“The purple house. I’ll show you. The purple house.”
The crowd stepped back when Achilles yanked the man to his feet and marched him off in the direction indicated. Someone said, “He ain’t all that tall no way.”
Achilles pushed through the crowd flashing his military ID, the men moving back like it was radioactive, except one old guy who called out, “That don’t scare me none. I was in the real war. Smells like a con to me.”
Conroy meant “wise advisor,” according to their father. According to one drill sergeant, it meant they had to carry a lot of shit. According to another, it meant nothing. “You have new brothers now,” he told them. “We are all your brothers. You are now 11-B, one and many.” Basic training and infantry school were combined into five phases named after colors, but Achilles thought of them in three stages: crawl, walk, and run. They learned to get by on little water, less food, and no sleep, and to carry only the bare necessities when possible, which was why Achilles was surprised as he went through the bag in which the man had found Troy’s BDUs. They were in a purple house right behind Wexler’s jobsite. When Achilles had found it empty before, he hadn’t thought to search the odd bags scattered throughout. There were several pairs of dirty socks and underwear, three T-shirts, another pair of pants (too short), a blank address book with the F-section torn out, and the same photo of them all on the way to Dubai, enough stuff to suggest that Troy might have hung around for a while. “How long has this been here?”
“I found it in the Bricks.”
The occasional black brick stood out like a rotted tooth. The top of the wall glinted, crowned with broken glass. There was no grass and no shade, only parched clay and cracked asphalt, nothing to catch the sunlight bearing down on the roofs and heads of the kids posted up at the entrance. They were as young as ten, the oldest not even twenty from the looks of it. They were joking, rambunctious, invincible; like in Afghanistan, Baltimore, DC, New Orleans, the poorest laughed the loudest. Ines knew how to speak to them. “Just look them in the eye and say hello. That’s all folks.” It’s easy, Achilles reminded himself. He showed them his picture of Troy, and they only laughed harder, without moving their mouths, with steady shark’s grins. They lounged like they had no bones in their bodies, leaning at impossible angles as if made of rope, loose-limbed and slack-jawed. They looked at the blood on his knuckles and waved him through. As he passed through the gate, they laughed even louder, like they had seen this before, as if to say, You’ll be right back, running so fast your sneaker soles will melt.
They thought they were tough. Tough was the little boy who snuck into their tent to steal food; tough was the sniper who shot two members of J9 before Wages neutralized him, a boy who had barricaded himself in his minaret, a boy barely as tall as his rifle, a boy who had affixed a pillow to the wall behind him to absorb the recoil. Tough was Wages, who walked away from that without looking back.
Achilles walked the inside perimeter of the housing project first. He was surprised that Wexler had been so adamant that he never enter the Bricks. People weren’t tossing bullets like it was the Wild Wild West. It was quiet. A white kid in a black hooded sweatshirt walked a pit bull. A few kids played king of the mountain on a picnic table in a roofless gazebo. An overturned slide lay under fingers of kudzu. Like his sergeant said, “The earth will soon eat us all.” All the buildings, except a smoke-damaged one in the back, appeared occupied. The complex was broken into nine square blocks, like a tic-tac-toe grid. Each block had two two-story buildings with a parking lot between them. Hand-printed signs were posted on the telephone poles: “Don’t let them change our name!” Across a few of the signs, someone had scrawled, They already killed them once. These streets hadn’t been renamed. MLK and Medgar Evers ran north to south, Malcolm X Way and RFK ran east to west. As he completed his walk around the perimeter, he saw the orange Hummer. Beside it, the boy in the hooded sweatshirt was talking to a man in a letterman’s jacket, large and angular, as if made of cinderblocks. A man wearing a red Atlanta Braves baseball jersey sat in the back of the Hummer. The kid left, without the dog.
As Achilles approached the Hummer, the big guy in the letterman’s jacket held out one hand like a traffic cop. He had a tattoo of a pistol on his palm, drawn so that Achilles was staring down the barrel of a revolver, like those decals that read, This Property Protected by Pistol. The dog pranced back and forth and whined. The man muttered something and the dog barked a few times, but Achilles wasn’t worried. Janice’s brother fought dogs in the old garage bay at the gas station, and Achilles knew what to look for. Even if he hadn’t seen the kid turn the dog over, Achilles would have known that it wasn’t the big man’s dog. The dog wasn’t in a defensive stance and didn’t position his body in front of the man. His ears were loose and his shoulders hunched like he was more anxious than anything else. The pit bull was a pet. He had his ears and tail and no scars. He seemed concerned about the kid who had just left.
Achilles held up the photo. The big man shrugged.
The man in the red jersey still sat in the backseat. Achilles slipped the photo through the half-open window. “Have you seen him around here?”
The window lowered, and the guy in the red jersey returned the photo. He had copper skin with freckles. He wore his auburn hair in cornrows, the rows on the side of his head woven into a diamond-shaped pattern and the braids extending almost to his neck. “This is the city of five-dollar whores and two-dollar hits. There’s a lot of folk around here, comin’ and goin,’ one-six-eight. What’s so special about this one?”
Achilles held out the photo again, holding his hand out until he felt awkward. “This one’s my brother. Look again. They found some of his stuff around here.”
“Brother? Ain’t we all?”
“No,” Achilles shook his head deliberately. “We all ain’t.”
The man laughed, opened the door to stretch his legs, and took the photo again. “I might have seen him around, but I can’t be sure.”
“How long ago? Within the past few days?”
He nodded. “Maybe yeah. If I see him I’ll let you know. You’re over at the old yellow house on Evers Ave, working with Tony Sharon and those crunchers, and Kevin Wexler with the scar.” The man pointed to his neck. “You know, the little one who looks like Prince.”
The big man guffawed.
The man with the cornrows leaned back into the car and stared straight ahead, as if signaling the end of the conversation. With a slight motion of his chin he directed the big man to close the door. Achilles leaned on it. “So you’ve seen him?”
The big man stepped closer. Achilles held the photo out again. Troy’s smiling face hung in the air between them. The dog whined, kids laughed, a window slammed.
The man with the cornrows stroked his chin. He spoke through a big grin, bearing his gold fangs. “Don’t this make your brown ass blue?” He took the photo, studied it for a moment, and handed it back. Leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees, he said, “You need to give up the ghost on this shit. Crunch crushes. The crush crunches. I seen a big fucker,” he spread his arms for emphasis, “a bodybuilder, looked like Lee Haney, get on his knees and gargle mayo. He had that crush. See, maybe this ain’t your brother. Maybe this is an animal.” He cocked his head to the side, studying Achilles, who said nothing.
He continued. “You can’t take him home. Listen to your pretty talk. You got shit. He slips up, pawns all your TVs and shit. Then what? He gets in that hole, they come gunning for him. He’s dying for the bullet, but you get your potato peeled. Then what? He hits your liquor stash. Fa-fa-flashback. He hits the locker room and comes back to your place with a crew of hos, and they fence your shit. Then what? Or you go on a three-day MLK vacation and this zigga turns your shit into a whorehouse before you can say ‘I have a dream.’ Then what? RICO Act, brotha. That’s your shit on the six, eight, and ten. That’s your shit stacking the shelves at the cop shop. All your favorite shit becomes the property of your least favorite uncle. And you still have to pay taxes.”