Jack never went home again. But he is afraid that his father will try to find him, that he will use the authorities to drag Jack back to the room with the stoplight blinking outside the window, hostage to the creaks and groans of his father’s nighttime footsteps. He knows he needs to disappear.
Where do you go when you disappear off the grid the authorities have constructed? Back in the day, you joined the army; before that, if you had a romantic soul, it was the Foreign Legion. But those gilded days have been long drained to black-and-white. Off the grid for Jack means staying with Gus.
Gus owns the Hi-Line, a pawnshop on Kansas Avenue, where the sidewalk is sticky with spent body fluids, and at any time of the year a dank and gritty wind rattles folding gates on dilapidated storefronts.
Jack shows up outside the gated storefront at 7A.M. the day after the incident at the All Around Town bakery and waits there until Gus arrives.
Gus shows no surprise whatsoever. “Huh, white boy develop a taste for grits.” He unlocks the gate, rolls it up. “I mightta known.”
“I’m not going home.” Jack follows Gus into the Hi-Line, a long, narrow space with glass cases to the right, a wall of mirror to the left. It’s impossible to do anything in the Hi-Line, even pick your nose, without Gus seeing it. “I want to work for you.”
Gus turns on the fluorescent lights, then the air conditioner, which begins to rumble like an arthritic pensioner.
“Well, I mightta said no, despite what Reverend Taske tol’ me.” More lights come on at the rear of the store. “Huh, he thinks he knows everything ’cause he’s got a direct pipeline t’God.” Now the lights in the glass cases flicker once before illuminating the pawned goods. “I made some calls after I dropped you off yesterday. Now I gotta better line on Cyril.”
Gus steps behind the line of counters, checks the till, puts in a stack of bills. He looks up, an expression of mild surprise on his face. “My name’s Augustus Turlington the Third, no lie. My name alone would get me into any country club in America. Until they see my black-ass face, that is.” He grunts. “So what a you doin on the customer’s side a the counter, anyways? You never gonna learn the business from there.”
The Hi-Line is habituated by tattooed bail-bondsmen, furtive pornographers, rough-and-tumble Colombians, burly pimps, sallow-faced pushers, and beat cops on the take preceded into the fluorescent-lit shop by their bellies.
At first, Jack’s job is simply to follow Gus’s orders, or so it seems to his clients. But what Jack is really doing is observing them, in the way only he can, absorbing the nature of the up-front business deals.
“I want you familiar with what I do here,” Gus says that first morning. “I want you familiar with the folks who run in an’ outta here on a reg’lar basis, got me?”
Gus lives in a large house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the Maryland border. Improbably, it’s surrounded by trees and thick shrubs. Jack has his own room on the top floor. When he looks out his windows, he imagines he’s in a tree house, all leafy bower, safely green. There is a bird’s nest dotted with bits of fluff and droppings in the crook of a branch, as empty now as it was full in the spring. In the mornings, the green bower is spangled gold; at night, it’s frosted by a silvery glitter. Except for the birds and, in August, the cicadas, it’s quiet.
Sometimes, though, Jack hears music. There is a part of him that quails deep inside, but it’s the music itself—slow, sad, resigned even in its seething anger that draws him. Gradually, he conquers his inner fear enough to creep downstairs. Now he hears the male voice, deep, richer, more burnished than James Brown’s. He sits down on the bottom riser, arms clasped around his bony knees, rocking slightly to the rhythm. For an hour or more, he is inundated by the river of sorrow, soaking up sounds that seep into his bones, that in their sadness seem to lift him up on a golden chariot, transport him over the gummy rooftops, the blinking traffic lights, the blaring horns, screeching brakes, the drunken shouts, into a realm of pure bliss.
After the last notes die away, Jack climbs back up the stairs, crawls into bed, and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Every night he hears the music, the ritual is the same: the soft creeping down the stairs, sitting alone, but not alone, connected to an invisible world by the music, by the lyrics, by the voices of men who’ve seen things he can’t even imagine.
Weekends Jack is being taught the ways of God by Reverend Taske. His weekdays are spent at the Hi-Line observing, cataloging, and collating the sad parade of used bric-a-brac that down-at-the-heels customers bring in for Gus to evaluate and, if he deems them desirable, shell out meager cash payment. Most never return for their pawned goods, Jack learns soon enough, though they may be dear to them in ways no one else understands. Every month Gus holds an auction to sell what’s been there for a half year, the term of the Hi-Line agreement. Always there are several treasures among the old guitars, Timex watches, cameos, and gold lockets. He makes money on these transactions, to be sure, though after less than a week on the job, Jack is quite certain his living is made in the back room.
During one such auction, Jack comes across a box of comics. Excited, he begins to paw through them, until he realizes that these are his comics. His father must’ve come in one weekend while he was with Reverend Taske, pawned them. At once, Jack knows that his father never had any intention of coming back for them. A terrible sense of freedom overwhelms him, a sorrow and a joy commingled precisely like that curious emotion that draws him to the bluesy music Gus plays at night.
For a moment, he contemplates asking Gus to take the cost of the comics out of his salary. Then he opens one, begins to read it. Almost immediately, he puts it aside, opens another, then another and another. He puts them all aside. Then he takes the box, puts it on the auction counter to be sold.
It’s only when he looks up that he sees that Gus has been watching him all along.
One morning about a week after the auction, there’s a present waiting for him when he comes down for breakfast.
He stands staring at the large package resting on the kitchen table. Gus, in a chef’s apron, his fingers white with flour, says, “Well, go on, kid, open it.”
“It’s not my birthday.”
Gus expertly pours four circles of batter into a smoking cast-iron skillet. “You don’t want me t’have t’give it to someone else, do you?”
Jack feels himself being impelled by Gus’s words. His fingers tremble as they rip open the paper. Inside is a square box with a grille on one side. He opens the top: it’s a record player. Inside are three albums, one by Muddy Waters, one by Howlin’ Wolf, one by Fats Domino.
Gus, flipping corncakes, says, “Life without blues music, now that’s a sin. Blues tells all kinds o’ stories, the history of the people composed it.”
He slides a plate of corncakes onto the table. “Eat yo’ breakfast now. Tonight we’ll listen to these records together. No sense you sittin’ all by yo’self on them hard stairs.”
After six weeks, Gus decides Jack is ready to observe the backroom deals. The back room is a frigid twelve-by-twelve bunker outfitted with a sofa and two La-Z-Boy easy chairs, between which rests a sideboard on which sits an array of liquor bottles, old-fashioned and highball glasses of sparkling cut crystal. A girl comes in once a day to clean, dust, and vacuum. Gus is extremely particular about the environment in which his deals get hammered out.
Jack fears that these deals somehow involve drug-running because that is one of the businesses Cyril Tolkan is into, and it seems clear to him that Cyril and Gus are rivals. He needn’t have worried. The deals are of another nature altogether.
His first day in the back room, Gus tells him, “All my life I was a outcast, someone who wanted t’be happier’n my daddy, but every time I tried, there was a white man standin’ in my way. So finally I gave up, went back here t’my own world where I’m the king of the castle.”
Through the back door of the Hi-Line come a succession of police detectives. Although they all look different physically, they seem the same to Jack’s brain: they’re hard, flinty-eyed, dyspeptic. To a man, they’ve seen enough—often too much—of the streets they are sworn to protect: too much rage, too much bitterness, too much jealousy and envy, too much blood. They inhabit a swamp eyeball-deep in organized prostitution, drug smuggling, murder for hire, turf warfare. They have murder in their sleep-deprived eyes. Jack can see it; he can smell it, taste it like the tang of acrid smoke.
They all want the same thing from Gus: shortcuts to turn their perps into collars. They want to make arrests, no fuss, no muss, arrests that stick, that won’t blow back in their faces like street litter. This Gus can do, because what Gus trades in, what makes him his living, is information. Gus’s castle may be at times too small to suit his taste, but it’s populated by a battalion of corner snitches, gang informants he set in place, embittered turncoats, ambitious politicos—the list seems endless.
Whatever these detectives want, Gus usually has or, if not, can get in a matter of days. All for a price, of course. They pay, with reluctance and a show of crankiness. They know the value of the goods.
One of Gus’s regulars is a detective by the name of Stanz. His face is as crumpled as a used napkin; his shoulders as meaty as a veteran boxer. His nose is a mess, broken in street brawls when he was Jack’s age and never properly fixed. He smokes like a demon, speaks as if his throat is perpetually clogged with tar and nicotine.
Decades on the force haven’t dimmed his clothes sense. He opens the button on his smartly tailored suit jacket, lifts his trouser legs fractionally before he sits down on the sofa. He lights an unfiltered Camel, inhales mightily.
“You did good on the Gonzalez thing.” He hands a thick white envelope to Gus. “That particular sonovabitch won’t be making money off coke or anything else for the foreseeable future.”
“We aim to please.” Gus stuffs the envelope in a pocket without opening it. Obviously, he trusts Stanz.
“Speaking of which.” The detective picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “My boss is on my ass like you wouldn’t believe about the deuce murders over McMillan Reservoir.”
Gus frowns. “I tol’ you. I’m workin’ on it.”
“Working’s not good enough.” Stanz hunches forward, perching on the edge of the sofa. “These past three weeks my life’s been a living hell—no sleep, no downtime—I can’t even get my usual tug-and-tickle, for fuck’s sake. You know what that does to a man my age? My prostate feels as big as a goddamn softball.”
The ash trembles precariously at the end of his Camel. “My tit’s in the fire, Gus. Three weeks of interviewing, reinterviewing, poring over old cases, canvassing the neighborhood, scouring every fucking trash can and Dumpster for the knife or whatever the fuck sharp instrument was used to kill the vics. I feel like I’ve run the marathon, and what do I got to put in the report to my loo? What’s he gonna report to the chief of detectives? What’s the chief gonna say to the commish and the mayor? You see the bind I’m in? All that goddamn pressure has more than a trickle-down effect. I’m the guy where the shitstorm’s gonna hit.”
He grinds out his Camel, stands. “Get me the name of the perp.” He points at Gus. “Otherwise I’m pulling my business, and where I go everyone else is gonna follow.”
Gus’s eyes go hooded, and Jack, feeling the dangerous crackle of heat lightning in the room, involuntarily takes a step back.
Gus says in the lazy voice that Jack has already determined means trouble, “You been on the force—what?—thirty years now?”
“Thirty-three, to be exact.”
“No.” Gus shakes his head. “Thirty-three years, eight months, seventeen days.”
Stanz stares, blinking. He has no idea where this is going, the lug. But Jack does, and he can’t help smiling a secret smile.
“That’s a long time,” Gus drawls. “Lotta shit piles up in those years.”
Understanding comes at last to Stanz. “Now, wait a minute.”
“Five years ago, the Ochoa takedown,” Gus continues as if Stanz hasn’t said a word. “Along with the thirty kees of coke, twenty-five mil was found with him, but only twenty-three made it into the police evidence room. Eighteen months ago, a Hispanic down. Forensics found a gun in his hand, but we both know that when you shot him he was unarmed, ’cause you bought the gun from me. And, my goodness, I have the paperwork to prove it.”
Stanz’s face is flushed red. “Hey, you told me—”
“This’s a game you don’t wanna be playin’ with me.” Gus’s inner rage has boiled up into his eyes.
Stanz turns away for a moment, gathering himself. At length, he says, “I’d never threaten you, Gus. You know that, we go back a long way.”
Gus’s bulk fills up the space; his rage seems to have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Stanz is trying his best not to breathe hard. “We good now?” he asks.
It looks like he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.