First Daughter (12 page)

Jack tries to nod, instead groans with the pain.

He must have passed out after that because when he opens his crusted eyes, dawn has crept into the alley. The gang leader and his cabal are nowhere to be seen, but Jack isn't alone.

A man of middle years with an angular face the color of freshly brewed coffee is crouched on his hams, regarding Jack with sympathetic eyes.

"Can you move, son?" He has a voice like liquid velvet, as if he is a singer of love songs.

Fully awake now, racked with pain, Jack pulls himself up against the slimy brick wall at the rear of the electronics shop. He sits with his legs drawn up, wrists resting loosely on his knees. Sucking in deep breaths, he tries to deal with the pain, but it covers so many parts of his body, he feels dizzy and sick in the pit of his stomach. All of a sudden, he rolls over and vomits.

The man with the velvet voice watches this without surprise. When he's certain Jack is finished, he rises, holds out his hand. "You need to get cleaned up. I'll walk you home."

"Don't have a home," Jack says dully.

"Well, I doubt that, son. Honest, I do." The man with the velvet
voice pushes his lips out. "Mebbe it's a home you don't feature going back to at this point in time. Is that it?"

Jack nods.

"But you'll want to, I guarantee that." He bends a little, taking Jack's hand in his. "In the meantime, why don't you come with me. We'll mend what needs to be mended, then call your folks. They must be frantic with worry about you."

"They probably don't know I'm gone," Jack says, which probably isn't true, but it's what he feels.

"Still and all, I do believe they have a right to know you're okay."

Jack isn't sure about that at all. Nevertheless, he looks up into the man's face.

"My name's Myron. Myron Taske." Taske smiles with big white teeth. "Will you tell me yours?"

"Jack."

When Myron Taske realizes that's all Jack is going to say, he nods. "Will you let me help you, Jack?"

"Why would you want to help me?" Jack says.

Myron's smile deepens as it grows wider. "Because, son, that's what God wants me to do."

M
YRON
T
ASKE
is minister of the Renaissance Mission Church farther down Kansas Avenue NE. The clapboard building that houses the church had once been a two-family attached house, but first one family defaulted on their mortgage, then the other. The building was put into receivership by the bank.

"Which was when we bought it," Taske says as he leads Jack through the side door into the rectory. "Lucky for us, one of the bank's vice presidents is a member of our congregation. We were searching for a new home and this became it." He winks. "Got it at a good price."

"But this area's filled with gangs, crime, and drugs," Jack says, and
winces as Taske applies peroxide with a swab to his numerous scrapes, cuts, and lacerations.

"And where better to accomplish God's work?" Taske indicates that Jack should take off his shirt. "Which begs the question, what were you doing on that wild corner in the middle of the night?"

"Hanging," Jack says sullenly.

"Why weren't you home and in bed?"

Jack shrugs off his shirt. "I thought it would be safer out on the street."

The reverend stares at the black-and-blue marks across Jack's rib cage. Softly, he says, "You didn't get those to night, did you?"

Jack bites his lip.

"Father or brother?"

"Don't have a brother, do I?" Jack says defensively. How would things go for him at home if he said his father is beating him? Anyway, it isn't his father's fault that Jack is so stupid.

Myron Taske, silent, contemplative, continues his work patching Jack up. As it turns out, he is a singer, every Sunday, leading the choir in three joyous songs at the end of his sermon. He loves to sing love songs of a sort, love songs to God's grace and goodness here on earth as in the heavens. This he tells Jack as he bandages him up.

"Everyone here is black?" Jack says.

Myron Taske leans back, regarding Jack over small eyeglasses he has set on the bridge of his nose for the close work. "Anyone who wants to be closer to God is welcome here, Jack."

Finished with his work, he packs up the first aid kit, stows it back in a large armoire that dominates one wall. On the opposite wall is a painting of Christ's face, resplendent within a golden aura.

"Do you believe in God, Jack?"

"I . . . I never thought about it."

Myron Taske purses his lips again. "Would you like to now?"

Before Jack can answer, a sharp series of raps comes on the door: three short, two long.

"Just a minute!" Taske calls, but the door swings inward anyway.

The doorway is entirely filled by a man of humongous height and girth. He must weigh close to 350 pounds. He is the color of a moonless night, his eyes yellow, teeth very large, very white, except for his left incisor, which is gold. Embedded in its center is a gleaming diamond. His hands are the size of other people's feet, his feet the size of other people's heads, his skull as bald as a bowling ball and twice as shiny.

"Jeremiah Christmas, Gus, didn't you hear me?"

Gus's face, scarred along both cheeks, is like a black lamp that sucks all the daylight out of the room. His gravelly voice is just as terrifying.

"Sure I heard you, Reverend." He walks into the room on legs whose thighs are so thick, they make him slightly bandy-legged. "I wanted to see for myself who you picked outta the gutter this time."

"News travels fast," Jack says, without thinking. He sucks in his breath as Gus's yellow eyes impale him on a stake.

"Good news travels fast," Gus rumbles. "Bad news travels faster."

"Gus is a storehouse of aphorisms," Myron Taske says for Jack's benefit. "A
vast
storehouse."

Gus's enormous belly shakes when he laughs. He moves into the room like a sumo wrestler, like a force of nature.

Still with his eyes on Jack, he says to Reverend Taske, "This one's different, though. He's white." He squints, addresses Jack without missing a beat. "That's one butt-ugly beating handed to you."

"It was my fault," Jack says.

"Yeah?" This seems to interest Gus. "How you mean?"

"I was standing on the corner over Eastern."

Gus nods his monstrously huge head as he circles Jack. "And?"

"And I got dragged into the alley and beaten. Guy said to me I disrespected him."

Gus appears on the verge of annoyance. "By doing what-all?"

"I was on his turf."

Gus's gaze swings to the reverend. "Andre," is all he says.

Taske nods sorrowfully.

"Shit, I told you the preachin' wasn't gonna work on him." Gus is clearly disgusted.

"How many times have I told you that kind of language has no place in God's house, Augustus," Reverend Taske says sternly.

"Apologies, Reverend." Gus looks abashed.

"Don't apologize to me, Augustus." He gestures with his head. "Do your penance, seek God's forgiveness."

With one last look at Jack, Gus lumbers out, slamming the door behind him.

There is a silence, out of which Jack struggles by saying, "I suppose now you're going to tell me not to worry, that his bark is worse than his bite."

Reverend Taske shakes his head ruefully. "No, son. You don't want to get in the way of Gus's bite." Slapping his palms against his thighs, he says, "Are you ready to go home now?" He looks at his watch. "It's already after eight."

"I'm not going home," Jack says stubbornly.

"Then I'll walk you to school."

Jack ducks his head. "Don't go to school. They don't want me."

There is a small silence. Jack is terrified Myron Taske will ask him why.

Instead, the reverend says, "I'll call Child Services at nine, make sure the beatings don't continue."

Jack bites his lip. Child Services. Strangers. No, then they'll find out how stupid he is, and his father will be even angrier. "Don't call anyone," he says in a voice that catches Taske's attention.

"All right, for the moment I won't," the reverend says, after a moment's pause, "on one condition. I'd very much like you to come back, because it seems to me that you're ready to talk about God."

Jack remains dubious, but he has no choice. Besides, Reverend Taske is so nice, there's a chance he'll get to like Jack, as long as Jack manages not to look or sound stupid around him. That means, among other things, keeping away from any printed matter the reverend might want him to read. Filled with anxiety, he nods his assent.

"Believe me, the first step is the most painful, Jack." Smiling, Myron Taske claps his hand gently on Jack's shoulder. "You're lost now—even you can't deny that. Consider that in finding God you will find yourself."

T
HE
F
IRST
Daughter awoke in a room of unknown size; the walls and ceiling, lost in shadows, seemed to mock her. She might have been in a bunker or an auditorium, for all she knew. Whether there were windows here was another mystery impossible for her to solve. A bare lightbulb, surrounded by the knife-edged penumbra of an industrial Bakelite shade, dropped a scorching bomb of light onto her head and shoulders.

She sat bound to a chair that seemed hand-hewn from the heart of a titanic tree. Its ladder back rose to a height above her head; its seat was of woven rush. Lacquered canary yellow, its surfaces were tagged in a graffiti of swooping red and purple, suggesting both bougainvillea and sprays of blood.

Her wrists were fastened to the muscular chair arms with thick leather straps, her ankles bound similarly to the chair legs, as if she were a madwoman in a nineteenth-century asylum. She was dressed in new clothes, not in the sleep shirt and boys' boxers she'd worn to bed. Her feet were bare. She felt the vague need to urinate, but she clamped down on it. She had far bigger problems.

Alli couldn't remember how she got here; she barely recalled the callused hand over her mouth, the nauseating odor of ether rising into her nostrils like swamp gas. After all, it could have been a nightmare. Now she smelled her own sweat, a stew of terror, rage, and helplessness.

"Hello? Hello! Is anybody there? Help! Get me out of here!"

Her straining voice sounded thin and strange to her, as if it were an elastic band pulled past its limits. Sweat rolled down her underarms, rank with fear. Tremors seized her extremities, held them hostage.

This is a dream,
she thought.
Any minute I'll wake up in my bed at Langley Fields. If this were real, my bodyguards would have rescued me by now. My father would be here, along with a battalion of Secret Service agents.

Then a mouse ran across her field of vision—a real, live mouse—and she shrieked.

B
LACK HOODIES
up over coffee-colored heads, the two young black men overran the block of T Street SE between Sixteenth Street SE and Seventeenth Street SE, the way dogs mark their territory. The Anacostia section of the District was not a good place to be if you weren't black, and even then if you were like these two big, rangy twenty-year-olds, you'd best be on the lookout for Colombians who, sure as hell if they caught you, would accost you, take all your cash, then, like as not, break your ass.

These two were searching for Salvadorans, runty little critters whom they could handle, on whom they could take out their rage, take their cash, then, like as not, break their asses. For years now, the Colombians, who owned the drug trade, had been muscling into the heavily black areas like Anacostia. Skirmishes had turned into battles, front lines fluid day to day. There had yet to be a full-blown turf war, though that level of hostility was in the air, corrosive as acid raid. In the Colombians' wake, slipstreaming like second-tier bicycle racers, came the Salvadorans, nipping at their heels, trying to dip their beaks.
That's the way things worked in Anacostia; that was the pecking order, written in broken bones and blood.

In any event, it was broken bones and blood these two were out for, so when they saw the big old red Chevy drawn to a stop at the traffic light at Oates, fenders sanded down to a dull desert hue, they sprinted in a pincer move, rehearsed and deployed scores of times. These two knew the timing of the lights in Anacostia as if they had installed them themselves; they knew how many seconds they had, what they had to do. They were like calf-ropers let loose in a rodeo, the clock ticking down from 120, and they'd better have made their move before then if they expected to get the prize. Further, they knew every car native to the hood—especially those owned by the Colombians, bombing machines with high-revving engines, ginormous shocks, astounding custom colors that made your eyes throb, your head want to explode. The sanded-down Chevy was unknown to them, so fair game. Inside, a young black male, making that mistake that outsiders made now and again, stopping in Anacostia instead of bombing on through like a bat out of hell, red traffic lights be damned. There wasn't a cop within three miles to stop him.

The truth of it was, he shouldn't have been here at all, so he deserved everything that came to him, which included being hauled out of his car, thrown to the tarmac, derided, pistol-whipped, and kicked until his ribs cracked. Then, tamed and docile, his pockets were ransacked, his cellie, watch, ring, necklace, the whole nine yards disappearing into deep polyester pockets. Took his keys, too, just to teach him a lesson, to be deftly whipped underhand into the yawning slot of a storm drain, there to
click-clack-click
derisively. The two thugs then fled, howling and whooping raggedly into a night with its head pulled in tighter than a turtle's.

R
ONNIE
K
RAY
, drawn out of a back room by epithets and racial slurs hurled like Molotov cocktails, watched from behind a thickly curtained
window as the two punks leapt down the street, whooping, guns raised, the flags of their gang, high on blood-lust. He knew those two, even knew where they had procured those guns, just as he knew every shadowy creepy-crawly of this marginalized neighborhood where civility had been mugged, civilization had fallen asleep and never woken up. He knew the lives they led, the lives they couldn't escape. He used that knowledge when he had to. Those guns, for instance, were as old and decrepit as the building stoops, no self-respecting District cop would be caught out on the street with one. But those guns—cheap, disposable, out of control—were all the young men had; in the way young white men in Georgetown had their parents to protect them, these thugs had their guns. And like parents, rich or poor, the weapons would probably fail you when you most needed them.