Darnell rocked his head and softly sang the chorus to “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa.” He turned the volume up a notch and looked across the channel to the restaurants and fish stands that lined Maine Avenue. I blew a jet of smoke out the window and watched it vanish in the wind.
“Nice day,” Darnell said, breaking away from his own song. “Thanks for askin’ me out. You been decent to me, man, and I appreciate it. To most people, it’s like I’m invisible.”
“Thought you might like to drive.”
“Been a while,” he said, staring toward the water. The sun made sailing shards of glass on the channel. “Funny how a simple-ass thing like a drive down the park”-he stopped, shook his head, and smiled weakly. “Drivin’s what got me my bid in Lorton in the first place, you know that?”
“I heard you got caught up in something.”
Darnell laughed shortly and without pleasure, then shook his head. “More than caught up, Nick. I knew what I was doin’, in the way that any kid knows he’s gettin’ into somethin’ wrong, knows it but can’t stay away.”
“What happened?”
Darnell rubbed a skeletal finger down the bridge of his long, thin nose. “Round about the mid seventies, I was runnin’ with this Southeast boy. I knew he owned an army forty-five, used to brag how he bought it off some vet in the street. One day, he asked me to drive him down to see this girl he knew, down his way. I was known in the neighborhood as a guy who knew cars, see, knew how to make ’em move. I did it, even knowin’ he was on somethin’, talkin’ more bullshit than usual that day, actin’ strange. Anyway, on the way down he told me to pull over in front of some market, down off Minnesota Avenue. I parked out front, left the motor run-he said he’d be back right quick-and then this stickup boy I was runnin’ with, he started shootin’ that forty-five of his inside, shootin’ that motherfucker all to hell.”
I dragged off my smoke and flicked ash. Darnell stopped, took a long breath, and continued. “The way it ended, somebody died, and the police were all over the joint straight away, and they ran in and killed that boy too. I stayed in the car, didn’t even try to run, knew it was over then, let them pull me out, my hands up, let them push my face right into the street.” He glanced in my direction but averted his eyes. “Later on, they told me that boy was hard on the Boat. Had enough green in him to knock down a horse.”
“You paid up,” I said.
“I did, man. More than you know.”
A black BMW pulled into the lot and stopped alongside the Mercedes. The driver, a young man wearing a black jacket with a large eight ball embroidered across the back, stepped out and gave the world a tough glance. The Mercedes’ door opened and a man not yet twenty wearing a parka with a fur collar put his foot out onto the asphalt. They shook hands elaborately, and then the driver of the BMW walked around the passenger side of the Mercedes and got in. Both doors closed, leaving only an armor of tinted glass.
Darnell said, “What do you think that’s about?”
“Couple of young professionals. Doctors, maybe, or lawyers. Right?”
“Nick, man, what the fuck happened to this town?”
“I can’t tell you what happened. Only that it did.”
Darnell leaned closer to me on the seat. His eyebrows veed up and wrinkles crossed his forehead. “Remember 1976, man? The way pean?/div›ople acted to each other, everything-the shit was so positive. Groups of kids on bicycles, blowin’ whistles, ridin’ in Rock Creek Park. The message in the music-Earth, Wind and Fire, ‘Keep your Head to the Sky.’ Even that herb-smokin’ motherfucker George Clinton, Parliament, ‘Chocolate City’-‘You don’t need the bullets, if you got the ballots, C.C.’-you remember that, Nick?”
“I remember.”
Darnell sat back and spoke softly. “When I got out, in ’88, it was a new world, man. There wasn’t no hope, not anymore-not on the street, not on the radio, nothin’. Nothin’ but gangster romance.”
I looked in the rearview and said, “Here comes our man.”
A black 1974 Eldorado turned in to the lot and pulled three spaces down from our car. The engine cut, the passenger door opened, and Louis DiGeordano slowly climbed out. He looked in my direction and titled his head toward the concrete walk that ran around the park at the water’s edge. I nodded and stepped out of the Dart.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes, Darnell,” I said before I closed the door.
“I’ll be waitin’ on you right here,” he said.
I buttoned my overcoat. DiGeordano was down on the walkway, facing southeast toward the brick edifice of Fort McNair. I walked to the driver’s side of the Caddy and watched the window roll down. Bobby Caruso sat behind the wheel.
He filled a shiny suit, the French cuffs of his shirt four inches ahead of the sleeves on his jacket. His hair was gelled and spiked, and the fleshy rolls of his neck folded down over the collar of his starched shirt.
“What is it?” he said, his face stretched in a constipatory grimace.
I leaned on the door. “That day in the market, when we went at it.”
“I remember. What about it?”
“I called you a name that day. I want to apologize for that.”
Caruso relaxed, letting the boyishness ease into his face. He looked then like the kid he was, dressed for the P.G. County prom. “Forget about it,” he said.
I shook his hand and walked away. Caruso yelled, “Hey, Stefano,” and I turned. “That shit you pulled on me that day, with your hands-where’d you learn it?”
I smiled. “From my doctor.”
Caruso smiled back, showing his beaver teeth. “I thought doctors were supposed to help people, not hurt ’em.”
“Take care of yourself,” I said, and walked across the grass, through the thin branches of a willow to the concrete walkway, where I stood beside Louis DiGeordano.
“Let’s walk,” DiGeordano said. “Shall we?”
DiGeordano put his hand on the two-tiered rail that ran along the channel, and began to move. I walked beside him, taking a last pull off my smoke.
He was wearing a gray lamb’s-wool overcoat with a black scarf over a suit and tie, and a matching felt fedora. The brim of the fedora was turned down, with a slight crease running back to front in the crown. A small red feather was in the band, the same shade of red as the handkerchief folded in the breast pocket of his suit. A liquid wave of silver hair flowed under the hat, swept back behind his ears.
DiGeordano smoothed the black scarf down across his suit and pulled together the collars of the overcoat, against the wind. “Those two in the parking lot,” he said. “You see them?”
“Yes.”
“Titsunes, ” he said. “Drugs, guns, and titsunes. That’s what this park is now. That’s what this whole city is.”
“I don’t know. I come down here in the summer, ride my bike down here quite a bit. I see a little of that. But what I mostly see is families having picnics, getting out of the heat. Old men fishing, couples holding each other, sitting under the trees.”
“It’s not like it was.”
“It’s exactly like it was. It’s people, enjoying their city.”
DiGeordano looked across the channel and shook his hand in the air as he walked, the wag of his fingers meant for me. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Nicky,” he said. “You’re not old enough to remember.”
“I guess not,” I said, deferring to his age, though in one sense he was right. We lived in the same city, but a million miles apart.
He put his hand back in his side pocket, his brown eyes squinting now in the wind. “We always walked this side of the park, in the old days, every Sunday. The Potomac side, looking toward Virginia; it gets too much wind, and too much spray from the chop.”
“You said you were with me and my grandfather the first day I came down here.”