The Bridge

by Solomon Jones

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Janay asked, her voice rising in panic.

  “It’s Kenya,” Lily said as she reached out to cradle her daughter’s face in her hands.

  “Somethin’ bad done happened to Kenya.”

  It was four in the morning when Judy realized that her niece had not come home. She knew—deep down in the secret place where women feel such things—that something was wrong.

  She considered calling the police, but thought better of it. She was down to her last twenty-cap bundle of crack—hardly enough to sustain the pipers who were buying them two at a time as they waited for Sonny to return with more. On this, the summer’s only first of the month to fall on a Friday, tens of thousands of dollars in welfare and Social Security checks were circulating through the projects. And Judy had to get her share.

  No, she couldn’t call the police. But as she looked around the room at sunken gray faces fixed in silent desperation, she knew that she had to do something. At this time of morning, with legions of addicts searching for their next hit, anything could happen to Kenya. And Judy knew it.

  She looked up at the grease-stained clock above the stove. It read 4:05. As images of Kenya worked their way through her mind, she was immersed in something she hadn’t felt in years. Fear.

  Judy picked up the phone and dialed the only person who knew Kenya better than she did. She only hoped that Daneen was where she’d said she would be. Because more often than not, she wasn’t.

  “Hello?” a groggy voice came on the line after the fourth ring.

  “Kenya with you?” Judy asked quickly.

  “Who this?” Kenya’s mother asked as she sat up in bed and tried to get her bearings.

  “Daneen, it’s Judy,” she said evenly. “Kenya left outta here ten o’clock to go to the Chinese store. She ain’t come back, and I was wonderin’ if she was with you.”

  “What you mean is she with me?” Daneen said, suddenly wide-awake. “She supposed to be with you.”

  “Well, she ain’t.”

  “How she gon’ get up here with me, and I’m damn-near ’cross town, Judy?”

  Daneen jumped out of the bed at her boyfriend Wayne’s house, reached over him, and grabbed jeans and a T-shirt from the floor.

  “Kenya don’t even know where Wayne live at,” she said as she pulled on her clothes.

  “Look, Daneen. I was just—”

  “You was just what, Judy? You was just so busy sellin’ that shit you let my baby walk out and disappear? What’s wrong with you? I swear to God, Judy …”

  Daneen screamed and cursed and said all the things she’d wanted to say to Judy for years. Judy listened to the tirade, and when her niece’s anger dissolved into sobs, she responded.

  “I know you think you got yourself together now that you done stopped smokin’ that so-called shit I’m sellin’. What is it, two months clean now?”

  Judy didn’t wait for Daneen to answer.

  “Congratulations. Maybe you can run back to family court in a couple o’ months and try to get your daughter back. Might even get your job back, too. Tell ’em you changed or some shit.

  “But for right now, Kenya’s out there. And it’s a whole lotta folk who care even less about her than you do. So I suggest you get outta bed with Wayne, or whoever the nigga o’ the week happen to be, and get down here and find your daughter.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line as Darnell and the other pipers in Judy’s apartment stopped smoking long enough to stare wide-eyed at Judy. She hadn’t meant for them to hear. But it was out now, which meant that word would spread before first light.

  Judy knew that. But she didn’t care. All that mattered was finding Kenya.

  “I’m callin’ a cab,” Daneen said in a near whisper after she’d calmed down. “I’ll be down there in a few minutes.”

  Judy slid the phone into its cradle, closed her eyes, and mouthed a silent prayer.

  Daneen called a cab. And then she made the call that she knew her aunt wouldn’t.

  Somebody was going to find Kenya, Daneen thought as she hung up the phone. One way or another, they were going to find her baby.

  It was four-twenty when Sonny parked his maroon Sedan de Ville on Watts Street, an alleywide passageway between Broad and Thirteenth. He got out and walked half a block, crossing to the hack stand in front of the deli on Broad Street.

  He handed five dollars to a thin, unkempt man in an old white Mercury Marquis. Then he got into the car’s passenger side and told the driver to go south on Broad.

  The man glanced warily at the garment bag that was slung over Sonny’s arm. He knew that it contained drugs, and that somewhere, tucked into the folds of Sonny’s clothing, there was a gun. But it didn’t take much to figure that out.

  Anybody who knew anything about Girard Avenue knew all about Sonny. He was a fixture outside the awning-bedecked building in the middle of the block, where welfare recipients collected their biweekly checks.

  He made loans to them at 50-percent interest, holding their welfare identification cards as collateral and escorting them to collect on check day. He bought their food stamps at seventy cents on the dollar and redeemed them at full value. He sold crack to them from Judy’s cramped apartment and took what he wanted from those whose drug habits outpaced their ability to pay.

  But if anyone ever crossed him in any one of his enterprises, Sonny did more than merely punish them. He made them disappear. Some showed up again, with scars that forever marked them as his victims. Others never came back at all.

  The man driving the old white Mercury had the good sense to be afraid of Sonny. That’s why he was glad for the short trip—one block south on Broad and a left at Poplar, then four more blocks to East Bridge Place—a one-block stretch of asphalt that ran along the front of the projects. Sonny would usually get out and walk to the building from there.

  Sonny, as always, was relaxed during the ride. But when the car reached the corner, and the building came into full view, his calm demeanor was shaken. There was a police van parked out front.

  “Stop the car,” Sonny said quietly.

  The driver pulled over and shut off the headlights.

  Sonny placed his hand against the garment bag, checking its contents, as he watched two officers get out of the van and walk toward the projects.

  He sat there for a few seconds after they went into the building, trying to tell himself that they weren’t on their way to Judy’s apartment.

  But in his heart, he knew where they were going. He even knew why. So he did what his instincts screamed for him to do. He ducked out the passenger-side door, disappeared around the back of the car, scrambled onto Poplar Street, and walked back toward Broad.

  The driver watched, glad to be rid of Sonny, who disappeared into the night.

  Judy heard the sound of a baton against her door and knew that it was the police.

  The pipers heard it, too. Darnell and his girlfriend Renee, along with the other two who remained in Judy’s apartment, quickly scrambled to hide pipes and rocks in pant hems and sneaker tongues. Judy moved more casually, slipping the remains of her bundle and a thick wad of cash into her ripped chair cushion.

  The baton rapped against the door again, harder this time.

  Judy lit a cigarette and waited, contemplating whether to answer the knock as the scramble to hide the drugs continued.

  “Somebody here call the police?” a male officer asked from behind the door.

  Judy didn’t answer, but raised her arm to signal Darnell and the others to stop moving. They did, and silence enveloped the room.

  Judy waited half a beat to answer the door. To ignore it when the lights and movement had already made their presence known would seem suspicious. And suspicion was something that Judy could ill afford, especially with Sonny on his way back with their third package of the night.

  Judy tousled her hair and kicked off her shoes. Then she wrapped her favorite robe around her clothes, walked to the doo
r, and opened it a sliver.

  She was nonchalant as she regarded the black cop and his white partner. For effect, she squinted and rubbed her eyes like she’d just been awakened from a deep sleep.

  “I didn’t call the police,” she said after a long pause.

  “You sure about that?” the black cop asked. “We got a call that somebody here wanted to file a missing person report.”

  “You must got the wrong apartment then.” Judy dragged on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. “Ain’t nobody here but me, and I ain’t missin’.”

  The officer looked at his partner, then back at Judy. He seemed puzzled.

  “Anyway,” she said, taking another drag on the cigarette, “I ain’t call no cops.”

  Before the officers could respond, she closed the door and locked it, then listened as their footsteps echoed down the hallway. When she was sure they were gone, she leaned back against the door in relief.

  Darnell sat on the floor with a broken metal hanger, scraping residue from the hollow glass tube that served as his crack pipe.

  “You coulda told ’em about Kenya,” he said without looking up.

  “And you coulda got the hell outta here,” she said, crossing the room and retrieving her money and drugs from the ripped chair cushion. “I wish you woulda just kept goin’ when you went out to get them matches.”

  “Yeah, I bet you do,” he said as he deposited the residue he’d scraped from his pipe onto a bent matchbook cover. “Same way you wanted Kenya to keep goin’ when you sent her to the store.”

  Judy retorted quickly. “You know what, Darnell? I think you need to shut the hell up.”

  Darnell glanced at his aunt as he struck two matches and held the flame at the end of his pipe. It hissed and sizzled as he sucked the glass tube. And when he exhaled, the smoke swirled in front of his face, giving his skin an otherworldly glow.

  Judy watched as his almond-shaped, coal-black eyes danced with childlike mischief. She took in the straight hair that extended from his scalp in fine, black wisps. It was at moments like these that the resemblance between Judy’s nephew and her great-niece was uncanny. Looking at Darnell was like looking at Kenya in a fun house mirror. He was her reflection, twisted into a gnarled, gray shell of itself.

  “You look like you seen a ghost,” Darnell said, reading Judy’s expression.

  “And you look like you chasin’ one,” she snapped back. “Ain’t shit else in that pipe, Darnell. All the scrapin’ in the world ain’t gon’ change that. Now if you spendin’, you can stay. But if you ain’t, you can get out. Matter fact, all o’ y’all get the hell out right now.”

  The pipers got up without a word and slowly shuffled to the door. Judy opened it and pushed them into the hallway. Darnell, who was last in the procession, turned to her as he left.

  “I know my sister,” he said with a mirthless grin. “Same way she called the cops, Daneen gon’ do whatever she gotta do to find Kenya.”

  “It’s a li’l late for her to be tryin’ to do whatever she gotta do for Kenya, ain’t it, Darnell?”

  At that, Darnell’s eyes grew intense. He looked at Judy as if he was probing her for the truth.

  “That’s what I’m wonderin’, Judy,” he said, staring at her as he walked out the door. “I’m wonderin’ if it’s too late.”

  It was five-thirty, and dawn had begun to sift burnt orange sunlight across the cracked sidewalks outside the projects. A cab screamed to a halt, and Daneen burst from the backseat with a crazed look she hadn’t worn in the two months since she’d begun her latest try at recovery.

  She charged into the building, ran past the foyer’s shrinking shadows, then bolted up the steps. But as she knifed through concrete passages that the light of dawn had yet to reach, she was reminded of all the ugliness that lived and breathed within the Bridge.

  Huddled in dark corners of the stairwell were the faces she despised: men she’d tricked for half a cap, women she’d fought for less than that, boys who’d snatched her self-respect and locked it in crack-filled vials.

  She saw them and hated them still. Hated the glint of recognition in their eyes, the way their smirks withered to pity as she approached, the way their glances turned downward to avoid the awful truth that had brought her back.

  Kenya. The sound of her name was just beneath the silence. Daneen could feel it. And as she reached the seventh floor and ran down the hallway to Judy’s apartment, she silently prayed that she would soon be able to wrap her baby in her arms again, the way she’d done in the days before things fell apart.

  Daneen tried to hold on to the sound of Kenya’s name as she stood outside Judy’s apartment, trying to gather herself. But she couldn’t feel it anymore. It was as if her name was merely an echo, a reflection of what she used to be.

  Daneen tightened her gut in an effort to push out the premonition that lingered there, then forced herself to raise her hand to knock. But before she could do so, the door swung open.

  Judy was wearing a robe and a blank expression as she stared at Daneen. When she saw that Daneen was frozen between her desire to leave and her need to stay, Judy opened the door a little wider and stood to one side.

  Daneen walked in hesitantly. When she looked around the room and saw that Judy was alone, her tension eased, but only slightly. She stood in the middle of the floor, not quite sure of what to do next.

  “Ain’t nobody call and say where she was?” she asked, her words dropping like hammers against the silence.

  “No,” Judy said. “And I ain’t call nobody, either. Not even the cops.”

  “Why not?”

  “‘Cause somebody already called the cops for me,” Judy said, turning up the corners of her lips in mild disgust as she stared at her niece.

  Daneen folded her arms and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She was clearly uncomfortable. “Look, Judy, what was I supposed to do? Sit there and wait for you to do it?”

  “Don’t matter,” Judy said. “I told ‘em wasn’t nobody missin’, and they left.”

  “Well, call ’em back,” Daneen said, her voice nearly a squeal.

  Judy ambled to her chair and sat down, pulling her near-full bundle of crack from one of her robe pockets and making a great show of counting each of the plastic caps.

  Daneen turned away and tried to ignore the sudden churning in her stomach. But there was no denying the rumble that soon grew to a growl. It echoed across the room as Judy placed one cap after another on the table beside her chair.

  “I think we should try to find her first,” Judy said, still counting the crack-filled vials.

  Daneen couldn’t hear Judy. Her nostrils were beginning to fill with the lingering scent of crack smoke. Her pores expelled tiny beads of sweat as her heart climbed out of her chest and beat wildly against her throat. The rumble in her stomach began to work downward until she felt that her bowels were going to burst.

  And still, Judy counted. Daneen thought she could see a tiny smile playing on her aunt’s lips.

  “You know what I think, Daneen?” Judy asked as she counted. “I think Kenya gon’ show up ’round nine o’clock talkin’ ’bout ‘What’s for breakfast?’ Same way you used to do when you was her age. Disappearin’ and showin’ up when you felt like it. Remember how you used to do that?”

  Daneen’s mouth was beginning to water. She could hear Judy now, but couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. The taste of crack was once again dancing on her palate. The smell of it was overwhelming her.

  “What’s wrong, Daneen?” Judy said, with a self-satisfied smirk.

  “You always did like to fuck with me, didn’t you, Judy?” Daneen said, turning to face her aunt. “Probably doin’ Kenya like that, too, ain’t you? Figurin’ out how to push her buttons. That’s probably why she got the hell up outta here.”

  “Kenya ain’t weak as you,” Judy said, taking out one of the caps and opening it. “She don’t give me the satisfaction.”

  “I ain’t gon’ g
ive it to you neither,” Daneen said, moving toward the door.

  “You sure about that?” Judy picked up the open cap and held it in the air. “’Cause I sure could use some satisfaction right about now. You got some money, don’t you, Daneen? First one’s free.”

  Daneen swallowed hard, ignoring the taste in her mouth, the rumble in her stomach, the stench in her nostrils. She backed toward the door, staring at the crack, even as she reached behind her and pawed at the air until her fingers closed around the doorknob.

  “I gotta find my baby,” she said as she opened the door and stepped backward. “I just—I gotta find her.”

  And with that, Daneen was gone—without a word about the final call she’d made before coming to Judy’s apartment.

  Chapter Three

  Not twenty miles from the chaos that was about to erupt in the projects, on the edge of a tree-lined section of Philadelphia called Chestnut Hill, Kevin Lynch could feel the quiet bearing down on him.

  The solitude of middle-class living was the one thing Lynch hadn’t mastered, even ten years removed from his last years in the projects. He still found himself wishing for profane tirades and breaking glass, childhood games and pulsing music. Sounds he had almost forgotten since leaving the richness of ghetto poverty.

  Whenever the silence he hated was broken, he jumped to embrace the noise, secretly hoping to snatch a piece of the confusion that was so much a part of him.

  That’s what had happened when he had received the phone call shortly before five. He had snapped awake to the sound of the ringing phone and listened with growing panic to Daneen’s sordid tale of crack dens and missing children.

  It had taken him just minutes to get up and bathe and dress. When he came back to his bedroom and his sleeping wife, he moved quietly, strapping on his shoulder holster and his handheld radio before easing himself down onto the corner of their bed. He bent and twisted his broad shoulders to tie his sneakers, then stood to his full six feet as the moonlight streamed in from the bedroom window and reflected against his bald head. When he was about to leave, his wife, who’d been listening to him move about the room, decided to speak.