Another Life (19 page)

* * *

I was standing on the upper level of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, waiting in the night. Back to the wall, hands in the empty pockets of my grimy raincoat. Under the brim of a trash-bin fedora, my eyes swept the deck.
A tall, slim black youth wearing a blue silk T-shirt under a canary-yellow sport coat. Baggy pants with pegged cuffs that broke perfectly over creamy Italian shoes.
Today’s pimp, waiting for the bus to spit out its cargo of runaways. He’d have a Maxima with tinted windows waiting in a nearby parking lot. Rap about how hard it was to get adjusted to the city, how he was the same way himself when he first hit town. Now he’s a talent scout for an independent film producer. If the girl wanted, he’d let her stay at his place for a few days until she got herself together. Plenty of room there: projection TV, VCR, sweet stereo, too. Some fine liquor, even a little coke. High-style. “The way it’s done, babe.”
Another black guy, this one in his late thirties. Gold medallion worn beneath an unbuttoned red polyester shirt that would pass for silk in the underground lights. Knee-length black leather coat, player’s hat with a tasteful red band. Fake gators on his feet.
Yesterday’s pimp, waiting his turn. This one would have an old Caddy, promise to make the girl a star. The audition would be in a no-see hotel just down the street. One with metal coat hangers in a closet that would never hold clothes.
Once a wide-eyed runaway got off that bus, she could go easy or she could go hard. But she
was
going.
Two youngish white guys, talking low, getting their play together. Hoping the shipment of fresh new boys wouldn’t be past their sell-by dates.
A blank-faced Spanish kid: black sweatshirt, hood pulled up tight around his head, felony-flyers on his feet. “Carry your bags, ma’am?”
A few citizens, waiting on relatives coming back from vacation, or a kid coming home from school. A bearded wino picking through the garbage, muttering.
The Greyhound’s air brakes hissed as it pulled into the loading port.
Night bus from Starke, Florida. A twenty-four-hour ride, changing buses in Jacksonville. The round-trip ticket cost $244.
I know; I paid for it.
The man I was waiting for would have a letter in his pocket. A letter in a young girl’s rounded handwriting. Blue ink on pink stationery.

The slow stream of humans climbed down, most carrying plastic shopping bags, cartons tied together with string, shoulder-duffels. Not a lot of leather luggage rides the ’Hound.
He was one of the last off the bus. Tall, rawboned man, small eyes under a shock of taffy-honey hair. Belle’s eyes, Belle’s hair. A battered carryall in one hand. The Spanish kid never gave him a second glance. A cop might have, but there weren’t any around.
I felt a winter’s knot tighten in my chest.
His eyes swept the depot like a prison searchlight.
I moved to him, taking my hands out of my pockets, showing them empty. He’d never seen me before, but he knew the look.
“You’re from Belle?” he asked. A harsh voice, not softened by the cracker twang.
“Yeah. She sent me to bring you to her,” I answered, turning my back on him so he could follow, keeping my hands in sight.
I ignored the escalator, took the stairs to the ground floor. Felt the man moving behind me. I knew Max was behind him; shadow-quiet, keeping the box tight.
My Plymouth was parked on a side street off Ninth Avenue. I opened the driver’s door, climbed in, reached over, and unlocked his door. Giving him all the time in the world to bolt if he smelled something wrong.
But he climbed in next to me right away. Glanced behind him. All he could see was a pile of dirty blankets.
“No backseat in this wagon?”
“Sometimes I carry things.”
He smiled, long yellow teeth catching the neon flash from a topless bar. “You work with Belle?”
“Sometimes.”
“She’s a good girl.”
I didn’t answer him, pointing the Plymouth to the West Side Highway. I lit a smoke, tossing the pack on the seat between us. He helped himself, firing a match off his thumbnail, leaning back like a man in charge.
I turned east across 125th, heading for the Triboro Bridge.
“Y’all got nothin’
but
niggers ’round here,” he said, looking out his window.
“Yeah, they’re everyplace.”
“You ever do time with them?”
“All my life.”
I tossed a token in the Exact Change basket on the bridge and headed for the Bronx. The Plymouth purred off the highway onto Bruckner Boulevard, finding its own way to Hunts Point.
He watched the streets pass, said: “Man, if it ain’t niggers, it’s spics. This here city’s no place for a white man.”
“You liked the joint better?”
His laugh was short and ugly.
I motored on, past blacked-out windows in abandoned buildings—dead eyes in a row of corpses. Turned off the main drag and headed toward the Meat Market. Whores working naked under clear plastic raincoats waved at the trucks as they passed by.
He just watched.
We crossed an empty prairie, tiny dots of light glowing where things that had been born human kept fires burning all night long.
I pulled up to the junkyard gate. Left him in the car while I reached my hand through a gap in the razor wire to open the lock.
We drove inside and stopped. I got out and relocked the gate. Then I climbed back inside, rolled down the window, and lit a smoke.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We wait.”
The dogs came. A snarling pack, swarming around the car.
“Damn! Belle’s
here?”
“She’s here,” I told him. Pure truth.
The Mole lumbered through the pack, knocking the animals out of his way with his knees as he walked, the way he always does. He came up to my open window, peered past me at the man in the front seat.
“This is him?”
“Yeah.”
The Mole clapped his hands together. Simba came out of the blackness. A city wolf, boss of the pack. The beast stood on his hind legs, forepaws draped over my windowsill, looking at the man next to me. A low, thick sound came out, as if his throat was clogged with unswallowed blood.
“We walk from here,” I told the man.
His eyes were ball bearings. “I ain’t walkin’ nowhere, boy. I don’t like none a this.”
“Too bad.”
“Too bad for
you,
boy. You look real close, you’ll see my hand ain’t empty.”
I didn’t have to look close. I knew what he’d have carried in his satchel—Greyhound doesn’t use metal detectors.
The dirty pile of blankets in the back of the Plymouth changed shape.
The man grunted as he felt the round steel holes against the back of his neck.
“Your hole card is a low card, motherfucker.” The Prof’s voice, big-chested powerful for such a tiny man. “I see your puny pistol and raise you one big-ass scattergun.”
“Toss it on the seat,” I told him. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Where’s Belle?” he said, frightened now, evoking the name of his property like it was a prayer. “I came to see Belle.”
“You’ll see her. I promise.”
His pistol made a soundless landing on the front seat. The Mole walked around and opened the passenger door. The man got out, the Prof’s shotgun right behind. I walked around to his side of the car. “Let’s go see her,” I said.
We walked through the junkyard until we came to a clearing.
“Have a seat,” I told him, pointing toward a cut-down oil drum. Took a seat myself, lit another smoke.
He sat down, reaching out a large hand to snatch at the pack I tossed over to him out of the air. Good reflexes, lousy survival instincts.
“What now?” he asked.
“We wait,” I said, again.
Terry entered the clearing. A slightly built little boy wearing a set of dirty coveralls. “That him?”
I nodded.
The kid lit a smoke for himself, watching the man. The dog pack watched, too. With the same eyes.
The Mole stumbled up next to me. The Prof by his side, holding his sawed-off like an artist with a paintbrush.
“Pansy!” I called. A Neapolitan mastiff lumbered out of the darkness, 160 pounds of muscle and bone. Her midnight fur gleamed blue in the faint light, baleful gray eyes pinning as she walked toward the tall man like a steamroller approaching freshly poured tar.
“Jump!” I snapped at her. Pansy hit the ground, her eyes still locked on her target.
I looked around one more time. All Belle’s family was in that junkyard. All that was left, except for Michelle. And she’d already done her part: not just writing that letter—she’d been waiting in the shadows next to my Plymouth, in case the guy had spooked and made a run for it.
The Prof handed me a revolver. It warmed my hand.
I stood up.
“They got the death penalty in Florida?” I asked the man.
“You know they do,” he said. No fear in his voice; he still thought he was being tested.
“They got it for incest?”
His eyes flickered as he realized he’d already been graded. “Where’s Belle? Let me talk to her!” His voice was a feathery whine.
“Too late for that,” I told him. “She’s in the same ground you’re standing on.”
“I never did nothin’ to you.”
“Yeah, you did.”
He tried a feeble stab: “I got people know where I am.”
The Prof sneered, “Motherfucker,
you
don’t even know where you are.”
“You want the kid to see this?” I asked the Mole.
Light played on the thick lenses of the underground man’s glasses. “He watched
her
die.”
I cocked the revolver, wanting Belle’s father to hear the sound.
He didn’t panic, kept his voice low, trying to sound reasonable. “Look, if I owe, I can pay. I’m a man who pays his debts.”
“You couldn’t pay the interest on this one,” I told him.
“Wait! I got money stashed. I can—”
“Save it for the Parole Board,” I told him.
The hammer dropped. The man I had waited too long to kill jerked backwards off the oil drum. I fired twice more, watching his body shudder as each hollow point slug went home.
The Prof walked closer. His shotgun spoke. Both barrels.
I looked at the body of Belle’s father for a long, dead minute.
We bowed our heads.
Pansy howled at the dark sky, grief and hate in the same voice.
The pack went silent, waiting for its meal.
I didn’t feel a thing.

* * *

“Burke was born a criminal, and raised to be a better one…by me,” the Prof told his other son. “I trained him to be a true thief instead of some hothead gunman. But
you,
you was raised up to be a gentleman. Your momma wouldn’t have wanted to even
meet
some of those give-it-up sluts you always playing around with. But you ain’t no baby anymore. You been a man a long time. When you and Taralyn get married, you
through
with what we do.”
“But…”
“You could open a million oysters and never find you a perfect black pearl, boy,” the Prof kept rolling. “Coming as close to crossing over as I did, it’s like every inch of your body picks up signals, not just your eyes and ears. So I
know.
“Listen now: That young woman will not tolerate you doing anything
but
right. She might—and I say
might,
can’t never tell with those Island girls—let you slide on church, but you want to be her man, you got to do her right. Take care of her, understand? You got to bring home the bacon without no faking.”
“I do not know how to—”
“You putting up the gun, son,” our father told him. Not asking, telling. “This job we got now, we all gonna finish it. Our family always pays its debts. But when this one’s done, you done, too. That Taralyn, she stand behind you if you gotta mop floors. But one wrong move, and she show you the door. I got her memorized, don’t I, now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You ain’t gonna mop no floors,” the Prof assured him. “I got me some ideas, but they can wait. For now, only thing you got to play is
straight.
Working here, she got to know a lot more than how to do this rehab stuff. The way that girl’s made, you can’t keep her in the shade. She brings her own sunlight. Brings it
wherever
she walks. You want her to walk with you, you got to walk right. Be true with everything you do.”
“Yes, Father.”
“How many women you think you been with in your life? Pussy is pussy; pink don’t think. Don’t go to waste behind your taste, boy. Sex ain’t love. Ask Little Richard; that boy knows what I’m talking about.
“A
real
man, he don’t raise his son to follow in his footsteps; he raises him
up
so he can walk further down the road than he ever did himself, even if that means the father ends up walking alone for a while, understand? Now Burke is my true son, but he’s only got but one path to walk. Not you. And now it’s time for you to change yours.”
“But what if—?”
“Don’t buy no ring without you talk to your sister first,” the old man said. “Men don’t know ’bout that kinda stuff.” Then he closed his eyes and drifted off.

* * *

W
hen a man pays for sex, the price rises with his age. It can be anything from a lap-dance to a marriage, but it’s still what the Prof always called it: cash-for-gash.
The older I get, the more I find myself back where I started. Every woman I’ve ever loved, they all left, one way or another. Some dead, all gone.
Maybe, one day…
But until love comes into my life again, I pay. I don’t pay more; I just pay more often.
I still remember what my father told me the night before I wrapped up my last felony fall:
“Youngblood, listen good now. You walk out that door, I know pussy’s first on your list. A man in this Life don’t need no wife. But never forget: when you get with a whore,
never
look for more. Do that, you gonna get fucked in more ways than I could ever say.”
I never forgot. Whores sell things for money, and you could end up being one of those things. They may be sporting a beautifully stacked deck, but there’s no ace of hearts in there.
I learned from Murphy men when I was still a kid. I learned the badger game later on. I never knock on a stranger’s door.
The street can be an anonymous play, but the Monster is always loose out there, and I’m not just talking about AIDS.
I met one of those monsters once. A long time ago, when I was looking for someone. The car-trick hooker’s name was JoJo, and thinking about her still scares me. I guess she’s dead by now. I wonder how many she took first.
You can’t call an escort service; you could be calling the cops. You can’t make appointments; you never know what will be waiting. You can’t deal with Web sites or setup services. Records can get seized. Or sold.
So I stick with women I know. None of them are working girls, but none of them work for a living. I don’t make dates, and I never drop in unexpected. Not fair to them, too much risk for me.
I just call. Out of the blue. My blue.
If they’re ready to go, right then—I make sure I’m close by when I call—the tiles fall and the mosaic forms. They come downstairs—they never live on the ground floor, not in
this
city—and wait on the corner.
If they get there quick enough, and if I don’t pick up on any visual dissonance while I’m waiting, I go the next step.
I slide the window down, and say the right words. I have to do that—if I tell them I’ll be driving a white BMW, it’ll be a red Chrysler that pulls to the curb. Those extra few seconds could make all the difference if the girl decided to make a call of her own.
If everything’s clear, she gets in, we drive to a place she hasn’t been before, and we play out our script. Different ones for different girls, but it’s always some version of: I’m on the run from the law, an undercover FBI agent…anything that explains why it always has to be come-and-go.
Then I drop them off at the opposite end of the city from where they live, with enough “cab fare” to fly to Aruba.
Maybe some of them buy the story, most probably don’t. But even if they tell, who
ever
they tell, nobody’s going to wait outside their place for me to come back—you can’t set your alarm clock to “random.”