POTTER and the rest drove down to Harvard Street and found his main boy, kid named Juwan, sitting on a trash can. Juwan was one of those, like Gary Coleman, had a man’s head on a boy’s body. They took Juwan back to where the fence ran along the McMillan Reservoir. Juwan, sitting next to White in the backseat, passed a large Ziplock bag full of money, which he had taken from his knapsack, up to Little. Little took the money out, separated some for Juwan, and filled the Ziplock with dimed-out bags of marijuana. Juwan slipped the package back into his knapsack.
“Everything all right, little man?” said Potter.
“It’s good, D. One thing, though. You know William, that boy got one leg shorter than the other? The po-lice took him in last night. William be like, thick and shit. I done told him, Don’t be carryin’ when you steerin’, you know what I’m sayin’? But he don’t listen. I know he’ll be out today, but—”
“Say what’s on your mind.”
“Was gonna ask you, I got this cousin, just moved up from Southeast? He was lookin’ to get put on, yo.”
“Put him on then, Jew. What I been tellin’ you, man? Someone don’t work out, go ahead and find someone else. Always gonna be kids out there wanna get in.”
They dropped Juwan back on Harvard and Georgia. Then Potter stopped at a market and bought a few forties of malt. They drove around some more, drinking the malt and getting smoked up. Little found a cassette tape, a Northeast Groovers PA mix that had been left in the glove box by the Plymouth’s owner, and he slipped it in the deck.
“Shits ain’t got no bass,” said White from the backseat.
Potter ignored White and turned up the volume. At a stoplight he stared down some young boy in a rice burner who he thought had been staring at him. The young boy looked away.
“Where we goin’?” said Little.
“Swing on up to Roosevelt,” said Potter.
“I don’t want to be drivin’ around all night lookin’ for some ghost.”
“You got somethin’ better to do?”
“Brianna,” said Little. “I might just meet her again tonight, she can get out her mother’s house. I tossed the shit out of that bitch today, boy.”
“She ain’t look too satisfied to me.”
“Bull shit.”
“That’s too much girl for you, man.”
“Shit, she was singin’, ‘Say my name, say my name’ this afternoon. You saw her smilin’ when she walked out the crib. Not like that girl you was fuckin’, had tears on her face when she left.”
“I gave her the anaconda, she couldn’t help but cry. Anyway, your girl Brianna wasn’t smilin’, she was laughin’.”
“At what?”
“At that itty-bitty thing you got between your legs.”
“Shit, I’m thick as a can of tuna fish down there, man.”
Potter side-glanced Little. “Long as one, too.”
They drove up to Roosevelt High and parked on Iowa. Potter walked down the driveway entrance to the lot, where several cars were parked, and went to the fence bordering the stadium. Kids in football uniforms were doing calisthenics on the field. Their call-and-response chant echoed up to the parking lot.
“How y’all feel?”
“Fired up!”
Potter didn’t see Lorenze Wilder in the group of parents and relatives sitting in the stands. A bunch of men, looked like coaches, stood around on the field. One of them he recognized as the older dude with the gray in his natural, had been bold enough to study him and Little that time before. Potter spit on the ground and walked back to the car. He got behind the wheel of the Plymouth, his face gone hard.
They went back to their place. They got their heads up and drank some more and watched UPN and something on the WB. Little tried to sweet-talk Brianna out again, but her mother got on the telephone line and told him she was in for the night. Potter suggested they go out again, and Little agreed. White didn’t want to, but he got up off the couch. Potter slipped his .357 into his waistband and put a Hilfiger shirt on, tails out, over his sleeveless T. He fitted his skully back on his head. White slipped on a bright orange Nautica pullover, his favorite, and followed Potter and Little out to the street.
They drove around, up and down Georgia. They checked on the troops. Potter drank another forty, and his face got more humorless and he drove from a lower position in the seat. It had been a long day of getting high and doing nothing, and it felt late to White. Anyway, it was full dark. Potter rolled the Plymouth into the Park Morton complex, driving real slow. Some kids were out, sitting like they always did on the entrance wall.
“Lorenze Wilder’s sister live here,” said Potter.
Little said nothing. Like White, he was tired, and right about now would rather have been in front of the television, or in bed. He didn’t like being out with Garfield when he’d been drinkin’, had all that liquid courage inside him. Truth was, Little was kinda drunk, too.
Potter slowed the car. A lanky young man was walking across the narrow street, onto a plot of dirt that passed for a playground. He wore khaki pants, a pressed white T-shirt, and wheat-colored Timberland boots.
“Ask him he knows her,” said Potter.
“Yo,” said Little out the window. They were alongside the young man now. He was still walking, and the Plymouth was keeping pace.
“What?” said the young man, who looked at them briefly, for just the right amount of respect time, but kept his step.
“You know a woman name of Wilder lives here?” said Little. “Got a little boy, kid plays football, sumshit like that. I got this friend owes her money, he asked me to swing by and tell her he’d be payin’ it back to ’er next week.”
The young man looked at them again, scanned the front and backseat, his sight staying on the odd-looking young man in the bright orange pullover for what he feared might be a moment too long, then cut his eyes. “I ain’t know no one around here, no lie. I just moved up in here, like, last week.”
“Aiight then.”
“Aiight,” said the young man, moving off into the playground, walking with his shoulders squared, his head up, turning a corner and disappearing into the night.
“Maybe I ought to talk to that boy my own self,” said Potter, the lids of his eyes heavy, half shut.
“He said he didn’t know, D,” said Little. “Let’s just let this shit rest for tonight.”
Potter kept the Plymouth cruising slow. He went around a kind of long bend that took him to the other side of the housing complex. They could see a group of people back in a stairwell lit pale yellow. Potter braked, steered the Plymouth up on the dirt, and cut the engine.
Potter said, “C’mon.”
They got out of the car and followed him across the dirt to the stairwell entrance. There were three men crouched down there and a pink-eyed woman leaning against a cinder-block wall. In one hand the woman held both a cigarette and a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Smoke hung in the yellow light.