Drama City Page 9

  Maybe he could skip the dash thing and do something else. He’d seen this video, had to be Ludacris, where Luda or whoever it was had installed a DVD screen right smack in the middle of the steering wheel. That was cool too. Only, if you turned the wheel while you was driving, and you had to turn it to drive the car, how the fuck could you see what was going on?

  Green pushed his fingers under his Raiders cap and scratched at his head. He did this unconsciously when his thoughts went deep.

  “Pull over, D,” said Michael Butler, sitting in the leather bucket beside him, pointing to a Giant supermarket on Georgia Avenue. “I wanna get Nigel’s moms some ice cream.”

  “Nigel told you she ain’t need nothin’.”

  “She love that mint-chocolate Breyers, though.”

  “I know it,” said Green, thinking, She love it like a dog loves a steak bone. Why she fatter than a motherfucker too.

  “We got to go by there anyway, drop off the count. Thought we’d bring her a surprise.”

  DeEric Green turned the Escalade into the lot of the Giant without further comment. He parked in a handicapped space and watched Michael Butler walk into the store. Boy wanted to bring Nigel’s mother a surprise, he wasn’t gonna fight it.

  A 4D cruiser came into the lot and drove through it slowly. Green reached down and pushed the butt of his chrome full under the seat.

  So now Butler was gonna get another gold star for being thoughtful to Nigel’s mother. Green guessed that Butler felt the need to kiss on Nigel’s ass, make a place for himself as some kind of house cat, ’cause he sure wasn’t gonna shine out on the street.

  Green wondered why Butler wanted to be in the life at all. He didn’t buy expensive things with the money he made. He took no pleasure in being hard. He didn’t talk about football, fucking dudes up, killing bitches in the bed, or none of that. Instead, Butler could point out foreign countries, like Canada, on a map. He could tell you about star constellations and stuff like that. He read books, newspapers, and magazines. Butler was different.

  Still, odd and soft as Butler was, Nigel was moving the kid up little by little. Green couldn’t deny that it bothered him some. You could even say it hurt him, ’cause he had been loyal to Nigel for a couple of years now. He had even put some work in for Nigel, back when he first came on.

  And what, exactly, had Michael Butler done to get his self on that fast track? He’d never smoked anyone. He’d never, far as Green knew, handled a gun. Nigel had taken a liking to Butler, was all, and now he was getting ready to promote him. All right, so the kid was smart, maybe even smarter than DeEric, if you measured it by books and shit like that. But didn’t being fearless out here count for nothing no more?

  Truth was, and hard as it was for Green to admit it, he could see why Nigel liked Butler. Butler had an easy manner about him. He was gentle, steady, and quiet. Even when he was drinking alcohol and smoking weed, his personality stayed the same. Green didn’t feel like Butler was suited for the game, but what else was a young man in his situation going to do? Butler didn’t have no man at home to guide him right, and even if he did, coming from the house where he came from, living with a no-ass straight-up fiend of a mother, Butler wouldn’t know how to act in the square world. Wasn’t like he was gonna go to Howard or Maryland U and blend in with them fraternity boys. College wasn’t in the boy’s future, anyway. He’d already dropped out of high school.

  So Butler had made his choices. Same way Green had made his, early on.

  Green had followed the path of his older brother, James, a midlevel dealer in Columbia Heights. James had done all right for a while, but he had died from a bullet to the back of his head five years back. James sold drugs, but he wasn’t about beefing with no one. It had happened over some girl.

  James was just crazy behind that ass. He saw it, he liked it, he had to go and hit it. Didn’t matter if some other motherfucker held the deed on the bitch’s pussy. DeEric had told James that this hunger was gonna kill him someday, and it did. Their mother, she had cried like a madwoman at the graveside. DeEric had kept his face set tight at the funeral, ’cause you had to in front of your boys. But when he got to their house on Lamont Street, up in his room? He’d cried his eyes out too. He still missed James fierce. Worst thing was, he couldn’t avenge him. By the time DeEric found out who’d done the thing, the killer was dead his own self by another man’s hand.

  The new Bone Crusher came on the radio. Green turned it up.

  It settled on Green that Butler was taking the elevator to the top floors no matter what, and he, DeEric, was gonna be staying down in the lobby. He wasn’t going to complain about it or anything else to Nigel. Nigel was why he was driving this Escalade right here. Nigel was why he was wearing these platinum chains. The preacher at his mother’s church called them slave chains, but that Bama was driving a Ford Taurus with duct tape on the bumper, so what could he know? Green liked what this life gave him. He wasn’t ashamed of one thing.

  Anyway, Green was a soldier, not an officer. He knew this. Maybe he’d be taking orders from Butler someday too. That would be fine, long as he kept getting paid.

  He sensed that Nigel didn’t want no bad to come to the kid. Green would make certain that none did.

  Green looked in the rearview and side-views. The police was gone. He didn’t notice the silver BMW that had followed them into the lot. Green took a half-smoked joint out of the ashtray and struck a match.

  As Green was hitting the weed, Michael Butler came out of the supermarket and got back in the Caddy. He reached into the bag where the ice cream was and pulled out a roll of Sweet Tarts.

  “This you, D,” said Butler, handing Green the roll. Sweet Tarts were DeEric’s favorite candy, especially when he was high.

  “Thank you, cuz,” said Green, passing the joint over to Butler, who took it and drew on it hard.

  Green thinking, Ain’t nothin’ wrong with this kid, when you get down to it. The boy’s just nice.

  RICO MILLER WAS UNDER the wheel of his 330i, sitting low, as Melvin Lee, in the passenger bucket, scanned the radio for a song he liked. Miller had let Lee drive the car for most of the day, but now it was time for Miller to take back what was his.

  Lee had this hoop, an old Camry, the kind of car a white man in the suburbs bought when he thought he’d made it. It was the car to go with the relaxed jeans and the goatee and the wife with the long T-shirts trying to cover her fat ass. Funny to see Melvin driving a car like that, much as he loved nice things, but that was part of his strategy for layin’ low and staying free. Show no flash, hold a job up at the car wash, watch the weed intake, report steady to the correctional officer, pee in the cup when they asked you to, all that. Melvin carried no gun, either, ’cause a felon like him, he got caught with one, that was a mandatory ten-to-fifteen right there. What they called the Reno law. Melvin did not want to go back to prison.

  So Rico Miller let him drive his whip. Not all the time, but some. Even let Melvin pretend it was his, like when he was talking mad shit to that dog man back at Dupont, saying, “You leanin’ against my car.” Dog man playin’ Melvin off, not using his words but his eyes to let Melvin know that he didn’t give a good fuck about Melvin or what he had to say. Anyway, if it made Melvin feel better about his circumstances to call the car his own, Miller had no problem with it. Melvin knew whose car it was.

  Rico Miller hit the hydro he was smoking and smiled about nothing. The weed was starting to blow kisses to his head.

  “I like this right here,” said Melvin Lee, his NY baseball cap sitting loose on his tiny head, taking his hand off the radio’s scan.

  “Alicia?”

  “Joint is tight. She tight too.”

  It was the one where the coffee shop waitress at “39th and Lenox” calls up a customer, this dude she’s been noticing, and leaves him a message on his answering machine, right in the middle of the song. She tells him how she’s been slipping milk and cream into his hot chocolate, even though the manager wo
uldn’t like her doing it, because she, the waitress, finds him “sweet.” Rico would never listen to this kind of bitch music on his own, but Melvin was an old head who was into that old-type thing. Rico didn’t ask him to turn it off.

  “I’d give that girl a whole bucket of cream,” said Miller, who felt he had to say something.

  Lee swigged from a bottle of malt liquor he had in a paper bag and wiped his chin. “They turnin’ up there.”

  “I got eyes.”

  “They turnin’, is all I’m sayin’.”

  Miller and Lee had followed DeEric Green and the Butler boy in the black Escalade through Petworth and into Park View. It was early in the evening, not yet close to dark. The sun was low and throwing gold on the street. People were walking on Georgia, going in and out of markets, Laundromats, liquor stores, check-cashing operations, and bars, their shadows long on the sidewalks. The activity would pick up soon. On the side streets both east and west of Georgia, open-air drug sales would intensify as the night progressed.

  The Escalade turned left onto Otis and went up its grade. It cut a right on 6th. Rico Miller kept his distance, going slowly up Otis and pulling over to the curb before the turn. He didn’t want to get burned, and from where he’d parked, he could see just fine down 6th. Also, he was being mindful of the territory into which he’d crossed.

  This was Nigel Johnson’s turf, from Otis to Park Road. Deacon Taylor had the south section of the neighborhood, from Lamont through Kenyon, down to Irving. They shared Morton, and the Park Morton Section Eights. What got confusing sometimes, what caused trouble, was some of those corners in between.

  Neither Nigel nor Deacon worked the area west of Georgia Avenue anymore. Way the Spanish were acting back in Columbia Heights, with their gangs, La Raza and especially that STC mob, just goin’ wild back in there, there wasn’t any upside to it anymore.

  Miller cut the engine. He and Lee watched DeEric Green and Michael Butler get out of the Escalade. Green had a shoe box in his hand and Butler had a bag.

  “What they doin’?” said Miller.

  “That’s where Nigel’s mother stay at,” said Lee. “Most likely, they be droppin’ off the count.”

  “Lotta cash to go to his moms.”

  “She get some every day. She be bankin’ it for Nigel.”

  “Both of them carryin’ money?”

  “The bag the kid be carryin’? I expect he got some food in that motherfucker. ’Cause you know that fat-ass heifer do like to eat.”

  Miller stared at the house. “We gonna brace ’em when they come out?”

  “Not in front of Nigel’s mother’s place,” said Lee. There were some things you did not do.

  They sat there for a while, Rico Miller enjoying his high, fingering the knife in his pocket as violent images moved like swift dark clouds behind his eyes. Melvin Lee drank methodically, staring at the run-down stretch of 6th. His mind was on simpler things.

  “I fucked a girl on that street,” said Lee, seeing her in his head.

  “Which house?” said Miller.

  “I’m tellin’ you, I fucked her on the street. We was walkin’ back from the Black Hole one night, and she couldn’t wait. I bottomed her ass right there on the asphalt.”

  “What her name was?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Make the story better,” said Miller, “if you know her name.”

  “How am I supposed to remember her name, all the girls I done had?” Lee grinned. “I can tell you one thing about her, though.”

  “What?”

  “She looked like your little sister.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Matter of fact,” said Lee, getting into it now, “it might could have been your sister. Dark as it was that night, I couldn’t tell.”

  “Did she scream?”

  “Like I was murderin’ it, son.”

  “Then it wasn’t my sister.”

  “Why you say that?”

  “My sister don’t scream when you fuck her,” said Miller.

  “That’s ’cause you ain’t doin’ it right,” said Lee. Only Lee laughed.

  Not much later, DeEric Green and Michael Butler came out of the row house and got into the Escalade. When they pulled off the curb, Rico Miller fired up the BMW and followed the Cadillac north, back to NJ Enterprises, Nigel Johnson’s storefront on Georgia Avenue.

  ELEVEN

  LORENZO BROWN WENT through his voice mail and got his paperwork up to date before clocking out of the office. He said good night to Mark, Irena, and his other coworkers, and patted the heads and stroked the bellies of his favorite animals, those who ran free and those caged in the basement kennel. Many were not pleased to be in cages, but all were better off than they were before they had been impounded. The lucky ones would be adopted and get second lives in good homes.

  Out on the sidewalk, Lorenzo went two doors down to the spay clinic to check on Queen, the old lady’s cat from over near Kennedy Street. The calico was shaking in the back of her cage.

  “You all right,” said Lorenzo, putting his index finger through the links. Queen edged forward and rubbed her face against his skin. “You gonna feel different, is all, when this is done. More calm.”

  The Humane employees parked their work trucks and personal cars on Floral Place, a residential court behind the office alley, accessible through a break in a narrow stand of trash trees and brush. Parking stickers for that particular zone were available to residents only, so the employees were constantly dodging tickets from traffic control. The court folks were cool; the residents back there did not complain, knowing they could call on the dog people and get a quick response if they had a problem on their street.

  Lorenzo got into his Pontiac Ventura, a 1974 he had bought on the cheap from the brother of a man he’d befriended in prison. The man had tipped him to the car and given him his brother’s address, over in Far Northeast. The Ventura, GM’s sister car to the Chevy Nova, was a green-over-green two-door and held that strong 350 engine, highly regarded in its time, under the hood. It had been in poor but serviceable shape when Lorenzo bought it, but at eight hundred dollars the price was right. After he turned it over to his boy Joe Carver, who had always been good with cars, the vehicle was more than right. Joe had installed new belts, hoses, plugs and wires, ball joints, and shocks. He’d replaced the muffler and the dual pipes, injected Freon into the cooling system, and reupholstered the back and front bench seats. Once that was done, Lorenzo had washed and detailed the Pontiac under an oak on Otis and stepped back to admire it. The Ventura had nice, clean lines.

  The Pontiac was old and needed a paint job and new chrome, but it was a runner. Young men driving drug cars, who knew only of German luxury automobiles and upscale rice burners, laughed at him at streetlights, but he got compliments occasionally from men older than he was. They called it “that Seven-Ups car,” and when he asked them what they meant, they said, “The movie, youngun.” If it was a movie, it was before his time, but Lorenzo said politely that he’d have to check it out someday. He’d never been one to watch movies, but it was something he was meaning to get around to. He had gotten into books in lockdown some, for the first time in his life. The prison librarian, a pale man named Ray Mitchell, had turned him on to street stories by writers like Donald Goines, Chester Himes, and this dude Gary Phillips, had his picture on the dust jackets, big man with Chinese eyes, looked like the real. So movies, yeah, maybe he would start to check out some of those. He’d like to read more books too. He sure did have time.

  Lorenzo drove south on Georgia, into the city. Dusk had fallen on the streets.

  Down near Fort Stevens, in the retail strip between Brightwood and Manor Park, he parked and entered the Arrow Cleaners. Lorenzo had his uniform shirts cleaned and pressed there. It was an extra expense, but he felt that a man needed to look right, like he cared about what he was doing, when he was on the job. This place here always gave him good service. The owner-operator, a Greek named Bil
ly Caludis, showed him respect. Caludis had hung a Dick Gregory poster up on the wall, another reason for Lorenzo to patronize the shop. Lorenzo had read Nigger in prison too.

  “No starch, on hangers,” said Caludis, handing Lorenzo his order across the counter. “Right, Mr. Brown?”

  “Right,” said Lorenzo. “You have a good one.”

  Coming out of the store with his shirts in hand, he saw Nigel standing on the sidewalk with two of his people out front of his place, NJ Enterprises, on the other side of Georgia. Lorenzo opened the back door of the Ventura and laid his shirts flat on the seat. Those hooks they put in most cars were long gone from this one.

  “Hey, Renzo!” said the booming voice of Nigel Johnson. “Hey, man, what you doin’?”

  Lorenzo turned, stayed where he was, shouted across the lanes of north and southbound traffic to his friend. “Just got off work. ’Bout to head home.”

  Nigel put his hands on his hips and bugged his eyes theatrically. “And you just gonna, what, drive that race car away without stoppin’ to say hello to your old boy?”

  Lorenzo hesitated, then locked down his car. Nigel was right. Wasn’t any harm in visiting now and again. It sure wasn’t like Nigel was gonna try and make him reenlist. It had been a while since they’d spoke. Lorenzo waited for a break in traffic before crossing the street.

  They hugged briefly and patted each other’s backs. Lorenzo stood back and had a look at Nigel. He seemed fit.

  “You pay rent on this place,” said Lorenzo, “and you out here standing on the sidewalk.”

  Nigel’s eyes went to the live cigar in his hand, a Cuban, no doubt. “Just stepped out to have a smoke. I don’t like the smell settlin’ in my office.”

  “Nice hookup,” said Lorenzo. The powder blue Sean John warm-up was draped exactly right on Nigel’s large frame.

  “Had it tailored,” said Nigel, “to accommodate these extra el-bees I been carryin’.”

  “Nah, you lookin’ all right.”

  Nigel nodded. “You too. But then, you always did keep your physical self together.”