The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  He would call her on a Friday evening, just off his shift at the airport, and say, “I’m thinking of rolling by—you around to chill?” Three or four hours later, after walking off a flight, he’d show up at her door and, once she let him in, head straight to her couch, sinking in deep, with a protracted exhale. They spent a lot of time in silence, each enjoying the proximity of the other. His dreadlocks fell a quarter of the way down his back now, and they would compare the density of the hair, the consistency of the braids. Sometimes they would drive to South Beach for a party, or simply to sit in the sand and watch the light from all the beachfront hotel towers play off the dark water. The visual reminded him of Rio, which he spoke of all the time: his friends down there, the attitudes, the career opportunities he would have if he were to make a permanent move. When Ina had met him, he’d been a teacher recently graduated from Yale. Now that his résumé seemed less compatible, Ina had been prepared for him to become something of a basket case, a lost and angry soul burdened by his upbringing and quick to blame it for any and all problems he had. She knew plenty of tiresome guys like that in the barrios of Dade County, and she wasn’t eager to import another one from Newark. But the man she came to know intimately didn’t meet this expectation. He talked about those aspects of his life—the poverty, the single parent, the dangers and influences of the streets—but he did so casually, laughing often along the way. These elements of his youth were certainly a part of him, but as a birthmark rather than a scar. To her, he just seemed like a good guy who was trying to figure it all out and having a little trouble along the way; he seemed thoughtful, confident, and above all hopeful. Ina had her own struggles with having grown up poor and surrounded by people who seemed intent on remaining that way, and when Rob spoke about where they were now and where they could be in the future, some of his optimism seemed to waft out of him along with the streams of marijuana smoke, and then drift gently downward onto her.

  “You’re cool, girl,” he said, lying beside her, no Thug Love present in this moment.

  She inhaled his scent and replied in kind, thinking about a life with this man. He’d spoken about graduate school and various academic career paths—spoken around them, mostly. “Teaching’s easy for me,” he said, “because I just know the shit.” She visualized him giving a lecture in front of a college auditorium filled with rapt twenty-year-old science nerds. Often, the image would make her laugh gently, and Rob would say, “What the fuck?” and she would reply, “Nothing, nothing.” The life he had in store seemed to her a good one, and she hoped to be a part of it.

  And yet, as they became more intimate, he gradually became more elusive. He’d say he was boarding a plane and then fail to show up. He wouldn’t return her calls, sometimes for weeks. By the winter of 2008, he was spending more time in Miami than ever but seeing less of her. The situation did not lead to the fierce confrontations to which Rob was accustomed, and which he at times seemed intent on baiting from her. Though “Aunt” Ina was twenty-nine years old, she was mature; her maturity was what had drawn him to her, the way her attitude transcended her age, and she could smoke weed and party but still seem to float above the life-stalling whimsy that marked most days. She and Rob had talked hypothetically about being together, how easy that would be. But they’d made no promises, and she refused to become possessive. Her concern for him trumped any ownership she was inclined to feel, and she had enough experience to know that voicing concern to a man like Rob invited nothing but anger in return.

  Rob had his own friends in Miami now. Some of them she knew, some she knew of, some she didn’t want to know. They were hustlers of the particular variety bred in Miami, where marine passageways to Cuba and Mexico made the business as cold-blooded and fraught—and opportunistic—as anywhere else in the country. She’d grown up directly adjacent to this commerce. Simply by virtue of geography she’d known men who had turned up savagely gutted in hotel rooms and Everglades swamps. She knew other men, some of them related to her by blood, serving long prison sentences. In a city like Miami, where that brand of easy money was always so tantalizingly close, the obstacles to living an honest life were hard to overcome. Ina had not been above dealing marijuana herself from time to time, in a courier capacity, which was basically what Rob became that winter: a courier of bulk marijuana, using his flight privileges the way locals used cars.

  The transits usually began with a trip to Overtown or Liberty City, where weed was plentiful and so, according to the laws of economics, cheap. He’d pick up two tightly wrapped cellophane cylinders of weed, no more than a pound each. These he would surround with a layer of lavender and other pungent herbs, also tightly wrapped, and then bind them in gift-wrapping paper, complete with a bow that he would coil prettily with the swipe of a scissors blade. He would stuff these parcels into his high-top Timberland boots, the same style as those he’d worn at Mt. Carmel and made illegal at St. Benedict’s, and plug them with wads of dirty socks. At the airport, where he’d acquainted himself with many of the security workers through his frequent trips, he would make sure he was traveling during a friend’s shift at the scanner station (because he flew standby, he could time his flights freely). He would chat these people up on his way through and complain about how he had to cut his trip short because of some bullshit at Newark International—bitching about airline bureaucracy being everyone’s favorite topic. And he would pass through and board his plane. In Newark, he’d drop off the packages with one of his old connects and pocket the difference, typically in the range of $500 for the two pounds and maybe two hours of actual “work.” The risks had never been higher, now that they included the FAA and DEA. He assumed these risks casually.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ina asked, watching him wrap the drugs in green and gold wrapping paper dotted with pictures of streamers and pointed hats.

  “Gotta get my money right,” was all he said, and he smiled at her, and the smile was dangerous, unconcerned and affable, the kind of smile that had landed ex-boyfriends of hers in jail.

  “Explain to me how this is worth it.”

  “Let’s just not talk about ‘worth it.’ Okay?”

  She knew about Jackie, about Frances, even about his father. Indeed, she’d spent a night drinking with Rob in Newark the day after Skeet’s funeral and had been indelibly touched by his grace in the wake of tragedy. She didn’t bother bringing them up, inviting him to justify his actions with the mathematics of his family. She already knew how skilled he was at performing this equation. Like most people in his orbit, she had never won a debate with him. She had her own baggage that she’d been dealing with for years and that Rob had helped her deal with through dozens of hours of talk. What she knew, and what she couldn’t believe Rob didn’t know, was that problems such as theirs, problems that traced back generations and involved far more than money (though money was often their emblem), would never be solved with $500 every two weeks.

  But Rob, whom she loved, had a plan. He always had a plan—a plan for the day, a plan for the year, a plan for his life. He rendered these plans simply, using ground-level details, and he tied his decisions to them tightly. When he talked through the path he planned to take from this moment to graduate school, with the flailing real estate market in between, his plans almost—almost—made sense. But the risks he took for the profit he made, from a big-picture standpoint, seemed only obliquely related to those plans. And Ina gradually understood that Rob didn’t seem capable of seeing the big picture, the way he had when they’d first met. He trafficked almost exclusively in the day-to-day: this shift at work, this flight, this city, this transaction, this chunk of money. No matter how skillfully he was able to string these moments together and stretch them into future years, he nevertheless struck her as inextricably lodged within the minute in which he was living.

  And never more so than when he asked for her help in a new venture, which involved guns.

  DARLENE, TAVARUS’S GIRLFRIEND,
unwrapped Rob’s gift for their son’s second birthday in March 2008. Christopher was light skinned and thick haired and wiry like his dad. Rob, who had been named Christopher’s godfather, gave him a full-size dirt bike.

  Tavarus laughed. “It’s a little big for the little man.”

  “He’ll grow into it. Do you know how many hours it took me to put that thing together?”

  “Thank you,” said Darlene, and she made a little show of propping the boy up on the bike seat, his feet dangling six inches above the pedals.

  They were in the backyard of 34 Smith Street. Rob had three seasoned pork loins roasting on the grill at low heat, his specialty, a dish he’d brought home from Rio. A tall clear plastic tank of vodka punch perched on the fold-out table beside the grill, to which Rob had helped himself many times. About two dozen people were milling around the driveway, beside the vegetable garden Curtis planted each year, wishing Christopher a “happy born day.” Neighbors popped in and out, young teenagers who had been not much older than Christopher when the Burger Boyz had first begun congregating here to study and hang out. Then, these kids had been little energy bundles running away from their mothers down the street, laughing gleefully while the women sprinted after them shouting, “Get back here right now—you don’t DO this to your mama!” Now they were almost young men, wearing ribbed tank tops and skullies and tripped-out footwear. Some of them dressed in red, the color of the Double II Sets. Too, there were the elderly ladies who’d watched Rob play street football behind their fans; they seemed not to have aged at all in the past fifteen years. Music blared: Young Jeezy and 2 Chainz and Drake. “Fuckin’ songs,” one of the children called them, due to the explicit lyrics, prompting laughter all around. “Fuckin’ is not nice.”

  Everyone was happy to have Rob there, because he often missed events like these, the celebrations that marked the passage of time. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three weeks straight, telling no one where he was going, and the lives of his friends would adjust to his absence, reducing him to the occasional, “I wonder what he’s doing right now?” and the invariable response, which fell along the lines of, “Getting head on a beach somewhere while smoking a big fat blunt, no doubt.” Then he would suddenly reappear, walking in the front door of Smith Street and heading straight for the Smirnoff on top of the refrigerator. He’d make himself a drink, sit, and launch back into the last conversation he’d had before he’d taken off, about music or the neighborhood or a girl. He’d been to Seoul, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Croatia, and places they couldn’t remember. He was always at his most peaceful before leaving on one of these sojourns, always at his most restless and uneasy upon his return. He’d put off graduate school applications for another year and now was talking about the fall of 2009 as a start date. Real estate remained his go-to topic when talk turned to the future, but very few of his travels had anything to do with Peace ­Realty. No one understood why he was screwing things up with Ina; she had visited more than once, partied here on Smith Street, and was the coolest girl Rob had ever met.

  A month after Christopher’s birthday party, Rob woke up naked in a one-room corrugated aluminum lean-to high in one of Rio’s favelas. His wallet and clothes were gone. He had no memory of the night before; it had begun with a woman, and his recollection ended with hopping on a bus with her. His head ached, but he thought clearly enough to check his abdomen for sutures to make sure his kidneys were where they should be; black market organ transplants were big business in Brazil. He found clothes and made his way down the maze of narrow alleyways to the city proper, thankful that he hadn’t been carrying his passport that night. It was April. He would turn twenty-eight in two months.

  When he came home a few days later, having cut his trip short, he said to Jackie, “Ma, I am going to get it right, I am going to take care of you.”

  To her, these words seemed like a plea more than a promise, and to himself more than to her.

  “I don’t need you to,” she replied. “I never have. Don’t you go worrying about me. Take care of yourself. I just want you happy foremost, and I want you around if it works that way. I want you settled.”

  Jackie was fine. She supervised the kitchen now. She had her own office at the nursing home. She was off her feet. She had TV shows she liked to watch in the evenings. She had a pension and was set to retire in three or four years. After that, she had her own plans, just like her son: she wanted to travel and see for herself a couple of the places Rob was always going on about. She was confused by all this talk of buying her a house. She’d lived at 181 Chapman Street for almost fifty years. She’d been poor for the same amount of time. That was the life she knew, and she was more or less content with it. She didn’t understand how her strong, bright boy could bring himself such discouragement trying to change what she had; she didn’t understand why he couldn’t hear her on the rare instances she’d tried to explain it to him.

  Jackie hadn’t been present at the Unknown Sons meeting when Rob had told a student that he couldn’t worry about fixing other people, he could only worry about himself. If she had been, maybe she would have repeated those words to him now.

  “Go back to school,” was all she could say, in her soft, understated manner. “That’s what I want to see. That’s where you’ve always done your best.”

  Chapter 13

  I CAN SELL ANYTHING.”

  Rob’s face was low to the wooden table, across from Hrvoje. His eyes projected a rare intensity, as he considered his visits to Pula, Croatia, some of the most relaxing weeks of his life. They’d spent most of the day on Hrvoje’s father’s small skiff, just cruising along the rocky coast of the Istrian peninsula. Tall, jagged stone cliff faces dropped into the aquamarine water and cast dramatic shadows beneath them. The temperature was in the mid-70s, and the clouds were wispy and dissipating. Hrvoje steered while Rob, wearing shorts, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops, rode in the bow, leaning forward like a kid trying to get ahead of the craft, his loosely bound dreadlocks fanning across his upper back. Hrvoje had grown up here, where the beauty of his coastal hometown belied the violence surging across the rest of his country as well as the collapse of its currency, the combination of which had impelled his relocation to Newark. He’d motored past these cliffs hundreds of times; their majesty had not dulled, and there was something vital in watching Rob Peace watch the scenery, drinking it through his eyes like an elixir, the muscles of his arms and back gradually loosening, his expression serene.

  Tonight, at an old-fashioned bar near the city center, his expression was very different: ominous and astray.

  Hrvoje knew about the drugs; he always had. But Rob was talking about something else, something Hrvoje had a feeling he didn’t want to know about. He’d simply asked what Rob’s next step was, assuming he wasn’t going to work on the tarmac for the rest of his life. He’d expected more murmured, probably empty talk of graduate school. The place Rob went to, the sinister energy in his eyes, caught Hrvoje off guard. Since their first interaction talking about prog rock, he had rarely felt uncomfortable around his friend.

  He said, “Rob, what are you doing?”

  “Just some movements going on, to get me to the next thing.”

  “No,” Hrvoje replied. “I don’t want to know about it. I’m saying, you don’t have to do any of this stuff. Don’t you get that?”

  Rob smiled and shook his head. He leaned back, drank from his beer stein, and reverted to his usual, disarming self. “Anyway . . .”

  Hrvoje lived with his wife, Marina, in an apartment in Union, about forty-five minutes west of East Orange. He was ambivalent about living in New Jersey and pined for his home country, but he had a good job with a Croat-based shipping company that sent him home often enough. Every now and then as the years went by, he would trek to the hood to hang out with the Burger Boyz on Smith Street. He knew that even driving the half mile back to the I-280 after midnight was not smart, but h
e also knew from experience how to sustain the right kind of awareness. Seeing old friends and laughing about high school was worth the risk. More often, Rob would visit him in Union, always seeming glad to get out of his neighborhood for a night. He’d sit at their kitchen table with Marina and drink grappa and ask about their homeland before ultimately passing out on their couch. From these many nights had sprung the idea of tagging along on one of Hrvoje’s trips home.

  Unlike the ethnic buffet of Rio, Croatia didn’t have a minority population to speak of. Rob could go entire trips without encountering anyone of color. Partly because of that, he became something of a celebrity in Pula, a town of sixty thousand complete with ancient stadium ruins in its center. The culture was embedded in every natural and architectural surface, and when residents saw a person like Rob Peace wandering around aimlessly, they didn’t want to call the police—they wanted to talk to him, share their stories, hear his. To him, the place had no negativity, no fear or suspicion or territoriality, and hardly any crime. People were generally happy and curious and self-sufficient. Considering the recent history of the country, Rob was in awe of the energy that characterized Pula, the absence of hostility.

  The draw heightened when he met Lana Kasun. She was just shy of six feet tall, with a perfect angular face, tan skin, and sun-streaked blond hair. She was Marina’s cousin, a fashion model in Croatia, and also, soon enough, what could be loosely termed as Rob’s girlfriend. Days with her were easy, because of the slight language barrier, and because she was an independent spirit, free from the manic, possessive qualities he saw in so many women back home. She treated the world, and Rob, in a spritely way, day-to-day-centric, and with minimal knowledge of where he came from for these visits. In heels, she towered over him, and at the taverns she would do little pirouettes and then fall into his lap with her long, languid arms laced around his neck. Nobody had ever been able to drink Rob under the table, but Lana could at least keep up.