Lula Bacon came into the living-room area with a glass in her hand, like God had answered his question. He took the glass from her and drank bourbon deep.
“Where you been?” said Jones, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Puttin’ him to sleep.”
She stood over him in a sleeveless shift, tapping her foot. She was wearing a pair of pumps with a little cloth bow on top of each one. He guessed he was supposed to notice her shoes.
“New kicks?” he said, giving her a little something, thanking her, in his way, for bringing him a drink.
“For Easter. But I wouldn’t mind wearing them out tonight.”
“Who’s gonna look after the kid?”
“My mother would.”
“Well, I ain’t goin’ no goddamn where but this chair. My cousin and his boy are comin’ over with some smoke, and I am going to get my head up right here.”
“We could go to Ed Murphy’s.”
“What, I hit the number and no one told me?”
“You just cheap.”
Jones liked Ed Murphy’s Supper Club, over on Georgia. The kitchen made a mean shrimp creole, and the bartenders poured with a heavy hand. He went there once in a while when he was looking for something fresh. But what was the use of taking a woman out and spending good money on her when he already had her ass for free, right here, twenty feet from the bedroom?
“You ain’t never want to go out,” said Lula.
“What, you still runnin’ your mouth?”
“Lazy motherfucker.”
“Shut up, girl.”
“Look —”
“I am warning you, either you shut that mouth of yours or, or . . .”
Lula put her hand on her hip. “Or what?”
“You keep talkin’, I’m gonna put a size ten and a half up in your ass.”
“Ten and a half?” she said, her eyes gone playful. “Now, you know you a ten. Why you men always tellin’ lies behind your shoe size?”
“If I’m lyin’, I’m lyin’ on the low side. You know that.”
Lula smiled.
Jones looked her over in that shift, cut up way above her knees. Nice legs, and they went up to an ass so good, made your friends jealous you’d gotten your hands around it first. Young girl, just past twenty. She hadn’t lost a goddamn bit of shape birthing that kid, either. Big brown eyes, too. Girl looked like Diana Ross, with titties.
Jones put his drink on the floor and opened his arms. “C’mere, girl.”
“You’re gonna wake the baby,” said Lula.
“You the one be makin’ all that noise.”
She chuckled, and he knew he was there.
“Alvin?”
“What?”
“Can we go out?”
“We gonna have to see.”
“I got somethin’ you can see right here.”
“When?”
Lula lifted her shift up to her waist. She sauntered toward him. The front of her panties was dark where her sex had dampened. The sight of her black mound behind those white panties made him grow. He was a small man, so there was room for them both on the chair. She straddled him there and unzipped his slacks.
“Can we go out?” she said.
“Okay,” said Jones.
Jones thinking, After I get my nut, I’ll just tell her I had a change of mind.
KENNETH WILLIS HAD bought his Mercury, a green Monterey, because of its flat rear window. With this feature, the Monterey was like no other model on the street. Women, he believed, would like to sit beside a man who drove a car like that.
Lately, though, Willis was having a little trouble making the payments. He had a custodial position over at this elementary school off Kansas Avenue, but it was a low-pay job. Also, he and Alvin had not pulled off any side thing for a while. He needed money. He was counting on having some soon.
Kenneth Willis and Dennis Strange were driving south on 7th Street in the Monterey. Both were high from the marijuana they’d smoked, fifteen minutes earlier, in Willis’s shit-hole apartment on H. Dennis was dressed in clothes that were fashionable in ’66. His hair was ratty. He held a paperback copy of Dominated Man in his hand.
Willis was under the wheel, filling out the window frame with his big body, nodding along to the brand-new Percy Sledge, “Take Time to Know Her,” coming thin and crackly from the speaker mounted under the dash shelf.
“Percy be singin’ good right here,” said Willis. He had big shoulders and lean, muscular arms. He would have been handsome if not for his buckteeth.
“Any motherfucker sound good when you’re high,” said Dennis Strange.
Dennis preferred the new-sound thing coming up, Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, and them. He dug the way those cats looked, like they were gonna step out any way they wanted to and just didn’t give a fuck about what society thought. Percy Sledge? To Dennis he was one of those old-time, lantern-on-the-lawn Negroes, a prisoner to the record company. He dressed in tuxedos. He still wore pomade in his hair. But he wouldn’t mention that to his friend Kenneth. Willis wore pomade in his hair, too.
The street was crowded and alive. Families were out alongside hustlers and children playing ball. Women were gliding on the sidewalks, still in their Sunday dresses.
“Damn, baby,” said Willis, slowing the car and leaning his head out the window to talk to a girl who was making her way down the strip. “Why you gonna walk like that while I’m behind the wheel? You gonna make a man have an accident.”
“Don’t blame me if you can’t drive.” She was smiling some but kept up her pace and would not look his way.
“Wanna go for a ride?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What’s wrong, you got a George?”
“Ain’t none of your concern if I do.”
“Why you wanna be like that, girl?”
“Go ahead, slick,” she said, before turning down the cross street.
“One of them jaspers,” said Willis.
“If they don’t like you, they must be lesbians, huh?”
“Some bitches just don’t like men,” said Willis, shrugging.
“You gonna talk to them all, though. Find out which ones don’t and which ones do.”
“Somethin’ wrong with that?”
It wouldn’t help any for Dennis to tell Kenneth that there was. Kenneth, who he’d known since they were both in the reserves, was as pussy hungry as a man could be. He’d done some time on a statutory rape conviction, but even that lesson hadn’t thrown water on his fire. Dennis didn’t know how a man like him could get a job, not even a janitor’s job, around little kids. He wouldn’t let Kenneth around his own daughter, if he had one. He didn’t even want him near his mother, and she was over fifty years old.
“Sure is some nice scenery out here, though,” said Willis, his sights already set on another girl.
“Sure is,” said Dennis, smiling at the familiar feeling he had, looking at his people, his world.
They rolled slowly past T Street, where the Howard Theater was set just east of 7th. Lately, the Howard had been replacing its stage shows with what they called adult films. Today the marquee read, Miniskirt Love, and underneath the title smaller letters had been put up, saying, “Warped Morals of the Mod World.” Dennis wondered, Why would anyone care about some rich-ass white kids, doing shit ’cause they bored?
“Where the music gone to, man?” said Willis.
“Acts be goin’ places where white folks got money to spend,” said Dennis. “Ray Charles just played Constitution Hall. James Brown, Gladys Knight, shit, they’re out there at Shady Grove next week.”
“Where the fuck is that?”
“In some cornfield out in Maryland. All I know is, I ain’t interested.”
He couldn’t have afforded to go to those kinds of shows if he wanted to. Dennis Strange had no job. He lived with his mother and father. He sold marijuana in small quantities so that he could afford his own stash. He had a pill habit. He
drank too much, and what he drank was cheap. In fact, he could smell last night’s fortified wine coming out his pores now. When his head was up, he thought of these things and his shame grew. But that didn’t stop him from getting high.
Being up on reefer, it chilled some of his anger, too. That was good, as it felt to him that he’d been angry for a long time. He’d been fired up on the injustices done to his people way before these Johnny-come-lately motherfuckers came out with their black gloves, naturals, and slogans. He was no longer interested in wearing signs.
Early on, during his stint in the navy, he’d gotten involved with a couple of Muslim boys who were into the same kind of ideology as him. Quietly, they’d hung together and talked about Elijah Muhammad and the new world they knew would have to come. They exchanged books like The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Wretched of the Earth. They talked about institutional oppression, the disease of capitalism, and revolution deep into the night. But Dennis never could get with the personal politics of the Muslim religion. For one, he liked to drink and get high, and he liked his women smart and free. Wasn’t any god worth giving those things up for. Then, when Malcolm was assassinated by his own, Dennis got disillusioned all the way. He stopped hanging with his Muslim friends and retreated inside himself.
One night, drunk on Night Train, out there in Chicago where he was stationed, he tumbled down a flight of stairs and broke his tailbone. He had been coming down out of a tenement where he had gone to cop some weed when he tripped and fell. He blacked out from the pain and the drink. No one got to him until the next morning. When they did he was sober and lying in his pee. His time in the navy was done. He received an honorable discharge and full disability. He walked with a slight limp and always had pain. He was prescribed barbiturates and fell in love with them. He began to receive a monthly check.
Dennis Strange came back to D.C. as a cripple living off the government tit, more bitter and insecure than he had ever been before. He moved in with his parents and did not try to get a job. He got high every day. He went to seminars at Africa House, a couple of SNCC and Black Nationalist rallies, and attended a few meetings organized by the local chapter of the Black Panthers in Shaw. He thought he would be into the Panthers, but he was put off by them, too. True, many in attendance were genuinely committed. But a few of the young brothers were there because they liked the fit of the beret and the cut of the uniform. Others were there for the pussy to be had. Some of them liked to shout; all of them liked to talk. To Dennis, they were dark-skinned versions of those kids with the long hair who hung out at Dupont Circle, on the other side of town. They were playing soldier, but they didn’t really want to go to war. As usual, he did not fit in.
He tried to follow Dr. King but felt the reverend was too forgiving. Time was gone for joining hands. King’s followers believed freedom could be got with pacifism and words of love. Dennis knew that America would only respond, really respond, to the sound of gunfire, the sight of blood, and the smell of ashes.
“Goddamn right,” said Dennis, the reefer, along with the pill he had taken, hitting him all at once.
“Say what?” said Kenneth Willis.
“Nothin’.”
“You talkin’ to yourself again.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Dennis. “Must be ’cause I’m high.”
Willis parked the Monterey on a residential block of LeDroit Park, southeast of Howard University, in front of a row house converted into three units.
“This your cousin’s new crib?” said Dennis.
“His woman’s,” said Willis. “She got a baby in there, too.”
“From his blood?”
“He’s made a couple his own self. But this one’s not his.”
Dennis Strange looked at the steps going up a hill to the house. There’d probably be at least another flight he’d have to take once inside. All those stairs were hell on his back.
“You can run the shit in to him,” said Dennis. “I’ll stay in the car.”
“You need to come with me,” said Willis.
“Why?”
“Alvin says he’s got a proposition for us. Wants you in on it, too.”
ELEVEN
DOMINIC MARTINI CAME up off Longfellow and turned left, taking Georgia Avenue north toward Silver Spring. His wrist rested on the wheel of his Nova, and a freshly lit Marlboro hung between his lips. Jack Alix, the DJ on WPGC, sprang boisterous from the radio as he introduced a song.
“Here’s Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, with ‘Woman, Woman,’ comin’ in at number one!”
The singer started out sincerely, then went dramatic on the chorus, demanding to know if his girl was thinking of stepping out on him. The music swelled around Martini in the car, but it barely registered. His attention was focused on the street.
When he’d gotten back from the service, the first thing he noticed about Georgia Avenue was that it had been repaved. The white concrete and streetcar tracks were gone, replaced by black asphalt. The platforms and watering troughs had disappeared. Everything looked less bright.
The second thing he’d noticed was that there were many more blacks in the neighborhood, up on the commercial strip and in the residential areas as well. Soul music came from radios of cars cruising the Avenue and sometimes it came from the open doors of the bars. Realtors had brought in black buyers and turned white blocks gray, causing many white homeowners to sell their houses on the cheap and move into the Maryland suburbs. Martini’s house on Longfellow looked the same as when he left it, but most of the neighbors he’d known in his youth were gone. He felt like a stranger in his hometown.
There were changes inside his house, too. His father had died of liver failure. Angelo was gone. His mother was in a state of perpetual mourning and always wore black. The smell of the pasta sauce simmering in the kitchen reminded Martini he was home. But it was a lifeless place now. Windows were kept closed. The air was still, and the furniture held a thin coat of dust. He often heard his mother sobbing at night in her room.
He had few friends. He had not finished high school and felt cut off from those who did. Some of the kids he’d come up with were away at college, and he seemed dead to those who remained. He had not expected to return to D.C. with a hero’s welcome. But he had hoped for respect.
He got it from the old-timers, especially the veterans, but it was different with the young. To many of them, he was a freak. In bars, he no longer talked about Vietnam. It didn’t help him with women and sometimes it spurred unwelcome comments from men. When he mentioned his tour of duty, it seemed to lead to no good.
Now he was twenty-five years old, back at the gas station, working the pumps and washing windshields, doing the same thing he’d been doing when he was sixteen. His service benefits would pay for college, but he’d have to tackle high school first. He supposed that he could get that degree if he worked at it, but he knew he wasn’t smart enough or ambitious enough to take the next step.
He hung with Buzz Stewart. Stewart rode him sometimes, but he was the closest thing to a friend Martini had. And there was something else about Buzz, something that was difficult for him to admit. Martini had gotten used to taking orders. He had grown comfortable getting up in the morning and having someone tell him what to do. When Dominic Martini looked at Stewart’s sleeves, he saw stripes.
Stewart had asked if he was in. To Martini, it had sounded like a command.
Martini went under the railroad bridge in downtown Silver Spring. He passed Fay and Andy’s, a beer garden at Selim where he sometimes drank with Buzz and Walter Hess, and hung a right at the Gifford’s ice cream parlor on the next corner. He drove down Sligo Avenue, toward Stewart’s place on Mississippi. He took a final drag off his cigarette and pitched the butt out the window.
Stewart was okay as long as he was sober. Hess was wrong most all the time. Both of them were ugly when they tied it on. Martini listened to their hate talk but didn’t join in. They were all together on some things but not on that. Martini ha
d been that way himself most of his life, but now he was not. While growing up, he had listened to his father talk constantly about niggers, mostly while drunk, and it had infected him. It took a tour of Vietnam to clean the poison from his blood.
It was clear from the start that the men of his platoon were more alike than they ever would have imagined. None of them came from money. None fully understood the circumstances that had brought them to Southeast Asia and put them in the line of fire. All watched one another’s backs. In those ways, and in many other ways, they were brothers.
He had forged deep friendships with blacks and whites. He had thought the bonds would last. But after his discharge he lost contact with them. He was embarrassed to write them letters, as he couldn’t spell for shit. And anyway, what would he say? My life is fucked. I’m pumping gas and getting ready to do a robbery. What’s up with you?
Back in D.C., he was disappointed to find that the old mistrust remained. If anything, the canyon between blacks and whites was wider than it had been before. He tried to make friendly with some black guys who were new to the neighborhood but got limp handshakes and ice-cool eyes in return. Stewart and Hess laughed about this, called him Martini Luther King, Lady Bird, shit like that. They told him that a guy needed to choose which side of the line he was gonna stand on. That even the niggers didn’t respect a man who switched sides. But he had lost the heart for that sort of conflict. He didn’t hate blacks. He didn’t want to hate anyone anymore.
Martini parked his Nova on Mississippi, near Stewart’s Belvedere and Hess’s ride. He walked beside a small brick house to a freestanding garage beside a large plot of plow-lined dirt, recently turned. Buzz did this every spring for his mother; he had done it even when the old man was alive. Albert Stewart had kicked from throat cancer while Buzz was overseas.
Stewart and Hess were in the garage, standing around Stewart’s bike, an old Triumph Bonneville with twenty-four-inch risers. Both were smoking ’Boros and drinking Schlitz out of cans. Both wore Levi’s jeans and motorcycle boots. A radio sat on a shelf under an old Esso sign, taken from the station. “7 Rooms of Gloom” came from its speaker.