A Drink Before the War Page 10

  She did and flipped it onto the seat beside my hip. She said, “Don’t you have any New Music?” New Music, I guess, is all those bands Angie listens to. They have names like Depeche Mode and The Smiths and they all sound the same to me—like a bunch of skinny white British nerds on Thorazine. The Stones, when they started, were a bunch of skinny white British nerds too, but they never sounded like they were on Thorazine. Even if they were.

  Angie was looking through my cassette case. I said, “Try the Lou Reed. More your style.”

  After putting in New York, listening for five minutes, she said, “This is all right. What, you buy it by mistake?”

  Just outside the city limits, I pulled into a Store 24 and Angie went in for cigarettes. She came out with two late editions of the News and handed me a copy.

  That’s how I confirmed that I’d become the second generation of Kenzie to achieve a sort of immortality in newsprint. I’d always be there, frozen in time and black-and-white on June 30, for anyone who wished to access the file on a microfiche. And that moment, that most personal of moments—squatting by Blue Cap with Jenna’s corpse behind me, my ears ringing and my brain trying to re-anchor in my skull—none of it was completely mine anymore. It had been spat out for the breakfast consumption of hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t know me from Adam. Possibly the most intensely personal moment of my life and it would be rehashed and second-guessed by everyone from a barfly in Southie to two stockbrokers riding the elevator in some skyscraper downtown. The Global Village Principle at work, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  But I did finally learn Blue Cap’s name. Curtis Moore. He was listed in critical condition at Boston City and doctors were said to be working frantically to save his foot. He was eighteen years old and a reputed member of the Raven Saints, a gang that ran out of the Raven Boulevard Projects in Roxbury and favored New Orleans Saints baseball caps and team memorabilia. His mother was pictured on page three, holding a framed photograph of him when he was ten years old. She was quoted as saying, “Curtis never ran with no gang. Never did nothing wrong.” She demanded an investigation, said the whole thing was “racially motivated.” She managed to compare it to the Charles Stuart case, of course, in which the DA and just about everyone else had believed Charles Stuart’s story that a black guy had killed his wife. They’d arrested a black guy, and possibly would have sent him up if the insurance policy Stuart had taken out on his wife hadn’t finally raised a few eyebrows. And when Chuck Stuart took a 9.5 swan dive off the Mystic River bridge, it pretty much confirmed what a lot of people had already thought was obvious in the first place. Shooting Curtis Moore had about as much in common with the Stuart case as Howard Beach has in common with Miami Beach, but there wasn’t much I could do about it standing outside a Store 24.

  Angie snorted loudly and I knew she was reading the same article. I said, “Lemme guess—the ‘racially motivated’ line.”

  She nodded. “The nerve of you, shoving that Uzi into that poor boy’s hand and forcing him to pull the trigger.”

  “I don’t know what comes over me sometimes.”

  “You should have tried to talk with him, Patrick. Told him you understood the life of deprivation that put that gun in his hand.”

  “I’m such a prick that way.” I tossed the paper in the backseat and got behind the wheel and headed into the city. Angie kept looking at the paper in the dim light and breathing heavily through her nostrils. Eventually, she bunched it in her hand and threw it on the floor.

  She said, “How can they look at themselves in the mirror?”

  “Who?”

  “People who say such…shit. ‘Racially motivated.’ Please. ‘Curtis never ran with no gang.’” She looked down at the paper and spoke to the picture of Curtis’s mother. “Well he wasn’t out till three A.M. every night with the fucking Boy Scouts, lady.”

  I patted her shoulder. “Calm down.”

  “It’s bullshit,” she said.

  “It’s a mother,” I said. “Say anything in the world to protect her child. Can’t blame her.”

  “Oh, no?” she said. “Then, why bring race into it if all she wants to do is protect her child? What’s next—Al Sharpton going to come to town, hold a vigil for Curtis’s foot? Pin Jenna’s death on the white man too?”

  She was sounding off. Reactionary white rage. I hear more of it lately. A lot more of it. I’ve said similar things on occasion myself. You hear it most among the poor and working class. You hear it when brain-dead sociologists call incidents like the wilding attack in Central Park a result of “uncontrollable” impulses, and defend the actions of a group of animals with the argument that they were only reacting to years of white oppression. And if you point out that those nice, well-bred animals—who happen to be black—probably would have controlled those actions just fine if they’d thought that female jogger was protected by an army of her own, you’re labeled a racist. You hear it when the media makes a point out of race. You hear it when a bunch of possibly well-intentioned whites get together to sort it all out and end up saying, “I’m no racist but…” You hear it when judges who forcibly desegregate public schools with bussing put their own children in private schools, or when, recently, a circuit court judge said he’d never seen evidence to suggest that street gangs were any more dangerous than labor unions.

  You hear it most when politicians who live in places like Hyannis Port and Beacon Hill and Wellesley make decisions that affect people who live in Dorchester and Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and then step back and say there isn’t a war going on.

  There is a war going on. It’s happening in playgrounds, not health clubs. It’s fought on cement, not lawns. It’s fought with pipes and bottles, and lately, automatic weapons. And as long as it doesn’t push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist.

  South Central L.A. could burn for a decade, and most people wouldn’t smell the smoke unless the flames reached Rodeo Drive.

  I wanted to sort this out. Now. To wade through it all, in the car with Angie, until our places in this war were clearly defined, until we knew exactly where we stood on every issue, until we could look into our hearts and be satisfied with what we saw there. But I feel this way a lot, and everything always ends up in circles, coming back to me with nothing solved.

  I said, “What’re you going to do, right?” and pulled to the curb in front of her house.

  She looked at the front page of the paper, at Jenna’s body. She said, “I can tell Phil we’re working late.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  I half laughed. “No, I’m not. But you can’t come into my dreams with me, protect me there. So, otherwise, I can handle it.”

  She was out of the car now, and she leaned back in and kissed my cheek. “Be well, Skid.”

  I watched her climb the stairs to her porch, fumble with her keys, then open the door. Before she got inside, a light went on in the living room and the curtain parted slightly. I waved at Phil, and the curtain fluttered closed again.

  Angie entered her home and shut off the light in the hallway and I drove off.

  The light was on in the belfry. I pulled to the curb in front of the church and walked around to the side door, acutely aware of the fact that my gun was sitting in the police-station evidence room. There was a note on the floor as I entered: “Don’t shoot. Two black men in one day will give you a bad rep.”

  Richie.

  He was sitting behind my desk when I entered. He had his feet up and a Peter Gabriel tape going on my boom box, a bottle of Glenlivet on the desk and a glass in his hand. I said, “Is that my bottle?”

  He looked at it. “I believe so, son.”

  “Well, help yourself,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said and poured another shot into his glass. “You need ice.”

  I found a glass in my drawer, made a double. I held u
p the paper. “Seen it?”

  “I don’t read that rag,” he said. Then, “Yeah, I saw it.”

  Richie is not one of those Hollywood blacks with skin like coffee regular and Billy Dee Williams eyes. He’s black, black as an oil slick, and he’s not what one would call handsome. He’s overweight, always has a five o’clock shadow, and his wife buys his clothes. A lot of times, his ensemble looks like she’s experimenting again. Tonight he was wearing beige cotton trousers, a light blue shirt, and a pastel tie that looked like a poppy field had exploded on it and someone had doused the flame with rum punch. I said, “Sherilynn went shopping again?”

  He looked at the tie and sighed. “Sherilynn went shopping again.”

  I said. “Where? Miami?”

  He lifted the tie for closer inspection. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” He sipped his scotch. “Where’s your partner?”

  “With her husband.”

  He nodded, and simultaneously, we said, “The Asshole.”

  “When’s she going to pump a round into that boy?” he asked.

  “I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

  “Well, you call me when she does. I got a bottle of Moët sitting at home for the occasion.”

  “To that day.” I held up my glass. He met it. “Cheers.” I said, “Tell me about Curtis Moore.”

  “Gimpy?” he said. “That’s what we’re calling ol’ Curtis these days. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?” He stretched back in the chair.

  “Tragic,” I said.

  “It’s too bad,” he said. “Don’t take it too lightly, though. Curtis’s friends might come looking for you and they are particularly heinous motherfuckers.”

  “How big are the Raven Saints?”

  “Not big by L.A. standards,” he said, “but this ain’t L.A. I’d say they got seventy-five hardcore and another sixty or so peripheral.”

  “So what you’re saying is I got a hundred thirty-five black guys to be wary of.”

  He put his glass down on the desk. “Don’t turn this into a ‘black thing,’ Kenzie.”

  “My friends call me Patrick.”

  “I’m not your friend when I hear shit like that come out of your mouth.”

  I was angry and damned tired, and I wanted someone to blame. My emotions were running hard along open nerve endings that stopped just short of breaking my skin, and I was feeling stubborn. I said, “Tell me about a white gang that runs around with Uzis and I’ll be afraid of white people too, Richie. But until then—”

  Richie banged his fist down on the desk. “The fuck you call the Mafia? Huh?” He stood up and the veins in his neck were thick, poking out as hard as I figured mine were. “The Westies in New York,” he said, “those nice boys, Irish like yourself, who specialized in murder and torture and cowboy bullshit. What color were they? You going to sit there and tell me the brothers invented murder too? You going to try and pass that shit off on me, Kenzie?”

  Our voices were loud in the tiny room, hoarse, slipping under the cheap walls and reverberating. I tried to talk calmly, but my voice didn’t come out that way; it sounded harsh and slightly alien. I said, “Richie, one kid gets hit by a car because a bunch of retard Hitler Youth chase him into the road in Howard Beach—”

  “Don’t you even bring up Howard Beach.”

  “—and it gets treated like a national tragedy. Which it is. But,” I said, “a white kid in Fenway gets stabbed eighteen times by black kids, and no one says a goddamn thing. ‘Racial’ never comes into it. It’s off the front page the next day, and it’s filed as homicide. No racial incident. You tell me, Richie, what the fuck is that?”

  He was staring at me, holding his hand a foot in front of him, then moving it to his head where it massaged his neck, then down onto the desk, where he looked at it, not sure what to do with it. He started to speak a couple of times. Stopped. Eventually, he said quietly, but almost in a hiss, “Those three black kids killed the white boy, you think they’ll do hard time?”

  He had me there.

  “Huh?” he said. “Come on. Tell the truth.”

  I said, “Of course. Unless they get a good lawyer, get—”

  “No. No lawyers. No technicality bullshit. If they go to trial and it reaches jury, will they be convicted? Will they end up doing twenty to life, maybe worse?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, they will.”

  “And if some white guys killed a black guy and it wasn’t, let’s pretend, called a racial incident, if it wasn’t considered a tragedy, what then?”

  I nodded.

  “What then?”

  “There’s a better chance they’d get off.”

  “Damn right,” he said and dropped back into the chair.

  “But, Richie,” I said, “that sort of logic is beyond the average guy on the street, and you know it. Joe from Southie sees a black death turned into a racial incident, then sees an identical white death called a homicide, and he says, ‘Hey that ain’t right. That’s hypocritical. That’s a double standard.’ He hears about Tawana Brawley, and loses his job to affirmative action, and he gets pissed off.” I looked at him. “Can you blame him?”

  He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “Aww, shit, Patrick. I don’t know.” He sat up. “No, OK? I can’t blame the guy. But what’s the alternative?”

  I poured myself another shot. “It ain’t Louis Farrakhan.”

  “And it ain’t David Duke,” he shot back. “I mean, what—we’re supposed to do away with affirmative action quotas, minority grants, racial incident cases?”

  I pointed the bottle at him and he leaned forward with his glass. “No,” I said, pouring his drink, “but…” I leaned back. “Damnit, I don’t know.”

  He half smiled and leaned back in the chair again, looking out the window. The Peter Gabriel tape had ended and from the street came the sound of the occasional car scooping up air as it hummed past on the asphalt. The breeze coming through the screen had cooled and as it drifted into the room, I felt the weight of the atmosphere dissipating. Somewhat anyway.

  “Know what the American way is?” Richie asked, still looking out the window, his elbow up, drink poised halfway to his mouth.

  I could feel the anger in the room beginning to fuse with the slow rush of scotch in my blood, dissolving in the liquor’s undertow. I said, “No, Rich. What’s the American way?”

  “Finding someone to blame,” he said and took a drink. “It’s true. You out working a construction job and you drop a hammer on your foot? Hell, sue the company. That’s a ten-thousand-dollar foot. You’re white and you can’t get a job? Blame affirmative action. Can’t get one and you’re black? Blame the white man. Or the Koreans. Hell, blame the Japanese; everyone else does. Fucking whole country’s filled with nasty, unhappy, confused, pissed-off people, and not one of them with the brain power to honestly deal with their situation. They talk about simpler times—before there was AIDS and crack and gangs and mass communications and satellites and airplanes and global warming—like it’s something they could possibly get back to. And they can’t figure out why they’re so fucked up, so they find someone to blame. Niggers, Jews, whites, Chinks, Arabs, Russians, pro-choicers, pro-lifers—who do you got?”

  I didn’t say anything. Hard to argue with the truth.

  He slammed his feet down on the floor and stood up, began pacing. His steps were a little uncertain, as if he expected resistance after each one. “White man blames people like me because they say quotas got me where I am. Half of ’em can’t so much as read, but they think they deserve my job. Fucking pols sit in their leather chairs with their windows looking out on the Charles and make sure their stupid-fuck white constituents think the reason they’re angry is because I’m stealing food from their children’s mouths. Black men—brothers—they say I ain’t black anymore because I live on an all-white street in a pretty much all-white neighborhood. Say I’m sneaking into the middle class. Sneaking. Like, because I’m black, I should go live in some shithole o
n Humboldt Avenue, with people who cash their welfare checks for crack money. Sneaking,” he repeated. “Shit. Heteros hate homos, now homos are ready to ‘bash back,’ whatever the fuck that means. Lesbians hate men, men hate women, blacks hate whites, whites hate blacks, and…everyone is looking for someone to blame. I mean, hell, why bother looking in the mirror at your own damn self when there’s so many other people out there who you know you’re better than.” He looked at me. “You know what I’m saying, or is it the booze talking?”

  I shrugged. “Everyone needs someone to hate for some reason.”

  “Everyone’s too damn stupid,” he said.

  I nodded. “And too damn angry.”

  He sat down again. “Goddamn.”

  I said, “So where’s that leave us, Rich?”

  He held up his glass. “Crying into our scotch at the end of another day.”

  The room was still for a while. We each poured another drink in silence, sipped them a bit more slowly. After five minutes of this, Richie said, “How do you feel about what happened today? Are you OK?”

  Everyone kept asking me that. I said, “I’m all right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think.” I looked at him, and for some reason I wished he’d met her. I said, “Jenna was decent. A good person. All she wanted was, once in her life, not to be pushed under the rug.”

  He looked at me and leaned forward, his glass extended. “You’re going to make people pay for her, aren’t you, Patrick?”

  I leaned forward and met his glass with mine. I nodded. “In spades,” I said, then held up my hand. “No offense.”

  15

  Richie left a little after midnight, and I carried the bottle across the street to my apartment. I ignored the blinking red light on my answering machine and flicked on the TV. I dropped into the leather La-Z-Boy, drank from the bottle, watched Letterman, and tried not to see Jenna’s death dance every time my eyelids reached half-mast. I don’t usually indulge in hard liquor to excess, but I was putting one hell of a dent in the Glenlivet. I wanted to pass out, no dreams.