“I gave you more chances than you deserved,” his father said and closed the inner and outer doors to the house. Caesar, still sprawled on the ground, saw the hall light go out. Seconds later, he saw the light in the upstairs front bedroom, his father’s room, go on, and a moment later, that light went out.
He got to his feet and looked up and down French Street. The new leaves rattled as if something were shaking the trees, and the sound unnerved him. He brushed off his clothes, not because of dirt or debris, but because right then he did not know what else to do. Under the street lamp, he looked at the watch Sherman had given him the week before, and it occurred to him that he had never before been awake at that hour in the morning. A cool wind sauntered up the street and chilled him, unnerving him even more, and he suppressed the urge to cry.
He considered pounding on the door, calling his father as loudly as he could and then running away. But he stood quiet. For all of his life, he had been Lemuel Matthews’s son, and even now, standing in the dark outside the walls of his father’s house, he was still his son and he knew he could not be a bad boy at such a place at such a time in the morning.
He saw the brighter lights at the half smoke joint at the 9th Street corner and he went toward those lights. The place was closed, but he used the outdoor telephone to call Sherman. Sandra answered, and after he had told her what happened, she told him to stay put, that Sherman would be back down to pick him up. While he waited, he called his father’s house several times, stepping out of the telephone booth with the receiver as he listened to the ringing. He looked up tree-lined French Street, but there was not enough light to distinguish his house from all the others.
It was true what people said about Angelo’s bad luck. He robbed the Riggs Bank on 15th Street in early May, using a gun he had rented for twenty-five dollars a day and a Safeway shopping bag. He was so curious about how much he had gotten away with that as he ran down M Street, he looked in the shopping bag, and at that moment the money, booby-trapped with a red dye packet, exploded in his face. He dropped the bag, cursing the bank teller, but he continued running, trying for the next several blocks to wipe the dye from his face and hands with the shirt he had taken off.
Sherman had thought that Angelo, eager, cocksure, had potential as a partner, but soon after the government people put Angelo away, he began to consider Caesar, who was now staying with him. Caesar knew Sherman didn’t have a real job, but he didn’t learn until he had been with him two months what he did for a living. He was not particularly surprised or disappointed. Caesar was seventeen, and for the first time in his life, he was living his days without the cocoon of family, and beyond that cocoon, he was learning, anything was possible.
“The first thing we do,” Sherman said one day, “is get all your shit from your daddy’s place. You gotta have an identity. Get you out in the world so you can stop all that mopin.”
The next morning they drove down to the house on French Street and waited in the car until Caesar was certain his father had left for work and his brother and sister had gone to school. Caesar opened the front door with his key. He was surprised his father had not changed the lock, but Sherman was not surprised. “What’s there to be afraid of from his own little boy?” Sherman said. Caesar stepped into the hall. Had his father suddenly appeared before him, it would have seemed the most natural thing. Indeed, he expected him, and when he stepped into the living room, he expected his father to be there as well. Sherman, silent, followed as Caesar went through the rooms on the first floor. Caesar touched nearly everything along the way — a lace piece made by his grandmother that was on the back of the easy chair in the living room; a drawing of the house signed and dated by his sister taped to the refrigerator; the kitchen curtains he had helped his mother put up. In a corner of the kitchen counter he found wrapped in a rubber band the letters he had been sending to his father; only the first one had been opened.
“Let’s get your stuff,” Sherman said after a bit. “Enough of this.”
They went upstairs, and in the closet of his father’s bedroom, Sherman found a small metal box, broke its tiny lock with his hand, and leisurely went through the papers in the box, putting aside Caesar’s birth certificate and the Social Security card he had gotten the year before in hopes of finding an after-school job. Caesar watched.
“You want your mom’s death certificate?” Sherman said, reaching the end of the papers in the box.
“No.” He turned away and went to his sister’s room, where he touched the heads of the three stuffed animals sitting on the pillows of her bed. In the room he had shared with his brother, he took as many of his clothes as he could carry, his hands shaking each time he picked up an item.
In the hall, Sherman was waiting at the head of the stairs. He took some of the clothes from Caesar. “He had a little money in the box, some cash and some gold pieces,” Sherman said. “And I found a stack of pictures in a drawer. I got a few of em, mostly some with you in em. Must be your mother, too. I got a lot of em. You might want em later on when you start to forget.”
Caesar nodded. In a few minutes they were on 11th Street, heading back uptown. He knew what his father would look like when he realized he had been robbed: the fist pounding the air, that pulsating vein at the left side of his head. For months and months after that, he could conjure up the image whenever he wanted and replay it. That night, they went to Manny’s and Carol said what she said about dancing with her not ending that way, about trying her and seeing. She took him home that night, and when he woke up the next morning, she was lying on her side watching him. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “It’s all right,” she said, “I already went and brushed my teeth.” Aside from the ones in Sherman’s magazines, she was the first naked woman he had ever seen. She kissed his ear. “There’s a toothbrush in there with your name on it,” she said. “And I bet I spelled your name right.”
Two weeks after Caesar and Sherman went into Caesar’s father’s house, Sherman took him out for the first time, to burglarize a home in Chevy Chase. Sherman peed on the sofa in the recreation room, having taken a quick dislike to a large painting behind the sofa of a man in a tennis outfit whom he took to be the owner. The next night, in a light rain, they followed a light-skinned, well-dressed fellow from a bar on Capitol Hill to his car parked a block away. The man had tottered the whole distance, not bothering to open the umbrella he was carrying. “Not a sound,” Caesar said, placing the pistol at the man’s head just as he stuck his key in the car door. “Not a sound. No words. Not one word.” Sherman went through the man’s pockets, took his wallet and then his watch. “Please, please,” the man kept saying, his arms extended high into the air. The man was balding and the hair he had left was combed perfectly to either side of a bald path that went back to the middle of his head. With the light of the street lamps, the robbers could see the beads of rain on the bald path and on his eyeglasses. “Next time,” Caesar said as they stepped away from the man, “buy your shit in a liquor store and take it home to drink.”
V
On the way home from following Anna that last time, Caesar bought white carnations for Carol and the ingredients for a shrimp creole dinner. He had dinner prepared when she came home, and after they had eaten, with her head swirling just a bit from the wine, he made love to her because he did not know what kind of mood he would be in when he returned from Manny’s that night.