The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (29 page)

T
HE PLANE BANKED
through the overcast April sky, dropped through a layer of low-hanging clouds, and Newark materialized below. From the height of a few thousand feet, the city didn't appear to lie very far from the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, the narrow column of Manhattan. The canvas appeared as one continuum of hyperdeveloped land, gray and veined with freeways. From this height, everything seemed to move slowly.

His plane landed at dusk, and he trudged through Newark International with the other travelers—thousands of people setting out on or returning from trips that looked nothing like the one Rob had just completed. Flowy picked him up at the airport. By the time they cleared the terminals, night had fallen. Rob told Flowy where to take him.

“You don't want to stop at your ma's first?”

Rob shook his head. As they entered the Oranges, he must have wondered what had happened to all the color, the human fluidity, the panoramic views that were still vivid in his mind. Ten minutes later, they parked at Carl's building. A few men loitered outside the front entrance, beneath a flickering, buzzy light.

Rob asked Flowy to wait for him, just a couple minutes, and he walked past the men, inside to Carl's apartment. His uncle, by heart if not by blood, opened the door. He was edgy as he asked about Rio and why Rob had come home earlier than he'd planned. Rob didn't answer, didn't say that this edginess
was
the reason. Rob had sensed it in Carl's voice a few days earlier when he'd called to check in, and he'd known what it meant. He'd bought his return ticket immediately. His money was more important than a few more weeks in Rio.

“You want a drink? A smoke?” Carl asked.

“Just want my trunk,” Rob said.

Carl led him to the closet, where the black trunk was wedged in the very back and covered with clothes. Carl stood on the far side of the bedroom as Rob pulled the trunk out. He saw immediately that the lock had been pried off and sloppily reattached. During the few seconds needed to pull the trunk out of the closet, he experienced helplessness, rage, regret, and most of all the despair of his own idiocy. Opening the trunk must have seemed like a formality, because he already knew that his money was no longer inside. He did open it, and his eyes confirmed that not only his savings but the time he'd put into earning it had vanished: four years' worth of Metro-North train rides, bulk drug transactions in shady inner-city homes, putting aside schoolwork so that a dozen kids a night could cycle through his room, the close calls and strained friendships. Vanished, too, was the year ahead that the money had been set aside to buy him, a year he'd intended to devote to Jackie.

And Rob was the one who had decided to keep it in cash rather than a checking account. Rob was the one who'd needed to leave the country for so long. Rob was the one who'd left the trunk with a man capable of opening it. Rob was the one at fault here.

Carl was behind him, mumbling something about debts and things being hard and his intent to pay the money back. Rob didn't listen. His clenched fists loosened, though he refused to turn and face the man. He leaned over and lifted the trunk. Because the lock was broken and the lid loose, he had to carry it upright in front of his chest, using both arms. The empty pipes and bongs that remained inside—some of them ornate and carrying sentimental value for him—clattered around hollowly. At this point, he didn't care that there were men outside who were not above jumping somebody carrying a trunk like this. They could take it from him if they wanted. He must have still been hearing Carl's voice, talking about the past, his needs, what he felt he was owed for his role in Rob's life. Rob's mind was most likely already inhabiting the future, precarious now, holding none of the freedom he'd promised himself.

Chapter 10

H
AVE YOU SEEN
that movie with Tom Cruise,
The Firm
?” Coach Ridley asked, and Rob nodded. “It's kind of like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once you get in, it's hard to get out.”

Beneath the light film reference, Coach Ridley's tone was serious. Being a high school teacher anywhere involved a certain amount of wear and tear, not to mention a low salary. But being a teacher at St. Benedict's was a way of life, and a draining one. Ridley could tell that Rob was approaching the prospect of joining the St. Benedict's faculty as a stopgap more than a career, a means to float himself for a time. From a practical standpoint, Ridley felt that Rob, with his BSc from Yale, could find an employment bridge that paid better and demanded less, and that offered him more flexibility in figuring out his next step. As they spoke, Rob kept nodding and looking around his former coach's cluttered ­office—textbooks, water polo trophies, loose-leaf papers of indeterminate purpose, the stuff that made up a teacher's life—and the teacher sensed the gears within his skull not turning so much as grinding noisily together.

The summer of 2003 had been the most uncertain of Rob's life, with no job, no schoolwork, and suddenly no money. Of all his evolving dreams and goals, the one constant had always centered on his mother, taking care of her, giving back what she'd given him. Now he was living in her house again, eating her food, seeing her out the door in the
morning and waiting for her to come home at night. He must have felt like one of his uncles or cousins, who'd struck out on their own, failed in some way, and been forced to return home to Chapman Street. Most grad school applications had been due in the spring; he'd missed them while in Rio.

He felt perhaps the most unkeeled when he visited his father in Trenton. In Brazil, he'd made mental notes of everything he was going to tell his father: the women, the favelas, Paolo's cabin, Carnival, the thong bikinis, and any other experience that might nourish the prisoner in some way. Unlike Yale, whose world was completely inaccessible to a man convicted of murder, Rio was a place that Skeet might be able to close his eyes in his prison cell and want to be, and Rob had aimed to give to his father this gift, to let them walk together along those beaches. But now he couldn't, not after what the trip had cost him. And so the tenor of their visits remained as they had been before he'd left. The Rio trip proved to be a reaffirmation of the nature of Rob's family and neighborhood rather than the transformation of his interior that he'd intended it to be. But still he wanted to go back. He just needed to work first.

Work: he dwelled on the word and its meaning as he made his rounds that summer—rounds that took him by Flowy's, Tavarus's, Drew's, and Curtis's. All of them were working: respectively, landscaping, real estate, construction, and marketing. All of them had stable living situations, girlfriends, paychecks. Rob, who had worked harder than any of them over the last eight years, had none of these stabilities. For the first time, his friends were the ones giving him advice, hooking him up with suppliers so he could hustle a little bit, letting him crash on their couches, brainstorming job possibilities. They were carrying him, in a sense, as they collectively struggled to figure out how Rob might get by the way they were all getting by. “Getting by” wasn't something they'd ever thought Rob Peace might need their help doing.

His rounds also took him frequently to St. Benedict's. The school was quiet during the summer, but teachers were there running tutorials to keep the students busy and safe while the faculty prepared for the year
to come. Teachers like Friar Leahy and Coach Ridley would ask him about Yale, his lab work, Rio, and Rob could feel like an achiever again. His old high school remained one of the few places where that feeling was authentic.

Dexter Lopina had been Rob's classmate there, and one of the three students perennially jockeying for the 4.0 GPA. After graduation, Dexter had gone to Essex County Technical Institute for a degree in computer science, their college years having coincided with the expansion of the Internet into all facets of American life. He could have gone to an Ivy League school like Rob had, but Dexter had been practical in mapping his life: he loved computers, and he'd set himself up for a career working with them—such as his current job as the head of IT at St. Benedict's. Dexter remembered high school, when he would arrive at St. Benedict's around seven thirty most mornings and find Rob asleep in one of the classrooms, power-napping between lifeguarding and morning convocation. He remembered those minutes of sleep seeming to symbolize some burden that Rob carried quietly and alone, and he sensed that burden having grown in the years since. They went out to lunch at the Burger King on the corner, where Rob grumbled about needing a job. Dexter tried and failed to find vestiges of his old classmate. Across the table in the fast-food restaurant he just saw a young man struggling. Casually, he said, “Hell, why don't you just teach at St. B's? It'd be fun.”

The idea wasn't as spontaneous as Dexter presented it. In fact, Friar Leahy had been thinking about this for some time—he may have even planted the notion in Dexter's head. He'd been tracking Rob closely during his various visits to the school since college graduation. Like Dexter, he'd been attuned to the weight that seemed to be bearing down on the young man. But unlike Dexter, he wasn't surprised that the former group leader and Presidential Award winner had run up against such a wall in his life. The situation reminded him of one of his first students, Class of '74, the year the school reopened. The very bright African American student had gone to Harvard and won a Rhodes Scholarship. Then he'd returned to Newark during one of the most
accelerated spans of the city's deterioration. Overeducated and underskilled for most jobs available, he hadn't been able to find work. The man had cracked up under the pressure of living in two worlds—being surrounded by friends from a hardscrabble youth and yet set apart by his elite education. Eventually, he'd killed himself.

Friar Leahy believed Rob to be far too confident and mentally sound to be driven toward suicide, but he also knew he might benefit from returning to the place where his potential had once blossomed. In August, he offered Rob a job teaching biology to freshmen and sophomores.

“It could be good for a minute,” Rob said, almost resignedly. He and Curtis were sitting on the hood of Curtis's car, smoking a joint amid the cherry blossom groves of Branch Brook Park. He approached the decision scientifically, reducing it to pros and cons. Pros: it was (barely) a living wage, a place and people he knew well, he would be very good at it, the job would look decent on a résumé, he'd have plenty of time off to travel and figure out his life. Cons: it was (barely) a living wage, the kids would annoy the hell out of him, the work would probably be more taxing than he thought, teaching at this level wasn't what he wanted to do.

“How much they pay?” Curtis asked.

“Twenty-seven five.”

Curtis nodded. He was making $40,000 a year in an entry-level position at a marketing firm, and he saw something fundamentally wrong with a world in which Rob Peace was earning 30 percent less. “You'll have fun,” he said finally, “but just don't, like . . .”

“Don't what?” Rob asked.

“Don't get stuck there.”

A
DOZEN OR SO
people hung out in a small living room, open bottles of cheap liquor and dollar store juices on the coffee table, music playing, TV on, marijuana haze thick. Rob was talking to a girl on the couch, probably telling her what Rio was like. He didn't know many others at
the party; he'd just tagged along with Tavarus and Flowy near the end of the summer.

“You the dude went to Yale?”

Rob looked behind him. He'd never seen the guy before. “Yeah,” was all he said.

“So what're you doing in my house?”

“What's it look like? Chilling.” Rob grinned. And the guy didn't like the way the grin looked.

“Go ‘slumming' somewhere else,” he said.

“I'm not leaving,” Rob replied. And then, “What?”

The room did what all rooms, whether at Yale or in East Orange, did when two men prepared to fight: it stopped, and people backed up to clear space, their faces exhibiting more excitement than concern. And Rob must have been gauging those faces, looking for familiar ones and finding none (Flowy and Tavarus were in the backyard), trying to figure which ones would back his opponent and finding many.

“C'mon,” Rob said. “If you want to start shit for no reason, then start.”

Then they were out on the front porch, arms locked together in close quarters, exchanging short jabs in order to prevent uppercuts and haymakers, calling each other “bitch,” “motherfucker,” “nigger.” The fight was real, one that drew blood—which, as Flowy and Tavarus rushed forward from the crowd, they considered the stupidest thing their friend could possibly have allowed to happen. You never knew who was carrying a gun or a blade. And even if they weren't carrying now, they probably would be tomorrow. Finding out where someone lived was easy enough to do.

They broke up the fight as cleanly as they could. Flowy knew the guy and talked him down while Tavarus hustled Rob onto the street, toward their car.

“You can't do that,” Tavarus said.

Rob was breathing heavily, the muscles of his face tight and hot, rushing with blood. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Chill. Walk away.”

“Why?”

“Because what if us two aren't there?”

Rob still liked to walk around the neighborhood, he liked hanging on stoops beneath the oppressive summer heat, and he liked house parties at his friends'. But he had to be careful now about what he said. For four years at Yale, he'd sat at the center of his circle with free rein to utter whatever was on his mind. He was well known for calling people out on their “bullshit.” But he'd been able to exercise that tendency with the concrete awareness that his words had no consequences, not real ones. Maybe someone's feelings would get hurt; maybe there'd be an argument. Even so, nobody at Yale would ever come at him, no one carried lethal weapons, no one constructed the particular walls around his pride that, if penetrated, might impel him to want to inflict severe physical harm. The situation was different in Newark—more so now than ever, since the gang explosion had begun. Offend the wrong person with a word or an expression, and Rob risked having a loyal militia patrolling the streets of East Orange, armed, with no compunction about putting a bullet in someone.

Whenever that word, “Yale,” was uttered, even in the lightest way possible, Rob did what he could to undermine its connotation. An exchange might begin with someone saying, “I still don't believe a punkass like you went to no
Yale
; you're just
lying
!” and Rob would shake his head with a doleful semismile and say, “Yeah. I did that shit.” Then later, he would politely ask whoever had invoked the university never to do so again. He didn't need or want that Yale label on his leather jacket.

Across the Hudson River in Manhattan, his former classmates were wearing the same label like a badge. We went out in groups, herding through the East Village and SoHo the way we once had through the quads of New Haven. We went to mixers at the Yale Club on Thursday nights, hobnobbing with other alumni over bowls of gourmet potato chips and heated silver trays of pigs in blankets. We had parties on walk-up rooftops and gazed at the uptown skyline, feeling like those towers
had been built not for commerce alone but also for us and our dreams.

The summer before Rob began teaching at St. Benedict's, I returned from two months living in Tanzania, where I worked writing grant proposals for an environmental nonprofit. In small villages dotting an arc of mountain cloud forests that rose dramatically from the Maasai Steppe, I'd helped people build wells with money my writing had secured. I'd hiked through a forest in northern Mozambique where cannibals were known to live. One afternoon I'd almost been trampled by an elephant, and the following evening, while urinating in an outhouse, a black mamba had slithered lazily between my feet. I'd snorkeled alone in great white–infested waters a mile from Zanzibar's shore. I'd lived in a small house, built by hand, on the edge of a mountaintop, and each morning a carpet of clouds condensed hundreds of feet below the front door and ascended the cliff face, passing over me in a thick mist, then giving way to a mesmerizing view of the savannah. When I returned to New York, I couldn't wait to tell Rob, tell him that I'd done something he would genuinely admire. I'd tried emailing his Hotmail account from the rare functional Internet kiosk in Dar es Salaam, but my message had been returned by MAILER DAEMON, saying that the address no longer existed.