“I do not—”
“Just watch, Ho. You see what the card man’s doing?”
“Yes,” I said. “He holds the cards with his thumb so the throwing motion he makes does not dislodge the card he picked up just before.”
“Like in slow motion?”
“I do not—”
“Slow motion for you, bro. Keep watching.”
As the crowd began to thin, Lamont shoved me forward, pressing a bill into my hand. I looked down, and saw it was five dollars. I held it up.
“You want to play, Pops?” the man behind the milk carton asked.
“Please.”
“Very easy. You see the beautiful queen?” he asked, holding it up in front of me.
“Yes.”
“All right, now. You just watch me move her around, okay? When I stop, you put your money over her. You find her, you double your money, understand?”
“Yes,” I said, again.
The man’s hands flashed. As they moved, I instantly understood what Lamont had meant by slow motion.
I placed the bill over the queen.
The man gave me a cold, appraising look. Then he turned over the card.
“Pops is a winner!” he said, loudly.
I held out my hand for the money I was expecting.
“Hey, come on, Pops. You don’t want to walk off a winning streak; that’s bad karma, Charlie Chan. Double or nothing?”
“Very well,” I said.
Again, he switched the cards, moving slightly more quickly, although no less transparently.
As he pocketed the bill Lamont had given me, I tapped the end card. It was the queen.
The card dealer took a step back. The black man in the red T-shirt started to walk toward me. I saw Lamont step into his path. Soft words were exchanged.
The card dealer watched as the black man nodded to him.
“Looks like this is not my day,” the card man said. “Pops here got too much juju going. Turned my beautiful queen into a whore.” He then handed me several bills. He did not return my bow.
66
“Why is this fifty dollars?” I asked Lamont, as I handed him my winnings. “It should only be twenty, is that not correct?”
“I told the monte man’s partner it’d cost them half a C-note for us to get in the wind. They’ll get that back in ten minutes, especially now that you pumped up all the suckers for them.”
I looked back and heard the crowd demanding that the game continue.
“What if he had refused?” I asked.
“Then you would have stayed right there until he was tapped out, Ho. The shill got the message—we were selling them a license to fleece the sheep. He flashed his partner, we get paid to walk away—everybody wins.”
“Everybody? They will cheat—”
“Look, Ho, any fool knows that three-card monte is all about the hands. Ain’t nobody making those suckers play, is there?”
“No,” I acknowledged.
“Beef in oyster sauce with snow-pea pods!” Lamont crowed, leading the way toward a take-out place we all knew well.
Target was clearly excited … and strangely silent.
67
As is our custom, Lamont and I arrived moments before the appointed time. Sometimes the area is not safe for such as Michael or Brewster, and we must guard against any incident that could endanger others. Our motives are pure. Lamont and I are not claiming territory; we are merely ensuring that it represents no danger to our brothers.
It might even be said that we are protecting others from our own. Years ago, before we established this procedure, Lamont and I had been so engaged in one of his schemes that we had arrived slightly late. By then, some men on motorcycles were frightening Michael and Target. They were not actually committing an assault, but their posture was menacing, and Target’s shouting seemed to be spurring them on. Every time they waved the heavy chains they carried, the fear of their prey encouraged them, and they moved in closer.
“Come on, Ho!” Lamont shouted. “Those motherfuckers are gonna—”
His exhortation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Ranger from behind what seemed to be an abandoned vehicle. The rearmost of the cyclists suddenly went to the ground. His riderless mount went forward a few feet before falling, drawing the attention of the others. Ranger let out an unearthly shriek and charged, brandishing a hooked scythe over his head.
The cyclists retreated just as Lamont and I arrived. We quickly herded Michael and Target away from the area. Ranger came with us, walking backward so as to keep his adversaries in sight. That precaution was quite unnecessary—as soon as the unseated rider had regained his mount, they all fled, leaving only the resonation of their engines behind.
We stood together, watching.
Not watching the motorcyclists retreating; watching Ranger slowly return to a calmer stage of psychosis.
“How many did I get?” he asked Lamont, minutes later.
“I counted four,” Lamont replied without hesitation.
Ranger looked across at the now-empty swath of asphalt. “Got to give it to ’em, man. Lot of outfits would’ve left the bodies, dead or alive. Must’ve been some of their top-class guys.”
“They never saw you coming, bro,” Lamont crooned softly.
Michael took off his overcoat and wrapped it around Ranger’s shoulders—we knew Ranger would start shaking very soon, as if afflicted with ague.
Target built a fire. He can conjure flame from anywhere, but Lamont has never been able to get him to do so on request, despite pointing out the financial opportunities such “magic” would open for us.
We huddled together until Ranger’s body expelled the poison that had invaded his mind.
Only then did we share our food.
68
This time, we had our feast all spread out by the time the others arrived.
As is our custom, we dined in polite silence. Although I generally preferred the lotus position, I occasionally varied this, for fear it would come to be viewed by the others as “correct,” knowing such would result in imitation.
Ranger invariably squatted, balancing his food in his lap, using his knife as a utensil. He had somehow replaced the edged weapon he had contributed toward our radio. This surprised no one.
None of the others were remotely predictable as to their dining posture. Target could use chopsticks one-handed even while pacing in circles around our perimeter, but he was always mindful never to move behind Ranger.
That afternoon, when our meal was finished, we carefully wrapped all that remained and distributed it equally. As always, Brewster refused his share, and so did Target.
Michael ceremoniously distributed the little packages of moist cloths he always carried. He was fastidious about his hands, keeping his nails trimmed and clean at all times. He had once attempted to explain to me that a man’s hands are the first thing a “prospect” examines. As he was explaining the importance of this, we both seemed involuntarily drawn to look at my own hands. And I then understood that what has meaning in one world has none in another. To a stockbroker, my hands would display a life unworthy of their trust; to a martial artist, they would display a life of combat knowledge.
Once the rituals of our meal had been completed, I told our clan what Lamont and I had observed earlier.
“That building on the other side of the alley, it had fire escapes?” Michael asked. “Air-conditioning boxes in some of the windows, but not all of them?”
“Yes,” I agreed, impressed at the accuracy of his guesses.
“They’re warehousing it,” Michael pronounced, knowingly. “The owner wants to take it co-op, but he can’t get enough of the tenants to give up a rent-stabilized lease, especially with how things are now. So he’s just letting the place go to hell. No maintenance, no painting, no fixing things when they break.”
“He is attempting to create intolerable living conditions?” I asked.
“No,” Michael dismissed my naïve
speculation. “You couldn’t make a place bad enough to get anyone to walk away from a sweet lease, not in this city. He’s just cutting down on expenses. Playing a waiting game. Most of the tenants are probably pretty old. When one dies off, the owner doesn’t even try to rent their unit; he starts ‘rehabbing’ it. Time’s on his side. Between paying off some tenants to move, and others’ relocating to a cemetery plot, the balance has got to tip. Soon as he gets enough people to sign on, he sells the whole thing to a co-op management outfit and walks away rich.”
“This helps us how, exactly?” Lamont asked him.
“Maybe it does, a little,” Michael replied, refusing Lamont’s standing offer to take umbrage. “We’ve got to empty Brewster’s library at night, so we don’t want people on the other side of the alley hitting nine-one-one when they see something suspicious going on. A building like the one you described, who’s going to be watching? Most of the units aren’t even occupied, and the ones that are, they’ll have their A/C going, blocking up the windows. Plus, when you’ve got a landlord who wants them all moving out, no way he’s putting money into security cameras out back, either.”
“Didn’t see any,” Lamont said, providing our band with the multiple perspectives of how he and Michael would assess any building. “And with those fire escapes running all the way down the back, they probably got burglar bars on their other windows, too.”
“No sentries?” Ranger asked, one foot in each of the two worlds he constantly moves between.
“None,” I assured him.
“It’s just a moving job,” Michael said confidently. “And I got just the van we need.”
“Where did you find—?”
“I don’t mean I got one, Ho. I mean I found the kind we need. Like I said, the library would have everything. What we need is a Dodge Sprinter 3500, okay? That thing’s got over three hundred cubic feet in the back. And it could carry all Brewster’s library like it was a load of feathers.”
“These are plentiful?”
“I don’t know,” Michael confessed. “But they look different enough from other vans that we should be able to spot one if we see it. They’ve got some kind of extended roof, like a big bubble on top.”
“Is there any way we could obtain a photograph?”
“All we need is the coins to feed the library machine and we can print out the image,” Michael said. “Nothing to it.”
I looked over at Lamont, and was pleased to see he was already reaching into his pocket.
69
“You cannot sell your medication while we are completing our mission,” I told Brewster later that night.
“But, Ho—”
“You sell your medication to acquire books,” I said to the young man. “You know this endangers you, but still you persist. None of us has ever criticized this behavior, have we?”
“I know you don’t like—”
“Man, we don’t like you when you’re not on your meds,” Lamont said, bluntly. “But you with us, so we let it slide. That’s two-way, bro. All for one, that’s got a flip side. You’re not in charge here. We ain’t working for you, we working with you, dig it? And if you not gonna pull your weight, why the hell should the rest of us be going through all this?”
“Not to buy books!” Brewster said, his face flushed with conflicting emotions.
Ranger tensed, reacting as he often does: to tone, not content.
“We do not understand,” I said to Brewster, my own tone indicating that we wished to understand, and were only awaiting the explanation we knew he had.
“Ho … Look, I was thinking. You know what would fix all this?”
“Money?” Lamont said.
“Damn right!” Brewster answered, as if Lamont’s response had not been sarcasm.
“You intend to sell your medication to obtain sufficient money to hire professional movers?” I asked him. “And to rent adequate storage space?”
“I know I’ve got … problems,” Brewster said. “But I’m not stupid.”
“No one has ever so much as implied this,” I told him, sternly. “My question was motivated by confusion only. Do not see what is not there.”
“I’m sorry, Ho. I … Look, here’s what I figure. I can get a little money from my sister, I know I can. Plus the meds. Maybe even a hundred dollars.”
“Yes?”
“Well … remember that time Lamont got us our radio?”
“And my compass,” Ranger reminded him.
“I do,” I acknowledged, cautiously.
Brewster turned to Lamont. “So … you could buy us a rod for a hundred dollars, couldn’t you?”
“A … what?!?”
“You know, a … pistol.”
“Man, that’s throwing away good money. You want to kill yourself, just jump off a fucking roof.”
“I don’t want to kill myself,” Brewster said, ignoring Lamont’s anger-edged derision. “I want to pull a job.”
70
Silence dropped over us as though a dictator’s mandate had forbidden all speech. I do not lack patience, but I knew such a state could not be tolerated for long. Any of us, left to his own thoughts, was capable of reaching self-destructive conclusions. Our pasts all had this in common: failure to distance thought from action had resulted in tragic consequences.
I stepped into the void. “You intend to commit a robbery?” I asked Brewster, my voice devoid of judgment.
“There’s no other way out,” the young man said. “I got to do what’s right.” He intended his voice to be that of the hardened criminals who live within the pages of his treasures, but it emerged as the cry of a frightened child.
“Might! Tight! Fight! Light!” Target clanged, returning to full volume.
Michael responded to that warning bell by reverting to his own past world: “Look, you’ve got a complete inventory, right?”
Brewster nodded, his lips trembling.
“People collect that stuff,” Michael said. His voice was disparaging, but his posture excluded Brewster from whoever those “people” might be. “There’s got to be price guides—you know, what they’re worth and all.”
Brewster retreated within himself.
“No, listen!” Michael entreated him. “I’m not saying sell them all, am I? Just whatever brings in the most, okay? We don’t have time to get the best deal, maybe, but we can score enough to get whatever’s left moved to a storage unit and pay a few months’ rent in front for sure.“
“That’s fucked up!” Ranger snarled. “Brewster earned those books, man. You don’t see me taking my star down to some pawnshop—”
“Ranger!” I interrupted. “Please, show us your star.”
“Come on, Ho. You guys have seen it a—”
“I like to look at it,” Brewster said, a genuine sincerity unmistakable in his voice. “I always like to look at it.”
Ranger slowly extracted a small black pouch from his waistband. Carefully he unfolded the pouch, laid it flat, and unzipped the pouch. Reaching inside, he withdrew a bronze star attached to a ribbon edged in white, with two broad stripes of red separated by a thin line of blue, also edged in white. The clasp held a five-point star with a circle at its center, on which another star was engraved.
“You see that ‘V’?” Brewster said, pointing to a tiny symbol attached to the ribbon. “That stands for ‘valor.’ Heroism. Combat heroism.” His voice was that of a proud son.
“Tell that to the desk soldiers at the fucking VA,” Ranger said, quickly but carefully replacing his medal in its protective case and slipping it back under his khaki sweatshirt. His voice was harsh, but his face was flushed with embarrassment at Brewster’s admiration.
“Your medal is well protected by that case,” I said, very mildly. “I did not realize that the military issued such—”
“I’m an asshole,” Ranger announced, as if answering a question about his occupation.
Target’s facial muscles twitched.
Lamont folded his arms acr
oss his chest.
“Forgive me, Michael,” Ranger said formally. He had learned that the American tradition of saying “I’m sorry” was a meaningless platitude, commonly uttered as vacuously as “How are you?”
“Apology” is inherently ambiguous. A man may truly regret his conduct … or only its outcome.
The first time Brewster had prevailed upon Ranger to display his medal in Michael’s presence, it took several minutes for Ranger to produce it—he had been carrying it wrapped in rags, duct-taped to his torso.
Michael had studied the medal with great care, his eyes as calculatingly intense as a jeweler’s loupe. Surprising us all, Ranger suddenly handed Michael his medal. Michael never shifted his eyes as he turned the medal over, noted its length against his own open palm, gauged its weight. He held the medal as if it were spun glass, but otherwise remained as emotionless as an assayer. When his examination was complete, he handed the medal back to Ranger. “It’s beautiful” is all Michael said.
Some time later—more than days, less than a month—Michael showed us all the pouch before handing it to Ranger. No words were exchanged between them as Ranger again removed his medal and placed it inside the pouch, where it has resided since.
Michael’s bow was both an acceptance of Ranger’s apology and abandonment of his plan to convert Brewster’s library to cash.
Thus, the burden was passed to Lamont.
71
“Pull a job?” He confronted Brewster, his voice sliding into a speech style he usually reserved for dealing with strangers. “What’s your problem, boy? The government already notarized your ass. Once they start sending you those loco checks, ain’t no reason to keep on proving you crazy.”
The young man recoiled as if he had been slapped. His face burned with shame; his eyes filled with tears of humiliation.
“That whole disability deal’s just a scam,” Michael said hotly, putting his body between Lamont and Brewster. “I tried the same dodge myself, but I wasn’t slick enough to get away with it.”
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