George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution

Jones cut right and then right again, going north of Massachusetts Avenue. He had parked his car over here the night before. He had heard talk on the street that 7th was going to burn the next day. Funny how most everyone down here knew, when the police, they hadn’t known a thing.

THE HOUSE IN Wheaton had gone quieter through the morning and into the afternoon. Olga sitting at the kitchen table, smoking her Larks, watching the news broadcasts on the little black-and-white Philco set on a rolling metal stand. Olga telling Alethea how sorry she was for her “people,” not meeting Alethea’s eyes as she spoke. Frank lumbering around in his robe, reading the sports page, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, like it was any other day. Only their son, Ricky, had talked to her not as a Negro woman but as a woman. Asked her, also, if there was anything he could do to help her get back home.

“Your father’s going to drive me,” she said. “Thank you.”

He hugged her outside the kitchen, unselfconsciously, as he had when he was a child. She had always been fond of him. Maybe there was hope in the young. Maybe she and the Vaughns and everyone like them needed to die out before this sickness was erased. It was a shame it had to be that way. But she had the feeling it was so.

Alethea stood in the foyer by the front door, waiting for Frank Vaughn to come downstairs and drive her back home. She could hear his muffled voice coming from his and Olga’s bedroom, and the music behind the closed door of Ricky’s room.

Up in the bedroom, Vaughn slipped his.38 Special into his shoulder holster and went to the small nightstand on his side of the bed. He opened its drawer and used a key on a green lockbox. Inside the box was another gun: a cheap.32 automatic holstered in a clip-on. He removed it from its holster, checked the magazine, and palmed the six-shot load back into the laminated-wood grip. He clipped the reholstered.32, which he had taken off a pimp in Shaw six months earlier, onto the belt line behind his back. He folded a cloth handkerchief into a small square and dropped it into the pocket of his pants. He shook himself into his Robert Hall suit jacket, gray with light blue stripes, and looked himself over in the mirror.

“Why do you have to go in?” said Olga, looking at him from across the room, leaning against the frame of their master bathroom door.

“I’m workin’ a case.”

“Today?”

“Homicide never sleeps.”

“Haven’t you been watching the news?”

Vaughn formed his mouth into an O, gave Olga a theatrical look of surprise. “Why, is somethin’ goin’ on?”

“Don’t be an ape.”

“I’m not goin’ near the trouble spots, Olga. Don’t worry.”

“Promise me, Frank.”

“Okay, I promise.”

It was a lie.

“Come here,” said Vaughn.

She crossed the room and put her arms around his waist. He lowered his face and kissed her on the lips. He pushed himself against her to let her know he was alive. He thought of Linda Allen and her warm box.

“I might be late tonight, doll.”

“Call me. So I know you’re all right.”

Vaughn left the room and stepped onto the second-floor landing, glancing at Ricky’s closed door before going down the stairs. Alethea Strange was waiting for him in the foyer, buttoning her coat over her uniform dress.

“Let’s go,” said Vaughn.

“Aren’t you gonna say good-bye to your son?”

“What, you kiddin’?”

“Tell him you love him. Hug him, Mr. Vaughn.” Alethea made a motion with her chin, pointing it toward the second floor. “Go ahead. I can wait.”

Something in her liquid brown eyes told him not to protest. He went back up the stairs and knocked on Ricky’s door.

DOWNTOWN GOVERNMENT WORKERS and private-sector employees, hearing the ongoing reports of escalating rioting on the radio, getting panic calls from spouses, and seeing the smoke drifting toward them from the eastern portion of the city, began to leave their jobs in numbers. Retail employees on F Street and in the rest of the downtown district did the same. Massive uptown and crosstown traffic jams ensued. Some citizens stepped into four-ways and tried to direct cars through gridlocked intersections. Others abandoned their automobiles and walked, trying to relieve the anxiety they felt at being trapped inside their vehicles.

On Georgia Avenue, the northbound lanes were at a virtual standstill. Vaughn drove his Polara south with relative ease, Alethea Strange beside him on the big bench seat. They had passed through Shepherd Park and Sheridan, where there had been scattered window-breaking and looting at places like Ida’s department store, but nothing of the magnitude of 7th Street below. The sky had darkened and the smell of smoke grew stronger as they drove deeper into the city.

Vaughn lit a cigarette and kept it in his left hand, hanging it out the window so as not to bother Alethea. He turned on the radio and tuned it to a middle-of-the-road station just as the DJ began to introduce a song: “And here’s one you’re gonna like, Frank and Nancy Sinatra doing ‘Somethin’ Stupid.’ I’m Fred Fiske, and you’re listening to twelve six-oh, WWDC.”

Vaughn sang the Frank parts under his breath and let Nancy do her thing without his accompaniment. Alethea had to marvel at Vaughn’s nonchalant attitude in the face of the ongoing events. But then, that was Frank Vaughn all over. Single-minded, unchanging, stuck in a time that never was and that existed, perhaps, only in his mind.

“Did you talk to Ricky?” said Alethea as the song came to an end.

“A little,” said Vaughn, keeping his eyes on the road.

“He’s a good boy.”

“Yeah, he’s all right.”

“It’s important to tell them that you love them,” she said. “Every time they leave the house, or you leave… You just don’t know if you’ll ever have the chance again. Only the Lord has that kind of knowledge.”

“Amen,” said Vaughn clumsily.

He was sweating a little under his collar. He knew she was reflecting on the death of her firstborn son and her own regrets. He had never been comfortable with these kinds of conversations.

When he’d gone into Ricky’s room, their brief exchange had been awkward and forced. Ricky hadn’t even turned down the music, some guy singing about his “white room,” something to do with drugs, most likely. Vaughn had given his son a hug before he left, as Alethea had suggested, the first one he’d given him in years. It felt as okay as an embrace could feel between two men. What he hadn’t done was tell Ricky that he loved him. He didn’t understand why you had to say you loved your kid or, for that matter, put your arms around him to show it. Hell, he’d been feeding him, clothing him, and buying him things his whole life. For Chrissakes, wasn’t that enough?

“Thank you,” said Alethea.

“For what?”

“Looking after Derek yesterday during that robbery. He told me the whole story.”

“He…” Vaughn searched for the word. “He acquitted himself well. He’s a fine young man. Gonna be good police.”

They drove into Park View and neared her street.

“I’m worried about him,” said Alethea. “Out there in all this.”

Vaughn could feel her eyes on him directly.

“I’ll look after him,” said Vaughn as casually as he could. “I’m goin’ down there now.”

Down there, thought Vaughn, to find the one who murdered your son. I have fucked up everything good in my life, but there is one thing that I still do right.

“Thank you, Frank,” she said.

He felt himself blush as he heard her say his name. He turned left onto Princeton and went slowly up the street. He stopped at her row house, where her husband, Darin or whatever his name was, stood out front. He turned to look at her. She nodded at him once and smiled with her eyes. Vaughn thinking, She’s no Julie London. But, damn, that is a woman right there.