The Sweet Forever Read online

  Donna had affection for Eddie. On the downside, he was a follower and without ambition, and the guys he partied with were stupid and cruel, but Eddie himself was kind, and he had yet to screw her over in that thoughtless way she had come to expect from men. He was younger than she was by a few years, too, and still eager to please in bed.

  Yeah, she had affection for Eddie. Affection, not love. The difference was significant. She never stared at Eddie and imagined what he’d look like with gray hair. Never pictured him at the head of anyone’s dinner table. Course, they did have a couple of things in common. Both of them liked to party, for one. And they shared a cockeyed dream of moving to Florida someday, having a modest house with their own swimming pool in the backyard. But this wasn’t much to base a future on, Donna knew.

  If you asked her what she was looking for, she’d give you the simple response: Love was what she was looking for, to love and to be loved back. And if she was being honest that day, she might have added something else: A guy with money in the bank and the looks to make her wet.

  At Donna’s instruction, Eddie pulled over near the corner of 11th. You’d barely notice the record store if you weren’t looking for it, what with all the construction equipment, bulldozers and such, parked in the middle of the street. Eddie guessed that was why the owner had strung up plastic flags and that big “Open” sign, on account of the store was so hard to see. Dividing the east- and westbound lanes, a platform truck up on leg cranks held a small load of steel I beams on its flat, open bed.

  “You want me to walk you in?” said Eddie.

  Donna smiled, patted Eddie’s cheek like he was some kind of kid or something. What, didn’t she think he could protect her if anything went down?

  “I’ll be okay,” said Donna. “Be out in about ten.”

  “Okay, babe. I’m watchin’ you.”

  That’s what he did. Watched her cross the street with that bouncy walk of hers, her ass doing the alternating piston thing inside her skirt, Eddie thinking, God, she’s some kind of woman. Man would be a fool to let that shit get away.

  Donna was only inside the record store for a minute or so when Eddie noticed the kid in the Oakland Raiders coat walking by his car. The kid had his hands deep in the pockets of the oversized coat and he was smiling at Eddie, checking out the car, smiling back at Eddie in a way that was neither friendly nor threatening but somehow knowing. Eddie figured, smile back, and he did it with a nod, but now the kid had passed. Eddie checked the kid out in the passenger sideview, watched him go and stand on the corner in front of the liquor store, where a couple of older black guys were laughing over something a third one had said.

  Eddie looked ahead to the next corner. A young black guy had gotten out of a late model black 300Z and was leaning against the door, his arms folded, just looking around. He caught Eddie’s eye for a moment—maybe Eddie imagined it; he couldn’t be sure—and glanced away.

  Eddie fumbled in the visor for another smoke.

  Black guys. Why’d they always look at Eddie Golden like they wanted to fuck him up?

  Eddie had nothing against black people; it was just that, growing up where he did, out Layhill Road near Bel Pre, he never had the opportunity to get to know any. The guys Eddie drank with, at Gentleman Jim’s in Twin-brook, the Stained Glass in Glenmont, and Hunter’s in Wheaton, those guys didn’t care much for the brothers. Because they were his friends, he listened to their nigger jokes and, sure, he laughed along, but it wasn’t like he had a racist bone in his body himself. The thing was, why rock the boat with his buddies for a bunch of black guys he didn’t know and who always seemed like they’d just as soon cut his throat as look at him anyway? What would be the point of that?

  Through the windshield, Eddie watched the black guy get in his Z and drive off.

  Eddie looked in the rearview mirror at the unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He dug the way that looked. He turned his head a little, ran his fingers through his straight, thin hair where it had receded back off the top of his forehead. In the rearview he saw a car approaching from two blocks back, coming on at a high rate of speed.

  Eddie checked himself out. He knew he wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Miss Donna M. could be doing a whole lot worse. The comments she made, about his car and his dishwasher installer’s job and his low-rent friends, they bothered him a little, like someone was always pinching his shoulder from behind. It was true that careerwise, Eddie hadn’t lit up the town as of yet, but he was a young man, just a hair off of twenty-seven, and he had time. He could score somehow—no immediate prospects, but you never knew—and then Donna would quit cracking on him so much and look at him in a different way. Not that she wasn’t a slave to the bone to begin with. But with a little money and success added to the bargain, she’d come all the way over to his side.

  Eddie heard a sound like a plane was coming down. He turned his head suddenly, saw that the car that had been coming so fast before was almost on top of him now, up on two wheels, narrowly missing a frantic woman running across the street with her child. The car was right behind him. It was a boxy GM, a Monte Carlo or the hopped-up version of the Cutlass, Eddie could no longer tell any of them apart. All four wheels were off the ground, and the car was in the air.

  “Fuck!” screamed Eddie, dropping to the bench seat, covering his eyes with his hands.

  An explosion filled his ears, and he felt his own car move a couple of feet as if it had been windblown, the tires abutting the curb.

  Eddie sat up. He took the crushed cigarette from his lips, tossed it aside.

  Eddie stood in the street. He had stepped out of the Plymouth without knowing that he had. He was thinking, I’m no hero, as he walked toward the car that had crashed. It got hotter as he approached because the interior of the car was on fire. The car had flown right into the platform truck parked in the middle of the street. An I beam overhanging the back of the flatbed had gone through the car’s windshield and out the rear window, and now the car hung suspended, smoke and licks of flame coming from the openings made by the beam.

  A green rectangular piece of paper blew out of the open windshield and was lifted in the air. It was a coupon of some kind, or one of those things they throw out of skyscrapers at New York parades—no, it was money.

  Eddie heard people yelling. Black men’s voices, the winos, maybe, from outside the liquor store. He saw a tall black guy, broad of shoulder and chest, come from the front door of the record store, walk slowly toward the center of the street.

  Eddie pulled back his hand. He had burned it on the handle of the back door of the burning GM. He must have opened the door, because the door was open, and there was a pillowcase spread out on the floor in back. Money spilled out of its open top. Medium denominations, not hundreds and not ones. A black head, its nose flattened, its mouth a stew of bloody, mashed teeth and gums, lay on the backseat. The I beam rested where the head had been, on the smoking shoulders of the torso behind the wheel.

  The pillowcase looked damn near full. Eddie’s face stung from the heat. His hair seemed to rise momentarily off his head. He was stumble-walking back toward his car, swallowing the bile that had risen in his throat, letting go of the pillowcase gripped tightly in his hand and allowing it to fall to the Plymouth’s bench seat. The kid with the Oakland Raiders coat stood just outside the passenger window of Eddie’s car, and he was tapping on the window, and there were many people shouting now, though it seemed not at him, and sirens, he had heard them first moments ago, and now they grew loud.

  Eddie fumbled the ignition, cranked it, pulled down on the tree, got away from the curb. Donna. He couldn’t wait for her. She’d understand. She’d be happy when she saw what he’d done. She’d be proud.

  He carefully negotiated his car around a cop cruiser that had just pulled in at the scene. A black cop and a white cop got out of the cruiser. Eddie went by them briskly, turning his head so they could not see his face.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, caught a glimps
e of Donna and some dude with gray hair, coming out of the record store.

  Eddie hooked a left on 9th. He floored the Reliant, felt it hesitate and knock. His heart raced. He felt good. He checked himself in the rearview: face sunburn-red, his rooster-cut hair black and curled at the ends, his eyebrows singed. The smell of burning things was strong in the car.

  Eddie reached to the right, let his fingers go to the money.

  Eddie thought of himself dropping to the bench, covering his eyes before the crash. He had been scared, like always. But he had done something, too.

  Eddie laughed without knowing why.

  THREE

  Dimitri Karras flipped the switch and extinguished the bathroom light. He stood motionless, savoring the cool drip of cocaine back in his throat, the touch of ice behind his eyes, the charge of energy flowing toward his brain. It was his first jolt of the day, and his first was always the best. The world was better than it had been moments before. The day would surely be more interesting now. There would be interesting people to meet, interesting things to talk about. What did his dealer call it? Medicinal optimism. The promise of a clean and deathless future.

  He smiled. It was comforting, standing in the darkness. It felt better here, out of the light.

  Karras fingered the amber-colored glass vial in the pocket of his jeans. That was the crazy thing about this stuff—well, one of the crazy things: Once you did your first hit, you were thinking about your next right away. What you were holding, when you’d get to it, how much you had left, how far it would go… you’d get so wrapped up in the plan, it was easy to forget the high itself.

  Through the bathroom door he could hear the announcer calling the Maryland-Pepperdine game from the thirteen-inch Sharp set atop Marcus Clay’s desk in the back office of the new store. Karras heard the announcer raise his voice, the surge of the crowd, Clay’s voice.

  “Lord!” yelled Clay. “Mitri, man, come on out, you’re missin’ this shit. Pepperdine’s making a run!”

  Marcus—he loved the epic four-day, sixty-four-team first and second rounds of the NCAA tournament. He waited for it like a child does Christmas morning, called it “the best four days in all of sports.” Damned if Karras could disagree.

  “I’ll be out in a second,” said Karras.

  “What’re you, waxin’ your little old carrot in there?”

  “I said I’ll be right out.”

  Fuck it. Might as well do another jolt.

  He turned the light back on, caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. His hair was short and gray and spiked with gel, the post–new wave look for aging rock and rollers. Thirty-seven years old and all gray. Just ten years earlier he’d had a head of long brown hair and a desperado mustache. The hair had come off when a girl in a bar had told him he looked “so seventies” by way of a quick get-lost. As for the mustache, he had removed it when some cowboy hat–wearing gay boys eye-fucked him on the street near his Dupont Circle pad.

  Karras retrieved the vial from his black Levi’s and unscrewed the plastic top. A tiny spoon dangled from the inside of the top on an attached chain. He dipped the spoon into the vial, removed a miniature mound of coke, fed one nostril, repeated the action, fed the other. He put everything back in place, ran some water from the spigot, wet his fingers, put the tips of his fingers into his nostrils, and inhaled. Karras splashed water on his face, dried it with a towel, and winked at his reflection. He switched off the light and headed out the door.

  “Oh, shit,” said Clay, pointing at the set. “Lefty, don’t be lettin’ Gatlin throw that ball in. ’Cause you know Gatlin threw it to the wrong uniform when they played Georgia Tech in the ACC tournament.”

  “Pulled a Fred Brown,” said Karras, moving alongside Clay.

  But Gatlin didn’t pull a Fred Brown. He got the ball in to Len Bias. Bias drove and was fouled before the shot.

  “What do we got?” said Karras.

  “Thirty-nine seconds left,” said Clay, and Karras grinned at the sight of spit flying from Marcus’s mouth. He was just so into this shit.

  “And?”

  “Pepperdine came back from a twelve-point deficit to bring it to within two.”

  “Your boy Bias gonna let it get away?”

  “Man can’t do it all himself. Got twenty-four, and he’s been pullin’ down mucho rebounds, too. Help if he had a center out there. Know how many Terry Long’s hit today? Zeee-ro.”

  “Relax, Marcus.”

  “Relax? Man, fuck all that.”

  Bias hit the one-and-one, and then the Waves had no option but to foul. Keith Gatlin went to the line, hit both from the charity line, and ended the game. The Terps had made it past the first round. Karras and Clay gave each other skin.

  “Well, Georgetown beat Texas Tech yesterday,” said Clay. “And we got Duke and Syracuse, Louisville and Navy, too—Mr. Robinson’s in his neighborhood, and I do believe he came to play.”

  “Had thirty against Tulsa.”

  “All my teams made it through. We got us a tournament now.”

  “Looking forward to the rest of the games—”

  “After you get your ass out there to the stores. Need you to look in on Arlington today.”

  “Shit, Marcus, you know I can’t deal with Northern Virginia on a Friday afternoon. Might as well park my car out there on Sixty-six.”

  “You’re my GM, man, you got to deal with it, hear?” Clay turned, looked up at Karras. He narrowed his eyes. “Dimitri, you don’t mind my saying so, your jaws are lookin’ kind of tight.”

  “Been grinding my teeth is all.” Karras felt his forced smile. “The pressure of working under you.”

  “You ain’t been hittin’ that freeze back in the bathroom, have you?”

  “Fuck no, man. Besides, you know I’m just a weekend warrior.”

  “We’re damn near right up on the weekend now.”

  “I said I wasn’t using,” said Karras, moving his eyes away from Clay’s.

  “All right, man, I’m just checking.”

  Karras moved toward the entrance to the showroom. He could hear the new Cameo coming from the sales floor.

  Clay said, “Hey,” and Karras turned.

  “What?”

  “You read the Post today?”

  “Haven’t got around to it yet.”

  “Houston let John Lucas go. Man went and failed his second drug test.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, it is too bad. Lucas could play. Was a role model, too. I remember seein’ him when he was at Maryland, wearin’ those crisp tennis whites. He was one of those Gold Coast brothers. Young black men in this town could look up to him, ’cause he had it all in front of him, see? Now he’s just another one who went and threw it all away on some powder.”

  “It’s a damn shame.”

  “Go on and mock it. But I’m just tellin’ you because…” Clay stood out of his chair and waved his hand. “Ah, forget it, man.”

  Karras looked at Clay standing in front of his desk, handsome with his close-cut hair and thick mustache. Even if it was out of style now, even if it had been a gay look for years now, Clay wouldn’t have shaved off that mustache for anyone but himself. He wouldn’t have shaved it because Marcus Clay knew who he was. Karras had never felt that kind of peace.

  “Don’t worry, Marcus. I got it under control.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you say you do,” said Clay, nodding, “then I guess you do.”

  Karras and Clay went out to the sales floor, where Clarence Tate, Clay’s controller, was talking to the new store manager, a guy who went by the name of Cootch. Cootch smoked Newports and wore long-sleeved Oxford shirts year round to hide his skinny arms. He claimed the girls liked him better like that, covered up, until they got surprised by the rest of him later on. Cootch had a big smile reflecting his positive disposition and a solid work ethic to go with it; Clay had recently promoted him from his six-month stint as a clerk at th
e Dupont Circle store.

  Tate stood behind the new register and explained the order-entry system, once again, to Cootch. Clay watched Tate’s face, the sidelong looks he gave Cootch as he tried to keep a lid on his impatience. All right, Cootch was a little slow on the uptake. But he loved music, had a deep knowledge of it, and was pleasant with the customers. Tate had to understand; not everyone caught on as fast as he did with this computer shit. But everyone did have their strengths, which was why Clay had Karras out in the stores, hiring and firing and dealing with personnel, and why he had Tate, who was a man who could deal better with numbers than with people, behind a desk.

  You had to give Clarence Tate credit, though. While working full time for Real Right he had done six years of night school and gotten his accounting degree. All that and he had raised young Denice, too, all by himself. Clay had been lucky to find Tate, and keep him, after that bad shit they had all got wrapped up in back in ’76.

  “Yo, boss,” said Cootch. “Wha’sup?”

  “Cootch,” said Clay. “How you doin’ with that, man?”

  “He’s gettin’ it,” said Tate, who picked up a tabloid-sized newspaper off the counter as he moved out from behind the register stand. Tate was as tall as Clay, but his schedule through the years had kept him away from any kind of exercise. Unlike Clay, he had let himself spread out.

  “Clarence,” said Karras.

  “Dimitri.”

  “Any beeswax?” said Karras. Not that he cared much about the numbers, but the coke pulsing through his blood was pushing him to conversation.

  “Huh?” Tate seemed distracted. He kept glancing over to the window fronting the store, where his daughter, Denice, stood looking out across the street, her book bag over her shoulder.

  “The business,” said Karras. “We doin’ any?”

  “Never enough,” said Tate, his standard answer. He turned to Clay, held up the newspaper. “Course, we might be doin’ better if we were in City Paper this week—”