Clockers (31 page)

The customers were impassive too, the kids around their little friend in the chair exchanging blank glances. Only the ex-con across from Strike seemed to react, nodding in approval, raising a huge fist and making a yanking gesture as if pulling on a train whistle.

“Thank you,” the man in the suit repeated. Hesitating in the doorway, he looked to Tyrone, to Strike, and then he gestured with a leather-bound book that could have been the Bible, the Koran or a dictionary. He pointed to Tyrone but spoke directly to Strike, his voice intimate and conversational now: “The children today, they
wiser,
but they
weaker
than ever before too.”

Strike nodded noncommittally. Tyrone twisted in his chair, slinking down and making a screwy face in his embarrassment at being singled out.

The guy in the suit marched out into the sunlight. Strike thought about everything he’d said, agreeing with most of it, then shrugging it off. A moment later the little kid hopped out of his chair, handed each of his older friends a dollar and led them out of the shop.

“Next,” the old man announced, nodding to Strike. Strike nudged Tyrone to rise and stood behind him as he took a seat. Tyrone sat in the porcelain-framed barber chair and stared at Strike and the barber in the mirror. The old man had secured the paper neck cuff too tight and Tyrone’s eyeballs bulged slightly. He coughed but said nothing.

“What you want?” The barber, holding his scissors to his chest, spoke to Tyrone’s reflection.

Strike followed Tyrone’s eyes to the cluttered work shelf and saw assorted clipper heads, brushes, a jar filled with homemade hair gel, a garden spray bottle filled with hair oil and a tiny stand-up calendar with Jesus holding out his crowned heart, just like the picture in Rodney’s house. Pinned alongside the mirror was a color photo of a woman’s midsection, from thighs to lower rib cage, glowing with oil and barely girdled with a G-string.

“What you want, young sir?” The barber sighed, clacking his scissors.

Tyrone looked to Strike in the mirror and the barber made a half turn, speaking to Strike now. “What you want?”

“Close and clean. Get all this”—Strike plucked at the unruly head—“out of here.”

The barber started in with his scissors, and clumps began tumbling into Tyrone’s lap and catching in his eyelashes. When the hair was close enough to the scalp, the barber switched to electric clippers and began racing over the temples and around the ears. Tyrone’s eyes dropped and Strike sensed that the kid was fighting down a smile, afraid of laughing or in some way getting childish.

“You about five pounds lighter now,” Strike said, not expecting a comment in return and not getting one.

The barber slapped witch hazel into his palms, then caressed Tyrone’s scalp, his fingers sliding back along the sides of Tyrone’s skull, the scent making Strike think of blue ice, jumping into blue ice, and he watched the kid involuntarily turtle his head into his shoulders, goofy with sensation, teeth clamping onto his lower lip to keep up the wide-eyed poker face.

“You too?” The barber tilted his chin to Strike.

“I’m cool.” Strike took a pic from the work shelf and fluffed out his hair in the mirror.

The barber hunched over Tyrone and trimmed the edges of his hairline with squinting two-handed precision, then went for the hair oil in the spray bottle. Strike put out a staying hand and the barber asked Tyrone, “You want a slice?”

Tyrone said nothing, just looked to Strike in the mirror.

“You want a slice?” The barber bowed down to Tyrone’s ear to make sure he heard the question.

Eyes still on Strike, Tyrone mumbled something inaudible.

“Give him here.” Strike ran a pinkie nail from Tyrone’s hairline back three inches, tracing the arc of a clean part. The old man switched clipper heads, stood on tiptoe, elbow high, and cleared a thin, exact path down to the scalp like the tail of a whippet. It seemed to Strike that the kid was so flushed with pleasure that he could barely look at himself.

The barber shook some scented talc on a silver whisk brush, dusted Tyrone’s neck and ears, then held a red plastic mirror up to the back of his head for his approval. But Tyrone’s eyes were closed.

“Yeah, OK.” Strike nodded, and when Tyrone finally opened his eyes, the old man was standing in front of him, frowning critically, pursing his lips, putting a hand to his chest.

“Don’t move,” the barber said.

Tyrone, open-faced in his anxiety now, looked to Strike as the barber retrieved a Polaroid camera from a cabinet below his work shelf, leaned back and took a shot of Tyrone, profile on the slice side, the photo sliding out like a tongue.

When the old man released Tyrone from the tricot smock and the tight neck cuff, Strike had to help the kid from the chair, as if removing a passenger from a roller coaster at the end of a ride. And as Strike waited for his change, he saw Tyrone steal a peek at the developing picture, watching himself emerge—star-eyed, solemn, handsome, new.

“How’s that?” Strike spoke with an edge in his voice, talking across the roof of the Accord.

“Good,” Tyrone mumbled, patting his head.

“You look clean.”

Strike waited for a response. Nothing. He jerked open the door and slid in, leaving Tyrone standing on the locked passenger side, annoyed that the damn kid couldn’t even say thank you.

They drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway in silence, and for half the ride Strike was stormed up with the kid’s ingratitude, until he saw Tyrone steal a look at himself in the exterior side mirror, cocking his head slightly to study his new crop, then return his gaze to a straight-ahead stare, fighting down another smile, trying hard not to blink. He reminded Strike of a dope dealer playing it all wrong when he’s rolled up next to a police car, his saucer-eyed profile screaming out “guilty” to the cops. Strike relented a little in his anger, seeing that the kid needed to conceal his pleasure, hide it like it was felony-weight cocaine.

After they had passed through midtown, Strike cut over to Seventh Avenue, and as they approached Greenwich Village they drove by sporadic clumps of people with shopping bags standing on the edge of the curb, competing with each other to flag down a taxi.

Tyrone took in their stiff-armed saluting and their pinched faces, then started chanting, “Sieg heil, sieg heil, sieg heil,” in a high soft voice. It was the first thing he had said since Harlem.

“What’s that?” Strike said.

“Hitler. They look like they going sieg heil, sieg heil.”

“Hitler, how you know about Hitler?”

“From school,” he answered, turning away from Strike. “And from my mother.”

Strike pulled over to a hot dog stand on a crowded stretch of Broadway above SoHo.

“Y’all hungry?” He passed the kid a five-dollar bill. “Get me a Yoo-Hoo.”

Tyrone returned to the car with a vanilla Yoo-Hoo—not a chocolate one, like most people would have. He carried a hot dog with ketchup and a can of orange soda for himself, but the smell of hot dogs made Strike sick, so he had Tyrone eat the same way he’d had him brush his teeth, hunched sideways over the street, shielded from people by the open car door. Once again the kid didn’t say thank you, but after he finished his meal, wiped his face and took the garbage—including Strike’s empty Yoo-Hoo—to a trash can, he returned the two fifty change without being asked for it. Fastidious, observant, honest, secretive, obedient—Strike wondered what he might do with this boy, feeling a flash of pleasure himself now, masking it behind a scowl while looking down at the kid’s ratty sneakers.

“What the hell you got on your feet?”

Tyrone looked down.

“Goddamn, they feet or
hoofs?
”

Strike took him to the Foot Locker, where the new sneakers were mounted like model ship hulls on individual transparent shelves. Strike scanned the room and got a rush of greedy arousal—collect the whole set.

He turned to Tyrone. “What you like?”

Tyrone took it all in, then talked to the air. “BKs, high-top white with light gray trim.”

As the salesman slipped Tyrone’s foot onto the metal measuring brace, the kid put up the hood of his sweatshirt, pulled hard on the drawstrings and disappeared.

Next to him, Strike fought off his irritation once again. He had never run up against this combination of paralyzed shyness and oblivious ingratitude. The sneakers were $69.95 but the kid didn’t even blink, as if he believed he had it coming to him. Strike glared at Tyrone hiding inside his hood, but then spied the toothpaste peeking out of his sweatshirt muff and retreated from his anger, thinking maybe nobody ever said “What you want?” to him before. Maybe he was inexperienced with having things. Maybe he never had the occasion to say thank you before.

As they stepped out of the shoe store, the sidewalk sunlight lit up the thick snow-white high tops as if they were a pair of giant fluorescent marshmallows.

“Now you clean at both ends,” Strike said in a dry drawl, cocking an eyebrow.

The kid didn’t answer, but his mouth jerked as if he was hiding a frog in there.

The weather had turned without warning, and when they emerged from the tunnel the sky was a yellow-gray luminescence, charged with the promise of a downpour. Driving past the oppressively familiar scenery of gas stations and highways and housing projects, all tinted by the threatening weather, Strike felt the weight of the past two days come down on him with such force that he gave out an involuntary hiss of pain.

He stopped the car two blocks from the projects and threw it into park, then tilted his chin to the sidewalk. “Go on out.”

He watched Tyrone walk off toward Roosevelt, a flinching self-consciousness in his gait, as if there was a gun aimed at his back. Every few feet the kid half turned his head, trying to catch the car in the corner of his eye.

Strike returned the Accord to the old lady’s driveway and sat for a few minutes to collect himself. He resisted getting out of the car, sensing that to return to the benches would be like walking into his grave.

He tried to imagine going straight back to New York, starting a fresh life in a fresh head in a fresh place, but he couldn’t even get the pictures up on the wall. He heard the man in the suit back at the barbershop booming, “It is the time, the time, the time,” but he didn’t believe that it would ever be his time, that he would ever be free of his life.

Back at the benches, Tyrone was perched on the garden chain exactly where Strike had found him that morning. For some reason, the kid had changed into his old sneakers again, the new ones back in the box and wedged between his ankles. When he saw Strike coming, Tyrone hoarsely whispered “Hi” as if they hadn’t seen each other all day. But Strike wouldn’t look at him, just walked on past and cut him dead as if the day had never happened.

The benches were busy now despite the threat of a downpour—or maybe because of it. Strike took his perch, feeling stiff and old and hopeless. He watched The Word palm a bottle out of his mouth and pass it to a customer in a long handshake, watched Horace take a bottle from his sock, jerking his knee high to snag it. Saturdays were always sloppy because the Fury never rolled on weekends and any other knocko squad going for overtime preferred nights to weekend days because of the ten percent pay differential.

Tyrone’s little brother came up to him crying about something, and Strike saw a flash of irritation register in Tyrone’s face, watched him gently backhand the eight-year-old on the hip, sliding him out of his line of vision to the benches, to Strike.

The clouds cracked like a staggered round of musket fire and the rain came down all at once, long drops that seemed to leap up intact from the pavement. Everybody ran for the two buildings on either side of the benches, 8 and 6 Weehawken, the clockers mainly breaking for 8, since it was closer. Tyrone was perhaps twenty feet from 6, a hundred feet from 8, but as Strike ran toward 8, he saw Tyrone stand up, hesitate for a second, then slip the sneaker box under his sweatshirt and follow.

Strike stood under the breezeway overhang with Futon and some others, the scene a wet and funky surprise party. With them was a forty-year-old pipehead who got caught in midpurchase, a tall, scratch-bearded mess of a man who hadn’t copped yet and stood hovering over everybody, grinning tentatively, half wolf, half beggar, trying to figure out if there was something in this situation that he could turn to his advantage.

Strike leaned against the wall, staring at a toothpaste tube lying out by the benches. The kid must have dropped it when he ran for the breezeway.

Patting his haircut, Tyrone followed Strike’s gaze, then hissed “Damn” and bolted out into the rain to retrieve the toothpaste. Strike watched him splash out there, noticing that the kid hadn’t even thought to put up his sweatshirt hood, asking himself what the hell he had in mind for this boy.

Strike’s beeper went off and Rodney’s number came up. He looked out to the pay phones, saw the rain dancing on the aluminum shelves. Just as he decided to call from the bottle apartment and began turning toward the stairs, his eye caught a flash of brown and orange, a figure with a gym bag loping through the rain all the way down by Dumont, and suddenly Strike found himself sprinting right past Tyrone, kicking up raindrops all the way across the projects, finally skidding to a stop in front of Victor just as he was bending down to unlock his car.

Victor reared up, hugged the gym bag to his chest and blurted, “Jesus!”

Strike thought his brother looked half crazy in his drenched uniform: brown cinch-waisted slacks, orange short-sleeved shirt, brown baseball cap with “Hambone’s” scripted on the crown. Everything was soaked dark, and Victor’s eyes were big with fear and exhaustion.

Strike blocked his path, not knowing exactly what to say now, how to say it, both of them standing in the rain as if unable to move.

“How come you don’t have no umbrella?” Strike asked.

“Car’s right here.” Victor lifted his chin, shivering.

“What happened last night?”

“I don’t know.” Victor tried to move around Strike.

“Well, who’d you talk to?”