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

I cleared my throat. “I think it was a couple of dudes who been renovating those houses on Euclid.”

That was my theory. It should have felt good to tell him, but it didn’t.

“Come here,” he said, waving me to the car window. He glanced up and down the street in a way that made me nervous. But what else could I do? Couldn’t run with him right there looking at me. I walked over to him with my hand stuffed in my pockets.

“What they do with him? You tell the cops?”

“I don’t know what they did. That’s why I came over. See how he doing.” That was mostly true. I’d come hoping Amp was alive, hoping the rumors were lies. But really, I just didn’t want Shag to ask why I hadn’t helped his nephew survive. I’d seen Amp fighting back. The dog was barking at me. Like it was saying, They’re gonna kill him, they’re gonna kill him, do something! Amp broke free, running off into the darkness of the alley with the men behind him. Maybe his dog barked at me just a beat longer before it realized I wasn’t going to do anything. It turned, running after them. I didn’t follow.

“Well, he ain’t here…” Shag said, getting out of the car.

“Okay.” I could see it in his face, he was lying to see if I’d know he was lying.

“You should come in with me and wait for him, he’ll be back soon probably,” Shag said.

“No, I got some errands to run. I might come back by later.”

Shag chuckled slightly and said, half to himself, “Nigga talking about errands .” He was jingling his keys.

“I’ll come back later.”

“Man, come on in the house,” he said. Then, a little bit softer: “I got something I want you to do.”

“Amp ain’t alive is he?” I said. Blurted.

“No, he ain’t,” he sighed. “He ain’t.”

He opened the door and I followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor where he and Amp and Amp’s mother lived. I don’t know where she was. Bawling at the East Liberty precinct. Picking out caskets. I thought the air smelled funny. Damp, salty with grief maybe. She might have been locked in her bedroom dreaming her son was still alive. We moved down a tiny hallway to a tiny den. I recognized Amp in the wood-colored face of a boy on an end table. His first or second grade school portrait. His grin was so wide it showed every one of his teeth. He had a small gold stud in his ear. I remembered he’d been the first of the boys our age to get pierced. Instead of the white-collared shirts we were supposed to wear for our school uniforms at Dilworth, he wore a loose white T-shirt.

“Amp did that shit,” Shag told me, pointing to where the thick blue carpet was yanked back revealing a perfect hardwood floor beneath it. “Told his momma he was going to fix this place up with his tools.” Shag sat down on a plaid sofa that took up nearly all the space in the room. I saw the edge of a bedsheet spilling beneath it and figured it was where he slept.

“You want to smoke,” he asked, pulling out a sandwich bag full of weed. He was settling in, I hadn’t sat down yet.

“No,” I said. Though I wanted to get high, really. What I really wanted was something to lift me from the ground. Up through the roof, up on above Penn Circle sitting like a bull’s-eye in the middle of our neighborhood. Up on out of Pittsburgh. But I told him no and watched him roll a blunt.

“I told that nigga he was gone get jacked up for stealing them boys’ shit,” Shag said. He told me to sit down, but he didn’t seem to care when I didn’t. “I told his momma too. His room’s full of their shit. Some dusty safety goggles, screwdrivers, dirty work gloves, dirty work boots, a fucking sliding T-bevel. You know what a T-bevel is? Amp didn’t know either, but he got one in there.”

Shag’s phone buzzed on his hip but he didn’t answer it.

“So I need you to do me a favor, youngblood. We need to ride over to where them motherfuckers are working and I need you to point them out to me.”

“I didn’t get a good look at them.”

“That’s all right. I want you to try. Just point in the right direction, know what I mean?”

He reached between the cushions of the sofa. I saw the butt of the gun just as his phone started buzzing again. This time he answered it. He smiled at me, then stood and walked from the room.

I sat down on the couch and touched the gun handle where it stuck out like the horn of an animal. I thought for a second about taking it and the bag of weed. Instead I got up, tipped to the hall, and listened. I could see into Amp’s room. There were a pair of sneakers and a dog leash on his bed.

“No, I’ll probably head to Newark. Atlanta. Somewhere with more black people than there are here.” I could hear Shag taking a piss in the bathroom while he talked. “You ain’t good for shit, you know that, right? No. No, nigga, just stay there. I got somebody here gonna ride over there with me.”

I thought again of the gun. Shag would want me to drive while he shot from the window. Or worse, he’d drive while he made me shoot. Either way, what I’d seen meant I’d have to be a part of what was going to happen.

I tried to be quiet running out of the house. I kept thinking I could hear a dog barking behind me. Amp’s dog. The ghost of his dog. I didn’t look back until I was panting around the corner. I was a few blocks from Star’s house. But I turned toward Euclid where the new houses were being built.

There was a young white woman working in her yard. Planting flowers or something. Trimming the hedges. She glanced at me, then stared as I walked up the steps of the big empty house standing next to hers. There was no one there. I rattled the doorknob looking through its window into the wide bare rooms. I glanced back at the white woman who was pulling off her gardening gloves and still watching me. I pulled the hammer Amp sold me from my book bag and used it to smash the window on the door. The woman rushed inside her house. I reached through and tried to grab the door latch, but couldn’t. I walked across the porch and hammered at the pane of the living room window until it broke open like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. It was loud as hell. I didn’t fucking care. I guess I got cut. My blood dripping on the shiny hardwood floors almost looked like a trail of pennies.

I wanted to carve Amp’s name somewhere no one would find it. Not for another fifty years or so. Not until the house had been lived in by rich white people, then rented out to poor black people, then renovated for white people again. I wanted someone in the future to strip back the sheetrock and find Amp’s named carved into a beam. There was nowhere to carve it, though. Nowhere discreet. The kitchen didn’t have cabinets yet. The bathroom on the first floor had no toilet. Wires hung from the ceilings and walls. Just an empty house. My grandmother said—she used to say this all the time—that people, black or white, would always fight over dirt but nobody could ever really own it. She said the land could only belong to the land. The rivers belonged to the rivers. The air was still air no matter who claimed to own it.

On the second floor I stood at a window in the master bedroom. Brick and sky, metal and wood, concrete and dirt, you already know what I saw out there: all the shit that gives air something to lean on. I knew the cops were on their way. And I’d have to do something. Say something. I thought I could already hear the sirens. I thought I could hear dogs trying to match the sound. I sat in the middle of the floor with the hammer in my lap. I had blood on my shirt and pants. I wasn’t crying. I was barely breathing.

When I dialed Star’s number, the dial tones echoed around me. We’d talked on the phone, but I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Wasn’t that I was afraid of Amp or his fucking dog. I just kept thinking she’d ask me over eventually. Soon as Amp fucked up, I figured she’d want to see me. And really, when I heard he was dead, I thought it was a reason to see her. Pregnant or not. I was going to be there for her. I was going to be with her.