Gussy reconnected with Kingston after leaving the service as a tie to the civilian world and to continue what they had started during their twenties in the Middle Eastern desert. She considered love to be an active decision, a conscious choice. She gave her heart to Kingston because, from her viewpoint, he needed the direction it was her nature to provide, and becoming the main woman in his life gave her access to his ample savings. Marriage might never be on the horizon but Gussy always appreciated the cushy situation she long ago stepped into as his assistant and lover.
The attached row house at 1839 Bruner — passed down from Kingston’s parents — must be put on the market, Gussy thought, cracking a lobster leg. She’d be breaching her own lease at Fordham Hill. Their collective furniture would need to be packed and shipped south, sold, or given away. (The cottage was sparsely furnished and completely undecorated.) They’d require two tickets to Louisiana sooner than later. Hillside, Pookie, and Elliott would have to be informed fast — Gussy was sure they wouldn’t have seen this coming — and the Amsterdam lease would also be broken. This was all irreversible stuff. She hoped Kingston had measured everything carefully.
“Is it worth it?” she asked softly.
“It’s time for a change,” Kingston replied, his mouth full. He finished chewing, measuring his words. “Seem like ain’t nobody wanna end up like they parents nowadays, and I gotta count myself in that too. Daddy always promised my mother he’d give all this up and retire down to Florida someplace and never got the chance to do it before she passed. I worked right up beside him till the end and it was clear to me…” He paused. “I just know he’d a done things different if he coulda. Fuck Héctor and Eddie, it ain’t about them. The house been robbed before. I just don’t wanna do this no more.”
Kingston’s initiative took Gussy a bit by surprise. “Well, I’ll handle the details, just let me know what you intend on doing yourself and I can take care of everything else. I can leave enough for Hillside and the fellas to take care of themselves till next year.” She smiled. “I can’t believe we’re really going! I do love it down there.”
“It’s a new day, Gus. I done made ample money off a this, God bless Daddy. There got to be more to life than Baychester and Amsterdam Avenue. Y’know, New Orleans is a big jazz town.”
“Really?” Gussy knew this already.
“Hell yeah, the Marsalis family hails from down there and…”
Kingston Lee never wore an earring. Back when he was a teenager at Evander Childs High, putting a hole through your right ear branded you a fag. But the year his boys all pierced their lefties together at a jewelry store on White Plains Road, Kingston just couldn’t do it. He failed to understand why everybody now seemed to get tattooed at the drop of a hat. He’d always had an aversion to anything that could make him substantially different than he was when his personality gelled as a youngster. Gussy learned this about him early on, deciding it was how Kingston had reached forty-two without any children. Moving from New York City, leaving the only real profession he’d ever known, felt to Kingston like bungee jumping with a sometimey cord.
His father had started the business in the ’60s, from a nearly bare stationery store on 233rd Street. Waiting for Jiffy Lube to service his ride that humid, overcast Sunday — he intended to leave it to Wallace and call things even — Kingston walked from Boston Road and up Baychester to 233rd, taking rolls of mental photographs. Passing Spellman High’s football field he remembered fingering a cheerleader before a game underneath the bleachers; he was a mean running back, she favored actress Jayne Kennedy and knew it. Up the hill he passed the Carvel stand his mother crashed into when he was ten. (“Fasten your seat belt,” she had said dead calmly, realizing the Oldsmobile’s brakes were failing.) Comics & Comics was long gone, another memory now. And the Big Three Barbershop.
Zack Abel, Jr. cut hair at the Big Three Barbershop with his father Big Zack from the time he and Kingston attended Evander together. Big Zack and his wife were staunchly religious; the Big Three of the shop’s namesake were naturally the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, though the secular folks coming in for their fades had no clue. Muhammad Ali had his Afro trimmed there once sometime after the Thrilla in Manila, and a yellowed photo of Ali sitting in Big Zack’s highchair stayed taped to a mirror till the shop closed. Kingston and Zack’s fathers both died in 2000. Big Zack’s death seemed to mature his son. He summarily sold his father’s shop, moved to North Carolina for a Cablevision job, fell in love, and had a son two years ago. Kingston missed Zack, the only friend he felt he really had outside of Gussy. Zack’s move left Kingston a bit ill at ease ever since, as if his life was a jumped-the-shark TV show the network refused to cancel.
Kingston reached the address where his father’s operation first started, now an insurance office. He stood there and removed his Kangol as if out of respect, wiping sweat from his brow with the white cap. He recollected his aunts, uncles, and his own mother dreaming up the number when he was a child, searching through slim stapled pamphlets by Madame Zora and Rajah Rabo listing corresponding numbers for different dream themes: love, sex, death. He got spanked for losing his great-grandmother’s tattered Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book once. His parents let him play occasionally; he recalled hitting for the first time at nine: a whole twenty dollars, all spent at the Good Humor ice cream truck that crept down Bruner playing Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “The Candy Man.” His neighbor Miss Lois once scored a combination hit on the very day she needed to pay her back rent to avoid eviction; she threw a lavish block party and bought herself Jordache jeans for every day of the week. And how many misadventures had young Kingston heard about Chink Low, one of his dad’s first runners, the brother with folded eyelids who never wrote down a number that police could confiscate, memorizing them all without fault? Or Chink’s running partner Clarence, who ended up as a regular on The Mod Squad?
The memories were cathartic. Just one month away, September 2005, Kingston would turn forty-three — with not much more to show for his life than what was left him by his father. He tried to pinpoint the source of his recent melancholy attitude; he knew it had started before the Hernándezes. Was it the birthday of little Zack the third, Gussy pressuring him for a baby? Kingston refused to believe his near depression had anything to do with a midlife crisis; he had a curvaceous kept woman on the side and hundreds of thousands of out-of-circulation Ben Franklins hidden in a safe at the spot on Amsterdam. He tried to envision what he wanted that he didn’t yet have, and it came down to this: He wanted to be his own man.
All his life, Kingston had been following his father’s path to uphold a perceived legacy, yet he couldn’t feel the same obligation on his shoulders anymore. Time and circumstance had moved on, and now, so would Kingston. His father had migrated from Georgia to lay his own path to personal freedom on the streets of the Bronx. Now Kingston would reversemigrate back, attempting to find his very own life purpose in Louisiana. This one-sided turf war was the perfect excuse. Let ’em play Lotto, he thought, liberated.
The phone in his pants vibrated.
It was a message. His battery must have been low, he imagined, having missed the call. Lacey’s voice. They hadn’t spoken since she rang in her number a week ago. She’d reconciled things with Tré-Sean. She wished him well in New Orleans. She asked him to not drop by Golden Lady or the Secor projects before leaving. She hung up the phone.