And anyway, most of the guys I knew were truly minor criminals. Burglarizing the cars and backyards of Highland Park for chump change. No one who was really hardcore lasted long. Not because they got killed in a drive-by or something you see in a movie, though that happened occasionally, but because they usually got snatched by the police before they could do anything that was truly gangster. Everyone was happy when Chuck Ferry was off the streets, for example. He was just too dangerous for anybody’s good. The streets were left more often than not to a mix of loiterers, dudes like Amp, and tired old men and boys who did little more than strut along the corners and back alleys. But when I passed them the morning after Amp was killed, everybody seemed nervous. I could feel it. Everybody was anxious to have the villains off the street so the neighborhood could be returned to itself.
“Heard ya boy got got,” a dude said when he saw me sitting on Amp’s steps. He was a few years older than me. I knew he was looking for some little bit of gossip he could take with him on down the road.
“Wasn’t my boy,” I said without looking him in the eye.
“Damn. That’s some cold shit to say, youngblood.” The dude stared until I looked at him. Then walked off with something like mild disgust flickering across on his face.
I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve never even broke up a fight. I’m the quiet dude that’s always watching from the edge of the clash. Dude like me, always the first one people ask what happened. “You saw that shit, Demario? Who threw the first punch?” Usually I know, but I don’t say. The conversations go faster that way. I got no problem with bystanding. One time Star sort of hinted that was my problem. I didn’t think it was a put down at first.
Star. She is without a doubt the blackest person I know. Which is funny because she is also yellow as a brown banana. She didn’t wear dashikis and all that Back-to-Africa shit, but she wore these white shells in her braids. And she knew everything there was to know about Malcolm X, M.L.K., W.E.B. Them famous Negroes whose names were initials. She still had an OBAMA 08 sign propped up in her bedroom window. I could see it whenever I stood across the street looking at her house. I never got, you know, to run my hands over her body and all that, but I know she had a little tattoo shaped like Africa somewhere under her clothes. She never showed it to me.
“What you doing?” I said with a flatness I meant to sound cool when I phoned her. I knew she wouldn’t be at school. She was like eight months pregnant. She’d have the baby in a couple of weeks and be back to finish the last two months of our junior year at Peabody.
“I can’t talk to you right now, Mario.”
“Yeah, I know. I heard what happened to Amp.”
She was quiet. Like she was holding her breath. I knew she’d been crying. After a long minute, she said, “I just don’t know why this is happening.” Damn. Then we were quiet a little while longer.
“I saw the dudes.”
“Who? You saw the dudes that did it?”
“Don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of it for you.”
“Who’d you see?”
Amp wasn’t dead yet when I saw him, I almost told her. I thought of how they had him pinned to a dumpster in an alley off Black Street. Two wiry, scruffy men. The dog, Strayhorn, was snapping at the pant leg of one of them. The guy gave the dog a frantic kick and then kicked at Amp in the same frantic way. They sort of snatched and poked at him. Amp’s shirt had been ripped. He was bleeding. I could hear him saying, “I ain’t got your shit. I ain’t got your shit.” Declaring it, really. Like he wasn’t afraid. Like he was in charge even if they were the ones grabbing and shoving and delivering awkward blows. They could barely handle him. I knew they weren’t gangsters. But I still did nothing.
“I’m gonna take care of this shit,” I said to Star, half talking up my nerve. I didn’t really know what I was saying.
“Don’t go trying to be a hero, Mario.”
“No, it ain’t like that.”
“Just go to the police.”
“Police?”
“Or go by his house— Wait a minute,” she said, putting me on hold.
I rubbed my brow. I thought for the first time that calling the police wasn’t such a bad idea. I won’t say I had plans to take care of Star, exactly. All the money I made working at the Eagle went to Marie. We lived in this little-ass apartment. My mother had been strange since her mother died. She was working long, lonely hours. She was my priority. And then Amp’s death last night, well, I told you she kissed me like her mother used to: a peck on each cheek then on my nose. Shit was embarrassing. I jerked back just a bit, but then I relaxed. I knew she was sad.
The phone clicked back on: “Demario?”
“Yeah? Why you put me on hold?”
“Listen: go over to Amp’s house and tell his uncle what you saw.”
“I’m there now. Ain’t nobody here.”
“You there now? At Amp’s house?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fuck is wrong with you, Star?”
“Don’t cuss at me,” she said.
“I want to see you.”
She sighed. “No. You can’t see me.”
“I’m coming by.”
“Just stay there. Wait for Shag... Come by after you speak to him.”
So that’s what I did. I sat on the steps with my hands in my pockets. Had there been no baby, maybe Star would have gotten back with me. Had there been no baby and no Amp, maybe she could have let herself fall for me. I ain’t bad looking. Amp was just a little taller. But he had these long dreadlocks, where I just have this little nappy afro. Not even enough to braid into cornrows. Once when we were hanging out at Highland Park, Star said she liked my Asiatic Black Man eyes. She grabbed my jaw and looked right into them like she was reading something. Fuck, I hadn’t ever heard the word Asiatic before.
People thought my grandmother had some Asian in her. She had a pudgy face — before the cancer got at her — she had a pudgy face and these slanted eyes that made her look like she was just waking up. If you were on her bad side her face looked full of NotToBeFuckedWithness. I know dudes who just moved and nodded when they saw her walking their way. But if you were on her good side, the same face, the same expression, just seemed real mellow. She’d nod back to those brothers almost without moving her head. She really wasn’t to be fucked with, though, that’s for sure. She kept a fat switchblade in her bra. I got it now.
After thirty, forty minutes, Shag pulled up in an old gray sedan. He was a long skinny man. Going bald. He almost didn’t have to lean over to roll down the passenger-side window.
“Who are you, boy? What you want?” He didn’t seem all that fucked up over anything. Just suspicious as anyone who finds somebody on his porch in the middle of the day.
“I’m Demario. I used to go to school with your nephew Amp.”
Shag didn’t exit the car. I started thinking he wasn’t as calm as I first thought. Seemed like he was figuring something out. Maybe he thought I had a gun or something. All I had was a few books and a hammer in my backpack. And my grandmother’s blade. I had that in my back pocket.
“I saw what happened to him last night,” I told Shag.
People were saying the dudes who’d killed Amp hadn’t been caught, that was true for the moment. People were saying some sort of drug shit was involved, it didn’t seem like that to me. I’d seen them but the stupid dog was the only one to notice me. He barked with the gray hair up on his neck. But it wasn’t his usual wild, territorial bark. There was urgency in it. Fear. I probably imagined it. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two.