last moment and jumped in to retrieve it.

  “How’s school?” said Flynn.

  “It’s all right. It’s just one class. Most of the stuff, I’m familiar with. I mean, I already read all those history books you turned me on to.”

  “Stay with it.”

  “I’ll see where it goes.”

  “And stay with our company. Isaac wants to expand, and we’re gonna need your help. It’s going to get better for you. Less grunt work and more management.”

  “There’s money for all of us,” said Chris, and Flynn blushed a little and smiled.

  “Seriously,” said Flynn, nodding his chin in the direction of Katherine, her strawberry blonde hair lifted by the breeze. “You’re gonna be working for three soon. You’ll need that paycheck.”

  “I know it,” said Chris. “I’m gonna keep the day job. But I’ve also got my eye on something else.”

  “If you want to be a teacher, pursue it. I’ll be there for you if you get jammed up. Me and your mom.”

  They sat there for a while, enjoying each other’s company, saying little but not uncomfortable in the silence. Then Chris got up and joined his mother and Katherine, talking about the wedding and the baby that was on the way. Chris dutifully listened and acted as if he cared about caterers and floral arrangements, but they knew he did not and told him that it was okay to leave them to their conversation and fun. Chris smiled at his mother, kissed Katherine, and turned back to the rocks. Thomas Flynn was gone.

  Chris walked through the woods. He got back on the trail and followed its markers south. A cloud passed overhead and the landscape darkened. And Chris thought, Isn’t it so.

  He was not unaware of his good fortune. He had been born in a well-to-do neighborhood, raised in a loving home. When he’d gotten out of Pine Ridge, his father had put him to work and his mother had continued to feed him and buy him clothes even as he passed from boy to adult. At twenty-six he’d come close to killing two men but was stopped by someone who sacrificed himself instead. Chris hadn’t been charged or implicated in any way. His call to the police had helped, along with Bob Moskowitz, who was tight with the prosecutors downtown.

  Chris knew that for everyone like him, who had good fortune, there was a Lawrence Newhouse, who had none. But it wasn’t as if Chris would go untouched. His life would not always be a spring afternoon, sunlight streaming on his mom, a breeze caressing the hair of his beautiful lover, a strong dog joyfully playing in a creek. If he could have looked into his future, he’d have seen much happiness in the family he would raise, and fulfillment in his career, as well as wrenching disappointment, regret, and old age. He’d have seen his mother, alone and suddenly aged, praying the rosary in her room. He’d have seen his father lying on a morgue slab at the age of fifty-five, his face deeply cut from windshield glass, his blood alcohol level impossibly high.

  If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death. But that will come in time, thought Chris. Not today.

  The clouds broke as he went down a long slope and found his father, standing before the thick oak rooted in the valley floor. Flynn had his open buck knife in hand. He was carving Katherine’s name beside Chris’s, inside the heart on the family’s tree.

  “Dad,” said Chris.

  Thomas Flynn turned and stepped toward his son.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) of the District of Columbia, for his good work and assistance. Also, thanks
go out to the youth, staff, and guards at the Oak Hill juvenile detention facility for their candid opinions and conversations. My lifelong friend Steve Rados provided the carpet-and-floor-business expertise.

  For more information on the promotion of a more effective criminal-justice system through reform of sentencing laws and practices, and alternatives to incarceration, go to www.sentencingproject.org.

  Following is an excerpt from the opening pages of

  The Turnaround

  TWO BROTHERS walked up a slightly graded rise toward a small market and general store called Nunzio’s. They had just finished playing one-on-one at the outdoor court of a recreation center that adjoined an African Methodist Episcopal church. The older of the two, eighteen-year-old James Monroe, held a worn basketball under his arm.

  Both James and his younger brother, Raymond, were long and thin, cut in the solar plexus and flat of chest, with good definition in the shoulders and arms. Both wore their hair in blowouts. James, a recent high school graduate, was good-looking and fully formed, and stood over six feet. At fifteen years old, Raymond was just as tall as James. As they walked, Raymond used a fist-topped pick to upcomb his hair.

  “James,” said Raymond, “you seen Rodney’s new stereo yet?”

  “Seen it? I was with him when he bought it.”

  “He got some big-ass Bozay speakers, man.”

  “Call it Bose. You sayin it like it’s French or somethin.”

  “However you say it, those speakers is bad.”

  “They are some nice boxes.”

  “Man, he played me this record by this new group, EWF?”

  “They ain’t all that new. Uncle William got their first two records.”

  “They’re new to me,” said Raymond. “Rodney put on this one song, ‘Power’? Starts off with a weird instrument—”

  “That’s a kalimba, Ray. An African instrument.”

  “After that, the music kicks in hard. Ain’t no words in this song, either. When Rodney turned it up… I’m telling you, man, I was trippin.”

  “You shoulda heard those speakers at the stereo store we went to,” said James. “Down on Connecticut? They got this sound room in the back, all closed up in glass. Call it the World of Audio. The salesman, long-haired white dude, puts Wilson Pickett on the platter. ‘Engine Number Nine,’ the long jam. Got to be the one record he spins when he trying to sell a stereo system to the black folk. Anyway, Rodney, you know he don’t play that. So he says to the dude, ‘Don’t you have any rock records I can hear?’ ”

  “Messin with the white dude’s head.”

  “Right. So the salesman puts on a Led Zeppelin. That song with all the weird shit in the middle of it, music flyin back and forth between the speakers? One where the singer’s talking about, ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love.’ ”

  “Yeah, Led Zeppelin… he’s bad.”

  “It’s a group, stupid. Not just one dude.”

  “Why you always tryin to teach me?”

  “You shoulda heard it, Ray. Those speakers liked to blow us out the room. I mean, Rodney couldn’t pull his wallet out fast enough. Fifteen minutes later, the stock boy is cramming a couple of Bozay Five-Oh-Ones into Rodney’s trunk.”

  “Thought it was Bose.”

  James reached out and tapped his brother’s head with affection. “I’m just playin with you, son.”

  “I’d like to have me a stereo like that one.”

  “Yeah,” said James Monroe. “Rodney got the baddest stereo in Heathrow Heights.”

  Heathrow Heights was a small community of about seventy houses and apartments, bordered by railroad tracks to the south, woods to the west, parkland to the north, and a large boulevard and commercial strip to the east. It was an all-black neighborhood, founded by former slaves from southern Maryland on land deeded to them by the government.

  By geography, some said by design, Heathrow Heights was both self-enclosed and cut off from the white middle- and upper-class neighborhoods around it. There were several traditionally black communities, most of them larger in area and population, like this one in Montgomery County. None seemed as secluded and segregated as Heathrow. The people who grew up here generally stayed here and passed on their properties, if they had managed to retain ownership of them, to their heirs. The residents were proud of their heritage and generally preferred to stay with their own.

  The living conditions were far from utopian, though, and there certainly had been challenges and struggles. The early residents had owned their properties through deeds, but many houses had been sold to land speculators during the Depression. The properties were bought by a group of white businessmen who razed them, then built minimally sound, cheap houses on the lots and became absentee landlords. The majority of these homes had no hot water or indoor bathrooms. Heat was provided by wood-burning kitchen stoves.

  Children had attended a one-room schoolhouse, later a two-room, on the grounds of an AME church. Elementary-age kids were educated there until the big change of 1954. Residents shopped at a local market, Nunzio’s, founded by an Italian immigrant and eventually passed on to his son, Salvatore. Consequently, many grew up without much contact with whites.

  Most of the roads in Heathrow had remained unpaved by the county until the 1950s. By the ’60s, community activists had petitioned the government to force landlords to make improvements to their properties. Officials did so reluctantly. A women’s association in one of the neighboring white communities had joined Heathrow’s residents in forcing the government’s hand, but by ’72, the neighborhood was blighted still. Ramshackle houses, improperly constructed and “improved,” were in disrepair. Rusting cars sat on cinder blocks in backyards among broken toys and other debris.

  To liberals, it made for dinner conversation, the stuff of slow head shakes and momentary concern between the serving of the roast beef and the pour of the second glass of cabernet. To some of the middle- and working-class white teenagers of the surrounding area, who learned insecurity from their fathers, Heathrow Heights was the subject of ridicule, slurs, and pranks. They called it “Negro Heights.” To James and Raymond Monroe, and to their mother, a part-time domestic, and their father, a D.C. Transit bus mechanic, Heathrow was home. Of them, only James had dreams of moving out and on.

  James and Raymond came up on a couple of young men, Larry Wilson and Charles Baker, sitting on the curb in front of Nunzio’s. Both were shirtless in the summer heat. Larry was smoking a Salem, drawing on it so hard and rapidly that its paper had creased. Both of them were drinking Carling Black Label beer from cans. A brown bag sat between them.

  Baker had a wild head of hair that was matted in spots. He looked over Raymond with hazel eyes prematurely drained of life. Baker’s face had been scarred by a young man with a box cutter who had casually questioned his manhood. Several people had gathered to witness the fight, the subject of rumors for days. Charles, bleeding profusely from the slice but visibly unfazed, had downed his opponent, kicked aside his weapon, and broken his arm by snapping it over his knee. The crowd had parted as a laughing, wounded Charles Baker had walked away, the boy on the ground convulsing in shock.

  “Y’all been ballin?” said Larry.

  “Down at the hoop,” said James. It was the only one in the neighborhood, and he didn’t have to elaborate.

  “Who won?” said Larry.

  “I did,” said Raymond. “I took him to the hole like Clyde.”

  “You let him win?” said Larry, with a nod to James.

  “He won square,” said James.

  Larry hotboxed his cigarette down to the filter and pitched it out into the street.

  “What you all gonna do today?” said Raymond.

  “Drink this brew before it gets too hot,” said Charles. “Ain’t nothin else to do.”

  Of them, only James had a job, a twenty-hour-a-week thing. He pumped gas at the Esso up on the boulevard and was hoping to move up from there. He planned to take a mechanics class. His father, who occasi
onally let him work on the family’s Impala, changing the belts, replacing the water pump, and the like, said he had skills. James was hoping to hook Raymond up with an entry-level position at the station when he turned sixteen.

  “You hear Rodney’s new system?” said Raymond, looking at Charles and not Larry. Raymond, being young, admired Charles for his violent rep and courted his favor.

  “Heard of it,” said Charles. “Hard not to hear of it, the way Rodney be braggin on it.”

  “He got a right to brag,” said James. “Rod earned that money; he can spend it how he wants to.”

  “He ain’t got to boast on it all the livelong day,” said Larry.

  “Actin superior,” said Charles.

  “Man’s got a job,” said James, defending his friend Rodney and making a point to his kid brother. “No reason to cut on him for that.”

  “You sayin I can’t hold a job?” said Charles.

  “I ain’t never known you to hold one,” said James.

  “Fuck all a y’all,” said Charles, looking past them and addressing the world. He drank from his can of beer.

  “Yeah, okay,” said James tiredly. “Let’s go, Ray.”

  James tugged on Raymond’s belt. They walked up the steps to Nunzio’s market. On the wooden porch fronting the store, they stopped to say hello to a Heathrow elder who was retrieving her small terrier mix from where she had tied his leash to a crossbeam, used often as a hitching post.

  “Hello, Miss Anna,” said James.

  “James,” she said. “Raymond.”

  They entered the store and went to a refrigerated bin, where James found some Budding pressed luncheon meat that sold for sixty-nine cents. He grabbed two packages, beef and ham. Raymond got himself a bag of Wise potato chips and two bottles of Nehi, grape for him and orange for James. They stood on the porch and ate the meat straight out of the package. They shared the chips and drank their sweet sodas as they looked down at the street, where Larry and Charles now stood, having risen off the curb but still inert.