“What you going to do, Fro, you find the hobo that hassed him?” Major said.
“One way to find out,” Hawk said.
Major turned and grinned at the audience. Then he looked at the big kid next to him. “John Porter, you do that?”
John Porter said “Ya,” which was probably half the things John Porter could say. From his small dark eyes no gleam of intelligence shone.
“There be your man, Fro,” Major said. “Lass time you mace him, he say you sucker him. He ain’t ready, he say.”
Hawk grinned. “That right, John Porter?”
The cork was going to pop. There was no way that it wouldn’t. Without moving my head I kept a peripheral fix on the van door.
John Porter said, “Ya.”
“You ready now, John Porter?” Hawk said.
John Porter obviously was ready now. His knees were flexed, his shoulders hunched up a little. He had his chin tucked in behind his left shoulder. There was some scar tissue around his right eye. There was the scar along his jawline, and his nose looked as if it had thickened. Maybe boxed a little. Probably a lot of fights in prison.
“Care to even things up for the sucker punch?” Hawk said.
“John Porter say he gon whang yo ass, Fro,” Major said. “First chance he get.”
The laughter still skittered around the edges of everything Major said. But his voice was tauter now than it had been.
“Right, John Porter?” Major said.
John Porter nodded. His eyes reminded me of the eyes of a Cape buffalo I’d seen once in the San Diego Zoo. He kept his stare on Hawk. It was what the gang kids called mad-dogging. Hawk’s grin got wider and friendlier.
“Well, John Porter,” Hawk said, friendly as a Bible salesman. “You right ‘bout that sucker punch. And being as how you a brother and all, I’ll let you sucker me. Go on ahead and lay one upside my head, and that way we start out even, should anything, ah, develop.”
John Porter looked at Major.
“Go on, John Porter, do what the man say. Put a charge on his head, Homes.”
John Porter was giving this some thought, which was clearly hard for him. Was there some sort of trickery here?
“Come on, John Porter,” Major said. “Man, you can’t fickle on me now. You tol me you going to crate this Thompson first chance. You tol me that, Homes.” In everything Major said there was derision.
John Porter put out a decent overhand left at Hawk, which missed. Hawk didn’t seem to do anything, but the punch missed his chin by a quarter of an inch. John Porter had done some boxing. He shuffled in behind the left with a right cross, which also missed by a quarter of an inch. John Porter began to lose form. He lunged and Hawk stepped aside and John Porter had to scramble to keep his balance.
“See, the thing is,” Hawk said, “you’re in over your head, John Porter. You don’t know what you are dealing with here.”
John Porter rushed at Hawk this time, and Hawk moved effortlessly out of the way. John Porter was starting to puff. He wasn’t quite chasing Hawk yet. He had enough ring savvy left to know that you could get your clock cleaned by a Boy Scout if you started chasing him incautiously. But chasing Hawk cautiously wasn’t working. John Porter had been trained, probably in some jailhouse boxing program, in the way to fight with his fists. And it wasn’t working. It had probably nearly always worked. He was 6’2“ and probably weighed 240, and all of it muscle. He might not have lost a fight since the fourth grade. Maybe never. But he was losing this one and the guy wasn’t even fighting. John Porter didn’t get it. He stopped, his hands still up, puffing a little, and squinted at Hawk.
“What you doing?” he said.
Major stepped behind John Porter and kicked him in the butt.
“You fry him, John Porter, and you do it now,” Major said.
There was no derision in Major’s voice.
“He can’t,” Hawk said, not unkindly.
John Porter made a sudden sweep at Hawk with his right hand and missed. The side door of the van slid an inch and I jumped at it and rammed it shut with my shoulder on someone’s hand, someone yelled in pain, something clattered on the street. I kept my back against the door and came up with the Browning and leveled it sort of inclusively at the group. Hawk had a left handful of John Porter’s hair. He held John Porter’s head down in front of him, and with his right hand, pressed the muzzle of a Sig Sauer automatic into John Porter’s left ear. Jackie had dropped flat to the pavement and was trying with her left hand to smooth her skirt down over her backside, while her right hand pushed the tape recorder as far forward toward the action as she could.
Somewhere on the other side of McCrory Street a couple of birds chirped. Inside the truck someone was grunting with pain. I could feel him struggle to get his arm out of the door. A couple of gang members were frozen in midreach toward inside pockets or under jackets.
“Now this time,” Hawk was saying, “we all going to walk away from this.”
No one moved. Major stood with no expression on his face, as if he were watching an event that didn’t interest him.
“Next time some of you will be gone for good,” Hawk said. “Spenser, bring him out of the truck.”
I kept my eyes on the gang and slid my back off the door. It swung open and a small quick-looking kid no more than fourteen, in a black Adidas sweatsuit, came out clutching his right wrist against him. In the gutter by the curb, below the open door, was an automatic pistol. I picked it up and stuck it in my belt.
“You all walk away from here, now,” Hawk said. No one moved.
“Do what I say,” Hawk said. There was no anger in his voice. Hawk pursed his lips as he looked at the gang members standing stolidly in place. Behind him Jackie was on her feet again, her tape recorder still running, some sand clinging to the front of her dress.
Hawk smiled suddenly. “Sure,” he said.
He looked at me.
“They won’t leave without him,” Hawk said.
I nodded. Hawk released his grip on John Porter’s hair and Porter straightened. He walked away from Hawk with his head down.
“You fucked yourself,” Major said without any particular emotion. “You dead, motherfucker.”
“Not likely,” Hawk said.
Major stood silently for a moment, looking at Hawk, then he looked at me.
“Enjoy yourself, slut,” he said to Jackie. And his face broke into a wide smile.
Then he turned and nodded at the gang. They followed him, and in a moment they were gone and all there was, was the two birds across the street, chirping.
CHAPTER I3
We were back in Hawk’s car. Jackie in back this time, Hawk and I in the front seat. Both of us had shotguns. “Would you like to reprise all of that for me?” Jackie said.
“Kid’s playing a game,” Hawk said.
“The leader? Major?”
“Un huh.”
“Well, could you explain the game?”
Hawk grinned back at her over his shoulder. “Un uh,” he said.
“Well, I mean, is it turf?” Jackie said.
“Sure it’s turf, but it’s more,” Hawk said.
“I didn’t even understand half what he was saying,” Jackie said.
“Gangs have their own talk,” Hawk said.
“You didn’t understand it either,” Jackie said.
“Not all of it. Got the drift though.”
“I wonder if he’s trying to see how you’ll act?” I said to Hawk.
“He’s heard of me?” Hawk said.
Hawk considered everything genuinely. He had almost no assumptions.
“Maybe,” I said. I looked at Jackie. “I don’t want to hear any of this on The Marge Eagen Show. ”
“No,” Jackie said. “Unless I warn you, it’s background only. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Maybe Major has heard of you. Maybe you are a kind of ghetto legend, like Connie Hawkins was on the New York playgrounds, say, for different reasons…�
�
“Who’s Connie Hawkins?” Jackie said.
“Basketball player,” Hawk said. He kept his eyes on me. “Yeah?”
“So maybe Major wants to learn,” I said. Hawk nodded slowly and kept nodding.
“Learn how to handle trouble?” Jackie said.
“How a man behaves,” Hawk said. He kept nodding. “That’s why they haven’t just done a driveby and sprayed us.”
“Which is not to say they won’t,” I said.
“But if he want to learn, he will escalate slow,” Hawk said.
“And observe, and if it goes right for him, maybe he can win over his father.”
“Father?” Jackie said.
Hawk grinned again. “Spenser got a shrink for a girlfriend,” he said. “Sometimes he get a little fancy.”
“I try not to use any big words, though. I respect your limitations.”
“Limitations?” Hawk said. “I got no limitations. Why you think I’m a ghetto legend?”
“Beats me,” I said.
CHAPTER 14
“So what’s she like?” Susan said. We were having a supper, which I’d cooked, and sipping some Sonoma Riesling, in the kitchen of what Susan now insisted on calling “our house.”
“Well, she’s brave as hell,” I said. “When the guns came out this morning, she hit the pavement facedown, but she kept her tape recorder going.”
Susan moved some of her chicken cutlet about in the wine lemon sauce I had made.
“Smart?”
“I think so,” I said. “She asks a lot of questions-but that is, after all, her job.”
Susan cut a becomingly modest triangle of chicken, speared it with her fork, raised it to her lips, and bit off half of it. Pearl sat quietly with her head on Susan’s thigh, her eyes fixed poignantly on the supper. Susan put the fork down and Pearl took the remaining bite quite delicately.
“There are dogs,” I said, “who eat Gaines Meal from a bowl on the floor.”
“There are dogs who are not treated properly,” Susan said. “Is she attractive?”
“Jackie? Yeah, she’s stunning.”
“Is she the most stunning woman you know?” Susan said. She put her fork down and picked up her napkin from her lap. She patted her lips with it, put it back, picked up her wineglass, and drank some wine.
“She is not,” I said, “as stunning as you are.”
“You’re sure?”
“No one is as stunning as you are,” I said.
She smiled and sipped more of her wine.
“Thank you,” she said.
I had cooked some buckwheat noodles to go with the chicken, and some broccoli, and some whole-wheat biscuits. We both attended to that, for a bit, while Pearl inspected every movement.
“Am I as stunning as Hawk?” I said.
Susan gazed at me for a moment without any expression.
“Of course not,” she said and returned to her food.
I waited. I knew she couldn’t hold it. In a moment her shoulders started to shake and finally she giggled audibly. She raised her head, giggling, and I could see the way her eyes tightened at the corners as they always did when she was really pleased.
“You don’t meet that many shrinks that giggle,” I said.
“Or have reason to,” Susan said as her giggling became sporadic. “What’s for dessert?”
“I could tear off your clothes and force myself upon you,” I said.
“We had that last night,” Susan said. “Why can’t we have desserts like other people-you know, Jell-O Pudding, maybe some Yankee Doodles?”
“You wouldn’t say that if I was as stunning as Hawk,” I said.
“True,” Susan said. “Do you think he’s serious about her?”
“What is Hawk serious about?” I said. “I’ve never known him before to bring a woman along when we were working.”
“Well, is she serious about him?”
“She acts it. She touches him a lot. She looks at him a lot. She listens when he speaks.”
“That doesn’t mean eternal devotion,” Susan said.
“No, some women treat every guy like that,” I said. “Early conditioning, I suppose. But Jackie doesn’t seem like one of them. I’d say she’s interested.”
“And he’s taking on this gang for her,” Susan said.
“Yeah, but that may be less significant than it seems,” I said. “Hawk does things sometimes because he feels like doing them. There aren’t always reasons, at least reasons that you and I would understand, for what he does.”
“I agree that I wouldn’t always understand them,” Susan said. “I’m not so sure you wouldn’t.”
I shrugged.
“Whatever,” I said. “He may have decided to do this just to see how it would work out.”
Susan held her glass up and looked at the last of the sunset glowing through it from her west-facing kitchen windows.
“I would not wish to be in love with Hawk,” Susan said.
“You’re in love with me,” I said.
“That’s bad enough,” she said.
CHAPTER 15
Hawk parked the Jag parallel to Hobart Street in the middle of the project. It was a great April day and we got out of the car and leaned on the side of it away from the street. Jackie and her magic tape recorder were there, listening to the silence of the project. “How come in books and movies the ghetto is always teeming with life: dogs barking, children crying, women shouting, radios playing, that sort of thing? And I come to a real ghetto, with two actual black people, and I can hear my hair growing?”
“Things are not always what they seem,” Hawk said. He was as relaxed as he always was, arms folded on the roof of the car. But I knew he saw everything. He always did.
“Oh,” I said.
“This is the first ghetto I’ve ever been to,” Jackie said. “I grew up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. My father is an architect. I thought it would be like that too.”
“Mostly in a place like this,” Hawk said, “people can’t afford dogs and radios. You can afford those, you can afford to get out. Here it’s just people got no money and no power, and what kids they got they keep inside to protect them. People here don’t want to attract attention. Somebody know you got a radio, they steal it. People want to be invisible. This place belongs to the Hobart Street Gang. They the only ones with radios. The only ones noisy.”
“And we’ve quieted them down,” I said.
“For the moment,” Hawk said.
Jackie was standing between Hawk and me. She was leaning her shoulder slightly against Hawk’s.
“Did you grow up in a place like this, Hawk?”
Hawk smiled.
A faded powder blue Chevy van pulled around the corner of Hobart Street and cruised slowly past us. Its sides were covered with graffiti. Hawk watched it silently as it drove past. It didn’t slow and no one paid us any attention. It turned right at McCrory Street and disappeared.
“You think that was a gang car?” Jackie said.
“Some gang,” Hawk said.
“Hobart?” Hawk shrugged.
“So how do you know it’s a gang van?” Jackie said.
“Nobody else would have one,” Hawk said.
“Because they couldn’t afford it?”
Hawk nodded. He was looking at the courtyard.
“Gang would probably take it away from anyone who wasn’t a member,” I said.
Jackie looked at Hawk. “Is that right?” she said. Hawk nodded.
“You can usually trust what he say,” Hawk said. “He’s not as dumb as most white folks.”
“Does this mean we’re going steady?” I said to Hawk.
He grinned, his eyes still watching the silent empty place. Cars passed occasionally on Hobart Street, but not very many. The sun was strong for this early in spring, and there were some pleasant white clouds here and there making the sky look bluer than it probably was. To the north I could see the big insurance towers in the Back Bay. The glass Ha
ncock tower gleamed like the promise of Easter; the sun and sky reflecting.
“Well, did you?” Jackie said.
“Don’t matter,” Hawk said.
Jackie looked at me.
“I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming,” I said.
“And do you know where he grew up?” Jackie said.
“No.”
Jackie took in a long slow breath and let it out. She shook her head slightly.
“God,” she said. “Men.”
“Can’t live with them,” I said. “Can’t live without them.”
Across the empty blacktop courtyard, out from between two buildings, Major Johnson sauntered as if he were walking into a room full of mirrors. He was in the full Adidas today, hightops, and a black warm-up suit, jacket half zipped over his flat bare chest. He wore his Raiders hat carefully askew, with the bill pointing off toward about 4 A.M. He was alone.
Hawk began to whistle through his teeth, softly to himself, the theme from High Noon. Between us, I could feel Jackie stiffen.
“How you all doing today?” Major said when he reached the car. He stood on the opposite side and rested his forearms on the roof as Hawk was doing. He was shorter than Hawk, and the position looked less comfortable.
Hawk had no reaction. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at Major. He didn’t look away. It was as if there were no Major. Major shifted his gaze to me. He was the first person who’d looked at me since I’d come to Double Deuce.
“How you doing, Irish?”
“How’s he know I’m Irish?” I said to Hawk.
“You white,” Hawk said.
“You call all white people Irish?” Jackie said. She had placed her tape recorder on the car roof.
“We gon be on TV?” Major said, looking at the tape recorder.
“Maybe,” Jackie said. “Right now I’m just doing research.”
“Goddamn,” Major said. “I sure pretty enough to be on TV.”
He turned his head in profile.
“You want to know ‘bout my sad life?” he said.
“Anything you’d care to tell me,” Jackie said.
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