George Pelecanos - DC Noir

José walked over. “ID?”

Calkins shook his head. “Gonna have to be DNA. All we gots is hamburger.” He pointed into the ditch. “That’s the largest.”

José walked over and looked. It took him several seconds to make out the thing that had been an arm. “What’s that in the hand?”

“Looks like a switch for a garage door. Best guess, these guys set off a bomb in their own vehicle.”

“How’d they manage that?”

Calkins shrugged. “They not gonna tell you, José.”

Gonna be a quiet day today.

Solomon looked down his alley, then across Wisconsin to where the Nigerian was setting up his stand.

“For once,” he said to Voice, “you got your shit together.”

Petworth, N.W.

They called him Bay Ronnie but I don’t know why. People in the neighborhood said he used to live around here but him and his people moved a long time ago. They said he was mean. Crazy-mean, like he’d rather take a switchblade to you than talk. He wore shades, a black dobb, Dak slacks or Sansabelts, silk socks, and Romeo Ballys. Black as tar, with pure white around the eyes. He would always come down singing from up Sherman Circle way. On Saturday morning, the 22nd of August, you could hear that ugly, husky voice: “…It’s a thin liiiine between love and hate/It’s a thin line between love and hate…”

Sunday, the 23rd of August, was a muggy and humid morning. It also marked the last sermon Reverend Yancey would preach at the old Gethsemane Baptist Church. Gethsemane had been on that hilltop at Georgia Avenue and Upshur Street for twentysome years. The church was set to be “tore down,” as all the adults were saying around me. “It gon’ be tore down by Monday mornin’.” Torn down to make room for a Safeway. The church was so small I couldn’t see how a big old grocery store was gonna fit, but I didn’t know nuthin’ about buildings. I was eight years old at the time. The youth and senior choirs would sing in a big service that day. My sister was in the youth choir and my mother taught Sunday school.

We moved into this two-story house on Crittenden Street between Georgia Avenue and 9th Street in the ’50s. There were a couple of white families when we came in, and everybody was friendly, but they had all left the neighborhood maybe a year after we moved in. Just as we started to play together, the white kids had to move someplace else. There were other friends too — Jon, Brian, Mark, and Lisa Rammelford — who lived around the corner on 9th Street before we arrived, along with Darryl Watson, a cousin of my sister’s friend Joyce, who was around most of the time.

At some point, like most of the other people on the block, my mother and father started renting out rooms in our house. Some were family, like cousins Ivy, June, and Neville, and all of us Jamaicans and Trinidadians ate together. There was always loud laughter and somebody telling you what to do. When we first moved in, my parents took in some black Americans and a Chinese man, who were all real different from the West Indians — Miss Ruby, Mr. Palmer, Miss Lucy, and Mr. Price. Mr. Kinney and his come-and-go wife were Americans. They stayed in the room that looked over the backyard and were pretty nice and quiet. There was Tommy and Doris (or Clay and Liston, as my father called them), who were also American. All the Americans and Mr. Lee, the Chinese man, kinda kept to themselves and ate different foods, like grits, which Mr. Kinney taught me to make with butter for breakfast.

Mr. Lee was a mystery. He always locked the door to his room, even when he was home or just going to the bathroom. He was real polite. When he came home, he’d stand in the living room and look at everybody and bow and say something under his breath with a big grin, like, “…Harerow…” Sometimes his strange speaking went on for many minutes. Then he’d go upstairs for the night. My father loved it, he’d stand up and bow and smile. Then he’d have a big laugh when Mr. Lee left and tell us, “That man got good manners.” It got to the point that when I heard Mr. Lee’s key in the front door, I’d go to the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to do the greeting.

All three bedrooms in the house were rented out, which left the living room and dining room. My parents slept on a bed in the dining room and my sisters and I shared a foldout sofa-bed in the living room. This felt normal to us. My moth was always saying this setup was just for a little while and it helped them make ends meet.

There were a lot of times that I didn’t like the folks who stayed at our house. I didn’t appreciate my mom cooking for everybody, and I thought they were stupid when they asked where Jamaica was or turned up their noses at ackee and saltfish or boiled green bananas and mackerel. But everybody knew food was always cooking at our house or at the home of one of our aunts or numerous cousins who lived nearby, so there were always people around and we always felt safe.

Still, there was a lot I wanted to understand about black Americans. Sometimes I would sneak into their rooms when they weren’t home. Not that I was looking for anything, but I was curious to know who they were — their smells, how they were different from us. Mr. Kinney’s magic shave smelled like rotten eggs; he said he used it so he wouldn’t get razor bumps, but it stank. Snooping in his room one day, I opened the can to see what it looked like and spilled it all over the floor. I swept it up and put it back in the can and cleaned the floor, but then it started smelling like rotten eggs, so I left and prayed that the scent would disappear. If he ever knew what happened, he never said. In the other rooms I would find clothes that didn’t get hung up, leftover fried fish sandwiches brought home from takeout, suitcases that never got unpacked, framed pictures and snapshots of smiling kids with missing teeth and shorts and barrettes. In some of the pictures taken long before I was born, the young men and women wore tweed suits and hats, their kids in front of placid monotone backdrops of trestled bridges over duck-filled English ponds, with Queen Elizabeth always somewhere in the background. But never any smiles. No Jamaican joy — only stern faces. All kinds of people were coming and going; why my parents chose them over other people was another mystery to me.

Everything became clear to me when I woke up that Saturday morning, August 22. The smells of cakes and pies being baked, greens being cooked, and chickens being fried settled like a cloud over the whole neighborhood. The Petworth Parents’ Club, headed by Mrs. Florence Billops, was holding one of its four-times-per-year dinners and bake sales. The money raised from these events paid for annual community trips for parents and kids to places like the New York World’s Fair, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and stuff like that.

So every mother in the neighborhood had started early in the morning, making her specialty. This meant me and my friends would have to hang around all day in case our mothers needed something from one of the corner stores, which they always did. Then we’d get the money and take off running through the alleys, pop over fences, shout at the friends who got to play kickball, and run in sweating to Mr. G’s or Chuck & Danny’s midnight delicatessen. Mr. G was this old — I don’t know, eighty years old maybe — heavyset bald-headed Jewish man, his fingers thick and curled up. He spoke with an accent I never figured out, maybe German, and all he ever did was grunt when we slid the money on the counter or if we told him, “My mother said she’ll pay you on Monday…” Then we’d take off again, racing three blocks to see who’d make it back to the front porch first.