by Bill Beverly
Then the blood began inside the white cotton shirt. Her eyes wandered and locked on him. Dying fast and gently.
The talkie whistled again.
“God damn you, boy,” Sidney panted.
The police in the back saw their chance, and three of them aimed. The gun in the window fell, rattling down the roof. Just then the four cops on the porch kicked in the door.
“You supposed to warn us,” crackled Sidney. “You supposed to do your job.”
“I gave you all I got,” East said.
Sidney didn’t answer. East heard him wheezing.
He got off the phone. He knew how to go. One last look—windows blown out, cops scaling the lawn, one U stumbling out as if he were on fire. His house. And the Jackson girl on the sidewalk, her blood on the crawl, a long finger pointing toward the gutter, finding its way. A cop bent over her, but she was staring after East. She watched East all the way down the street till he found a corner and turned away.
2.
The meet-up was a mile away in an underground garage beneath a tint-and-detail shop with no name. The garage had been shut down years ago—something about codes, earthquakes—but you could still get a car in, through a busted wall in the lot below some apartments next door. Nothing kept people away from a parking space for long.
East took the stairs with his shirt held over his nose. The air reeked of piss and powdered concrete. Three levels down he popped the door and let it close behind him before he breathed again. A few electric lights still hung whole and working from a forgotten power line. Something moved along a crack in the ceiling, surviving.
East wondered who’d be there. Fin had hundreds of people in The Boxes and beyond. After things went wrong, a meet like this might be strictly chain-of-command. Or it might be with somebody you didn’t want to meet. Either way, you had to show up.
Down at the end he saw Sidney’s car: a Magnum wagon, all black matte. Johnny reclined against it, doing his stretches. He squared his arms behind his head and curled his torso this way and that, muscles bolting up and receding. Then he bent and swept his elbows near the ground.
Sidney stood away in the darkness with his little snub gun eyeing East’s head.
“Failing, third-rate, sorry motherfucker.”
East went still. They said that down here people got killed sometimes, bodies dropped down the airshaft into the dark where nothing could smell them. He looked flatly past the gun.
Sidney was hot. “I don’t like losing houses. Fin don’t like losing houses.”
“I ain’t found out yet what happened,” East said simply.
“Your boys ain’t shit. Who was it?”
“Dap. Needle.”
“Someone’s stupid. Someone didn’t care.”
East objected, “They know their jobs. That was my house I had for two years.”
“I had the house, boy,” Sidney spat. “You had the yard.”
East nodded. “I was there a long time.”
“Best house we had in The Boxes. Fin loves your skinny ass—you tell him it’s gone.”
It was not the first gun East had talked down. You did not fidget. You showed them that you were not scared. You waited.
Just then, Sidney’s phone crackled. He uncocked his gun and stuck it away. Behind him, Johnny wagged his head and got off the car. Johnny was a strange go-along, dark black and slow-moving where Sidney was half Chinese, wound up all the time. Johnny was funny. He could be nice; he handled problems inside the house, kept the U’s from fighting with each other. But you did not want to raise his temperature.
“Sidney don’t relish the running,” Johnny laughed. “In case you wasn’t clear about that.”
East breathed again. “Did everyone get out?”
“Barely. They got some U’s. No money and no goods.”
“Who was shooting out?”
“I don’t know, man. Some old fool, shotgun in his pants. We was grabbing and getting. I guess you could say he was too.”
Sidney put his phone away. He turned, fuming. “Someone did get shot.”
“I know it,” said East. “Little girl.” He could see the Jackson girl, the roundness of her face, like a plum, a little pink something tied in her hair.
“In the news it ain’t gonna be no little girl,” said Johnny. “Gonna be a very big girl. It’s a little girl when your ass gets shot.”
This had been a bad time. Fin’s man Marcus had been picked up three months ago. Marcus kept bank, never carried, never drove fast or packed a gun, quiet. He had a bad baby arm with seven fingers on his hand. He knew in his head where everything came from and where it went, where it was—no books, nothing to hide. Twenty-two years old, skilled, smart: Fin liked that. But they had him now, no bail. No bail meant the PD could just keep asking him questions till they ran out of questions. Since then, everything was getting tight. One lookout picked up just loitering—they kept him in for three days. Runners getting scooped off the street, just kids, police rounding them up in a boil of cars and lights, breaking them down.
Some judge wanted a war, so everything had gotten hard.
—
They rode the black wagon south unhappily. Sidney coughed wetly, like the running had made him lung-sick. He wiped his gargoyle face. “Don’t look at the street signs,” he snapped.
“Man, who cares? I know what street this is,” said Johnny.
Something went pumma, pumma, pum in the speaker box, and the AC prickled hard on East’s face. He closed his eyes, like Sidney said, and didn’t look out at the street.
Losing the house—it was going to be on him. He owned the daytime boys; he owned their failure. He’d run the yard for two years, and he’d taught the lookouts, and until today everyone said he’d done it well. His boys knew their jobs; they came on time, they didn’t fight, didn’t make noise. He could not see where it’d gone wrong. That girl—he shouldn’t have talked to her for so long. Maybe she would have wandered off. He could have let Antonio muscle her a bit. She wound up dead anyhow.
What could he do? That many cops come to take a house, they’re gonna take it.
A pair of dogs went wild as the car slowed, but East didn’t open his eyes. Some of the neighbors’ dogs likely were Fin’s. Most people would keep a good dog if you gave them the food for it. And the cops looked where the dogs were. You didn’t keep dogs where you stayed.
“Don’t look at the house numbers.”
“Man, how I’m not gonna see what house it is?” countered Johnny.
They parked down the street and walked. A little girl on a hollow tricycle scraped the sidewalk with her plastic wheels. The day had turned hot and windy. When Sidney said, “Hyep,” they all turned and mounted two steps up toward a flat yellow house.
FOR SALE, said a sign. Someone had blacked out the real estate agent’s name.
—
Answering the door was a short, stark-faced woman East had seen once before somewhere. On her hair she wore a jeweled black net. Her mouth was thin and colorless, slashed in. She showed them inside, then retreated, into a kitchen where something bubbled but gave no smell.
The room was empty, bare, brown wood floors. The drawn blinds muted the daylight into purples. A lonely nail on the walls here and there told of people who’d lived here once. There were two guns there too, Circo and Shawn. East had seen them before. It was never good, seeing them.
“Everyone get out your house when it happen?” asked Shawn. He was a tall kid, like Johnny.
“Little bitch didn’t even give us a heads-up,” flared Sidney.
East ignored it. It wasn’t Sidney he had to answer to now. He wondered how much about it everyone knew.
Shawn wiped out the inside of his cheek with a finger and bit his lips unpleasantly.
“Gonna need me in Westwood tomorrow?”
“Depends. See what the day brings,” said Sidney. “Miracles happen.”
Shawn laughed once, more of a cough. He patted the bulk in the pocket of his jeans
approvingly.
A security system beeped, and down the hall a door opened—just a click and a whisper of air. The woman exited the kitchen softly, on bare feet, and turned down the hall. She slipped inside the cracked door and shut it. A moment later it beeped open again. East watched the woman. She had a spell about her, like her time in this world was spent arranging things in another.
She pointed at East, Sidney, and Johnny. “You can come,” she said calmly.
East had been in rooms like this before, where guns had talked vaguely amongst themselves. Until today, the day he’d lost the house, he’d found it exciting. Today he was glad to be summoned away. He caught a scent trailing from her body as he followed, and inhaled. Usually if he got this close to a woman, it was a U, heading in or out. Or one working the sidewalk, or stained from the fry grill. This woman was perfumed with something strange that didn’t come out of a bottle. He held his breath.
The net in her hair glistened: tiny black pearls.
The system beeped again as she unsealed the door.
—
Fin’s room: unlit except for two candles. He sat in a corner, barefoot and cross-legged atop a dark ottoman, his head bowed as if in prayer, a candle’s gleam splitting his scalp in two. He was a big man, loose and large, and his shoulders loomed under his shirt.
This room had a dark, soft carpet. A second ottoman sat empty in the center of the room.
Fin raised his head. “Take off your shoes.”
East bent and scuffled with his laces. In the doorway behind them appeared Circo, a boy of nineteen with a cop’s belt, gun on one side and nightstick on the other. He stuck his nose in, looked around, and left. Good. The door beeped as the woman pulled it shut behind her.
Johnny took a cigarette out.
“Don’t smoke in here, man,” Fin said.
Johnny fumbled it back into the pack. “I’m sorry.”
“House is for sale.” Fin wiped the back of his head. “Purchase it if you like. Then you can do whatever you want.”
The three boys arranged their shoes by the door.
Dust curled and floated above the candles. Fin sat waiting, like a schoolteacher. When he spoke, it was with an ominous softness.
“What happened?”
Sidney answered, grievous, wheezing. “No warning, man. Paying a whole crew of boys out there. When the time came, no one made a call. Didn’t shout, didn’t do shit.”
“I did call you,” East protested.
“When there was police already banging on the door.”
So Sidney was here to saw him off.
“Why didn’t they call?” Fin said it quietly, amused, almost as if he were asking himself.
Sidney jostled East forward unnecessarily. This meant him: this was his why.
“There was a lot going on,” East began.
Fin, quizzical: “A lot?”
“Fire trucks. House fire,” East said. “Lots of noise. The ends—Needle, Dap—maybe that’s what they was thinking: police going to the fire. Maybe. I mean, I ain’t spoken to them yet, so I can’t say.”
“I think your boys know to call when they see a police.”
“Oh, yes, they know,” East said. “Oh, yes.”
“And why ain’t you talked to them?”
“Something goes wrong, stay off the phone,” East answered, “like you taught.”
Fin looked from East to Sidney and back.
“Was there a fire for real?”
“I saw smoke. I saw trucks. I didn’t walk and look.”
“Maybe it don’t matter,” said Fin quietly, “but I might like to know.” He gave East a hard look and then veiled his eyes. East felt a beating in his chest like a bird’s wing.
A minute passed before Fin spoke again. “Close every house,” he said. “Tell everybody. Submarine. I don’t want to hear anything. I hate to say it, but people gonna have to look elsewhere a few days.”
“I got it,” said Sidney. “But what are we gonna do?”
“Nothing,” Fin said. “Close my houses down.”
“All right,” said Sidney. “But how is it this little nigger fucked up, and I’m not getting paid? Johnny neither?”
“I taught you to save for a rainy day,” Fin said. “And, Sidney, I taught you not to say that word to me. You know better, so why don’t you step out. You hear me?”
Sidney fell back and grimaced. “I apologize for that,” he said, and he turned to pick up his shoes.
“You too, Johnny. You can go.” Fin sighed. “East, you stay.”
“You want us to wait for him?”
“No,” Fin said. “Go on.”
East stood still, not watching the two boys moving behind him. When the door beeped open and they left, the woman was there, outside, barefoot, waiting. She brought in a tray with two steaming clay cups. She stood mute, and something passed between her and Fin, no words, borne like an electrical charge. Then she placed the tray with the two cups on the empty ottoman.
Quietly she eyed East and then turned and left through the same door. Beep.
—
“How you doing?” Fin said. “Shook up?”
East admitted it. He was aching where he stood. Tightened up more than ever. His knees felt unstrung. “Yeah.”
“Sit.”
East lowered himself to the second ottoman stiffly and sat beside the steaming tray in the dusky room. Fin spread his shoulders like a great bird. He moved slowly, top-heavy, as if his head were filled with something weightier than brains and bone.
Fin was East’s father’s brother—not that anyone had ever introduced East to his father. Others knew this; sometimes they resented East for it, the protective benevolence he moved under. But it shaped their world too, the special care that was given him, his house, his crew. When East was a child, Fin had been an occasional presence—not a family presence, like the grandmother whose house held a few Christmases, like the aunt who sometimes showed up in bright, baggy church clothes on Sunday afternoons with sandwiches and fruit in scarred plastic tubs. Fin was a visitor when East’s mother was having hard times: to put a dishwasher in, to fetch East to a doctor when he had an ear infection or one of the crippling fevers he now remembered only dimly. Once Fin took East to the Lakers, good seats near the floor. But East didn’t understand basketball, the spitting buzzers and the hostile rows of white people in chairs, and they’d left long before the game was decided.
But since East had grown, Fin was the quiet man in the background. East had never had to be a runner, a little kid dodging in and out of houses with a lunchbox full of goods or bills. He’d been a down-the-block lookout at ten, a junior on a house crew at twelve. He’d had his own yard for two years, directing and paying boys sometimes older and stronger than he was. Not often in that time had he laid eyes on Fin, but often he’d felt the quiet undertow of his uncle’s blood carrying him deeper into the waves.
Did he want to do this? It didn’t matter: it would provide. Did boys respect him because he could see a street and run a crew more tightly than anyone else, or because he was one of Fin’s favorites? It didn’t matter: either way he had his say, and the boys knew it. Was this a life that he’d be able to ride, or would he be drowned in it like other boys he’d kicked off his gang or seen bloody or dead in the street?
It didn’t matter.
—
“Try it,” Fin said.
East touched a cup, and his hand reared back. He was not used to hot drinks.
“Not ready yet?” Fin reached for his cup and drank soundlessly. The steam rose thick in the air. “Now tell me again why that girl got shot.”
East saw her again, her face sideways on the street. Those stubborn eyes. He could still see them. “I tried,” he said, and then his voice slipped away, and he had to swallow hard to get it back. He stared at the tea, the steam kicking up.
“I tried to make her go away,” East said. “She been down the street all weekend playing ball and just came up that minute. Then the p
olice. You couldn’t tell her nothing.”
“I see. Just her bad luck, then. Her bad timing.”
“She was from Mississippi.”
Fin sat and looked at East a long time.
“You know that girl hurts me more than the house,” Fin said. “We got houses. We can move. Every time we move a house, we bring along the old and we pick up the new. It’s that girl that costs us. It’s that girl that goes down on my account.”
“I know.”
“She died.”
East swallowed. “I know,” he said.
Fin agitated his cup and stared down into it. “Get up and lock that door,” he said. “I don’t want nobody walking in on us, what happens next.”
East stood. He stumbled in the carpet’s pile. The lock was a push-button, nothing more. East pressed it gently.
Fin’s dark eyes followed him back to the cushion.
“So you’re free now. Had a house. Had a job. Lost the house. Lost the job.”
East hung his head, but Fin waited on him to say something. “Yes, sir.”
“You wondering what comes next?” Fin smacked his lips. “Because maybe nothing comes next. Maybe you should take some time.”
Take some time, East thought. What they said when they didn’t want you anymore.
“There is something you might do for me,” Fin said. “You can say yes or no. But it’s quiet. We won’t talk about it. Not now, next year, not ever. You keep it till you die.”
East nodded. “I can keep quiet.”
“I know. I know you can,” Fin said. “So: I want you to go on a drive. At the end of that drive, I want you to do something.” He curled a foot up and pulled on it. Fluid joints, a slow movement. “Murder a man.”
East drew in his shoulder and carefully dried his mouth on it. A spark fired in his stomach; a snake curled.
“You can say yes or no. But once you do, you’re in. Or out. So think.”
“I’m in,” East said automatically.
“I know you are,” said Fin. And he drank down the rest of his tea, then shook his head twice, a long shudder that might have been a laugh or might have been something else entirely. East felt Fin’s gaze then and swallowed the hard beating inside him.