Clockers (60 page)

Are you Ronnie Dunham…

The slick Homicide had come on all concerned, as if he was queer for Victor—what have you heard from him, how’s he holding up in there? How the fuck does he
think
he’s holding up in there? Strike told himself he had to go see Victor. He’d get it up for a visit, go see if his brother needed anything. But not right now, not with this gut ache here.

Erroll finally came forward and stood over him, looking off through his eye slits. He still had the brown bag under his arm.

“What he want?” Erroll said, talking softly out of the side of his mouth.

“He was asking about the Ahab’s thing, muh-my brother’n shit.”

Strike tried to take a deep breath in order to straighten up, but he didn’t think he could. Erroll sat next to him on the bench, slightly tipped forward like he was noddy, but his cheeks and forehead glistened with sweat. Strike realized that Erroll, too, was bricked up with pain.

“Where’s your car?” Erroll’s words were like a rustling in his head. “Bring it round.”

Strike did as he was told, walking off bent over as if carrying a huge stone. A few minutes later Erroll leaned on the open passenger-side window of the Accord, supporting himself on his forearms, his craggy face inside the car. He dropped the package on the empty seat.

“This from Rodney.”

“OK.”

Erroll zoned out for a second, his eyes going dim, a tiny high moan escaping his cracked lips. Strike chilled with horror, then noticed that Tyrone was still watching from his perch on the chain.

“Rodney say whack it up, he’ll bang you on it tonight.”

Strike kept bobbing his head for a good thirty seconds while Erroll struggled with the intimacies of his pain and marshaled the strength to push off from the window.

Strike looked down at the brown bag on the shotgun seat, thinking, Now we’re dealing weight; thinking, This is no way to live anymore, but you are where you find yourself, so what can you do?

Are you Ronnie Dunham … He wished the answer was no.

***

As Strike drove, he weighed the package in his hands. Half a kilo, Jesus Christ. Rodney was acting like there was no one in the world but him, nothing to worry about but what’s in the fridge.

Strike took the package to one of his houses, a sixth-floor walk-up not far from his own apartment, in an old but well-kept building, the hallways always clean and odor-free, the lobby freshly painted a glossy beige. The mailboxes were bordered by notices of community board meetings, petitions for more police patrols and exterminator sign-up lists. Poor but proud—Strike admired the spirit, hated the climb.

Herman Brown was ninety years old and the cleanest dresser Strike had ever known. He always wore crisp white shirts, and if his suit was gray, his socks and tie were always maroon. He owned a dozen beautiful old-time hats, the colors soft and rich—pearl gray, chocolate brown, charcoal, camel. But it took him twenty minutes to rise from his easy chair overlooking the street, and whenever Strike stopped by his railroad flat, old Herman would insist on standing up to shake his hand, which was no good if Strike was trying to make some time. Strike told Herman he was a college student, and as far as the old man knew, Strike actually lived in the small padlocked room at the end of the apartment.

Strike liked Herman. He had dignity, he had books, and he had framed portraits of famous black leaders every three feet in his hallway, like a private Afro-American hall of fame. The only thing that worried Strike about using Herman’s place was that everybody thought the old man was secretly rich, because of his clothes and because three times a week he paid two kids from the neighborhood five bucks each to carry him down to the street for air. But he knew Herman didn’t have any money except for what came in the mailbox. His clothes were thirty years out of style, and the five-dollar bills came from Strike, who sometimes overpaid his rent, depending on his mood.

When Strike entered the long narrow flat, Herman was asleep in his window chair, his head back, his lipless mouth gaping open as if food was about to drop from the ceiling. Strike tiptoed down the creaky corridor. Leaning against his locked door was a yellowed paperback book,
Cane,
the cover showing the silhouette of a young black man in front of a cotton field that rose mysteriously into an urban skyline. Herman had left other books on his doorstep, apparently his idea of helping out a young man in college. Strike slipped the book under his arm, next to the package, and quietly opened the lock on his door. He wouldn’t have bothered with a lock except that he didn’t trust Herman’s lady friend, a fifty-year-old Oriental who cleaned up and made the old guy’s meals. All Strike knew about Oriental people was that they worked hard and didn’t laugh, but he figured they were greedy and sneaky just like everybody else.

Strike’s room consisted of a narrow bed, a card table and a beat-up maple dresser. Under the bed was a safe, and the only things in the dresser were a soup spoon, a brown bottle of Italian baby laxative, a box of pint-size Ziploc bags and a triple-beam scale, all in the bottom drawer.

He put the book and the dope on the card table and rested for a second on the edge of the pillowless bed. A pulled-down manila window shade threw the silent and bald room into golden shadow. Strike absorbed the barrenness and thought that being in this room was like being in solitary. Thirty years in. For what?

As he took out the half ki, Strike remembered a day when he and Victor were kids, maybe six or seven years old. They were in the schoolyard, and a bunch of boys had circled Victor and were taking turns punching him in the back. Strike saw the crowd, saw his brother getting pummeled, and then suddenly he was joining in — not for any reason he could understand, just knowing he wanted to, and feeling love for Victor while he did it. Love wasn’t a word Strike thought about a lot, but remembering the startled look on Victor’s face when he’d seen Strike join in, he also recalled the indescribably sweet feeling he’d had for his brother right before hooking him in the ribs, and then the pleasurable remorse he had felt afterward, while walking home with him, both of them acting as if nothing unusual had happened.

Strike felt a headache coming on. He looked at the half ki in his hand; heat-sealed in plastic, it looked like a flat, see-through brick made of white crumble. Strike imagined razoring off a pebble or two, cooking it up, seeing what all the fuss was about. He closed his eyes and felt scared again, but not of the Homicide, not of Erroll or Rodney or Andre or Buddha Hat, or of his own torn guts. He was scared of this room, the silence of it. He felt sure that if he didn’t get out quick it would crush him flat, and no one would hear him scream.

As Strike was locking up, Herman sensed company and began his struggle to rise, blinking at the ceiling, moving his arms and legs like an overturned beetle. Strike dashed over and shook the old man’s hand before he could get a grip on the armrests for leverage. “Yo Herman, thank you for the
buh-book,
man.” Avoiding the watery, confused eyes, Strike scanned the silver platter of prescription bottles and this day’s wardrobe. “That’s a nice tie,” he added, then bolted for the door just as the old man was about to find his voice.

Strike was the only male in a loose and snaky line of a dozen women standing outside an aluminum-sided trailer in the parking lot of the Dempsy County Jail. The trailer looked like the contractor’s shack on a construction site, but for anyone attempting a visit to the inside, it was Checkpoint Charlie. The jail stood fifty yards away, its seven stories of sooty brick seeming to lean forward, tilting toward Strike under the scudding clouds.

Some of the women around him held envelopes that Strike assumed contained ten or twenty dollars for deposit in a son’s or boyfriend’s prison account. Others held shopping bags filled with pajamas, sneakers, underwear, maybe cigarettes if the jail wasn’t enforcing the regulation that you buy the packs from the inside concession. Strike hadn’t brought anything, not even a comic book or some T-shirts. Just getting here was about all he could manage.

The line moved slowly toward the door of the trailer. Strike saw the woman next to him slip a deflated balloon into the side of her mouth like a wad of chewing tobacco—a dangerous play. He looked up at the jail, wondering if something bad, something uncontrollable, would happen once he got inside and saw Victor.

The interior of the trailer was surprisingly roomy. Two correction officers sat behind a collapsible table covered with long plastic cases filled with index cards. A half-dozen visitors, already cleared, sat on a bench bracketed into the rear end of the room; in another corner, a male and female CO stood by, ready for pat-downs and bag checks.

“Who you for?” A young black CO in a crisp uniform gave Strike a quick up-and-down.

“Viv-Victor Dunham.” Strike leaned forward on his fists as the officer finger-walked through his box and pulled out a long yellow card. Strike recognized Victor’s handwriting.

“What’s your name?”

“Victor Dunham.”

The CO looked at him patiently.

“Ronald Dunham.”

The CO scanned the card. On it was a list of allowable visitors, all approved by Victor. Trying desperately to read upside down, Strike saw their mother’s name first, then his own, then ShaRon’s, then two other names that he couldn’t catch. Victor had put him ahead of his wife, which made Strike feel both moved and miserable. They hadn’t been close in over a year, yet there it was in Victor’s own handwriting—Strike’s name, number two on the list. Did this mean his brother forgave him? Or maybe he just wanted Strike in there with him.

“You got some ID?”

Strike offered the CO his old high school photo ID and his New Jersey driver’s license.

“Over there.” The officer flicked a finger toward the pat-down corner, then called Victor’s name into a hand-held radio to someone on the inside.

Strike gave up his pockets to a plastic dish, then raised his arms. The pat-down was light compared to a Thumper Special, but the hands made him tense, made him feel there was no going back.

Looking out a small louvered window as he was being frisked, Strike saw a group of visitors being escorted out of the prison. Trailing just behind a knot of six women was Buddha Hat, and Strike unthinkingly moved to the window in the middle of his pat-down, the CO saying, “Easy, easy,” grabbing Strike by the hip to keep him in place.

What were the two other names on that yellow card? Strike debated asking the CO at the desk if he could take a look, but he already knew how the CO would answer. He craned his neck to watch Buddha Hat walk to his Volvo, wondering if the Hat had visited Victor, but then reasoning that there were eight hundred prisoners inside, and somebody like Buddha Hat probably had at least a nodding acquaintance with a hundred of them.

When enough visitors had been cleared to make up a decent herd, a CO sent them single file out the rear of the trailer, into a fenced-in walkway topped with razor wire. The woman who had slipped the balloon in her mouth kept sliding it from cheek to cheek, a flash of bright blue showing between her lips now and then, and Strike imagined that he might get busted too, just for being near her. He looked up at the steel foliage overhead, feeling the wire in his belly, wanting to tell the CO leading them that this was a mistake, that he was sick, that he’d come back later.

The visitors were ushered through a side door. Walking the half-dozen steps to a waiting elevator, Strike picked up a sensory memory of school: glazed and stinky cafeterias, the misery of a frozen clock.

The elevator was huge and grindingly slow, the walls lined with the same greasy metallic sheeting that was used in Ahab’s, and they had that same fried-food smell. A baby at the rear was yowling, the noise making Strike’s temples bulge.

The doors opened onto a narrow vestibule. Beyond it was the visitors’ room, a harshly lit rectangle dominated by a long banquet-length table. The table was bisected from floor to chest height by a slat of pegboard. Once seated, visitors had to stretch their spines to get a good look at whoever they were visiting. Two COs sat on high chairs at either end of the table, overseeing the conversations. A red hand-lettered sign in English and Spanish warned that any physical contact would result in ejection for the visitor and suspension of visitation privileges for the inmate, although Strike couldn’t see how anybody could touch at that table, except for a quick and obvious high-five. He wondered what the hell the girl with the balloon in her mouth had in mind.

The visitors from his elevator group had to form a line again, and the CO at the door called out the name of the inmate to a CO across the room, who held off a corresponding line of prisoners. Standing there waiting his turn, Strike thought about what he would say to Victor. All his energy had gone into working up the nerve to get here, and now his mind was all feelings and no words.

“Who you for?” The CO held Strike by the elbow.

“Victor Dunham.”

“Dunham?” The officer frowned, cocked his head and then yelled across the room. “Dunham. He’s
in
already, right?”

The other CO pointed to the long table. “He’s got someone. What the fuck are they doing downstairs, playin’ with themselves?”

Strike looked to where the CO had gestured and saw Victor’s head above the pegboard. Sitting across from him was their mother—Strike recognized the labored rise of her shoulders. Neither of them were looking up. Victor’s eyes were riveted and wild, cut off from the rest of his face by the divider. His mother, with her back to Strike, talked rapidly and passionately to her other son.

The guard took Strike’s elbow again. “They shouldn’t’ve let you up. He’s got someone. C’mere.” The guard steered Strike to a small bare room alongside the elevator, a waiting room with bone-colored walls and a scattering of orange plastic chairs. The air was dense with old cigarette smoke; a ^chrome torpedo-shaped sand urn sprouted a stubby crop of butts, some with lipstick stains, and the sight turned Strike’s stomach.

“I’ll bring you out when he’s free.” The CO paused, amused at his unintentional pun. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Who is this kid, the ex-mayor?” Then he closed the door behind him, leaving Strike alone.