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

“Whateva.”

My father complained about everything for the next hour. I listened to him, and the junkie veteran in the next stall over who was begging for something to take away his pain, and the gags of another dude who was getting a stomach tube forced down his throat. Then an Indian doctor, name of Singh, pulled the curtain back and walked into our stall. He told my father that there was nothing in his blood or on the EKG to indicate that there was cause for alarm.

“So all this bull shit was for nothin’?” said my father, like he was disappointed he wasn’t sick.

“Go home and get some rest,” said Dr. Singh, in a cheerful way. He smelled like one them restaurants they got, but he was all right.

Matthew returned, got my father dressed back into his streetclothes, and filled out the discharge forms.

“The Lord loves you, Leon,” said Matthew, before he went off to attend to someone else.

“Get me out this motherfucker,” said my father. I fetched a wheelchair from where they had them by the front desk.

I drove my father’s Buick to his house, on the 700 block of Quebec Street, not too far from the hospital, in Park View. It took awhile to get him up the steps of his row house. By the time he stepped onto the brick-and-concrete porch, he was gasping for breath. He didn’t go out much anymore, and this was why.

Inside, my mother, Martina Coates, got him situated in his own wheelchair, positioned in front of his television set, where he sits most of his waking hours. She waits on him all day and sleeps lightly at night in case he falls out of his bed. She gives him showers and even washes his ass. My mother is a church woman who believes that her reward will come in heaven. It’s ’cause of her that I’m still allowed to live in my father’s house.

The television was real loud, the way he likes to play it since his stroke. He watches them old games on that replay show on ESPN.

“Franco Harris!” I shouted, pointing at the screen. “Boy was beast .”

My father didn’t even turn his head. I would have watched some of that old Steelers game with him if he had asked me to, but he didn’t, so I went upstairs to my room.

It is my older brother’s room as well. James’s bed is on the opposite wall and his basketball and football trophies, from when he was a kid all the way through high school, are still on his dresser. He made good after Howard Law, real good, matter of fact. He lives over there in Crestwood, west of 16th, with his pretty redbone wife and their two light-skinned kids. He doesn’t come around this neighborhood all that much, though it ain’t but fifteen minutes away. He wouldn’t have drove my father over to the VA Hospital, either, or waited around in that place all day. He would have said he was too busy, that he couldn’t get out “the firm” that day. Still, my father brags on James to all his friends. He got no cause to brag on me.

I changed into some warm shit, and put my smokes and matches into my coat. I left my cell in my bedroom, as it needed to be charged. When I got downstairs, my mother asked me where I was going.

“I got a little side thing I’m workin’ on,” I said, loud enough for my father to hear.

My father kinda snorted and chuckled under his breath. He might as well had gone ahead and said, Bullshit , but he didn’t need to. I wanted to tell him more, but that would be wrong. If my thing was to be uncovered, I wouldn’t want nobody coming back on my parents.

I zipped my coat and left out the house.

It had begun to snow some. Flurries swirled in the cones of light coming down from the streetlamps. I walked down to Giant Liquors on Georgia and bought a pint of Popov, and hit the vodka as I walked back up Quebec. I crossed Warder Street, and kept on toward Park Lane. The houses got a little nicer here as the view improved. Across Park were the grounds of the Soldier’s Home, bordered by a black iron, spear-topped fence. It was dark out, and the clouds were blocking any kinda moonlight, but I knew what was over there by heart. I had cane-pole fished that lake many times as a kid, and chased them geese they had in there, too. Now they had three rows of barbed wire strung out over them spear-tops, to keep out the kids and the young men who liked to lay their girlfriends out straight on that soft grass.

Me and Sondra used to hop that fence some evenings, the summer before I dropped out of Roosevelt High. I’d bring some weed, a bottle of screw-top wine, and my Walkman and we’d go down to the other side of that lake and chill. I’d let her listen to the headphones while I hit my smoke. I had made mix-tapes off my records, stuff she was into, like Bobby Brown and Tone-Loc. I’d tell her about the cars I was gonna be driving, and the custom suits I’d be wearing, soon as I got a good job. How I didn’t need no high school diploma to get those things or to prove how smart I was. She looked at me like she believed it. Sondra had some pretty brown eyes.

She married a personal injury lawyer with a storefront office up in Shepherd Park. They live in a house in PG County, in one of those communities got gates. I seen her once, when she came back to the neighborhood to visit her moms, who still stays down on Luray. She was bum-rushing her kids into the house, like they might get sick if they breathed this Park View air. She saw me walking down the street and turned her head away, trying to act like she didn’t recognize me. It didn’t cut me. She can rewrite history in her mind if she wants to, but her fancy husband ain’t never gonna have what I did, ’cause I had that pussy when it was new.

I stepped into the alley that runs north-south between Princeton and Quebec. My watch, a looks-like-a-Rolex I bought on the street for ten dollars, read 9:05. Detective Barnes was late. I unscrewed the top of the Popov and had a pull. It burned nice. I tapped it again and lit myself a smoke.

“Psst. Hey, yo.”

I looked up over my shoulder, where the sound was. A boy leaned on the lip of one of those second-floor, wood back porches that ran out to the alley. Behind him was a door with curtains on its window. A bicycle tire was showing beside the boy. Kids be putting their bikes up on porches around here so they don’t get stole.

“What you want?” I said.

“Nothin’ you got,” said the boy. He looked to be about twelve, tall and skinny, with braided hair under a black skully.

“Then get your narrow ass back inside your house.”

“You the one loiterin’.”

“I’m mindin’ my own, is what I’m doin’. Ain’t you got no homework or nothin’?”

“I did it at study hall.”

“Where you go, MacFarland Middle?”

“Yeah.”

“I went there, too.”

“So?”

I almost smiled. He had a smart mouth on him, but he had heart.

“What you doin’ out here?” said the kid.

“Waitin’ on someone,” I said.

Just then Detective Barnes’s unmarked drove by slow. He saw me but kept on rolling. I knew he’d stop, up aways on the street.

“Awright, little man,” I said, pitching my cigarette aside and slipping my pint into my jacket pocket. I could feel the kid’s eyes on me as I walked out the alley.

I slid into the backseat of Barnes’s unmarked, a midnight-blue Crown Vic. I kinda laid down on the bench, my head against the door, below the window line so no one on the outside could see me. It’s how I do when I’m rolling with Barnes.

He turned right on Park Place and headed south. I didn’t need to look out the window to know where he was going. He drives down to Michigan Avenue, heads east past the Children’s Hospital, then continues on past North Capitol and then Catholic U, into Brookland and beyond. Eventually he turns around and comes back the same way.