by Jeff Hobbs
Jackie nodded her head and said, “Yeah, yeah, I know you’re right.” She hadn’t really been serious about retiring this year but had nurtured the idea as a pleasant fantasy. She’d been working at the nursing home for fifteen years. The recession had hit the company hard, and she’d taken a pay cut, but she was still making over $30,000 a year supervising the kitchen, and her pension and benefits would remain intact. The $237 extra per month would make a difference in the long run.
Her son made sense with numbers. He always had. And now he was thirty years old, taking her through the tiers of retirement benefits. She wished that these calculations hadn’t always been so challenging, not in terms of the math but its implications. She knew that he wished the same thing. But she didn’t fix any anger, as her son did, to that wish. She’d entertained many such wishes during the course of her life and had long since accepted the reality that very few of them would come true. She’d wished that Skeet had been innocent. She’d wished for jackpots with each crank of an Atlantic City slot machine. She’d wished that her boss would slip and fall and hit his head hard enough that he would suddenly become kind. She’d wished that her mother would be able to pass on without further suffering. She’d wished that her son would be able to make his way in the world easily, successfully, and happily. When she’d been thirty, she hadn’t yet given birth to him; in retrospect, her life hadn’t even begun, because Rob would ultimately become her life. He was still more or less a child. He had time. But she couldn’t explain this brand of time to him. She wasn’t good with words that way.
By the middle of May, any danger Rob felt himself to be in seemed, at least to his friends, to have subsided. He spent one night at Tamba’s house, a DJ friend of his who lived around the corner from Smith Street, playing spades until four in the morning. He told Flowy that he’d talked to someone, a Blood, and it was all on the up-and-up again. Kamar hadn’t been seen or heard from in over a week. “Bitch left town, no doubt, now that I outed his lyin’ ass.” He filled the void left by Kamar himself, spending most nights driving around, selling dimes, music blaring and the window down as his car worked the freeways and bridges and tunnels surrounding New York City. He texted with Lisa Wingo incessantly.
Lisa: u don’t visit a sister?
Peace: gotta lay low
Lisa: what u been doing?
Peace: Rippin n runnin
Lisa: b careful
Peace: always
Peace: oh and I started watching glee yesterday
Peace: Don’t tell anyone
Lisa: =))
Lisa: N u luuuuuuv it
Peace: More than I thought possible
Peace: Shhhhhhh.....
Lisa: See??? Told ya
Peace: Just watched the episode where they did ceelo song forget u
Lisa: Hahahahahaha
Peace: I know. This is our lil secret though, right?????
Lisa: Who da hell am I gonna tell??!?
Peace: Just making sure
Lisa: Imma blast u on facebook!!!!!!!
Lisa: Just like a man......u like glee, but don’t wanna admit it. Puuuuunk
Peace: U so mean
He wore the Kevlar vest whenever he was in his car, night and day, but he kept the gun buried in the spare tire compartment of the trunk or else in a ground-floor closet at Smith Street, an afterthought, or maybe a reminder, but nothing more.
“I just can’t believe I know someone with a gun in his car,” Raquel told him. He had stopped by to give her weed so she could make brownies, which he called Dem Shits. “Who the fuck does that?”
He shook his head and smiled. “It’ll be done with soon enough.” He gave her a hug and told her to give one to Felix for him when the boy woke the next morning. Then he left. From the window, she watched his shadow cross 119th Street and get in his car and head west toward First Avenue. She imagined him driving over the gorgeously lit George Washington Bridge, alone, with that sober expression on his face that being stoned could no longer mask.
On Thursday, May 12, he took Lisa Wingo and her daughter to Red Lobster for dinner. She gave him a hard time for ordering a pineapple cocktail complete with an umbrella skewering a stack of fruit slices. She argued over the check but ultimately let him pay. His happiness was always the most genuine when he was taking care of her in some mannish way such as this: paying a bill, lifting a heavy box, bringing food to the apartment. They joked sometimes about an alternate world in which they were husband and wife. “You’re too pretty for me,” he said, “my little Oompa Loompa.” After dinner, she asked him where he was going.
“Get some ass.”
“Who with?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Well, have fun.”
“If she’s already asleep when I get there, I’ll kill her. I ain’t paying no twelve-dollar tolls just to go to bed.”
Rene was asleep, but he woke her, and they made love, and afterward he talked once again, in that deep refrain, about providing for her someday. She let him talk. His voice was a pleasing sound by which to drift off to sleep, a white noise.
THAT WEEKEND, the Burger Boyz had a cookout in the backyard on Smith Street. Friends came in and out down the side alley between houses. In fold-out chairs along the fence, men and women passed a joint back and forth. Music played, old-school songs like “Ruff Ryders Anthem” by Jay-Z and “Put It on Me” by Ja Rule. Lisa came, her mousy voice rising high above the men’s low tones. Flowy held court, his long arms waving loops above his tall, narrow frame as he talked. Curtis showed off the watermelon vines he’d planted in his garden this year, the tiny buds that in a few months would be monstrous and succulent. Christopher scurried around at waist height until his bedtime, at which point Tavarus and Darlene both took him upstairs to read books.
Rob was in a quiet mood. He worked the grill for hours, slow-roasting his Brazilian pork with a spatula in one hand and a drink in the other. His face lit brightly whenever the rendered fat caused a flare-up out of the charcoal bed; his eyes were angled down into the flames as he carefully scooted the meat toward the edges of the grill. A friend from Mt. Carmel Elementary, Demien, taught karate classes at a local dojo, and Rob had been training with him recently—intense, battering workouts that taught him a specific set of combat moves that leveraged an opponent’s power against him. Rob asked Demien how he could live on the minuscule salary he made there. “I don’t know.” Demien shrugged. “I can pay rent, eat. That’s good enough with how much I love what I do.”
The night felt happy and old—a return to form no different from the hundreds that had occurred over the years since high school, but also a foreshadowing of times to come.
Tavarus returned to the yard from Christopher’s room upstairs. He was drunk and talking loudly about the latest long-term idea he and Rob had conceived. They wanted to establish a kind of training college, in which students would come straight out of high school and learn practical skills like how to interview and dress and work for a corporation. The curriculum would be tiered over three years. The first year would be purely classroom lessons, taught by local business owners. The second year would involve an intensive internship in one’s chosen field. The third year would segue into an actual job, with a certain percentage of salary set aside to pay for the full tuition on the back end. Tavarus spoke in big terms about how necessary such an institution would be in this neighborhood, how meaningless the traditional secondary education ultimately was to people like him: loading up on debt in order to study liberal arts with no practical value.
“You talk too much,” Rob called from the grill. “This isn’t even an idea yet. This is, like, the far future, like, decades away. And who knows what the educational system’s gonna look like then. Chill.”
On Monday, May 16, Rob showed up at Sherman Feerick’s house in Bloomfield. Sherman was a former classmate from Yale, a staple at the Weed Shack.
They’d remained good friends over the years, though Sherman did not overlap much with Rob’s other friends. He had a seven-year-old daughter and was active in Newark’s business sector as a consultant. He was constantly talking on one of his three cell phones, filling the atmosphere around him with business-speak that Rob didn’t understand. He had worked off and on as a liaison between the mayor’s office and the gang entities of the North Ward, though a murder on the street outside his office in Vailsburg, in the middle of the day when he’d brought his daughter to work, had caused him to rethink his capacity to bring any form of progress to these neighborhoods. He was thinking about moving to Orange County in California to give his little girl a healthier life. In the meantime, his latest venture was a summer camp for at-risk children.
For all Sherman’s goings-on, his home was small and barely furnished. Rob sat at the kitchen table, uncharacteristically quiet as he stared down at the nicked wooden surface. He didn’t take off his leather jacket.
“I need some work,” he said.
“Okay,” Sherman replied. He was confused; Rob had never asked him for anything in over a decade of knowing each other.
“I was thinking I could be, like, a counselor at your camp or whatever.”
“You’d be great at that,” Sherman said.
“So, you got any openings?”
Sherman shook his head. He didn’t have the money to pay any actual wages. “Our fund-raiser is in June, I’m putting it together right now. After that, yeah, I’ll probably be able to make a spot for you if you can hold out till then.”
Rob breathed out and nodded. Sherman felt for him, knowing how hard it had been to come here and ask for a job, wishing he had a job to give. He was also flummoxed by the defeated, desperate expression on his friend’s face. Too much time had passed, too many opportunities had come and gone, for Rob Peace to still not have his life figured out. Sherman experienced something close to pity as his old friend left. If Rob had come even a few months earlier, Sherman probably could have figured something out for him. He had the contacts to do so. They were close enough that Rob shouldn’t have needed to wait until the last possible moment to ask. He had never understood why Rob had found so much shame in asking.
Two days later, on Wednesday, Rob woke up late after a long night working in the basement. He picked up Christopher from school and brought him back to Smith Street, where he hung out with the boy for two hours in the backyard. When Darlene came home, Rob took a Tupperware container with the leftover pork to Chapman Street. Jackie was working, so he left it in the refrigerator with a note that read, Ma—Bon apetit. Love, Shawn. That evening he texted some friends and watched TV with Curtis, the two men sprawled on the sofa like college kids in a dorm room. Tavarus was upstairs with his family. Rob was in an upbeat mood, as if beginning to see through to the other side of this task he’d undertaken. After a time, they moved to the kitchen to cook dinner. Curtis washed sweet peppers from his garden in the sink. Before he finished the stir-fry he was preparing, Rob stood up, arched his back severely with his hands locked behind him, and let all those bones pop.
“Hang out and eat,” Curtis said. “Then go to bed. You haven’t slept in, like, a week.”
“I’ll hang out later. Gotta do some work downstairs first.”
“Come on, just take a break.”
“Just want this all done,” Rob mumbled, leaving the kitchen through the rear door, turning left down the stairs.
Then they heard the car pull up in the driveway.
Chapter 16
FROM HIS ANGLE in the kitchen, Curtis couldn’t see what happened in the rear stairwell. He heard Rob open the back door on the landing half a level below the kitchen and above the laundry room, to see who had pulled up. Rob muttered, “Ah, shit!” and began to close the door, then froze with the door half open. It must have been too late. In the days following, when Curtis gave his account to the police, he would guess that at this point, not three seconds after his final exchange with Rob about eating and sleeping, someone outside already had a gun trained on his best friend.
The door swung open, and Rob was saying, “Chill, chill, chill . . . ,” as the footsteps of at least two, possibly three, men seemed to back or prod him down the stairs toward the basement. Curtis didn’t try to get a clear look into the stairwell, because he was running toward the front of the house, his diaphragm pressing up against his lungs such that breathing became difficult. Already, he heard yelling in the basement, though he could not make out the words. The men who had invaded his home wanted something, and Curtis did not need to be thinking coherently—which he was not—to discern what that was. Because they had pushed Rob immediately downstairs without even checking the rest of the house, they must have known where Rob did his work, which meant they had talked to someone with knowledge of both the money and the drugs.
Curtis reached the front door, his plan at this point simply to start yelling outside as loud as he could, draw some bodies out of the neighboring houses and onto the street. During any time of year, during any time of day or night, a street was always safer when people were on it. If neighbors congregated outside wondering what the hell was going on, these men would hear that, and they would leave the way they’d come in. If Curtis was lucky, he wouldn’t even have to call the police.
Curtis was not lucky. Before he opened the front door he saw a man—or possibly a teenager—standing watch directly outside, wearing a hoodie and leaning against the wall at the bottom of the front steps so that he could cover the stoop, the sidewalk, and the front basement door simultaneously. His hand was buried allusively in his pocket. His face was hidden.
The basement had been largely cleared since that initial procurement of their stash. The marijuana was hidden in a trunk wedged back on one of the metal storage shelves. The hydroponic planters had been dismantled, as Rob had dried enough plant matter to see him through the remaining poundage of Sour Diesel. Money was down there, maybe a few thousand dollars.
The men had been inside the house for maybe twenty seconds at this point, and they were still yelling—the kind of yelling that indicated something important was at stake, yelling that negated the value of human life. Curtis couldn’t pick out Rob’s voice, which was alarming, because Rob’s voice was so distinctive and it was unlike him to not be taking control of a situation, calming people down, as he’d done with Boobie a few years ago on the sidewalk where the watchman now stood. Talking was Rob’s talent.
Curtis moved backward, away from the front door and its guard, toward a storage closet in the hallway. As he did so, his mind cycled through the possible circumstances in play downstairs. They could have been some of Rob’s buyers desperate enough to risk ripping them off. They could have been involved with a threatened local dealer, here to make a statement. They could have been Amin’s people responding to rumors. They could have had something to do with Kamar and his recent associations with the Double II Set Bloods. They could have been anyone, really, any of the dozens of people, both local and farther flung, with whom Rob worked now or had in the past, people who Rob had confidently assured the Burger Boyz they would never know anything about. Curtis thought—here, now—of how vastly compartmentalized his best friend’s life was, how even with all the hundreds and hundreds of nights he’d spent in this house, he’d spent just as many nights out there in places unknown. For the most part until recently, Rob’s shadiness and mysteriousness regarding his conduct outside the realm of 34 Smith Street had been a source of amusement: he was always acting as if he were living a hustler’s life, when most likely he’d been home on Chapman Street watching sitcoms with Frances and Jackie, or at some woman’s house helping her kid study math, or getting laid in Brooklyn. All of his cumulative dour expressions and weighty sighs and murmured phone calls taken in the other room had always struck them to some extent as being staged by a guy who, hard as he presented himself to be, was just a mama’s boy Yalie at hea
rt. They’d always let him play the role, as most people in his life had, believing it to be for the most part simply that: a role. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t dangerous. It wasn’t uncontrollable. It was just marijuana. It was just Rob Peace.
Maybe thirty seconds had passed since the break-in. Curtis was pulling the gun from the closet, the gun Rob had been carrying around town lately. Except for visits to the firing range with Rob and a few other friends, he had no experience with guns. He checked the chamber, which was loaded, and he moved back toward the rear stairway. He cocked the gun, unaware that this motion was unnecessary when a round was already chambered. He heard Rob’s voice now, his tone defensive and deflecting and scared, and then Rob stopped speaking abruptly, too abruptly.
Curtis descended the stairs slowly, first to the landing by the back door, then down the last flight into the laundry room. He squatted behind the wooden railing for cover. On the far side of this area, about eight feet away, a very tall, robust black man filled the entire doorway of the basement, facing away from Curtis and into the room. He was wearing a ski mask and holding a gun at his side.
The majority of men figure that, when put in a situation where life hangs in the balance—both your own and that of those you care about—some dormant, primal instinct will activate, and you will be strong and decisive and precise and intelligent with every movement. In this moment, Curtis learned that such an instinct did not exist, or at least not in him. His weapon quavered, as did his voice when he called out to Rob to ask if he was all right.
The man in the doorway turned but didn’t seem particularly startled. They exchanged charged words from either end of the laundry room. Curtis wouldn’t remember exactly what had been said, only that he’d alternated a few times between ordering the intruders out of his house and pleading for Rob to say something, just one word, to let Curtis know he was okay. But behind the blocked door, Rob remained silent, which signaled that at least one more man was in the basement, most likely with a gun aimed at him.