The Garden of Lost and Found (32 page)

Anyways (she thinks after she’s done it, when she’s waiting for the, for the, for—oh
fuck
yeah) anyways it just got worse after Parker and Ellis graduated high school. Ellis had hisself a what-do-you-call-it. A internship with some law firm down to D.C., all very prestigious, and like the best offer Parker had was assistant manager of the Foot Locker where he worked after school, which he ended up getting fired from when his boss seen him sharing a joint with Rolando Santiago. Lando wasn’t no big deal then, I mean he ain’t all that right now, he ain’t like Mr. Big Shit no matter what O.G. line of bullshit he try to feed you, although he is still alive, I’ll give him that much. Sonofabitch is still in the game and still kicking it. But back then he was known up and down 1-2-5 as your basic sort of lowlife thug, always on the make, never in too much trouble but more through dumb luck than lack of trying. He and Parker and Ellis all knew each other at school, they didn’t exactly run with the same crew, Lando went off on this whole I-ain’t-black-I’m-
Dominican
trip when he was a teenager, but they knew each other’s names and shit, and who knows, maybe Parker really was smoking a joint with him. But it ain’t like facts matter shit. Parker got hisself canned from Foot Locker and he never heard nothing back from Columbia, and then like before you could say
gangbanger
he was spending all day hanging with a bunch-a lowlifes and no-accounts and wannabe bad boys and big shots, passing around the 40s and shaving they initials into each other’s heads. Dad like to scalp Parker the first time he come home with that shit going on. Kicked his ass
right
out the house. After that I didn’t see too much-a him, and then when I did it was always crib this and bitch that, Crips and Bloods and gold chains and the Lexus, you know what I’m saying, never mind the Lexus ain’t got no hubcaps and has a garbage bag taped over one-a the back windows, Parker was making it, word up, he was running with the devil, he was crimi
nal
and fuck Columbia and fuck Dad and fuck Ellis too while you at it, being a good boy like his brown-nose ass-kissing goody-two-shoes fucking two-faced baby brother never got Parker nothing but grief and goddamn anyone who thought he was gonna spend his whole life working for the man like Daddy did, wearing some stripy-ass polyester shit with a nametag on it that said Hi my name is Parker and I am your personal nigger, stick your foot in my ass and I will lick it clean. He even asked me to call him Park Place like that was his handle or some shit, and even though I figured he was mostly talking out the side-a his throat I was still a little concerned like any sister would be. Talk is cheap downtown, but up here you go around calling someone like Lando your
ese
you best be able to back it up. So like I called Ellis. I told him if he cared about his big brother he best take off the tie and haul ass up here and get on the situation. Probably the dumbest shit I ever pulled. Why? Well listen, Jamie, life ain’t no movie. It ain’t no
Good Times
where everybody gets together and makes a plan and it all works out. Parker was just going through his own personal shit same as we all do, growing pains, life’s a bitch and I guess it’s time you learned it, you know what I’m saying, he had to work out his deal for hisself and if his deal was gone be pushing crack or smoking it they wasn’t shit anybody was gone do to change that and there I go calling up Ellis who was dumb-ass enough to drive up from D.C. in his own goddamn Lexus. I guess it wasn’t his own, one-a the lawyers he worked with let him borrow it or it was like a company car or some shit. Not like that made any fucking difference to Parker. All he saw was the paint job, baby, all he heard was that goddamn
beep-beep
one-touch remote-control your-car-alarm-is-now-armed-against-any-and-all-wannabe-jacking-niggers shit. How do you spell success? L-E-X-U-S, baby, tinted windows, leather interior, and fourteen-karat-gold accents.

And so picture this. Eighteen-year-old Ellis MacTeer stepping outta some sixty-thousand-dollar black Lexus,
beep-beep
setting the car alarm and letting all the hoods and homies on the street know brother’s not only got the car, he intends to keep it. Wearing a thousand-dollar suit he bought with one-a the half dozen credit cards that more or less got handed to him when he got into Columbia, Armani that suit was, I read that in the paper, I had to learn from the newspaper of all places that my own brother was wearing head-to-toe Armani, sunglasses to socks tucked into Gucci loafers, and he had hisself a Rolex too, fake someone said but I didn’t buy that, Ellis always went for the real shit, and one gold ring with a big-ass rock that he turned in toward his palm as he stepped outta the Lexus,
beep-beep
, the ring and the car and everything else either borrowed or paid for on credit, a little advance on a limitless future, and then he walks into some piss-ant
shoe store
on 1-2-5 and throws it all away. Says he looking for his brother. Says it’s a emergency. Says it to this fucking A-rab shoe salesman—oh excuse me,
branch manager
—oh excuse me,
Lesbianese
—and what does this fucking one-step-up-from-a-camel-turd do but send him straight into the lion’s den. He been hangin with Lando’s crew, he say, like he all down with it and shit. They got a crib on 1-2-7 twixt Malcolm X and A.C.P. Right over there behind the St. Nicholas Houses, he say, just to be helpful, just to make sure Ellis don’t head over to some other 1-2-7, like say maybe 1-2-7 in
Albany
, or 1-2-7 in
Buffalo
, 1-2-7 in
Rochester
, punk-ass motherfucking camel jockey go on back to wherever it was you came from and meanwhile
beep-beep
with the car alarm and Ellis is gone. I swear to fucking Christ, if they’s anyone who should-a gone to jail in all this shit it’s that fucking wannabe gangbanger, Sheik Abu bin Foot Locker, goddamn hunchback towelhead without no towel and without no head either, far as I’m concerned, making up stories bout other people like it don’t make no difference when meanwhile who comes creaking up in his cheap-ass excuse for a automobile but Parker. I heard Ellis was in town and You seen him and Where he at. Lando’s crib, say the sand nigger in the prison stripes, still trying to help out, I kiss your feet, I suck your toes, Behind the St. Nicholas Houses, I ain’t got no oil well like the rest of my people America right or wrong, Right there on 1-2-7, suckie suckie real good man real good, and Parker is all like What the
fuck
you talking bout nigger, and you know, I don’t wanna go through the whole fucking scene but it turns out where that whacked out walk-on-my-back-I-am-your-personal-flying-carpet at the Foot Locker done sent Ellis off to was a crackhouse which the only thing Lando had to do with that joint was that once upon a time he used to deal outta there until one night somebody sliced off a piece-a his ear and he left street dealing behind for good. Well, Parker had the Lexus, piece-a shit that it was, he had the handle and the haircut and the track suit with one leg pushed up to the knee and he even had a couple-a rocks in his pocket but what he didn’t have was a piece, you know what I’m saying. No, you don’t, cause you don’t know shit about life in the ghetto do you white boy, you can put words in my mouth, you can stick your hand up my goddamn ass and work my jaw but when someone says “the street” the first thing you think of is dot com. Well word associate this dot com motherfucker: Parker didn’t have no
gun
is what I am T-R-Y-ing to tell you, and a gun is what you
need
if you wanna walk your ass into a fucking crackhouse and even
think
about walking back out with it, and so what Parker did was he went out and found Lando and the two-a them hauled ass over to 1-2-7, yes sir, 1-2-7 in NYC, 1-2-7 right behind the goddamn St. Nicholas houses, and even before they got there they could hear the car alarm, no more-a that
beep-beep
shit, this was a serious-ass siren, goddamned Ellis’s goddamned borrowed car, back window busted out, radio gone, car phone, gold accents pried off the hubcaps and trunk and hood in less than a fucking
hour
. I swear to Christ if those fucking factory workers in Detroit worked half as hard as the average New York City crackhead wouldn’t be nobody driving a goddamn
Japanese
car, and you
know
you know what I’m saying.

What I know of the rest I know from Lando, which means I know that about half-a it’s shady and the other half’s a out-and-out lie. But it’s all I got to go on, you know what I’m saying, it’s all I got to remember my brothers by, besides the fucking newspaper story which I disbelieve even more than I disbelieve Lando’s version. What Lando said was that by the time they got to the crackhouse them crackheads was like totally bugging. Everybody was sporting this like Chinese monkey I-ain’t-seen-shit-I-ain’t-heard-shit-I-don’t-know-shit attitude, but meanwhile they so fucking worked up they bouncing off the walls, can’t even sit still to smoke up they crack, and they—aw, fuck it, Jamie. You wanna know what happened? They found him in a closet. Hard to call anything anything in a crackhouse, one corner’s the same as every other corner, people sleeping in the bathtub, shitting in the kitchen sink, turning tricks in the front door, everything coated in smoke and smelling like piss and the only thing left in the place bigger than a crack pipe was whole pieces-a plaster ripped right out the goddamn walls. Crackheads used em as pillows and blankets and toilet paper, and they used a couple to cover up Ellis’s body too, and that’s all that was covering him. They’d taken his clothes right down to his Tommys, or I guess it wasn’t Tommys back then it was still Calvins but it whatever it was they got em and they got his sunglasses and his Rolex and his ring. Not a mark on him, but that didn’t make him any less dead. And, well, you know, Parker did what any self-respecting brother would do. He fucking flipped out. He started shooting up the place with the gun he got from Lando, everybody ducking for cover, including Lando, who says that somewhere in all the commotion he dropped his gun—which, by the by, baby, off the cuff and off the record, I have a hard time believing. Nigger didn’t get to where he is by dropping his gun just cause somebody shooting at him. But the jury bought his story not least I suppose cause he testified from a hospital bed. Nigger didn’t have no gun but the police shot him anyway, and if no polices went to jail Lando didn’t go to jail either, not guilty by reason of liberal guilt, and so I guess that’s the official version. Except for, oh yeah, Parker. Which one was Parker? My brother? Parker? One thing I can tell you for sure about Parker: crack or no crack whoever it was got a hold of Lando’s gun wasn’t so bad a shot as Parker was. Police hauled forty-seven crackheads out that place and not one-a them had a scratch on em. Only injuries was to my brothers. Now figure that shit out, Jamie, work it out in your head till you know what it means and then tell it back to me so it makes sense. Ellis they shot through the eye and Parker they shot through the ear. See no evil, hear no evil. And me, well, I just shot myself in the foot cause I was in too much of a goddamn hurry to take off my coat, and—

And? What, Claudia? And what?

And…poof.

Poof?

Poof: she opens her eyes.

She’s still buttoned up in her father’s coat, still wrapped up in
that dress
, one foot still soled in one of
those shoes
, the other bare, the needle still hanging from a vein. What’s the first thing she checks? Divine.

She’s in the back foyer, behind that treasure chest ice box where her mother kept the popsicles and fudgesicles and creamsicles, summers and winters both. The heat from the coils is so intense she’s soaked the overcoat’s wool through with her sweat, but underneath it Chez Divine seems to have resisted her efforts at demolition. She unbuttons the coat, checks him more closely. He’s quiet for a moment, then—
oomph
. Son of a
bitch
, she thinks, but then she thinks, I guess I had that coming.

She leaves a note for her father before she leaves his house.

I was here but you weren’t
, she writes.
I’m sorry I missed
, she writes, but she forgets to add the word
you
.

three

CLAUDIA DIDN’T COME HOME that night. Didn’t show up till late the next day, sweating and wheezing, barely able to walk or breathe. She was so ill she had to sit down twice on her way up the stairs, but she refused to take the elevator, said Nellydean had “ears like a hawk” and she didn’t want to deal with her.

“And don’t you fucking tell her, Jamie,” she hissed at me, as if I’d ever voluntarily sought out Nellydean. “What’re you doing downstairs anyway? Waiting for me to get home? Sorry I’m late,
Dad
.”

Her rage was terrifying and inexplicable, but I was more concerned by her appearance.

“Don’t you want to see a doctor—”

Claudia’s nails bit into my arm, nearly pulling me to the floor. She opened her mouth to say something but couldn’t catch her breath. Her coat had fallen open, and I saw she wasn’t wearing the dress from yesterday. She had on a pair of rolled-up cargo pants and a man’s shirt. I don’t know why I thought this was significant—the clothes were probably just Reggie’s—but still, in many ways that dress was everything I knew about Claudia, and without it she was nothing more than a stranger in my home.

“Claudia,” I pleaded. “What happened?”

Claudia pulled her coat closed. It looked like she was trying to rest her face on her knees but her stomach was too big. Her head hung limply off her thin neck, and underneath her chin her breasts looked not so much big as bloated, sagging. The collar of her shirt was soaked through with sweat.

I stood there, searching her for a clue as to what was wrong. What I could do. Finally I reached to touch her as I had yesterday, but her shoulder jerked away, her head shook back and forth. “Uh uh.” She gulped in air. “Your mother was right,” she said then, her voice so faint I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.

“My mother…?”

With an effort, Claudia lifted her head. She pinched my right wrist between her thumb and index finger, flipped my hand back and forth as though it were the skeletal remains of a little lifeless bird.