Fastened to the end was a white cardboard box tied up with red ribbon, the kind they put your leftovers in at a nice restaurant. Cloud turned it in his hands. Capri faded the music, and the whirring of the blades turned into a collective heartbeat.
Inside the box was an envelope. Cloud tore it open, removed a card, and read aloud.
Welcome home, Inmate #44823573.
Your friends in law enforcement
will be watching you.
A.B.
p.s.—I’d ask you for your vote,
but convicts don’t get one.
The chopper swooped toward the deck, and the crowd scattered before it, at velocities ranging from panicked dash to my own casual speed-walk. Cloud held his ground, clenched his fists and tracked the helicopter with his eyes as it came out of its dive thirty feet above us and began easing itself down. At twenty, the doors opened, and out flew dozens of little metal canisters that tumbled to the deck and rolled around, spraying tear gas in every direction.
It’s always the personal touches that show how much somebody cares. Like using aerosol dispensers instead of the more common gas grenades.
I wish I could better describe the chaos that came next, but only an omniscient narrator could pull it off—omniscient or goggled. I can tell you that getting gassed feels like rubbing fresh habanero peppers all over your eyes, and that before I had to squeeze mine shut I saw four guys in breathing masks slide down ropes until they reached the deck.
Then my memory becomes a soundtrack, filled with shrieks and smashing glass, charging feet that never get any farther away. There were runners and there were duckers. I was a ducker, and that was a mistake. Within seconds I’d been bowled over, trampled by about six pairs of shoes. I curled double and yelled out, but the people stepping on me could no better pinpoint my voice and body than I could theirs. I scrabbled to my feet, ricocheting off bodies, tripping over limbs, stepping on women I’d probably ogled five minutes before. We were crazed with pain and staggered by fear; we crashed into one another like hot molecules. It was a blind, mindless dance, and the enemy strolled through it, doing as he pleased.
I found the metal staircase leading to the VIP lounge, crouched underneath, and waited. I don’t know if it took five minutes or fifteen, but eventually the tear gas started to wear off, and we all blinked our way back to sanity.
The chopper was gone. The ship, trashed. There had been three full bars on board, and not a single bottle had escaped the siege. People were picking diamond-sized shards out of each other’s skin, pressing cocktail napkins to flesh and watching streaks of blood soak through. Kid Capri probably would’ve played a requiem, but his turntables were smashed to shit. Records floated on the surface of the water, like losing hands scattered across a poker table.
The boat was moving at an incredible speed, back toward the dock. The city rose to meet us, magenta reflections still glinting in the highrise windows, and I wished the sun would fucking wrap it up already. Some community-minded black chick was crisscrossing the deck with a champagne bucket, handing out wet washcloths for people to lay over their eyes. Nobody was okay, but nobody was dead, either. I wondered how many of Cloud’s four hundred closest homies even knew what A.B. stood for, and whether any who did not intended to find out.
I found him and Rage and Wren slumped shoulder-to-shoulder on a couch in the deserted VIP, and Fever on the matching loveseat. Only one lightbulb still worked. The carpet squished with liquor, and an empty tear-gas canister lolled back and forth across it.
“Hey,” I said from the threshold. “Everybody okay?”
Karen beckoned me over for a kiss on the cheek, a double handsqueeze, some soulful eye contact. Billy glanced up, then right back down. Only Dengue spoke.
“Motherfucker, you know what to do.”
“Right.”
By the time I got the joint rolled, the yacht was docking. The captain brought us in with a bang that nearly knocked me off my chair; guess he was beyond trying to impress anyone at this point. I stood and peered down at the lower deck. People were pressing toward the exits.
Cloud joined me by the window, leaving a gigantic, Cloud-sized vacancy on the couch. Karen and Billy, who’d been wedged on either side of him, eased into it.
“Fuck them,” he said, waving a hand at the throng below. “I got this ship rented for another six hours. Light that shit.”
He walked over to the bar, picked up a walkie-talkie, flicked it on. “Cloud 9 to fucknuts one through six. Come in, fucknuts. Anybody out there?” A staticky voice assented. “All right, listen up, I need a case of Guinness Stout and about a hundred dollars’ worth of Chinese food up here as soon as possible. I know that might not fall under y’all’s job description, but somehow I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth from you Barnum-and-Bailey-ass security boys, so make it happen. What the fuck, get yourselves some dinner too, it’s been a rough night. Cloud 9, over and out. You sparking that or what, nephew?”
I handed him the joint, the lighter. “Don’t you have piss tests?”
Cloud started to laugh, and then bam—I was in a headlock, and he was still roaring. “Nigga, you get here late or something? My homecoming just got Boston Tea Partied. Drug tests are the least of my concerns. But thanks for asking.” He planted a kiss on the top of my dome, then shoved me halfway across the room and shook his head. “Youngblood, he a trip.”
Cloud smoked in silence, watching the crowd file down the gangplank and tapping his foot.
“You’d think they’d fuck me up,” he said a half-inch into the joint. “I mean, why not, right? Long as you’re dropping by.” He filled his lungs again, and handed the weed to Karen at arm’s length. “I’ll tell you why. Because those dudes didn’t know me from Adam’s housecat. Bracken told them to gas the yacht and break everything, and they were like ‘whatever you say, boss,’ and that was that.”
“Scary,” said Karen, and nodded in agreement with herself.
Cloud spun from the window. “You know what I think about sometimes?” He spread his arms. “How the whole game could have turned on a dime. Become a totally different thing. Y’all remember in ’82, when Erni and Pink and them met with the curly-haired dude from the Transit Authority and offered to give back the insides?”
“You talking about the scene in Style Wars?” I asked, incredulous.
Cloud pumped a finger. “Exactly. The scene in Style Wars. I was supposed to be there, but I skipped it to go get some pussy off Giovanna Northrup. It doesn’t matter; that dude had no juice anyway. Still, yo, I swear to God, I thought about that meeting every day I was locked up. Right there, everything could have changed.”
“What, like if they’d gone for it?”
“Yeah, like if they’d gone for it! Think about it: we stop tagging the insides, because the shit is ugly and stupid and it freaks out the civilians, and in return the MTA gives us the outsides, where all the burners that most regular New Yorkers said they liked were popping off. Throw in a couple art scholarships and a press release, and presto-change-o, New York becomes the city that solved its graffiti problem with the most innovative arts program in the country. Next comes x-amount of inspirational news stories about kids from the ghetto making a name for themselves as artists and beautifying their communities at the same time, all thanks to the fuckin’ vision of their fuckin’ leaders. And we all live happily ever after.”
Cloud turned back to the window. The last of the partygoers were filing onto land. “They wouldn’t even’ve had to pay us,” he said, almost to himself. “Just left us alone.”
Nobody spoke. I looked from one to the next. At Cloud, prison-chiseled shoulders hunched as he watched a parade of people who’d barely entered his life making a U-turn. At mammoth, glue-sniffing, sightless Dengue, the I5’s lone standard bearer for all these years, who’d finally left the warren of his apar
tment only to have paranoia one-upped by reality.
I looked at Karen, saw the timeline of her existence collapsing on itself as she sat here, bruised by life and the elbows of strangers, no longer sure whether she was the abandoned or the abandoner, grieving or aggrieved or just sixteen again.
Finally, I looked at my father. He raised his head to meet my eyes, just as he had in that ravaged hotel room, and we stared at one another until I had to turn away.
The tear gas canister rolled into my foot, and I reared back and kicked it as hard as I could, sent it caroming off the wall.
“Okay. We’ve got to destroy this guy. Right?”
Nothing.
“Sometimes life gives you a second chance,” I announced, finding the courage to look at Billy. Give me my props: it’s not easy to talk from your heart and out your ass at the same time.
The faces before me showed no signs of life, and someplace in my memory, a spark fired. I’m not proud to admit this, but your boy here was something of a mock trial whiz back in ninth grade, when I first got to Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy. It was a straightforward case of wanting to compete with the rich kids, and yet confound the expectation that I’d do so on a court rather than in one. I was a fairly nasty two-guard at thirteen, don’t know if I’ve mentioned that, and while Whoopty Whoo didn’t technically recruit athletes, my ability to drain an eighteen-footer off the dribble didn’t hurt me with the admissions board, you can be sure. Naturally, I refused to suit up once I got there, and also stopped growing. The flyest girl in my English class was on the mock trial squad, so I joined that instead, and spent the year out-arguing the rest of Manhattan’s contentious little prep-school jerks.
The judges were always these dour, Easter-Island-statue-looking dudes, impossible to pique. One time a kid from Poly Prep ripped a fart so loud it disrupted radio transmissions in three boroughs, and not one so much as twitched. For some reason, those bloodless sons of bitches brought out the best in me. I’d have the trophies to prove it, if I hadn’t chucked them all.
I could almost feel the clip-on tie around my neck now.
“Yo, all due respect? It’s time to sack up and play some offense, because if Bracken doesn’t go down, you do. All of you. Cloud, this is a man who shows up sixteen years after putting you in jail to wreck your life again, just for the sport of it. Billy, imagine what he’ll do when he finds out you’re back. And he will find out.”
“So what, then?” Cloud demanded, lifting his arms to crucifix height. He stepped in front of me, brought us chest to chest, and for a moment I understood what being terrified of Cloud might feel like—had an ass-puckering flash of the brutal world he’d left behind this morning. Out the corner of my eye, I saw Billy rise to his feet, and realized he couldn’t predict his homeboy anymore either.
“You talking murder, youngblood? Or just talking reckless?”
I stared into his eyes—no choice—and realized just how little of a fuck Cloud gave about anything right now. If I was talking murder, he was all ears. And if I was talking reckless, he was getting blue balls.
“Revenge,” I said, splitting the difference. “I’m talking revenge. For everything and everybody.” I had no idea where I was going, but it beat standing still. “For Amuse, for Sabor, for all the kids whose lives turned to shit because they wrote on trains. Think about it: you guys have troops. You just need to mobilize them.”
Cloud’s expression seemed to be flickering between a sneer and a smirk. I didn’t know which one to root for.
“Mobilize them for what?”
I threw my arms up, imitating him. “What they do. Bomb. Kill everything. Destroy all trains.”
Karen was perched on the arm of the couch. “The city doesn’t run painted trains anymore, Dondi. You know that.”
I spun to face her. “They’d have to, if you hit them all. I’m talking every single car of every single train. The only other option would be to shut the system down, and they really can’t do that.”
“Impossible,” said Karen. “Retarded.”
Dengue shifted his girth. “I’ve thought about this,” he said. “It’s not impossible. With the right personnel, right strategy. Right money.”
“How many writers would it take?” I asked.
“Figure fifty.”
“Good luck,” said Cloud, starting to pace. “Niggas don’t know shit about hitting trains no more, B. You’d have to dig up fossils like us. Shit, you shoulda told me a week ago. More subway writers in the beng than out of it. Not that I’m down anyway. Tricks is for kids. I say we lay up in the fuckin’ garbage cans outside his little bullshit house in Bay Ridge, wait ’til he comes out, and wedge some handguns in some orifices.” He tossed a look at Dengue. “Figure two.”
“He moved,” said Karen. “Lives in midtown now. A doorman building.” She glanced away. “I don’t even know how I know that.”
Cloud considered it for a moment, and when he resumed his voice was slower, sadder. “Look, as far as bombing trains, we been there and done that, and all it got us is here. Hell, Billy killed everything from polar bears to rooftops, and for what?”
“Cloud doesn’t know about the tunnel,” my father said. He sounded like a scared kid, or what I’d imagine a scared kid sounds like. I probably hadn’t heard an actual scared kid since I was him. “Dengue, tell him about the tunnel.”
“I look like fuckin’ Rosencrantz and Guildenfuck to you? Tell him yourself.”
Everybody stared at him.
“It’s a Shakespearean reference, goddamnit. You got that, right Dondi?”
“Yup.”
Billy walked up to Cloud, put a hand on his shoulder. “Bracken’s sealing off the tunnel.”
“The tunnel?”
“And all points of access.”
Cloud scowled, paced a four-step circle that suggested the dimensions of his cell. “And we’re sure that’s a bad thing? I’m saying, if it’s sealed . . .”
“Yeah, maybe Bracken’s acting for all the right reasons,” I said. “Seems like a real Dudley Do-Right to me.”
He pursed his lips for a moment. “Has either of you been back down there?”
Billy and Dengue said that they had not.
Cloud snapped his fingers for what was left of the joint. He must have burned his thumb relighting it, if not his lips, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“For what it’s worth,” he croaked, holding in his hit, “I’ve got a truckload of paint stashed in south Jersey.”
You ever have one of those moments when something moves from bullshit to real, but through a side entrance, so you’re like wait, what just happened? It was a feeling I knew mostly from messing around with females: one second you’re play-flirting, or having a jokey theoretical discussion about kissing, and the next you’re actually getting busy and you didn’t even see it coming, although presumably she did.
This was like that. Cloud tipped back his head and French-inhaled, which looked extremely gangster on him, but I think he did it to hide what had now resolved into a smirk, a challenge.
Dengue rocked back and forth in his chair, obviously hoping this was for real and afraid to jinx it. Billy examined the ground. Karen, her cuticles.
Cloud swung his arms and watched his smoke rise. “Got a ex-cellmate who served in the Gulf War. Dude’s up on all types of infrared goggles and smoke bombs and trip wires and shit. Always used to talk about the capers we could pull off with that stuff. Might be useful, I’d imagine.”
“How’d he get caught, then?” Karen asked. Her arms weren’t crossed over her chest, but if you closed your eyes, it would have sounded like it.
“It was an unrelated charge. You kinda quiet over there, William.”
“Just thinking,” Billy said into his lap.
We waited.
; “It would ruin Bracken, right? If one Monday morning, it was 1982 again?”
“Completely. Forever. He’s the goddamn Transit president, and he’s campaigning as tough on crime.” The Ambassador smiled, cheeks shimmying toward his eyelids. “I notice you said Monday morning. Care to elaborate?”
Billy shrugged, then looked up as if noticing the rest of us for the first time. “Well, you could paint everything laid up in the yards over a weekend, if you worked around the clock. Then, on Monday around four A.M., when the fewest trains are in service, you’d start motioning”—the term means hitting trains in service, when they pause at the end of the line to have their insides cleaned—“and stay in the tunnels until the first ones came back around.”
“My thinking exactly.”
“Three people per train? Left side, right side, inside? Send teams out to bomb the highways, as a diversion? Call in fake tips?”
“All that, brother. And more.”
Cloud wasn’t hiding his grin now. He jerked a thumb at Billy, raised an eyebrow at me. “Hear that, youngblood? The monster’s stomach is growling.”
Karen interlaced her fingers, straightened her elbows, twisted her wrists. Eight knuckles sounded off. “It still two guards per yard?”
Dengue’s mouth cleaved into a smile. “It is, sister. It is.”
I took a couple of steps toward her. “Thought you didn’t believe in any of this stuff.”
“I believe in ruining Anastacio Bracken’s life. If we compromise some fuckin’ ghoul’s ability to influence the course of human events in the process, I’m good with that. Mostly, I miss the hell out of bombing.”
“You and me both, homegirl.” Cloud dropped his roach, ground it into the carpet. “We’re gonna need a lot of duct tape,” he said. “I’ll straight kidnap all of ’em before I hide in the bushes memorizing shift changes. Shit, it’s 2005.”
There was a knock on the open door, and two bouncers entered, laden with plastic bags.
Cloud raised his arms like he was signaling a field goal. “Fucknuts one and two, my niggas! Is there some General Tso’s in there? Yeah? Excellent. You got yourselves something? Of course you did. All right, then. I’ll holler when I need more beer.”
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