“You’re doin all right, too, man.”
“Right.” Chris walked toward the white van. “Come by, hear?”
Ali said, “I will.”
Lawrence Newhouse walked up the road in his long T-shirt, along the Barry Farms dwellings, this particular block a two-story strip of tan motel-style structures with chocolate doorways and arches. Time was, in his youth, he and his boys at Parkchester would have been beefing with those at the Farms, and he supposed the young ones still did the same, but that was past for him. People looked at him as he went along, eyeing him but not hard, like he wasn’t worth the time it took to fix a stare. At twenty-six, Lawrence was old. He had not taken care of himself, what with his poor diet, drinking, all manner of smoke, and powder when he could get it. He looked close to forty.
He had a plastic bottle of fruit punch in his hand. He had bought it at the local Korean place, having woken up, still in his club clothes atop the sheets of his bed, with a vicious thirst. He’d spent a bunch of money the night before in that strip club he liked on New York Avenue. He’d spent it on hard liquor and dancers, the usual shove- the-bills-in-the-string thing, and on a gram of coke he’d copped in the bathroom from a young man he’d met at the bar. The freeze had made him shit soon as he’d taken his first bite of it off the end of a key. That’s what he got for buying coke from someone he didn’t know. Wasn’t much more than laxative, but it kept him awake. And it got one of the dancers interested enough to come outside with him and swallow his manhood in the backseat of her man’s car. Which had cost him another hundred. He didn’t remember driving his Cavalier back to Southeast, but it was parked in his spot, so he supposed that this is what he had done.
Money went quick.
Lawrence walked across a small dusty playground with monkey bars and the rusted, spidery frame of a swing set. At the edge of the playground a steel pole with no backboard was set in concrete. Around the pole was a tribute to a boy named Beanie, a loose arrangement of teddy bears, ribbons and banners, empty Hennessey bottles, and photographs, a commemoration of Beanie’s short, fast life and death by gun.
Then Lawrence was on Wade and heading toward the Parkchester Apartments, stepping around boys he recognized but did not speak to who were grouped at one of the entranceways, and going into a stairwell holding the usual stagnant smells of things that were fried, eaten, or smoked.
He went into his place.
It wasn’t his place, exactly. It was Dorita’s, his half-sister. Dorita was on government assistance, had three children by two different men, and let him stay here. When she was short on food or needed Nikes for the kids, he gave her cash, if he had it. He had it now, but Dorita didn’t know.
Her two younger kids, Terrence and Loquatia, were on the carpet, watching a show on a widescreen plasma television Dorita had bought on time. Loquatia, eleven and already running to fat like her mother, had her hand in a bowl of Skittles, running her fingers through the colored bits. Long as Loquatia was touching food, she was cool. Her little brother was staring at the cartoon lobster on the screen but daydreaming, thinking on something called a galaxy, which he had learned about in school. He had an active imagination, and his teacher suspected he was highly intelligent. The teacher had phoned Dorita to tell her about an accelerated program available at his elementary, but Dorita had yet to call her back.
Dorita sat on the living-room sofa, her feet up on it, cell phone in hand. There was no man currently in her life. She was thirty-two, and her stretch-marked belly spilled out from beneath her tight shirt. At two fifty, she had eighty pounds on Lawrence. They had the same mother but looked nothing alike.
“Where you been at?” said Dorita.
“I went down to the Chang’s,” said Lawrence.
“And you ain’t get me nothin?”
“Wasn’t like I went to the grocery store.” Lawrence head-shook his braids away from his face. “Where’s Marquis at?”
“Mr. Carter came past and picked him up. Before you woke up. Marquis said they were going to play basketball.”
“Okay,” said Lawrence, annoyed but not fully understanding why. He appreciated that Ali was trying to help the boy, and he also resented it.
“You snored last night,” said Terrence, and Dorita laughed.
“So?” said Lawrence. “You farted.”
Terrence and Loquatia laughed.
“If you goin to the Chang’s, you need to tell me,” said Dorita. “We could use some soda in this house.”
“I ain’t no shopping service.”
“You could contribute,” said Dorita. ’Stead of just taking all the time.”
“Least my mother didn’t name me after a corn chip,” said Lawrence, saying the same tired thing he had been saying to his sister since they were kids.
Dorita did not respond, and Lawrence went to his room.
It wasn’t his room, exactly. He shared it with the two younger kids. He had strung up a sheet between their beds and his single bed to give him some privacy. Didn’t leave much space, but this was what he had. Free rent, you couldn’t complain. Anyway, he was about to be out of here.
About to be.
He pulled aside the sheet, flopped down on his bed, and draped his forearm over his eyes. Underneath the bed, the bag of money. He felt he had to keep it close. But what was he going to do with it? That was the thing that was fucking with his head.
He knew he should be looking for a nice place of his own. Maybe go to one of the Eastern Motors and trade up off that hooptie he had. But then he’d be in an apartment by himself, no one to talk to, no one to Jone on, and driving a car that was newer, that’s all. He’d already spent a couple of thousand on women and fun. Beyond that, wasn’t anything that he could see to buy that would make him happy.
What he wanted, what he’d always craved, was to have friends and pride. He’d thought that money would help him get those things. But to get it, he’d tricked the one dude who’d been his friend, the only boy who’d stepped in and stood tall for him back when he was getting his ass beat regular at Pine Ridge. And now he, Lawrence, had gone and done him dirt.
Sometimes, no lie, he hated the sight of his own self in the mirror.
Lawrence rolled over onto his side. In the heat of the room, sweat dampening his long T-shirt, he went to sleep.
Ali Carter lived with his mother, Juanita Carter, in a vinyl-sided duplex town home on Alabama Avenue in Garfield Heights, across the road from the offices of Men Movin on Up. The development was on the new side, the yards were still clean, and the several hundred homes that had been constructed here had replaced some problem- ridden projects that had been good for no one. Houses here were still being sold for about three hundred thousand dollars, with low-interest loans and no-money-down offers in effect. A chain grocery store, the Seventh District Police Station, and Fort Stanton Park were within walking distance. Communities such as this one, housing longtime residents and newcomers alike, had been appearing in several spots in Southeast. Only those who were unreasonably resistant to change could say that this was not a positive development. For Ali, it was a huge step up, and a world away from where he’d been raised.
Juanita Carter had not been a bad mother to Ali and his sisters in any way; she had merely been born poor. Her start at the back of the line had crippled her, and by the time she had made a family, her lack of higher education and unfortunate choices in men had put her at a severe disadvantage. She and her kids lived in the Barry Farms dwellings, and she had no choice but to raise them in that rough-and-tumble and occasionally toxic atmosphere. After earning her GED, she started taking health care classes while working on the cleaning crew at the old D.C. General Hospital. But while she was bettering herself in order to move her family out of the Farms, Ali was entering his teens, a dangerous time for a boy to have little supervision at home. Juanita blamed herself to this day for the trouble Ali and one of his sisters, who eventually was lost to the streets, had found. But Ali knew it wasn’t her. It was him, and the fact that some young men just had to touch their hand to the flame to see for themselves that fire was hot.
“Where you off to?” said Juanita, as her son entered the kitchen in his pressed jeans and a sky blue Lacoste shirt, picking a pair of sunglasses out of a bowl on the counter that held his things.
“Chris Flynn’s father is having a cookout,” said Ali. “For his employees.”
