As Lamont’s words ribboned through my mind, I literally watched suicidal depression assume human form. It stood before me, leering. My brother’s mortal enemy had boldly stepped forth from its hiding place within him, bristling with confidence.
My reaction was not strategic but reflexive. “Why did you need fourteen dollars?” I asked Michael, giving myself a few precious seconds to study my opponent before we did battle.
“I had the winner, Ho. But what good is that if I can’t capitalize? So I needed to wheel her on top in the exacta.”
My blank-faced expression was not to buy time—Michael had switched to a language foreign to me. He noticed this at once, and realized an explanation was required: “An exacta, it’s just what it sounds like, Ho. You have to get the horse that comes in first and the one that comes in second, exactly in that order, okay? There’s eight horses going. So with seven bets, we guarantee that, if our horse wins, we cash, no matter which of the rest comes in second.”
“Ah.”
“Naturally, the goddamned chalk comes second,” Michael said, as if he had been cheated out of something rightfully his. “But we still cashed good. Five hundred and seventy-one dollars and forty cents, Ho.”
“It is not nearly—”
“That’s my point! But now, with this kind of stake, I can parlay it into—”
“Michael …” I said. My voice trailed off into helplessness, as I realized I was no match for the opponent sneering at me from within my friend.
Lamont immediately stepped into the fray. “That is totally fucked, bro!” Catching Ranger’s eye, Lamont drew him into the fight: “That’s not the mission, man. That’s just your jones kicking in.”
“No!” Michael said, angrily. “I mean, we need money to move Brewster’s library, am I right?”
“Sure you are,” Lamont answered, still looking at Ranger. “And what you scored is exactly what we need for supplies. We need gear to pull this off, and you just won us enough to—”
“Restock!” Ranger cut him off.
“But I’m the one who won the money,” Michael protested.
Finally seeing an opening, I struck. “It was Ranger who obtained the money you used to win, is that not so?”
Under Ranger’s unforgiving glare, Michael’s only response was “If you put it like that, Ho.”
“And Ranger did so because you assured him that it was in furtherance of the mission?” I persisted, delicately poised between needing to impress the consequences of Michael’s flirtation with disaster on him and not igniting Ranger.
Many times, during moments of coherency, Ranger would tell us that the worst thing about being a soldier was “They lied to us.” Whether his accounts—“fragging” a platoon leader who had ordered what the troops believed would be walking into their certain deaths; “taking out” a comrade-in-arms whose cowardice under fire had endangered them all—were accurate, I could not determine. But I had been present at other times, and I could well envision how Ranger would process the information that Michael had—to be blunt—used him to obtain gambling money.
“It was for the mission,” Michael protested. “And I came through, didn’t I?”
“Let us look together,” I said, beckoning my brothers to stand with me on the knife-point balance of our kinship. “If you saw a single opportunity, a unique opportunity, to enable us to stock up on the provisions we will need to complete our mission, you did, in all truth, come through, Michael. Just as you said.
“But, surely, you would not expect any of us to view gambling as a way to accumulate funds? Who knows the folly of such reasoning better than you? It is from you that we all learned such a vital truth. That is why such conduct is banned among us.”
“Banned! Scanned! Can! Band!” Target erupted.
“Sonofabitch,” Lamont muttered softly. “You get it, Ho?”
“Hai,” I replied. I turned to Michael. He looked around the circle. I cannot know what he saw. I could only hope he saw what I did: his family.
“Sure!” he finally said. “That bet, it was like an … exception, right? Ranger always says, when you’re in the field, you have to improvise. The only thing that matters is the mission, not how you get it done.”
With that, Michael ceremoniously handed the money to Lamont, being careful to include the coins. Ranger had regarded Lamont as our “quartermaster” ever since Lamont had presented him with the compass he now used to navigate about the city, so the gesture was doubly meaningful.
“Do you understand what Target just told you, Michael?” I asked him.
“Target?” he said, confused. As with all of us—until very recently—he regarded Target’s verbal explosions as devoid of actual meaning. He would no more attempt to understand Target’s speech than he would the sounds pigeons make as they descend upon a discarded piece of bread.
“Target is saying you can do it, Michael. He has expressed the confidence we all feel in you. He understands that what you did was not a moment of weakness, or a breaking of your vow—it was your way of contributing to the mission.”
Michael’s eyes showed he understood what was being offered to him—another chance to be one of us.
“I got it, Ho,” he said. “And thanks for the vote, Target.”
Target looked at him blankly.
Lamont patted his outer pocket, where he had placed Michael’s gambling winnings. “This’ll buy us some very fine tools for the work we gotta do.”
“Lamont—” I began.
“Just thinking out loud,” Lamont cut me off, holding up both hands, palms facing me.
“Mission-specific,” Ranger said.
“What about hiring a PI?” Brewster suddenly intervened.
“A what?” Lamont said, just short of annoyed.
“A private investigator, I mean,” Brewster told him. “You know, someone who can go through records, track people down, stuff like that.”
“And who the fuck do we want to track down?” Lamont asked, clearly out of patience with Brewster’s fantasies.
“The white Rolls-Royce,” Brewster said, as if stating the obvious.
“Jesus H.—”
“That, too, would be a gamble,” I interrupted, much as I would deflect a strike … not blocking, redirecting. “I do not know the hourly rate charged by such people, but it seems unlikely we could purchase enough time to complete such a complex investigation.”
“It’s even worse than a gamble,” Michael said.
We all froze, each of us in his own way. For Michael to reject the idea of risking money on what he had previously considered a “mortal lock” was impossible to absorb.
“Look,” Michael went on, as if unaware of the shock wave he had sent through us all, “what’s to stop this PI guy from taking our info and using it himself?”
“They have a code of ethics,” Brewster protested.
“So do stockbrokers,” Michael said. “And lawyers.”
At that, Lamont extended his fist for Michael to tap.
“Michael’s right,” Ranger added. “That white Rolls is ours. It’s on the books. Our next mission, right after this one. No outsiders allowed.”
“One! Run! Done! Son!” from Target.
We were a family once again.
79
Brewster was the first to leave that morning, but not before renewing his promise not to sell his medications. I knew he would be trying again to convince his sister to allow him to store his library in her house. I knew he would be refused. Brewster knew this as well, but he would not be able to accept it in an unmedicated state—the stress would cut him loose from his tenuous mooring, and he would be lost to us all.
Ranger and Michael departed together, their plans unknown.
Target chose to accompany Lamont and myself.
We still had some money remaining from Lamont’s manipulation of the card-cheating team, so no fishing was required in order for us to eat.
I felt no pity for the cheaters. Only among humans is th
ere no natural food chain, with pre-designated predators and prey. Those of our species who become predators do so by choice. When they themselves become prey, this is simply a return to the natural order of things.
“It’s not what you do, brother. It’s what you do it for, and who you do it to—that’s what makes it right or wrong.”
Instantly, I recognized that the narcissism I had been struggling to destroy for so many years had retained its presence, burying itself deeper and deeper as my self-scrutiny increased. I had chopped down the tree, but left its taproot untouched. Yes, I no longer pontificated before adoring audiences, but I still occasionally uttered my pronouncements to myself.
Is not a narcissist always his own most appreciative audience? I thought, filled with self-disgust at the revelation.
I pride myself that I can read the body of an individual the way another could read a book. I do not “sense” the attack of an opponent; I see it, as if already in motion. In contrast, I believe my own body to be unreadable. My face betrays nothing; my eyes are reflectors, not windows. And my body is always at rest within itself. But Lamont had read the supposedly unreadable, stepping into my internal train of thought as if it had been a conversation between us.
“I do not understand,” I lied, as I would conceal an injury from an opponent.
“Remember when Brewster said it was all coming down? Maybe it takes that, sometimes. ’Cause, the way I see it, it’s all coming together,” Lamont said. “Just check it out, Ho. We know what’s gotta get done, right? Target showed us how we can get the books out, but we still need cash to move them, never mind find a place to take them to, okay? Michael always wants to roll the dice, but it’s not his own money he’d be playing with … and the crazy bastard finally got that.”
At a look from me, Lamont paused, then said, “I don’t mean he’s got the money, Ho. I mean, he’s got it down. He understands he can’t be gambling with money we need to save Brewster’s library. Not because he’s scared to, because he don’t even want to. Not anymore, anyway.
“And Ranger, he’s up for any damn thing, but you can’t be turning a pit bull loose at a carnival—he might start looting popcorn, or he might figure people make for a better snack. It is coming down. Down to us, brother.”
“I will not—”
“Yeah, you will,” Lamont interrupted. “You already did, plenty of times. What’s the difference between straight-up stealing, and betting against a man you know doesn’t have a chance to win?”
“Such people choose their own—”
“Yeah. That’s right. All we did was go Robin Hood on their ass.”
“By their own conduct, they invited—”
“And a dope dealer doesn’t?”
I had no answer for that.
80
“I haven’t hot-wired a car since I was a kid,” Lamont said, as we walked toward Brewster’s building. “The way they do it today, it’s either some sad-ass amateur—you know, pop the circle out of the steering column with a dent-puller, stick in a screwdriver, and hope for the best—or a pro specialist with his own set of code-breakers. The amateur, he wants to go joyriding. The pro, he’s just filling an order.”
“You are speaking of the van?”
“Yeah. Brewster goes up to his library. We figure out a way to make some kind of chute, slide everything down to the van. Between you, me, and Target, we can load it up in a few minutes.”
“Target?”
“The man can do anything you can do, Ho. Well, maybe not anything. Not the, you know, voodoo stuff. But … hey, show the man, bro!”
I did not react.
Then I realized Lamont was speaking to Target. Directly to him.
But Target would not meet Lamont’s eyes. He focused only on mine.
Motioning with a slight movement of my head, I guided us onto a new path.
81
Luzanne was once one of us. Even though she earned sufficient money to afford a place of her own, she would often spend weeks at a time with our band.
“This is where I can be me,” she said, one night.
“Because of …?” Lamont said, tapping his Adam’s apple to signal Luzanne that he understood she was a male.
“No. There’s plenty of he-shes working the Meat Market,” Luzanne dismissed Lamont’s too-simple explanation. “That’s like being a cancer patient on a ward. Some are worse than others, but everything’s always about the cancer. That’s all they talk about, all they think about.
“You can’t have friends. I mean, you’re all ‘Girlfriend!’ on the street, but you’re working that street. That same street. Even when you take a little break, have a smoke, get the … taste out of your mouth, what do you talk about? Which john ripped off which girl. Which cop is working shakedown patrol. How much you made last night. Lies about how your rich boyfriend’s going to take you away from all this soon. Schemes and dreams, that’s all there ever is.
“But here, with you all, I’m just me. Luzanne. Not Luzanne the freak magnet. Not Luzanne the fake name on my mailbox. When I met Ho, I could see he knew it all. I don’t mean like you did,” she said to Lamont, “I mean everything. So, when he said to come with him, I did.”
“Yet you left,” I had reminded her.
“I’ll come back for good someday, Ho. You know, I always wondered about ‘Homeless.’ That word, it can’t be like this huge umbrella over every one of … you. Just like there can’t be one over all of us, either. Trannies who car-trick, I mean. Some of us, maybe we didn’t have any other choice. Or maybe the other choices were worse. The real young ones, it’s like they don’t even know there are other choices. There’s even some who … I don’t know how to put it, but I know they don’t have to be out there. Like they had a whole menu, and picked out the dish they really wanted.”
“Hai.”
“That’s what I learned, Ho. I want a life that’s my choice, too. I’m not ready. Not yet. So I come and be with you for a while, then I go back to … what I do. But you notice how I stay longer each time I come? One day, I’ll be back for good.”
“You will always be welcome,” I promised her.
82
As we entered the Park, Luzanne entered my thoughts. In daytime, the Park is always full of exhibitionists, allegedly “working out.” I was originally puzzled by this, until Luzanne called it “voguing,” and explained the meaning of that term.
She would have been the first to help with a solution to relocating Brewster’s library. I am sure of this.
But Luzanne has been gone for years. Returning from her work late one night, she had been beaten to death by a gang of thugs on a subway platform. The killers were apprehended almost immediately. They admitted what they had done, but claimed Luzanne had attempted something so obscene—it does not bear repeating—that they went into a rage. The court must have accepted their explanation in some way—they are all free today.
I had learned this only because an old newspaper I had intended to use as padding displayed a headline about the outrage of certain groups over the lenient sentences handed down to Luzanne’s murderers.
Thoughts of Luzanne had flooded my mind, as if propelled by the blazing sunlight. Her light reminded me of Chica’s.
And of my vows.
83
With so many seeking to draw attention to themselves, there was no difficulty locating a place from which we would be unobserved. Always there is this parallelism between our world and theirs: we seek what others discard; we use what others find useless; and their lack of interest is our camouflage.
That day, in the sunlight-defying gloom of dying trees, I executed a “high forms” kata. Though originally intended as a method of practicing and perfecting various techniques, kata has become its own form of competitive sport. Today, it is the sole method by which “promotion” is earned in some styles. In my former life, I might have expounded at great length about this perversion of purity. One of my favorite pearls of recycled wisdom was to compare kata t
o ballet—not in a disparaging manner, as a lesser “master” might, but to demonstrate how the acme of each art required great skill, and was entitled to respect. Left unsaid was the message that neither art had developed as a defense against violence.
I performed the forms as if underwater. Each movement correct, but radically slower than would be acceptable to judges.
Target watched. Target always watches. I could not discern any unusual alertness in his posture, or any change of expression.
Lamont watched as well. He was not watching me; he was on guard. Lamont believes this city’s streets are fields of gazelles, watched by lions. Any gazelle that appeared too crippled to outrun the lions would quickly become their target.
I had learned many things from Lamont over the years, but this lesson had been taught to me before Lamont had been born. Some might reason that The Homeless would enjoy a kind of immunity, because preying on obviously impoverished individuals would be profitless. But the war had taught me well. Vulnerability is the sadist’s ultimate aphrodisiac. My first night on that park bench had merely confirmed what I have known ever since an evil sergeant had ordered a young boy to accompany him to his final resting place.
I had not performed a true kata for many years, yet I was unsurprised at the fluidity of my movements. The body retains muscle memory long after the limbs and joints and tendons have lost their ability to execute what the mind commands. Age has not altered my lifelong habits of self-maintenance, and years of living without a home had provided endless opportunities for me to maintain the flexibility needed for survival.
Three times I performed the micro-motioned kata.
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