Hard Revolution

ONE

DEREK STRANGE GOT down in a three-point stance. He breathed evenly, as his father had instructed him to do, and took in the pleasant smell of April. Magnolias, dogwoods, and cherry trees were in bloom around the city. The scent of their flowers, and the heavy fragrance of a nearby lilac bush growing against a residential fence, filled the air.

“You keep your back straight,” said Derek, “like you’re gonna set a dinner up on it. You ain’t want your butt up in the air, either. That way you’re ready. You just blow right out, like, and hit the holes. Bust on through.”

Derek and his Saturday companion, Billy Georgelakos, were in an alley that ran behind the Three-Star Diner on a single-number block of Kennedy Street, at the eastern edge of Northwest D.C. Both were twelve years old.

“Like your man,” said Billy, sitting on a milk crate, an Our Army at War comic book rolled tightly in his meaty hand.

“Yeah,” said Derek. “Here go Jim Brown right here.”

Derek came up out of his stance and exploded forward, one palm hovering above the other, both close to his chest. He took an imaginary handoff as he ran a few steps, then cut, slowed down, turned, and walked back toward Billy.

Derek had a way of moving. It was confident but not cocky, shoulders squared, with a slight looseness to the hips. He had copied the walk from his older brother, Dennis. Derek was the right height for his age, but like all boys and most men, he wished to be taller. Lately, at night when he was in bed, he thought he could feel himself growing. The mirror over his mother’s dresser told him he was filling out in the upper body, too.

Billy, despite his wide shoulders and unusually broad chest, was not an athlete. He kept up on the local sports teams, but he had other passions. Billy liked pinball machines, cap pistols, and comic books.

“That how Brown got his twelve yards in eleven carries against the ’Skins?” said Billy.

“Uh-uh, Billy, don’t be talkin’ about that.”

“Don Bosseler gained more in that game than Brown did.”

“In that game. Most of the time, Bosseler ain’t fit to carry my man’s cleats. Two weeks before that, at Griffith? Jim Brown ran for one hundred and fifty-two. The man set the all-time rushing record in that one, Billy. Don Bosseler? Shoot.”

“Awright,” said Billy, a smile forming on his wide face. “Your man can play.”

Derek knew Billy was messing with him, but he couldn’t help getting agitated just the same. Not that Derek wasn’t a Redskins fan. He listened to every game on the radio. He read the Shirley Povich and Bob Addie columns in the Post whenever they saw print. He followed the stats of quarterback Eddie LeBaron, middle linebacker Chuck Drazenovich, halfback Eddie Sutton, and others. He even tracked Bosseler’s yards-per-carry. In fact, he only rooted against the ’Skins twice a year, and then with a pang of guilt, when they played Cleveland.

Derek had a newspaper photo of Brown taped to the wall of the bedroom he shared with his brother. With the exception of his father, there was no one who was more of a hero to him than Brown. This was a strong individual who commanded respect, not just from his own but from people of all colors. The man could play.

“Don Bosseler,” said Derek, chuckling. He put one big, long-fingered hand to the top of his head, shaved nearly to the scalp, and rubbed it. It was something his brother, Dennis, did in conversation when he was cracking on his friends. Derek had picked up the gesture, like his walk, from Dennis.

“I’m kiddin’ you, Derek.” Billy got up off the milk crate and put his comic book down on the diner’s back stoop. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“Where?”

“My neighborhood. Maybe there’s a game up at Fort Stevens.”

“Okay,” said Derek. Billy’s streets were a couple of miles from the diner and several miles from Derek’s home. Most of the kids up there were white. But Derek didn’t object. Truth was, it excited him some to be off his turf.

On most Saturdays, Derek and Billy spent their time out in the city while their fathers worked at the diner. They were boys and were expected to go out and find adventure and even mild forms of trouble. There was violence in certain sections of the District, but it was committed by adults and usually among criminals and mostly at night. Generally, the young went untouched.

Out on the main drag, Derek noticed that the local movie house, the Kennedy, was still running Buchanan Rides Alone, with Randolph Scott. Derek had already seen it with his dad. His father had promised to take him down to U Street for the new John Wayne, Rio Bravo, which had people talking around town. The picture was playing down at the Republic. Like the other District theaters on U, the Lincoln and the Booker T, the Republic was mostly for colored, and Derek felt comfortable there. His father, Darius Strange, loved westerns, and Derek Strange had come to love them, too.

Derek and Billy walked east on the commercial strip. They passed two boys Derek knew from church, and one of them said, “What you hangin’ with that white boy for?” and Derek said, “What business is that of yours?” He made just enough eye contact for the boy to know he was serious, and all of them went on their way.

Billy was Derek’s first and only white playmate. The working relationship between their fathers had caused their hookup. Otherwise they never would have been put together, since most of the time, outside of sporting events and first jobs, colored boys and white boys didn’t mix. Wasn’t anything wrong with mixing, exactly, but it just seemed more natural to be with your own kind. Hanging with Billy sometimes put Derek in a bad position; you’d get challenged out here when your own saw you walking with a white. But Derek figured you had to stand by someone unless he gave you cause not to, and he felt he had to say something when conflict arrived. It wouldn’t have been right to let it pass. Sure, Billy often said the wrong things, and sometimes those things hurt, but it was because he didn’t know any better. He was ignorant, but his ignorance was never deliberate.

They walked northwest through Manor Park, across the green of Fort Slocum, and soon were up on Georgia Avenue, which many thought of as Main Street, D.C. It was the longest road in the District and had always been the primary northern thoroughfare into Washington, going back to when it was called the 7th Street Pike. All types of businesses lined the strip, and folks moved about the sidewalks day and night. The Avenue was always alive.

The road was white concrete and etched with streetcar tracks. Wood platforms, where riders had once waited to board streetcars, were still up in spots, but the D.C. Transit buses were now the main form of public transportation. A few steel troughs, used to water the horses that had pulled the carts of the junkmen and fruit and vegetable vendors, remained on the Avenue, but in short order all of it would be going the way of those mobile merchants. It was said that the street would soon be paved in asphalt and the tracks, platforms, and troughs would disappear.

Billy’s neighborhood, Brightwood, was mostly white, working- and middle-class, and heavily ethnic: Greeks, Italians, Irish Catholics, and all varieties of Jew. The families had moved from Petworth, 7th Street, Columbia Heights, the H Street corridor in Northeast, and Chinatown, working their way north as they began to make more money in the prosperous years following World War II. They were seeking nicer housing, yards for their children, and driveways for their cars. Also, they were moving away from the colored, whose numbers and visibility had rapidly increased citywide in the wake of reurbanization and forced desegregation.

But even this would be a temporary move. Blockbuster real estate agents in Brightwood had begun moving colored families into white streets with the intention of scaring residents into selling their houses on the cheap. The next stop for upper-Northwest, east-of-the-park whites would be the suburbs of Maryland. No one knew that the events of the next nine years would hasten that final move, though there was a feeling that some sort of change was coming and that it would have to come, an unspoken sense of the inevitable. Still, some denied it as strongly as they denied death.

Derek lived in Park View, south of Petworth, now mostly colored and some working-class whites. He attended Backus Junior High and would go on to Roosevelt High School. Billy went to Paul Junior High and was destined for Coolidge High, which had some coloreds, most of whom were athletes. Many Coolidge kids would go on to college; far fewer from Roosevelt would. Roosevelt had gangs; Coolidge had fraternities. Derek and Billy lived a few short miles apart, but the differences in their lives and prospects were striking.

They walked the east side of Georgia’s 6200 block, passing the open door of the Arrow cleaners, a business that had been in place since 1929, owned and operated by Bill Caludis. They stopped in to say hey to Caludis’s son, Billy, whom Billy Georgelakos knew from church. On the corner sat Clark ’s Men’s Shop, near Marinoff-Pritt and Katz, the Jewish market, where several of the butchers had camp numbers tattooed on their forearms. Nearby was the Sheridan Theater, which was running Decision at Sundown, another Randolph Scott. Derek had seen it with his dad.

They crossed to the other side of Georgia. They walked by Vince’s Agnes Flower Shop, where Billy paused to say a few words with a cute young clerk named Margie, and the Sheridan Waffle Shop, also known as John’s Lunch, a diner owned by John Deoudes. Then it was a watering hole called Sue’s 6210, a Chinese laundry, a barbershop, and on the corner another beer garden, the 6200. “Stagger Lee” was playing on the house juke, its rhythms coming through the 6200’s open door.

On the sidewalk outside the bar, three young white teenagers were alternately talking, smoking cigarettes, and running combs through their hair. One of them was ribbing another, asking if his girlfriend had given him his shiner and swollen face. “Nah,” said the kid with the black eye, “I got jumped by a buncha niggers down at Griffith Stadium,” adding that he was going to be looking for them and “some get-back.” The group quieted as Derek and Billy passed. There were no words spoken, no hard stares, and no trouble. Derek looking at the weak, all-mouth boy and thinking, Prob’ly wasn’t no “buncha niggers” about it, only had to be one.

At the corner of Georgia and Rittenhouse, Billy pointed excitedly at a man wearing a brimmed hat, crossing the street and heading east. With him was a young woman whose face they couldn’t see but whose backside moved in a pleasing way.

“That’s Bo Diddley,” said Billy.

“Thought he lived over on Rhode Island Avenue.”

“That’s what everyone says. But we all been seein’ him around here lately. They say he’s got a spot down there on Rittenhouse.”

“Bo Diddley’s a gunslinger,” said Derek, a warmth rising in his thighs as he checked out the fill of the woman’s skirt.

They walked south to Quackenbos and cut across the lot of the Nativity School, a Catholic convent that housed a nice gymnasium. The nuns there were forever chasing Billy and his friends from the gym. Beyond the lot was Fort Stevens, where Confederate forces had been repelled by the guns and musketry of Union soldiers in July of 1864. The fort had been re-created and preserved, but few tourists now visited the site. The grounds mainly served as a playing field for the neighborhood boys.

“Ain’t nobody up here,” said Derek, looking across the weedy field, the American flag flying on a white mast throwing a wavy shadow on the lawn.

“I’m gonna pick some porichia for my mom,” said Billy.

“Say what?”

Derek and Billy went up a steep grade to its crest, where several cannons sat spaced in a row. The grade dropped to a deep gully that ran along the northern line of the fort. Beside one of the cannons grew patches of spindly plants with hard stems. Billy pulled a few of the plants and shook the dirt off the roots.

“Thought your mama liked them dandelion weeds.”

“That’s rodichia. These here are good, too. You gotta get ’em before they flower, though, ’cause then they’re too bitter. Let’s go give ’em to her and get something to drink.”

Billy lived in a slate-roofed, copper-guttered brick colonial on the 1300 block of Somerset, a few blocks west of the park. In contrast with the row houses of Park View and Petworth, the houses here were detached, with flat, well-tended front lawns. The streets were heavy with Italians and Greeks. The Deoudes family lived on Somerset, as did the Vondas family, and up on Underwood lived a wiry kid named Bobby Boukas, whose parents owned a flower shop. All were members of Billy’s church, St. Sophia. On Tuckerman stood the house where midget actor Johnny Puleo, who had played in the Lancaster-Curtis circus picture, Trapeze, stayed for much of the year. Puleo drove a customized Dodge with wood blocks fitted to the gas and brake pedals.

On the way to the Georgelakos house, Derek stopped to pet a muscular tan boxer who was usually chained outside the front of the Deoudes residence. The dog’s name was Greco. Greco sometimes walked with the police at night on their foot patrols and was known to be quick, loyal, and tough.

Derek got down on his haunches and let Greco smell his hand. The dog pushed his muzzle into Derek’s fingers, and Derek patted his belly and rubbed behind his ears.

“Crazy,” said Billy.

“What you mean?”

“Usually he rises up and shows his teeth.”

“To colored boys, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“He likes me.” Derek’s eyes softened as he admired the dog. “One day, I’ma get me one just like him, too.”

TWO

AFTER DELIVERING THE porichia to Billy’s mother, the boys returned to Fort Stevens. There they saw two brothers, Dominic and Angelo Martini, standing in the middle of the field.

“You wanna move on?” said Billy. The last time they’d met, Dominic Martini had ridden Derek hard.

“Nah,” said Derek. “It’s all right.”

They approached the boys. Dominic, sixteen, stood a couple inches shy of six feet and had the build of a man in his twenties. His skin was dark, as was his perfectly pompadoured hair. His black eyes were flat. He had dropped out of Coolidge on his last birthday and was a pump jockey at the Esso station south of Georgia and Piney Branch. His brother, Angelo, fourteen, was similarly complected but lacked the size, good looks, and confidence of Dominic. His slumped posture said that he was aware of the difference.

“Billy,” said Dominic. “See you got your shadow with you today.”

“His name’s Derek,” said Billy, a forced strength to his voice.

“Relax, Billy boy.” Dominic smiled, dragged on his cigarette, and gave Derek the once-over. “Wanna fight?”

Derek had expected the challenge. The first time they’d met, he had seen Martini do this to another kid who was minding his own and crossing the park. Dominic, he supposed, liked to lead with the question, let everyone know from the start that he was in control. It knocked the other guy off balance and was a way for Dominic to gain the immediate upper hand.

“Not today,” said Derek.

“Maybe you wanna run to yo’ mama instead.”

Dominic’s mention of his mother and his idea of a colored accent caused Derek to involuntarily ball his fists. He took a breath and relaxed his hands.

“Now, look here, I don’t mean you gotta mix with me,” said Dominic. “Wouldn’t be fair. I don’t pick on no one littler, see?”

You ain’t all that much bigger than me, thought Derek.

“I was thinkin’ of you and Angie,” said Dominic, and as the words left his mouth, Angelo’s eyes dropped.

“I got no quarrel with your brother,” said Derek.

“Knock it off, Dom,” said Angelo.

“I’m talkin’ to Derek,” said Dominic.

Derek knew he could take Angelo. Shoot, the boy’s chin was down on his chest; he was already beat. Derek figured that Angelo feared colored boys the same way many other white boys did. And that fear would be the difference. But there wasn’t anything in kicking Angelo’s ass for Derek. Wasn’t any way he could win.

“You got your mitts?” said Derek.

“Yeah, we got ’em,” said Dominic. “So?”

“Me and Billy,” said Derek, “we’ll take y’all on in a ball game instead. How about that?”

“Fine,” said Dominic. “But first say you won’t fight.”

“Dominic,” said Angelo in a pleading way.

“I got no need to fight,” said Derek.

“That ain’t the same thing. Say what I told you to say or step to my brother and put up your hands.”

“Okay, then,” said Derek. “I won’t fight.” He didn’t mind saying it. He had not backed up a step, folded his arms, or looked away. His body said that he was not afraid. Dominic could see it. He knew.

“All right,” said Dominic. For a moment, Derek saw something human in Martini’s eyes. “Let’s play ball.”

The Martini boys had a bat, a hardball, and two mitts stashed in the ammo bunker built into the base of the fort’s hill. Basically, the game was stickball, but without the wall. Base hits were calculated by landmarks-the flagpole, the fort’s commemorative plaque, et cetera-with the crest of the hill the ultimate goal. A ball hit over “the wall” of the fortification line was a home run.

Derek had the superior swing, and even Billy was a better athlete than the Martinis. Soon it was apparent that the contest was done. When Derek knocked out his third homer, Dominic said he was bored and stopped the game. After putting the playing equipment back in the bunker, Dominic turned to Derek.

“Say, you ever had any, man?”

“Sure have,” said Derek, which was a lie. He had rubbed a little over-the-shirt tit off this older girl in his neighborhood, had a reputation for starting the young boys off, but that was all.

“Sure you have,” said Dominic, laughing a little and lighting a cigarette. “Me, I get it all the time.”

He told Derek about the Fort Club, which he and his friends had recently formed, and how they drank beer and pulled trains on girls inside the bunker on Friday nights. Derek issued a small shrug, enough to stave off another conflict, not enough to let Dominic think that he cared. It wasn’t the reaction Dominic wanted. He pulled something from his pocket and held it in front of Derek.

“You know what this is?”

“That’s a cherry bomb.”

“How about I set it off?”

“Go ahead.”

Martini lit the fuse off his smoke and calmly dropped the bomb into the muzzle of one of the cannons. The cherry bomb exploded, and its report was surprisingly loud. A janitor came out of the church, yelled something at the boys, and walked toward them. Angelo and Billy jogged in the direction of 13th Street. Derek and Dominic followed the other two out of the park, walking at a leisurely pace.

“You and me,” said Dominic, “we ain’t gonna run from nothin’, right?”

Derek had the feeling that this afternoon would come to some kind of bad, the way a boy always knows that the direction of the day has turned. It was as if he were walking, willingly, from the sunny side of the street to the side covered in shadow. He had been raised to understand the clear difference between right and wrong, and he knew that, right about now, he should head back to the diner with Billy. But he was attracted to that shadowed side just the same. So when Dominic suggested they go over to “the Sixth,” just to “fuck around some,” Derek did not object.

THE SIXTH PRECINCT station was on Nicholson, set to the left of Brightwood Elementary. The station structure, all brick fronted with columns, looked like a small schoolhouse itself. A goldfish pond was set beside the concrete drive that horseshoed the rear of the station. The boys approached it from the right side, grouped themselves beside a tall oak, and studied the building through a chain-link fence.

“There’s the cell block right there,” said Dominic, pointing to the right side of the building. “They ain’t got nothin’ but old spring cots for you to sleep on.”

“How do you know?” said Billy, challenging Martini but secretly impressed.

“Our old man told us,” said Angelo. Their father had slept off public drunks in the station a couple of times in the past year.

“Not just that,” said Dominic, annoyed. “I been in there myself.” He had never actually spent the night in the jail, though he had aspirations. Dominic had been written up for a field investigation, which was less dramatic than “a record,” for throwing a rock through a window of the elementary school.

Back behind the main structure was a garage housing several Harleys for the motorcycle cops. One of the precinct’s three squad cars, a high-horse Ford, was parked in the lot, beside a black unmarked, also a Ford. The boys of Brightwood recognized the squad car numbers, 61 to 63, printed on the sides of the vehicles. They knew the names of the desk sergeant and homicide cops and the beat police as well. Among them was an Irish cop whose status had been elevated to legend after he had taken a.45 slug in the gut. The Sixth also had one uniformed colored cop, William Davis, and the hated Officer Pappas, a Greek who was especially tough on kids. He had made it his mission to bust the fathers and sons, some of whom were fellow Greeks, who ran numbers and occasionally fenced out of their businesses up on the Avenue. Pappas had a pencil-thin mustache, which the boys thought of as a French look that bordered on feminine. They had nicknamed him Jacques. When he was on foot patrol, they taunted him from rooftops and alleys, calling out to him with high-pitched voices, “Jaaacques, oh, Jaaacques.”

Officer Davis came from the front of the building and walked to squad car number 62. Davis was tall and lean, his uniform perfectly pressed, his service revolver snapped into its holster. Derek wondered what you had to do to become a police. Must be something to it to make Davis walk the way he was walking. Chin up, close to a swagger. It seemed like the man had pride.

Dominic Martini picked up a rock. Derek grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t,” said Derek.

Derek’s action surprised both of them, so much so that Dominic didn’t resist. He dropped the rock, shook his hand free, and stared at Davis.

“Look at him,” said Martini with contempt. “He really thinks he’s somethin’.”

He is, thought Derek Strange, studying the police officer as he got into the Ford. That’s a man right there.

BUZZ STEWART FED gas into the tank of a ’57 DeSoto Fireflite, a two-tone red-and-white sedan fitted out with whitewalls and skirts. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he worked the pump. He wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere near the tanks, but there wasn’t anyone at the station, including his boss, big enough to tell him not to. As he replaced the pump handle and took the money from the square behind the wheel, he thumb-flicked ash off his Marlboro and put the smoke back in his thin-lipped mouth.

“Hey, Buzz,” said Dominic Martini, walking by with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand.

“Hey,” mumbled Stewart.

Stewart watched Martini, an Italian kid who worked weekend nights, join a group of younger boys at the edge of the Esso station lot. One of the boys was Martini’s no-balls brother. The other was some fattish kid, looked like another spaghetti-bender to him. The third kid was a nigger. Now, why would Martini want to run with a colored boy? He’d have to give Dom some shit about it the next time they talked.

Stewart walked across the lot, patting his Brylcreemed blond hair. He admired his veins, like root tendrils, standing up on the inside of his forearms and popping out on his biceps. He felt strong. He went six-three and one ninety, none of it waste. Some guys thought they could challenge him, all that harder-you-fall bullshit they had to tell themselves ’cause they were small. Stewart could back up his size and didn’t need to be pushed to prove it.

He went inside the station. The manager, built-guy once, fat-guy now, was sitting behind his desk, doing his usual heap of nothing. “Party Doll” was coming from the radio, Buddy Knox with his stutter-step vocals, then that nice guitar break with the walkin’ rhythm behind it coming in right after. Stewart liked that one. It wasn’t no Link, but it was nice.

“We talk?” said Stewart.

“Go ‘head,” said the manager, not meeting Stewart’s eyes.

“When am I gonna get a chance in them bays?”

“When you take the course.”

“I could take apart an engine and put it back together with my eyes closed.”

“Maybe they could use you at the circus,” said the manager. “But the sign out front says ‘Certified Mechanics.’ You wanna be one, parent company requires you to take the course.”

Fuck a course, thought Stewart. Last course I took was at Montgomery Blair, and that was when I was sixteen. I didn’t need no courses then and I sure as hell didn’t need no high school degree. You didn’t have to sit in no classroom to know how to work on cars.

“Maybe later,” said Stewart, jerking a thumb toward the clock on the wall. “I’m out.” He took the bill roll he kept in his pocket, undid the change belt he wore around his waist, and put both on the manager’s desk.

“Wait for me to count it out,” said the manager.

“If it’s wrong, you’ll let me know.”

“You in a hurry?”

“Yeah,” said Stewart. “I got places to go and people to meet, and none of ’em are here.”

Stewart walked out.

“Big maaan,” said the manager, but only after Stewart had left the office.

Buzz Stewart got into his bored-out ’50 Ford, outfitted with headers and dropped near to the ground. The paint job, a purple body over a blue interior, had been customized. He and his crowd named their cars and scripted the names on their right front fenders. His read “Lavender Blue,” because of the color scheme, and also for that Sammy Turner song. He was proud of the name. He had thought of it all by himself.

Stewart cranked the ignition and drove north out of D.C., toward his parents’ house in Silver Spring.

A little ways over the District line he drove under the B amp;O bridge and passed the Canada Dry plant on the left. He and his boys used to hit the plant on Saturdays, when there wasn’t but one security guard on duty, and steal as many cases of ginger ale as they could carry. In a nearby wooded area they dumped out the soda, then turned in the bottles to local merchants for pocket change. You could make a few bucks like that, but it had ended one day a few years back when a gray-haired guard happened upon him and his group. Luckily, Stewart’s best bud, Shorty Hess, was behind the guard and knocked him out with a crack to the skull from a length of pipe he kept slipped down his jeans. They were afraid at first he’d killed him, but it didn’t make the newspapers or nothin,’ so they guessed the old guy lived. Since then, he and his buddies had gone on to bigger things, like break-ins. For fun they liked to race cars, drink beer and hard liquor, run coloreds off the sidewalks, and fuck girls. They also liked to fight.

Stewart drove to his house. He lived with his folks in a detached place on Mississippi Avenue, between Sligo and Piney Branch. The house, a square of bricks fronted by a wooden porch, sat on nearly a half acre of land. In the back was a freestanding garage where Stewart worked on vehicles. Beside the garage ran a large garden plot where his mother would plant vegetables-corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, and the like. Stewart had recently turned the soil for her, as she would begin planting her summer crop soon.

Inside he found his father, Albert, sitting in his upholstered chair in the living room, drinking Old German beer and smoking a straight Camel. Al bought his beer for $2.50 a case and went through a case every two days. He was watching a Cisco Kid rerun on TV. Albert was as big as his son and nearly bald. Like his son, he was neither handsome nor ugly, with no features of prominence or note, a bland, perpetually scowling man, thin lipped, small eyed, quick to anger and judge.

“What you doin’?” said Al, not turning his head.

“Nuthin’,” said Buzz, staring openmouthed at the TV.

“You get paid?”

“Yesterday.”

“You eighteen now, boy. Time you started paying rent.”

“I know it.”

“Then pay it up.”

“I will.”

“When?”

Stewart went past the kitchen, where his mother, Pat, was sitting at a Formica-top table, smoking a cigarette. She wore a housedress with a floral print, one of two she had bought years ago at Montgomery Ward’s and wore on alternate days. Her gray hair was pinned back in a bun. She still had lines around her mouth from when she used to laugh. Her eyes were a washed-out blue. Relatives on her side claimed she had been pretty once.

“ Carlton,” she said, using her son’s given name.

“Yeah, Ma.”

“You staying for dinner?”

“Nah, I’m going out. I’ll take a sandwich or somethin’, though.”

“You think this is a restaurant?” called Al from the living room.

“Yeah,” said Stewart, raising his voice. “Can I get a steak? Make it medium. And I’ll take one of them fine brews you drinkin’, too.”

“Stupid sumbitch,” said Al.

Buzz Stewart went down to his room.

THREE

FROM THE SIXTH Precinct station house, the boys walked back up to the Avenue. Dominic Martini bought a bottle of Coke from a red cooler up at the Esso station and assured his boss he’d be there on time for the late shift. On his way back to the group, he said, “Hey, Buzz,” to a big guy, his sleeves rolled up to show off his biceps, who was pumping gas.

Dominic passed the bottle to his brother, who then passed it without thinking to Derek. Derek took a pull from the bottle and handed it back to Dominic. Dominic wiped the neck off before putting it to his mouth. As he did this, he locked eyes with Derek.

Eventually, they made their way to Ida’s, the department store up on the east-side corner of Georgia and Quackenbos. In addition to selling household goods, the store clothed most of the kids in the area, colored and white alike. The PF Flyers on Derek’s feet were from Ida’s, as was the old Boy Scout uniform in Billy Georgelakos’s closet. Ida’s was the uptown equivalent of the downtown Morton’s.

The boys entered the store, hit one of the aisles, and went toward the back. The employees were busy with customers and no one had taken note of them yet. There was no good reason for them to be here, as none of them had any money to spend, but Derek had a good idea of their intent. Still, he went along. Almost immediately he saw Dominic take an Ace comb out of a bin and slip it into his back pocket in one smooth motion. Angelo, sweat on his upper lip, did the same.

“Let’s get outta here, Derek,” said Billy.

“Yeah, you pussies take off,” said Dominic.

“Who you callin’ pussy?” said Derek, regretting his words as they left his tongue.

“Do somethin’, then,” said Dominic. “Prove you got some balls on you, Derek.”

“I will,” said Derek Strange.

Dominic smiled. “See you out on the street.”

Derek went farther into the store and cut down another aisle as the Martini brothers vanished. Billy stayed with Derek. Derek came upon the tool and hardware section, saw a padlock, thought his father could use it for something. He must have stood there for a full minute, staring at the lock. He looked around, saw no one in the aisle, and slipped the padlock into the right front pocket of his blue jeans. He started walking for the front of the store, Billy at his heels.

As they reached the entrance doors, he felt a hand grip one of his biceps. He tried to shake it off and run, but the person who held him held fast.

“Hold on there,” said a man’s voice. “You’re not going anywhere, son.”

Derek gave up his struggle. He was nailed, and down somewhere deep he knew that he deserved it. He cursed himself silently and then cursed himself out loud.

“Stupid,” said Derek.

“That’s right,” said the man. He was a stocky white man with broad shoulders. He wore a cardigan vest, an open-necked shirt, and had a pair of eyeglasses perched atop his head of black hair. Strange read the name tag on his chest: “Harold Fein.”

“You have anything in your pockets, son?” said Fein, turning to Billy.

“No,” said Billy.

“Then get out of here, now.”

“Can’t I wait for my friend?”

Derek felt some affection for Billy then, the way he’d called him “friend.” Until now, Billy was just a kid he’d been put together with, almost by accident.

“If you’re gonna wait,” said Fein, still holding Derek’s arm, “you’re gonna wait outside. Now, I know you, and your mother, too. Don’t ever let me see you involved in anything like this again.”

Billy said, “You won’t,” but it was to their backs, as Fein was already leading Derek to the back of the store. They went through a narrow opening into a low-ceilinged stockroom.

Fein instructed Derek to take a seat. There was a padded chair behind a desk cluttered with paperwork and a hard chair beside the desk. Derek figured the padded chair was Mr. Fein’s. He sat in the hard one. On the desk was a triangular block of wood with a brass plate. It read “Receiving Manager.” Also on the desk were framed photographs of a little girl and what looked to be a two-year-old boy.

“What’s your name?” said Fein, still standing.

“Derek Strange.”

“Where do you live?”

Derek told him he lived down on Princeton Place, in Park View.

“I’ve got to go check the manifest on a truck,” said Fein. “You just sit right there. Put the padlock on the desk before I forget about it. And don’t think about runnin’ out, ’cause I know where to find you, hear?”

“Yessir.”

It took a while for Fein to come back. Maybe thirty minutes or so, but it seemed like hours to Derek. He was miserable, thinking on what his mother and father would say when they got the phone call. Angry, too, for allowing himself to get baited by Dominic Martini, a boy he didn’t even respect. Why he felt he had to prove himself to Martini, he couldn’t say. Derek had done some bad things, and he’d do more bad things in the future, he knew, but he vowed that he would never do a stupid bad thing for no reason again. He hadn’t been raised that way.

Fein returned and took his seat. He shuffled the papers on his desk and put them in some kind of order. Then he folded his hands, rested them in his lap, and turned his attention to Derek.

“You did wrong today,” said Fein.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Fein exhaled slowly. “I saw those other boys steal those combs. There’s no trick to it; we have mirrors up in the corners of the store. Do you know why I didn’t grab them first?”

“No, sir.”

“Because it wouldn’t have done them any good. I’ve seen them around. The older one, especially, is already… Well, he’s on a path. I’m not going to speed things up for him, if you know what I mean.”

Derek didn’t, exactly. Later he would think on this day and understand.

“So now you’re wondering, why me?” said Fein. “It’s because you’re not like that other boy. I watched you and your friend in that aisle. You hesitated, because you know the difference between right and wrong. Then you made the wrong decision. But listen, it’s not the end of the world, if you know you made the wrong decision.”

Derek nodded, looking into the man’s eyes. They had softened somewhat since their first encounter.

“Derek, right?”

“Yes.”

“You know what you wanna be when you grow up?”

“A police,” said Derek, without even turning it over in his mind.

“Well, there you go. You need to start thinking on how you’re going to live your life, even now. Everything you do as a young man can affect what you become or don’t become later on.”

Derek nodded. It was unclear to him where the man was going with this. But it sounded like good sense.

“You can go,” said Fein.

“What?”

“Go home. I’m not going to call your parents or the police. Think about what I’ve told you today.” Fein tapped his temple with a thick finger. “Think.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Derek, rising up out of his chair as if shocked.

Harold Fein moved his eyeglasses down from the top his head and fitted them on the bridge of his nose. He returned his attention to the work waiting on his desk.

Billy was sitting on the curb outside the store. He stood as Derek came to meet him.

“You in trouble?” said Billy.

“Nah,” said Derek, “I’m all right. Where the Martini boys at?”

“They left.”

“Figured they would.”

“We better be gettin’ back to the diner, Derek, it’s late.”

Derek put a hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Thanks, man.”

“For what?”

“For waitin’ on me,” said Derek. Billy ducked his head and grinned.

They walked southeast on Missouri Avenue, toward Kennedy Street. The shadows of late afternoon had begun to lengthen, and they quickened their steps. Down in Manor Park a car went by, its radio playing “You’re So Fine” by that group the Falcons, had that singer Derek’s father liked. The sound of it, and the sight of the colored men in the car, made Derek smile. He felt clean, like he’d just walked out of church. The way you do when you confess.

BY MOST FOLKS’ estimation, Frank Vaughn had it pretty good. He had survived a tour of Okinawa, married a girl with a nice set of legs, fathered a son, bought a house in a white neighborhood, and was making a fair living with a pension waiting for him down the road. Men gave him wide berth, and women still looked him over when he walked down the street. Coming up on forty, he was where most men claimed they wanted to be.

Vaughn had a sip of coffee, dragged on his cigarette, and fitted it in a crenellated plastic ashtray his son, Ricky, had bought for him at Kresge’s for Father’s Day. Imagine a kid buying his old man an ashtray. Might as well have given him a card to go with it, said, “Here you go, Dad, hope you croak.” But the kid wasn’t clever enough for that. The ashtray must have been Olga’s idea, her idea of a joke. Like she’d last a week if he wasn’t around. What would she do for a living? No one pays you to shop, watch television, or talk on the phone with your girlfriends. Least not that he was aware.

Vaughn snatched the sports page from the newspaper sections piled at his feet. Redskins president George Marshall, in the process of renegotiating a lease with Calvin Griffith, was threatening to build a new stadium down at the Armory grounds if he didn’t get his terms. Former welterweight champ Johnny Saxton had tried to hang himself in a jail cell after he was caught robbing a five-and-dime. Saxton, who had beaten Kid Gavilan, Carmen Basilio, and Tony DeMarco before he hit the skids, had previously been arrested for trying to steal a fur cape and a pack of smokes. Former Washington Senator Jim Piersall, another candidate for the laughing house, said he was “unhappy” about being traded from Boston to Cleveland. When, exactly, thought Vaughn, had Piersall ever been happy? Audacious and Negro Minstrel were the long-shot daily double picks at Laurel. And the Nats had taken the Orioles two to one when Killebrew doubled in the eighth.

Vaughn dropped the newspaper on the floor and yawned. There was nothing about the straight life that excited him. These days, he could only get jazzed when he walked out that front door, to his other life on the street.

He sat back in his chair and took in Olga, who was building sandwiches on the counter beside the sink. She was wearing black pedal pushers she had picked up at Kann’s, a top from Lansburgh’s over in Langley Park, and a new pair of shoes on her feet. All of it courtesy of his Central Charge card. It kept her happy and it kept her out of his hair, so what the hell.

Olga walked toward him, carrying his sandwich. She had a plain face that had hardened over the years. The heavy eye shadow she wore, the hair-sprayed helmet of hair, the pancake makeup, and the red-red lipstick did not enliven her, but rather reminded Vaughn of a corpse. She had kept her figure, at least, though it had flattened out somewhat in the back. She still had nice legs.

“Here you go, honey,” she said, putting the plate down in front of him.

“Thanks, baby doll,” he said.

Olga picked up one foot and wiggled it around. “Capezios. You like ’em? I got ’em over at Hahn’s.”

“They’re all right,” he said with a scowl. He wasn’t angry that she’d bought them. He couldn’t have cared less. But he was expected to react this way. And now she’d justify the purchase.

“I needed a new pair,” she said. “And I’ve been saving every place else. Honey, I’ve got a full book of S amp;H Green Stamps…”

He blocked out the rest of it. Her voice reminded him of flies buzzing around his head. Annoying but harmless. He grunted almost inaudibly, thinking of how he must have looked. Sitting there, acting like he was listening but not really listening at all, giving her his canine grin, his eyes heavy lidded and amused, slowly nodding his head.

Finally, when she was done running her mouth, he said, “C’mon, Olga, let’s eat.”

He finished his cigarette while she went to the stairs by the foyer and called up for their son. He heard her add, “And go down and get Alethea, tell her to come up, too.”

As Olga placed the other setups and drinks around the table, Ricky came in, twelve years old and flouncy-bouncy in that way of his that made Vaughn fear his son was gonna be a swish, and took a chair. He had been up in his bedroom, standing in front of the mirror, most likely, doing the twist or some other crazy dance he had learned from watching that guy, Dick Clark. It hadn’t been long since Ricky was nuts over Pick Temple, that TV cowboy, and now his interests had gone to girls in sweaters. Vaughn hoped. He loved his kid but had never understood him. He should have tried to get closer to him, especially when he was younger, but he didn’t know how. No one gave out road maps on how to be a father. Vaughn tapped ash, thinking, All you can do is the best you can.

Alethea entered the kitchen wearing one of those old uniforms of hers, a shapeless white dress that could not hide her shape. Vaughn watched her walk to the table, hoping to get a look at her legs as the sunlight from the kitchen window went through her dress. She held her head erect and her shoulders square as she crossed the room and took a seat. She wore no makeup, and her hair was hidden under some kind of patterned scarf she always donned when working at their house.

Vaughn put her at about forty. She wasn’t young, but she was allwoman. He wondered what she did to her husband when the lights went out. He thought about it often. Sometimes he thought about it when he made love to his wife.

You couldn’t call Alethea beautiful or anything close to it. Her skin was dark and she had those prominent colored features that Vaughn didn’t go for. No one was gonna mistake her for Lena Horne. Her eyes, though, they did it for him. Deep brown, liquid, and knowing. If there was something, one thing about her, it had to be her eyes.

Olga had a seat at the kitchen table. Alethea closed her eyes, put her hands together, and soundlessly moved her lips. The Vaughns were not themselves religious, but they sat quietly while Alethea said her grace. When she was done, they began to eat.

“How’s it going today, Alethea?” said Olga.

“I’m on my schedule. Gonna get to that laundry next.”

“You feeling okay?”

“Fine.”

“How’s your family?”

“They’re fine. Everyone’s fine.”

Same old conversation, thought Vaughn. Olga, influenced by her girlfriends in the neighborhood who sat around talking about segregation and civil rights when they weren’t talking about their nails or pushing around mah-jongg tiles. Olga, with her guilt about paying Alethea “only” ten dollars a day, when that was the fee Alethea herself had quoted from day one. Olga, still trying to make Alethea feel like she was one of the family; Alethea polite but not giving up anything of herself. And why should she? For Chrissakes, she was their maid. Get in, do your work, earn your money, and get back downtown to your people. Vaughn understood this, but Olga, who wasn’t out there, could not. Okay, so some folks were pushing for equality, and Vaughn had no problem with that. But nobody wanted to mix, not when you got down to it. People wanted to be around their own kind.

“Olga,” said Vaughn, “give me some potato chips, pickles, or somethin’, will ya, honey? This is… this sandwich would leave a bird hungry, right here.”

Anything to shut up Olga’s yap. But when she returned to the table with a jar of sweet pickles, she tried again.

“Alethea, isn’t it awful about that boy down in Mississippi?”

“Yes,” said Alethea, “it sure is.”

“They lynched that boy!”

“That’s what the newspapers say.” Alethea’s voice was void of emotion. She kept her eyes averted from Olga as she replied.

“The way they treat those Negroes down South,” said Olga, shaking her head. “When do you think this will stop?”

“I don’t know,” said Alethea.

“Do you think it will get better for your people soon?”

Alethea shrugged and said, “I just don’t know.”

When they were done, Olga cleared the table. Vaughn watched as she separated Alethea’s plate and glass from the others she had put in the sink. Later, Olga would wash Alethea’s things more thoroughly than she did the rest. Vaughn noticed that Alethea was watching Olga arrange the dishes.

Alethea turned back to the table and, for a moment, looked into Vaughn’s eyes.

FOUR

DOWN IN HIS room, Buzz Stewart turned on the fourteen-inch Philco that sat on his dresser and switched the dial to channel 5. The Saturday edition of The Milt Grant Show was still in progress. Local band Terry and the Pirates were onstage, and the kids were dancing up a storm.

Milt Grant’s show was on Monday through Saturday on WTTG. On Saturday, Milt went up against the nationally telecast American Bandstand. Everyone knew that Milt Grant had come up with the concept first, but the preppy kids and those whose parents had desk jobs had gone over to Dick Clark. To Stewart, the kids on Bandstand looked like pussies and fakes. The kids with rougher edges and rough tastes, greasers and the like, and those who liked their rock and roll on the raw side, had stayed with Milt Grant. Hell, Link Wray headed Grant’s house band. That was enough to make Stewart go for him right there.

Many of the famed Milt Grant’s Record Hops were held in the Silver Spring Armory, not too far from Stewart’s house. At these events, packed to the walls with kids from local high schools, Stewart saw acts like the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and that wild boy, Little Richard. Stewart wasn’t much of a dancer. At the hops, he leaned his back against a wall, his sleeves rolled up to show off his arms, and watched the girls. But sometimes, especially when the colored acts got up there and cut loose, he wished he’d learned a few steps.

After the Grant show was done, Stewart took a shower. Then he returned to his bedroom, where his mother had placed a turkey sandwich and a bottle of RC Cola on his nightstand. He played some singles on his Cavalier phonograph while he ate and dressed. First was “Bip Bop Bip,” by Don Covay, on the local Colt 45 record label. Then a Flamingos tune, and “Annie Had a Baby,” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and finally, as was his pre-Saturday night ritual, Link’s “Rumble” before he went out the door. Anything by the Raymen got him fired up.

He said good-bye to his mother, sitting at the table, smoking another cigarette. She told him to have fun and he said that he would. Out in the living room, his father, half lit now, looked him over. Stewart wore black Levi peg-legs, thick-soled loafers called “bombers,” and a bright orange button-down shirt under black leather. His hair was thick with Brylcreem and it rode high and stiff on his head.

“Where’d you get that shirt?” said Albert.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“You look like a nigger.”

Buzz Stewart left the house.

DOWN IN THE basement of the Vaughns’ split-level, Alethea folded the family’s clothing, warm from the dryer, on an ironing board set under a naked bulb. She timed her day so that she could have this relatively light chore after lunch, when she tended to grow tired. All that food sitting in your stomach, especially that bland, tasteless food Olga Vaughn made, just made you want to lie down and close your eyes.

It was quiet down here, pleasant and cool. All the toys sitting around the basement, things Ricky didn’t use anymore and probably never had used much, gathering dust. In Alethea’s opinion, they had spoiled that boy, not an uncommon thing to do with an only child. When really all any child needed was love, food, shelter, and a good example of how grown men and women should conduct their lives.

Olga had become barren after the birth of Ricky, Alethea guessed, which was a shame for the boy. A child needed a sibling to play with and also to confide in when things got tough. Frank Vaughn was not the kind of man who could find a way to be both a father and a friend to his son. For Frank, it took too much effort and thought. He should have spent more time with Ricky, though, even if it was not in his nature, as the child had become something of a mama’s boy. Boys like that grew up to be lovers and layabouts, the kind of men who leaned on their women far too much. But Ricky was smart and kind. Most likely, despite what he hadn’t gotten in his home, he would find his way.

Alethea stopped for a moment to stretch her hurting back. The pain could have been a mind thing, thinking too much on the fact that she’d turned forty a couple of years ago. But she was getting out of bed slower most mornings, no question about it. Wasn’t her imagination or the date on her birth certificate giving her those pains. You worked this kind of labor six days a week all these years, what did you expect? She wasn’t going to think on it all that much, because none of that worrying ever did anyone any kind of good.

The Lord would show her the way.

She could see a doctor about her back, she supposed, but money was tight, like it had always been. Another ten, twelve dollars a week would help, and she felt certain she could get it, spread out among the six households she worked on her regular schedule. Wasn’t one of those families could argue that she didn’t deserve a two-dollar raise. But seventy-two would put her over the salary of her husband, who was making sixty-five a week on his job, and that would be a problem right there. You never wanted to be making more money than your husband. A situation like that, it could kill the lion in your man.

Alethea folded a pair of Olga Vaughn’s white panties.

“Oh, Lord,” said Alethea, chuckling at the thought of Olga, trying to make conversation at lunch.

Lunch should have been Alethea’s time of rest, but truly, at the Vaughns’ it was the most challenging portion of her day. Olga insisted she eat with the family when all Alethea wanted was one half hour of peace. She accepted it, the way you had to accept most anything your boss asked of you, but it was a chore, more work, like being forced to take a role in a play. When Olga was talking to you, she was so aware that she was talking to you: Look at me, world, I’m talking to a “Negro.” The whole lunch thing was her way of telling herself, and her friends, most likely, that she was pure of heart, better than those people “down South.” But she wasn’t any better. Matter of fact, she was worse, ’cause with a race hater from anywhere, least you knew where you stood. If Olga was so pure, then why was she separating Alethea’s dishes in the sink?

Don’t want to get any of that colored on you, do you, girl?

“Forget it,” she said aloud, not liking her resentment, knowing it to be a trait that went against her Christian teachings. To herself she said a small prayer of forgiveness.

She began to fold Frank Vaughn’s underwear, extra-large-size boxers. Big man, Frank. She wondered… never mind. Wasn’t a sin to think about it. It was just natural curiosity about a physical thing, is all it was. She knew, though, that he studied her in that way. She felt his eyes on her all the time. But she never did think of him like that, not even for a moment. In any kind of world he was not her type.

Frank Vaughn would be upstairs in their bedroom now, taking his afternoon nap, like he always did before going off to work. Probably he went off to sleep quickly, like uncomplicated people tended to do. That was Frank Vaughn in a word: uncomplicated. If you asked, she’d bet he would tell you the same. Unlike his wife, this was a person who knew who he was. Not good, exactly, but clear. He must have done bad things on his job, had to have done bad things, she supposed, ’cause that’s the kind of job it was. In the end he was just a man. All man, if you had to say it short.

Anyway, this family here was no business of hers. She would always be polite to them, but she was uninterested in being their friend. This was something Olga and most “good” white folks would never understand. The thing of it was, she had her own friends, took pleasure in her own world. Her own family, too. A good man and a good provider who she loved fierce, and two strong, fine-hearted sons.

AFTER FRANK VAUGHN woke from his nap, he showered and shaved in his master bathroom. He left both the door to his bedroom and the bathroom door closed, as it blocked out the rock-and-roll music coming from Ricky’s room.

Vaughn could blame himself for that, as he had bought most of Ricky’s records. Occasionally he paid retail down at the Music Box on 10th and at the Jay Perri Record Shop, next to the Highland Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southeast. But most of the time he got them hot from this colored fence he knew down near 14th and U. This fence owed him a favor for something Vaughn didn’t do to his kid brother, so often these records came free.

The records made Ricky happy, and that made Vaughn feel good. Still, Vaughn couldn’t stand the sound of the shit. Sinatra, Perry Como, and them, they were real singers, and some of the broads like Peggy Lee, June Christy, and, God, Julie London were pretty good, too. Elvis? He sang like a hopped-up spade, and the way he wiggled his hips was just, well, it was suspicious. These days, at least you didn’t hear him every time you turned on the radio. Presley was in Germany now, wearing a uniform. Kids had short memories, so maybe he would just fade away. In Vaughn’s opinion, that was good.

Vaughn found his can of shaving cream between Olga’s private things, a box of Modess and a bottle of Lysol douche. He lathered his face and used a straight razor to shave himself. He had large features, jowly cheeks, and a squarish head. His teeth were crooked and widely spaced. His eyes were blue and lazy. He liked to think of himself as a less pretty Mitchum. Some of the younger guys at work called him Hound Dog. He figured it had something to with his determination on the job and something to do with his looks. And there was that goddamn Elvis song. The name didn’t bother him, though. Long as they respected him, he didn’t mind.

He dressed in a white shirt, black tie, and gray Robert Hall suit. He opened the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed and extracted his.38. He checked the load, then slipped the service revolver into the clip-on holster he wore on his belt.

Olga came into the room. She smiled crookedly and ran her hands down the thighs of her pedal pushers. He walked over to her, pulled her to him, and kissed her roughly on the mouth. She grabbed him tightly around the waist.

“You’re gonna make my gun go off.”

“And you’ll mess up my lipstick.”

“I already did,” he said, showing her his smile. He pushed himself against her to let her know he had it. Tired of her as he got sometimes, she was still his lover as well as his wife. Olga did like to buck. She had always been a wildcat in the sack, once you tuned her up.

“Let’s go out this weekend,” she said. “See some music and have a few cocktails. We haven’t done that for a while.”

“Where to?”

“Xavier Cugat’s playing down at Casino Royal.”

“The hell with him.”

“ Abbe Lane ’s on the bill.”

“Okay, baby doll. We’ll see.”

He kissed her again, slipping her his tongue before breaking the embrace. He liked to give her something to remember him by while he was down at work.

Vaughn left her there. He didn’t bother to knock on Ricky’s door to say good-bye.

Down in the foyer, he took his raincoat and hat from the closet. The April evenings were cool and damp, so he would need the warmth. Also, he liked the way the getup looked. The coat-and-hat rig reminded him of the cover of No One Cares, with Sinatra sitting at the bar, staring into his whiskey glass, looking as though he’d just been punched in the heart. A night wolf, wounded and alone. Vaughn liked to think of himself just like that. The image pleased him.

Alethea came up the stairs as he was about to go out the door. She was wearing a clean raincoat over her street clothes and had removed her scarf and combed out her hair.

“You wanna ride somewhere?” said Vaughn. “I’m heading into town.”

“I’m just gonna walk up to Georgia and catch the bus. It takes me straight home.”

“You sure?”

“Thank you, but I’m fine.”

He was usually going to work as she was getting off. He always offered her a lift, and her answer was almost always the same.

“I ask you somethin’?” said Vaughn.

“Long as it’s not too personal,” she said, letting him know in her tone that she would take no offense either way.

“Are you happy?” said Vaughn.

Alethea Strange hesitated. It was an odd and unexpected question, but Frank Vaughn’s eyes said that he truly wanted to know.

“Most of the time,” she said. “I’d say nearly all the time I am. Yes.”

“You look it,” said Vaughn.

Outside, Frank Vaughn got into his ’57 Dodge Royal, a two-tone, two-door rose metallic V-8 with a push-button transmission parked in the driveway of his house, on a suburban block between Wheaton and Silver Spring. Alethea Strange walked toward Georgia Avenue and stood at the bus stop with two other domestics who were waiting for a D.C. Transit bus to take them south over the District line, to the familiar faces, smells, and musical cadences of the voices that told them they were home.

HIS FATHER HAD got his blood up, but that feeling soon passed when Buzz Stewart cruised up the street in his car. He got WDON, Don Dillard’s R amp;R record show that was broadcast out of a bunker on University Boulevard up in Wheaton, on the radio and turned it up. Dillard was spinning the Chantels’ “Maybe,” one of Stewart’s all-time favorite songs, and this made his spirits rise. When it was done, Dillard signed off, as sunset had come, and WDON held only a daylight license. He thumbed the dial up to WINX on 1600, which aired till midnight. Then he pulled a Marlboro from his breast pocket and lit himself a smoke.

Walter Hess’s car, a dropped-down 283 Chevy painted candy apple red, was parked outside the doughnut shop on Pershing. In script on the front right fender it read “Shorty’s Dream.” Stewart cut in behind the Chevy, let his car idle, and honked the horn. Hess was inside the doughnut shop, most likely working the pinball machine they’d rigged for multiple plays. Once they’d pried the glass off the top with Hess’s knife and gotten to that button, it was easy. The owner never knew what was going on.

Walter came out of the shop a few minutes later. He wore an outfit similar to Stewart’s, only in much smaller sizes. Walter’s friends called him Shorty. It was not said with derision but rather with respect. He was tightly muscled and a fighter who would do damn near anything to win. One of his front teeth was chipped and his eyes were comically, some would say pathetically, close set. Some people claimed he didn’t know how to read, and others went further and said he was retarded, but never to his face. Guys were afraid of him and girls prayed he wouldn’t ask them to dance. He was funny looking, but in a scary way.

“Me or you,” said Hess, approaching the open window of the Ford.

“You,” said Stewart, killing the ignition. “We’ll switch up later on.”

Stewart took off his bombers before getting into Hess’s Chevy. It was a ritual practiced by many of the car freaks in their crowd, who took pride in their flawless interiors. Stewart only removed his shoes for Hess. They had been best buds since their grade school days at St. Michael’s, the Catholic elementary in the neighborhood. Both had been labeled as troublemakers early on. No teacher, not even a nun with a hot ruler, could tell them what to do.

No one could tell them anything now.

FIVE

DEREK STRANGE AND Billy Georgelakos neared the Three-Star Diner a little past closing time. Inside the area’s apartments and row houses, men and women were having their first beers and highballs, listening to the radio, arguing, making love, and changing into stylish threads. Freshly washed cars cruised the strip, rhythm and blues coming from their open windows. It was coming up on Saturday night, and the pulse on Kennedy Street and behind its walls had begun to pick up.

The boys entered the diner. Mike Georgelakos sat by the register counting out the day’s folding money and change. Darius Strange ran a cleaning brick over the grill, stripping it of any excess grease. Ella Lockheart, the Three-Star’s counter-and-booth waitress, poured watery A amp;P brand ketchup into bottles marked Heinz. As was her custom this time of day, Ella had found the gospel hour on the house radio. A tune called “Peace in the Valley” was playing.

The diner had been set up in the forties. A Formica-top counter held fourteen armless red-vinyl swivel-top stools. Three four-seat booths, upholstered in red, ran along the plate glass that fronted the store. All food and drink was prepared and served from behind the counter: prep, colds, and hots. At the far right of the diner the counter elbowed off. This area was hidden behind a ceiling-hung plastic curtain. Behind the curtain were a stainless-steel automatic dishwasher and a double-tubbed sink with an industrial-sized tube-and-spray nozzle. Three walls of the diner were white plaster. The fourth wall, the one that ran behind the counter, was covered in white tile.

“Vasili,” said Mike to his son. “Derek.”

“Ba-ba,” said Billy.

“Mr. Mike,” said Derek, unable to correctly pronounce the family’s last name.

Darius Strange glanced over at his son without breaking the rhythm of his chore, looked him over, and nodded. Derek Strange lifted his chin in return.

“C’mon, boy,” said Mike, “help me count the money. Derek, the mop’s waitin’ for you in the back.”

Derek found the bucket, strainer, and mop back by the dishwasher. The place had a utility man, addressed only by his nickname, Halftime, but he left early on Saturdays to allow Darius’s son the chance to earn a little money. This suited Halftime fine.

Derek took up the webbed rubber mats behind the counter and rinsed them out in the sink. He carried the mats back through the small storage room, one by one, and laid them out in the alley to dry in the sun. He then waited for Ella Lockheart to fill the salt and pepper shakers, change into her street clothes in the back room, and leave the store. Lockheart, in her early thirties, was light-skinned, rail thin, pretty, quiet, unmarried, and deeply religious. She said to Derek, “Have a blessed day, young man,” before going out the door.

Derek mopped the floor while his father sat on a stool and read the sports page of the Post. His chef’s hat, which he wore at all times while working over the grill, was on the counter by his side. Mike was showing Billy how to enter numbers in a green-covered book. Derek had seen the pages of the book once, a grid of lines with small figures penciled into the squares.

Derek strained water from the mop to the point that it was damp, and put it to work on the floor. He made sure to get the area at the base of the stools, where grease tended to collect.

“Elgin Baylor had thirty-four last night for Minneapolis,” said Darius Strange, raising his voice some so his son could hear him while he worked. “Thirty-four in a championship game. That’s the Lakers playin’ against Russell, Cousy, Sam Jones, and them. That is some kind of accomplishment, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure is.”

“Boy’s got that quick first step.”

“Yep.”

“Came out of Spingarn, too,” said Darius, naming Baylor’s high school alma mater, off Benning Road in Northeast D.C. “The Green Wave graduates some superior athletes.”

Derek smiled to himself as he worked. Partly it was because of the way his dad always liked to make his point with those local-boy-makes-good stories. But mostly he was smiling ’cause he liked the deep sound of his father’s voice.

Darius Strange looked over at his son, bent over, pushing the mop. It was good for the boy to have this chore. After inspecting the finished floor, Mike would give Derek a dollar, which was walking-around money and also a simple work-and-reward lesson. The boy had a twice-a-week paper route, too. Darius wasn’t worried about Derek the way he was worried about his older son, Dennis. Basically, Derek was good.

It was nice that Derek could see him working this steady job here as well. Plenty of boys never did get to see that kind of example. Someday Derek would know that this had all meant something with regard to what he himself would become.

But beyond that, Darius Strange did enjoy, and take pride in, his work. After the war he had taken several jobs involving hard, mindless physical labor, finally landing in the kitchen of the house restaurant of a downtown hotel. He was a dishwasher there, but he closely watched the activities of the line cooks and chefs. One of the cooks, a white steam-table man, was nice enough to school him in the details of the job. It wasn’t long before Darius felt he was due for a promotion. But the manager wouldn’t bring him along, so he left and got his first cooking job as a grill man in a greasy spoon in Far Northeast. The owner was a hard, bitter white who looked upon him as an animal and paid him pennies, but he got what he needed there, and when he had learned his trade he started looking around for something else. He signed up with Conway ’s Employment Service, down on 6th Street, which listed him as “Cook, Colored,” and soon they had hooked him up with Mike Georgelakos, who had just let go of a good man who was bad behind drink. Georgelakos offered Darius forty dollars a week to start. Five years later, he was pulling in sixty-five.

“I’m finished,” said Derek Strange.

“Go talk to Mr. Mike,” said Darius.

Mike Georgelakos got off his stool behind the register. He was not much taller standing than he was sitting. He was bald on top, with patches of graying black hair on the sides. His nose was large and it hooked down over his mustache. Mike’s shoulders were broad, his chest barrel shaped. Both of these traits had been passed down to Billy.

Mike walked the house ceremoniously and inspected the floor. When he returned he gave Derek a clean dollar bill.

“Here you go, boy. Good job.”

“Thanks, Mr. Mike. Catch you around, Billy.”

“You, too, Derek,” said Billy, standing beside his father, smiling a little at his friend, sharing the secret of their day.

At the door, Darius Strange turned to give a short wave to Mike Georgelakos, as he always did.

“Yasou, Mike,” said Darius.

“Yasou, Darius,” said Mike. “Adio.”

Out on the sidewalk, Derek said to his father, “What’s that Greek talk mean, anyway?”

“Adio means, like, adios. And Yasou? It’s just a greeting, a, what do you call that, a salutation. All-purpose, kinda like aloha. You know, how they do in Hawaii?”

Derek Strange looked up at his father. Strong and handsome, with a neat mustache and closely cut, pomaded hair. He had to go six-two or six-three.

“Speaking of Hawaii,” said Darius Strange, “Globetrotters gonna be comin’ to Uline. They’re playin’ the Hawaiian team, the Fiftieth Staters? I just read the announcement in the paper. You feel like goin’, I can get us tickets.”

“Yeah!”

“Trotters got this young giant, Wilt Chamberlain, played for Kansas. They’re payin’ him sixty-five thousand dollars a year. I’d like to see what that boy can do to earn it.”

“He come out of Spingarn, too?”

“Stop playin’,” said Darius Strange in a stern way, but Derek could see a smirk breaking on the edge of his lips.

They got into Darius Strange’s car, a ’57 Mercury he had picked up at a lot on 10th and New York. It was a repossession deal, nineteen dollars a month on an eight-hundred-dollar balance. There had been a “special” interest rate put on it, a kind of penalty imposed on colored buyers. Darius was aware of it, and he knew it was wrong, but he accepted it just the same. Any way he looked at it, he would be paying on that car for the next four years.

DARIUS STRANGE DROVE up Georgia Avenue, his son at his side. They passed Ida’s department store, where Derek had found trouble earlier in the day. It now seemed to him to have happened a long time ago. He was safe with his father now, and all of that mess he’d gotten into was tucked far away.

Just up above Piney Branch Road, near Van Buren, Darius Strange pulled into the lot of the soft-ice cream place, had mirror chips embedded in the stucco of its walls. The name of the place was Beck’s, but everyone called it the Polar Bears because of the animal statues out front.

Darius killed the engine, gave Derek some change, and told him he’d meet him back at the car. Derek went to the service window, bought a tall swirl of chocolate on a cone, and had a seat on the curb. His father had walked to the Hubbard House to buy one of their layered chocolate pies. Derek Strange looked forward to this Saturday ritual all week long.

As he ate his ice cream, he watched his father cross the street with the pie box in his hand. A group of white boys drove by in a dropped-down Chevy and yelled something at his father from the open windows of their car. His father returned, expressionless, and made no mention of the incident. But Derek had heard their laughter, and the sound had cut him deep.

The last stop on their route home was Tempchin’s Kosher Meat Market, a butcher shop between Shepherd and Randolph, down on 14th. In the store, Darius Strange said hello to Abe Tempchin, the proprietor, a thick, balding man who always seemed to have a smile on his face. To Derek, the place smelled funny, and the customers in here, white folks but not exactly, talked funny, too. Kinda like Billy’s father, Mike.

“The holy man come in today?” said Darius Strange.

“Yes, he was here,” said Tempchin.

“Let me get one of those chickens he got to, then.”

Derek knew that Tempchin kept a shack full of live chickens behind the store. His father had told him that the rabbi, “the Jew version of a minister,” would come to the store and kill the chickens, an odd thing, Derek thought, for a man of God to do. His father had explained, “That’s what makes ’em kosher,” and Derek had asked, “What’s kosher mean?” “I got no clue,” admitted his father. “But your mother thinks the chickens here are better than the ones at the A amp;P.”

They drove southeast into Petworth and Park View. Darius Strange parked the Mercury on Princeton Place, a street that graded up off Georgia. Row houses holding single and multiple families, mostly colored now, lined the block.

“Go on and get your mother some milk,” said Darius as he set the brake.

“Okay,” said Derek.

Derek went down the block to the east side of the Avenue. On one corner was the neighborhood movie house, the York, and on the other was a small grocery, one of many neighborhood markets scattered around the city. He picked up a bottle of milk and took it to the counter, where the owner, a Jew the kids called Mr. Meyer and the adults called just Meyer, sat on a high-backed stool. Mr. Meyer knew Derek and the other members of his family by name. He marked the purchase down on a yellow pad and thanked Derek for his business. Darius Strange settled his debt with Meyer on payday, or the first of the month, or sometimes whenever he could.

Derek came out of the market. A girl he knew was standing on the corner, wearing a store-bought dress. She was his age and his height, and she had breasts. She had dimples when she smiled. She was smiling now.

“Hi, Derek,” she said musically.

“Hey,” said Derek, stopping in his tracks. He had the milk bottle in one hand, but the other was free. That hand felt awkward hanging there, so he put it in the pocket of his blue jeans.

“Don’t you know my name?” the girl said. Lord, thought Derek, she has got some pretty brown eyes.

“Sure, I know it.”

“Why you don’t call me by it, then?”

“It’s Carmen.”

“I know what it is. You don’t have to tell me it! You should be polite, though, and call me by my name when you see me.”

Derek felt his face grow hot. “Why you got a Puerto Rican name, girl?”

“It’s not Puerto Rican. My mama thought it sounded pretty, is all.”

“It’s all right,” said Derek.

Carmen Hill giggled and began to tap one foot on the sidewalk. She was wearing patent leather church shoes, must have had something on the tips of those soles for dancing, ’cause they made a sound.

“Why you laughin’?” said Derek. “I ain’t tell no joke.”

“That how you give a girl a compliment? My name is all right?”

“It’s pretty,” said Derek quickly, and before he lost his nerve added, “Just like you.”

He turned and went up the street. He passed a German man, one of the last whites on the block, who had once thrown hot water at him and his brother for playing too close to his house, and a boy he recognized who was cradling a Daisy lever-action BB rifle he had gotten for his birthday. Ordinarily Derek Strange would have stopped and checked out the gun. But he kept going, looking over his shoulder at Carmen Hill, still standing there tapping her foot, smiling that smile, her eyes alive, those deep dimples of hers…

That girl bothered him nearly every time he saw her. Least he had had the nerve to tell her she was pretty. He wondered what her smart self thought of that.

At 760 Princeton, he took the steps up to his home.

SIX

THE FAMILY LIVED in a row house that Darius Strange had divided into two apartments. A single mother who worked at the cafeteria down at Howard University, not much more than a mile away, lived in the bottom unit with her three wild sons. Darius had bought the house after answering an ad in the Washington Post that read, “Colored, NW, Brick Home.” After putting three hundred and fifty down, he had secured a GI Bill loan at 4 percent. His nut was eighty-six dollars a month, and so far he had not missed a payment. The tenant downstairs was often late with her rent, but she was trying her best, and often he let her slide.

The Strange unit consisted of two bedrooms, a living room/ dining area, and a galley-style kitchen. The furniture and appliances were old but clean. A screened-in porch, where Derek Strange often slept on summer nights, gave onto a view of a small dirt-and-weed backyard and then an alley. The alley, and the grounds of Park View Elementary up the block, were the primary playgrounds for the boys and girls of Princeton Place and those on Otis Place, the next street to the south.

Derek Strange entered the apartment. His father had settled in his regular big old chair, the one facing the television set, a new twenty-one-inch Zenith with Space Command remote control. He had the latest Afro-American spread out in his lap. On the TV screen, James Stewart and Stephen McNally were firing rifles at one each other, both of them having found protection in an outcrop of rocks.

“Young D,” said Dennis Strange, eighteen, tall and lean like his father, dark skinned like the entire family. Dennis was seated at the table where the Stranges took their meals. He, too, had a copy of the Afro-American before him. There were always extras around the house.

“Dennis,” said Derek.

“What you been doin’, man?”

“Playin’.”

Dennis rubbed his fingers along the top of his shaven head. “With your white-boy friend?”

“So?” Derek stared at the gunplay on the TV screen. The sound of ricochet was loud in the room. “Why they tryin’ to kill each other, Pop?”

“One man took the other man’s Winchester in the beginning of the movie,” said Darius Strange. “They just gettin’ around to settlin’ it now.”

Derek looked at the tabloid-sized newspaper in his father’s lap. Derek and his best friend, Lydell Blue, delivered the Washington edition of the newspaper to neighborhood subscribers on Tuesdays and Fridays, earning roughly two dollars a week each. This was real money to them. Derek always tried to read the paper, too. Unlike the stuff he read in the Post and the Star, the stories in the Afro described his world.

Often, though, the stories scared him some. The front page of the latest issue talked about this boy Mack Parker, only twenty-one years old, who got beat half to death and dragged out of his cell by a lynch mob down in Mississippi. His mother was sayin’, “Oh, Lord, why?” ’cause no one had seen Parker since the mob threw him in a car outside the jail. Reminded Derek of the story of that boy Emmett Till, which Dennis was always goin’ on about, who got murdered down there for nothing more than whistling at a white girl.

But in this apartment, with his mother, father, and big brother, Derek felt safe.

“Where Mom at?” said Derek.

“Kitchen,” said Dennis.

Derek walked by the Life magazines stacked on a table by the sofa. The cover story of the issue on top was one in a continuing seven-part series called “How the West Was Won.” Darius Strange had collected every one. Dennis called it “How the West Got Stole” just to annoy their father. The same way he made fun of those programs his father loved to watch at night during the week: Wagon Train, Bat Masterson, Trackdown, and the like. These days, seemed like Dennis and his father were at each other all the time.

Next to the eating table sat a Sylvania hi-fi console combination with records stacked on top. His father listened to some jazz, but mostly the rhythm and blues singers who had started out in gospel. Derek liked to look at the album covers, photos of people like Ray Charles and that Soul Stirrers singer, and a big boy on the Apollo label named Solomon Burke. He wondered what it was like to sing for all those people up onstage, have that kind of money, have the finest women and the Cadillac cars. He wondered if his father, who smelled like grease, sweat, and burned meat when he came home from work, was envious of these men’s lives. Derek didn’t like to think on it too much, because it made him feel bad to imagine that his father would ever leave their home.

As Derek tried to walk by him, Dennis grabbed hold of his shirt and pinned his arms at his side. Derek managed to place the bottle of milk he was holding atop the stack of records. Once he had done this, he tried to break free, but Dennis was too strong. Derek did the only thing he could, dropping to his knees, taking Dennis down with him. They hit the floor and rolled.

“You can’t get away from me,” said Dennis.

“Punk,” said Derek.

“Call me that again and you’ll be lookin’ like one of them polio kids. They’ll be havin’ to fit you for some of them braces and stuff.”

“That’s enough,” said their father, his eyes on the TV.

Derek rolled Dennis so that one of Dennis’s hands was pinned beneath him. Derek felt around and tried to get purchase on Dennis’s other hand. Instead he grabbed Dennis’s crotch.

“You like that, boy?”

“Like what?”

“You got your hand on my rod!”

They rolled into the hi-fi and laughed.

“I said that’s enough,” said Darius. “I ain’t even finished payin’ on that console yet.”

Darius Strange had bought the hi-fi and the television on time. He had first gone downtown to George’s, on 8th and F, but the salesman there, a chubby white man, had treated him with disrespect. When he walked in, Darius had heard Chubby laughing with one of his coworkers off to the side, talking about he was gonna sell that guy a “Zenick” and saying, with his idea of a colored voice, “Can I put it on lays-aways?” Chubby hadn’t thought he’d heard him, but he had. Darius hadn’t raised a stink about it, but he’d left right away and driven over to Slattery’s on Naylor Road, where the man himself, Frank Slattery, had written him up for the Zenith and the Sylvania, gotten him credit, and delivered it all the next day. The colored money got put together with the white money in the register, and once you counted it out come closing time, you couldn’t even tell the difference. That’s what Chubby didn’t understand.

Like the car, he’d be paying on these things for a long while. Darius didn’t worry on it, though. He expected he was going to be working for the rest of his life.

“You gettin’ strong,” said Dennis, looking his younger brother over with admiration as they both got to their feet.

“Bet I can take you soon, too.”

“You can try,” said Dennis. He made a head motion in the direction of the kitchen. “Go ahead, man.”

“I’m gone.”

Dennis chuckled as he pushed Derek’s forehead with the flat of his palm. He tried it again and Derek ducked away, snatching the milk bottle off the record stack and walking through a short hall back to the kitchen.

“Boy wrinkled my shirt,” said Dennis. “I was gonna wear it tonight, too.”

Darius Strange looked over at his older son. “You goin’ out?”

“I’m fixin’ to. Why?”

“Who you goin’ out with? That no-account I seen you with down on the Avenue?”

“Kenneth?” said Dennis. “He all right.”

“He ain’t look all right to me.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry. We just gonna drive around a little with his cousin, is all. Maybe check out that All-Star Jamboree they got down at the Howard. They got Baby Cortez and the Clovers on the bill. Anyway, I won’t be late.”

“Don’t be. You comin’ to church tomorrow morning with us, right?”

“I’m going to temple. There’s a service in the afternoon.”

“ Temple,” said Darius with a grunt. “You mean that place on Vermont Avenue?”

“Minister Lucius presiding,” said Dennis.

“He gonna be presidin’ now, huh?”

“The man is a disciple of Elijah Muhammad.”

“I know who that is.” Darius tapped the newspaper in his lap. “There’s an advertisement your man paid for right in here. Calls himself the Anointed Leader. Asking for donations, says he wants to build a hospital. Ain’t they got hospitals already in Chicago?”

“This one’s for our people.”

“Oh. If you so taken with him, why don’t you send him some of your money?”

“If I had any I would.”

“The man is just another hustler. He ain’t no better than any old pimp you see out here on the street. And he ain’t even Christian.”

“That’s the point. Jesus is the white man’s god.”

“Don’t let your mother hear you say that, boy.”

“Look, to me the Christian church is like that paper you readin’. Supposed to be for us, but it’s not. You see the ads they run in there?” Dennis picked up the newspaper in front of him, opened it, and read off the page. “‘Black and White Blanching Cream-a brighter, lighter, softer, smoother look.’ Here’s another one: ‘Dr. Fred Palmer’s Skin Whitener.’ And the pictures of the women write these social columns they got? Those women all got light skin, and the way they got their hair fixed, I mean, they look like they’re trying to be white. So who is hustling who? What you think this newspaper is trying to sell us here, huh?”

“I got eyes. You might think I’m blind, but I am not. Things are changing slow, but they’re changin’. It ain’t all good in this world, but for right now, it’s what we got.”

“You just gonna settle for what we got, then.”

“You’re young,” said Darius. “Sooner or later you’re gonna see, you got to go with some things to get along.”

“You mean like last summer, when we went down to the shore? Remember when you got Jim Crowed, how you just went along? How’d you feel that day? How you think it made us feel?”

Darius had driven the family down to the Annapolis area, looking for Highland, the beach that allowed colored. But he drove to the wrong place, and before he could back up and turn around, he got told by some man in a booth that they didn’t allow his kind. Got told this in front of his wife and sons. Anger was what he felt. Anger and shame. But he didn’t answer his son.

“Things ain’t changin’ quick enough for me,” said Dennis. “I don’t want to just get along. And just so you know, I’m gonna be goin’ to that march next week, too.”

“What march is that?”

“Youth March for Integrated Schools. They say twenty-five thousand strong gonna meet down at the Sylvan theater.”

“Mind what you get yourself into.”

“I know what I’m doin’.”

“You think you do,” said Darius Strange. “But y’all start rising up too hard, they gonna start doing you like they did that boy in that Mississippi jail.”

“I ain’t worried.”

“Course not. Like I said, you’re young.”

In the kitchen, Derek Strange put the bottle of milk in the Frigidaire and went to the sink, where his mother stood washing dishes. There was a window over the sink, but at present it did not let in much light, as Alethea Strange had taped cardboard to the bottom panes. She did this so the humans in the kitchen would not scare the birds that had built a nest in the window frame outside.

“Hey, Mama,” said Derek, touching his mother on her hip.

“Derek,” she said, looking him in the eye. Sometime in the past year, her youngest had reached her height. “Anything special happen today?”

“Nothing special,” he said, thinking of the incident at Ida’s, wondering if he had just told his mother a lie. “How about you?”

“Oh, you know, just work.” Alethea moved a bottle of Kretol roach killer that sat on the sill and peeled back a corner of the cardboard on the window before her. “Look here, son.”

Derek leaned forward on the counter. A mother robin was feeding her babies in her nest. Three featherless heads were going after one half of a worm.

“Where the father at?” said Derek.

“He’s still around, I expect. He built the nest and now the mother is taking care of the kids. How we do around here.”

Derek nodded. His mother had told him this many times before. He watched her tape the cardboard back in place and leaned his back to the counter.

“Lydell came by,” said Alethea.

“Yeah?”

“Was looking to see if you wanted to go fishing up at the Home. Said he’d come back to pick you up in a little while.”

“Can I go?”

“Yes, but not for long. Sun’s gonna be going down soon anyway, and your father and me were thinking we’d go to a movie tonight. Want you back in the house before we go.”

“What movie?”

“I wanted to see that one, Imitation of Life, ’cause everyone’s been talkin’ about it. But you know your father; he said he wasn’t gonna pay to see no ‘weepie.’ He was pushing for some western, but I am not getting dressed to go out and see some show with men got dust on their clothes. So we made a compromise. We’re gonna go see that new picture I Want to Live! down at the Lincoln.”

“The one where they put that woman in the gas chamber, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“Dag, I’d like to see that, too.”

“You’re not ready to see it. Now listen, your brother will be going out. You can stay here a couple of hours by yourself, can’t you?”

“Sure.”

“We won’t be late. We’ve got church tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Derek Strange.

ALVIN JONES AND Kenneth Willis sat in a car in the alley behind Jones’s grandmother’s place, sharing a ninety-seven-cent bottle of imported sherry. Willis, in the passenger seat, was thumbing the wheel of the radio dial, trying to find a song that Jones could get behind. He stopped searching as a DJ introduced a record. The tuned kicked in, followed by a woman’s vocals.

“Who is that bitch?” said Jones.

“Man said Connie Francis,” said Willis.

“She can’t sing a note. But I would fuck her to death if I ever got close to it.”

“She’s too old. Anyway, I seen her picture in a magazine, and she ain’t all that great.”

“I don’t care what she looks like. I would fuck the life out of that white girl anyway.”

“She’s Spanish.”

“So?”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“What’s the name of that song she’s singin’? ‘My Hot Penis’?”

“‘My Happiness.’”

“What I said.”

They were in Jones’s Cadillac, a ’53 sedan, a basic radio-and-heater model that was no Coupe DeVille or Eldorado. It had the Caddy symbol on it, though, and that is what Jones cared about most. It was a start. He had bought it on time from Royal Chrysler on Rhode Island Avenue for eight hundred and ninety-five. He had lied about his job status to get the credit. He’d owned it for three months and had made one payment so far. They could go ahead and repossess it, they wanted to. He wasn’t gonna pay on it anymore.

“Where we goin’ when we done with this bottle?” said Jones.

“Told my boy Dennis we’d swing by and pick him up, ride around some. Boy’s a grasshopper, man. Figure he might have somethin’ we can burn.”

“That tall boy lives over on Princeton?”

“Yeah.”

“He ain’t no more than a kid.”

“He’s my age.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

Alvin Jones was twenty-two. His cousin Kenneth Willis had just turned eighteen. Jones was feral, thin, light-skinned, and small of stature. Willis was dark, medium height, bucktoothed, and skinny, with thick wrists that said his frame would fill out soon.

“How you know this Dennis from?” said Jones.

“We both in the navy reserve.”

“Huh,” said Jones, and then laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Picturin’ you in one of the sailor suits. You know, that uniform looks like a dress to some of them navy boys. Heard them ships be crawlin’ with faggots.”

“I ain’t no punk.”

“You better not be one. If you was, it would be my blood duty to put a size ten up your motherfuckin’ ass.”

Willis grabbed the crotch of his slacks. “This here is for bitches only, Alvin.”

“So is this,” said Jones, raising his fist. “You got a point?”

“Don’t be callin’ me no punk,” said Willis.

“Shit, just find some got-damn music on that box.”

Kenneth Willis turned the radio dial and got a Fats Domino tune, “I Want to Walk You Home,” on WUST. Now, that was how a song should be sung. Willis looked across the bench at his older cousin, who knew so much.

“ Alvin?”

“Huh.”

“What it felt like when you killed that boy?”

Jones hit the bottle of sherry and used his sleeve to wipe his mouth. “I ain’t planned to kill him.”

“Planned to got nothin’ to do with it. He dead whether you meant him to be or not.”

Two nights earlier, Jones had called a liquor store he knew delivered and asked for a messenger boy to bring out a bottle of Cuban rum, a fifth of French cognac, and a bottle of Spanish sherry. He had taken the selection right out of an ad the shop had run in the Evening Star. When the boy, young buck wearing a hat, had arrived at the address, a deserted row house in east Shaw, Jones had come out of the shadows and put the muzzle of a hot.22 to his temple. The boy gave up the money he had on him without any kind of fight. Jones shot him anyway, and watched the boy’s last moments with fascination as he shivered and bled out on the street. He had always known he would kill a man someday and had decided just then that it was time to get it done.

“It felt like nothin’,” said Jones. “Boy was breathin’ and then he wasn’t.”

“You cold, man.”

Jones shrugged. “We all headed to a bed of maggots. I was just helpin’ the boy along.”

The response chilled Willis. In some way it excited him, too. He reached for the bottle and took a long pull.

“You ain’t said nothin’ to no one, right?” said Jones.

“No one,” said Willis.

“Don’t even be talkin’ about it with your friend.”

“You know I won’t.”

Jones took the bottle, put it to his lips, and drank off the base. “That’s the end of the evidence right there. I already done drank the rum and the cognac up.”

Willis wiped at his forehead. “I am high.”

“I am, too,” said Jones.

They drove out of the alley and stopped on the adjoining street, where Willis got out and rolled the empty bottle down a sewer. He and Jones then headed for Princeton Place to pick up Dennis Strange.

SEVEN

DENNIS?” “What?”

“I was looking at this police officer today, studyin’ on him, like.”

“So?”

“I was thinkin’ I’d like to be one my own self someday.”

“A police?”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna keep all us Negroes in line down here, huh?”

“What you talkin’ about?”

“Never mind.”

Dennis and Derek Strange sat on the front steps of their row house in the last hour of daylight. On the sidewalk, three girls were playing jump rope, and on the north side of Princeton a woman pushed a baby carriage down toward Georgia. The light from the dying sun was like honey dripping on the street. Derek thought of it as “golden time.”

“What about you?” said Derek. “What you gonna do?”

Dennis fingered the marijuana cigarette he had slipped into his pocket before leaving the house as he thought about the question. He didn’t mind answering, as long as it was Derek and not his parents who were asking. Not that he was thinking on his future all that much. Lately, all he looked forward to was getting high. This older cat on the next street over had introduced him to reefer a few months back, and Dennis had taken to it from the start.

“I don’t know. Continue on with the navy, I expect, when I get out of Roosevelt. Learn some kinda trade. Let the government put me through college, maybe. Knowledge is power, little brother, that’s what they say.”

“The navy. That means you got to go away?”

“What you think, man?”

“I don’t want you to,” said Derek, trying to keep the desperation that he felt out of his voice.

“It’s just natural that things gonna change around here, D. You’ll be missin’ me at first, but soon you’ll be lookin’ to get out yourself. Like them baby birds Mama’s always goin’ on about. They ain’t gonna be stayin’ in that nest forever, right?”

“I guess.”

“Go on, young man,” said Dennis, pushing on his kid brother’s head, hoping to lighten the sadness that had come into his eyes. “It’s gonna be all right.”

A Cadillac came up Princeton and pulled up behind Darius Strange’s Mercury. Though there was space behind him, the driver of the Caddy touched his bumper to the rear bumper of Darius’s car.

A man and a young man got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk. Derek had met the younger one, Kenneth, a friend of his brother’s from the reserves, and didn’t like him. He bragged on himself too much and talked all the time about what he had done or was going to do to girls. Kenneth Willis didn’t look like he was headed anyplace good.

The other man, the older, smaller one with the light skin, didn’t seem like someone Derek would care to hang with, either. He was dressed in black slacks and a thin purple shirt, looked like silk. He was what Derek’s father called a no-account, or a hustler, or sometimes just a pimp. You could tell by the way his father’s lip curled when he said it that he had no use for this kind of man.

Dennis rose from the steps as the two from the Cadillac came up the walk. Derek got up and stood beside his brother.

“Damn, Alvin,” said Dennis, “ya’ll ain’t had to hit my father’s car.” He said it with a smile, to let them know that he was not angry. It made Derek ashamed.

“That your old man’s Merc?” said the one called Alvin, who was the driver of the Cadillac. “Thought he had a job.”

“He does.”

“Car look like a repop to me.”

So what if it is? thought Derek. Don’t mean you had to bump it.

Alvin Jones lit a cigarette from a pack he produced from a pocket in his slacks. He carelessly tossed the spent match on the weedy front yard as smoke dribbled from his mouth and nose.

These men, with their bloodshot, heavy eyes, looked like they were on something. Derek had heard about things some people used to make themselves crazy in the head. But as they stepped closer, he could smell the alcohol coming off them. He recognized that stench from a wino he often came in contact with in the neighborhood. These two were drunk.

“That your brother?” said Alvin, looking Derek over.

“His name’s Derek,” said Dennis.

“Where you hidin’ Dumbo at?” said Alvin Jones.

“What, all a y’all got names start with D?” said Kenneth Willis.

“My father’s idea,” said Dennis, looking at his feet.

Don’t apologize to them for our father, thought Derek. Don’t you ever do that.

“Musta got little man all angry, talkin’ about his family,” said Willis. “Lookit, Alvin, he got his fists balled up.”

Derek relaxed his hands. He hadn’t realized he had formed them into fists.

“Damn,” said Jones, “we ain’t mean to upset you, little man. What, you want to steal me, somethin’ like that? Come over here, then, you got a mind to. I’ll let you have a free swing.”

Derek felt Dennis’s arm come around his shoulder. He felt Dennis pull him in.

“He’s all right,” said Dennis, making a head motion toward the Cadillac. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“You bring that gage with you, man?” said Willis.

“Shut up, Kenneth,” said Dennis, losing the pleasant tone he had been trying to maintain. “Ain’t you got no sense?”

Jones and Willis laughed.

Dennis turned to Derek. “Go on, Young D.”

“Why you got to go with them?” said Derek, not caring if Willis and Jones could hear.

“I won’t be late. There go Lydell, lookin’ for you.”

Derek glanced up the block, where Lydell Blue was coming down the sidewalk from the direction of Park View Elementary, two cane poles resting on his shoulder. Derek walked north and met his friend. They shook hands, then tapped fists to their own chests.

“Us,” said Derek.

“Us,” said Lydell.

Lydell, stocky and muscled, with the beginnings of a mustache, handed Derek one of the poles. They were headed up to the Old Soldiers’ Home, where they would jump the fence that surrounded the property and fish the pond on the wooded grounds. They hardly ever got a bite, but no one bothered them there, and it was a nice place to sit and talk. Lydell was Derek’s boy going back to kindergarten. He had always been his tightest friend.

“You all right?” said Lydell, studying Derek’s troubled face as they walked up the street.

“What is gage, Ly?”

“That’s marijuana, man. Don’t you know nothin’?”

“I knew,” said Derek, feeling a drop in his chest. “I was just wonderin’ if you knew, is all.”

Derek turned his head, watched as his brother and the other two went toward the old Cadillac, watched Dennis put his hand to the handle of the back door.

Don’t get in that car.

Derek Strange heard doors open and slam shut, and then the ignition of an engine. He and Lydell Blue walked east through the last of golden time as dusk settled on the street.

STEWART AND HESS went over to Mighty Mo ’s, a drive-in with car-side service at the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue and 410. It had been built in ’58 and was the hangout for their crew and others. This was where they went to plot out the action for the rest of the night. Hot rods and lowriders with names like “Little Dipper,” “Little Sleeper,” and “Also Ran” were scattered about the lot. Rock and roll came from the open windows of the rides, their freshly waxed bodies gleaming under the lights.

Stewart and Hess hooked up with their friends. They ordered the signature burgers and onion rings through speakers, and were served by waitresses who ran the food from the kitchens out to the cars. The young men and women washed it down with beer. The night went on like that, engine talk and boasts and eye contact with the girlfriends of others, and soon enough the buzz of alcohol and deep night had come. It was time to go out and run the cars.

Hess and several others began to drive out of Mo’s. In a corner of the lot, apart from the younger ones, stood Billy Griffith, Mike Anastasi, and Tommy Hancock, all leaning on their cars. These were the most feared, badass white boys in the area. For sport they frequently went into D.C. and picked fights with groups of coloreds. The most famous fight had started at the Hot Shoppes down at Georgia and Hamilton and continued on to the Little Tavern across the street. It was said that Griffith, Anastasi, and Hancock took on ten coloreds and beat the living shit out of them. As the story got around, the coloreds numbered twenty.

Stewart nodded at Billy Griffith, the most demented of the three, as he and Hess drove by. Griffith had a legendary rep. Men of all ages talked about him in bars and quieted when he walked into a room. Buzz Stewart could only hope that people would someday see him that way, too.

STEWART AND HESS drove out Route 29 to the area around Fairland Road. It was not far from downtown Silver Spring, maybe five miles on the odometer, but it was country. By ten o’clock there was little traffic, and those who were parked along the shoulders were there for fun.

A quarter mile had been marked off. Small bets had been made back at Mo’s and at other area hangouts. Hess pulled over near a group of their friends and watched a race between a Chevy and a Dodge. Then a guy arrived towing a trailer holding a ’31 Ford sedan without tags.

“Man claims it’s got a five-twelve rear, dad,” said Hess.

“What he claims,” said Stewart.

The driver of the Ford dragged a hopped-up ’50 Studebaker and blew its doors off.

“Whew,” said Hess. “He wasn’t braggin’.”

They watched more races and drank more beer. Stewart saw a peroxide blonde named Suzie who he had dry-fucked one time in the back of his car when both of them were falling down on gin and Coke. He couldn’t remember nothin’ about her except the smell she’d left in his car. He started toward her but changed his mind. He could have that any old day, he wanted it. What he wanted tonight was a different kind of action. Three beers had been whispering to him, and now four talked in his ear, telling him to kick somebody’s ass.

But Hess wanted to take a run at some snatch, so they went over and talked to a couple of tough girls they recognized, one who was okay, one who looked like a pimply duck. Both of them were wearing tight jeans. They got the girls into the car and after they’d switched to boy-girl and he’d gotten everyone to take off their shoes, Hess drove them through some farmer’s cornfield for laughs. The girls were as drunk as they were, and soon they found a place to park. Stewart took a walk with the okay girl while Hess stayed in the car with the pimply duck. Later, after they had dropped the girls at a field party off Peach Orchard Road, Stewart admitted that he hadn’t gotten anything off his girl, not even tit. Hess claimed he got his fingers wet and with an outstretched hand offered Stewart a smell.

“Get that shit outta my face, Shorty,” said Stewart.

Hess cackled like a witch. “You ready to go sportin’, Buzz?”

“Yeah. Let’s pick up my ride.”

They switched cars at the doughnut shop, bought more beer down below the line, and drove into the District, looking for something or someone to fuck up.

Their next stop was the Rendezvous, down on 10th Street in Northwest. The bar was jammed with rough old boys, bikers, and women who liked their type. The place smelled like alcohol and sweat. Link Wray and his Raymen were up on the bandstand. Link was wearing leather and rocking the house.

Stewart and Hess stepped up to the bar and ordered a couple of drafts. Stewart got a man’s size and Hess ordered a fifteen-center. It looked like a girl’s glass, but Hess didn’t care. The fifteen-cent glass was tall, fragile, and skinny. You could break the head off it easy, if you had to, and use the jagged edge to open up some joker’s face. Hess had a sip and put his back to the bar.

The band did a number with sometime vocalist Bobby Howard, then another. The Raymen were at their most raucous on their instrumentals, but Howard had a good voice for this kind of rock. It was known that Link couldn’t sing. He had caught TB overseas when he was in the service, and the doctors had removed one of his lungs.

“Here he goes,” said Stewart happily, and they watched Link use a pen to punch a couple of holes in the bands’ speakers. It was how he got that fuzz tone out of his ax, and it was a signal that the band was about to lift off.

Which is how it went as the band kicked into “The Swag” and then an extended version of “Rawhide.” It was a sound that no one else could seem to get, a primal, blood-kicking kind of rock and roll, and it energized the room. People were dancing into one another, and soon punches were thrown, and many of the people who were fighting still had smiles on their faces. Link himself was said to be a peaceable man, but sometimes his music incited righteous violence.

“You in?” said Hess, his eyes on a fight that was building in numbers on the edge of the room.

“Nah,” said Stewart, who just wanted to enjoy the music for now. “I’m good.”

Hess put his glass down on the bar, made his way into the crowd, and started swinging. His first punch met the temple of some guy who turned his head right into it, knocking him clean off his feet. Hess thinking, Some nights you just get luckier than shit, right before some other guy, looked like Richard Boone, up and split his lip with a straight right.

AN HOUR LATER they were parked up on 14th Street, way north of Columbia Road, drinking beers and huffing cigarettes. “The Girl Can’t Help It” was playing on the radio, and Stewart was tapping his finger in time on the steering wheel.

Both of them were drunk stupid but still adrenalized from the fight. Stewart had waded in after Hess had caught that right and they had cleaned house from there on in. The most prideful thing about it was they weren’t even tossed. In fact, they had walked out on their own two feet as the band played “Rumble” to their backs. Stewart would always remember the way that felt, like Link was playing that song for him. They should have been satisfied, but they still had energy to burn and felt that the night was not yet done.

“What you figure he’s doin’?” said Hess, looking down the street to where a young colored guy stood by himself.

“Pretty obvious he’s waitin’ on a bus,” said Stewart, thinking, as he did sometimes, that someone had taken a scalpel to Shorty’s brain. Hell, the boy was right there at the D.C. Transit stop.

Hess touched at his lip. The blood had congealed some, but it still seeped out occasionally, as the split was deep. He put his cigarette in the other side of his mouth and had a drag.

“What you gonna do?” said Hess.

“What you mean?”

“Like, with your life?”

“I don’t know.” Stewart hadn’t weighed it much.

“I’m thinking of enlisting in the Corps.”

“Think they’ll take you, huh?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Ain’t you never heard of a Section Eight?”

Hess rubbed at his crotch, thinking of the duck-looking girl he’d had. She’d fought him some when he jammed his fingers down those panties of hers. Maybe he had been a little rough with her, but shit, they said don’t, you knew they meant do.

“You know that girl I had tonight?” said Hess.

“I seen her on You Bet Your Life. She dropped down from the ceiling and almost hit Groucho.”

“Stop it. That girl was the most, man.”

“The most ugly. Had to be to get with you.”

The two friends laughed. And then Hess’s eyes narrowed as he tried to focus on the colored boy down the street.

“Let’s try and peg that coon, Stubie. You wanna?”

“Sure,” said Stewart. “Why not?”

Stewart hit the ignition and cruised slowly down the street. He kept the headlights off.

“He’s watchin’ us,” said Hess. “He’s trying not to, but he is.”

Hess reached over to the radio and turned it way up, Little Richard’s wail of release hitting the night. The colored boy turned his head in the direction of the Ford.

“Now we got his attention,” said Hess.

Buzz Stewart drove his car up on the sidewalk and punched the gas. The colored boy took off.

“Run, nigger, run,” said Hess.

“How many points if I hit him?”

“Say five.”

Stewart laughed as they closed in on him. The boy leaped off the sidewalk and hit the street. Hess cackled as Stewart cut left, jumped the curb, and felt his four wheels find asphalt. At the last moment, when they got dangerously close, Stewart braked to a stop.

They watched the boy hotfoot it down the street. They laughed about it on the ride home.

DETECTIVE FRANK VAUGHN checked in with his lieutenant down at the Sixth Precinct house and changed over to a black Ford. He drove around town, talked with his informants, and interviewed potential witnesses on a recent homicide involving a liquor store messenger who was lured to an address by a phone call, then robbed and shot dead. He had a few bourbons at a bar near Colorado Avenue and didn’t pay for one. While there, he phoned a divorcée he knew who lived in an apartment on 16th, near the bridge with the lions. He and the divorcée, a tall, curvy brunette named Linda, had a couple of cocktails at her place and some loose conversation before he fucked her on her queen-size bed. An hour after he had entered her apartment, he was back on the job.

Late that night he was called to the scene of a murder on Crittenden Street, down near Sherman Circle. The colored kid who’d bought it, eighteen years old, had been stabbed in the neck and chest. Uniforms had begun to canvass the neighbors but had turned up nothing yet.

Vaughn would do his job in a methodical, unhurried way. There wouldn’t be much pressure from the white shirts to make a quick arrest. A dead colored boy was not a high priority. Hell, it would barely make the papers.

The mother of the victim had arrived on the scene and was crying hysterically. The sound of her grief turned Vaughn’s thoughts to his maid, Alethea Strange. She had two sons, one the same age as Ricky, the other about the same age as the dead kid lying on the street. He’d met them once, and her husband, when he’d driven her home in a hard summer rain.

He shook off the thought. Every murder was a tragedy to someone, after all.

DEREK STRANGE LAY in his bed, listening to a scratching sound. The wind was moving the branches and leaves of the tree outside his window. A dog was making noise out there, too. Had to be the Broadnaxes’ shepherd, barking in the alley that ran behind the house. That’s all it was. A tree he climbed regular and a dog who always licked his outstretched hand.

Dennis was still out with his friends. Their parents had returned from the movie and gone to bed.

Derek felt his blood pulsing hard inside him. He wanted Dennis to come back home. He wanted him under the same roof as his mother and father. It was safe here when they were all together in this house.

He got up, went to Dennis’s bed, and slipped underneath the sheets and blanket. His brother wouldn’t mind that he’d switched. Derek smiled, smelling Dennis in the bed, knowing then that he could rest. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

As he slept, shadows crept across the wall.