The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (48 page)

“You can't pass through this way, ma'am.”

“It's my son,” she said, “my son is in that house.”

“You can't pass through this way.”

Flowy towered behind her, his confusion and sadness turning into anger. “It's the boy's mother. Let her through.”

The house was crowded with uniformed men clustered around the basement door and the stoop. Two more officers came down from the porch and approached. They consulted with one another and with their radios, then faced Jackie again. “You can't come through here, ma'am.”

“Motherffff—” Flowy began, but Jackie laid her hand against his chest. Her face remained calm, so impossibly calm, amid the lights and uniforms and spectators looking on with the sober, downcast expres
sions that Flowy had seen surrounding crime scenes growing up on his block, that Jackie had seen on her block, too. These expressions appeared only in reaction to violence, to pointlessness, to tragedy.

“Where is he?” she asked. “Is he still inside there?”

The officers consulted again, this time only with their eyes. They told her that a man had been taken to the hospital, but they refused to give a reason, name, or condition.

Flowy's big hands, so perfect for palming water polo balls, were on her shoulders. Quickly now, he was realizing what he'd known intuitively since he'd answered that call from Tavarus. His friend was either dead or close to it. Police behaved differently when someone had died than when someone had been wounded; they behaved just as they were behaving now, repeating evasive, scripted statements over and over.
You can't come through here, ma'am.
Flowy pulled gently on Jackie's shoulders, and she turned away from the house with him. They went back to their cars, and he followed her again, this time to East Orange Hospital, where she had once spent twelve-hour days cooking meals.

Flowy took over the questioning while Jackie sat in the ER waiting room, hands folded in her lap, eyes pointed at the floor as her body rocked gently forward and backward. Anyone who looked vaguely associated with the hospital, he grabbed and asked where Shawn Peace was. Then he realized that these people wouldn't know Rob's middle name, the name he went by in the hood, and started asking for Robert Peace instead, what Rob had called his “
nom professionnel.
” Regardless of the name, nobody could tell him anything. He kept being passed off by doctors and nurses and administrators who seemed to put a special effort into looking harried and important and being needed urgently somewhere else. “It's the man's mother here, and nobody's telling her anything? This is fucked-up . . .” Flowy was not a violent man; his nickname had derived from growing up peacefully in one of the city's most unpeaceful neighborhoods. But he had anger in him that began to rise very fast up his spine. An administrator appeared and threatened to kick him out of the hospital if he couldn't be more patient and less profane.
He sat beside Jackie. Finally, almost an hour later, a nurse said that a John Doe had been brought in from 34 Smith Street, nothing more. Another hour passed. Flowy, fuming, noticed that Jackie was crying as quietly as it was possible for a human being to cry.

“Let's go,” he said. “You need to rest. Shawn's okay. We'll find that out soon enough.”

He followed her home from the hospital and walked her to the front door. The phone had been ringing at the house, and Carl and Frances were awake. It was five in the morning, the first faint glow radiating from the horizon to the east, where the city was. Carl had spoken with Tavarus by now. He knew that Rob was dead. On the front porch of 181 Chapman Street, while Flowy watched from the cracked stairwell by the sidewalk, Carl took Jackie into his arms and whispered into her ear. Frances was wailing faintly inside, her respiratory system not capable of volume. Jackie nodded silently as if she already knew, then moved slowly inside with him.

“Ma,” Flowy called, but no one heard him or else didn't respond. He didn't know what he'd meant to say, at any rate. He drove back to his apartment on Munn Avenue. His girlfriend, LaQuisha, was out of town. His cell phone was ringing every few minutes. He didn't answer or call anyone back. He lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling. The room was dark and very quiet aside from the neighborhood sounds that invariably rose to the seventh-floor window: cars passing by with the early-to-work shift, dogs barking in backyards, and the ever-present sirens.

T
HEY'D CONFISCATED EVERYTHING
, including the dismantled planters, and now the basement was a mess of overturned furniture, chalk and fingerprint dust, decades' worth of the Gamble family's stored detritus. They'd searched the entire house for more drugs and money, so the upper floors were a disaster, too. Darlene had taken Christopher to her parents' house, and Curtis had been taken into custody by the police. Tavarus found himself drawn to the basement. The blood re
mained pooled in and around the chalk outline of Rob's body, lying on his side as he had rolled off Curtis's lap when the police had arrived. The narrow profile drawing didn't look anything like Rob, or any person at all. The red trail that led to the drain had congealed. Tavarus squatted at the trail's midpoint. They would be back before long, maybe even in minutes, and he'd been instructed not to enter the basement or touch anything. Too, there were murderers out there in the hood somewhere, probably laughing about having done the smart-ass Yalie but good. ­Tavarus didn't care. His friend had been here in the house, with Curtis, talking, laughing, being Rob. And then he was unconscious and bleeding out on the floor. And now he was gone. Rob Peace was gone. He would never come back the way he had from all those trips abroad, coasting through the front door to make himself a drink and catch up on what he'd missed. He was just gone, gone, gone.

T
HE HOLDING CELL
where Curtis waited between questioning sessions was crowded with the vagrants and dealers and johns and drunks of Newark. Curtis had made his phone call, to his mother. She would get him out of here soon. He sat on a bench in the corner, leaning far over so that his head was nearly resting on his knees. For the most part, the other criminals left him alone; each man seemed lost in his own interior. In the basement of his house had been a dead body, dozens of pounds of marijuana, and thousands of dollars of illegally obtained cash. The questioning both at the scene and here at the precinct had been aggressive, beginning with the events directly surrounding the murder and segueing harshly into the circumstances of the basement lab and growhouse. He forgot most of what he'd told them, except that he'd been honest about the home intrusion and his whereabouts during it, but he'd pleaded ignorance regarding the drugs as well as the gun that had jammed on him, which he'd left lying beside the refrigerator. He
must have sounded like a fool saying that he never went into the basement, that the basement was Rob's room, that Rob paid rent for it, no one else knew what was going on down there. Charges would be formally filed against him; no universe existed in which they wouldn't be. During the questioning, he'd gotten the impression that he might even be held accountable for the murder itself. These were the immediacies that his mind had no option but to confront, even as they paled in comparison to the life that had been taken tonight. He thought of all those parties in high school, all those cookouts in the backyard, all the nights out at the bars and clubs. He thought mostly of Rob cracking his joints, laughing, calling him a bitch for something he'd said or done. Rob's laugh had been oddly high-pitched compared to his baritone voice, as if his true spirit were released only in those moments, the stupid, humorous ones. Curtis cried, sniveling tears like those cast by a small child, and he feared that as a result these other imprisoned men would be drawn toward him, attuned to the naked weakness and looking to take some kind of advantage. But everyone remained still and quiet as night became morning.

I
N THE MORNING
, Jackie received a call from the police, asking if she would be able to go to the city morgue and identify the body thought to belong to Robert DeShaun Peace. She told Carl to stay with Frances, and she drove downtown, nearly the same route she'd taken to St. Benedict's on the days she'd dropped Rob off. She parked and placed one foot in front of the other until she stood in the cold, metallic room that smelled of chemicals, and watched the coroner fold the white sheet down from her son's face. She nodded and said, “Yeah, that's Shawn, that's my son.” From there, she drove straight to work.

Chapter 17

From: Facebook

To: Jeff Hobbs

Subject: Victor Raymond sent you a message on Facebook...

Hey Jeff,

You might not remember me but I was your roommate's Rob Peace's best friend. I came down to visit him at Yale a few times throughout the years.

Well I regret to inform you that he passed away. I am trying to figure out a way to notify his Yale friends. The only one I knew to contact was you. Please let me know if you need further information.

Sorry to inform you this way!!!

Victor

This message brayed on my phone just before midnight on Thursday, May 19, the day after Rob died. The words wiped away the drowsiness caused by two
Seinfeld
reruns. A few shocked back-and-forths confirmed what I instinctively knew already: my college roommate of four years had died violently. But they did not give much else, not even the minor consolation of knowing he'd made the ultimate transition without pain.

The death of someone you know is so vastly different from reading of the same event happening to a stranger. You are familiar with your
friend's face and voice, and so you are haunted, during the overstimulated state of being wide awake at four in the morning, by the very specific expressions and sounds he might have made as a bullet, perhaps more than one, passed into his body. The terrible resoluteness of this passage had likely happened not long after my wife and I, three thousand miles away, had undergone our nightly square dance—one flosses while the other brushes, then switch—padding softly on the floorboards so as not to wake our little girl.

A Yale graduate lost to the drug trade seemed so far-flung and bizarre that the task of relating this to our college community was barely short of incapacitating. But still, the tidy Facebook search-poke-send features provided the necessary distance for me to friend a few dozen people I was no longer—or, in some cases, had never been—friends with in order to inform them that our mutual friend was gone. The responses I received all fell along the lines of, “Jeff it is so great to hear from you but what HORRIBLE news!!! How did this HAPPEN???” The bombardment of questions to which I had no answers only made me feel less fit for the task, particularly when I was corresponding with those who knew him far better than I, such as Raquel and Daniella. Some inquiries were as simple as the when/where of the funeral (I had conflicting times/addresses), while others asked, in the cosmoreligious sense,
Why?
(Being more or less a Christmas and Easter churchgoer, I had no clue.) The answers I did manage to learn in the days preceding the burial remained broad and overearnest and sometimes contradictory: he was dealing only to support his mother; all he wanted was to live in South America; he was broke; he was trying to go back to school; he was going to get out of it soon; he was trying to open up his own pharmacy; what had happened wasn't supposed to have happened. And yet they still rendered the predictable media spin of potential squandered, the gift of education sacrificed to the allure of thug life, etc., not only simplistic but offensively so. Equally unilluminating were the brainy musings of classmates, accompanied by the requisite, almost haughty “borne back ceaselessly into the past” references. The fact was that what he'd been
killed over didn't seem any more sinister than what he'd done in college, when the “farmacy” he'd opened in his dorm room had seemed as far removed from lethality as the Ivory Tower itself.

I flew alone from LAX to JFK and arrived at eleven on the night before the funeral. Ty Cantey and a few other Yale classmates were out drinking relatively near my in-laws' house in Brooklyn, so I went straight to the bar, my small suitcase clattering on the sidewalk behind me. This was in Clinton Hill, a kind of in-between neighborhood, and the side streets were dark and intimidating. But I reached the bar without incident and sidled up beside my old roommate. The girl whom Rob had set me up with following my college heartbreak, LaTasha, was also there. She'd majored in MB&B with Rob and was now a veterinarian in Philadelphia. Ty and I talked about our wives and children, the tribulations of last-minute travel arrangements, the logistics of all of us reaching Newark by train in the morning—anything, it seemed, except Rob himself. Our collective information regarding his death was still limited, which brought forward the sadder fact that, at the end of it all, none of us had actually known Rob as well as we thought we did, as well as we should have, as well as—with just a little more effort—we could have. But we were here. We'd spent the money and made the arrangements and undergone the hassle of gathering to commemorate his death. That, at least, meant something, as did our subdued toasts to Rob having been a “good dude.”

The next morning I showed up at the apartment where Ty and LaTasha were crashing on Eastern Parkway, across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. Ty, as he'd been on his wedding day, was late getting dressed. We boarded the subway a half hour later than we'd planned, got all turned around trying to find the Path station at the World Trade Center (wondering why, a decade after the towers had fallen in our senior year of college, they didn't seem to be building anything yet), disembarked from the Path at the wrong stop, and were swindled by the Newark cabdrivers who charged a flat $20 to take us to the funeral less than a mile from the train station. The trip ended up being so long
and error filled, our laughter over the general incompetence of us Yale graduates so constant, that at a certain point we almost forgot that we were heading to the funeral of someone we'd known and loved. Then we arrived and saw the people gathered outside. The ceremony was at St. Mary's Church, which adjoined the St. Benedict's campus. None of us had ever been to an open-casket funeral before. The line for the viewing was two blocks long and one of the most diverse collections of people I'd ever seen: Yale students and professors, people conversing in Portuguese and Croatian and Spanish, young and old residents of all the boroughs of New York City and all the townships surrounding Newark. More than four hundred people were there.

For us, the achingly slow-moving line along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard took on the aspect of a college reunion without alcohol. Some faces I recognized vaguely as Rob's customers from a decade ago, men and women who'd constantly filed through our common room, wearing hoodies and piercings—uniform in their aversion to uniformity—to sit with Rob in giggly plumes of smoke, railing against university roboculture while feeding live mice to his python. Now they were lawyers and investment bankers, with faces creased and drawn by the skirmish of daily life. Others I'd known well, and as we inched perilously closer to the casket, our talk evidenced a shared fondness for Rob but also something else shared in our own receding dreams. There was Ty and his dermatology career, me and my struggles to publish a second novel, former history majors who were doing their best to remain in school forever. Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he'd thought he would make, inhabiting the home he'd thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he'd thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier.

These uncomfortable observations closely preceded the limbo moments, maybe fifteen seconds' worth, during which we finally filed inside and faced the embalmed body. Rob's hair had been tightly braided by his cousin Diandra that morning. He was dressed in a black suit, with his hands folded at his waist. His head was tipped backward slightly. His
skin was waxen, shrunken, scentless, insufficient, and so very still. I'd expected that Rob would look somewhat at ease—peaceful even. But if anything, he looked uncomfortable, like maybe he needed to crack his joints one last time to relieve some pressure inside him.

The day was muggy and hot, and the crowded church was stifling. Between the series of hymns and as the occasional cracked sob sent a stab of pain through the atmosphere, Friar Leahy gave a long and fiery sermon about the value of human life. I didn't really listen to much of it, because I was trying to figure out what I would say when Ty and I went up to the lectern later. Victor had mentioned to me in an email that there would be something like an “open mike” at the end of the ceremony, and anyone could speak, but that comments should be kept under two minutes if possible. Ty went before me and promised to establish a scholarship to St. Benedict's and to Yale in Rob's name, to resonant applause. (There would ultimately be two separate efforts in this regard, and neither would gain any traction at all; donors weren't prone to give money in the name of a drug dealer.) Then I was standing there, my gaze panning across those hundreds of faces, every one of whom Rob had known but only a very few of whom I did. The coffin was beneath the lectern and to the left. Rob's face was obscured by a flower arrangement. I said something about the kung fu movies we used to watch in our dorm room, and something else about his grin and how we were all lucky to have known someone with a grin like that. After I stepped down, a funeral-crashing evangelist who had seen the obituary spoke extensively about the Lord's judgment and how we all needed to go to church more often and pray more devoutly. Then Raquel climbed the three steps to the microphone and, through a curtain of tears, spoke of what a gentleman Rob was, what a good friend, what a role model to her son Felix (“He taught my son how to shake hands like a
man
instead of this Puerto Rican kissy-kiss-on-the-cheek thing we do when we greet people . . .”), and how he'd always instilled her with confidence: first when she'd been a student, then a young woman, and then, most important, a mother. She said, in reference to Jackie, “He knows a good
mama when he sees one.” Then she concluded:

I don't know where I heard it first but “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.” In that way, Rob was like a redwood tree looming large in my life. His life was cut short before it could reach the full heights of its glory. But as I look around this room, I take solace in the fact that so many others thrived and found refuge in his shade while he was with us. I miss you, Rob. I always will.

Only a small contingent made it to the burial following the service, maybe two dozen people or so. In a small lawn on the fringe of the sprawling Rosedale Cemetery, Rob was buried in his father's plot, which still had no headstone. After a curiously labor-intensive process of straps and pulleys managed by two grunting, sweaty workers, his coffin was set literally on top of Skeet Douglas's. From a heap of flowers at the foot of the plot, we each pulled a lily or a rose and dropped it on the bowed, dark wood. I noticed that there were a lot of pretty women our age weeping, none of whom seemed to know one another. I watched Jackie throughout the burial. She did not cry, though almost all the family members surrounding her did. She was tucked in the middle of them all, like a pillar covered in vines. She looked as she had in our dorm room that day in September of 1998, sullen and impassive and not yet accepting the sheer degree to which she would miss her son.

After that, a luncheon was held in St. Benedict's bright and airy cafeteria, aluminum vats of chicken, rice, and greens. People were laughing and telling stories, some of which involved Rob, some of which didn't. At one point Friar Leahy approached the table where the remaining Yale contingent sat. Ty and I stood and shook his hand. He told us about the school and its philosophy while showing us a plaque bearing Rob's name as the 1998 Presidential Award winner. He seemed very happy to have a collection of Yale grads in his school, happy that we were there because a boy he had once taught had gone to Yale, had once stood on the cusp of achieving everything that word called to mind.
I imagined Rob sitting over his own food in this very room so many hundreds of mornings, as both a student and a teacher. I imagined the particular way he ate, hunched over, mouth close to the plate while his left forearm made a rampart around it, as if someone lurking nearby would try to snatch his meal away. Outside the windows stretched a pristine turf field where he had played lacrosse with Victor for one season. Beyond that, the Newark skyline cut an industrial picture against the overcast sky.

Like college graduation, there always seemed to be another event. The last of the day was at a bar in Bloomfield called A.S.H., one of Rob's haunts. I took a ride from one of Rob's East Orange friends who, while swerving sharply through the labyrinth of merging Newark streets, told me about the travails of his job selling cars, the lousy commissions. Once we reached the bar, he ordered me a “little beer,” one of Rob's favorite drinks, which was disgusting, and we had our own toast, though I never even learned the guy's name. Most of the people there, myself included, drank aggressively. Men I didn't recognize were paying hundreds of dollars for bottles of vodka to bring to the tables, as if we were at a nightclub. I talked to Raquel, whom I barely knew, for a while about how weird it was that we were all adults. Oswaldo Gutierrez was there. He was the only one who still looked sober and grim, the expression that a day like this seemed to call for. I didn't know how involved he had been in Rob's life after college; I didn't know how angry he was that day because Rob had never listened to him, because he had enabled Rob to not listen, because Rob had died owing him the $4,000 that had indirectly caused his death. Oswaldo knew better than to blame himself. Rob would have found that money one way or another, and that was one of the hardest things for many of us to accept: that no matter how loosely or intimately intertwined we had been with the life of Rob Peace, our ineffectuality extended far enough to encompass the living and dying of others.
So fucking smart, but so fucking dumb.
That was how Oswaldo had always characterized his friend, to his face as well as in his consciousness. The words were a refrain in his head that would play on
and on and on.