“Knock it off, Dom,” said Angelo.
“I’m talkin’ to Derek,” said Dominic.
Derek knew he could take Angelo. Shoot, the boy’s chin was down on his chest; he was already beat. Derek figured that Angelo feared colored boys the same way many other white boys did. And that fear would be the difference. But there wasn’t anything in kicking Angelo’s ass for Derek. Wasn’t any way he could win.
“You got your mitts?” said Derek.
“Yeah, we got ’em,” said Dominic. “So?”
“Me and Billy,” said Derek, “we’ll take y’all on in a ball game instead. How about that?”
“Fine,” said Dominic. “But first say you won’t fight.”
“Dominic,” said Angelo in a pleading way.
“I got no need to fight,” said Derek.
“That ain’t the same thing. Say what I told you to say or step to my brother and put up your hands.”
“Okay, then,” said Derek. “I won’t fight.” He didn’t mind saying it. He had not backed up a step, folded his arms, or looked away. His body said that he was not afraid. Dominic could see it. He knew.
“All right,” said Dominic. For a moment, Derek saw something human in Martini’s eyes. “Let’s play ball.”
The Martini boys had a bat, a hardball, and two mitts stashed in the ammo bunker built into the base of the fort’s hill. Basically, the game was stickball, but without the wall. Base hits were calculated by landmarks—the flagpole, the fort’s commemorative plaque, et cetera—with the crest of the hill the ultimate goal. A ball hit over “the wall” of the fortification line was a home run.
Derek had the superior swing, and even Billy was a better athlete than the Martinis. Soon it was apparent that the contest was done. When Derek knocked out his third homer, Dominic said he was bored and stopped the game. After putting the playing equipment back in the bunker, Dominic turned to Derek.
“Say, you ever had any, man?”
“Sure have,” said Derek, which was a lie. He had rubbed a little over-the-shirt tit off this older girl in his neighborhood, had a reputation for starting the young boys off, but that was all.
“Sure you have,” said Dominic, laughing a little and lighting a cigarette. “Me, I get it all the time.”
He told Derek about the Fort Club, which he and his friends had recently formed, and how they drank beer and pulled trains on girls inside the bunker on Friday nights. Derek issued a small shrug, enough to stave off another conflict, not enough to let Dominic think that he cared. It wasn’t the reaction Dominic wanted. He pulled something from his pocket and held it in front of Derek.
“You know what this is?”
“That’s a cherry bomb.”
“How about I set it off?”
“Go ahead.”
Martini lit the fuse off his smoke and calmly dropped the bomb into the muzzle of one of the cannons. The cherry bomb exploded, and its report was surprisingly loud. A janitor came out of the church, yelled something at the boys, and walked toward them. Angelo and Billy jogged in the direction of 13th Street. Derek and Dominic followed the other two out of the park, walking at a leisurely pace.
“You and me,” said Dominic, “we ain’t gonna run from nothin’, right?”
Derek had the feeling that this afternoon would come to some kind of bad, the way a boy always knows that the direction of the day has turned. It was as if he were walking, willingly, from the sunny side of the street to the side covered in shadow. He had been raised to understand the clear difference between right and wrong, and he knew that, right about now, he should head back to the diner with Billy. But he was attracted to that shadowed side just the same. So when Dominic suggested they go over to “the Sixth,” just to “fuck around some,” Derek did not object.
THE SIXTH PRECINCT station was on Nicholson, set to the left of Brightwood Elementary. The station structure, all brick fronted with columns, looked like a small schoolhouse itself. A goldfish pond was set beside the concrete drive that horseshoed the rear of the station. The boys approached it from the right side, grouped themselves beside a tall oak, and studied the building through a chain-link fence.
“There’s the cell block right there,” said Dominic, pointing to the right side of the building. “They ain’t got nothin’ but old spring cots for you to sleep on.”
“How do you know?” said Billy, challenging Martini but secretly impressed.
“Our old man told us,” said Angelo. Their father had slept off public drunks in the station a couple of times in the past year.
“Not just that,” said Dominic, annoyed. “I been in there myself.” He had never actually spent the night in the jail, though he had aspirations. Dominic had been written up for a field investigation, which was less dramatic than “a record,” for throwing a rock through a window of the elementary school.
Back behind the main structure was a garage housing several Harleys for the motorcycle cops. One of the precinct’s three squad cars, a high-horse Ford, was parked in the lot, beside a black unmarked, also a Ford. The boys of Brightwood recognized the squad car numbers, 61 to 63, printed on the sides of the vehicles. They knew the names of the desk sergeant and homicide cops and the beat police as well. Among them was an Irish cop whose status had been elevated to legend after he had taken a .45 slug in the gut. The Sixth also had one uniformed colored cop, William Davis, and the hated Officer Pappas, a Greek who was especially tough on kids. He had made it his mission to bust the fathers and sons, some of whom were fellow Greeks, who ran numbers and occasionally fenced out of their businesses up on the Avenue. Pappas had a pencil-thin mustache, which the boys thought of as a French look that bordered on feminine. They had nicknamed him Jacques. When he was on foot patrol, they taunted him from rooftops and alleys, calling out to him with high-pitched voices, “Jaaacques, oh, Jaaacques.”
Officer Davis came from the front of the building and walked to squad car number 62. Davis was tall and lean, his uniform perfectly pressed, his service revolver snapped into its holster. Derek wondered what you had to do to become a police. Must be something to it to make Davis walk the way he was walking. Chin up, close to a swagger. It seemed like the man had pride.
Dominic Martini picked up a rock. Derek grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t,” said Derek.
Derek’s action surprised both of them, so much so that Dominic didn’t resist. He dropped the rock, shook his hand free, and stared at Davis.
“Look at him,” said Martini with contempt. “He really thinks he’s somethin’.”
He is, thought Derek Strange, studying the police officer as he got into the Ford. That’s a man right there.
BUZZ STEWART FED gas into the tank of a ’57 DeSoto Fireflite, a two-tone red-and-white sedan fitted out with whitewalls and skirts. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he worked the pump. He wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere near the tanks, but there wasn’t anyone at the station, including his boss, big enough to tell him not to. As he replaced the pump handle and took the money from the square behind the wheel, he thumb-flicked ash off his Marlboro and put the smoke back in his thin-lipped mouth.
“Hey, Buzz,” said Dominic Martini, walking by with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand.
“Hey,” mumbled Stewart.
Stewart watched Martini, an Italian kid who worked weekend nights, join a group of younger boys at the edge of the Esso station lot. One of the boys was Martini’s no-balls brother. The other was some fattish kid, looked like another spaghetti-bender to him. The third kid was a nigger. Now, why would Martini want to run with a colored boy? He’d have to give Dom some shit about it the next time they talked.
Stewart walked across the lot, patting his Brylcreemed blond hair. He admired his veins, like root tendrils, standing up on the inside of his forearms and popping out on his biceps. He felt strong. He went six-three and one ninety, none of it waste. Some guys thought they could challenge him, all that harder-you-fall bullshit they had to tell themselves ’cause they wer
e small. Stewart could back up his size and didn’t need to be pushed to prove it.
He went inside the station. The manager, built-guy once, fat-guy now, was sitting behind his desk, doing his usual heap of nothing. “Party Doll” was coming from the radio, Buddy Knox with his stutter-step vocals, then that nice guitar break with the walkin’ rhythm behind it coming in right after. Stewart liked that one. It wasn’t no Link, but it was nice.
“We talk?” said Stewart.
“Go ‘head,” said the manager, not meeting Stewart’s eyes.
“When am I gonna get a chance in them bays?”
“When you take the course.”
“I could take apart an engine and put it back together with my eyes closed.”
“Maybe they could use you at the circus,” said the manager. “But the sign out front says ‘Certified Mechanics.’ You wanna be one, parent company requires you to take the course.”
Fuck a course, thought Stewart. Last course I took was at Montgomery Blair, and that was when I was sixteen. I didn’t need no courses then and I sure as hell didn’t need no high school degree. You didn’t have to sit in no classroom to know how to work on cars.
“Maybe later,” said Stewart, jerking a thumb toward the clock on the wall. “I’m out.” He took the bill roll he kept in his pocket, undid the change belt he wore around his waist, and put both on the manager’s desk.
“Wait for me to count it out,” said the manager.
“If it’s wrong, you’ll let me know.”
“You in a hurry?”
“Yeah,” said Stewart. “I got places to go and people to meet, and none of ’em are here.”
Stewart walked out.
“Big maaan,” said the manager, but only after Stewart had left the office.
Buzz Stewart got into his bored-out ’50 Ford, outfitted with headers and dropped near to the ground. The paint job, a purple body over a blue interior, had been customized. He and his crowd named their cars and scripted the names on their right front fenders. His read “Lavender Blue,” because of the color scheme, and also for that Sammy Turner song. He was proud of the name. He had thought of it all by himself.
Stewart cranked the ignition and drove north out of D.C., toward his parents’ house in Silver Spring.
A little ways over the District line he drove under the B&O bridge and passed the Canada Dry plant on the left. He and his boys used to hit the plant on Saturdays, when there wasn’t but one security guard on duty, and steal as many cases of ginger ale as they could carry. In a nearby wooded area they dumped out the soda, then turned in the bottles to local merchants for pocket change. You could make a few bucks like that, but it had ended one day a few years back when a gray-haired guard happened upon him and his group. Luckily, Stewart’s best bud, Shorty Hess, was behind the guard and knocked him out with a crack to the skull from a length of pipe he kept slipped down his jeans. They were afraid at first he’d killed him, but it didn’t make the newspapers or nothin,’ so they guessed the old guy lived. Since then, he and his buddies had gone on to bigger things, like break-ins. For fun they liked to race cars, drink beer and hard liquor, run coloreds off the sidewalks, and fuck girls. They also liked to fight.
Stewart drove to his house. He lived with his folks in a detached place on Mississippi Avenue, between Sligo and Piney Branch. The house, a square of bricks fronted by a wooden porch, sat on nearly a half acre of land. In the back was a freestanding garage where Stewart worked on vehicles. Beside the garage ran a large garden plot where his mother would plant vegetables—corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, and the like. Stewart had recently turned the soil for her, as she would begin planting her summer crop soon.
Inside he found his father, Albert, sitting in his upholstered chair in the living room, drinking Old German beer and smoking a straight Camel. Al bought his beer for $2.50 a case and went through a case every two days. He was watching a Cisco Kid rerun on TV. Albert was as big as his son and nearly bald. Like his son, he was neither handsome nor ugly, with no features of prominence or note, a bland, perpetually scowling man, thin lipped, small eyed, quick to anger and judge.
“What you doin’?” said Al, not turning his head.
“Nuthin’,” said Buzz, staring openmouthed at the TV.
“You get paid?”
“Yesterday.”
“You eighteen now, boy. Time you started paying rent.”
“I know it.”
“Then pay it up.”
“I will.”
“When?”
Stewart went past the kitchen, where his mother, Pat, was sitting at a Formica-top table, smoking a cigarette. She wore a housedress with a floral print, one of two she had bought years ago at Montgomery Ward’s and wore on alternate days. Her gray hair was pinned back in a bun. She still had lines around her mouth from when she used to laugh. Her eyes were a washed-out blue. Relatives on her side claimed she had been pretty once.
“Carlton,” she said, using her son’s given name.
“Yeah, Ma.”
“You staying for dinner?”
“Nah, I’m going out. I’ll take a sandwich or somethin’, though.”
“You think this is a restaurant?” called Al from the living room.
“Yeah,” said Stewart, raising his voice. “Can I get a steak? Make it medium. And I’ll take one of them fine brews you drinkin’, too.”
“Stupid sumbitch,” said Al.
Buzz Stewart went down to his room.
THREE
FROM THE SIXTH Precinct station house, the boys walked back up to the Avenue. Dominic Martini bought a bottle of Coke from a red cooler up at the Esso station and assured his boss he’d be there on time for the late shift. On his way back to the group, he said, “Hey, Buzz,” to a big guy, his sleeves rolled up to show off his biceps, who was pumping gas.
Dominic passed the bottle to his brother, who then passed it without thinking to Derek. Derek took a pull from the bottle and handed it back to Dominic. Dominic wiped the neck off before putting it to his mouth. As he did this, he locked eyes with Derek.
Eventually, they made their way to Ida’s, the department store up on the east-side corner of Georgia and Quackenbos. In addition to selling household goods, the store clothed most of the kids in the area, colored and white alike. The PF Flyers on Derek’s feet were from Ida’s, as was the old Boy Scout uniform in Billy Georgelakos’s closet. Ida’s was the uptown equivalent of the downtown Morton’s.
The boys entered the store, hit one of the aisles, and went toward the back. The employees were busy with customers and no one had taken note of them yet. There was no good reason for them to be here, as none of them had any money to spend, but Derek had a good idea of their intent. Still, he went along. Almost immediately he saw Dominic take an Ace comb out of a bin and slip it into his back pocket in one smooth motion. Angelo, sweat on his upper lip, did the same.
“Let’s get outta here, Derek,” said Billy.
“Yeah, you pussies take off,” said Dominic.
“Who you callin’ pussy?” said Derek, regretting his words as they left his tongue.
“Do somethin’, then,” said Dominic. “Prove you got some balls on you, Derek.”
“I will,” said Derek Strange.
Dominic smiled. “See you out on the street.”
Derek went farther into the store and cut down another aisle as the Martini brothers vanished. Billy stayed with Derek. Derek came upon the tool and hardware section, saw a padlock, thought his father could use it for something. He must have stood there for a full minute, staring at the lock. He looked around, saw no one in the aisle, and slipped the padlock into the right front pocket of his blue jeans. He started walking for the front of the store, Billy at his heels.
As they reached the entrance doors, he felt a hand grip one of his biceps. He tried to shake it off and run, but the person who held him held fast.
“Hold on there,” said a man’s voice. “You’re not going anywhere, son.”
“Stupid,” said Derek.
“That’s right,” said the man. He was a stocky white man with broad shoulders. He wore a cardigan vest, an open-necked shirt, and had a pair of eyeglasses perched atop his head of black hair. Strange read the name tag on his chest: “Harold Fein.”
“You have anything in your pockets, son?” said Fein, turning to Billy.
“No,” said Billy.
“Then get out of here, now.”
“Can’t I wait for my friend?”
Derek felt some affection for Billy then, the way he’d called him “friend.” Until now, Billy was just a kid he’d been put together with, almost by accident.
“If you’re gonna wait,” said Fein, still holding Derek’s arm, “you’re gonna wait outside. Now, I know you, and your mother, too. Don’t ever let me see you involved in anything like this again.”
Billy said, “You won’t,” but it was to their backs, as Fein was already leading Derek to the back of the store. They went through a narrow opening into a low-ceilinged stockroom.
Fein instructed Derek to take a seat. There was a padded chair behind a desk cluttered with paperwork and a hard chair beside the desk. Derek figured the padded chair was Mr. Fein’s. He sat in the hard one. On the desk was a triangular block of wood with a brass plate. It read “Receiving Manager.” Also on the desk were framed photographs of a little girl and what looked to be a two-year-old boy.
“What’s your name?” said Fein, still standing.
“Derek Strange.”
“Where do you live?”
Derek told him he lived down on Princeton Place, in Park View.
“I’ve got to go check the manifest on a truck,” said Fein. “You just sit right there. Put the padlock on the desk before I forget about it. And don’t think about runnin’ out, ’cause I know where to find you, hear?”
“Yessir.”
It took a while for Fein to come back. Maybe thirty minutes or so, but it seemed like hours to Derek. He was miserable, thinking on what his mother and father would say when they got the phone call. Angry, too, for allowing himself to get baited by Dominic Martini, a boy he didn’t even respect. Why he felt he had to prove himself to Martini, he couldn’t say. Derek had done some bad things, and he’d do more bad things in the future, he knew, but he vowed that he would never do a stupid bad thing for no reason again. He hadn’t been raised that way.
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