The Way Home

SEVENTEEN

Chris, Ali, and several younger men were in a Saturday afternoon game on the basketball courts at the Hamilton Rec Center between 13th and 14th in Northwest, in an area known as 16th Street Heights. When he was available, Ali liked to have Chris hang out with his boys, so that they could see by example an ex-juvenile offender who had managed to reenter society in a positive way. Chris wasn’t about giving speeches or deep advice, but if it meant simply showing up to ball, he was there.

Chris had asked Ali to bring the boys to Hamilton, as the fenced-in courts were in good shape, and the red, white, and blue nets were kept intact. He’d been playing there since his teens and found the quality of players fairly high. It was here where an errant elbow had split his lip and given him his scar, which Katherine later told him was the second thing she’d noticed about him and liked, after his eyes. Ham Rec now held value to him for that alone.

Ali had driven out from Southeast in his mother’s beat-up Saturn with William Richards and Marquis Gilman, Lawrence’s nephew, in tow. They had invited in two young men who lived on Farragut Street and gone three-on-three for a few games. Chris had bulk and a jumper, and Ali still had his vertical leap, but the teenagers had them on speed. The games had been hard fought but without major conflict, the players evenly matched, and all had been sweated out and satisfied when it was agreed that they were done.

Chris stayed on the court and worked with Marquis, showing him his box-out move and telling him to watch the extra step on his drive to the bucket. Marquis, still gangly in his youth, looked Chris in the eye when spoken to but disagreed that his pretty move was a violation.

“That’s a jump step, Mr. Chris,” said Marquis.

“It’s an extra step,” said Chris. “Just ’cause they don’t call it in the NBA doesn’t mean you can do it out here.”

“I’ll do it when I go pro, then.”

“You’re not goin pro, Marquis. But you could be a good pickup man. If you didn’t travel with the ball every time you drove.”

“Okay,” said Marquis. “I hear you.”

Ali returned with some bottles of water he had gotten out of the Saturn’s trunk. William Richards, who had been sitting by himself near the playground, got up and joined them. Ali offered him a bottle, but he waved it away.

“I don’t want it,” said William, his Bulls cap cocked sideways on his head. “That water’s hot.”

“Wet, too,” said Ali.

“I’m gonna walk down to Kennedy and Georgia, get somethin to drink at the Wings n Things.”

“They closed that place,” said Chris.

“Whateva they call it now, they still got cold sodas,” said William. “You comin, Marquis?”

“Is it all right, Mr. Ali?” said Marquis.

“Yeah, go ahead. Keep to yourselves, hear? I’ll come by and pick you two up on my way out.”

The two young men walked east on Hamilton, then cut north on 13th. Ali and Chris went to the black Saturn, parked behind Chris’s van. Ali sat on the hood and took a swig of warm water.

“Marquis is all right,” said Chris.

“Ain’t nothin wrong with him,” said Ali. “He got some issues at home and with his peers at those apartments, is all. Marquis only did dirt ’cause his friends did. He’s just tryin to belong to something, man.”

“You get him legit work?”

“I’m about to hook him up at a Wendy’s, if the manager ever calls me back.”

“Ben said Lawrence came to see you.”

“He wanted me to put Marquis up with your pops. I wouldn’t even ask. Wendy’s is a better start for him at this point. That boy’s gonna be one of my success stories.”

“No doubt,” said Chris.

“You seen Lawrence lately?”

“No. Ben and him were together one night recently. But I wasn’t with ’em.”

Chris hadn’t told Ali about Lawrence and the bag of cash. Lawrence had been putting that money up his nose, most likely, or watching it bounce on his dick since he’d broke into the Kramer house to take it. Chris was trying to forget about the money, and for the most part he had.

“Man looks old,” said Ali. “But he’s the same Lawrence.”

“Bughouse is Bughouse,” said Chris, repeating something that had been said often in their unit, many years back.

Ali took a long drink. Chris bunched up his shirt and wiped sweat from his face.

“Appreciate you coming out today,” said Ali.

“I just came to play basketball.”

“It’s more than that. The boys like seeing you. You got a nice way with them, man.”

“I don’t mind hangin with them, when I have the time.”

“You ever think of changing up? Doing something different?”

“What, you asking me to come work with you?”

“I make less than you do,” said Ali. “So I wouldn’t suggest that. I’m talking about switching careers. You love reading those books of yours so much, why don’t you use it? Good as you are with kids, you could be a history teacher, somethin like that.”

“You mean like Mr. Beige? He didn’t look all that prosperous to me.”

“Teachers make decent money now, Chris, and it’s getting better all the time. In some cities schoolteachers make six figures, they hang with it long enough.”

“But I can’t be one,” said Chris.

“Sure you can.”

“Armed with a high school degree?”

“So get yourself enrolled in a community college, then transfer to a university or state school when you make grades.”

“How would I support myself?”

“You’d work, just like you do now. Work during the day and go to your classes at night.”

“That would take forever.”

“Those years would go by quick. You could earn your teaching certificate and get out there and do some good. They got this Teach For America program, where people come fresh out of college and go to work in disadvantaged school districts-”

“Nah, man.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not who I am,” said Chris. “I’m a carpet installer, Ali.”

“You could be more.”

“Okay, Shawshank.”

Ali chuckled. “Shit. That old man just didn’t know when to quit, did he.”

“Like you,” said Chris, eyeing his friend and tapping his water bottle to Ali’s.

“Well, let me go pick up those knuckleheads,” said Ali, getting off the hood of his mother’s car.

“My father’s having his employee barbecue tonight at his house,” said Chris, retrieving the van keys from the pocket of his shorts. “You gonna come past?”

“Your pops walks backward when he sees me,” said Ali.

“He asked me to tell you to come by. Even though you made him put Lonnie and Luther on the payroll.”

“Don’t forget Milton.”

“Yeah, Milton couldn’t operate the tape measure. But my old man does like you. Not that I can figure out why. Prob’ly cause, out of me and my friends, you’re the only one who’s had any success.”

“You’re doin all right, too, man.”

“Right.” Chris walked toward the white van. “Come by, hear?”

Ali said, “I will.”

Lawrence Newhouse walked up the road in his long T-shirt, along the Barry Farms dwellings, this particular block a two-story strip of tan motel-style structures with chocolate doorways and arches. Time was, in his youth, he and his boys at Parkchester would have been beefing with those at the Farms, and he supposed the young ones still did the same, but that was past for him. People looked at him as he went along, eyeing him but not hard, like he wasn’t worth the time it took to fix a stare. At twenty-six, Lawrence was old. He had not taken care of himself, what with his poor diet, drinking, all manner of smoke, and powder when he could get it. He looked close to forty.

He had a plastic bottle of fruit punch in his hand. He had bought it at the local Korean place, having woken up, still in his club clothes atop the sheets of his bed, with a vicious thirst. He’d spent a bunch of money the night before in that strip club he liked on New York Avenue. He’d spent it on hard liquor and dancers, the usual shove-the-bills-in-the-string thing, and on a gram of coke he’d copped in the bathroom from a young man he’d met at the bar. The freeze had made him shit soon as he’d taken his first bite of it off the end of a key. That’s what he got for buying coke from someone he didn’t know. Wasn’t much more than laxative, but it kept him awake. And it got one of the dancers interested enough to come outside with him and swallow his manhood in the backseat of her man’s car. Which had cost him another hundred. He didn’t remember driving his Cavalier back to Southeast, but it was parked in his spot, so he supposed that this is what he had done.

Money went quick.

Lawrence walked across a small dusty playground with monkey bars and the rusted, spidery frame of a swing set. At the edge of the playground a steel pole with no backboard was set in concrete. Around the pole was a tribute to a boy named Beanie, a loose arrangement of teddy bears, ribbons and banners, empty Hennessey bottles, and photographs, a commemoration of Beanie’s short, fast life and death by gun.

Then Lawrence was on Wade and heading toward the Parkchester Apartments, stepping around boys he recognized but did not speak to who were grouped at one of the entranceways, and going into a stairwell holding the usual stagnant smells of things that were fried, eaten, or smoked.

He went into his place.

It wasn’t his place, exactly. It was Dorita’s, his half-sister. Dorita was on government assistance, had three children by two different men, and let him stay here. When she was short on food or needed Nikes for the kids, he gave her cash, if he had it. He had it now, but Dorita didn’t know.

Her two younger kids, Terrence and Loquatia, were on the carpet, watching a show on a widescreen plasma television Dorita had bought on time. Loquatia, eleven and already running to fat like her mother, had her hand in a bowl of Skittles, running her fingers through the colored bits. Long as Loquatia was touching food, she was cool. Her little brother was staring at the cartoon lobster on the screen but daydreaming, thinking on something called a galaxy, which he had learned about in school. He had an active imagination, and his teacher suspected he was highly intelligent. The teacher had phoned Dorita to tell her about an accelerated program available at his elementary, but Dorita had yet to call her back.

Dorita sat on the living-room sofa, her feet up on it, cell phone in hand. There was no man currently in her life. She was thirty-two, and her stretch-marked belly spilled out from beneath her tight shirt. At two fifty, she had eighty pounds on Lawrence. They had the same mother but looked nothing alike.

“Where you been at?” said Dorita.

“I went down to the Chang’s,” said Lawrence.

“And you ain’t get me nothin?”

“Wasn’t like I went to the grocery store.” Lawrence head-shook his braids away from his face. “Where’s Marquis at?”

“Mr. Carter came past and picked him up. Before you woke up. Marquis said they were going to play basketball.”

“Okay,” said Lawrence, annoyed but not fully understanding why. He appreciated that Ali was trying to help the boy, and he also resented it.

“You snored last night,” said Terrence, and Dorita laughed.

“So?” said Lawrence. “You farted.”

Terrence and Loquatia laughed.

“If you goin to the Chang’s, you need to tell me,” said Dorita. “We could use some soda in this house.”

“I ain’t no shopping service.”

“You could contribute,” said Dorita. ’Stead of just taking all the time.”

“Least my mother didn’t name me after a corn chip,” said Lawrence, saying the same tired thing he had been saying to his sister since they were kids.

Dorita did not respond, and Lawrence went to his room.

It wasn’t his room, exactly. He shared it with the two younger kids. He had strung up a sheet between their beds and his single bed to give him some privacy. Didn’t leave much space, but this was what he had. Free rent, you couldn’t complain. Anyway, he was about to be out of here.

About to be.

He pulled aside the sheet, flopped down on his bed, and draped his forearm over his eyes. Underneath the bed, the bag of money. He felt he had to keep it close. But what was he going to do with it? That was the thing that was fucking with his head.

He knew he should be looking for a nice place of his own. Maybe go to one of the Eastern Motors and trade up off that hooptie he had. But then he’d be in an apartment by himself, no one to talk to, no one to Jone on, and driving a car that was newer, that’s all. He’d already spent a couple of thousand on women and fun. Beyond that, wasn’t anything that he could see to buy that would make him happy.

What he wanted, what he’d always craved, was to have friends and pride. He’d thought that money would help him get those things. But to get it, he’d tricked the one dude who’d been his friend, the only boy who’d stepped in and stood tall for him back when he was getting his ass beat regular at Pine Ridge. And now he, Lawrence, had gone and done him dirt.

Sometimes, no lie, he hated the sight of his own self in the mirror.

Lawrence rolled over onto his side. In the heat of the room, sweat dampening his long T-shirt, he went to sleep.

Ali Carter lived with his mother, Juanita Carter, in a vinyl-sided duplex town home on Alabama Avenue in Garfield Heights, across the road from the offices of Men Movin on Up. The development was on the new side, the yards were still clean, and the several hundred homes that had been constructed here had replaced some problem-ridden projects that had been good for no one. Houses here were still being sold for about three hundred thousand dollars, with low-interest loans and no-money-down offers in effect. A chain grocery store, the Seventh District Police Station, and Fort Stanton Park were within walking distance. Communities such as this one, housing longtime residents and newcomers alike, had been appearing in several spots in Southeast. Only those who were unreasonably resistant to change could say that this was not a positive development. For Ali, it was a huge step up, and a world away from where he’d been raised.

Juanita Carter had not been a bad mother to Ali and his sisters in any way; she had merely been born poor. Her start at the back of the line had crippled her, and by the time she had made a family, her lack of higher education and unfortunate choices in men had put her at a severe disadvantage. She and her kids lived in the Barry Farms dwellings, and she had no choice but to raise them in that rough-and-tumble and occasionally toxic atmosphere. After earning her GED, she started taking health care classes while working on the cleaning crew at the old D.C. General Hospital. But while she was bettering herself in order to move her family out of the Farms, Ali was entering his teens, a dangerous time for a boy to have little supervision at home. Juanita blamed herself to this day for the trouble Ali and one of his sisters, who eventually was lost to the streets, had found. But Ali knew it wasn’t her. It was him, and the fact that some young men just had to touch their hand to the flame to see for themselves that fire was hot.

“Where you off to?” said Juanita, as her son entered the kitchen in his pressed jeans and a sky blue Lacoste shirt, picking a pair of sunglasses out of a bowl on the counter that held his things.

“Chris Flynn’s father is having a cookout,” said Ali. “For his employees.”

“You don’t work for him.”

“No, but he’s been good to some fellas I know. At least, he tried to be.”

“So you gonna, what, show your appreciation to this man by eating his burgers and potato salad?”

“I’ll prob’ly ask him for some more favors, too.” Ali put his hand in Juanita’s bowl of things, set beside his, and looked at her sheepishly. “Can I get your car?”

“If you say you’re not gonna drink.”

“You know I don’t even like it.”

Ali took the keys and kissed his mother on the cheek. She was a small woman of forty-two with big brown eyes and a pretty smile. It was from her that he had acquired his modest height and handsome features.

In the past, they had experienced conflicts, but as adults, they made a good team. They had cosigned for the loan on the house and together they had made it work. She was an attendant at a dialysis center on 8th Street on Capitol Hill, and had learned to budget herself, watch her purchases, and still walk down the street in relative style. He stayed with her to pay her back, in some way, for the trouble he’d caused her as a youth. Both knew he’d be gone when he found someone special and started having kids of his own. She seemed to want it more than he did.

“Any girls gonna be at this barbecue?”

“Nah, Mama. We’re all members of the He-Men Women Hater’s Club.”

“I wonder sometimes.”

“Huh,” said Ali. He had his eye on this one girl he’d met at church, but his mother didn’t need to know that yet.

“Don’t drink tonight,” said Juanita, as her son headed out the door, her car keys in hand.

“I won’t,” said Ali.

She watched him go, thinking, I’m not trying to get on you or nag. I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s all it is.

You’ve come so far.