Up the street, Asad came out, followed by Nadif. Nadif walked with a heavy limp. In one hand, an umbrella he used for a cane. His other cluched Gehdi’s shoulder. Asad locked up, keyed the alarm, and the three made their way toward him.
Solomon smiled. One gimpy Somali. Man gonna remember this day, long as he live.
The three passed by him and soon headlights swept the alley as the Navigator came up the garage ramp. It stopped where the alley intersected 31st, then took a right toward M Street and disappeared from view.
“Goodbye, Somalis,” Solomon whispered. He got up, folded his flag carefully, and hung it over one of his Safeway carts. He crossed Wisconsin to stand guard over Ngame’s goods while the Nigerian fetched his van.
It was 9:30 when Ngame slammed the doors of his van. He palmed Solomon their customary closing-of-the-day bill.
“This a twenty,” Solomon said, offering it up.
Ngame waved it away. “We had a good day today.”
“Business wasn’t that good.”
Ngame got into his van and started the engine. He leaned out the window and patted Solomon on the shoulder. “Business isn’t all that makes a good day.”
Canal Road runs northwest out of Georgetown along the Potomac River. Round a bend, the bright lights fade and it becomes a country road. After a mile, Waverly Ngame noticed headlights coming up behind him, speeding at first, then taking a position fifty yards or so behind and hanging in there. He checked his rearview. The lights behind him belonged to Asad’s white Navigator.
And somebody in the passenger seat had an arm out the window, pointing something at him.
“Don’t get so close,” Asad said. “Drop back some.”
Gehdi eased off the gas. He gave Asad a leer. “Fried Nigerian.”
Asad laughed and pressed the button of the garage door opener. He imagined the sequence: the electronic command sent to the door opener’s receiver, the receiver that would shoot thirty-six volts into the blasting cap, the blasting cap embedded in the quarter pound of C-4 plastic explosive that the magnet held to the gas tank of the Nigerian’s van.
An hour later, José Phelps ducked under the police line tape.
Floodlights washed out color and turned the carnage two-dimensionaclass="underline" an axle with one wheel attached, its tire still smoldering, grotesque twists of metal strewn across the roadway and into the trees, a man’s shoe obscenely lined up on the asphalt’s center-stripe, a portion of the owner’s foot still in it.
Renfro Calkins huddled with two of his forensics techs at the far side of the road, looking into the drainage ditch.
José walked over. “ID?”
Calkins shook his head. “Gonna have to be DNA. All we gots is hamburger.” He pointed into the ditch. “That’s the largest.”
José walked over and looked. It took him several seconds to make out the thing that had been an arm. “What’s that in the hand?”
“Looks like a switch for a garage door. Best guess, these guys set off a bomb in their own vehicle.”
“How’d they manage that?”
Calkins shrugged. “They not gonna tell you, José.”
Gonna be a quiet day today.
Solomon looked down his alley, then across Wisconsin to where the Nigerian was setting up his stand.
“For once,” he said to Voice, “you got your shit together.”
The light and the dark
by Robert Wisdom
Petworth, N.W.
They called him Bay Ronnie but I don’t know why. People in the neighborhood said he used to live around here but him and his people moved a long time ago. They said he was mean. Crazy-mean, like he’d rather take a switchblade to you than talk. He wore shades, a black dobb, Dak slacks or Sansabelts, silk socks, and Romeo Ballys. Black as tar, with pure white around the eyes. He would always come down singing from up Sherman Circle way. On Saturday morning, the 22nd of August, you could hear that ugly, husky voice: “…It’s a thin liiiine between love and hate/It’s a thin line between love and hate…”
Sunday, the 23rd of August, was a muggy and humid morning. It also marked the last sermon Reverend Yancey would preach at the old Gethsemane Baptist Church. Gethsemane had been on that hilltop at Georgia Avenue and Upshur Street for twentysome years. The church was set to be “tore down,” as all the adults were saying around me. “It gon’ be tore down by Monday mornin’.” Torn down to make room for a Safeway. The church was so small I couldn’t see how a big old grocery store was gonna fit, but I didn’t know nuthin’ about buildings. I was eight years old at the time. The youth and senior choirs would sing in a big service that day. My sister was in the youth choir and my mother taught Sunday school.
We moved into this two-story house on Crittenden Street between Georgia Avenue and 9th Street in the ’50s. There were a couple of white families when we came in, and everybody was friendly, but they had all left the neighborhood maybe a year after we moved in. Just as we started to play together, the white kids had to move someplace else. There were other friends too — Jon, Brian, Mark, and Lisa Rammelford — who lived around the corner on 9th Street before we arrived, along with Darryl Watson, a cousin of my sister’s friend Joyce, who was around most of the time.
At some point, like most of the other people on the block, my mother and father started renting out rooms in our house. Some were family, like cousins Ivy, June, and Neville, and all of us Jamaicans and Trinidadians ate together. There was always loud laughter and somebody telling you what to do. When we first moved in, my parents took in some black Americans and a Chinese man, who were all real different from the West Indians — Miss Ruby, Mr. Palmer, Miss Lucy, and Mr. Price. Mr. Kinney and his come-and-go wife were Americans. They stayed in the room that looked over the backyard and were pretty nice and quiet. There was Tommy and Doris (or Clay and Liston, as my father called them), who were also American. All the Americans and Mr. Lee, the Chinese man, kinda kept to themselves and ate different foods, like grits, which Mr. Kinney taught me to make with butter for breakfast.
Mr. Lee was a mystery. He always locked the door to his room, even when he was home or just going to the bathroom. He was real polite. When he came home, he’d stand in the living room and look at everybody and bow and say something under his breath with a big grin, like, “…Harerow…” Sometimes his strange speaking went on for many minutes. Then he’d go upstairs for the night. My father loved it, he’d stand up and bow and smile. Then he’d have a big laugh when Mr. Lee left and tell us, “That man got good manners.” It got to the point that when I heard Mr. Lee’s key in the front door, I’d go to the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to do the greeting.
All three bedrooms in the house were rented out, which left the living room and dining room. My parents slept on a bed in the dining room and my sisters and I shared a foldout sofa-bed in the living room. This felt normal to us. My moth was always saying this setup was just for a little while and it helped them make ends meet.
There were a lot of times that I didn’t like the folks who stayed at our house. I didn’t appreciate my mom cooking for everybody, and I thought they were stupid when they asked where Jamaica was or turned up their noses at ackee and saltfish or boiled green bananas and mackerel. But everybody knew food was always cooking at our house or at the home of one of our aunts or numerous cousins who lived nearby, so there were always people around and we always felt safe.
Still, there was a lot I wanted to understand about black Americans. Sometimes I would sneak into their rooms when they weren’t home. Not that I was looking for anything, but I was curious to know who they were — their smells, how they were different from us. Mr. Kinney’s magic shave smelled like rotten eggs; he said he used it so he wouldn’t get razor bumps, but it stank. Snooping in his room one day, I opened the can to see what it looked like and spilled it all over the floor. I swept it up and put it back in the can and cleaned the floor, but then it started smelling like rotten eggs, so I left and prayed that the scent would disappear. If he ever knew what happened, he never said. In the other rooms I would find clothes that didn’t get hung up, leftover fried fish sandwiches brought home from takeout, suitcases that never got unpacked, framed pictures and snapshots of smiling kids with missing teeth and shorts and barrettes. In some of the pictures taken long before I was born, the young men and women wore tweed suits and hats, their kids in front of placid monotone backdrops of trestled bridges over duck-filled English ponds, with Queen Elizabeth always somewhere in the background. But never any smiles. No Jamaican joy — only stern faces. All kinds of people were coming and going; why my parents chose them over other people was another mystery to me.