The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (3 page)

Like any two parents, they fought. These fights happened mostly on the Chapman Street front porch at night, sitting in the plastic chairs that were chained to the wooden railing, Skeet's cigarette making loops of smoke as he waved his hands around. The neighborhood became
desolate after dark, aside from a few clusters of young men passing periodically, smoking and murmuring. Some of them would offer nods of recognition to Skeet, a telepathy between men from which Jackie was glad to be excluded. Jackie's and Skeet's voices would echo off the cracked sidewalk. She didn't care if these street thugs or neighbors or her family could hear, so long as Rob, asleep upstairs in their room, could not. They concentrated on the particulars, the minute details of books and music and diction and schools. Deeper in their hearts, they were debating what kind of man they wanted their son to be.

“T
HE
P
ROFESSOR'S RIGHT
over there.” The day-care lady pointed to a set of building blocks, over which Rob, now three years old, crouched intently.

“The Professor?” Jackie replied.

“You didn't know we called him that?”

Jackie thought she—or, worse, her son—was being made fun of somehow and began searching for a cutting rejoinder while mentally mapping out the second-nearest day care.

“It's because he's so smart and he knows everything.”

Jackie looked up and saw that the woman was actually serious—that she called Rob Peace “Professor” in an earnest reference to his intellect.

Professor
, she thought to herself.
My boy, the Professor.

Humbly, she figured that the moniker came simply because Rob talked so much. He could make her own brain go lumpy with the constant stream of comments and questions. More than any other child she'd ever cared for, he asked, “Why?” And maybe she was projecting this, because he was her own, but she felt that he did so not out of reflex but out of a genuine desire to understand their world and the people who inhabited it.

On weekends when it was warm, she'd take him to Orange Park by herself: a blanket, some canned pears and ham, a precious few lazy hours between the night shifts and backaches of the six-day workweek.
For many years now, the park had been owned by the dealers, and more so as the progression of the 1980s brought crack to the neighborhood. Men—and sometimes women, sometimes boys—sat on picnic tables in groups of two, their feet planted on the benches beside malt liquor in brown bags. Their talk was generally cheerful, and they were unassuming enough until their patrons approached and a certain gravity fell over the ensuing transaction. The executive of this enterprise was named Day-Day. He was a smooth-faced man in his midthirties, Jackie's age, and he was always on his feet traversing the diagonal footpaths. He never interacted with the dealers, but he was always watching. If you didn't know him, he looked like a guy strolling in the park for exercise and peace of mind. But everyone knew him. Jackie figured he must walk fifteen miles a day within those few acres of city land. He knew Skeet and always paused by their blanket to comment on how Rob looked more like his father each day. On Sundays, he moved his salesmen to the south side of the park and gifted the north side, where the playground was, to parents and children.

The playground equipment was splintered, held together loosely by rusty protruding nails. Bits of glass from crack pipes and vials were embedded in the dirt beneath the swing set. The park was a highly secure place for people to do drugs after dark, more secure even than homes and apartments. The police didn't make regular patrols because they were too busy answering 911 calls. Policemen were more likely to enter a user's building during the night, answering a domestic abuse call from down the hallway, than they were to make a pass through the Orange Park playground.

Jackie and Rob would eat their snacks on the blanket (never on park benches, because stupefied addicts peed themselves on them), and she'd follow him closely over the jungle gym while her eyes searched always for nails or glass or older, rougher children who had no business on a toddler playground, anything that posed a threat to her boy.

J
ACKIE ENTERED THE
house to raised voices, one of them her four-year-old son's. She walked into the kitchen where Rob and her younger sister Debbie stood on opposite sides of a pool of milk and an empty, upturned carton. He'd spilled it; Debbie was demanding that he clean it up and, once Jackie appeared, that she go buy more. Rob's arms were crossed, his eyes wild. His logic for refusal was that someone had carelessly left the carton open and with the bottom hanging a third of the way over the shelf edge.
That
person should clean it up and buy more. That person was clearly Debbie, judging by her defensiveness. Jackie told her son, not gently, to clean the mess, and he did—huffing and muttering to himself with the fury of the wronged.

“It's just not right,” Debbie said, “that in a house with this many people, you've fixed it so you're the only one he listens to.”

Too many people were spread across too many years in the house on Chapman Street, and the result was friction. Jackie and most of her siblings were blunt and to the point, like their father. The house could be a chorus of minor discontentments and accusations that became further compacted when Horace took on tenants on the third floor. Because the neighborhood was increasingly unsafe, everyone stayed in the house most of the time, pent up with no energy outlets but to go at one another. Solitude, silence, stillness—these commodities were nearly impossible to find.

Jackie wanted to move, particularly once Rob grew old enough to engage in arguments himself, something he did with particular tenacity. She experienced a spiritual erosion when watching her four-year-old scrap his way indignantly through an argument with an equally indignant adult, and do so with increasing tactical skill. The aggravated environment was no place to nurture qualities like reason and sensitivity. She had the money to move, barely, but nowhere comfortable and nowhere permanent. Renting an apartment in East Orange, the only neighborhood she could afford, was a massive and insecure endeavor. First came the actual search, which meant riding unfamiliar bus lines through neighborhoods that changed from livable to dan
gerous to mortally dangerous quickly and with no defined boundaries between—a street sign, a dogwood tree, an unthreatening housefront containing a drug den within. Then came the taut negotiations with landlords who were always ultraskeptical because they'd been had so many times before, the rules and restrictions and deposit she'd never see again regardless. Then came the maintenance issues, the expenses of furniture and fixes, the fighting neighbors, the cronies of prior tenants knocking on the door in the middle of the night. And above all, the constant wondering—the fear—of her job going away. Jackie had been through it all a few times before and each attempt had ended with her back home.

And now Rob was about to turn five. She was thinking about elementary school, determined to send her son to a private school. That cost money—not much, but “not much” was relative. She knew that the security required to afford tuition would be a stretch to maintain anywhere else except on Chapman Street.

Skeet tried to make the extraction easier for her by renting an apartment on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from the house on Pierson. His plan was to conduct his business from the apartment and leave the house free and safe for his family. Jackie remained reluctant. She knew that in the deeply layered world of drugs, the nexus of commerce was the person, not the place. Too, in the very possible event that Skeet was arrested and sentenced to a few months or years in jail, she had no interest in being knotted to any property bearing his name.

“Look at me,” he told her. “I'm thirty-eight years old. Nothing's ever happened to me, and nothing's ever going to. I'm cool.” And Skeet was cool about his involvement with the drug trade, as far as she could see.

Jackie didn't like to talk about or even reference obliquely the drugs that Skeet sold. She had never gravitated toward the dealers in high school or the years after, the way many women around her had, enticed by the gifts of coats and jewelry, the bravado and relentless charm, the respect these men commanded from their peers. However, Skeet wasn't like the other dealers. He never flaunted the money he made—which didn't seem like all that much, just enough to even out the math be
tween work paying
x
and life costing
y.
He drove a boxy Volvo that had constant problems. He had jobs during the day—nothing permanent, but there was always something; the man wasn't lazy. His friends were for the most part people from childhood, decent-seeming men who'd stayed around and paid attention to their mothers if not always their children. He coached a youth basketball team. He was always casual, never anxious. Most important to him in terms of safety, he didn't try to run with or compete against the younger generation of hustlers, with their codes and protocols always evolving toward brutality. “I got too much respect for human life to mess with all them young 'uns,” he assured her. “I stay the hell out of their way.” Skeet was loud and sometimes arrogant about his own intelligence and prospects, but he was quiet and conservative about drugs.

What made Jackie wary was the huge extent to which Rob's father was known. To her, it seemed as though everyone living in the three square miles of East Orange—all fifty thousand people—knew Skeet Douglas. Wherever they went out, she heard the constant hoots and waves and incantations of “You call me now!” He told her that this was just the kind of person he was—friendly, with a lot of friends. Jackie knew that friends and friendliness weren't always directly related. Skeet had a huge smile, a beautiful smile, and he bent the truth very well from behind it.

She didn't have to make a final decision on his offer, because the house on Pierson Street burned down. She never found out why. Skeet hadn't called her for a week—rare even for him. She needed to figure out the day-care pickup situation for the month to come, and so she went to the Pierson Street house after work, ready for a fight. The smell of combusted carbon still hung in the air a week after the fire. Skeet was sitting on the front step, hunched over, talking to an elderly acquaintance from the block, his expression one she'd rarely seen on him before: resigned, tired, damned. The house was completely gutted, just an assortment of heavy beams scarred black and ashy objects that had once been furniture. He muttered something about faulty wiring, and
she got out of his way.

And the house on Pierson Street just stayed like that, a torched shell, while Skeet moved into his rented apartment on Chestnut Street but continued to pay the property taxes on the now-useless plot of land.

O
AKDALE
E
LEMENTARY
S
CHOOL
was on Lincoln Avenue, just a few blocks west. Redbrick, two stories, with a footprint in the shape of the Chevrolet logo, the local public school looked like a nice enough place to send a six-year-old. When Jackie's younger siblings had gone there, it had been. When Rob began kindergarten, it was no longer. The school's decline wasn't immediately evident. The interiors were generally well maintained, the curriculum in keeping with federal guidelines, the other kids more or less what they were: kids, just barely past toddlerhood. Jackie would walk Rob there and watch him join the stream of children his age going inside with backpacks and lunches, usually turning at the door to wave. But she observed something less tangible in the expressions and movements of the teachers, the laissez-faire attitudes of fellow parents. Most of these children, Jackie felt, were being sent here to be watched for a few hours, not to be taught.

She had gently floated the idea of private school past her parents, and they'd both shaken their heads. He's six, they told her. He's not reading Shakespeare. He's not learning cutting-edge chemistry. Kindergarten was about being with people his age and maybe picking up some simple letters and arithmetic. Paying significant money for an elementary education was silly, considering what she earned. They told her to spend her income on feeding, clothing, and sheltering him. Education was what they all paid taxes for—a whole lot of taxes in this state.

Still, she talked to Skeet about it. Catholic schools, the cheapest of the private options, generally cost $200 a month. If they split it, then Jackie would be paying only a quarter of her own salary toward education: manageable if not ideal. Skeet looked at her and said she was being “uppity.” Though he was speaking off-the-cuff, the word carried weight.
Where they lived, being known by this label meant that you thought you were better than everyone else around you, that you deserved more, and that—given the opportunity—you would leave this place behind without a second thought. There was shame in thinking like that. Jackie didn't understand what the term had to do with her wanting the best education they could afford for their son, but Skeet had deployed it at just the right moment to make her second-guess.

So Rob went to Oakdale, where by Skeet's reckoning he would learn how to stop being a mama's boy and become a man respected, listened to, and followed by other men. This was more important than humanities and sciences.

The transition to school brought another transition—Skeet began buying Rob things, mostly clothes and music. Jackie resented these purchases heavily, especially coming from a man who refused to pay $100 a month for school, but she stayed quiet about it, which was hard for her to do. The rap group N.W.A. was the worst, with songs like “One Less Bitch” and “Fuck tha Police” that contained not even a nod toward grammatical consistency let alone morality. Skeet worked out in a boxing gym on Halsted Street a few times a week, and a punching dummy soon appeared in the corner of the room she still shared with the boy, a bottom-heavy rubber bowling pin featuring a cartoon white man with a handlebar mustache that righted itself regardless of the force with which it was knocked over. Like a salty manager, Skeet worked with the boy intensely. He taught Rob to swing his arms laterally from wide angles, so that a fist to the temple could be followed by an elbow to the chin.