Checkmate (4 page)

He shrugged. “I didn’t see the script,” he said. “They were still working on it yesterday.”

“The screen’s going to be behind her,” the woman from
the agency said. “This is a wonderful account. I hope she pulls it off.”

“I thought she had the job already,” I said.

“We look for ongoing accounts,” the woman said. “Not one-shot deals.”

“She’ll pull it off,” Marc said. He didn’t sound too confident.

We waited for another five minutes before they rolled a camera into the room. Then Mom came in, dressed in a kimono. She waved to me and I waved back.

The guy who was directing the shoot was in the room, too, and we could hear his voice through a speaker.

“Okay, let’s just run it down cold,” he said. “You look down at the
x
that’s on the floor. Do you see it?”

“Yes,” Mom replied.

“Then look up and do the lines,” the director said. “Frank, you ready?”

Another voice. “Okay, one, two, three … whenever
she’s
ready.”

Mom was looking down, then she looked up with this big smile on her face.

“My husband cannot resist a great smile!” she said.

“Frank?” The director.

“Looked good,” the videographer said.

“Do I see a shadow on her forehead?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Let’s try it again.”

Mom looking down. Mom looking up.

“My husband cannot resist a great smile.”

“Jack, how’s the audio?”

“It works for me.”

“Let me see the clip,” the director said. “Everybody relax.”

We waited for a few minutes and the director was asking if they should shoot Mom while she was sitting and the videographer said she might be too tall for a good angle.

From somewhere another voice came through the speaker announcing that the clip was ready.

Mom moved to one side and leaned against the wall. The back wall lit up, and there was a picture of Mom with her head down. Behind her there was Ninth Avenue, with cars moving and all kinds of color going on. Mom lifted her head, and out came some Japanese!

“Miriam, how’s it look out there?”

“Fabulous!”

“Looks good here, too,” the director said. “It’s a wrap. Thanks, Melba.”

Everybody shook everybody else’s hands and we left. That was it. We went down in the elevator with Marc and grabbed a taxi to go uptown.

“That was it?” I asked. “How come they didn’t use a Japanese model?”

“They weren’t sure if they wanted to use a black model or a Japanese-American model,” Mom said. I saw the cab-driver look at Mom in the mirror. “But then the Japanese girl got sick. She has an eating disorder.”

“She’s too fat?”

“Too thin.”

“I thought models were supposed to be skinny.”

“The Japanese don’t like their models too thin,” Mom said. “Also, she overdid it. There’s a lot of pressure on American models to be thin for high-fashion work. It’s hard if you have a tendency to put on weight.”

The whole gig looked easy to me.

My cell beeped. It was LaShonda texting me saying that Bobbi had texted her with a freak-out. Sidney had called Bobbi asking if he could borrow twenty-five dollars and he wouldn’t tell her why he needed the money.

That might have been fun to do but I didn’t like it. If we got Sidney somewhere all we were going to say to him were the same old things we had already said. Also, I knew that he could run it all down to us the same way we would run it down to him.

We got uptown, stopped at La Supermercado, and bought hamburgers, buns, and cheese. Mom was all bubbly and feeling good about herself and smiling the same smile she had on when she did the commercial.

“You look like you’re going to bust out with some Japanese any minute,” I said.

“You going to pay me?”

“I’m your son, Mom,” I said. “I shouldn’t have to pay you for a smile.”

She gave me a big smile, which was a little strange because I had just seen her do her smile for money and knew she could put it on anytime she wanted. I was cool, though, and didn’t say anything about it.

I called Kambui and told him what LaShonda had said.

“Yeah, she texted me, too,” he said. “I think that sometimes you just got to let people go through what they got to go through. Druggies know they’re foul, so what are you going to tell them that’s going to make a difference?”

“How about that Scared Straight program?” I said. “You ever see it when they take those kids to jails and let the prisoners scare them?”

“They didn’t scare some of the kids but they scared the heck out of me,” Kambui said. “I think if I had the choice between going to jail and going into the army to fight I’d choose the army. At least you have a gun to protect yourself.”

“If I can pull it off, will you back me?” I asked. “I can call my uncle Guy.”

Guy was my mom’s brother. He was my height but real big in the shoulders and chest. He worked for the police department in gang relations and Mom worried about him a lot. She said that when they were young anybody who wanted to go out with her had to ask Uncle Guy’s permission.

“Then he would look them over and say yes or no.”

“How did you like that?” I asked her.

“I always told him which ones to say yes to so I liked it fine,” Mom told me.

I told Mom about Sidney wanting to borrow money
from Bobbi and that I wanted to call Uncle Guy to see if he could bring Sidney to a jail to scare him.

“If you think it might work,” she said. “Guy’s good with young people.”

We found Guy’s number at home and Mom called him and ran down the whole situation. Then Guy wanted to talk to me and I was ready to tell him that I thought that Sidney was a good kid and just needed help but he didn’t want to hear that.

“Joe Weinstein still running the sports over there?” he asked.

“Yes.” Cody Weinstein’s father was a gym teacher in Da Vinci’s athletic department.

“I’ll talk to him and let you know,” Guy said.

“Sidney’s not an athlete,” I said.

“Did I ask you if he was?”

“No.”

“No
what
?”

“No, sir.”

Hey, I’m not using drugs. It’s Sidney.
That’s what I thought about saying, but you don’t say too much to Uncle Guy. I could see why he was a policeman.

I called Kambui and said that we might get Sidney to see prison life and scare him away from drugs.

“You know what a guy told me?” Kambui asked. “He said it would be cheaper to give addicts free drugs than to put them in jail.”

“It’d be cheaper to shoot them, too,” I said. “My uncle Guy said he’d see about showing Sidney something that would change his mind.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kambui said. “Look, what did you do today?”

“Went down and watched my mother shoot a commercial,” I said. “She did it in English and then they dubbed in some Japanese over her so it looked as if she was speaking Japanese.”

“You ever wonder why people speak different languages?” Kambui asked. “I can see it in the old days when everybody was separate, but now that what happens gets around the world in two seconds I don’t see why we don’t just settle on one language so we could understand each other.”

“And we wouldn’t have to take language in school.”

“And you know what else I was thinking?” Kambui went on. “In Africa they have languages with different kinds of sounds, not just regular syllables. Swahili has clicks in it. How do you teach kids how to do that?”

Good point.

T
he Cruisers are a very interesting group,” Mrs. Maxwell said in the hallway. “You are very bright
and
very resourceful. I spoke to your uncle this morning.”

“He was at the school?”

“No, he called for permission to take some of you on a field trip this Saturday afternoon,” Mrs. Maxwell said. “I called the parents of all the Cruisers and they were quite concerned but understood what we are trying to do. Once they discovered that their own children were not involved with drugs they were quite cooperative. Oh, yes, and Cody Weinstein is going with you. Apparently, your uncle and his father played something together.”

“Oh, good,” I said. That sounded kind of lame but I was thinking as fast as I could. I didn’t like Mr. Weinstein that much. He was a gym teacher and kind of jocky. He
once told me that I could play better basketball if I got a lot tougher. I thought he meant to play nastier, and I didn’t like that. His son, Cody, was the best athlete in the school and could play any sport, but he wasn’t on any team his father coached, which was football and soccer. He played basketball well and was always up-front with what he said. I liked him a lot. I was even thinking of asking him to join the Cruisers.

When Mrs. Maxwell said we were going on a field trip in the afternoon I thought she meant right after lunch. It turned out she meant after school.

We had agreed to meet on Morningside Avenue and 125th Street, in front of St. Joseph’s. Kambui and I got there first and then Bobbi and then LaShonda.

“Suppose Sidney doesn’t show up?” Bobbi asked.

“Cody is going to pick him up,” I said. “He said if there was a problem he’d call me.”

“Suppose a prisoner grabs us … or something,” Bobbi said. “Some of these guys have been locked up for years.”

“Then I’ll turn Zander loose on them,” Kambui said. “He’ll bust out with his Tae Kwon Do and it’ll be all over. They’ll be in lockdown and Zander will be writing it up for
The Cruiser.
Ain’t that right, Zander?”

“It’s the word you heard,” I said.

Cody and Sidney showed up in a gypsy cab a minute later. Cody had on jeans and a polo shirt, looking like an advertisement from JCPenney, and Sidney had on a suit and a bow tie.

“Don’t crack on the bow tie,” LaShonda whispered as we watched them get out of the cab.

We all gave Sidney and Cody high fives and tried to make small talk but I dug that Sidney’s eyes were already getting bigger. He was scared before the scaring got started.

Uncle Guy showed up with a van marked
NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT,
and Cody and the Cruisers piled in, with Kambui and Bobbi leading the way.

“Did you see some of the vendors looking at us?” Kambui asked. “They were probably wondering what we were doing going with the police.”

“They’re probably going to think we’re undercover cops,” Cody said.

“We got black guys with us,” Bobbi said. “They’ll probably think we’re felons.”

I had called Sidney and told him that I wanted to show him something and that maybe that would help him make up his mind about messing with drugs.

“I don’t think I can be helped,” he’d answered.

He sounded real bad on the phone and I wondered if he was more into drugs than we knew about. I remembered what he had said once about playing chess, that in any position there were good moves and then there was the best move.

“Sometimes, when things look terrible,” he had said, “you just need to find the right move to turn the whole game around. When you find it you feel great.”

I wondered why he wasn’t looking for the right move to get himself away from being a drug addict.

Uncle Guy was in the front of the van with another man he introduced as Officer Riley. Riley was my height, had a flat nose and a wide jaw that seemed to go right down into his neck. He looked like he could have beat up a truck. Uncle Guy said Riley worked with him in investigating drug cases. When he said that, Sidney looked away.

We drove uptown to 145th Street and across the bridge. That was weird because I thought we were going to be driving across town to the Triborough Bridge and over to Rikers Island. Rikers is the biggest prison complex in the country.

“The Bronx,” Cody said, “home of the New York Yankees.”

We drove down some small streets and nobody in the van had anything to say. We stopped in front of a building off Morris Park Avenue.

“We’re here,” Uncle Guy said. “And from now on I don’t want anybody making any wisecracks, no jokes, no loud talking. Anybody here don’t understand that?”

Nobody spoke. I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest and the palms of my hands were sweating. I looked at the building. It looked deserted. Some of the windows were boarded up. There was what looked like a plastic tricycle on the fire escape above us. A torn blind flapped from a window on the top floor. But there was music coming from one of the apartments so I knew that someone must live there. I realized I was holding my breath.