“I’ll be damned,” Jackie said.
CHAPTER 29
It was nearly noon when Erin and I pulled into a fast-food hamburger place on Lister Way. Three kids were sitting in a gray and black Aerostar van with the doors open and the tape deck blaring. The parking lot was crowded and the restaurant was full of people getting out of the rain. Nobody was over twenty.
“This time let’s try you stay in the car,” Erin said.
“Okay.”
I sat while she got out and went to the van. Again she put out her hand, again the gentle slap.
Then she got in the backseat of the van and I couldn’t see her. The two kids in front turned to talk with her. The rain made the bright colors of the pseudocolonial restaurant shiny and clean looking. There was a litter of hamburger cartons and paper wrappers and cardboard cups among the cars, and the trash barrel near the front door of the place was overfilled. With Erin out of sight I was the only white face in a sea of black ones. If I weren’t so self-assured it would have made me a little uncomfortable. If I had been uncomfortable no one would have noticed. No one paid any attention to me at all.
I shut the motor off. The rain collected on the windshield and made the colors of the restaurant streak into a kind of impressionist blur. Here’s looking at you, Claude Monet. The restaurant and its parking lot stood alone, the only principle of order in a panorama of urban blight. There were vacant lots on both sides of the place. Each one littered with the detritus of buildings long since dismantled. Across the street was a salvage yard with spiraling coils of razor wire atop a chain-link fence. Even prettified by the rain this was not the garden at Giverny.
Erin got back in the car. “Want a cheeseburger?” she said.
“Too far from medical help,” I said.
Erin smiled and closed the car door.
“These kids know Devona Jefferson,” she said.
“And?”
“She had a boyfriend named Tallboy.”
“In a gang?”
“They’re all in gangs,” Erin said. “It’s how they survive.”
“Know which gang?”
“Yes,” Erin said. “Tallboy’s a member of the Dillard Street Posse.”
“Progress,” I said.
“More than that,” Erin said. “I know him.”
CHAPTER 30
Tallboy wasn’t anywhere we looked for the rest of the day. Erin and I stopped in my office for drink.
“Some of them are only seven or eight years old,” Erin said.
She had half a glass of Irish whiskey which she held in both hands.
“Some of the older gang kids will recruit the wannabes to carry the weapon, or the drugs, even sometimes do the shooting-they’re juveniles. If they’re caught, the penalty is lighter. And the little ones are thrilled. Peer acceptance, peer approval.” She smiled a little and sipped her whiskey. “Upward mobility,” she said.
I nodded. Outside the window the rain was still with us, straight down in the windless darkness, making the pleasant hush hush sound it makes.
“The thing is,” I said, “is that that’s true. The gangs are upward mobility.”
“Oh, certainly,” Erin said. It was obviously so ordinary a part of what she knew that she hadn’t thought that anyone might not know it. “These kids are capitalists. They watch television and they believe it. They have the values they’ve seen on the tube. They think that the Cosby family is reality, and it is so remote from their reality that they find their own life unbearable. The inequity enrages them. It is not arrogance that causes so many explosions of violence, it’s the opposite.”
“Would the term `low self-esteem‘ be useful?” I said.
“Accurate,” Erin said. “But not very useful. None of the things people say on talk shows are very useful. What they see on television is a life entirely different than theirs, and as far as they can see, what makes the difference is money. The way for them to get money is to sell drugs or to steal from people who sell drugs-there isn’t anybody else in their world that has money to stealand since either enterprise is dangerous, the gang offers protection, identity, even a kind of nurturance.”
“Everybody needs some,” I said.
The whiskey was nearly vaporous when I sipped it, less liquid than a kind of warm miasma in the mouth. It was warm in my office, and dry, and in the quiet light the two of us were comfortable.
“Where do you get yours?” I said. “Nurturance?”
She sipped her whiskey again, bending toward the glass a little as she drank. Then she raised her head and smiled at me. “From the kids, I suppose. I guess the gangs provide me meaning and belonging and emotional sustenance.”
“Whatever works,” I said.
We were quiet briefly while the rain fell and the whiskey worked. There was no uneasiness in the silence. Either of us would talk when we had something to say. Neither of us felt the need to talk when we didn’t.
