T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

Wexler nodded knowingly.

“This has nothing to do with religion.”

“You’ll find him,” said Wexler. “The creator has a master plan. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. Sometimes we have to be tried before we can be really blessed, like Jacob or Job. You’ll see. My pastor says that sometimes you have to suffer to be tempered, like the iron in a forge becomes a fine sword. You’ll see. Soon we’ll all be delivered, like the Israelites out of Egypt. My pastor says we’re the chosen ones. My pastor says God loves black people, and God has a plan for everybody.”

So did Hitler, thought Achilles. “Leave that alone already.” He pointed at Dobbs Plaza in the distance, where winos slept in the shadow of that slave-castle wall, and beyond that, at a new church, as if people could pray their way out of poverty. He made a sweeping motion with his hand as if to say Behold . These people were fucked up. It was always the same. The pushers, pimps, and preachers all drove fancy cars while everybody else rode the two-dollar taxi. The big sell: get high Friday, get laid Saturday, get forgiven Sunday. God was the gravy that made shit sweet as sugar. “This shit isn’t mysterious.”

“I know it’s not your thing, but I’ve been praying for him. Look around this neighborhood. He needs all the help he can get. So, I pray for him.”

“Thanks,” said Achilles, the way he said it when Sammy gave him a CD he already had. Avoiding Wexler’s eyes as he left, Achilles took the stairs one at a time, his steps heavy. Outside, the last few people scrounged through the scraps abandoned by the lunch crowd: bread crusts, potato chip crumbs, warm dregs of pop. At the end of the block, a malt liquor sign blinked a question, a menthol cigarette sign winked a response. A pregnant woman carrying a baby on her hip, dark V s on the backs of both of their shirts, pushed a stroller piled high with newspapers, and perched atop that pile, two bags of crushed cans. If this was his plan, God hated black people.

The man in the BDUs rummaged through the fifty-gallon drum that served as a trashcan, his arm in up to the elbow so that only the shoulder patches were visible: the Infantry badge, the Airborne patch, and as Achilles saw when he was close enough to read it, a nametag that read CONROY.

Achilles took the man by surprise, throwing him facedown to the ground, kneeling on his back, and pulling the jacket below the elbows so that the man’s arms were tangled in the sleeves, making it hard for him to fight back. Achilles leaned on the back of the man’s head with one hand and grabbed an ear with the other, pressing his head into the ground, his mouth into the dirt, suffocating him, pressing harder the more he kicked and easing up when the kicking stopped. The procedure was simple: induce panic, take control, set parameters. “Where you’d get the jacket?”

The crowd was initially stunned, but the spell broke when Achilles spoke. A few stepped forward, muttering about their rights. They were the same crew that had been lurking along the bushes while the lunch truck was there.

Achilles put his hand up. “Army business. Step back or you’re obstructing.” He returned his attention to the man beneath him. “Where did you get the jacket?”

His response was drowned out by the crowd, which had now coalesced around the old man who’d eaten the mayonnaise packets. He had a neatly trimmed beard and a shock of gray hair brushed back like Frederick Douglass. He cleared his throat. “This ain’t the army. I was in the army. And you can’t come around here like that. This here is America.” “Amerca,” he pronounced it.

“Preach on,” a few murmured their assent. Others shouted, “This ain’t Virginia Beach.”

“Where’d you get the jacket?” Achilles asked again. “That’s all I want to know.”

“The purple house. I’ll show you. The purple house.”

The crowd stepped back when Achilles yanked the man to his feet and marched him off in the direction indicated. Someone said, “He ain’t all that tall no way.”

Achilles pushed through the crowd flashing his military ID, the men moving back like it was radioactive, except one old guy who called out, “That don’t scare me none. I was in the real war. Smells like a con to me.”

Conroy meant “wise advisor,” according to their father. According to one drill sergeant, it meant they had to carry a lot of shit. According to another, it meant nothing. “You have new brothers now,” he told them. “We are all your brothers. You are now 11-B, one and many.” Basic training and infantry school were combined into five phases named after colors, but Achilles thought of them in three stages: crawl, walk, and run. They learned to get by on little water, less food, and no sleep, and to carry only the bare necessities when possible, which was why Achilles was surprised as he went through the bag in which the man had found Troy’s BDUs. They were in a purple house right behind Wexler’s jobsite. When Achilles had found it empty before, he hadn’t thought to search the odd bags scattered throughout. There were several pairs of dirty socks and underwear, three T-shirts, another pair of pants (too short), a blank address book with the F-section torn out, and the same photo of them all on the way to Dubai, enough stuff to suggest that Troy might have hung around for a while. “How long has this been here?”

“I found it in the Bricks.”

The occasional black brick stood out like a rotted tooth. The top of the wall glinted, crowned with broken glass. There was no grass and no shade, only parched clay and cracked asphalt, nothing to catch the sunlight bearing down on the roofs and heads of the kids posted up at the entrance. They were as young as ten, the oldest not even twenty from the looks of it. They were joking, rambunctious, invincible; like in Afghanistan, Baltimore, DC, New Orleans, the poorest laughed the loudest. Ines knew how to speak to them. “Just look them in the eye and say hello. That’s all folks.” It’s easy, Achilles reminded himself. He showed them his picture of Troy, and they only laughed harder, without moving their mouths, with steady shark’s grins. They lounged like they had no bones in their bodies, leaning at impossible angles as if made of rope, loose-limbed and slack-jawed. They looked at the blood on his knuckles and waved him through. As he passed through the gate, they laughed even louder, like they had seen this before, as if to say, You’ll be right back, running so fast your sneaker soles will melt.

They thought they were tough. Tough was the little boy who snuck into their tent to steal food; tough was the sniper who shot two members of J9 before Wages neutralized him, a boy who had barricaded himself in his minaret, a boy barely as tall as his rifle, a boy who had affixed a pillow to the wall behind him to absorb the recoil. Tough was Wages, who walked away from that without looking back.

Achilles walked the inside perimeter of the housing project first. He was surprised that Wexler had been so adamant that he never enter the Bricks. People weren’t tossing bullets like it was the Wild Wild West. It was quiet. A white kid in a black hooded sweatshirt walked a pit bull. A few kids played king of the mountain on a picnic table in a roofless gazebo. An overturned slide lay under fingers of kudzu. Like his sergeant said, “The earth will soon eat us all.” All the buildings, except a smoke-damaged one in the back, appeared occupied. The complex was broken into nine square blocks, like a tic-tac-toe grid. Each block had two two-story buildings with a parking lot between them. Hand-printed signs were posted on the telephone poles: “Don’t let them change our name!” Across a few of the signs, someone had scrawled, They already killed them once. These streets hadn’t been renamed. MLK and Medgar Evers ran north to south, Malcolm X Way and RFK ran east to west. As he completed his walk around the perimeter, he saw the orange Hummer. Beside it, the boy in the hooded sweatshirt was talking to a man in a letterman’s jacket, large and angular, as if made of cinderblocks. A man wearing a red Atlanta Braves baseball jersey sat in the back of the Hummer. The kid left, without the dog.