They reached the jobsite in the dark morning hours, just before five a.m. Wexler worked for his cousin, Tony Sharon, renovating a historic Victorian home four blocks from the King Center. It was the tallest house on the block, with three floors and an attic bristling with narrow dormers sharp as steeples. Like all the houses on that stretch of Medgar Evers Avenue, from the second floor you could see the eternal flame hovering over Dr. King’s tomb, mere blocks from where he was born.
Wexler rambled as he led Achilles through the house and up the stairs, ducking under hanging plaster and high-stepping over debris. The interior of the house was being dismantled to save the antique fixtures such as wood trim, solid wood doors, and stained-glass windows. He followed Wexler up to the attic, brushing cobwebs aside, stepping cautiously from joist to joist like he was crossing a river on rocks.
From one dormer, Wexler pointed out the gingerbread houses and embroidered lawns of Inman Park. “Cross those tracks and you’re in Inman Park. They jog, we run. There, B&B means bed and breakfast. Here, it means boarded up or burned down.”
From another dormer, Wexler pointed out the vacant lot across the street. “That’s where the lunch bucket parks. Where I saw him.” In the dark there was little to be seen except a billboard-sized silhouette of MLK’s profile at the far end of the lot.
From the third dormer, Wexler pointed out a complex of scarred cinderblock buildings surrounded by a brick wall and painted the same shade of red as the clay upon which they stood, as if they had grown out of the earth. “That’s Banneker Homes, aka the Bricks. People are posted up at the entrance twenty-four seven, or one-six-eight as they say around here. When someone dies, they just dump the body outside the wall and call the police. Don’t go in there. For true, Chief. Someone gets shot or falls off a building every other week. That’s how they settle things. Don’t go in there. For true.”
Wexler pointed out the last dormer. “That’s the cemetery. It’s historic.” He tapped his temple. “I like to come up here and watch the traffic right before the sun comes up, when you can hear it better than you can see it. I think about going to another country, not like we did, but just to see how other people normally live. Shopping, talking, reading, whatever, in another language. It’s weird the first time you see people doing the shit you do, but in a different language. Someone said there’s an MLK boulevard in every city with blacks. There’s blacks in France and London. They have one? Probably not. There wasn’t one in Valdosta when I was a kid. I know it’s not true, but I’m curious. They say it’s always the worst street in the city. That can’t be true either. Look around.”
Wexler’s voice dropped like he was in the confessional. “It doesn’t look like much now, but wait a year. New street names. Flowers grow from shit. See, the neighborhood is changing. You have to watch it like white people.” He tapped his temple again. “They watch, they wait, and pounce when the time is right. That’s why my cousin Tony is successful. Other blacks are moving out. For them, success means moving away. But Cousin Tony bought these houses, just like the white folk. He’s going to be rich because he’s thinking like a white person.” He swung around to face Achilles. “How do you plan to do this?”
The Old Fourth Ward was nearly fifteen blocks across and twelve blocks up, much larger than the Tremé District, too much ground to cover on foot, yet it made little sense to drive from house to house. By the time he started the car and drove a block and parked, he could walk. So his plan was, “Watch, walk, and wait.”
“I mean, what if he doesn’t want to go?” said Wexler. “Are you going to check him in?”
“Check him in?”
“Look around. It’s not a vacation destination.”
“Who says he needs to be checked in? Who says he’s got the crush?” asked Achilles, pounding the joist closest to him. A cloud of pink insulation drifted between them.
Wexler pointed at him. “You just did.”
“You’re twisting shit. How can you know what my brother needs?”
Wexler raised his arms in surrender. “It might be more complicated is all I’m saying. I’ll do whatever you need, but there’s one thing I wanted to tell you earlier. I’m born again.”
“Again?” asked Achilles. “What went wrong the first time?” An ambulance crawled by, the siren loud and frantic.
When the sound died down, Wexler said, “You know you’re not the funny one.”
Achilles raised his arms in a gesture of surrender.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Wexler clapped his hands together, interlacing his fingers. As he spoke, his hands shook slightly, like he was praying. He said, “I want to help. I will help. But it’s just that I can’t do any more crazy shit.”
“Who said crazy shit?” asked Achilles, knowing that Wexler was referring to the boardinghouse fight, which had grown in Wages’s imagination. “I don’t even have a gun.” Noting Wexler’s disbelief, Achilles added, “Really.”
“Okay. It’s just that I don’t want to make it a situation where force is the answer. This isn’t a battle of wills.”
So this was the new and improved Wexler: all fore, not enough head. Whatever happened to “react or die”? What kind of pussy shit were they learning in PTSD counseling? Was the same thing happening to Wages? This was worse than that Zulu hoodoo. They used to say people didn’t need shrinks; people needed friends. For Christ’s fucking sake, was Wexler really reborn? They used to say, “My M16 is my G-O-D.” Achilles was the only veteran among Ines’s friends, the wild one, Brick they sometimes called him, a name he wore with more pride and bravado than he’d ever felt on duty. His military swagger set in. Achilles put a finger to his temple and said, “Every fucking thing is a battle of wills.”
Wexler said, “This shit gets in the brain. Crunch affects people on an animal level. It’s like possession. Think The Exorcist or Night of the Living Dead. They get like zombies. Believe me. Most people can’t even quit cigarettes.”
Achilles raised his hand to silence Wexler. Achilles wasn’t naïve. Maybe Troy had the crush. Maybe he’d gotten flushed into some bad shit hanging around with his black family. But that was only a possibility, and Achilles wasn’t going to treat the probable like the definite. He knew Wexler would back him if ever push came to gun, but said, “It’s cool.”
“Brrrlll.” Wexler blew air across his lips, as if to brush off Achilles’s remark, shook his head, gave Achilles the finger, looked flustered, said “Fuck,” and crossed himself.
Achilles shot the finger back, as he used to during PT when Wexler would glide by grinning, his stride as smooth as a moonwalk. “How’d he ever outrun you?”
Wexler snapped his head back, as if dodging a live wire. “He had a head start. Fuck man. I called you.”
Achilles felt awkward. He was being a complete dick to the friend who’d called him, put him up, taken him to where Troy could be found, a friend who was a brother in his own right. But Wexler owed them. Troy had saved his life, and, after Jackson died, Troy had soothed Wexler. It was Troy who pried Wexler — kicking, screaming, biting — off Merriweather. In fact, Troy had calmed Wexler first, like Wexler was his brother. Achilles didn’t hold that against Wexler, nor did he resent all the other times it seemed Troy was more concerned with Wexler, nor did he resent Wexler’s obvious attachment to his brother, but for some reason Wexler’s almost matronly caution was always Achilles’s trigger, or was it just that whenever he was around Wexler he felt like yelling “bring the thunder,” screaming “drop the money shot,” throwing rocks, blowing chunks, drinking whiskey with a crazy straw, and shooting himself in the head with the tequila pistol?