“The site. For the Topaz condo. Little Haiti, remember? Unless you want to call it North Design District. North NoDo? You take North Miami Ave—”
“What the fuck you there for? What are you doing? Vámos, get the fuck out of there, Brian. Don’t tell me anything now. Just get in your car and go.”
Brian wants to laugh at the creaking panic in his friend’s voice, the way it intensifies his accent. “It’s fine. I’m talking to these guys here—”
“What fucking guys? Do not talk to no guys.”
“Too late.”
“They right there? How many are there? Do they have guns?”
Brian lapses into silence. He senses his lovely, iridescent state of fearlessness start to wisp away. “I don’t know,” he says quietly as he eyes the way Red Shirt swings his arms impatiently, opening and closing his hands. “Possible.”
“Brian, what the fuck. How the fuck did you do this?”
“I don’t — I didn’t—” His voice falters.
“Listen.” Now Javier has dropped to a kind of broken rasp — the closest he can come to a whisper. “Do not move. Do not get into a car with them. Stay there. I’m coming. Right now. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Yeah. Yes. Good,” he mumbles. He listens to the line disconnect and then listens to silence for a few seconds, wishing he could preserve the magical sense of safety he felt while he was talking to Javier. The young men shift and look around. Sunglasses says, “So what your boy say?”
Without meeting his eyes, Brian slides the phone back into his pocket. “He says he’s coming here.”
At this, Red Shirt throws up his hands. “Man, what’re we hanging around this fool for? Let’s leave him and go. I don’t got all day.”
Brian notices a look exchanged among the men and it comes to him then that they might not be the danger at all. Perhaps it’s not necessarily a good idea for him to be sitting here alone in an open field. Danger — his sense of it — floats free of itself. Brian thinks of Parkhurst’s contempt for “fearfulness,” and what he calls its antidote — the “magnificence of ambition.”
“Wait. Wait a sec.” Brian carefully rolls on to his knees, then, bracing with fingers on the ground, pushes to stand, one foot at a time. “I want to — can we just…” He needs to catch his breath. “You seem like — like really good people — like—” He’s shaken by some sort of emotion and has to let it subside: he doesn’t have himself fully in hand today. “You remind me of my son,” he says to the shaved-hair kid. “I mean, he wouldn’t like any of this — the development. I just need to tell you guys something. If this project does get under way? These people — PI&B, they’re going to try to destroy this place — everything you’ve built here. And you have to find a way — you have to really organize. The Little Haiti Action Corps — they didn’t even come to meetings. I can give you the names of some good legal people — they’ll do it pro bono.”
Sunglasses holds the back of his hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes. “Whoa, man, wait a sec here. You’re talking about the people you supposedly work for — is that right?” he asks. Brian wonders why he doesn’t just lower the glasses to cover his eyes. And… why not a belt for those pants? Make life easier. Why not go to trade schools, learn some skills — like welding! — instead of wandering around like a pack of animals? That must not be the point, he thinks. So what is the point? He wishes desperately he could call Stanley right now, but fears these young men are out of patience — just when he could be on the verge of giving them some really useful advice.
“You dissing these people — you ain’t even established you work for them yet.” Red Shirt draws a finger through the air, limning his words. He’s more compact and intense than the other two. “This muthafucka on crack,” he says.
“You know what?” Shaved Head rests his hands on the striped fabric of his boxers. “These Pib boys? They come round here last month or two. These boys in suits offer my auntie money for that piece of junk she lives in — right over there, see? And then what, the other day, another dude come out, throw another pile of cash on top of that.”
Brian notices again the flickering glance pass between the men: a kind of alert or caution. “What the hell, man?” Shaved Head cries: this is directed at Sunglasses, as if he’d said something. “It’s no secret.” His gaze swings to Brian. “They giving my auntie two hundred fifty thousand for her fallin’-down house. My auntie’s eighty-two year old — her house smell like a hundred cats died inside it.”
“Word,” Red Shirt says.
“They’re giving my mama and my granpapa the same,” Sunglasses says. “You can trash the white boys all you want. That’s some dollars. Shouldn’t be messing with it.”
Brian shakes his head, slow, wild energy entering his body. It’s all around him, turbidity in the air, a humid swelling, like the curling of water before it boils. “Okay, so — they’ve already been here? I know that sounds like a lot? But if your auntie wants to go buy another place — she’s gonna find out that—”
“His aunt is eighty-two,” Red utters, his voice low and hot. “She ain’t gone be buying no new house.”
“She gone live with her people near Charleston,” Shaved Head adds more casually. “My auntie is still cleaning houses for people, man. She gets six hundred dollars a month.”
“My mama and granpapa and great-uncle, they live together and between them, they got nine hundred fifty dollars a month to live on. They pay taxes, too. You believe that?” Sunglasses says. “This money coming in mean some our old folks can finally relax.”
Red Shirt spits into the field dust. “We’re getting money too. And I ain’t even gone discuss that with you. Yo, we don’t even know who you are really.”
A SLEEK BLUE BULLET of a car rolls in, stops beside Brian’s SUV, and Javier springs out. Brian is touched to realize that Javier is afraid for him, that he did apparently manage to shrink the time-space continuum of downtown traffic and make it there in just over eight minutes. He jogs across the lot, taking in Brian, his dusty chinos, the three men, the scrubby, ruinous field. “Hola, boys. Greetings. What I miss? Bring me up to speed here.”
Sunglasses snorts lightly, chin lifted. “This your homeboy, Habana?” he asks Javier. “’Cause he come up in here, get in that dirt you see right there, and start talking crazy shit about you people.”
“Tell them,” Brian says, vaguely sensing they’re having parallel conversations. “They don’t believe me. Tell them I work for PI&B.”
Javier’s eyes tick between Brian and the men. “Okay — yeah — this guy is my homeboy, and yes, he’s on staff as our permanent, full-time loco.” He grabs Brian’s arm and starts pulling him toward the cars. “Now time to get my friend back to work.”
Brian lets himself be led forward, but as he walks his body feels pervaded by low-level trembling — his heart is beating in a strange way and it becomes harder to walk normally. Some vital thread in his fabric has been tugged away and he seems to be coming apart. “I want…” he says hoarsely, lumbering to a halt. “This isn’t right. I want to help these men.”
Javier’s face swings around, eyes shining: he has the look of someone trying to carry a buddy out of a bloody battlefield. His jaw seems to have lengthened and his lips are pale. “Not now, Brian. Now is not a good time.”
Brian pats his pockets, again coming up empty. “Damn, dammit.”
“Listen, homes, you really work for these people? You already done plenty for us,” Sunglasses says. Gazing at his patient face, Brian understands that the three men are just as eager as Javier to see him gone. He wonders if Jack Parkhurst assigned these three to keep an eye on this lot. Parkhurst had done something like that with an abandoned warehouse and parking area he’d acquired in a ravaged section of Liberty City. “What can I do?” he asks mournfully, already sensing defeat. “Is there something I can do for you guys? Do you have résumés?”