by Sam Munson
How long did I stand in their garish kitchen like some hesitant rapist? No idea. The orange clock’s hair-thin second hand jerked itself into each upcoming empty moment. Then my trance dissolved: the harmonious, skillful whistling was getting louder, accompanied by footfalls, and the front door slammed. I hadn’t heard the car return, and now everything was happening at once: Mr. and Mrs. Broadus were greeting each other in the front hall, they murmured warmly to each other, and I couldn’t understand, he was so much taller than his wife and she had a blue towel wrapped around her hair. I stood in utter stillness, having shoved myself against the fridge (for camouflage). They held each other for five, ten seconds, her voice muffled by his sweater, his by her hair towel. Talking the whole time, in friendly undertones. She was the one who broke the embrace to lead him upstairs by the hand. Their treads matched, receding. An upstairs door closed, with grave delicacy. And then, hoping they would not hear, I crept out of the kitchen and slid through the front door, opened just enough to let me pass. I was freezing now. Slicked in sweat. But despite my all-body shivers I followed McKinley Street up the slight hill into the dark. Toward home. Maintaining the walk of innocence, my retarded bantam strut. September 27, 1999, 7:48 p.m.
XIV.
FOR THE THIRD FUCKING TIME, ladies and gentlemen! On the first of October, as I was leaving my house, an unsupervised boy rammed my shin with his blood-colored tricycle. I was all primed to go distribute my sheaf of flyers. I had resigned myself to a life of despair, without Digger, I mean. It’s quite a voluptuous feeling. I had my backpack with me, with the dumb-ass posters and my rubber-banded, sorted bundles of money. As the pain of the tricycle blow receded, and the afterecho of the boy’s shout thinned, my pager went off. This was at nine o’clock in the morning. It was the earliest daylight page I had ever received. The number was unfamiliar. A D.C. number, an exchange (that’s the first three digits after the area code) I knew: 202-364-1889. But at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning? The thought of someone needing weed first fucking thing in the morning kind of wowed me. I mean, it’s not heroin. It’s just pot. How strong can your craving for it be? There’s no physical dependency. Yeah, some kids pretend that they’re total addicts, but that’s just the exuberance of being young, rearing its clumsy, horned head. So I decided to ignore it.
Four days since my intrusion into the Broaduses’ house. I lost track of things in the interval. I can’t remember anything specific happening. I mean, when you’re in free fall from some bizarre event, as I was for those days and the preceding weeks, some catastrophe, time takes on this amazing uniformity. One day becomes indistinguishable from any other day, simply because the dominant fact illuminating them all doesn’t change, I mean the constantly present fact of your loss or your crime or your remorse or whatever. Probability dictates that, in the ensuing ninety-six hours, I showered, took a shit, ate, slept, went to school, sold drugs, jerked off seven or eight times, pretended not to think about Digger. The chill I’d felt the night of my trespassing had stayed with me, as an irritating tautness at the back of my throat, a sandy pain behind my eyes. The one thing I remember from this period is my growing determination to get rid of my money. I mean the weed money. All of it. I wanted to burn it, originally. But that would be too conspicuous. I thought of my father’s kiln. This was ruled out by the possibility of his discovering the cash, even a burned fragment of it. I had fantasies of giving it to some bum or something, though I realized this would create more problems than it solved, if anyone found out about it. So I started thinking about throwing it in the Potomac, and as soon as I pictured it I knew it was right.
Twelve thousand dollars. In an absolute sense it’s not that much. But it was more than I’d ever had before. Three thousand of it came from the relentless sales push I’d made in the past month and a half. I hadn’t even counted it. I’m estimating here. I wanted to throw it in the river. The Potomac, which varies in autumn color between black and gun blue. With webs of gray foam veining the surface. And even some gulls, even this late in the year, pellmelling back and forth looking for scraps. The river’s the one thing in D.C. that has no opinion or ideas on any subject. Making it the ideal candidate for propitiatory offerings. Who or what would I even be appeasing? The Great Anonymous, the mute steely river? I didn’t know. I’m not some believer in the wet-locked, classical water deities, despite my involvement with the dead culture that venerated them. Whatever. I was a wreck that morning.
So I ignored the page and drove off, down Wisconsin Avenue. Most of the main traffic arteries in D.C. are named after states. As a gesture of Federalist unity or something. I was going to just drive straight down it, south-southeast. It kinks a bit east and west out of true, past Kennedy, past the Cochrane, all the way down to M Street. Where the land humps down to the water, under a thunderous overpass buttressed with steel fins. These are the exact dirty-cotton color of old ice, but all year. Remainders of some frozen sea or something. Once there, I’d heave the money in. The bundles would spread out, a flotilla drifting toward the Chesapeake Bay. With luck none of the insane autumn anglers (yes, they exist, and even in the summer the river’s not alive, really, at least where it passes through the city) that line the thin promenade north of the Roosevelt Bridge would snag any. There would be no questions. That kind of human-interest bullshit always makes the papers here, because nothing else happens. And I believed with all fervor that if I did this and then put up my whole sheaf of posters before sunset, then whatever god watches over rivers would grant my petition. And I’d find someone with the information necessary to lead me to the man I’d imagined, the man with the hideous purpose lighting his eyes. Not Lorriner, who violated all my aesthetic ideas of what a murderer should be. But a calm-handed and indifferent killer. Never subject to any emotional upheavals. A free man. In some sense an enviable man. If it’s permissible to speak that way.
Wisconsin and M. Remember? That’s where the Stubb’s is. Where Kevin got killed. I’d chosen my route symbolically. I have a tremendous sense for that. Empty gestures. As you’ve seen. Everything looked normal, at first. I’d beaten the Saturday crush of late-morning traffic, and that weird preactivity staginess had settled on the streets. All that remained of Kevin’s hideous memorial was a long bow of weather-lightened purple ribbon kicking in the river breeze. And then I got this weird dislocation, a recall failure. A construction crew, four fat guys in orange vests over their sweatshirts and trucker jackets, was moving with infinite slowness and carelessness. There was an empty storefront. Roughly where they were digging up the street. It was, I realized as my sense of having lost something broke, where the Stubb’s used to be. “Fuck!” I screamed and punched my horn, and the construction guys whipped their heads toward me in outrage. One of them offered a middle finger! A classic gesture. So classic I failed to realize he meant it for me. Following its line of motion, looking for the man who deserved this gesture, I craned my neck like a trapped animal and holy fuck! They (they? what?) had opened another Stubb’s ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE STREET.
This shouldn’t have hit me the way it did. I mean, that’s the company’s business plan. You can find a Stubb’s at each five-block interval in any neighborhood. In any city. In the world. Their stupid green logo, with this piratey-looking guy on it in that fake-woodcut style, you know? Pipe in his mouth, brandishing a cutlass at the sky? Everywhere you go. They don’t even have commercials. They have achieved ubiquity. So why not! Why not across the street? Acceptable and even praiseworthy, according to the natural order of things. Yet I stared and stared. The crew member holding the STOP sign flipped it to GO, red to green. And I started to make the turn down the short hill to the water, when I saw that they had blocked off that chunk of Wisconsin, and that I’d have to keep going.
The stop-sign guy had started doing this deeply satirical dance before I got my shit together enough to drive on. He and his coworkers waved their arms at one another, to communicate my failure, and I drove east on M and took the dogleg onto Pennsyl
vania, and then turned down this dinky little exit until I hit Rock Creek Parkway, now heading northwest. I could have stayed on M and made a turn down to the water later. I mean, the whole of downtown abuts on the Potomac or the Anacostia. They flow into each other and vanish on the long meander to the bay. But this certainty overcame me: the offering would be refused. The downside of large empty gestures! When they fail, you can’t do the logical thing and accomplish your goal some other way. You have to do the symbolically coherent thing. Which is, nine times out of ten, nothing at all.
During the course of my drive, the unknown number paged me and paged me. Three more times. It was starting to worry me. I mean, what the fuck could anyone want from me that they wouldn’t wait for? I ran through everyone I suspected it might be, as I drove, muttering to myself and looking around for tails. The cops. No, that didn’t make any sense. Why would they page me? Digger. As much as I wanted it to be true, this didn’t make any sense either. I knew her number. Unless her mother had gotten her a cell phone. My father, calling from the Cochrane. That would just be crazy. I was sure he didn’t even know I had a pager. And he’s way too languorous to page someone four times in a row. Alex Faustner. Just to fuck with me, you know? Or maybe lure me into some clever trap. And so on and so forth, calculating all the stupid probabilities. I followed the parkway. I knew it would turn into one of the roads that wind through the northern mass of the park, and end up among a mansion-filled glade of hills and declivities. But I wanted to go through the silent woods, at this point, to rush through them. As though I could get away from the money that way. From the unknown number. I knew if I just gave myself enough time, the leaden feeling would leave, I’d be able to make a real decision, to develop some stratagem for making my offering, or abandon the whole enterprise entirely. I was stuck in this twilight for now, yes. But it would go. I just needed patience. My pager was buzzing again. I didn’t even bother to check to see who it was. Just have patience, you stupid asshole, I kept telling myself.
Which is, as you’ve guessed, the one thing I lack. During normal times, when it’s not required. And when I most need it. I didn’t drive until my mental twilight dissipated. I didn’t pull over and breathe deeply, or meditate, or any of that shit. I only made it to a bit north of the zoo before I lost control of myself and turned back out of the leafless twilight. I screeched into the first free parking place I saw, just bucking back and forth with these shrieks of the rubber, and rammed a quarter and a dime into the pay phone on the corner. I was calling the unknown number. The worst thing to do. Answering the provocations of mystery, I mean. As this whole endeavor should demonstrate. It had gained me nothing but confusion so far. And I wanted more. The line rang three times before someone picked up.
“Yes, hello? Hello?” I yelled, loudly enough to make an old lady passing on the street stop and look. She was pushing a grocery cart, one of those oblong personal carts, not a store cart, from which two stalks of celery dangled like broken arms. There was only light breathing on the line. “If this is you, Lorriner, like fuck you,” I screamed. The old lady pushed off again. Whoever it was hung up. I stomped back to my car. And noticed, for the first time that morning, where I was. About a ten-minute drive from Noel’s house. Not by chance, I promised myself. Not by chance. I was, at this point, absolutely sure that it was Lorriner, calling from a shadowy associate’s house in D.C., trying to fuck up my life in some unspecified way. Maybe he was in secret league with Huang and Baltimore. Maybe he had found an armed and willing friend. It didn’t matter. Noel would straighten everything out. My neck started to throb, right when I thought this. The ache served as further proof of my correctness. As did my chills and grinding jaw.
No one answered the door at Noel’s. The street was empty, but I still felt watched. I kept pounding, though. My pager was going off again, which increased my determination. After (I counted) seventeen thumps on the door, three locks, two tenor toned and one bass, tumbled open. The door opened inward, drawing the security chain tight. Just enough for me to see David.
“Addison, we busy, man,” he said.
“No, I need to see Noel.”
“Yo, man, like come back in like a hour. He busy.” This low-frequency hum was drifting out of Noel’s house, along with David’s voice. “You a’ight?” he asked. “You look sick, man.”
“I just like need to see Noel like now. It’s like über-urgent. David. Like just let me in. I’m not going away.” David clicked his tongue and shut the door. He clicked a couple more times. A calculating noise, abacus beads or whatever. Then I heard him sigh, and the security chain clattered and he opened up again, and I was inside. The thrumming was louder. “Dude, what’s going on down there?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“Shut up a second, man,” David said. “Just wait.” I listened to the noise: it was unmistakably the murmur of a crowd of people. Coming from nowhere. I wondered, with no fear or even concern, really, if I had gone crazy.
“Do you like hear that? All those people?” David gave me an empty look and opened the basement door. The noise swelled and resolved enough for me to make out single voices. Somehow, despite the fog in my head, a suspicion began to announce itself to me.
“Just wait here. Just wait.” Then he was gone, and the noise dimmed back to a dull thrum. I occupied myself eye-tracing the crimson lines on Noel’s Chandler pennant. About all I was good for, at this point. Nothing else to look at, anyway. My pager went off again, and I yelled to no one, “Do you like have a phone in here,” before some still-operating sense of abashedness shut me up.
Then David reappeared. “Look, man. This sound weird, but I need your coat and bag. Pager, too. I need you to hand them to me. And then I need to frisk you.” I shouldered off my bag and the coat, which David set down with real care. He then frisked me. First time it had ever happened. Not even the cops had frisked me. I slumped there as he patted my back and chest. His behavior confirmed my guess about what was happening in Noel’s basement. You’d expect him to be cursory. Some skinny-ass motherfucker like me presents no threat, right? But David takes his work seriously, and he did a thorough, efficient job. He pocketed my pager. Turned it off, to my relief: I’d missed a few more, just standing there. I never even felt awkward when his hand approached my scrotum! A sign of skill. “A’ight, shit, man. I guess you good.” He hefted my coat and bag in one hand and beckoned me downstairs. The passage, narrow and alley-dark as ever, was made worse by the increasing noise.
He left me at the bottom, telling me once more to wait, and opened the door leading into Noel’s room. I saw a slice of dead-white fluorescent glare and one rumpled edge of a crowd. And I knew I’d been right. It was a fucking dogfight. The door was opened fully, and Noel was trotting across the room to shake my hand. “What up, my niggaaaaa,” he cawed, and we leaned into our usual handshake. He reeked of sweat. A happy sweat. The room was hot as fuck, anyway. There were about twenty guys there, ranging in age from mine to my father’s. All dressed the same, though the older guys were wearing more muted colors. Jeans, too-large T-shirts, ornately knitted sweaters. Enormous shoes. It’s weird to see a forty-five-year-old man in huge spaceman shoes. I didn’t stare too much. Or I tried not to. Other than Noel, who was doing his host act, and David, who looked worried and embarrassed on my behalf, no one was paying the slightest attention to me.
A long trestle table had been set up along one wall, on which lay a pile of coats, a heap of pagers and cell phones, and several handguns. At the end opposite from these piles, the battered old money counter. You know: it’s this thing that looks kind of like a scale, and you drop stacks of cash into it and it whickers through them and gives you a digital readout of the amount. Above it, at shoulder height, the small blackboard was covered—the first time I’d ever seen it used—in small, clipped, legible handwriting. Which I knew without having to ask belonged to David. Who was now placing my hole-elbowed gray coat with the others, adding my pager to the heap. David dangled my bag from his hand and
stared at it, and then kicked it beneath the table.
I read the blackboard: just a bunch of initials and numbers, divided into two columns, one headed by the word Shazam and one headed by the word Trojan. “So what you want, nigga?” Noel asked. Through the human voices bouncing between the concrete floor and the baffling on the walls, I heard different, animal sounds, a growl and a whine.
“Man, am I like interrupting a bout, or something?” I asked. I was sure, now, that I was. I noticed the pen, made of scuff-clouded black plastic and hinged with oxidized metal, that had been set up in the room’s center. This was what everyone was crowding around. It rose to hip height. Noel’s bed was gone to make room for it, a fact I accepted with feverish equanimity.
“Shit, nigga,” Noel breathed out. “You too funny, man. You wanna like bet or suh’in?”
Noel would straighten everything out. Not wholly wrong. I remembered my purpose in coming here. For literally two seconds. And then, louder than I’d meant, I yelped, “I have like twelve thousand dollars in my backpack.” This caused the other spectators gathered to pay attention. “Shit, Richie Rich!” one of the older guys said, in this gravelly voice. The guys standing with him cracked up and they all went back to ignoring me. Noel was restraining laughter, too. David still had that tight-lipped look of professional concern stretching his face. “I’d like like to bet man. I’d love to,” I gushed. David crossed back to us to interfere, but Noel was already asking me who I wanted to bet on. It took less than a second for me to reply, “Trojan.” Symbolic coherence, ladies and gentlemen! I was sure he would lose. Based on the name. That’s what Trojans do. They lose. Greeks win, Trojans lose. Kind of the story of everything, right?