Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Marty told me, Marty told me,” he said, his voice retaining all its good cheer. He looked up at the ceiling through an invisible grove of artificial lemons. “Yo, Marty! What the fuck you doing?”

  From the back of the apartment, Marty said, “Where’d Cerebral Pauly put the kung fu dummy?”

  “You know Marty’s not even his real name,” the dealer told her. His hand dropped over the futon’s edge to scratch the dog behind its ears. “What am I talking about? Of course you know that. You guys are old friends. It’s my name that’s Marty. His name’s some ching-chong Korean shit you can’t hardly pronounce, so he takes my name like I’m supposed to be flattered. Meanwhile, I am sorta flattered. Hey, so what do you think of my paintings?”

  “You did all these? Wow. That’s amazing.”

  “You didn’t even look. What’s that one over there? Right there.”

  “Chicago?” she said.

  “That was an easy one,” he said. “The Sears Tower, it gives it away. Tallest skyscraper in North America. Also known as Willis Tower. What about that one over there? What’s that one?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Listen, I’m really just trying to—”

  “Take a guess.”

  Still wearing her cap and coat, in the hope they might communicate her eagerness for a speedy transaction, she felt beads of sweat rolling down her chest. “I really don’t know,” she told him.

  “I know you don’t know,” he said. “Take a guess.”

  “Los Angeles?”

  “You kidding?” he said. “Los Angeles?” The pleasure he took from her wrong answer scooted him forward on the futon, his hands bunching the bottoms of his shorts. “Try Abu Dhabi. Capital of the United Arab Emirates, the most balling country in the world. Took me three months to get the details correct on that bad boy. No joke. And it lights up, too.”

  The dog lifted its head to watch Marty, White Marty, hoist himself off the futon and cross the room toward the painting. A small green cord hung off the bottom of the canvas. When he got down on his knees to fiddle with plugs along the baseboard, she undid tooth by tooth the golden zipper of her purse. She looked first to Marty, then ridiculously to the dog, to see if either of them had noticed.

  “There,” he said, sliding the plug into the outlet, and the lights came on in Abu Dhabi. Scores of embedded teeny bulbs lit up behind the buildings’ painted windows. He gave Janice a falsely modest little shrug. “It looks better at night,” he explained. “I did some of the detailing with this special kind of paint. You should see it. Get a black light going, smoke a bowl, it looks crazy cool. The paint’s very expensive, though, so you can’t really use too much.”

  He unplugged the canvas before sitting back down. One at a time, to show her his tattoos now, he rolled up the bicycle jersey sleeves. “This one here, that’s North and South America obviously. It’s a little faded. I’m going to have to get it touched up.” He pointed to the other arm. “And over here, that’s Europe, Asia, and Africa. Because we’re all citizens of the same world, know what I mean?”

  “Totally,” she said. “Listen, I really don’t mean to be rude, but I sorta have to bounce pretty quick here. Marty, the other Marty, I guess, was talking about like two vials for twenty? Does that sound all right?”

  Once again he looked up at the ceiling. “Hey, Marty? Can you come here real quick?”

  He was already on his way. Without his white leather jacket but sweating even more heavily than Janice, he tottered into the living room carrying what she assumed was the kung fu dummy he’d been looking for. The one Cerebral Pauly—whoever the hell that was—had tried hiding on him. An enormous wooden beam, it must have weighed more than two hundred pounds, with a single wooden leg, bent at what was supposed to be its knee, and a pair of arms, also wooden, sticking straight out, as if, truly a dummy, it expected a hug. Dry blood crusted its chest. Made out of what appeared to be high-quality oak, designed to absorb punishment without splintering or complaint, it hit the ground hard when Korean Marty set it down, startling the dog.

  “In the closet?” he said. “Like I’m not gonna find it there?” He wiped the sweat off his face with the hem of his T-shirt. “Jesus H., man, it’s like a million fucking degrees in here.”

  White Marty said to him, “Hey, before we start punching and kicking here, I just wanna know: where’d you meet this Miss Thing? You know her a long time? This nice lady you bring up into my home?”

  “Ah man, what’s the matter with this one?”

  She dropped the twenty into her purse, without of course zipping it back up. “Listen—”

  “You’re on time-out right now,” White Marty told her. “It’s quiet time for you, okay? You understand?”

  She was worried they thought she was a cop and they’d try to blow her cover. She was worried they thought she wasn’t a cop and so they felt they could … forget it. Don’t even go there. Awkwardly lurching, she wiggled herself out of the chair, both of the Martys watching her with what seemed like amusement. She draped the purse’s cross-body strap around her neck and positioned the bag so she could reach into it easily. The dog was watching her, too, although with less amusement than impatience. A yawn snapped its jaws open. Sweat pooled along the backs of Janice’s knees, in her armpits and elbow crooks, and all across her chest. The tape came loose. The kel-mic plummeted, but she caught it, trapped it against her stomach with a hand outside her coat. Her shoulders were hunched. If she moved her hand away, the small black gherkin of the mic would drop out into the open between her knees.

  “What’s the matter?” Korean Marty said. “You gotta take a shit or something?”

  “You scared her,” White Marty said. Still rolled all the way up, the jersey sleeves seemed to bunch uncomfortably around his shoulders. When she started to walk away, he said, “Hey, hold on! Where you going? I haven’t even told you my dog’s name.”

  Korean Marty reached out and grabbed her arm. “Don’t be rude,” he said.

  “Yeah,” White Marty said. “Don’t be rude.”

  “Geronimo,” she said, and the dog pricked its ears. “Great name. Thanks. See you guys later.”

  “Oh, you stupid fucking cunt,” White Marty said. “The dog? The dog’s name is Marty. Come on. You kidding? Geronimo, please, that’s just like her chill word. You understand? She’s got like a chill word and an attack word. You wanna hear the attack word?”

  “No.”

  He quickly nodded his agreement. “That is correct. No you do not. So guess what?”

  These two men, especially the bigger Korean Marty, worried her more than the pit bull did. Rolled over on its side, it seemed minutes away from labor contractions. Matter of fact, a normal dog would’ve already slunk off into some quieter, calmer, cooler corner of the apartment. Back when Janice worked as a patrol officer in the Housing Division, she had met some truly cop-hating pit bulls, trained either to come right up on her and bark or come right up on her and bite, but never before had she seen one work its intimidation across the length of the room, as if it were forbidden to leave its doggie bed. Oh, she thought. The dog acted as if it were forbidden to leave its doggie bed because it was forbidden to leave its doggie bed.

  “It’s not gonna work,” she told Korean Marty. He still had her arm in his grip; she still had her hand still trapping the kel-mic against her stomach. “What did I say?” she asked him. “Over and over again: it’s not gonna work. I’m telling you, baby, we just gotta take it off him.”

  White Marty said, “What?”

  Korean Marty laughed, confused. To distance himself from her, to show everyone in this living room where his true alliances lay, he shoved her into the kung fu dummy. A cry rose up into her throat. The dummy’s sharp wooden arm had jabbed her in the kidney. With a soft moan, the dog rose reluctantly onto its skinny legs, but White Marty stayed sitting on the futon with his knees spread far apart and his hands reaching for the lemon air freshener, as if he needed something to throttle. Surely he didn�
�t believe this double-cross talk of hers, or at least not yet, but she knew the dread of possible betrayal hisses at drug dealers from every corner of their wicked hearts.

  “Stop playing!” she told Korean Marty. She moved the purse strap off her neck so he couldn’t use it to choke her. “No more clowning,” she said. “Enough. I told you I ain’t trying to fuck him, believe me. And even if I got him into the bedroom, how you supposed to steal the stash out from under the doggie bed with that pit bull standing on top of it?”

  Korean Marty put both his palms up in front of him and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

  The other Marty sprang off the futon, toward either her or his buddy. She didn’t know which, because she’d already turned and run. When she reached the door, the welcome mat slid out from under her, but she kept her balance. The dog was barking. An aerosol lemon taste gummied her throat. She unlocked the dead bolt and flung open the door and heard behind her what sounded like wood cracking bone. She ran out into the hallway. Too claustrophobic to ever take an elevator, even in the best of circumstances, she leapt down the stairs three at a time and raced through the lobby, past a tut-tutting old white woman collecting her mail.

  Out on the sidewalk, Janice allowed her knees to start shaking. She couldn’t take deep-enough breaths. On the corner, next to a stop sign, two teenage Latinas in puffy jackets tossed an egg back and forth, higher and higher with each throw. Janice was chewing on cuticles when her ghost, Chester Tevis, materialized behind her to take her arm. As always, a bushy and magnificent soupsoaker of a beard obscured his round and black face. His eyes swam in yellow. Wiry gray hair burst from his ears. She leaned into his soft body, his long brown coat smelling of cocoa butter and Salvation Army bins, its rough wool scratching her cheek. Tasked with the responsibility of her safety—supposed to follow close behind her while remaining invisible, supposed to report via a Nextel walkie-talkie all her drug buys to the four investigators in their unmarked white Impala—Tevis felt most helpless whenever she went into buildings, with nothing for him to do except stand across the street and try to guess the window and scratch at his beard with both hands. The next time they go out, they’ll switch. He’ll be the uncle and she’ll be the ghost and it’ll be her job to worry. But for now, he had his arm around her shoulders. Together they turned the corner toward Roosevelt Avenue, which seventeen months ago he had told her to pronounce Ruse-uh-velt, not Rose-ah-velt, so that she’d sound like one of the locals.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Meanwhile, at around this same time, New York governor Eliot Spitzer was in a hotel room banging call girls. The CIA announced that water-boarding didn’t qualify as torture. China blamed the ongoing unrest in Tibet on the Dalai Lama. Barbers, bartenders, prosecutors, defense attorneys, street-corner lawyers, and tabloid op-ed writers insisted that the Sean Bell shooting—in which an unarmed black man, intoxicated on the morning of his wedding, rammed his car into police officers before they fired back with fifty bullets—was obviously an open-and-shut case of insert your biases here. Despite obvious rage issues and a fat face getting exponentially fatter over time, the baseball player Roger Clemens told a congressional committee that he had never self-injected steroids. Just as preposterously, presidential candidate Barack Obama vowed to end the divisive tone of D.C. politics. In sports fibs, the back page of the Post read, “Attention Knicks Fans: There’s Hope.” Three out of four economists claimed that the best way to solve the subprime mortgage crisis was to give more money to three out of four economists. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Best Picture Oscar to No Country for Old Men, the very title of which was a lie, see above re: the economic solution to the subprime mortgage crisis.

  And over at the original House of Lies, One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan, the NYPD’s Big Bosses told young, ambitious minority cops like Janice that if they lasted eighteen months in undercover narcotics work, then they’d receive an automatic promotion to detective. See their silver shield turn gold … but that’s not all! Act now, last another eighteen months without getting killed, and you can switch over into Narcotics Investigations, not only a safer job but a jump in the queue toward the upper balconies of Major Case, Special Victims, Homicide, and Counterterrorism, the kinds of squads with the kinds of stories that get turned into movies.

  Janice couldn’t remember where or when she’d first heard about the narco guarantee—it seemed to be something every young cop knew, and had always known—but she could remember the first time she saw an uncle on the job.

  She was straight out of the Academy, a sore-footed soldier in Operation IMPACT, Commissioner Ray Kelly’s plan to deluge the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods with the department’s most inexperienced cops. She worked Housing at the Queensbridge projects, where she spent her days and nights telling residents to extinguish their blunts, turn down their music, steer their bikes off sidewalks, and stop swinging baseball bats inside the bodegas. The worst, though, was verticals, schlepping up and down every step of every building to make sure nobody was hunched over a bottle of brandy in the stairwell or taking a leak off the roof. Within months her calves had hardened into bocce balls. Once, while resting in a lobby, she watched a middle-aged black man and an older black woman come into the lobby together, chatting about the things people chat about: the weather, the neighborhood, the way things used to be. They looked right through her, not even nodding, a uniform in their lobby as unremarkable as the Chinese takeout menus wedged under the front door. The woman carried her grocery bags into the elevator and asked the guy if he was coming up.

  “Nah, Ma. Go ahead. I gotta check my mail.” As soon as the elevator door shuddered closed, he turned to Janice and said, “Listen, I’m on the job.”

  He told her he was an undercover narc, sent in by the gang squad to clear out the lobby so they could execute a search warrant. An envoy from the secret world beyond this one, he talked quickly, quietly, his lips thin and chapped behind his overgrown beard.

  “And your mom lives here?” she asked.

  “My what?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “I thought the lady in the elevator … it just seemed like you really knew each other, but I guess that’s the whole—”

  “You wanna act like you belong,” Tevis said, his first-ever lesson for her.

  “Right.” If she was going to hang around undercovers, she would need to think faster. She hiked the heavy patrol officer belt up over her hips, tried to make herself appear taller. “So,” she said. “Executing a warrant, great. What can I do to help?”

  “Go away,” he said pleasantly. “You’re making everyone nervous.”

  The other narco cops outside? The potential dealers upstairs? Both? She didn’t ask. He’d slammed the secret world’s door on her, but she could still see the light bleeding around the edges. When her shift ended, she drove down to One Police Plaza to fill out an application with Narcotics. Young, brown, from the city, no college, desperate to move up, single and childless, without anyone to collect her pension if she got killed in the line of duty, she looked on paper like the perfect uncle, a narco lieutenant’s dream. But because nothing ever moved quickly through the department’s lymphatic bureaucracy, it took months for the Big Bosses to call her out for an interview at Rodman’s Neck, a little hamlet in the Bronx where the NYPD trained dogs for the K-9 unit, blew up suspicious if-you-see-something-say-something packages, and vetted all their potential undercovers.

  An Asian woman with a clipboard gave her forty dollars and told her to go into the role-play room to buy some drugs. Five chaotic minutes later, the pretend dealers were shoving real shotguns, presumably unloaded, into her face. They went through her pockets. They ordered her to snort a line of powder off the desk, and when she bent her head to it, the exercise ended. She’d failed. But that was okay. Everyone failed, although she didn’t know that at the time. The Big Bosses were impressed that she’d lasted a full five minut
es, that before going into the room she had stashed half the buy money in her sock. That sort of commitment to the department’s precious bottom line earned her a follow-up interview, also on Rodman’s Neck, with the clipboard-toting Asian woman and an old white bald man. The wizard who’d come out from behind his green curtain to meet her. Every time the bomb squad blew up another package outside the window, they flinched, all three of them, and the dogs for a moment barked a little bit louder.

  She did not get a call. Or an email. No one came to find her in person or sent her a letter saying, After a careful review of a number of highly talented applicants, we are pleased to offer you …

  Nope, she found out in the regular way, on the daily sheet, with the news of all the latest transfers and memoranda: ITWARU, J, TO REPORT TO NARCOTICS, 0900, 10/1/06. She snuck away into the nearest stairwell and called her mother. Guess what, Mom, she whisper-shouted into the phone. Guess what, guess what, guess what.

  On her first day as an uncle she gave twenty dollars to a crack fiend, who told her to wait out on the sidewalk while he ran up to his apartment real quick for some primo-quality rocks. He of course never returned. The investigators all whooped, crowing, happy to root against the new girl. “Fooled by the fools,” they said, and so she followed the next potential scam artist into his apartment building and made sure to come back out with both him and an eighth of weed. Tevis radioed Sergeant Hart and the investigators, who showed up a minute later to head-steer the dealer into a prisoner-transport van. A perfect buy, her very first.

  And there were plenty more. Because female undercovers were a relative rarity, and because most dealers start dealing to impress girls, Janice’s early buys came quickly, in bunches. It helped that she hadn’t been in law enforcement very long. Her posture had not yet hardened into the policeman’s stance: hands on hips, feet spread apart as if expecting someone to knock you over. She could still speak to people, especially young men, without the automatic assumption of their deference. Half black and half Indian, assigned to the Babel of blocks in Jackson Heights, she bought weed, crack, coke, heroin, opium tar, and baking soda beneath the el, at the Manuel de Dios Unanue Triangle, in alleyways, liquor stores, apartment buildings, and on practically every corner of Roosevelt Avenue from Sixty-First Street to Ninety-Third.