Clockers (55 page)

“Yo, Hat.” Both of them turned to see Champ under the breeze-way, sitting on his overturned shopping cart and surrounded by his cloud of children, some of them burning paper too. Champ lurched upright and waved them over, hitching up the waist of his baggy white shorts, a melon slice of flesh peeking high over each hip.

Champ squinted at Strike as if trying to place him. Strike looked away, and then Champ took Buddha Hat under his arm, giving Strike his back, and the two of them went for a walk around the building. Strike breathed through his mouth, thinking, What the fuck is going on? As he waited he watched the clockers serve the cars, everybody racing down the line and trying to beat each other to the open windows, thrusting bottles on the drivers, barking, “Yo Ry
dell,
Ry
dell,
“ breaking their ass. Strike wondered why Champ would let his own people compete against each other like this, what the point of it was.

Buddha Hat and Champ reappeared from around the building and walked toward Strike. Champ stopped a few yards away, rocking lightly from leg to leg. Then Champ beamed. “You a
un
dercover man!” Laughing huskily, he massaged his own chest.

Strike turned right, then left, then forced himself to stand his ground and keep his mouth shut.

Champ closed one eye and pointed an accusing finger, his gestures exaggerated and playful, then gave Strike his back again.

Buddha Hat had gone on past Strike, and now he waited for him to catch up. “Come on,” Buddha Hat said, standing in front of a breezeway. And once again Strike found himself with no option but to do as he was told.

The lobby of Buddha Hat’s building was filled with the whine of mosquitoes and the acrid stench of burning paper. The kids playing by the elevator bank ignored the bugs, lighting the strips just for the fun of it.

Strike and Buddha Hat shared the buckle-floored elevator car with a disheveled white woman wearing thick glasses and hauling a shopping cart filled with unfolded laundry. All three of them stared straight ahead as they rode up to seven, where Buddha Hat held the elevator door for the woman, and then to twelve. As he walked behind Buddha Hat down the hot and close corridor, Strike passed a stairway entrance and fantasized about bolting down twelve flights of stairs. He didn’t think Buddha Hat would chase him, but somehow the image of the Hat just standing there listening to his fleeing footsteps stopped Strike from making a move.

Buddha Hat shared a tight four-room apartment with his grandmother, the walls in the living room and kitchen painted brown and yellow, shining and greasy with the heat. The grandmother—heavy-set, bespectacled, an elderly fifty-five, one leg swollen to twice the size of the other—sat in a red vinyl recliner, her bad leg propped on a matching ottoman. As they walked in, she was leaning forward, poking the buttons on a nineteen-inch television set with a broomstick from across the small room.

“Where’s the remote at?” Buddha Hat sounded annoyed. Strike stood right behind him, staring at three velvet paintings on the living room walls: Isaac Hayes, topless save for heavy gold chains; Levar Burton, topless save for slave shackles; and Jesus Christ looking up at something.

“Lost.” She winced with the effort of speaking.

Buddha Hat got down on all fours, slid his hand under the set and retrieved the dusty remote control.

Strike rocked sideways and glanced into the kitchen. The air was faintly smoky, although there was no sign of recent cooking. A brand-new microwave oven, the energy-saver decal still in place on the glass front panel, sat balanced on a stove-top burner like a huge pot. Two pieces of masking tape on the refrigerator door formed a crucifix, and Strike had a dim childhood memory of his grandmother making the same sign on her refrigerator as a way of assuring that the house would never be without food.

Buddha Hat motioned for Strike to follow him, and they walked down a short hallway to the Hat’s bedroom. The room was austere but not really clean, and Strike stood in the doorway taking inventory: bare walls, a cold overhead light illuminating the need for a fresh coat of paint, a pink portable fan on a folding chair aimed at a narrow bed, a twenty-five-inch TV topped with a VCR, and on the floor, two foot-high speakers flanking a CD player. There was no chest of drawers, no desk, no rug, no personal doodads, no pictures, photos or phone, and nowhere to sit except Buddha Hat’s unmade bed, the bedsheet half off revealing the same deep blue Star Wars mattress that Strike had seen in the Furniture Shack with Andre. Strike tried to draw some reassurance from the humanity of the details but it didn’t work — most everybody he knew lived this way and having a little fan in his room or a masking tape crucifix on his refrigerator didn’t make the Hat any less a killer.

Buddha Hat stood in front of his open closet door, his back to Strike, and stripped down to a pair of oversize boxer shorts. With his tight skull-head, his bony legs, his shoulder blades flaring out like twin shark fins, Buddha Hat looked like either a little boy or an old man. Looking from the Star Wars mattress to the Hat, Strike remembered something else Rodney had once said: It ain’t the body, it’s the heart.

Buddha Hat tossed his fatigues into the closet, on a pile of clothes almost two feet high, then plucked a pair of razor-sliced jeans from deep in the same tangle.

“How you like Rodney?” he said as he draped a thin gold chain over his collarbone.

“He’s OK,” Strike said warily, wondering how to play this, thinking Buddha Hat wouldn’t do anything with his grandmother in the next room.

“I don’t like him.” Buddha Hat stooped to retrieve an orange perforated Syracuse football jersey. “He thinks nobody knows nothing, you know?”

Strike didn’t answer.

“He thinks he’s the only one who got the
know
ledge.” Buddha Hat turned to Strike finally, palmed down his tight cap of hair, then replaced his jungle-fighter hat. “You ever been in jail?”

“Aw-aw-on a overnight, that’s all.”

Buddha Hat gave him a curious look when he stammered, then seemed to shrug it off. “I
never
been in jail, not even for a hour. How many times Rodney been in jail? If he’s got the knowledge, how come he always in and out of jail? See what I’m saying?”

Strike bobbed his head, pressed a finger to his eye. “I ain’t disrespecting him. I’m just saying, If you gonna
act
superior, you got to
be
superior to back it up.”

Buddha Hat drove out onto I-9, and Strike watched the New York skyline appear as they shot past Jersey City into North Bergen and then followed the Hudson River.

“You like to get high?” Buddha Hat drove with his wrist, his hand riding limp over the top of the steering wheel.

“Unh-uh. Not really.”

“I used to do reefer a little, like when I was twelve? But I dint like what it made me
think
about.”

“Yeah, I do-don’t like it.”

Buddha Hat gave him another frowning puzzled look, which after a moment turned into that icy evaluating stare of his. He scanned Strike from head to toe. “How tall are you?”

“Five seven? I don’t know.”

“I’m five six and a half,” Buddha Hat announced, adjusting his hat as he studied his reflection in the rearview mirror.

“Ha-how you know Victor?” Strike startled himself with his own question.

“Victor?” Buddha Hat gave him a slow glance. “He go to the same church with my grandmother. One time I come to pick her up, but when I got there my damn car was all fucked up an’ he gave us a ride home. Then like that same night he gave her a ride to her sister’s house in East Orange. He dint even charge her. He just did it for free because I couldn’t take her, you know, with my car all like it was.”

“Yeah, Victor, he in jail now.” The words drifted out of Strike in a gentle exhalation, as if he was making small talk.

Buddha Hat didn’t respond, and Strike wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard or was simply shutting down the conversation.

Strike opened his mouth and again the words seemed to float out: “How you know
me?
”

Buddha Hat didn’t answer for a moment, just watched the road. Then, without turning his head to Strike, he said, “How you know
me?
”

Buddha Hat veered off the river road and followed a descending curve into the cavernous mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. As they approached the state boundary marker midway through, he passed a hand across his mouth, then his crotch.

“You hear about that Do
min
ican guy got all shot up an’ died in the Holland Tunnel last Saturday?”

Strike said nothing. Buddha Hat sniffed and quickly pinched his nostrils.

“Shut down the whole damn New York tunnel for like four hours. Anybody in New Jersey wanting to go through to New York? No way, not for like four hours.” His voice dropped, becoming both musical and solemn. “Four fucking hours, the whole of anybody wanting to go through to New York—”

“I don’t”—Strike shook his head to prompt the rest of the sentence—“know nothing about that.”

“No?” Buddha Hat turned to look at him, a dreamy half-smile on his face. “You should read the papers more.”

Strike and Buddha Hat stood in the glass arcade of a martial arts store on Forty-second Street, the display windows on either side of them bristling with a huge collection of stabbing and hacking implements, from ten-foot silver-plated pikes to four-finger butterfly knives, from samurai swords to brass knuckles crowned with steel studs. There were Rambo knives, switchblades, throwing stars, the entire armory interspersed with aikido and judo pamphlets, illegal police patches, Green Beret T-shirts with ironic death slogans, and a rainbow of child-size Chinese pajamas.

“Man, this shit is clown show.” Buddha Hat pointed to a gold-plated sword, the blade the size and approximate shape of an adult dolphin. “What the fuck you gonna do with that? The nigger starts running away? You gonna have to chase him in a station wagon, hope he don’t hop a fence or run upstairs on you. I tell you one thing, though, with knives? I can’t negotiate knives. It take a lot of anger to stick somebody, you know? That’s like real
per
sonal.”

“I hear that.” Strike bobbed his head automatically, distracted by the weapons. He kept an eye on the street, which was somehow brighter at night than during the day. Everybody who passed looked like some kind of prey fish, some kind of hunter.

“How much you weigh?” Buddha Hat gave him another of his head-to-toe looks.

“One th-th—”

“One thirty?”

“Two.” Strike wiped his mouth.

“One thirty-two?” Buddha Hat compressed his lips. “Yeah, I weigh one twenty-eight.”

Buddha Hat walked into the store. Strike followed, moving to a glass counter filled with security IDs, dog tags, more knives and several varieties of counterattack sprays. He watched as Buddha Hat tried on different fatigue jackets and soft khaki headgear, buying two more hats identical to the one he had on.

As they waited for the Asian salesman to ring up the purchase, Buddha Hat cocked his head at a photo nook set up in a corner of the store. A tripod-mounted Polaroid camera pointed toward a high-backed wicker chair set in front of a red velour curtain. Next to the chair, a gold and white fake antique phone rested on a small wicker side table.

“You want to get your picture took?”

Strike shook his head.

Buddha Hat sat stiffly on the wicker throne, legs crossed. The Asian salesman appeared, squinted through the viewfinder and chirped, “Ring! Ring!”

Buddha Hat shot Strike a quick, nervous look.

“Ring! Ring!” The salesman gestured with an upturned palm.

“What…” Buddha Hat looked tense, on the verge of anger.

“Hallo? Who dere? Ring! Ring!” The salesman gestured again and finally Buddha Hat got it. Blushing a little, he picked up the gaudy receiver and the camera flashed.

Back outside, his purchase stuffed into his back pocket, Buddha Hat led Strike to a hot dog stand next to a peep-show parlor. Buddha Hat was soon finishing the first of two hot dogs, but the chlorinated reek of disinfectant wafting through to the street from the porno store made Strike nauseous; it was all he could do to sip at a coconut drink in a conical paper cup.

Buddha Hat nodded toward two Muslims down the block who were manning an incense and pamphlet stand. He eyed their combat boots, ankle-length white robes and knit white skullcaps. “They good, you know, for like the community? They keep theirselves clean and all and that’s good, but like, if they keep marching into places they don’t belong? They asking for something, and pretty soon, you know, like, they gonna get it. But they good for the community. How come you not eating?”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“What’s wrong with your stomach, then?”

“Nothin’. I ate before.”

“Goddamn, my cousin? One time he was holding his stomach all the time? Just holding it, bitchin’ like for about a week? He went to the hospital, they opened him up, he had like a
can
cer in there, like all over in there. My uncle, he said everybody thought he was bullshitting or like
ate
something, you know, but that ol’ boy had a cancer all up in there. You have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“What she look like, your girlfriend?”

“She’s nice, she’s got like greeny eyes, you know up in the Bronx?”

“That’s nice.” Buddha Hat sounded far away.

“Yeah.” Strike nodded, the stomach cancer in him as tangible as undigested food.

“I had a girlfriend but I just cut her loose, man. I like to keep myself free most times. You want this?” He offered Strike the cardboard-framed photo of himself on the phone. “I don’t like it no more.”

“Thanks.” Strike took the picture, not knowing where to put it, making a show of admiring the portrait. And then, as if completely undone by the gift and with a sudden hope that Buddha Hat wasn’t going to cut him down after all, Strike opened his mouth and let it run, talking about Victor.

“Yeah, my brother, man, huh-he … he crazy. He got this game he invented? He call it A
round
ball. He woke up one night from a dream, he say he dreamed a
game
and he got to write it down, he say there’s all the people in a circle an’ you in the middle an’ they got to get this ball past you. An’ if they get it past you on a fly? It’s one point. On a bounce? It’s two points. Aw-on a roll it’s three. An’ it’s like you got to block too, an’ every time you block
you
get a point, but like it the
opp
osite, so you block a fly you get three, you block a roll it’s one, an’ after ten balls you-you see who got more points, you or the people surrounding you. He think he can get rich off that.” Strike looked at Buddha Hat directly for the first time since he started babbling. “He-he
cra
zy.”