The Turnaround

  On the way to Georgia, Monroe talked to Marcus about body language. “Chin up, and keep your shoulders square, like you’re balancing a broom handle on there. Make eye contact, but not too long, hear? You don’t want to be challenging anyone for no good reason. On the other hand, you don’t want to look like a potential victim, either.”

  “How’s a victim look?” said Marcus.

  “Like someone you could rob or steal in the face,” said Monroe. He had said these things to Kenji when he was a little boy. Raymond’s father, Ernest Monroe, had said them to him.

  Down on the Avenue, as the foot traffic increased, Marcus reached out and held Monroe’s hand.

  CHARLES BAKER sat in the passenger seat of Cody Kruger’s Honda, looking through the windshield at a gray four-square colonial at the corner of 39th and Livingston. Deon Brown was in the backseat, shifting his considerable weight. They were parked down the block, near Legation Street. Two blacks and a white, sitting in a beat-up car in one of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. Anyone who came up on them would know they were wrong.

  “These houses are nice,” said Cody.

  “Big trees, too,” said Baker. “This here’s a burglar’s paradise during the day.”

  They were in Friendship Heights. Baker had done some break-ins in neighborhoods just like this one. Two men in, one lookout in the car. Go directly to the master bedroom and toss it. People liked to keep their jewelry, furs, and cash close to where they slept. But he and his crew had been retired from that game by the law. He wasn’t about to go back to prison for a fur coat. If he was going to fall, it would be for something worthwhile.

  “All this money,” said Cody. “Why they not drivin nicer whips?”

  “Look careful,” said Baker. “They’re showing that they got it in a quiet way, but they’re sayin something else, too.”

  This was not the new-money, look-what’s-in-my-driveway lifestyle of a Potomac or a McLean. The residents here had it, but they did not care to advertise it. Their cars weren’t flashy, even when they were fast, but they were fairly new and environmentally correct. All-wheel-drive Volvos, Saab sedans, SUV hybrids, Infiniti Gs, and Acuras lined the streets.

  “They sayin, ‘Look at me,’ ” said Baker. “ ‘I can afford a Mercedes, but I choose not to own one.’ They gonna spend fifty thousand dollars on a Lexus hybrid so they can save a few miles per gallon on gas and boast about it at their next dinner party. But ask one of these motherfuckers to give a thousand dollars to a school on the other side of town, so a poor black kid can have a computer and a chance? You gonna see the door slam right in your face.”

  How do you know? thought Deon, tiring of the cynical drawl in Baker’s voice. When have you ever done anything for any kind of kid, poor or otherwise?

  “Ain’t that right, Deon?”

  Deon adjusted his body. He had big legs and was uncomfortable in the small backseat. “Right, Mr. Charles.”

  “I can’t stand these people,” said Baker, and Cody nodded his head.

  “Can we go?” said Deon.

  “In a minute,” said Baker.

  Deon wasn’t comfortable in this part of the city. Even when he dressed right, even when he was straight, he got looks. It wasn’t just his color, though that was a large part of the reaction. The locals could sense he didn’t belong here. Once he bought a shirt from one of those stores over on Wisconsin Avenue, on what they called the Rodeo Drive of Chevy Chase, and when he took it to the register, they asked for his ID, even though he was paying cash. His mother told him he should have asked why, but he had been too humiliated to question the clerk. He never went shopping on that fancy strip of stores again.

  The side door to the four-square colonial opened. A tall, thin man in a sport jacket and slacks stepped out of the house. His hair was thick, gray, and on the long side, falling a little over his ears. He held a leash, and on the end of it was a fat dachshund. The man stopped to light a cigar, then walked north.

  “Every night,” said Baker.

  Cody touched the handle of the door.

  “Not yet,” said Baker. “Let him go some.”

  “How you know he’s not gonna be right back?”

  “He’s off to that nice little rec center and ball field they got, just a block or so away. Takes a little while for him to get there ’cause his poor excuse for a dog got them short little legs.”

  “Dark ball field be a good place to rob his ass,” said Cody.

  “What I want can’t fit in a wallet,” said Baker. “His debt is bigger than that.”

  The man cut left on Livingston and disappeared.

  “Here you go,” said Baker, handing Cody a security-tinted envelope. The name Peter Whitten was printed on its face.

  Cody got out of the car, jogged down the block, and placed the envelope in the mailbox beside the door of the colonial. He returned to the Honda, excited, pink of face, and short of breath.

  “Go, boy,” said Baker.

  Cody turned the ignition and pulled out of the space. They drove east, headed back to their side of town.

  VICKI HAD gone to bed early, as she tended to do since Gus was killed. She could not bear to watch the serial-killer and autopsy shows that dominated the television schedule late in the evening, and she had never been a reader. Alex spent most nights in his chair in the living room, alone, with a trade paperback and a glass of red wine. He still read novels but alternated them with biographies, battlefield memoirs written by soldiers, and nonfiction books about the politics of war.

  The house ticked and settled. Johnny was out with his friends, and Vicki by now was asleep. Alex dog-eared the page and poured out the rest of his wine in the kitchen sink. He left a light on for Johnny and went upstairs.

  He entered Gus’s bedroom. They had kept it as it was. Neither he nor Vicki had been able to box up his football trophies, give away his clothing, or take down the posters Gus had tacked to his walls. Alex had talked about relocating, selling the house and moving on, but both of them decided that leaving the house would mean leaving Gus behind.

  Alex wasn’t mentally unsound. A year ago, he had been close enough to madness to know how it felt to be scrambled. After that day, after the men in uniform came to the front door, after they’d buried what was left of Gus, Alex went half crazy with bitterness and rage. He took to hard liquor for the first time in his life. He thought of burning his house down. He had violent thoughts about the president. He talked to God aloud and asked him why he had not taken him first. One black night he asked God why he had not taken Johnny instead of Gus, and cried out for forgiveness until Vicki came to him and took him in her arms.

  The woman the army sent explained the stages of grief. He said, “Fuck your stages of grief,” and repeated it to her back as she walked quickly from his house.

  It got better. Time passed and it hurt less. He stopped drinking scotch. He grew tired of being angry. He wrote a letter to the army shrink and apologized. He had a business to run, a wife to take care of. He wanted to see Johnny settled. He wanted a grandson.

  Alex looked at Gus’s bookshelf, which held few books but many trophies, mostly from his days in Pop Warner, the good years for Gus that were Alex’s best years, too. Driving the boys to the games, hearing their conversations, boasts, and predictions as their favorite hip-hop tunes played in the car. After the game, Gus on one knee, sometimes happy, sometimes tearful, listening intently to his coach, steam rising off his head, sweat beaded and streaked on his face, sod clumped in the cage of the helmet he cradled against his chest. Gus slept with a football then. His goal was to play for the Hurricanes. He wanted his father to move them to Florida so he could train year-round.

  He was not much of a student. He was goal oriented only in athletics and at work, where he spent summers with his father down at the coffee shop, delivering food. His high school football career was a disappointment due to the limited talent and lackluster efforts of his teammates, and his grades were substandard. By his senior year, it
was clear that he was not headed for college. A recruitment officer who hung around the strip mall near his high school began to talk to him. Gus was the perfect candidate: fit and strong, not particularly book smart, eager to test himself and tie his manhood to training and the battlefield. He watched commercials that made soldiering seem like a cross between a knight’s quest, an Outward Bound adventure, and a video game, and they filled him with emotion. Gus wanted to scale the mountain, pull the sword from the stone, and face the dragon. He enlisted at the age of eighteen.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. When I come back, we’ll grow the business together.”

  “That’s what the sign says,” said Alex, bringing his son roughly into his arms and hugging him tightly. “I’m keeping it for you, boy.”

  Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Gus was killed by a makeshift bomb detonated beneath his Humvee, west of Baghdad.

  Alex held a trophy in his hand and read its plate: Gus Pappas, MVP, 1998. At the Boys Club banquet, Gus had swaggered to the podium to receive the award, stopping to replicate the Heisman pose to the laughter of his teammates.

  “Son,” said Alex softly, replacing the trophy on the dusty shelf. And, as he often did on nights like this one, he thought, Why?

  Eleven

  DOMINIQUE DIXON had called Deon Brown on his disposable, given him the meet and time. It would be on Madison Place, near Kansas Avenue, along Fort Slocum Park.

  Typically, Dixon would drive by the location first, and if he felt that it was hot he would warn Deon off and change the plan. There was rarely a problem and there had been no surprises.

  Dixon had been in the marijuana business for a couple of years. He now supplied about a half-dozen dealers in the northern portion of the 20011 zip of Manor Park. Though he was not hard or a fighter, he did have a talent for reading people. Once he decided to enter into a business arrangement with someone, he treated them fairly. He reasoned that if he did them right, there would be no cause for them to betray him. Up until now, his reasoning had been sound.

  Dixon grew up in a stable home in Takoma, D.C. His father and mother were good providers, attentive, and had mostly made the correct parenting moves. Nevertheless, Dominique had become a supplier. The blame fell not on the parents, but on his older brother, Calvin.

  Calvin was handsome, reckless, a risk taker, thoughtless, charming, and short-tempered. He had a friend named Markos, the son of an Ethiopian father and an Italian mother, a successful Adams Morgan couple who had done well in Shaw and Mount Pleasant real estate. Calvin and Markos had met in the VIP room in a club off New York Avenue and discovered a mutual interest in highpotency marijuana, expensive champagne, mixed-race women, and Ducati bikes. Through a club acquaintance, Markos obtained a meeting with a Newark connect, who liked his sense of style. Neither Markos nor Calvin cared to work for a living, so they tapped Calvin’s smart younger brother to run the business. Dominique idolized his older brother and saw a chance to grow his stature in Calvin’s eyes. Markos’s seed money paid for the initial order. It had been a successful venture from the start.

  Dominique had run into Deon Brown, with whom he had gone to high school, up at a shoe store in the Westfield Mall. He remembered Deon as a quiet, intelligent kid, an underachiever, maybe, but straight, someone he could trust. He recalled, too, that Deon liked to cocktail his antidepressants with heavy amounts of marijuana. Deon fitted Dominique into a pair of Vans and offered them to him at his employee discount. Out in the parking lot, Deon handed him the shoes, and Dominique pressed a very small baggie of marijuana into Deon’s palm.

  “Trust this,” said Dominique.

  “What is it?”

  “Some nice hydro. If you like it, ring me up.”

  “You still stayin with your parents in Takoma?”

  “I got my own spot now. But you need to reach me, just hit me on my cell.” Dominique gave him the number. “Don’t be givin that out to nobody else, hear?”

  That night, Deon and his friend Cody smoked the hydroponic weed and got stupid behind it.

  Deon phoned Dominique the next day. “Hook me up with some more of this, dawg. Me and my boy want an OZ.”

  “I don’t deal with that kinda weight.”

  “I’ll take a quarter, then.”

  Dominique laughed. “You’re not hearin me right.”

  “Oh,” said Deon.

  “Look, man. You want, I can tell you how you can get an ounce for free.”

  “When?”

  “Let’s do a face meet. Bring your boy, too.”

  They got together at a breakfast-and-lunch place high up on Georgia, just north of Alaska Avenue, past the Morris Miller’s liquor store with the partially lit neon sign. The lunch place was in the last days of its operation, having been mortally wounded by the fast-food businesses flourishing around it. The area within earshot of their four-top was full of empty tables.

  As Deon and Cody entered, Dominique, already seated, was initially surprised and a bit put off by Cody’s appearance. That he was white did not bother him particularly, though he did prefer to deal with people his own color, if only for reasons of comfort. Cody, with his black-on-black D.C. dog-tag hat, plain black T, Nautica jeans, and black Air Force highs, looked like any rough-edged city kid his age, until you got a good look at his face. There was a slackness to the acne-dotted jaw and a vacancy in the wide-set eyes that suggested a lack of intelligence beyond the dulling effects of pot. If he was a docile idiot, then fine. If he compensated for his stupidity by being overbearing or violent, then it would present a problem. Dominique decided to sit with them, make his proposal, and see where it went.

  “So,” said Dominique after Deon had introduced him to Cody. “You liked the sample, right?”

  “Shit was tight,” said Cody.

  “That’s average quality for me.”

  “You told Deon we could get some free,” said Cody.

  “I’m gonna get to that,” said Dominique.

  “We listenin,” said Deon.

  Though they were alone, Dominique leaned forward and lowered his voice. “If I was to give you more, do you think you could get rid of it?”

  “How much more?” said Deon.

  “A pound, to start.”

  Deon felt Cody looking at him, but he kept his eyes on Dominique. “Why us?”

  “You and me go back. I need to know the people I deal with.”

  “I ain’t the only person you know from high school.”

  “True. But when I ran into you at the shoe store, I remembered how you and me was always straight. And I started to think, that shopping mall you work in is an untapped market. You and your boy must know a rack of heads out there, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Cody with a careless shrug.

  “I got no one out in that area,” said Dominique. “This here is an opportunity for me but also for you. I mean, what’s the next step you take after salesman at that shop? Assistant manager? I’m not tryin to be funny about it, either. I’m askin you.”

  “That’s right,” said Deon.

  “There it is,” said Dominique.

  “What’s a pound gonna cost us?” said Cody.

  “This shit I got now is fifteen hundred wholesale,” said Dominique. “But I’m gonna front it to you. This time only, because I want to help you get started. The first fifteen comes in, you pay me back. The rest you sell for profit or keep for your personal use. It makes no difference to me.”

  “Sell it for what amount?” said Deon.

  “What the market bears. You get two hundred an ounce for it, you gonna double your money. Time to time, I’m gonna bring in some high-intensity hydro that’s more expensive. Two thousand, twenty-five hundred a pound. When that happens, you got to get three, four hundred an ounce to make your usual thing. ’N other words, you adjust.”

  “What do you pay for it?” said Cody.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m just interested.”

  “That ain’t none of your bus
iness,” said Dominique, smiling in a friendly way.

  Cody looked at the young man in the Ben Sherman shirt with the little roses on it, his slender fingers and thin wrists, his shiny, manicured nails. Cody didn’t like what he saw, but he nodded his head.

  “Look, dawg,” said Dominique. “The way this works, the way this got to be is, keep it simple. I’m gonna deliver what you need whenever you need it, and then it’s on you to move it. But I’m just a middleman. I don’t get involved in what you do, and you don’t need to know the details of what I do. Understand?”

  “Yeah, okay,” said Cody.

  “My advice? Don’t get sloppy. That’s what you got to keep in mind. Far as who you sell to, I’m sayin take care. Some kid who got no loyalty to you gets put in the box for possession, he might offer up your name. And then you gonna be under the hot lights yourselves, and you might say mine.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” said Cody.

  “No doubt,” said Dominique. “We just talking here. But you should know, anyone gives me up, the people I deal with gonna be nervous.”

  “I get you,” said Cody.

  “You remember my brother, don’t you, Deon?”

  “Sure,” said Deon. He didn’t know Calvin Dixon but knew of his rep. “Where he at now?”

  “Oh, he’s out there. Still out there, you know.”

  Deon drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He glanced around the lunch place. He looked at Cody, then back at Dominique.

  “So,” said Dominique, relaxing in his chair. “Y’all ready to make some money?”

  Dominique had contacted Deon and Cody at the right time. They were bored, unsatisfied with their income levels, and saw no way up or out. It would be fun, a game played outside the law, something that would blow up their self-esteem. Neither of them felt that what they were about to do was wrong. Marijuana was a part of their everyday lives, as it was for their peers. Smoking weed didn’t hurt anyone. It wasn’t heroin or cocaine, and they weren’t corner boys. Of them, only Cody aspired to the life he had heard about in rap songs and seen on television, sung and acted by people who for the most part had never experienced that life themselves. Deon, prone to depression and treading water since high school, saw it as a positive move. He liked the idea of extra money in his pocket and free weed to smoke. Beyond that, he looked no further than the day he walked through.