War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (33 page)

I followed him into the kitchen.
At the far end, near the stove, another door opened, leading to the bathroom.
It was small and mean, without enough room for a bathtub, only a built-in shower.
The toilet itself had no seat.
Apparently, the money that had been used to fix this place up hadn’t been spent here.

“I hope there’s bedrooms,” Malcolm said from behind me.

“He said there were two.” I turned around, and looked, hoping to see the door.
It was in the kitchen, painted white to match the walls.
I had initially thought it was a broom closet.

Instead the door opened onto a short hallway.
Two doors stood across from each other.
Once this had been a separate apartment, or maybe two separate apartments, all sharing the bath with the apartment we were standing in.

Malcolm flicked on the hall light, then peered into one of the rooms.
“Fancy,” he said, and his tone was mocking.

I looked in
,
too.
There was the promised air
conditioner, as far from the living room as it could possibly be.
Only the bedrooms could be cool, and only if we kept our doors open all night long.

The bed in the room with the air conditioner was a double, with
an
end table on either side.
The other room, smaller and with no window at all, had room only for a bunk bed.

“I get the top,” Jimmy said as he came up beside us.

“I get the top,” Malcolm said.
“I’ll hit my head underneath.”

“It can’t hold your weight,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t want to die when you come crashing down on me.”

“It’ll hold him,” I said.
“And if you guys don’t like sharing, one of you can take the couch.”

“No thanks.” Malcolm went around me and disappeared into the kitchen.

“He doesn’t like any of this,” Jimmy said.

“I know,” I said.

“Maybe he should go home.
I’ll be okay by myself.
You told me how to get around.”

This was absolutely the worst place for Jimmy to be alone.
He probably hadn’t noticed the teenagers loitering in doorways, or the men leaning against walls, their eyes half closed in some drugged-out ecstasy.
I knew he had seen the guy in the entry because we’d all had to step over him.

But Jimmy could have selective vision sometimes.
He had seen a group of children his own age playing stickball up the block.
He had also seen another group on the basketball court at the nearby school, playing as if their lives depended on it.

“Sorry, Jim,” I said. “You’re going to need to be with one of us at all times around here.
This isn’t a good neighborhood.”

“I thought you said we’d stay some place safe.”

“It’s safe enough,” I said, “but it’s not somewhere I’d ch
o
ose to put down roots.”

“Didn’t say I wanted to move here,” Jimmy said sullenly.
“We’re not moving here, right?”

“Not permanently,” I said. “Not this apartment.”

“Yeah,” Malcolm said, coming up behind us.
“This is a cruddy place. There isn’t even a phone.”

“That’s something else we’d have to pay for if we were staying,” I said, remembering all the things the lease enumerated as our responsibility.
“There’s a pay phone across the street.
We can use that if we need to make calls.”

Malcolm took his suitcase into the room.
He tossed the case on the top bunk as if to claim it as his own.

“It’s safer for me to be up there, Smoke,” Jimmy said.

“Let him,” I said quietly.

“Jeez,” Jimmy said. “No TV, and a stupid bottom bunk, and you guys gotta babysit me all the time.
This is just dumb.”

“Where are the books Grace had
you bring?” I asked. “In the van?”

“Some,” he said.
That surprised me. I had expected a yes.
“I brought three.”

No wonder he had struggled with his suitcase.

“Three’s a good start,” I said.
“Looks like between the books and the newspapers you’re supposed to read every day, you’ll have plenty to do.”

“Can we at least get a radio?” Malcolm asked.

“That’s probably wise,” I said. “We’ll pick up a transistor this afternoon.”

For the moment, though, I wanted to get the air
conditioner working.
I wanted to sit down and rest for a few minutes, then figure out my plan.

I wanted, with an intensity that surprised me, to be somewhere else.

THIRTY-THREE

We spent the rest of the day settling in and exploring the neighborhood.
It wasn’t as bad as it had initially seemed.
Even though there were junkies in doorways, there was also a newly formed neighborhood watch.

The building’s manager, a strongly built man in his midthirties, found me as I was coming down the stairs.
He made a point, he said, of meeting all the short-timers, especially since the neighborhood watch had gotten so diligent.

I quizzed him about the area.
Turned out that the rental agent had been right — the neighborhood was cleaning itself up.
Even though half the residents were on welfare, they were mostly elderly people who had lived in the area since the 1920s.
Many had been in the same apartment for more than forty years.

The rest worked.
Most of the drug addicts had been routed from the apartments as part of the government’s condition for cleaning up the place.

The manager had most of these figures courtesy of the government.
This had been one of the first model cities projects in 1964.
It had been designed as a working experiment in not just cleaning up the buildings, but improving the lives of the residents as well.

The apartments had been improved.
The rats were mostly gone, at least inside, and so were the cockroaches, thanks to diligent spraying efforts.
The locks worked, there were no exposed
electric
wires, and the buildings themselves were as secure as the residents desired.
Apartments had more than one room now, functioning bathrooms, and actual closets.

But the government’s work had stopped there.
The neighborhood watch had come out of a committee the residents had put together to force the government to
fulfill
its promises, promises to provide the drug center, the jobs, and adult education—the very things that would keep the neighborhood improving.

At least I didn’t feel any despair here.
Maybe the watch worked.

That night before it got dark, I showed Malcolm and Jimmy the
way to the nearest
subway station.
I showed them how to read the map, and then I took them up to 135
th
and Lenox, where the public library was
located
.
The neighborhood wasn’t as good as I remembered, but it was all right for them to be here during the day, while I was working.

I checked the library hours for the Fourth of July, and noted that the building was closed.
On that day we might have to make special plans.

The next day, I left Malcolm with Jimmy. I had Malcolm give me his estimated itinerary, so that I could find them if I had to, then I headed for Sugar Hill to see if I could find Daniel Kirkland and Rhondelle Whickam.

The address that Whickam had given me was in one of the older neighborhoods closest to the park.
All of Edgecomb Avenue had a great view of the Harlem Plain, but this
area
had a quiet air of comfort.

Even though it was about nine
A
.
M
., the day was already getting warm.
Traffic moved by quickly, as if the cars knew that they could overheat if they stopped for too long.
Headlines
on a discarded
newspaper caught my eye: Hanoi was releasing
three
U.S. prisoners;
f
our Arab jets had been shot down over the Suez Canal.

The entire world continued to burn, and here, in Sugar Hill, the radiant heat seemed to envelope everything.

I walked up the nearly empty sidewalks, stepping over broken bottles and piles of garbage in bags that sat out for collection. The stench was amazing — rotted food, spoiled milk, and other odors I couldn’t identify mingled with the heaviness of the air.

Rows of wrought
-
iron banisters rose toward the row houses, looking identical despite the bicycles chained to some and the clothes hanging on others.
From my sideways angle, the door arches looked like sculptures.
If I
squinted
, I could almost see the past, when this neighborhood was in its prime, the red brick was clean, and people walked with pride.

I finally found the address I was looking for.
I walked up the concrete steps to the small stoop and stopped. The door was made of fine wood, which had once been polished, but lost its luster to time and the elements. The door
knocker had survived
,
though
,
and a
wonderfully detailed
lion’s
head
with a ring
in
its mouth suggested the elegance that this place had once had.

I grabbed the ring and pounded it against the brass with force. For a moment, I didn’t think anyone heard me.
Then the door opened a slight crack.

“What?” a female voice asked.

“I’m looking for Danny,” I said.

“He’s not here,” the woman said.

“How about Rhondelle?”

“What do you want her for?”

Finding
them
had been easier than I expected.
I tried not to let my surprise show.

“I got some business to finish up,” I said.

The door opened all the way.
A young white woman, in shorts and a cropped
T
-shirt, held it open for me.
Her dark hair was gathered at the back of her neck, and her eyes were red with exhaustion and maybe something else.

“C’mon in,” she said
,
and moved away.

She didn’t ask who I was or what I wanted.
She didn’t seem to care.

I stepped inside. The entry was ornate.
A chandelier hung from the ceiling, the chain trimmed in gold.
To my right, a floor-length mirror as big as a door was framed in mahogany, and brass clothes hangers hung in
a
square pattern on each side, waiting for coats. Just beyond that, stairs rose to the house’s upper
floors
.

“She’s having breakfast,” the young woman said, motioning toward a hallway that disappeared toward the back.

Then she climbed the stairs like an elderly person. She didn’t even look back to see if I had taken her direction.
Her manner was odd and unnerving, and even though this place didn’t smell of pot like some of the places I’d found in New Haven, I wondered if her lack of response was due to drugs rather than a natural lack of interest.

I felt uneasy.
I had thought I would find no one here.
I had planned to spend the day talking to the neighbor, searching for Daniel and Rhondelle, going through the same sort of wild goose chase that I had pursued in New Haven.

Now that I had found them, I would have to find out what was going on without alienating them.

I walked down the hall, the wooden floor squeaking beneath my shoes.
Another door opened to my left, leading into a back parlor.
I peered inside.
Clothing was strewn all over the heavy Victorian furniture.
The fireplace screen was being used as a drying rack for underwear.
Dirty dishes sat on an expensive wood table.
Above it all, someone had left yet another chandelier burning, its dusty globe sending a dim light through the room.

I continued forward.
Ahead of me, an unprepossessing door remained closed.
I pushed it open, and found myself in a long narrow kitchen.
A utility sink with an orange base leaned against the wall, the top covered with copper dishes that had once been used as decoration.

The room smelled faintly of peanut butter and toast. A young woman sat at a small table toward the back, barely visible beyond the huge turn-of-the-century
cast iron stove.
She was hunched over the table, reading as she drank from a steaming mug.
Her hair was frizzed into an oversized
A
fro that looked teased instead of natural.