Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“Speak,” the Director said.

“It’s Hector. Hector Alvarez.”

The Director could practically hear Alvarez gulping through the phone. The Director did not like Alvarez, a former drug addict turned counselor. The Director had little respect for addicts. He viewed them as weak, lacking self-control.

But dealer recruitment was not something the Director wanted to do himself. He came up with the idea for recruiting in prisons early on. It just made sense. Most of the inmates were there for dealing drugs in the first place, so they already knew the business. Plus, recruiting in jail meant you weren’t taking the unnecessarily dangerous step of swiping active dealers from other syndicates or gangs.

It hadn’t taken long working through the Director’s various Department of Corrections contacts to find Alvarez. He and the Director had a few beat-around-the-bush conversations, but the Director knew the first time they spoke he had found the right man. Alvarez had the taste for the finer things in life but not the paycheck. He had that sense of grandiosity, common among addicts, that convinced him he was due more than what life was giving him.

The arrangement with Alvarez, as it was with the recruiters in the other prisons, was simple: he received a cash bounty for every dealer he channeled to the Director. Yet while the Director valued Alvarez’s service, he had little patience for the man himself-especially when he was being hysterical like this.

“Get a hold of yourself,” the Director commanded.

“I’m sorry. I just got a visit from a reporter, a guy from the Eagle-Examiner,” Alvarez said through shallow breaths. “I think he’s on to us.”

“Explain.”

“Well, he had one of the dealers with him. Rashan Reeves. I got him for you a couple months ago. Remember him?”

“I do,” the Director said. The Director knew who all his dealers were, even if they didn’t know him.

“Yeah, so the reporter is like, ‘Rashan here tells me you’re recruiting drug dealers from jail. I’m going to write a story about you if you don’t tell me who you work for.’ ”

“And you told him. . what?”

“Nothing,” Alvarez said, his voice cracking slightly. “I told him to screw off, and that was it.”

“So by ‘on to us,’ you really mean ‘on to you,’ ” the Director said coolly.

Alvarez did not reply.

“Well, you’re calling me,” the Director said. “Is there something you want me to do about this?”

“I just. . I thought you should know.”

“Fine. What’s this reporter’s name?” the Director asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“I don’t know. He said his name so fast.”

“Carter Ross.”

“Yeah, that’s it!” Alvarez said. “I swear, I didn’t tell him anything.”

“And where is Mr. Ross now?”

“I don’t know. He just left.”

The Director frowned. The Director thought he had rid the world of Carter Ross with one push of a wireless detonator. It had surprised the Director to see Ross alive and breathing on the News at Noon. Clearly, he needed to be dealt with. Immediately.

As for Alvarez. .

“So, tell me, Hector, how old is that little girl of yours?” the Director asked.

“She just turned nine,” Alvarez replied, his voice faltering.

“How nice,” the Director said. “Tell her happy birthday.”

I must have yelled Red’s name twenty or thirty times, with each repetition a little louder, a little more desperate than the last. I yelled until my throat went raw and I lost the breath to yell anymore.

But he wasn’t there. Or perhaps he was, but only as a corpse buried under several tons of debris. I started walking toward Building Five to, I don’t know, say a prayer or something. Then somewhere off in the distance, I heard a faint voice.

“Who there?” it said.

“Red?” I shouted one final time.

“What you want?” the voice said, and this time I could trace it a little better. It was coming from Building Three. And it sounded like Red.

I ran toward Building Three, pushing my numb legs to move as fast as they could. As I got closer, I saw Red’s patchy-bald head sticking out of a second-story window. I never thought I would be so happy to see an old homeless man in Newark.

“Hey, Red!” I said, feeling some warmth returning to my body. “Remember me? Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner .”

“Yessir. I got Queen Mary right here,” he said, then lowered his voice for a moment. “I’m trying to get me a little some, you know what I mean?”

I was so happy to see him alive, it didn’t bother me that the image of two aging addicts in the throes of passion was now drifting through my mind.

“Why aren’t you dead right now?” I asked.

“Oh, you mean with the building and all that? Shoooot,” he said. Red was directly above me, one story up. I was still on ground level, which made me feel like the world’s weirdest Romeo looking up at the world’s ugliest Juliet.

“Yeah, you weren’t in Building Five this morning?”

“Oh, I was there,” Red said.

“Then how did you not get blown up?”

“Aw, hell, youngster, I got more lives than a kitty cat,” Red boasted. “Can’t nothing blow me up.”

“You mean you were inside?”

“Well, I was jus’ layin’ in there with Queen Mary”-more bad visuals-“when I heard this racket coming from the fire escape,” he began, and I imagined this was not his first time telling the story today. “An’ I was thinking, ‘Who’s comin’ visitin’ at this time of the mornin’?’ Our friends ain’t exactly early risers, you know?”

I nodded. Red sounded a little less drunk than the first time I spoke with him, which was to say he might have only been two sheets to the wind instead of the usual three.

“So I stole a peek around the corner, an’ I saw this guy with a bunch of dy-no-mite. An’ I thought he was from the city, come to blow the buildin’ up. They’s always talking about how they gonna blow it up. An’ I jus’ thought maybe today was the day, an’ they jus’ hadn’t told none of us street people, you know?”

“Right,” I said.

“So I watch him go ’bout his bidness, pickin’ out a wall and tapin’ his dy-no-mite and fussin’ with all his doodads. And then he musta gone and taped it to some other walls or something, I don’t know. But as soon as he was gone, I went an’ got Mary. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we best be gettin’ usselves outta here. It about to blow.’ An’ you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Awww, there you go again,’ ” Red said, and then started howling with hee-haws, punctuating it with some woohoos, then finishing with some hoo-wees. I laughed to be polite, having no idea what he found so funny. Then again, I’m not sure it was fair to expect total clarity from a guy whose last sober day had probably been while I was in the first grade.

“So I said, ‘No, no, Mary, we got to go. I mean, we got to go now, ’ ” Red said. “An’ she didn’t say nothin’. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we got to go. ’ An’ I done picked her up and carried her out, jus’ like I was Superman.”

I was having a tough time believing Red could carry a well-mannered lapdog-much less an inert old woman-down a fire escape. And apparently so did Queen Mary.

“There you go again!” she hollered from somewhere inside the building. And Red, finding this every bit as inexplicably hysterical as last time, started with a fresh round of har-hars, tee-hees, and ho-hos. I let him finish and he continued.