Double Deuce (5 page)

“They set twelve fires last night,” he said. Hawk nodded. Jackie clicked on her recorder. “They set one in every trash can in the project,” Tillis said. He glanced at Jackie’s recorder. “And I believe I know why. It is an affront to every African-American that you should have one of the oppressors with you, protecting black people from each other.”

Hawk nodded again.

“That’s probably it,” he said.

“You cannot be taken seriously as long as you appear allied with the oppressor,” Tillis said.

“Sure,” Hawk said.

“Are you saying that blacks and whites cannot work together?” Jackie said. Unconsciously she held the tape recorder forward. Tillis pointed it like a spaniel with a partridge.

“Could slaves work with slaveholders?” he said. “The white man is still trying to enslave us economically. He tries to destroy us with drugs and guns. Where does all the dope come from here? Do you see heroin labs in the ghetto? Do you see any firearms factories in the ghetto?”

Tillis pointed at me rather dramatically, considering that it was only us and the tape recorder. “His people are practicing genocide, should we ask them for help?”

“You shut that thing off,” Hawk said to Jackie, “and he’ll shut up.”

She looked startled, but she switched off the tape recorder. Tillis stopped gazing into it and looked at Hawk.

“They will not take you seriously,” he said, “if you work with a white man.”

Hawk stared at Tillis without expression for probably fifteen seconds. Then he shook his head slowly.

“You got it backwards,” he said. “We the only thing they do take seriously. We all they can think about sitting out in the middle of their turf. They set those fires to see what we’d do. They don’t care about you. We are an affront to them. They think about us all the time.”

“Why don’t they just shoot you?” Tillis said.

“Maybe one reason being they can’t,” Hawk said. “And maybe they kind of interested, see what we do.”

“Why?”

“They admire Hawk,” Jackie said.

Hawk continued as if neither of them had spoken.

“And they going to keep doing things, a little worse, and a little worse, and finally they going to get into shooting with us and we going to kill some of them.”

Tillis’ eyes shifted to Jackie and back to Hawk. “Just like that?” he said.

“Un huh,” Hawk said. “Maybe get lucky and one of the ones we kill will be the dude that did Devona and Crystal.”

Tillis started to say “who?” and then remembered and caught himself.

“You sound like you are talking about simply shooting them to clean up the problem,” he said.

“Un huh.”

“I want no part of that,” Tillis said. He glanced again at Jackie, who was all the media he had at the moment. “I can’t condone murder.”

Hawk shrugged.

“What makes you think they won’t kill you?” Tillis said.

“Blue-eyed devil here,” Hawk said, “going to prevent them.”

“And I thought you’d never even noticed my eyes,” I said.

“I am here,” she said, “because two people I know tell me Susan Silverman is to be trusted, and Susan Silverman says you can be trusted.”

“One can’t be too careful,” I said.

“I also know a woman named Iris Milford who says she knew you nearly twenty years ago, and, at least at that time, you could leap tall buildings at a single bound.”

“Iris exaggerates a little,” I said becomingly. “When I knew her she was a student. How is she?”

“She has stayed in the community,” Erin Macklin said. “She has made a difference.”

“She seemed like she might,” I said.

“You and another man are attempting to deal with the Hobart Street Raiders,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “we are dealing with them.”

“And Susan told me that you would like to know what I know about the gangs.”

“Yes,” I said. “But first I’d probably like to know a little about you.”

“I was about to say the same thing,” Erin Macklin said. “You first.”

“I used to be a fighter. I used to be a cop. Now I am a private detective,” I said. “I read a lot. I love Susan.”

I paused for a moment thinking about it.

“The list,” I said, “is probably in reverse order.”

“A romantic,” she said. “You don’t look it.” I nodded.

“The man you are working with?”

“My friend,” I said.

“Nothing more?”

“Lots more, but most of it I don’t know.”

“He’s black,” she said.

“Yes.”

We were quiet while she looked at me. There was no challenge in the look, and the silence seemed to embarrass neither of us.

“I used to be a nun,” she said. “Now I am a teacher at the Marcus Garvey Middle School on Cardinal Road. I teach a course titled the History of Contemporary America. When I began we had no books, no paper, no pencils, no chalk for the blackboard, no maps. This made for innovation. I started by telling them stories, and then by getting them to talk about the things that they had to talk about. And when what they said didn’t shock me, and I didn’t dash for the dean of discipline, they told me more about the things they knew. The course is now a kind of seminar on life for fourteen-year-old black children in the ghetto.”

“Any books yet?”

“Yes. I bought them books,” she said. “But they won’t read them much. Hard to find books that have anything to do with them.”

“The March of Democracy is not persuasive,” I said.

She almost smiled.

“No,” she said. “It is not persuasive.”

She paused again, without discomfort, and looked at me some more. Her eyes were very calm and her gaze was steady.

“I used to work in day care, and we’d try to test some of the kids when they came in. The test required them, among other things, to draw with crayons. When we gave them to the kids they didn’t know what the crayons were. Several tried to eat them.”

“The test was constructed for white kids,” I said.

“The test was constructed for middle-class kids,” she said. “The basal reader family.”

“Mom, Dad, Dick, and Jane,” I said.

“And Spot,” she said. “And the green tree.”

“You and God have a lovers’ quarrel?” I said. Again she almost smiled.

“Gracious,” she said. “A literate private eye.”

“Anything’s possible,” I said.

“No. I had no quarrel with God. He just began to seem irrelevant. I could find no sign of Him in these kids’ lives. And the kids’ lives became more important to me than He did.”

“The ways of the Lord,” I said, “are often dark, but never pleasant.”

“Adler?”

“Theodor Reik, I think.”

She nodded.

“It also became apparent to me that they needed more than I could give them in class. So I stayed after school for them and then I began going out into the streets for them. Now I’m there after school until I get too sleepy, four or five days a week. I came from there now.”

“Dangerous?” I said.

“Yes.”

“But you get along.”

“Yes.”

“Is being white a handicap?”

She did smile. “Kids say I’m beige. Getting beiger.”

“Save many?” I said.

“No.”

“Worth the try,” I said.

“One is worth the try,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You understand that, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

She nodded several times, sort of encouragingly. She leaned back a little in her chair, and crossed her legs, and automatically smoothed her skirt over her knees. I liked her legs. I wondered for a moment if there would ever be an occasion, no matter how serious, no matter who the woman, when I would not make a quick evaluation when a woman crossed her legs. I concluded that there would never be such an occasion, and also that it was a fact best kept to myself.

“A while back the state decided to train some women to work with the kids in the ghetto. The training was mainly in self-effacement. Don’t wear jewelry, don’t bring a purse, don’t wear makeup; move gingerly on the street, don’t make eye contact. Be as peripheral as possible.”

She shook her head sadly.

“If I behaved that way I’d get nowhere. I make eye contact. I say hi. Not to do that is to dis them. If you dis them they retaliate.”

“Dis as in disrespect,” I said.

“Yes. The thing is that, to the people training the women, these kids were a hypothesis. They didn’t know them. Everything is like that. It’s theory imposed on a situation, rather than facts derived from it. You understand?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s deductive, and life is essentially inductive. Happens everywhere.”

“But here, with these kids, when it happens it’s lethal. They are almost lost anyway. You can’t afford the luxury of theory. You have to know.”

“And you know,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I’m out there every day, alone, on my own, without a theory. I listen, I watch. I work at it. I don’t have an agenda. I don’t have some vision of what the truth ought to be.”

She was alive with the intensity of her commitment.

“Nobody knows,” she said. “Nobody knows what those kids know, and until you do, and you’re there with them, you can’t do anything but try to contain them.” She paused and stared past me out the dark window.

“Had one of my kids on probation,” she said. “Juvie judge gave him a nine P.M. curfew and he kept missing it. There was a drug dealer, used to work the corner by the kid’s house every night. So I got him to keep an eye on the kid, and every night he’d make sure the kid was in by nine.”

She smiled. “You got to know,” she said.

“And if you do know,” I said, “and you are there, how many can you save?”

She took in a long slow breath and let it through her nose.

“A few,” she said.

The overhead light was on, as well as my desk lamp, and the room was quite harsh in the flat light of it. I had the window cracked open behind me, and there was enough traffic on Berkeley and Boylston streets to make a sporadic background noise. But my building was empty except for me, and Erin Macklin, and its silence seemed to overwhelm the occasional traffic.

“A little kid,” she said, “goes to the store. He has to cross somebody else’s turf. Means he has to sneak. In a car he has to crouch down. The amount of energy they have to expend simply to survive… ” She paused and looked down into her whiskey. She swirled it slightly in the bottom of the water glass.

“They live in anxiety,” she said. “If they wear the wrong color hat; if their leather jacket is desirable, or their sneakers; if they have a gold chain that someone wants; they are in danger. One out of four young men in the inner city dies violently. These kids are in a war. They have combat fatigue.”

“And they’re mad,” I said.

I had shut the overhead light off, and the room was lit like film noir, with my desk lamp and the ambient light from the streets casting elongated vertical shadows against the top of my office walls and spilling their long black shapes onto my ceiling. I felt like Charlie Chan.

“Yes,” she said. “They are very angry. And the only thing they can do with that anger, pretty much, is to harm each other over trivial matters.”

She took in some of her whiskey. She sat still for a moment and let it work.

“Something has to matter,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”

“Are there turf issues?” I said.

“Sure, but a lot of the extreme violence grows out of small issues between individuals. Who dissed who. Who looked at my girl, who stepped on my sneaker.”

“Something’s got to matter.”

“You get it, don’t you,” she said. “I didn’t expect you would. I figured you’d be different.”

“It has always seemed to me that there’s some sort of inverse ratio between social structure and, what… honor codes? Maybe a little highfaluting for the issue at hand, but I can’t think of better.”

“By honor do you mean inner-directed behavior? Because these kids are not inner directed.”

“No, I know they’re not. I guess I mean that nature hates a vacuum. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.”

Erin Macklin sat back in her chair a little. She was holding her whiskey glass in both hands in her lap. She looked at my face as if she were reading directions.

“You’re not just talking about these kids, are you?” she said.

“Any of them got families?” I said. “Besides the gang?”

“Not always, but sometimes,” she said. Outside a siren whooped: fire, ambulance, cops. If you live in any city you hear sirens all the time. And you pay no attention. It’s an environmental sound. Like wind and birdsong in the country. Neither of us reacted.

“Often the families are dysfunctional because of dope or booze or pathology. Sometimes they are abusive, the kind you see on television. But some times they are Utopian-my kid can do no wrong. My kid is fine. The other ones are bad. It’s the myth by which the parent reassures herself, or occasionally himself, that everything is okay. And of course it isn’t and the pressure on the kid to be the source, so to speak, of `okayness’ for the family adds to his stress and drives him to the gang. Sometimes the kid is the family caretaker. He’s the one putting food on the table-usually from dealing drugs-nobody asks him where he got the money. He’s valued for it.” She raised her glass with both hands from her lap and drank some more of the whiskey.

“If you’re dealing,” she said, “you have to be down with the gang where you’re dealing.”

I stood and went around my desk and poured a little more whiskey into her glass. She made no protest. She had settled back into her chair a little; she seemed in a reverie as she talked about what was obviously her life’s work.

“Then there’s the other myth. The bad-seed myth. The family that tells the kid he’s bad from birth. One of my kids got shot in the chest and was dying of it. I was there, and his mother was there. `I told him he was no good,‘ she said to me. `I told him he’d end up with a bullet in him before he was twenty. And I was right.’ ”

“What a triumph for her,” I said.

The whiskey seemed to have no effect on her, and she drank like one who enjoyed whiskey-not like someone who needed it. She smiled, almost dreamily.

“Had a kid, about fifteen, named Coke. Smart kid, had a lot of imagination, felt a lot of things. He knew the numbers, one in four, and he was sure he was going to be the one. So, because he was certain he’d die young, he set out to impregnate as many girls as he could. Even had a schedule set up, so he could achieve the maximum possible pregnancies before he died.”

“There’ll be one child left to carry on,” I said.

“Unfortunately there are twenty or thirty children left to carry on. All of them with junior high school girls for mothers, and no father.”

“Did he die young?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But he’s not around for those children.”

“They were a stay against confusion,” I said.

“A continuation, a kind of self,” she said, “that would survive him when the world he lived in overwhelmed him.”

“And he never identified with the three out of four that don’t die violently in youth,” I said.

“No. The life’s too hard for that kind of optimism.”

“Seventy-five percent is good odds in blackjack,” I said. “But for dying, it would not seem a source of much comfort.”

“Where I work,” she said, “there is no source of much comfort.”

“Except maybe you,” I said.

She smiled a little and sipped a little more whiskey.

“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “a literate ex-nun.”

“Anything’s possible,” she said.