Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

I found myself at Aja’s house. It was after midnight, but I rang the bell, hoping somehow that she might answer the door instead of her parents. I heard the dog barking and clicking his long nails excitedly on the floor.

Aja’s dad, a short yellow man with a mustache and no beard, answered the door. “Zingha? Now you know it’s too late. Does your mom know—”

“Mr. Bell, I really need to see Aja.”

“Are you serious, girl?” Then he started pushing the door shut. The dog was going crazy.

“Aja!” I screamed.

Her mother appeared. She grabbed Subwoofer’s collar with one hand and pulled him up short. He whimpered and I felt bad for him. All I’d ever known him to attack with was his huge floppy tongue.

“Shut up and get in here,” she said.

Aja’s father moved off to the side but he wasn’t happy about it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.

“Quiet, you!” she responded. She was nearly a head taller than he was, with eggplant-colored lips and very arched eyebrows.

“Look, Nzingha,” she said, “Aja’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”

I shook my head frantically. “We have to find her! You don’t know what’s going on. There’s a—”

“Stop talking and listen,” she said, getting louder. “If anyone comes around asking where my daughter is, tell them the truth. That she has disappeared and that we are very worried. Mr. Bell will walk you home.”

Mr. Bell fumed as he escorted me. “I guess there’s no point in any more stupid fucking shit happening,” he muttered. I didn’t answer; he wasn’t talking to me.

I let myself in as quietly as I had left, shocked by the thick silence of the house. I tried not to imagine Jess’s closed eyes, her blood on the asphalt. I had to remind myself that she was dead, so she couldn’t be as cold as she looked. I tried to tell myself that her floating body, Dahani, and Aja were in another world.

But the next morning I learned that my mother hadn’t been home. She’d been down at the precinct with my brother.

By the time the police had arrived at the pool, Roger was nearly dead. He had tried to drown himself. He couldn’t answer questions about Jess from his coma, but the police knew he hadn’t done it.

It seemed to me, from what I managed to read before my mother started hiding the papers, that Jess’s death had been an accident. But her dad was a lawyer and Aja was dragged back from an aunt’s house in Maryland to do eighteen months in the Youth Detention Center. I went to visit her once that winter, in the dim, echoing room that reminded me of the cafeteria at our elementary school. I didn’t tell my mother where I was going. She hadn’t let me go to the trial.

Aja and I made painful small talk about how the food was destroying her stomach and about her first encounter with a bed bug. She said fuck more than usual and her skin looked gray.

Then she blurted, “I didn’t do it.”

“I know,” I said.

“Things just got crazy.” She told me about that night. Everyone had been drinking, including her, and Adam called for another chickenfight.

“First I fought that girl Tanya and I beat her easy. Then it was me and Jess. But I had won the time before, the night you came, you remember?”

I nodded, though I hadn’t seen her victory.

“So she was really getting rough. And then she fucking—”

“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” I said, trying to be the sweet girl my mother remembered.

“She pulled my top down. I kept telling them I wanted to stop. But they were yelling so loud. And Adam was cheering me on. It was so—” Aja’s voice seemed to swell with tears, but her eyes remained empty.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and we were quiet for a moment. The din of the visiting room filled the space between us.

“But Jess was my best friend,” she said. I had come to be good to her, yet I wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her teeth chattered.

My brother was able to convince the police that he hadn’t done it. But he not only needed an alibi, he also had to rat out the Gutter Boys, with whom he’d apparently tried to go into business. Tried, I say, because he was such a crummy drug dealer that he had to steal to make up for what he couldn’t sell. Dahani told the police what he knew about the small operation, and after that, a couple of Jeeps slowed down when he crossed the street, but he didn’t turn up in the Schuylkill or anything. He got his old job at the video store back, but he got fired after a couple of months, and then our VCR disappeared. After two weeks in a row when he didn’t come home, and my mom had called the police about sixteen times, she changed the locks and got an alarm system.

Sometime after that she looked at me over a new tradition—a second nightly beer—and said, “Nzingha, I know we should have talked about this as soon as I knew what was going on with your brother. But I didn’t want to say anything because I know that you love him.”

The scandal didn’t break the pool. They held a floating memorial service for Jess and hired a real security company. The scandal did, however, break the news of the pool to the neighborhood. But at $1,400 a year, none of the black folks we knew could afford to join it anyway.

Kid showed up at the river in the shadow of the High Bridge with a grin on his face, a bottle of Cutty in his hand, and a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. Kid was usually in a good mood, but I’d never seen him quite so happy. Or so flush. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a bottle of good scotch.

It was going on dark. I had a pot of watery stew on the fire—rice mostly, with some unidentifiable vegetables I’d pulled from the dumpster behind an Asian grocery store.

I held up the Cutty to the firelight and watched the reflection of the flames lick the glass. “Rob a bank?”

“Better.” Kid bent over the pot and smelled the stew. “Got a job.”

“Work? You?”

“There’s this guy took me up on my offer.”

Most days Kid stood at the top of the off-ramp on Marion Street and I-94 where a stoplight paused traffic for a while. He held up a handmade sign that read, Will Work For Food. He got handouts, but he’d never had anyone actually take him up on his offer.

“What kind of work?”

“Chopping bushes out of his yard, putting new bushes in. This yard, Professor, I tell you, it’s big as a goddamn park. And the house, Jesus.”

He called me Professor because I have a small wire-bound notepad in which I scribble from time to time. Why that translated into Professor, I never knew.

I wanted badly to break the seal on the bottle, but it wasn’t my move.

Kid sat down cross-legged in the sand on the river­bank. He grinned up at me. “Something else, Professor. He’s got a wife. A nice piece of work. The whole time I’m there, she’s watching me from the window.”

“Probably afraid you were going to steal something.”

“No, I mean she’s looking at me like I’m this stud horse and she’s a… you know, a girl horse.”

“Filly.”

“That’s it. Like she’s a filly. A filly in heat.”

I watched the gleam in Kid’s eye, the fire that danced there. “You already have yourself a few shots of something?”

“It’s the truth, swear to God. And get this. The guy wants me back tomorrow.”

“Look, are we just going to admire this bottle?” I finally asked.

“Crack ’er open, Professor. Let’s celebrate.”