George Pelecanos: Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

“Take it easy, Nick.”

“You, too.”

I took his bills and rang on the register, dropping what was left into my tip jar. In the bar mirror, I saw Dan Boyle moving toward the front door. He turned once and stared at my back, his mouth open, his eyes blank. Then he turned again and walked heavily from the bar.

I worked another shift on Friday, and in the evening Lyla and I caught a movie at the Dupont and had some appetizers after the show at Aleko’s, the best Greek food in town for my money, on Connecticut, above the Circle. Lyla had a few glasses of retsina at the restaurant and a couple more glasses of white before we went to bed. I didn’t drink that night-three days now without a drop, the longest downtime in a long, long while. I had some trouble going to sleep, though, and when I did, my dreams were crowded, filled with confusing detail, unfamiliar places, blue-black starlings rising in the corners of the frame.

On Saturday, Lyla went into the office to put the finishing touches on a cover story, and I rode my ten-speed down to the Mall to catch a free Fugazi show at the Sylvan Theater. A go-go act opened to a polite crowd, and then the band came out and tore it up. I saw Joe Martinson, a friend and contemporary of mine from the old postpunk days, and we hung together in the late-teen crowd that was getting off-clean off-on the music.

That night, Lyla and I stayed at my place and listened to a few records. Lyla drank a gin and tonic and switched over to wine, and around midnight she called me outside, where I found her sitting on a blanket she had spread in the yard. She smirked as I approached her, and as she opened her legs, her skirt rode up her thighs, and I saw what that smile was all about. It was a good night, and another day gone by without a drink. But my dreams were no better than those of the night before.

On Sunday, we drove down to Sandy Point and buried our toes in the hot orange sand, then cooled off in the bay, dodging the few nettles, which were late that year due to the heavy spring rains. In the evening, I drove over to Alice Deal Junior High and worked out with my physician, Rodney White, who ran a karate school in the gym. Though I had resisted “learning” tae kwon do-I had boxed coming up in the Boys Club and was convinced that hand technique was all I needed to know-I had been doing this with Rodney for years now, and he had managed to teach me some street moves as well as the first four forms of his art. I finished the last of those forms, and Rodney and I got into some one-step sparring. height="0em"›

“All right, man,” Rodney said.

We bowed in, and then I threw a punch. Rodney moved simultaneously to the side and down into a horse stance, where he sprang up and whipped a straight, open hand to within an inch of my throat. I heard the snap of his black gi and the yell from deep in his chest.

“What the hell was that?”

“Ridge hand,” Rodney said. “Keep the first joints of your fingers bent. You’ll be striking with the whole side of your hand. And the kicker’s in the snap of the wrist, right before the strike. Step aside, and use the momentum coming up to drive it right into the Adam’s apple. You do it right, man, you’ll ruin somebody’s day.”

I tried it, then tried it again. “Like that?”

Rodney gave a quick nod. “Something like that. More snap, though, at the end. Like everything else, it’ll come.”

“What now?”

“Get your gloves, man,” Rodney said. “Let’s go a few.”

After we sparred, I drove back to my place and grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and took it with me into the shower. I didn’t think about it one way or the other, as this was something I did every time I returned from Rodney White’s dojo. No bells went off and I felt no guilt. The beer was cold and good.

I stood in the spray of the shower, leaned against the tiles, and drank. I thought about what had happened at the river, and what I had heard: the inflection of the voices, the words themselves, the animal fear of the boy. The memory had resonance, like a cold finger on my shoulder. Everyone else had this wrapped up and tied off as a drug kill, another black kid born in a bad place, gone down a bad road. But I had been there that night. And the more I went back to it, the more I suspected that they were wrong.

I got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my middle, then got myself another beer. I cracked the beer and went to the living room, where I phoned Dan Boyle.

“Yeah,” he said, over the screams and laughter of several children.

“Boyle, it’s Nick Stefanos. What’s goin’ on?”

“These fuckin’ kids,” he said, letting out a long, tired breath into the phone. “What can I do for you?”

I told him, and then we went back and forth on it for the next half hour. In the end, against his better judgment, he agreed to do what I asked, maybe because he knew that we both wanted the same thing. I set a time and thanked him, then hung the receiver in its cradle. Then I tilted my head back and killed the rest of my beer.

I could have called Boyle back and ended it right then. If I had just called him back, things might not have gone the way they did between Lyla and me, and I never would have met Jack LaDuke. But the thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know y ou shouldn’t chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.

After my Monday shift, I walked out of the Spot and headed for my car, with Anna Wang at my side, a colorful day pack strung across her back. She wore black bike shorts and a white T-shirt that fell off one muscled shoulder, leaving exposed the lacy black strap of a bra. I let her into the passenger side and then went around and got myself behind the wheel.

“Boss car,” Anna said as she had a seat in the shotgun bucket of my latest ride.

“I like it,” I said with deliberate understatement. Actually, I thought it was one of the coolest cars in D.C.: a ’66 Dodge Coronet 500, white, with a red interior, full chrome center console, and a 318 under the hood. After my Dart blew a head gasket a year earlier, I had gone into the Shenandoah Valley and paid cash-two grand, roughly-to the car’s owner in Winchester, and I hadn’t regretted it one day since.

Anna snagged a cigarette from the pack wedged in my visor and pushed in the dash lighter. I hit the ignition, and the dual exhaust rumbled in the air. Anna glanced over as she lit her smoke.

“What are you, some kind of gearhead, Nick?”

“Not really. I just like these old Chrysler products. My first car was a Valiant with a push-button trans on the dash. After that, I had a ’67 Polara, white on red, the extralong model, a motel on wheels. My buddy Johnny McGinnes called it my ‘Puerto Rican Cadillac.’ It had the cat-eye taillights, too. A real beauty. Then I had a ’67 Belvedere, clean lines, man, and the best-handling car I ever owned. I guess because of the posi rear. Then my old Dart, and now this. I’ll tell you something, these Mopar engines were the strongest this country ever produced. As long as there’s no body cancer, I’ll keep buying them.”

Anna took a drag off her cigarette and smirked. “ ‘Posi rear’? Nick, you are a gearhead, man.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you got me nailed.” I looked her over and caught her eye. “Speaking of which, there’s this tractor pull, next Saturday night? I was wonderin’… if you’re not doing anything, I’d be right proud if you’d care to accompany me-”

“Very funny. Anyway, you can just take your girlfriend to that tractor pull, buster.”

At the top of 8th, we passed an old haunt of mine, a club where you used to be able to catch a good local band and where you could always cop something from the bartender, something to smoke or snort or swallow in the bathroom or on the patio out back. I had met my ex-wife Karen there for the first time one night. The original club had closed years ago, shut down at about the same time as my marriage.