Anthony had got himself in trouble a few times this past year. He got beat up twice by his school “friends” and his teacher had told him she didn’t much care for his attitude. He wasn’t hard, not hard for real like some of the other boys, but he had to act tough because if you didn’t those other boys would take you for bad and punk you out. He began to cut the classes he could and sometimes entire days. He spent much of his time in the Martin Luther King library down on 9th, reading sports biographies and old-timey books about the West and black cowboys and such, and the rest of his time he’d hang on the corner of 12th and U, where he had gotten to know some of the winos and the merchants around the liquor store. You saw things down there, too. And after a while, the older guys on the corner and in the houses down the way, it got comfortable to be around them, like they were some kind of kin.
Granmom tried her best to keep him in the house, but he hung there less and less. Not that she was weak — she wasn’t no Moms Mabley — looking grandmother, neither. She was strong, a Viceroy smoker with big arms who supervised an office cleaning crew. Granmom wasn’t too old, after all, maybe forty-six, something like that. She was a good woman, too; he knew she meant well with all those lectures she was always giving him. She was real sorry that one time when she’d gotten so mad at him, said his mama had left him behind because he wasn’t no good. She apologized right after, even cried some, which he had never seen her do, but it stuck with him just the same. Made him think, Maybe I am no good.
Granmom had this boyfriend name of Louis, no-account hustler type, wore velvet sport jackets, wide-brimmed hats, dressed like old school. Came over Friday nights, helped Granmom spend her fresh paycheck on beer and expensive liquor. The two of them would listen to that old Philadelphia sound and some Stax/Volt jive from the days when they were both coming up, get to dancing as the night wore on. Then some loving, or a big argument, one of the two. Either way it ended, Anthony didn’t like to be around the house on Friday nights.
He sure would like to see his moms again. And his half sisters, Keechie and Michelle, fathered by a man named Rondo who used to come around and then was just gone. Least they had seen their father, could recall his voice and smell. Anthony had never known his, not even a picture. When he asked about his father he got no straight-up answers. When he kept asking, his moms and Granmom told him to hush his mouth.
Anthony looked at the time on his clock radio. Solid Gold was coming on soon on channel 20, right after the Benson rerun, but any minute now Louis would be walking through the front door. Anthony changed his shirt, put his Raiders jacket on, double-knotted his Nikes, told Granmom he was going out for a while, and left the house. It was dark now out on the streets.
He walked east on Fairmont. He crossed 13th, quickened his step when he saw a few Clifton Terrace boys hanging out around some parked cars, fast-stepping by them, but not too fast. Head up, eyes straight ahead. At 11th he turned right, went down the hill to U.
The pedestrians had gone home, and the residents were in their houses. He saw a couple of drug cars he recognized, one cruising and one idling at the curb. He saw a foot soldier on the corner and another at a pay phone. Tyrell Cleveland’s, all of them. Anthony walked on.
There wasn’t anyone in front of the liquor store this evening, just patrons buzzing in, leaving hurriedly, carrying forties and pints wrapped in brown paper. The cops and ambulance people had cleaned up and left the scene. Anthony had recognized that black Buick. He knew the driver by sight, a boy named Junie, a runner for Tyrell. He’d seen the skinny white guy take the money or the drugs or whatever it was out of the burning Buick. The woman who had been with him, the good-looking white woman wearing that short skirt with the short boots, she had gotten out of the skinny dude’s Plymouth before it all happened. She had walked into that new record store, come out with another white guy, gray-haired but not too old, after the crash. By then, her friend in the Plymouth had taken off.
Anthony noticed these kinds of things, standing for hours like he did out on this street. He wondered who else would want to know, and if he told them, would he get paid.
Anthony Taylor put his hands in his pockets, looked across the street at the new record store. No customers, just one young brother working inside. Anthony wondered where the owner was, the tall man with the wide shoulders. The guys on the corner said that the tall man was one of those soldiers in that war, Vietnam, ended about the year Anthony was born. The tall man didn’t look like any old businessman. He looked kind of hard, like he could go with his hands if the situation came up.
The night, young as it was, felt cold. And there wasn’t nobody out tonight ’cept for drug dealers and drunks. Maybe Anthony should go over to that record store when the tall man came back to close up, introduce himself, warm up. Way the tall man looked, he might turn out to be a good man to know.
Six
Tyrell Cleveland ran one long finger down his cheek and sat back in his chair. He uncrossed his long legs, stretched them out before him. He cracked his knuckles, then let one wrist dangle off the chair’s arm.
Tyrell’s cousin Antony Ray, whip thin and dressed in a black shirt and black slacks, sat silently on a hard chair against the wall.
“Chink,” said Tyrell, “turn that shit off.”
“Tyrell, man,” said Charles “Chink” Bennet.
“Turn it off.”
Bennet scampered off the couch, went over to the wide-screen, kicking Atari wires and empty Doritos bags out of the way. He stood in the blue light for a moment, watching the Suzie Wong video, Oriental Jade, that was playing on the set.
“Damn, Chink,” said Mario “Jumbo” Linney. He smiled, leaned forward from his place on the couch, where he sat twisting up a fat bone. “Can’t you bring your tiny self to stop watchin’ that shit?”
“Look at her, though, Jumbo. She’s a straight-up freak.” Bennet lifted his arm dreamily and pointed at the set. “She pantin’ like a dog, man.”
“She be takin’ it like a dog, too.”
“Turn it off,” said Tyrell.
Bennet reached down and turned off the set. Tyrell relaxed his shoulders. That was better. The sound from the TV was no longer competing with Whodini’s new one, Back in Black, coming from the stereo. Tyrell could deal with loud music or loud television, one or the other, but not with both. There were a couple of girls making noise and laughing back in the kitchen, high schoolers from Northeast who Alan Rogers and Short Man Monroe had picked up on their way out East Capitol. Tyrell didn’t mind their voices; he planned to double them up later on.
Chink Bennet went back to the couch, sat down next to his friend Jumbo Linney. Linney handed Bennet the lit bone. Bennet hit it hard, kept the smoke down in his lungs.
Jumbo Linney was dark and round and went three hundred pounds at six foot four. He ate greasy hamburgers and food from buckets and bags. But he still had his youth, and he was hard. He was certain his size would protect him. He was too dumb to know fear.
Chink Bennet was tiny, wiry, light-skinned with almond-shaped Asian eyes. When violence went down or was about to, he got giggly, silly as a slumber-party girl. So far he had always held up his end. Sitting next to Linney, he looked like an Afro-Chinese Webster.