Clockers (30 page)

Stitch backed away, looking even more gangly and awkward. “Damn,” he whined, trying to come off bruised.

“Yeah, right,
damn.
Just get the fuck on out.”

Stitch walked off, mumbling his story to himself as if he actually believed it. Strike gave him about another six months before he was either locked up or killed.

Tyrone, still rocking on the chain, looked at Strike again, and this time the kid was the one to initiate an expression of eyes-to-heaven disgust.

Strike nodded, thinking, Spy boy, ounce mule, brightful and young, too young to be noticed. Strike stretched his legs, slid off the top bench slat like a lazy meat eater, walked up slow and distracted toward Tyrone, stopping in front of him, looking down at the top of his head, the kid going blank, but too blank. Strike towered over him, then lightly plucked the hair around the nappy Mercedes Benz symbol. “What the fuck is this?”

The kid stared off, shrugging as if Strike’s voice was in some daydream.

“You look like motherfuckin’
Buck
wheat.”

The kid jerked erect with embarrassed dismay but still didn’t get up and face Strike. Feigning a fed-up weariness, Strike slipped a half-inch roll of cash from his pocket and put on a show of counting all the tens and twenties, pretending to check whether he had enough to spring for a haircut. A lot of the young boys around the projects liked to tear and fold paper until they had a stack of blank pretend money and could play dope dealer, whipping out their roll, hiking one foot up on a bench and counting out loud like it was a good night. Strike thought such behavior in real-life clockers was embarrassing, and in little kids it was just sadder than shit. But sometimes You had to play games in order to get things going: this morning he had broken his ten-dollar-limit rule and taken a roll of money with him, thinking that maybe he’d run into this kid today, begin working on him, though he couldn’t say exactly what he had in mind.

“Yeah…” Strike palmed the cash, slid it into his front pants pocket and scanned the street. “C’mon, get in the damn car.” He walked off without a backward glance, glad for the excuse to get the hell away from here, away from Rodney, Victor, Champ, that bloody sheet, all of it.

Tyrone rose off the chain, rubbing the backs of his thighs and self-consciously hobbling like an old man. He followed Strike for three blocks, to the old lady’s driveway. Strike liked the way he understood how to lag behind without having to be told. It was intelligence or shyness or maybe both, but it was a good sign. He had done it right, and nobody watching from the bench would have thought they were going off together.

Sitting in the car now, with Tyrone in the shotgun seat staring straight ahead, Strike massaged his temple, wondering how he would play this thing. Finally he turned and broke the ice.

“What’s wrong with your leg?” Strike sounded peevish, like Rodney talking to his kids.

“Nothin’.” Tyrone shrugged, eyes still facing forward.

“Then how come you limping?”

“Foot fell asleep.”

“You see something in front of the car I don’t see?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then why don’t y’all look to who you’re answering?”

Tyrone turned and stared at Strike’s throat. “Foot fell asleep.”

Strike jerked back, eyelids fluttering. The kid’s breath was bad enough to make him forget the lesson in manners.

Strike drove the two blocks to Shaft Deli-Liquors. He was three steps inside before he saw the tall, skinny, gray-haired Homicide behind the cash register; by then he had been noticed, so he had no choice but to go ahead and do his business. Otherwise, the man would win without a fight.

The Homicide owned the store but rarely worked there, and nine times out of ten Strike dealt with the two blacks or the Puerto Rican who worked for him. They treated Strike with respect, but the Homicide was a hawk-eyed motherfucker, and anytime they were under the same roof it was a goddamn pissing match.

Strike walked to the back of the store and stopped in front of the glass-doored refrigerator, the Homicide making a big show of following him with a half-amused smirk. Dope dealers came in and out of Shaft around the clock, buying everything from cigarettes to lottery tickets to hero sandwiches, but Strike had never heard of the Homicide breaking anybody else’s balls, only his. As far as Strike could figure, the cop despised him because he didn’t
act
like a dope dealer, he didn’t
act
like a street nigger. Apparently the cop took it as a personal and professional insult that Strike could walk into his store and think he could come off like some bona fide human being.

Strike took a small bottle of club soda and a vanilla Yoo-Hoo from the glass case. Everything else he needed was behind the counter and he had to ask for it, but just as he was about to open his mouth, it dawned on him that he was probably face-to-face with one of the cops charged with investigating Darryl’s death. Strike took a second to compose himself, catch his breath.

“Give me that small Colgate,” he said, sounding slightly winded, pointing behind the Homicide’s head. The man reached for it, repeating “Co/gate” like a homeboy, challenging Strike with his eyes.

“Yeah,” said Strike, “and that toothbrush.”

The cop took down two plastic-wrapped toothbrushes and held them up to Strike. “Dis toombrush? O’
dis
toothbrush?” He threw Strike a leering smile.

“The green one.”

“De
green
one.”

“Naw,
the
green one,” Strike said, surrendering to his anger, going eye-to-eye despite the danger.

“That’s what I said.” The Homicide was pleasant now that he had succeeded in yanking Strike’s chain. “De green one. Anything else?”

Strike paid and walked back to the car. He had the kid sit sideways in the front passenger seat, with his feet planted on the street and his head hunched over his knees as if he was puking. Strike gave Tyrone the toothpaste and toothbrush, then hugged the open car door to his ribs to block the show. “Get the inside teeth too.”

The kid did as he was told, and a moment later spit out a bright plug of toothpaste that splattered between his beat-up sneakers.

“Now do it all over again. Make them circles with your elbow.”

His movements wooden and slow, Tyrone brushed his teeth again, too embarrassed to look anywhere but straight down.

“Spit.” Strike shifted his stance and wedged the car door even closer to his body.

An old man had stopped nearby, frowning at Tyrone. “That boy sick?”

“He OK.” Strike waved the guy on, then cracked the top of the club soda and gave it to the kid.

“Don’t swallow, just pump your cheeks and don’t splash on your sneakers.”

The kid stretched his neck and let out the club soda in a thin, careful stream.

“Put the brush in the bottle and get it clean like you mixing up chocolate milk.”

After Tyrone finished, Strike took the bottle away, trying not to look at the whitish foam, and slipped it down a sewer grate.

Inside the car again, Strike took the toothbrush and the small tube of toothpaste and slipped them both into the kid’s sweatshirt muff. “What’s your name?”

“Tyrone.” The kid shied from Strike’s eyes.

“Over here.” Strike snapped his fingers, and the kid forced himself to face Strike.

”
Tyrone,
“ he said again.

Strike made a show of sniffing the air between them. He leaned back, took a slug of Yoo-Hoo, burped up some bile and fought down a glower of redness in his belly.

“Y’all got to brush them teeth twice a day, my man,” Strike said, starting the car. “You got to fight the dragon.”

The trip to New York took only thirty minutes, and as they flew around the glazed fluorescent curves of the Holland Tunnel, a false promise of daylight around each bend, Tyrone sat stiffly next to Strike, immobile and mute, the lights running across his face in staggered bars. Strike couldn’t tell whether he was shy, bored or terror-stricken, but he would bet that the kid had never been to New York before in his life, or at least not without his mother.

Strike had done some casual asking around since he had first laid eyes on Tyrone and found out that although his father and two of his uncles were in prison, that woman Iris was one of those grizzly bear mothers, the type who walked her kids to school every day, waited for them outside at three o’clock and monitored their health, education and welfare from dawn to midnight.

One of the girls who hung around the crew said she once saw Iris walking her three kids through the projects, giving them a Just Say No tour, pointing out the odd pipehead and saying things like, “You remember her? You remember how clean she used to be? How nice she used to dress?” And one of the clockers on the Dumont side had told Strike that when Tyrone’s family had lived on that side of Roosevelt, Iris would get into shouting matches with that crew, right on the street, and one time had even gotten into a fistfight with a kid for selling bottles in front of her building, as if she had never heard of payback. Or maybe she didn’t have to worry about payback: one of the hazier rumors going around was that her secret boyfriend was Andre the Giant. But even if that was true, the woman had to be crazy, since
any
body could catch a bullet.

“We’re under the water now.” With both hands on the wheel, Strike twisted his head up to grimace at the arched dome overhead. “One of them ceiling tiles come out? Like from the pressure? Shit, that’s all she wrote.” Strike made a clucking noise, putting it on a little, trying to get the kid to say something, anything. Maybe his mother made him leave his tongue in the house, keep him out of trouble.

On the New York side, Strike made a show of taking the .25 out of the step well, checking the clip, announcing in a grim singsong, “New York, New York, city of dreams, sometimes it ain’t
all
what it seems.” Tyrone continued to sit straight ahead, ignoring what Strike was doing. The kid’s stone face was starting to get on Strike’s nerves. Maybe still waters didn’t run so deep after all. Maybe the kid was quiet because he had nothing on his mind.

Strike retreated into his own moody silence, thinking again about Tyrone’s mother, imagining himself in an argument with her, knocking her speechless by saying, “Yeah, maybe I sell dope, but at least
my
mother taught me how to brush my damn teeth.” But maybe the kid just had halitosis or a stomach problem, Strike softening a little as he considered that possibility, believing that you can’t criticize someone’s heart for the failings of their body.

Strike drove across 116th Street into East Harlem and pulled up to a barbershop on the ground floor of a high-rise apartment house. The place had wood-grain vinyl wallpaper and smelled of scented hair oil, the type that lathered up white in the barber’s palms before he slicked it onto your crop if you let him. The shop was run by an eighty-year-old straight-haired Puerto Rican and his three straight-haired grandsons, but they cut Afro hair just fine. Strike came here for his own haircuts because he once saw an old photograph of an Italian gangster shot dead in a barber chair, and he didn’t like the idea of getting his head cut in a place where people knew him from business.

The four barbers were occupied, and Strike motioned Tyrone to a salmon-pink plastic chair, then sat down next to him. Across from them was a huge man with a prison physique who wore a Jesus head with ruby eyes on a gold chain.

In the barber chair closest to the door sat a kid who looked to be eleven—about Tyrone’s age. The kid was flanked by two older friends, skinny boys in baggy pegged dungarees who were loudly commenting on each snip of the scissors. Swathed in a tricot sheet, the kid was scowling into the mirror as his two friends poked his skull and argued about what kind of slice to put in. The barber, the old man who owned the place, stepped back to let them work it out, winking at Strike in recognition.

“You see anything you like?” Strike asked Tyrone, nodding to a style display pinned to the far wall over the ex-convict’s chair—fifty unsmiling Polaroid head shots of customers, taken over the last year. Tyrone shrugged, refusing to walk over and get a better look, and again Strike felt annoyed at his indifference.

“Excuse me, brothers!”

They both jumped at the abrupt bellow. A young tieless black man in a suit and clean white shirt stood in the doorway. Bespectacled and goateed, he looked like the ghost of Malcolm X.

”
Excuse
me!”

The whole place got quiet, everyone turning toward the door.

“Excuse me. I just want to
say,
I just want to
remind
the young mens in here of the
time.
What time is that? The time for you to start respecting yourselves, the time for you to start taking care of yourselves, the time for you to stop victimizing each other, the time for you to pass on the easy dope money, the blood money, the time for
this
brother”—he nodded to the weightlifter—“to realize that chain gold is
fool’s
gold.” Strike winced, expecting some kind of explosion, but the ex-con was placidly nodding in agreement.

The man in the suit went on: “The time for you to
give
something to the community instead of
take,
to stop disrespecting our mothers, our sisters, our women, and to rethink the word
power,
the time for you to realize true power ain’t about muscle, revenge, payback, pain or sexual ability, but that true power means education—spiritual, economic, political—that true power means
love,
of family, community and of race, and it is the time, the time, the time to realize that you got to understand that no one’s gonna help us ‘cause no one wants to see a black man with true power, so we got to love ourselves, do it ourselves,
spread
it ourselves … Thank you and I love you all.”

The barbers had all retreated politely from the heads in the chairs during the man’s rap. But the minute he said thank you, they stepped up and went back to work without expression.