Hell To Pay

chapter 12

ON Wednesday morning, Garfield Potter had Carlton Little and Charles White drop him at the Union Station parking garage, where he spotted a car he liked, a police-package, white-over-blue ’89 Plymouth Grand Fury with a 318 engine and a four-barrel carb. Potter used a bar to break into the vehicle and a long-handled flat-head to pop out the ignition. He hot-wired the Plymouth and rolled down to the exit. Potter wore a skully and shades so that the booth camera could record very little of his face. As he didn’t have a ticket, he paid the full-penalty parking fee and drove out of the garage.

Potter followed Little and White out to Prince George’s County, pulling up behind them on a gravel shoulder running alongside a football field in Largo. He waited for his boys to wipe the prints out of the interior and off the exterior handles of the beige Caprice, as he had instructed them to do, and when they joined him inside the Fury he turned the car back toward D.C.

Potter and Little both had priors: possession, intent to distribute, and aggravated-assault beefs. Also, there had been one sodomy-rape charge on Potter, dropped when the victim would not testify. Eventually, they knew, some judge would have to give them time. Like many of his peers, Potter often bragged on the fact that violent death or a jail cell awaited him. But he didn’t want to go down on something as mundane as grand theft. A charge like that was a bitch charge, and it bought you no respect inside the walls. So he was always careful to cover his tracks when he got rid of one of his stolen cars.

Old police cars, or those outfitted for police specifications, were the vehicle of choice for many young men in and around D.C. Potter heard you could buy them cheap off lots in Virginia, in places like Manassas and Nokesville, wherever that was. But he didn’t like to cross over into Virginia for any reason, and anyway, lately he hadn’t been buying shit. You could steal a car easily in the District, and if you rotated it out, say, once a week, you’d never get caught. Well, he hadn’t been caught at it yet.

Potter looked at it like this: What you had to do was, you had to target a car owned by a young brother who lived in the city or near the PG County line. Some young brothers got their shit stole, they didn’t even report it to the police, on account of they knew damn near nothing would come of it anyway, and there was also this unwritten thing about not talking with the MPD. Many of them didn’t carry insurance either, so there wasn’t no money reason to report it. Sure, the ones got their cars took kept their ears open and their eyes out for the thief, looking to get some street justice if they could. But so far, Potter, Little, and White had escaped that as well.

Potter floored the gas as he got on the entrance ramp to the Beltway.

“Shit moves,” said Potter.

“Better than that hooptie we done had, D,” said Little.

“Gonna buy us a Lex soon, though. I’m fixin’ to own me a nice whip.”

“When?” said Little.

“Soon.”

Charles White sat in the backseat, letting the wind from the open window hit his face. He was listening to that song “Bounce with Me,” done by that singer they called Lil’ Bow Wow, who dressed like a gangster but wasn’t nothin’ much more than a kid. White was still up there from the hydro him and Carlton had smoked on the way out to Largo, and the song sounded good. He was into music; it was, like, his hobby. Sometimes he made tapes of himself over beats. Maybe someday he’d take some of the money they were making and go into a studio, lay somethin’ down for real. But he figured that was for other people to do, like Bow Wow, had someone showin’ him how to make it and all that. Someone to guide him, like.

In his true mind Charles White knew that he was stuck with what he had right here. The only family he had now, except for his grandmother, was the boys he’d come up with. Garfield and Carlton, before both of them turned cold and all the way hard, like they were now.

White’s hand instinctively dropped to his side, but there was nothing there. He still thought of Trooper all the time. He missed him. He wished Trooper were sitting warm beside him on the backseat.

Potter looked in the rearview at White, breathing through his mouth, looking out the window with the wind beatin’ on him, slumped in the backseat. Dumb-ass motherfucker, probably still stressin’ over that stupid dog. Potter thought of White as a dog, too, in a way, a thing that just kind of followed him and Carlton around.

He was stuck with White. White still acted and thought like a kid sometimes. He hadn’t changed much since the three of them had been tiny, growing up in the Waterfront Gardens, the Section Eight housing units down off M Street by the Southeast / Southwest line. Wasn’t no “waterfront” about it, though sometimes the seagulls did drop in from Buzzards Point and pick at the trash. Some government type actually did have the nerve to name that shit hole a Garden, too. One of those jokes you couldn’t even laugh at. Not that Potter was crying about it or nothin’ like that. If it wasn’t for what he didn’t have, and he never did have one good thing, he wouldn’t have the ambition and drive he had today.

He could have used a father, he supposed, someone to throw a football to or sumshit like that. His mother didn’t even have the strength to lift a ball, eighty-eight pounds of no-ass crackhead like she was, at the end.

He wasn’t gonna cry about that either. Family and all that bullshit, it meant nothing to him, and it didn’t get you anything when you counted the chips up at the end of the day. It was like them books his teachers was always tellin’ him to read before they gave up on his ass, back about the fifth grade. He couldn’t hardly read, and still he had a shoebox full of cash money in the closet at his place, clothes, cars, bitches, everything. So what was the point of books, or some piece of paper, said you went to school?

He had a good business going now. Him and Carlton, he guessed he had to call Charles a partner, too, they had some runners down on Georgia, below Harvard Street, and they sold the shit out of some dime bags of marijuana on that corner there. Marijuana, the good shit that was goin’ around, the stuff grown hydroponic, was the way to go. In D.C., didn’t matter whether you were in possession of a dime bag or ten pounds, it wasn’t nothin’ but a misdemeanor. You did go to court, most of the time it was no-papered, everyone in the life knew that. Black juries didn’t want to send a young black man into the deadly prison system for some innocent charge like holding a little marijuana. Innocent, shit, Potter had to laugh at that. Young brothers killed one another over chronic just as dead as they did over crack and heroin. The people in charge would change the laws, make them tougher again when they figured all this out, but until then, hydro was the game.

So Potter had this business and he liked to keep it small. He didn’t call him and his boys a “crew” or a “mob” or nothin’ like that. You got into turf beefs and eyeball beefs that way; shit just got too complex. Potter was basically into having fun: stealing cars, taking off dumb motherfuckers who could get took, robbing crap games, shit like that. But he never fucked with those he knew to be hooked into crews, or their kin. Never that he knew, anyway. Only fuck with the weak, those who had no strength in numbers, that was his plan. He figured he hadn’t made any big mistakes yet. He was still alive.

“Where we goin’?” said Little.

“Dime the rest of that key out and get it out to our troops,” said Potter. “Maybe tonight we’ll slide by Roosevelt, see if our boy Wilder is hangin’ with his nephew on that football field.”

“You still on that?”

“Told you I wouldn’t forget.”

They went back to their place, a row house they rented month-to-month on Warder Street in Park View, and dimed out the shit. They smoked a couple of Phillies while they worked. White went out for a bag of McDonald’s, and when he returned there were a couple of young local girls up in the crib who’d dropped by. The new Too Short was up loud, and everyone was on the get-high and drinking gin and grapefruit. This pretty young thing, Brianna, was with Little, and they were laughing and then just gone, up in Carlton’s room. Potter took the other one, couldn’t have been more than thirteen, away with him next, kind of pulling on the sleeve of her Tweety Bird shirt. To White she didn’t look like she wanted to go. A little while later White heard the bedsprings from back in Potter’s room against the crying of that girl. White turned up the stereo so he didn’t have to hear it, but he could still hear it deep in his head. So he went outside and sat on the stoop, where he rubbed at his temples and tried to remember if there had ever been a time in his life when he felt right.

POTTER and the rest drove down to Harvard Street and found his main boy, kid named Juwan, sitting on a trash can. Juwan was one of those, like Gary Coleman, had a man’s head on a boy’s body. They took Juwan back to where the fence ran along the McMillan Reservoir. Juwan, sitting next to White in the backseat, passed a large Ziplock bag full of money, which he had taken from his knapsack, up to Little. Little took the money out, separated some for Juwan, and filled the Ziplock with dimed-out bags of marijuana. Juwan slipped the package back into his knapsack.

“Everything all right, little man?” said Potter.

“It’s good, D. One thing, though. You know William, that boy got one leg shorter than the other? The po-lice took him in last night. William be like, thick and shit. I done told him, Don’t be carryin’ when you steerin’, you know what I’m sayin’? But he don’t listen. I know he’ll be out today, but-”

“Say what’s on your mind.”

“Was gonna ask you, I got this cousin, just moved up from Southeast? He was lookin’ to get put on, yo.”

“Put him on then, Jew. What I been tellin’ you, man? Someone don’t work out, go ahead and find someone else. Always gonna be kids out there wanna get in.”

They dropped Juwan back on Harvard and Georgia. Then Potter stopped at a market and bought a few forties of malt. They drove around some more, drinking the malt and getting smoked up. Little found a cassette tape, a Northeast Groovers PA mix that had been left in the glove box by the Plymouth’s owner, and he slipped it in the deck.

“Shits ain’t got no bass,” said White from the backseat.

Potter ignored White and turned up the volume. At a stoplight he stared down some young boy in a rice burner who he thought had been staring at him. The young boy looked away.

“Where we goin’?” said Little.

“Swing on up to Roosevelt,” said Potter.

“I don’t want to be drivin’ around all night lookin’ for some ghost.”

“You got somethin’ better to do?”

“Brianna,” said Little. “I might just meet her again tonight, she can get out her mother’s house. I tossed the shit out of that bitch today, boy.”

“She ain’t look too satisfied to me.”

“Bull shit.”

“That’s too much girl for you, man.”

“Shit, she was singin’, ‘Say my name, say my name’ this afternoon. You saw her smilin’ when she walked out the crib. Not like that girl you was fuckin’, had tears on her face when she left.”

“I gave her the anaconda, she couldn’t help but cry. Anyway, your girl Brianna wasn’t smilin’, she was laughin’.”

“At what?”

“At that itty-bitty thing you got between your legs.”

“Shit, I’m thick as a can of tuna fish down there, man.”

Potter side-glanced Little. “Long as one, too.”

They drove up to Roosevelt High and parked on Iowa. Potter walked down the driveway entrance to the lot, where several cars were parked, and went to the fence bordering the stadium. Kids in football uniforms were doing calisthenics on the field. Their call-and-response chant echoed up to the parking lot.

“How y’all feel?”

“Fired up!”

Potter didn’t see Lorenze Wilder in the group of parents and relatives sitting in the stands. A bunch of men, looked like coaches, stood around on the field. One of them he recognized as the older dude with the gray in his natural, had been bold enough to study him and Little that time before. Potter spit on the ground and walked back to the car. He got behind the wheel of the Plymouth, his face gone hard.

They went back to their place. They got their heads up and drank some more and watched UPN and something on the WB. Little tried to sweet-talk Brianna out again, but her mother got on the telephone line and told him she was in for the night. Potter suggested they go out again, and Little agreed. White didn’t want to, but he got up off the couch. Potter slipped his.357 into his waistband and put a Hilfiger shirt on, tails out, over his sleeveless T. He fitted his skully back on his head. White slipped on a bright orange Nautica pullover, his favorite, and followed Potter and Little out to the street.

They drove around, up and down Georgia. They checked on the troops. Potter drank another forty, and his face got more humorless and he drove from a lower position in the seat. It had been a long day of getting high and doing nothing, and it felt late to White. Anyway, it was full dark. Potter rolled the Plymouth into the Park Morton complex, driving real slow. Some kids were out, sitting like they always did on the entrance wall.

“Lorenze Wilder’s sister live here,” said Potter.

Little said nothing. Like White, he was tired, and right about now would rather have been in front of the television, or in bed. He didn’t like being out with Garfield when he’d been drinkin’, had all that liquid courage inside him. Truth was, Little was kinda drunk, too.

Potter slowed the car. A lanky young man was walking across the narrow street, onto a plot of dirt that passed for a playground. He wore khaki pants, a pressed white T-shirt, and wheat-colored Timberland boots.

“Ask him he knows her,” said Potter.

“Yo,” said Little out the window. They were alongside the young man now. He was still walking, and the Plymouth was keeping pace.

“What?” said the young man, who looked at them briefly, for just the right amount of respect time, but kept his step.

“You know a woman name of Wilder lives here?” said Little. “Got a little boy, kid plays football, sumshit like that. I got this friend owes her money, he asked me to swing by and tell her he’d be payin’ it back to ’er next week.”

The young man looked at them again, scanned the front and backseat, his sight staying on the odd-looking young man in the bright orange pullover for what he feared might be a moment too long, then cut his eyes. “I ain’t know no one around here, no lie. I just moved up in here, like, last week.”

“Aiight then.”

“Aiight,” said the young man, moving off into the playground, walking with his shoulders squared, his head up, turning a corner and disappearing into the night.

“Maybe I ought to talk to that boy my own self,” said Potter, the lids of his eyes heavy, half shut.

“He said he didn’t know, D,” said Little. “Let’s just let this shit rest for tonight.”

Potter kept the Plymouth cruising slow. He went around a kind of long bend that took him to the other side of the housing complex. They could see a group of people back in a stairwell lit pale yellow. Potter braked, steered the Plymouth up on the dirt, and cut the engine.

Potter said, “C’mon.”

They got out of the car and followed him across the dirt to the stairwell entrance. There were three men crouched down there and a pink-eyed woman leaning against a cinder-block wall. In one hand the woman held both a cigarette and a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Smoke hung in the yellow light.

Older cats, all of ’em, thought Potter. Didn’t know nobody, didn’t have nobody gave a fuck about ’em.

The dice-playing men looked up briefly as Potter approached, Little and White behind him. The oldest of the players, vandyked, wearing a black shirt with thin white stripes and a black Kangol cap, eyed Potter up and down, then rolled dice against the wall. The dice came up sixes. There was some talk about the boxcar roll, and money changed hands. Money was spread out on the concrete.

“Y’all want in,” said the roller, staring down the lane to the wall, shaking the dice in his hand, “you’re gonna have to wait.”

Potter didn’t like that the man didn’t look him in the eye when he spoke.

“That your woman?” said Potter, staring at the lady leaning on the wall. She took his stare, even as Potter smiled and licked his lips.

The dice man didn’t answer. He made his roll.

“Asked you if that was your woman.”

“And I told you to wait,” said the man.

The other men laughed. One of them reached into his breast pocket and extracted a cigarette. None of them looked at Potter.

“Get up,” said Potter. “Stand your tired ass up and face me.”

The dice man sighed some, then stood up. He grunted and rubbed at one knee as he did. He was old. But he was bigger than Potter expected, both in the shoulders and in height. He had a half foot on Potter if he had an inch. Now his eyes were twinkling.

“You got somethin’ you want to say to me?”

Potter reached under his shirttail and drew the Colt. He held it at his hip, the muzzle on the midsection of the man. The man’s eyes were calm; they didn’t even flare.

“Give it up,” said Potter. “All the cash.”

“Shit,” said the man, drawing it out slow, and he smiled.

“I’m gonna take your money,” said Potter. “You want, I’ll dead you to your woman, too.”

“Son?” said the man. “I done had guns pointed at me, by real men, while I was layin’ in rice paddies and mud, for two solid years. And here I am standin’ before you. Do I look like I’m worried about that snub-nose you got in your hand?”

“This here?” Potter looked at the gun as if it had just showed up in his hand. “Old-time, I wasn’t gonna shoot you with it.”

Potter swung the barrel so quickly that it lost its shape in the light. He slashed it across the brow of the man, the blow knocking the cap off his head. The man’s hand went to his face, blood seeping through his fingers immediately, and he stumbled back against the wall. Potter flipped the gun in the air and caught it on the half turn, so that he held it now by the barrel. He moved forward, ignoring the other men who had stood suddenly and backed away, and smashed the butt into the man’s cheekbone. He hit him in the nose the same way, blood dotting the cinder blocks as the man’s head whipped to the side. Potter laughed against the woman’s screams. He reared back to beat the man again and felt someone grab his arm. Looking over his shoulder with wild eyes, he saw that it was Charles White who held him there.

“Man, get your got-damn hands off me, man!” yelled Potter.

“Let’s just take the money,” said Little, moving into the light. “You about to kill a motherfucker, boy.”

“Get the money, then,” said Potter. He smiled and spit on the man lying bloodied before him. “You ain’t standin’ now, are you, Old-time?” Potter barked a laugh and raised his voice in elation. “Can’t nobody in this city fuck with Garfield Potter?”

Little and White gathered the cash up off the concrete. They backed up into the grassy area, turned, and walked quickly to the car. No one followed them or shouted for help.

Little counted the cash as they drove out of the complex. White looked in the rearview. A grin had broken, and was frozen, on Garfield Potter’s face.

LAMAR Williams said good night to his mother, a thirty-two-year-old woman with the face and body of a forty-year-old, who was leaning against the stove in their galley-sized kitchen, smoking a cigarette.

“Where you been at, Mar?”

“Practice with Mr. Derek. I was watchin’ wrestlin’ with that kid Joe Wilder after that, over at his mother’s.”

“I’m gonna need you in tomorrow night. I got plans.”

“Aiight.”

Lamar went down a hall and pushed open the door to his baby sister’s room. She was lying atop her bed, stretched out in those pj’s of hers, the ones had little roses printed on them. On her feet were those furry gold slippers she wouldn’t take off, with Winnie the Pooh’s head on the front. What was she now, almost four? Lamar covered her with a sheet.

He went back to his room, turned on his radio, sat on the edge of his bed, and listened to DJ Flexx talkin’ to some young girl who’d called in with some shout-outs for her friends. Then Flexx played that new Wyclef Jean joint that Lamar liked, the one with Mary J., where they was talkin’ about “Someone please call 911.” That one was tight. It made him feel better, to hear that pretty song.

Lamar lay back on the bed. He could still feel his heart beating hard beneath his white T-shirt. He’d done right, not giving up anything to those boys who’d tried to sweat him from the open windows of that car, because whatever they wanted with Joe Wilder’s mother, it was no good. But it was hard to keep doing right. Hard to have to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, keep up that shell all the time out here, when sometimes all you wanted to do was be young and have fun. Relax.

Lamar was tired. He rested the palm of his hand over his eyes and tried to make himself breathe slow.