Jones went to a pay-phone booth on the corner, dropped change into the slot, and dialed his cousin’s number. The phone rang and kept on ringing. The ring became a scream in Alvin Jones’s head. It told him that he was never going to see Broadway or ride down the street in that white El D.
“Come on, Kenneth,” said Jones. “Pick up the got-damn phone.”
KENNETH WILLIS HAD dressed in dark clothing and was rifling through his dresser drawer trying to find a pair of stockings this big redbone had left at his crib. He was gonna put one of the stockings over his face when the time came, the way his cousin Alvin had told him to do. “Funky Broadway” was playing from back in the living room, out this box he’d bought from the local Sears. He was charged up for what he was about to do, and Wilson going, “Shake shake shake,” and growling, “Lord, have mercy,” was charging him further still.
He found the stockings, a pair of fishnets. Well, Alvin had said stockings; he hadn’t said what kind.
Willis took one and, couldn’t help it, sniffed it before he stuffed it in his front pocket. He looked in the mirror. He was a big man with a chest and some big-ass arms on him, too. Wasn’t no one in that market gonna hesitate to hand over whatever he was asking for, they had a look at him. Also, he had a gun.
Willis went out of his bedroom to the small living-room area of his place, stepping on some stroke magazines he had left on the floor. The apartment was all messed up, like it always was. Ashtray was overfilled with butts, beer bottles sat on the eating table, and in the kitchen sink were dishes from last week, still had food on them, with water bugs crawling across the food. Even Willis knew this shithole needed cleaning. Maybe he would pay a woman to do it, soon as he had some money.
He pulled his shirttail out to cover the gun, which he had slipped behind the waistband of his slacks. Cheap gun, but damn sure looked like a gun when it got pointed in your face. It was a pocket .32 with a six-shot magazine, and it was pressing into his back. He’d put it somewhere else once they got in the car. His cousin had told him they’d meet on the sidewalk, out in front of the liquor store. Willis hoped he wasn’t late.
There was an Earl Scheib commercial on the radio now, and Willis turned it off. He went out the front door, locked the door, and headed down the stairs. He saw a white man with some shoulders coming into the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, where they had the mailbox slots on the wall, and then he heard the phone ringing back in his place, and he stopped where he was. The white man, a look on his face like he’d never seen a black man before, backed up and went outside. Must be one of them working for the landlord or something, come to collect. He was paid up, so it wasn’t no concern of his. . . . Damn, that phone. Willis looked up the stairs to his place, wondering if he should go back in and catch it. Might be his cousin calling him about a change of plans. But he knew Alvin was already driving over here, because Alvin had told him the time to meet out front, and Alvin was never late. So it couldn’t be him.
Still, whoever it was, they were trying to get him for something. They were just ringin’ the shit out of that phone, too.
Willis went down the stairs. He didn’t want to keep Alvin waiting.
The sunlight was bright as he exited the front door of the building. Nice day. Wasn’t many people out, though, not even that wino who folks called Cricket, usually stood out front. Willis turned his head to the left and saw the white man he’d seen before rushing toward him. He had a revolver in his hand and his gun arm was out straight. Willis reached his hand up under the back of his shirt. He heard his back crack and felt a snap in his neck as arms wrapped around him and he was tackled from behind by someone strong. His chest and face hit the sidewalk at the same time, and he said “uh,” and tasted blood in his mouth, and heard tires screeching to a stop in the street. White voices yelling at him not to move, and some people in the neighborhood cussing at the police who had taken him down, and the hard feel of cuffs locking on his wrists.
“What we got here?” said the white police who had tackled him, the man’s knee now pressing into his back. Willis felt the .32 ripped out of his waistband, the automatic’s grip scraping his skin.
“Motherfucker,” said Willis, spitting blood on the concrete.
“Keep talkin’, nigger,” said a low voice in his ear.
Way he got yanked up off the sidewalk then, felt like his arms were gonna tear right off.
Across the street, down near 9th, Alvin Jones came out of the phone booth and watched as his cousin got took right outside his place. He watched them cuff him and bring him up to a standing position, rough, like they liked to do, and he watched them walk him to a squad car and push him inside. Somewhere in all that, he hoped he had caught Kenneth’s eye. Remind him that his blood was still out here, waitin’ on him, and everything was gonna be all right.
Kenneth was cool. Kenneth would not give him up. Jones wasn’t worried about that.
But it was a damn shame. All that money for the taking, and now it was out of reach. They’d been cheated out of a big opportunity. Wasn’t no guarantee something this good was gonna come around again.
He walked quickly back toward his car, his lips moving, his face contorted, fussing all the way.
Someone had fucked up their plans. Couldn’t be no random shit that got the law on his cousin.
Jones came to his Buick. Looking at it, knowing he had to get inside it, hating that he had to get inside it, ’cause he deserved a more stylish ride than this.
Why someone would do this to him and Kenneth he didn’t know. But that someone, whoever it was, was someone who needed to be got.
DEREK STRANGE HAD a one-bedroom place in an apartment house on the northeast corner of 13th and Clifton, just above Cardozo High School, a handful of blocks up from the very heart of Shaw. It was close to his parents, Howard University, U Street, and everything else a young black man could want or have need for in a city. The building sat atop the very edge of the Piedmont plateau. The landscape and the street dropped down sharply from there, with the downtown skyline, including the monuments, spread out below. The apartment was not plush in any way, and the neighborhood was what it was, but Strange had a million-dollar view.
That view was no secret, either. Consequently, the apartments in this building rarely turned over. When one had come up empty, Strange had gotten in over the other candidates when the landlord found out he was a cop. Strange had emphasized it on the application and told the man he would keep an eye out for any criminal activity around the building, though he had no plans to do so at all. Using his uniform to get the place he wanted, well, that was just another perk of having the job.
Except for the view from his window, Strange’s place was unremarkable, a bachelor’s crib that appeared to be furnished with one eye on economy and the other shut. His couch, eating table, and chairs were secondhand. He didn’t have an interest in that kind of thing anyway, and if he knew a woman was coming up, he could make the place look reasonably neat in a matter of minutes. For art and decor, he had hung a couple of posters. On one wall, the Man with No Name, wearing a poncho, that little cigar hanging out his mouth. On another, Jim Brown, grenades in hand, readying himself to make that run across the courtyard of the chateau in The Dirty Dozen, which Strange had seen first run at the Town theater on 13th and New York two times. He had yellowed newspaper clippings of Brown in uniform as well, from his playing days with Cleveland, which he’d framed on the cheap and hung up around the place in a haphazard way. He had a TV set that he hardly used. He was happy here. Only thing wrong with this building, they didn’t allow dogs. He’d seen this boxer at the pound, a tan female, who looked good and had a real nice disposition, too. That would have to wait.
The dominant feature of the living room was Strange’s sound system, purchased at Star Radio on Connecticut and Jefferson, and his music. He had sprung for the components, powered by a Marantz tube amplifier, the previous year, and he would be paying on them through ’68. The purchase was an extravaganc
e, given his salary, but to Strange it made coming home every night worthwhile.
Around the stereo was his wax collection, stored in fruit crates, arranged alphabetically. From his father, Strange had gotten full-length albums by Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others, along with some gospel recordings by groups whose members had gone on to careers in R&B. But Strange kept these records mainly because they were a gift from his father; these days he rarely pulled them from their sleeves. Strange was into the new soul thing. To be precise, he was a lover of southern soul. There were exceptions, like the Impressions, who were out of Chicago and making some beautiful, politically courageous music, and some of the artists recording for the Blue Rock and Loma labels, but generally he went for the southern sound.
Otis Redding, the greatest soul singer who ever lived, was his man and would be his man forever, wasn’t any question of that. But there were others. He especially liked James Carr, the personification of deep soul, a gut-wrenching, from-the-bottom vocalist who seemed to be intimate with heartache and pain. Also, O. V. Wright, the self-proclaimed Ace of Spades who brought muscle and real emotion to every track he cut, and Solomon Burke, a survivor who always surprised and could work up a head of steam like no other, his songs often climaxing in thrilling ways.
To find his bounty, Strange visited small record stores in Shaw and Petworth, and spent too much money at the Soul Shack, on 12th and G, and Super Music City, down on 7th. He only bought albums that he felt were keepers, those that he suspected he would still be listening to in thirty years: Otis Blue and The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, Aretha’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, and the one full-length that every brother and sister he knew seemed to own, James Brown’s legendary Live at the Apollo.
But mainly Strange was a collector of singles. He would buy damn near any 45, unheard, if it carried one of “his” labels, because he had come to recognize that these labels had a certain sound. He’d been told by the counter clerk at the Soul Shack that it was session men from Booker T. & the MG’s who were doing most of the playing on the hottest songs, but he already knew, without having to be told, that Atlantic, Atco, Dial, Stax, and Volt shared musicians. You could hear the same rhythm and horn sections on cuts from Wilson Pickett, Otis, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, Aretha, William Bell, Joe Tex, Johnnie Taylor, and others. You could hear this same kind of rough old sound on releases from smaller labels like Goldwax and Back Beat. Most of these recordings, he noticed, came out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals. James Brown was an exception. He recorded on King and Smash, and had a sound that was all his own, but JB, a man who seemed to have dropped down from another planet, was an exception to everything. But there was something about those southern singers and the cats who were backing them up that separated them from their counterparts coming out of Detroit. Some said that the Motown machine had purposely tried to take the sexuality and rawness out of their tracks so they could sell records to the masses in general and to white teenagers in particular. Some went even further and more to the point, saying that Motown got you thinking on kissing, while Stax/ Volt made you want to fuck. But that wasn’t exactly fair or right. True, the southerners’ vocals were wet with sex, but in them you could also hear the joy and hurt that came along with love. This combination of blues, country, gospel, R&B, and hard history could only have risen up from the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Whatever it was, it had gotten into Strange. He had even begun to catalogue the release numbers of each single he owned in a notebook he kept by the stereo. It was a sickness with him, almost an obsession, and he couldn’t talk about it or explain it, but what he did know was that when he listened to this music, it just about moved him to tears.
And here he was, feeling that way now. Sitting on the couch, his eyes closed, listening to James Carr singing his new one, “A Man Needs a Woman,” Goldwax number 332.
He heard a knock on his door and got up out of his seat. He looked through the rabbit hole and opened the door.
Dennis stood in the frame, wearing yesterday’s clothes. There was that smell coming off him, the sweetness of smoke and the cut of cheap wine, that Derek Strange had come to know as his brother’s since he’d been back from the service. He was always walking around with some book, and he had one in his hand now. Everything was like it always was, except his eyes, which looked different today, brighter somehow than they had in a while.
“Young D.”
“Dennis.”
“What, you gonna make a black man stand out in the hall?”
“Come on in,” said Derek.
Derek closed the door behind Dennis. Both had a seat on the couch.
“You want a Coke, somethin’?” said Derek.
“Nah, I’m good.”
Dennis commented on the stereo, how clean the sound was and how the speakers must have cost big money. Derek told him it was the tubes in the amplifier, not the speakers, that gave the sound its crispness, as it had been explained to him by the salesman, as he’d explained it to Dennis many times before.
“Gonna get me a box like that someday,” said Dennis.
“You should.”
“Gotta get my own place first, I guess.”
“You should do that, too.”
Dennis looked around the room and took it in. “You got it all, don’t you?”
Derek had heard this kind of remark from his brother before, usually said in a different way. But there was no jealousy or rancor in Dennis’s voice now.
“I don’t have a penny,” said Derek, downplaying the surroundings and also telling the truth. “Payin’ rent money’s like throwing your money out in the street. What I need to do is like Pop did. Invest in a house.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
A silence came between them. The music ended, and the silence was amplified. Derek didn’t know why his brother had stopped by or what they were supposed to talk about now. Lately, they’d had less and less to discuss.
“Look here, Dennis . . .”
“What?”
“I’m going out soon. Lydell and me are going by this party, over near Howard.”
“Can I come?”
“Wouldn’t be a good idea,” said Derek, too quickly. “I mean, it’s not like you’d know anyone, right?”
“Relax. I’m just playin’ with you, man. You and me don’t exactly swing with the same crowd.”
Derek was instantly ashamed for trying to talk his brother out of coming with him and Lydell. There was a time when he’d looked way up to Dennis. When, aside from his father, his big brother had been his main hero. Back then, he would have given anything for Dennis to ask him to come along to a party or anywhere else. In those days, it felt like a privilege just to walk by his side.
“You’re welcome to stay here tonight,” said Derek. “Put some space between you and Pop. I know it’s been rough lately between you two.”
“Yeah, it’s been rough. On my side of things, it’s hard to live up to his expectations. But I can dig it. I been a disappointment to him, I know.”
Derek said nothing.
“Think I might have turned a corner, though,” said Dennis.
“How’s that?”
“Seein’ things more clearly, is all I’m trying to say.”
“Somethin’ happen?”
“Wasn’t like a lightning bolt came shootin’ out of heaven. It came to me slow. The point is, it came. What I was thinking was, a man’s got to have a plan.”
“True.”
“Doesn’t have to be a big plan.”
“I hear you.”
“You were talking about trying to hook me up with a job. I think I’d like to look into that. I mean, it would be something, right?”
“Sure would be,” said Derek. “It would be a start.”
“Nothing too strenuous, ’cause of this back of mine.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” said Dennis. “I was on the bus, heading down to U. Saw Clifton S
treet and pulled the cord. Thought I’d stop by and see you. If you were wondering why I came by.”
“You’re welcome anytime.”
Dennis picked his book up off the coffee table and rose from the couch. “Well, let me get on out of here, then.”
“You’re not gonna stay?”
“I don’t think so. Gonna catch a movie, somethin’, then head back to the house. Talk to Pop the way I talked to you.”
Derek stood and shook Dennis’s hand. “Thought you looked different when you walked in here.”
“I’m still me.”
“So we shouldn’t be expecting you to buy any tickets to this year’s policemen’s ball, huh?”
“I’m angry, man. I’m always gonna be angry about the way things are. And I’m gonna keep speaking my mind.”
“Nothin’ wrong with that.”
“I just hope I live to see a better world.”
“I do, too.”
“But I want you to know somethin’, Derek. I been angry, but I ain’t never been angry at you. Matter of fact, I always been proud of you, man. Always.”
Derek took a step toward his brother. Dennis brought him in and held him tight. They patted each other on the back. They broke apart and Dennis stood straight.
“I felt that,” said Dennis, wiping at his eye.
“What?”
“You tried to grab my rod.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You damn sure did.”
“Go ahead, man.”
“I’m gone,” said Dennis. He smiled and went out the door.
Later, Derek Strange stood at his southern window, watching his brother limping down the hill of 13th Street. Thinking, I should’ve told him I was proud of him, too.
EIGHTEEN
AFTER WORK, DOMINIC Martini went down to the 6,000 block of Georgia, entered John’s Lunch, and took a seat on a stool at the L-shaped counter. He ordered a Swiss steak dinner and had a smoke while old man Deoudes prepared the meal. There was no kitchen in the back, so Martini knew the place was okay. That was one of the few useful things his father had taught him: “Eat in a place has the kitchen out front. That way, you gonna know it’s clean.”