Hold It 'Til It Hurts

by T. Geronimo Johnson

  The lunch bucket was setting up in the partially paved lot across the street, the doors unfolding upward like quilted silver wings glinting in the sunlight. He watched the lunch line grow in clusters—the sheetrockers coated in white dust; the painters in their dappled whites; the masons in their gray, dusty overalls; and Wexler, who stood alone, yet spoke easily with everybody. A gaunt gray dog, ears tattered like pom-poms, wandered the lot, dodging kicks and stopping to sniff the occasional rock tossed its way. An old man sucked a packet of mayonnaise like it was a pig’s foot, licking each finger when done. Others did the same, collecting and trading condiments, which he hadn’t seen in New Orleans. But he was always at locations where food was given away.

  At the edge of the lot, at rapt attention, stood a man draped in desert BDUs that hung on him like curtains. The pant legs, rolled up to midcalf, rattled around his thin shins like bells. Achilles moved from dormer to dormer, scanning near and far, looking at everyone again and again, as if studying a check for an extra zero. A sheetrocker had Troy’s profile, a painter his gait, a mason his habit of pulling on his earlobe when waiting in line, and a beggar the same tilt of the head just before telling a joke. When the men in line around him laughed, Achilles’s throat constricted as if he’d swallowed a pinecone. A gold Hummer cruised by and in its wake the bubble of laughter collapsed, lips tightening and necks twisting, as if it were a hearse.

  Wexler came up with two Styrofoam containers, offering one to Achilles. His mouth watered at the smell of fried food, but he wanted to remain light, coiled, and ready to spring.

  “I don’t eat that crap anymore.” He’d long ago said good-bye sloppy joes, pot roast, cheesy hot dogs; hello muffuletta, jambalaya, stuffed mirliton.

  Wexler patted Achilles’s stomach. “Can I make a wish?”

  It was true, he spent less time in the gym and more time in the kitchen. But it was hard not to. Until Ines, he’d never known what it meant to really want to be with somebody, to have somebody just for him. To get up and have a common routine, to be in the same circle. He and Janice were never completely in the same circles. “Life is good.”

  “Yep.” Wexler stood in the sunniest dormer and ate, chewing loudly, attacking the chicken like a big cat. He always ate like he was happy to be alive.

  Achilles kept moving around the attic, watching the surrounding streets, examining every profile. When the lunch bucket folded up its wings and trundled off, there was still no sign of Troy. The workers drifted off. The homeless men who had been standing at the edge of the lot swooped in, kicking the dog out of the way.

  Achilles sat on an overturned bucket across from Wexler. Achilles had been up all night and felt the fatigue setting in as soon as the lunch bucket left. His muscles were smoldering, aching, and burning. “He’s here. I can feel it.”

  Wexler nodded knowingly.

  “This has nothing to do with religion.”

  “You’ll find him,” said Wexler. “The creator has a master plan. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. Sometimes we have to be tried before we can be really blessed, like Jacob or Job. You’ll see. My pastor says that sometimes you have to suffer to be tempered, like the iron in a forge becomes a fine sword. You’ll see. Soon we’ll all be delivered, like the Israelites out of Egypt. My pastor says we’re the chosen ones. My pastor says God loves black people, and God has a plan for everybody.”

  So did Hitler, thought Achilles. “Leave that alone already.” He pointed at Dobbs Plaza in the distance, where winos slept in the shadow of that slave-castle wall, and beyond that, at a new church, as if people could pray their way out of poverty. He made a sweeping motion with his hand as if to say Behold. These people were fucked up. It was always the same. The pushers, pimps, and preachers all drove fancy cars while everybody else rode the two-dollar taxi. The big sell: get high Friday, get laid Saturday, get forgiven Sunday. God was the gravy that made shit sweet as sugar. “This shit isn’t mysterious.”

  “I know it’s not your thing, but I’ve been praying for him. Look around this neighborhood. He needs all the help he can get. So, I pray for him.”

  “Thanks,” said Achilles, the way he said it when Sammy gave him a CD he already had. Avoiding Wexler’s eyes as he left, Achilles took the stairs one at a time, his steps heavy. Outside, the last few people scrounged through the scraps abandoned by the lunch crowd: bread crusts, potato chip crumbs, warm dregs of pop. At the end of the block, a malt liquor sign blinked a question, a menthol cigarette sign winked a response. A pregnant woman carrying a baby on her hip, dark Vs on the backs of both of their shirts, pushed a stroller piled high with newspapers, and perched atop that pile, two bags of crushed cans. If this was his plan, God hated black people.

  The man in the BDUs rummaged through the fifty-gallon drum that served as a trashcan, his arm in up to the elbow so that only the shoulder patches were visible: the Infantry badge, the Airborne patch, and as Achilles saw when he was close enough to read it, a nametag that read CONROY.

  Achilles took the man by surprise, throwing him facedown to the ground, kneeling on his back, and pulling the jacket below the elbows so that the man’s arms were tangled in the sleeves, making it hard for him to fight back. Achilles leaned on the back of the man’s head with one hand and grabbed an ear with the other, pressing his head into the ground, his mouth into the dirt, suffocating him, pressing harder the more he kicked and easing up when the kicking stopped. The procedure was simple: induce panic, take control, set parameters. “Where you’d get the jacket?”

  The crowd was initially stunned, but the spell broke when Achilles spoke. A few stepped forward, muttering about their rights. They were the same crew that had been lurking along the bushes while the lunch truck was there.

  Achilles put his hand up. “Army business. Step back or you’re obstructing.” He returned his attention to the man beneath him. “Where did you get the jacket?”

  His response was drowned out by the crowd, which had now coalesced around the old man who’d eaten the mayonnaise packets. He had a neatly trimmed beard and a shock of gray hair brushed back like Frederick Douglass. He cleared his throat. “This ain’t the army. I was in the army. And you can’t come around here like that. This here is America.” “Amerca,” he pronounced it.

  “Preach on,” a few murmured their assent. Others shouted, “This ain’t Virginia Beach.”

  “Where’d you get the jacket?” Achilles asked again. “That’s all I want to know.”

  “The purple house. I’ll show you. The purple house.”

  The crowd stepped back when Achilles yanked the man to his feet and marched him off in the direction indicated. Someone said, “He ain’t all that tall no way.”

  Achilles pushed through the crowd flashing his military ID, the men moving back like it was radioactive, except one old guy who called out, “That don’t scare me none. I was in the real war. Smells like a con to me.”

  Conroy meant “wise advisor,” according to their father. According to one drill sergeant, it meant they had to carry a lot of shit. According to another, it meant nothing. “You have new brothers now,” he told them. “We are all your brothers. You are now 11-B, one and many.” Basic training and infantry school were combined into five phases named after colors, but Achilles thought of them in three stages: crawl, walk, and run. They learned to get by on little water, less food, and no sleep, and to carry only the bare necessities when possible, which was why Achilles was surprised as he went through the bag in which the man had found Troy’s BDUs. They were in a purple house right behind Wexler’s jobsite. When Achilles had found it empty before, he hadn’t thought to search the odd bags scattered throughout. There were several pairs of dirty socks and underwear, three T-shirts, another pair of pants (too short), a blank address book with the F-section torn out, and the same photo of them all on the way to Dubai, enough stuff to suggest that Troy might have hung around for a while. “How long has this been here?”

  “I found it in the Bricks.”


  The occasional black brick stood out like a rotted tooth. The top of the wall glinted, crowned with broken glass. There was no grass and no shade, only parched clay and cracked asphalt, nothing to catch the sunlight bearing down on the roofs and heads of the kids posted up at the entrance. They were as young as ten, the oldest not even twenty from the looks of it. They were joking, rambunctious, invincible; like in Afghanistan, Baltimore, DC, New Orleans, the poorest laughed the loudest. Ines knew how to speak to them. “Just look them in the eye and say hello. That’s all folks.” It’s easy, Achilles reminded himself. He showed them his picture of Troy, and they only laughed harder, without moving their mouths, with steady shark’s grins. They lounged like they had no bones in their bodies, leaning at impossible angles as if made of rope, loose-limbed and slack-jawed. They looked at the blood on his knuckles and waved him through. As he passed through the gate, they laughed even louder, like they had seen this before, as if to say, You’ll be right back, running so fast your sneaker soles will melt.

  They thought they were tough. Tough was the little boy who snuck into their tent to steal food; tough was the sniper who shot two members of J9 before Wages neutralized him, a boy who had barricaded himself in his minaret, a boy barely as tall as his rifle, a boy who had affixed a pillow to the wall behind him to absorb the recoil. Tough was Wages, who walked away from that without looking back.

  Achilles walked the inside perimeter of the housing project first. He was surprised that Wexler had been so adamant that he never enter the Bricks. People weren’t tossing bullets like it was the Wild Wild West. It was quiet. A white kid in a black hooded sweatshirt walked a pit bull. A few kids played king of the mountain on a picnic table in a roofless gazebo. An overturned slide lay under fingers of kudzu. Like his sergeant said, “The earth will soon eat us all.” All the buildings, except a smoke-damaged one in the back, appeared occupied. The complex was broken into nine square blocks, like a tic-tac-toe grid. Each block had two two-story buildings with a parking lot between them. Hand-printed signs were posted on the telephone poles: “Don’t let them change our name!” Across a few of the signs, someone had scrawled, They already killed them once. These streets hadn’t been renamed. MLK and Medgar Evers ran north to south, Malcolm X Way and RFK ran east to west. As he completed his walk around the perimeter, he saw the orange Hummer. Beside it, the boy in the hooded sweatshirt was talking to a man in a letterman’s jacket, large and angular, as if made of cinderblocks. A man wearing a red Atlanta Braves baseball jersey sat in the back of the Hummer. The kid left, without the dog.

  As Achilles approached the Hummer, the big guy in the letterman’s jacket held out one hand like a traffic cop. He had a tattoo of a pistol on his palm, drawn so that Achilles was staring down the barrel of a revolver, like those decals that read, This Property Protected by Pistol. The dog pranced back and forth and whined. The man muttered something and the dog barked a few times, but Achilles wasn’t worried. Janice’s brother fought dogs in the old garage bay at the gas station, and Achilles knew what to look for. Even if he hadn’t seen the kid turn the dog over, Achilles would have known that it wasn’t the big man’s dog. The dog wasn’t in a defensive stance and didn’t position his body in front of the man. His ears were loose and his shoulders hunched like he was more anxious than anything else. The pit bull was a pet. He had his ears and tail and no scars. He seemed concerned about the kid who had just left.

  Achilles held up the photo. The big man shrugged.

  The man in the red jersey still sat in the backseat. Achilles slipped the photo through the half-open window. “Have you seen him around here?”

  The window lowered, and the guy in the red jersey returned the photo. He had copper skin with freckles. He wore his auburn hair in cornrows, the rows on the side of his head woven into a diamond-shaped pattern and the braids extending almost to his neck. “This is the city of five-dollar whores and two-dollar hits. There’s a lot of folk around here, comin’ and goin,’ one-six-eight. What’s so special about this one?”

  Achilles held out the photo again, holding his hand out until he felt awkward. “This one’s my brother. Look again. They found some of his stuff around here.”

  “Brother? Ain’t we all?”

  “No,” Achilles shook his head deliberately. “We all ain’t.”

  The man laughed, opened the door to stretch his legs, and took the photo again. “I might have seen him around, but I can’t be sure.”

  “How long ago? Within the past few days?”

  He nodded. “Maybe yeah. If I see him I’ll let you know. You’re over at the old yellow house on Evers Ave, working with Tony Sharon and those crunchers, and Kevin Wexler with the scar.” The man pointed to his neck. “You know, the little one who looks like Prince.”

  The big man guffawed.

  The man with the cornrows leaned back into the car and stared straight ahead, as if signaling the end of the conversation. With a slight motion of his chin he directed the big man to close the door. Achilles leaned on it. “So you’ve seen him?”

  The big man stepped closer. Achilles held the photo out again. Troy’s smiling face hung in the air between them. The dog whined, kids laughed, a window slammed.

  The man with the cornrows stroked his chin. He spoke through a big grin, bearing his gold fangs. “Don’t this make your brown ass blue?” He took the photo, studied it for a moment, and handed it back. Leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees, he said, “You need to give up the ghost on this shit. Crunch crushes. The crush crunches. I seen a big fucker,” he spread his arms for emphasis, “a bodybuilder, looked like Lee Haney, get on his knees and gargle mayo. He had that crush. See, maybe this ain’t your brother. Maybe this is an animal.” He cocked his head to the side, studying Achilles, who said nothing.

  He continued. “You can’t take him home. Listen to your pretty talk. You got shit. He slips up, pawns all your TVs and shit. Then what? He gets in that hole, they come gunning for him. He’s dying for the bullet, but you get your potato peeled. Then what? He hits your liquor stash. Fa-fa-flashback. He hits the locker room and comes back to your place with a crew of hos, and they fence your shit. Then what? Or you go on a three-day MLK vacation and this zigga turns your shit into a whorehouse before you can say ‘I have a dream.’ Then what? RICO Act, brotha. That’s your shit on the six, eight, and ten. That’s your shit stacking the shelves at the cop shop. All your favorite shit becomes the property of your least favorite uncle. And you still have to pay taxes.”

  Achilles inhaled deeply, and deeper still. And held it. Remember to breathe.

  “Pretty-talking zigga like you, you know you got matching sheets and an old lady who don’t want to deal with this shit, who does not want to contend with these muchos problemos. I hope I’m not making your record skip. I admire the way you come after your kin. That’s righteous. It’s straight country. Too bad it’s probably a waste of time. Most of these cats end up ziplocked, on the shelf at the cop shop, or on the six-eight-ten. But I’ll keep my eyes open. We’ll talk again.” He smiled wide enough for Achilles to see that the jewels in his teeth spelled Devil Dog, a glint that in some circumstances was an invitation to a bullet, and shined brightly enough that with an ACOG sight, he could reach out and touch him from up to eight hundred meters away, at night.

  “We will,” said Achilles, stepping away from the door. Ziplocked? He smiled, picturing the bastard’s grinning head as a ripe melon rolling off a high counter, as Merriweather liked to put it.

  “Not even you want to ante up for this. For true.” Wexler even knew their names. Pepper was the man with the cornrows. The big man in the letter-man’s jacket was Cornelius. Even after hearing that Pepper knew his full name, Wexler remained calm, telling Achilles, “My grandmother used to say, ‘Even a crooked limb can cast a straight shadow when the sun is right, and ain’t no one with good sense won’t stand in that shade.’ The dealers do some good stuff around here. They keep people from breaking into cars and houses. It is
n’t like there’s a lot of opportunities around here.”

  As he spoke, he worked steadily, up on a ladder removing strips of crown moulding with the care of one peeling back a bandage. His movements economical and precise, he moved along the ceiling two inches, removed a nail, pried the moulding out a bit, moved down two more inches, removed a nail, and pried the moulding out a little bit more. Achilles had heard the term “dental moulding,” but only while watching Wexler did he realize that the notches indeed resembled teeth. Wexler said to himself, “Nope. Not a lot of jobs around here. Even the local laborers only get a few hours of work at a time, and they’re paid hot shit.”

  For the past few months, Achilles had gophered part-time at Boudreaux’s law firm on Camp Street. He envied Wexler’s focus, that he had a job actually doing something, not running errands for his potential uncle-in-law; that his only coworkers were the day laborers that helped load lumber for a few hours every few days, not guys like Keller, who insisted on speaking to Achilles in slang. After the film Big Dog City was released, downtown came uptown, and the vernacular went mainstream. For the last few months at the office, Achilles had been haunted by underhanded references to drugs because the white-collar workers had started talking like rappers. “Hello” and “What’s up, man?” were replaced by a catalogue of hip phrases that they tossed around like enthusiastic tourists armed with a new phrase book.

  They stopped sharing rides to lunch and started rolling to the joint. “Call me” became hit me on the hip. Achilles said, “Hello.” They said, What up, folk? If Achilles made the mistake of saying, “What’s up?” they said, You know how we do it. And when he stopped nodding and starting saying, “No, I don’t,” they laughed. And when he said, “No really, explain it to me,” they only laughed harder, Keller’s sharp cackles ricocheting around the law library like trapped birds. Only a few years older than Achilles, Keller was a prodigy, the newest partner, a shining star, so Achilles said nothing, not even when Keller’s favorite celebratory catchphrase became the Chapelle Show’s infamous Fuck your couch, Zigga.