George Pelecanos: The Way Home

It was a section of Northwest whose residents were wealthy in a living-off-the-interest way. Large homes of brick and stone, deep and wide, lushly landscaped lots, Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs, many embassies, and, down Brandywine toward Rock Creek Park, towering contemporaries housing gyms and indoor movie theaters. In the past, Forest Hills had been the exclusive base for Washington’s most wealthy Jewish residents, so for many years D.C.’s less enlightened had called it Hanukkah Hills. Chris and Country knew it as a good place to get high.

Chris pulled into their usual spot at the dead end of Albemarle, where it ran into a striped barrier at the woods of Rock Creek, and cut the engine. Their place was past the light of the last streetlamp on the road. It was dark here and very quiet. Unless they turned around, there was no exit, but they weren’t worried; they had never been hassled here before, not even by embassy police.

Chris pulled a couple of beers from the brown paper bag resting on the floorboards behind his seat and opened them both. Jason rolled a tight joint, sealed and dried it with fire, then lit it. They passed it back and forth, drank warm beer, and listened to the radio turned low.

“You used to come here with your mom and pops, didn’t you?” said Jason, when they had smoked the joint down. Both of their heads were up, but without the new-high joy of the first smoke of the night.

“Once a year, in the spring,” said Chris. “Darby, too, back when he was a puppy. We’d hike that trail they got. You get onto it back up Albemarle, near Connecticut.”

He meant the Soapstone Valley Trail, a one-mile hike up and down hills, through an arm of Rock Creek Park. It was one of those city secrets, a wonderful green place, old-growth trees and sun glinting off running water. Chris had thought of it as his family’s place when he was a kid, because they rarely saw anyone else on the trail, and because they had claimed ownership on a tree. There was a big oak down there, rooted in the valley floor, on whose trunk his father had carved their names with his buck knife. Thomas and Amanda in a heart when they’d been married, and then, in another heart, Chris when he was born. His father had put Darby’s name in a smaller heart as well. When they were down there, Chris and his father would throw rocks and try to skip them in the creek, and sometimes his father would pick up a stick that was shaped like a gun and Chris would find one, too, and they would play war, his father coming from behind a tree and pretending the stick was a machine pistol or some such thing, his mouth making the sound of it spitting bullets. In his mind he could see his father doing this, younger, without that disappointment on his face. But it was just a memory. It didn’t make Chris feel anything at all.

“Chris?”

“Huh?”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Go home, I guess.”

Jason stubbed out the roach in the ashtray and put it inside a matchbook, which he stowed in his jeans. “What if Johnny Law’s waitin on us?”

“Why would they be waitin on you? No one even saw you, Country. You stayed in the car the whole time.”

“True.”

Chris stared out the windshield. “You think someone wrote down my plate numbers?”

“Not the way you shot out that parking lot,” said Jason with an unconvincing smile. “I don’t see how they could.”

Chris sat there, stoned, hoping and wishing that this were true.

“I can’t take the weed home,” said Jason. “This funk is potent. It stinks.”

“I’ll stash it under the deck of my house,” said Chris. “We can bag it up at your place tomorrow, after your parents go to work.”

Chris took a circuitous route back to their neighborhood and stopped the Trooper a couple of blocks away from Jason’s house, a Dutch colonial on the corner of 38th and Kanawha. Jason and Chris shook hands and said good-bye.

Jason walked down the street. When he turned the corner, Chris drove off, but not in the direction of his own house. He had too much energy, and he needed to work it off. He headed south, where his girl, Taylor, stayed with her mother, on Woodley Avenue, a street of modest row houses in Woodley Park, between Connecticut Avenue and the zoo. Taylor’s mother would be sleeping now, but Taylor would be up and ready. She’d let him in.

Taylor Dugan had put Chris’s two remaining beers in the freezer to rechill them quickly, then brought them back down to the basement, where Chris was sprawled out shoeless on the couch. Taylor’s mother, a divorcee who worked as a lawyer for a trade association downtown, was in her bed and snoring, two floors above. Though it was tempting, Chris and Taylor never raided the mother’s liquor cabinet while Chris was visiting late at night. Taylor’s mother, like many alcoholics, counted her drinks and memorized the levels of the bottles, no matter how trashed she got, and Taylor did not care to get busted by her mom.

Taylor was a slim young woman with short dyed-black hair, a nose ring, freckles, and blue eyes. She had changed into boxer shorts and a V-neck white T-shirt after going upstairs to get the beer.

Taylor handed Chris his beer and put hers next to a 35 mm camera that was on an old table set before the couch. She went to a bookshelf, removed a paperback, and found a stash pipe with a hole in each end, one to light, one to draw from. In the middle, a small amount of marijuana was fitted in a screened chamber.

“You want some?” she said.

“Sure,” said Chris.

He got up on a chair and cranked open a casement window, and then she joined him. The chair wobbled beneath them and they giggled as they each took a couple of deep hits and blew the exhale out into the night.

“Whew,” she said, as she stepped down onto the carpet.

“You need some more?” said Chris.

“No, I’m good.”

“Because I copped tonight. I got a pound out in my truck.”

“That’s not all you did tonight.”

“Oh, man. You should have seen me.”

“Were you scared?” said Taylor, flopping down onto the couch. Chris had already told the general story, but she was buzzed now and wanted to hear the details.

“Nah, not really,” said Chris, walking to the table to get his beer, careful not to step on the sketchbooks scattered about the carpet. “I mean, I didn’t think on it all that much. It’s like that shrink said to me, the one my parents made me go to? ‘It’s all about choices, Chris.’ Well, I made one.”

Taylor picked the camera up off the table, framed Chris through the lens, and snapped a photograph. “Why’d you take off?”

“I dunno. That boy practically begged me to hit him. I mean, what, I was supposed to take the weight for that? I hate the police. I don’t like explaining myself to them. I don’t even like to speak to them if I don’t have to.” Chris took off his T-shirt and dropped it on the floor. “Hot in here.”

“Uh-huh,” said Taylor.

Chris tipped his head back, took a long swig of beer, and let her have a look at his flat stomach. Taylor took several more photographs of him like that and placed the camera back on the table.

“How far did they chase you?”

“A good long while,” said Chris. “It was like Cops, only they didn’t get me. Shit was sick, Taylor. I blew a red light on Connecticut Avenue at McKinley, and cars were spinning out in the intersection.”

“Bad Chris,” said Taylor.

“That’s me.”

Taylor was at that public arts school, Duke Ellington, and liked to paint and stuff. Chris had met her at a Blessed Sacrament dance when they were both in middle school. She had come over to him. Told him later that she’d noticed him straight off, that he looked different from the other boys, that he wasn’t trying too hard and that she liked his aloof manner, whatever that meant. They had been together, friends and lovers, for a couple of years. He wasn’t worried about the other boys at her school, who she said were “fey.” He guessed that meant they were faggies or something, ’cause it rhymed with gay.