We were both wired, well after midnight. Half a bottle could do that?
“I told you, right, we’d be going out whenever.” Duke had come back from a late-night errand he never divulged and lay on the bed, awake but with his eyes closed. I was sprawled on the floor with my pad, still tinkering.
“You couldn’t have meant this late.”
“Why would you think you ever know what I mean?” He stood above me. “And maybe I didn’t, but whatever, we’re going. It’s a home-game weekend—you have to enjoy those. Your boss would want you to come along, anyway. This is a business trip, right? Then let’s do some business. I did split that shit with you.”
He wasn’t wrong. I owed him something for sharing his supplies with me, given how desolate I’d felt before the intervention. So, somewhat reluctantly, I traveled south a long way with Duke—too long, I realized halfway through—down the I-41, on the lake’s edge. The compromise we’d struck was that I’d bring along my things, so I didn’t have to come back to his place afterward: I could go straight to my hotel, which was closer to the airport, and therefore to my home. When we reached the vicinity of Soldier Field, I had some hope that this might be our destination, yet our driver never slowed at the exits. I looked over at Duke, still in the headphones he’d put on in the elevator of his apartment. It didn’t seem like he wanted to be disturbed. We needed some time apart, I suppose; so the drive was as quiet as the last one.
Descending ever further down the lakeshore, I began to grow agitated, not knowing what this trip was really about, until it occurred to me, quite suddenly, just where we must be going: Duke’s South Side stomping grounds, the place that had eaten his teen years. My agitation dissolved into dread as our journey began to resemble my northbound trip from the Upper East Side through to Mott Haven and the Patterson Houses, only much starker. I knew Chicago to be, at this point, an order of magnitude unrulier than New York; despair had fermented into bitterness, which I’d already noticed hung very thickly here, more so than anywhere else I’d been. Its worst neighborhoods were just more dire than ours, and once we’d traded the 41 for the surface streets, the difference became palpable: in the casualness, for instance, with which young men in dirty pants and excellent shoes had their heads tucked into the windows of old American cars—Pontiacs and Buicks more than Cadillacs—arms clasping the frame of the door, scoring without a thought of concealment; and in the melancholic charm of emaciated single mothers in tank-tops and tights, prancing through empty blocks, holding hands with their children or girlfriends, entirely unafraid when fear was the only thing called for. The Bronx, even at three a.m., wasn’t quite this ghoulish. The degree of our driver’s discomfiture was another novelty. More than once, he pulled away through solid red lights to avoid bands of young men cloaked in solid colors taking a terrific interest in our uninteresting sedan. The driver continually wiped his brow, presumably rethinking the value of taking on this ride, though Duke managed to coax him along with a flash of rubber-banded bills.
More than anything, the slums’ architecture set this place off from New York. The chunky buildings seemed to me only three quarters there, as if partly evaporated, having never being tended to since the ribbon was cut at some municipal ceremony praising this latest venture in affordable housing. However long these apartments might have stood there, they seemed only a good strong Chicago gust away from coming down.
Duke had told me his roots were dirty, but I’d suspected he was selling me something, mythmaking to legitimate his drift into waywardness, as so many of the disenchanted and poor do in the company of those they perceive as “haves.” Now, it seemed, if anything, he might have underplayed it.
“Where exactly are we going?” I asked while shaking Duke’s shoulder, beyond the point at which there could be any doubt our destination was a long-lost hell only his kind could be nostalgic for.
He slid his headphones off his ears and around his neck. I don’t know whether he’d heard me, but he seemed to understand well enough. “I was wondering when you’d flinch. I’ll give you some credit, though, coming this far without bitching out.”
“Your parents’ place?”
He clapped his hands and looked out his window. “You won’t find them around here anymore. They’re on the north side.”
“Up where you are?”
“I’m a lot further up. I really don’t know how things would go with them if I were any closer. They’re more central.”
“So who exactly are we meeting?”
He turned back and smiled and reached into his coat pocket.
“Seriously.”
“The Cal man—you think he’s going to be satisfied if we don’t get down to this? He’s hoping Arête will be a little different, right? Dangerous?”
He opened the case and put his sunglasses on, Oliver Peoples with pure black lenses. He dropped his window—also tinted—and stuck his arm down the side of the door as wind came through the car. I wondered what he could possibly see with lenses so dark.
“These are my oldest, oldest friends,” he said once we were slowing down near buildings genuinely teetering on the edge of non-existence, they looked so frail. In many countries, you’d call this place what it was: a shanty town. “It wasn’t this bad then. That’s not how I think of it, anyway. They’re almost not friends anymore, that’s how old. We lost track when I moved. We all had our crises—there’s no friends in the middle of that. But being back now, being with the Bears, it’s been good to get these ones back. I don’t really know how many friends I’m going to make on the team.” Duke nodded, as if reconsidering his own words and coming again to the same conclusion, which set off a slow, controlled, almost meditative chuckle in him.
“Are they different? From then?”
“The ones I’m taking you to? No. There are others who are lawyers, you know. Pediatricians, math teachers, all of that. But not these guys. And because they’re older now, they’re a lot further along. Not different, I wouldn’t say—just a little harder than when I was with them, living here, shoplifting, stealing cigars for blunts, selling weed. That’s bitch shit to them now. Which is a shame. It’s a lot of fun, selling weed, stealing worthless things. Being a bitch, I guess.”
Grubby walk-ups, small bunches of them like weeds, interrupted looming tenements that appeared ashen in the chilly beams of our headlights, which provided the only reliable illumination on these flickering streets. The same beams would abruptly land on a face in the black, right in the middle of the road, forcing our driver to veer dangerously to one side, or break hard enough to send my head into his seatback, until some kid wearing an open button-down draping to his knees, with his face stubbled here and there, he was so young, could amble across the way. These boys and men had no appreciable reaction to our lights, they just kept trudging along, their pace unchanged, if they weren’t simply frozen in place, who knows for how long, in a narcotic haze. We turned several corners, entered a maze of buildings bearing the stamp of collective design, buildings that had yet to be unbuilt, which costs money, too. The inner lanes of this housing complex were fenced in by the apartment towers themselves, so you might have thought they would offer some sense of security; in fact they were only more menacing for being isolated from the street. Our driver, who in New York I would have presumed to be Puerto Rican, though here I was unsure, as I didn’t know if they’d colonized Chicago, too—the mestizo driver was cursing every time he came across so much as the shadow of a human form, for the possibility of trouble it brought. He decelerated in the orange glow encircling the entrance stairs of one of what seemed like dozens of near-identical block towers, and with a whip of his head encouraged us to get out, though he’d not even quite stopped. Duke urged him onward anyway: we weren’t quite there yet, it had to be just up ahead.
When we finally parked across from the door, which we’d missed in the dark and had to reverse the car to reach, Duke bestowed on the driver the heavy tip he couldn’t have deserved more. Without dawdling a moment—and not because of the cold—Duke and I went straight for the half-dozen steps leading into the tower. Just before we passed through the entryway, I noticed the building’s blackened face: soot-covered red brick, as if the place had been swept by fire, or else the years themselves had been their own kind of conflagration. We had seven floors to climb; the elevator was jammed with an ornately upholstered chair stained by condiments or bodily fluids, I couldn’t tell which. The doors of the lift were propped wide open, the elevator car was screaming (we covered our ears), and no-one was coming. Duke took my stuff right out of my hands, as if it would be too much for me to carry. Quickly I lost ground on him—he was probably right. These were long, steep flights, and the challenge seemed to goose him. Steps had been a training ground for him for many years, so many different staircases, depending on where he was, running sprints, up and down. Even more than that, this new proximity to old friends, to the neighborhood itself and this shabby building that smelled of rotting plums, pulled on him harder and harder, the closer he got to the top; he was taking two or three steps at a time by the time I’d made the third flight, springing himself upward into the sky, never mind the baggage of mine he carried.
I didn’t bother accelerating. I wasn’t going to catch Duke, and anyway I felt a wobble growing in my legs. A few gulps of Theria wasn’t going to cover that up. In any case, I didn’t really want to catch him. I listened for his footsteps, hoping he would clear away any trouble ahead in the stairwell, as though he were my security detail. On approaching each landing, I braced for conflict of any and all kinds. When I clamored up to the fourth floor, I think I heard Duke make his first taps on a door. By the sixth floor I heard men roughly hugging, the thump of quick comings-together, the firm clasp of arms, and all of it slightly muted, in deference to the hour.
I heard no words pass between any of them. Was Duke whispering about my presence now? He might not even have told them he’d be bringing me along, not until this moment. I stopped mid-flight and considered reversing course. All my exertions in the stairwell so far might be rewarded only with decisive violence. After a moment, I continued my trek upward, though much more gingerly. Maybe, I reasoned, they would have an easier time coming to grips with my arrival if I retarded the speed at which it occurred. That would also leave Duke time to negotiate my entrance, and for his friends to rearrange whatever they might need to before I saw it in the apartment. Finally, I emerged out of the stairwell and into the corridor of the seventh floor, breathing aggressively, slowly examining the walls—stalling. The hallways were canary yellow, impressively bright under the industrial light fixture running the length of the corridor, so bright they seemed to steer your eyes away from direct confrontation with them. But I was motivated. Squinting mildly, I found what I’d thought I would on them: irretrievable filth, the same brown film that covers laminated diner menus. By the same process, the apartment doors had gone from white to cream. Along the edges of the hall lay the crushed bodies of insects, likely representing several distinct infestations. The final door I came across, just before turning down the central hall, wore what looked like French’s mustard, long zigzags of it, and beneath the door, right on the tile, a clear pinkish fluid had trickled out. I didn’t bother hypothesizing. There’d be no way of puzzling out the mysteries contained in these projects; here, the most unlikely things were simply the norm. Nothing could be ruled out.
I walked quietly up to the corner and paused when I heard faint clicking and scratching, and the sounds of furniture sliding, too—but still no talking. I poked my head into the hall and found the doorway on the end wide open, yet the threshold absolutely black, owing to the deep shadows made by the harsh lighting. The noises carried on, but hearing no voices, I crept slowly and silently forward until the threshold was just in front of me, hoping the sounds would settle. Duke and his friends could have as much time as they liked, really, if it was going to save me some distress tonight. The shuffling tailed off. I was sweating torrentially again, just as hard as when I’d come face-to-crotch with Duke hours ago. I considered saying something before entering, just so I wasn’t seen to be trespassing. I wasn’t sure, however, if alerting the neighbors to my presence would be taken as more of an affront than my entering unannounced. There were rules to this sort of public space that I, in my townhouse, had little need of knowing or abiding. With great uncertainty, then, I penetrated the black.
Even deep within, I could see the apartment remained intensely dark, save for the paper-thin sheets of light creeping in through the closed blinds. Another sliver of yellow jutted out of the bottom of a door on my right, though I left it alone (knocking seemed unwise). I felt my way around the edge of what must have been the living room, being careful not to kick anything over. The smell here was different, the plums of the hall replaced by rubbing alcohol and menthol.
I found a sofa by thudding straight into it and falling forward onto the cushions. As if in response, I heard a door squeak from the far side of the apartment. I froze there with my knees up on the couch, holding fast to an arm of the chair so as not to spill backward onto the floor. There was a shuffling again, and this time muted footsteps—the sound of bare feet. Seconds later the refrigerator door swung open, revealing, in silhouette, a boy with a lean build: narrow limbs, and big rounded bumps for shoulders. He reached for something in back of the fridge, and as he crossed into the light, I found him shirtless and in white boxers. He must have been in his late teens, and his body was a chalky sort of black marked by the white islands of vitiligo.
Now I was terribly grateful for the dark that had sent me crashing. I steadied myself on the couch as the boy straightened up and brought out his hand with an RC cola in it. I’d not seen that chintzy blue-and-red logotype in years, thought the drink long dead, but this skinny black boy, I could imagine him in Lagos with an assault rifle over his shoulder, was proving me wrong about the fate of a third-rate soda. Again he reached into the fridge and this time emerged with a bunch of green grapes. He lifted it with his free hand and opened his mouth wide, the lips retracting over his teeth. Lowering the bunch by its stem, he worked his jaws on the bulbs of fruit, pulping them so lustily I could hear the juice splattering the insides of his face. He looked around slowly as he ate, right into the dark—right at me, at one point, though it seemed he couldn’t see me. He lingered a moment before nudging the fridge closed with his back. All light was lost, and all I could sense was his shuffling gait taking him back from where he’d come. I looked for any trickle of light in that direction but heard only the crack of a can being opened. He would polish off those grapes in the same dark enveloping me, with the soda fizzing in his hand.
I turned around on the couch and tried to settle myself properly when a vertical streak of light appeared across from me, opposite to where the boy disappeared. The closed door I’d noticed on entering was opened just wide enough for someone’s eye to fit in the gap—and someone’s eye was in the gap, scanning the area but failing to detect me while I sat stone still in the dark. The slice of light gradually widened into a wedge, and there was Duke, sliding out of the room. Without making a sound, I put myself into the far end of this same wedge, which fell upon a portion of the couch, and after a single moment of alarm—Duke’s body seemed to seize up—he smiled softly and beckoned me with one hand while holding two fingers vertically across his lips with the other. I tiptoed to him, but before I could reach him, he slipped back inside the room. For a moment, I thought hard about my prospects. And then I followed him inside.
The light was less yellow than pink or rust, which cut the coldness of the men gathered just inside. I stiffened, naturally, as they studied me from various perches: the couch, on which two sat; the end tables (two); and the identical dining chairs pulled up nearby (three). I found my portfolio and duffel inside, near the dark curtains that were everywhere sealed in a way that seemed permanent. I didn’t imagine daylight changed anything here, anyway. Although the room was large enough, these men were larger still, so that they gave the impression of being crowded into the room, a bit like sullen refugees, I thought, awaiting the phone call of the trucker who, for a steep fee, would shuttle them away to some land where they might not have to wear such scowls, not always. The gaze they jointly trained on me left me in little doubt I was not this man.
With a decisive click Duke shut the door behind me, a cold dented metal door that appeared retrofitted, the original probably having been kicked in one too many times. One of the men was quick to his feet: short but thick, with a modest Afro, his big basketballer’s hands reached out at me like a zombie’s. This was Anthony, Duke said, and the one next to him, Marcus.
Anthony stepped in too close to me to have sterling intentions. “You the guy looking for some nigger shit then.”
“This little nigger can draw the fuck he wants,” Marcus said, “but he not getting a phone out.” Marcus looked more of a football player than Duke did. He took up two spots on the three-seater sofa, so that he didn’t need to rise for me to see his magnitude, the way his legs jutted forth on an upward slant as though he were seated on toy furniture. He talked at a quick clip, with garbled grammar, and dressed not merely poorly, like the rest, but badly: jeans stained by food-desert slop at the thighs, paired with a printed white tee so oversized it reminded me of a poncho. These were standard-issue shrouds, it seemed—I’d just seen them outside in the streets. You saw them in National Geographic, too, in those documentaries from Lesotho or Gabon, where everything the Red Cross left the natives turned up, all our faddish eyesores (Hammer pants) and ephemeral sports apparel (Buffalo Bills: 1993 AFC Champions) that could no longer be unloaded, even at half-off.
“Duke ain’t bringing no-one around who don’t know they business,” Anthony replied, almost in my defense. I would have been touched had it not been for the murderous stare he was giving me, which in fairness might have been the only look in his repertoire, a sort of all-purpose tool.
“Well, this ain’t no nigger I know. That the only kind that should be coming in here. You telling me—really, you telling me, Anthony—you ever talked to a bitch like this, looking like he do?” Marcus waved his hand at me as if I were an animal incapable of grasping any of this. Which was almost true, they spoke with such heavy inflection, the syllables were barely formed. On its own terms, I’d always found black dialect quite elegant. So many shorthands were built into it; it was only a half-step beyond pidgin English. Formalities, things in their proper place, were anathema. Practice was all. There was something in it even for someone like me, far removed from where this idiom had been birthed, out on the fields, under a sweltering Southern sun. This was the way of language, of signs generally, roaming far from their homes, taking on unfathomable baggage or losing it all in the process. Things survived by being true to nothing, especially themselves.
This hulking, should-have-been football player, Marcus, he refused to address me all night, other than, once or twice, as faggot, which, given the way he generally ignored me, I came to take as a kind of compliment of his attention.
“I’m seeing at least one bitch here right now,” Duke said, staring coldly at Marcus. “Don’t fuck this up, boy.”
Marcus regarded Duke with an uncertain fury as the others tried—a little, anyway—to suppress their laughter.
“But I’m not taking any photos, no,” I said to Marcus, hoping to ease his troubles and mine. “I’m just trying to get a feel for Duke’s life, for the pictures we’re doing together. And since he did live here...”
“Long fucking time ago,” another of them cracked, I couldn’t tell who. The rest of them whooped.
Duke eyed each of them, tried to settle them down. “Oh, not that long.”
“Duke, you was in the private blocks,” someone else said.
“Across the goddamn street,” two others chimed in gleefully.
“I don’t know why this nigger go around telling people he lived here,” the first one finished.
Anthony swiped the neon green bandana off his own head, as if delivering a fatal blow to it, and then got right up close to Duke with a very serious face, big eyes, as though Duke had better have a good explanation for his deceit. But, after a single beat, he carried on straight into Duke until he was hugging him in jest. Naturally, Duke pushed him off and the others howled. All this settled Marcus down. Seeing his opinion joined, and Duke ribbed and jeered, he said no more.
A new man poked his head around the corner to my left, in the darkened recess behind everyone else. It must have been a hallway of some kind. I hadn’t realized the apartment extended further; the corridor must have been quite narrow. The man, who only I could see, as I was the only one facing into the room, wore a grave look that didn’t change, even slightly, on seeing me. Anthony must have noticed some shift in my expression, as he immediately said with mirth, “Eric, show this boy the pieces we picked up.” Eric, though, if this was him standing in the corner, didn’t move.
“He’s straight—I told you,” Duke said.
Eric receded into the corridor without
showing me his back.
I watched the bright whites of his eyes get eaten up by the dark shrouding this
chamber. Duke and I, even Marcus—he followed behind me, as though ready to do whatever
was necessary when the order came—we tracked Eric down the little hall, past a
table without chairs, back to a room that felt more like a closet, with only a
wardrobe and a twin bed crammed into it, along with a comically small window that
was covered over, this time, by duct tape rather than fabric. Under clinical,
blue-white light, Eric opened up the wardrobe’s sliding plywood doors and began
digging behind a layer of clothes. One at a time, in absolute tranquility, he
placed firearms on the sky-blue quilt of a bed that seemed never to have been
unmade, its folds were so definitive. Had it ever supported anything besides
lead and steel?
What materialized before me had the feel of the video games I’d indulged in throughout high school, or at Immo’s place even now, every once in a while. My friend was something of a first-person shooter aficionado; his time in boarding school had left him permanently adolescent in some ways, this being one. But what I saw in front of me now was almost like those games’ display of stock, shown between levels, where you would select a weapon for your next mission. Starting on one end, then: a greasy .22 pistol; a 9mm Beretta with such a crudely molded handle, it must have been a ghost gun; a S&W Model 29; a monstrous .50 caliber pistol; a plastic handgun, evidently 3D printed; a small-bore shotgun, sawed off to keep its dimensions crime-capable; and a hunting rifle that Eric had to lay at an angle on the bed, it was so long. Finally, when there was room for only one more piece, Eric set out, with that almost tragic look in his eyes, the crown jewel: a shiny Kalashnikov, which I recognized by the brilliant swerve of its banana clip.
Marcus was standing directly behind me as I admired the weapons. I heard him wheezing through his girth; I could smell the Ritz crackers on his breath. Finally, he said, “Can’t he just look at this shit? Why’s he got to take anything down?” A moment lapsed before Eric’s long face began to bob slowly in agreement. There was an ingrained caution in the man that must have long predated my arrival. The large, unflinching eyes, shiny like glass, though they moved so efficiently you knew his vision was perfect, gave me the feeling that it was Eric, and not Duke, the most prosperous of them for now, who would be the one to make the final call here. Either he would reach into his waistband—I noticed he often kept his right hand perched above his hip, the ideal position from which to do this—or with a single, sorrowful nod to Marcus, my neck would be snapped and I’d be rolled up in the very carpet we stood on.
“Taking something down,” Duke said, “was the whole damn point of bringing him here, M.”
Marcus wasn’t wrong, actually. I didn’t really need to jot anything down in the pocket pad I’d dutifully brought along. The primary value to me was to be found simply in letting my eyes, and my senses generally, absorb the place. That pitch dark living room I’d sat in, for instance, the coolness of the sofa’s vinyl against my palms as I’d waited for the lean black boy to take his cola and grapes away, would leave more of a mark on my consciousness than so much else here—and I’d not even seen the thing in the ordinary sense of the word.
“That AK is bullshit,” said Marcus, newly sullen. “It jams, jams all the goddamn time.”
“How would you know, fat man?” Duke spat. “You’ve never even pulled a gun on someone.”
I was looking at Eric gently, hoping this might mitigate his loneliness, or diminish his caution, and in either case save my life. But nothing changed. His hand hung on his hip.
“I have,” Marcus went on—somewhat cautiously, I felt. “You been gone is all. Things have changed, Duke.”
“That ain’t changed, though. Don’t lie.” Duke kept reinflecting his voice, searching out the right tone for each moment.
“It jammed on Anthony. Fucking ask him.” He turned back into the hall: “Anthony, the AK jammed on you last time, wasn’t that it?”
“Can you keep it down, you fat fuck?” Anthony called from the other side of the darkness, past the corridor.
“None of these are for sale, I guess?” I asked Eric sotto voce.
This changed things.
“Fuck you asking for?” Marcus said. “Why you bring this bitch nigger around, Duke? It’s fucking stupid.” Marcus, who’d been on the defensive until now, was strengthening like a storm. And my comment was suspicious, that much I had to accept.
“I don’t really have to draw anything, Duke,” I said. In truth, I wouldn’t have minded making some general sketches of the place. It always sharpened the final pictures, even those mostly forged in the imagination, to have some reference point in the ordinary world of sense. But such a plan didn’t appeal to me under the circumstances.
“See what he’s saying? He don’t need to. He’s an artist, isn’t he? This faggot got imagination, right?”
Duke’s face, though normally plastic, took on a bit of Eric’s clinical sobriety. “Draw something,” he commanded. Gradually his voice rose in volume: “The room, the big picture at least. The Cal man told Freddie that it helps you. You’re not going to tell me now that it doesn’t. That this was a waste of my time.”
“That’s exactly what he’s saying,” Marcus said.
Duke’s scowl evinced purest murder for about a second and a half. Was it meant for Marcus or for me, though? Had I wasted his time? Duke’s head suddenly went Marcus’ way, sending the man reeling into the dark. God was on my side. The carpet would stay where it was, no rolling necessary. No-one, not even their resident stoic, Eric, was going to object to Duke now, not when he was looking positively demonic. We gazed back across that darkened alley. More lights had come on there, but after overhearing Duke, everyone seemed to be finding something with which to busy himself, a reason to look the other way. It was unnerving, the authority Duke clearly still carried with his crew, given how much less illicit his life was these days than theirs. How irreproachably evil must his past have been to justify such deference all these years later? Otherwise, I thought, they must already be on his payroll, given that every pro athlete required a retinue. Perhaps, though, Duke held the kind of authority that lived directly in the flesh, that would only be ceded at death, like Hector’s, or when it was no longer obvious to all that he could, as he did so often on the field, reduce you to nothing, to a body without a mind, one that would need to be stretchered out. All this was inscribed in his bearing. Even Eric was shaken by it, enough to take a seat on the bed now, right next to the lineup of guns, and fiddle with a cartridge.
“Get your paper and pen out,” Duke enjoined without looking at me, while he escorted Eric out of the armory.
“And don’t touch nothing,” Marcus called from the darkness.
“Look at him, M,” Duke said with feigned patience. “Now look at me. Look at you. Do you think he’d even consider taking something?”
Duke closed the door on me with that chilling bit of dialectic. He was right, of course—as was Anthony, when he’d said I was looking for nigger shit, although on Garrett’s behalf, naturally. There was something titillating, peeking into a world as profane and pained as this. The whole country had been doing it for at least a century, through jazz and swing, the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and finally hip-hop—and that was just the music. There were sports, too, and so much of television and film. Hadn’t it been whites lining up in droves to see Black Panther, cheering their own downfall? Like the time they stuffed the ballot box in 2008. Hadn’t hippies and socialists filled out the protests in the civil rights movement and BLM? Whites were always there, reveling in the dramas of others when their own lives, in virtue of their power, could offer none.
I was specifically under instructions from Garrett not to exalt black lifeways, though. Beautiful squalor was a hack’s notion, it had always been so. No, I was looking rather to affirm something in this kind of life. Not merely the look of it, which was easy enough to do, and already had been done long ago by all the vultures of the advertising, film, and music industries, but the very substance of it: the crumbling schools, the stray bullets through children’s hearts, the malnutrition and rampaging obesity (the grapes notwithstanding), in short, the abject neglect that defined it. Only a fantastic image of black existence interested commercial culture. Yet surely there was more to these fantasies, our hearts, just as there was more to black reality. Advertising had rendered that world too simplistically and thereby missed everything most appealing in it.
I knelt before the bed, withdrew the little pad from my pocket, and sketched on one knee, beginning with the baby of the family, the junky .22 with the heft of a toy and duct tape for a grip. I couldn’t say how long it would be until one of the men, struck by legitimate fear, decided to throw me out or something worse. So I rendered everything quickly and loosely, using wide strokes like those I’d used on the practice field with Duke, here applied to guns that signaled, even stock-still, their own trajectories of movement, as the Jugs machine had. Couldn’t everything, as Daphne had told me, just after stroking me off to the punching and choking above us that night—couldn’t it all be grasped as movement?
Ultimately, what Eric had presented me with, this bed full of guns, looked far too staged, like a Knoll lay. The rectangular framing seemed to attenuate the guns’ capacity to mean. Still, I thought while composing my group portrait, even a forensic assemblage might have its uses. The deliberateness with which each instrument of death had been laid out for inspection by Eric helped to anatomize the driving force of these men’s lives.
Harsh murmurs came through the bedroom walls. Consternation was brewing, my fate was up for grabs. I pressed my ear against the wall and picked out Anthony’s and Duke’s voices—at the exact moment that Eric opened the door, catching me in the act. His face was no more droopy as he entered than before. I gathered he only meant to ask if I’d finished up, or needed anything else. But my suspicions triggered his, and a subtle rigidity overtook his body. I pushed off the wall, approached him as though what I’d been doing were entirely banal. He looked away and gazed deeply into his guns on the bed. He was their shepherd; he’d been almost jealous of my time with them, I felt. His eyes tranquilly but steadily went from one to the next, counting his flock. I doubt he thought I would be so foolish as to lift one. Rather, this was simply protocol: you counted them up without exception. Exceptions were how things got lost. Exceptions were how people got hurt. As he came to the end of the line, his brow furrowed slightly. I had profound hopes the tally matched. He dropped his head for moment; his hand retreated to the familiar place near his waist. Had he miscounted? With his head bowed he eyed me sadly but said nothing. I was about to plead for something—for all I knew, he might have been waiting on this—but before I could think of what to plead for, the furrow lifted and he nodded me softly toward the door.
I tried to swallow but felt only a tightening of my throat. As I jittered my way out of the room, wondering whether I should thank him for his mercy—I certainly felt like thanking him—he reached for the .22, wrapped it in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and tucked it into the back of the wardrobe. I went out. The immediate vicinity was empty. The lights were all on now, there was no darkened alley anymore. The square table, almost too tall to eat from, bore items that, unlike the guns, didn’t seem arranged for my viewing: powder trails and crumbs of weed, half-crushed pills and cotton swabs. The remnants of a deal? This, I supposed, was why there were so many people over, crammed into the back rooms of the apartment in the middle of the night. They must have been in the midst of a sale. Nothing terribly large, it looked like, but something all the same. It would have made them antsy about my presence. I listened to some of them shuffling toward the front of the apartment and presumably out of the building.
Eric would d be coming out of the bedroom on his patrol soon enough: it would have been suicidal to try to squeeze in a sketch of what was on the table. The crew’s patience with Duke, and certainly with me, was just about gone; that much was already palpable to me, even in an empty space. So I did what I could: I simply fixed all the paraphernalia of a just-done deal in my mind. I was gazing at a stack of miniaturized Ziplocs when the door beside the table cracked open and a black hand waved me in. It was Duke. The space appeared like another small bedroom but functioned, I would learn, as a storehouse: the desk, the single bed, the water cooler, the leather lounger, all held chambers for drugs.
Duke dug into a couch and came out with a plastic-wrapped brick of weed. “Shit’s terrible,” he said, unwrapping the plastic a few turns and releasing the brick’s stale fragrance. “But they lace it up good. I wouldn’t smoke it, though. I’d be no good for football with bud like this.”
Footsteps. Someone was coming. He rolled the brick on a short pine shelf to wrap it up and buried it deep in the couch, down among the springs, which whined to make room. Then he tore a piece of a broad blackout cloth from the lone window and looked down into the street with a touching serenity, as though it’d been too long since he’d last taken in the view. In fact hardly anything could be seen outside. There was an accumulating fog—common here, I would learn—and only some of the streetlights had functional bulbs, leaving long stretches of darkness. The city didn’t worry much about light in this neighborhood, it seemed. What was there to see?
Two or three footsteps sounded directly behind us and then the street was piercingly lit, right down the middle. Duke and I retreated from the window on instinct, turned away from the blaze, and there was Anthony standing by the switch, behind a filing cabinet that kept only their drugs sorted.
“That’s some kind of shit right there,” Duke said. “A South Side bat signal.”
“The fuck it is. But hurry up and draw or whatever the fuck you come for. I can’t leave it on long without a problem.”
“At four-thirty?” I asked without really meaning to.
“When you drove up, what you find? People, right? Lots of niggers. It’s no different than daytime, see. No different. What do we care about time for around here? Don’t nobody do. It’s different for my man Duke. You can’t go by that shit.” He laughed and offered his fist for bumping, but Duke looked suddenly raw again.
Behind us the burning beam turned the night red rather than white, scorching everything in its path. It was eating up the fog, too, transforming the street, whose abasement I’d not yet appreciated, into a glory of flame and shadow. These were shadows, as Anthony said, of people walking around without a grain of fear, not because there were no looming threats—Chicago these days just was one big threat—but because they’d gotten over it, made their peace. Why worry about something you could do nothing about?
In this light, I drew the leafless trees throwing their spindly shadows down onto the people, shadow upon shadow. A couple of boys entered the frame, their hands up to block out Anthony’s light, which shone like a second sun. These boys spent a lot of time, you felt, with their hands up, with flashlights shining in their eyes—and flash grenades, too, now and again. What was the difference to them?
Down in the street, there was a touch of Stygian joy afoot as neighbors and transients stumbled around, alone or in twos. My environs back home teemed with the indigent, all crowded together. Here, though, the poor and hopeless preferred to walk alone, anonymous in the cloak of night. Really, it had to be said, this was the picture of a joyous hell, one that Duke’s old friends nourished through drug dealing and assault and whatever else they doled out, whenever boundaries were crossed. In another way, they helped keep this inferno raging through mis-en-scène, with the help of this brilliant light.
Anthony and Duke crowded around me on either side, staring down into the brightened abyss. (Jeff could have learned something from this.) I penciled in the masses of garbage in the street, all those gargantuan trash bags the darkest green, ribboned by time; mattresses stained with dark fluids; planks of furniture—on the drive, I’d seen some boys splintering a chair in the street—piles of loose clothing, as at a refugee camp. Were they for distribution, a common stock? Is this where Eric, their vigilant keeper of arms, found the garments to swaddle his guns in?
The light failed, and all was dark again. Anthony started to curse, until he saw the long-limbed harlequin boy, I could see only his silhouette, standing by the switch now, still shirtless. He’d finished his soda and grapes, it seemed, and was shutting the shop. Could this be his house? Was he far more significant than I’d assumed? Certainly Anthony stopped his grumbling on finding the boy there. Who might the child be related to, if he wasn’t the one Anthony directly feared? An older brother? A father?
The boy said nothing to us, not even to Duke. He didn’t think he had to. He moved languidly, with that shuffling gait I’d observed in the dark. Without seeking anyone’s sign-off, he took the blackout cloth from the ground and methodically re-taped it over the window. Duke left the room and we followed him back into the hall. The dealing table was now clean as could be. The place wasn’t just quiet but silent. The guests had all gone. Our time had come—although I was sorry the patchy boy hadn’t taken just a few more minutes to arrive, so that I could have taken down a bit more from the window. There were real riches out there; the shine in Anthony’s and Duke’s eyes then had proved it. They’d even pointed out details without explanation, tapping on the glass, directing my attention to whatever enlivened their world, to whatever made hell hell—this hell, I suppose. But then, as I walked out the front door with Duke, without a word to Anthony, who lingered uncertainly in the canary hall, I considered how the mystery boy—a drug kingpin, as I imagined him now—had furnished me with the most potent image of the night, just by cobbling together a late-night snack.