George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution

“You know that girl I had tonight?” said Hess.

“I seen her on You Bet Your Life. She dropped down from the ceiling and almost hit Groucho.”

“Stop it. That girl was the most, man.”

“The most ugly. Had to be to get with you.”

The two friends laughed. And then Hess’s eyes narrowed as he tried to focus on the colored boy down the street.

“Let’s try and peg that coon, Stubie. You wanna?”

“Sure,” said Stewart. “Why not?”

Stewart hit the ignition and cruised slowly down the street. He kept the headlights off.

“He’s watchin’ us,” said Hess. “He’s trying not to, but he is.”

Hess reached over to the radio and turned it way up, Little Richard’s wail of release hitting the night. The colored boy turned his head in the direction of the Ford.

“Now we got his attention,” said Hess.

Buzz Stewart drove his car up on the sidewalk and punched the gas. The colored boy took off.

“Run, nigger, run,” said Hess.

“How many points if I hit him?”

“Say five.”

Stewart laughed as they closed in on him. The boy leaped off the sidewalk and hit the street. Hess cackled as Stewart cut left, jumped the curb, and felt his four wheels find asphalt. At the last moment, when they got dangerously close, Stewart braked to a stop.

They watched the boy hotfoot it down the street. They laughed about it on the ride home.

DETECTIVE FRANK VAUGHN checked in with his lieutenant down at the Sixth Precinct house and changed over to a black Ford. He drove around town, talked with his informants, and interviewed potential witnesses on a recent homicide involving a liquor store messenger who was lured to an address by a phone call, then robbed and shot dead. He had a few bourbons at a bar near Colorado Avenue and didn’t pay for one. While there, he phoned a divorcée he knew who lived in an apartment on 16th, near the bridge with the lions. He and the divorcée, a tall, curvy brunette named Linda, had a couple of cocktails at her place and some loose conversation before he fucked her on her queen-size bed. An hour after he had entered her apartment, he was back on the job.

Late that night he was called to the scene of a murder on Crittenden Street, down near Sherman Circle. The colored kid who’d bought it, eighteen years old, had been stabbed in the neck and chest. Uniforms had begun to canvass the neighbors but had turned up nothing yet.

Vaughn would do his job in a methodical, unhurried way. There wouldn’t be much pressure from the white shirts to make a quick arrest. A dead colored boy was not a high priority. Hell, it would barely make the papers.

The mother of the victim had arrived on the scene and was crying hysterically. The sound of her grief turned Vaughn’s thoughts to his maid, Alethea Strange. She had two sons, one the same age as Ricky, the other about the same age as the dead kid lying on the street. He’d met them once, and her husband, when he’d driven her home in a hard summer rain.

He shook off the thought. Every murder was a tragedy to someone, after all.

DEREK STRANGE LAY in his bed, listening to a scratching sound. The wind was moving the branches and leaves of the tree outside his window. A dog was making noise out there, too. Had to be the Broadnaxes’ shepherd, barking in the alley that ran behind the house. That’s all it was. A tree he climbed regular and a dog who always licked his outstretched hand.

Dennis was still out with his friends. Their parents had returned from the movie and gone to bed.

Derek felt his blood pulsing hard inside him. He wanted Dennis to come back home. He wanted him under the same roof as his mother and father. It was safe here when they were all together in this house.

He got up, went to Dennis’s bed, and slipped underneath the sheets and blanket. His brother wouldn’t mind that he’d switched. Derek smiled, smelling Dennis in the bed, knowing then that he could rest. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

As he slept, shadows crept across the wall.

COMING OUT OF Sunday school at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral, a boy heard a slow, carefully enunciated voice echoing from outdoor speakers. The voice was commanding and somehow welcoming. The boy walked down the front steps of his church and headed in the direction of the voice.

Around him, fathers were gathering their wives and children. Men were laughing with one another and smoking after-service cigarettes. The day was pleasantly cool. The smell of tobacco smoke and the scent of dogwood and magnolia blossoms were in the air.

The boy neared a big man with a friendly, wide-open face, scarred on one cheek, who was on the sidewalk talking to another aging Greek. The big man smiled at the eleven-year-old boy, who had curly brown hair and wore a blue blazer with an attendance pin fixed to its lapel.

“You ready, Niko? ”

“Not yet, Papou. Soon.”

“Where you goin’?”

“Gonna see what’s goin’ on over there. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay, boy. Meet me at the karo. ”

The big man watched his grandson cross Garfield, go down a set of concrete steps, and disappear into the grounds of the National Cathedral.

The boy followed the voice and walked through a lawn landscaped with azaleas and other shrubs, finally reaching the edge of a huge crowd. He made his way into the middle of the crowd, which was mostly white, but a different kind of white than he and his grandfather and friends. His grandfather called these people Amerikani, or sometimes simply aspri. They were facing the loudspeakers that had been placed outside the cathedral and they were listening to that voice, sounded like a black man, which was coming from somewhere inside the stone walls. From the look of concentration on their faces, the boy could tell that what was being said was important.

“… we are not coming to Washington to engage in any histrionic action, nor are we coming to tear up Washington…”

The boy turned to the man beside him and tugged on his suit jacket.

“Excuse me,” said the boy. “Who is that?”

“Dr. King,” said the man, who did not take his eyes from the loudspeakers as he answered.

“… I don’t like to predict violence, but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will not only be as bad, but worse than last year.”

Some of the men in the crowd looked at their wives as this was said. These same men and women then glanced at their children.

Soon the boy grew bored, as he did not understand the meaning of Dr. King’s words. He walked from the cathedral grounds back toward the property where his own church and people stood. His grandfather was leaning against his gold ’63 Buick Wildcat, parked on Garfield. He flicked the last of his cigarette onto the street and opened the passenger door for the boy. Then he got under the wheel of his car and turned the ignition.

“You went to hear the mavros, eh?” said the grandfather, pulling away from the curb.

“I heard a little,” said the boy. “Is he good?”

“Good?” The grandfather shrugged. “What the hell do I know? I think he believes what he’s sayin’. Anyway, he’s stirring things up, that’s for sure.”

The boy reached for the radio switch. “Where we goin’?”

“To see Kirio Georgelakos, over on Kennedy Street. He ran out of tomatoes. I told him we’d drop some by.”

The boy, whose name was Nick Stefanos, fiddled with the dial of the radio, stopping it at 1390. He found a rock-and-roll song he liked on WEAM and upped the volume. He began to sing along.