“Look, man. That’s between you and her. I’m sorry this is happening, but you’re right, it’s none of my business. So…what do I do about the crackhead thing?”
“You move, nigga.”
“That’s not an option.”
“You know how to leave town. Just do it again.”
“I can’t fucking move, George. I’m broke. I got to spend all the money getting this place good enough to sell. I got a seventeen-year-old girl in here to protect and this place is infested with crackheads. So now what?”
“Warren, you’re on the border between Germantown and North Philly. You’re dealing with the side effects of centuries of economic and social disenfranchisement. So yeah, there are drug addicts here. You know this. It’s like complaining there are chipmunks in the woods. Don’t get a gun. You’ll miss and wound them and then they’ll sue you and then you’re really screwed. Just get a security system. Protect yourself, protect your daughter. Buy a Taser if you want — but don’t get a gun unless you’re willing to kill somebody, and trust me, you’re not. Head to a security store. Matter of fact, have Tosha help you, because that woman knows all about that shit. I know she knows all about that shit. You can tell her I told you, that I know, that she knows, all about that shit.”
“You know she loves you,” I tell him. It seems like the right thing to do. Not for him, but for me, because he’s starting to piss me off and Tosha is my true friend and I like the way he flinches when I say it. I know Tosha does, though. I’m sure no matter how bad he’s done her over the years, she still does, and would take him back. I say it also because I want someone to say that to Becks every time I come up in a conversation. I know he still loves you. And I want it to hurt when she hears it, too.
“I know she loves me. And I love her. But saying that shit is easy and doing it, working on it year in and out, keeping it alive when it feels like it’s slowly killing you, that’s fucking hard. I’m tired, bro.”
George sniffles that broad nose and walks off down the hill toward his car. He’s bald, but shaves it so you can’t tell, and there are enough brown men still doing that for style that he gets away with it. He puts his fedora back on, and between that and the raincoat he probably never has to pull the badge to prove he’s a detective. Still, it doesn’t look like a costume on him. It just looks like detectives must face some sorts of rainstorms they haven’t told the rest of the world about. When George turns around to stop and look at me, he’s got a dramatic strut going too. All he’s missing is a synthesizer soundtrack and he’d be a living embodiment of the investigators we watched on prime-time television in our childhoods.
“ ‘Are you gay?’ ” he repeats, yelling to me over his shoulder. And then he laughs again, pointing at me like he’s caught the playful prank I was setting. “Man, I’d suck a thousand dicks if I could get away with that excuse.”
—
With Tosha’s credit card, I buy sixteen closed-circuit video cameras with night-vision and thermal detection, all of which feed wirelessly to an external hard drive connected to my laptop. I get the cheapest cameras I can because I want low-quality images. I want blurry faces and dark shapes. I don’t want proof that any specific crackhead is haunting my house, I want proof of a general, unknowable infection, something to show the insurance company later without making some pathetic wretch’s life even worse. I buy Digital Night Vision Binocular Goggles, 1x24 zoom, with head straps and a carrying case. I buy a M26c Taser gun with laser targeting, and a baseball bat — Triton Senior League model SL12T aluminum composite — the only sporting equipment in the store. Then I buy two more bats, one for each door in the house, another for upstairs.
“So he says I know surveillance? Damn right I know surveillance. Glad he knows I know surveillance,” Tosha says a little too loud. She’s been talking too loud since she picked me up, arriving a few minutes after George drove away. Tosha laughs and the sound is red, bitter, dry. It scares the clerk behind the counter and he motions to go help another customer, but she won’t let him leave either.
“Can we get a GPS tracker? A little one. Real little. Hardly noticeable. Something like that.” Tosha points to the one she likes. It’s as small as a cigarette lighter. To me she says, “Oh I know all about George. I know all his secrets now.”
“You still think he’s screwing some dude?”
“Come on,” she tells me, brushing off her earlier theory. “The only man that bastard loves is himself. This isn’t about another man. It’s even worse. It’s a goddamn white woman.” The white guy on the other side of the counter pretends he didn’t hear that, keeps his expression passive and servile. We have truly arrived in a new age.
Already, the boxes of equipment are piled up as if we’re in the early stages of invading a rogue state. Already, we have twice what I’d budgeted.
“Don’t worry about it, just pay me back when you can. Unless they rob you blind first.” Tosha is inspecting the GPS device, turning it in her hands. “This tracker’s too big; I need a smaller one.”
“They didn’t take my car. They even left the keys in the glove compartment. I’m not really worried about theft, I’m worried about them getting in and getting near Tal. I don’t need a tracker.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for the white bitch.”
—
I don’t know if the “white bitch” is really white. I mean, even through the bookstore window I can see that the blond is bleached and she’s got a tan that looks like it doesn’t go away in the winter.
“I got to get back to the house. I got the roofers coming,” I whisper to Tosha from the passenger seat. This gets her to drop the binoculars she’s been staring through since we parked. They’re not like the high-powered, professional scopes we were just looking at in the spy shop. These are pink, plastic, and have a purple strap that dangles loosely in front of Tosha’s face as she peers through them. It almost makes what we’re doing seem light, trivial, instead of wrong and creepy and probably illegal.
“Let me get this right, it’s a whole big compound, with an education program and all, just for half-black people? In the park, with the bugs? What the hell is the point of that? All that just to run away from being black?”
“They’re not trying to run away from blackness. Some of them are even learning to run to it. They’re just mixed people trying to be themselves.”
“They’re not mixed,” she snaps back, the word wet and viral. “I’m black. You’re black. African American, Bilalian, Negro, Colored folk, blackity-black, black. Those Oreos up there, they’re black too, although I’m sure they’d cry if you told them. We’re all mixed with something, no one is pure. Who cares about percentages?”
“Yeah, but it’s not about genes, DNA. It’s about being able to express all of who you are culturally. I mean, they would say that. That if you grew up connected to parents of two races, just saying, ‘I’m black,’ or whatever, negates part of who you are, culturally. As a person.”
“They realize they’re in America, right? You could dress in just kente and only eat fufu and you still wouldn’t balance out the whiteness. We speak English. We wear European clothes. Really, all that’s not enough white for them?”
“I’m telling you, they’re not trying to be white.”