Ink comes to Josh’s backseat window. Josh hands him the money, just two twenty-dollar bills today. They mutter a few words to each other, and Ink’s little helper drops the baggies of marijuana onto James’s lap. Ink starts walking away. And then there’s a boom, the sound of the rear door of that gray Chevy van bursting open.
Three plainclothes cops jump out. They’re wearing bulletproof vests; their medallions are dangling around their necks by strings of beads. Oh fuck, I think. Oh fuck, I really am fucked. I can still remember my childish, selfish thought processes so clearly. My father is going to find out about my secret life, the life that I have so carefully kept hidden. He is going to have a heart attack. He will die. My mother and sister will be sad and alone. They’ll be all alone, and I’ll have to care for them. If only I knew then how the justice system works in this country. If I knew then what I know now, I would have realized I had nothing to worry about.
One cop stands in front of my Civic and yells at us to stay put right where we are, hands on our heads, of course. Meanwhile, the other two cops pin down Ink. They grind his face into the gravel, give him a few kicks to the gut. His face puckers from the pain. It looks like he’s howling, but no sound comes out. That’s what happens when you get the wind knocked out of you, though maybe you haven’t gotten the wind knocked out of you since your days of playground tomfoolery. Our cop joins the other two, and it doesn’t seem at all weird to me that he has left us unattended. Together the three cops rough Ink up for what seems like a long while. But it’s probably just a minute. Then they stand him up and cuff him, and he’s all coughing and drooling.
I sit there frozen, barely breathing. I’m wondering if I would rather die than face my parents at a police station. I look around and see how I might be able to end everything right now, but the only people with any deadly weapons are the cops. Josh says, from the backseat, Throw the bags out of the car; get rid of them. But thankfully I know better than to listen to him in this moment. Josh reaches over my seat to grab the pot, and as soon as he does, our cop is back. And this time his gun is out. He’s telling Josh to freeze. He says, Out of the car, you dumb fucks, and keep your hands on your head. We get out, he pats us down. He tells us to keep our hands on the hood of my Civic. The hood is burning hot, but we have no choice but to keep our hands there. I glance around and notice a whole bunch of people are staring at us like we’re the worst people in the world — not just the hoppers and prostitutes, but a grandmother with a baby carriage.
Our cop grabs the dime bags from the car. I don’t see what he does with them. He grabs all my Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs, even the Bitches Brew CD from Ink. He dumps them on the road and crushes them with his black boot. He takes out my Panasonic portable CD player, a birthday gift from my parents, and does the same thing with it. I’m thinking he’s gonna go for our backpacks, which have all sorts of booze, bongs, and bowls in them, but he lets them sit there. I shoot a glance at Ink. His cheeks are bloody, covered in sand, and he keeps on bending over and spitting out blood. He looks at me for a second, then goes back to his coughing and spitting.
The two cops with Ink are white and black. Our cop is white, but he might have a touch of color in him. He gets very close to my face. I can smell his stale breath, and yes, it does smell like coffee. He says, Listen very clearly. You little shits are gonna get in that shitty car. You’re gonna get the fuck out of here and never come back. And if I ever see any of you little brats again, you’ll be shitting from your mouth and pissing from your assholes for the rest of time.
Ink stops his coughing and stares at us. He says, You’re letting them go?
The cop who’s standing behind him and holding his cuffed wrists pulls something out — a bobby club maybe, I can’t really remember. All I know is that he pulls something out and whacks Ink hard across the face with it. And then on his chest. Ink keels over again, gritting his teeth and growling. We get in our car and drive away. And we never go back to Gilbert Street to score drugs.
I sometimes wonder what happened to Ink. Did he straighten out? Become a music producer? Stranger things have happened. But we all know the statistics. We all know that the sociologists’ models predict something different.
There was a time last year after some book came out when Jenny’s colleagues would talk about the prison-industrial complex at their eighteen-dollar-bottles-of-wine cocktail parties. They talked about the undying legacy of Jim Crow, something they might have read about but never actually experienced. During these Stalie convos, I took long sips of beer and tried not too think too hard about Ink and those fucked-up years. Luckily for me, all this talk only lasted a couple months — a surprisingly long time for these people. Soon they were onto a new topic. Syrian refugees maybe? Or no, it was the plight of Mexican tomato farmers. In Jenny’s world, there’s a woe for every season.
Sure Thing
by David Rich
Long Wharf
If a leopard had strolled up the stairs and into the big room, or a giggling leprechaun had slid down a light beam, the reactions of the patrons at Sports Haven could not have been any stronger. Friends, who had sat next to each other through countless losses and victories and drinks and smoke breaks but never knew the color of each other’s eyes, checked now for confirmation that the vision was real and to show their own special, personal appreciation of it.
She was shorter than I expected, and leaner, but the muscle definition was there in her arms and her stride was long and cushioned. I turned away as she approached the bar, checked the ice for anything that needed killing, checked the glasses for the weather — partly cloudy — but that only took a few seconds. I didn’t have to check her progress anyway — I could watch Lou and Jerry at the end of the bar, as gape-mouthed and riveted as kids at the finish line at Saratoga.
At the sound of the chair scrape I turned and slid a napkin in front of her and met her eyes: blue, but not cool and not calm, and I was thankful for that flaw.
“Hi. What would you like?”
“What kind of wine do you have?”
“The kind that used to be red when I opened it three weeks ago and the kind that used to be white.”
“When was that one opened?” She had a way of playing straight as if she was confident of a payoff.
“No one is sure. It’s just always been here. Like them.” I nodded toward Jerry and Lou, each holding onto his beer for stability.
“Pour me something I won’t remember,” she said. “Maybe you have a specialty.”
I held up a bottle of Bud. She smiled and shrugged, then turned on the stool to look around. The eyeballs did not seem to bother her. I opened the bottle and placed a glass beside it. She asked to run a tab and said, “That the only door?”