Gods Go Begging (28 page)

Loud, martialistic music with snarling, petulant lyrics poured from every apartment and vehicle at the crest of the hill. Every open door revealed an eternally blaring television. There were no books or magazines in this place. In this place, Johnny Hartman and Duke Ellington were truly dead. No one here had ever heard of Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane. A few of the apartments featured computer screens filled with loud, blazing, stupefying war games of eternally repetitive violence: space marines killing aliens; ninja assassins assailing a Mandarin emperor. Gigabytes of memory for kilobyte lives.

Here, where Biscuit Boy was born and raised, was a free fire zone, open season on any moment of calm. Like the Middle Ages, this was a place of basic oral communication only. An oligarchy of sports and movie celebrities ruled over a new consumer peasantry. Like poor soldier serfs, these children built their lives around the imaginary castles of athletes and actors. In this land of functional illiteracy, there were icons everywhere, sports icons, icons of status, icons on the computer screen. There were icons on every television urging children to buy denim icons for their legs and canvas icons for their feet. As a new medieval era dawned, iconography, cryptography, and feudal impotence merged and now held sway.

Amazingly, here, too, was the cutting edge of modern mass culture in America. The high-fives and low-fives of a celebrating Brazilian basketball team began here as back-street gestures of satisfaction or recognition. America’s hairstyles began here, too. Even barbers in faraway Kansas had been forced to learn how to cut a fade into the hair of freckle-faced, blue-eyed boys. Ghetto and barrio fashions, sources of probable cause for arrest in Oakland, would, in time, be found draped over the long, lithe bodies of starving French models. Oozing importance, feigning hostility, and sporting plastic pistols, they would glide to and fro down a runway in New York City.

“The doctors over at General,” continued Eddy, “think that urban Tourette’s is, in part, the result of radon gases from all this concrete mixing with hamburger wrappers and the tons of cocaine residue that have fallen onto the roadway. This compound ferments underfoot and is then bombarded by that dead blue light that pours out of television screens.

“The result is an insidious chemical gas that slowly leaches the human spirit out of these kids. It attacks and destroys the hippocampus so that these kids have no future and no cultural memory. Without a hippocampus they are forced to live in the eternal now. The same thing happens to all the young vatos in the Mission. The gas robs all of them of their souls.”

“Like soldiers in extremis,” mused Jesse.

“Jesse, these kids are incapable of abstraction. Everything in their lives is physical and in the immediate present. They need to own things now; they need to react to insults now. They need to retaliate now. Hell, half the boys that were raised in this place are already in state prison. When the union movement was murdered in America, the bodies were thrown here and a thousand places like this.”

“Damn,” said Jesse, amazed at the depth of Eddy’s feelings. “I thought I was angry. Now, tell me, my man, just how do we get up that hill without ending up like those ambulance drivers?”

“You have to climb up a few feet at a time, then rest a bit. Otherwise you’ll get the spiritual bends. Bubbles of Tourette’s gas will form in your blood and in your joints if you move too fast. Did you know that I charge you extra for coming up here? Hazardous-duty pay.”

The two men walked up the hill and through the incredible din of boom boxes, maundering dope fiends, and narcotics hawkers at the street corners.

“You cops?” one young man asked threateningly through a set of expensive gold teeth. He was wearing a tattered Domino’s pizza uniform, a paper hat with matching jacket.

“No,” said Jesse, “I am Biscuit Boy’s lawyer and this is his investigator.”

“Is the Biscuit in trouble? ” said the young man. “He ain’t that kind of boy, I’ll tell you that much. Fact is, he a chicken-chested wimp. He don’t know how to do no drama. He ain’t even strapped. How he gonna do a drama?” As he said it he proudly opened his Chicago Bulls jacket to show Jesse and Eddy the Mac-10 semi-automatic he had tucked into his belt. It was the nine-millimeter model. The young man smiled.

“Have you ever considered a membership in the National Rifle Association?” asked Eddy sarcastically. “They worship projectiles just like you do.”

“Ain’t they the enemy?” answered the boy after scratching his head for a moment.

“Can you tell me something more about Calvin?” said Jesse impatiently.

“The Biscuit Boy don’t use no drugs, didn’t never hardly drink, don’t do nothin’ but steal biscuits. He kind of a sissy. Hey, do you want to buy a twenty-shot?” He opened his mouth to display two off-white rocks on his tongue. “Say, was you my lawyer once?”

“I don’t recognize you,” said Jesse. “What’s your name? ”

“I know I seen you someplace,” said the young man without answering the question. “I seen you, too,” he said pointing toward Eddy. “Is you here from the pizza parlor? I swear I didn’t steal that van!” He pointed to a van that was parked halfway up the hill. It had been put up on blocks and stripped clean. Only the plastic pizza on the roof of the van was left intact. With a confused look lingering on his face he turned toward Jesse. “I think I remember something about a pizza parlor. Maybe I worked there. Was you my boss? ”

“I told you, I’m Calvin’s lawyer. Do you know who those kids were?” said Jesse, pointing downward to the four empty graves on the hillside.

“Yeah, I know,” said the young man who turned away suddenly and began to punch in a number on his tiny cellular phone, his long curving fingernails savagely entering the digits. Evidently, Jesse’s conversation with him was over. A phone not thirty feet away began to ring. The young man screamed “Fuck you” twice into the phone then pulled the instrument away from his lips. “Now I remember you. You done Mark Ballinger’s cases, didn’t you? ”

Jesse nodded. The young man’s lips returned to his phone.

“Biscuit’s got that Mexican lawyer who done them cases for Baby Strange. No, not that Baby Strange. We talkin’ about his son, little Baby Strange with them three murder beefs. Remember, he touched up them two dudes from Valencia Gardens and he did a touch-up on that one-eyed dude from the Fillmore? Baby Strange beat the gas chamber.”

“I’ve never been very religious,” sighed Jesse to his investigator, “but I think I could be a born-again Luddite.”

The young boy terminated his conversation with an expletive that was yet another synonym for intercourse, then turned to Jesse and Eddy.

“You okay up here. You can come on up.”

Jesse realized that this seeming buffoon had just transmitted the lawyer and the investigator’s identities and credentials across the entire hill, and in code, to boot: “These two are not the enemy.” He was an RTO and cryptographer combined.

“People will talk to you now, but you can’t subpoena nobody. Nobody up here will take a subpoena,” the young man cautioned. Jesse noticed that the young man’s voice had changed. There was a deeper, more authoritative tenor in his words.

“That’s some tired shit you’re peddling. It’s gaffle, man,” spatJesse angrily. “Everybody in the projects is always crying and moaning that they can’t get no justice in the courts, but no one ever wants to help. These people don’t want to be subpoenaed because they have warrants for traffic and petty theft. Biscuit could be charged with six murders! Do you understand that? Scream that into your damned phone!”

The investigator laughed at Jesse’s frustration while he turned to a page of his notes. The young man walked slowly, mechanically toward the van and stood next to it, touching the metal, probing it as though it held a secret

“Calvin’s mother lives in 27D,” said Eddy. “I spoke to her on the phone this morning. She’ll be home. According to Calvin she’s always home.”

A small window in the door opened a crack, just enough for a pair of dark eyes to peek outside. The room behind that eye was black, lit only by the numbing flicker of a cathode-ray tube. Above the insipid drone of an announcer’s voice, the sound of a half dozen deadbolts could be heard as they were removed, one after the next, like a jagged line of old iron sutures.

A small woman used one thin arm to usher the men into her tidy, dark home. The other arm was raised to cover her eyes. She seemed like a woman who should have been blind. She was stunned by brightness; her awkward, offset eyes announced that her true life’s vocation was to be found in sleep. Jesse remarked to himself that except for the eyes, Calvin looked just like his mother.

Without asking for her permission, Jesse began to walk slowly from room to room. He opened cabinets and closet doors as he moved. He touched fabric and linen and the gaudy white oak veneer that had been glued onto every visible surface of her cheap, particle-board furnishings. He moved to the tiny kitchen, to the stovetop, where a shriveled pork chop languished in a puddle of cold grease. He would have to describe Calvin’s home to the jury, describe his life. Jesse was struck by the fact that Mrs. Thibault had so few possessions.

There was no shortage of knickknacks but nothing of any size—doilies, handmade dolls, a cluster of bottles with colored water, and a gaggle of ceramic figurines. On the wall was a single black velvet painting of Martin Luther King. There were old circus tickets taped to the refrigerator. There was a tiny gathering of photographs on top of the television.

“There, Calvin in that one. He just ten year old. That my daughter Beulah. She doing real good. She got a job at the school of cosmetology over in Oakland. She even got a credit card now. That my Marvin. He be killed in a drive-by shooting last year. At least we found his body right off and buried him proper. Not like them boys out there. Thank Jesus God for that.”

She pointed to the school photo that was taped to the wall, above the rest. “That one be my youngest boy, Angelo. We call him Pickle ‘cause he a real sourpuss. He out there somewhere on the hill sellin’ gaffle.”

“Gaffle?” said Eddy.

“It’s the latest word for bunk,” answered Jesse with a smile, referring to fake cocaine. “Ain’t you up on the lingo? Some kids are out there selling instant mashed potato buds in place of crack. That’s a dangerous business, Mrs. Thibault. Those crackheads can get really mad if they aren’t unconscious by noon.”

“I told him that, but I can’t make him stay home. No matter what I do, he won’t stay home and he won’t go to school. At least he be safe now,” she said softly.

“Safe from Little Reggie,” ventured Eddy.

Mrs. Thibault slumped to the couch, then nodded her head twice, then let it fall wearily into her lap. She put her hands behind her head and laced her fingers together. Her thin knuckles were bony and worn. Now Jesse knew why she stayed indoors, a prisoner of her apartment. She was surrounded by a world on fire and she had resigned herself to the fact that she was nothing more than kindling.

“Everybody knew they was dead,” she said softly as she lifted her head. “Them poor mamas …” She was crying. “Them poor mamas. Their poor boys died alone, without so much as a Christian burial.” The television was still blaring, so Eddy reached for the remote and turned it off. Surprisingly, Mrs. Thibault did not seem to notice. In her life, television was a loyal, mindless, and undemanding companion, an endless drone of product-objects and product-people, a semihuman machine that automatically transformed itself into a night light at two in the morning.

“Everybody so afraid of Little Reggie that didn’t no one say nothing about them boys being missing. They went one at a time, a couple of months or so apart. We all heard the shots. Even the boys’ mothers didn’t say nothing. They got other kids, you know. Little Reggie could hurt them, too. He said he would. That Little Reggie always been real bad. I been scared to death about Pickle since Calvin been arrested.”

“Did anyone see Little Reggie do these killings?” asked Eddy. “Are there any witnesses to any of the shootings?”

“No, but he steady be saying he done it. He always be bragging on it to everybody, waving that big gun around. Mind you, as sure as there’s a devil, that boy be Satan hisself. A bad seed. And his mama’s so nice and all. She a real pretty woman. She magazine pretty. She be light-skinned and she’s got that good hair … real straight. She coulda been Miss America back in 1977, did you know that? I think it was ‘76 or ’77. She was Miss Alabama, but something happened. Something bad happened. She a nice lady. She sure deserve better than all this. Last week she braided my hair.”

She used one hand to primp her braids.

“Do you know anything about a note that Calvin supposedly wrote to Little Reggie?” asked Jesse. “It’s said to contain a death threat.”

“My boy couldn’t death-threat nobody,” said Mrs. Thibault weakly. “And if he did, it’s about time he stood up to that fool. He was all the time making Calvin do things.”

“What kind of things?” asked Eddy, pressing down the top of his ballpoint pen. Mrs. Thibault found the clicking sound disquieting, disconcerting. People in the projects always suffered whenever a stranger came by and wrote things down.

“I don’t know,” she answered cautiously, “but Calvin used to come home crying and say that Little Reggie went and did something real mean to somebody, or made him watch while Reggie done some crazy things. I don’t know, but I’m glad that boy be dead. God help me I’m glad. His mama live right over there in the next building. She glad, too. I can tell. Is you ever seen Little Reggie?”

Neither the lawyer nor the investigator answered the question.

“He favors his mama, except for them eyes. He be a pretty boy, but he got them yellow, catfish eyes. Mean, swampy eyes. He look at you and you know there’s no use talkin’ with him. He don’t feel nothin‘. He empty inside. Something to do with his father. He be cursed or got the evil eye or something.”

Mrs. Thibault fell quiet. For a few moments the apartment experienced a rare spell of silence.

“The folks on the hill say the devil raped Mrs. Harp and she gave birth to Reggie just a week later. I seen them police diggin’ up Little Reggie’s body. He look for all the world like he be sleepin‘. Too damn mean to rot.”