The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (37 page)

Chapter 12

T
HE SKIN OF
his face and forearms had darkened to an inky hue. The sun bore down directly overhead, its heat absorbed by the asphalt underfoot to the point where the rubber soles of his work boots softened and began adhering to the ground. At its peak, the temperature on the tarmac could reach upward of 120°, and the heat became locked between the blacktop and the haze of thick exhaust fumes firing out of the jet engines as they endlessly jockeyed around him. Rob's bright orange vest called to mind his father's prison uniform during those first three years at Essex County. During the most heavily trafficked hours, he wore noise-canceling earmuffs, but he preferred not to. In the tall windows of the terminal one story above, he could see the travelers waiting for their planes, listening to music or pecking on laptops, young children with faces pressed against the glass in awe of the massive vehicles that would carry them into the sky. Below the terminal, on ground level, Rob hefted their distended suitcases, their golf clubs and strollers and duffels, into the cargo hold.

“Yo, Peace.”

“Whassup, Peace?”

“Need you over here, Peace.”

His coworkers were almost all men, typically broad men with hoarse voices who had been doing this work a long time. They had their systems and their silent language; they knew how to move the bags fast enough to satisfy the gate attendants upstairs but slowly enough so as not to faint
from exhaustion. A careful efficiency governed their work, a weighing of the most important commodity in the airport, time, against the most important commodity of the laborers, stamina. Rob fit in seamlessly, almost anonymously. He didn't complain—in fact, he rarely spoke at all on the job. During breaks, he typically read alone in the employee lounge, or took a cigarette to the subterranean parking lot outside the terminal set aside for staff smokers. While working, he was strong and tireless, not susceptible to the general stress that trickled down from the dispatchers constantly barking from the control tower. Most people rattled easily at first due to the unceasing chorus of
hurry it up, hurry it up, hurry it the FUCK up.
Others became mean and irritable. Peace, which was the name by which he was known, struck others as being very chill; he was simply there, on time, making sure the work got done but never putting his personality forward beyond the work. He was the kind of guy you wanted in this arena, especially in the heat of the 2007 summer: muggy, stagnant, unrelenting.

“You didn't go to college so you could carry people's luggage,” Jackie said, not sniping necessarily but simply telling him the truth. “You don't even need a high school diploma to do this job.”

Hearing her say this over and over—her jaw set and thrust forward, her tone objectively observant—was the reason he found himself coming around Chapman Street less and less often since Continental had hired him. At first he'd replied aggressively with various versions of, “I'm the one trying to make ends meet around here, and that wasn't going to happen on a teacher's salary.” And these exchanges became real arguments, the kind that flushed their faces with blood and urged them harder and deeper into one another's weakest points. Her debating points were logical and immediate: he was a Yale graduate, a scientist, a teacher, one who had benefited from the sacrifices of others, so what the hell was he doing working the lowest-level job in the entire airport? His were more abstract: he had a plan that one day would make sense to her, and in the meantime he was a grown man who had the right to make his own decisions—decisions, he was quick to remind her, that had his
torically turned out well. Then there were the wages, the benefits, the liberation of his mind that the manual labor allowed. In essence, he'd swapped mental wear and tear for physical. When he was a kid, before St. Benedict's or Yale, an airline job would have been seen as a solid career path, as it was for his cousin Nathan. In his evolving view, the fact that he'd gone to those schools and accomplished those things didn't need to complicate what life had once been about: the simplicity of providing for oneself, without expectations. At a certain point, he couldn't explain these feelings to his mother; they came off as defensive, which was a platform Rob hated to stand on.

When her son left, Jackie would sit on the front porch, stewing and chain-smoking in the dusky summer light. Her frustration had little to do with disappointment but rather with fear. She was afraid for her headstrong son, because no matter how articulately Rob spun his circumstances, she knew what almost forty years of manual labor felt like (terrible) and what it earned you (very little). Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments—as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligation to his own talent. In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life wasn't stacking up to be what he and everyone around him had always assumed it would. In short, she saw weakness. Rob's extreme and not always coherent argumentativeness, which deployed in force whenever she brought the subject up, supported her view. His whole life he'd listened to her, whether she was complaining about work or pressing through the tricky economics of paying for high school; by listening in his gentle way, he'd made things okay. He'd been her sounding board, her life partner, her heart. Now, at age twenty-seven, when he should have been thinking about starting his own family, he was sassing her like a child. Whatever future he saw for himself right now, however vividly he saw that future, its images lay beyond the reach of her bewildered eyes, even if those eyes were literally and figuratively shortsighted. Jackie was almost sixty years old. Though she had never known about Rob's second job, she might have found some solace in the fact that, as
he'd done during his last career shift at St. Benedict's, he'd stopped selling drugs for the moment.

In addition to being able to give out buddy passes, Continental employees themselves flew for free on standby—a fundamental component of Rob's short-term plan. He had gotten the job through Nathan, who worked in the control tower as a kind of runway manager, tracking incoming planes and moving the tarmac workers around from gate to gate to accommodate them. Nathan and Rob had recently traveled to Amsterdam together. During that week of excess, Rob had learned that as long as employees logged their monthly quota of 160 hours worked, they could go anywhere at any time. No longer did Rob have to wait for national holidays to make his sorties to Cleveland and Orlando to prospect properties; no longer did he have to hustle in order to afford the tickets. The airline had thousands of employees at Newark International, and the supervisors were generally bottom-line types. The attitude was: get your work done, doesn't matter how. Weeknight shifts were preferred, because there was less runway traffic and the air was cooler, so it was relatively easy for Rob to trade nights for days and weekends, transactions he treated like any other form of dealing. He front-loaded his months with double and even triple shifts so that he could clear space to travel, and to further the cause of Peace Realty.

By the end of his first summer working for Continental, he had narrowed his target neighborhoods down to three in Cleveland and two in south Florida. A $10,000 down payment on a property there would require a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $400. If he could pin down four houses, he would be paying a total of $1,600 each month, which was only marginally more than the house on Greenwood Avenue was bringing in. The challenge was to find properties in relatively good condition so that the renovations wouldn't put him underwater. “I don't need to be replacing no more damn boilers,” he said to Tavarus. He'd known that these stipulations would be harder than they sounded, but he didn't know how hard they would actually be.

Most of the available properties Rob could afford had suffered some
form of neglect. Even for a middle-class family with steady factory income in Ohio, avoiding maintenance costs was always easier than addressing them. And by the time the family had saved up enough to pay for a major repair, they were probably in a position to move to a better neighborhood anyway. What they left behind were shorted-out lumps of electrical wires stapled into the crawl spaces, rot, rodent and insect infestations, cracked foundations, asbestos and radon and mold, water damage. Rob would spend four-day weekends going from house to house, crouching in the crawl spaces with a flashlight to look at water pipes and gas lines, swearing at the rats. At night, he would mutter on the phone to friends, “How is it possible that not a single fucking person in America knows how to respect a goddamn house?” And on the rare occasion when he did find an ideal property, he would lose it to the competition—real estate prospectors with the exact same idea, who had the benefit of operating locally and with far more liquid cash to invest. At the end of these trips, he would disembark at Newark International, pull his small rolling suitcase through the terminals, and try to ignore the families of hyped-up children leaving for summer vacation, the businessmen in suits walking very fast while thumbing their cell phones, the students with gigantic canvas duffels heading off to college. Often, he would just go straight to work, with two weeks of sixteen-hour days ahead of him to make up for the fruitless ventures.

“It's frustrating as hell,” he said in the kitchen at 34 Smith Street in early September. He'd just come home from the airport. Flowy, Curtis, and Tavarus were there, smoking, having their first drinks of the evening over aluminum containers of chicken wings. The first thing Rob did was crack his joints the full length of his body while his friends cringed.
Rat-tat-tat-tat
, endlessly, impossibly, grossly realigning his diarthrodial joints. Then he poured himself a tall vodka with cranberry juice, sat at the table, and took his boots off.

“Well, shit, you thought it would be easy building an empire?” Flowy asked.

Rob shook his head and exhaled. “Just didn't think it would take this long.”

Rob hadn't discussed the move to Continental with his friends. He hadn't discussed many decisions at all since he'd taken the St. Benedict's job four years ago.

“Anyway, fuck it,” he said, meaning,
Let's talk about something else.

Tavarus had a son now, named Christopher, who was a year old. The mother was his girlfriend, Darlene. Their living situation was precarious at the moment, crammed into a small one-bedroom in the North Ward of Newark. The baby had been accidental, and they had no plans to get married, but they were both working and seemed happy, above the line of self-sufficiency for the moment. When their own personal topics became grim or redundant, the friends talked about that: the first child born among the Burger Boyz, and a boy no less.

Flowy had been with his girlfriend, LaQuisha, for six years, but they'd been careful about contraception. His foremost reasoning for choosing St. Benedict's had been to avoid getting someone pregnant; childbirth and education were more or less mutually exclusive in the neighborhood where he'd grown up. Now that his education was over, Flowy thought of fatherhood in terms of leaving the hood. He'd seen babies become anchors among many of his friends; the new costs paired with the necessity for proximate family child care rendered moving even a few miles away impossible. Tavarus's situation served as a prime example. Flowy didn't know how he was going to move, but he talked about it often, the dream of getting out of Essex County and settling down someplace where there was space, trees, and no gangs. The problem was that in places like that there were no jobs, at least not for him. There were enough indoor and outdoor pools in Newark for him to be lifeguarding most of the time, and the job required more than CPR training. He also had to keep gang fights from breaking out using skills he'd developed growing up. Where neighborhoods were more spread out and the pools belonged to country clubs, this particular job qualification didn't help him, nor did the dozen-plus tattoos he now wore, many of them the result of “tattoo parties” he sometimes hosted: Matthew 20:7, Psalms 23, and numerous tributes to friends he'd lost.

Curtis's marketing job was secure but promised no upward mobility, and being beholden to corporate types had been grating on him for two years now. In high school and college, he'd been the dynamic center of his social circles, the person others looked to when they wanted to know where to go. He'd been always in motion, planning the nights, planning the weekends, planning the future. Now he worked on a team of public relations people servicing energy companies, which seemed pointless to him, since energy was an inelastic demand and thus had no real need to be promoted. He'd lived in a condo in South Orange for a few years but had ultimately moved back to Smith Street when his mother had moved away; after more than thirty years there, the neighborhood had come to feel too dangerous for her. The house was fully owned, and the economics made enough sense to justify the more precarious environment. He didn't know what his next job should be, just that he was gaining weight, both physically and mentally, in his current job.