George Pelecanos - The Way Home

“Help,” said Ben, horrified, his voice soft and low.

Several guards ran across the field toward them. Chris looked at Ali, and Ali lowered his eyes and shook his head.

Chris lay down on his stomach and waited. He felt his arm twist up violently behind him. He felt a knee grind into his back.

It seemed as if it took a long time for the emergency medical technicians to arrive. When they came, the ambulance driver drove the vehicle very slowly across the muddy field, as if he were wary of getting stuck. The boys were being led toward the guards’ building then, and they watched the ambo pass.

They were taken to separate rooms and interrogated by Pine Ridge authorities and police. Warden Colvin and a visibly agitated Glenn Hill, the director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, were in attendance. When the interviews were done, Chris and the others were taken to their cells, where their dinners were brought to them. Chris did not touch his food.

They found out later that Calvin Cooke had suffered what one of the guards called “a cerebral hemorrhage caused by trauma.” It was said that the slow response time by the emergency people had allowed Calvin’s brain to swell up and that was why his condition would not improve.

In a J. Paul Sampson novel, the boys from Calvin’s unit would have been out for revenge on the boys of Unit 5. There would have been eye-mugging, shoulder brushes, talk of get-back, and maybe another minor tragedy of some kind, but in the last chapter the boys of the two units would have met in another contest on the same court where Calvin got his dome crushed, and the game of basketball would have united them. They would have agreed that revenge was a dead-end street and decided to honor the spirit of Calvin and shake hands and walk away as comrades rather than enemies.

The reality was, no one thought to avenge Calvin. The boys in his unit understood that what happened to him was an accident he’d brought upon himself, the cost of boasting and stepping to someone, and anyway, they never did like him much. Calvin did not return to Pine Ridge, and no one spoke of him. When he died two years later, of infection brought on by bedsores, he had been forgotten.

In his cell, Chris lay on his stomach, his arms dangling over the sides of his cot. On the floor in front of him was an open notebook, a pen resting on a blank white sheet of paper. Chris could hear Ben Braswell, speaking to himself and crying, from his cell down the hall. He could hear the guards out there in the hall, walking back and forth, talking and chuckling, making one another laugh to try and cut the boredom of their suicide watch.

In his mind, Chris saw a spring day down on the Soapstone Valley Trail in Rock Creek Park. Darby galloping clumsily though a carpet of leaves, Chris’s mom in a new down vest, a shade of green that was her favorite color. His father swinging out from behind the trunk of a tree, a stick in his hand, making machine gun noises, a lock of black hair fallen across his forehead. Chris jumping from rock to rock across the creek, the sun dancing off the water.

Chris picked up his pen. Across the paper he wrote: “Signal 13.”

In his bedroom on Livingston Street, Thomas Flynn woke suddenly, startled from a dream.

The job was north of Logan Circle and south of U Street, in a section of the city that people in the past had broadly called Shaw, but now got called Logan by many real estate agents and some residents. In midtown the homes were row houses, mostly, some topped with D.C.-signature turrets, all backed by alleys. There were houses here and there whose disrepair went back generations, but the majority had been restored and remodeled, and the general impression was one of transformation.

A white Ford cargo van rolled down U Street, its two occupants in matching blue polo shirts, taking note of the sidewalk parade, people strolling past restaurants, bars, and boutiques. Different skin colors, a mash-up of straight and gay, non-flash money and hipsters, heads, hustlers, and intellectuals, young couples, bike messengers, old folks who remembered the fires of ’68, everyone trying this new thing together. It wasn’t perfect because nothing is, but down here it seemed as good as Washington had ever been, and for some, it was a dream realized.

To Chris Flynn, it just looked like a nice place to live. But he figured that he would never be able to afford to buy a place in this zip code. Weren’t any carpet installers who owned property here. The ones who carried mortgages here, he reckoned, had gone to college.

“Dag, boy, it sure is different than it was,” said Ben Braswell, his big frame sprawled on the bench, his arm on the lip of the open passenger window.

“It was the Metro system did it,” said Chris, thinking on something his father had once said, explaining the positive changes in the city. “Every place where they opened subway stations, the neighborhoods improved around them. Public transportation got all this shit going again.”

“Took, like, twenty-five years to happen.”

“Point is, it happened.”

“Yo, man, pull over,” said Ben, rubbernecking the diner that bore his name. “I need a half-smoke now.”

“After this job, maybe,” said Chris.

“Chili, mustard, onions,” said Ben, his gentle eyes gone dreamy. “Sweet tea. Maze on the juke…”

“We don’t do this installation, we don’t get paid.”

“How we supposed to work if we don’t eat?”

“How you supposed to pay for your half-smoke if you don’t work?” said Chris.

“True,” said Ben.

Chris was going to have to disappoint him. There wasn’t time to stop anywhere because they were already behind. After this install they’d have to drive back out to Beltsville in Maryland to pick up the roll for the next job, then head over to a home in Bethesda to complete it. Ben would understand.

Chris turned left off U into the residential section of the neighborhood. “If we get done quick, we’ll have time for lunch.”

They found a spot on the street close to the job site. A real estate agent was standing outside the row house, talking on her cell, a look of annoyance on her face as she spotted the van, recognizing the magnetic sign on its side that read “Flynn’s Floors.”

“Wait here,” said Chris. “Let me get up with this woman before we unload.”

Chris got out of the van and approached her. She continued to talk on her cell and did not acknowledge him. She was in her midfifties, with a short, spiky, gelled hairdo. She was blond, heavily made up, and had crinkle-bunny lines from age and too much sun. Her petite figure seemed shapeless under her loose, sleeveless purple dress.

The “For Sale” sign mounted on a post behind her had her photograph on it, arms crossed, smiling, with two young people, also smiling, standing behind her. In big letters, the sign said, “Mindy Kramer,” and below it, in smaller script, “The Kramer Dream Team.”

“I’ve got to go,” said Mindy Kramer into her phone. “They finally got here.” She shut the cell’s lid with an audible snap and looked at Chris. “You are?”

“Chris.” He did not use his last name unless asked.

“I expected you earlier.”

“We got hung up on another job-”

“And now I have to leave and meet a client on Capitol Hill. I’ll let you in and then I’ll come back and lock up when the job is done.” She looked past him to Ben, seated in the van, slouched, his blue Nationals W cap worn sideways on his head. “Mr. Flynn said his crews were bonded and insured. I assume that includes you and your partner.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Let’s take a look at the room.”