The Man Who Came Uptown Page 6

  The siblings knew how she cooked them. She’d been doing greens the same way their whole lives.

  Thomas stayed mostly silent for the rest of the meal. He had been the quiet, stoic one since childhood, and his time in the military had not changed him. Judging from his comments, he also seemed to have grown more socially conservative. This sparked no rebuttal from Michael, who was basically apolitical. Plus, it was a matter of respect to let Thomas say whatever was on his mind. Their father had been in and out of their lives, mostly out, due to issues with alcohol, so Thomas, several years Michael’s senior, had played the paternal role. With his steely, insular manner, he had always seemed like a man to Michael, even when they were kids.

  After dinner they went to the living room and watched a Dallas–Green Bay football contest on the cable channel that showed old games. It had been played on the frozen tundra, in the snow, and the Pack was handing Dallas its ass. They were a Redskins house, united in their hatred for the Cowboys. For Michael, it was a nice cap to an already good day.

  Later, up in their old bedroom, Thomas took Michael aside for the inevitable talk. He put a large hand on Michael’s shoulder and looked into his eyes.

  “You straight now, right?” said Thomas. He was taller than Michael, with very dark skin and hair shaved close to the scalp. Veins wormed across his left temple when his manner grew intense. “You through with all this nonsense?”

  “I am.”

  “You put the old girl through some grief.”

  “I know it. That’s what I regret more than anything. I’m not gonna go down that road again.”

  “Okay, then. Bring it in.”

  Thomas stepped forward and wrapped his strong arms around Michael. Michael felt his spine shift and heard it crack some too.

  “Damn, Thomas, you about to break my back.”

  “You fuck up like that again,” said Thomas, “I’m gonna come home and snap you in two.”

  Michael knew he meant it. Thomas had always had problems controlling his temper, even now, in his thirties. In fact, it had cost him his marriage. But Michael knew that Thomas’s words were said in love. Michael wasn’t going to mess up again. For his own self, and especially for his mother.

  The next morning, Olivia drove down south, and Thomas flew back to Texas. That left Michael, his mother, and Brandy, their aging dog.

  The Hudsons had adopted Brandy from the no-kill animal shelter on Oglethorpe Street and Blair Road, in Northeast. Michael, then a sophomore at Cardozo High School, had chosen Brandy, a medium-size mix of indeterminate breeds, when she limped across her cage to lick his hand. She had a cast on her rear right leg, which was healing from a fracture. Her former owner, a D.C. police officer, had broken her leg with the handle of a broom. In a separate incident, he had broken his wife’s nose. In court, he beat the charges of spousal abuse but was later tried and convicted on animal abuse, which was a felony in the District. The Hudsons learned of Brandy’s history only six months after she was adopted, when they read a story in the Washington Post about the officer’s expulsion from the force. Previously, Michael had wondered why the dog ran terrified from the room whenever his mother picked up a broom.

  Brandy was now thirteen and Michael was in his late twenties. The dog seemed to have grown old while he’d been away. She was stiff on her right side, as if the injury she had sustained when she was a puppy had returned. She had trouble getting up the stairs at night when it was time to follow Doretha to bed. Her tan coat had faded, she had lost weight, her muzzle was white, and she had gone deaf. But she still had the eyes of a doe.

  Two days after his return, Michael filled out a form on his mother’s laptop, printed it out, and left the house. Doretha was already down at the Department of Transportation, where she had worked as an administrative assistant since graduating from Strayer, the business college, thirty years ago. Michael walked up to the Petworth library on Kansas Avenue at Georgia and presented his form and his driver’s license to the bearded man who sat at the desk near the front entrance. The man gave Michael a temporary library card on the spot and told him that a permanent one would be sent to him in the mail. It was his first library card.

  Michael looked around him at the intricate inlaid design on the lobby floor and the hanging lights with the large glass bowls. It was a nice, freestanding brick building with a quiet, peaceful vibe. Though it was an old structure, it seemed redone, like one of those cars that had been restored.

  Michael went to the big room where they kept the fiction books. Folks of all ages sat at a long table holding keyboards and screens, doing research, or just reading random stuff on the internet. The floor in here was a nice checkerboard design, and there was an inactive fireplace at the rear of the room where people sat on comfortable furniture and read. Some of the windows gave to a view of the nicely kept football field at Roosevelt High, home of the Rough Riders. Michael spent an hour or so browsing the stacks, picking out a couple of books from the hardwood shelves. He was happy here and could have stayed all day.

  At the desk, he checked out the books from the same bearded man who’d greeted him when he came in. He asked the man if they had a fiction book called Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter. The man looked it up on a monitor and told him that they didn’t have the book at that particular branch, but that they could have it transferred over to Petworth.

  “I’d like that,” said Michael. “Thanks.”

  The man scanned the bar code on the books Lost in the City and The Things They Carried, which had been one of Anna’s recommendations from when Michael was locked up.

  “Edward P. Jones,” said the bearded man, tapping his finger on the cover of Lost in the City. “He went to Cardozo. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” said Michael. “I went to Cardozo too.”

  “There you go,” said the bearded man. “Another win for the D.C. public-school system.” Michael took the books off the counter and once again thanked the man for his help.

  Walking back to Sherman Avenue, Michael thought of his time at Cardozo, the wasted opportunities, the teachers and administrators there who’d tried to help him along. But he was too much of a knucklehead then to listen to them or even to his mom.

  There was this one teacher, O’Leary, also the school’s baseball coach, who’d encouraged him to sign up for the AP English class. In that class they had this Writers in Schools program, where the students would all read a certain book, and then the author who wrote that book would come into the classroom and discuss it with the kids. That would have been cool, but Michael at that point was not a reader and lacked the confidence to give it a try. He was always good with numbers and passed his mathematics exams without even studying. But books scared him some. Books were like a foreign language he had yet to learn.

  Wasn’t till Anna turned him on to reading at the jail that he began to appreciate the difference books could make in someone’s life. She had brought authors to the chapel, and celebrities too, the way O’Leary had brought in real writers to Michael’s high school. The poet Ethelbert Miller, longtime D.C. dude, was one he remembered well. Lisa Page, an author and a creative writing professor over at GW. And that news lady on Channel 4, Wendy Rieger, a woman who didn’t talk down to the inmates and looked each one of them in the eye. He knew what Miss Anna had been doing: Giving them a connection to the outside world and showing the men who were incarcerated that writers and celebrities were flesh-and-blood people. Taking the mystery out of folks like them. Saying: They’re talented but they’re not necessarily better than you. They set their sights on something and they worked to get it. You can work toward something too.

  Back on the concrete porch of his mother’s house on Sherman, Michael sat in a rocker sofa and began to read “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the first short story in the book by Mr. Jones. The row house was brick, painted red, with a red-and-white metal awning over the porch and a smaller, matching metal awning above each of the three windows on the second floor. Brand
y lay out on the porch by his feet. She had found a spot in the early-spring sun.

  He looked out to the street. Sherman Avenue had that grassy island in the middle of it, separating the north- and southbound lanes, which made it seem special. Across the road, on the west side of Sherman, were restored row homes topped with turrets. On the east side, the 3200 block where his mother’s house sat, a large condominium building had gone up next to an old Baptist church while Michael had been incarcerated. The upward transformation of his neighborhood was happening too quickly for his taste, but it meant that his mother’s property, which she owned outright, was growing tremendously in value. His mom would retire and live comfortably for the rest of her life when she sold the house.

  Presently a uniformed mailman, a lean, middle-aged man named Gerard who had been on their route for quite some time, came up the steps. When he saw Michael, a look of pleased surprise came to his face.

  “How’s it going, young man?”

  “Sir.”

  “Haven’t seen you for a long time.”

  “I been away. But I’m back now, permanent.”

  Gerard nodded. He knew. “Well, we need to catch up, talk about those Redskins. But not today. I got to get on it.” He handed Michael some mail folded up in a magazine.

  “You look good, Mr. Gerard.”

  “Shoot, I walk ten miles a day.” Gerard turned to the side and showed Michael his flat stomach. “U.S. Postal Service pays me to stay in shape.” It was something Gerard said often, and Michael smiled.

  “Be easy, Mailman.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  Michael watched Gerard quickstep down the block. It reminded Michael that he needed to look for work straightaway. He wasn’t trying to freeload off his mother. Back in lockup, he had spoken to a lady from Open City Advocates, folks who helped juvenile offenders come back out into the world. He was a long way from being a juvenile, but this lady knew someone who knew someone, a man who ran a restaurant in Columbia Heights, who might want to talk to him about a kitchen job. But Michael didn’t even have a phone, so the next thing on his list was to go out and get a new cell so people could contact him. His mother would have to help him out with that. Probably she’d need to put him on her phone contract too. She would do it. He’d let her down many times, but she’d never lost faith in him or pushed him away.

  There was so much to do. He felt like he was ready.

  ANNA LIVED with her husband, Rick, in a row home on the 3600 block of Warder Street in Park View, between Quebec and Princeton, a block west of the Soldiers’ Home with its wooded acreage, pond, and putting green. Theirs was a tan brick home with interesting architectural details, a porch just large enough for a single chair, and bars on the first-floor windows. A wide, clean alley paved in red brick ran behind the house.

  The Byrnes were home-owning gentrifiers who had moved onto the block four years earlier and were now familiar by sight to the long-timers. Outwardly, they were accepted. Though you never knew what was in people’s hearts.

  Anna liked her neighborhood and most of the people they’d met there. She and Rick could walk to the bars and restaurants on Georgia, to the newish Safeway up on Randolph—an addition to the hood that had changed the game in a way that only a grocery store could—and to the refurbished library in Petworth. There was a reborn recreation center complete with a small pool, playgrounds, and a beautiful field with bleachers, steps away. Bruce-Monroe Elementary, with its crenellated, castle-like walls, was a block south. That was a plus for Rick, who was ready to have children. He felt that the school was a sign that they should stay here and try to make it work. Anna mostly let him talk about it. She wasn’t sure she wanted kids yet. Or at all.

  Her parents, who visited a couple of times a year, had their reservations about Anna and Rick’s chosen home. They’d ask her if living here was “safe,” and she reassured them that it was fine. She was no urban dilettante. When she was out at night, she was aware of her surroundings and had no liberal guilt about crossing the street to avoid groups of young men who were coming her way. Knowing where you were was simply a reality of city life. Many young couples had dogs for security, both in their homes and on their nightly walks, but Anna felt it was unfair to keep an animal alone in the house so much of the time, as she and her husband spent every weekday at work. There were street robberies, armed and strong-arm, and the occasional homicide, and every so often she would hear the pop of gunshots at night. But there were far fewer incidents of violence than there had been when they’d first moved here. In fact, there was progress citywide.

  Still, she was restless. It wasn’t the neighborhood; it was marriage. Rick himself was not the problem. He was smart, funny, a gentleman, and attractive in a dark Irish way. They were friends and, so far, good partners, and they were fine in bed. Rick touched all the bases, though he was somewhat of a technician and there was a sameness to his moves. She came infrequently but that’s what her vibrator was for. She loved him. She got that “now it’s all right” feeling when he walked into a room.

  The conventions of marriage were what gave her pause. The expected milestones and progressions. Wedding ceremony, home ownership, kids, colleges, empty nest, retirement, death. The step 1, step 2, step 3 of it that, when she thought of it, bored her to tears. And then she’d laugh at herself when she questioned these things. She was married to a good man. She didn’t want to be alone.

  Rick came home from work after her, as he always did. He was wearing a navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit and a blue-and-red rep tie. He called it the uniform of his law firm. Rick was handsome in a grown-man way, changed from the shaggy, bearded look he’d carried off effortlessly when they first met at Emerson. When they’d go out to see bands, and she’d stand close to him in clubs, the heat radiated between them. Now he barely listened to music anymore. In his free time, he ran and played golf.

  “Hey,” he said. Rick embraced her and they kissed. “Good day?”

  “Yes. I’m gonna take a ride, okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll have a run and meet you back here in, what, an hour or so?”

  “Okay.”

  “We can grab some dinner out.”

  “Great.”

  He kissed her again. “You look good. Really good.”

  She was wearing shorts over spandex, a D.C. stars-and-bars T-shirt from Bureau, a skate shop on U Street, and shoes with steel shanks. “You’re quick with the compliments tonight.”

  “That’s ’cause I want something.”

  “Hmm.”

  She climbed onto her Cannondale road bike and pedaled down the steep hill of Georgia, past the Banneker public pool where she swam during lap time in the summer months. She was hurtling straight down the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, and it would be a bitch to return on, but it was a good hard way to end a ride. She’d go downtown to the Mall and if she was ambitious, she’d do the loop at Hains Point, then come back home. They’d shower and maybe walk over to Eleventh Street to one of those restaurant/bars, then come back to the house and watch some Netflix, and at the end of the night they’d make love, that “something” he’d mentioned. It would be a good night. And, also, routine.

  Pedaling hard, she thought of work, as she tended to do while on her rides. The Mental Health unit was on the schedule for the next day, and its inmates had different needs and presented different challenges than those on the other blocks. She had staged them earlier in the afternoon and would make some additions the next morning. And then she thought about Gen Pop, which would meet the following day, and what those men would need. That guy Donnell, crafty and smart, and the born-again Christian who looked at her in ways she could not decipher, and Michael Hudson…but oh, yeah, Michael, one of her favorite clients, was no longer in the unit. One day he simply wasn’t there. She didn’t know if he had transitioned to a federal facility or if he’d been released.

  This was something she had gotten used to. The jail held pretrial felons, pretrial misdemeanants, and sentenced misdeme
anants. It wasn’t a prison. No one stayed too long. She got comfortable with being around many of these men, and in some cases she looked forward to seeing them. And then they were gone.

  She wondered about Michael. She hoped he’d landed well.

  Eight

  THE WEITZMAN residence was in Potomac, Maryland, off of Falls Road, in a neighborhood of split-level and Colonial homes built in the 1970s. By modern standards, the lots and structures were modest, none approaching the large acreage and square footage of houses in places like Howard County and in communities like McLean, across the river. But the big-ticket imports in the driveways and the highly rated public schools in the zip code told a story of quiet wealth.

  Phil Ornazian was seated in a small room off the kitchen, his notebook, pen, and a glass of water before him, talking to Leonard Weitzman, sitting across the table from him. Weitzman’s wife, Diane, sat on a stool in the kitchen at a kind of breakfast bar, having a glass of chardonnay. She was within earshot of the conversation but had elected to situate herself away from the men.

  “Where’d you two go that weekend?” said Ornazian.

  “The Hyatt down in Cambridge,” said Weitzman. “On the Eastern Shore. Just Diane and me. We like to get away when we can.”

  “Do you play golf?” The resort featured an eighteen-hole course overlooking the Choptank River.

  “I don’t go down there for that,” said Weitzman. “We go because Diane likes the atmosphere.”

  “They have wonderful spa facilities,” said Diane.

  “But you play,” said Ornazian to Weitzman.

  “Sure,” said Weitzman, and then, offhandedly, “I’m at Congressional.”

  The initiation fee at Congressional Country Club was in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It told Ornazian, and the world, that Weitzman had fuck-you money. Also, Weitzman, a Jew, had elected to join Congressional over Woodmont, the traditional Jewish club on Rockville Pike, whose initiation fee, eighty K, was considerably less. Ornazian didn’t know what any of this meant, but, as he had always been outside the tent of money and power, he found it interesting.