George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution

He liked all kinds of R amp;B. But when he was looking to spend money in the record stores, he kept his eye out for the labels Tamla, Gordy, and Motown. There wasn’t nothin’ better than the Motown sound. Those blue-gum singers they had down south, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett and them, some of their stuff was okay, but when they got to grunting and sweating they were way too niggerish for Stewart’s tastes. The Motowners, they dressed high-class, in tuxes and gowns, and wore their hair like whites. What they were singing about, you could tell it wasn’t just meant for colored. Hell, they could have been singing about things that happened in white people’s lives. Sometimes, you closed your eyes, you could even pretend that they were white.

Not that Stewart had given up on rock completely. He and Shorty, sometimes with Martini in tow, still went out to the clubs. And Link Wray remained his man.

Stewart had missed Link’s long run at Vinnie’s, a rough old bar down around the Greyhound station on H, because those were the years he had been in the service. When he returned, Wray and the Raymen were the house act at the 1023 Club in Far Southeast. It was a bikers’ bar, with members of Satan’s Few, the Phantoms, the Pagans, and others in the mix. By then that part of Anacostia was going from working-class white to colored, and tensions between the neighborhood residents and the club patrons had begun to boil. In the summer of ’66, coloreds attacked the club, cutting power lines, knocking over bikes, and tossing bricks through the 1023’s windows. The following week the Pagans retaliated with some righteous ass kicking of their own. Buzz Stewart and Walter Hess had joined the melee. This was before Shorty went to jail for something else he’d done. But on the bloody night of that retaliation, Stewart had seen him take a gravity knife to some coon’s face during the free-for-all. Last Stewart had seen that man, he was running down the street screaming like a girl. Shorty musta cut him good.

Eventually that club had to close. Link moved to the Famous, on New York Avenue, across from the Rocket Room, another rough-and-tumble joint. Stewart followed him and continued to drink there and in other bucket-of-bloods just like it. There was the Anchor Inn, in Southeast, which was known to employ a whore waitress or two; and Strick’s, on Branch Avenue, which still had country music; the Alpine, on Kennedy; the Lion’s Den, on Georgia; and Cousin Nick’s, another Pagan dive, near the bus depot, high on 14th. Coloreds were not welcome in most of these places, though many of these bars were in colored neighborhoods. If one came in and leered at one of the white girls, well, that was his misfortune. You just had to go ahead and stomp his ass.

Inside these establishments, Stewart felt safe with his own. It was like he was with his car-club boys in the parking lot of Mo’s, the Chantels were singing from the dash radio, and the calendar still read 1959. But outside the club walls, the attitude had changed. Coloreds weren’t looking away when you stared them down. They walked real slow across the street, almost daring you to hit ’em. Young ones especially had that laughing, fuck-you look in their eyes. Clearly they weren’t going to take any shit from white boys anymore.

There were other changes as well. Greasers were no longer cool. Hot rods were out, muscle cars and pony cars were in, and Elvis was for squares. Stewart lost the Brylcreem in his hair and let it grow, just a little, over his ears. Some of Stewart’s friends got into pot. A few got into worse. Walter Hess still drank beer and sometimes Jack, but somewhere along the line, probably in prison, he’d started in on amphetamines, too. As for Stewart, he stayed with beer and hard liquor. He liked Ten High bourbon and ginger ale. On certain nights, when he wanted to get way outside his head, he went with gin and Coke.

In their day, Stewart and Hess had relied mainly on their fists. Now they never went into the colored sections of town without some kind of weapon. Buzz kept a derringer in his boot; Shorty always carried some kind of knife. They wore the same accessories in the after-hours bars they frequented on 13th and 14th Streets, down in Shaw. Of course, the races in those joints mixed, as a certain tension release came with the late-hour buzz. The patrons were a drunken blur of black and white. The whores were mostly black.

“You got that Olds ready?” It was the fat manager, standing in the open bay door.

“Just about,” said Stewart, who had balanced and rotated the tires and was now tightening the lugs.

“The blue-hair’s waiting.”

“Said I was near done.”

Stewart looked out the door. The manager was already waddling back to his office. Out by the pumps, Martini was talking to a big guy wearing a suit and hat, the gas line going into his old-man’s Dodge. The big guy had a sleepy set of eyes, and his hair was cut real short. You’d think he was military from the first glance. But Stewart had been around enough to know different. This guy was a cop.

Stewart wasn’t surprised. Dominic Martini knew most of the cops in the neighborhood. It was like a game he played, knowing their names. He’d been hanging around precinct houses, watching them, since he was a kid.

Dumb shit, thought Stewart. It was like he looked up to them. Imagine, looking up to a cop.

Soon after, a squad car drove into the lot with two uniforms, colored and a white guy, in the front seat. The driver, the white guy, pulled up near the plainclothesman’s Dodge.

Stewart said, “What the fuck.”

FRANK VAUGHN LIKED to get out of his car and stretch while the young man at the Esso station gassed up his car. This one had been working here on and off for many years.

On his shirt, the name Dom was stitched onto a patch. There was a long period there when this Dom had been gone. Vaughn guessed he had done an active tour. He had the look of someone the government would snatch. He sure wasn’t college-deferment material, and he was no rich man’s son. Probably a high school dropout to boot. But plenty big enough to be a soldier. When Vaughn used to come here years earlier, the kid was full of piss and vinegar. Knew Vaughn was a cop and was a smart-ass about it, too. Now it looked like all that attitude had drained right out of his eyes.

“Don’t fill it all the way,” said Vaughn, who was admiring a shiny, tricked-out Plymouth Belvedere parked alongside the garage. “Leave some room for the tiger.”

“Huh?”

“Your sign says ‘Put a tiger in your tank.’”

“Oh, yeah,” said Dom, like he didn’t get the joke. More likely, he heard the same crack ten times a day.

A squad car pulled into the lot. Vaughn knew the occupants. Peters, the Ivy Leaguer, and the colored rookie, Derek Strange. The white knight and his black partner, crisp as a newly minted bill, part of the new look of the MPD. To Vaughn, it seemed like more of a publicity stunt than anything practical. Peters was a high-profile uniform who sometimes got his picture in the papers. Put him next to a colored guy, a good-looking one who could speak in full sentences, to make some sort of point. This is the face of your future po-lice officer.

Vaughn felt that the MPD was hiring black cops too quickly, with little regard for their qualifications. In theory, it was a good idea to have coloreds policing colored citizens. But Vaughn was not sure that he or the department was ready for the change. Like everything else rushing by him these past few years, it seemed to be happening too fast.

This young man was all right, though. Hell, he was Alethea’s son, so that wasn’t any kind of surprise.

The Ford stopped on the other side of the pump and idled. Derek Strange was on the passenger side, his arm resting on the lip of the open window.