and Silver Spring. Alethea Strange walked toward Georgia Avenue and stood at the bus stop with two other domestics who were waiting for a D.C. Transit bus to take them south over the District line, to the familiar faces, smells, and musical cadences of the voices that told them they were home.
HIS FATHER HAD got his blood up, but that feeling soon passed when Buzz Stewart cruised up the street in his car. He got WDON, Don Dillard’s R amp;R record show that was broadcast out of a bunker on University Boulevard up in Wheaton, on the radio and turned it up. Dillard was spinning the Chantels’ “Maybe,” one of Stewart’s all-time favorite songs, and this made his spirits rise. When it was done, Dillard signed off, as sunset had come, and WDON held only a daylight license. He thumbed the dial up to WINX on 1600, which aired till midnight. Then he pulled a Marlboro from his breast pocket and lit himself a smoke.
Walter Hess’s car, a dropped-down 283 Chevy painted candy apple red, was parked outside the doughnut shop on Pershing. In script on the front right fender it read “Shorty’s Dream.” Stewart cut in behind the Chevy, let his car idle, and honked the horn. Hess was inside the doughnut shop, most likely working the pinball machine they’d rigged for multiple plays. Once they’d pried the glass off the top with Hess’s knife and gotten to that button, it was easy. The owner never knew what was going on.
Walter came out of the shop a few minutes later. He wore an outfit similar to Stewart’s, only in much smaller sizes. Walter’s friends called him Shorty. It was not said with derision but rather with respect. He was tightly muscled and a fighter who would do damn near anything to win. One of his front teeth was chipped and his eyes were comically, some would say pathetically, close set. Some people claimed he didn’t know how to read, and others went further and said he was retarded, but never to his face. Guys were afraid of him and girls prayed he wouldn’t ask them to dance. He was funny looking, but in a scary way.
“Me or you,” said Hess, approaching the open window of the Ford.
“You,” said Stewart, killing the ignition. “We’ll switch up later on.”
Stewart took off his bombers before getting into Hess’s Chevy. It was a ritual practiced by many of the car freaks in their crowd, who took pride in their flawless interiors. Stewart only removed his shoes for Hess. They had been best buds since their grade school days at St. Michael’s, the Catholic elementary in the neighborhood. Both had been labeled as troublemakers early on. No teacher, not even a nun with a hot ruler, could tell them what to do.
No one could tell them anything now.
FIVE
DEREK STRANGE AND Billy Georgelakos neared the Three-Star Diner a little past closing time. Inside the area’s apartments and row houses, men and women were having their first beers and highballs, listening to the radio, arguing, making love, and changing into stylish threads. Freshly washed cars cruised the strip, rhythm and blues coming from their open windows. It was coming up on Saturday night, and the pulse on Kennedy Street and behind its walls had begun to pick up.
The boys entered the diner. Mike Georgelakos sat by the register counting out the day’s folding money and change. Darius Strange ran a cleaning brick over the grill, stripping it of any excess grease. Ella Lockheart, the Three-Star’s counter-and-booth waitress, poured watery A amp;P brand ketchup into bottles marked Heinz. As was her custom this time of day, Ella had found the gospel hour on the house radio. A tune called “Peace in the Valley” was playing.
The diner had been set up in the forties. A Formica-top counter held fourteen armless red-vinyl swivel-top stools. Three four-seat booths, upholstered in red, ran along the plate glass that fronted the store. All food and drink was prepared and served from behind the counter: prep, colds, and hots. At the far right of the diner the counter elbowed off. This area was hidden behind a ceiling-hung plastic curtain. Behind the curtain were a stainless-steel automatic dishwasher and a double-tubbed sink with an industrial-sized tube-and-spray nozzle. Three walls of the diner were white plaster. The fourth wall, the one that ran behind the counter, was covered in white tile.
“Mr. Mike,” said Derek, unable to correctly pronounce the family’s last name.
Darius Strange glanced over at his son without breaking the rhythm of his chore, looked him over, and nodded. Derek Strange lifted his chin in return.
“C’mon, boy,” said Mike, “help me count the money. Derek, the mop’s waitin’ for you in the back.”
Derek found the bucket, strainer, and mop back by the dishwasher. The place had a utility man, addressed only by his nickname, Halftime, but he left early on Saturdays to allow Darius’s son the chance to earn a little money. This suited Halftime fine.
Derek took up the webbed rubber mats behind the counter and rinsed them out in the sink. He carried the mats back through the small storage room, one by one, and laid them out in the alley to dry in the sun. He then waited for Ella Lockheart to fill the salt and pepper shakers, change into her street clothes in the back room, and leave the store. Lockheart, in her early thirties, was light-skinned, rail thin, pretty, quiet, unmarried, and deeply religious. She said to Derek, “Have a blessed day, young man,” before going out the door.
Derek mopped the floor while his father sat on a stool and read the sports page of the
Derek strained water from the mop to the point that it was damp, and put it to work on the floor. He made sure to get the area at the base of the stools, where grease tended to collect.
“Elgin Baylor had thirty-four last night for Minneapolis,” said Darius Strange, raising his voice some so his son could hear him while he worked. “Thirty-four in a
“Sure is.”
“Boy’s got that quick first step.”
“Yep.”
“Came out of Spingarn, too,” said Darius, naming Baylor’s high school alma mater, off Benning Road in Northeast D.C. “The Green Wave graduates some superior athletes.”
Derek smiled to himself as he worked. Partly it was because of the way his dad always liked to make his point with those local-boy-makes-good stories. But mostly he was smiling ’cause he liked the deep sound of his father’s voice.
Darius Strange looked over at his son, bent over, pushing the mop. It was good for the boy to have this chore. After inspecting the finished floor, Mike would give Derek a dollar, which was walking- around money and also a simple work-and-reward lesson. The boy had a twice-a-week paper route, too. Darius wasn’t worried about Derek the way he was worried about his older son, Dennis. Basically, Derek was good.
It was nice that Derek could see him working this steady job here as well. Plenty of boys never did get to see that kind of example. Someday Derek would know that this had all meant something with regard to what he himself would become.
But beyond that, Darius Strange did enjoy, and take pride in, his work. After the war he had taken several jobs involving hard, mindless physical labor, finally landing in the kitchen of the house restaurant of a downtown hotel. He was a dishwasher there, but he closely watched the activities of the line cooks and chefs. One of the cooks, a white steam-table man, was nice enough to school him in the details of the job. It wasn’t long before Darius felt he was due for a promotion. But the manager wouldn’t bring him along, so he left and got his first cooking job as a grill man in a greasy spoon in Far Northeast. The owner was a hard, bitter white who looked upon him as an animal and paid him pennies, but he got what he needed there, and when he had learned his
