George Pelecanos - Soul Circus

“Okay. And what you gonna do then?”

“I’m gonna make it right.”

“You find her, you let me know where she at, I’ll make it right.”

“Nah, man, this here is me.”

“ ’Cause you can’t be lettin’ no bitch do you like she did, and I don’t care how good that pussy was. She took me off, too, and I can’t have none of that.”

“Said I’m gonna square it.”

“Don’t tell me. Show me that you will.”

“We’re kin,” said Mario. “I won’t let you down.”

Kin. Who would know it? thought Dewayne. Boy looked like a water rat ain’t had nothin’ to eat for, like, forever. They shared the same mother; that was true. Mario’s father, a nothing by all accounts, had died in a street beef when Mario wasn’t nothin’ but a kid. He must have been one ugly man. Dewayne had never known his father. His mother, Arnice Durham, had claimed that he was handsome. He was doing a stretch, last Dewayne had heard, in some joint in Pennsylvania. Didn’t mean shit to Dewayne anymore, if it did mean something to him to begin with. Whateva. Anyway, he had promised his mother he’d look after Mario, and there wasn’t anything Dewayne wouldn’t do for his moms.

Dewayne looked down at Mario. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed a couple of twenties to Mario.

“Here you go,” said Dewayne. “Go out and buy you some new stuff, don’t look like last year. Shit’s hangin’ off you, boy. And Deion ain’t even with the squad no more.”

Mario held up the bills. “I’m gonna get this back to you, too, soon as I get myself situated with a job.”

Mario slid the bills into his pants pocket, alongside the Taurus, thinking, now I got some of the hundred back I gave to that Strange in Petworth, and it’s right here next to my gun. It feels good.

“Okay, then. You need a ride somewhere?”

“Nah, man, I got my short right up there at the end of the alley.”

“I don’t see no car.”

“It’s down the street some.”

“Holler at you later,” said Dewayne.

Mario turned and walked away. Dewayne watched him hitch up his Tommys as he went down the alley.

“That boy ain’t got no whip,” said Walker.

“I know it,” said Dewayne. “I don’t know who’s more stupid, a man can’t afford no car or a man who’d rather walk than admit it.”

Some kids on bikes had been circling them in the alley, not lingering but keeping within Dewayne’s sight. They all knew who Dewayne Durham was. They were hoping to catch his eye in some way, get noticed. They were hoping, someday, to get in with him if they could.

“Hey, D,” said one of them, riding by, “when you gonna put me on?”

Dewayne didn’t answer. The one who had asked was bold on the outside but was hiding his insecurities and his fears. Dewayne had noticed how this one always backed down when someone called him on his words. The kid standing on the pegs of the back of the bike, that was a kid to look out for. He didn’t speak too much, but when he did the other kids listened. And they stepped out of his way when he was walkin’ toward them, too. He wasn’t but eleven or twelve, but in a couple of years Dewayne would start him out as a lookout by the elementary school, across from the woods of Oxon Run, where he moved product at night. Give him the opportunity to rise up above all this.

“Yo, little man,” said Dewayne to the kid riding the pegs. “Move that shit out the head of the alley so we can roll on out of here.”

The kid nodded and gave directions to the one steering the bike. They rode to the T of the side street and moved some old tires and trash cans placed there to discourage the police from entering the alley. Then they rode back and continued to circle the car. Dewayne held out a five-dollar bill to the kid on the pegs as he made a pass. The kid refused the tip with a short shake of his head. Another thing Dewayne liked about this one: He was looking toward the future. He was smart.

“Better go see Ulysses,” said Dewayne, head-motioning Walker toward his car. “Told him we’d be out.”

Dewayne got under the wheel of the Benz, and Walker got in beside him. They drove slowly down the alley, the kids on the bikes following their path. Walker got PGC up on the radio. Soon he grew tired of the commercials and scanned down to KYS. They listened to the song, that Erick Sermon joint that sampled Marvin Gaye. Marvin was a D.C. boy originally, and anything had his voice in it was all right. Least they hadn’t played this cut out, the way they liked to do.

“You think Mario’s gonna fuck up?” said Walker after a while.

“Maybe he won’t this time.”

Dewayne kept his eyes on the road and tried not to show that sick feeling he’d been having inside his stomach these days. Running a business was easy. Dealing with family, that was hard.

HORACE McKinley stood in the back window of the house on Yuma and watched Dewayne Durham’s Benz roll out the alley. McKinley, large like Biggie, looked even heftier today in his warm-up suit. He wore a large crucifix on a platinum chain that hung outside his shirt. He wore the latest And Ones on his feet. A four-finger ring, spelling YUMA in small diamonds set in gold, was fitted on his right hand.

McKinley’s body filled the window’s frame. Kids around the way called him Candyman when he was coming up, not from that horror movie but from that big fat actor whose heart went and blew up in his chest. McKinley was fat then, and he was still fat, but no one called him Candyman anymore.

He had been watching Dewayne Durham talking to that sad-ass, no-job-havin’, retard-lookin’ brother of his across the alley. If Horace had a brother like that he wouldn’t claim him. But Dewayne was soft that way. That soft spot was gonna get him dead someday, he didn’t look out.

Truth was, Dewayne didn’t seem to have the fire no more to keep up what he’d got. McKinley’d seen the way Dewayne had cut his eyes away when one of the cousins, out on the back steps, had stared him down. It was cool not to look for trouble, but sometimes you had to give a little attitude just to wake up the troops. Bottom line was, these boys were in this shit to begin with for the drama, like the way boys used to be all eager and shit to go off to war. That’s what most folks didn’t understand. But Horace McKinley did. Once in a while you had to feed your boys some conflict, just to give them something to do.

A cell phone rang behind him. He heard his man Michael Montgomery, a.k.a. Monkey Mike, talk into the phone. Then Mike was beside him by the window, hitting the “end” button on the cell.

“That was Inez over at your hair shop,” said Montgomery.

“He came back?”

Montgomery nodded. “She say he looks like some kind of police. Drivin’ a police-lookin’ car, anyway. He’s been sittin’ in the parking lot waitin’ on Devra. Look like she’s fixin’ to meet up with him, sumshit like that.”

Horace looked over at Montgomery, his arms longer than shit, his hands hanging down around his knees. How he got the name Monkey, Horace suspected. But he never had asked Montgomery to confirm it. Didn’t serve no purpose, other than to rile his ass up. Monkey was loyal, but when he was fierce he was fiercer than a motherfucker, like someone went and crossed the wires and shit inside his head. At the same time, there was something soft behind his eyes, too. McKinley had never been able to figure that part of him out.

“Better keep an eye on her,” said McKinley.

“I’ll get a couple fellas from out back.”

“Get the cousins,” said McKinley, and Montgomery went to the back steps, where James and Jeremy Coates were with the others, getting high.