Hard Revolution

by George Pelecanos

  Available units had been called to the scene by radio. Derek Strange and Troy Peters were among the first to arrive. Strange got out of the car with his hand on his nightstick. He and Peters joined the other uniforms who had gathered around the lieutenant in command. The men were instructed to use their presence, rather than physical force, to restore order and protect the commercial properties on the strip. The crowd, now numbering in the hundreds, continued to swell as the men received their instructions. “Do not draw your guns unless it is absolutely necessary,” said the lieutenant. Strange felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. His hand involuntarily grazed the butt of his .38.

  Strange and Troy joined the police line in front of the store and spread out several arm lengths but remained side by side. From what Strange could see, he was the sole black officer on the scene. He heard screams of “Tom” and “house nigger,” and felt a pounding in his head. He brandished his stick and slapped it rhythmically into his palm. He did not look the crowd members in the eye.

  Serve and protect. Do your job.

  A missile broke the pane of the Peoples door. Rocks, cans, bottles, and debris flew around them. A Doberman pinscher was unleashed into the crowd by a local store owner, further inciting the mob. A sergeant screamed at the civilian to get his “goddamn dog” out of there, but it was too late. A full bottle of Nehi grape soda hit a cop car, cracking its windshield. Two police went into the mob and pulled out a man, cursing and kicking, and threw him into the back of a wagon. A second man was cuffed and put into the wagon. Kids poured lighter fluid against a tree and set it aflame. They laughed and cursed at a fireman who put it out. Pebbles hit a squad car with the force of shot and twelve-year-old girls screamed out horrible things at the uniforms and Strange’s hands felt damp upon his stick. He looked at Peters and saw Troy’s wide eyes and the sweat bulleted across his forehead. For the next twenty minutes it was like a flash fire that they were powerless to stop. A young officer drew his gun in fear, and the noise grew louder and Strange knew then that they had lost control. Their lieutenant ordered them to pull back.

  But suddenly, as if spent from its own rage, the crowd began to calm down. Stokely Carmichael, wearing a fatigue jacket, arrived from the SNCC office, was given a bullhorn, and instructed everyone to “go home.” He told people to disperse and clean the street of what they’d thrown, as this was, after all, their neighborhood. They did not move to clean a thing, but as he spoke the crowd quieted further and moved slowly away from the scene.

  Police stood in the emptied street, surrounded by shattered glass and other debris. Smoke roiled in the strobing light of the cherry tops idling in the intersection. A boy rode through on a bicycle, his kid brother sitting on the handlebars, both of them laughing. A young officer lit a cigarette with a shaking hand.

  “Troy,” said Strange.

  Peters’s face was drained of color. He stared ahead, his feet anchored to the street.

  “Come on, buddy,” said Strange, tapping him on the arm.

  They walked together to their car.

  LIKE THE MAN who lived in it, James Hayes’s apartment was clean and unpretentious. Its furniture came from a downtown store and would still be stylish in twenty years. The kitchen had been outfitted in new harvest gold appliances. A color television sat in the living room along with a console stereo. The shirts hanging in the bedroom closet were dry-cleaned and custom tailored. All of these possessions were of some quality but deliberately understated. The man showed no flash.

  James Hayes had lived here on Otis Place long enough to have seen boys like Dennis and Derek Strange run the alleys and streets of Park View and grow to be men. He didn’t talk to the young ones until they came of age, and when they got involved with him it was always of their own volition. He was not a good man, nor was he bad.

  Hayes sat in his living room with Dennis Strange, having a couple of Margeaux cognacs, listening to a record, enjoying the music and each other’s company but saying little because both of them were high. They had shared a joint of gage, and now the cognac was working on them, too, giving them that warm liquor thing on top of the head thing that blurred the edges of the room. Dennis had swallowed a red an hour earlier and was just about where he wanted to be. He had left the apartment before his parents came home from work, because he hadn’t wanted to look them in the eye.

  “There it is, right there,” said Hayes. “Hear him growlin’?”

  “Man can do it.”

  “They say Sam was soft. If the only Cooke you own is Live at the Copa, you might think so. But you got to listen to these old records to know.”

  Dennis smiled and nodded his head. Like Dennis’s father, Hayes went for that old sound, the R&B singers with the gospel roots. Dennis had spent many a night up here, listening to Sam Cooke’s Keen sides, the Soul Stirrers with R. H. Harris, the Pilgrim Travelers with J. W. Alexander, Jackie Wilson, and others. He was not religious, but he often got the feeling he got in church, listening to these records.

  Dennis felt comfortable here. When they weren’t deep inside their heads or into the music, he and Hayes often had long discussions about politics and the black man’s future in America. Hayes was smart and sensible and put his words together right. Dennis knew enough to realize that James Hayes was a father to him in ways that his own father could not bring himself to be. He listened, for one, and was not quick to judge. Dennis also knew that it was easy for a man to let you slide on things, and be your friend, when you were not his son.

  “I’ve got a woman,” said Hayes.

  “Ray Charles,” said Dennis, laughing at his little joke, laughing because he was high.

  “What I’m sayin’ is, I’ve got a lady friend comin’ over tonight.”

  “I hear you.”

  “I don’t mean to put you out.”

  “Ain’t no thing,” said Dennis. “We’re cool.”

  Dennis didn’t want to leave. He had no place to go. But he got up from the floor, where he had been sitting cross-legged, and stretched. He finished his cognac and put the empty snifter on the small table beside the chair where Hayes always sat. He shook Hayes’s hand.

  Near the front door of the apartment, in a bowl on a telephone stand where Hayes kept his keys and things, Dennis saw the check, written by Jones’s lady friend, that he had brought over on Sunday night.

  “You ain’t cashed this yet?” said Dennis.

  “Was feeling poorly the last couple days. Haven’t had the chance to get to the bank.”

  “I was just wondering if it was any good.”

  “If it isn’t, I’m gonna need you to make it good.”

  “You know I will.”

  Dennis said this with bravado, but he didn’t know what he’d do if the check were to bounce. He didn’t want to deal with Jones again, not after what he’d done to him and especially Kenneth. He wondered what had happened to Kenneth, if the police had took him in, and if they had, would he do time. He hadn’t really thought the whole thing through, the consequences and such, when he’d talked to that old man down at the market. Just an impulse, really, nothing like a plan. He wasn’t sorry he’d done it or anything, ’cause it was the right thing to do, but . . . whatever. He didn’t want to think on it, not right now. His head was up too good.

  “Take it easy, young man,” said Hayes.

  “You, too.”

  Dennis went out the door. He took the stairs down to the foyer of the row house where Hayes had his place and stepped out to the street.

  The moon hung low and bright. Dennis could see no clouds. But to him it smelled like rain.

  He walked up Otis toward the school, passing many parked cars. Mustangs and Novas for the cock-strong, Dodge Monacos and Olds 88s for the middle-aged and elderly, Caddys and Lincolns for those who liked to show. This was not his street, but he could match many of the vehicles to the houses where their owners stayed. He could match them all when he was straight. He passed a green Buick Special, then a VW Bug owned by this brother h
e knew who was always high, and a new Camaro, white with orange hood stripes, whose owner was a mechanic up near Fort Totten. Dennis had always been able to identify large things with small pieces of information. Like the dogs barking in the alleys. He could tell you the names of those dogs. Though maybe not right now. His head was all torn up.

  He found himself on the grounds of Park View Elementary. He limped across the weedy field. He found the last quarter of the joint they’d smoked in his pocket and lit it with a match. He had a seat on a swing that he barely fit into and hit the jay. He snorted up the smoke that was coming off its tip and held the whole draw in his lungs.

  His parents had finished dinner by now. His mother had washed the dishes, taken her bath, and gone to bed. His father would still be up, nursing his one beer, watching television. What was it, around eleven? He would be into Wanted: Dead or Alive on channel 20. A rerun, but his father didn’t care. Long as it had horses and guns.

  Dennis chuckled as he exhaled his smoke. He rubbed at the top of his head.

  His father had listened to him the night before, when Dennis had told him about his plan. How he was gonna turn it all around, get a job, work hard like his brother, and get his own place like his brother had, because his eyes had opened up and he’d learned. His father had nodded patiently the whole time he was talking. Yeah, there was the usual flicker of doubt in his eyes, and his hands were opening and closing at his sides, the way they did when he was impatient. But he had listened.

  That plan thing, it was all bullshit, anyway. Dennis had looked through the want ads in the morning but had made no calls. Basically, he’d done nothing all day. And here he was, sitting on a swing set late at night, no friends, no woman, no one to talk to and no one looking to talk to him. Just high. Sitting in the same swing he’d sat in over twenty years ago. Still a child, gone no further than a child.

  His plan had felt electric last night. It felt like nothing now.

  Derek’ll find me something, though, thought Dennis. My little brother will hook me up.

  He wet his fingers and extinguished the roach, putting it into his pocket because there was a hit or two to be had later on. He got up and limped across the field.

  Otis Place was up ahead. He could hear the bark of the dogs in its backyards. He cut into a short stretch of alley that joined the long common alley that ran between Otis and Princeton. Behind the corner house, he passed a mongrel named Betty who was growling with her face up against her owner’s fence. Betty knew him by sight and smell. Dennis said a few calm words, but Betty did not cease, and Dennis shrugged and moved on.

  He knew every stone in this alley. Didn’t even have to look at his feet to mind the uneven parts. When he and his father had played catch back here in the late ’40s, around sundown on summer nights, his pop would throw him grounders along with flies. Got so he knew when the ball would take a hop, depending on where it got thrown. He could picture his father, the white sleeves of his work shirt rolled up on his strong forearms, the easy motion of his throws. Coming out here and playing ball with his boy, even though he was bone tired from his job.

  I didn’t hug my father last night, thought Dennis. That’s what I forgot to do. I am high tonight and I might be high tomorrow, but I will hug my father when I get inside his place and I will tell him how good it felt for him to listen. What it meant, and how good it felt to me.

  Halfway down the alley, a German shepherd mix ran back and forth behind the fence, baring his teeth and gums, barking rapidly. The shepherd’s name was Brave, and Dennis stopped to pet him every day. Dennis approached the fence and leaned forward, extending his hand so the dog could smell it through the links.

  “Come here, boy. It’s me.”

  Brave barked wildly, snatching at the air with his jaws. Saliva dripped from his mouth, and his eyes were feral and desperate. The dog snapped at Dennis’s hand.

  Dennis drew back and stood straight.

  “Smart nigger,” hissed a voice in his ear as the edge of a straight razor was pressed against his throat.

  Pop, thought Dennis Strange.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ON WEDNESDAY, THE Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Tennessee. The city of Memphis received a Federal Court Restraining Order against Friday’s planned march, claiming that officials there would be unable to “control” the participants.

  On Wednesday, in New Haven, Connecticut, Senator Eugene McCarthy, energized by his primary victory in Wisconsin, appeared at a rally six thousand strong. A band played “When the Saints Go Marching In” as he entered the aisle of the meeting hall, some supporters running their hands through his hair as he passed. Later, McCarthy traveled to a north Hartford ghetto and spoke through a bullhorn to four hundred blacks, promising a “new set of civil rights,” detailing his proposals, but reminding them that the most important thing government should do is “find out what you think, what you want.” The reaction to his comments went unreported.

  On Wednesday, in Washington, D.C., in the evening, five to ten thousand people attended a rally at the corner of 14th Street and Park Road, where Robert F. Kennedy arrived via convertible motorcade and stepped up onto a makeshift platform set on the back of a flatbed truck. Banners and signs reading “RFK, Blue-Eyed Soul Brother” could be seen in the crowd. A street party atmosphere ensued as Kennedy spoke of “Washington’s monuments to failure, to indifference, to neglect.” People stood in the street and on rooftops, telephone booths, and trash cans, cheering wildly. One blond woman fainted in front of Kennedy’s wife. Down the block, at a much smaller gathering, a couple of Black Nationalists spoke to their predominately black audience, urging them not to vote for “another whitey.” According to the Washington Post reporter on the scene, their comments drew “little attention.”

  At the same time, in Memphis, Dr. King spoke to more than two thousand supporters. Friday’s march had been moved to Monday, but the city was still seeking an injunction against it, in part because of threats made to the reverend’s life.

  “It really doesn’t matter what happens now,” said Dr. King. “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

  Very early that day, just around dawn, the body of Dennis Strange was discovered in the alley shared by Princeton Place and Otis Place, near the row house where he had lived with his parents, by a neighbor who was headed off to work. As the neighbor walked toward his Oldsmobile sedan, his tired eyes not yet focused, he saw starlings alighting on something heaped on the stones up ahead. The birds took flight as the man approached. He knew it was a dead body he was nearing, having seen much death in the Second World War. He recognized the victim immediately, though he looked very different in the grotesque freeze of violent death than he had in life. His head had been nearly severed from his shoulders; it rested at an unnatural angle to his body, as if hinged. His teeth, stained with blood, protruded from lips drawn upward, a grimace of agony common in slaughtered animals. His eyes were open, fixed, and bulging. And there was all that blood. The blood, a pond of it beneath him, had soaked into his clothing and turned much of it black.

  “Lord,” said the man, his voice not much more than a whisper.

  He went back to his house and phoned the police, then woke his wife and sat on the edge of their marriage bed.

  “Poor Alethea,” said the wife.

  “I know it,” said the man, shaking his head. Their words were minimal but mutually understood. He and his wife had grown children of their own.

  “You think he was robbed?”

  “Of what? Boy never had twin dimes.” The man squeezed his wife’s hand and got up off the bed. “I better get back out there. They’ll be wanting to talk to me, I expect.”

  By the time the neighbor had returned to the scene, two squad cars had arrived, and soon thereafter came the meat wagon, photographer, and lab man. Last to arrive was a homicide detective named Bill Dolittle, who was working a double and had the bad luck to catch the case just an hour before break time. Dolittle was a slack-jawed alcoholic,
prone to seersucker suits, whose stick never shifted past second gear. He had the lowest closure rate in his precinct. Other cops called him Do-nothing and laughed at the mention of his name. He didn’t mind. He was working for his pension and his next drink.

  Dolittle dispatched one of the uniforms to talk to the old man whose house was behind the fence where the murder had occurred. The man, a gnarled-faced gentleman who went by R. T., said he knew the victim and nothing else. He had let his dog, Brave, back in the house at a late hour but had seen “not a thing.”

  “Your dog stays out all night?” said the uniform.

  “Usually he does. That’s my security guard right there. But he was barking at nothin’ last night. Leastways nothin’ I could see. I was up there on my stoop with the kitchen lights shining behind me. All’s my eyes could make out was the black of night.”

  “Why’d you let him in?”

  “Dog was barkin’ at a ghost, far as I could tell, and he wouldn’t stop. I was afraid Brave was gonna wake someone up.”

  After getting a statement from the neighbor, Detective Dolittle went to notify the victim’s parents. He found the mother, Alethea Strange, drinking a cup of coffee at an eating table, wearing a uniform-style dress, preparing, she said, to head up into Maryland to her “Wednesday house,” where she worked as a domestic. The father, Darius Strange, had already left for his job as a grill man in a diner. The woman broke down briefly when Dolittle gave her the news, Dolittle standing before her, jingling the change in his pocket and staring impotently at the floor. She then composed herself, rose abruptly from the table, and phoned her husband. When she was done talking to him, she phoned her younger son.

  FRANK VAUGHN HAD closed his fresh Petworth homicide the night before, the way most cases got closed: via a snitch. A parole violator brought in on a marijuana charge offered up the killer, with whom he regularly played cards, and cut a deal. Uniforms arrested the suspect at his grandmother’s apartment without incident. Vaughn interrogated the suspect at the station, but it was a formality, as he had already signed a confession he had written out, in pathetic grammar, before Vaughn arrived.