The Turnaround

Four

Three teenage boys cruised the streets in a Gran Torino, drinking beer, smoking weed, and listening to the radio. Three Dog Night’s “Black and White” came from the dash speaker. The vocalist sang, “The world is black, the world is white / Together we learn to read and write.” Billy sang along but changed the words to “Your daddy’s black, your mama’s white / Your daddy likes his poontang tight.” They had heard Billy sing this one many times, but they were laughing as if it were new to them. The three of them had just blown a fat bone. Though the temperature was in the upper eighties, they had rolled up the windows to keep the high in the car.

Billy sat under the wheel of the Torino, a green-over-green two-door with a 351 Cleveland under the hood, his dad’s latest loaner. He wore a red bandanna over his thick black hair. He looked like a heavy pirate.

“Pin this piece,” said Alex from the backseat.

Billy gave the Ford gas. Beneath them, dual pipes rumbled pleasantly as they headed up a long rise on an east-west residential thruway. They were nearing the small commercial district not far from their neighborhood.

“Mach One,” said Billy, reverently. “Hear it roar.”

“It’s a Torino,” said Pete, riding shotgun.

“Same engine as the Mach,” said Billy. “That’s all I’m sayin.”

“To ree no,” said Pete.

“Least I’m drivin a car,” said Billy.

“It’s off your dad’s lot,” said Pete. “It’s like a rental.”

“Still, I’m drivin it. Wasn’t for me, you’d be walkin.”

“To your mother’s house,” said Pete.

Billy’s wide shoulders shook. He laughed easily, the way big guys did, even when a friend was cracking on his mother.

“Your baby sister, too,” said Pete, holding his hand palm up so that Alex could slap him five. Alex did it sharply, and the action made Pete’s straight shoulder-length hair move about his face.

Pete killed his Schlitz and tossed the can over the seat. It hit the other ones they had drained that day, now in a heap on the floorboard, and made a dull sound.

“I need cigarettes,” said Billy.

“Pull into the Seven-Ereven,” said Pete, like he was a Chinese trying to talk American.

They parked and got out of the car. They wore 501 straight-leg Levi’s, rolled up at the cuffs, and pocket T-shirts. Pete wore Adidas Superstars, and Billy sported a pair of denim Hanover wedges. Alex wore his Chucks. The boys weren’t stylish, but they had down-county style.

The store was not a 7-Eleven, but it had been one for a time, and the three boys still identified it as such. Now run by a family of Asians, its primary offerings were beer and wine. As the boys entered, Climax’s “Precious and Few” played through a cheap sound system from behind the counter. One of the Asians was singing along softly, and when he came to “precious,” he sang “pwecious.” When Alex heard this he chuckled. He found these things funny when he was high. Alex went to the candy aisle and stared at its display.

Pete and Billy had a brief conversation that ended with a bit of laughter. Then Pete went to a spinning rack and tried on a hat with a hooked-bass patch stitched on its front while Billy bought cigarettes, Hostess cherry pies, and beer. They never carded Billy here or anywhere else. He looked like a man.

Outside, Billy broke the cellophane on a hardpack of Marlboro Reds, tore out the foil, and extracted a cigarette. He fired it up with a Zippo lighter that had an eight ball inlaid on it. He had lifted it at the Cue Club after some greaser had left it lying on a rail.

“What do you girls wanna do now?” said Pete.

They were standing by the car in the direct sun. The heat was coming up in waves off the sidewalk. Billy held the bag of beer and cherry pies under his arm.

“Drink this brew before it gets too hot to drink it,” said Billy.

“Who don’t know that?” said Alex.

Pete watched Billy smoke. Pete didn’t use cigarettes himself. His father said his friends came from uneducated people and that was why they had stupid habits. Pete took mild offense at this and expressed it vocally, but he felt in his heart that his father was right.

“Y’all ready to get torched?” said Billy.

Alex shrugged a Why not? There was nothing to do on this Saturday afternoon but get higher than they were now.

Billy finished smoking. He flicked his cigarette out into the parking lot with practiced nonchalance.

“Let’s roll, Clitoris,” said Pete to Billy Cachoris.

They got back into the Ford.

They drank six more beers and smoked another joint of Colombian, scored that morning, and got stoned and reckless behind the alcohol they had been pouring on empty stomachs. “Tumbling Dice” was finishing up on the radio, and Pete had cranked it up. In front, Billy and Pete were heatedly discussing the Fourth of July Stones concert, which had included good bud, a party ball of sour mash whiskey, and a girl in a halter top.

“God made halters,” said Billy, “so blind guys can grab tit.”

“Jenny Maloney,” said Pete, naming the pom-pom girl at their high school whom the boys called the Hole. “She’s got this one halter top, boy…”

Alex remembered the girl in the halter top and Peanut jeans who had danced in front of him during the concert. He could recall the details of the entire day. He, Billy, and Pete had gone down to RFK Stadium on the morning of the Fourth in the Whitten family Oldsmobile and parked in the main lot, where the Dead and the Who were blasting from the open windows of cars and vans. They had brought sandwiches, packed by Alex’s mom, and a dude in a wheelchair traded them a small piece of hash for a ham-and-Swiss. They smoked it, got up immediately, and went to join the crowds moving toward the venue. When the gates opened, the expected chaotic surge ensued, caused by the festival seating policy, which had thousands trying to enter the stadium at once. Coolers holding bottles of beer and liquor were being smashed by security guards, and at one point Alex was pinned against a chain-link fence, only to be rescued by Billy, who yelled, “Jerry Kramer!” with joy as he body-blocked a big man to the ground and set Alex free. Alex, Billy, and Pete found seats behind the dugout, where Alex had sat with his father at baseball games before the Nats left town, and commenced smoking one of the many joints they had rolled that morning with Top papers. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas came on first, played “Dancing in the Street,” and when they sang the phrase “Baltimore and D.C.,” the audience lit up. The girl in the halter top danced before them, her hips alive, and the boys imagined her in the act, all of them transfixed. Stevie Wonder appeared next, oddly opening with “Rockin’ Robin,” a hit for Michael Jackson earlier that year, and then got the throngs going when he moved into his own material. During “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours),” a handler came out and turned Stevie around, as he was inadvertently singing to the empty, obstructed-view portion of the stands. After a dead period during which people got more inebriated, more unruly, and more high, the Stones walked onto the stage, and Mick Jagger, cocaine skinny in a white jumpsuit and red silk scarf, shouted, “Hello, campers!” launching the band into “Brown Sugar.” Forty thousand were up on their feet, fueled by alcohol, speed, acid, pot, and youth. A police officer twirled his nightstick in unison with the rhythm section. The band played cuts from Exile on Main Street, which had recently been released. Mick Taylor’s guitar solo on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was epic. Jagger pranced, pirouetted, and whipped the stage with a leather belt during “Midnight Rambler.” Jagger toasted the crowd with a bottle of Jack, saying, “I drink to your independence.” Tear gas drifted in from police action outside the stadium. The boys’ eyes burned, but they didn’t care. Girls who tried to climb onstage were thrown off or hauled away by security and had their hands cut by nails driven up through the stage’s edge. Near the end of the concert, during a violent “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the houselights were turned on, and the smoke in the air was industrial as it moved up into the night sky. Alex could not remember being happier. He had never experienced anything like this and doubted that anything in his life would ever top it.

“The Hole must wear a halter top down there, too,” said Billy. “ ’Cause she likes to allow that easy access.”

“For real,” said Pete.

Billy and Pete were still talking about Jenny Maloney. Alex wondered how long they had been discussing her. He wondered if he had blacked out.

“I know you had your fingers in it,” said Billy, setting Pete up.

“I had my arm in it, man,” said Pete. “In the stairwell up at the HoJo hotel? Her parents were giving her a sweet sixteen party and shit. While they were passing out party favors, me and Jenny were up there on the landing, making out, and she put one foot up on this step and took my hand and kinda guided it up there. I didn’t need no petroleum jelly, either, no lie…”

As Pete went on, Alex Pappas tuned him out. Billy and Pete always sat together up front, and at some point when they were partying, they forgot he was in the car. He didn’t mind. The things they said when they were high, he had heard them all before. Pete, elbow deep in Jenny Maloney’s pussy at her sweet sixteen party, in the stairwell of the HoJo hotel up in Wheaton while her parents passed out birthday hats in the rented room… no shit, he knew it by heart.

Alex looked out the window. The world outside was tilted a bit and moving, and he blinked to stop the spin. He could feel the sweat dripping down his chest under his T. They were at the red light at the Boulevard. They were in the middle lane, which meant straight only. He had never been “over there” to Heathrow Heights, and as far as he knew, neither had his friends. He vaguely wondered why Billy was in this lane. He remembered the conversation between Billy and Pete the night before, and he thought: Now Billy is going to show us that he is not afraid.

PGC was playing “Rocket Man.” The song reminded Alex of his girlfriend, Karen. Karen lived on a street called Lovejoy. Billy called the street “Lovejew” because the neighborhood was heavy with the Tribe. In the spring, Alex and Karen had cut school and gone out to Great Falls in Karen’s eggplant-colored Valiant. They swam in a natural pool and drank warm Buds, sunning themselves on the rocks. On the way home, Karen let Alex drive her car. “Rocket Man” was on the radio, and Karen sat beside him smoking a cigarette, shivering in her bikini top and damp jeans, tapping ash into the tray as she sang along to the song and sometimes smiled at him with strands of black hair stuck to her face. Karen’s cold father and hateful stepmother made him want to protect her. He pondered if this was what it meant to love someone and he guessed that he did love Karen. He thought, I should be with her right now.

“What are we gonna do when we get in there?” said Pete.

“Just fuck with ’em,” said Billy. “Raise a little hell.”

Alex wanted to say, “Let me out here.” But his friends would call him a pussy and a faggot if he did.

Alex looked through the windshield as Billy caught the green.

They were crossing the Boulevard and then they were across it, going down an incline along the railroad tracks and past a bridge that spanned the tracks and then down into a neighborhood of ramshackle homes and cars that said poor. There were three young black guys grouped on the sidewalk ahead, in front of what looked like a country store. Two of the guys were shirtless and one of them wore a white T-shirt that had numbers written on it in Magic Marker. Alex noticed that one of the shirtless ones had a scar on his face. Pete and Billy were rolling down their windows.

“You ever been back here, for real?” said Pete. Alex could hear excitement and a catch in Pete’s voice. Pete was rooting through the paper bag at his feet and coming up with one of the Hostess cherry pies in his hand. He tore the wrapper off the pie.

“Nah,” said Billy, who was looking at the group of black guys, now eye-fucking them as they approached. They were thin, flat of chest and stomach, broad shouldered, and muscled out in the arms.

“You know how to get out of here, right?” said Pete.

“ Drive outta here,” said Billy, switching off the radio. “I got the wheel. You just do your thing.”

“Why you goin so slow?”

“So you don’t miss.”

“I’m not gonna fuckin miss.”

“Billy,” said Alex. His voice was soft, and neither Billy nor Pete turned his head.

And now the Torino was there, and the young men were stepping slowly to the car as it pulled alongside them. Billy’s face was stretched tight. He leaned toward the passenger window and yelled, “Eat this, you fuckin niggers!” and Pete backhand-tossed the cherry pie. It glanced off the scar-faced, shirtless young man, and Pete ducked to avoid his punch, thrown through the open window. Billy floored it, cackling with laughter, and the Ford left rubber on the street as it fishtailed and straightened and headed down the road. Alex felt the color drain from his face.

They heard the angry calls of the young men behind them. They passed more houses and an intersection and then a very old church, and down at the end of the road they saw a striped barrier erected by the county and behind it, beside the railroad tracks, thick woods and vines in full summer green.

“It’s a turnaround,” said Alex, as if in wonder.

“The hell it is,” said Billy. “It’s a dead end.”

Billy put the Ford through a three-point maneuver, slamming the automatic shifter into reverse, then into drive, and headed back up the street. The young men were standing in the road, not moving toward them, not yelling anymore. The shirtless one who had been hit by the pie looked to be smiling.

Billy tore his bandanna off his head, letting his black hair fall free. He turned left at the intersection, and the tires cried as they passed more houses in disrepair and an old black lady walking a small dog, then they came to a T in the road and all looked right and left. On the right, the road became a circle. On the left, the road ended with another striped barrier bordering woods. All of them pondered their stupidity and bad luck, and no one said a word.

Billy turned the car around and drove back to the main road. He stopped at the intersection and looked left. Two of the young men were spread out in the middle of the road, spaced so the Ford could not pass through. The other had taken a position on the sidewalk. An older black woman with eyeglasses had appeared and was standing on the porch of the country market.

Pete touched the handle of the door.

“Pete,” said Billy.

“ Fuck this,” said Pete. He opened the door, leaped out, closed the door behind him, and took off. He ran toward the woods at the end of the street, the soles of his three-stripes kicking up as he slashed left and hit the railroad tracks without breaking stride.

Alex felt betrayal and envy churn inside him as he watched Pete vanish behind the tree line. Alex wanted to book, too, but he could not. It wasn’t just loyalty to Billy. It was the suspicion that he would not make it to the woods. He was not as fast as Pete. They’d catch up to him, and the fact that he had run would only make it worse. Maybe Billy could talk them out of this. Billy could just apologize, and the ones in the street would see that what they’d done was nothing more than a stupid prank.

“I can’t leave my dad’s car,” said Billy very quietly. He hit the gas and went back up the road, the way they’d come in.

She is my parents’ age, thought Alex, looking at the older woman wearing eyeglasses who stood on the porch in front of the store. She will stop this. His heart dropped as he watched her turn and walk into the market.

Billy stopped the Torino and locked the shifter into park about fifty feet from the young men. He stepped out of the car, leaving the door open. Alex watched him walk toward the young men, who gathered around him in the street. He heard Billy’s amiable voice say, “Can’t we work this out?” He saw Billy’s hands go up, as if in surrender. A lightning right came forward from one of the shirtless young men, and Billy’s head snapped back. He stumbled and put a hand to his mouth. When he lowered his hand there was blood on it, and Billy spit blood and saliva to the ground.

“You knocked my teeth out,” said Billy. “You satisfied?”

Billy turned and pointed at Alex, still seated in the backseat of the Torino.

“Take off!” shouted Billy, blood and anguish on his face.

Alex pushed the driver’s seat forward and got out of the car. His feet hit the asphalt lightly, and he turned. He was grabbed from behind and thrown forward, and he tripped and went down on all fours. He heard footsteps behind him and was lifted off his knees by a fierce kick in his groin. The air left his lungs in a rush. When he caught his breath, he puked beer and bile. He panted furiously, watching his vomit steaming on the asphalt before him. He rolled onto his side and closed his eyes.

When Alex’s eyes opened, he saw a foot rushing toward his face, and it hit him like a hammer.

“Shoot that motherfucker!”

“Nah.”

“Shoot him!”

“Nah, man, nah…”

“Do it!”

Another blow came down on Alex, and something was crushed. It felt as if one of his eyes had been loosened and sprung.

My face is broken. Dad…

A shot echoed out into the streets of Heathrow Heights.