The Sweet Forever

  In her room, under the covers with her street clothes still on, Denice felt her heart race. She had just barely beaten her father home. She thought of Alan, and that awful boy he ran with, and that ugly white cop with the small eyes and the pink face.

  Denice was scared, excited, and a little bit ashamed. All of those things at the same time. She couldn’t stop thinking of Alan. Even with all the bad in his world, she couldn’t wait to see him again.

  Tutt pulled over alongside Murphy’s Trans Am on Colorado Avenue. He looked at his partner.

  “Tomorrow we talk to some of those people in the neighborhood, Murph. See what we come up with on Junie’s money.”

  “All right.”

  “Maybe try and hook up with that little—”

  “Little what?”

  Little nigger. Say it.

  “That little fuck, Chief.”

  “Right.”

  Murphy stared through the windshield at some clean young brother and his girl, dressed nice, headed over to Twin’s Lounge to hear a little jazz. Wasn’t that long ago that he and Wanda used to go there, have a nice late evening together, one or two drinks.

  “Murphy, you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Tutt said, “You see that little piece of ass hangin’ on Alan Rogers’s arm? Wouldn’t mind cuttin’ a slice of that myself.”

  Cuttin’ a slice. Tutt was always quoting that Grease Monkey, or whatever his name was, the deejay on DC-101 that all the white boys loved.

  “She ain’t but thirteen, fourteen years old, Tutt.”

  “Yeah, she’s young, but you know what the Greaseman says, don’t ya?”

  Greaseman, that’s what the fool’s name is.

  “No, Tutt, what’s your boy say?”

  “ ‘Old enough to sit at the table, old enough to eat.’ ”

  Tutt was high-cackling as Murphy got out of the Bronco. Murphy didn’t look back or say good-bye. He wanted to forget he knew Richard Tutt. He wanted to scrub down until the skin came off his hands.

  Kevin Murphy drove up to his neighborhood, parked in front of his house, slipped his gun beneath the bucket seat. He walked over to Takoma Station at 4th and Butternut, had a beer and then another while listening to the quartet headed by a tenor sax, with piano, sticks, and upright bass backing the reed man up. He drank his third beer quietly, facing the bar. No one initiated a conversation or bothered him in any way. He knew a couple of the folks in the bar. A couple of others he didn’t know had made him as a cop.

  Murphy bought a six at the corner market. He popped the ring on one as he walked back home. He went to Wanda’s bedroom and put the chocolate Turtles on her nightstand. He turned off her lamp. He stood in the dark for a minute or two and listened to her sleep.

  Murphy went down to the basement, had a seat on the couch, put the rest of the six-pack on the floor beside him. He turned on the late game, Kentucky versus Davidson, and watched the last ten minutes as he drank.

  The game was a rout. Murphy was bored and drunk. He looked around the room. Knotty pine walls, signed Redskins photos, a full-length bar, a beautiful pool table… everything he had wanted when he was first coming up.

  Everything he’d wanted—every thing—and now he had them, and none of these things made him happy. He wondered, What’s left to acquire? What could possibly make me happy now?

  He thought of a dark and quiet place he called the Peace.

  Murphy pulled on the chain of his gold crucifix, let it hang out over his shirt. He fingered the cross and rested his head against the back of the couch. He closed his eyes.

  Eddie Golden lay in his bed, his fists clenched tight. He unballed them and tried to relax. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest, his back arching slightly, coming up off the bed. He knew he’d never get to sleep. God-damnit, he’d be up all night.

  Round about now, like he always did, Eddie wondered why he had done so much blow. What the fuck was so good about this shit, anyway?

  So now he had money. He had brought the pillowcase inside. He had dropped it in the hall closet. You couldn’t spend it, though, could you? He was just an appliance installer, after all, and walking around with a bunch of show money, that would cause suspicion. And you couldn’t just put it in the bank. Someone would get hip to that, too.

  Eddie Golden didn’t want to look at the clock radio on his night-stand. He had been lying in bed for hours now, and looking at the time, it would only get him upset.

  Eddie noticed that, once again, his fists were balled tight. He turned over on his side and closed his eyes.

  Eddie wanted to see Donna, tell her what he had done, how he had reached into that burning car and taken the money.

  What to do with the money, that was Eddie’s question now. He’d hook up with Donna in the morning. Donna would know what to do.

  Dimitri Karras used a hard kitchen match to scrape the last residue of cocaine from his amber vial. The end of your coke: It was flagged by the hasty exit of friends, the pitifully thin line, the empty inhaler, the final canine lick of the snow-seal. But it was never truly the end. If you went through all your containers, you could always find a little more blow.

  Karras managed to create a minimound on the glass paperweight he kept under his bed. He used his blade to chop it further. He spread what he’d made into a short line.

  The tap tap tap of the blade on the glass. His dealer called that sound the mating call of the eighties.

  At the moment, Donna Morgan couldn’t hear the call. She was in the bathroom, moving about, getting herself ready for bed. She had run water from the spigot to cover the sound of her urination. Now he could hear her brushing her teeth. Then the click of the light switch by the door.

  Donna came out of the bathroom wearing only her black panties and bra. Karras felt his stomach jump; it was always like this when a woman first came to him undressed. It gave him those good butterflies, like when he was eight years old, leafing through Playboys against the side of his house, feeling hard in his blue jeans, dizzy and guilty and nearly desperate because he didn’t know what to do next. But now he knew. Sitting there in his briefs, stretching them straight out.

  Donna stumbled, caught herself as she opened her fist and dumped six aspirin on the bed. Her black hair fell sloppily about her face.

  “I’m going to get us a glass of water.”

  “I’ll be here,” Karras said.

  He listened to The Good Earth coming through the Bose 301s wired into his bedroom. He had put it on the platter before they had shut off the living-room lights.

  Donna returned, squinted as she picked up three of the aspirin and washed them down with water. She handed the glass to Karras and he did the same. He placed the water on the nightstand, the ice cubes like muted chimes banging against the sides of the glass.

  He stood before her and kissed her. He unclasped her bra, peeled it off her shoulders. He kissed her breasts and licked them, going slowly to his knees, kissing her warm belly and the inside of her hard thighs as he tugged at her panties and she stepped out of them. The heat and smell of her hit him as he buried his face in her sex. He split her folds with his tongue.

  “Dimitri.”

  “Been waitin’ for you to say my name.”

  Donna came, gripping his shoulders.

  They sat facing each other on the bed. Donna’s thighs rested atop his. Karras dipped one finger in the cocaine, rubbed some on Donna’s clit and along the silk pink of her lips. Donna followed, touching cocaine to the head of his cock, running the remainder down the underside of his shaft and massaging his balls. Karras’s sex felt frozen and hot at once.

  He cupped a hand under her ass, lifted her and brought her forward, slipped himself inside her. Engulfed in her warmth, he let out a long, relieved breath.

  “Bury it,” she said.

  There was nothing better than this.

  They moved slowly. They moved for a long time. The rhythm and squall of the Feelies was just right. Donna threw he
r head back, pushed her pelvis out. Sweat flew off her hair. Karras squeezed her breast. She put her hand over his and made him squeeze it harder.

  “Go,” she said.

  “You go,” said Karras.

  The sounds she made got him closer. It started in his thighs. He bit down on his lip.

  He heard that chiming sound and opened his eyes. He saw Donna’s hand coming back with a fistful of ice as she reached beneath him.

  “What the—”

  “No,” said Donna. “Now you go.”

  She jammed the ice cubes through his asshole and into his rectum. Karras thrashed, the veins defined on his neck. He came convulsively as Donna laughed from far away.

  “Damn,” said Karras minutes later. “What the hell was that?”

  “Something I picked up somewhere.”

  “I thought I was the teacher,” said Karras.

  “You were,” said Donna. “But not anymore.”

  Marcus Clay stood out on R Street, his hands buried in his pockets, watching Dimitri Karras through the living-room window that faced out from the third floor of the Trauma Arms. Karras was doing some weird kind of dance. Clay could hear Irish-sounding music all the way down on the street.

  Fuckin’ Dimitri, man. Thirty-seven years old and up there raising all kinds of hell with that black-haired girl. Probably coked up out of his head, too.

  Clay wanted to go to bed. But he figured there was no way he could sleep in there, not while Karras was on that kind of roll. He got back into his car.

  Clay thought of going to a bar that had a television, watching the late Kentucky-Davidson game, but he had already had a beer tonight, and one was pretty much his limit. He drove uptown.

  He knew where he was going. He went up through Rock Creek Park. He got off near Arkansas Avenue, and then he was on the edge of Mount Pleasant, on Brown, the street where he owned his house. He parked the car a few houses down.

  He walked over to a Chevy owned by a good guy named Pepe, a hardworking Puerto Rican he’d been knowing for the last fifteen years. He leaned against the car, looked up at his own house, to the second-story window on the right, the room where Marcus Jr. had slept since he’d been born.

  Clay could see Elaine’s silhouette in there, Elaine sitting in the rocker, patiently looking at a book—reading a book aloud, Clay knew—as Marcus Jr. jumped up and down on the bed.

  He could see Marcus Jr.’s nappy head rising in the frame of the window and falling out of the frame as he jumped. Marcus had a big head and nicely formed features for a boy. You could already see the muscles defined in his shoulders and arms. Dark skin—he got that coloring from Elaine. And deep brown eyes. He was going to be a big man, Marcus reckoned, and a handsome one, too.

  Elaine, reading that Donald Crews book aloud, one about the kids going back to the country, playing around the train tracks and all that. Reading it while Marcus Jr. jumped around, listening while he jumped because he loved that book, but having too much energy to lie still. By now Clay would have lost his patience, told his little boy to sit his butt down.

  Elaine was better with the boy, there wasn’t any doubt about that. But a boy needed a father around to make him whole.

  It was a lot of little things that had driven Clay and Elaine apart: the fact that they led two separate lives, that they barely made time to talk, that their conversations centered around money when they did talk, that they had become more like housemates than lovers and friends. Stepping around each other, not meeting eyes, always on the way to something else. Details and obstacles, clouding the memory of how it had been when they’d first met. All those little things that weaken a marriage over time. But it was one big thing that had torn them apart.

  That girl Clay had met at the Foxtrappe that night, she’d shown him more attention in the hour she knew him than Elaine had shown him in six months. That’s how he explained it to Elaine, anyway, after one of those he-said/she-said friends of hers had called Elaine and told her she’d seen Clay and this girl leaving the club and going out to his car. The truth was, this young girl, she looked good, and Clay just had to find out, could he still if he wanted to? He’d had four beers, way more than he ever drank, and he supposed his judgment was off, too. Never should have gone out to the Peugeot—that damn car, it always had brought him bad luck—and never should have put fire to that fat joint of Lumbo she rolled while she was smiling and showing him all those perfect teeth. Shouldn’t have kissed her when she leaned into him, either, or slipped his hand in her dress and brushed it across that big red titty of hers, but there it was. He’d denied it to Elaine, of course, which had only made the whole thing worse. He never had been able to look her straight in the eye and tell a lie.

  The hardest part was what he’d learned. Maybe it was self-righteous of him—okay, it was self-righteous—but Clay had always thought that he was better than all that. Turned out, you put something fine as that girl in front of him, he wasn’t any different than most men he knew. The thing that hurt was he had never imagined himself to be that weak.

  Okay, he’d made a lot of mistakes. He’d make an effort to be a better husband if only she’d let him try. As for strange women, never again. One thing that had come out of this: He knew now how deeply he loved Elaine. And God, he loved his son.

  The light went out in the window. Elaine would try to quiet Marcus Jr. down now, get him up in that rocking chair, hold him in her arms. It was tough on her, big as Marcus Jr. was, but this always got him down to sleep.

  If Clay were in there now he’d offer to help. He’d tell his wife, It’s all right, go on downstairs, baby, I’ll do this part tonight. He’d sit there in that rocker, hug his boy tight, make him feel loved. Smell his hair.

  But he wasn’t in there. He was out here, standing on the street.

  Dimitri had always warned him, when he’d seen a certain look in Marcus’s eye, You don’t even want to be thinkin’ about messing with any strange. You don’t want to end up standing outside your own house, like some kind of heartbroke spy, looking with puppy-dog eyes at our own wife and kid, separated by brick and glass you paid for yourself.

  And now that’s exactly where he was. Funny how it was that Dimitri, king of the players, ended up being the one to give him that kind of advice.

  Not like Dimitri would ever change in that way himself; just look how he was carrying on with that girl up in the Arms. As for Clay, he had no business living in that apartment down on R Street. He had love for his friend, but Clay was all the way past that bachelor thing. He didn’t want any part of that world anymore.

  Clay turned and walked back to his car. He hit the ignition, rubbed his hands together against the chill as he looked back up through his boy’s window.

  Clay belonged with his wife and son, behind the walls of that warm house.

  SATURDAY

  MARCH 15, 1986

  ELEVEN

  Dimitri Karras had a seat on the edge of his bed. The furnace heat of the sun came through his bedroom window, causing him to lower his head. Hundreds of other cokers across the city were sleeping off their Friday night grams and wouldn’t get out of bed until noon or one o’clock. But Karras worked retail, and Saturday happened to be the biggest day of the week. He thought of his mother, always giving him advice, urging him to be a professional. He could see her raised eyebrow, the flip of her hand punctuating her words. “Go to law school, Dimi mou, you’ll work gentleman’s hours. No weekends, nothin’ like that.” And then he thought, I haven’t been out to see my mother for some time.

  Karras rubbed his temples. He was suddenly dizzy, and his stomach felt fragile as glass. He burped up some liquid, swallowed it, and fell back on the bed. He passed gas. He wiped flop sweat off his forehead. He forced himself to sit up.

  “Ah, Jesus.”

  Donna Morgan lay behind him, naked under a single sheet. Her lips were chapped from breathing through her mouth. Her breath carried a deep wheeze. Her skin looked grayish in the light.

  Karr
as touched Donna’s shoulder, gave it a gentle shake. “Donna. Donna, honey, wake up.”

  “I just got to sleep,” she mumbled. Donna stirred but did not open her eyes.

  Karras felt as if he had just gotten to sleep himself. He remembered staring out the window, the feeling of self-disgust at the sight of the false dawn. He had slept two, maybe three hours tops.

  “Come on,” he said, “you gotta get up.”

  Karras went to the bathroom, ate three more aspirin, swallowed cold water from the spigot until his head ached. He blew blood from his nose into a tissue. He voided his bowels. He took a long shower, came out, and dressed for work. His clothes smelled of cigarettes.

  Karras pulled Donna to a sitting position on the bed, sat with her for a while until she stood up. He watched her grasp the door frame for support before entering the bathroom. He waited to hear the shower run.

  Karras walked down the hall to the kitchen. Marcus Clay sat on a stool at the counter, reading the sports page.

  Clay looked up from the newspaper. “There’s got to be a morning after.”

  “Maureen McGovern,” said Karras.

  “Good thing you work in a record store. Otherwise all that useful knowledge you got might go to waste.”

  Karras poured coffee into a mug. “Thanks for making the extra java.”

  “Thank you for leaving the lights on last night.”

  “Sorry, man, I forgot.”

  “I drove by, saw you through the window lookin’ like the Lucky Leprechaun, dancing some kind of fool dance, decided not to crash your little party just yet. When I came back, I could hear you all makin’ a hell of a racket back there in the bedroom before I even got through the door.”

  “Just havin’ a little fun.”

  “Sounded fun. What’s she doin’ now, rinsin’ the plaster chips off her forehead?”

  “Funny.”

  Karras took a sip of coffee and screwed up his face.

  Clay said, “Taste like dog shit, huh?”