Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

When she got to the dealer she stopped, two arm lengths away, and put a hand on her hip. He looked the other way. I could see her head bobbing as she talked, each shift of her hip putting her another step closer. Suddenly, in a movement like a snake strike, the man's hand flicked out and caught her flush across the face. The violence of it made my own hand jump to the door handle, but I sat still. The girl stumbled back. None of the runners reacted. They kept their eyes to the street as if the bitch-slap was either expected, or a regular occurrence.

The woman slunk away and the man resettled himself on a tall wooden stool. He pulled straight the crease in his trousers and then looked up in my direction as if daring me to make a move. I couldn't have done a thing. I wasn't wearing a badge and had to take a grain of solace that I was killing his business for a couple of hours.

Momma never said a word. Now Eddie was invisible to her, too.

He'd sat in the house too long. The drugs were long since gone. He was hungry, both for food and another high. He still had some of Mr. Harold's money in his pocket. The light was dying through the living room window, so he went out. Under a few bags of bottles and some chunks of aluminum window framing, he found his old winter coat in his cart. He knew it wasn't winter. He would know when the city started putting up the Kwanzaa banners on Sistrunk Boulevard that winter was coming. But he put the coat on today because he was still shivering.

Eddie had made a decision in the silence of his momma's house. He would go back to the liquor store and wait for Mr. Harold to show up. It was either there or the jail where he'd first met him. But he didn't want to go near the jail. Mr. Harold had told him to never come to the jail or the money would stop. And Mr. Harold had been the only one in the forensics ward who really sat and listened to Eddie. The liquor store. It was the only place he had. But first he'd need a bundle to get through.

When he got to Thirteenth and Court he stopped at the corner like he always did to watch the place. He pretended to look in the dumpster at Ringold's but that's not where his eyes went. There was something different on the street and he could smell it. Eddie knew his days and this should be a busy one. But the runners weren't moving and the street was cold. Eddie pulled his coat tighter.

There was only one potential buyer, in a blue pickup parked near the big oak tree, but he couldn't see from here what color the man was who sat unmoving inside. Eddie pushed the cart forward and saw the girl coming up the sidewalk. He watched her walking hard, her blocky shoes scuffing. She was a junkie. Eddie had tried to lure her to go with him before but she always spat at him and told him to keep his nigger ass away.

That was all right. Eddie just quietly made the offer. If they accepted, he would give them what they wanted and then get what he wanted. That's the way it worked.

As she got closer Eddie could hear her cussing and could see the wetness leaking through the hand she held to her face. He moved on, distracted but hungry. When he got close to the Brown Man's runners he could feel them step away instead of moving closer to the man as usual. Eddie pushed his cart closer. One of the runners spit out a harsh whisper, "What you doin', junk man? Cain't you see five-oh on the street?"

Eddie never raised his head, never turned around. He just bent over to pick up a beer can and cut his eyes back to the blue pickup that he'd forgotten after the girl. Police on the street?

The white man in the driver's seat looked directly at him. Not past him at the Brown Man. Not through him like everyone else did. He was looking Eddie straight in the face in a way that no person had done in years on the street, and it scared him.

It was then that the marked patrol car came around the corner and Eddie heard the Brown Man say "Fuck" in a low growl. Eddie stood up and pushed away, feeling the cold eyes of the man in the truck on him like two icy nickels being pressed against the skin on the back of his neck.

I sat watching the dealer on his stool, his wooden throne on the street. The sneer and quick pop of anger had blown a hole in his act of nonchalance. He didn't like me messing with his action, but he also knew he'd be here tomorrow, and the next day. He knew his customers wouldn't go away like I would. I'd done my stints on the narcotics cases and done the proselytizing to the local kids when I was walking a beat. I'd stroll up into a group off South Street and know from the active hands going to pockets what was up. I'd try to be cool, say what's up fellas. They would avoid eye contact except for the one ballsy one who would look me in the face and sarcastically call me officer.

To him I'd give the speech about the penalty for possession with intent to sell, the mandatory minimums. And as often as not he'd recite the correct amounts of product needed to constitute a charge of intent. The others would hide whatever grin was crawling onto their faces. They were smart enough not to push it. Ballsy guy was not. So I would position my body and cut him off from the others, back him to a wall like a good fighter cutting off the ring and without touching him I'd get my face close and watch his eyes widen like a bad fighter knowing he's in trouble. The eyebrows would raise and he'd say "What?" By then I would have tilted up my nightstick from its metal ring on my belt and would have stuck the rounded end up into the vulnerable notch where ribs meet below the sternum and I would push.

"Not on my beat," I would say, only loud enough for him to hear. "Not on my street."

If he nodded, I would let them walk away and I would stand and watch them. Sometimes they would go in silence. Sometimes from a block away I would hear one yell, "Fuck you, cop." Either way I would wonder why I was out there.

I was thinking the same thing today when I picked up the dark figure in the corner of my eye.

He was a big man, shrouded in a long dark coat in seventy- degree weather. He was pushing a grocery cart down the sidewalk in a slow, lethargic pace. His head was tucked down into his thick shoulders like a big, wary tortoise, and he seemed to be mumbling to himself. Then as I watched, he deftly, too deftly, steered the cart effortlessly around a milk crate in his path and then through the drug runners. I was trying to place him, recall where I'd seen his shape before when he bent to pick up a can. I watched the hand slide out of the coat cuffs and swallow the can and that's when he looked up and I saw his eyes. They were black hollows, set deep in a face that was dark and emotionless. I could not blink and suddenly felt a fine ripple of muscle along my spine like a traveling drop of sweat.

The yelp of a siren snapped my head away. Blue lights flashed three times in my rearview, and in my side mirror I saw the cop opening the door of his patrol car.

"Stay in the vehicle," he said over his P.A. system. He got out of his car and stood for a moment. And then I watched him walk up, hand on the butt of his holstered gun. I checked my other side mirror and saw his partner standing behind his opened door, looking through my back window. Two-man patrol, I thought, a luxury in Philly.

When I looked back up the street, the big junk man was gone. It had only been seconds, but he had disappeared. Two residents were poking their heads out of partially opened doors.

"That's a good place for your hands, sir," the approaching cop said, staying close to the body of the truck and back over my left shoulder. I had already put my hands up on top of the steering wheel, knowing what made these guys nervous.

"License and registration, please."

For some inane reason, maybe it was just biological to the species, I said, "Is there a problem, officer?"