After death, p.6
After Death, page 6
“Get the fuck out, Aleem.”
He rises from the chair and stretches extravagantly, arms extended as if he’s nailed to a cross, rolling his head to loosen his neck muscles. After a yawn, he says, “What you just done there is you undermined your status as a victim. Every word you say, you got to think to yourself how sayin’ it might be like pissin’ on your precious status as a victim. A pretty girl talks dirty, a man might think she comin’ on to him, so what he does don’t count as crime.”
“I’m calling the police.”
His voice is laced with mockery. “Why would you do that ’stead of you just break up with me? We got somethin’ beautiful, how you know my needs and I know yours, how we satisfy each other, our old flame burnin’ bright again. But, hey, if you go hormonal on me, you say hit the road, I got so much respect for you, baby, I’ll leave, no argument. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
The house is warm, but Nina is cold in flesh and bone. Cold but steady. She won’t give him the pleasure of seeing her tremble. “Your crazy talk doesn’t scare me.”
He feigns puzzlement. “Crazy? Nothin’ crazy about love, baby. It makes the world go round.”
When he steps past the footstool, she does not back away. Any sign of weakness will encourage him.
As he retrieves something from a pocket of his jacket—an Our Legacy jacket that costs God knows what—he says, “And nothin’ proves our love more than this.”
A key. It’s how he got in here.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Where I get it? You don’t remember?”
“Don’t say I gave it to you.”
“You know me, sugar. I only say what’s true.”
“Don’t say it’s from me.”
“You want it back?”
“I want it. There’s no ‘back’ involved.”
“You want the other one, too?”
She says nothing.
“Remember? You give me a second, case maybe I lost this one.”
“You can’t have him.”
“Him? A key don’t have no him or her about it.”
“Damn you.”
“And here I thought you was a church lady.”
“Put both keys on the table there.”
“You want the third? The fourth?” He takes a step toward her, then another. They are five feet apart. He returns the key to his jacket pocket. “Got me a homeboy used to work for a locksmith. You want, he can come change out the locks, make you feel safe.”
John steps out of the hallway, into the living room. He has retrieved the pistol from his mother’s bedroom. He holds it in both hands, aimed at the floor.
Aleem says, “You gonna pop a cap, boy?”
John looks to his mother.
She tells him to put the gun down, but he doesn’t.
“You know what it means—pop a cap?” Aleem asks.
John says, “No.”
“It means shoot someone. You gonna shoot someone, boy?”
“Leave him out of this, Aleem.”
“Can’t leave him out of a thing that’s all about him.”
She says, “John, go to your room.”
Favoring her with a cobra smile, Aleem adopts a sweet tone at odds with his words. “Sugar, much as I love you, sometimes you’re a dumb cunt. This’ll go down nicer iffen you keep your mouth shut when I’m talkin’ to my son. Can you do that, sweet thing?”
She has sheltered John, kept him from all influences of the street. He’s a good kid, but short on hard experience. He’s not imprudent, certainly not rash, but there’s no telling what he might do if Aleem strikes her. He might interpret a slap to the face as prelude to homicidal violence. Even if he only wounds Aleem, what happens to him then? Not juvenile detention. But something. He’ll be taken by child-welfare authorities for psychological evaluation, be separated from her for days, maybe longer, maybe a lot longer. Bad things sometimes happen to kids when they’re in the custody of the state. She feels as if she’s on a wire, above an abyss.
To John, Aleem says, “They teach you nothin’ but ignorant shit at that Saint Anthony School?”
The boy stares at the gun in his hands.
“You pull a piece on a guy, be ready to use it, ’cause he’s gonna pull his on you, ’less he’s your father.”
From the moment that Aleem first spoke to her, Nina has not heard the rain beating on the roof. For her, the house has been submerged in the stillness of some horrific potentiality. Suddenly she once more apprehends the drumming cataracts, a sound that fills her with dread, as if a grievous and unstoppable fate is rumbling toward them on tracks from which it can’t be derailed.
Aleem says, “Do them priests teach you it’s righteous to pop your own father, a good way you get to Heaven, see Jesus?”
John is fixated on the gun that he holds.
“Only future matters, boy, is here in this one world. You seen your future, Johnny?” Aleem waits, and John doesn’t respond, and Aleem says, “What kind of altar boy don’t got the courtesy to answer his own daddy? Tell me now—you seen your future?”
“No.”
“Well, I seen it clear. You drink Jesus poison at school, get womanized here in this shithole house, then the rest of your life, you be jammed and jacked up by every guy with balls, till you can’t take it no more, till you go on the pipe, maybe one you’re freebasin’ coke with, maybe one comes at the business end of a fuckin’ twelve-gauge, suckin’ buckshot to get outta your nowhere life. You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You believe me?”
After a hesitation, John says, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“You better think about it. Think real hard. Better get down for yours like I got down for mine. I’m holdin’ down this whole county, boy, holdin’ it down tight. I got the power to smooth you into the set, get you up on it, make you a Vig. By the time you’re sixteen, you be rollin’ high, makin’ bank big-time.”
John raises his head and looks at his mother. He’s embarrassed for himself, for her.
“Look at me, boy.”
John looks at him.
“Don’t be no pussy. Don’t be no trick. Tell me you won’t.”
“All right.”
“Tell me. Say it. Come on, boy, let me hear it.”
“I won’t be a pussy.”
“Say it all.”
“I won’t be a trick.”
“You know what a trick is?”
“I guess so.”
“A trick is a phony and a sissy.”
John chews on his lower lip.
“No son of mine gonna sit down to piss or get on his knees for anyone.”
“Enough,” Nina says.
The face Aleem turns on her isn’t his, but instead the face of something that lies curled eternally at the bottom of the pit of the world, waiting for its hour to devour. Such fury, such malevolence, such thirst for power, such an appetite for violence have never before so keenly whetted his stare and clarified in his features. “You want to keep your teeth, then shut your damn mouth.” He means it. He will badly hurt her.
John issues a thin sound of pure torment. Although the pistol is still pointed at the floor, it swings back and forth like the pendulum in a grandfather clock, as if counting seconds toward a moment never to be forgotten or redeemed.
To the boy, Aleem says, “You my own blood. I can’t but love my own blood. You know how much I love you?”
John continues to make that grievous noise.
“I love you so much, I won’t never let no Christer or no Oprah wannabe take the starch outta you, turn you into a pussy lawn boy or head-duckin’ wage slave. I’ll kill you ’fore I see you brought down from a full man to some pathetic crawlin’ thing that shames me ’fore the world. Thirteen is old enough to make your name, be where it’s at, makin’ the rules ’stead of livin’ by the man’s rules, do a bitch whenever you want one. I’m gettin’ a sweet place ready for you. I’m settin’ it up nice and tight. So you better get yourself ready.”
John says nothing.
“You get yourself ready, boy. You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You hear me?”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
“What is?”
“Getting out of this place.”
“It’s a shithole, ain’t it?”
“Boring,” says John. “Nothing exciting ever happens here.”
“And nothin’ never will,” Aleem assures him. “Not here.”
“I heard about you.”
“That’s all bullshit.”
“I don’t mean what she said. What I mean is, I heard about you on the street. You are somebody.”
“More than just somebody, son. You’ll see. Time comes, you’ll be somebody. You won’t be John Dozier no more. John Sutter. If you want, we’ll spin up a new first name, somethin’ true street, a name everyone’ll know and someday bow to.”
John turns a defiant look on his mother. She’s afraid that he’s going to overplay it. She prays that he won’t say anything further, not another word. Sensing deception, his father could decide to take him now.
Triumphant, Aleem turns to Nina, regarding her with the icy contempt he has for all women. “You known this day was comin’. He was only ever yours till he was old enough to be mine.”
Her response is little more than a fierce whisper. “I hate you.”
“That’s good. Hate gives you somethin’ to hold on to, keeps you from fallin’ apart. Never was true love makes the world go round. Hate makes the world go round. Just remember which of us, you or me, is the better hater. Now I know the boy’s mind, I’ll pave his way into the set, get my crew used to the idea, be ready for him in a few days. Don’t even think you can take him and run. There’s nowhere I can’t find you. No law’s gonna help you. It’s the law lets me be what I am. There’s no real law no more. And after you been found, what’ll you do with your life? Won’t be no one wants to hire themselves a blind accountant.”
“He wouldn’t go with me, anyway,” she lies. “There’s too much of you in him. I’ve spent thirteen years trying to counsel it out of him, but it’s in his blood.”
Aleem leaves as he came, by the front door. He uses his key and then rattles the doorknob to be sure the deadbolt is engaged, making the point that he has locked them up in every sense of the word.
CONVENIENT RUINS
Alone in an agency sedan, Durand Calaphas maneuvers through flooded intersections, around tree branches broken off as if by the hand of some enraged giant and cast down on the pavement, contesting with incompetent motorists who are unaccustomed to driving in heavy wind-harried rain or who are compromised by whatever drugs have clouded their minds. He passes through suburbs with romantic names that once fired the American imagination with images of lush palm trees and sunshine and girls like those tanned beauties in the songs sung by the Beach Boys. All changed. Even the heaviest rains can’t wash away the shabbiness. Past boarded-up shops. Past a metastasized encampment of addicts who have cast themselves out of civilization and onto its crumbling ramparts.
Four miles short of his destination, he slows almost to a stop, intrigued by a long-haired and bearded derelict costumed in clothes as ragged and filthy as the tattered ravelings of an ancient mummy’s cerements. The man lies on his back, on the sidewalk, unaware of the storm or embracing it as his preferred way to bathe—or dead.
It is the last of these possibilities that induces Calaphas to pull to a stop at the curb for a closer look. These days, people who once died discreetly are found in parks and other public places, having succumbed to overdoses or violence. His father, Ivor, is a mortician who owns three successful funeral homes, above the largest of which the old man still lives with Durand’s mother. During his childhood and adolescence, Durand had much experience of cadavers, whom Ivor referred to as “our quiet and respected guests.” Durand has been fascinated—if not obsessed—with the dead since he was at least seven years old, when at a quarter to midnight on Halloween, alone with a corpse in the cold-holding chamber adjacent to the embalming room in the basement of the funeral home, an eighty-five-year-old man, felled earlier that evening by a stroke, spoke to him.
The vagrant on the sidewalk abruptly sits up and surveys the rain-swept day with bewilderment, as if his most recent memory is of going to bed in a suite at a four-star hotel. Calaphas at once loses interest in the man and pulls away into traffic.
The late—and apparently resurrected—Michael Mace lives in a town less corrupted than others in the orbit of the city. It’s one of those places referred to as a “bedroom community,” a term meant to define it as a bland, soulless snoozerville by those who think all action, spirit, and wisdom concentrates only in big cities. In fact, it is attractive, reasonably well preserved, with tree-lined streets, and it seems to be governed by those with the courage to defend their way of life against those who insist on change for the sake of change.
The sedan’s navigation system brings Calaphas to an address in mid block, where it looks as if a cognizant tornado with specific intentions touched down to catastrophic effect. However handsome Mace’s residence might have been, it’s now a waste mound of rubbled masonry and collapsed blackened structure, the contents reduced to wrack and ashes.
Calaphas gets out of the car, locks it, pulls up the hood of his raincoat, and follows the front walkway, shattered window glass crunching underfoot. The fire must have been intense. Everything burnable has been reduced to dross that the rain compounded into a carbonaceous mud. Metal pipes had half melted into bearded serpents and other fantastical forms.
In spite of the ferocity of the blaze, the neighboring homes stand untouched. Although the lots are wide in this suburb, the failure of the fire to have any smallest effect beyond the property lines is curious.
Treading cautiously, Calaphas circles the ruins, studying the scene from multiple angles. Outdoor furniture is tumbled across the back flagstone patio—six chairs, two sun loungers, small tables—the metal frames intact, the scattered cushions badly scorched and soot stained. The swimming pool is a swamp. After he has come 360 degrees to the front walkway, he is convinced that, even with a skilled team of forensic excavators, he won’t find what he most wanted when he came here, which is a photograph of Michael Mace.
LEANING TOGETHER, HEADPIECES FILLED WITH STRAW
Because maybe Nina knows he drives a black Cadillac Escalade, Aleem is traveling in a white Lexus SUV driven by his homey, Kuba Franklin. Earlier, Kuba parked two blocks from Nina’s shitcan house, and Aleem walked to her place.
Now that Aleem is back in the Lexus, riding shotgun, Kuba takes them into Nina’s block and parks across the street, at a distance but within sight of the house, so they have a clear line on whatever might go down. He lets the engine run to keep the heater on, but he switches off the windshield wipers, so as not to be too obvious.
“You drippin’ all over my upholstery,” Kuba says.
“Fuckin’ weather app said won’t be no rain till four o’clock. I ruin this jacket, I oughta sue their ass.”
“What makes me wanna jack up somebody is my health app.”
“You got a health app?”
“Too much data, man. Too much naggin’. Says eat this, next thing says iffen you eat it, you get cancer.”
“You got a health app?”
“Sends me an alert, says it can track my menstrual cycle, predict when’s my next period. They think I’m goin’ trans or what?”
“You confuse ’em, spellin’ Cuba with a K, like a girl might. What’s the point, gangbangers like us havin’ a health app?”
“Come sixty-five, I want my brain and balls workin’ good.”
“Sixty-five?”
“I wanna enjoy retirement.”
“How old are you, homey? Twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Only way you get as far as fifty is Jesus pullin’ a miracle for you.”
“I believe in positive thinkin’.”
“You do, huh?”
“I do.”
“So a carload of Crips or Bloods, gunned up for a ride, pulls up next to us, outta nowhere.”
“This is too deep into Vig ground.”
“Nowhere’s too deep. They got themselves a full-auto breakdown loaded with slugs in a big-dick magazine.”
“You gotta worst case it to make your point.”
“They hose us through your window. How does positive thinkin’ make a difference?”
“It’s better than negative thinkin’.”
“It is, huh?”
“Damn right.”
“How’s it better?”
“You worry about a thing, you’re callin’ it to you.”
“That your philosophy?”
“A piece of it, yeah.”
“So now I’m gonna worry about a good-lookin’ bitch knockin’ on this window to give me the sweetest piece of head I ever got. Hope this don’t take too long ’fore it happens.”
Kuba laughs.
Aleem says, “You see the error of your philosophy.”
“No way. I’m laughin’ in spite of myself. It don’t mean you’re Socrates.”
“Don’t matter how long you live, homey. Matters that you get what you want when you want it. Matters that you jack them up ’stead of they jack you up. Matters that no one never wants to die enough to disrespect you.”
They sit for a moment without speaking, cocooned in the roar of the downpour, which to Aleem is the sound and the promise of power, matching the quieter but persistent roar within him, the power within him to enforce his will with violence and be known as a war god of the streets.
Kuba says, “What Miss Nina do when you told her how it’s gonna be?”
“What’s she gonna do ’sides what she did? She hangs her head, says ‘yes, sir.’ She knows better than back talkin’ me.”
“But you don’t trust her.”
“Ever known a piece of tail you could trust?”
“Not even my mother.”
“There you go.”
“How long we in this?”
“If I spooked her bad, she’ll split after dark. If not, she’ll hang here a day, maybe two, get her business done.”
