Clockers (27 page)

“I’m desperate, man. She snatched my goddamn package, man.”

“Yeah?” Rodney said. “She told me
you
snatched it from her. Says you walked out the house with six clips and you came back with no money.”

Bernard shook his head. “Yeah, you go on believing her. But I’m
tellin
you, man. I swear. I need a favor, man. I need a favor
bad.
I need like half an ounce on consignment, man.”

Rodney nodded. “You need a half ounce?”

“I’m desperate, man.”

“You need a half ounce.” Rodney’s face became stern. “How long you coming to me?”

“Three months, man.” Bernard tucked in his ass as a car whizzed by.

“Three months. Now you broke, right? Y’all should be working with some serious weight by now, but you broke.” Serious weight. Strike had assumed that Bernard was on one of Rodney’s other crews, but a bottle docker had no business talking about serious weight.

“Rodney, man.” Bernard held out his palms for understanding.

“What I say to you in the beginning?”

Bernard sulked for a minute before reluctantly answering. “Sell a ounce, buy two.”

“Then what?”

“Sell two, buy four.”

“Then what?”

“Buy four, bleed in a ounce of cut, make it five.”

“And the cut is what?”

“Your profit.”

“You take the profit from that first cut and do what?”

“Put it aside for bail.”

”
Then
what you do?”

“Buy another four, do it again, keep the profit.”

“You put in more than a ounce cut in four, what do you do?”

“Lose business to better stuff.”

“You keep that steady four-to-one ratio, you got what?”

“Consistent product and steady customers.” Bernard spoke grudgingly, as if reading from a manual.

“And where you at?”

“Sitting pretty.”

“Yeah, uh-huh. So Bernard, you sitting pretty or you on your ass?”

Bernard looked out to the street.

“How come you never come to me for more than a ounce?”

“Rodney, man, you don’t know…”

Turning to Strike, Rodney kept Bernard hanging on the window. “I meet this nigger in jail when they got me on that ten-day traffic thing? I like him, right? Pay his bail, get him out, give him a ounce, right Bernard?”

Bernard stared at his hands.

“I say to him, here, you gonna
pay
me for this ounce, seven hundred dollars, but first you gonna break it into bottles, sell the bottles for fourteen hundred, give me my seven, buy another ounce with the other seven, get it rolling, right? Now he supposed to make another fourteen hundred in bottles, buy
two
ounces from me. Does he do that? Hell no. He takes seven hundred, buys one ounce, takes the other seven hundred and parties. Comes back next week after that, buys a ounce for seven, parties for seven, every goddamn week. Seven-and-seven Bernard. He ain’t got
no
money for bail, can’t
ever
get up enough of a package to put any kind of cut on it. Week in, week out, hand-to-mouth Bernard.”

Strike felt numb with revelation: Fucking Rodney, never showing his whole hand, never telling the whole truth.

“I got expenses,” Bernard muttered weakly.

“Party-to-party Bernard.”

“See, Rodney, man, you don’t know.”

“The man should be looking for
real
estate by now, but instead he’s hangin’ over my window beggin’ for half ounces to get back on his feet. He depress the hell out of me.”

Bernard hung his head.

“Put out your hand,” Rodney snapped. Bernard did as he was told, his palm up but jerking back and forth nervously as if Rodney was going to cause it pain.

Rodney peered down like a fortune-teller. “What color you see?”

Bernard looked at his own hand. “Light brown,” he said, sounding confused, then, second-guessing Rodney’s game, correcting himself and trying to sound proud: ”
Black.
”

“Yeah, well you
should
be seeing green.”

Bernard straightened up, sighing.

Rodney eased off a little. “I give you a half ounce, you best come back in two days, buy a ounce off me. Next time after that you best buy two then four, or I ain’t gonna have no truck with you ‘cause I don’t like doin’ business with wastrels. My man Strike here, I throw
him
a half ounce, in six months he own the building you
live
in, throw your ass out on the street.”

“Yeah, I hear that,” Bernard said.

“I doubt it,” Rodney drawled, enjoying himself immensely. “Come on by the store around two, two-thirty.”

“Yo thanks, Rodney, man. You saving my life, man.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rodney clucked as he drove off. “Yeah, ol’ Bernard. I like that boy.”

“He sellin’ buh-bottles for you, right? And he’s sellin’ them in town, right?”

“He sellin’ for hisself. I sell him a ounce, I don’t know what he do with that. That’s his business.” Rodney sounded blissful in his artificial ignorance.

“You told me
weight,
man. Goddamn, you into bottles. You on the
street,
Rodney.” Strike suddenly wanted to sleep, his words coming out drugged and petulant.

“It ain’t better than Champ, you know, when I put my cut on it? It about the same, so it don’t draw off Champ’s business or anything. Besides, pretty soon now? Champ is gonna be havin’ him some
problems,
an’ he ain’t gonna be that involved in what I’m doing.”

“What you mean, problems?”

“I can’t say right now. It’s on confidence. You’ll find out later. All I’m sayin’ is, don’t you be worried about no Champ.”

Strike covered his mouth, slowly shook his head.

“Besides, Bernard the only one.”

Overwhelmed with fatigue, Strike was unable to keep the disgust from his voice. “Yeah,
right.
”

Rodney slammed on the brakes so hard that Strike flew forward, his head banging on the dashboard.

“Look. You in or you out on the business end, ‘cause I already got me a goddamn naggy wife on the
ass
end.”

Strike, holding his forehead, was reduced to begging. “Just be
straight
with me, man. You say you ain’t suh-sellin’ in town but Ahab’s right in the middle. You say all the customers from outside, Bernard right in the middle. You-you say—”

Strike slammed back into the seat as Rodney floored it, doing sixty on the side streets, Dempsy flying past, Strike silent, his stomach wriggling to break free, Rodney skull-faced, blasting through lights, whipping corners, screeching up to a halt ten minutes later in front of the crescent of benches at the Roosevelt Houses, Futon and everybody staring at the car. Rodney leaned across Strike and pushed open his door.

“Get your ass back to work.”

Strike looked at the crew looking at him. The benches seemed smaller somehow, the ten-dollar-bottle men like children. Strike didn’t move.

“Get on out, motherfucker. I’ll pick me up Bernard. Let
him
make the goddamn money. Take
him
off the goddamn street.”

Strike sat there, ear almost touching his shoulder. A Virginia-bound ounce stepped on one and a half times would be six hundred dollars in his pocket, free and clear. Sixty ten-dollar-bottle transactions done in one minute flat.

“Yo Rodney. Look, alls I’m saying…”

But Rodney cut him off, jumping out of the car and blocking the path of a skinny young woman pushing a stroller toward the projects. He started in on her, jerking a hand toward the stroller. “What you takin’ him out for now?”

“He sleepin’,” she said.

“You know how late it is? What the hell’s wrong with you?” Rodney ducked down and lifted the baby into his arms.

“I
said
he’s sleepin’.”

“You goin’ to the store?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’ll meet you at the store, you take him upstairs. An’ don’t you make me wait.”

She walked off with the empty stroller, her face puckered into a pout.

“Goddamn, don’t I even get a kiss?” Rodney shouted after her. He ducked back into the car, cradled his son in his lap, turned on the ignition with his free hand and then looked up at Strike, eyebrows high in mock surprise. “You still here?”

10

ROCCO
stood in the littered motel room, hands in his pockets, watching Duck Gathers chew out a part-time dope dealer who lay spread-eagled in his boxer shorts on the unmade bed, one half-mast eye on Duck, the other on “The Joe Franklin Show,” playing behind Duck’s left shoulder on the wall-mounted television.

“You listening to me? You go down to your caseworker tomorrow. You say, The Duck says I got to move out of the Royal or I’m gonna get violated. You hear that?”

The room stank of unwashed laundry and imitation grape candy. Short strips of tinfoil lay on the dresser top, crumbs of crack nestled in the folds and dimples. The guy on the bed was smashed on crack and gin, and Rocco was surprised he was acting so stupefied; Rocco thought crack made you fly backwards like an untied balloon. But Rocco had rarely seen crack, since Dempsy was primarily cook-it-yourself powder-coke country.

“What I say, Orlando? Tell me what I just said.”

“My caseworker on vacation.” Orlando had both eyes on the TV now, one hand over his crotch, the other across his chest, cupping his nipple.

“So you go to whoever’s covering her files. Because I swear, I come by tomorrow and you’re not packed up? Or if you don’t at least have a letter for me saying you went in and they’re working on it? I come in here tomorrow and you’re laying there playin’ with your peenie, I swear I’m gonna fuckin’ tune you up so fuckin’ bad you gonna wish you were fuckin’ dead, you hear me?”

Orlando didn’t answer, now totally absorbed by the TV show. Duck looked to Rocco with helpless dismay, walked over to the bed and yanked up the mattress, spilling Orlando onto the floor. When Orlando struggled to his feet, he looked annoyed.

Duck stood in front of a dresser mirror, sighed, adjusted his three gold chains and patted his perfect hair. Rocco knew that Duck was trying to calm himself down with a little preening. Duck was obsessive about his appearance, and he was the only non-Jewish, non-Italian white man that Rocco ever met who favored gold.

“Get in the shower, Orlando. You stink.” Duck shook his wrist, frowning down at his ID bracelet until it lay initials up.

“Can I wait for the commercial?”

“You go in now, you get to mix the hot and cold yourself. You wait, I do it for you.”

Orlando hesitated a few seconds more before heading off.

“And wash your armpits,” Duck yelled after him. He turned to Rocco. “You remember getting laid here?”

“Are you kidding me?” Rocco yawned, feeling in need of a shower himself. “This place was like my entire sex life.”

Back in the sixties, everybody used to bring their girlfriends to the Royal because it had the cheapest rates. Now it was Duck Gathers’s fiefdom, and having the Duck as escort would make Rocco’s life easier tonight. If he had tried to toss Darryl Adams’s room on his own, he might have gotten the shit kicked out of him, since he was sport jacket and wing tips—one-time police not likely to return—whereas Duck was high-top Ponys and jeans, daily life and endless payback. The problem was, when you were Duck’s guest, you had to go at Duck’s pace.

“I don’t hear no water running,” Duck blared in a distracted singsong as if talking to children upstairs. He swept all the tinfoil and crack and crumpled it up into a golf ball, batting it back and forth between his palms. He looked at Rocco and shrugged. “Darryl Adams was a good kid. That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, so, can we go over now?”

“Hang on.” Duck spied a loose ceiling tile, got a chair to stand on and poked the tile free. He felt around inside, then hopped off and smacked his hands clean. “Take a picture of this room in your head, and when we get there, compare it to Darryl’s. You’ll see what I mean.”

The shower kicked in. They headed for the door and bumped into a petite black whore tripping into the room with a twenty-dollar bill in her hand.

“Oop, it Sergeant Duck.”

She turned to leave but Duck snatched the money. “What’s this?”

“I owe it to Orlando.” She turned to Rocco. “You motel squad too?”

“Vatican Secret Service,” Rocco said.

Duck draped an arm around her shoulders. “Who you scoring bottles for, Tina?” In Tunnely, crack came in tinfoil because it was easier to hide and cheaper to package, but out of habit everybody still called it bottles.

“I ain’t for nobody. I just owe.”

“Let’s go back to your room.” Duck held her hand, their fingers clasped like lovers, the ball of dope in his free fist. “Rocco, you mind?”

“Hey, no problem.” Rocco said, thinking, Here we go again. He had already been following Duck for an hour like this.

Duck Gathers patrolled a dozen motels from eight
P.M.
to four
A.M.
He and the others in his squad were roving zookeepers, kicking in doors at will and on whim, half the time walking in on some illegal tableau, from professional cocksucking to crack smoking. Duck was on a first-name basis with two hundred hookers and small-time bad guys, and he rarely arrested anybody if he could help it—the jails were full up already. He mainly tried to harass, hound and torment the lowlifes on his turf into picking up and moving on, out of the town of Tunnely and back into Dempsy, where most of them originated.

Cruising with the Duck was like being trapped in some hellish cartoon of endless two-bit crime and punishment, a time-chewing symphony of banging doors and uh-oh eyes. A cop had to be suicidal to patrol the Royal solo, but the Duck was a special case: more than anybody else on the motel squad, he considered the Royal his personal mission, regarded himself as the town marshal and spiritual maintenance man for all souls contained in its eighty rooms.

When Duck clocked out and went home, all he had in his studio apartment was a bed, a TV and a rowing machine, and he rowed for two or three hours a day to unwind, and sometimes to rewind. He had no wife, no kids, no hobbies—just motel patrol, gold jewelry and that rowing machine, which gave him the upper body of a home run king and the wrists of a strangler. As the longtime Royal tenants told the newcomers: Pay your rent, lock your door, and don’t fuck with the Duck.