by Matt Burgess
Brother stood between them with his hands held up in front of his chest, as if to show the living room his pale palms and absolve himself of any responsibility going forward or backward. His wife’s camera, his daughters’ dispute. Don’t look at me. So Janice didn’t. Instead she looked down at the ground and told the perfectly straight fringes on Barbara’s Oriental carpet that she just really didn’t feel like jumping.
“Then you don’t have to,” Brother said.
“Yes, she does,” Judith said. “Yes, she does. You think she’s just acting like a baby, but what she’s really doing? She’s bullying you. She picks on people’s vulnerabilities because she can. If she sees them, she attacks them.”
“Why’re you looking at him?” Janice said. “You want to say these things, look at me when you say them.”
“Okay, girls,” Brother said.
“I hope you learn something from this,” Judith told her. “Seriously. I hope you think about this and learn something.”
“What should I learn, Judith?” she asked, smiling. “Tell me what I should learn from this.”
“I don’t know, Jan. That’s something you got to figure out. I don’t know. I can’t tell you that.” Then she told her. “I hope you, like, understand someday that this is no way to live. That the whole world, it’s not all about you, you know?”
“Amen,” Barbara said, and her eyes bulged when everyone turned to look at her, as if she realized only then that she’d actually said aloud what she’d been thinking.
“Barbara,” Brother said.
“I am so sorry,” she said. Because she kept her head down as she adjusted the camera strap, it was impossible to tell if she was apologizing to her husband, or to Janice, or most likely to her husband through Janice. The camera’s proboscis retreated in segments back into its body. “It’s not my place to get involved,” she mumbled, re-capping the lens. “That was completely inappropriate and I am honestly sorry.”
“Do you worry he’s gonna cheat on you?” Janice asked.
Judith screamed. She wanted Janice to see. She wanted Janice to listen to herself, but Janice had heard herself just fine. She heard everything. She heard the old grandfather clock ticking somewhere deep in the house, heard her father back in their Richmond Hill living room telling her that the clock had belonged to his father, her grandfather, her grandfather’s grandfather clock, but it seemed impossible that Brother would’ve shipped all those pulleys and boards from Guyana to Queens. A faucet was dripping. Good. Out in the road, beyond the pebbled cul-de-sac, expensive car engines thrummed. She heard her father retreat cowardly into silence. She heard Barbara clear her throat before speaking, which was meant to indicate that Janice’s question, however inappropriate, would not rile her.
“I’m sorry you’re still hurting from all this,” she said.
“Somewhere at the back of your brain,” Janice said, “you gotta be thinking about it. You gotta worry he’s gonna do it to you.”
“Sweetie,” Brother interjected. “I admire, I really honor your loyalty to your mother. I think that’s a really great—”
“Your father and I are very happy,” Barbara said. To her credit, she did not look to Brother for a small nod of permission, nor did she turn to Judith with some thin-lipped acknowledgment of their confederacy. “Very happy,” she said. “And not that it’s any of your business, but we trust each other completely.”
Janice said, “Oh, sure, I know what that’s like, but you’re not worried he’s gonna start beating the shit out of you, or has that started already?”
“Listen to yourself,” Judith said.
“I’m a different person now,” Brother said quietly.
“Yeah, a year younger,” Janice said. She snatched the picture of her off the mantel. “We understand this, right? Not fifty. Fifty-one. He turns fifty-one tomorrow. We all know this, correct?”
The other pictures above the fireplace—the wedding photos, the cruise photos, the white kid (Barbara’s nephew?) in a graduation robe and mortarboard, the photo of a grown-up Judith looking gorgeous with her legs dangling over a dock Janice didn’t recognize—she left all those alone. But this one right here? This one belonged to her. She removed the felt backing, slid the picture out from behind the glass, and handed him the empty frame. The digital camera around Barbara’s neck surely had plenty of other photos to take its place. Janice explained that now that she worked undercover, every picture of her in uniform needed to be destroyed, an obvious lie she regretted as soon as she said it, not only because of its obviousness but because it suggested she owed them any sort of explanation at all when really she could do whatever she wanted. A picture of her, it was her picture. Judith seemed about to challenge that, but Janice turned to her with such an icy look that it froze her mouth shut. Their father said something, though. As Janice was leaving the living room, he called out an apology, but it was one of those fake apologies, like Barbara’s: I’m sorry you feel this way, not I’m sorry I boozed to excess, battered your mother, cheated with a white woman, hired a better lawyer, and left you with multiple mortgages on one tiny house.
Janice hurried down the hallway toward the door, toward the sunlight and pebbles. Already her keys were in her fist. Behind her, Judith shouted something unintelligible, but Janice kept going. She had no reason to stop. She’d left her coat in the car and so now she didn’t have to stand around while somebody fetched it out of the closet; in violation of Vita’s standards of etiquette, she’d kept her shoes on and so now she didn’t have to waste any time awkwardly wedging her feet into pumps. The drama of her dramatic exit was spoiled only on her way out the door when she caught her foot in the open O of her father’s Christmas wreath. She fell down but picked herself up quickly.
A few hours later she watched Tevis reach under the driver’s-side seat of the uncle car for their stashed bottle of Admiral Nelson Coconut Rum. They were parked at a broken meter with a red canvas bag wrapped around its face, on the corner of Broadway and Roosevelt, the neighborhood borderland between Woodside and Jackson Heights. Because ladies first, he passed her the bottle. This was no pity party—she’d told him nothing about Great Neck—but was instead a long-standing ritual whenever Tevis went out to make buys and she ghosted. They allowed themselves one swig apiece. She tipped her head back for a real neck-bobber, but as always Tevis took only a dainty mouthful, and even that was just for gargling. His bushy beard absorbed the dribbles; the rest he spat out the window.
“Let me see that bottle again real quick?” she said.
“See with your eyes,” he said, and slid the Lord Admiral back under his seat.
A navy-blue Impala drove past them going thirty. It had been floating in her side-view mirror for miles, trailing them since Flushing, but no worries: it was just Sergeant Hart and three of his investigators from the 115 Precinct: the inseparable, indistinguishable Irishers, McCarthy and Duckenfield; and the Big Redheaded Boy, Federico Cataroni, who’d started in Narcotics on the same day as Janice. The Impala made a U-turn after passing them and parked across the street, in front of a Tibetan restaurant specializing in Himalayan yak. The car’s suspension sagged under the investigators’ collective weight, and because Janice was actively trying to torture herself, she thought, Oh, suspensions, my dad fixes those.
“I’m probably going to go with the limp today,” Tevis was saying. “You know what I mean? That way, some homeboy wants me to go around the corner with him, rob me, maybe shoot me in the face, I can be like, ‘Nah, sorry, can’t really walk. Got this limp.’ ”
“Uh-huh,” she said, thinking, He’d get that Impala up on the car lift and install some Chinese load-adjusting shocks that’d disintegrate in a hundred miles.
“Hello?” Tevis said.
“Sorry, sorry.” Because eye contact and follow-up questions suggested engagement better than staring out the window, she shifted in her seat to look at him. “Which leg were you thinking?”
“What do you mean?”
“For the limp. Which leg?”
“Which leg?” he said. “What kind of stupid dang question is that? What difference does it make, which leg?”
“Seriously, let me see that bottle,” she told him. “I promise I’m just gonna break it over your head.”
When the prisoner transport van finally arrived—it had taken the Van Wyck here, to avoid coasting down Roosevelt and tipping off dealers—Janice and Tevis stepped out of the car. An oncoming 7 train spooked all the pigeons. The sun, so bright on Long Island, fragmented in Queens as it passed through the el tracks. Once the train had gone by, Tevis spoke a few do-you-copies into his chest, as if he were asking the Looney Tunes characters on his lucky T-shirt—Bugs and Taz posed like early-nineties gangstas with backward ball caps and turned-around jeans—but they didn’t answer him. Nor did the investigators in the presumably toasty Impala across the street. Federico Cataroni tried rattling the kel-mic receiver near his ear.
“Hello?” Tevis said. “Do you copy?” The lip-reading investigators shook their heads, which in turn caused him to shake his. “It’s criminal,” he told her. Another 7 was coming, an express chasing the local, and he had to holler into her face. “Make sure you stay close!”
Quick as a bear, he took gentle hold of her wrist and eased the thumbnail from her mouth. It shocked her, literally, a burst of static electricity forking from his fingertips into her body. For whatever reason, it seemed to embarrass him. He turned quickly away from her and limped into Jackson Heights; after a half-block head start, she followed.
“Uncle is proceeding west on Ruse-ah-velt Avenue,” she told the Nextel.
“What’s he walking like that for?” Hart asked. “You give him blue balls or something?”
She pulled the rubber band from her ponytail and wrapped it around her wrist.
It was a Saturday, but Manhattan’s shoe stores still needed salesmen; its restaurants, waitresses; its paintings, protection. Double-parked gypsy cabs waited on Roosevelt for the returning workers too shift-hobbled to walk home. The arepa lady baked bread for the hungry, their grim faces hardened by the ascent from the subway, the descent from the el. And then there were the white-collars who went past them going the other way, headed into the City to buy shoes and eat out and torture their feet across museums. A block away from the train station, on the periphery of the commuter crush, a young Puerto Rican leaned against the plateglass window of a pet store. He looked promising, a possible dealer, and when Tevis limped up to him Janice raised the Nextel to her mouth. Uncle is approaching a Hispanic male, early twenties, in a Mets cap, with what looks like a cardboard poster tube under his arm. She leaned against an el pillar, too far away to hear the particularities of Tevis’s pitch. Not that it mattered: the kid wasn’t biting. He left before the pitch could even begin, abandoning Tevis outside the pet store talking to the turtles behind the glass.
“Location!” said Sergeant Hart.
“Never mind,” she whispered. “The kid bounced.”
“What?”
“Never mind!”
She stuffed the Nextel into her purse as the boy walked toward her, his ears pink beneath the Mets cap. Still needing three of her four buys, she wanted to ask him if he had any drugs concealed in that poster tube of his, but ghosts can’t ask questions like that—they can’t ask anything—and besides, maybe he was a nice kid from a nice family, a Queens College architecture student who simply didn’t like the rummy smell of Tevis’s breath.
The limp—on the right leg, by the way—made it hard for her to keep a surveillance-approved half block of space between them. Again and again she had to abandon all her better New York instincts and amble like a bumpkin. She lingered outside an electronics shop. She watched a video demonstration on eyebrow threading in the window of a salon. To the exasperation of all the commuters behind her, she slowed to take every flyer offered, then slowed again to throw them all away in a trash can. The languid pace of ghosting allowed her mind to wander toward unfortunate associations. When she passed a sporting-goods store, she thought of her father’s birthday tracksuit. A travel agency that everyone knew laundered money for the Mexican cartel reminded her of her father’s own shady dealings. A strip club … gross men … her father. The Scorpion Bar, her father. And when she passed a bank, a supermarket, a chicken joint, the Ping-Pong palace, and the neighborhood’s one legal massage parlor, all without thinking of her father, she congratulated herself for not thinking of her father, and the loop started anew. Her thumbnail oozed blood. She snapped at the rubber band around her wrist. She felt ridiculous, but to be fair she always felt ridiculous when ghosting, certain the whole neighborhood had already made her as a narc. How could they not have? Every time Tevis stopped, she did, too, and narrated into her Nextel.
Uncle is approaching two Indian women on the south side of Roosevelt between Eightieth and Eighty-First. One of the women wears a blue jacket that says SWEETIE in glittered cursive across the back. The other woman is, oh, never mind. Uncle is walking away. Uncle is approaching a kid pulling a shopping cart full of laundry. Never mind. Uncle is approaching an adult black male, never mind. Uncle is approaching an old Latino who’s missing an arm. Scratch that: who’s got his arm in a sling. The guy is reaching into his pocket, dropping something into uncle’s hand. We got a possible oop, never mind. It was just some loose change. Sorry about that. Uncle is approaching a kid on a bike, an old white lady, a red Toyota Camry with its hazards blinking, a pretty Latina mama pushing a baby stroller built for two.
“Location,” said Sergeant Hart.
“Never mind,” Janice said, disappointed the woman didn’t have any crack vials in her diaper bag. “Uncle just went into a bodega.”
To avoid seeming even more obviously obvious—“The art of ghosting,” Fiorella had once told her, “is doing jack shit convincingly”—she drifted into a nearby taco cart line. It stretched far enough down the sidewalk that she could feign impatience and jump out whenever Tevis reappeared. And if she did reach the front, where the ground beef was sizzling on the grill, she could get a water or guava juice to ease her overstrained vocal cords. She shuffled forward, closer to the cart’s garlicky steam puffs. Maybe she should get a taco, too, for authenticity purposes. Maybe—since this was her favorite food cart, one of the few never to have liquefied her bowels—she should get herself a couple of tacos, which were so much better than the ones her mother used to make, the Ortega kind out of the box with the little white packet of not enough red sauce. Her father always complained the shells broke as soon as he picked them up. And there he was! Back in her dome, making himself comfortable, twisting the anxiety dials. Her stomach was grumbling, her brain was on auto-flagellate. She looked in her purse to see if she could even afford a taco.
“Can we get an update?” the sergeant asked. The Nextel’s obligatory beep-beep bookended his transmission. “Itwaru? Do you copy? Can we get an update?”
Up near the front of the line, a curly-haired Latino turned around. Atypically for her, she struggled to determine his age. He had the oddly angled face of a teenager whose features had not yet snapped into focus, but any potential boyishness was offset by a flaming eyeball tattoo on his neck and a goatee so finely groomed it looked like stage makeup. His chin jutted out to the left as if someone had long ago broken his jaw for him. With small white teeth—nubbins really—he smiled at her, and she smiled right back.
“Itwaru,” the sergeant said.
“Oh, will you shut up already,” she said into the Nextel. “I’m getting us tacos. I’ll be home in a minute.”
Tevis limped out of the bodega across the street. Unable to make any buys so far, he’d bought himself a pack of cigarettes, which he kept slapping against his palm. Her face must’ve betrayed some sort of recognition when she spotted him. She must’ve squinted or arched her eyebrows. She must’ve done something, because the Latino turned his head to follow her line of sight across the street. They both watched Tevis pat his coat and pants pockets, as if look
ing for matches. When the Latino, still grinning, turned back to her, she stepped out of the line and slunk away.
The Impala crept down the avenue no more than two blocks behind her. Maybe. Probably. Standard operating procedure dictated that backup teams stay within the kel’s frequency range, but since the kel didn’t work the investigators might still be parked all the way back at the Tibetan restaurant, or possibly in one of Woodside’s Irish pubs with their white faces hovering over Guinness pints. She walked with her head down. The ghost watches the uncle, but who watches the ghost? She wanted to ask the investigators for their location, but she didn’t know how without sounding like the chicken-shit little sister who needed her big brothers close by in case she got jumped.
At the intersection she braved a look over her shoulder. She didn’t see the Impala or, thank God, the goateed Latino, but she did see Tevis, a hard man to miss when he wasn’t ghosting. He had found a Smoker’s Samaritan, a young black kid willing to offer his lighter. They were talking to each other—the kid, at least, was nodding—and Janice once again looked around for the goateed Latino before putting the kid’s scrip over the radio. With his back to her, she didn’t have much to say: Uncle has approached a young black male, around six feet, puffy jacket and reversed Knicks cap, hard to tell his build.
“Is it a buy?” the sergeant asked.
“Hold on,” she said.
She stood as still as the traffic pole while street-crossers streamed past her. The kid had his hands in his pockets. A 7 train rumbled far away down the tracks, a local or express, she couldn’t tell which. Her eyes were leaking wind-tears. She waited for Tevis to button his coat, his positive signal to indicate he’d made a buy, but instead he reached into his pocket for a cap of his own, a rusted orange Kangol that belonged to the early nineties as much as the thuggish Looney Tunes on his T-shirt. When he put the cap on, the kid began to look around, clearly nervous. He stepped off the curb and into a puddle, something going on here but she didn’t know what. Still unbuttoned, Tevis’s coat fluttered behind him with the wind.