“No, I’ll probably head to Newark. Atlanta. Somewhere with more black people than there are here.” I could hear Shag taking a piss in the bathroom while he talked. “You ain’t good for shit, you know that, right? No. No, nigga, just stay there. I got somebody here gonna ride over there with me.”
I thought again of the gun. Shag would want me to drive while he shot from the window. Or worse, he’d drive while he made me shoot. Either way, what I’d seen meant I’d have to be a part of what was going to happen.
I tried to be quiet running out of the house. I kept thinking I could hear a dog barking behind me. Amp’s dog. The ghost of his dog. I didn’t look back until I was panting around the corner. I was a few blocks from Star’s house. But I turned toward Euclid where the new houses were being built.
There was a young white woman working in her yard. Planting flowers or something. Trimming the hedges. She glanced at me, then stared as I walked up the steps of the big empty house standing next to hers. There was no one there. I rattled the doorknob looking through its window into the wide bare rooms. I glanced back at the white woman who was pulling off her gardening gloves and still watching me. I pulled the hammer Amp sold me from my book bag and used it to smash the window on the door. The woman rushed inside her house. I reached through and tried to grab the door latch, but couldn’t. I walked across the porch and hammered at the pane of the living room window until it broke open like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. It was loud as hell. I didn’t fucking care. I guess I got cut. My blood dripping on the shiny hardwood floors almost looked like a trail of pennies.
I wanted to carve Amp’s name somewhere no one would find it. Not for another fifty years or so. Not until the house had been lived in by rich white people, then rented out to poor black people, then renovated for white people again. I wanted someone in the future to strip back the sheetrock and find Amp’s named carved into a beam. There was nowhere to carve it, though. Nowhere discreet. The kitchen didn’t have cabinets yet. The bathroom on the first floor had no toilet. Wires hung from the ceilings and walls. Just an empty house. My grandmother said—she used to say this all the time—that people, black or white, would always fight over dirt but nobody could ever really own it. She said the land could only belong to the land. The rivers belonged to the rivers. The air was still air no matter who claimed to own it.
On the second floor I stood at a window in the master bedroom. Brick and sky, metal and wood, concrete and dirt, you already know what I saw out there: all the shit that gives air something to lean on. I knew the cops were on their way. And I’d have to do something. Say something. I thought I could already hear the sirens. I thought I could hear dogs trying to match the sound. I sat in the middle of the floor with the hammer in my lap. I had blood on my shirt and pants. I wasn’t crying. I was barely breathing.
When I dialed Star’s number, the dial tones echoed around me. We’d talked on the phone, but I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Wasn’t that I was afraid of Amp or his fucking dog. I just kept thinking she’d ask me over eventually. Soon as Amp fucked up, I figured she’d want to see me. And really, when I heard he was dead, I thought it was a reason to see her. Pregnant or not. I was going to be there for her. I was going to be with her.
Star didn’t speak a word when she answered. “Hey,” I said after a few seconds. I said it just as I’d said it to my mother when we came home from my grandmother’s funeral. Sort of like it was a question. Softly. Slowly. It embarrassed me the same way when I said it then. “Hey.”
WHITE TRASH
by Jerome Charyn
Prudence had escaped from the women’s farm in Milledgeville and gone on a crime spree. She murdered six men and a woman, robbed nine McDonald’s and seven Home Depots in different states. She wore a neckerchief gathered under her eyes and carried a silver Colt that was more like an heirloom than a good, reliable gun. The Colt had exploded in her face during one of the robberies at McDonald’s, but she still managed to collect the cash, and her own willfulness wouldn’t allow her to get a new gun.
She wasn’t willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn’t steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She’d had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn’t appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that’s what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn’t out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.
The cops had caught on to her tactics, and her picture was nailed to the wall inside post offices, supermarkets, and convenience stores; she might have been trapped in a Home Depot outside Savannah if she hadn’t noticed a state trooper fidgeting with his hat while he stared at her face on the wall.
Pru had to disappear or she wouldn’t survive her next excursion to Home Depot or McDonald’s. And no book could help her now. Travel guides couldn’t map out some no-man’s land where she might be safe. But Emma Mae, her cellmate at Milledgeville, had told her about the Bronx, a place where the cops never patrolled McDonald’s. Besides, she hadn’t murdered a single soul within five hundred miles of Manhattan or the Bronx. Pru wasn’t a mad dog, as the bulletins labeled her. She had to shoot the night manager at McDonald’s, because that would paralyze the customers and discourage anyone from coming after her.
She got on a Greyhound wearing eyeglasses and a man’s lumber jacket after cutting her hair in the mirror of a public toilet. She’d been on the run for two months. Crime wasn’t much of a business. Murdering people, and she still had to live from hand to mouth.
She couldn’t remember how she landed in the Bronx. She walked up the stairs of a subway station, saw a synagogue that had been transformed into a Pentecostal church, then a building with a mural on its back wall picturing a paradise with crocodiles, palm trees, and a little girl. The Bronx was filled with Latinas and burly black men, Emma Mae had told her; the only whites who lived there were “trash”—outcasts and country people who had to relocate. Pru could hide among them, practically invisible in a casbah that no one cared about.
Emma Mae had given her an address, a street called Marcy Place, where the cousin of a cousin lived, a preacher who played the tambourine and bilked white trash, like Prudence and Emma. He was right at the door when Pru arrived, an anemic-looking man dressed in black, with a skunk’s white streak in his hair, though he didn’t have a skunk’s eyes; his were clear as pale green crystals and burned right into Pru. She was hypnotized without his having to say a single syllable. He laughed at her disguise, and that laughter seemed to break the spell.
“Prudence Miller,” he said, “are you a man or a girl?”