May 8, 1973
Cleveland
The skyline over the buzz-cut prairie brush wore a glowing crown of electric fuzz as Reggie Marshall knelt on his right knee to address the bloody gash on his left. He looked up and there were Terminal Tower’s yellow-dot windows, the spire that doesn’t even come close to scraping the sky. He looked down and there was his knee broken open in the shape of a smile, his pants broken open, too, a smile within a smile. He touched the gash and winced so hard the pain made him drop to both knees, which hurt even worse. His whole body hurt like a motherfucker. Being him hurt like a motherfucker. He thought, I’m the motherfucker who hurts like a motherfucker. He thought, Happy motherfucking birthday.
He spun his head on its creaking neck-swivel so he was looking over his left shoulder, then his right. No one, but they still could’ve followed him all the way from the garage. And he was collapsed, crouching not twenty feet from the highway with his back to them, just begging them to run up on him. He was a pischer, as Sunny would say, which he thought probably meant your fool ass can’t even remember to look both ways when you cross the street but in Hebrew-speak. Reggie put both hands on his head and dug his nails deep into his scalp, which he sometimes did to calm himself down. The right sleeve of his coat was torn up. A hollow-cheeked white man in a Cadillac drove by and slowed down to look at him like We need to clean up these streets, then sped off. If no one helped him, no one could find out what he was running from, and that meant much less of a situation. But if he was being honest with himself chances were small that he’d ever again walk into that apartment with the green tile on the ceiling, the apartment where Tasha had taken both his hands in hers and told him she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Six years after she’d told him that—just three months ago—he’d packed his father’s old leather bowling bag with the four fake passports Sunny had made for him, five grand in cash, two of Tasha’s old work dresses, a razor and shaving cream for him, and some jumpers and a picture book, Baby Bear Is Hungry, for the boys. That bag now stayed in the trunk of the sedan always. He was being realistic, not paranoid: shit happened in this business. He hadn’t told Tasha about it because things like that disturbed her. She was sensitive and hard to read and he still wondered what she’d been watching for, staring soft-eyed out the window of her daddy’s house on that first day he ever saw her. If he thought about it too hard, he got a tight little sadness in his chest. It sure as hell hadn’t been him.
He could feel his heartbeat in his knee now, it was hurting so bad. His options were: (1) move back deeper in the grass and sleep there, or (2) walk west to Ohio City and find Sunny and tell him what had happened. Just below the skyline’s chin was a chain-link fence crawling with weedy vines, keeping him from the Flats and the river and the rich white boats with bullshit names like SS Salty Bottom that were tied up to the dock. He could lean against the fence and sleep sitting up with his legs out in front of him, but now the gash was so full of dirt that even the air blowing over it stung so bad he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out. He was a wimp about pain according to Tasha, and she would know because she’d given birth to twins in the bathtub at home. When he’d sliced his thumb chopping potatoes once, he had screamed so loud it woke Aaron the Brick up and got him crying, and even after Tasha had gone into the room to calm him down, Reggie was still dancing around the kitchen shouting about an ambulance. She had just clucked at him and said she hoped he never grew a uterus because that was what really hurt, he better fucking believe it. He had been so mad he had forgotten about his thumb and started in on a you-don’t-take-that-tone-with-me lecture, the kind his father used to give. Then they both looked down at all the chocolate-syrup-colored spots on the floor and she looked back up at him like Are you for real right now? And she had been right. She had been so right.
Good Christ he missed her and it’d only been eight hours since he’d last seen her. He rose to his feet and stumble-jumped into the brush behind him, the grass whipping hard against his knee as he walked. He was lucky, actually. This whole thing could’ve gone a lot worse. He’d probably pissed off Shondor a little, but everybody pissed off Shondor. Shondor was born pissed off. Sunny would understand the situation. He was like the Shondor whisperer: if you did something dumb and you didn’t know how to put it into words that wouldn’t get you killed, you told Sunny and he’d make something up for Shondor and all you’d get was a slap on the wrist. One time a guy on the corner had gotten lazy and started letting junkies use in an alley a few blocks away; Reggie remembered the guy had these huge teeth like a cartoon horse and a permanent drip from blowing through Shondor’s product. But luckily for the guy he was close with Sunny, they’d gone to the same temple growing up. Sunny told Shondor that he’d gone out to Glenville to see the guy and they’d fucked up the junkies and it turned out it wasn’t Shondor’s, it was Irish. And that calmed Shondor down and probably saved the guy’s life. The guy told Reggie the whole story like he was preaching gospel. I swear, he kept whistling through his horse teeth, I owe my life to Sunny. It ain’t nobody else who’d put his neck on the line like that for me. But then Shondor caught the guy in a smoke shop in Collinwood cutting fatties for his friends and he took him outside and shot him in the head.
Now all that stood between Reggie and the chain-link fence was a sick-looking tree. He watched the boats bobbing silently at the dock. He was about to sit down when the SS Goodtimes in front of him caught the reflection of some high beams. He took three steps back and kneeled on one knee again. The beams rolled across the riverbank, lighting up Reggie’s torn right sleeve, his trembling hand. He ducked and threw himself back-first into the brush behind him, landing miraculously clear of any twigs or rocks. The mud was damp and thick and seemed to be filling his ears. He listened to the muffled sound of the truck’s wheels. He thought about what he’d do if the truck stopped. It wasn’t five-o in that truck, he knew, but it was probably the kind of redneck who’d kill to be one.
The truck stopped moving but the beams still shot light through the tops of the grass. Reggie tried to breathe less. He tried to count the number of windows in the skyline but it was too far away. He tried to remember the last time he’d been up close to Terminal Tower. It’d been when he’d taken Tasha to the West Side Market on their second date. He had bought celery, bell peppers, onions, and shrimp and taken her back to his place and cooked her gumbo. She had said he was a good cook and she wasn’t expecting him to be one. His father was stretched out on the sofa that day, trembling and sweating, trying hard to pretend he didn’t need his forty. Had his father met the boys before he died? It embarrassed Reggie that he couldn’t remember. That was the sort of thing he should know.
Reggie’s had been the last daddy standing in Hough, had only gotten locked up twice, once for less than a gram of grass and once for public urination. Reggie’s mother used to call him “docile,” which was the kind of word that made Reggie think of a deer or a dove. He was either happy or he was seeing withdrawal ghosts—the meanest he ever got was when his breakfast didn’t come hot, and even then he just frowned and wouldn’t talk to anyone for an hour or so. After Reggie’s mother got taken away he made a habit of bringing Reggie to Hot Sauce Williams every Saturday. Reggie had liked watching him when the ribs were set down in front of him: his sleepy eyes got wider, his mouth smiled so his gums showed, his shaky hands tucking his napkin-bib into the front of his shirt. They had gone there so regularly that Lemaud Williams himself became friends with Reggie’s father, calling him Sly because “I’m not tryna say ‘Sylvester’ every damn time I see you.” It got so whenever they walked in the door Lemaud would walk out from the kitchen, wiping his hands on the towel in his apron, shouting, “Sly Marshall and Little Green Eyes are back!” The walls had been pink in there: whenever Reggie had a good dream as a little kid, even if he didn’t remember anything in it, he always woke up seeing pink.
The truck finally drove off. Reggie exhaled hard and sat up. What the hell was he doing acting like a condemned man already? He bent his knee and inspected it in the moonlight. It was swelling up now, leaking still. He wasn’t a condemned man. He hadn’t used up his chance with Sunny. That was why he’d gotten as fucked up as he’d gotten—he was almost one of the guys as far as Shondor was concerned, he’d just run into a little trouble. Small-timers didn’t run into trouble like this. Small-timers were disposable. Not Reggie. Reggie made bricks disappear. Shondor called him Black Lightning, which Reggie hated at first but minded less when he’d heard guys calling Sunny the Schnoz. “The name’s a compliment,” Sunny told him. “It means he actually notices you.” There was a lot worse in the world than being noticed. Why would you start anything if you’re making 15K a year? Whenever he used to get mad at school, his mother would tell him never to bite the hand that feeds him, which was ironic since she’d pretty much bitten his father’s hand right off and here Reggie was in a bunch of grass by the highway, not biting Shondor’s hand. He dug both his hands in his pant leg at the knee and ripped it off. He tied it around the gash, whispering motherFUCKER the whole time because now it was Dockers against his blood and pus. If only his mother could see him now, hobbling back to the side of the road, breathing hard through his mouth because breathing normal somehow made the knee hurt more. She’d at least be impressed by his loyalty, probably raise those drawn-on eyebrows and say, “You starting to make your momma believe in God again.” Now he could feel all the other places they’d fucked him up, the bruises on his sternum and right hand. The .45 was heavy against his belt. He still had that, at least. If he’d lost it, that’d be grounds for Shondor to end him.
He walked slowly, foot in front of foot, like his father used to walk right before he died. The skyline was still twinkling ahead of him—he was surprised by it. Why wasn’t it giving up like the rest of the city? His father hadn’t met the boys, Reggie remembered now. When Tasha was pregnant Reggie’d stopped by the place in Hough to tell his father the news, but his father had been on the floor when he walked in. He had rolled off the sofa onto his stomach. There were cornflakes sprinkled on his back and the Supremes blaring on TV. The cornflakes were damp with milk; the bowl was upside down on the sofa, still dripping onto his father’s snoring head. “Dad?” Reggie had said, and his father didn’t respond, didn’t even move. “Dad!” he yelled, and his father’s foot twitched, and Reggie felt small and pathetic the way he used to feel as a child, when his father would fall asleep on the sofa and his mother would smoke and stare at him like he was a stain she wanted out of the carpet. “Why did I ruin my life?” she’d ask him, and he’d say, “What you mean, Momma?” And she’d just shake her head at him, take a drag from her cigarette, and let the tears start falling behind her glasses. She had a rash across her nose and cheeks that never went away and always made her look angry. She said it was Reggie who made her tired, but he figured out later it was her body attacking itself. His parents had been given bodies that hated them, made them grab for pipes and bottles—he’d done the same, he’d be lying if he ever claimed he hadn’t. But they were worse and always had been. He only kept a little blow for special occasions because Tasha liked it, and he did knee-highs and sprints around the block and bench presses every morning. By the time Tasha was pregnant, he was stronger and sleeker than he’d ever been. When he found his father that day he had wedged his hands under his father’s armpits and picked him up from behind, pivoted him, and sat him back down. “I was eating breakfast,” his father had said, spitting milk as he spoke. Reggie asked him what else he remembered, but he just massaged up and down his left arm and stared into the obsidian of the now switched-off TV. The room had smelled like stale Schlitz and Maker’s Mark. Reggie told him that this was the last straw, he couldn’t keep on if he didn’t go to a doctor or stop the drinking or both, and did he know that the whole reason Reggie came over was to say he was going to be a grandfather? His father turned to him and said, “A grandfather?” Reggie was hot with anger by then but not so much that he couldn’t answer: “Yes!” Then he hung his head and whispered, “Goddamn,” and his father wrapped his hand around Reggie’s wrist like Reggie was a little kid again. That afternoon he made an appointment at the free clinic for his father but his father never went. Three months later, Reggie found him dead in the same position next to the sofa.
* * *
He’d always imagined Caleb and Aaron would grow up different than he had, with money and cars and the carefree laughter of rich white kids whose biggest problem was choosing where to go to college. He and Tasha already had a private school picked out for them, a Catholic kindergarten where they’d be taught how to count and spell before they turned four. They’d grow up to be twin doctors or lawyers. They’d have barbecues when Reggie and Tasha got old, the boys charcoal-grilling chicken while their children ran around Reggie’s big backyard, Reggie telling some story about stealing soda or shoes or something as a kid, making his mother’s temper into something batty and not dangerous, his father’s drinking charming and not sad. The boys would laugh admiringly and Tasha would squeeze his hand. Caleb (he had always been more talkative) would say, “Dad, we’re so glad we didn’t have to deal with any stuff like that growing up.” And Aaron would laugh and nod, pull his little daughter up onto his shoulders while she screamed “I’m too tall, Daddy!” because she’d be scared of heights, but he’d be such a good father that she’d trust him anyway. And Reggie would say, “It’s true! Only in America could you start out like that and end up like this!” And Tasha would get her deep scholar’s voice on and tell him to stop being so goddamned patriotic about a terrorist slave state. She was too smart for him and he knew it but she loved him still. Thank God she loved him still.
A car shot past him doing at least eighty if not ninety. Drunks shouldn’t be allowed to drive—he could say this from experience. All those nights when he was a kid sucking down Wild Turkey, cruising around with Cookie and those other guys from the block: Rell, Kingston, Daevon. Miracle he didn’t T-bone someone. Miracle he’d done all the things he’d done and still lived. He reviewed what he’d tell Sunny: he’d gone to the garage in Lakewood to find the guy Shondor wanted killed, found and killed him, hadn’t counted on the guy’s two friends being there. Then they’d tried to kill Reggie (specifically, Reggie scuffled with the one for his gun but ended up having to shoot him twice in the chest, then the other came at him with a knife, swiped hard at his arm, and tried to kneecap him but Reggie shook him off and killed him, too), and he’d done it all without leaving any evidence. They had clearly been foot soldiers, couldn’t even handle Reggie between the two of them. It was pathetic how lazy their operation was run. He lived minutes from Little Italy and nobody was trying to stop him from picking off greaseball pawns.
Walking was easier as he got used to the pain. He passed the Cleveland Soapbox Derby track, its silver plaque looking blunt and knifelike without light to catch. He walked over the bridge above the flats, looked into the still-bright factory windows at the people in jumpsuits and goggles walking back and forth. One of them was looking out the window at him, and Reggie considered waving before the window went dark. It had to be at least ten o’clock, if not eleven. He had never understood how anyone kept a job like that: clocking in at nine in the morning or earlier, being forced to work overtime by a boss who wouldn’t pay extra. If there was a way out of that hustle, why not take it? Tasha was always telling him to have compassion for people who didn’t understand the boxes they were trapped in, and he tried to for her sake, but he couldn’t see how anyone wouldn’t want money if they had the chance to get it. Maybe people who’d always had it, people like the ones in Tasha’s graduate classes who kept criticizing the “greedy bourgeoisie” and saying the world needed a revolution led by the poets. Whatever the fuck kind of revolution they were trying to start, Reggie had been getting rich the whole time. He’d gotten hired instead of killed by Sunny: could a poet do that?
He’d entered the city limits and none of the cars driving past him were slowing down to watch his crooked walk. When there was a gap in traffic he ran screaming in pain to the median, then ran from the median to the sidewalk and collapsed on the grass gasping, staring at the smoggy sky. The first time he’d kissed Tasha they’d been sitting on the Central Avenue bus headed east into the best sunset of his life, packed full of pinks and oranges and purples and blues: a sunset on acid. Tasha had told him Cleveland had sunsets like that because of all the factory fumes and he said that if he could watch sunsets like that for the rest of his life, he’d live right inside a steel factory, which made her roll her eyes and laugh. He knew he had her then, even though she was so far out of his league he couldn’t see where she was standing.
He sat up and looked around him. A pack of drunk kids was walking up the street singing a song he didn’t know—a bullshit folk song, probably. One of them stepped aside and parted the curtain of his hair, staring right at Reggie. The kid nudged him with his foot. “Hey, man,” he said. Reggie lay back down. “Hey, man,” the kid said again, “bad trip?” Reggie could hear the other kids snickering. The kid nudged him again, and then the nudging became a little kick. This one’s lights are out, Reggie heard one of them slur, not the one who’d kicked him. He opened his eyes and now a girl was standing over him, white like the first kid, with worm-thin lips and fat cheeks. She laughed from deep in the back of her throat and made a sound like she was about to hock spit in his face. Instead he kicked her in the calves so she fell screaming to her knees, and when the long-haired one shouted “What the fuck?” and came at him, Reggie got to his feet in time to deliver a haymaker. Then he ran, the pain in his body gone, the kids screaming “Somebody call the police!” behind him. A helpless laugh escaped him as he ran. You really had to pity anybody stupid enough to believe in the police.
Detroit and West Twenty-Eighth: pink neon flickering the words MASSAGES OPEN at him. He got out his key and jammed it in the knob and the door came open in his hand. He was inside; the curtains were drawn, the room was dark. The back-room light was off. He reached for the switch next to the door and the Christmas lights along the molding snapped on to reveal the velour chairs, the girls’ skirts and pasties laid out on the wood-and-leather tabletop, and, before he could even make sense of what he was seeing, the blinking red eyes of some wino. Reggie screamed and the intruder screamed, covering his face with a pair of raggedy-gloved hands. Reggie pulled the gun from his pants and cocked it, which made the man whimper “God no Reggie no.” And then Reggie realized it wasn’t a john or a wino: it was Leland Sr., the cokehead who always asked for Reggie by name.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Reggie said. “Why are you here? How did you get in here?” Leland Sr. shrugged and started blubbering as if this were the first time he’d ever tried talking. The only time Reggie felt bad about what he did was when he started to notice junkies deteriorating. When he first met Leland Sr., he’d been a skinny hippie with a days-old beard and some scrap-metal job and a wife with a kid on the way. Reggie didn’t really pay attention to the people he met on the corner aside from how much money they had and whether they looked like liars, but Leland Sr. was like gristle in your teeth. He’d come up to Reggie and start talking and no matter how many times Reggie pushed him away his stupid ass would find a way back in an hour or two, yammering about how the president was a bitch and he couldn’t refinance the mortgage on his house and how “medicine” made him stronger. Eventually Reggie just gave in and listened, because some days he was kind of entertaining and there was no getting rid of him once he got going. But Leland Sr. was the kind of stupid that couldn’t take a hint, and he started to think he was Reggie’s best friend. As in, he invited Reggie to dinner with his wife in what Reggie assumed was going to be a nasty Glenville two-bedroom, probably all dust-motey, the carpet full of cat shit, to which Reggie said, “Seriously, man? You inviting your pusher to dinner?” And Leland Sr. made some joke about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which made Reggie’s skin crawl so much he slammed Leland Sr. in the jaw. The punch had knocked him down but he just stumbled up from the ground laughing, probably too numb to take a hint. Recently, Reggie would hide when he saw Leland Sr. coming, take a midafternoon hit if it meant avoiding Leland Sr.’s pasty speed-freak mouth.
“I got in through the front door,” Leland Sr. said. “I picked the lock. We share a birthday today, remember? I wanted to wish you happy birthday.” Reggie threw his hands up. When did I tell this hebe weasel motherfucker about my birthday? he thought, but didn’t say it. Instead he spun around so he was looking Leland Sr. in his sad-sack face and said, “I have business to do, man. You gotta leave.”
Now he could feel Leland Sr. taking him in, his whole jacked-up self, so he moved to the other side of the room and pretended to be busy sorting pasties. “What happened to you?” Leland Sr. asked, and Reggie said, “It’s better if you don’t know.” But Leland Sr. wanted to know—he was standing behind Reggie, breathing heavy on his neck, offering to fuck up whoever had fucked him up, until Reggie turned around and pushed him away. “I don’t need your punk ass helping me!” he shouted. “You acting like a faggot!” That last part shut him up. Leland Sr. apologized and held his hands folded in front of him like a singer in a church choir, saying he didn’t mean any harm, he was just getting desperate for a re-dose, his wife was making him see this headshrinker and it was driving him insane. “My whole goddamn life don’t revolve around you,” Reggie said. He began opening and rearranging the boxes on the shelf in front of him—water-damaged copies of Hustler and Penthouse mostly—hoping Leland Sr. would take the hint and just leave. But when he turned around the asshole was waving a hundred-dollar bill in his face. “I got this doing a favor for a guy at the Ford plant,” he said, like Reggie gave a fuck. He sighed and grabbed the money. “Let’s make this quick,” he said, and Leland Sr. nodded, his face now like an obedient dog’s. Reggie went downstairs to the basement, where the girls sometimes slept if they were going through a rough patch. There was one there that night, her greasy hair spun out sunray-style from her head, her face grimacing in sleep. Reggie would never think of touching one of them, but he knew the others did. He tiptoed past the girl to the safe in the back, opened the lockbox in the safe, and fished around for an eightball. Then he brought it upstairs and threw it on the table. “This is all we got left,” he lied. “You gonna have to break that bill or take what I give you.” Leland Sr.’s eyes got huge. He grabbed the bag, ripped it open, and dipped his pinkie inside. He snorted it up and did that two or three more times before his eyes got glassy and his head perked up on its grasshopper neck. “This feels Colombian,” he said, and Reggie shrugged. “Honestly, man, can I just stay here for a little bit?” Leland Sr. asked. “My kid is sick and my wife is gonna be sitting up with him and if you kick me out I’ll just go stand across the street.” Reggie made a sound like a bull snorting. What was stopping him from breaking this stupid motherfucker’s neck? He watched Leland Sr. do his sad little bumps. Outside a car rolled past slowly, bass pounding. There was something about him Reggie couldn’t understand. He hated him, but hurting him would feel like kicking a stray dog. He had a philosophy that the kind of person who deserved to be on the receiving end of a barrel was also the kind of person who’d been on the firing end, and Leland Sr. had never been on the firing end.
“Just sit under the table,” he told Leland Sr. “And be quiet.” Leland Sr. started sputtering his thanks, offered as he always did to put himself on the corner if Reggie ever needed help. “Shut the fuck up, man,” Reggie said. “You make one sound and I’ll kill you.” He remembered his mother telling him he was a promise breaker and that was why she hated him. She was halfway out of her mind by then, weeks away from being hauled off by the police. She was standing over Reggie in the kitchen with a knife in her hand. She was freebasing by then, the rash across her nose bright red and scabbing. The knife was the one he’d seen her use to slice the turkey’s neck two Thanksgivings ago. Reggie was shaking in his undershirt, knees to his chin, tears down his cheeks. He was eight. He was asking into his knees, “Why am I a promise breaker?” He couldn’t help it, he just wanted her to tell him so he could fix it. But every time he spoke, the whites of her eyes got angrier and she said, “You promised to love me and you ain’t delivered on it!” Then she brought the knife down in the carpet in front of him and he jumped back and ran.
Leland Sr. crawled under the table and Reggie bolted the front door, then unlocked the door to the back room and bolted that, too. He turned on the single lightbulb and the room blinked into focus. Clients sometimes met girls back here—if it was a slow night, Sunny would turn it into a private room and one lucky john would get to turn a girl out on top of Sunny’s mother’s old kitchen table. Right now the room was almost empty except for some old shoes stacked high enough against the wall to reach Reggie’s knees. He didn’t want to think about whom they belonged to.
He sat down at the table and put his pistol in front of him. The clock on the wall said it was almost midnight. Reggie had been running late, but Sunny wouldn’t have come and then left without seeing him. The idea that he would’ve made Reggie sweat a little. There was no reason for Sunny to give him the money other than Reggie was loyal and everybody liked him. Even the assholes who did nothing but bust people’s faces for Shondor thought Reggie was pretty stand-up. He was family. For the first time in a long time, Reggie’s knee screamed out and he squeezed his thigh to distract from the pain. He could feel his chest turning in on itself like the hollow side of a spoon. Reggie thought of the girl trying to spit in his face and replaced it with a thought about his sons eating Cheerios. Caleb always picked them up one by one and Aaron just slammed handfuls into his mouth. He suddenly regretted not bringing up a dub bag from the vault for himself.
The back door opened and Sunny came in holding the briefcase, which was stupidly canary colored and had all kinds of shit locking it up on top. Reggie was relieved that Sunny had shown, but his face looked like the stretched-back faces of those astronauts in the g-force machines on TV. “Hey,” Reggie said, and Sunny jumped and wailed, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Reggie shook his head, trying to look like Don’t start something, but he could never look that way with Sunny. Sunny, who came across more as a needle-nosed accountant motherfucker than Shondor’s right-hand guy, with his button-down shirts and his high socks and the way he had of putting so much waxy shit in his hair it looked like he got it buffed at the car wash. Back when Reggie and Cookie were desperately pushing their own grass on Scovill and East Fifty-Fifth, Sunny had come up in a Cadillac one day to buy from them. Reggie, stupid kid that he was, agreed and got right in the passenger seat. Then Sunny had a gun in his ribs and as quick as he could Reggie whipped out his own gun and shot Sunny in the shoulder. He still remembered being terrified of the sound it made, and that little girl jumping rope outside the rec center who looked through the car window dead at him. And Sunny, who should’ve been weeping from pain, laughed. He’d looked from Reggie to the little girl and asked him who his boss was. That was the start of the whole thing.
But now Sunny wasn’t looking the way he did in the car. He was small and sunken. Reggie was starting to feel sick: Sunny’s paler-than-pale face, his own throbbing knee, the lunatic babbling away in the next room. “Were you here earlier?” Reggie asked, and when he got no response: “Is that the money?” Sunny nodded, staring at a place in the wall past Reggie. “Yes what?” Reggie asked, but Sunny said nothing. Then he opened the briefcase on the table. The bills were two stacks deep and wide enough to fill the entire thing. “That’s it,” Sunny said, then sighed and closed it. “I’m supposed to be dead.” Reggie wanted to reach for the leather handle but held back. “What do you mean?” he asked, and Sunny began to cry. He thought it was a joke but the crying didn’t stop. “My wife and kids,” he said—Reggie had met all of them, Alma the Spanish girl and their two cinnamon babies, always squirming around, asking Uncle Reggie can we play Connect Four? He was surprised Sunny was capable of a woman like that, but then Sunny surprised everyone.
“Your wife and kids what?” But Reggie didn’t really want to ask. Sunny shook his head and sucked his teeth. “Blown up in my car,” he said, and shuddered so hard Reggie thought for a second he was having a stroke. “Blown up outside the dentist’s.” They both sat still, but Reggie could feel the room getting smaller. “It was meant for me,” Sunny said. Reggie didn’t hear much past “blown up.” His first thought was to go home. Go home immediately: run if he had to. Fuck the money. But his second thought was, Get the money, then go home. He latched onto the briefcase handle but Sunny shook him off. “You’re supposed to be dead, too,” he said. “He’s liquidating. He doesn’t trust anyone anymore. I’m not supposed to have this briefcase still.” Reggie wanted to know what the fuck it meant to liquidate a business like this but it didn’t really matter. He tried again to grab the briefcase but Sunny shook him off, hard. “Come on, man,” Reggie said, “I did the job, now give me the money.” But Sunny was pacing back and forth, making these little hiccup noises. “He’s basically my father,” he kept saying. “He can’t do this to me.” Then he stopped. “I love him like a father,” he said, staring Reggie dead in the face, his eyes huge and vacant. And then he brought what Reggie recognized as his favorite Beretta to his own temple. Reggie was on his feet, saying “Holy shit holy shit.” He got the gun out of Sunny’s hands and held it away from him. “Stop it!” he said, and then Sunny’s little man-boy frame fell into Reggie’s arms as he wailed. “You’re so stupid,” he said into Reggie’s shirt. “It was supposed to be three guys there today. You’re supposed to be dead. You know how I know that? I planned it. Shondor told me to.” Reggie held him up and said, “You and me can get away. You got the money, I got a car, you can come with me and my family.” Sunny snorted, the old laugh he did when one of the guys said something really stupid. “You seen too many movies,” he said. “I’d rather be dead than be alive without my wife and kids.” Then Reggie’s jaw went crooked and he didn’t feel any of the pain until he hit the ground and realized Sunny had punched him.
Reggie should’ve run when he had the chance. Tasha would’ve said fuck the money. His body hurt now so much he couldn’t move. His ears were buzzing, making everything Sunny was saying a faraway hum. Like someone had hit a gong hard and then just let it ring and ring and ring. He remembered Cookie played drums in junior high. He got so good that they made him part of a program where he went on a bus to Shaker Heights to play in a youth orchestra, and one time Reggie went to see his show at the high school there. Cookie had done the same dumbass face he always did whenever he saw Reggie—tongue stuck out, eyes crossed—and Reggie was laughing so hard, because instead of doing it at the corner shop or the gas station, he was doing it while wearing a suit on a stage full of white and Asian kids. The conductor said, “We’ll be playing Prokofiev’s concerto in something,” and Reggie watched Cookie bang on the drum at the back of the stage, fast and loud and with perfect rhythm.
The last time he saw Cookie was four years ago. He had been trying to leave the woman he had his first kid with, a girl he kept calling “bossy” but who Reggie thought was calm as a swan. They were smoking at Reggie’s place, trying to think of how to make more money. Reggie had just been fired by the postal service and Cookie was posted up on the corner. “Why don’t you get back in it?” Cookie asked, and Reggie actually thought about it, the shit in his head making everything foggy. “Ay, it’ll be like school days,” Cookie said, his little cherub face scrunched up and laughing. “It’s like being sixteen again.” The last thing Reggie wanted to be was sixteen again: making his father’s rent, ripping up his mother’s postcards from the crazy house. But who else was going to pay him? He was getting rejected everywhere he applied. He was in love with a girl and he needed to get paid.
He had officially been fired from the postal service for stealing from mailboxes, which he had never done. That was back when he was determined to “fly straight” and “have a career.” His route had taken him through Cleveland Heights, and every day he had to walk past the house of this ancient white woman who had a mouth like a toenail clipping all screwed up on the side of her face. Every time he pulled up into that neighborhood she was at her door staring him down, and once she even shouted, “I know why you’re here and I can let the police know, too!” He tried to keep his head down, only speak if spoken to. But one day in that neighborhood, in a house several streets over, he noticed a girl standing in a second-floor window, looking out into the sky. She had been playing with her necklace, her one arm crossed over her stomach. He’d seen girls in Hough who looked a little like her, but none of them stood the way she stood, made that serene face she was making. She was more beautiful than all of them put together.
He parked and got out of his truck to deliver her mail, which he really didn’t need to do because he could’ve just reached through the truck’s window, but he wanted to stand on her driveway and get her attention. He saw she’d seen him and was leaning forward to take him in, both hands on the windowsill, her face gentle and curious. He had waved up at her, chin to dumbass chest Cookie-style because he didn’t know what else to do. She had laughed silently and waved back. She wore a sweater that showed her shoulders and a pearl necklace he’d later find out was made of something called Bakelite.
Every day after that he got out of his truck to see her. He did this even though she wasn’t always there. Eventually she showed up every day, waving like she’d been expecting him. Sometimes she’d point to her watch and shake her head, like Look how late you are. He’d point to his wrist and shrug: I don’t have a watch. She’d laugh. When she laughed, she hugged her shoulders and turned a little from side to side. She was small, he could tell.
One day, she had walked outside and down the driveway. She looked at her feet even though he knew she knew he was watching her. She put her hands on the mailbox and smiled up at him. Then she stuck her hand out for the mail.
“I want to bring it up to the house personally,” she said. Her first words to him.
“Who’s living in that house with you?” he asked.
“My daddy,” she said. “My momma. And my sister.”
“Full house.”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other a little longer, smiling.
“You go to school?” he asked.
“Yeah. Axel Renfroe College. It’s one of the Black Ivies.”
He nodded like he knew it, but he didn’t. He could tell she saw right through him.
“My daddy teaches there,” she said. “He’s a professor of history.”
“Would your daddy mind if I called you?”
She lost her smile for a second, and he waited.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. He didn’t even know her name and she had left him standing at the foot of her beautiful driveway. He was about to drag himself back into the truck when she emerged from the house, skip-running down the driveway, a piece of paper in her hand. Breathless, she gave it to him. There was a phone number, and above it her name and a message: Natasha Harrison. Below the phone number was written: Call after 7:00 p.m.! Now, whenever she told the story, she was always saying she’d written something different. The message in that note was one of the few things they could never agree on.
He got fired the morning after that, the patchouli-smelling supervisor who’d hired him saying, “We should’ve known better than to take a risk on you, Reginald.” That night he called the number at seven o’clock exactly.
Reggie was thinking about all of that while Sunny reached down to remove the Beretta and the .45 from his pockets. His eyes were up on the ceiling and his knee was oozing and a tooth had come loose from his jaw. Damn, I should’ve just said no when Shondor asked me did I wanna do him a big favor for big money. Sunny’s a fucking idiot if he ever thought he was family. I’m a fucking idiot for ever thinking I was family. Then he was thinking of his real family, thinking of Caleb and Aaron in their matching cribs with the duckie bunting Tasha had picked out, thinking of Cookie and his goofy-looking daughter with Cookie’s same busted teeth, thinking of his dead father and probably dead mother. Good fucking Christ he’d felt so small so many times in his life. Why, from the minute he was born, did so many people want him dead? What was so wrong with his being alive?
He wished things had gone differently. Out of his bloody mouth he whispered the words, “I wish things coulda been different.” And then Sunny fired the .45 at his head.