Cracker Bling

by Stephen Solomita

  ‘The only thing you’re out of is your fuckin’ mind.’

  Hootie listens to the sound of his own voice. He’s still high, of course, and he feels as though he’s eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Even his anger seems remote. But then Bubba nods thoughtfully and it’s obvious that he’s giving Hootie’s complaint a hearing.

  ‘Ya know, I was up in Clinton for two years before they shipped me to Green Haven. Talk about a tough joint? You get out of line, the COs beat you with axe handles.’

  ‘Didn’t I just—?’

  ‘I heard you, Hootie. But just let me say what I have to say.’ Bubba hesitates long enough to lay a massive hand on Hootie’s shoulder. ‘In the institution, the Man’s only got one game and that’s to break your spirit. You hear what I’m sayin’? And you really can’t blame the COs. With rehabilitation off the table, the only way to control the population is to break the inmates, physically and psychologically. And it’s not just the beatings, or gettin’ thrown in solitary. It’s about the strip searches. It’s about trashing your cell during shakedowns. It’s about screws who call you “piece of shit”, or “asshole”, or “scumbag”. It’s about ten thousand other humiliations designed for only one purpose, to break your spirit, so that when they finally cut your loose, you’re not good for anything more than shakin’ a cup. “Spare change, sir? Spare a quarter?”’

  The speech slows Hootie down precisely because the ideas Bubba tosses out so closely parallel his own. What do you do when the whole world’s beating you down? How do you make your way? Hootie doesn’t have many answers, but he’s certain that killing rats on subway platforms is a losing strategy.

  Hootie takes a minute to check his surroundings. Despite the hour, there are passengers scattered throughout the car, the usual mix of races and nationalities. At the far end, three Latino knuckleheads glare into space. Two wear black hoodies pulled over their heads. The other wears a T-shirt that reaches his knees. Badasses or wannabes? Hootie’s not sure.

  ‘Lemme ask you this …’ Hootie finally says.

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘No, don’t shoot. Leave the piece where it is. Because if committing suicide is the only way to keep my spirit alive, I’m ready to get on my knees and start sucking cock.’

  Bubba’s laugh fills the train, drawing the attention of the other passengers, including the three assholes at the far end of the car. Hootie watches them stir, eyes swinging to Bubba as they make a careful assessment. Bubba, on the other hand, pays no attention. It’s as if they’re alone.

  ‘Stick with me awhile,’ he says when Hootie finally calms down. ‘Let’s talk.’

  They ride in silence, down to Fourteenth Street where they catch a cross-town L to First Avenue. Hootie takes a deep breath when they finally reach the street. The temperature has fallen to eighty degrees and the humid air seems pristine compared to the air in the station. As Bubba leads the way to a narrow promenade that runs between the East River and FDR Drive, Hootie opens up, describing a history that includes his homeless state and the reasons for it.

  ‘See, that’s just what I mean,’ Bubba says when Hootie grinds to halt. ‘Your mom? Your stepfather? They want to throw you down, put their feet on the back of your head. They want you to show submission, like a dog. All that crap about your identity? That’s an excuse, Hootie. Even if you memorized every speech Martin Luther King ever made, they’d find a reason to make you crawl. And the funny part is they don’t even know they’re doin’ it. They think they love you.’

  The early morning is overcast and the air smells of fish. Hootie can taste the salt on his tongue. To his left, the river is flat and black, a mirror that returns the city’s lights as if rejecting a gift. To his right, the few cars on FDR Drive whip past at high speed, here and gone. Bubba looks around, then yanks the automatic from beneath his shirt.

  ‘Two hundred dollars. That’s what I paid for the piece.’ Bubba hesitates, but when Hootie doesn’t respond, he shrugs his shoulders. ‘From the half-court line,’ he announces, before scaling the gun out over the water. The weapon describes a long arc, spinning like a Frisbee, before dropping into the river some thirty yards away. A moment later, a handful of shell casings follow.

  ‘You get caught with a handgun,’ Bubba declares, ‘it’s three and a half years, mandatory.’

  Without further explanation, Bubba leads Hootie south, toward the Tenth Street overpass. ‘You need a place to stay, you could bunk with me for a couple of days. I got room.’

  And what can Hootie say to that? I’d rather spend the night on the street? Hootie watches the elongated shadows in front of him, his alongside Bubba’s. He’s thinking he looks like a kid walking beside his father. Thinking, not for the first time, that he’s somehow climbed the beanstalk.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’

  ‘And there’s somebody I want you to meet.’

  Hootie doesn’t respond. He’s pretty certain that he’s being played, that Bubba’s trying to sell him something. But if listening to Bubba’s sales pitch is the price of a room, it’s a price Hootie’s willing to pay, especially now that Bubba’s gun is in the river. They recross FDR Drive at Tenth Street, walking west through the Lillian Wald Houses, a low-income project that runs for blocks in either direction. Hootie’s visited the projects that dot West Harlem many times and the ground isn’t unfamiliar. Still, his brain jumps to full alert when a black man steps out of the shadows and walks directly toward them.

  ‘Yo, Bubba, s’up?’

  ‘Nothin’ to it.’ Bubba offers a forearm which the man dutifully bumps.

  ‘You gonna win tomorrow?’

  ‘The kid they got at center, he’s too small. I can handle him.’

  ‘But I’m askin’ if you gonna win.’

  ‘I’m gonna have a good game. Beyond that, I got nothin’ to say.’

  ‘I hear ya.’

  The man walks back into the shadows without so much as glancing at Hootie. Bubba watches him for a moment before continuing on to Avenue D. They’re on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in an area gentrifiers call Alphabet City.

  ‘I play in a basketball league,’ Bubba explains, ‘twice a week. Asshole drug dealers sponsor the teams and bet on the games. There’s even a point spread. But the thing is, this league, half the players are ex-cons like me. So it ain’t a question of whether points are being shaved, but only who’s shaving them.’

  Hootie finally puts the pieces together. He was ten or eleven, he can’t remember exactly, but the story was big news for months. The starting forward at St. John’s, a white kid on full scholarship, got into a fight with a teammate, a fight the teammate did not survive. Basketball had more or less defined Hootie’s world back in the day, and Hootie distinctly remembers the public outcry when the killer was allowed to plea bargain the original murder charge down to manslaughter.

  ‘You’re that dude from St. John’s.’

  ‘No, Hootie, I’m not that dude. I’m that power forward who was a dead lock to go in the first round of the NBA draft. That power forward who was lookin’ at a minimum two million dollar signing bonus.’

  Bubba leads Hootie across Avenue D and halfway up the block before coming to a halt. They’re standing beneath a tree, a sycamore, with the light from a street lamp bleeding through the leaves. The light is falling across Bubba’s head and shoulders like a spotlight and it occurs to Hootie that his companion deliberately chose the setting.

  ‘See, it wasn’t like they said, what they wrote about. I mean, the jerk got in my face one too many times and I gave him a beat down. I admit that. And I admit that I beat him bad, alright? But the fact is that he was in the emergency room fifteen minutes after I got off him and the docs said he was OK. You hear me, right? The docs examined him, took his blood, gave him a CT scan, and sent the poor bastard home. Six hours later, he’s dead from internal bleeding, which naturally is my fault. I tell ya, Hootie, if I wasn’t playin’ big-time ball, I wouldn’t have gotten more than a year.
I mean, it’s not like the asshole wasn’t fightin’ back. But every judge is a law-and-order judge when the media’s lookin’ over his shoulder. Same for the DA. They don’t wanna look soft on crime, so they make an example.’

  ‘And the example was you.’

  ‘Take it to the bank.’

  Hootie looks Bubba right in the eye. Time to take a stand. ‘If you were innocent, why did you plead guilty?’

  ‘Simple, they were gonna charge me with murder unless I took the plea and my lawyer wouldn’t guarantee an acquittal. Ten years is a long time – I oughta know – but it’s a lot less than twenty-five to life.’

  They continue west, to Avenue A. As they wait for the light, a police cruiser drifts by, slowing as it comes alongside them. The two cops inside fix them with a hard stare, a stare that challenges even as it dismisses them. Hootie absorbs the stare without flinching, but doesn’t begin to relax until the cops move on. This is something else he’ll never shake, this reaction to cops. He might cover the tension, might not show it on the outside, but inside he’ll always feel a mix of rage and fear, the emotions curling around each other like mating snakes.

  ‘See there,’ Bubba says as they cross the street. ‘Those cops, they’ll remember.’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘Remember me, Hootie. And that’s my whole problem. Big as I am, nobody forgets me. I’m conspicuous wherever I go. Now you, you’re just the opposite. If those cops try to describe you an hour from now, they won’t even know what to call you. White, black, Hispanic, even Asian or Muslim. You could be anything.’

  They cross First Avenue before Bubba pulls to a halt in front of a five-story brick townhouse. The townhouse is in good repair, the brick clean enough to have been freshly laid. There’s a fan window above a lacquered oak door and window boxes on the third floor that bear impatiens, begonias and a lime-green ivy, white at the borders, that trails along the brick.

  ‘Home sweet home, at least temporarily,’ Bubba says. ‘I’m house-sitting for the owners. They’re in Morocco. Which means we have to be quiet and keep the place neat. The neighbors are real assholes, which naturally follows from the fact that they have money.’ Bubba winks. ‘Now me, I can’t wait to have money. Then I can be an asshole, too.’

  Bubba climbs the stoop, two steps at a time, and shoves a key in the door lock. He leads Hootie up three flights of winding stairs, past a series of vintage city photographs, to an apartment door. With a flourish, he unlocks the door, leans inside and calls, softly, ‘You decent?’

  A girl’s voice answers. ‘We have company?’

  ‘That we do.’ Bubba shoves the door open to reveal a young, very blonde girl. He steps inside, Hootie following, then closes the door and locks both locks. Finally, he gestures to Hootie and says, ‘This is Two-Bears Hootier, better known as Hootie. Hootie, this is Amelia Cincone. She has a nickname, too, but before I tell you what it is, try to guess Amelia’s age.’

  Hootie figures the girl in front of him can’t be more than nine or ten. Tall for her age, maybe, but she has neither breasts nor hips. Growing up, Hootie watched his older sister mature into a woman, so he believes himself familiar with the process. Still, there has to be a point here, otherwise Bubba wouldn’t have raised the question a few seconds after they walked through the door.

  ‘Nine?’ Hootie guesses.

  ‘Add ten years.’ Bubba’s grinning. ‘Show him,’ he tells Amelia.

  Amelia hesitates just long enough for Hootie to read her age in her eyes. There’s no child in those blue eyes. Not even close. He watches her rummage through her purse for a moment, then turn to offer him a pair of documents. The first is a driver’s license bearing her photograph, the second a birth certificate. Both confirm her age.

  ‘Kallmann syndrome,’ she tells Hootie. ‘For reasons unknown, but probably having to do with a genetic mutation, my hypothalamus doesn’t produce sex hormones, so my body didn’t mature.’ She looks down, bats her eyelashes, finally curtsies. ‘I’m Patricia Pan,’ she tells Hootie. ‘I’m a freak.’

  Bubba takes out a roll of bills, a thick roll. ‘Seed money,’ he explains passing it to Amelia. He lays an arm around Amelia’s shoulder while she thumbs through the roll, greedy as a child in a toy store. ‘Alright, now, we’ve done the show. It’s time for the tell. Like I already said, Amelia’s has a nickname. Can you guess what it is?’

  Hootie shakes his head. ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Meal ticket.’

  Later, Hootie’s sitting on the edge of a platform bed in a smallish bedroom while he strips off his shoes, socks and pants. He’s never been fond of modern furniture and the decor throughout the apartment, which covers the entire floor, is all glass, chrome and abstract paintings, with the occasional pop art canvas thrown in for contrast. But like it or not, the entire apartment screams money, leaving Hootie to wonder how Bubba came to be living here. The foam mattress is cradling his ass like the hand of a lover.

  Hootie folds his clothes and lays them across a wicker side chair with a pink cushion on the seat, another habit learned in prison where he pressed his Rikers Island jumpsuit by laying it beneath his mattress while he slept. He turns off the bedside lamp and drops his head to a stack of pillows. He, Bubba and Amelia had shared a nightcap, some kind of bourbon from a jug, then gone off to separate bedrooms. Amelia and Bubba were business partners, not lovers. This pleased Hootie – nineteen or not, the scene was too perverted for his tastes. But it left him restless, too. Bubba was slowly pulling him in, just as the foam mattress was curling around his body. Right now, this minute, if Bubba hadn’t come along, he’d be sleeping on a subway train, or walking the streets, waiting for sunrise and a quick nap on a park bench. Instead, he’s pulling up a comforter to ward off the chill of the air conditioner, a comforter nearly as soft as the sheets and the pillowcases, which are as soft as satin. And how do you say no to that? Given the alternatives?

  Hootie’s last thoughts are of his prison mentor, Eli Scannon. Eli was a small man who’d survived many years in New York’s worst prisons. He had tiny eyes that he squeezed down when he was excited, so that he looked at you through narrow slits. And his hands were always moving, though the rest of his body remained still.

  ‘When the heat comes down,’ he told Hootie, ‘the white man will always betray the black man. And it don’t matter how close they are, don’t matter if they was asshole buddies. When the shit hits the fan, it’s the black man’s face gonna be in front of the blades. Now the thing about the white man is that he can’t admit it, not even to himself. No, the white man will sell the black man’s ass down the river, then pronounce himself righteous. Myself, I prefer the other kind of white man, the one who wanna see niggers hangin’ from every tree. I feel safer with him.’

  THREE

  Detective Peter Chigorin, universally called the Russian by his peers, can’t believe what he’s seeing. The 1 Line shut down in both directions at 145th Street. Enough crime-scene tape to decorate the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. A dozen crime-scene cops swarming over both platforms. A knot of uniformed officers, including a lieutenant, drinking coffee by the token booth. A pair of detectives huddled over a drunk who falls on his face whenever he tries to stand up.

  And for what? For a dead rat? Because that’s the only victim on the Russian’s immediate horizon: what’s left of a dead rat surrounded by a forest of yellow tape.

  The Russian strolls down to the end of the platform and removes what appears to be a thick, leather notebook from his pocket. The notebook is actually a flask with enough vodka at the bottom for a final chug. With his back to the assembled cops, Chigorin drains the flask, thinking, This is gonna be a short visit.

  Detective Chigorin, of the prestigious Homicide Division, is not here to investigate a shooting in which no human being was injured. He’s investigating the murder of a drug dealer on Hamilton Place, two blocks away. As the murder occurred minutes before the rat shooting, the Russian naturally needs to know if the two inciden
ts are related. This should not be a big deal. A single shell casing was recovered on the subway platform and a pair of shell casings was recovered at the scene of the murder. They’ll match or they won’t.

  Officially, the rat case belongs to the two detectives at the other end of the platform, Budlow and O’Malley. They’re questioning the drunk, who’s now squatting. Chigorin can smell the drunk from where he stands, a stench that will not abate as he draws closer to its source. Nevertheless, he walks the length of the platform.

  ‘Hey, Chigorin, what happened to the Arab?’ Budlow asks. The Arab is Ahmad Mansouri, Chigorin’s partner.

  ‘Sciatica.’

  ‘Again? How long does he expect to get away with this sciatica bullshit? Every time I turn around he’s gettin’ paid to sit on his ass.’ Budlow is small and overweight. His complexion is florid to begin with, but when he becomes indignant, as he is now, the color along his cheekbones approaches the red of a fire engine.

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ Chigorin responds agreeably. ‘Anyway, I got a homicide took place a couple of blocks away. Two shots, one to the back, one to the head. The woman who called in the shooting claims she dialed nine-one-one right away. That was at three twenty-five.’

  Budlow chews this over for a moment, then says, ‘Look, you wanna fold this shooting into your case, it’s fine by me.’

  Budlow’s partner, Ralph O’Malley, seconds the motion. The Chinese takeout on his desk is growing colder by the minute. ‘No problem here if you wanna take over,’ he says.

  In fact, the Russian has no desire to take the case. He’s sweating like a pig and wants only to be out on the street where he can breathe. But the thing about the Russian, a fault he’s reproached himself for maybe ten thousand times, is that he has a conscience about taking the Man’s pay and doing the Man’s job. Which is really amazing in that he’s fucked up the rest of his life entirely.