But one of them, skinny with bare arms and a head shaped like a peanut, hitched up his T-shirt to show me the handle of a Saturday night special. I stood quietly between them at the foot of the wooden stairs. The rap song on the stereo ended, and another one began, a shouted lyric and a ropy bass line snaking between beats. It was not a song I knew, but I don’t listen to a lot of rap. It’s that power in it-that danger that scares a lot of white people, that’s gotten it banned outright in some places-that power that’s right up there on the surface. It’s too much for me sometimes. It batters at me. It catches me in the rib cage.
“I am afraid you fellas have me mistaken,” I said, still mild, even smiling slightly. “I have never even been behind the line.”
“Oh, yeah?” said the other of the two boys. He was larger, dense, thickly muscled arms in a sleeveless Colts T-shirt. He had beady little eyes. Medium-red pigment, somewhere in the mahogany range; his friend, with the peanut head, he was brighter-skinned, almost Caucasian. “I think you lyin’,” said the thick one, but then turned, uncertain, to his boy. “He lyin’, right?”
Peanut Head ignored him, pushed a flat hand into the center of my chest. I didn’t flinch. I kept my cool.
“You a hardworking man, PB?” he demanded. “You got good years in you, yeah? How much you think you worth?”
“Yeah,” said the other. “How much we earn, we call you ass in?”
“Call it in?” Peanut Head turned to his friend, incredulous. “Shit, Bernard. We ain’t calling the fucking tip line. We call Elron, he call his cousin what’s-his-name, that snatcher. We make some real bread on this fucking runner.”
I contemplated my options. I wondered about Elron, about the cousin. There are real snatchers, of course, man takers cruising the back alleys of black neighborhoods and Freedman Towns, looking for men to peel off the fringes of life: parolees, the homeless, sex offenders living low-anyone who can be thrown in an SUV, shorn of papers, and sold to some bargain-hunting middler who’ll turn him around on a no-auction sale. It happens rarely, but it happens. Everything happens.
“Hold ’em,” said the littler one to his friend, but Bernard hesitated. “Grab him, son, go on.”
Bernard cornered me against the porch rail, wide body blocking my exit, and I thought about my move. If it came to it, I’d catch them both before either could draw. Quick, easy martial-arts throat chops to bring them down, slam their heads together to make them still. Drag them down the stairs quickly and put them in the trunk of the Altima. Drive back north toward the hotel, call Bridge from the car. There was a man he used, I knew, to handle these kinds of situations. His name was Ferdinand. He was a Cuban. I didn’t have the number, but I would call Bridge, and Bridge would call Ferdinand. Unavoidable, I would say. Nothing I could do.
“Go on, Bernard,” said Peanut, one hand on the butt of his gun, the other calling Elron with his phone. “Grab that bitch.”
Bernard raised his hands as if to seize me, but he wasn’t quite sure on this thing, not quite yet. I took the moment. I spoke, slow and low and clear. “I would not do that.”
Bernard’s hands came down. He could hear it, the cold ancient strangeness in my voice, all that cow’s blood and knife heat pulsing in my eyes.
Peanut Head wasn’t there yet. He lowered his phone and turned back to glare at me. Yanked out the gun. Bernard winced. He didn’t like this at all.
“Put it down,” I told him. “Put down the weapon.”
“Or what, slave?”
“I am no runner. I am no slave.”
“What?”
I kept going. I told them the truth.
“But neither am I a man.”
“What?”
“I am a monster in the shape of a man. I am a man with the skin of a snake and the feet of a wolf.”
“Fuck you talkin’ about?” said Peanut, starting to get a little bit of Bernard’s nervous eyes. His fingers dancing on the gun butt. Bernard, for his part, was done. “Come on, man,” he said, tugging on his boy’s sleeve. “Come on.”
“I do not walk the world, son, but stalk it,” I said. “With the scent of blood in my nostrils, my flanks a mess of scars.” I started down the street, still talking. “I am not a slave. But neither am I a man.”
“That ain’t no PB,” I heard Bernard say behind me. “That dude’s just fucking crazy.”
The problem was that those old bad times, once they got keyed up, were hard to quiet. It was all around me in the air now, all those miserable fucking memories, the terrified lowing of the cattle and the ka-thunk of the bolt gun. The heat and stench of the workroom, my cramped grip on the saw, the cows’ slow turning in the air, bloated and dripping gore. My brother Castle, his big eyes in the darkness. I was trying to go along now and get on with my work, and all these snatches of vision hovered like bits of ash or motes of dust, flickering glimpses of an old world, my old world, floating around me and settling on my skin as I came out onto Central Avenue, breathing hard.
“All right, now, honey,” I whispered, talking to myself, nice and soft. “All right.”
It was twilight. Streetlamps blinked to life. I just breathed. Nice and easy.
Once I got back to the spot, I was fine. I was cool. I ambled slowly up to the community center in a pair of heavy black work shoes and the CIRCLE CITY LAWNSCAPING coveralls I had boosted off the back of Ruben’s truck. The tag above the breast pocket said in cursive letters that my name was Albie, and I liked that name. I murmured it twice, thinking maybe I’d put it to use sometime in the future.
I stood outside the community center at dusk with my hat tilted back, taking in the building, scratching my head, and I knew exactly what I looked like: I looked like a gardener. Albie the lawn man at the end of the day. Maybe trying to puzzle out the location of the hose connection, maybe going back to pull out this one particular dead rosebush the boss man said to be sure to pull. I had gloves on, tight latex, thin as skin. I walked down the hedge-flanked walkway with a workingman’s purpose, peered in the windows, and tested the handles.
I hummed and whistled and crouched and took a sounding of that big brass front-door lock, running my fingers gently across its surface, feeling for nicks and scratches that would show that someone else had been here before me. My humming built its way up to a crescendo as I opened my slim black case and found the right rake and the right tension bar and stuck them in there and wiggled and poked at the lock’s invisible insides. As I tested that hardware-store lock I considered which way I would run if this turned out to be the moment when I ran. Highway overpass was one mile west. I would move as fast as I could without running. Chuck the lock-pick kit into the bushes, peel off Albie’s uniform, stuff it into a garbage can, and head away on foot, due west on 38th Street. One mile, then I would hustle up the on-ramp on foot and flag down a car and get myself gone.
I shooed the idea away. I always shooed it away. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was tethered tight. There was a device inside of me, right up at the place where the top of the spine meets the base of the brain. Screwed in by government doctors, sending out coordinates on me all day every day to Bridge, to whoever sits beside Bridge. Smaller than a grain of rice, that little device, or so they’d told me. Smaller than the head of a pin.
They also told me I would not feel it, but I could feel it, I always felt it, I always heard it, though it made no sound. When I was too quiet for too long I heard it singing in me: humming, taunting, burning. A hook. An anchor. A leash.