The Man Who Came Uptown

Twenty-Six

Ten men in orange jumpsuits sat in a circle in the chapel of the D.C. Jail. Anna, the jailhouse librarian, was among them. Two armed guards stood by, watching the proceedings but unconcerned, as there was rarely any trouble during the book club. In addition, the men in today’s session were from the Fifty and Older unit, and were relatively docile. They were here because they wanted to be.

Anna had selected John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By, the first novel in the Travis McGee series, originally published in 1964. Though it was at times a violent and erotic book, the sexual content was not graphic, and she had managed to get it in through the DCPL filter. Anna had argued that The Deep Blue Good-By was an important novel about the complex nature of masculinity and the cost of retribution. It was also a damned good read.

Most of the men had put the reading guide she had prepared under their chairs. Each man held a copy of the book, the twenty-third printing of a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback, in his hands. She had found copies in passable condition on the internet for next to nothing, all with the classic Ron Lesser cover art showing a woman with big hair wearing leopard-skin capri pants and high heels, her bare back exposed. Anna’s father, recently diagnosed with colon cancer, had collected the McGee paperbacks. There always seemed to be one on his nightstand when she was growing up. So picking this book for the club had been an emotional choice as well as a literary one.

After a prayer, led by one of the more religious members of the group, the discussion commenced.

“What did you all think of the lead character, Travis McGee?” said Anna.

“That’s a bad white boy right there,” said a man named Sam, a serial parole violator with two clown patches of gray hair flanking a bald head. Anna never knew what Sam did to keep getting locked up, but it couldn’t have been too egregious. He had a gentle manner.

“He’s got no nine-to-five job,” said Russell, an intelligent longtime heroin addict who dealt small quantities to pay for his habit. “He only works when he runs out of money. He’s tall, strong, and good-looking. He can go with his hands. He drinks but he’s not a drunk. He scores with all kinds of women. Got no commitments. No mortgage, no family. Shoot, the man lives on a houseboat. You don’t get no freer than that.”

“McGee is the man that many men would like to be,” said Anna. “He’s wish fulfillment in the flesh. That’s one of the reasons the series was so popular.”

“This reminded me of a Western movie,” said a repeat offender named Randolph, a film freak who often spoke nostalgically about life in the 1970s, the decade, apparently, when he’d had the most fun. He was sixty years old, very tall, light-skinned with freckles, still wore his hair in a blowout, and had a comically long nose. Some of the men called him Big Bird.

“How so, Randolph?” said Anna.

“McGee is like John Wayne or some shit. You know that movie The Searchers? Ethan Edwards. That’s McGee right there. He’s a protector, but he don’t fit into society nohow.”

“He’s more like a knight,” said Russell, putting on his reading glasses and opening his book. “Look here, I marked it. Page twenty-nine. McGee talks about himself getting on his white steed, knocking the rust off his armor, and tilting a crooked old lance.”

“There you go,” said Sam. “The lance is crooked. That means Travis knows he’s not straight.”

“You could say he’s a tarnished angel,” said Anna. “What about the villain in the book, Junior Allen?”

The mention of Allen, the sociopathic predator of the novel, caused the group to stir.

“That’s a wrong motherfucker right there,” said a man. “Excuse me, Anna.”

“McGee calls Junior a goat-god,” said Russell. “A satyr.”

“But isn’t Junior similar, in a way, to McGee?” said Anna. “I’m talking about in their relations with women. Sure, Junior uses women for sport, but McGee also sleeps with many women he doesn’t love.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with that. A man got needs.”

“Junior is like McGee if McGee was a bad person for real,” said Russell.

“Junior is McGee’s id,” said Anna. “His dark side.”

“That’s why McGee got to kill him,” said Russell, taking off his glasses and folding his hands in his lap.

“Why does he have to?” said Anna.

“So he can destroy that dark side of his self.”

The men quietly considered that. Some of them nodded their heads.

“Someone should make a movie of this book,” said a man.

“There was two Travis McGee movies,” said Randolph.

“Now Randolph gonna school us about cinema,” said Russell.

“One of ’em was a TV movie with a cowboy actor,” said Randolph. “That don’t even count. But there was one called Darker than Amber, with Rod Taylor as McGee? Taylor was macho, boy, he played the shit out of that role. There was like a ten-minute hand-to-hand fight in the end between him and William Smith, big muscle-bound cat who usually played bikers. It looked like the two of them were really going at it. The director was the same guy who did Enter the Dragon.”

“Man, nobody ask you to talk about Bruce Lee. This is a book club, not a movie club.”

“Just sayin,” said Randolph. “Darker than Amber was tight. I saw it at the Booker T. back in the day.”

“We ain’t back in the motherfuckin day, Big Bird. So you can just step out of your time machine.”

Laughter rippled through the group. Some of the men touched fists.

“Did John MacDonald make much money?” said a man.

The conversation and debate grew heated and lively. When it was time to end the session, many of the men wanted to stay.

“That was a good book,” said Sam.

“Thank you, Miss Anna,” said Russell.

“It was my pleasure,” she said.

In the weeks that followed the murder of Phil Ornazian, Thaddeus Ward kept a low profile. He attended the funeral but did not speak to Ornazian’s widow, Sydney, who never once looked his way. Ornazian’s sons were not there. His wife, apparently, had spared them the sight of their father’s casket being lowered into the ground.

Ward checked into his business, Ward Bonds, infrequently. In his absence, he had put Genesis, the smart ex — National Guardswoman, in charge. She was a natural manager and was good with the clientele.

At home, he drew the curtains, placed loaded guns in various rooms, and kept his shotgun by his bed. He told his daughter not to visit, that he would come see her and his grandchildren when the opportunity arose. If the killers were going to come for him, he would be ready, but he would be ready alone.

They didn’t come.

Restless, he drove into Northwest one day and found the garage in the alley near Kansas Avenue where Ornazian had gotten his hacks. There he met Berhanu, an Ethiopian with curly black hair, in one of the bays. It had come to Ward that the cameras on the brothel’s street had recorded the Impala SS they had used in the robbery.

The Impala was not here, but there were three high-horse imports in the garage. After introducing himself, Ward asked Berhanu, known by many in this part of the city as an off-the-books renter of cars, if anyone had come to him asking about the renter of the SS. Berhanu told him that a Spanish man with a clean-shaven face had done just that, but he added that he had not given the man any information. Ward believed him.

“Anybody work here with you?” said Ward.

“I had a man,” said Berhanu. “A mechanic named Donnie. But he’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“He didn’t show up for work one day and never returned. I left messages, but...” Berhanu shrugged. “Donnie was a drunk. Good with tools, but unreliable.”

Ward considered this. In his heart he knew that it was Gustav who had ordered the hit on Ornazian. It fit that the mechanic had given up the plate numbers on Ornazian’s Ford in exchange for a payoff. It would be simple to locate the Ornazian residence and follow Phil from there. They’d executed the classic trap at the intersection of Park and Sherman. Cesar, most likely, had wielded the shotgun that ended Phil’s life.

Nos encontraremos otra vez.

We will meet another time.

It was the last thing Cesar had said to them the night they’d bound him to a chair. He’d made good on his promise.

“I’m sorry about Phil,” said Berhanu. “I liked him.”

“So did I,” said Ward.

The question for Ward was, what would he do now? Homicide detectives had already shown up at his house and spoken to him. He imagined that Sydney had given him up as a business associate. Ward, despite his past as a D.C. cop, had told them he had no knowledge of the event. His involvement in the home invasion would have incriminated him, of course, but there was something else. In the image he had of himself, he saw retaliation, some payback for the murder of his friend.

Soon after his meeting with Berhanu, Sydney called Ward on his cell and asked if he could meet her at a spot in her neighborhood.

They sat at a booth at Slim’s, a diner on Georgia and Upshur. Both of them were drinking coffee. Sydney’s cheeks were drawn. She appeared to have lost weight. Her body odor was strong. He wondered when she had showered last.

“I have something for you,” she said, and she reached into her bag. She found an envelope and dropped it on the table between them. Thaddeus was written across the face of the envelope in Phil Ornazian’s scrawl. Ward took it and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Aren’t you going to count it?” said Sydney. “There’s ten thousand dollars in there.”

“I don’t need to count it.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your apology. I only came here to give you your money. Do you know why? Because Phil would have wanted me to. In his own way, he was an honorable man.”

“I’ll gladly give you this money back. It’s the least I can do.”

“No need. Phil took care of everything. He had a half-million-dollar life insurance policy. On top of that, unbeknownst to me, he had taken out mortgage insurance so that in the event of his death, our house would be paid for. If you don’t account for the fact that I no longer have a husband and my sons will grow up without a father, everything’s just fine.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ward, again, because he could think of nothing else to say.

“I blame myself, not you. I knew that the two of you were into something wrong. I told Phil that I didn’t like it. That I was afraid for him. I told him gently. But I should have threatened to leave him if he continued on with whatever he was doing. I should have screamed it into his face.”

“I’m going to find the ones—”

“No!” she said, loud enough to turn heads in the diner. “No. Just stop it, Thaddeus. This has to stop.” She gathered herself. “Answer me one question: Are my children safe? Are the people who did this going to do violence to me and my family?”

“This wasn’t about retrieving what we took from them. It was about revenge. I’ve thought hard about this. They’re not going to do anything to an innocent woman and her children. It’s too high-profile. It will bring all kinds of heat down on them.” He held her gaze while she stared back at him, quiet anger radiating off her. “The answer is, you and the kids are safe.”

She stood up abruptly and left him there. He watched her through the window as she walked east on Upshur. Their waitress came and asked him if everything was all right. He told her he was fine.

Stop.

Sydney was right. They had played a bold game and paid a price. The only thing left was more bloodshed. More loss. And anyway, he was damn near seventy years old. It was time to get off the stage.

Ward was done.

Twenty-Seven

Late in the spring, Michael Hudson convinced his mother that their dog Brandy’s time had come. Brandy had long been unable to climb stairs, and now she dragged her rear feet when she went to the front door to bark at the mailman, Gerard, or when she tried to walk to her dish come feeding time. Michael sat his mother down and gently explained to her that it was selfish and cruel to prolong the life of an animal that was suffering. She agreed to have Brandy euthanized.

Brandy was on her bed by the couch with her favorite ball and rubber bone next to her as their vet injected a solution into her paw. Doretha Hudson talked to her and rubbed behind her ear in that spot that made her sigh as the pentobarbital took effect, rendering her unconscious and shutting down her heart and brain. She was looking up at Michael, seated beside her on the floor, as the light left her eyes.

The very next day Michael and his mother went to the shelter on Blair Road and Oglethorpe Street, as they had done when he was in high school, and found a dog. It was not a puppy but an adult terrier mix. Not big or strong, and not all that attractive, but with lively eyes. As they approached him, he came up off his bed, put his feet up on the door of his space, and licked Doretha’s outstretched hand. His tail wagged furiously.

“That’s the one,” said Doretha.

“Kinda funny lookin,” said Michael. “There’s plenty of cute puppies here we could get.”

“Everybody wants a puppy. This dog here won’t get adopted unless we take him home. I like him.”

“What about that name?” said Michael. The card on the door said the dog’s name was Honeyboy.

“I’m going to call him O’Jay.”

“You gonna name him after a murderer? For real?”

“Not for O. J. Simpson, silly. Brandy was named for that beautiful O’Jays song about a man who’s missing his dog. So I’m just making a connection.” Doretha smiled. “Let’s go talk to that nice Spanish girl and do the paperwork.”

There was a dark-haired young lady named Rosa who worked at the shelter and who had been very helpful when they arrived.

“She’s Guatemalan,” said Michael.

“So? The point is, Michael, let’s take O’Jay home.”

“Whatever you want, Mama.” He meant it too.

Michael had begun to spend the money a little at a time. He used it to get a new pair of Timbs, and a Helly Hansen jacket from a shop at Gallery Place, but he was not much of a clotheshorse, and he needed little for himself. He found a bookcase with glass doors at an antique spot on North Capitol Street, splurged on that and a cab ride home, and put it up in his room. He bought more books.

Mostly, he used the money on others. He bought one of those comfortable outdoor chairs, the weather-resistant kind people put on decks, for Woods, the veteran amputee who was usually out back in the alley. He didn’t like seeing Woods sitting on an overturned crate. And he bought Alisha, Carla Thomas’s daughter, a set of children’s books recommended by the lady at the store on Upshur Street. It wasn’t going anywhere with Carla, but they were friends, and he liked her little girl.

One night he took his mother out to dinner at the Prime Rib on K Street because she had always wanted to go. He asked for a table near the piano where they could hear the man in his tuxedo play and sing standards and watch the bar, where nice-looking people drank and socialized. His mother had the signature dish that gave the establishment its name, and he had a New York strip, medium rare. The atmosphere and service were impeccable, which Michael, now in the restaurant business, could appreciate. His mother was in her glory.

The money would soon be gone. It wasn’t much to begin with, not by modern standards. Not enough to have risked death, of that he was certain. Michael thought of this every time he walked to work and passed the intersection of Park and Sherman, where Phil Ornazian had been murdered in his car.

With everything that had happened, there was a lesson to be learned, and Michael had taken it to heart. He was alive, and he was straight.

His job at the District Line was secure. It was not a challenging position, but it was work, and he was accepted and had found a second family there. Despite Angelos Valis’s frequent reminders that Michael would receive a raise only when the minimum wage went up, he was in fact given a raise, unceremoniously. The increase simply showed up one Friday in his paycheck. Also, he had health insurance. It looked like he had a home here for as long as he wanted it. All was fine, for now.

But he was looking ahead. He had spoken to Gerard again about a U.S. Postal Service job, and he had downloaded a sample of the 473E, the entrance exam. It was mostly memory questions, numbers, codes, addresses, routes, stuff like that. He was confident that he could score high. The criminal background check could present a problem, but he planned to visit his lawyer, Mr. Mirapaul, to see about the juvenile priors and the adult charges that were still on his record. Maybe Mr. Mirapaul could help him get those things expunged. It would take time. But that was all right.

It wasn’t just the U.S. Postal Service job that made him want to clear his record. He wanted to do volunteer stuff, too, and that would involve working with kids. He had other ideas as well. If he enrolled and took some college classes, maybe starting at UDC or Montgomery College, over the Maryland line, he might get the ambition to keep going with it and earn his degree. Maybe teach, eventually. Teach about books.

It was possible. It was.

One evening, coming out of Wall of Books on Georgia Avenue, Michael saw Anna and her husband seated at one of the outdoor picnic tables at the Midlands, having a talk. They looked serious. Her husband, Rick was his name, was wearing a hat that said TITLEIST across the front. He was drinking a beer. Anna was drinking water.

Michael didn’t walk over to the patio to say hello. It looked like they were discussing something important, and he didn’t want to bother them. Though he thought of her often, he hadn’t seen Anna or talked to her for quite a while. He had walked up to her neighborhood a couple of times in the past month, watched the soccer games at the rec center there, in the hopes that she’d come past on her bike. But she hadn’t, and it was better that way. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew that trying to take things further with her was wrong.

He had no desire to upend her life. But he missed her.

The next time he ran into Anna was during the dinner rush at the restaurant. She was picking up a pizza to take out, and he was delivering glassware to the bar. She was by the cash register, and she saw him and smiled. He walked along the bar until he came to where she stood.

“Anna.”

“Michael. How’s it going?”

“A little warm down there in the kitchen. But I’m fine. About to be the best dishwasher in the city, if I keep this up.”

“Is it a contest?”

“In a way. How have you been?”

“I’m still at the jail. We have an actual library there now, where the inmates can browse for books. Everything’s good.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke. He looked into her eyes.

“Seriously,” she said. “Are you doing all right?”

“I am. I’m thinking of enrolling in a couple of college courses. Like English. But it’s a blessing to have this job right here too.” His expression grew serious. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy a farm out in the country, something like that. ‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’.’”

Anna laughed. “You remembered.”

“How could I forget?” he said. “You’ve still got my number, right?”

“Yes. And you have mine.”

“You ever need anything, Anna, all you got to do is hit me up. You got a friend in this city, hear? For life.”

“As do you,” she said.

“Be easy, Anna.”

Michael turned and headed for the spiral stairs.

Anna walked home slowly, because she needed the time alone.

She was pregnant.

The next time Michael would see her, she’d be showing, or maybe she’d be out on the patio of the District Line with her husband and their baby. A stroller by their table, like so many others. Like all the young couples who had taken that next step.

Rick, once a die-hard stay-in-the-city enthusiast, had already begun to talk about putting their house on the market and buying something bigger, with “more yard” and space “for the kid to play,” in Maryland or Northern Virginia. Someplace near a golf course, no doubt. She’d end up compromising. It was a partnership. It wasn’t all about only what she wanted or liked.

She wasn’t unhappy. She knew she’d love her child and she wanted to be a good parent, as her own parents had been. And yet these things that were being put in motion couldn’t be reversed. She could see her trajectory.

Her mood lightened as she thought of tomorrow. Not the long tomorrow, but the immediate days that were to come. She was preparing for the next book club and had staged the cart for the Gen Pop unit the following day. There was a young man named Terrell in Gen Pop who had shown a growing interest in reading. She had chosen something especially for him, a positive memoir about growing up on the once-notorious block of Hanover Place, a book called Slugg, by Tony Lewis Jr. She felt certain that Terrell would like it.

Not everything was perfect, or would be. Anna was married to a good man she loved, and together they would make a family. She had her work. And a friend in the city, for life.

In his spare time, Michael Hudson had begun to venture out of his neighborhood and his quadrant to explore the wider city around him. He visited the renovated Mount Pleasant library, which held fifty thousand books, and the beautiful Francis Gregory Library, in Ward 7, designed by David Adjaye. At various libraries, Michael signed up for discussion groups and attended movie nights. And, for the first time in his life, he took advantage of the numerous world-class art galleries and museums in D.C. to which entry was free. He was growing.

On a day in early summer, as dark afternoon clouds began to gather, he walked to Petworth to pick up a novel he had ordered from the store on Upshur Street. The book was True Grit. Anna had recommended it to him when he was incarcerated. She knew he liked Westerns, and this one, she’d said, was a classic.

He paid for the book, an Overland Press trade edition, and found a seat on a bench. He opened the novel and read the first paragraph.

Michael closed the book and rubbed his thumb across its cover.

The clouds broke and drops began to fall. He was not near shelter, so he decided it was best to head home. Michael slid the book into his shirt, adjusted the watch cap that was on his head, and went south on foot. He was already thinking about the book, its marriage of story and voice. It had captured him immediately. It had taken him somewhere else.

To anyone watching, he was one of many out on the street, going along, stepping quick against the weather. They couldn’t know his inner life, or his history, or that he was a Washingtonian, born and bred, with a steady job, family and friends. A lover of books. A man who knew who he was and who he hoped to be.

Just another man who came uptown.

Walking in the rain.