Wexler was slight, shorter than Achilles, and his skin was much lighter, almost the color of pale cedar, like Troy’s. Before their tans had set in, people had thought Wexler and Troy were brothers. Wexler had the light step and braided muscles of a runner, which he was, but he looked thinner, if that was possible. His face was drawn, cheekbones sharpened as if by hunger, and when he raised his arms to give Achilles a hug, his shirt rode the waves of his ribs. But when Achilles felt Wexler’s forearms press against his shoulder blades, he knew that his friend’s strength had not faded one bit. Wexler squeezed even tighter, and Achilles’s eyes began to swell, so he dug his chin into Wexler’s shoulder until Wexler pushed him away.
Wexler clapped him on the shoulder. “Ape arms.”
Achilles pointed to the fancy black sedan. “You’re coming up in the world.”
Flashing his Love-Sexy grin, Wexler said, “My cousin’s. It’s in the witness protection program.”
Achilles was puzzled until Wexler explained, “He’s hiding it from the repo man.”
The laughter felt like a release valve, felt like the good old days when they would drink down a weekend of R&R without sleeping, felt good enough to ignore the shallow creeks running across Wexler’s cheeks, and Achilles’s new habit of averting his eyes.
“Where’s Chief?” asked Achilles, surprised that Naomi’s beagle wasn’t yapping at their heels.
“He’s gone.”
A knot pulled tight in Achilles’s stomach.
“Just old age. He was up there, you know.” Wexler winked and pointed up, his voice light. “Hey, you brought the rain.”
“Eee-yeah, baby. Here comes the thunder!” said Achilles, mimicking the battle cry that announced air support. They hunched their shoulders and peered up at the sky and listened attentively, nostrils flared, Wexler bent back at the waist as if leaning against an invisible wall. They saw the three flickering red lights on the belly of a jumbo jet, a squadron itself, and heard the engine, a low, distant rumble scraping the sky. Antennae atop skyscrapers blinked their secret, stuttering code through the clouds. A swarm of gnats snapped around their necks. The smell of jasmine mixed with the scent of fresh-cut grass mixed with lingering exhaust. Though a few feet from the car, the warmth radiating from the engine pressed against their thighs. A dog barked, another answered. In the house across the street, a light blinked on, yellow behind the faded curtain, followed by whimpering, the rattle of a chain, the clattering of a glass pane in a slamming door. Soon the jet had passed, that sound funneling into a distant point. They strained, but all that remained to be heard was the rain and humming gnats and breath. And though it was a bright night, the raindrops materialized only inches from their face, always too late and too close and too fast to blink in defense, but blink they did, catching the rain in their eyes until lightning sliced the night, illuminating Wexler’s eyes, round and burning, as when Troy had carried him out of that minefield. Achilles plucked Wexler on the back of the head where the cross on his Trojan would have been and said, as they’d always said after a touchdown, “They shoulda punted.”
Wexler shrugged, his eyebrows knitted. Achilles pressed his tongue behind his lower lip, poking it out, doing Troy’s impression of a drunken camel, coaxing his friend into thin laughter, and promising himself to never again utter, “Here comes the thunder.” As he searched for something reassuring to say, something Ines would say when she caught him intently watching the lines at the shelters, the burden of the unmentionable set in, and he remained silent as Wexler stepped aside to usher him up the porch stairs.
The living room, painted sage, was as orderly as a footlocker. The magazines were stacked in neat pyramids: Essence on the bottom, Jet and TV Guide on top. At Achilles’s house, that pile would have contained People, TV Guide, and Readers’ Digest. His mom had ordered a subscription to Jet when they were in middle school. Smaller than a comic book, it seemed appropriate for children. After she discovered that each issue included a weekly swimsuit centerfold, each little glossy mag appeared on their desk sans pinup. “Jet” became their code for “porn.” They later found the missing centerfolds in their father’s winter chest. It was funny to see that magazine here, nestled innocently between the other publications. Beside the magazines, the remote controls on the black lacquer entertainment center were arranged in squad formation, the bottom of each one flush with the front of the television. Wexler had remained fastidious, as they had all been once, believing that to have an item out of place was to be out of place was to invite disaster; they would sooner stand downwind during target practice. But Achilles knew it wasn’t Wexler’s home by the row of potted sunflowers lining the porch, the embroidered placemats, the burnt-orange bathroom walls, the smell of sage, and most importantly, the open blinds in every room. He recognized Naomi’s touch, earthy and open.
He could smell her—nutmeg, which was also the color of her skin, and his. A first for him. She’d thought him freaky because he couldn’t stop staring down when they had sex, his eyes drawn to the immeasurable symmetrical shadow pulsing between them. Then, doing the William Tell trick, he’d shot Chief in the leg, grazed him really. He was reckless during the few days the squad spent in Atlanta on the break between earning their silver wings and Goddamnistan. He had learned to live without food or sleep or water or fear and felt a certain power, as if he had fingers of fire. He’d expected the feeling of invincibility—the other Achilles—to last until he reached the FOB, but it began to fade in that kitchen as Naomi pushed the placemats aside to tend to Chief, his breathing worried, his black eyes spinning wildly, as if looking for a reason. When she’d poured peroxide on his leg, his claws on the healthy front paw had tapped the kitchen table, click, click, click.
That same sound he heard now, sitting at the same table as Wexler fiddled with the matching glass salt and pepper shakers, sliding them from hand to hand, clacking them on the table as he explained to Achilles how he had seen Troy near the lunch bucket across from his jobsite, and how he had called Troy and chased Troy and lost Troy in an overgrown alley that cut between a row of abandoned homes and a large housing project called the Bricks. But surely it would be different when Troy saw Achilles. It would be different when he saw his brother. “When he sees you, it’ll all be over,” said Wexler.
“Yeah,” said Achilles. It would all be over, whatever that meant. He pressed for details. How did his brother look? What was he wearing? Had he lost weight? Or teeth? Wexler had only seen him from a distance, and remembered little. There were no more details, other than the map Wexler had made.
That Troy had run from Wexler forced Achilles to face a possibility that had been bugging him. What if Troy was avoiding Achilles? Vowing to be smarter this time, he cautiously unfolded the map, as if afraid of what might pour out, as if to damage it would spill the truth, or ruin his luck, when he was so close. Across the top of the page, block letters spelled out OLD 4th WARD. There was a T circled where Troy had been spotted, and an S where Wexler worked and, near the middle of the map, an area highlighted and labeled THE BRICKS.
Wexler said, “I made up the spare bedroom, but you can only stay until Sunday night, when she gets back.” He said it quickly. Though his face was visibly relaxed, he started clacking the shakers again. Click, click, click.
Achilles nodded. He couldn’t be in Atlanta any longer than Sunday. He had work Monday morning. Today was only Wednesday. That gave him long enough, he hoped. Boudreaux probably wouldn’t mind if Achilles took another day off, but he didn’t want to ask for any more favors, not after the DUI, which had roused Boudreaux’s ire because he’d repeatedly warned Achilles off that stretch of road.
“I think she’s still mad,” offered Wexler.
“I apologized,” said Achilles with the same air of exasperated finality as his original apology. He seldom openly expressed regret, so when he did, he felt that it was beyond mere atonement; his shouldering the blame and burden should be accepted as the final word, the final fistful of dirt on a
grave to which no one should ever return, and of which no one should ever speak. Besides, he’d been assured that Chief was well trained, and could remain still for long periods. There would be nothing between them now anyway. In recent photos, Naomi wore an Afro. Wexler said she’d gone granola, but that was too much. She’d never get a job with that hair.
“There’s something else you should know.” Wexler paused.
When Wexler still hadn’t said anything a minute later, Achilles said, “I know you’re gay. And Naomi is your cross-dressing boyfriend.”
Wexler laughed weakly. “Yeah, I turned faggity after you sucked me off.”
They fell silent, gay jokes falling flat when there were only two of them.
“Going to any groups?” Wexler asked this like he was talking about a playoff game.
“You?” asked Achilles.
“I go to PTSD sometimes, but ain’t no crazier than when I went in. Speaking of crazy, Merri’s going to run a marathon and the VA got him a thing he can run on and he’s not talking about exploding melons anymore. I guess you’ve seen little Wages.”
Achilles was glad to hear that Merriweather was moving on with his life, that he had stopped picturing everyone who crossed him as dead, their heads burst open like melons, an image borrowed from Day of the Jackal, a French film in which the assassin used large fruit for target practice: “Blow the seeds out,” Merri would say. He deserved to be happy. In a world so hungry, a world that took so much, a man deserved something good in exchange for a foot. As for Wages, Achilles hadn’t seen him since that time at the casino a few months back. Little Kyle he’d seen only once, shortly after they brought him home. Whenever Wages called, Achilles claimed busy. Achilles suspected that Wages still thought the Bethany incident was the reason for their parting. Achilles wanted to tell him otherwise, but to bring it up would only reinforce Wages’s suspicions. That, or they’d have to start hanging out again, and Achilles just didn’t see how to make that happen. If Wages was in the room, Troy was in the room, then they all were, and then Achilles would have to introduce them all to Ines.
Wexler flashed a photo of Wages’s son, insisting it was the cutest baby he’d ever seen. Achilles agreed. He didn’t know exactly what babies were supposed to look like, only that they shouldn’t resemble the crushed infants he often saw when accompanying Ines to clinics: glazed in sweat, distended eyes, urgent, yurling cries, persistent twitching, even in sleep their tiny limbs flailing as if drowning.
On the drive to his jobsite, Wexler explained that several roads had been recently renamed after flowers to lure suburbanites into town. Achilles ran his fingers across the map, memorizing the terrain. He’d never seen the Fourth Ward, but he’d been with Ines enough to know exactly what it looked like. The corner store stocks tawny-tipped lettuce and lottery tickets. Near the front doors sit two barrels of ice, one filled with malt liquor named after animals and weapons, the other filled with syrupy drinks in little plastic jugs with foil tops, drinks with names like Red Jungle Punch, Yellow Jungle Punch, and Green Jungle Punch. When you buy a pack of cigarettes—they sell singles as well—they won’t give you matches. But they do sell several types of lighters, which is important, because at the counter they have a display case stocked with screens, pushers, and straight glass pipes: everything needed to pretend to satisfy your crush—pretend—because they will tell you the pipes are novelty items. They also trade in insults: Learn English! No, you learn English! As they toss your change on the counter, the mouth sometimes says, “Thank you.” The eyes often say, Dirty motherfucker. Half of the stores are run by Koreans, the other half by men who resemble, at first glance, those he was sent a quarter-way around the world to kill.
Outside the store, squat houses mired in moats of wrinkled concrete rimmed with crabgrass, stripped of copper and wire. Potholes are de facto speed bumps, large enough to swallow tricycle tires, but that doesn’t keep children out of the road. Streetlights are shot out. The neighborhood is bordered by a cemetery, a factory (possibly abandoned), a waste treatment plant, and railroad tracks or a highway. And indeed that was the Old Fourth Ward, except there was no waste treatment plant and there were two highways—the Connector and Freedom Parkway—so that the neighborhood was both bordered and bisected by high-traffic roads impassable by pedestrians. It looked like the Tremé District in New Orleans, or DC, or inner-city Baltimore.
They reached the jobsite in the dark morning hours, just before five a.m. Wexler worked for his cousin, Tony Sharon, renovating a historic Victorian home four blocks from the King Center. It was the tallest house on the block, with three floors and an attic bristling with narrow dormers sharp as steeples. Like all the houses on that stretch of Medgar Evers Avenue, from the second floor you could see the eternal flame hovering over Dr. King’s tomb, mere blocks from where he was born.
Wexler rambled as he led Achilles through the house and up the stairs, ducking under hanging plaster and high-stepping over debris. The interior of the house was being dismantled to save the antique fixtures such as wood trim, solid wood doors, and stained-glass windows. He followed Wexler up to the attic, brushing cobwebs aside, stepping cautiously from joist to joist like he was crossing a river on rocks.
From one dormer, Wexler pointed out the gingerbread houses and embroidered lawns of Inman Park. “Cross those tracks and you’re in Inman Park. They jog, we run. There, B&B means bed and breakfast. Here, it means boarded up or burned down.”
From another dormer, Wexler pointed out the vacant lot across the street. “That’s where the lunch bucket parks. Where I saw him.” In the dark there was little to be seen except a billboard-sized silhouette of MLK’s profile at the far end of the lot.
From the third dormer, Wexler pointed out a complex of scarred cinderblock buildings surrounded by a brick wall and painted the same shade of red as the clay upon which they stood, as if they had grown out of the earth. “That’s Banneker Homes, aka the Bricks. People are posted up at the entrance twenty-four seven, or one-six-eight as they say around here. When someone dies, they just dump the body outside the wall and call the police. Don’t go in there. For true, Chief. Someone gets shot or falls off a building every other week. That’s how they settle things. Don’t go in there. For true.”
Wexler pointed out the last dormer. “That’s the cemetery. It’s historic.” He tapped his temple. “I like to come up here and watch the traffic right before the sun comes up, when you can hear it better than you can see it. I think about going to another country, not like we did, but just to see how other people normally live. Shopping, talking, reading, whatever, in another language. It’s weird the first time you see people doing the shit you do, but in a different language. Someone said there’s an MLK boulevard in every city with blacks. There’s blacks in France and London. They have one? Probably not. There wasn’t one in Valdosta when I was a kid. I know it’s not true, but I’m curious. They say it’s always the worst street in the city. That can’t be true either. Look around.”
Wexler’s voice dropped like he was in the confessional. “It doesn’t look like much now, but wait a year. New street names. Flowers grow from shit. See, the neighborhood is changing. You have to watch it like white people.” He tapped his temple again. “They watch, they wait, and pounce when the time is right. That’s why my cousin Tony is successful. Other blacks are moving out. For them, success means moving away. But Cousin Tony bought these houses, just like the white folk. He’s going to be rich because he’s thinking like a white person.” He swung around to face Achilles. “How do you plan to do this?”
The Old Fourth Ward was nearly fifteen blocks across and twelve blocks up, much larger than the Tremé District, too much ground to cover on foot, yet it made little sense to drive from house to house. By the time he started the car and drove a block and parked, he could walk. So his plan was, “Watch, walk, and wait.”
“I mean, what if he doesn’t want to go?” said Wexler. “Are you going to check him in?”
“
Check him in?”
“Look around. It’s not a vacation destination.”
“Who says he needs to be checked in? Who says he’s got the crush?” asked Achilles, pounding the joist closest to him. A cloud of pink insulation drifted between them.
Wexler pointed at him. “You just did.”
“You’re twisting shit. How can you know what my brother needs?”
Wexler raised his arms in surrender. “It might be more complicated is all I’m saying. I’ll do whatever you need, but there’s one thing I wanted to tell you earlier. I’m born again.”
“Again?” asked Achilles. “What went wrong the first time?” An ambulance crawled by, the siren loud and frantic.
When the sound died down, Wexler said, “You know you’re not the funny one.”
Achilles raised his arms in a gesture of surrender.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Wexler clapped his hands together, interlacing his fingers. As he spoke, his hands shook slightly, like he was praying. He said, “I want to help. I will help. But it’s just that I can’t do any more crazy shit.”
“Who said crazy shit?” asked Achilles, knowing that Wexler was referring to the boardinghouse fight, which had grown in Wages’s imagination. “I don’t even have a gun.” Noting Wexler’s disbelief, Achilles added, “Really.”
“Okay. It’s just that I don’t want to make it a situation where force is the answer. This isn’t a battle of wills.”
So this was the new and improved Wexler: all fore, not enough head. Whatever happened to “react or die”? What kind of pussy shit were they learning in PTSD counseling? Was the same thing happening to Wages? This was worse than that Zulu hoodoo. They used to say people didn’t need shrinks; people needed friends. For Christ’s fucking sake, was Wexler really reborn? They used to say, “My M16 is my G-O-D.” Achilles was the only veteran among Ines’s friends, the wild one, Brick they sometimes called him, a name he wore with more pride and bravado than he’d ever felt on duty. His military swagger set in. Achilles put a finger to his temple and said, “Every fucking thing is a battle of wills.”
Hold It 'Til It Hurts Page 23