Clockers (11 page)

Rodney cocked his head and spoke with a terrible softness. “He got to be got.”

And there it was. Strike had been thinking all along that Rodney was about to offer him something for free, had been debating with himself whether to pass it up, but now Rodney was telling him that it would cost to get in on this partnership and that the cost was high to the point of stupidity. And despite his passion for prudence, Strike suddenly couldn’t imagine saying no.

Got to be got. No one had ever challenged him with something like this, but he couldn’t think clearly now, couldn’t mount any arguments and instead was reduced to blindly searching for something he knew was inside him, an impulse that as yet had no name.

“Yeah, ol’ Erroll want to go to heaven, ain’t that a bitch? Useless Virus-ass motherfucker—after all I done for him.”

Strike stumbled for a second: maybe Rodney was talking about taking out Erroll all this time. But that didn’t make sense. Rodney was just underlining the problem. Well, who was this partner he was talking about? But it didn’t make a difference yet. It was a secondary consideration right now.

Strike tried to examine the pros and cons, the Fury versus Champ, the relative jail time for selling bottles versus ounces. But pounding up from under the practical concerns, his heart was quick with colors, brilliant colors that had nothing to do with business, with judgment. He was a virgin in some areas of experience, and somewhere inside his head, inarticulate but powerful, was the understanding that all his life he had it building in him—the stammer, the burning in his gut, the crazed cautiousness, the dicky checks, the minute-to-minute rage and disgust, all begging for an outlet just like the one being offered him right now.

“And you gonna fall
out
when I tell you who I’m talking about too.”

Strike knew that Rodney was trying to tantalize him, draw him in. But there was no need for that now. Strike was so unmanned, so filled with a primitive recognition, that his hands were shaking. “You sellin’ this shit out of town, right?” They were just words.

“Just about,” Rodney said pleasantly. “Just about.”

“Yeah … huh.”

“Say, what the fuck you doin’!” Rodney’s voice climbed to a raw squawk.

“What…” Strike jerked as if an alarm had gone off.

“Lookit.” Rodney pointed at the last one hundred bottles Strike had stoppered. He had forgotten to put in the coke.

Strike stared at the empty vials and shook his head. He wondered if this was what it felt like to get high.

After Rodney dropped him off by his car, Strike drove back to the benches, forgetting to perk up at the red lights, forgetting the Newark stickup artists, even flooring it a little on the boulevard.

Strike had been so overwhelmed with his decision to get wet and do this that at first he hadn’t given the target more than a passing thought. But when Rodney dropped Darryl Adams’s name Strike had almost fallen down, stumbling backwards against the coffee table, and flopped into the easy chair.

Darryl Adams: the hardest-working and least-smiling kid in the history of the grocery business. Strike had worked with him six, seven days a week for an entire year in Rodney’s Place, and he had been the only guy who had ever made Strike feel like a frivolous fuck-up.

Darryl Adams. Goddamn Darryl Adams. Strike thought of his mother, spoke to her out loud—“What you think of him
now?”—
even though she didn’t know Darryl from the mayor of Dempsy.

Darryl had been selling ounces for Rodney out of Ahab’s, the fast-food hole three blocks from Rodney’s store. Trying to figure out why the ounces were selling so slowly, Rodney had found out that Darryl had picked up a second supplier, a white guy in Bayonne who had offered him a forty percent commission to Rodney’s thirty-five. For the last two months Darryl had been alternating ounces, half the time selling Bayonne weight to Rodney’s customers, telling Rodney business was slow and risking his life for an extra five percent cut.

Steamed up, breathing through his nose, Strike drove blind toward the benches. Fucking Rodney, calls me “my son,” then puts me on the street like some ice cream man, and Darryl’s indoors selling ounces like a human being. Well, you get what you sow. Strike conjured up snapshot memories of Darryl: sorting candy bars, stacking Chore Boys, hauling out trash bags.

He spoke to his mother again, to Rodney: “Yeah? Well, what do you think about him
now?
”

My son. Shoot Rodney too.

Not bothering to stash his car in the old lady’s driveway, Strike pulled up to the curb hard by the semicircle of benches that cupped the entrance to the central walkway of the Roosevelt projects like a yawning mouth. It was ten-thirty and the place was rocking now that the Fury were downing various heart medicines at the Pavonia Tavern. The clockers had their bottles in bags under benches and in the grass, using tonight’s apartment only to re-up whole clips or more, giving the mule eighty dollars out of the hundred sold to go upstairs and bring down another ten bottles.

They were selling Redi Rocks this evening, precooked nuggets ready to smoke, purer than crack and no mystery ingredients like Raid or formaldehyde. But having the rocks in hand, ready to burn, made some customers itchy to be high right
now,
and people were piping up on the street, on the corner, up against a building breeze-way, crouched down between parked cars, their faces flaring up yellow as they fired up the cocaine.

Futon saw Strike fuming in his car and reluctantly came up to the window. “I just sent out for another twenty clips. It feel like somebody won the
numbers
out here, the way it going.”

Strike counted three pipeheads lighting up in plain sight. “Look at that.”

“What?”

“What’s wrong with you? Get them motherfuckers out of here.”

Futon stood up straight, curling his hands under the belly of his shirt, taking in the pipeheads and making a face, clucking his tongue, doing nothing.

“Get them the fuck out of here.” Strike flicked his hand. “They ain’t doin’ nothin’.”

“We got families up and down here. This look like shit, stupid.” To Strike, selling bottles was clean, no more than a handshake, but piping up was dangerous to the crew—they might as well put up neon signs. Plus, he found it disgusting to look at.

“I go look for Hammer.” Futon backed away from the car, glancing around for the nighttime muscle and security man.

Livid now, Strike jumped out of his car and sprinted toward a pipehead lighting up while leaning against 8 Weehawken. Strike picked up speed as he moved, breaking into a dead run the last ten feet, the pipehead holding a lungful of coke as Strike rammed him in the chest with both hands. The dope expelled in a white cloud of shock, and the doper went down, Strike kicking him under the armpit, the guy gasping, “Yo wait, wait.”

Strike hissed, “Next time I see you, I will
kill
you.” He marched back past two other startled dopers, one backing away, the other running, and Strike lunged two steps off his march to take a swinging slap at the doper who didn’t run, missing him, but the guy got the message and took off. Strike came back to the curb and found Futon and Hammer standing there, blinking, mouths open. Hammer, big but stupid, said, “What you want me to do?” Strike didn’t answer, just got back into his car and drove off, thinking, If I do take care of this other thing about Darryl, Futon’ll run this corner into the ground, but then thinking, So what—it won’t be my problem if he does.

Strike was pumped up from the beating and didn’t want to work the bench tonight, didn’t want to see Futon’s face. He drove in square circles around the neighborhood for a while before deciding to get out of town altogether, go across the river to the Bronx, see Crystal.

Strike hated going through the tunnels to New York. Port Authority cops were sometimes parked by the toll booths, profiling the drivers and stopping whoever looked like they might be transporting. Recently he had heard two guys talking about a secret radar-TV scanner the cops had that could somehow videotape what was going on inside the car once you were actually in the tunnel, so that if you were getting high or just being three niggers laughing a lot, you could get pulled over when you came out the other side. Nothing had ever happened to Strike, but he always rolled into the Manhattan streets or out to Jersey City with a backache from trying so hard to come across blank.

Driving up the Henry Hudson Parkway, with Dempsy across the neon-black river now, he transferred his gun from the step well to his belt—this being New York, an exception to any rule you had for conducting yourself. The streets that took him from the Cross Bronx Expressway exit to the garage near Crystal’s house were unrelieved stretches of blasted moonscape. They always filled him with awe: every broken block was spoken for, every dead building a different nation, a different drug. Colombian, Dominican, Jamaican; pot, heroin, coke; weight, bottles, nickel bags. He never stopped for a red light here, just treated it as a slow-down signal. He had New Jersey plates and that made him a customer, a mark, and the streets were crawling with crackheads emerging from the shadows silent and purposeful pop-eved pushing shopping carts for scavenged booty, rinsing out soda cans.‘beer bottles, even washing off stolen car tires in open hydrants which flooded the gutters with billowing arcs of water.

Most of the streetlamps were out and the disembodied glow of flaring pipes sent up jerky constellations between buildings, in vacant lots and under the odd tree. Here the clockers worked mostly indoors, set up security gauntlets with guys hanging out in front of the buildings, on up the stairs and straight into the apartments. The ownership of the streets was not in question, and even with his gun Strike felt like an outraged citizen, a potential victim. He never considered himself a criminal: clocking was just what he did, what he considered his best shot at having a life, like going into the army or working for UPS. But this place was out of control, these people should be punished, and he wished the New York knockos would do something about it.

Crystal’s apartment house was on a bad block, but not so bad that there wasn’t more than one kind of life on it. There were some dope houses in the dirty blond brick apartment buildings and so a lot of robberies, three or four killings a year, a rivalry or turf battle sometimes spilling over into the street. But there were no dope crews on the sidewalk and no abandoned buildings. Most of the people here worked for a living, and kids played outside all day and late into the night. And after the dinner hour, the adults would drag out fold-up aluminum beach chairs, drink beer and make small talk around the stoops and courtyard entrances.

Crystal was like a lot of the others: she saw this address as a stop on the way to somewhere else. She was twenty-eight, had a six-year-old son and an ex-husband in jail. She worked as a waitress and two nights a week went to a business training institute over on Fordham Road, the school a big loft room on the second floor above a shoe store. Crystal studied basic computer skills and bookkeeping; she planned to hit the employment agencies with her double degree any week now.

Strike liked her because she was clean, not bummy, a working woman with a kid, holding down the world. She didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t get high except for a little reefer now and then. Strike also liked the fact that she lived far away from his business, didn’t know any of his associates. She knew what he did—not that he ever told her in words, but he had a gun, never talked about his work and always had money for her. So what else could she think? Besides, she had seen him in action the day they met. She had come to the Roosevelt projects to visit a girlfriend and seen Strike sitting on the top slat of the bench, apparently doing nothing but watching all this docker action around him. She had gone into her friend’s apartment, had left to go home six hours later, and there he was, still perched on the bench as if he hadn’t moved. Crystal stood in front of him smiling with that space between her teeth light green eyes in a heart-shaped face, a sexy cat, saying, “Don’t your butt hurt?” He said no, coming off a little sulky, maybe shy, but she didn’t miss a beat: “Then how come you look so sad?”

That’s what got Strike, her saying he looked sad. He couldn’t say why but it got him good.

Strike had once asked her what she liked about him and she had said she just liked the way he seemed so together: clean, neat, not loud with gold, sitting there so alert, all serious and composed. She’d also said he was too skinny and his head was kind of small but then quickly added he had a maturity that put weight and age on him, so he could get away with it. For two days after she told him all this, he walked around palming and probing his skull, eyeing other people’s heads, and came to the conclusion that Peanut’s head was even smaller—that’s why they called him Peanut.

Once Strike and Crystal started in, he made her cut off her friendship with the girl from the projects. He didn’t like seeing Crystal when he wasn’t expecting to, and he didn’t want this girlfriend gossiping about his business to her. Strike would usually come by Crystal’s apartment one or two times a week, unannounced, late at night. He would watch some TV, maybe eat a little. They would have sex, although not every time. He rarely fell asleep in her bed, but sometimes he stayed overnight and he always left her money. Sometimes he’d come over earlier, like on a slow Sunday evening, and he’d take her and her son for dinner on City Island and then to a movie on Fordham Road. He didn’t like movies or restaurants—they made him impatient—but he figured that this, along with leaving them some money, was what he was supposed to do when he was with someone In fact, he had no clear idea why he was involved in this relationship except that he kept waiting for Crystal to say something like “You look sad” again to him—not those exact words, but something that would make him feel the way he did when she said it to him that first day.

Sometimes he got sulky thinking that maybe Crystal liked him more for what he wasn’t than for what he was: he wasn’t fucked-up on drugs, he wasn’t about beating her, he wasn’t about taking her money, and he wasn’t going to give her the Virus. He wondered sometimes if her reason for going out with him was that he filled a gap without causing her pain.