by Amy Bloom
I wish I could write about how Josh explained to James that it was wrong of him to let Ink take the blame, that James was torn up with guilt for the rest of the night. But none of that happened; we just drove in silence. When we got to the Green, which was desolate except for the sleeping drunkards and crazies, Josh rolled down his window and chucked the Silver Ghost onto the sidewalk, in front of one of those ancient churches.
* * *
I didn’t want to write in this diary ever again. Writing’s stupid. All it does is make you feel important for a second, when you’re really not. But then that decision came out, about the fat black guy in Staten Island. Eric Garner. And I felt so deeply bad about it. How could I tell my kids—my students, that is, because Jenny and I don’t have any kids—how could I tell my students to dream and hope and try when Eric Garner got murdered and his society said, Too bad you were black, better luck next lifetime.
I broached the subject in my first-period class yesterday, and more than half of them hadn’t even heard of Eric Garner. A few of the girls were aghast, though, and talked about making the world a better place. I smiled and nodded and tried to make them feel that I felt what they were saying. But a voice inside of me wanted to tell them, Girls, don’t even bother trying. One of my kids, Anthony—super smart and always getting into trouble—he says, Teacher, this isn’t anything new. Cops been beating on black folk since the beginning of time.
Now I definitely don’t have a problem with policemen. My neighbor’s a cop and he’s the most helpful guy in the world. Votes Democrat, opposes the NRA, which is the most you can hope for someone in this fucked-up postindustrial world. But Anthony was right. And the first time I learned the truth he was speaking was the last time I ever saw Ink.
The last time we ever saw Ink was during the second week of our senior year, a Friday in September. Since that East Rock party at Franfuck’s house, we’d been down to Gilbert two or three times. Things had definitely cooled with Ink. He still sold to us, still cut us the deal that had been previously arranged. But there were no niceties anymore. No more chitchat about food, music, or girls. It was an unpleasant change, but we got used to it quickly. As we rolled into Dwight that Friday, I didn’t notice anything strange in the air. I didn’t think that the gray van parked at the end of the block in front of a boarded-up Victorian was at all conspicuous. There were a couple kids throwing a football on the sidewalk. A cracked-out prostitute hobbled down the street in high heels, hopefully on her way to a shelter. I was ready for some fun after a boring week of my AP classes, and I honestly wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world besides Gilbert Street with my boys Josh and James. I no longer felt any nerves about copping drugs down here. Anything becomes normal when you do it with some regularity. That’s why immorality is the norm, not the exception. That’s why genocide occurs.
Ink comes to Josh’s backseat window. Josh hands him the money, just two twenty-dollar bills today. They mutter a few words to each other, and Ink’s little helper drops the baggies of marijuana onto James’s lap. Ink starts walking away. And then there’s a boom, the sound of the rear door of that gray Chevy van bursting open.
Three plainclothes cops jump out. They’re wearing bulletproof vests; their medallions are dangling around their necks by strings of beads. Oh fuck, I think. Oh fuck, I really am fucked. I can still remember my childish, selfish thought processes so clearly. My father is going to find out about my secret life, the life that I have so carefully kept hidden. He is going to have a heart attack. He will die. My mother and sister will be sad and alone. They’ll be all alone, and I’ll have to care for them. If only I knew then how the justice system works in this country. If I knew then what I know now, I would have realized I had nothing to worry about.
One cop stands in front of my Civic and yells at us to stay put right where we are, hands on our heads, of course. Meanwhile, the other two cops pin down Ink. They grind his face into the gravel, give him a few kicks to the gut. His face puckers from the pain. It looks like he’s howling, but no sound comes out. That’s what happens when you get the wind knocked out of you, though maybe you haven’t gotten the wind knocked out of you since your days of playground tomfoolery. Our cop joins the other two, and it doesn’t seem at all weird to me that he has left us unattended. Together the three cops rough Ink up for what seems like a long while. But it’s probably just a minute. Then they stand him up and cuff him, and he’s all coughing and drooling.
I sit there frozen, barely breathing. I’m wondering if I would rather die than face my parents at a police station. I look around and see how I might be able to end everything right now, but the only people with any deadly weapons are the cops. Josh says, from the backseat, Throw the bags out of the car; get rid of them. But thankfully I know better than to listen to him in this moment. Josh reaches over my seat to grab the pot, and as soon as he does, our cop is back. And this time his gun is out. He’s telling Josh to freeze. He says, Out of the car, you dumb fucks, and keep your hands on your head. We get out, he pats us down. He tells us to keep our hands on the hood of my Civic. The hood is burning hot, but we have no choice but to keep our hands there. I glance around and notice a whole bunch of people are staring at us like we’re the worst people in the world—not just the hoppers and prostitutes, but a grandmother with a baby carriage.
Our cop grabs the dime bags from the car. I don’t see what he does with them. He grabs all my Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs, even the Bitches Brew CD from Ink. He dumps them on the road and crushes them with his black boot. He takes out my Panasonic portable CD player, a birthday gift from my parents, and does the same thing with it. I’m thinking he’s gonna go for our backpacks, which have all sorts of booze, bongs, and bowls in them, but he lets them sit there. I shoot a glance at Ink. His cheeks are bloody, covered in sand, and he keeps on bending over and spitting out blood. He looks at me for a second, then goes back to his coughing and spitting.
The two cops with Ink are white and black. Our cop is white, but he might have a touch of color in him. He gets very close to my face. I can smell his stale breath, and yes, it does smell like coffee. He says, Listen very clearly. You little shits are gonna get in that shitty car. You’re gonna get the fuck out of here and never come back. And if I ever see any of you little brats again, you’ll be shitting from your mouth and pissing from your assholes for the rest of time.
Ink stops his coughing and stares at us. He says, You’re letting them go?
The cop who’s standing behind him and holding his cuffed wrists pulls something out—a bobby club maybe, I can’t really remember. All I know is that he pulls something out and whacks Ink hard across the face with it. And then on his chest. Ink keels over again, gritting his teeth and growling. We get in our car and drive away. And we never go back to Gilbert Street to score drugs.
I sometimes wonder what happened to Ink. Did he straighten out? Become a music producer? Stranger things have happened. But we all know the statistics. We all know that the sociologists’ models predict something different.
There was a time last year after some book came out when Jenny’s colleagues would talk about the prison-industrial complex at their eighteen-dollar-bottles-of-wine cocktail parties. They talked about the undying legacy of Jim Crow, something they might have read about but never actually experienced. During these Stalie convos, I took long sips of beer and tried not too think too hard about Ink and those fucked-up years. Luckily for me, all this talk only lasted a couple months—a surprisingly long time for these people. Soon they were onto a new topic. Syrian refugees maybe? Or no, it was the plight of Mexican tomato farmers. In Jenny’s world, there’s a woe for every season.
Sure Thing
by David Rich
Long Wharf
If a leopard had strolled up the stairs and into the big room, or a giggling leprechaun had slid down a light beam, the reactions of the patrons at Sports Haven could not have been any stronger. Friends, who had sat next to each other thro
ugh countless losses and victories and drinks and smoke breaks but never knew the color of each other’s eyes, checked now for confirmation that the vision was real and to show their own special, personal appreciation of it.
She was shorter than I expected, and leaner, but the muscle definition was there in her arms and her stride was long and cushioned. I turned away as she approached the bar, checked the ice for anything that needed killing, checked the glasses for the weather—partly cloudy—but that only took a few seconds. I didn’t have to check her progress anyway—I could watch Lou and Jerry at the end of the bar, as gape-mouthed and riveted as kids at the finish line at Saratoga.
At the sound of the chair scrape I turned and slid a napkin in front of her and met her eyes: blue, but not cool and not calm, and I was thankful for that flaw.
“Hi. What would you like?”
“What kind of wine do you have?”
“The kind that used to be red when I opened it three weeks ago and the kind that used to be white.”
“When was that one opened?” She had a way of playing straight as if she was confident of a payoff.
“No one is sure. It’s just always been here. Like them.” I nodded toward Jerry and Lou, each holding onto his beer for stability.
“Pour me something I won’t remember,” she said. “Maybe you have a specialty.”
I held up a bottle of Bud. She smiled and shrugged, then turned on the stool to look around. The eyeballs did not seem to bother her. I opened the bottle and placed a glass beside it. She asked to run a tab and said, “That the only door?”
“The only entrance. There’s a back way out through the kitchen if you need it.”
“I’m meeting someone.”
I knew who she was and suddenly it seemed important not to let her know that. I remembered seeing her in Transmission, Stiletto, and I Can’t Help You, all of them on DVD while killing time at various spots around the Middle East. None more recent than five years ago. In the movies, Addie Tarrant wore thigh-high boots with six-inch heels and eyelashes almost that long, and delivered devastating kicks to guys who just couldn’t decide to shoot her quickly enough. She drove fast, wore shiny dresses with slits up the side, flirted with confidence and impunity, and mastered many exotic and arcane weapons. She posed in colorful wigs. She purred.
She looked around for a moment, then said, “I’ve had a house in Connecticut, just down the road, for five, six years, and never knew we had off-track betting. I suppose most of the towns would rather we didn’t know.”
“Well, there’re casinos up the road and hedge funds down. This is just sort of a rest stop. I suggested they put that on the sign, but . . .”
The place sat next to I-95. It had been built for smokers, a big barn with a thirty-foot ceiling that dwarfed the enormous screens lining the catwalk and walls. Not that it mattered: the world’s biggest screen, curved with ten trillion pixels, wouldn’t have moved the plungers to a show of awe or appreciation. No matter the size of the presentation, they managed to find the exact dose of hope and disappointment required to keep them upright.
Jerry signaled for another beer. I brought it and said, “That’s number five, Jerry.”
“Thanks, Pete. Listen . . .” Instead of grabbing the beer as he usually did, he grabbed my wrist. His watery eyes oozed hope, the way they did when he touted a horse based on his great insight and drunken perspicacity. “That’s your girl, right?”
I shook my head. “But leave her alone anyway, Jerry.”
“Really?” He turned to Lou. “She went right to him.”
“That’s number five, Jerry.”
He nodded, obedient now because of my apparent magnetism, and limped to the men’s room. The signal inside him had been permanently muted, and a bartender who relied on Jerry’s own tally was usually sorry.
Addie Tarrant had barely touched her beer. I offered to replace it. She shook her head. “Can you show me how to bet?”
“Sure. There’re two ways to do this: you can open an account and place bets using your phone, or you can use cash.”
“What do you recommend?”
“Are you lonely enough to want to spend five or six hours on the phone with a guy not named Joe Smith in Mumbai?”
“So, cash?”
The screen to my left showed the feed from Santa Anita. Next to it was Golden Gate Fields. I laid out a racing form and turned to the Santa Anita pages. The fourth was going off in a few minutes. I began explaining how to read the form, check the past results, the class, the opening odds versus the real-time odds on the screen, the jockey and trainer standings.
She was watching me.
“Or you could simply choose a name you like. It works just as well.”
“I’d like to pick a sure thing,” she said.
“Doesn’t exist.”
“One of them is going to win.”
“You’re an optimist. There are no winners. There are horses that pay off, but the money just goes back in the system. You just prolong the agony.”
“A philosopher too.”
I walked her over to the teller and she bet a hundred dollars on Holyshirt to win. The odds were 25–1. As she slid over the money and waited for the ticket, she put her hand on my arm as if to steady herself.
“What do you usually do for good luck?”
“I kiss the ticket.” I hesitated and said unhappily, “I never told anyone that.”
She kissed the ticket and then made me do it.
“Do you really do that?” she asked.
“No.”
She looked me up and down as if she were considering casting me in one of her B movies. “You’re confident, aren’t you?”
“Not enough to keep me from wondering where that came from.”
“Too strong? It’s just that I’m around people faking it for a living, so when I see the real thing, I’m impressed.”
Real or fake, the openness and honesty was drowning my skepticism. Maybe she was a better actress than she was given credit for. When we turned we bumped against each other. She was looking at the ticket and I was looking back at the bar, so I saw the guy she was waiting for before she did. He was short, about her height. Muscles under a T-shirt and a tight cream-colored sport coat. His hair was carefully tousled.
He stopped and waited until she spotted him. She went to him quickly.
“What’s this?” His voice was breathy and low as if he had to struggle to get the words out.
“I just bet on a race at Santa Anita.”
“I’ve been waiting for you outside. I’ve been sitting there like an asshole.”
“I just assumed . . .”
He took her arm roughly and guided her to a table by the far wall. Then he turned and barked something at Shannon, the waitress, who promptly came to her station with the order. I went back and filled it and watched while she delivered it. The man swigged his drink. He said something and smiled with his mouth closed and his eyes narrowed. I lifted the gate to the bar. Addie stood. The man stood too and grabbed her. Addie slapped him and the man slapped her back. She staggered but caught herself and moved at him, pushing with two hands against his chest.
I caught his arm before he could slap again. I twisted it behind his back and pulled hard so it hurt. With my other hand I gripped his throat. I liked the sound of him straining to breathe and pressed for more. I was just pointing him toward the door when I felt the pounding on my back and heard her voice, shrill now and angry.
“Let him go! Let him go!”
Still holding him, I turned to her dumbly. She hit me on the jaw, but I hardly felt it. I let him go. She stepped past me and put an arm around him while he squeezed out a few curses in my direction. They were gone by the time I got back behind the bar.
I don’t know what anyone else saw, but I saw my anger get ahold of me and I didn’t like it. I knew that for the second time that night eyeballs had detached from the screens, all except mine. I glanced up at the finish of the fourth at Santa
Anita.
“You gonna see her again? ’Cause they didn’t pay me,” Shannon said.
I laid a twenty down on her tray.
* * *
By dawn I was able to close my eyes and I pretended to sleep until morning passed me by. I deleted two messages from my day-job employer and went for a run. The black sedan settled in behind me not long after I passed the train station. I led it under the highway down to the water. It’s a filthy run. The path along the harbor—what the city of New Haven calls Long Wharf Park—is just an open trash can. The tide was out and seagulls stood on the marshy mud which somehow never clung to their feet or delayed their takeoffs. I ran west to the end of the path and turned back toward the pier. The sedan passed me and parked. There were three other cars in the lot, all empty. I ignored the sedan, ran until I reached the pier, then walked out past the Amistad to the end.
Two men got out of the sedan. They hesitated at the beginning of the pier. Behind them was the highway and beyond that, to the right, loomed the big red Sports Haven sign. If anyone was watching I should have been able to spot them. But no cars so much as slowed down. It took almost a minute for the men to reach a decision; one came toward me, one stayed put.
Dan Haley was a US attorney from the District of Columbia. His suit, too large as always, flapped in the wind and rustled his curly hair. He was a skinny guy with glasses—the type people think they can push around only to find out too late how wrong they were.
“Why are you following me, Haley? I’m on your side, remember?”
“I don’t hear from you. You don’t answer my calls. You’re supposed to check in. Are you going soft on me?”
“Just tell me when you’re ready to go to trial and I’ll be there. Just like I told you I would be.”
He didn’t answer.