Righteous

by Joe Ide

  “Okay. You try.”

  They switched places. Isaiah’s first efforts were clumsy and slow, Ari instantaneously taking the gun back and putting Isaiah in an armlock or a choke hold or flipping him over his hip and slamming him to the mat.

  “Come on, Isaiah,” Ari said. “Quicker, smoother.”

  After another half hour of constant motion, Isiah got better but he couldn’t breathe without bending over with his hands on his knees. He raised his hand. No más.

  “You need more cardio,” Ari said. “Look at you, breathing with your mouth open. Are you a fish? If you were in better shape you could be a P4 by now.”

  “No…thanks…couldn’t…take it,” Isaiah said between wheezes.

  “I will tell you your problem,” Ari said.

  “That’s okay,” Isaiah said. “I don’t want to know.”

  “You are holding back,” Ari said accusingly. “You are afraid of hurting your opponent. But remember, he wants to kill you. Do you understand? He wants to take your life and you must not let him.” Ari had turned indignant, like Isaiah was refuting him.

  “Okay, Ari,” Isaiah said, taken aback. The woman instructor and the kids had stopped their exercises and were staring.

  “You must fight, Isaiah,” Ari said. “Fight with everything you have. No quitting, no quarter! Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Ari, I really do,” Isaiah said, trying to calm him down.

  “Okay, we start again.”

  “I can’t. Really. I’m beat.”

  “Beat?” Ari said. “This is not beat. This is nothing. We start again!”

  “Papa,” the woman instructor said like she’d said it before.

  “Look, Ari, I’m done for now, okay?” Isaiah said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? What tomorrow?”

  “Take it easy, Ari,” Isaiah said, but Ari got more adamant, like he couldn’t get it through Isaiah’s thick head.

  “You must do whatever is necessary to win!” he shouted. “You win or you die!” He came forward, his jaw hard set, the muscles in his neck bulging, his big hands ready to grab and destroy.

  “Okay, Ari, we’ll start again,” Isaiah said, retreating with his palms out. Ari kept advancing, his eyes big and horrified, sweat pouring off him. The woman was running toward them.

  “Papa!” she screamed.

  “YOU WIN OR YOU DIE!” Ari bellowed.

  Stumbling backward was the only thing that saved Isaiah from the full force of Ari’s punches. The straight right nearly ripped his ear off. The left knocked the wind out of him, the side kick missing as he fell to the floor. In an instant, Ari was on top of him, one hand clamped around his throat, the other in a cannonball fist about to smash his face.

  “PAPA, STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!” the woman screamed. She tackled Ari’s arm and held on. He half-turned, ready to strike her. “Papa, it’s me! It’s me!” she said. “Stop fighting. It’s me.” Ari hesitated a moment, looking as if he’d just now recognized her. Then his entire body went slack. The woman was crying now, hugging him, stroking his head as he wept into her shoulder. “You don’t have to fight anymore, Papa,” she said. “The fighting is done. All the fighting is done.”

  Isaiah wondered about Ari, what had happened to him. There were consequences to violence. Like grief, it changed you, eroded your core, exposing and desensitizing at the same time. So many things were not like they happened in the movies. The hero shooting the bad guy in the face or throwing him off a rooftop and in the next scene he’s sipping a martini with a babe in a tight dress. No night sweats, nightmares, anxiety attacks, or flashbacks. No kids cowering in the closet because you’re drunk again. No weeping in the psychologist’s office, or attacking a student you’ve known for years, your screaming daughter the only one who can bring you back to reality.

  When Isaiah got home, he took a shower and put on some music. There were a lot of Marcus’s old jazz albums, the covers probably hip at the time. Men in shiny suits and dark sunglasses in a haze of blue sepia; a cutout of a horn player against a background of mod triangles and psychedelic flowers. Isaiah put on Coltrane’s Ascension, forty-five minutes of improvised pandemonium and musicianship. Music helped Isaiah bear down and think, his neurons forced to overcome the sounds, the notes filling in the blank spaces between thoughts, keeping more pleasant diversions out of his head: having an espresso, reading, walking the dog, tinkering with the car. He lay down on the sofa with an ice pack on his ear, his middle aching where Ari punched him. Ruffin trotted over. He mewled and rested his head on Isaiah’s knee. “It’s okay, boy,” Isaiah said. “Everything’s okay.” It was common knowledge that dogs could sense your emotional state, but nobody ever said how a species that bears no resemblance to humans, doesn’t speak English, and was bred to herd sheep, retrieve dead birds, or ward off predators knows that you’re upset and comes over to comfort you. Most humans weren’t nearly that sensitive.

  Frankie said, It was your brother that robbed me. Your fucking brother shot me in the gut. Ridiculous. Isaiah was restless and decided to go for a drive, Ruffin in the passenger seat, wearing his seat belt like anybody else. He had his head out the window, enjoying the night air laden with a thousand scents. They drove past Dodson’s apartment, shadows moving across the curtains. Isaiah thought about calling him and talking things over but he couldn’t work up the nerve. Dodson and Cherise were expecting their first child. They were probably shopping online for bassinets and baby carriages or fixing up the nursery. He wondered what that would be like, sharing a future with someone you love.

  He kept driving, past Deronda’s house and the animal shelter where Harry Haldeman worked and Hot Dog Heaven where the gang war had started and the taquería where Flaco was shot. Isaiah ended up at the Del Orto, the building Manzo had rehabilitated. Something had drawn him here but he didn’t know what. Just as Néstor had said, it was definitely the best apartments in the hood, with its crisp white paint unmarked by graffiti. The steel-framed front door and the intercom had been expertly installed. The Spanish tiles in the vestibule had been laid by a craftsman, the grout lines straight as arrows. The burglar bars looked new, as did many of the window frames. Something inside him twitched. What? he thought. What is it?

  That night, he slept fitfully, waking up numerous times. Theories and possibilities tumbled in his head like laundry in a clothes dryer. He got up at dawn, exhausted. He played some music, walked Ruffin, and had three espressos but still nothing came to him. He decided to go to TK’s wrecking yard and get a replacement cruise control module for the Audi. At least he’d be accomplishing something.

  He parked in the lot next to a spotless Volkswagen GTI, five or six years old, gleaming white, eighteen-inch wheels and a six-speed manual. Fast car, handled great. A driver’s car. It would be good to see TK, something reassuring about his timelessness. Way back when Isaiah met him, he was bony and decrepit, wrinkled as crackled varnish, a fuzz of white whiskers on his drooping hound-dog face. He was wearing coveralls, black and waxy with layers of grease, the STP cap so filthy you could only see the S. Eight years later, absolutely nothing had changed except you couldn’t see the S either.

  “How you doin’, Isaiah?” TK said, squinting as he lit a Pall Mall, a crust in his voice. “Been a while.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Isaiah said. “You know how it is. How are you?”

  “Old and slow,” TK said. “But I’m hangin’ in.” He looked at the dog and said: “You ain’t gonna say hello, you ungrateful fleabag?” Ruffin jumped up and put his paws on the old man’s chest. “You know the best thing about people?” he said, scratching the dog’s ears. “Their dogs.” TK gave Ruffin a treat that had probably been in his pocket for months or maybe wasn’t a treat at all. With some trepidation, Isaiah left the dog here when his cases took him out of town. Ruffin loved the wrecking yard, roaming the bleak twelve acres, sniffing, peeing on things, and chasing ground squirrels.

  “Say,” TK said, “did you k
now they buildin’ one of them Jewish churches right down the street?”

  “You mean a synagogue?” Isaiah said. “Here?”

  “Uh-huh. They callin’ it Beth You Is My Woman Now.”

  Isaiah looked at him and shook his head. “That’s the worst joke you’ve ever told.”

  “That’s all right,” TK said with a chuckle. “More of ’em where that came from.”

  Isaiah told TK about his investigation into Marcus’s death, about Seb and Frankie and Manzo and how his hatred was keeping him up nights and how he wanted revenge.

  “Careful, boy,” TK said. “Go down that road too far and you might never get back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, this was a while ago, when I was still married to Etta. There was a pal of mine name of Jimmy Truitt, we was in the army together.” TK said Jimmy used to come over to the house, play cards, watch TV, and drink. Sometimes they’d go out on an overnight charter boat and catch rockfish, lingcod, and yellowtail off San Clemente Island. Then they’d have a fish fry, wives and kids partying in TK’s backyard. TK fixed Jimmy’s car for free and when he lost his job, TK loaned him money. When Jimmy’s wife kicked him out, he crashed on TK’s couch. “We was buddies,” TK said. “Good buddies. But then I found out he was messin’ around with Etta. You believe that? Bonin’ my woman in my own damn bed? Stabbin’ me in the back like that? Well, I worked up a real hatred for the man, that’s all I thought about night and day. Got to a point where I couldn’t stand it no more, so I go over to Jimmy’s place, drag his ass out of his house, and beat him black and blue. Left him lying on the lawn like the sack of shit he was.”

  “He deserved it,” Isaiah said.

  “Yeah, I think so too. But you know what? I felt bad about it.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Getting my revenge didn’t make the pain go away and didn’t make Etta love me again. Jimmy got over his beatin’ soon enough, but all that hatred made me crazy and turned me into somebody I didn’t want to be. So who got the worst of it? Me or Jimmy?”

  TK said he didn’t have an Audi on the lot but a cruise control module wasn’t vehicle-specific. Maybe Isaiah could find one in the German section that would work. “I got a customer to tend to,” he said. “Go on and look for yourself. You know where everything is.”

  Isaiah took his toolbox and wound his way through the yard. Strange being here again; so quiet, not even sparrows chirping, walking through row after row of abandoned cars. Cars that took people to work, families on vacations, couples on dates, kids on joyrides, pregnant women to the hospital. He could hear them laughing and talking and making love. He could hear their anger, heartbreak, and joyful celebrations. He could hear the life he’d never had.

  Ruffin had wandered off, probably chasing a ground squirrel. Isaiah thought about what TK had said. It made sense but it had no effect on how he felt: furious and savage. Some murdering son of a bitch had not only taken Marcus’s life away, he’d stolen Isaiah’s future. He could have gone to Harvard; studied, achieved, fulfilled his own dreams, and made Marcus proud. Instead, he was here in the hood with no family and a career chasing cockroaches like Frankie. Isaiah would get his revenge and what happened after that didn’t matter. As he came around the mountain of tires, he saw that the Accord was gone, a rectangle of dead grass the only evidence it had been there at all. TK probably removed it so Isaiah wouldn’t think about Marcus every time he came here. Nice of him but it didn’t help.

  When Isaiah reached the German section he saw someone leaning under the hood of a battered Passat. A white girl, muttering to herself, body tense, struggling with something. She had on jeans with authentic holes in the knees; an old chambray shirt over a faded gray T-shirt that said ROYAL & LANGNICKEL. Royal & Langnickel made paintbrushes; Isaiah had come across the name in a case. There were different-colored paints splattered on her work boots, the faint smell of turpentine coming off her. No great leap to figure out she was an artist.

  “Need some help?” he said. The girl didn’t look up or answer. She was fussing with a length of the wiring harness, trying to remove the terminal ends from one of the connectors. She already had the secondary lock off but was stuck there, frustrated, staring at the intricate plastic widget, wires coming off it.

  “You need a depinning tool,” he said.

  “I don’t have one,” she said.

  “Hold on.”

  He went into his toolbox, found what looked like a tweezer with a handle like a screwdriver.

  “Oh,” she said. She took the tool, looked at it a moment, and without waiting for instructions inserted it in the pin slots and slipped out the terminal ends. “Yeah. That works. Thanks.” She continued depinning more connectors, a quiet confidence about her but a sadness too. Isaiah recognized it right away. Like things had happened to her she was trying to forget.

  “Are you trying to take out the whole harness?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, like it was obvious.

  Isaiah got some more tools and for the next twenty minutes, the two of them removed a myriad of bolts, screws, and connectors. The girl was focused, not seeming to mind the heat, the stink of oil and gasoline or the sweat dripping off her nose. Her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore no jewelry, little makeup, a tattoo of an antique pocket watch on her forearm, secrets behind the pale green eyes.

  “Water?” he said, offering her his bottle of FIJI.

  “Got my own,” she said.

  The girl went on working like he wasn’t there. He wondered if he’d done something to offend her or if she saw something about him that put her off. Now she was stuck again, pulling on the harness and moving wires aside, looking for a way to detach the section she was working on. She seemed in a hurry, like she wanted to find it before he said anything. He thought about letting it pass but couldn’t help himself. He went and stood next to her, lifted some corrugated tubing out of the way, his hips touching hers, but she didn’t seem to notice. “There’s a bolt,” he said. “See it?” She shook her head and sighed like she was stupid for missing it.

  “You a mechanic?” she said.

  “No. I used to work here. Took apart a lot of cars.”

  Isaiah was skeptical of artists generally, not that he knew anything about art. He’d been to the Getty, LACMA, and MOCA. He had no real interest in art. A lot of the things he saw were in a language he didn’t understand. Smeared concentric circles. Big letters stenciled on a canvas. Coiling scribbles of white on a gray background that looked like a fourth grader had doodled on a chalkboard. Were they supposed to be something? Represent something? Make you feel something? They should at least give you something beautiful to look at, something that required some skill, some craftsmanship. The Rembrandt portraits Isaiah saw at the Getty had faces that jumped off the canvas and talked to you, and you could feel the wind and smell the grass coming off the Van Goghs.

  When they’d finally gotten everything loose, they wrestled the harness out like a length of seaweed made of wire and plastic.

  “It’s in pretty good shape,” he said. “Should work fine. That GTI out there yours?”

  “Yeah, it’s mine.”

  “What year?”

  “Oh nine.”

  “Nice car. They switched to a turbo that year.”

  “Yeah, they did,” she said, not impressed.

  And then, amazingly, she smiled at him, big and warm and glad, like she was just realizing how incredible he was. He was wondering what the hell had happened when Ruffin bounded up to them. She was smiling at the dog.

  “Hello, friend,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “Aren’t you beautiful.” Ruffin jumped up, his paws on her chest.

  “Ruffin, get off her,” Isaiah said. “Get off her, Ruffin.” But the dog didn’t obey. The girl calmly turned her back, forcing the dog to get down. “Sorry, he’s bad about that,” Isaiah said.

  “It’s not his fault,” she said, turning around again. “Dogs don’t speak English. Get
off her doesn’t mean anything to him.”

  “Right,” Isaiah said, stung.

  Most people were wary of the powerful slate-gray pit bull with fierce amber eyes, but she got down on one knee and scratched Ruffin’s neck and stroked his head. “How are you, huh?” she said, looking at him like parents look at their sleeping babies. Ruffin was usually standoffish with people but this was like old home week, the dog wagging his tail, reveling in the attention. “What’s his name?” she said.

  “Ruffin.”

  “After David Ruffin? Cool. He looks to be what, a year?”

  “About that.”

  “How come you haven’t trained him?”

  “I just started,” he mumbled.

  “At a year? You should have started when he was a puppy.”

  Isaiah was used to asking the questions, backing other people into corners. He tried to turn it around. “You know a lot about dogs,” he said. A statement, get her talking about herself. Instead, she shut down in an instant, her whole self going still. Isaiah got the same way when somebody tried to manipulate him.

  “He’s not neutered, is he?” the girl said.

  “No,” he said. “Haven’t gotten around to it.” Dammit. You’re still on defense.

  “That’s really messed up, you know. It’s hard on the dog.” She gave the dog one last flurry of scratches, beamed at him for a moment, then slung the wiring harness over her shoulder and picked up her toolbox, so heavy it made her tilt to one side. Isaiah thought about giving her a hand but that didn’t seem like a good idea.