The Sweet Forever

by George Pelecanos

  Karras said good-bye to Scott and to Mary, the cute British clerk, and walked down Wisconsin. He passed the Georgetown theater, where Caligula had been playing for years. He bumped into a man and kept walking, through the late afternoon shopping crowds that were bleeding into the early evening party crowds of suburban and city kids beginning their night. Karras went into Pied Au Cochon and had a seat at the bar.

  He liked this old place, an English professor’s idea of a Parisian café. It had become a ritual to have a drink here on Saturday before his last stop at the Dupont store. Tonight Karras needed the drink. He felt as if his soul was drowning and maybe one drink would lift it back up. He hadn’t had a bump for the past hour, having made the decision to cut himself off before he reached the point where he couldn’t stop. His body couldn’t take one more late night, and he didn’t want to see another empty snow-seal lying crumpled in the Sunday morning trash.

  “Hey, Bobby.”

  “Dimitri,” said the bartender.

  “A Grand Marnier.”

  “You got it.”

  Karras watched the tender take a pot off a hot plate and pour steaming water into a snifter. He rolled the water around in the glass and dumped the water out into the sink. Then he free-poured Grand Marnier into the heated glass, eyeballing the level carefully.

  Karras watched with interest. He loved the rituals involved in getting high.

  “Here you go.” Bobby, who looked like a wind-carved laborer in a red vest, set the glass in front of Karras.

  Karras tipped the snifter carefully off its base and laid it on its side. The liqueur kissed the very top of the glass but did not spill out by even a drop.

  “Perfect, Bobby.”

  “I know.”

  Karras sipped the warm liqueur. If he were a smoker he would have lit one now, but Karras had never found pleasure in the taste. Back when he and Clay were serious about ball, Karras wouldn’t have even considered smoking, as it would have affected his game. Marcus still played one night a week over at Alice Deal’s gym, with a group of longtime D.C. boys—Ted Tavlarides, Adam Young, Sam Pinczuk, and Bill Valis among them. Karras hadn’t played pickup for years.

  “Hey, how you doin’?” said Karras, smiling rakishly at a leggy brunette who was cruising by the bar.

  She surveyed him quickly and looked away. Her date, an impeccably groomed young man, said something funny when she arrived at their table, and both of them laughed.

  In the bar mirror Karras looked at his wasted form.

  “Goddamn you, man,” he said out loud.

  “What say?” said Bobby.

  “Nothin’.”

  Karras thought of Donna, rushing off to Eddie Golden, that dishwasher installer, outside her apartment house earlier in the day. He was jealous, and the jealousy confused him. Okay, he’d been with her, and they’d had fun—why would she be different than any other girl he knew? Of course, he didn’t love Donna, not in any way he recognized. But he didn’t want to lose her so quickly. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to lose.

  Karras threw back his shot. He left seven on four and got off his stool.

  “Later, Bobby.”

  Bobby said, “Later than you think.”

  You can keep your barroom wisdom, pal, thought Karras, but the tender’s words were swimming in his head as he walked out to the street.

  Kevin Murphy placed a bowl of hot vegetable soup on a TV tray and carried it across the room. He put the tray by the bed. Wanda Murphy sat up, gathered her robe around her nightgown, and pushed her feet into an old pair of slippers.

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Hey, Kev.”

  She gave him a smile. Her red lipstick was thick and trailed off in places from her mouth, as if it had been applied by a child. Her hair went off in a couple of odd directions, and sheet lines creased her face.

  Even with all that mess, thought Murphy, she’s still a good-lookin’ woman when she smiles. I wonder if she knows.

  He said, “You look beautiful, Wanda.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m serious.” He lifted the tray so it fit over her legs. “Here’s your dinner.”

  “All that?”

  Murphy laughed. “You said you weren’t hungry, girl!”

  “I know. I’m just playin’, Kevin.”

  He sat next to her on the bed while she ate the soup and watched TV. He rested his hand on her thigh, warm through two layers of cloth. His old thirteen-inch Admiral was set up on her dresser, and Wanda would laugh every so often at the jokes on the show, laugh at things that couldn’t even bring Kevin Murphy to smile. She watched the same comedy shows every Saturday night—Gimme a Break, Facts of Life, Golden Girls, and 227, all in a row. Called it her “lineup.” Some real stupid shit, but if it made her happy for a couple of hours, it was all right by him.

  “Wanda?”

  “What, Kev?”

  “Been hanging out with this boy I met, down in Shaw?”

  “That right.”

  “Uh-huh. Eleven years old. Boy name of Anthony Taylor. Goes by T, but I tell him not to use it. Sounds like one of those street names all the kids got now.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “He’s a good boy, Wanda. Not much of a home life, though. Lives with his grandmother down there. She’s tryin’ and all that, but a boy needs a mother and a father to make him right.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Kevin?” Wanda smiled at something said on the show. She hadn’t once moved her eyes away from the set.

  “Just makin’ conversation, baby. Just a story is all it is, tellin’ you about my day.”

  “Sounds like you’re sayin’ we ought to take this boy into our home. That what’s on your mind? We’re supposed to bring in a stranger you just now met?”

  “No, Wanda, I’m not sayin’ that. This boy’s life is incomplete, but he’s got his own kin.” Murphy looked down at the carpet. “Look, all I’m sayin’ is, there’s plenty of boys like Anthony out there in this world, got nobody to guide them, tell ’em what they gotta do to be a man. Babies and toddlers, too, lookin’ at a future with no real love. Now, you and me, we can make a home for a child like that. We’ve got this house, you know it’s too big for the two of us, and I’ve got the money put away. Between you and me, we can provide a whole lot of love for some—”

  “Kevin!” Wanda laughed raucously. She rocked back and forth and pointed to the TV screen. “You see what that girl did? Oh, Lord, I can’t believe it!”

  Murphy took the empty soup bowl and water glass to the kitchen. He changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt and went down to the basement. He did some stretches, put on a pair of twenty-ounce gloves, and began to hit the Everlast heavy bag suspended from the ceiling beams near his workbench. The bag had duct tape wrapped around its middle where a split had begun; Murphy had copped the bag from an acquaintance, a karate instructor whose students had given it a punishing hands-and-feet workout over many years.

  Murphy started slowly, light brushes and then hard combinations, pounding the canvas with jabs and hooks and straight rights. He broke a good sweat and stopped to catch his breath. He listened to the sound of rain pebbling the glass of the window wells that ran around the house. He relaced his gloves and worked the bag until his shirt was soaked and his head felt light.

  Just about then his father phoned about Sunday dinner. Murphy told him he’d try to make it and said good-bye.

  Murphy showered, opened a can of beer, and went back down to the basement. He watched a little ball. He got up, grabbed another beer, and carried it to his workbench. There was a cardboard box filled with old lottery tickets from his father’s church on it. He put the box on the floor. He opened up a box of Remington ammo and spilled rounds out onto the workbench top. One by one, he clamped the bullets in a vise and cut X’s in their heads using a hammer and fine-edged chisel. He brought his S&W Combat Magnums down from the shelf, dismantled them, and used his Hoppe’s kit to clean and oil the parts. He reassembled t
he guns, replaced them in their cases, and put the bullets that he had dumdummed back in the box.

  Murphy glanced at his watch. He had been three hours at his bench.

  The phone rang in the basement, and Murphy picked it up.

  Murphy listened and said, “Lord.” Then he said, “I’ll meet you at O’Grady’s in fifteen.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Eddie Golden turned right off Route 1 and drove his Ford Courier down Sunnyside Avenue toward a concrete horizon of two-story warehouses and fenced-in lots. On weekdays this part of Beltsville’s industrial district was traffic heavy, but on Saturdays the landscape was barren and bleak. There’d be tumbleweeds blowing across the street, thought Eddie, if tumbleweeds tumbled in Prince George’s County.

  Eddie was glad his friends from Hunter’s weren’t around to see him driving the Jap-made truck. The way the Courier looked, short based and low to the ground, like a kid’s toy, they might as well have removed the Ford logo on the tailgate and painted on a rising sun.

  Eddie pulled into the lot of Appliance Installers Unlimited, a squat little building not much more than a hollow rectangle of cinder blocks housing two bays. He backed the Courier close to the building, got out, and climbed into the bed, then he pushed an old GSD-400 dishwasher, which he had taken out of a rental unit earlier in the day, to the edge of the tailgate. He pushed the dishwasher off the truck. It landed next to several others where his fellow installers had made a pile.

  Eddie locked up the truck. He got his tool belt from the bed and walked toward his car. The Reliant was the sole car in the lot. He had parked it next to a Dumpster set along the building’s side wall. A black sports car sat on the street, parked along Sunnyside’s curb.

  Eddie sang an April Wine tune he liked as he looked up in the sky. Clouds had gathered, and he could smell rain in the air. But he wouldn’t let a little weather kill his evening. He was in a really good mood. He hated working weekends, but with the money and all, he wouldn’t have to much longer. He couldn’t wait to spend the evening with Donna, sit her down, make some plans.

  Florida. Goddamn, boy, that would be nice.

  He put his key into the lock of the Reliant. He heard footsteps scrape gravel.

  Someone grabbed his free hand from behind and twisted it upward. Eddie went forward, his cheek smashed up against the car window, his eyes clearing the roof.

  “Whoa,” said Eddie, trying to stay on his feet. “Wait a—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” said a voice.

  Eddie had a blood rush, hearing the black-man’s inflection in the words.

  A car pulled from a lot down the street and began to drive away. Eddie panicked and let out a high-pitched yell.

  He heard a crack. A fire bolt traveled up his arm, rocketed through his neck, and flared at the base of his skull. He felt his fingers touch the back of his forearm.

  Eddie screamed. Eddie went to black.

  Eddie stared at the back of a black seat. He was on the floor of a car, and he felt very close to the ground. There was vibration and city music and two men arguing over the music, and when the music stopped there was still the arguing and the sound of wipers on glass.

  He was near fetal behind the seats. Something heavy lay across his legs. He moved his arm up an inch and looked down so that he could see what was causing all the pain. His hand was bent too far, and his wrist bone pushed out against the skin where it had snapped. A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “Fuck you had to break his arm for, Short?”

  “Bitch screamed; I had to make him stop.”

  “What we gonna do with him now?”

  “Couldn’t just leave him there. Take him back to Ty’s, find out what we need to know.”

  “Tyrell ain’t gonna like it, man, you bringin’ him to the house.”

  “He’s gonna like how we found the one tried to beat him for his money. You can believe that.”

  “What if someone comes around, looks for him where he parked his truck?”

  “Why I had you drive his car and park it a couple miles away, behind that car wash. Anybody comes around, they’ll think he got back from work, took off, went and got drunk, some shit like that. That is, if anybody cares.”

  Eddie Golden closed his eyes. Maybe none of this was real.

  Alan Rogers slipped the Z in the space between the Supra and Tyrell’s 633. He cut the engine and watched rain cloud the windshield.

  “Go ahead, Alan, I’ll get our boy inside.”

  “I’ll get him, Short. Take his tool belt and go on in. Let Tyrell know we got him ’fore I bring him through the door.”

  “Right.”

  Monroe reached behind him and lifted the tool belt off the white boy’s legs. He got out of the car and walked through the rain, stepped up onto the porch and into the bungalow.

  Rogers looked into the back of the car at the white boy. His eyes were open but set kind of strange.

  “What’s your name?” said Rogers.

  “Ed.”

  “Ed what?”

  “Ed Golden.”

  “Okay. I’m gonna tell you what’s what, ’cause once we get inside I’m just another employee. Can’t help you none in there.”

  Eddie licked some crust off his lips. “I’m listening.”

  “We know you took the money. All Tyrell gonna want to know now is where it’s at. You tell us, you got a good chance to walk away. You don’t, well, you think you’re hurtin’ now, you got a whole world of hurtin’ comin’ to your ass. Things you can’t imagine, hear?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  “Don’t be stutterin’ like that, either. My partner, Short, he pick up on that, he gonna run it right into the ground.”

  “It hurts.”

  “I bet it do. Short had no call to do you like that. But he did, so there’s nothin’ we can do about it now.” Rogers reached into a cup set between the buckets where Monroe had dropped the last of his codeine pills. “Here you go, eat these. Make you feel better, man.”

  Rogers put the pills, one at a time, in Eddie Golden’s open mouth. Eddie chewed them up and swallowed the bits.

  “What’s your name?” said Eddie.

  “Never mind that.”

  “Wanted to thank you, that’s all.”

  “Never you mind. Remember what I said. Tell it straight. Be a lot easier on you if you do.”

  Rogers got out of the car, reached behind the seat, pulled up on Eddie’s bicep.

  “Uh,” said Eddie.

  “Yeah,” said Rogers, “I know.”

  He got Eddie out of the car, guided him toward the house. He felt him shake beneath his hand.

  Eddie heard bass coming from the house. He saw the silhouettes of two figures behind the curtained front window. For a moment he thought he would break away and run. There were dark woods around the house and tiny lights back beyond the woods. It was quiet, except for the rain. The moment passed. He let the tall kid with the gentle eyes lead him to the front door of the house. They went inside.

  A light-skinned black man with very green eyes and sharp, angular features sat in a cushioned chair, looking up at Eddie. The scary one with the fucked-up nose was at a round table, dipping his finger into a mound of cocaine and rubbing the coke on his gums. In another open room, a huge black guy and a tiny yellow black sat on a couch, laughing at something on the television. A thin black leaned against the wall, staring at Eddie with flat, dull eyes.

  Eddie saw several guns, shotguns and pistols, scattered around the room.

  The light-skinned black uncoiled himself and stood from his chair. He was taller than Eddie by a foot. His ears were long and pointed, like those of a goat.

  Eddie’s knees weakened. He felt a quiver in his sphincter. He tightened himself and swallowed hard.

  “This the one?” said Tyrell incredulously.

  “Yeah,” said Monroe.

  “Don’t look like much,” said Antony Ray, pushing away from the wall and unfolding his arms. “Hard to believe he took you
off, Tyrell.”

  “Heard that, cuz,” said Tyrell.

  “Name’s Ed Golden,” said Rogers.

  “Golden,” said Tyrell. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Jewboy,” said Antony Ray. “Ain’t that right?”

  Eddie lowered his head. Rogers pulled a chair away from the round table and set it by the fireplace. He looked at Eddie and said, “Sit down.”

  Eddie took a seat. He leaned forward, rested his broken wrist on his lap, and winced. He didn’t look anyone in the eye. They were talking, but he couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. The music, someone shouting angrily over a bass line and what sounded like a whistle of rockets, was playing too loud.

  Eddie saw the one named Tyrell go to the other room and tell the others to come back with him. They turned off the TV and lowered the music and returned. The six of them stood around him then. He kept his head down. The fire shadows played at their feet.

  “Eddie,” said Tyrell. “You don’t mind I call you Eddie, right?”

  “No,” said Eddie.

  “He don’t mind,” said someone, and a couple of them laughed.

  “Look up when we’re talkin’ to you, boy.”

  Eddie made himself look at them.

  “Good.”

  “Damn, Short,” said Linney, “who fucked up your nose?”

  “Shut up, Jumbo.”

  “For real, man, who fucked up your shit like that?”

  “You oughtta go ahead and tell it, Short Man,” said Tyrell. “I’d like to know.”

  “Man by the name of—what’s that nigga’s name, Alan?”

  “Marcus Clay,” said Rogers. “Owns this record store called Real Right, down on U.”

  “You know him, Alan?” said Tyrell.

  “My boy Alan,” said Monroe, “he knows his name ’cause he’s datin’ this little girl Neecie Tate. Her father works there.”

  “That so?” said Tyrell.

  “Just this girl I know, Ty—”

  “And this one here,” said Tyrell, gesturing to Eddie. “Didn’t he take me off right in front of that shop?”