“Once you’re in,” Juan said, “no one much fucks with you. It’s like a license to do what you want. Even the cops are afraid of us. They know we find out who they are and where they live, we might give them or their little straight families a visit.”
“Gang is the only way to live around here,” Billy said. “Get what you want, feel protected, you got to have the gang, ’cause without it…man, you’re just on your own.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what that’s like, being on my own. So I’m in. I’ve done my deed and I’m proud of it, and I want in.”
We went out of there and around the corner and walked a few blocks to where the gang had their headquarters. I thought about the streets and how dark they were and figured that fast as the streetlights got repaired, someone shot them out. Maybe the city was never going to repair them again. Maybe they’d had enough.
Dad told me once that if people don’t care about where they live, the way they act, people they associate with, they get lost in the dark, can’t find their way back ’cause there’s no light left.
I had taken a pretty good step into the shadows tonight.
There was an old burnt-out building at the end of the block. We went past that, turned right, and there was this old bowling alley. The sign for METRO BOWLING was still there, but there was nothing metro about the place. The outside smelled like urine and there was some cracked glass framed in the doorway. When we got to the door, Juan beat on the frame with his fist. After a moment the door opened slightly, and a young white woman with long black hair showed her face. Juan said something I wasn’t listening for, and then we were inside. The girl turned and walked away. I saw she had an automatic in her hand, just hanging there like it was some kind of jewelry. Juan gave her a slap on the ass. She didn’t even seem to notice.
The place stank. You could hear music in the back. Hardcore rap and some good old-school hip-hop going, all of it kind of running together. There were quite a few people in there. The floors where the bowling alley had been were still being used for bowling. Gang members, most of them dressed so you knew they were in a gang, flying their freak flags, were rolling balls down the wooden pathways, knocking down pins. The little pin machine was working just fine and it picked up the pins and carried them away and reset them. The alleys were no longer shiny and there were little nicks in the wood here and there and splinters stuck up in places as if the floor was offering toothpicks.
In front of the bowling alleys were racks for shoes, but there weren’t any shoes in them. Some of the gang members were wearing bowling shoes, some weren’t. The clack and clatter of the balls as the machine puked them up and slammed them together made my ears hurt. Over near the far wall, a big black guy had this Asian girl shoved up against the wall so that both her palms were on it, her ass to him. Her pants were down and so were his. What they were doing wouldn’t pass for bowling, though balls were involved.
“That there is B.G. He’s slamming him some nook,” Billy said.
“I kind of figured that’s what was going on,” I said.
We went past them, around a corner, and into a back room. There was a desk there, and a guy that looked older than the others was sitting behind the table with a big bottle of Jack Daniel’s in front of him. He was a white guy with some other blood in him, maybe black, maybe all kinds of things, and he was looking at me with the coldest black eyes I’ve ever seen. They looked like the twin barrels of shotguns. He grinned at Billy and Juan, showing me some grillwork on his teeth that was silver and shiny and had what looked like diamonds in them. For all I knew they were paste or glass.
On his right side was a young white girl who wasn’t bad looking except for a long scar on her cheek. On her right hand side was a guy who looked as if he might like to eat me and spit me out. On Grillwork’s left was a husky-looking Hispanic guy with eyes so narrow they looked like slits.
“So, you got a wayward soldier,” Grillwork said.
“That’s right. We known him now a couple weeks, and he’s been wanting in. Talking to us, walking around with us some. He did some righteous business tonight,” Juan said.
“No shit,” Grillwork said. “What’d he do?”
Billy told him and Grillwork nodded like he had just been told I had invented time travel.
“That’s good,” Grillwork said. “That’s real good. So you wanting in, huh?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I want in. I thought I was in. I did what was asked.”
“Well, that’s a beginning,” Grillwork said. “You showed some stones doing something like that.”
I didn’t think it had taken that much in the way of stones. She was a kid, something a high wind could knock over.
“Sit the fuck down, man,” Grillwork said. “What’s your name?”
I sat in the chair in front of the table and told him my name.
“What you want in for?” Grillwork asked.
“I don’t have a family. It’s tough to make it in this town. Jobs bore me.”
“All right, all right.” Grillwork nodded. “You got to understand some things. You come in, you got to stay in. You want to get out…well, you get out all right, but all the way and pretty goddamn final. Not pretty final. Final. Savvy?”
I nodded.
“You get in, we got work of our own, but it’s different. You do stuff that makes money by taking other people’s money. We sell some chemicals, man. Got our own lab.”
“Meth?” I said.
“Oh yeah. Now and again, we deal in some weed and some pussy, but mostly we got the meth. You pick dough up on the side? That’s yours, but not by selling chemicals, man. The mind mixer business, that’s all ours. I find you dipping your dick into that, you’ll wind up in a ditch with flies on your face. Got me?”
I nodded again.
“You can’t run your own string of whores, lessen’ you hook up with some gal will pull the train for the club, then go out there and lube some johns. You got that understood?”
“I do.”
“All right. The things on the side, you can do what you want to the citizens, you know? I don’t care you rob them or rape them or whatever, but you get caught and dragged downtown, not a thing we can do. But there is this. Cops on our turf-which is about twelve blocks, almost square, ’cause it’s got an old park in it that fucks up the square thing, makes it like a square with an addition-”
“Who gives a shit?” the girl next to him said. “Just tell him what you’re gonna tell him.”
Grillwork looked at her, and she looked back. Her eyes were pretty damn cold too.
He looked back at me, said, “Those twelve blocks, the park, that’s ours. But these cops, they pretty much leave us alone. ’Cause when they don’t, we got a way of not liking it, a way of tracking them down. It’s been done, man.”
I nodded.
Juan was chewing gum now, and I could hear him popping it. I felt something cold against the back of my neck and turned. Juan had a nine poking against my neck as he was grinning and chewing his gum.
“That there,” Grillwork said, “that was in case you didn’t have all the right answers. Like maybe you wanted to argue a point.”
“No argument,” I said, turning back to face Grillwork. “I take it you’re the one called Headmaster, since you’re the one laying out the ground rules.”
Juan took the nine out of my neck.
“No. You don’t talk to Headmaster about this shit. I’m one of his lieutenants. You can call me Hummy.”
“All right,” I said. It was a curious name, some nickname, and I wondered about it, but didn’t really care enough to ask.
“You frisked him?” Hummy said to Juan and Billy.
“Earlier tonight,” Juan said. “He ain’t packing nothing but a dick and balls.”
“All right,” Hummy said. “Let me ask.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask who he wanted to ask or what he wanted to ask them about. I found the best thing was just to be quiet and everyone filled things in for themselves. You said too much, then you gave them room for varied interpretation. You didn’t say anything, they usually filled it up with what they wanted.