The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (45 page)

Exacerbating the problem was the fact that the weed had been relatively old when they'd procured it, at least three months by Rob's analysis. Some bagged clusters were already growing mold due to the humidity in the basement paired with the hash oil integrated into the
buds. He could have frozen what he had in order to string out the process over a few extra months or even a year, but doing so affected the quality of the high, which in turn would be bad for his reputation as he tried to keep selling. Above all, he just wanted all this behind him and to have the cash in hand.

“Let's hire,” Rob said, his voice resigned, the prospect akin to admitting defeat.

Flowy didn't like it, but there was really no other way. He hadn't been helping much in finding new buyers. Flowy knew intimately every block of the three square miles of East Orange. Looking one direction from his apartment window, he could see east across the Garden State Parkway toward downtown Newark. Looking the other way, he could see the forested incline that rose into South Orange. These lines of sight encompassed fully what he felt to be his domain, but his reach did not extend many blocks beyond it, and he suffered a kind of agoraphobia whenever he ventured beyond Newark, where business could be conducted safely and in higher densities. The opportunity he now had to leave this neighborhood permanently was narrowed by his inability to operate outside it. When he and Rob had begun selling in earnest, they'd shared a proud solidarity in being the only members of the Burger Boyz “hard” enough to go all-in on the enterprise. Now, as the pressure quickly mounted and those dozens of pounds of marijuana rested uneasily in the basement while weeks passed and quality decayed, Rob was assuming the burden almost fully alone. Instead of becoming resentful, he seemed further driven in this role; once again, he was dutifully carrying his friends, the way he'd carried them toward college. But there was more at stake now than there had been then. The Burger Boyz had learned—or they believed they had learned—that at the end of the day education didn't matter. Potential didn't matter. Knowledge didn't matter. Only money mattered. And Rob, once the only one capable of actualizing a full education, was now the only one capable of producing the money—this ability having nothing to do with his intelligence, only his endurance.

He began canvassing for mules. The job description was very specific. Rob wanted young guys who had enough experience to avoid arrest but not so much experience that they'd get greedy and try to negotiate rates. He wanted people connected enough to pad Rob's base but not so connected as to spread rumors. He wanted people with the aspirational drive to be doers but also with the respect to heed his authority. He wanted people desperate enough to work hard for the commissions he offered but secure enough to stay safe and conservative. He wanted people who were smart enough to understand what they were doing but dumb enough to do it anyway. He wanted people like the young man he had been, once. A man like this was hard to find, let alone several of them. In the end, concessions had to be made.

“I
JUST WANT
to provide for you.” Rob was lying in Rene's bed in Brooklyn, repeating words that, consciously or not, had become all but a mantra for him. On the wall above, her photo collages were like a dream, all of life's moments scattered and colored and angled almost at random, a kind of organized chaos that, when looked at closely, told her story. Rob would stare up at it and breathe out smoke and let himself be hypnotized.

Rene was self-sufficient. She worked in a photo artist's studio. She paid her rent. She had a career trajectory, even if it was that of a starving artist. She sometimes felt that she'd been born twenty years too late, and in the '80s she would have thrived as a professional photographer working for glossies. But computer technology had also opened up her profession in new ways, and success simply meant finding a new method by which to apply it. Like Rob in his college labs, she worked through trial and error, constantly experimenting with color and layout. She possessed a buoyant hopefulness that Rob did not. Increasingly, he dwelled on archaic principles of manhood and providing, and his current inability to do so: “I just want to provide for you . . . I just want to provide . . . Soon, real soon, I'll be able.”

She didn't need him to provide. She wanted him to replace her roommate and move in with her. Nothing was keeping him in Newark except his mother, and she didn't live too far away from Clinton Hill. For now, Rene's hope remained unvoiced. Rob's equilibrium was off in a way that she hadn't seen before, and not even marijuana seemed to be helping. He would show up at her apartment at all hours and fall backward onto her bed, and she could almost see the pressure sliding off him like some primordial ooze. And she would be overcome by the urge to take care of him—to provide for
him
—not with money but with words and gestures that she could not summon, because right now he would not understand them. Lately, he'd been upset because of a murder on Center Street, right around the corner from his mother's house. The victim was no one he knew, just an anonymous young male Newarker who'd paid the ultimate price for dealing drugs.

“I
'VE ALWAYS LOOKED UP
to you,” Ty Cantey said into the phone. Ty and Raina were living in San Jose for a portion of their residencies. Through an arrangement with the hospital, they were swapping twelve-hour shifts so that one of them could always be with their two children (a third daughter was on the way). The existence was grueling, and made more so by the fact that for months at a time, they saw each other only in passing, just long enough to trade parenting details such as when medicine was to be administered and how much food should be eaten. Spontaneously one afternoon in March, having slept for four hours in the last forty-eight, Ty thought of Rob, and he called him half expecting the cell number to have changed. Rob answered in his deep, brusque voice, and Ty told him why he'd called, simply to say that Rob had always inspired him.

“Uh, thanks, I guess,” Rob replied, sounding uncomfortable with this naked emotional sharing between men.

“I'm serious,” Ty said. He didn't know why he was so desperate to get his feelings across. “I guess I always wished I could be more like
you.”

“Eh, grass is always greener. You're a cool dude, too.”

Ty tried to recall moments that would illustrate his feelings. He had been troubled for a long time by the dissolution of his memory. He had been the top student in the Yale premed Class of 2002, and very near the top at Harvard Medical School, with unsurpassed memorization skills. But a few years of marriage, fatherhood, and residency had nearly wiped his brain clean of what mattered more and more as time passed: the conversations, the dining hall meals, the small moments that had made him who he was now.

“Anyway,” Ty said, “I just wanted to say that to you.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Gotta get back to the kids now.”

“Enjoy them.”

And they both hung up.

Around the same time, Nathan met Rob at the Gaslight Brewery in South Orange, its windows peering out onto the beautiful town square bordered by quaint shops and streetlamps, white suburban kids loitering on benches. Nathan asked a question that, by now, Rob had been asked dozens of times by those who cared about him. “What are you doing?”

On this rare instance, Rob confronted the question directly, albeit without providing an actual answer. “I went to Yale,” he said. “I know what I'm doing.”

“Shawn,” Nathan replied, “I hate that I'm the one who has to say this to you, but that was ten years ago. What are you doing
now
?”

This time, Rob didn't answer.

B
Y MID-
A
PRIL
, Rob had four young guys working for him. They were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. They worked for stipends of $400 a week, plus gas money, plus commissions. One of them, when hired, actually fell to his knees and wept, saying the job would keep
him from becoming homeless. Rob treated them very casually, like a big brother, careful not to give orders in a way that would engender any resentment at all. The only point he was aggressive about was that their cars have up-to-date registrations and functional taillights, and that they obeyed all traffic laws. Otherwise, he cracked jokes and gave them small kickbacks and tried to maintain a smooth dynamic. While careful to keep a certain distance, he presented himself as a mentor figure:
If you handle yourself this way and don't cause problems, you'll be where I'm at soon enough.
To the mules, where Rob was looked pretty good. None of them ever saw the basement on Smith Street or knew any of the specifics of the enterprise; their business was conducted in parks, parking lots, side streets.

For three weeks, the situation worked out well. They were moving the product at almost a pound per day, and money was coming in—less than Rob had originally calculated because of the new overhead of roughly $8,000 a month, but that would ultimately be a small dent. The first profits went to Curtis, Tavarus, Drew, and Flowy to pay down their original investments. The money Rob took in himself, he spent on back mortgage payments for the Greenwood house and Jackie, to whom he hadn't been able to contribute much since last November. The house on Chapman Street needed some radiator repairs. Frances was in her worst condition yet, undergoing dialysis for kidney disease in addition to her emphysema; he began paying off the credit card debts that the family had taken on for those costs. He was once again able to be generous with his friends, helping with rent, car repairs, and marijuana. At their current rate, the stash would be cleared out by midsummer, just in time to prepare for the Johnson & Johnson application process.

Before he could start thinking fully forward, however, Kamar had to be handled.

Kamar was one of the mules. He was nineteen years old, small in stature but able to carry himself like a heavy, complete with a full beard. At first he'd been very quiet. He listened. He was on time. His car never broke down. He worked harder than the others and never tried to rene
gotiate his stipend. Rob liked him; he respected the kid's work ethic and follow-through. The latter quality, in particular, was rare. “That one's got a future,” Rob told Flowy. “Hopefully not in the game, but somewhere.”

Maybe Rob liked him a little too much. Maybe he grew lax during their exchanges. Maybe he allowed Kamar to feel like an associate rather than an underling. Their physical meetings happened one on one, in the dark, so nobody knew. They only knew that by late April, Kamar had become a problem.

Bits of gossip began filtering back from some of the buyers with whom Kamar had been dealing. “Watch out for that one, he's talking shit.” Apparently, during drug deals, he'd been making comments about Rob, saying that he was smug, he was a cheat, he didn't know what he was doing. He was also talking about the Yale marker. The natural capacity for Rob's pedigree to draw resentment was at work once again. Overall, these rumors were harmless and had no effect on the business; as in any industry, low-rung workers undermined their bosses all the time. Words were currency, as they always had been, and it was important, careerwise, to present yourself as bigger than you were. The worry was that words would morph into something more serious. Rob's biggest concern was that Kamar would start talking to more people than simply the buyers—that the information would spread wide that he was running his own operation while still working for Amin, and that the operation was far-reaching. The possibility of this coming to pass was remote; Rob had made sure that none of his employees had any history with Amin, the local Bloods, or anyone else capable of intruding. But regardless, Rob had enough on his mind already.

The severance occurred on the sidewalk outside Smith Street. Because Rob was hungover and didn't feel like driving to a more discreet location, he let Kamar pull up right outside the basement door. Curtis was inside playing video games when he heard the shouting. Kamar's voice was high-pitched and, though Curtis had met him only once and not directly, unmistakable. Rob's remained, as ever, low and controlled.
The exchange was laced with profanities from Kamar, met with weary platitudes from Rob. Curtis's only real thought was that Rob should have done this somewhere else, because he didn't want the neighbors to complain. After a short time, the car rumbled off, and Rob came back inside. He laughed uneasily and said, “
Damn
, the young 'uns be uppity these days.” Curtis laughed and kept playing his game as Rob passed the TV room and returned to the basement.

The talk started almost immediately and intensified fast. People around the neighborhood were worried because Rob's name was coming up in a bad, bad way. In the kitchen of Smith Street, his cell phone would ring constantly, and he would take the calls into the backyard and speak in halting, unheard phrases.

“You need to tell me something?” Flowy asked during the first week of May. He was concerned by how reclusive Rob had become, all but cutting Flowy out of the business transactions. In drug dealing, as at St. Benedict's, disengagement was always the first sign of trouble within.

“No,” Rob said, “nothing's going on.”

“Seriously, what is it?” Flowy had been in partnerships where the pulling away of another typically meant that he himself was getting screwed somehow. He didn't have to worry about this with Rob. He only had to worry
about
Rob, and the degree to which, unasked, he'd taken the entire enterprise on his shoulders.

“The boy's asleep upstairs,” Rob said, referring to Christopher on the second floor. “We'll talk later.”

There wasn't any time to talk later, because Rob wasn't around the house much anymore. Usually, neither Flowy nor the others knew where he was. They figured maybe Hrvoje's or Lisa Wingo's, and sometimes they were right. Lana, his Croatian girlfriend, visited that week, and Rob slept with her a couple times on Hrvoje's couch. They made enough noise during their coupling to wake Hrvoje and Marina's infant son, and Rob was told that he couldn't stay there anymore. Rob had no plans to anyway. For the first two weeks of May, he slept in his car in random parking spaces around East Orange so that violence, were it to
trail him, would not do so in the homes of anyone he loved. How dark and still and quiet those nights must have been, reclined in the passenger seat with a blanket covering his chest. How he must have thought of the various places he'd slept during his thirty years, the hundreds of different beds: Chapman Street, Smith Street, Lanman-Wright Hall and Pierson College, the apartment with the French doors overlooking Ipanema, Ohio and Florida and Japan and South Korea and Costa Rica and Amsterdam, Hrvoje's and Lisa Wingo's and Ina's and Rene's and the Raymond brothers', various airplanes flying seven miles above the world's oceans. How he must have questioned the decision points that had led to him sleeping here, now, in his chilly car, alone in the streets to which he'd always been drawn.