Slow Motion Riot (29 page)

Darryl King was looking at his own
reflection in the window-pane that night as he talked on the phone to his
girlfriend, Alisha Watkins.

"I hate bagging up," said
Alisha, who was small-boned, seventeen, and the mother of Darryl's two
children. "I hate working. You know what I mean?"

"You hate working,"
Darryl King said on his end of the line. "You mean what you're doing
now?"

"Yeah, I'm getting all drowsy
from the fumes."

Darryl looked at the windowpane
from a different angle and saw the reflection of his mother and his sister
talking at the dining room table behind him. Women were always excluding him
from the big plans now.

"I'm gonna get into the
heavier weights," he told his girlfriend with phony confidence. "I
wanna start dealing with kilos, you know. That's all I want to get with. That's
it." He forgot what he was going to say next.

"You better stop smoking so
much of that shit," Alisha Watkins said. "Your sister says she's
ready to open up this new spot. She say she needs people to work for her."

"She told you that?"

"She didn't tell you?"
Alisha asked.

Darryl whirled around to glare at
his sister, Joanna, at the table. She kept pointing at her astrological chart
and talking to their mother, ignoring him completely. Neither of them was
telling him what was going on anymore. One of them said something that sounded
like his name. Maybe they were going to give him up to the cops.

Sometimes it seemed like everything
was out to get him. The police, the people on television, the slippery bathroom
floor. Maybe his own family too. He could be being paranoid, but that didn't
mean he was wrong.

"Yeah, I'm gonna open up a new
spot too," Darryl said loudly. He hadn't thought of doing any such thing
before and he was not sure if he wanted to do it now. But he raised his voice
so his mother and sister could hear him.

"Yeah, I'm gonna get me some
reliable people," Darryl said. "I'm not gonna pay them right away
until we build up the clientele. I want about four spots, and we'd run for six
months, man. I'm gonna fold that money, and that's it. I want a piece of land."

"Where?" his girlfriend
asked.

"The building across the way
here." Darryl pointed out the window as though Alisha could see him. From
the twelfth-floor apartment in the Fortress, Darryl was looking at building B
of the Charles J. Stone Houses. Its lights appeared blurred in the
head-softening heat of the evening. "My family's got all this action in
this building, you know, so I wanna expand. Get me a spot to start off that
would bubble about ten Gs a day."

"That sounds like the right
track," said Alisha, pleased by her boyfriend's new sense of enterprise.
"You should get a little something for yourself. But you know when you
first start something, it be slow," she cautioned him.

Again, Darryl lost his place in the
conversation, and he started chewing his thumb. Maybe he was smoking too much
crack. It was getting harder and harder to finish a thought now. Besides
getting high, there were just two things he could think about for two minutes
in a row these days. One was the movie

The Wild Bunch, which had several
bloody scenes he watched over and over again on the VCR. The other was his
probation officer.

He was beginning to think all his
troubles began with his first meeting with Baum. Everything was wrong since
then. He'd got caught breaking into Pops Osborn's car, he'd had to show up in
court, he'd had the shoot-out with those cops, and worst of all, he had to stay
shut up in the house like it was prison.

He reached down to touch his
stomach and noticed there was a lot less of it than there used to be. He'd lost
a tremendous amount of weight in these past few weeks, and all his clothes
seemed too big now.

"How long you think it takes
to knock off half a kilo?" he asked his girlfriend after a few seconds.

"Darryl, who you talking
to?" his mother demanded in her lazy junkie voice from across the living
room.

"Alisha, Moms."

"She ready to work for
me?" his sister, Joanna, asked, without looking up from the dining room table.

"Maybe she work for me,"
Darryl King said.

"Maybe I work for
myself," Alisha murmured on her end.

"Darryl, you can't be selling
no drugs with the whole world out looking for you..." his mother said in a
voice that trailed off into nothingness.

His sister stood up from her chair
and came lumbering toward him. Her handcuff-sized gold earrings banged against
the sides of her neck.

"Ever since you shot at those
cops," she was saying, "we can't allow the workers to come out until
ten at night. We don't get any money in the daytime." She was standing
beside him now, nattering at him while he cradled the phone to his ear with his
left shoulder. "And after all the bullshit we been through 'cos of you,
you turn around and say you wanna go start your own business... Well, I think
that is about the most selfish thing I have ever heard."

"Terrible," his mother
chimed in from across the room. "And with Aaron looking for the probation
officer for you."

"Fuck you," Darryl said.

"Darryl, don't you talk to
your mother like that," Alisha said over the phone.

He felt overwhelmed by women and
their disapproval.

A cop would not take this. A real
cop. Like the kind he had in his head. Not like those suckers he shot at. Or
the one he popped just before Christmas. A real cop would cuff these bitches
and throw them in the squad car and beat both their butts with a television
antenna. A crackhead would just stand there, feeling paranoid and trying to
figure out if he wanted to jump out of his own skin or peel them out of theirs.

"You wouldn't talk like that
there was a man in this house," his mother told him.

"I am the man in the
house," Darryl King said.

He went back to chewing his thumb.

I'm sitting in the office between
appointments on Tuesday, my second and final report day, when the phone rings.

"What're you doing?" the
now-familiar voice asks me.

"Trying to make an honest
living," I say. "Something you ought to think about."

"Why bother?" he says
with a fatherly chuckle. "All that pressure. There're easier ways, you know."

"I know." I throw away
the file of a client who got killed recently. "So are you doing that
community service program like I told you too?"

"Central Harlem Boys' Club,
I'll be there with bells on," Richard Silver says. "And have you
thought about the conversation we had before?"

"Yeah, a little." I
glance out the doorway to see if anybody might be listening in on this. "I
haven't made up my mind."

"Why not?"

"I don't know if I'm
ready."

"Remember what I told you
about opportunity," he says in a quiet, assured voice. "Do you want
to be a probation officer the rest of your life? That's what you have to ask
yourself."

I must admit, he does have the gift
for knowing his customer's soft spot.

"I gotta jump, Richard. Be
good."

"Yeah, you too," he says.

Aaron Williams sat in the waiting
room of the Manhattan probation office, touching the thin new mustache on his
harelip as though he wanted to make sure it was still there. He wore a red
Troop shirt, green shorts, white athletic socks pulled up to his knees, and a
pair of blue-and-white Avia sneakers. He was looking for just the one probation
officer, but now he couldn't remember the name.

Darryl said something about the guy
having curly hair and a big nose. That didn't help much. All these white people
looked the same to him.

Everyone expected a lot from Aaron
now. He proved he had heart with the way he took care of Eddie Johnson with the
razor blade at the swimming pool. And Eddie was a friend of his. But he was a
snitch and Aaron needed the juice with Darryl and the rest of the crew.

But now he was getting angry and
tired trying to recall anything Darryl and the others had told him about the
probation officer. The only thing he could think of was that the guy had
definitely disrespected Darryl by calling him "Dooky."

By early afternoon, he was wishing
he'd stayed home in bed, looking at his Michael Jackson poster and enjoying the
clean, strong ether smell from his pipe. He shifted in his seat so the gun in
his waistband wouldn't keep sticking him in the back. He still couldn't believe
the metal detector at the front hadn't picked it up, but everything around here
seemed pretty broken-down anyway.

The other people in the waiting
room noticed him twitching and cursing to himself. He went out of the building
to smoke a vial and beam up. When he returned, the metal detector remained
silent. The white court officer at the reception desk didn't even look up from
his television to see him going by.

As he sat back down, the older men
ignored him and went on talking quietly among themselves. The younger guys made
fun of his harelip and women looked away as soon as they noticed it. He looked
down and started tying and untying his sneaker laces.

Probation officers came and went
past the front desk. More of them were black than Aaron expected. The whites
all seemed pale and doughy to him. His mother said he needed glasses, but then
why hadn't she gotten him any? She was always hassling him, but never doing
anything about things she didn't like.

After another hour or so, Aaron
began to notice that many of the probation officers and their clients were
stopping to look at something on the table near the receptionist. When he got
the chance, Aaron drifted over to take a look for himself.

From being in Family Court, Aaron
recognized it as the sign-in table. More than a dozen white sheets were taped
to the table, with a box of eraserless little yellow pencils on the side. Aaron
knew that each sheet had the name of a probation officer on the top, and that
clients were supposed to sign in underneath. If he could have recognized the
name of Darryl's probation officer on one of the sheets, Aaron thought, he
would have had a good start.

He could have stood there and seen
which probation officer checked the sheet with his name on the top. Then Aaron
would have been sure he had the right guy. He could have tracked the probation
officer home from work and shot him in the head from across the street. It'd be
easy.

But the plan would not work.
Because Aaron Williams's mother had not sent him to school regularly since the
second grade and he could not read the names on the sheets or anything else. He
looked around to see if there was anyone who might help him. But all he saw
were unfriendly faces. Panic and shame went through him like electrical shocks.
Everyone was looking at him. He was sure of it. They all knew he couldn't read.
His heart started pounding and his face began sweating.

A very fat white man, wearing a
fedora and a white polo shirt, came barging by. "Can I help you?" he
asked.

Aaron could not speak. The fat man
was looking right through him. He knew Aaron couldn't read. Aaron's mouth
trembled and twisted. "What's the matter with you?" the fat man
demanded.

Aaron backed away quickly, with his
eyes cast down and his head shaking. He nearly fell over his own feet as he
turned and ran for the elevators.

After Aaron got home, Darryl King
and the others spent hours questioning him about what went wrong. It was
Winston Murvin, Joanna's boyfriend, who finally got him to admit his reading
panic. The others threw things and screamed at Aaron, but Winston took Aaron's
face in his hands and smiled.

He said that Aaron was now the
first man in the history of the drug business who failed to get ahead because
he lacked a formal education.

Over the next few days, I find
myself struggling more and more to hang on to some standard of patience and
decency.

On the subway platform, I curse
silently and clench my fists in anger. On the street, I'm getting rude and
shoving people out of the way. And it's getting harder and harder to put on a
civil face when I see Andrea after a day spent kicking ass in the field. Maybe
I should consider this thing, Richard Silver's offering. At least that way I
could afford one of those fucking ski vacations she's always talking about.

The last person who I should try
and discuss this with is my father. He's busy stockpiling Gatorade in his
basement for some imaginary race war. But you never know what's really driving
you until you get there, so I call him and set up a time for us to go for a
walk in Flushing Meadows Park.

He meets me early on a Saturday
afternoon. Dozens of other men, all of whom look like divorced fathers, are
playing with children they barely seem to know around the lake nearby.

"How come you never took me
out like that when I was small?" I ask my dad.

"Ask a psychiatrist," he
says sourly.

A sea gull flying over his head
shrieks loudly. My father and I are wearing the exact same kind of blue
windbreaker from Sears with the plaid lining, but for the first time I notice
that I've developed two of his strangest old habits—not only do I carry a
hundred things around in my pockets at all times, but I also never take my
jacket off. He always said he kept his pockets stuffed and his jacket on
because he thought he might get taken some place unexpectedly. Like Auschwitz
or something. I don't know why I've fallen into doing the same thing.

"So what's it all about?"
he says with his thick accent, walking a little bit ahead of me. "Why the
big talk now?"

"I'm thinking about changing
jobs maybe, and I wanted to talk it over with you."

"Feh!" He waves his arm
and starts shuffling along again. "You want my advice now. I told you
before not to take that farchadat job, but your mother raised you to be soft."

I hate it when he talks that way
about Mom, but I don't feel like arguing about it now. A plane passes overhead
and the traffic hums on the Van Wyck Expressway. The old man starts walking
with the stiff-kneed gait of a man who's recently had surgery. Which he hasn't.
We pass a lawn full of young people sunning themselves. More than half the
women are wearing just bra-like halter tops and tight shorts, leaving their
stomachs and thighs exposed. My father gazes across the landscape of flesh and
raises a rigid arm and a clenched fist.

"Oh boy," he says.
"If I were your age, ahhh!"

He nods as he navigates between the
bike riders on the stone path called Robert Moses Walk, which leads to the
World's Fair grounds. I wonder what I'm doing trading barbs with a crazy old
man on a nice afternoon like this. The same question seems to occur to him at
the same time.

"Enough standing on
ceremony," he says. "What do you want from me?"

"Not much," I say a
little sheepishly. "I just have some things going on in my life, and I
wanted to see what you thought of them."

He plops himself down on a green
bench along the side of the path and looks at me with mild curiosity. I notice
his stomach is about the size of a small baby sitting on his lap.

I sit down beside him. "I'm
seeing a girl now," I tell him. "She's very nice. You wouldn't like
her, of course."

"Of course."

"But she likes nice things.
She wants a good life. Things that cost money."

He sticks out his bottom lip.
"So don't look at me," he says. "I'm retired. I don't have
anything."

"Yeah, I know." Though I
guess in some strange abstract way, I've been hoping he would suddenly turn out
to be a millionaire, which would solve all my problems. "Anyway, she's
come along at a peculiar time for me. Work's been very hard lately..."

He gives me a "what did you
expect?" look.

"And then this other thing
came up, which you can't tell anybody about."

He looks around in disbelief, with
his sagging eyelids opened wide. "Who am I going to tell?" he says.
"The mice in the kitchen?"

"It's just something that I'm
trying to keep quiet."

He leans toward me a little.
"What?"

"One of my clients is offering
me a job."

My father is stunned. "Some
schvartze's going to give you a job?"

"Well, who it is isn't so
important," I say sharply. "He wants to keep his name quiet anyway.
Anyway, the point is he wants me to... neglect my responsibilities. To look the
other way."

"So?"

"So. I have a problem with
that."

"Does this job pay well he's
offering you?" he asks.

"Pretty well. Probably twice
what I'm making now. But that's not the point even. I'd have some real power to
do the things I want to, especially since he can't get involved directly. I
could get to be like an assistant commissioner over at housing, or something."

He looks at me like he's suddenly
discovered a dismembered animal sitting on the bench next to him. "Forget
the housing, take the money," he says as if it's the most obvious thing in
the world.

"I can't do that so
easily."

"Why not?"

"It'd mean everything I tried
to do before was wrong. I can't just give up like that."

His head goes up and down. Someone
who didn't know him might think that he's nodding in agreement. But I know that
my father actually just wants me to stop talking so he can interject his own
vehement opinions.

"You wanna know what I
think?" he says. "You wanna?"

"Sure. Yeah."

"Ideals are nice. I had a few
when I was younger than you are now. But..." He clears his throat with a noisy
hacking sound. "A man," he says finally, "does what he does..."

I can't bear to hear this again.
The story about him almost killing the Polish carpenter in Auschwitz over a
scrap of bread. The survivalist reduction of all right and wrong to his own material
comfort. "I woke him up in the middle of the night and told him I would
cut his throat from ear to ear with an aluminum knife while he slept," my
father is saying. "They had him killed a little later anyway. He was too
weak to work by then."

Whenever I hear this, it's like
running straight into a brick wall. The same one I've spent my whole life
trying to get past. I can't accept that I've ended up in the exact same place
as him in spite of everything. "And you'd do just like me..."

"Hey, Pops," I say.
"Skip it, will you? I know how it ends."

"You never understand,"
he mutters. "I'm the only one."

I stop talking and just stare at
him for a minute. "I'm the only one," he said. It's like catching a
glimpse of something shimmering out in the middle of the lake. Maybe the reason
he's been this way for so long is because he feels guilty for surviving when so
many of the other people he knew died in the camps. But the moment is over between
us before it really gets started. He's already walking away and cursing me
under his breath.

"You already know what you'll
do," he says coldly as a softball rolls up to his feet. "Why ask me
anything?"

A little boy, not yet four years
old, comes toddling toward us in search of the softball. My father bends an
inch or two at the waist, grunts in discomfort, and then kicks the ball past
the little boy who has to go chasing after it the other way.

"I'm sorry," I say
quietly.

"If you don't want to listen
to me, why did you call me here today?" he asks before he clears his throat
and spits on the stone path.

I have to think about that one for
a while myself. Why ask him about something in which he has no vested interest?
Why expect him to behave any differently now than he has for the past
sixty-five years, or however long he's actually been alive? If I'd had a black
client who had as hard a life and as many problems as my father, I'd probably
just feel sorry for him. So why do I keep resenting the old man and picking on
him?

When the answer finally comes to
me, it seems so stupid and banal I want to crawl under the bench. What I want
from my father is a scrap of affection, something to take with me as I go back
out and face the world. But he's too old to change. He never was the
affectionate type anyway. I know that, but I can't help myself. I sit there,
feeling ten years old and helpless again.

More sea gulls fly past us and an
abrupt wind shivers the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a brass band is
playing. The sun glints off the Unisphere, two hundred yards away. My father
zips up his windbreaker like he's getting ready to go.

"So that's it?" he says.
"That's the big talk?"

"Well," I tell him
finally. "I'm your only son and you're the only close relative I have, I
guess. I just thought you might want to know what I've been up to."

"So." He stands up.
"Now I know."

If anything, my talk with my father
strengthens my resolve to hold out a little bit longer against Richard Silver.
Instead, I find myself looking for more dangerous assignments at work, because
in the back of my mind I'm hoping maybe I'll get hurt and that'll take away the
pressure to make a decision.

When the sun comes up on Monday
morning, I'm behind the wheel of the K car, fighting with Bill Neill and Angel
about where we should go first. Bill wants to see a Colombian pickpocket named
Pablo in Washington Heights, because the guy used to be one of his clients. I
want to follow up on a tip that there's an informant on St. Nicholas Avenue
who's willing to talk about where Darryl King is, provided the reward money is real.

"Come on, Baum," Bill
says as I make the turn onto West Street and head uptown. "We're supposed
to leave all that Darryl King stuff to the police. It's their
investigation."

"But the tip came from a
probation client," I tell him.

"Who?" Bill asks.

"One of Cathy Brody's
people," Angel explains. "I think she threatened him with a
two-by-four."

"Anyway, it's our guy," I
argue. "And no one said we're not supposed to follow up on our own
leads."

"Ah, you're just pissed off
because the judge made you look bad on this Darryl King case." Bill puts
his leg up on the dashboard as we pass the meat-packing district and see the
male prostitutes straggling back from the docks. "It's just
politics."

"So what?" I say to him.
"Are you scared?"

Bill sighs and stares out the
window. "No, Baum, I'm not scared," he says. "I'd just like you
to be the first one through the door this time."

The informant lives in a six-story
gray stone building at the foot of Sugar Hill. Compared to a lot of the other
places we've been, this is not too bad. It still seems like a working-class
neighborhood with grocery stores and laundromats nearby and hardly any garbage
in the street. In fact, I think I remember reading something about how the
tenants in one of these apartment houses bought their building from the city
and fixed it up as a co-op after their landlord abandoned them.

The informant's apartment is on the
second floor and as Bill requested, I do the knocking.

After a couple of seconds, I hear
someone moving around inside and a dog barking. Bill gestures for me to stand
to the side a little and I start to get a little nervous. What if it's a pit
bull in there that's going to come jumping out? Or worse, if this is somebody
who knows Darryl King, we could be walking right into a hail of automatic
weapons fire. Part of me wants to stop knocking and run downstairs right now.
But the other part wants to stay and show it isn't scared.

Slowly the door starts to open a
little way. The small oval face of an old man with dusky skin and avid eyes
peers out at us. He won't remove the chain from the door. Instead, he insists
on talking to me through the narrow space.

"Excuse me, sir, you called
us," I say, starting to relax a little. "Didn't you?"

"Yes, I did," he tells me
in a voice like a creaky hinge. "I believe I know how to find what you're
looking for."

"Then why don't you just let
us in?"

"I'd rather have you stay out
there," he says.

From inside the apartment, that dog
keeps barking. Sounds like a big dog. Maybe a rottweiler. Barking continuously,
as though he doesn't need to draw a breath. I glance back at Bill and Angel and
get a couple of indifferent looks.

"Sir, you have some
information for us?" I ask.

"Yes, I do," he begins.
"Now I wanna take you all back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 1943."

"Yes."

"A man buried a pair of
shoes."

"Uh-huh."

I catch a whiff of something like
old peanut butter wafting out of the informant's apartment. Behind me, I hear
Bill mumbling, "Fuckin" wing-nut."

"Now you go there and you find
those shoes," the informant is saying. "And then we'll talk about the
man you're looking for."

This has been a complete waste of
time. If he didn't live here already, I'd slam the door on the old man. I
should've known the offer of a Darryl King reward would bring out every crank
in the city. The dog still hasn't stopped barking. I wonder if one of the
neighbors is going to come out and shoot it.

"Is that it?" I ask.

"That's it," the man
says. "You find them shoes, you'll have your answer. But let me know if
you hear anything about some socks."