Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Who the heck knows? Guys like Vega, they’re so f-ing stupid, you’d drive yourself crazy trying to rationalize the crap that comes out of their mouth. Charlie, meanwhile, he gets these frequency numbers and says, ‘Okay, Mr. Clean. What else you got?’ Vega comes back with some coke, sells it to Charlie. ‘Okay, Mr. Clean. What else you got? Drugs? I can go down to I.S. Two Fifty, get coke off an eighth-grader. What else, what else?’ So Vega’s looking around at all these smiling wiseguys and he knows they’re thinking he’s small-time, he’s nobody, but see what they don’t know is that he’s secretly the baddest of the bad. What else has he got? He’s got a story.

  “Now, this is why Charlie was the best ever. The department has since betrayed him, but that’s something else for another time and it doesn’t change the fact that he was the very best I’ve ever seen. He starts a fight with one of the other uncles in the room. It gets physical pretty quick, and Charlie ends up tossing the guy out of there. Then he sits back down at Vega’s table, breathing heavy, annoyed, and he says if he could get rid of that guy he would, the implication being that if the guy wasn’t a made man he’d take him out in a second.

  “ ‘I’ll do it for you,’ Vega says. ‘You ever need a piece of work done just ask for Mr. Clean. I’ll take care of it.’

  “Now, I’m watching all this down on the closed-circuit TVs. I can’t see Charlie’s reaction. I don’t know if he’s making like a skeptical face or if Vega just can’t stop talking now that he’s opened his mouth, but he turns to his friend and says, ‘In the summer of ’87, what happened on your block?’

  “You never know what you’re gonna get with these CIs. They’re professional hustlers. They hustle their friends, their family. They think they’re hustling us. They’re addicts, everything that comes out of their mouth is either smoke or a lie. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be good at this, right? We can coach them up, but what’s coaching? I know you get mad that I don’t give you more direction, but seriously, how do you teach this? You see new uncles come in here, they’ve got their month of Narco training, and they’re completely clueless once they hit the street. You’ve got actors, professionals … and don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about Eddie here, he’s a genius … but you see some of these doofs on TV and they’re terrible, right? Completely unconvincing. Professional actors. With do-overs. Multiple takes and blanks in the guns. And that’s with someone telling them what to say.

  “But sometimes? Sometimes you find a CI who just gets it and it’s like a gift from God. ‘What happened on your block?’ Vega asked the guy, and the guy says, ‘A cop got killed.’

  “ ‘Who does that belong to?’ Vega says. ‘That everyone pointed a finger to?’

  “ ‘Scheu?’ the CI says, and the brother under the trapdoor with me is, like, tapping my arm with his fist because that’s exactly what the CI needed to say. It’s five months we’ve been doing this. And the CI is talking to Vega now but everything he says also needs to be directed toward an eventual grand jury, too. And he’s magic, he’s flying, and it’s because he’s a gift from God, I really believe that, but it’s also because Charlie made him better by being so very exceptional himself, by setting the bar so high like how Jordan did with Pippen. ‘Scheu?’ our guy says, and Vega says, ‘Yeah. Who’s everyone point to on that?’ And the CI says, ‘You.’

  “ ‘You want a body?’ Vega says.

  “He starts telling Charlie how all he wanted was the radio, but this cop Scheu intervenes and the problem is they know each other from around the neighborhood. What’s Vega supposed to do? He can’t run away. He’s been recognized. As he’s telling the story, he starts laughing, excited because the whole place is smiling at him now. And if he thinks they’re hanging on to his every word, he’s right. He stands up from the table and raises his arm like his finger is a pistol. ‘Poof,’ he says. ‘Poof.’ Then he gets down on the floor. Seriously. The guy’s acting out all the roles because he needs to show everybody how he left Scheu bleeding out on that sidewalk. Then he stands up and hails himself an imaginary cab, and that’s when we find out how he got away. A cab just happened to be passing by, just like that ambulance minutes later. Did the cabbie say anything to Vega? I don’t know. We never found him. But Vega did say he paid the fare with money out of Scheu’s wallet.

  “Charlie stands up and he puts his arms around Vega and gives him a big Italian kiss on the cheek. Down under the ground we can see Vega picture-perfect on the television screen. His face, man. His face is electric with delight.

  “ ‘I’m a natural,’ he says. ‘I know I did good.’

  “Two years later, almost to the day, a Queens jury finds him not guilty. Even with the videotaped confession. Even with another confession at the precinct, after he’d been arrested and knew he was being recorded. His attorney argued that he was just bragging, making stuff up to impress his new friends. And the jury buys it, I guess. Reasonable doubt. A reporter overheard the judge, as he’s leaving the bench, say, ‘I’m very surprised.’ No kidding, the judge is very surprised.

  “I don’t know where the ghost of George Scheu is with all this, but I do know where Henry Vega’s at. He’s serving a ninety-seven-year sentence for selling that coke to the uncles in the barbershop. You seen The Untouchables? Remember how they busted Capone at the end? Tax evasion? Failure to report? And maybe if I was good at math I’d be working for the IRS and then the only people calling me fascist would be the libertarians, but I ain’t good at math. For me it’s this and only this.”

  Saturday morning, on the drive out to their father’s house in Great Neck, Judith expressed her doubts. How did the cops know Vega wouldn’t make an unexpected trip to the barbershop on his own? Sure, he had a suspended license, but lots of people drove with a suspended license, especially guys like Vega. (As if Judith was an expert on guys like Vega; actually, on second thought, maybe she was.) And okay, a bus ride from his place to Flushing took over an hour, requiring more than a couple of transfers, but if he was soooo into this wiseguy social club, then surely he might make the time one day to schlep out there, just to look through the windows—and then what happens? He’d see it was just a regular storefront, without any red candles on the tables.

  “Are you saying it’s not a true story?” Janice asked.

  “No, no, no, no,” Judith said, because that was exactly what she’d been saying. “I just mean, it was sort of a risky plan, that’s all.”

  “Well, it’s sort of a risky job.”

  The sun, after making only cameo appearances throughout the week, had at last asserted itself and forced Janice to drive with her visor down. To the east an enormous glass office building quivered with light. It stood tall over the Jackie Robinson Parkway, which would take them to the Grand Central Parkway, which would take them to Long Island, or so claimed Janice’s GPS, its sense of direction much stronger than her own, especially beyond the city limits. When she’d agreed to drive Judith to Great Neck, Janice made it clear that she’d just be dropping her off in their father’s pebbled cul-de-sac. But since when did Judith give a shit about what Janice wanted? Before the trip had even started, before she had even buckled her seat belt, Judith began pestering her to pop into the house for at least a second when they got there, if only to wish him a happy birthday. Foolishly, in an attempt to change the subject, Janice had told her a work story.

  “Not to mention,” Judith said, “all the people who aren’t cop-killers, right? Who get thrown in prison just for smoking a joint.”

  Jail, Janice could’ve corrected. Not prison. And usually, depending on the neighborhood, joint-tokers just got a desk ticket, nothing worse. But so that Judith could score an easy point and luxuriate in her feelings of superiority, Janice told her, “Well, with weed, they only spend the one night in lockup. And with the backlog, most of the time the charges will just get thrown out, so …”

  And on cue, Judith said, “Then why arrest them in the first place?”

  Janice arranged her
face into its most chastened expression. She’d spent these last twenty-four hours intentionally stepping on rakes, trying to make amends after boss-hogging Judith off the couch, and at last puncturing any illusion that the two of them operated according to the normal big/little sister hierarchy. And they never really had, or at least not since grammar school. As teenagers it was Janice who had the complicated highlighter system to study for tests, Janice who had flabbergasted the family the one time she’d been truly bad, sneaking Jimmy Gellar into the house, and now as grown-ups it was Janice who paid her own cell phone bill, invested in a 401(k), and stayed home to take care of their mother. The flipped scripts—and their official exposure the other night—embarrassed the both of them. In the shower, lying in bed, waiting for the single-cup coffeemaker at the rumpus, in the car at this very moment, Janice caught shame shivers as she imagined looking up at herself from her big sister’s body, sprawled across the carpet. And so ever since then she’d been aggressively playing the little-sister role, which is to say she tried to seem as if she idolized Judith while simultaneously taking her for granted. She asked to borrow clothes, bangles, shoes, and a legitimately gorgeous studded black purse that looked like a Victorian doctor’s medical bag. She took her advice about wearing a hair tie around her wrist. She took her side in an argument with Vita about hip-hop. When the three of them went out to breakfast this morning, she ate half of one of Judith’s pancakes without asking. She let Judith bully her into this car ride. And after the George Scheu story, with a younger sibling’s limitless capacity for deference, she ate a bucket load of shit all the way to Long Island, listening to a series of lectures on corporate prisons, Rockefeller laws, New York’s fundamentally racist police department, the misappropriation of taxpayer funds, a right-wing conspiracy to reframe the debate by nonsensically coupling words like war with words like drugs, and a few other rants Judith had most likely lifted out of Mother Jones.

  Janice’s tires kicked up pebbles pulling into the cul-de-sac outside their father’s house. It was a three-story colonial with two separate chimneys and more than a dozen windows with expensive wooden siding. A Christmas wreath hung on the front door, months past the expiration date. Above it an American flag, bigger than the one outside the Archer Avenue post office, snapped with the wind. When she’d first got her license, she would drive out here sometimes, just to look at the place, but hadn’t been back in many years. The attached garage looked wider than she remembered, the upper-floor additions more tumorous.

  “You coming in?” Judith asked. “Just for a minute?”

  Janice, who hadn’t even put the car in park, said, “I gotta get to work.”

  “Come on. You wouldn’t have come all the way out here unless you secretly sorta wanted to see him.”

  She saw him now, scurrying out of the house with such eagerness that when he’d flung open the door he knocked off its Christmas wreath. He was an Afro-Guyanese to Vita’s Indo, a source of great disappointment to Janice’s maternal grandmother, who had famously objected to their wedding on the grounds that he was as black as a frying pan. Which should’ve been the least of Ajee’s worries. Janice hadn’t seen him in, oh wow, nine years, but he was wearing almost exactly what he would’ve been wearing back then: a white tracksuit with red piping, penny loafers without socks. He even had all his hair, although its uniformly brown coloring most likely came out of a box now. From cowlick to loafers he looked heartbreakingly the same, except around his waist, where contentment had settled like a tire. He had exchanged Vita for a white woman who surely couldn’t cook, Richmond Hill for Long Island—and according to Judith, alcohol for marathon running—and still he’d managed to somehow gain weight.

  “Girls!” he said.

  Judith stepped out of the car to be absorbed. He machine-gun kissed her cheeks, touched her hair, framed her face in hands calloused from untwisting millions of radiator caps. My girls, my girls, he kept saying. He came around to Janice’s side and pulled open the door. When he reached into the car she thought he might try to unbuckle her seat belt for her, but really he just wanted to squeeze her shoulder. Her chin turned to cottage cheese. Back at the house, the white woman, Barbara, stood in the open doorway twisting a dish towel, as if to imply that she was more than happy to suspend some super-important kitchen business, the baking of a tasteless soufflé perhaps, in order to witness this Very Special Family Reunion.

  “Let me look at you,” he said. Always an easy crier, he wept openly without bothering to wipe away the tears. “Oh, honey. My God. You’re beautiful, beautiful.”

  “Hi.” She felt she had a kel-mic taped to her chest, tuned to her mother’s secret frequency back at home. “Are you having a nice birthday?”

  His hand moved up from her shoulder to lightly touch the rubbery flesh of her earlobe. “Look at you,” he said. “Can you stay?”

  Over the roof of the car, Judith said, “She has to go to work.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” he told Janice. “For the party.”

  “I have to work tomorrow, too,” she lied.

  His tongue filled the lower fold of his lip, a habit of his when he was thinking especially hard. “I’ll call all the criminals,” he said. “Tell them to take the day off.”

  He probably knew enough of them, too, from his auto-body repair shop in Willets Point, one of the shadiest spots in all of Queens. Need an inspection sticker? A new license plate? Go see Brother Itwaru, but make sure you bring cash. He’d done well over the years, but not so well that he could have afforded this Long Island monstrosity, or at least not on his own. The real money—the money that trimmed the hedges and whitewashed the walls—belonged to Barbara, who was coming down the walkway with that dirty dish towel slung over her shoulder. She worked in cruise lines or something. Around her neck she wore—who cares? Who cares what she wore? She gave Judith a kiss and a surprisingly long hug before opening the passenger’s-side door to say hello to Janice.

  “Hello,” Janice said, snapping the rubber band around her wrist.

  “She can’t stay,” he told Barbara. “She has to work. Today and tomorrow. Can you believe that? On the weekend?”

  “You can come in for lunch at least,” Barbara said. “Right? A quick lunch? I made more tuna macaroni than I know what to do with.”

  “I have to work,” Janice said again as Judith reached into the backseat for Brother’s birthday gift: another full-zip tracksuit, this one blue with orange piping, wrapped up in Vita’s Christmas paper.

  He said, “You guys know you didn’t have to get me anything!”

  “It’s from Judith,” Janice told him.

  “What about for just a second?” Barbara asked her. “You have to have a second, right? Just so I can take a picture of you guys?” She dropped her voice to a dramatic whisper, as if the two of them were in some sort of conspiracy together. “I haven’t bought your father a present yet,” she said, “so you’d be doing me a big favor here.”

  Later, when telling the story to her mother over mugs of Sleepytime tea, Janice described the living room’s high ceilings, the gaudy orchids in porcelain vases, the birthday streamers already taped to the walls, the weird harpoon-looking thing propped up against a fireplace that had probably never been used. Janice saved for last the framed eight-by-ten picture of her on the mantel. A relatively recent portrait, taken only two years earlier by the NYPD—Don’t smile! the photographer had shouted—it showed her frowning, looking spooked, dressed in the dark blues of her old uniform. It was the picture newspapers would run if she ever got killed, the picture on her own mantel at home.

  “How’d he get ahold of that?” Vita said.

  “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

  Janice first noticed the photo as Barbara was positioning the three of them in front of the fireplace. Brother stood in the middle with his arms across their shoulders, smelling like he’d always smelled, like sweat, popcorn, metal screws, and motor oil. When Janice was a kid, they used to watch Columbo and Masterpi
ece Mystery together, her head in his lap, and when he got up for another beer, or, later, when he got up for another Johnnie Red, she’d stick her face in his couch cushion. Daddy, I think the killer left his teeth marks in that cheese. Daddy, I bet you everybody on the train is the murderer. A camera flash split atoms of light across her vision. She lurched forward to get away, but Barbara apparently needed to snap another one because Brother had his eyes closed. Big smiles! Say cheese! The second flash re-dazed her. She tried to get away again, but now Barbara needed a real quick shot of the three of them jumping.

  “All of a sudden she loves these jumping photos,” Brother said.

  “On three, okay?” Barbara said.

  “I gotta get to work.”

  “I know, I know,” Barbara said as she pulled the camera over her face. “It’ll just take a sec.”

  On Barbara’s two, Judith and Brother flexed their knees. On three, they floated up into the air away from Janice.

  “Jan,” Barbara said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?” Judith said. The elastic waistband of her blouse had hiked up on her when she’d jumped; she pulled it down now, tucked it over her newly narrow hips and flat stomach. “You just refuse?” she said. “It’s beneath you?”