Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (22 page)

How you know that?

Terry, don't let him bullshit you! Kill this motherfucker!

I pointed at Polhemus and said He wrote it all down, on some How I Spent My Summer Vacation shit. It's sitting right there. Changed a couple names, but not your cousin's. He gets murked on page ten.

Terry walked over to the table and kind of leafed through the story with one eye. With the other, and with the gun, he watched Polhemus. My guess is that homeboy was on the remedial tip, reading-wise, but I saw his mouth move around the word Jumpshot, and that seemed to be enough for him.

This shit true?

Of course it's true, I said before Polhemus could deny it. Why even take me Uptown unless I had some shit on him—some shit he'd pay a hundred grand to keep quiet?

Terry, Polhemus said. Me and you been doing business for how long? You gonna believe this?

Terry looked at me, like point-counterpoint. I shrugged.

Believe what makes sense. Or if you want to be sure, take him and these pages over to Everton. He'll probably give you T's job just to say thanks. I ain gotta tell you how tight Lazarus is with those Yardies.

Terry picked the story up and shook it at me.

You came across this how?

I looked at Polhemus, and flashed on his description of Jumpshot's face right before he'd gotten killed. He'd said it was a death mask, that seeing it drained all the sympathy he had for homeboy. Though it couldn't have been much to begin with.

Does it really matter how I came up on it? I said.

Yeah, nigga, to me it does. His grip on the gun tightened. Polhemus saw it too, and took a pointless little half-step back.

I decided to give Terry what he needed. I know you might feel that was reckless, Dondi, but it needed doing. When a situation jumps the shark or the tracks or whatever and you gotta freestyle your way out, sometimes that means throwing your watch and sneakers in the pot like fuck it, all in, I got this. I hope you understand that, youngblood. Wasn't some shit I did light, letting them hear your name.

I pointed my chin at Polhemus, real casual, and said Nigga was dumb enough to send his story to a friend of mine, trying to get a book deal. Turns out her son works for the clown. We were gonna sting him for that hundie and keep it moving. I just got home, you know what I'm saying? Same as you. I need some fresh-start money.

Your friend's kid, what's his name?

Dondi. Young lightskinned cat.

Yeah, I know D. Used to see him up here back when it was Lazarus running the spot.

He looked across his shoulder at me, rocking back and forth on his heels as if he were holding a baby and not a .45, and said He keeps everything under a loose floorboard, under the bed. Take it and go.

Just the hundred, I said. The rest is you. Plus all the product.

He didn't answer. Too busy breathing hard through his nose.

I went back there, tossed the mattress, found the floorboard. Dude had his loot rubberbanded up all neat, in twenty-five or thirty bundles of ten thou. But it was old money, slow money—worn, smelly bills all gussied up like he'd just withdrawn them from his fuckin account in the Caymans. Some people gotta pretend. I threw my cut into my knapsack.

Terry was still pinning Polhemus with the gun when I came out. You kill a motherfucker's kin, he might decide to make your death a real event. Factor in those souvenirs crisscrossing Terry's face, and who knew what this cat was gonna do.

I wiped the .38 clean, laid it back on the table, and opened the door to leave. Then I said Can I make a suggestion? and closed it again.

What?

There's plenty of shit back there for you either way, but if I was in your situation I'd hand him over to Everton. Get straight with them Jamaicans. You gotta live in this neighborhood, right?

We'll see.

Okay then.

I turned the doorknob again, and this time Polhemus twitched, and his eyes jerked over to me. I thought some final words might be in order.

Actually, that's not true at all. No such thing was in order, and the fuckin kid smelled like he'd shitted himself while I was back there digging through his safe deposit box. I should've just left, but I felt like telling the cocksucker a couple of things about himself, so I said Think about this, dude. If you'd been straight with me, I woulda been gone fifteen minutes ago, and all you woulda been's a little light on cash. I'ma drop a Bob Marley quote on you, Polhemus, in the spirit of your fine short story. You can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time, you fuckin dumb-ass.

I flashed a peace sign. Take it easy, I told Terry. I'm out.

I will, he said, and turned back to Polhemus.

There are a lot of ways to become an old man, but the quickest is to stop caring about new shit—not new ideas, because there's no such thing, but music, technology, fashion. I'm a walking fossil, how you say, a trilobite or a troglodyte or maybe both, and it's not incarceration's fault because some people do manage to stay up on everything from inside. You got cats plugged into iPods and sending e-mails from the library and all that. Whatever mixtapes is on the street, I guarantee they're in the cellblocks the same week, not to mention the fact that so many rap dudes stay coming in and out the joint on gun charges or drugs or whatever stupidness that the most signed-out books are always the rhyming dictionaries. I've seen niggas record whole albums into payphones. What turned me into an old man was that around the time I got sent up, everything started to get wacker and wacker in the real world, especially music, so I just gave up on caring.

All of which is to say that when I stepped outside and saw a Mercedes SUV with government plates and tinted windows idling right in front of Polhemus's building, the two quotes that popped to mind were both from songs that came out in like '88–'89, one from each coast, the two of them together a pretty good snapshot of what hip-hop looked like before everybody started pretending to be a shiny-suit-wearing pimp-thug-golf-pro-actor-murderer.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away is one, from the beginning of A Tribe Called Quest's joint “If The Papes Come,” though probably it's from the Bible originally or maybe the Koran, since at least one of those brothers went Muslim.

The other, from the end of some NWA song, was: Oh, it ain't over, motherfuckers.

Indeed.

Down came the back window.

Hello, Adofo.

My government name. Even Ma Dukes has probably blanked on it by now.

Hello, Anastacio.

Step into my office. He opened the door, slid back across the butter cream leather, tapped the seat beside him.

Suck my dick.

He chuckled. Sixteen years earlier, when he'd tried to get me to give him RAGE, they were the only words I said. I said them a lot.

Get in the car before I have the two meatheads in the front seat beat the black off your ass.

The doors opened, and a matching pair of whiteboys in dark suits emerged. Hands on the car, one of them barked, while the other unbuttoned his jacket so I could see the shoulder holster.

He's clean, the barker told Bracken once he'd patted me down. Except for this. He passed my backpack to his boss, then turned to me.

You heard the man. Into the vehicle.

I heard the zipper teeth separate, and then Bracken said Well well Adofo. This is a lot of money.

I climbed into the backseat and checked him out. Word to God, yo—Bracken hadn't aged a day, an hour, a motherfuckin nanosecond. As if while I was humping out my bid all he'd done was go home and take a quick nap and a shower, then cop an expensive haircut and a shoeshine and slip on an Italian suit.

I take good care of myself he said like he could read my mind, and then the cocksucker winked at me, real quick, a little flick of eyelash. Pilates. Works wonders. You should try it.

Yeah, I will. Now what the fuck you want from me?

Bracken flipped one of the money stacks in the air and let it land in his hand. I wonder what I'd find inside that building, he said.

Well I said, if you hurry, you might find a newly paroled ex-con holding a forty-five on a drug dealer who killed his cousin, plus a whole fuckload of weed and money, none of which has shit to do with me, which is why I took what I was owed and left. So how about it? You gonna run your meatheads up to the second floor and stop a homicide, Mr. Tough On Crime?

I saw the driver's eyes dart to the rearview mirror, like he was expecting the order. Bracken caught it. McGrath, Downing, wait outside he said. Leave the air on. The whiteboys did as they were told.

Bracken crossed his legs. Your friend, I hear he's back in town. He studied my face, looking for a tipoff, but I didn't give up shit.

Or maybe under it, Bracken said, trying again.

What friend I said, thinking that before the whiteboys could get to us I might have time to slam either my knee or the heel of my hand into Bracken's nose at an angle that would drive the cartilage into his brain and kill him. I saw it done once, by this smallish Filipino who came into the joint with a rep as some kind of Ultimate Fighting champ and had to prove it every day until word got around.

What friend, Bracken repeated. What friend, he says. It sounds to me like you miss prison, Adofo. Is that it? Cunt just doesn't do it for you anymore, after all that nice tight greasy asshole? Because I could send you back. You make it real easy, strolling out of a drug den with a backpack full of cash.

Who told you he's back? I asked. We had RAGE cribbed up at a real unlikely spot now for safekeeping, two blocks from WREN's pad at an out-of-town neighbor's. Seemed like Bracken's tips were coming late and weak, RAGE topside a week and him just catching a wisp of it now, and for a second I caught a little case of the smugs. Then it occurred to me that Bracken's first move would probably be to send his boys over to the same apartment doors they'd banged on back in '89. He might've been late and weak, but we were only a halfstep earlier, a couple pushups stronger.

Bracken smiled and said How'd you like my gift?

I hear you're down fifteen points in the polls. Maybe you should concentrate on that.

Fifteen last week. It's ten now. But thanks for your concern. He pointed at the backpack, lying open between us like a chick in a skirt with her legs spread.

I could let you have that. What's a little pocket change between friends, right Adofo?

I slipped my hand inside. You sound scared, Bracken. You think my man is gonna take it back to '87, huh? A few thousand BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE tags wouldn't help your numbers, would they?

He pivoted so we were eye to eye. I'm gonna tell you something, you piece of shit. And I want you to tell him. It wasn't me. I didn't kill Stein.

Oh yeah? Who did?

He just stared at me. I just stared back. There was more red in his eyes than any other color.

It wasn't me, he said again. I think you know what I mean.

Like hell I do. Why don't you tell me what happened, if it wasn't you?

Those tunnels I'm closing, Bracken said. It's not something I'm supposed to do. You tell him that. Tell him we want the same thing.

Fuck this bullshit, I said. Tell him yourself. I opened the door. Always a pleasure.

I had one foot on the sidewalk when the whiteboys hustled over and blocked the way.

Boss? the one who'd frisked me said.

I looked back at Bracken. Either arrest me or shoot me or let me go, I said. Because this conversation is over.

The whiteboys stood waiting, like any of those options was cool with them.

I'm going to give you a day to think this through, Bracken said. He reached into his inside jacket pocket, handed me a business card, and crossed his legs again. And to find out what I want to know, just in case you don't know it already. I'll hold on to your money until then. Tomorrow either you give me an address, or I'm going to give you one. One you know real well. In the meantime, like I said, your friends in law enforcement will be watching. Okay, let him go.

The whiteboys stepped out of the way. One closed the door behind me.

McGrath, I said. Downing. See you two bitch-made faggots around.

You could see them straining at their leashes, but they didn't say a word. I sauntered around the corner, then sprinted flat-out for the subway station.

11

know I haven't really talked about being expelled—sorry, hey, it's me Dondi again—or about the consequences. I haven't talked about a lot of things, because I'm trying to focus on the most interesting shit. So, like, for example during this same time I was also conducting long agonizing breakup-aftershock phone conversations with the Uptown Girl, at the rate of about one per day. Maybe that's an important dimension of the narrative through-line and I should find a way to weave it in, but it was a long slow slog to even live through, and I can't imagine why you'd want to read about it.

The truth is, I'd been lying on my side like a derailed train for months when Billy made the scene. My wheels weren't even spinning anymore. I was smoking more than usual, and for different reasons, worse ones. I had no clue what I was going to do with myself, and each day I felt less able to confront that fact, to shake my head clear and start bouncing on the balls of my feet and throwing jabs and working out a plan.

It was something I'd never really had to do. As different as I felt at Whoopty Whoo, your boy was walking a real conventional path, straight to—wait for it—the Ivy League. I'd applied early-decision to Columbia and they were like
Word
,
member of a demographically underrepresented minority group with whiteboy-tight grades, which dorm you wanna live in?
, so by December I was chilling. Nothing left to do but get my senior slump on, jog a lazy semester-long victory lap around the Whoopty Whoo gymnasium, maybe give some kind of Ladies-and-gentlemen-I'm-living-proof dinner speech to the folks who endowed the What the Hell, Let's Give a Clever Young Colored Boy a Chance to Transcend His Race Scholarship.

I'm not even going to say I fucked up, because the true fucking up was done by the two halfwit theater dorks who got caught chiefing a bowl of my Sour Diesel in the school auditorium before first period by Mel the janitor. He handed them over to the school disciplinarian, and the next thing you know my name is in their mouths like retainers, and then I'm standing in the principal's office denying and denying and denying.

Meanwhile, good ol' Ironsides Mel is cutting the lock off my locker, and the office secretary's raising Karen on the phone, and shortly thereafter Mel rejoins us with the contents of my messenger bag, and phrases like
zero tolerance policy
and
notify the proper authorities
start finding their way into the conversation. So when I walked out of the building expelled but not in police custody, I considered myself more lucky than not. The feeling didn't last long, and if Billy hadn't shown up, who knows what I'd be doing now. Not writing a book, that's for sure. And since sitting down each day and trying to get this story committed to paper is the main thing I have going on in my still-beat-to-shit life, I guess I owe him the same as he owes me.

Anyway, back to it. When we resurfaced aboveground, Billy made his way to Fever's and I took my ass back to the Fort and knocked on Karen's door, in deference to my not-officially-living-there status. No answer. I let myself in, shouted a greeting over the shower's rush, and began scrubbing tunnel grime from my hands at the kitchen sink. I'd gotten nowhere when the phone rang.

Cloud. He was out of breath; train brakes screeched behind him. We needed to meet, he said. The five of us, right now—but no addresses over the phone, and no names either. We had to make sure not to be followed.

I thought about it for a sec. “You know the building where I found you-know-who? How about the lobby in half an hour, and I'll take us someplace super-private from there?” That worked for Cloud. He told me to set it up, slammed the receiver down.

Why a dude who never left his apartment had a mobile phone instead of a landline, I don't know. Maybe it was cheaper. The Ambassador's voicemail picked up without a ring, and I declared my intention to text him an address that Billy could read and to which they should both skedaddle with maximum celerity. I was typing it into my phone and feeling pretty clever when Karen padded down the hall, her bare feet leaving wet marks on the hardwood and her hair twisted into a yellow bath towel.

“Who called?”

I told her the deal.

“He didn't say whether he had the money?”

“Nope.”

“How did he sound?”

“Frantic.” I pressed the
send
button, and hoped Billy would be able to figure out text messaging despite having left town when cellies were brick-sized and used primarily on the set of
New Jack City
.

“Frantic, or like he wanted you to
think
he was frantic?”

I stared at her.

Karen shook out her hair. “It's not that I don't trust him. It's just . . .”

“That you don't trust him. That's fucked up. You trusted him enough to let him risk his ass while you slept in.”

“Oh, so
I'm
supposed to go shake down a drug dealer?”

“You coulda come to the writers' meeting, at least.”

She pointed a finger at me. “I'm going to tell you something I shouldn't have to, Dondi. Money makes people do sick things. Keep that in mind when Cloud tells us whatever he's got to tell us.” She turned and walked back toward the bathroom.

“Next you're gonna say that there's no honor among criminals,” I called, but Karen was already firing up the blow-dryer. A moment later, my phone buzzed with a message:
K. On r way
. Apparently, a twelve-year-old Korean schoolgirl had taught Billy how to text.

We hopped a cab to Dumbo. I gave the driver a weird, indirect route, sat in the front, used the side mirror to check for a tail. I didn't see one, but I had him drop us around the block from our destination anyway, in front of the yuppie deli. One of them. Karen got coffee. I scanned the street for loiterers. We left through a side door, and when we reached the building I told Karen we were clear.

She stared the other way, into the sun. “That's because nobody followed us to begin with, Columbo.”

I was about to reply when some guy with a little emasculating dog pushed open the door. I caught it, ushered my mother inside.

We walked through the lobby and found Cloud slumped on a low, boxy couch, legs kicked out in front of him. We took the armchairs facing it. The space dwarfed the furniture, ridiculed anyone who used it. I felt like a model who'd been hired to demonstrate the comfort of the floor samples at some moderately outrageous design store.

My mother chugged the last of her coffee and deposited the cup on the small lacquered table between our chairs.

“So. What's up?”

Cloud blinked behind his glasses. “Chillin'. What's up with you?”

“Not much.” She crossed her legs. “What's up with you?”

“Chillin'.” He looked at me. “You reach them?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we'll talk when everybody's here.”

Karen tossed her coffee cup at Cloud. It landed on his chest, rolled to the floor.

“Stop messing with me, man. You get it or not?”

Cloud snatched up the cup and returned fire. It sailed past Karen's shoulder, landed near a huge vase full of cherry tree branches or some shit.

“Hold your fuckin' horses.” He settled even more deeply into the couch, and closed his eyes.

Karen watched him for a few seconds, then rose to pace the lobby. I chased down her coffee cup, found it a trashcan. If we started crapping up the place, the various effete dogwalkers who called this building home were liable to go hire a doorman.

Billy and Fever arrived a few minutes later. Cloud was standing by the time they reached him.

“Where y'all comin' from?”

“My crib,” said the Ambassador. “What's left of it.” He leaned on his stick with both arms, so heavily that they tremored beneath the weight. “Motherfuckers smashed everything to bits. My sculptures, all the alphabet racers . . .” he trailed off, shook his head at nothing in particular, snorted some snot back up his nose.

“Not all of them,” said Billy, grim. “They left the
A
and the
B
alone, on some calling-card shit. Surprised they could even read 'em.”

“Damn, Fever, I'm sorry.”

He waved me off. “Fuck it. No sense crying over paint and plastic. At least now we know Bracken's still a fucking kick-in-the-door gorilla, even in a suit and tie. If he'd grown a brain, he woulda staked my place out, and Billy would be in bracelets, or worse.”

“I can't go home, can I?” asked Karen.

“Nope,” said Cloud. “My bad, I shoulda thought to tell you pack a suitcase. I was a little frazzled and shit, on the phone.”

“How would you know—”

“Because me and Bracken just had our own little reunion.” Cloud tapped me in the chest with the back of his hand. “Lead the way, youngblood.”

Billy and Karen did a verbal impression of two people trying to walk through a door at the same time.

“What do you mean, ‘lead the way'?” my mother demanded. “Why can't we just talk here?”

“You saw him?” my father asked. “You actually saw him?” But Cloud was following me across the lobby, to the stairwell.

I pushed open the door. “Hope nobody has any pressing commitments for the next twenty-four hours.”

“Aaaah,” said Dengue. “Smart. Smart.” He was the only one I'd told besides my mother, and he'd taken the notion very much in stride. In sit, if you wanna get technical about it.

“Tell me this is a joke. That's your big plan? The magical staircase to tomorrow?”

I ignored her. Nobody seemed to have a problem with that. Not even Karen, really.

“Talk to me,” said Cloud, as we began to climb.

“You know that song ‘time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the fuuuuture'?”

“Steve Miller. That's my niggaro.”

“Well, this is sort of like that. On the top floor, it's tomorrow. But only if you take the stairs. All of them.” I looked over my shoulder at Billy, three steps behind, his hand on Dengue's elbow. “The top floor's where I found you.”

My father's eyes narrowed, but all he said was “Huh.”

“If you go back down, can—”

“Nope.”

Cloud's thousand-yard stare bumped into the wall four feet in front of us. “Weak.”

“I find a rip in the fabric of space-time, and all you can say is ‘weak'?”

Cloud shrugged. “The shit's weak. All these goddamn stairs for one day? Easier to get drunk and pass out.”

“You're right,” I said, as we passed the third-floor landing. “It is kind of weak.”

“A day is a huge amount of time,” said Billy. Nobody paid him any mind. “No portal I've seen gives you anything close to that,” he added, and Cloud and I stopped in our tracks. Dengue plowed right into me.

“Say something if you gonna stop walking, boy!”

“Sorry.” I faced my father. “How many portals have you seen, Billy?” Karen crossed her arms, like she was in a rush and we were holding up the line.

“A bunch. The shamans said I had an innate gift for sensing them . . . it was the only thing they said I had an innate gift for, actually. And they considered it pretty useless.”

“Guess it's genetic,” I said. “I mean, I found this one. We both did.”

Billy gave a little tick of a nod. “Usually, a portal only jumps you a few minutes forward. It's always forward. Most of them, you could walk through and not even notice.”

“They don't have any buildings this tall, do they?” said Karen. We all looked at her. She dropped her hands to her hips. “In the jungle, I mean. I'm saying, maybe on the ground you only get a couple minutes, but higher up, you could get more. Or whatever.”

“That's possible,” said Billy. It came out sounding like charity. “A portal has to be approached in a specific way. From a certain direction, a minimum distance. So that part's the same. But a whole day would blow their minds.”