by Randy Alcorn
At Keisha and Celeste’s insistence, Clarence began reading the third Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Jake had given him a copy of Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. After reading it twice he’d passed it on to Dani, who devoured it and started reading other Lewis books. Even though he was a Lewis fan, this was Clarence’s first trip through Narnia.
The children laughed after Clarence read the opening line: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Hearing the name “Clarence” helped set them off.
“Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card.” The portrait of the surly, arrogant Eustace continued. He thought things and did things that were selfish and hateful. Eventually Eustace Clarence’s inner condition transformed his appearance. The boy turned into a hideous pathetic dragon.
For some reason this frightened Clarence.
“I want to introduce you to someone,” Torel said to Dani. She looked at the man Torel towered over. He appeared very pleasant, with an impish twinkle in his eye that reminded her of her daddy. He smiled with polite reserve, but his eyes shined. Though she’d never seen him, she instantly felt as if she knew him.
“Welcome to Elyon’s world, daughter of Eve,” the man said brightly. She enjoyed his delightful British accent and his deep drawn-out, Hitchcock-like voice.
“Dani,” Torel said, “this is C. S. Lewis.”
“Lewis!” she exclaimed, wide eyed. “Oh, I loved your books. They’re wonderful. My family’s reading through Narnia right now in the Shadowlands!”
“Yes, so your guardian told me,” Lewis said. “Torel spoke to my own advocate, Eldil, and asked if I might come and help tutor you for part of your orientation. That is, if you wish it.”
“Wish it? I’d die for it!”
“Well,” Lewis said with a smile, “there’s no need for that, is there? You already have.”
Torel seemed to enjoy Dani’s obvious delight. “Those who impact Elyon’s children on earth,” the angel said, “often take a role in orienting them to heaven. Sometimes that includes people you knew on earth, other times ancestors you’ve never known, such as Zeke and Nancy. It may include someone whose writings Elyon used in your life. Lewis is one of those, and since he still speaks to your family in the Shadowlands, it seemed appropriate to seek him out.”
“Appropriate? It was a wonderful idea. Thank you, Torel!” She threw her arms around him. He hugged her back with angelic reserve. “How like Elyon to surprise me with a treat like this!”
“Yes,” Torel said. “Does not his Word tell you that he delights in the well-being of his servant and that in his presence there is fullness of joy?”
“Come,” Lewis said, extending his hand to Dani. “Walk with me—I know just the place, one that stimulates both mind and body. As we walk, I will ask you questions and learn all about you. Before class begins, I must discover exactly who my pupil is!”
Shadow stood at the door of the abandoned church doing pig watch while eight bangers gathered for business inside.
“Hear you did the burg over on Mason,” GC said to Pharaoh. “Nice crib. Got you some money to buy my stuff, make you up some rocks?”
“Burg? Me?” Pharaoh feigned innocence. “Man, I straight as an arrow. But I did win Lotto, so yeah, I got some green, if you got some white.”
“Got some fine white.” GC pulled the cocaine out of a baggy inside a McDonald’s sack. Pharaoh looked at it skeptically.
“Best stuff in town,” GC said. “Special blend. Sweet.” It all came from the same source, but he was a salesman. He would have succeeded in a hundred legal occupations as surely as he did in this one.
Pharaoh, who’d excelled in science classes before he dropped out of high school, examined the powder with the detailed eye of a chemist. He poured some powder into a test tube, then dropped in a pinch of baking soda to harden it. He measured just the right amount of water and added it carefully.
Pharaoh’s four companions watched respectfully, one hungrily picking up tips he could emulate when he graduated to high roller. The other three, less entrepreneurial, eyed the product itself and hungered only for it.
Pharaoh took out of his coat pocket a small butane lighter, an inch and a half wide and six inches long. He held the flame under the test tube, cooking it just so, like a finicky French chef. He added a few drops of cold water. He shook up the sticky substance until it hardened. He jounced the tube just so, and the newly formed rock clattered around like a single die in a Yahtzee cup.
Pharaoh placed the rock neatly in the middle of a piece of brillo stuck in the broken-off bottom of a car antenna, in a neighborhood where many cars no longer had antennas. He lit it. The moment the rock got hot enough, he took a long, hard drag, with the finesse of a wine taster. Pharaoh took advantage of the small window of opportunity and got his one vapor, his quick hit.
The four junkies were getting restless, like starving men watching the line go through a smorgasbord. Finally one of them took over for Pharaoh and produced more rocks. Another took out a shiny mirror and chopped up the cocaine powder with a razor into four fine lines, each an inch and a half long. He passed out tooters, McDonald’s straws cut into two- or three-inch lengths. The first guy inhaled, sliding the straw steadily up the line, snorting it up his nose, the powder absorbing into the membranes.
One other junkie didn’t want to smoke or snort. He used the butane lighter to heat up water in a bottle cap, mixed in the cocaine, then drew it up a syringe. He injected a third of the syringe contents into his arm, then passed the needle to another shooter.
They all sat back, glassy-eyed, each going where no man had gone before.
“Which way you want to do it, little homie?” GC asked Ty.
Ty pointed at the mirror that had two lines left.
“Nah. Try the rock. You can do it.” GC took an extra rock, positioned it in the brillo at the antenna’s end, and told him, “Wait till I tell you, then suck it in.”
He held the fire up to the rock and suddenly said “Now.” Ty drew it in, got the full vapor, rocking him back.
Ty had smoked dope, but never crack. The bag of cocaine his uncle had found under his mattress had been entrusted to him to deliver to someone at school. He’d never done the stuff till this moment. He’d studied the others as tinies always do, not wanting to look the fool when their time comes. Ty was an amateur in a room full of veterans. He watched through changed eyes as one of the junkies studied the counter, then gathered a few white particles onto a piece of paper, as if they were the shavings off cut diamonds.
GC didn’t touch the stuff himself, not when he was on duty. “Never get buzzed when you doin’ a deal, or they run you up.” He was armed with his nine, and a tiny back-up derringer in his jeans pocket, as well as a knife. Every drug dealer’s dread was to get “run up on,” to be robbed in a sneak attack. Such an attack had only been successful on him once, back in South Central. It had been tried twice in Portland, leaving him with a bullet and a sore back from a baseball bat. But he’d left two attackers in the hospital and one laid out in a casket. Word was out that if you wanted to run up a high roller or a bailer, you’d better pick someone other than Gangster Cool of the Rollin’ 60s.
“Don’t smoke the co-caine,” he’d advised Ty, “sell it.” Yet now he’d introduced him to it. As Ty moved in and out of reality, he remembered GC’s tip on how to tell if you’re approached by an undercover cop trying to bust you. “Look at their eyes. If he be a crack smoker, his eyes all red. If his eyes white, he be a cop.”
After a while, Pharaoh’s head started to clear enough to do business. He looked at GC. “How much for a teener?”
“A teener?” GC looked horrified at the thought of selling only a sixteenth of an ounce. “Hundred dollars, but you make me mess with a teener, I charge you another fifty for the samples. I thought we’d do a Z, minimum.”
“How much for an eight ball?”
“One
eighty. You a dealer or just a doer? I’m sellin’ the Z today. If you can’t afford it, I got the plain stuff, I sell you an ounce for six hundred. You want a rep for havin’ the good stuff, it’s nine hundred for the best Z in town.”
“How ’bout eight?”
“How ’bout nine and the samples be free, like I always do for the big sellers? You can break it down in dimes, make your rocks, sell it for three thousand dollars.”
“Maybe twenty-six hundred.”
“Still be a big profit.”
“And lots of risk.”
“You a business man. You rewarded for risk.”
Pharaoh handed over nine hundred dollars cash, mostly in fifty-dollar bills, for an ounce of cocaine. After five more minutes they left, like business partners following a two-martini lunch. Now that Shadow was off duty, he fired up a rock himself.
Tyrone left the abandoned church a different boy. Already his body was developing an addiction to this new substance. Even now, though he didn’t yet know it, he was chasin’ the bag.
“Clarence, did you take some money from my purse?”
“Nope. Not guilty.”
“I could have sworn I had two twenties,” Geneva said. “Now I’ve just got a couple of ones. I can’t remember buying anything.” She hesitated. “This isn’t the first time this has happened. I don’t want to accuse him, but I’m wondering about Ty.”
“You think he’s a thief?”
“I don’t know. I just know I’m missing some money, and this is maybe the third time in the last few weeks. Considering what else he’s done, I admit I suspect him.”
“I’ve got to talk to him about the drug thing again. I’m not sure the confrontation with that crack dealer was enough. He looks spacy, eyes are red. I think he’s using. I’ve got to do more to convince him. I just don’t know what.”
Clarence walked to Ty’s bedroom and knocked. After a while he heard a faint groan. He opened the door. Ty looked utterly detached, as if his uncle’s presence had no meaning.
“Have you been taking money from your aunt’s purse?” Clarence asked. Ty shook his head unconvincingly, then covered guilt and fear with a sullen look, teen code for “go to blazes.”
“I want you to take a walk with me, Ty.”
“Where we goin’?”
“We’re going on a tour. And don’t make me pull you by the ear this time.”
They went out the front door and walked three blocks while Ty looked around frantically, hoping his homies wouldn’t see him marching around with his uncle again.
“I’m gonna show you what drugs do to you.” They walked past two addicts leaned against the wall. They looked like zombies straight out of Night of the Living Dead. A third to a half of their teeth were missing. Ty felt like heaving. He’d seen them before, but never got close to them, never looked at them like this. They sat there scratching, as heroin addicts do. Crack and methamphetamines were the younger generation’s drugs of choice, but heroin still had a market with the older addicts. The pitiful men had scars everywhere from being beaten and robbed who knows how many times. Their skin looked ashen and sickly. It seemed contradictory to see black men so pale. In the midst of four blacks sat a white man and a Hispanic.
“Drugs are multicultural,” Clarence said. “They’re nondiscriminatory. They take down everybody.” He gestured at a man with vacant eyes and a face as expressionless as a mask. The man wrapped up a tissue paper speedball, a combination of heroin and cocaine.
For most citizens, walking by these men was like driving past an accident. You wanted to look and not look at the same time. So you sort of half looked and half listened to their whispering whimpering testimony to a life not lived. Clarence was determined Ty would look and listen.
Two of the cocaine addicts appeared to be having a conversation, except neither could understand the other. They seemed oblivious to Clarence and Ty. A couple of times they glanced their way but looked through them as if they existed on another plane, as if their world was its own reality incapable of all but momentary intersections with the real world. They not only couldn’t see legions of warriors surrounding them, they could barely see the people around them.
“See those old men, Ty? They’re probably no more than forty. They’re not old, just ruined. See what drugs have done to them?”
“Don’t plan to live that long,” Ty said.
“Well, that’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy if you mess with drugs. Crack will take you out. You’ll be dead or wish you were. Maybe make somebody else dead. Is that what you want, son?”
“Don’t know what I want. Just want to hang with my homies. That’s all.”
They went farther, nearing the corner liquor store, one of a dozen in a two-mile radius. Two old men sat with hands extended, looking like beggars on the streets of Delhi.
“See these guys? They all started by just hangin’ with their homies too. Most of them don’t have a life outside three blocks from this liquor store. It’s their church, their synagogue. It defines the boundaries of their lives. They were nickel-and-dime hustlers. Now they beg for money. No self-respect. They eat rock and breathe liquor, that’s all they do. Take a good look, boy. That’s where you’re headed.”
Clarence stared at Ty’s face, seeing the determined look of a boy who doesn’t want to listen. “Hey, Petey.” Clarence waved to a man who looked as though he could be anywhere between thirty and seventy. He sat on the cold sidewalk, gazing suspiciously at Clarence.
“See that guy? Name’s Petey. I interviewed him for a column a few weeks ago. He doesn’t remember me. Doesn’t even remember how old he is. He just hustles for chump change, begging off little old ladies that come by. He’s still trying to be hip, shirttails out, hat on backwards. Permanent adolescence. Ugly, isn’t it? Like a twelve-year-old still wearing diapers. Anybody offer you so much as a toke, this is where they’re sending you. Remember that, boy.”
Ty stared at a crack in the concrete.
“In one of his clearer moments, I asked Petey what he thought of his life. Know what he said? ‘I may not be in hell yet, but I can see it and smell it.’ That what you want, boy? Answer me now.”
“No. But don’t want no white man pullin’ my strings neither.”
“Question is whether you’re going to pull your own strings. You really think the Man is making all this happen, putting the liquor stores everywhere, floodin’ the streets with crack? The white sheets aren’t smart enough to pull off this kind of program. This is straight from the devil. It’s right outta hell.”
“But it’s honkies that brings in the drugs and make the big money. They’re the ones that wants us to kill each other.”
“Well, boy, if you’re right, then you’re doing just what they want, aren’t you? Are you really that stupid? Come on. People taking the drugs and shooting the guns, they only got themselves to blame. You want to take on the Man, fine, go slug it out, get smarter than he is, beat him at his own game. But don’t hide in the ghetto and whine about injustice while you smoke the vapors. When white boys went to the moon, these brothas here were doing just what you’re starting now. Well, take a good look, Ty, because if this is the life you want, here it is. If you’re lucky. I mean. If you don’t end up in a casket before you’re twenty. They’re losers, man. Their big prize is when somebody drops a cigarette with a half inch left on it. Then they suck that baby down to the filter, and it’s like they repaired a car or taught a class or fixed a roof. Like it was some big deal. All the gangbangers, they’re losers just like these dudes.”
Ty glowered.
“Don’t care what you think of them, they’re still losers. They whine about how white folk treat black folk, then what do they do? Kill black folk. Break up black families. Steal black kids from their parents. Turn smart kids like you into stupid ones.” Clarence searched for the words that might get through. “Our ancestors were slaves, Ty. Their hands and feet were chained, but they learned to use their heads. Your hands and feet are free, but
you’re going to be a slave, a prisoner, if your mind doesn’t get back on track. You know why blacks kill blacks, boy? Answer me. You know why?”
“No.”
“Because they hate the color of their skin and they take it out on anybody that looks like them. Is that how your mama taught you to think?”
Ty shook his head. Tears started flowing. Clarence hugged him. “Let’s go home, son.” As the two walked past the liquor store, an audience of curious addicts watched a fight for purpose and dignity, a fight each of them had lost years ago.
Clarence pulled Ty close. “I want better for you, son. With your mama gone, somebody’s got to be her voice. That’s why I hammer on you, boy. Not because I don’t care about you. Because I do.”
The next day Clarence walked into the Main Street Deli and saw Ollie sitting at the far corner table, reading the front page of the Tribune. His eyes squinted at the words under the headline “Economic Problems Plague Country.”
“I thought you didn’t read the Trib,” Clarence said, taking the seat across from him.
“It’s not that I don’t read it. It’s just that I don’t believe it. There’s a difference.” Ollie flashed Clarence a serious expression. “There’s a real economic crunch, huh? I hear it’s so bad in New York City that the Mafia’s had to lay off five judges.”
“Ollie, before we get to anything else, I want to thank you for all your hard work on this case.”
Ollie looked surprised. “It’s my job.”
“You didn’t have to include me, and I really appreciate it.” Clarence cleared his throat. “Listen, I got some great seats for the playoffs—the Mariners and Yankees on Saturday. I was wondering if you’d want to go up to Seattle with me and my daddy and Jake?”
“Wow, no kiddin’? I’d love to. Count me in!”
They went to the front counter. Clarence noticed the girl taking his order seemed friendlier to him than usual. The two men settled back at their table.
“What’s the word on 920 Northeast Jack?” Clarence asked.