Soul Circus

by George P. Pelecanos

  Ashley sat on the edge of their bed in her pajamas, having changed back into them after Long and Jones, Dewayne Durham’s boys, had come, bought that pretty blue Taurus.38, and gone. She had taken her gun out of the drawer of her nightstand, which is where she kept it all the time. Ulysses had instructed her that this would be its most useful spot; he kept his, the 9mm Colt, the one with the custom bonded ivory grips, in his own nightstand on his side of the bed.

  She was giving the gun a good inspection. She liked the weight of it in her hand.

  It was the Smith amp; Wesson 60LS, the LadySmith, a.357 stainless-steel revolver with a speed-loader cutout and smooth rosewood grips, specially contoured to fit a woman’s hand. The grips were smooth and carried the S amp;W monogram; Ashley oiled them often, and she used her Hoppes kit to clean the chambers and barrel at least twice a month. It was a beautiful gun. She had her eye on a similar model, the 9mm auto, manufactured in frosted stainless with matching gray grips.

  “Ulee?”

  “Huh.” He was lying on his back on the bed, his head propped up on pillows, his eyes on their flat-screen Sony.

  “You know that LadySmith nine, the pretty one I seen in the magazine, all gray?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want one.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Foreman was watching ESPN Classic. Ashley didn’t know how men could stand to look at some old basketball game, had been played years before, when they knew how it was gonna end. But she did like to see him lying there, one arm behind his head, his bicep rounded, that rug of tight, curly hair covering the upper part of his chest.

  “I’m thinkin’ on goin’ to see my daddy down in Port Tobacco,” said Ashley.

  “Go ahead.”

  On the tube was game 6 of the Bulls-Jazz finals from ’98, played in Salt Lake. He watched Karl Malone take a dish from Stockton – white boy had to do something about those tight drawers, but he could orchestrate the shit out of some ball – and go underneath for a one-handed reverse dunk.

  “The Mailman,” said Foreman with admiration.

  “Ulee?”

  Foreman thought about how Malone was wastin’ hisself out there in Morman land. Handsome man like him, going home to his dull-ass family after the games, listenin’ to country music and shit, when he could be playing in a real city like New York, spending his dollars in clubs, gettin’ fresh pussy every night. To Foreman it seemed like Malone wasn’t having any fun. Playing with Stockton and his short shorts, and that other white boy, wiped his face like there was somethin’ runnin’ down it every time he got to the foul line. Lack of fun was probably the reason why Malone had never won the ring.

  “Ulee, come with me.”

  “Huh?”

  “To Port Tobacco!”

  “Maybe I’ll meet you down there,” said Foreman. “I got business to attend to.”

  The truth was, he was a city boy and wasn’t cut out for no farm. Also, her father, had one of those lantern-holdin’ negroes set on his lawn, made Jesse Helms look like Jesse Jackson. Pop wanted to bite right through his tongue every time Foreman came to visit. There was this other thing, too, bothered him some. Black men down there, deep in southern Maryland, some of them acted like they was back in 1963. Yessirin’ and all that, walkin’ down those country roads in the summertime, scratchin’ at the top of their heads.

  Ashley put the gun back on the nightstand. She picked up the glass that was sitting there and had a sip of chardonnay.

  “I’m thinkin’ of heading down there tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Baby, I need to stay home. I got some serious demand for low-end product right now, and I am light.”

  “What about that boy goes to Howard? I thought he was coming up from Georgia.”

  “He is. He’s bringing a load up Ninety-five in that trap car of his. But he’s not due up in here for a few more days.”

  “What you gonna do, then?”

  “I got that kid stays in Virginia, keeps a bunch of girls down there, over in Alexandria? I don’t know where he gets these girls, but he gets ’em. Anyway, the girls he finds, they got no priors.”

  “They old enough?”

  “Course they are; I wouldn’t waste my time they weren’t of age. He’s gonna come by tomorrow so I can give him the cash to make the buy.”

  “I wish you could come with me.”

  “So do I, baby, but work is work. Maybe I’ll have him see if they got one of those LadySmith nines in stock while he’s down there.”

  “For real?”

  “Why not?”

  Foreman heard her place the glass of wine back on the nightstand. He heard the rustle of cloth and her gutter-girl giggle. When he looked over at her she had peeled her pajama top off her shoulders and was crawling toward him across the bed. The bedsprings were crying on account of her weight. Her titties hung low, and those silver-dollar nipples of hers were grazing the sheets.

  Foreman didn’t have to watch the rest of the game. He’d seen it. And anyway, four minutes to go, Jordan on the court with that look in his eye, any fool would know how it was going to end.

  Ashley lowered herself upon him, her greenish-blond hair tickling his face, and kissed him deep. Her nipples felt hot on his chest. Her tongue was hot, too. Lord, could she kiss. He closed his eyes so he didn’t have to look at her. She wasn’t good-lookin’ or nothin’ close to it, but he did love her. And the woman could buck like a horse.

  “Uh,” she said. “Uh-huh.”

  The way she was on him now, making those sounds she liked to make? His dick was so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it. He’d had her earlier that day, but that was hours ago. She kept playin’ like this, he was just gonna have to go ahead and toss the shit out of her again.

  “GIMME some of that,” said Jerome Long.

  “You sure?” said Allante Jones. He had just put fire to a joint, double rolled in EZ Widers.

  “Gimme it. I need that shit to calm my nerves.”

  “Shaky, huh?”

  “A little.”

  “You’ll be all right, after. You’ll feel good then.”

  They were in their car, purchased for them by Dewayne, a plush 2000 Maxima with seventeen-inch tires and custom alloys, with a V6 under the hood. Jones sat behind the wheel, and Long was beside him. The Taurus.38 was under Long’s seat.

  The Maxima sat on the street, facing the lot of the apartments where the Coates cousins lived. This girl Long knew from the clubs, who mentioned once that she’d been with one of the cousins before, had told him where they stayed.

  Their hooptie, the old 240SX with the spoiler, was parked in the lot. It was dark out now, and they’d been waiting on the street for an hour or so. But so far the cousins had not come out.

  Long got the joint from Jones and hit it. He took the herb into his lungs, watching a man in a wheelchair roll down the sidewalk toward their car. The man was dressed in black and wore a black skully on his head. Not far behind him were two young girls, smiling, elbowing each other, having fun.

  “Boy musta caught one in the spine,” said Jones.

  Long closed his eyes. When he opened them the man in the wheelchair was gone. The young girls were alongside the car, laughing as they walked by. Long hit the chronic again, wondering what those girls had to laugh at, and passed it back over to his friend. Sometimes Long didn’t know how anyone could laugh, the way they lived.

  “You know that Muslim dude,” said Long, “always be sellin’ Final Call newspapers and shit down by the Metro?”

  “Young dude wears the dark suit?”

  “They all young. This one’s light-skinned, got a real faint mustache.”

  “I seen that dude, yeah.”

  “He was talkin’ to me the other day, tryin’ to tell me about the life I was livin’. How I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ but playin’ into the white man’s plan of a black holocaust.”

  “You mean like how they done to them Jews.”

  “Except he was sayin’ that we’re doin�
� this to ourselves. Killin’ each other like we do.”

  “Whateva.”

  Long took the joint but didn’t hit it. “Man said it was like we were in some kind of circus down here.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “And we in the ring, performing like the white man expects us to. One big ring of souls, killin’ each other while Mr. Charlie claps. You think it’s like that?”

  “I don’t know if it is or if it isn’t. But take a look around you, boy. What else we gonna do? ’Cause there ain’t nothin’ else.” Jones shook his head. “Nothin’.”

  Long was high. He stared through the windshield. He saw nothing and no way out. Though the night air was warm, he felt a chill run through him. The cold feeling went all the way down to his feet.

  “Don’t you ever get scared?” said Long.

  “Not really,” said Jones. He looked away from Long then. He did get scared sometimes. But he couldn’t tell his friend that he did.

  The cousins emerged from a stairwell in the apartment complex, crossed the parking lot, and walked toward the Nissan.

  Jones chucked up his chin. “There they go, Nut.”

  “I see ’em.”

  Jones turned the ignition. “Time to go to work.”

  Chapter 19

  STRANGE and Quinn had some barbecue at a place Strange liked, around 18th and U, then went over to Stan’s, near McPhearson Square, for drinks. The crowd was unpretentious, mixed race and class. The house signature was a full glass of liquor with a mixer side. The music was always tight. This was Strange’s idea of a bar.

  The tables in the main area were full, so Strange and Quinn found stools at the stick.

  Strange drank Johnnie Walker Red with a soda back. Quinn had a Heineken. Here, My Dear was on the house stereo, and the bartender was letting it roll from front to back.

  “Marvin’s masterpiece,” said Strange.

  “He was local, right?”

  Strange nodded. “He came back to sing at Cardozo once, after he got huge. But they say he wasn’t really into being back in D.C. All those memories with his old man, I guess. Course, he had all sorts of demons, not just family stuff. I remember back in the seventies, cats were walkin’ around sayin’, Is Marvin gay?”

  “It bothered you, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m not gonna lie. And I’m not sayin’ he was or he wasn’t, ’cause I don’t know. But I couldn’t understand the concept then and I still can’t get all the way comfortable with it today. You get old enough, you’re gonna see young people doin’ shit you can’t get behind, either. Y’all’s generation is all right with a man being with a man. I’m not exactly against it, but don’t expect me to embrace it, either. In my time, it’s not the kind of thing we were taught to accept.”

  “All of these hatreds get taught,” said Quinn.

  “Sure they do,” said Strange. “We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.”

  “Yesterday, when I tricked that kid into giving me his mother’s apartment number?”

  “Olivia Elliot’s boy.

  “Him. You should have seen the way he was looking at me, Derek. Like he should’ve known from the get-go that the white guy was gonna fuck him.”

  “That’s like blaming the meter maid’s color for the ticket she wrote. You were just doing your job.”

  “The job stinks sometimes.”

  “You took those kinds of looks regular when you were a cop. Like you were part of the occupying army or something. On my side, when I wore the uniform, I caught that house-nigger rap all the time. Again, it’s part of the job.”

  Quinn finished his beer and asked Strange if he wanted another drink. Strange put his hand over the top of his glass. Quinn signaled the bartender and was served another Heineken.

  “So anything we do,” said Quinn, “it comes under the heading of just another job.”

  “If you accept it going in, yes.”

  “Like Granville Oliver?” said Quinn. “That just a job to you, too?”

  Only Janine knew the truth: that Strange had been responsible for the death of Granville Oliver’s father, back in 1968. That Oliver had spared the lives of two killers at Strange’s request, in exchange for Strange’s help, less than a year ago.

  Strange looked into his drink. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “You were making a living before you took Oliver’s case. You didn’t have to take it.”

  “I know you think it’s wrong.”

  “Damn right I do. Piece of shit killed or had killed, what, a dozen people. He infected his community and he ruined the lives of all the young men he took on, and their families.”

  “Most likely he did.”

  “Then why shouldn’t he die?”

  “It’s not him I’m working for. For me, it comes down to one thing: I don’t believe any government should be putting its own citizens to death. Here in D.C. we voted against it, and the government’s just gonna say, We don’t give a good goddamn what you want, we’re gonna execute this man anyway. And that’s not right.”

  “Maybe it will make some kid who’s thinking about getting into the life think twice.”

  “That’s the argument. But in most civilized countries where they don’t have the death penalty, they’ve got virtually no murders. ’Cause they’ve got the guns off the street, they’ve got little real poverty, and they got citizens who get involved in raising their own kids. The same people who are pro-death penalty are the ones want to protect the rights of gun manufacturers to export death into the inner cities. Hell, we got an attorney general sold on capital punishment and at the same time he’s in the pocket of the NRA.”

  “Well, yeah, but he doesn’t think people should dance, either.”

  “I’m serious, Terry, shit doesn’t even make any sense. Look, an active death row doesn’t deter crime; ain’t nobody ever proved that. It’s all about some politicians lookin’ to be tough so they can get reelected the next time around. And that makes it bullshit to me. I’d do this for anyone who was facing that sentence.”

  “What about McVeigh?”

  “You know what they do in prison to people who kill kids? McVeigh got off easy, man; that boy just went to sleep. They should’ve put him in with the general population for as long as he could live. Trust me, wouldn’t have been long. But they did him to get the ball rolling on this wave of executions we got coming. Wasn’t nobody gonna object, for real, to McVeigh’s death. A week later, they put that cat Garza down, and nobody even blinked an eye. Now that the ice got broke, next thing, a line of black and brown men gonna go into that chamber in Terre Haute, and bet it, it’ll barely make the news.”

  “Here we go.”

  “Look here, Terry. Out of the twenty men they got on federal death row right now, sixteen are black or Hispanic.”

  “Could be they did the crimes.”

  “And it could be they got substandard representation. Could be they found a death-qualified jury that’s more likely to find guilt than the other kind. Could be the prosecutors used those Willie Horton images to convince the jury that what they had was another nigger needed to be permanently took off the street. And I’m not even gonna talk about where these men came from, the opportunities and guidance they didn’t have when they were coming up. You gonna sit there and tell me that this isn’t about class or race?”

  “It’s about Granville Oliver, to me. Everything you’re saying, it makes some sense. But it all comes down to the simple question: Did Oliver do what they say he did?”

  “That’s off the point.”

  “It is the whole point, way I look at it. If he did those things, then I wouldn’t want to do anything to help him get off. I’m looking to stay on the right side from now on. You keep on the Oliver thing, you want to. But it’s not for me.”

  Strange and Quinn noticed that their faces had become close and their voices had risen. They both moved back and sat straight. Strange looked down the bar and nodded to
a man he knew, a Stan’s regular.

  “What’s goin’ on, Junie?”

  “I’m makin’ it, Strange.”

  Strange sipped at his scotch while Quinn had a pull off his beer and set the bottle on the bar.

  “I’m gonna use the head,” said Quinn.

  “That vein of yours is standin’ out on your face.”

  “So what?”

  “Don’t get up in anyone’s shit, is all I’m sayin’.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Quinn walked toward the men’s room. At a large table near the hall, a man wearing sunglasses sat with a group of six. As Quinn neared him, the man’s white cane, which had been leaning against his chair, fell to the floor. Quinn picked it up and replaced it.

  “Thank you,” said the man.

  “No problem,” said Quinn.

  Junie moved down a stool so he could get closer to Strange. When they ran into each other, the two of them generally talked about local sports, who was coming out of what high school and where they were headed, and the ’Skins.

  “That friend of yours is wound up a little tight, isn’t he?” said Junie.

  “He’s okay.” Strange smiled over Junie’s shoulder at a nice-looking woman who was smiling at him. It was a habit he would never break.

  “You two were arguing about something?”

  “My boy just gets passionate about shit sometimes. So do I, I guess.”

  Junie took a sip of his drink. “What you think about Jeff George and the new coach? He gonna listen to Schott?”

  “George don’t need a coach,” said Strange. “You ask me, man needs a shrink.”

  Quinn came back and finished his beer. As they settled up their tab, Quinn’s cell vibrated in the pocket of his jeans. He answered the phone and the lines in his face smoothed out. Strange figured it was Sue on the line.

  “What’s up?” said Strange when Quinn was done.

  “Sue’s all stoked. She’s over at the Black Cat at some show.”