Double Deuce s-19 Page 5

  He turned his head in profile.

  “You want to know ‘bout my sad life?” he said.

  “Anything you’d care to tell me,” Jackie said.

  “I don’t care to tell you nothing, sly,” Major said.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Jackie said.

  “I don’t know no better, you understand. I is an underprivileged ghet-to youth.”

  “Mostly you are an asshole,” Hawk said. He was looking at Major now. His voice had no emotion in it, just the usual pleasant inflection.

  “Not a good idea to dis me, Fro,” Major said. “You in my crib now.”

  “Not anymore,” Hawk,said. “Belongs to me.”

  “The whole Double Deuce, Fro? You been smoking too much grain. You head is juiced.”

  Hawk smiled serenely.

  “Why you think you and the flap can shut the Deuce down? Five-oh can’t do it. Why you think you can?”

  “We got nothing else to do,” Hawk said.

  Major grinned suddenly and patted the roof of the Jaguar.

  “Like your ride,” he said.

  Jackie wasn’t a quitter. “Can you tell me anything about being a gang member?” she said.

  “Like what you want to know?”

  “Well,” Jackie said, “you are a member of a gang.”

  “I down with the Hobarts,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Major looked at Jackie as if she had just questioned him about gravity.

  “We all down,” he said.

  “Who’s we?”

  Again the look of incredulity. He glanced at Hawk.

  “All the Homeboys,” he said.

  “What does membership in the gang mean?”

  Major looked at Hawk again and shook his head.

  “I’ll see you all again,” he said and turned and sauntered off into one of the alleys between the monolithic brick project buildings and disappeared. Hawk watched him until he was out of sight.

  “I’m not sure it was fatherly to call him an asshole,” I said.

  “Honest, though,” Hawk said.

  “What was that all about?” Jackie said. “You guys are like his mortal enemy. Why would he come talk to you?”

  “Ever read about Plains Indians?” Hawk said. “They had something called a coup stick and it was a mark of the greatest bravery to touch an enemy with it. Counting coup they called it. Not killing him, counting coup on him. That’s what they’d brag about.”

  “Was that what Major was doing? Was he counting coup on you?”

  Hawk nodded.

  “More than that,” I said. “To a kid like Major, Hawk is the ultimate guy. The one who’s made it. Drives a Jag. Dresses top dollar-I think he looks pretty silly, but Major would be impressed-got a top-of-the-line girlfriend.”

  “Me? How would he know I was Hawk’s girlfriend?”

  “All you could be,” Hawk said. His eyes were still resting on the alley where Major had disappeared. “In his world there aren’t any women who are television producers. There’s mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and girlfriends.”

  “For crissake-that defines women only in reference to men,” Jackie said.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Hawk said.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was quarter to nine when I came into the house on Linnaean Street in Cambridge. Susan had her office and waiting room on the first floor; and she, and now I, lived upstairs. Pearl capered about and lapped my face when I came in, and Susan came from the kitchen and gave me a peck on the lips.

  “Where you been?” she said.

  “Double Deuce,” I said.

  I went past her to the kitchen. There were three bottles of Catamount beer in behind some cartons of low-fat lemon yogurt sweetened with aspartame. I got a bottle of beer out and opened it and drank from the bottle. On the stove, a pot of water was coming to a boil. I put the bottle down and tipped it a little and Pearl slurped a little beer from it.

  “You don’t like it when I ask where you’ve been,” Susan said.

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t mean it in any censorious way,” Susan said.

  “I know.” I wiped the bottle mouth off with my hand and drank a little more beer. “I have lived all my life, nearly, in circumstances where I went where I would and did what I did and accounted to no one.”

  “Even as a boy?”

  “My father and my uncles, once I was old enough to go out alone, didn’t ask where I’d been.”

  “But two people who live with one another, who share a life… It is a reasonable question.”

  “I know,” I said. “Which is why I don’t say anything.”

  “But you do,” Susan said. “Your whole body resents the question. The way you hold your head when you answer, the way you roll your shoulders.”

  “Betrayed,” I said, “by my expressive body.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Susan said.

  She held her gaze on me. Her huge dark eyes were serious. Her mouth showed the little lines at the corner that showed only when she was angry.

  “Suze, I’ve lived alone all my adult life. Now I’m cohabitating in a large house in Cambridge with a yard and a dog.”

  “You love that dog,” Susan said.

  “Of course I do. And I love you. But it is an adjustment.”

  She kept her gaze on my face another moment and then she smiled and put her hand on my cheek and leaned forward, bending from the waist as she always did, a perfect lady, and kissed me softly, but not hastily, on the mouth.

  “I’m having pasta and broccoli for supper,” she said. “Would you care for some?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll drink a couple of beers and then maybe make a sandwich or something and watch the Celtics game.”

  “Fine,” Susan said.

  She cut the tops off the broccoli and threw the stalks away. Then she separated the flowerets and piled them up on her cutting board. I sat on a stool opposite her and watched.

  “You could peel those stalks and freeze them,” I said. “Be great for making a nice soup when you felt like it.”

  Susan looked at me as if I had begun speaking in tongues.

  “In my entire life,” Susan said, “I have never, ever felt like making a nice soup.”

  Susan put some whole-wheat pasta in the pot, watched while it came back to a boil again, and tossed in her broccoli. It came to a second boil and she reached over and set the timer on her stove. While it cooked she tossed herself a large salad with some shaved carrots and slices of yellow squash and a lot of lettuce.

  “Susan,” I said, “you’re cooking. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you cooking.”

  “We’ve done a lot of cooking together,” Susan said. “Holidays, things like that.”

  “Yeah. But this is just cooking supper,” I said. “It’s very odd to see you cooking supper.”

  “Actually I kind of like cooking for myself,” Susan said. “I can have what I want and cook it the way I want to and not be subject to suggestions, or complaints, or derision-even if I throw away broccoli stalks.”

  “Actually I throw them away too,” I said. “After I’ve peeled them and frozen them and left them in the freezer for a year.”

  “See,” Susan said, “I’ve eliminated two steps in the process.”

  She stirred her pasta and broccoli around once in the pot with a wooden spoon and got out a pale mauve plastic colander and put it in the sink.

  “I have been talking to a woman I know who works with the gangs,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “She would be willing to talk with you. Not the television woman, just you. And Hawk if he wishes.”

  “Social worker?” I said. Susan shook her head.

  “No, she’s a teacher. And after school she spends her time on the street. It’s what she does. It’s her life.”

  “She black?”

  “No.”

  “And the kids tolerate her?”

  “They t
rust her,” Susan said. “You want to talk?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Pays to understand your enemy.

  “She does not see them as the enemy,” Susan said.

  “She’s not hired to protect people from them,” I said.

  “If you want her input,” Susan said, “you should probably not stress that aspect.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  CHAPTER 17

  Orestes Tillis was waiting for us when we arrived for work at Double Deuce the next day.

  “They set twelve fires last night,” he said. Hawk nodded. Jackie clicked on her recorder. “They set one in every trash can in the project,” Tillis said. He glanced at Jackie’s recorder. “And I believe I know why. It is an affront to every African-American that you should have one of the oppressors with you, protecting black people from each other.”

  Hawk nodded again.

  “That’s probably it,” he said.

  “You cannot be taken seriously as long as you appear allied with the oppressor,” Tillis said.

  “Sure,” Hawk said.

  “Are you saying that blacks and whites cannot work together?” Jackie said. Unconsciously she held the tape recorder forward. Tillis pointed it like a spaniel with a partridge.

  “Could slaves work with slaveholders?” he said. “The white man is still trying to enslave us economically. He tries to destroy us with drugs and guns. Where does all the dope come from here? Do you see heroin labs in the ghetto? Do you see any firearms factories in the ghetto?”

  Tillis pointed at me rather dramatically, considering that it was only us and the tape recorder. “His people are practicing genocide, should we ask them for help?”

  “You shut that thing off,” Hawk said to Jackie, “and he’ll shut up.”

  She looked startled, but she switched off the tape recorder. Tillis stopped gazing into it and looked at Hawk.

  “They will not take you seriously,” he said, “if you work with a white man.”

  Hawk stared at Tillis without expression for probably fifteen seconds. Then he shook his head slowly.

  “You got it backwards,” he said. “We the only thing they do take seriously. We all they can think about sitting out in the middle of their turf. They set those fires to see what we’d do. They don’t care about you. We are an affront to them. They think about us all the time.”

  “Why don’t they just shoot you?” Tillis said.

  “Maybe one reason being they can’t,” Hawk said. “And maybe they kind of interested, see what we do.”

  “Why?”

  “They admire Hawk,” Jackie said.

  Hawk continued as if neither of them had spoken.

  “And they going to keep doing things, a little worse, and a little worse, and finally they going to get into shooting with us and we going to kill some of them.”

  Tillis’ eyes shifted to Jackie and back to Hawk. “Just like that?” he said.

  “Un huh,” Hawk said. “Maybe get lucky and one of the ones we kill will be the dude that did Devona and Crystal.”

  Tillis started to say “who?” and then remembered and caught himself.

  “You sound like you are talking about simply shooting them to clean up the problem,” he said.

  “Un huh.”

  “I want no part of that,” Tillis said. He glanced again at Jackie, who was all the media he had at the moment. “I can’t condone murder.”

  Hawk shrugged.

  “What makes you think they won’t kill you?” Tillis said.

  “Blue-eyed devil here,” Hawk said, “going to prevent them.”

  “And I thought you’d never even noticed my eyes,” I said.

  CHAPTER 18

  Erin Macklin came to my office at about 9:30 in the evening. She had thick dark hair cut short and salted with a touch of gray. Her features were even. Her makeup was understated but careful. She wore big horn-rimmed glasses, a string of big pearls, matching pearl earrings, a black suit, and a white blouse with the collar points worn out over the lapels of the suit. Her shoes were black, with medium heels. Dress for success. She looked around my office, located the customer’s chair, and sat in it.

  “I am here,” she said, “because two people I know tell me Susan Silverman is to be trusted, and Susan Silverman says you can be trusted.”

  “One can’t be too careful,” I said.

  “I also know a woman named Iris Milford who says she knew you nearly twenty years ago, and, at least at that time, you could leap tall buildings at a single bound.”

  “Iris exaggerates a little,” I said becomingly. “When I knew her she was a student. How is she?”

  “She has stayed in the community,” Erin Macklin said. “She has made a difference.”

  “She seemed like she might,” I said.

  “You and another man are attempting to deal with the Hobart Street Raiders,” she said.

  “Actually,” I said, “we are dealing with them.”

  “And Susan told me that you would like to know what I know about the gangs.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But first I’d probably like to know a little about you.”

  “I was about to say the same thing,” Erin Macklin said. “You first.”

  “I used to be a fighter. I used to be a cop. Now I am a private detective,” I said. “I read a lot. I love Susan.”

  I paused for a moment thinking about it.

  “The list,” I said, “is probably in reverse order.”

  “A romantic,” she said. “You don’t look it.” I nodded.

  “The man you are working with?”

  “My friend,” I said.

  “Nothing more?”

  “Lots more, but most of it I don’t know.”

  “He’s black,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  We were quiet while she looked at me. There was no challenge in the look, and the silence seemed to embarrass neither of us.

  “I used to be a nun,” she said. “Now I am a teacher at the Marcus Garvey Middle School on Cardinal Road. I teach a course titled the History of Contemporary America. When I began we had no books, no paper, no pencils, no chalk for the blackboard, no maps. This made for innovation. I started by telling them stories, and then by getting them to talk about the things that they had to talk about. And when what they said didn’t shock me, and I didn’t dash for the dean of discipline, they told me more about the things they knew. The course is now a kind of seminar on life for fourteen-year-old black children in the ghetto.”

  “Any books yet?”

  “Yes. I bought them books,” she said. “But they won’t read them much. Hard to find books that have anything to do with them.”

  “The March of Democracy is not persuasive,” I said.

  She almost smiled.

  “No,” she said. “It is not persuasive.”

  She paused again, without discomfort, and looked at me some more. Her eyes were very calm and her gaze was steady.

  “I used to work in day care, and we’d try to test some of the kids when they came in. The test required them, among other things, to draw with crayons. When we gave them to the kids they didn’t know what the crayons were. Several tried to eat them.”

  “The test was constructed for white kids,” I said.

  “The test was constructed for middle-class kids,” she said. “The basal reader family.”

  “Mom, Dad, Dick, and Jane,” I said.

  “And Spot,” she said. “And the green tree.”

  “You and God have a lovers’ quarrel?” I said. Again she almost smiled.

  “Gracious,” she said. “A literate private eye.”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said.

  “No. I had no quarrel with God. He just began to seem irrelevant. I could find no sign of Him in these kids’ lives. And the kids’ lives became more important to me than He did.”

  “The ways of the Lord,” I said, “are often dark, but never pleasant.”

  “Adler?”

/>   “Theodor Reik, I think.”

  She nodded.

  “It also became apparent to me that they needed more than I could give them in class. So I stayed after school for them and then I began going out into the streets for them. Now I’m there after school until I get too sleepy, four or five days a week. I came from there now.”

  “Dangerous?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But you get along.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is being white a handicap?”

  She did smile. “Kids say I’m beige. Getting beiger.”

  “Save many?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Worth the try,” I said.

  “One is worth the try,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You understand that, don’t you?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded several times, sort of encouragingly. She leaned back a little in her chair, and crossed her legs, and automatically smoothed her skirt over her knees. I liked her legs. I wondered for a moment if there would ever be an occasion, no matter how serious, no matter who the woman, when I would not make a quick evaluation when a woman crossed her legs. I concluded that there would never be such an occasion, and also that it was a fact best kept to myself.

  “A while back the state decided to train some women to work with the kids in the ghetto. The training was mainly in self-effacement. Don’t wear jewelry, don’t bring a purse, don’t wear makeup; move gingerly on the street, don’t make eye contact. Be as peripheral as possible.”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “If I behaved that way I’d get nowhere. I make eye contact. I say hi. Not to do that is to dis them. If you dis them they retaliate.”

  “Dis as in disrespect,” I said.

  “Yes. The thing is that, to the people training the women, these kids were a hypothesis. They didn’t know them. Everything is like that. It’s theory imposed on a situation, rather than facts derived from it. You understand?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s deductive, and life is essentially inductive. Happens everywhere.”

  “But here, with these kids, when it happens it’s lethal. They are almost lost anyway. You can’t afford the luxury of theory. You have to know.”

  “And you know,” I said.