Clockers (10 page)

There was a soft rap at the door and Rodney lunged to his feet. The apron, untied at the waist, flapped in front of him like a five-foot bib.

Rodney opened the door for Erroll Barnes, who floated into the living room as if he didn’t own footsteps. His furrowed face seemed as big as a balloon, and Strike sat frozen, never having been so close or even indoors with him before. Erroll looked at Strike for only a second, then glanced to Rodney for verification that everything was OK. Rodney shrugged and Erroll took a quart-size Ziploc bag filled with coke out of his jacket, laid it on the coffee table, glanced at Strike one more time and left the house, Rodney saying a soft “Awright” at the door.

Strike felt as if Erroll was still in the room. He was amazed at how frail the man seemed—more shadow than flesh. And then Strike realized what he’d seen when Erroll was actually standing before him: stuck in Erroll’s waistband, right over his belly, was a .38.

Coming back to the table, Rodney stood over the coke, chin on his chest, as he tied the apron strings behind his back. “Ol’ Erroll ain’t gonna be aroun’ much longer.” He said it softly, as if Erroll had an ear to the wall.

“He goin’ up for sentencing?”

Rodney made a quick face. “He got the Virus.”

“Virus?” Strike’s voice fell away. The Virus, for Strike, was something out of the monster closet that struck at the heart of his lifelong dread of others, a ghastly reminder for him to stay true to his instinct for distance. The Virus wasn’t a disease; it was a personal message from God or the Devil, and in Strike’s imagination the messenger would look something like Erroll Barnes. Erroll’s having the Virus was like death squared.

“Yeah, ol’ Erroll…” Rodney sat down again. “The nigger mostly smoke and bluff now, you know, but everybody so scared a him on legend alone, man, that people are gonna be walking tippy-toe two years after he’s dead.”

Strike scrambled to remember if he had touched Erroll at all. He imagined he felt something scuttle up his thigh. He slapped at it, then scratched his chest and ran a thumb down his temples. He was sweating.

“Yeah, dint you see that white shit up in his mouth? That the Virus, man. Las’ week I had to carry him up a flight of stairs like a baby.” Rodney shook his head sadly as he dumped the contents of the plastic bag into the wok. Then, measuring by eye, he added about two ounces of lactose, draped the cheesecloth over the bowl, slipped the eggbeater through a slit in the cloth and stepped on a quarter kilo as if making whipped cream.

“Erroll give up the needle a little too late, you know? All
proud
a hisself for going on the methadone. Tch-tch. That’s why I don’t sell that heroin shit anymore. Too disgusting.”

Strike hugged himself, his hands up under his armpits, as he watched Rodney make product. He tilted his chin at the wok. “That Papi’s?”

“Naw, man, this for Champ, this for
bottles,
“ Rodney said with contempt. “Erroll dropped off Papi’s shit somewheres else. This for tonight’s re-up. You all’s gonna help me bottle this, then I’m gonna drop you back by your car.”

Strike didn’t know much about Rodney’s dealings on the kilo level, mainly the logistics and a little of his marketing strategy. He knew that when Rodney bought his weekly ki from Champ, Erroll picked it up, divided it into quarters and delivered three of the quarters to three old people who held the dope in exchange for having their rent paid, and maybe a little walkaround cash if Rodney had known them from his childhood. Erroll delivered the fourth quarter to Rodney for bottling. Rodney liked to do it himself, converting a loose quarter ki into anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand ten-dollar bottles. Every other day or so, as the bottles started drying up on the street, Erroll brought over another quarter. As a rule, Rodney stepped on alternating re-ups, sending the first bunch of bottles out on the street uncut, getting the pipeheads all excited by the quality, so that by the time the word had gone out and the first batch was sold, the second quarter was out on the street—not as good, but with a built-in market ready to snatch it up. And by the time
that
was all sold and they started complaining that it was weaker up came the third batch all strong and pure again the word going out and the ensuing rush to buy spilling over into the last quarter’s bottles which Rodney stepped on again.

All the pipeheads knew Rodney’s game, and each day they tried to guess which quarter ki was out there. But even if they wound up with a weaker bottle, they still hung around because tomorrow’s bottles would probably be better. Rodney made more money faster than any of the other lieutenants who put a heavier cut on their packages, because half the time his product was the best in town and because, as Rodney had told Strike more than once, “everybody likes to find out what’s behind door number three.”

Finding himself once again lost in a drifting list of all that Rodney had taught him over the last year or so, Strike suddenly remembered who Rodney reminded him of, the long-ago resemblance that had been nibbling at the edges of his consciousness: Wilson Pickett. Strike’s father had had an album of Wilson Pickett songs in the house when Strike was a kid, and the singing face of the sky-blue cover was a dead ringer for Rodney’s. Now, sitting on Rodney’s couch, Strike recalled that when he was little, when he was five or six and his father was still alive, his father would sometimes throw back a few beers and call his boys into the living room. He would plant them on the green couch opposite the record player and sing for them, accompanying Wilson Pickett on “International Playboy,” or the Impressions on “It’s All Right.” Strike’s father had never been a heavy drinker, and whenever he did get a little messed up he’d never do anything mean or violent. He’d just want to talk about things, like how he could have been a professional singer, how he’d grown up in Jersey City with Kool of Kool and the Gang, and how Kool had wanted him to join the group, but he said no because he didn’t want to leave “you boys’ mother” all alone while he went out on tour. He would explain all this to Strike and Victor as they sat on that couch all solemn and quiet, legs swinging, only slightly scared as their father would abruptly kick in on “Ninety-nine and a Half Just Won’t Do” or “I Found a Love” with a powerful tenor that turned the living room into a church of regret.

Now Rodney removed the cheesecloth, carefully shaking some coke off the folds back into the wok and gently tapping the eggbeater against the side. He pulled out several gray cardboard boxes from under the couch, passed a box to Strike and opened one for himself. Each box contained a gross of glass bottles about two inches high and a half inch in diameter. Next came two plastic bags, each filled with hundreds of tiny purple stoppers. Purple stoppers were Rodney’s street brand. If anybody was caught selling any other color in Rodney’s territory, whether they worked for Champ or not, Rodney had the right to take away their dope and put them in the hospital—something he had only needed to do once, to some green-stoppered docker about six months before, in order for everybody in town to get the message.

Strike looked down at all the piecework to come, thinking about how he was the only guy he knew his age who had no interest in or reaction to music, going back in his memory again to hear his father singing in the living room, with the nubby rub of that green couch on the backs of his legs, then snapping out of it as Rodney took a pocketknife out of an end table drawer, dipped the blade into the bowl and silently offered Strike a chunky hit. Strike just stared at him, not in the mood for jokes. Neither of them so much as drank beer, although Rodney had been a heroin addict all through the 1970s.

“Yeah, I got me a partner on the Papi thing,” Rodney drawled as he tilted the coke off the blade back into the wok, took two glass bottles, one in each hand, and dipped them daintily into the mix. Then he tapped them against each other, letting the coke settle, measuring roughly a tenth of a gram by eye. “He’s a real fuck-up, though. I just found out the nigger stealing me blind since the gitty-up.”

“Oh yeah?” Strike hesitated before joining in the bottling operation. It had been his very first job around dope for Rodney and he always hated it, but once he started, his fingers fell to it automatically, and soon he was lost in thought, starting to put the night together a little, figuring that if this other guy was on the way out, Rodney was probably asking him in.

“Greedy, greedy, greedy,” Rodney clucked, eyes on his work. They labored in silence for a few minutes, building up a nice scoop-and-tap rhythm, seesaw style, each one hesitating for a beat as the other one dipped, like two lumberjacks manning a double-handled saw. Between the two of them they were filling two dozen bottles a minute.

“Stealing from you how?” Strike asked flatly.

The door handle rattled. Gently, swiftly, Rodney put the wok between his feet, the cardboard boxes on the floor. The filled bottles vanished into his hands, then under the couch.

The front door opened and Rodney’s wife, Clover, came in. She was light-skinned, a bit chunky with a flattened-down face, her hair straight and short, shiny and stiff, curling up on one side like a frozen wave.

Strike stood up awkwardly and bobbed his head. She ignored him, her hands filled with plastic shopping bags, yarn spilling out of one.

“You find something in the kitchen?” she asked Rodney.

“Yeah. I’m good, how’re you?”

“The Lord’s seein’ me through.”

Rodney winked at Strike, and they both watched her move straight through the shotgun flat: first to the bedroom, dumping her bags and her coat on the bed, then into the kitchen, where she ducked into the refrigerator and pulled out a pink bowl covered with plastic wrap, and finally into the back bedroom, the only room that had a door, which she shut behind her.

Rodney pulled out the dope and the bottles again and got back to work. Strike knew that Rodney had been some kind of dope dealer since high school, but he insisted that his wife thought he just ran the candy store. He also insisted that she didn’t know anything about the eighteen-month-old boy who was in the store every time she came in to talk to him, or about the constantly changing cast of teenage girls who hung around, including one or two who looked slightly pregnant. His wife was a cashier supervisor for New Jersey Transit, a notary public and an ordained Pentecostal minister. In their own way they got along fine, Rodney and Clover: they’d been tolerating the hell out of each other for more than twenty years.

Strike’s back started to knot up from the bottle work. His thoughts returned to Rodney’s greedy partner. “Stealing from you how?”

“Stealing from me hand over fist, that’s how.” Rodney turned his head away from the coke and sneezed. “You know, Erroll won’t hurt nobody no more? The nigger killed a TV reporter once—four, no maybe five, six other motherfuckers that
I
know of. I say to him, Yo, Erroll, this boy done stole my money, is
stealing
my money.”

Rodney hissed in disgust and shook his head, his hands a blur of bottles and stoppers. “But Erroll’s all worried about dyin’ now, you know, he’s feeling
bad’n
shit about his life, like he’s gonna make amends and not do nothing bad no more.” Rodney laughed. “The motherfucker startin’ to sound like my goddamn
wife.
”

Strike nodded. “Lot of people think heaven is in this bo-bowl, here. That’s all the heaven they want.”

“I tell you one thing, bawh.” Rodney passed a finger alongside his nose. “If God invented anything better’n drugs, he kept it for hisself. That’s the
damn
truth.”

Strike rolled his eyes: this was Rodney’s second-favorite saying, right behind “A dime’s a dime.”

They went back to working in silence for a while, about two hundred bottles ready to sell, maybe six, seven hundred more still in the bowl.

“Yeah, ol’ Erroll … Right about now I just pay him to walk around scare the piss out the people with that damn
face
of his.”

Strike held his peace, waiting Rodney out.

“See, people get killed around here ‘cause they can’t see two minutes in front of they nose. Somethin’ feels good
now.,
that’s all they want to know about. But you know, if you fuck that girl her boyfriend gonna
kill
you. If you get high off that product you supposed to be sellin’, if you get greedy, go into business for yourself when you supposed to be out there for the man, well, the
man
gonna kill you.”

Yeah, Strike thought, and that’s exactly what Rodney’s pulling on Champ. Fucking Rodney should be talking into a mirror right now.

Suddenly Rodney put down the bottles, lifted his hands and let them drop on his kneecaps, as if he was too upset to go on. “Goddamn greedy motherfucker.”

Strike worked faster as a way of keeping still, sensing that Rodney was finally about to spell it out.

“That boy do nothin’ but lay back, pass some baggies, rake in the dough. We clearing two hundred a ounce each, me an him,
sellin
maybe seventy ounces a week. Nice indoors work, clean, safe, all the dope heading out of town, out of state, Jersey City, New Hampshire. Shit, it almos’ legitimate the way we got it set up.”

Allowing for the lying-dope-dealer factor, Strike figured thirty-five ounces at about a hundred each. Strike found himself starting to fume: Are you telling me something or are you asking me something? He didn’t know what he would say if it was
ask.

“We got no hassles with the knockos, no ten dollars here, ten dollars there, no pipeheads all licky-lipped with their greezy little eyes. I tell you, man, it’s sweet.”

Strike dreamed his dream: no more bench, no more retail, no more Fury. But right behind it came a newspaper photograph of a maverick dealer who set himself up in Dempsy last year and was found by the police with the brass peephole of his apartment door embedded in his face, courtesy of a shotgun blast from the hallway. Fucking with Champ: Strike was torn between visions of paradise and survival.

“Least it
was
sweet, but the nigger a thief, so like, you know.” Rodney stared at Strike as if looking at someone through blasted black earth. Strike stared back at him, as still as a cat.