Drama City

by George Pelecanos

  “Fuck that bitch.”

  Graham left the shop. Nigel sat heavily in his chair, staring through the plate glass window to the street.

  LORENZO WALKED to the entrance of a squat brick apartment building that held four units. He was familiar with the layout of the complex and could describe the interior of the dwellings without having been in this actual structure. These kinds of apartments, minimally maintained and surrounded by black iron fences, were common in Southeast. In his early years, Lorenzo had lived in one just like these, here in Congress Heights.

  Outside, kids were plentiful, cracking on one another, riding bikes, and making up games on the dirt-and-weed grounds. Mothers, most in their teens, stood around with one another, smoking, talking with men and young men who were not the fathers of their children. A couple of the older kids hard-eyed Lorenzo as he passed. He was not police, but he was some kind of official, which put him on the other side. A boy in a wife beater and loose pants, no older than fourteen, got on a cell phone as he watched Lorenzo enter the building.

  Inside, the building smelled of fried food, with the faint tang of urine and feces in the mix. A dog barked from behind one of the two apartment doors on the second floor. Lorenzo went directly to the first-floor dwelling of Felton Barnett, the man who had left the message on his machine.

  Barnett answered Lorenzo’s knock. His eyes carried the baggage of repeated late-night alcohol consumption. He was small, middle-aged, and fastidiously dressed.

  “Remember me?” said Barnett.

  “Yes,” said Lorenzo. It was not a pleasant memory. For some reason, Barnett reminded Lorenzo of a rodent in man’s clothes.

  Barnett had contacted the office months ago with what turned out to have been a nuisance call. Lorenzo had responded, been polite, and shown him respect, something Barnett was apparently not used to. Now Lorenzo was Barnett’s personal officer. When he phoned the Humane Society, he dialed Lorenzo’s direct number.

  “I got a problem, a very serious problem up in two-B. Dog been up there barking for two days straight.” Barnett, who smelled of beer and cigarettes, pointed a thin finger at Lorenzo. “Y’all need to respond quicker than you do.”

  “I just got the message this morning. If you had called the main number —”

  “I did call it, this morning.”

  “If you had called it originally, they would’ve sent someone out yesterday.”

  “I don’t want someone,” said Barnett, standing ramrod straight. “You’re my man. When I call, I want you.”

  “You got a key to the apartment?”

  “I’m the resident manager,” said Barnett. It was like he was telling Lorenzo that he was the king of New York.

  “Let’s go check it out.”

  They went up the stairs and approached 2B. On the landing, the barking was incessant and loud. The smell of feces was strong. Lorenzo’s headache was back full-on.

  “You tried contacting the resident?”

  “Boy who rents this place don’t reside here. You want to know what I think?”

  Lorenzo began to knock on the door.

  “He keeps drugs and money up in here,” said Barnett, tired of waiting for Lorenzo to reply.

  “Go ahead and open it,” said Lorenzo.

  Barnett used his key to unlock the door, then stepped behind Lorenzo. Lorenzo pushed on the door and opened it enough to look inside.

  A cream pit bull with a brown eye patch stood in the corner of the living room, baring its teeth, barking maniacally at Lorenzo. The room was bare, the floor nearly covered in feces. The dog’s coat carried several deep lesions, some of which appeared to be infected. The dog’s ribs were highly defined in its coat, and its eyes bulged in their sunken sockets. Flies nested in one prominent lesion and were bunched in clumps on the dog’s ears. Flies buzzed about the room. There were blood streaks on the wall where the animal had tried to rub at the cuts. There was an empty aluminum bowl, pocked with teeth marks, on the floor.

  Lorenzo backed onto the landing and closed the door.

  “Go back to your place,” he said to Barnett. “Write down the name of the man who rents this apartment and any other information you have on him from his lease.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Lorenzo took the stairs without answering and went directly to the Tahoe. He got Cindy on the radio and told her of the situation, and when she asked if he would like MPD assistance, he told her that he could handle it himself. He got the choke pole out of the truck and headed back into the building. As he went through the door, he heard comments and laughter from the young men gathered outside.

  In the apartment, Lorenzo breathed through his mouth to avoid the stench. He looked carefully at the barking dog. He whistled to it softly.

  “You all right,” he said, like he was talking to a baby in a crib. He walked toward it.

  The dog showed its teeth, growled, and backed up until its hindquarters touched the wall. Lorenzo kept walking through the feces, step by careful step, flies buzzing around him, one hand out, the other holding the wooden pole with the wire noose on its end. He looked at the dog’s eyes, desperate and afraid. He reached out and put the noose near the dog’s head, and the dog lunged at him and backed up again.

  “You all right. You all right.”

  Lorenzo dropped the noose over the dog’s head. The dog moved in his direction. Lorenzo put slight pressure on the pole to let the dog know that he could control it now at will. But the dog was not coming toward him with aggression. It had stopped barking. Its nub of a tail wiggled weakly on its rump.

  Lorenzo felt his heart rate slow. He realized how very hot it was in the room, and that his shirt was damp with sweat.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you some cool water.”

  Using the pole and noose as a leash and collar, he walked the dog down the stairs. The dog went calmly with him.

  “Everything all right?” said Barnett, standing behind the door, open just a crack.

  “Fine. You write down that information I asked for?”

  “Right here,” said Barnett, handing Lorenzo a slip of paper. Lorenzo read the name written on the paper, put it in his breast pocket, and walked out of the building into the bright sunlight.

  A small crowd had gathered outside the building, mostly kids and some adults. He heard some positive things said by the adults. Some of the kids looked away at the sight of the sick, injured, dehydrated dog. Others laughed. The boy with the cell phone said, “Man who own that dog on his way,” and “He gonna fuck someone up too.” Lorenzo did not look at any of them. He went directly to the truck.

  He got the dog up into the back of the Tahoe and released it from the choke pole. He poured a small amount of bottled water into a bowl and let the animal lap it up. He poured a little bit more and placed the bowl in a large cage. The dog went into the cage without being prodded. Lorenzo closed the cage door and then the rear hatch on the Tahoe. He heard a car come into the lot, bass thumping from its windows, and he heard some boys talking and laughing with excitement and a car door slam, but he did not look at the source of the sounds. He locked the hatch and went to the driver’s side of his vehicle.

  “Fuck you think you doin’?” said a voice. Lorenzo turned around and faced the man standing behind him.

  The man was as tall as Lorenzo, and younger. He had good size. He wore a four-finger ring that spelled LEON. His shirt was a genuine football jersey that went for one hundred and seventy dollars. He had stepped out of a fifty-thousand-dollar car.

  “I’m impounding this dog,” said Lorenzo, rubbing his finger on the spare key in his right hand.

  “You mean you takin’ her.”

  “That’s right,” said Lorenzo, keeping his gaze steady on the swinish eyes of the man. “Are you the owner?”

  “Yeah, I’m the owner. What the fuck you think?”

  Lorenzo removed the piece of paper from his shirt, looked at it, and replaced it. “Leon Skiles?”

&n
bsp; “Why you need to know?”

  “Just want to make sure I got it straight. It’ll help me identify you when we prosecute.”

  “Oh,” said Skiles, “so now you gonna prosecute. Motherfucker, you ain’t even police. Standin’ there with that fake-ass uniform and shit.”

  Some people in the crowd laughed.

  “Look here,” said Skiles, stepping forward, getting close to Lorenzo’s face. “You ain’t takin’ a gotdamn thing from me.”

  A boy cackled and another one whooped. Lorenzo did not step back or cut his eyes away. He could feel his blood pulsing through his veins.

  “You think I’m gonna let you just drive on out of here with my personal property?”

  Lorenzo did not answer.

  “What,” said Skiles, “you fixin’ to stare me to death?”

  Lorenzo made a loose fist and moved the key so that its tip came out between his middle and index fingers.

  “Play the bitch, you want to,” said Skiles. “I’m about to drop your bitch ass too.”

  “Do it,” said Lorenzo, hearing something in his voice he had not heard in a long while. Knowing the code, knowing, as he said it, that Skiles could not back down.

  Skiles put his weight on his back foot.

  Now you gonna throw your right.

  Skiles swung his fist. Lorenzo sidestepped it and came with an uppercut, bringing his shoulder and chest full into it. The blow landed squarely under Skiles’s jaw; the key stabbed him there.

  Skiles staggered and tried to keep his feet. Lorenzo rushed forward, pushed Skiles up against the Tahoe, and pinned his left forearm to Skiles’s neck. Lorenzo put the tip of the key to Skiles’s right eye. The sun winked off the metal.

  “Smart-mouth boy like you came at me in the cut,” said Lorenzo, keeping his voice low. “I stuck him in the eye with a little old file. Wasn’t no bigger than this key I got in my hand.”

  “I ain’t . . . I ain’t want no more trouble,” said Skiles, gasping as he spoke.

  “You gonna relax now, right?”

  Skiles nodded slightly under the pressure of Lorenzo’s arm. “I’m straight.”

  “Straight,” said Lorenzo, chuckling quietly. He released Skiles and stepped back.

  Skiles, blood trickling down his neck from where he’d been cut, looked away. There were only mumbles from the crowd. The air had gone out of it. The wrong man had won.

  Lorenzo got into the Tahoe and drove away, his hands tight on the wheel. His headache was gone. In the rearview, he saw that his eyes were alive. He felt like getting high.

  He punched the gas. First thing he had to do was drop this dog at the kennel. Get her situated and get her some care. Then, if he could, get to someplace he should be.

  RACHEL LOPEZ WOKE UP in her car at a little past noon. Her shirt was soaked with sweat. The Honda stank of perspiration, alcohol, and nicotine. She rolled the window down and breathed clean air.

  Rachel drove to the nearest gas station. There, in a filthy bathroom, she washed herself as best she could. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, then looked at her watch. She still had time to get to the meeting on East Capitol. She needed it today.

  EIGHTEEN

  I LEFT MY BABY a little present this morning,” said Shirley, the small young woman with the almond eyes and smooth chocolate skin. “Put it right there on the doorstep of my grandmother’s place, where my little girl stay.”

  “What’d you get her?” said a dark-skinned woman sitting in Shirley’s row.

  “What you call a playwear set. Got it up there at the Hecht’s company, thirty percent off. With the coupons, it was next to nothin’.”

  “Hecht’s havin’ a sale this weekend,” said a man.

  “They always be havin’ a sale,” said another.

  “The shirt part of the outfit had a drawing of these four young white dudes on it,” said Shirley. “I don’t know who they are, but the lady at the Hecht’s told me the kids are into ’em.”

  “The Wiggles,” said the dark-skinned woman helpfully.

  “That’s who it was,” said Shirley. “So I was walkin’ away from the house and I heard the door open, and I turned around? And there my little girl was, standing with my grandmother. And my little girl took that outfit out of the bag, looked at it, and smiled. ‘This for me?’ she said to my grandmother. You could see she liked it, ’cause she was all happy. And my grandmother said to my little girl, ‘That’s a present for you from your mother.’ My little girl looked at me, said, ‘That my mother right there?’ It sunk my heart that she forgot me, but she wasn’t no more than a baby when I left. My grandmother says, ‘Yes, sweetheart, that’s your mother. Tell her thank you, child.’”

  Shirley cocked her head. “She couldn’t say it. She was scared, or too shy. But the look she gave me . . . That look is gonna keep me sober. I’m gonna carry that look with me for a long time.” Shirley wiped at her eyes. “Thank you for letting me share.”

  “Thank you for sharing.”

  Rachel Lopez leaned back in her folding chair. Her nausea was gone, and color had returned to her skin.

  The hard middle-aged man named Sarge, wearing a T-shirt and the same dirty Redskins hat he always wore, raised his hand and was acknowledged by the guest host.

  “Sarge here . . .”

  “Hey, Sarge.”

  “. . . and I’m a straight-up addict. Now, I had a little episode last night, over at my efficiency. I was goin’ through this drawer in this old dresser I got, lookin’ for a knife. This one drawer, I keep all this stuff inside it from when I was little. Got an old baseball I kept from when my team won the city championship, under the lights in Turkey Thicket, back in seventy-three. A Zippo lighter and some firecrackers and shit. You know, boys’ stuff. There’s this badge in there too, like a sheriff’s badge. I used to pin it on my shirt when I was a boy.”

  A man chuckled. He stopped abruptly when Sarge gave him a cool look.

  “So I was lookin’ for this knife,” said Sarge. “Not to cut no one or nothin’ like that. I had some dirt under my fingernails, and I wanted to clean ’em out, see? I remembered I had this pocketknife, with a pretty pearl handle and a sharp little blade that could do the trick. But I couldn’t find it. I guess I lost it somewhere or it got took. What I did find, though, inside this cuff link box, was a joint of weed I forgot I had. I mean, it could have been five years old, sumshit like that. I musta hid it in that box, either from someone I was stayin’ with at the time or from my own self.

  “So I’m standin’ there, staring at this old joint. I had some music playin’ in the room at the time, comin’ out this box I have. That song ‘Rock Creek Park,’ by the Blackbyrds. Donald Byrd and them? ‘Doin’ it in the park, doin’ it after dark’ . . . Y’all remember that one. It just reminded me of, you know, summer and shit. Bein’ with this one girl I knew, the way the park smelled all green and nice, and how this girl smelled nice too. Kids ridin’ their bikes in packs down Beach Drive, blowin’ on them whistles like they used to do. Cookin’ some chicken or whatever on the grill, having a cold beer. Gettin’ your head up good.”

  “Yes,” said a man in a far corner of the room.

  “I needed to speak to someone,” said Sarge, “before I went ahead and put some fire to that stale-ass joint.” Sarge made a head motion toward Shirley but did not look in her direction. “And I remembered that young lady over there, she said at yesterday’s meeting it would be all right to call her. So I did. We talked for a long while. And by the time we was done talkin’, I had decided to flush that weed down the toilet. It hurt me to do it, but that’s what I did.”

  “You did right,” said the dark-skinned woman in Shirley’s row.

  “Understand, I didn’t call that woman up because she was female,” said Sarge. “I don’t want to get with no females right now, anyway. I don’t act right with ’em when I do.”

  “Hmph,” said a man.

  “But I just wanted to tell y’all about my experience,” said Sarge. �
��It don’t mean nothin’, really. It’s just a story.”

  “We all in the same lifeboat,” said Shirley. “Ain’t no one here deserve to get throwed out before no one else.”

  Sarge tightened his hat over his graying hair and lowered his voice to a mumble. “So thank you for letting me share.”

  “Thank you for sharing.”

  Lorenzo Brown raised his hand. Rachel looked down the row to where Lorenzo sat, at the far end of the horseshoe-shaped aisle. She had seen him enter the meeting room at the same time she had but had not approached him. She wanted to respect his privacy and leave him to his spiritual time. He was under no obligation to talk to her, after all.

  The host nodded in Lorenzo’s direction. “Go ahead.”

  “My name is Lorenzo . . .”

  “Hey, Lorenzo.”

  “. . . and I’m a substance abuser. Something happened to me today, on my job.”

  “You some kind of police?” said Shirley, looking him up and down with interest.

  “Dog police,” said Lorenzo. “This morning, some man got up in my face over an animal he’d been abusing. I retaliated in a physical way, which I shouldn’t have done. But the thing is, it felt good. I get these headaches most all the time now. After this man tried to take me for bad and I went right back at him, my headache went away. But something else came over me too. I wanted to get high. Doin’ violence, getting my head up . . . it’s all part of the same package for me, I guess.”

  Lorenzo glanced around the room. “Most of y’all, you made a decision to try and stop what you was doin’ on your own. Me, I had it decided for me. I’m comin’ off an incarceration, see? I caught a charge for dealing drugs.”

  “You ain’t alone,” said a man.

  “All respect,” said Lorenzo, “that don’t make it any easier. You can’t always be at these meetings or get someone on the phone. One thing I learned, this here’s not a team sport. It also ain’t no sprint. The more you walk this road, the longer the road seems to be.”

  “I heard that,” said the same man.

  “Long road,” said Lorenzo. “Shoot, I started sellin’ marijuana when I was twelve years old. Started smokin’ it around that time too. By then, I had already lost my mother to drugs. She got to the point, she was selling herself for money. Later, she did this grand-larceny thing and got put away. She came out eventually, but she couldn’t make it. She had to violate herself to save her life. My mother’s behind walls to this day.”