They nodded to Angie. No one wants to get too well acquainted with a woman whose husband’s jealous streak is legend.
I said, “Colin, how’d you guys like to make fifty bucks before the liquor store closes?”
His eyes lit up for a moment before he remembered how cool he was. He said, “You go in and buy the shit for us?”
“Of course.”
They kicked the idea around for a second and a half or so. “You got it. What do you need?”
I said, “It involves screwing with people who might be packing.”
Colin shrugged. “Niggers ain’t the only ones with guns anymore, Mr. Kenzie.” He pulled his own from under his tank top. A couple of other kids did too. “Since they tried to take over the Ryan playground a couple months back, we stocked up a bit.” For a moment I thought back to my days on this fire escape—the good old days of tire irons and baseball bats. When a switchblade was rare. But the ante kept getting upped, and obviously, everyone was willing to meet it.
My plan had been to get them to pack around us as we walked back up to the church. With hats, in the darkness, we could probably pass as kids, and by the time Socia’s people figured it out, we’d be in the church with our guns. It had never been much of a plan. And I realized now that I’d missed the obvious because of my own racism. If the black kids had guns, only went to figure, the white kids would have them too.
I said, “Tell you what. I changed my mind. I’ll give you a hundred bucks and the booze for three things.”
Colin said, “Name ’em.”
“Let us rent two of your guns.” I tossed him my car keys. “And go boost my car from in front of my house.”
“That’s two things.”
“Three,” I said. “Two guns and one car. What’re they teaching you kids these days?”
One of the kids laughed. “Helps if you go to school.”
Colin said, “You just want to rent the guns? You’ll definitely bring them back?”
“Probably. If not, we’ll kick in enough to buy you two more.”
Colin stood, handed me his gun, butt first. A .357, scratched along the barrel, but well oiled. He slapped a buddy’s shoulder and the buddy handed his gun to Angie. A .38. Her favorite. He looked at his buddy. “Let’s go get Mr. Kenzie’s car.”
While they were gone, we walked across the street to the liquor store and filled their order—five cases of Bud, two liters of vodka, some OJ, some gin. We carried it back across the street and had just given it to the kids when the Vobeast came hurtling down the avenue and smoked rubber the last quarter block to the curb. Colin and his pal were out of it before it stopped rolling. “Get going, Mr. Kenzie. They’re coming.”
We scrambled into the car and pulled off the curb as the headlights loomed large and malevolent in back of us. There were two sets of headlights and they were right behind us, three silhouettes in each car. They started firing half a block past the school, the bullets ripping into the Vobeast. I cut across the wrong lane of traffic and jumped the divider strip as we entered Edward Everett Square. I banged a right past a tavern, punched the pedal as we lit down the small, densely packed street, the cars fat on both sides. In my rearview, I saw the first car spin around the corner and straighten out cleanly. The second car, though, didn’t make the turn. It bounced off a Dodge and the front axle snapped in two. Its fender plowed into asphalt and it flipped up onto its grill.
The first car was still firing away, and Angie and I kept ducking our heads, not sure which explosions came from a gun muzzle and which came from the barrage of fireworks in the sky overhead. Straight out, like this, there was no way we’d last. A Yugo could outrun the Vobeast, and the streets were growing tighter and tighter with less cover and more parked cars.
We crossed over into Roxbury and my back window imploded. I took enough shards of glass in my neck to think I’d been shot for a moment, and Angie had a cut on her forehead that was bleeding a thick river down her left cheekbone. I said, “You OK?”
She nodded, scared but pissed off too. She said, “Goddamn them,” and swiveled on the seat, pointing the .38 at the space where the window used to be. My ear exploded as she squeezed off two shots, her arm steady.
Angie’s one hell of a shot. The windshield of the car splattered into two big spiderwebs. The driver spun the wheel and they rammed a white panel truck, bounced back into the street sideways.
I didn’t stop to check their condition. The Vobeast careened onto a badly paved stretch of road that rocked our heads off the ceiling. I spun the wheel to the right and turned onto a street that was only marginally better. Someone screamed something at us as we went past, and a bottle shattered against the trunk.
The left side of the street was one big abandoned lot, scorched overgrown weeds pouring up out of piles of gravel, crumbled cinder block and brick. To our right, houses that should have been condemned a half-century ago sagged toward the earth, carrying the weight of poverty and neglect with them until the day they’d spill into one another like dominoes. Then the right side of the street would look identical to the left. The porches were crowded and no one seemed too pleased with the whiteys in the rolling piece of shit tearing down their street. A few more bottles hit the car, a cherry bomb blew up in front of us.
I reached the end of the street, and just as I saw the other car appear a block back, I took a left. The street I turned onto was even worse, a bleak, forgotten path through brown weeds and the skeletal remains of abandoned tenements. A few kids stood by a burning trash can tossing firecrackers inside, and behind them two winos tackled one another for the rights to that last sip of T-bird. Beyond them, the condemned tenements rose in crumbling brick, the black windows empty of glass, singed in places by some forgotten fire.
Angie said, “Oh, Christ, Patrick.”
The street dead-ended, no outlet, twenty yards away. A heavy cement divider and years of weeds and rubble stood in our way. I looked behind me as I began to apply the brakes, and saw the car turning the corner toward us. The kids were walking away from the barrel, smelling the battle and getting out of the line of fire. I stood on the brakes and the Vobeast gave me a belligerent “fuck you” in reply. Metal clacked against metal, and I might as well have been in a Flintstone car. It seemed to almost pick up a last burst of speed just before we hit the divider.
My head popped off the dashboard and a rush of metal taste fragmented within my mouth as the impact shook me. Angie had been a little more prepared. She snapped forward, but her seatbelt held her in place.
We barely looked at one another before we jumped out of the car. I scrambled across the hood as the brakes behind us squealed on the torn cement. Angie was sprinting like an Olympian across the lot of weeds and cinder block and broken glass, her chest out, her head thrown back. She was a good ten yards ahead of me by the time I got going. They fired from the car, the bullets chunking into the ground beside me, what remained of natural soil spitting up between the garbage.
Angie had reached the first tenement. She was looking at me, waving me to go faster, her gun pointed in my general direction, craning her head for a clear shot. I didn’t like the look in her eyes at all. Then I noticed the shafts of light jerking up and down in front of me, shining off the tenement, jagged where my body blocked them. They’d driven in after us. Exactly what I’d been afraid of. Somewhere in all these weeds and gravel, roads had existed before this area was condemned. And they’d found one.
A burst of gunfire stitched a pile of torn brick as I jumped over it and reached the first tenement. Angie turned as I came through the doorway and we ran inside, ran without thinking, without looking, because we were running into a building that had no back wall. It had crumbled some time ago, and we were just as out in the open as we’d been before.
The car came across the middle of the building, rocketing over an old metal door ahead of us. I took aim because there was nothing to hide behind. The front passenger and the guy in the backseat were sticking black weapons out t
he windows. I got off two shots that punched the front door before they let loose, tongues of fire bursting from their muzzles. Angie dove to her left, landing behind an overturned bathtub. I went up in the air, nothing to cover me, and I was halfway down when a bullet burned across my left bicep and snapped me around in midair. I hit the ground and fired again, but the car had gone out the other side and was circling for another pass.
Angie said, “Come on.”
I got up and saw what she was running for. Twenty yards ahead of us were two more tenement towers, intact it seemed, and packed close together. Between them was a dark blue alley. A hazy yellow streetlight shone at the end of it, and it was much too thin for a car to work its way into. Silhouettes of misshapen hulks of metal stood out in dark shadows between the two towers.
I ran across the open lot, hearing the engine coming off to my left, blood pouring down my arm like warm soup. I’d been shot. Shot. I saw their faces again as they fired, and I heard a voice that I soon realized was mine saying the same thing, over and over again: “Fucking niggers, fucking niggers.”
We reached the alley. I looked behind me. The car was stalled by something in the gravel, but the way they were rocking it from the inside, I didn’t think they’d stay that way long. I said, “Keep going.”
Angie said, “Why? We can pick them off as they come in.”
“How many bullets you got left?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We could run out trying to pick them off.” I worked my way over an upturned dumpster. “Trust me.”
Once we made it to the end of the alley, I looked back and saw the headlights arcing to the left, moving again, coming around to meet us. The road at the end of the alley was a faded yellow cobblestone. We stepped out onto it, hearing the big engine roaring closer. The yellow streetlight we’d seen was the only one for two blocks. Angie checked her gun. “I have four bullets.”
I had three. She was the better shot. I said, “The streetlight.”
She fired once and stepped back as the glass fell in a small shower to the street. I jogged across the street into a mass of brown weeds. Angie climbed down behind a torched car directly across from me. Her eyes peered over the blackened hood, looking at me, both of our heads nodding forward, the adrenaline rippling through us like fission.
The car fishtailed around the corner, hurtling over the torn cobblestone toward us, the driver craning his head out the window, looking for us. The car began to slow as it got closer, trying to figure out where we could have gone. The shotgun passenger turned his head to his right, looked at the scorched car, didn’t see anything. He turned back, and started to say something to the driver.
Angie stood up, took aim over the blackened hood, and fired two shots into his face. His head snapped to the side, bounced off his shoulder, and the driver looked at him for one moment. When he looked back, I was running up to the window, gun extended. He said, “Wait!” through the open window and his eyes loomed large and white just before I pulled the trigger and blew them out through the back of his head.
The car went left, hit an old shopping cart on its way to the curb, bouncing up and over it before ramming a wooden telephone pole and cracking the wood at a point about six feet off the ground. The guy in the backseat shattered the window with his head. The telephone pole wavered in the fragrant summer breeze for a moment, then dropped forward and crushed the driver’s side of the car.
We approached slowly, guns pointed at the hole in the back window. We were about three feet away, side by side, when the door creaked open, the lower corner hitting the sidewalk. I took a deep breath and waited for a head to show. It did, followed by a body that dropped to the pavement, covered in glass and blood.
He was alive. His left arm was twisted out behind him at an impossible angle and a large flap of skin was missing from his forehead, but he was trying to crawl anyway. He got two or three feet before he collapsed, rolling over onto his back, breathing hard.
Roland.
He spit some blood onto the sidewalk and opened one eye to look at me. The other eye was already beginning to swell under the mask of blood. He said, “I’ll kill you.”
I shook my head.
He managed to sit up a bit, resting on his good arm. He said, “I’ll kill you. The bitch too.”
Angie kicked him in the ribs.
All the pain he was in and he rolled his head at her and smiled. “’Scuse me.”
I said, “Roland, you got this all backward. We’re not your problem. Socia’s your problem.”
“Socia dead,” he said, and I could tell a few of his teeth were broken. “He just don’t know it yet. Most of the Saints coming over with me. I get Socia any day now. He lost the war. Just a matter of picking his coffin.”
He managed to open both eyes then, for just a moment, and I knew why he wanted me dead.
He was the kid in the photographs.
“You’re the—”
He howled at me, a stream of blood jetting from his mouth, trying to lunge for me when he couldn’t even get off the ground. He kicked at me and banged his fist off the ground, probably driving shards of glass all that much farther into the skin and bone. His howl grew louder. “I fucking kill you,” he screamed. “I fucking kill you.”
Angie looked at me. “We let him live, we’re both dead.”
I considered it. One shot is all it would take. Out here on the cusp of the urban wasteland with no one around to question. One shot and no more Roland to worry about. Once we settled with Socia, back to our regular life. I looked down at Roland as he arched his back and jerked up, trying to stand, like a bloody fish on newspaper. His sheer effort scared the shit out of me. Roland didn’t seem to know pain or fear any longer, just drive. I looked at him steadily, considering it, and somewhere in that raging, hulking mass of hatred, I saw the naked child with the dying eyes. I said, “He’s already dead.”
Angie stood over him, gun pointed down, hammer pulled back. Roland watched her and she stared back at him flatly. But she couldn’t do it either, and she knew no amount of standing there would change that. She shrugged and said, “Have a nice day,” and we walked toward the Melnea Cass Boulevard, four blocks west, shining like civilization itself.
27
We flagged down a bus and climbed on. Everyone on it was black and when they saw us—bloody, torn clothes—most of them found some sort of excuse to move to the back. The bus driver closed the door with a soft whoosh and pulled off down the highway.
We took seats near the front, and I looked at the people on the bus. Most of them were older; two looked like students, one young couple held a small child between them. They were looking at us with fear and disgust and some hatred. I had an idea what it must be like to be a couple of young black guys in street clothes boarding a subway car in Southie or White Dorchester. Not a nice feeling.
I sat back and looked out the window at the fireworks in the black sky. They were smaller now, less colorful. I heard an echo of my voice as a carload of murderers chased me across an open lot firing bullets at my body, and my hatred and fear distilled into color. “Fucking niggers,” I’d said, over and over. I closed my eyes, and in the darkness, they still took note of the light bursting above me in the sky.
Independence Day.
The bus dropped us at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Columbia. I walked Angie back to her house and when we reached it, she touched my shoulder. “You going to get that looked at?”
For all the pain, when I looked at it on the bus, I realized it had only grazed me, cutting the skin like the slash of a good knife—hardly lethal. It needed cleaning and it hurt like hell, but it wasn’t worth a cosmetic job in an overcrowded emergency room at the moment. “Tomorrow,” I said.
Her living-room curtain parted slightly: Phil, thinking he was the detective. I said, “You better go in.”
The prospect didn’t seem to appeal to her all that much. She said, “Yeah, I guess I better.”
I looked at the blood on her face, the cut on her forehead. “Better clean that up too,” I said. “You’re looking like an extra in Dawn of the Dead.”
“You always know the right thing to say,” she said and started toward the house. She saw the parted curtain and turned back toward me, a frown on her face. She looked at me for almost a full minute, her eyes large and a little sad. “He used to be a nice guy. Remember?”
I nodded, because I did. Phil had been a great guy once. Before bills came and jobs went and the future became a vicious joke of a word, something to describe what he’d never have. Phil hadn’t always been the Asshole. He’d grown into it.
“Good night,” I said.
She crossed the porch and went inside.
I walked up onto the avenue, headed toward the church. I stopped in the liquor store and bought myself a six-pack. The guy behind the counter looked at me like he figured I’d die soon; a little over an hour ago—one that seemed like a lifetime now—I’d bought enough liquor to start my own company, and now I was back for more. “You know how it is,” I said. “Fourth of July.”
The guy looked at me, at my bloody arm and dirty face. “Yeah,” he said, “tell that to your liver.”
I drank a beer as I walked up the avenue, thinking about Roland and Socia, Angie and Phil, the Hero and me. Dances of pain. Relationships from hell. I’d been a punching bag for my father for eighteen years, and I’d never hit back. I kept believing, kept telling myself, It’ll change; he’ll get better. It’s hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
Angie and Phil were the same way. She’d known him when he was the best-looking guy in the neighborhood, a charmer and natural leader who told the funniest jokes, the warmest stories. He was everyone’s idol. A great guy. She still saw that, prayed for it, hoped against hope—no matter how cynically she viewed the rest of the world—that people change for the better sometimes. Phil had to be one of those people, or what gave anything purpose?