You got that on you? he says.
Fasho, I say.
Cool, he says. Let’s roll.
We pull off slow, with Todd finger-steering and the music on whisper and the wipers lulling and the dashboard lit in neons. We make a few turns to the drum of languorous rain.
This lick has got me breaking my embargo on business after sundown, but we know why, correct? Plus, as I said, me and dude go back. Way before his sucker-for-love scene, we both pledged Brothers Gaining Equality, a fledgling high school fraternity (you wouldn’t catch me pledging a college frat now, plodding campus with an ego gassed on Greek myths) made up of upperclassmen and a freshman or two. BGE held can drives, coat drives, community cleanups, spoke to kids, danced at step shows, threw parties, volunteered weekends at old folks’ homes. As it happened, Todd pledged a couple months after me and rocked with the group till years later we lost steam.
He pulls to the curb on a gloomy side street, and I give him the sack. You can feel how heavy it was when it leaves me and the shit ain’t in any way negligent.
This everything? he says. Homeboy’s redolent of high-powered chronic, got lower lids the shade of sliced peaches. Of course, I say. You know how I do. He hands me a brown paper sack with its edges rolled closed. All there, he says, a scarlet sclera dialed to me, the other scoping the road. Yeah, I know it is, bro. That’s why we do business, I say.
I open the sack expecting a bundle of big faces arranged faceup and folded but scoop a handful of fucking board-game bills!
Ha, I say. Good one.
Todd hits the locks. He hits the locks and, on God, dynamite would make less boom! The click is a brisance that shoots through my ears and into my head and stomps down my spine. What’s worse, someone springs from the backseat and chokes me around the throat. That someone smashes a gun against the side of my eye and, on my life, this can’t be true; how could it? That fast my face goes cold; that fast the rest of me does too. Don’t say one motherfuckin word! he says, and grinds the gun till the gun breaks skin. There ain’t no life flashing past. No white lights. No image of Jesus floating above my head. There’s a trickle of blood scribbling into my eye and this nigger easing off with lethal calm.
Chapter 39
I need to find him.
Andrew’s truck isn’t out front, so I sneak around back to check if it’s garaged. I’m peeking into the garage when I hear the patio door slide open. It’s his wife.
What? I say.
Why you look? she says. She can make her eyes into swords when she wants. Or lances.
Where is he? I say.
So rude, she says.
Where? I say.
She looks into the alley and asks if I’m alone.
I need to find him, I say.
He downtown, she says. Rally at the square.
I stomp for the gate. She calls after me and I decide to stop. She comes down the steps and whisks across the patio with her arms in a gesture of peace.
This way with us, she says. It is no good.
This could be a ploy. Why here? Why now? This woman who long ago plied at Andrew to send me away. Who all these years has dug a moat between us. The hard heartbreaks don’t soften this fast.
* * *
My brother Pat used to tell me stories about Andrew, how he’d made the local paper for his role in a school board meeting, about him marching in police beating protests, how he’d sit front row at a city forum to rename a street. Times he was present for others when that presence too was at my expense. When it meant missing a recital, or school play, or a track meet. Andrew oft absent, though in this way we’ve been more alike than we have not.
There’s a Measure Eleven protest at the courthouse square. A slew of folks shouting and stomping and waving and pounding cardboard signs tacked to sticks. There are so many of them, all that shows through the mass of feet and bodies are bits of red brick. I stand on the fringes with what seems little chance of finding Andrew inside the crush.
My eyes dart from this to that one and Andrew is nowhere to be found. I wade closer and see a man on the steps dressed in khakis and a windbreaker, a bullhorn in hand. He jumps and barks through the horn. The veins in his neck flex to tight ropes and his face blushes to the red of a fresh scratch. Police with helmets and clubs and shields show up and stand shoulder to blue-uniformed shoulder — stewing, but where don’t they? — around the sides of the square. I skirt around to Broadway to look from higher up. But there’s no sign of Andrew, so I ease down the steps and into the horde. The speaker points to the sky and the crowd roars. They spike signs and pump their fists and chant, and I sift for Andrew, feeling as if each step places me more and more in harm’s way, as if finding his dark face would be the same as seeing Christ. It isn’t long until I’m in the center, suffering bumps and nudges, with my arms stiff and my shoulders pushed tight, me on the verge of a full cardiac stop or else an organ about to burst through my ribs. It’s too much. It isn’t anything left for me to do but brace and wait for the crowd to grant me a safe distance.
The touch on my arm you couldn’t mistake. It’s a father’s touch, a kind touch. Grace, he says. What are you doing? Why are you here?
Chapter 40
So this, this, is why these niggers feel super.
Security at the shack shakes me down at the front and turns an aphasic tower till I ask where I can find Mister. He nods towards the steps at the end of an unlit hall, steps that announce my weight all the way down. From down here you can see Mister through an archway among an ambit of gamblers, hustlers fatmouthing with fat stacks in their fists and piles of bills underfoot, an august vision when you’ve lost what I lost: thousands, in one whop! I stand by while they bicker over who’s next on the dice, who hit what point, who made what side bet, stall with no clue of what the fuck I’ll say. Mister gets his turn on the dice, and that’s when, trepid as shit, I slug inside. Mister nods. He’s got a knot of bills in his grip, money flapping out his pockets too. One of the old heads asks if I’m shooting and I shake my head no. The old head who asked about me playing ain’t the only one of them I’ve seen before, and I’m wondering which one, if any, knows what happened last night? What happened to me last night is the kind of news that travels at Mach speed, light speed, motherfucking god speed. It’s called the wire. And it’s the same kind of wire that turned these dice games into legends.
You hear of fools losing new car money in a night, losing that much and returning the next day, hear of games going all night and through the morning, shoot-outs that start with bet the dub and end with two men standing and heaps of cash. And if the games are legends, Mister’s (it’s almost impossible to beat the inexhaustible bank) the hero, mythic for winning big, for never getting duped by a scheme nor jerked on a debt.
Mister smooths his tie, brushes dust off his knee, gives Red, who’s holding his sport coat, a clutch of wrinkled hundreds. He blows on the dice and shakes them near his head. Taking all bets, gentlemen, he says. Tonight’s a good night. Tonight could be your night. His first roll shows four and five, and he scoops the dice and rubs them together. Who else wants a shot at the bank? he says, and taunts the reluctant into wary side bets. Mister kisses the dice and shoots. He shoots and shoots and shoots. You could fall out and die waiting for him to hit his point or crap out, and, shit, I almost do. But he does — he hits it and sends Red around to collect the loot.
The hope, a foolish hope, fleets that his mood is such he might forgive what I owe. We (the we being anyone with even a toe in the streets) all know if you owe this man a cent, you pay this man that cent, or else.