“You already know what you’ll do,” he says coldly as a softball rolls up to his feet. “Why ask me anything?”
A little boy, not yet four years old, comes toddling toward us in search of the softball. My father bends an inch or two at the waist, grunts in discomfort, and then kicks the ball past the little boy who has to go chasing after it the other way.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
“If you don’t want to listen to me, why did you call me here today?” he asks before he clears his throat and spits on the stone path.
I have to think about that one for a while myself. Why ask him about something in which he has no vested interest? Why expect him to behave any differently now than he has for the past sixty-five years, or however long he’s actually been alive? If I’d had a black client who had as hard a life and as many problems as my father, I’d probably just feel sorry for him. So why do I keep resenting the old man and picking on him?
When the answer finally comes to me, it seems so stupid and banal I want to crawl under the bench. What I want from my father is a scrap of affection, something to take with me as I go back out and face the world. But he’s too old to change. He never was the affectionate type anyway. I know that, but I can’t help myself. I sit there, feeling ten years old and helpless again.
More sea gulls fly past us and an abrupt wind shivers the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a brass band is playing. The sun glints off the Unisphere, two hundred yards away. My father zips up his windbreaker like he’s getting ready to go.
“So that’s it?” he says. “That’s the big talk?”
“Well,” I tell him finally. “I’m your only son and you’re the only close relative I have, I guess. I just thought you might want to know what I’ve been up to.”
“So.” He stands up. “Now I know.”
If anything, my talk with my father strengthens my resolve to hold out a little bit longer against Richard Silver. Instead, I find myself looking for more dangerous assignments at work, because in the back of my mind I’m hoping maybe I’ll get hurt and that’ll take away the pressure to make a decision.
When the sun comes up on Monday morning, I’m behind the wheel of the K car, fighting with Bill Neill and Angel about where we should go first. Bill wants to see a Colombian pickpocket named Pablo in Washington Heights, because the guy used to be one of his clients. I want to follow up on a tip that there’s an informant on St. Nicholas Avenue who’s willing to talk about where Darryl King is, provided the reward money is real.
“Come on, Baum,” Bill says as I make the turn onto West Street and head uptown. “We’re supposed to leave all that Darryl King stuff to the police. It’s their investigation.”
“But the tip came from a probation client,” I tell him.
“Who?” Bill asks.
“One of Cathy Brody’s people,” Angel explains. “I think she threatened him with a two-by-four.”
“Anyway, it’s our guy,” I argue. “And no one said we’re not supposed to follow up on our own leads.”
“Ah, you’re just pissed off because the judge made you look bad on this Darryl King case.” Bill puts his leg up on the dashboard as we pass the meat-packing district and see the male prostitutes straggling back from the docks. “It’s just politics.”
“So what?” I say to him. “Are you scared?”
Bill sighs and stares out the window. “No, Baum, I’m not scared,” he says. “I’d just like you to be the first one through the door this time.”
The informant lives in a six-story gray stone building at the foot of Sugar Hill. Compared to a lot of the other places we’ve been, this is not too bad. It still seems like a working-class neighborhood with grocery stores and laundromats nearby and hardly any garbage in the street. In fact, I think I remember reading something about how the tenants in one of these apartment houses bought their building from the city and fixed it up as a co-op after their landlord abandoned them.
The informant’s apartment is on the second floor and as Bill requested, I do the knocking.
After a couple of seconds, I hear someone moving around inside and a dog barking. Bill gestures for me to stand to the side a little and I start to get a little nervous. What if it’s a pit bull in there that’s going to come jumping out? Or worse, if this is somebody who knows Darryl King, we could be walking right into a hail of automatic weapons fire. Part of me wants to stop knocking and run downstairs right now. But the other part wants to stay and show it isn’t scared.
Slowly the door starts to open a little way. The small oval face of an old man with dusky skin and avid eyes peers out at us. He won’t remove the chain from the door. Instead, he insists on talking to me through the narrow space.
“Excuse me, sir, you called us,” I say, starting to relax a little. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did,” he tells me in a voice like a creaky hinge. “I believe I know how to find what you’re looking for.”
“Then why don’t you just let us in?”
“I’d rather have you stay out there,” he says.
From inside the apartment, that dog keeps barking. Sounds like a big dog. Maybe a rottweiler. Barking continuously, as though he doesn’t need to draw a breath. I glance back at Bill and Angel and get a couple of indifferent looks.
“Sir, you have some information for us?” I ask.
“Yes, I do,” he begins. “Now I wanna take you all back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 1943.”
“Yes.”
“A man buried a pair of shoes.”
“Uh-huh.”
I catch a whiff of something like old peanut butter wafting out of the informant’s apartment. Behind me, I hear Bill mumbling, “Fuckin’ wing-nut.”
“Now you go there and you find those shoes,” the informant is saying. “And then we’ll talk about the man you’re looking for.”
This has been a complete waste of time. If he didn’t live here already, I’d slam the door on the old man. I should’ve known the offer of a Darryl King reward would bring out every crank in the city. The dog still hasn’t stopped barking. I wonder if one of the neighbors is going to come out and shoot it.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“That’s it,” the man says. “You find them shoes, you’ll have your answer. But let me know if you hear anything about some socks.”
59
DARRYL HAD BEEN SMOKING crack and arguing with his mother steadily for two days. Now she was passed out in the other room and he was almost ready to crash.
He looked out the window in the kitchen.
The action was picking up on First Avenue. A man with hair like a bunch of corkscrews was pacing back and forth, steering people into a building that Darryl knew was a rival crack house. Many of the customers did not go far after leaving the brownstone. They just stopped in a doorway, took out their vials and pipes, and began flicking their lighters.
Darryl King could see the points of light going on and off, like fireflies in the night.
At about the same time, a woman named Thelma McDonald had a much closer perspective. She lived on the top floor of the brownstone and she could see the crackheads on the street directly under her window. Her two small boys, in first and second grades, had to walk past by them every day on their way home from school. But this night, there seemed to be more of them than usual. McDonald, a thirty-four-year-old bus dispatcher, called her local police precinct and asked them to send a car by.
Darryl King got hold of Bobby “House” Kirk and told him to take care of the problem. Bobby rounded up a few of his friends right away and they chased the steerer off the block with knives and baseball bats. They directed the remaining customers diagonally across the street to the Fortress, where the King family’s dealers were operating.
An hour later, the police car that Thelma McDonald had requested stopped by outside the brownstone. By then, the street was nearly empty and the cops did not notice anything unusual. They drove off.
By nine o�
�clock, Darryl started feeling hungry again. For what, he wasn’t sure. He went into the back bedroom to ask his mother to fix him something, but she was still facedown on the pillow and she wasn’t getting up anytime soon.
He started pacing back and forth in the kitchen. Getting more and more useless and angry by the minute, the way he used to in the foster home. It was her fault for letting him go anyway. And now that she had him back, she expected him to act like it was all okay and everything in between didn’t happen.
He opened up the refrigerator and looked through it. The old people who’d lived here before had kept it well stocked. They had greens, milk, catsup, cider, chicken, and macaroni and cheese in a round plastic container. But they’d been gone for weeks now and most of the food was spoiled.
He shut the door so the smell wouldn’t be so bad and he started going through the cupboards. Nothing much was there either. Spices, tea bags, syrup. Then he saw the familiar orange box that had the picture of the old black guy with the white hair. Uncle Ben. He looked a little like the old guy who used to live in this apartment. Darryl took the orange box out and shook it. It sounded like it was still halfway full of rice.
He listened for his mother stirring in the other room. But she was just talking in her sleep a little. Maybe she’d be hungry by the time she got up. And maybe if he had a hot plate of rice ready for her, she wouldn’t give him so much shit. It was hard living close with somebody this way.
He stood there for a minute, trying to remember how they used to do it at the foster home. It didn’t seem so hard. All you needed was a stove, some water and salt, and then it was almost as easy as making crack.
He rummaged around in the cabinets and found a big steel pot and filled it with water. A pigeon landed on the windowsill outside and looked at him suspiciously. He turned on the stove and set down the pot of water. Now came the ingredients. He emptied the box of Uncle Ben’s rice into the pot and then found a salt shaker and poured that in for a while. The pigeon cooed like it was trying to warn him about something. Rice tasted kind of bland, he remembered. All of a sudden he wished he could’ve had something sweet instead. His mother always preferred eating candy bars. But they didn’t even have cookies here.
It still didn’t seem like enough for a whole meal. He went back to the refrigerator and opened up the freezer. There were a couple of white packages. He took one of them out and unwrapped it. Pork chops, frozen solid. He found a roasting pan in the cabinet and put them in. This part he wasn’t as sure about, but it was worth a try. He turned on the oven and shoved in the pork chops.
The pigeon seemed to be nodding at him now. He sat down on an old wooden chair by the kitchen table so he could watch the stove. When he lowered his head a little, he could see the burner’s blue and orange flames dancing off the bottom of the pot with the rice in it.
They were trying to hypnotize him, those flames. He felt himself getting pulled back into that dream again. The one where he was driving along in the Jeep through the middle of nowhere. No buildings, no streets, no sky. That’s when a girl came up to him on the passenger’s side of the car. She was really fine, like the girls in the M.C. Hammer video, with their flat little stomachs and their bouncing titties. So she got in beside him and before he knew it, she’d unzipped his fly and she was busy sucking his dick. It was really nice.
But then she did something really fucked up. She bit down on it. And then she lifted her head and it was still in her mouth. He got very scared, even though it didn’t hurt yet. And here was something even more fucked up: When the girl spoke, she had his mother’s voice. She said, “Darryl, what the hell you doing?”
He was about to start crying, but that made her angrier. “Darryl, what’s up with this shit?” she shouted. “You trying to kill us all?” This time, the voice didn’t sound like it was coming from a dream. It sounded real.
He slowly opened his eyes. There was smoke everywhere. He looked over at the pot on the stove. Streams of whitish gunk were coming down the sides and the lid was rattling a little. Most of the actual smoke was coming out of the oven. It smelled like a body was burning in there. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping, but it was even darker than before outside now.
He rubbed his eyes and coughed a couple of times. Through the smoke, he could see his mother turning off the stove and throwing open the window. She was mad again.
“The fuck’s the matter with you?” she said.
“Damn, that’s a lot of smoke,” Darryl grumbled. He still could barely see anything.
“It’s a good thing them smoke detectors don’t work in here.”
“Why?”
She put her hands on her hips and hollered, “Because then they bring fuckin’ fire department up here, and they’d find us and take us all away!”
“All right, all right,” Darryl said, twisting in his seat, so he wouldn’t be facing her voice. “Fuck you all. I’m never cooking again.”
60
THE DISINTEGRATION CONTINUES.
After the episode with the shoe-obsessed informant and a couple of more routine field visits, Bill and Angel drop me off in Chelsea so I can look in on one of my other old clients: Ricky Velez, the little token sucker, who’s attending an Alternative to Prison facility in the neighborhood.
They’re supposed to be helping him with his reading, but instead they’ve got him finger painting and lip syncing to rap records at a talent show.
When I walk in, one of the bearded counselors is up on the stage, strumming a guitar and braying “Blowin’ in the Wind” while dozens of bored young felons yell at him and throw things at each other. It’s like a gruesome parody of what probation was supposed to be. After one of the little hoods gets up and starts doing a rap number about the importance of not missing your day in court and the excellence of Darryl King’s marksmanship, I grab Ricky and drag him out of there.
I don’t know if it’s Darryl who put me off social work. I just know since I ran into him, things haven’t been quite the same.
Just to end the day right, I get mugged coming in my building by a Hispanic crackhead with the sniffles. I don’t see him waiting for me in the shadows. He just shoves me against the tiled wall and punches me in the nose before I know what’s happening. I’m so busy holding my face that I don’t get a good look at him as he takes my wallet and bounds down the front steps, almost jauntily.
Luckily, my nose isn’t broken and the swelling isn’t so bad, but I have this funny feeling inside. It’s not that I’m angry or sad. I just feel different. And it isn’t the mugging or the beating that did it. I think it was the sight of that pathetic bearded guy up with his guitar in front of the uninterested kids.
What’s the point anymore? Fuck these people.
I fill out violation forms against Charlie Simms and Maria Sanchez.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Ms. Lang asks me when I give her the papers the next morning.
“Why not?”
“I thought these were two of your favorite clients.” She looks over her half glasses to peer at me.
“Used to be,” I say, feeling the vinegar in my veins.
I take a good look around her office. It’s not much bigger than my old cubicle, but she has all her degrees and graduation pictures up on the wall. I notice how young and pretty she was in her cap and gown. It’s sad to see her sitting at the desk now, looking worn-down and defeated.
“So what happened with these people?” Ms. Lang asks, putting my papers into a wooden tray marked “Out.”
“They fucked up.”
She plucks the papers out of the tray and examines them again with her eyes narrowed. “You know, I think something happens sometimes to people who work here too long or too hard,” she says in a slow, reflective voice. “They forget what they’re supposed to be doing here and they take their frustration out on the clients. They see the symptoms, but they forget about the cause.”
“What do you mean?” I say a little sullenly.
&nb
sp; “Oh, they don’t see the racism in the system,” she says as though it’s something she’s thought about so often that she doesn’t get worked up about it anymore. “They don’t see how our young black children go into schools that have nothing to teach them about their own people. They don’t learn about Marcus Garvey or Crispus Attucks …”
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, feeling like I’ve been called into the principal’s office. I’m in no mood for being lectured to. “Does all this go for Darryl King too?” I say with some impatience.
“Maybe. Maybe he’d be a different kind of person in another zip code.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, I don’t think anyone could say for sure,” she says tolerantly.
This is all making me wince, which in turn makes my nose sting where the guy hit me. “So do you or don’t you have a problem with the way I did my violations?” I say finally, stepping forward. “Because if you have a complaint, I’d like to hear it.”
“No.” She sighs, putting the papers down in the tray again and taking off her glasses. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just hope you’re not settling any scores here.”
“Of course not.”
“Good,” she says. “There are too few good guys left. I’d hate to see you go over to the other side.”
61
AS THE HOUR GOT later, the cars from New Jersey started coming in over the George Washington Bridge and driving up to the curb near the Fortress.
Two white guys in a black Trans Am pulled up behind a brand-new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that was being washed by a crazy-looking black guy with a rat’s nest of hair and a tangled beard.
The white guy who’d been driving the Trans Am got out and hitched up his chinos. He looked around nervously and then walked up to the crazy old man who was washing the Cutlass.
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