Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  R-U-N.

  I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta. We’d been living in Greenville with my mom’s second husband when one day he up and left. Terence. That was his name. But no one called him that, not even when they were mad. Everyone called him “BeeGee,” for Big Goon. There was a Little Goon too, once upon a time. His name was spray painted across the windowless rear wall of the Bristol Market, a convenience store and neighborhood hangout a few blocks from our house. “Little Goon” was spelled in uneven letters next to “R.I.P.” and above the names “J-Son” and “Mikey Singe.” The three of them died in a car accident in their late teens. The circumstances varied depending on whatever lesson the teller wanted to impart on a young kid like me. Sometimes Little Goon and the crew were fleeing heroically from the police. Sometimes Little Goon was drunk and got them all killed by driving into a concrete wall.

  BeeGee hadn’t been with them that day. The way he told it, he was in jail shaking an angry fist at the man, but Mom said the others had ditched him because his fat ass took up too much room in the car and he ran too damn slow for what they were going to do. Whatever else he did in life, Big Goon earned his name. That man could eat. I suspect eating big was the only reason he ever held a steady job. Not that he was ever bad to me—or to his son, my half-brother, Bug. He wasn’t bad to us the way the couch in our living room wasn’t bad to us. It just was. It did its thing and didn’t much care if we came and went, so long as we didn’t block the television.

  On weekdays, BeeGee would come home from work and eat and watch TV and fall asleep on that couch. On weekends, he woke up late and had a big breakfast before his friends came over to barbecue and bullshit and shoot bottles in our big back yard, which faced an open field. Seems like it always ended in an argument over whose turn it was to buy weed. Then one day, Big Goon just up and left, or so it seemed to me, and Mom said there wasn’t any reason for us to stay. She sent me and my brother to our room with a couple rolling suitcases with broken wheels. Bug packed his two favorite shirts, his Batman underwear, and all his action figures with their weapons and vehicles. Mom sent him back with orders for me to help. Bug asked me why we were leaving. I didn’t want to tell him that Mom was skipping out on the lease. And a bunch of other stuff, probably.

  She took us back to Asheville at first, to my grandma’s, who lived near where I was born. It also wasn’t too far from where my dad was incarcerated. I remember feeling legit terrified that I might be asked to visit him. The possibility of having to stand there awkwardly for an hour and pretend to like a man I never knew and didn’t respect always struck me as the worst punishment imaginable. I was two years old when he went in for possession with intent to distribute. For the longest time, I only knew his face from old photographs. The man who sat opposite us in the visitor’s lounge was a stranger. His defense, he told me time and again, was that he hadn’t intended to distribute, that the two bricks of heroin in his trunk had simply been part of a scam to cheat some street dealers out of some cash, and that the uniformed officers knew that but had arrested him anyway. But since it’s a tall order convincing a jury that you’re innocent of one crime by virtue of being guilty of another, lesser crime, he was convicted after a few minutes of deliberation. Since it wasn’t his first—or his second—offense, he got three years. Eleven months later, for reasons that were never disclosed, he sent a guard into intensive care and got 15 long.

  I thought we’d stay in Asheville since we had roots there, but one night Mom came home pretty shaken up and said she was tired of small-town men and we packed up again and moved to Atlanta. Our first home was a pay-by-week motel with one bed and no door on the bathroom. Mom counted out her dollars and cents on the little table by the window and gave me enough for a trip to the store. I walked back with a drink in one hand and a mess of plastic bags in the other. That’s when I saw him—legs first, sticking out from behind a brick corner. One of his shoes had come off. The other had a hole in the toe. At first I thought it was just a junkie passed out in the alley, so I kept walking and kept an eye, which is how I noticed the blood. It had run across the pocked pavement and made an uneven puddle, like a long-fingered grasp, before drying in the hot sun and turning dark. Flies danced over it like grains of rice on a hot plate. They landed on the man’s open eyes and crawled over his lashes. But he didn’t blink. He stared through me, all the way to the horizon. And there was the hint of a smirk on his face, as if he knew something I did not. I ran.

  That was my welcome to the big city. Instead of calling the police, Mom called our new landlord to see if we could move early into the rental house she’d found near the park. The man said no at first, but she went into the hall and made some kind of special arrangement and we were carrying bags the next day. I liked being close to the park. I could play ball any time. Back in Greenville, our neighbors across the street had a hoop on their garage and they let me use it whenever I wanted. I spent hours and hours out there, usually when BeeGee and his friends were carrying on out back. But the hoops at the park near our new house didn’t have any nets. The pavement was cracked and turned to gravel in spots, which hurt if you fell on it. But the way I saw it, that was all the more reason to keep your feet. There were kids my age there, and I met some guys, Curtis and ‘Kwon, which was short for something, and one other whose name I forget. ‘Kwon did pull-ups on the hoop. He leapt straight up and grabbed it and flexed his muscles, lifting his head through the metal circle to impress the neighborhood girls who were always chatting at the tables off-court. The four of us played two-on-two while the girls half-watched, only I was new, so I didn’t know enough to let Curtis win. Even at fifteen, Curtis “C-Note” Wilson was the king of our block. Or so he thought. I sunk the winning basket from the three-point line and the girls hooted. I turned to smile and C-Note pushed me and swung a fist.

  I’d gotten into a few fights before, but I can’t say I was a fighter. I reacted more with panic than anything. I pushed to avoid the swing and for a moment there was an awkward, grappling struggle. When he couldn’t overpower me easy, Curtis let go and went for a gun, a fat .38 revolver with a taped handle, stashed in his jacket by the fence. I remember seeing the tips of the rounds in their chambers, pointed right at me. There was a long moment where that barrel faced my chest and nobody moved.

  I don’t think he would’ve shot me, not in broad daylight, not in front of a bunch of witnesses. In fact, I suspect the girls were the real reason he’d pulled the gun at all. Just don’t kid yourself it was only about a basketball game.

  Where I grew up, there were rules to being a man. Rule number one was that you took care of your own. Any man who couldn’t do that was a punk. Like Big Goon. Which is why, in the immediate aftermath of that day, Curtis Wilson didn’t take his revenge on me—at least not directly. He went after my little brother. A few days after the altercation on the court, C-Note and his boys ran into Bug coming home from school and decided to send a message. They called him names and pushed him around. But he wasn’t a punk neither. He talked back. Acted like he was his big brother. Curtis and the crew got mad. The next morning, they cornered him on his way to school. They pushed him down and took his shoes. Right off his feet. Punched him hard, too, right in the chest. So he’d stay down.

  “But I didn’t cry,” he told me later. He was so proud. All of seven years old.

  By the time he got home, Mom and I had already left for the day, so Bug didn’t have anywhere to go. He skipped school and spent the day by himself, wandering around outside the house in dirty socks until our neighbor, Mrs. Hattis, asked him inside. She gave him church cookies and let him watch TV.

  “You did all right,” I told him later, rubbing his head.

  He smiled up at me. He needed a lot of reassurance in those days. After BeeGee.

  Bug’s real name was Alvin, after his paternal grandfather. I started calling him Bug shortly after he started crawling, because that’s what he did to me. I suppose I was getting him back for taking
away the special relationship an only child has with his mother. Bug and I were opposites on just about everything. I was lean, physical, analytical. I liked sports and numbers. I talked back to Mom and questioned everything she did. Bug was plump, quiet, and sensitive. He preferred playing with his toys to going outside. His big dream was to get a fancy video game system like the kids out in the suburbs. Without it, he spent most of his time drawing. We didn’t have money for sketchbooks, so he drew on ruled paper or whatever else he could get his hands on. But as different as we were, none of it mattered. Mom was Mom, which meant all we really had was each other, and we knew it.

  The weeks later, it seemed as if everything had blown over. I was tired of being stuck in the house, like a prisoner, and went back to the park. I figured it would be cool as long as I stayed away from Curtis and his boys, especially if the girls were around. It was a mistake. Seeing me brought back the fight, and the next day, C-Note and his crew ran into Bug again and told him he’d have to sell drugs for them. Bug said no and ‘Kwon punched in the stomach so hard he pissed himself. Curtis kicked him. Hard. Over and over. Even stomped on his head once. He bled that time. Cried, too. Although I think that had more to do with the dark stain on his crotch than the rest. Made him look like a boy. He cried because somewhere inside, he knew then that now he’d shown weakness, and anybody who looked weak was a target. Now it wasn’t going to stop. He sobbed all the way home, shuffling his feet, trying to keep it together. When he got into bed, it all came out.

  I’ll never forget that. I stood at the crack of his door and watched him wipe the tears from his little round face. Bug shared his father’s build. I felt so angry. So helpless. The doors in that house were made of plywood and didn’t block a single sound. I got up when I heard Bug crying and stood there and listened as Mom talked to her cousin on the phone. She talked about me and how I didn’t have no sense, how I always had to push things, just like my dad, and how we might have to move and how we didn’t have the money for it. We all knew what would happen. We all knew it was just gonna get worse and worse until Bug gave in and worked for the gang—or I did. That’s how thugs get power. And politicians, too. They make it so going along is the best of a bunch of bad options.

  Of course, there was no way I was going to let my little brother into that life. So I started walking him to school. I cut class early so I could walk him home. I explained to my sixth-period teacher, Mr. Odell, what was happening and he let it slide.

  “As long as you keep up with the homework,” he said. “No slippin!” He was a good man.

  One weekend around then, I went to the store, just like I did when I found the body. Mom was home so I didn’t think there’d be any trouble. I came back and Curtis Wilson and his boys were in front of our house. They always ran together—for protection. They weren’t the only crew stalking our block. Bug was on the sidewalk with some of his friends. C-Note was trying to get him to take a hit from a glass pipe. Said he needed to know the merchandise. I don’t think he cared much if Bug actually smoked it. He just wanted to show everyone who was boss.

  Mom was watching from the front porch. C-Note told everyone she smoked crack, that she’d bought from him even. She didn’t say anything. I was so mad. Looking back, I’m sure the other kids already knew. We all knew who was using and who wasn’t. But in my adolescent mind, the fact that no one had ever talked about it meant it was still a secret, so when Curtis said it out loud, right there in front of everyone, I felt so ashamed. I wanted to scream at him that my momma didn’t do that. That she wasn’t no junkie. That she was good to us. But mostly I wanted her to say it. I wanted her to come down off the porch and tell Curtis Wilson to stop bothering us and go home. But she couldn’t. Not without making things worse. So she just stood there and took it. Just like everybody else.

  Except me.

  I ran up, dropped my groceries on the lawn, and pushed C-Note away from my brother. The two of us stood eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose, chests puffed.

  He wore dark sunglasses and a white shirt and a crisp ball cap on his head. “Whatchu gonna do?” he asked. His breath stank. “Whatchu gonna do? You ain’t gonna do nuthin.”

  Old Mrs. Hattis next door came out then, screaming and hollering about the noise. She had jar-bottom glasses damn near half-an-inch thick and went around saying things like “I don’t see so well no more,” and maybe that was true, but she heard just fine. She knew what she was doing. She threw out all kinds of stuff from her kitchen. Rumor was, she was a witch.

  I shoved C-Note off me and he made a gun with his fingers. The hammer of his thumb fell as he walked backward, smiling.

  Mom was mad. I’d only made him angry, she said. Only made things worse. I was just like my dad. I was too proud to take it. And now those boys were gonna hurt her baby.

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. All of fourteen and stupid.

  She looked at me with hate in her eyes. “I didn’t mean you.”

  Sure enough, two days later, in the dead of night, shots were fired into our house.

  One-two-three-four-five.

  I can still hear it. The crack of the gun. The chime of broken glass. The muffled crunch of bullets piercing wood. Thump-thump-thump. The sound of screeching tires. My mom on the floor in the hall screaming at the top of her lungs, reaching out to her two boys.

  After a few minutes of trembling silence, the world returned. A front door opened across the street and a dog barked at all the activity. We felt each other for blood. A couple of the neighbors came. They knocked and we went outside. I remember being surprised it was still so damned humid, even at 4 a.m. Only now it was dark and there wasn’t even a breeze. It was stifling.

  The police came and talked to everyone. Flashing lights reflected off everyone’s front windows. They hadn’t seen anything, they said. No, they wouldn’t give a statement. They hadn’t heard anything and they hadn’t seen anything and they didn’t have anything to say. They just came out when they heard the sirens. That was all.

  Bug and I didn’t go to school for a week after that. Mom eventually got ahold of Big Goon, but he said no. So she sent Bug to stay with her cousin, our Auntie Susan. She lived north of town with her husband and their three kids. It was just temporary, she told me, while we figured out a way to get some money and start over.

  We never saw him again.

  I woke late to my phone ringing under my pillow. I reached for it.

  Ollie.

  “Well,” he grumbled, “you wanted something big, you bastard. You got it.”

  I thought he meant the adventure from the day before. “Just animals,” I said, looking at the bandage on the back of my hand. “Not our jurisdiction.”

  “Huh? No, I mean a new case.”

  “What?” I sat up. “Already?” They were coming faster now.

  “Seven years old. I just got a visit from the boss. She said she tried calling you yesterday. I did, too, by the way.”

  Dr. Chalmers didn’t come down to The Pit, as we called it—the windowless basement offices of the building—except for promotions and firings.

  I sat up. “What’d she say?”

  “Nothing. She asked where the hell you’ve been and told me the news.”

  I looked at the clock. After 10:00. “When did it happen?”

  After my little outing, I let the Jersey police know what I had found at the apartment complex. Then I went to the ER, which took most of the night. I needed several boosters.

  “Boy was admitted to the hospital yesterday,” he said. “I was about to head over. Thought you might like to join me.”

  I told him I’d meet him there. I hung up and stared at my sheets.

  Shit.

  Seven years old.

  I looked at my phone. I had unread messages. From Amber. Dr. Massey.

  NO LUCK YET ON ALONSO FILE SORRY

  HOW IS THE INVESTIGATION GOING?

  I looked around the room. I didn’t like waking up in the hotel. It was the worst part of my day.
There was always that moment just after sleep but before I was fully conscious where it seemed like I was back home and my dirty clothes would be on the floor and Marlene would be making a racket with my daughter in the bathroom.

  But there was none of that.

  If my wife had seen how I lived those months in New York, she probably would’ve been upset. It wasn’t just that it was clean, which the housekeeping staff saw to regularly. It was tidy. I picked up after myself like I never had at home. Mostly because I wasn’t taking turns feeding Marigold or putting her down. I wasn’t sneaking away to catch up on my reading, neglecting the dishes, because now I had time. All I had was time. And with no reason to hurry, there was no reason not to tidy up.

  And I suppose some part of me knew that if I didn’t do it, no one would.

  The effect, week after week, was to make the place look unlived in, and waking up to that—and the quiet—amplified my sense of isolation. I was always happy to step out of the elevator and back into the noise of the world.

  I texted Dr. Massey from the train.

  NOT WELL. THERE’S A NEW CASE

  JUST GOT WORD

  7 YEARS OLD

  She texted back right away.

  SEVEN?? THAT’S TERRIBLE!!!

  Then, a few minutes later:

  I’LL HAVE JAIME CHECK STORAGE.

  ALONSO FILE MIGHT HAVE BEEN

  ACCIDENTALLY ARCHIVED

  THANKS

  I got off the train and moved to a different platform, heading northbound. I was waiting for the train when my phone dinged again.