The November Criminals (16 page)

His parents, I now assumed, panting like a hound, were still there. So let me introduce them a bit. Because you’re only going to get a fleeting glimpse of them in what follows. Stanford Broadus, Kevin’s father, was born in Grimshawes, North Carolina, in 1948. He studied at the Franklin Institute,
an historically African American college
—how pretentious is that an! Thanks, Archer B. Sexton, you goddamn motherfucker!—
graduating with a master’s in public administration
. His mother, Ellen Maskelyne, graduated from Antioch College in 1964, and then from Columbia Law School in 1967, after which she was employed by Godwin Howe—
an historically African American firm
. Who was copyediting you, Archer B. Sexton, you cocksucker!
The Broaduses have been D.C. residents since 1970
. Kevin, their only child, was born in the spring of 1981.
(March 19
, according to the article.)
Kevin’s legacy as a student at John F. Kennedy Senior High School is perhaps best expressed in the words of Conrad Vanderleun, an English teacher in the Gifted and Talented Program there: “Kevin was a strong and quiet presence, though blessed with a genuine musicality, a strong rhythm. He’ll be remembered and missed.”
Can you
believe
a human being would write that way? Our species is a disgusting one. Though you’ve determined that already from observing me.

Five minutes’ walk and I was there. Not a kid in the street. My cigarette tasted sweeter than normal. Or more complicated. It hurt my lungs more than usual too, which I welcomed. The wind, just barely, worked over the stripped branches. Ten or so yards away from the house, I stopped walking. I could see even from a distance 3549 was largish, with those unbearable, sad green shutters, like leaves of a useless plant, and a trained yew hedge around the front, flashing its poisonous flame-orange berries. A brick walk, of which each brick looked dusted. But all these undeniable facts interested me much less than the tall, paunched figure I watched emerge from the front door and climb into a dark blue sedan, whose engine sputtered to life. Kevin’s father, going about some trivial evening task. I almost puked from happiness. The car passed my way, and I caught one frame of Mr. Broadus in the driver’s seat. His face was calm, empty. Faint music, a piano, wafted out of his car, despite the closed windows. The car made the corner and chuffed away, taking the undertone of music with it. I ground out my smoke and kept trotting and panting, my feet lighter than ever. I was about to lose contact with the pavement. Just a few more paces, and I arrived at the first lip of the brick walk. Couldn’t go forward, at least not for a long minute. I watched a light traveling in the house from window to window, a dutiful servant. The blue aura of television wavered in an upper bedroom. My breath tasted of smoke and leaves, of some burning. Sweat rilled down my rib cage, tickling me. I swear to fucking God I could feel every hair on my scalp and forearms.

The brick walk gleamed in the streetlight. I didn’t know how long it would be before Mr. Broadus returned. But I had to act. I had no plan, just this ungovernable tide of impulse. And before I could stop myself I’d dashed to the front door and thumbed the brass handle. The door was unlocked. I guess I’d been subconsciously counting on this. In Kevin’s neighborhood many don’t lock their doors. A fact Noel pointed out to me once. I hadn’t even thought of entering the house, at first. I hadn’t even wanted to. Now I was fumbling with the door, conspicuous as a government. A stripped finger of elm branch kept scraping the roof slate. It was the last thing I heard before I crossed the threshold. The house, inside … holy fuck! The air warm and heavy. The intoxicating scent of floor polish, and some common but unidentified spice. Doilies, looking leprous as always. And glass-fronted cabinets. One of which contained thirty-one (yes, I counted; what else did I have to do?) porcelain parrots of varied color and size. All that was missing was a table of votive candles, to add the waxy scent of holiness. I wandered on tiptoe around the living room, fingering the openwork lace of the doilies, pressing my palms against the parrot cabinet. There was a grandfather clock as tall as I am next to the kitchen entrance, at the rear of the room. It needed winding. Seemed to have been in disrepair long enough for its counterweights to be cowled with grime, which I fingered off in streaks. Nose-breathing the whole time. Sounding like some obscene phone caller, I have no doubt.

I didn’t notice the whistling, for at least the initial moments of my trespassing. Mrs. Broadus was whistling to herself upstairs. She was good at it. A full tone, a steady breath. I picked out the melody with not too much effort. The opening aria, the theme, of the Goldberg Variations. Don’t think I’m some kind of
classical music expert
, just because I cite the Goldberg Variations so casually. I’m not. I don’t know
anything
about music, as I’ve said. It’s just that my father puts his record of the piece on our stereo a lot. And you have to admit it’s fairly goddamn memorable: a geometrical ascent of some mountain into the purest, liveliest solitude, some meadow where all human imperfection is gone. I love it. I hate it. It makes me clench my fists and jaw and curl my toes with tension.

It was calling me upstairs. I decided that it was a sign, beckoning me upstairs. Moving was tricky. Staircases are loud, in movies and other situations where someone is trying to sneak around. In real life, too. I risked it, though. I couldn’t stop myself. As I climbed, taking these arched, agonized, careful steps, Kevin’s face at every age stared out of the pictures on the wall, ascending with me. All set in uniform black frames. He’d been even plumper as a child, with that fat-kid shine of jollity and fear in his eyes. Then he started resembling anyone (and everyone) else going through adolescence. He had the same chubby solid build his whole life. He looked capable of enduring anything. He got his glasses young. At eight or nine, these huge ones that made his round face even younger. He had a grin in that photo, with a missing tooth, a grin betraying no awareness of anything. And despite his submersion in the generality of adolescence, he had not lost this original childish smile as he aged. That’s rare. I can’t smile the way I did as a child. Being able to demonstrates some tremendous inner reserve.

The pictures stopped when Kevin was seventeen. At the top of the stairs. Where I paused as well. No idea of where to go next. Luckily it was decided for me. A floorboard whined beneath my sole. The decorous whistle stopped and Mrs. Broadus called out, “Hello? Hello?” I held my breath and crouched. And a second later the whistling started again, taking up at the precise place she had stopped the recitation, and I tiptoed back downstairs. I couldn’t go forward. I just couldn’t bear it. I sneaked back down into the Broadus’s orderly, crammed living room, and then into their kitchen.

What I saw then made my stomach lurch. Not that what I saw was fucked-up. Just sort of nerdy in the way that parents overly concerned with decorating schemes are. It made me sick, though, because it was so domestic and well-executed. A sign of the life I was invading, I guess. It would have been totally impossible in my own house. They had decorated the whole room, with what looked like tremendous and painstaking effort, using fruit-themed objects. A clock in the shape of an orange, with a slice cut out from it between eleven and midnight. Alternating columns of pineapples and bunches of grapes stenciled on the walls. Pot holders the color of black cherries. Napkins emblazoned with nippled peaches piled up in the glass-fronted cabinets, next to dishes painted with images of papayas. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like red and green apples. Curtains printed with waterfalls of chemically yellow lemons. Every goddamn thing. And then I noticed—I swear this is true—a figurine about nine inches high, one of those hideous racist caricatures of black people, in a jockey outfit, embracing with both arms a huge, wet-looking watermelon standing on its end next to the spice rack. I fingered the manikin’s lumpy skull and stroked the melon in unbelief: ceramic, with a small dimpled handle on the upper end. A cookie jar, filled almost to the brim with gingersnaps. In retrospect, it kind of makes sense. I mean, like Digger and her nickname. A way of offering a preemptive
fuck you
to anyone with bad intentions. At the time, though, I was stunned. And amused, in a horrified way.
Why would they have this?
I thought, and smothered a laugh. Then I whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Out loud. To the dead, spiced air. My paltry voice disgusted me.

How long did I stand in their garish kitchen like some hesitant rapist? No idea. The orange clock’s hair-thin second hand jerked itself into each upcoming empty moment. Then my trance dissolved: the harmonious, skillful whistling was getting louder, accompanied by footfalls, and the front door slammed. I hadn’t heard the car return, and now everything was happening at once: Mr. and Mrs. Broadus were greeting each other in the front hall, they murmured warmly to each other, and I couldn’t understand, he was
so
much taller than his wife and she had a blue towel wrapped around her hair. I stood in utter stillness, having shoved myself against the fridge (for camouflage). They held each other for five, ten seconds, her voice muffled by his sweater, his by her hair towel. Talking the whole time, in friendly undertones. She was the one who broke the embrace to lead him upstairs by the hand. Their treads matched, receding. An upstairs door closed, with grave delicacy. And then, hoping they would not hear, I crept out of the kitchen and slid through the front door, opened just enough to let me pass. I was
freezing
now. Slicked in sweat. But despite my all-body shivers I followed McKinley Street up the slight hill into the dark. Toward home. Maintaining the walk of innocence, my retarded bantam strut. September 27, 1999, 7:48 p.m.

XIV
.

F
OR THE
THIRD
FUCKING TIME
, ladies and gentlemen! On the first of October, as I was leaving my house, an unsupervised boy rammed my shin with his blood-colored tricycle. I was all primed to go distribute my sheaf of flyers. I had resigned myself to a life of despair, without Digger, I mean. It’s quite a voluptuous feeling. I had my backpack with me, with the dumb-ass posters and my rubber-banded, sorted bundles of money. As the pain of the tricycle blow receded, and the afterecho of the boy’s shout thinned, my pager went off. This was at nine o’clock in the morning. It was the earliest daylight page I had ever received. The number was unfamiliar. A D.C. number, an exchange (that’s the first three digits after the area code) I knew: 202-364-1889. But at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning? The thought of someone needing weed first fucking thing in the morning kind of wowed me. I mean, it’s not heroin. It’s just pot. How strong can your craving for it be? There’s no physical dependency. Yeah, some kids pretend that they’re
total addicts
, but that’s just the exuberance of being young, rearing its clumsy, horned head. So I decided to ignore it.

Four days since my intrusion into the Broaduses’ house. I lost track of things in the interval. I can’t remember anything
specific
happening. I mean, when you’re in
free fall
from some bizarre event, as I was for those days and the preceding weeks, some catastrophe, time takes on this amazing
uniformity
. One day becomes indistinguishable from any other day, simply because the dominant fact illuminating them all doesn’t change, I mean the constantly present fact of your loss or your crime or your remorse or whatever. Probability dictates that, in the ensuing ninety-six hours, I showered, took a shit, ate, slept, went to school, sold drugs, jerked off seven or eight times, pretended not to think about Digger. The chill I’d felt the night of my trespassing had stayed with me, as an irritating tautness at the back of my throat, a sandy pain behind my eyes. The one thing I remember from this period is my growing determination to get rid of my money. I mean the weed money. All of it. I wanted to burn it, originally. But that would be too conspicuous. I thought of my father’s kiln. This was ruled out by the possibility of his discovering the cash, even a burned fragment of it. I had fantasies of giving it to some bum or something, though I realized this would create more problems than it solved, if anyone found out about it. So I started thinking about throwing it in the Potomac, and as soon as I pictured it I knew it was right.

Twelve thousand dollars. In an absolute sense it’s not that much. But it was more than I’d ever had before. Three thousand of it came from the relentless sales push I’d made in the past month and a half. I hadn’t even counted it. I’m estimating here. I wanted to throw it in the river. The Potomac, which varies in autumn color between black and gun blue. With webs of gray foam veining the surface. And even some gulls, even this late in the year, pellmelling back and forth looking for scraps. The river’s the one thing in D.C. that has no opinion or ideas on any subject. Making it the ideal candidate for propitiatory offerings. Who or what would I even be appeasing? The Great Anonymous, the mute steely river? I didn’t know. I’m not some believer in the wet-locked, classical water deities, despite my involvement with the dead culture that venerated them. Whatever. I was a wreck that morning.

So I ignored the page and drove off, down Wisconsin Avenue. Most of the main traffic arteries in D.C. are named after states. As a gesture of Federalist unity or something. I was going to just drive straight down it, south-southeast. It kinks a bit east and west out of true, past Kennedy, past the Cochrane, all the way down to M Street. Where the land humps down to the water, under a thunderous overpass buttressed with steel fins. These are the exact dirty-cotton color of old ice, but all year. Remainders of some frozen sea or something. Once there, I’d heave the money in. The bundles would spread out, a flotilla drifting toward the Chesapeake Bay. With luck none of the insane autumn anglers (yes, they exist, and even in the summer the river’s not alive, really, at least where it passes through the city) that line the thin promenade north of the Roosevelt Bridge would snag any. There would be no questions. That kind of human-interest bullshit always makes the papers here, because nothing else happens. And I believed with all fervor that if I did this and then put up my whole sheaf of posters before sunset, then whatever god watches over rivers would grant my petition. And I’d find someone with the information necessary to lead me to the man I’d imagined, the man with the hideous purpose lighting his eyes. Not Lorriner, who violated all my aesthetic ideas of what a murderer should be. But a calm-handed and indifferent killer. Never subject to any emotional upheavals. A free man. In some sense an enviable man. If it’s permissible to speak that way.

Wisconsin and M. Remember? That’s where the Stubb’s is. Where Kevin got killed. I’d chosen my route
symbolically
. I have a tremendous sense for that. Empty gestures. As you’ve seen. Everything looked normal, at first. I’d beaten the Saturday crush of late-morning traffic, and that weird preactivity staginess had settled on the streets. All that remained of Kevin’s hideous memorial was a long bow of weather-lightened purple ribbon kicking in the river breeze. And then I got this weird dislocation, a recall failure. A construction crew, four fat guys in orange vests over their sweatshirts and trucker jackets, was moving with infinite slowness and carelessness. There was an empty storefront. Roughly where they were digging up the street. It was, I realized as my sense of having
lost
something broke, where the Stubb’s used to be. “Fuck!” I screamed and punched my horn, and the construction guys whipped their heads toward me in outrage. One of them offered a middle finger! A classic gesture. So classic I failed to realize he meant it for me. Following its line of motion, looking for the man who deserved this gesture, I craned my neck like a trapped animal and holy fuck! They (they? what?) had opened another Stubb’s ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE STREET.

This shouldn’t have hit me the way it did. I mean, that’s the company’s
business plan
. You can find a Stubb’s at each five-block interval in any neighborhood. In any city. In the world. Their stupid green logo, with this piratey-looking guy on it in that fake-woodcut style, you know? Pipe in his mouth, brandishing a cutlass at the sky? Everywhere you go. They don’t even have
commercials
. They have achieved ubiquity. So why not! Why not across the street? Acceptable and even praiseworthy, according to the natural order of things. Yet I stared and stared. The crew member holding the STOP sign flipped it to GO, red to green. And I started to make the turn down the short hill to the water, when I saw that they had blocked off that chunk of Wisconsin, and that I’d have to keep going.

The stop-sign guy had started doing this deeply satirical dance before I got my shit together enough to drive on. He and his coworkers waved their arms at one another, to communicate my failure, and I drove east on M and took the dogleg onto Pennsylvania, and then turned down this dinky little exit until I hit Rock Creek Parkway, now heading northwest. I could have stayed on M and made a turn down to the water later. I mean, the whole of downtown abuts on the Potomac or the Anacostia. They flow into each other and vanish on the long meander to the bay. But this
certainty
overcame me: the offering would be refused. The downside of large empty gestures! When they fail, you can’t do the logical thing and accomplish your goal some other way. You have to do the
symbolically coherent
thing. Which is, nine times out of ten, nothing at all.

During the course of my drive, the unknown number paged me and paged me. Three more times. It was starting to worry me. I mean, what the fuck could anyone want from me that they wouldn’t wait for? I ran through everyone I suspected it might be, as I drove, muttering to myself and looking around for tails.
The cops
. No, that didn’t make any sense. Why would they page me?
Digger
. As much as I wanted it to be true, this didn’t make any sense either. I knew her number. Unless her mother had gotten her a cell phone.
My father, calling from the Cochrane
. That would just be crazy. I was sure he didn’t even know I
had
a pager. And he’s way too languorous to page someone four times in a row.
Alex Faustner
. Just to fuck with me, you know? Or maybe lure me into some clever trap. And so on and so forth, calculating all the stupid probabilities. I followed the parkway. I knew it would turn into one of the roads that wind through the northern mass of the park, and end up among a mansion-filled glade of hills and declivities. But I wanted to go through the silent woods, at this point, to rush through them. As though I could get away from the money that way. From the unknown number. I knew if I just gave myself enough time, the leaden feeling would leave, I’d be able to make a real decision, to develop some stratagem for making my offering, or abandon the whole enterprise entirely. I was stuck in this
twilight
for now, yes. But it would go. I just needed patience. My pager was buzzing again. I didn’t even bother to check to see who it was.
Just have patience, you stupid asshole
, I kept telling myself.

Which is, as you’ve guessed, the one thing I lack. During normal times, when it’s not required. And when I most need it. I didn’t drive until my mental twilight dissipated. I didn’t pull over and breathe deeply, or meditate, or any of that shit. I only made it to a bit north of the zoo before I lost control of myself and turned back out of the leafless twilight. I screeched into the first free parking place I saw, just bucking back and forth with these shrieks of the rubber, and rammed a quarter and a dime into the pay phone on the corner. I was
calling
the unknown number. The worst thing to do. Answering the provocations of mystery, I mean. As this whole endeavor should demonstrate. It had gained me nothing but confusion so far. And I wanted more. The line rang three times before someone picked up.

“Yes, hello? Hello?” I yelled, loudly enough to make an old lady passing on the street stop and look. She was pushing a grocery cart, one of those oblong personal carts, not a store cart, from which two stalks of celery dangled like broken arms. There was only light breathing on the line. “If this is you, Lorriner, like
fuck
you,” I screamed. The old lady pushed off again. Whoever it was hung up. I stomped back to my car. And noticed, for the first time that morning, where I was. About a ten-minute drive from Noel’s house.
Not by chance
, I promised myself.
Not by
chance
. I was, at this point, absolutely sure that it was Lorriner, calling from a shadowy associate’s house in D.C., trying to fuck up my life in some unspecified way. Maybe he was in secret league with Huang and Baltimore. Maybe he had found an armed and willing friend. It didn’t matter.
Noel would straighten everything out
. My neck started to throb, right when I thought this. The ache served as further proof of my correctness. As did my chills and grinding jaw.

No one answered the door at Noel’s. The street was empty, but I still felt watched. I kept pounding, though. My pager was going off again, which increased my determination. After (I counted) seventeen thumps on the door, three locks, two tenor toned and one bass, tumbled open. The door opened inward, drawing the security chain tight. Just enough for me to see David.

“Addison, we
busy
, man,” he said.

“No, I need to see Noel.”

“Yo, man, like come back in like a hour. He busy.” This low-frequency
hum
was drifting out of Noel’s house, along with David’s voice. “You a’ight?” he asked. “You look sick, man.”

“I just like need to see
Noel
like now. It’s like über-urgent. David. Like just let me in. I’m not going
away.”
David clicked his tongue and shut the door. He clicked a couple more times. A calculating noise, abacus beads or whatever. Then I heard him sigh, and the security chain clattered and he opened up again, and I was inside. The thrumming was louder. “Dude, what’s going on down there?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Shut
up
a second, man,” David said. “Just wait.” I listened to the noise: it was unmistakably the murmur of a crowd of people. Coming from nowhere. I wondered, with no fear or even concern, really, if I had gone crazy.

“Do you like hear that? All those people?” David gave me an empty look and opened the basement door. The noise swelled and resolved enough for me to make out single voices. Somehow, despite the fog in my head, a suspicion began to announce itself to me.

“Just wait here. Just wait.” Then he was gone, and the noise dimmed back to a dull thrum. I occupied myself eye-tracing the crimson lines on Noel’s Chandler pennant. About all I was good for, at this point. Nothing else to look at, anyway. My pager went off again, and I yelled to no one, “Do you like have a phone in here,” before some still-operating sense of abashedness shut me up.