Double Deuce (4 page)

“Would you like to reprise all of that for me?” Jackie said.

“Kid’s playing a game,” Hawk said.

“The leader? Major?”

“Un huh.”

“Well, could you explain the game?”

Hawk grinned back at her over his shoulder. “Un uh,” he said.

“Well, I mean, is it turf?” Jackie said.

“Sure it’s turf, but it’s more,” Hawk said.

“I didn’t even understand half what he was saying,” Jackie said.

“Gangs have their own talk,” Hawk said.

“You didn’t understand it either,” Jackie said.

“Not all of it. Got the drift though.”

“I wonder if he’s trying to see how you’ll act?” I said to Hawk.

“He’s heard of me?” Hawk said.

Hawk considered everything genuinely. He had almost no assumptions.

“Maybe,” I said. I looked at Jackie. “I don’t want to hear any of this on The Marge Eagen Show. ”

“No,” Jackie said. “Unless I warn you, it’s background only. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Maybe Major has heard of you. Maybe you are a kind of ghetto legend, like Connie Hawkins was on the New York playgrounds, say, for different reasons…”

“Who’s Connie Hawkins?” Jackie said.

“Basketball player,” Hawk said. He kept his eyes on me. “Yeah?”

“So maybe Major wants to learn,” I said. Hawk nodded slowly and kept nodding.

“Learn how to handle trouble?” Jackie said.

“How a man behaves,” Hawk said. He kept nodding. “That’s why they haven’t just done a driveby and sprayed us.”

“Which is not to say they won’t,” I said.

“But if he want to learn, he will escalate slow,” Hawk said.

“And observe, and if it goes right for him, maybe he can win over his father.”

“Father?” Jackie said.

Hawk grinned again. “Spenser got a shrink for a girlfriend,” he said. “Sometimes he get a little fancy.”

“I try not to use any big words, though. I respect your limitations.”

“Limitations?” Hawk said. “I got no limitations. Why you think I’m a ghetto legend?”

“Beats me,” I said.

We were having a supper, which I’d cooked, and sipping some Sonoma Riesling, in the kitchen of what Susan now insisted on calling “our house.”

“Well, she’s brave as hell,” I said. “When the guns came out this morning, she hit the pavement facedown, but she kept her tape recorder going.”

Susan moved some of her chicken cutlet about in the wine lemon sauce I had made.

“Smart?”

“I think so,” I said. “She asks a lot of questions-but that is, after all, her job.”

Susan cut a becomingly modest triangle of chicken, speared it with her fork, raised it to her lips, and bit off half of it. Pearl sat quietly with her head on Susan’s thigh, her eyes fixed poignantly on the supper. Susan put the fork down and Pearl took the remaining bite quite delicately.

“There are dogs,” I said, “who eat Gaines Meal from a bowl on the floor.”

“There are dogs who are not treated properly,” Susan said. “Is she attractive?”

“Jackie? Yeah, she’s stunning.”

“Is she the most stunning woman you know?” Susan said. She put her fork down and picked up her napkin from her lap. She patted her lips with it, put it back, picked up her wineglass, and drank some wine.

“She is not,” I said, “as stunning as you are.”

“You’re sure?”

“No one is as stunning as you are,” I said.

She smiled and sipped more of her wine.

“Thank you,” she said.

I had cooked some buckwheat noodles to go with the chicken, and some broccoli, and some whole-wheat biscuits. We both attended to that, for a bit, while Pearl inspected every movement.

“Am I as stunning as Hawk?” I said.

Susan gazed at me for a moment without any expression.

“Of course not,” she said and returned to her food.

I waited. I knew she couldn’t hold it. In a moment her shoulders started to shake and finally she giggled audibly. She raised her head, giggling, and I could see the way her eyes tightened at the corners as they always did when she was really pleased.

“You don’t meet that many shrinks that giggle,” I said.

“Or have reason to,” Susan said as her giggling became sporadic. “What’s for dessert?”

“I could tear off your clothes and force myself upon you,” I said.

“We had that last night,” Susan said. “Why can’t we have desserts like other people-you know, Jell-O Pudding, maybe some Yankee Doodles?”

“You wouldn’t say that if I was as stunning as Hawk,” I said.

“True,” Susan said. “Do you think he’s serious about her?”

“What is Hawk serious about?” I said. “I’ve never known him before to bring a woman along when we were working.”

“Well, is she serious about him?”

“She acts it. She touches him a lot. She looks at him a lot. She listens when he speaks.”

“That doesn’t mean eternal devotion,” Susan said.

“No, some women treat every guy like that,” I said. “Early conditioning, I suppose. But Jackie doesn’t seem like one of them. I’d say she’s interested.”

“And he’s taking on this gang for her,” Susan said.

“Yeah, but that may be less significant than it seems,” I said. “Hawk does things sometimes because he feels like doing them. There aren’t always reasons, at least reasons that you and I would understand, for what he does.”

“I agree that I wouldn’t always understand them,” Susan said. “I’m not so sure you wouldn’t.”

I shrugged.

“Whatever,” I said. “He may have decided to do this just to see how it would work out.”

Susan held her glass up and looked at the last of the sunset glowing through it from her west-facing kitchen windows.

“I would not wish to be in love with Hawk,” Susan said.

“You’re in love with me,” I said.

“That’s bad enough,” she said.

“How come in books and movies the ghetto is always teeming with life: dogs barking, children crying, women shouting, radios playing, that sort of thing? And I come to a real ghetto, with two actual black people, and I can hear my hair growing?”

“Things are not always what they seem,” Hawk said. He was as relaxed as he always was, arms folded on the roof of the car. But I knew he saw everything. He always did.

“Oh,” I said.

“This is the first ghetto I’ve ever been to,” Jackie said. “I grew up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. My father is an architect. I thought it would be like that too.”

“Mostly in a place like this,” Hawk said, “people can’t afford dogs and radios. You can afford those, you can afford to get out. Here it’s just people got no money and no power, and what kids they got they keep inside to protect them. People here don’t want to attract attention. Somebody know you got a radio, they steal it. People want to be invisible. This place belongs to the Hobart Street Gang. They the only ones with radios. The only ones noisy.”

“And we’ve quieted them down,” I said.

“For the moment,” Hawk said.

Jackie was standing between Hawk and me. She was leaning her shoulder slightly against Hawk’s.

“Did you grow up in a place like this, Hawk?”

Hawk smiled.

A faded powder blue Chevy van pulled around the corner of Hobart Street and cruised slowly past us. Its sides were covered with graffiti. Hawk watched it silently as it drove past. It didn’t slow and no one paid us any attention. It turned right at McCrory Street and disappeared.

“You think that was a gang car?” Jackie said.

“Some gang,” Hawk said.

“Hobart?” Hawk shrugged.

“So how do you know it’s a gang van?” Jackie said.

“Nobody else would have one,” Hawk said.

“Because they couldn’t afford it?”

Hawk nodded. He was looking at the courtyard.

“Gang would probably take it away from anyone who wasn’t a member,” I said.

Jackie looked at Hawk. “Is that right?” she said. Hawk nodded.

“You can usually trust what he say,” Hawk said. “He’s not as dumb as most white folks.”

“Does this mean we’re going steady?” I said to Hawk.

He grinned, his eyes still watching the silent empty place. Cars passed occasionally on Hobart Street, but not very many. The sun was strong for this early in spring, and there were some pleasant white clouds here and there making the sky look bluer than it probably was. To the north I could see the big insurance towers in the Back Bay. The glass Hancock tower gleamed like the promise of Easter; the sun and sky reflecting.

“Well, did you?” Jackie said.

“Don’t matter,” Hawk said.

Jackie looked at me.

“I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming,” I said.

“And do you know where he grew up?” Jackie said.

“No.”

Jackie took in a long slow breath and let it out. She shook her head slightly.

“God,” she said. “Men.”

“Can’t live with them,” I said. “Can’t live without them.”

Across the empty blacktop courtyard, out from between two buildings, Major Johnson sauntered as if he were walking into a room full of mirrors. He was in the full Adidas today, hightops, and a black warm-up suit, jacket half zipped over his flat bare chest. He wore his Raiders hat carefully askew, with the bill pointing off toward about 4 A.M. He was alone.

Hawk began to whistle through his teeth, softly to himself, the theme from High Noon. Between us, I could feel Jackie stiffen.

“How you all doing today?” Major said when he reached the car. He stood on the opposite side and rested his forearms on the roof as Hawk was doing. He was shorter than Hawk, and the position looked less comfortable.

Hawk had no reaction. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at Major. He didn’t look away. It was as if there were no Major. Major shifted his gaze to me. He was the first person who’d looked at me since I’d come to Double Deuce.

“How you doing, Irish?”

“How’s he know I’m Irish?” I said to Hawk.

“You white,” Hawk said.

“You call all white people Irish?” Jackie said. She had placed her tape recorder on the car roof.

“We gon be on TV?” Major said, looking at the tape recorder.

“Maybe,” Jackie said. “Right now I’m just doing research.”

“Goddamn,” Major said. “I sure pretty enough to be on TV.”

He turned his head in profile.

“You want to know ‘bout my sad life?” he said.

“Anything you’d care to tell me,” Jackie said.

“I don’t care to tell you nothing, sly,” Major said.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Jackie said.

“I don’t know no better, you understand. I is an underprivileged ghet-to youth.”

“Mostly you are an asshole,” Hawk said. He was looking at Major now. His voice had no emotion in it, just the usual pleasant inflection.

“Not a good idea to dis me, Fro,” Major said. “You in my crib now.”

“Not anymore,” Hawk,said. “Belongs to me.”

“The whole Double Deuce, Fro? You been smoking too much grain. You head is juiced.”

Hawk smiled serenely.

“Why you think you and the flap can shut the Deuce down? Five-oh can’t do it. Why you think you can?”

“We got nothing else to do,” Hawk said.

Major grinned suddenly and patted the roof of the Jaguar.

“Like your ride,” he said.

Jackie wasn’t a quitter. “Can you tell me anything about being a gang member?” she said.

“Like what you want to know?”

“Well,” Jackie said, “you are a member of a gang.”

“I down with the Hobarts,” he said.

“Why?”

Major looked at Jackie as if she had just questioned him about gravity.

“We all down,” he said.

“Who’s we?”

Again the look of incredulity. He glanced at Hawk.

“All the Homeboys,” he said.

“What does membership in the gang mean?”

Major looked at Hawk again and shook his head.

“I’ll see you all again,” he said and turned and sauntered off into one of the alleys between the monolithic brick project buildings and disappeared. Hawk watched him until he was out of sight.

“I’m not sure it was fatherly to call him an asshole,” I said.

“Honest, though,” Hawk said.

“What was that all about?” Jackie said. “You guys are like his mortal enemy. Why would he come talk to you?”

“Ever read about Plains Indians?” Hawk said. “They had something called a coup stick and it was a mark of the greatest bravery to touch an enemy with it. Counting coup they called it. Not killing him, counting coup on him. That’s what they’d brag about.”

“Was that what Major was doing? Was he counting coup on you?”

Hawk nodded.

“More than that,” I said. “To a kid like Major, Hawk is the ultimate guy. The one who’s made it. Drives a Jag. Dresses top dollar-I think he looks pretty silly, but Major would be impressed-got a top-of-the-line girlfriend.”

“Me? How would he know I was Hawk’s girlfriend?”

“All you could be,” Hawk said. His eyes were still resting on the alley where Major had disappeared. “In his world there aren’t any women who are television producers. There’s mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and girlfriends.”

“For crissake-that defines women only in reference to men,” Jackie said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Hawk said.

“Where you been?” she said.

“Double Deuce,” I said.

I went past her to the kitchen. There were three bottles of Catamount beer in behind some cartons of low-fat lemon yogurt sweetened with aspartame. I got a bottle of beer out and opened it and drank from the bottle. On the stove, a pot of water was coming to a boil. I put the bottle down and tipped it a little and Pearl slurped a little beer from it.

“You don’t like it when I ask where you’ve been,” Susan said.

I shrugged.

“I don’t mean it in any censorious way,” Susan said.

“I know.” I wiped the bottle mouth off with my hand and drank a little more beer. “I have lived all my life, nearly, in circumstances where I went where I would and did what I did and accounted to no one.”

“Even as a boy?”

“My father and my uncles, once I was old enough to go out alone, didn’t ask where I’d been.”

“But two people who live with one another, who share a life… It is a reasonable question.”

“I know,” I said. “Which is why I don’t say anything.”

“But you do,” Susan said. “Your whole body resents the question. The way you hold your head when you answer, the way you roll your shoulders.”

“Betrayed,” I said, “by my expressive body.”

“I’m afraid so,” Susan said.

She held her gaze on me. Her huge dark eyes were serious. Her mouth showed the little lines at the corner that showed only when she was angry.

“Suze, I’ve lived alone all my adult life. Now I’m cohabitating in a large house in Cambridge with a yard and a dog.”

“You love that dog,” Susan said.

“Of course I do. And I love you. But it is an adjustment.”

She kept her gaze on my face another moment and then she smiled and put her hand on my cheek and leaned forward, bending from the waist as she always did, a perfect lady, and kissed me softly, but not hastily, on the mouth.

“I’m having pasta and broccoli for supper,” she said. “Would you care for some?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll drink a couple of beers and then maybe make a sandwich or something and watch the Celtics game.”

“Fine,” Susan said.

She cut the tops off the broccoli and threw the stalks away. Then she separated the flowerets and piled them up on her cutting board. I sat on a stool opposite her and watched.

“You could peel those stalks and freeze them,” I said. “Be great for making a nice soup when you felt like it.”

Susan looked at me as if I had begun speaking in tongues.

“In my entire life,” Susan said, “I have never, ever felt like making a nice soup.”

Susan put some whole-wheat pasta in the pot, watched while it came back to a boil again, and tossed in her broccoli. It came to a second boil and she reached over and set the timer on her stove. While it cooked she tossed herself a large salad with some shaved carrots and slices of yellow squash and a lot of lettuce.

“Susan,” I said, “you’re cooking. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you cooking.”

“We’ve done a lot of cooking together,” Susan said. “Holidays, things like that.”

“Yeah. But this is just cooking supper,” I said. “It’s very odd to see you cooking supper.”

“Actually I kind of like cooking for myself,” Susan said. “I can have what I want and cook it the way I want to and not be subject to suggestions, or complaints, or derision-even if I throw away broccoli stalks.”

“Actually I throw them away too,” I said. “After I’ve peeled them and frozen them and left them in the freezer for a year.”

“See,” Susan said, “I’ve eliminated two steps in the process.”

She stirred her pasta and broccoli around once in the pot with a wooden spoon and got out a pale mauve plastic colander and put it in the sink.

“I have been talking to a woman I know who works with the gangs,” she said.

“Oh?”

“She would be willing to talk with you. Not the television woman, just you. And Hawk if he wishes.”

“Social worker?” I said. Susan shook her head.

“No, she’s a teacher. And after school she spends her time on the street. It’s what she does. It’s her life.”

“She black?”

“No.”

“And the kids tolerate her?”

“They trust her,” Susan said. “You want to talk?”

“Sure,” I said. “Pays to understand your enemy.

“She does not see them as the enemy,” Susan said.

“She’s not hired to protect people from them,” I said.

“If you want her input,” Susan said, “you should probably not stress that aspect.”

“Good point,” I said.