“Fell the fuck down.” The reporter shrugged, closing his pad. When he walked away, they noticed that he had a clubfoot.
“That’s got to suck,” Ike said under his breath.
“Excuse me, sir!” a bespectacled black man, his clothes nearly in rags but carrying an attaché case, called out to the Orthodox, still on his cell. “Are you rebuilding?”
“Of course.”
“Very good,” the raggedy man said, and left.
“We should go too,” Ike said, slapping Eric on the arm and heading out for the Virgin.
As they came up on the Sana’a, Eric turned to Ike, ready to school him on slipping the line, but the kid had already done so, giving Nazir his dollar admission fee and disappearing inside.
Hemmed in by supplicants, they knelt side by side like batters in an on-deck circle before the Virgin, the shrine-pile of offerings having tripled since Eric’s previous visit.
His first thought was to approach one of the brothers, appeal to them to at least reroute the line outside so it wouldn’t screw up all the other businesses in the neighborhood, but he realized that the line was just that: outside, as in, out of their control. Which left asking them to lose the Virgin altogether, not likely given the cash coming in. Which left . . .
“Fuck me,” Eric whispered, then to Ike: “Can I ask you something personal?” his voice feathery with tension.
“Absolutely.”
“All those tattoos, what are you going to tell your kids someday?”
“My kids? I’m my own kid.”
“My own kid,” Eric said, massaging his chest as if to get more air in there. “I like that.”
“Yeah? Good, it’s true.”
“Shit,” Eric hissed. “How do you do this . . .”
“Do what?” Ike whispered, then casually reached for the glass door, opening it for a few seconds, then closing it back. “That?”
Within a minute the inrush of humid air had changed the condensation pattern and sent the Virgin packing. Fifteen minutes later, as the news shot back across Rivington, the milagro line was no more. And by noon, over at Café Berkmann, there was a twenty-minute wait for tables.
“See you din’t live round here back in the heyday, so no way you’d know, but about ten, twelve years ago?” Little Dap Williams yakking away as he stopped to scoop up the next bunch of Bible pages from under a brick. “Man, it was, there was some bad dudes up in here. The Purples on Avenue C, Hernandez brothers on A and B, Delta Force in the Cahans, nigger name Maquetumba right in the Lemlichs. Half a them got snatched up by RICO for long bids, the other half is dead, all the hardcores, so now it’s like just the Old Heads out there sippin’ forties and telling stories about yesteryear, them and a bunch of Similac niggers, stoop boys, everybody out for themselves with their itty-bitty eight balls, nobody runnin’ the show.”
“Maquetumba?” Tristan’s pillowcase was nearly full.
“Dominican dude. Dead now. My brother told me him and his crew had the Lemlichs sewed tight.”
“What kind of name is that.”
“I just said. Dominican.”
“What’s it mean, though.”
“Maquetumba? Man, you should know, you Dominican.”
“Puerto Rican.”
“Same shit, ain’t it?”
Tristan shrugged.
“Sss,” Little Dap sucked his teeth. “Like, ‘he who drops the most,’ some shit like that.”
“Drops what?”
Little Dap just stared at him.
“Right.” Pretending like he got it. Tristan was just glad to be hanging with Little Dap, glad to be hanging with anybody, with him having to live 24/7 with his ex-stepfather, the guy’s new wife, kids, rules, and fists. Even how he got here, picking up Bible paper on this shitpile, seemed a little bit of a miracle; after having dropped off the hamsters—his not-really brothers and sisters—at their schools this morning, he hadn’t felt like going to school himself.
So he’d been sitting outside Seward Park High School at ten, not knowing what to do or having anyone around to do it with, when Little Dap cut out of the building, passed him by with a nod, then shrugging, walked back and asked him if he wanted to make some change at the Jew cave-in.
It always seemed like whenever he chose to cut school, everybody else picked that day to go in and vice versa; if he didn’t have to be dropping off the hamsters first thing every morning, he could just hang out in the candy store by Seward having a Coca-Cola and Ring Ding breakfast with everybody from the Lemlichs when they decided what to do that day, but he could never make it there in time; same for the afternoon, everybody coming together after last class and deciding whose place to go to; Tristan once again stuck doing the reverse hamster run and not having a clue where they went. And his ex-stepfather wouldn’t allow him a cell phone.
“Yeah, the PJ’s wide-open now,” Little Dap said again.
“What about your brother?”
Tristan knew all about Big Dap, everybody did, the only nigger in history to ever get into a fight with a police in an elevator, wind up shooting the guy in the leg with his own gun, and beat the case.
“Dap? Pfff . . . Nigger’s too lazy. I mean, he could run the Lemlichs, at least if he wanted to, got everybody up in there so scared a him, you know, if he put in the effort? But shit, all he wants is get the cheese easiest way he could. Go up on a corner, ‘Yo Shorty you slingin’? It’s a hundred a week.’ Collect, go back to Shyanne’s crib, smoke his brains out and watch the TV. That ain’t no life.”
“Times ten corners?”
Tristan only made $25, $30 on a delivery for Smoov, and Smoov only came to him if nobody else was around.
“Wide-open . . .” Little Dap shaking his head like it was a tragedy.
“So, what. You gonna go all kingpin out there?”
“Hell no. And wind up in some underground supermax? This Old Head round the way said them joints age you ten years for each real one, guys be laying there twenty-four/seven daydreaming ’bout how to kill themselves.”
“For real?”
“I’ll take another bid in gladiator school over that anytime.”
“For real.”
Tristan had never been to either juvie or, since he turned seventeen last year, the Tombs, just ROR’ed a few times like everybody else for the usual shit: possession, trespassing—aka hanging in the park after curfew—for fighting that one time, pissing out the bedroom window.
“I tell you what I am gonna do, though,” Little Dap said. “Get up on a package tonight? Work it, sleep in tomorrow and party.”
“Pay your own brother corner rent?”
“He ain’t charge me.”
“You got the money for a package?” Tristan asked.
Dap did what Tristan did, deliver, maybe more often because he was more popular, but he also got money from his grandmother and occasionally made collections for his brother.
“Not right now as such, but I’ll get it tonight. Come back out here to the midlands, jux me a head, and I’m good to go.”
“All right.” Tristan not really following.
“There’s this barbershop up in Washington Heights? If you’re an hermano dominicano, they sell you a gram for twenty dollars, so I’m thinking let’s snatch us a head out here, take the kibble, go up there, let you do the talking, come back down around Tompkins Park, resell the g for a hundred to the white boys coming out the bars, you know what I’m sayin’? We go up with, say, two hundred for ten grams, come back out here, sell for a grand, you do the math.”
We . . .
“Yeah, huh?”
“Oh hell yeah.”
But Washington Heights. Or even just back out here. They were only five or six blocks from the Lemlichs, but Tristan could almost count the times he’d been this deep away from home when he wasn’t making a delivery. He didn’t like going north of Houston or west of Essex, and he hated delivering dope to the doctors and nurses up at Bellevue or NYU Special Joints, both so far uptown t
hey might as well be in another country. In fact the only place he didn’t mind delivering to was the lawyer’s office on Hester Street, close enough, although that redheaded lawyer there, Danny, sometimes when he got his head on, he’d start calling Tristan “Che” because of his goatee, Tristan having no idea how to tell him to quit it.
It was amazing to him how Smoov, only a year older than him, had the confidence to go into all those uptown bars by the hospitals and chat up all those doctors, nurses, and lawyers and whoever to drum up new customers. Shit, he wouldn’t even be here in this junk field now if Little Dap hadn’t just said, C’mon.
“So you up for this?”
“I don’t know.” Thinking about his curfew, those fists. “I might got to watch the kids.”
“See?” Little Dap addressed the rubble. “Similac niggers, everywhere I look.”
“Maybe I can get out of it,” Tristan murmured.
“Ey, yo,” Little Dap called out to the rabbi or whatever he was. “What you gonna do with them candlesticks back there?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“What?” Little Dap starting to trip.
The bearded guy, back on his cell now, ignored him.
“I ast you a civilized question. You think I’m gonna steal them or something?”
The guy smiled, briefly taking the phone from under his jaw. “They’ll go in the new temple.”
“Who gives a fuck,” Little Dap said, tossing his pillowcase.
Tristan looked out at the rubberneckers on the roped-off sidewalk—sand niggers, flat-face Chinese, blancos, other kids—imagining that they were all there to stare at him, to see what his goatee was hiding, the lightening underneath, knowing it wasn’t really true but not liking the idea anyhow, and so he put his eyes to the task he was getting paid for. A big $20.
When he looked up again, the rabbi or whatever was staring at him, a pained smile on his face.
“What?” Tristan flushed, then tracked the guy’s eyes down to his own feet, seeing the Bible page he was standing on.
During the late-afternoon lull, Eric wandered behind the bar and made himself a light club soda and Hennessy. He wasn’t a daytime drinker as a rule, but he’d been feeling amorphously anxious ever since they booted the Virgin. The boss hadn’t even thanked him, not so much as a knowing nod, although it was probably more prudent for Steele to go all Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell on it if you were in his position.
Having watched the two new bartenders get through the lunch crush, Eric thought they’d both work out. Cleveland, the black one, was no artiste with a cocktail shaker, but was a warm conversationalist, far more important; and Ike, good enough with the drinks, had an easy laugh. Eric imagined that both would build up considerable followings within a month.
He was not amused at the stunt Ike had pulled. Not that he hadn’t been thinking of doing the same thing, but the kid didn’t even have the patience to look around and size up the pilgrims present to see if they’d wind up with a good ass-kicking before they could make it out the door. Fortunately there was just enough of a time delay before the Virgin evaporated, and they were almost out of earshot before the wailing started.
“Eric.” Ike sidled up to him as he was putting back the cognac. “If you want, I’d be happy to make those for you.”
“I’m good.”
Despite three women coming in off a shopping spree to belly up to the bar, Ike lingered by Eric’s side, anxiously toddling from foot to foot. “Can I tell you something?” His voice dropped. “I’m not superstitious or anything, but that thing I pulled this morning? I have a real bad feeling it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass.”
Touched by the kid’s unprotected candor, Eric was about to say something dry and reassuring, but the nitwit beat him to it, grinning and punching his shoulder: “I’m just fuckin’ with you, brother,” then going off to serve the ladies.
Tristan took the offered joint and dug his feet into the gravel on the roof of their building in the Lemlichs, the both of them gazing at mile-high One Police Plaza only a few blocks away. Not only was he blowing off curfew tonight, but he never picked up the hamsters from their various schools this afternoon: a first. There’d be hell to pay, but there was always some kind of hell to pay in that house, and he couldn’t believe Little Dap was still hanging with him, so fuck it.
“We going to the Heights?” he murmured.
“First things first.”
“What.”
“What do you mean, what . . .” Little Dap cocking his head. “Gotta get that cheese, podner.”
“Oh,” Tristan said. “Shit.”
In his preoccupation with the big journey to Washington Heights, he had forgotten that part of it.
“What.” Little Dap sipped deep. “You never . . .”
“Yeah, no, not like . . .”
Little Dap shrugged. “Ain’t nothing to it,” passing him the joint.
Tristan in his embarrassment was unable to stop grinning.
“But I can’t do it without my dolgier.” Little Dap slow-poking him in the chest. “You know what I’m saying?”
A bloodred moon slipped out from behind 1PP.
“Why don’t you just go to a couple corner boys,” Tristan said, coughing out a cloud. “Say you collecting for Big Dap, we run uptown get the shit”—coughing again—“come back down here and turn it into something before he finds out, then just give him his money like normal.”
It was the most words he had said all at one time in a year.
“Nah, unh-unh.” Little Dap stretched his neck. “I tried that once, ran into some problems? That ain’t a good idea. You don’t ever get between Dap and his money. I mean, shit, you can send me to jail, I can handle that gladiator-school shit, in fact if truth be known, I could be like one of the instructors, but with Dap, he gets his hands on you when he goes off? Naw, unh-uh.
“And that’s like the other, we got to be like deep cover on this, ’cause all them porkies from the Eighth? They always looking for a excuse to beat my brother’s ass for that cop got shot, so they collar me, it’s like, ‘Oh, Little Dap, where’s Big Dap?’ Like he’s my automatic mastermind on a caper, and so now they got another excuse to light him up from here to the river. But whatever they do to him? Comes back on me double.”
Tristan dredged up a memory of Big Dap hauling off and slapping Little Dap in front of everybody on the street last year, the sound of it like a gunshot.
Then he thought of his ex-stepfather’s eyes, the way they bulged when he was good and liquored, getting ready to knock one out of the park.
Tristan didn’t want to go through with this anymore. “Maybe you shouldn’t do it then,” trying to come off as if he were saying it out of concern.
“Nah, it’s good, I’m good with it.”
They smoked in silence for a while, Tristan deciding the Manhattan Bridge was God’s forearm, barring the way to Brooklyn.
“I tell you.” Little Dap choked. “The one thing when we get out there? Stay off the Chinese, they get juxed so much, most times they never have nothing on them no more, and even when they do? You come up on them, they’re like, ‘Here,’ hold out the money before you can even say something.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s disrespectful.”
“It’s what?”
“How do they know what I got in mind before I even get up on them.”
“Yeah.”
“But them white kids?” Little Dap laughed, snorting smoke. “Ho’ shit, they’re like . . .” Doubling over, hand over his mouth. “I come up on this one guy last year, put the whistle in his mug? Motherfucker din’t have no money on him so he asked if I wanted him to write a check, like, whom should I make it out to?”
“What?” Tristan laughing too now, like everybody up here was a fully blooded vet.
“Here.” Little Dap went to his back pocket and pulled out a wrinkled pale blue check. It was from a bank in Traverse City, Michigan, dated s
ix months ago and made out to cash for $100.
“You gonna cash it?” Tristan suddenly dizzy with friendship.
“Naw, man, if I cash this, then they can trace it. I just keep it for a joke.”
“But if they find it on you, it’s like evidence, right?” Tristan murmured. “Call this bank on here, ask who’s this guy, was he robbed in New York . . . ”
Another silence came down, Tristan worried that he had just disrespected Little Dap, made him out to be a fool.
But Little Dap was too wasted to catch it, his eyes like two cherries floating in buttermilk.
“So what do you say,” passing Tristan the roach. “You gonna be my dolgier out there or what . . . I need to hear you say it.”
Tristan took a last hit. “Yeah, OK.” The words coming out like smoke signals.
“All right then.” Little Dap offering his fist for a pound, Tristan fighting off another out-of-control smile, it felt so good, something did at any rate.
“Man, you are one grinny motherfucker,” Little Dap said, popping the nub of the joint in his mouth, taking the gun out of his sweatshirt muff and attempting to hand it over.
Tristan reared back and laughed, if you could call it that.
“What.” Little Dap blinked.
“Nah.”
“Nah? What, you think you go out there and what, yell at a motherfucker?” He took Tristan by the wrist. “It ain’t like you use it, man,” slapping it into his palm. “You just flash it.”
At first Tristan tried to pass it back to him, but then got caught up with the feel of it in his hand, the giddy heft.
“Naw, man, this’ll be good for you,” Little Dap said. “Get you blooded, you know what I’m saying? First time’s like first-time sex, you just do it to get it done with, then you can start concentratin’ on getting better at it, havin’ fun with it.”
“All right.” Tristan staring and staring at the thing in his hand. “Can I ask you something?”
Little Dap waited. And waited.
“What the fuck is a dolgier.”
“A dolgier? A do-anything soldier.”
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