Nick's Trip

by George Pelecanos

  Through the tiny kitchen, past the main room, and out the front bay window to the yard, a set of headlights approached from up the road.

  I jumped off the steps and hit the ground running. I saw the headlights pass across the house and traverse the ground at my feet, and I heard myself grunt as I sprinted blindly into the woods. Willow sticks lashed my face, and there was the sound of branches snapping at my feet, and the sound of the branches adrenalized my legs, and I turned right and ran harder and faster, as if a fire were chasing me up a flight of stairs. I kept running until I reached the broken grove of willow and pine.

  I stopped for breath, looked behind me once more, and ran out of the grove, across the hard field and the road, back to my Dart. I gunned it and drove up Gallatin to the Maryland line at Chillum, where I cracked the window and lit a smoke, hanging a left and then another just after that, back into the District.

  The streets were shining and noisy, filled with loud, swerving vehicles and juiced-up, hard-luck cops on the worst beat of the year. I dodged them all, driving beneath a pearl moon, my fingers tight around the steering wheel, all the way back to my apartment in Shepherd Park.

  I TURNED ON THE lamp switch next to my couch on the way to the liquor cabinet in my kitchen, where I withdrew what was left of my green-seal Grand-Dad. My cat circled my feet as I poured the bourbon into a juice glass, and kept circling as I tossed it back. I swallowed the whiskey, leaned over the chipped porcelain drain board, felt the burn, and waited for the warmth to wash over my face. I poured another shot and let the liquor slop out of the bottle’s neck. Some of it spilled out onto the porcelain. The rest filled half the glass. I had a sip this time and walked out of the kitchen with the glass in my hand to the couch in my tiny living room.

  I balanced the glass on the arm of the couch, picked the telephone up off the rug, and placed it in my lap. My cat jumped up on the couch and touched her nose to my arm, then jumped down and walked off, tail up, to the bedroom. I dialed Winnie Luzon.

  Winnie picked up on the third ring. “Talk about it,” he said.

  “Winnie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nick Stefanos.”

  “Nicky! Happy New Year, Holmes.”

  “And to you, man.” There was some sort of tinny disco in the background, and the laughter of a woman.

  “So what’s up, Nick?”

  “Partying tonight?”

  “You know me, man, tonight the shit is serious.”

  “I won’t keep you, then. Got a couple of questions, though, if you can spare a minute.”

  “Hold on.” Winnie put his hand over the mouthpiece and yelled something I couldn’t make out. When he got back on the line the music had been cut, and the woman was talking rapidly in Spanish, her voice fading as she walked away. I heard a match strike and the crackle of lit paper, and Winnie’s exhale.

  “We talk now?”

  Winnie said, “Sure.”

  “Listen—you ever hear of a place called the Olde World? Pizza and subs, down in your neighborhood, Sixteenth and U?”

  “Down near Rio Loco’s, right?”

  “The same.”

  “Yeah, sure. Good pizza, man.”

  “You know the owners, anything about ’em?”

  Winnie took in some smoke and held it. I could envision the glaze in his eyes, and the shrug. “Uh-uh.”

  “There was a place near the Olde World, another pizza joint, called the Pie Shack.”

  “The Pie Shack—that’s that place burned.”

  “Arson?” I said.

  “That was the rumor.”

  “Any real word on that?”

  “Nothing in stone.”

  “How about the name Bonanno, that mean anything?”

  “Bonanno?” Winnie said. “It’s a Guinea name, Nick, common as Smith.”

  “So it doesn’t click.”

  “Uh-uh. This about that Goodrich thing, the thing with Joey DiGeordano?”

  “That’s taken care of,” I said.

  Winnie went silent for a minute or so, then snapped his fingers into the receiver. “Hey, Nicky, that reminds me, man. You had some heat come around, asking questions about you, in Malcolm X.”

  “What kind of heat?”

  “Two cops. Detectives I do business with, now and again.”

  “You sell them information?”

  “When I have to, yeah. But this one, I don’t like the way he looks, or the way he talks. I don’t sell him nothin’.”

  “What was he asking?”

  “About your friend, the one got slashed in the Piedmont.”

  “William Henry.”

  “Right. This joker wanted to know if you been around, askin’ about your friend.”

  “You tell him anything?”

  Winnie paused. “Don’t embarrass yourself, Nick.”

  “Thanks, Winnie.” I had a sip of bourbon and let it settle while I thought things over. “What’d this cop look like?”

  “Skinny and mean. Like a wet dog.”

  “He give his name?”

  “Goloria.”

  I put fire to a Camel and rolled the bourbon around in the glass. “And his partner?”

  “Lady cop, with nuts.”

  “Wallace, right?”

  “That’s right. Ring a bell, Nick?”

  “It’s beginning to,” I said.

  “Listen, man, I gotta go.” Winnie’s voice lowered to a whisper. “Don’t want to piss off the pussy, Holmes. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Go on, Winnie. Have a good time, man.”

  “Stay safe, Nick.” The phone clicked dead.

  My landlord was having a small party upstairs. I listened to the thump of bass and the sound of feet moving on hardwood floors. My cat emerged from the darkness of the bedroom and hopped back up onto the couch. She waited for me to move the telephone aside, then crawled onto my lap and kneaded it until she tucked her paws in and dropped down on her belly.

  I lit another smoke and finished my bourbon. A blanket of gray had settled in the center of the room. I butted the cigarette and turned off the lamp next to the couch, letting my head ease back as I ran my fingers through the fur of my sleeping cat. The last thing I heard was an ebb of laughter from above, the swell of music, and the muffled screams of old friends and lovers.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  HELLO?”

  “Mr. DiGeordano?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nick Stefanos.”

  “Nick, how are you? Happy New Year.”

  “Thanks, same to you.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I apologize for calling you at home on the holiday, but I need to ask a favor.”

  “You want to speak to Joey?”

  “No, sir, it’s you I’d like to speak to.”

  Louis DiGeordano cleared his throat. “Go ahead,” he said in his high rasp.

  “Not over the phone, if you don’t mind.”

  “Is this about the Goodrich girl?”

  “Some of it is,” I said. “Most of it’s about something else.”

  DiGeordano’s voice went in and out as he mumbled for a bit. I sat on the couch at my apartment, sipping coffee. He put his mouth closer to the line. “The family’s coming over for New Year’s dinner,” he said, “at five. I suppose I can meet you this morning, for a short while.”

  “How about in about an hour? Say, eleven o’clock?”

  “Fine.”

  “Hains Point, is that okay? Parking Area Six. You know where that is?”

  “Do I know it? Nick, it was me that took you to Hains Point for your first time, nearly thirty years ago.”

  “Can I pick you up?”

  “No, I’ll have Bobby drive me. See you at eleven.”

  I waited for another dial tone, then rang Darnell. He lived alone in the Shaw area of Northwest, with only a mattress on the floor and a small table and chair set in a bare-walled efficiency. The holidays were rough on guys like me, rougher on guys like Dar
nell.

  Darnell said, “Yeah.”

  “Darnell, it’s Nick.”

  “Nick, what you doin’, man?”

  “Headin’ down to Hains Point. Want to come along?”

  “Hains Point? While the hawk flies? Shit.”

  “I’ve got to meet a man. It won’t take long. But it’s a nice day, thought you might want to take a drive. Matter of fact, thought you might want to drive.”

  “You know I ain’t driven a car since I checked outta Lorton. Don’t even have a license, Nick.”

  “Come on, Darnell—what’re you going to do today, sit around, watch beer commercials in black and white? You don’t even drink.”

  Darnell thought it over. “I can drive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You swing by my way?”

  “In a half hour.”

  Darnell said, “Right.”

  WE CAUGHT THE PARK off Thirteenth at Arkansas and took the express route downtown. Heavily clothed joggers bounded coltishly through blocks of sunlight on the path to our right, the wind at their backs.

  Darnell wore his brown overcoat, his matching brown leather kufi tight on his head. He drove my Dart with one hand on the wheel, his left elbow resting on the window’s edge. Darnell had brought his own tape—Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On—for the ride, and he slipped it in as soon as he had slid gleefully into the driver’s seat. He had rolled down the window right after that, and I had let him do it without objection, seeing the involuntary, childlike grin on his face, though it wasn’t a day for open windows. The bright sun barely dented the cold front that had fallen into town overnight.

  We passed the Kennedy Center and drove along the river to East Potomac Park, winding finally into Ohio Drive. Darnell eased off the gas as the road went one-way, a line of naked-branched cherry trees to our left, the golf course to our right. After another quarter-mile, at Parking Area Six, Darnell pulled the Dart into a small lot that faced Washington Channel.

  There were few cars circling the park, and only one—a red Mercedes coupe with gold alloy wheels—in the lot. In the light I could make out the outline of a shaven head behind the tinted glass of the coupe’s driver’s side. I rolled my own window down and pushed the lighter into the dash. When the lighter popped out thirty seconds later, I used it to burn a Camel.

  Darnell rocked his head and softly sang the chorus to “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa.” He turned the volume up a notch and looked across the channel to the restaurants and fish stands that lined Maine Avenue. I blew a jet of smoke out the window and watched it vanish in the wind.

  “Nice day,” Darnell said, breaking away from his own song. “Thanks for askin’ me out. You been decent to me, man, and I appreciate it. To most people, it’s like I’m invisible.”

  “Thought you might like to drive.”

  “Been a while,” he said, staring toward the water. The sun made sailing shards of glass on the channel. “Funny how a simple-ass thing like a drive down the park”—he stopped, shook his head, and smiled weakly. “Drivin’s what got me my bid in Lorton in the first place, you know that?”

  “I heard you got caught up in something.”

  Darnell laughed shortly and without pleasure, then shook his head. “More than caught up, Nick. I knew what I was doin’, in the way that any kid knows he’s gettin’ into somethin’ wrong, knows it but can’t stay away.”

  “What happened?”

  Darnell rubbed a skeletal finger down the bridge of his long, thin nose. “Round about the mid seventies, I was runnin’ with this Southeast boy. I knew he owned an army forty-five, used to brag how he bought it off some vet in the street. One day, he asked me to drive him down to see this girl he knew, down his way. I was known in the neighborhood as a guy who knew cars, see, knew how to make ’em move. I did it, even knowin’ he was on somethin’, talkin’ more bullshit than usual that day, actin’ strange. Anyway, on the way down he told me to pull over in front of some market, down off Minnesota Avenue. I parked out front, left the motor run—he said he’d be back right quick—and then this stickup boy I was runnin’ with, he started shootin’ that forty-five of his inside, shootin’ that motherfucker all to hell.”

  I dragged off my smoke and flicked ash. Darnell stopped, took a long breath, and continued. “The way it ended, somebody died, and the police were all over the joint straight away, and they ran in and killed that boy too. I stayed in the car, didn’t even try to run, knew it was over then, let them pull me out, my hands up, let them push my face right into the street.” He glanced in my direction but averted his eyes. “Later on, they told me that boy was hard on the Boat. Had enough green in him to knock down a horse.”

  “You paid up,” I said.

  “I did, man. More than you know.”

  A black BMW pulled into the lot and stopped alongside the Mercedes. The driver, a young man wearing a black jacket with a large eight ball embroidered across the back, stepped out and gave the world a tough glance. The Mercedes’ door opened and a man not yet twenty wearing a parka with a fur collar put his foot out onto the asphalt. They shook hands elaborately, and then the driver of the BMW walked around the passenger side of the Mercedes and got in. Both doors closed, leaving only an armor of tinted glass.

  Darnell said, “What do you think that’s about?”

  “Couple of young professionals. Doctors, maybe, or lawyers. Right?”

  “Nick, man, what the fuck happened to this town?”

  “I can’t tell you what happened. Only that it did.”

  Darnell leaned closer to me on the seat. His eyebrows veed up and wrinkles crossed his forehead. “Remember 1976, man? The way people acted to each other, everything—the shit was so positive. Groups of kids on bicycles, blowin’ whistles, ridin’ in Rock Creek Park. The message in the music—Earth, Wind and Fire, ‘Keep your Head to the Sky.’ Even that herb-smokin’ motherfucker George Clinton, Parliament, ‘Chocolate City’—‘You don’t need the bullets, if you got the ballots, C.C.’—you remember that, Nick?”

  “I remember.”

  Darnell sat back and spoke softly. “When I got out, in ’88, it was a new world, man. There wasn’t no hope, not anymore—not on the street, not on the radio, nothin’. Nothin’ but gangster romance.”

  I looked in the rearview and said, “Here comes our man.”

  A black 1974 Eldorado turned in to the lot and pulled three spaces down from our car. The engine cut, the passenger door opened, and Louis DiGeordano slowly climbed out. He looked in my direction and titled his head toward the concrete walk that ran around the park at the water’s edge. I nodded and stepped out of the Dart.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Darnell,” I said before I closed the door.

  “I’ll be waitin’ on you right here,” he said.

  I buttoned my overcoat. DiGeordano was down on the walkway, facing southeast toward the brick edifice of Fort McNair. I walked to the driver’s side of the Caddy and watched the window roll down. Bobby Caruso sat behind the wheel.

  He filled a shiny suit, the French cuffs of his shirt four inches ahead of the sleeves on his jacket. His hair was gelled and spiked, and the fleshy rolls of his neck folded down over the collar of his starched shirt.

  “What is it?” he said, his face stretched in a constipatory grimace.

  I leaned on the door. “That day in the market, when we went at it.”

  “I remember. What about it?”

  “I called you a name that day. I want to apologize for that.”

  Caruso relaxed, letting the boyishness ease into his face. He looked then like the kid he was, dressed for the P.G. County prom. “Forget about it,” he said.

  I shook his hand and walked away. Caruso yelled, “Hey, Stefano,” and I turned. “That shit you pulled on me that day, with your hands—where’d you learn it?”

  I smiled. “From my doctor.”

  Caruso smiled back, showing his beaver teeth. “I thought doctors were supposed to help people,
not hurt ’em.”

  “Take care of yourself,” I said, and walked across the grass, through the thin branches of a willow to the concrete walkway, where I stood beside Louis DiGeordano.

  “Let’s walk,” DiGeordano said. “Shall we?”

  DiGeordano put his hand on the two-tiered rail that ran along the channel, and began to move. I walked beside him, taking a last pull off my smoke.

  He was wearing a gray lamb’s-wool overcoat with a black scarf over a suit and tie, and a matching felt fedora. The brim of the fedora was turned down, with a slight crease running back to front in the crown. A small red feather was in the band, the same shade of red as the handkerchief folded in the breast pocket of his suit. A liquid wave of silver hair flowed under the hat, swept back behind his ears.

  DiGeordano smoothed the black scarf down across his suit and pulled together the collars of the overcoat, against the wind. “Those two in the parking lot,” he said. “You see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Titsunes,” he said. “Drugs, guns, and titsunes. That’s what this park is now. That’s what this whole city is.”

  “I don’t know. I come down here in the summer, ride my bike down here quite a bit. I see a little of that. But what I mostly see is families having picnics, getting out of the heat. Old men fishing, couples holding each other, sitting under the trees.”

  “It’s not like it was.”

  “It’s exactly like it was. It’s people, enjoying their city.”

  DiGeordano looked across the channel and shook his hand in the air as he walked, the wag of his fingers meant for me. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Nicky,” he said. “You’re not old enough to remember.”

  “I guess not,” I said, deferring to his age, though in one sense he was right. We lived in the same city, but a million miles apart.

  He put his hand back in his side pocket, his brown eyes squinting now in the wind. “We always walked this side of the park, in the old days, every Sunday. The Potomac side, looking toward Virginia; it gets too much wind, and too much spray from the chop.”

  “You said you were with me and my grandfather the first day I came down here.”

  DiGeordano’s pink lips turned to a smile beneath his gray mustache. “Yes. This was very early in the sixties, you were maybe five years old. Nick had bought a cheap fishing pole for you and baited it with a bloodworm. You were holding the pole—he was holding it, really, standing over your shoulder—and a perch hit the line. Nick yanked it from the channel and removed the hook, and this little perch, it was no bigger than the palm of your hand, it flipped off the walkway and back into the channel.” DiGeordano laughed deeply. “You were wearing a pair of denim overalls with a red flannel shirt underneath, and I’ll never forget you chasing after that fish, trying to scoot under the railing. Nick grabbed you by the straps of your overalls and pulled you back—he laughed the rest of the day about it, talked about it at our card games, how you tried to go in after that fish. He talked about it for years.”