Soul Circus

Course you do, thought Strange. You’re not much more than a kid yourself.

AT the Metro station Strange idled the Caprice while Quinn passed out flyers to Anacostians rushing to catch their Green Line trains. The flyers were headed with the words “Missing and Endangered” and showed a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl that Sue Tracy, Quinn’s girlfriend, had been hired to find. Tracy and her partner, Karen Bagley, had a Maryland-based business that primarily took runaway and missing-teen cases. Bagley and Tracy Investigative Services also received grant money for helping prostitutes endangered by their pimps and violent johns. Quinn had first met Tracy when he agreed to take on a case of hers that had moved into D.C.

Strange watched a cocky and squared-up Quinn through the windshield, the only white face in a sea of black ones. Quinn was drawing fish eyes from some of the young men and a few double takes from the older members of the crowd. Strange knew that Quinn was unfazed by the attention. In fact, he liked the challenge of it, up to a point. He was, after all, a former patrol cop. As long as he was given the space he gave others, everything would be cool.

But it often didn’t happen that way. And when Quinn was shown disrespect, the kind that went down with a subtle eye sweep from a black to a white, it got under his skin, and baffled him a little bit, too.

Something was said by a couple of young males to Quinn as he began to walk back to the car. Quinn stopped and got up in the taller of the two’s face. Strange watched Quinn’s jaw tense, the set of his eyes, the vein wormed on his forehead, the way he seemed to grow taller as the blood crept into his face. Strange didn’t even think to get out of his car. It was over without incident, as he knew it would be. Soon Quinn was dropping onto the bench beside him.

“You all right?”

“Guy told me to give him a dollar after he called me a white boy. Like that was gonna convince me to pull out my wallet. God, I love this town.”

“It was the boy part got your back up, huh?”

“That was most of it, I guess.”

“Think how it felt for grown men to be called boy every day for, I don’t know, a couple hundred years before you were born.”

“Yeah, okay. So now it’s my turn to get fucked with. We all gotta have ourselves a turn. For some shit that happened, like you say, before I was even born.”

“You don’t even want to go there, Terry. Trust me.”

“Right.” Quinn breathed out slowly. “Look, thanks for stopping here. I told Sue I’d pass some of those out.”

“Who’s she looking for, anyway?”

“Girl named Linda Welles. Fourteen years old, ninety-nine pounds. She ran off from her home in Burrville last year, over near Woodson High, in Far Northeast? Couple of months later, her older brother recognizes her when he’s with his boys, watching one of those videos they pass around.”

“She was the star, huh?”

“Yeah. It was supposed to be a house party, freak-dancing and all that, but then a couple of guys start going at it with her back in one of the bedrooms, right on the tape. Not that she wasn’t complicit, from the looks of it.”

“Fourteen years old, complicit got nothin’ to do with it.”

“Exactly. The brother recognized the exterior shot of the street where they had the party. It was on Naylor Road, up around the late twenties, here in Anacostia. That was a while back. The girl’s just vanished, man – nothing since.”

“So, what, you gonna go deep undercover down here to find her?”

“Just passing out flyers.”

“ ’Cause you’re gonna have a little trouble blending in.”

“But I feel the love,” said Quinn. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

They drove back to W Street, passing the Fredrick Douglass Home, then cut up 16th toward Minnesota Avenue, where they could catch Benning Road to the other side of the river and back into the center of town. They passed solid old homes and rambling bungalows sitting among tall trees on straight, clean streets, sharing space with apartments and housing complexes, some maintained but many deteriorating, all surrounded by black wrought-iron fences. Many of the apartment buildings, three-story brick affairs with the aesthetic appeal of bunkers, showed plywood in their windows. Hard young men, the malignant result of years of festering, unchecked poverty and fatherless homes, sat on their front steps. Strange had always admired the deep green of Anacostia and the views of the city from its hilly landscapes. It was the most beautiful section of town and also the ugliest, often at the same time.

“You can’t find one white face down here anymore,” said Quinn, looking at a man driving a FedEx truck as it passed.

“There’s one,” said Strange, pointing to the sidewalk fronting one of the many liquor stores serving the neighborhood. A cockeyed woman with a head of uncombed blond hair and stretch pants pulled up to her sagging bustline stood there drinking from a brown paper bag. “Looks like they forgot to do their head count this morning up at St. E’s.”

Strange was hoping to bring some humor to the subject. But he knew Terry would not give it up now that he’d been stepped to.

“Bet you there’s some down here, they’d tell you that’s one too many white people on these streets,” said Quinn.

“Here we go.”

“You remember that loud-mouth guy they had in this ward, ran for the city council, Shazam or whatever his name was? The guy who wanted everyone to boycott the Korean grocery stores?”

“Sure, I remember.”

“And?”

“And, nothin’,” said Strange.

“So you agreed with that guy.”

“Look. People down here got a right to be angry about a lot of things. They talk it out among themselves, in the barbershop and at the dinner table, and when they do they talk it out for real, the pros and the cons. But one thing they don’t do is, they don’t go shittin’ on that guy you’re talking about, or our former mayor, or Farrakhan, or Sharpton, or anyone else like that to people like you.”

“People like me, huh?”

“Yeah. Black folks don’t put down their own so they can feed white people what they want to hear.”

“This guy ran his whole election on fear and hate, Derek.”

“But he didn’t win the election, did he?”

“Your point is what?”

“In the end, in their own quiet way, the majority of the people always prove that they know the difference between right and wrong. What I’m saying is, there’s more good people out here than there are bad. Once you get hip to that, that anger you’re carrying around with you, it’s gonna go away.”

“You think I’m angry?”

“Look at the world more positive, man.” Strange reached for the tape deck, looking for some music and some peace. “Trust me, man, it’ll help you get through your day.”

Chapter 5

“I SEE you’re a ’Skins fan,” said Mario Durham, nodding at the plaster figure with the spring-mounted head on Strange’s desk.