“Look at that,” said Baker. “They think they can just move in here… They don’t even know where they at or what can happen to’em. Walkin all confident and shit. They think they gonna take over our city.”
“Thought you grew up in Maryland,” said Deon.
“Don’t correct me, boy,” said Baker, his face old and grim in the dashboard light. “I don’t like it when you do.”
“I didn’t mean nothin.”
“I know you didn’t, big man.” Charles Baker forced a smile. “Thanks for the ride. I’ll catch up with you soon, hear?”
Deon Brown watched Baker walk west on Fairmont Street, his collar casually turned up, his hands swinging free. Deon drove east, then swung a left on 11th Street and headed uptown.
Charles Baker went to the middle of the block, a strip of row houses with turrets, and cut up a walkway to the front of a building that held multiple apartments. He stepped into the foyer and pushed one of several brown buttons set beside pieces of paper fitted behind small rectangles of glass.
A voice came tinny from a slotted box. “Yeah.”
“It’s your boy Charles.”
There was a long silence. “So?”
“I was on your street. I just thought, you know, I’d say hello.”
Baker imagined that he heard a sigh. Perhaps it was the hiss of static coming from the speaker. He couldn’t tell.
A buzzer sounded, and Baker opened the unlocked door of glass and wood. He passed through a short, clean hall and up a flight of stairs to a second-floor landing, where he knocked on a door marked with stick-on numbers.
The door opened. A big man with a barrel chest, dressed in blue Dickies work pants and a matching unbuttoned shirt, stood tall in the frame. His white T-shirt hung sloppily over his belly. He held an open can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in one meaty, calloused hand. His eyes were large and a bit bloodshot. His hair was unkempt and unstylish, a medium-length natural.
“What is it?” said the man.
“That how you talk to your old partner?”
“You want somethin. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“I just wanna visit. But I can’t do it out here.”
“I gotta be up for work tomorrow.”
“Shoot, I got a big day, too,” said Baker. “Can I come in?”
The big man with the barrel chest turned his back and walked into the dark apartment, the sound of a television loud in the room. Charles Baker entered and closed the door behind him.
The man sat in his favorite chair, a recliner, and took a swig of beer. It spilled some and rolled down his chin and onto his shirt. The man wiped at the wet spot, near a white oval patch with his name stitched across it in script.
“Ain’t you gonna offer a man a beer?” said Baker.
“Get one,” said the man.
“I knew you were my boy.” Baker stepped toward the refrigerator in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. He had no trouble finding it. He’d been here before.
James Monroe sat in the recliner and stared ahead, the light of the television flickering in his black eyes.
Fourteen
Alex and Vicki Pappas sat in their living room, nursing glasses of wine, red for Alex, white for Vicki. He had told her about their son’s day at work, and of Johnny’s gift for interaction with the customers and help. She said that Johnny’s presence in the store was going to be good for their relationship, that it would help bring them closer together. He had been prepared to argue the point, but in all honesty, he had to agree. He did like having Johnny there. And having him in the shop was going to be good for business, too.
Alex then told her about the man who’d visited him at closing time. She listened carefully and asked some questions but did not seem particularly interested in prolonging the conversation or invested in the subject. The incident had happened years before she’d met Alex. To her, it was an abstract event that had happened to a boy she did not know and had little to do with the man she loved and had been married to for twenty-six years.
“You don’t think this is some sort of scam, do you?”
“It’s him,” said Alex.
“I’m asking you, is this an extortion thing?”
“No. He had a nice way about him. I don’t think it’s anything like that.”
“Will you call him?”
“ Should I?”
“Honey, that’s up to you.” Vicki shrugged and got up out of her chair. “I’m bushed. I’m going to bed.”
She leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. He gripped her hand and held the kiss.
“Good night, Vicki.”
“ Kah-lee neech-tah.”
After he had poured out the rest of his wine, Alex went to the family’s computer station off the kitchen and got on the Web. He first searched the archives of the Washington Post and found several articles related to the incident, from the initial reporting of the crime in metro to the conviction announcement, eighteen months later, in the spring of 1974. He had read most of these articles at the time, had even kept a few of them, suspecting that he would someday want to revisit them, but he had thrown them out a year into his marriage, hoping that with the birth of his first son, that chapter of his life had been closed.
His recollection of that period was as hazy as the incident itself. He had not gone to the funeral of Billy Cachoris. At the time of Billy’s burial, Alex had been hospitalized at Holy Cross, and then there were the two reconstructive surgeries in the fall. His stay at the hospital was one druggy, painful day after another, his only entertainment a high-mounted television set, which strained his good eye, and his clock radio, which his parents brought from home. He listened to Top 40 because he could not get the progressive stations he favored in his room, and the playlist mocked him. “Rocket Man,” “Black and White,” “Precious and Few.” Songs that had been playing that day. Songs that they had joked about only hours, minutes before Billy had been killed. Introducing each song, the disc jockey on PGC would announce, “Nineteen seventy-two, this is the soundtrack to your life!” And Alex would think, What a laugh.
Like many teenage boys who have found serious trouble, he felt that the sun would never shine on his side of the street again. Back at home, he listened to his Blue Oyster Cult album incessantly, returning to the song “Then Came the Last Days of May” over and over again. Three good buddies were laughin and smokin / In the back of a rented Ford. / They couldn’t know they weren’t going far. It seemed to have been written for him and his friends.
Except in the presence of legal authorities, Alex had little further contact with Pete Whitten. Pete’s father had forbidden him to socialize with Alex, and their few phone conversations were awkward and filled with blocks of silence. Pete would be off to an out-of-state university the following summer, unaltered by the event, as neither he nor Alex had been charged with crimes. Alex understood that their friendship was done.
For Alex, the strangest aspect of the aftermath was returning to school. He felt that his face was ugly and frightening, though of course his perception of it was far worse than the reality. His eye drooped severely at the corner, and the scar tissue around it was waxy. It would never go unnoticed, but it was far from horrific; in a way, he just looked permanently sad. He broke up with Karen, assuming she would no longer be attracted to him. One day, in the E wing hall, a kid named Bobby Cohen innocently said, “Hey, man, I heard you got jumped by some black dudes,” and Alex grabbed him by the shirt and threw him up against the lockers. The boy had said nothing wrong, but Alex had been looking for an excuse to explode.
He grew more sullen every day. He was not a tough kid, but he acquired a reputation as a badass simply because he had been involved in a racial incident in which one of his friends was shot and killed. The black kids at
