The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (46 page)

He wore a Kevlar vest on these nights and during certain segments of the day. He also owned a handgun now, which he kept close. Though there are no accounts of Rob ever following through on his plan to sell weapons on the black market (a plan that, like so many others he had, seems to have fallen by the wayside), he did purchase one.

Amin, the dealer for whom Rob still worked, hadn't in fact learned about his massive dealings, but members of the Double II Set Bloods had. Apparently, Kamar had deduced that what he'd been involved in—and fired from—had involved more than just a few ziplocks of weed, and he'd decided to raise his station by getting in good with the most powerful entity in East Orange. The Yalie was working in secret, Kamar said, and in a big way, in their territory. This was a lie; the essential aspect of Rob's initial instructions to Kamar and the other mules had hinged on the layout of territory in East Orange and the specific blocks they were to venture nowhere near. But fact-checking wasn't a major tenet of gang behavior. Immediate action was.

Rob suspended his dealings for the time being. He spent his time trying to figure out how to plug the freely flowing stream of information. He needed to talk to someone associated with the Double II Sets and do so quietly, safely. He was good at talking. Given the right chance with the right person, he was certain he could explain honestly his intentions
and his dealings while outing Kamar as an unreliable source with a petty vendetta. He had two concerns. The first was that he didn't want to get Kamar hurt. The second was that, were he to stage his outreach under the wrong circumstances, there wouldn't be time to talk.

He finally told his friends what had happened. And his admission, while standing in direct contrast to all his initial promises, was received calmly, without anger. The guys had not helped him as much as they'd promised, but they wanted nothing more than to fix this situation.

“We should get rid of the stuff,” Drew said. “For real. We're paid out. No harm done.”

“No,” Rob replied. “I just need a minute to get on top of this.”

“C'mon,” Curtis said. “It's not worth it.”

Rob looked at Tavarus, their real estate vision with its many charts and graphs passing through the eye contact.

“Give me three days,” Rob said, nearly a plea. “No one's gonna do anything in three days, certainly not that little punkass Kamar. I can get it right by then.”

They'd entered into this dialogue hoping to be reassured by Rob's demeanor if not his words. But Rob looked cold, antsy, the opposite of peaceful.

In the
Newark Star-Ledger
a few days later, a front-page article referenced the previous March, 2010, which had been Newark's first ­murder-free calendar month in over forty years. The first quarter of 2011 had shown a 71 percent uptick in violent crime compared to the same period of last year.

“Y
OU WORK UNTIL
you're sixty-five and your benefits go up almost twenty percent,” Rob told his mother.

Jackie was sixty-three and dreaming of retirement. She knew that one of her son's most enduring motivations had always been to allow her to retire early, much earlier than sixty-three. She didn't hold it against him that he was now convincing her, with numeric logic, to hold out
until sixty-five. According to the tables he'd found, if she retired now she'd receive $964 per month in Social Security payments as opposed to $1,201 per month if she worked for two more years.

They were sitting across from one another in the parlor. The curtains hung down over the window right behind Rob's head, the same curtains she used to chastise him for poking his face through while waiting for his father to arrive. Jackie took them down twice a year for cleaning. The street was semivisible through the lace. Spring was beginning to manifest in earnest; new weeds in the vacant lot across the street had almost reached the height of the fence. Clusters of children passed by in their navy uniforms walking home from school, looking forward to the summer.

Jackie nodded her head and said, “Yeah, yeah, I know you're right.” She hadn't really been serious about retiring this year but had nurtured the idea as a pleasant fantasy. She'd been working at the nursing home for fifteen years. The recession had hit the company hard, and she'd taken a pay cut, but she was still making over $30,000 a year supervising the kitchen, and her pension and benefits would remain intact. The $237 extra per month would make a difference in the long run.

Her son made sense with numbers. He always had. And now he was thirty years old, taking her through the tiers of retirement benefits. She wished that these calculations hadn't always been so challenging, not in terms of the math but its implications. She knew that he wished the same thing. But she didn't fix any anger, as her son did, to that wish. She'd entertained many such wishes during the course of her life and had long since accepted the reality that very few of them would come true. She'd wished that Skeet had been innocent. She'd wished for jackpots with each crank of an Atlantic City slot machine. She'd wished that her boss would slip and fall and hit his head hard enough that he would suddenly become kind. She'd wished that her mother would be able to pass on without further suffering. She'd wished that her son would be able to make his way in the world easily, successfully, and happily. When she'd been thirty, she hadn't yet given birth to him; in retrospect, her life
hadn't even begun, because Rob would ultimately become her life. He was still more or less a child. He had time. But she couldn't explain this brand of time to him. She wasn't good with words that way.

By the middle of May, any danger Rob felt himself to be in seemed, at least to his friends, to have subsided. He spent one night at Tamba's house, a DJ friend of his who lived around the corner from Smith Street, playing spades until four in the morning. He told Flowy that he'd talked to someone, a Blood, and it was all on the up-and-up again. Kamar hadn't been seen or heard from in over a week. “Bitch left town, no doubt, now that I outed his lyin' ass.” He filled the void left by Kamar himself, spending most nights driving around, selling dimes, music blaring and the window down as his car worked the freeways and bridges and tunnels surrounding New York City. He texted with Lisa Wingo incessantly.

Lisa: u don't visit a sister?

Peace: gotta lay low

Lisa: what u been doing?

Peace: Rippin n runnin

Lisa: b careful

Peace: always

Peace: oh and I started watching glee yesterday

Peace: Don't tell anyone

Lisa: =))

Lisa: N u luuuuuuv it

Peace: More than I thought possible

Peace: Shhhhhhh.....

Lisa: See??? Told ya

Peace: Just watched the episode where they did ceelo song forget u

Lisa: Hahahahahaha

Peace: I know. This is our lil secret though, right?????

Lisa: Who da hell am I gonna tell??!?

Peace: Just making sure

Lisa: Imma blast u on facebook!!!!!!!

Lisa: Just like a man......u like glee, but don't wanna admit it. Puuuuunk

Peace: U so mean

He wore the Kevlar vest whenever he was in his car, night and day, but he kept the gun buried in the spare tire compartment of the trunk or else in a ground-floor closet at Smith Street, an afterthought, or maybe a reminder, but nothing more.

“I just can't believe I know someone with a gun in his car,” Raquel told him. He had stopped by to give her weed so she could make brownies, which he called Dem Shits. “Who the fuck does that?”

He shook his head and smiled. “It'll be done with soon enough.” He gave her a hug and told her to give one to Felix for him when the boy woke the next morning. Then he left. From the window, she watched his shadow cross 119th Street and get in his car and head west toward First Avenue. She imagined him driving over the gorgeously lit George Washington Bridge, alone, with that sober expression on his face that being stoned could no longer mask.

On Thursday, May 12, he took Lisa Wingo and her daughter to Red Lobster for dinner. She gave him a hard time for ordering a pineapple cocktail complete with an umbrella skewering a stack of fruit slices. She argued over the check but ultimately let him pay. His happiness was always the most genuine when he was taking care of her in some mannish way such as this: paying a bill, lifting a heavy box, bringing food to the apartment. They joked sometimes about an alternate world in which they were husband and wife. “You're too pretty for me,” he said, “my little Oompa Loompa.” After dinner, she asked him where he was going.

“Get some ass.”

“Who with?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Well, have fun.”

“If she's already asleep when I get there, I'll kill her. I ain't paying no twelve-dollar tolls just to go to bed.”

Rene was asleep, but he woke her, and they made love, and afterward he talked once again, in that deep refrain, about providing for her someday. She let him talk. His voice was a pleasing sound by which to drift off to sleep, a white noise.

T
HAT WEEKEND
, the Burger Boyz had a cookout in the backyard on Smith Street. Friends came in and out down the side alley between houses. In fold-out chairs along the fence, men and women passed a joint back and forth. Music played, old-school songs like “Ruff Ryders Anthem” by Jay-Z and “Put It on Me” by Ja Rule. Lisa came, her mousy voice rising high above the men's low tones. Flowy held court, his long arms waving loops above his tall, narrow frame as he talked. Curtis showed off the watermelon vines he'd planted in his garden this year, the tiny buds that in a few months would be monstrous and succulent. Christopher scurried around at waist height until his bedtime, at which point Tavarus and Darlene both took him upstairs to read books.

Rob was in a quiet mood. He worked the grill for hours, slow-­roasting his Brazilian pork with a spatula in one hand and a drink in the other. His face lit brightly whenever the rendered fat caused a flare-up out of the charcoal bed; his eyes were angled down into the flames as he carefully scooted the meat toward the edges of the grill. A friend from Mt. Carmel Elementary, Demien, taught karate classes at a local dojo, and Rob had been training with him recently—intense, battering workouts that taught him a specific set of combat moves that leveraged an opponent's power against him. Rob asked Demien how he could live on the minuscule salary he made there. “I don't know.” Demien shrugged. “I can pay rent, eat. That's good enough with how much I love what I do.”

The night felt happy and old—a return to form no different from the hundreds that had occurred over the years since high school, but also a
foreshadowing of times to come.

Tavarus returned to the yard from Christopher's room upstairs. He was drunk and talking loudly about the latest long-term idea he and Rob had conceived. They wanted to establish a kind of training college, in which students would come straight out of high school and learn practical skills like how to interview and dress and work for a corporation. The curriculum would be tiered over three years. The first year would be purely classroom lessons, taught by local business owners. The second year would involve an intensive internship in one's chosen field. The third year would segue into an actual job, with a certain percentage of salary set aside to pay for the full tuition on the back end. Tavarus spoke in big terms about how necessary such an institution would be in this neighborhood, how meaningless the traditional secondary education ultimately was to people like him: loading up on debt in order to study liberal arts with no practical value.

“You talk too much,” Rob called from the grill. “This isn't even an idea yet. This is, like, the far future, like, decades away. And who knows what the educational system's gonna look like then. Chill.”

On Monday, May 16, Rob showed up at Sherman Feerick's house in Bloomfield. Sherman was a former classmate from Yale, a staple at the Weed Shack. They'd remained good friends over the years, though Sherman did not overlap much with Rob's other friends. He had a seven-year-old daughter and was active in Newark's business sector as a consultant. He was constantly talking on one of his three cell phones, filling the atmosphere around him with business-speak that Rob didn't understand. He had worked off and on as a liaison between the mayor's office and the gang entities of the North Ward, though a murder on the street outside his office in Vailsburg, in the middle of the day when he'd brought his daughter to work, had caused him to rethink his capacity to bring any form of progress to these neighborhoods. He was thinking about moving to Orange County in California to give his little girl a healthier life. In the meantime, his latest venture was a summer camp for at-risk children.

For all Sherman's goings-on, his home was small and barely furnished. Rob sat at the kitchen table, uncharacteristically quiet as he stared down at the nicked wooden surface. He didn't take off his leather jacket.

“I need some work,” he said.

“Okay,” Sherman replied. He was confused; Rob had never asked him for anything in over a decade of knowing each other.

“I was thinking I could be, like, a counselor at your camp or whatever.”

“You'd be great at that,” Sherman said.

“So, you got any openings?”

Sherman shook his head. He didn't have the money to pay any actual wages. “Our fund-raiser is in June, I'm putting it together right now. After that, yeah, I'll probably be able to make a spot for you if you can hold out till then.”

Rob breathed out and nodded. Sherman felt for him, knowing how hard it had been to come here and ask for a job, wishing he had a job to give. He was also flummoxed by the defeated, desperate expression on his friend's face. Too much time had passed, too many opportunities had come and gone, for Rob Peace to still not have his life figured out. Sherman experienced something close to pity as his old friend left. If Rob had come even a few months earlier, Sherman probably could have figured something out for him. He had the contacts to do so. They were close enough that Rob shouldn't have needed to wait until the last possible moment to ask. He had never understood why Rob had found so much shame in asking.