Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “I don’t think it’s a buy,” she said into the Nextel.

  “It’s not a buy, or you don’t think it’s a buy?”

  The kid cut across Roosevelt into Elmhurst, a bordering neighborhood where the streets left the grid to zigzag without reason or logic. She told Hart it wasn’t a buy, but with the 7 train now directly overhead she couldn’t hear his response. She couldn’t see the kid anymore, either, or the goateed Latino, who’d apparently vanished. But she could still see Tevis. That was her job, to always keep him in sight. He was laughing on the sunny side of the street, pleased with both himself and the world. As if to share the joke with someone else, he took out his own Nextel, which uncles kept on silent for obvious reasons. A slug of gray ash lengthened off his cigarette. When the train had slid far enough down the tracks to no longer be thundering, she heard both Sergeant Hart demanding an update and her cell phone ringing inside her purse. Tevis was waiting for her to answer. He stared blankly ahead, as if he couldn’t see her, even though she was only fifty feet away at the intersection, the crazy lady with a phone pressed to each ear.

  “I love that kid,” Tevis told her, his lips lagging behind his words. “Hart, oh man, Hart is really going to love that kid.”

  “You made a buy?” she asked.

  “Are you serious?” Now he turned to look at her because he always, always, knew exactly where she was—ghosting or buying, it didn’t matter. He said, “I gave you my positive!”

  “Your coat’s not buttoned!”

  He tugged on the Kangol. “My cap,” he said. “I put on my cap.”

  “That’s my positive!” Actually, in the winter, her positive was taking the dockworker cap off, but either way: she was hats, he was buttons, no need to confuse it, that’s how it had been since they’d started working together.

  “In the car,” he said. “I told you. I wanted to switch. Because I’ve been in a slump. I told you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Because you weren’t paying attention. The kid saw it. Do you realize that? He was like, ‘That’s your positive signal, isn’t it?’ Exact words, Itwaru. You understand what I’m saying? The frickin’ kid knew.”

  “I’m sorry, okay? I’ve been sorta distracted, my father—”

  “You’re my ghost,” he said. “You’re not allowed to be distracted.”

  He hung up in her ear, but in the other ear Sergeant Hart kept chirping for an update. Without admitting blame—it seemed irrelevant—she told him that the uncle had in fact made a successful buy after all. She repeated from memory what little description she had: six feet tall, adult black male with a puffy jacket and at least one soggy sneaker. And a Knicks cap, too, although he’d probably already stashed it behind the wheel of a parked car, along with all his drugs and the buy money. When she explained that he’d run into Elmhurst’s jumbled streets over a minute ago, the line went dead. She pushed down the Nextel’s antenna with her teeth. Not only had she allowed a drug dealer to evade capture, but she’d also cost Tevis a buy on the rumpus’s whiteboard. Not only that, she’d robbed the investigators of an opportunity to fill out two to three hours of OT-approved paperwork at time-and-a-half. Not only that—it never ends!—now the investigators would have to fill out two to three hours of non-OT-approved paperwork explaining why the uncle had brought back without a perp. Oops, never mind. To save them all from that particular hassle, Tevis was crouched over the curb across the street, slipping his buy into the sewer, where one of New York City’s mutated alligators would swallow it whole and spend the rest of this night happily swimming on his scaly back. The Nextel chirped back on with a series of miniature honks, most likely Sergeant Hart banging his head against the steering wheel. He told her his investigators had no interest in chasing a poorly described knucklehead they’d never catch. He also asked that in the future she try not to be a complete and utter fuck-up, which she thought was an entirely unfair criticism, which was itself a Big Boss specialty. She’d been alternating ghosting assignments between Tevis and Gonz for seventeen months now and had never before missed a positive signal. She hadn’t even really made a mistake since her first day as an uncle when she let that huckster disappear into an apartment lobby with the department’s twenty bucks. But the Narco Big Bosses, like Big Bosses everywhere, tended to fixate only on fumbles. Over the Nextel she heard either McCarthy or Duckenfield in the background asking if she had at least gotten the tacos.

  Good news or bad news? Bad news: Tevis went buyless for the rest of the day.

  The good news: it was March 8, and the end of Puffy’s shift marked the end of his first eighteen months in Narcotics. He’d officially just made detective. Back at the rumpus, where Richie had strung up a congratulations banner, uncles and investigators came by to slap his back and shake his hand. Klondike and Morris argued over whether he should invest his new pay raise into property or a money market. Eddie Murphy wrote down the number of a good accountant. James Chan beamed but said nothing. A sleepy, yawning, nightcap-wearing Grimes was the first to call him Detective Okazaki, the name a surprise to half the rumpus who only ever knew him as Puffy. Pablo Rivera, now the rumpus’s second-most-junior detective, bequeathed the ceremonial Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap and pipe, with an added warning to watch out for Internal Affairs. Despite his strong chin and clear eyes, even Puffy couldn’t make that cap look unridiculous. Fiorella pinned to his shirt a plastic badge from the toy department at Rite Aid, something Janice wished she’d thought of herself. He’d get his real detective shield later in the month, at a private ceremony at One Police Plaza, but in the meantime all the uncles except Gonz took him out for celebratory drinks at A.R.’s Tavern, which had a dangerous Saturday-night special on three-dollar Cosmos.

  She floundered down her alleyway at around two o’clock in the morning. Before going inside the house, she wiped her feet on the back door’s welcome mat and saw little green needles stuck in its synthetic fibers. No wonder she’d fucked up Tevis’s buy! She’d been hexed, walking around all day with bits of her father’s Christmas wreath stuck to her shoe bottoms. His own stinking shoes sat near the door, as they had every day of her life, these boots as much as part of the world behind her house as the alien-fruit tree. She picked them up. Unwilling to pluck every pine needle out of the welcome mat, she instead carried her father’s boots down the alley and threw them away in Mr. and Mrs. Hua’s fishy-smelling garbage can. Immediately feeling lighter, feeling winged, she bounded back up the porch steps. She knew her mother had wanted to protect the family from ghosts, but what you have to understand, Mama, is that those boots were haunted all on their own. They had to go. Plus, Janice had drunkenly, definitively decided that she wasn’t going to believe in ghosts anymore.

  But since when has that ever stopped them?

  CHAPTER SIX

  A couple of nights later, she and Fiorella dolled up for the triple T: Techno Techno Tuesday at the Pure Magic Dance Hall and Lounge. They wore shredded fishnets, shimmering shirts, a racoonish amount of eyeliner, and two spritzes apiece of Fiorella’s Truly Pink perfume, which got immediately absorbed by the burnt dust smell of the club’s fog machines. An actual disco ball splintered green strobe lights. Up in a crow’s nest, a DJ spun bass-heavy oonst-oonst records for a surprisingly dense crowd of dancers, most of them underage, almost all of them simultaneously grinding their teeth and the person in front of them. Janice’s shoes stuck to the floor. Because coincidentally she and Fiorella were each expecting their periods, and because nightclub bathroom dispensers sold only cheapy brands at outrageous prices, they’d brought their own emergency tampons, just as they’d brought along their own ghosts: Tevis, like a proper specter, melted into the fog, but that miserable prick Gonz headed straight to the bar to pay no attention to them whatsoever and sip on nine-dollar Budweisers.

  Janice pushed herself into the crowd, confused as to how ordinary citizens could party like this on a weeknight. Didn’t they have algebra tests to
take? Jobs to show up for? Unconcerned with what would surely be a miserable hump-day morning, they appeared high on weed, coke, Ecstasy, or some combination of all three. They tipped their mouths back to swallow the music. Their flowing hands fashioned invisible pottery from invisible kilns. Some of these children sucked on actual pacifiers, but not a one of them would be getting arrested. At least not for selling or using. At least not tonight. The arrests, when they came, were still a few months away. The Big Bosses had sent Janice and Fiorella here to make one buy apiece and then leave, so as not to stoke suspicion, so as to lay the foundation for an eventual case against the nightclub itself. Because Sergeant Hart preferred these two buys to come directly from Pure Magic’s impure employees, Fiorella went looking for a barback with dilated eyes or a sniffy nose. Armed with techno song names from a Google search before leaving the rumpus, Janice climbed a spiral staircase toward the DJ’s crow’s nest. There was no one to stop her. All the bouncers were outside pretending to check fake IDs. When she reached the DJ booth, a white DJ—a sticker on his purposefully dorky button-down said HELLO, MY NAME IS WHITE DJ—looked up from his turntables, annoyed, as if he expected her to request the latest Beyoncé song.

  This little booth fly? With her tights tattered to shit? She came buzzing up to him to ask, “Yo, you got ‘Dam Dadi Doo’?”

  “Hmm,” he said, surprised.

  One of them anime girls, then. Probably went to Comic-Cons wearing the plaid schoolgirl skirts with her hair twisted into fuck-me braids. Sure, he had “Dam Dadi Doo,” had it right here, matter a fact, bought it like—what? Like two weeks ago, from Breakdown in Bayside. He planned to quick mix it in later, during primetime, with some of his other party-rocking tracks, but yeah, okay, if she couldn’t wait—and the way she leaned over his table, hands held behind her back, she didn’t seem the type who liked to wait for anything—he’d play it for her now, no problem, milk it for her, too. But first? To show her a little turntablism? He adjusted one of the muffs on his headphones, dropped the record, cut it twice with the cross-fader, dropped it again and gave it a reverse teardrop before dropping it for real this time, how do you like that? When the morning come come, I’m dancing like you’re dumb dumb. She closed her eyes to move with it a little, just her hips and shoulders going.

  “Me and my girlfriend?” she said with her eyes still closed and her voice real quiet like she didn’t care if he heard her. “We lost our virginity to this song.”

  He pulled off his headphones.

  When she opened her eyes again, she looked so happy, but a little out of it, too, a little heavy-lidded, like maybe she was drunk or tripping balls. “Your nose is running,” she told him.

  Of course it was. He wiped it real quick with the back of his hand, then tried to distract her by baby-scratching “Dam Dadi Doo” over the beat on table one’s record, which was, of all things, a remix of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go.” Of course it was. Please don’t go, he accidentally asked her without asking her, and she leaned even farther over his table.

  “How much more of that coke you got on you?” she asked. “I’m not trying to score anything off you for free. Don’t worry, I got money. But me and my girlfriend?” She tilted her head toward the dance floor beneath them, where he was making all those young bodies move. “We’ll save half for you when you get a break.”

  “I don’t get a break,” he said. “I’m stuck up here until closing.”

  “But you got that coke on you?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, that’s perfect because I got a little money,” she said. “You should probably take my number, too. When’s closing at? Like five? I can’t promise me and my girl will still have a whole half for you left, but I guarantee we’ll both be up.”

  Dam dadi doo dam dam didoodi dam

  Dam dadi doo dam dam didoodi dam

  Dam dadi doo dam dam didoodi dam

  Dam dadi doo dam dam didoodi dam

  Two buys down, two more to go.

  Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Breath mints. Dental floss. Mouthwash strips. Paper towels, a big stack of them, ready for Rose to disperse one at a time. Knockoff perfumes from the former love of her life, that dirty-dicked motherfucker Ricky Sprinkle. Lotion. Band-Aids. Hairpins and safety pins. A needle and thread, although Rose had never seen anyone reach for them. Condoms ribbed for her ladies’ pleasure. Kleenex, aspirin, Tums, and Pepto-Bismol. A comb and two brushes. A lint roller. Some static-cling spray. Some antiwrinkle spray, which she twice had to explain was for fabric not faces. Midol. Tampons. Maxi pads. Shout Wipe & Go Instant Stain Remover. Windex for the windows when the nastier of these nasty-ass bitches popped their pimples onto the glass. Jasmine-lily hand soap to pump into the palms of women who too frequently avoided eye contact. A wicker basket loaded with one- and five-dollar bills, most of it money brought from home to remind these misers that tipping was always appreciated, that none of these goodies were free—except for the perfumes, which technically counted as gifts but had cost her all sorts of emotionally crippling capital—and it wasn’t any fun to sit in a ladies’ room all night on an ass-deadening stool and smell other people’s shit, piss, farts, and vomit.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” a young lady said. She was half black and half Hindu, probably from one of those Caribbean islands near Jamaica. Her skirt was high enough for the wind to whistle through her you-know-what, but she’d spoken to Rose with more politeness than anyone in months. Ma’am? Please, Rose was just happy to have someone look into her face. “Can I ask you a question?” the girl asked.

  “Anything you want.”

  “I’m not looking to buy one, but how much do you charge for tampons? I’m just curious.”

  “Everything here is pay-what-you-will, like the Natural History Museum, but if you’re in trouble just take one and don’t worry about it. You want some Midol? How bad is it? You want some OxyContin?”

  She laughed. “You got Oxy?”

  “Honey, if you can think it, I got it.”

  Behind them a toilet flushed. A chubby redhead, with eyes spread too wide apart on her face, stepped out of the middle stall. Head down, she hurried over to the sink, not to wash her hands like a civilized human being, but to drink water straight from the tap. Rose tried to give her a paper towel, but the girl walked away without taking it. Now that her cotton mouth was a little less cottony, nothing else mattered. Once the door swung shut behind her, the other girl, the nice Hindu girl, handed Rose a twenty.

  “The Oxy,” the girl said. “Is that pay-what-you-will, too?”

  “It’s more of a suggested donation.” She gave the girl two fives from the tip basket and a small white pill from her purse. “That should do you for now, honey. It’s a little-bitty dose, just the ten millis, but you come right back if you think you’re gonna need anything else.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the girl said, her manners exquisite, her mama having done at least a little something right. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that.” Rose shrugged. “But I do aim to please.”

  With more buys on the night than she could use, Janice left the bathroom and went looking for Tevis. It was a quick search. She found him right there in the corridor between the ladies’ room and the gents’. He stood on a line six dudes deep, whereas the women’s had no wait at all, a disparity Janice had only ever seen at Mets games. Under the club’s silly black lights, his cocoa butter glowed like impetigo. She wondered if he knew, if that’s why he was waiting on line, to wash his face, but probably not. Probably, a conscientious ghost, he’d only been waiting for her. She slipped the DJ’s coke into his palm. It filled half of a miniature manila envelope, the kind used in Clue to conceal murderers, weapons, and crime scenes.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “The one I owe you!”

  “What?”

  “The one I owe you!” Close to a cluster of speakers, they took turns shouting into each other’s ears, certain none
of the other guys waiting for the bathroom could hear them. “For missing your positive last week,” she said. “Now we’re even!”

  He untied the golden string on the manila envelope and peered inside. “Are you crazy?” he said. “I can’t take this!”

  He meant—she assumed—that as the ghost he wasn’t allowed to make buys. But what if he’d only been doing his job? What if he’d gone up into the crow’s nest for its better vantage point, to keep an eye on both uncles at once, and the envelope got forced on him, pushed into his palm, which was with a few minor differences essentially the truth? What if the coke was so cheap he couldn’t give it back without arousing suspicion? Seriously—who did it hurt? Over at the bar on the other side of the club, Gonz was in no position to contradict anything. Nor was Fiorella. And the DJ wasn’t even going to get arrested. So why shouldn’t Tevis score a little boost on the buy board, especially since he unfairly got screwed the last time he went out? As far as Janice was concerned, this was merely the universe leveling itself out, I Ching–style. Plus, even better, now she could stop feeling guilty.

  “But they know I didn’t come out here with any buy money,” he said.

  “Who’s they?” she hollered into his ear. “All this gets buried in paperwork. Just say you used your own money.”

  “I would never use my own money.”

  “I just used my own money to buy Oxy off the bathroom attendant.”

  “A bathroom attendant?”

  Fiorella snuck up behind them to bump their heads together. It was, apparently, the most hilarious thing she’d ever done. She couldn’t stop laughing, her grin glittering in the black light as if floating in a photo negative. Because it was impossible to get mad at her, because Janice and Tevis were both happy to have found another familiar face in this overcrowded nightclub, they rubbed at their foreheads without complaints. The music cross-faded into a novelty song, a remix of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” something Janice actually recognized from long-ago quinceañeras and bat mitzvahs.