The Turnaround

Eight

Charles Baker sat in Leo’s, a neighborhood watering hole on Georgia Avenue, near a flower-and-tree cross street in Shepherd Park. On the wood before him was a glass of draft beer that he had been nursing for some time. He was reading a newspaper and waiting on his ride.

Baker went through the Washington Post front to back. He did this daily. Though he had opened neither books nor newspapers in his youth, he had picked up the reading bug while in prison. The habit had stuck.

One section he skipped was employment. With his history, there wasn’t any good reason to apply for a job that came with a pension, health insurance, or a future. He’d been down that funny road. Going out on interviews, employers sensing immediately that he wasn’t “right” for the job, the box cutter scar on his face not helping him, the stink of his life on him permanent. When it was time to talk about his experience, he mentioned his felony convictions and incarcerations, as he was required to. Also, he liked to make straights squirm.

“It’s only fair to tell you that there are a lot of people applying for this position” (people without rap sheets). “Many of them are highly qualified” (they have been to school past the tenth grade, unlike you). “You seem like a good person” (I’m afraid of you). “We’ll give you a call” (never).

Sometimes Baker just wanted to laugh out loud in their offices, but he did not. He was a good boy. On the outside.

Anyway, he had a job, a part-time thing his PO had hooked him up with. It involved bedpans, soiled diapers, trash bags, and mops, but he was on paper, so he had to get himself employed. He was part of a cleaning crew in a nursing home down in Penn-Branch, off Branch Avenue, in Southeast. He had an arrangement with the dude he worked with, some variety of African, who would cover for him when he didn’t come in, assure the lady parole officer that Baker was regularly showing up for work. The African preferred to have his brother, whom he’d just brought over from the motherland, take the hours instead.

It was at the nursing home that Baker had met La Trice Brown. And through La Trice he’d gotten together with her son, Deon, and his friend Cody. Indirectly, working in that shithole had been good for him.

“What’s the name of the song and who did it? And don’t say Lou Rawls.”

“Gimme a second. I’m thinking.”

At the other end of the bar were two middle-aged white men four rounds deep in vodka. They had been talking loudly about women they claimed to have done, sports they’d never played, and cars they would someday like to own. Now they had begun to argue over the song coming from the juke. It was a popsoul number, heavy with strings. The vocalist had a smooth voice that started calm and grew in drama. At the peak of it, the man sounded like he was about to bust a nut all over the microphone. Baker knew the song but not to name it.

“ ‘Hang On in There, Baby.’ Johnny Bristol.”

“What year?”

“Seventy-four?”

“It was seventy-five.”

“I was off by a C hair.”

“What about the label?”

“It was MGM.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I bought the forty-five up at Variety Records when I was a teenager. I can still see the lion and shit.”

“You know what this song means, don’t ya?”

“It means, like, don’t let the world get you down.”

“No, dumbass. It means, hang your sausage hard inside me and don’t let it go limp.”

“Inside you? ”

“You know what I mean.”

“But it’s a dude singing it.”

“Okay, so he’s telling a broad to hold on. He’s telling her, hang in there. Try not to come too fast.”

“Who cares if she comes?”

“You got a point.”

Baker did not look over at the fools or pay them any mind. He was into the business section now, reading one of those sidebars they had, “Spotlight On,” where they profiled a successful person in the Washington area. Age, college attended, married to, kids, last book read, bullshit like that. It was in this very sidebar that Baker had first been mentally reacquainted with his man, who had made the big time. Not just an attorney, but a partner in a law firm. Bragging about how he was “involved” with kids in the inner city, had started a charitable foundation in the name of his family, through which he made “substantial contributions” to scholarship funds for “African American” students who were bound for college but needed “a helping hand.” Baker wondered if the man was running for office, or if he was just trying to show his friends that he was right in his heart. Everyone was gaming in some way.

The bartender, a heavyset guy with a big nose, asked him if he was ready for another. Baker put his hand over the top of the glass and said that he was good. The bartender went down the stick and asked the jokers if they wanted another round. They said they did and went back to their conversation.

“Hey, you ever been to Wardman Park?”

“When it was the Sheraton Park, I did.”

“I’m going to an affair down there on Saturday night. A wedding reception, in that Cotillion Room they got.”

“Yeah?”

“I haven’t been there in years. But I got, like, a history in that place.”

“What kinda history?”

“It’s of a sexual nature.”

“This again.”

“I’m sayin, I scored my first make-out there when I was fifteen years old.”

“Where, in the men’s room?”

The bartender prepared their drinks.

Baker thought of the photograph of the man he had seen in the newspaper. He remembered the boy at the trial. Blond, soft-spoken, so filled with remorse. The lucky one who ran away. He didn’t look anything like that boy anymore. Gray hair, nicely dressed, distinguished. Wouldn’t he be surprised to meet his old friend Charles?

“Hey, pal, can we buy you a beer?”

Baker turned his head. It was one of the white dudes, short guy with a Jew boy-looking Afro. Baker had been in and out of the world for many years, but he felt certain that whites had given up on that tired look a long time ago.

“I’m about to get up on outta here,” said Baker in a friendly way. “Thank you, though.”

In his previous life, he might have pulled back on his jacket to show the little dude the grip of a pistol coming out the waistband of his slacks. A visual reply to his kind offer with a glimpse at something that said “I ain’t thirsty.” That was the old Charles Baker. Not that he didn’t like to fuck with people now and again. But he wasn’t about to take an automatic fall for carrying a firearm.

Time was, he carried a gun regular and cared less than nothing about the consequences. Used to be, back when he was staying with a woman he knew, over there in the high forties, off Nannie Helen Burroughs in Northeast, he’d get up in the morning, drop a pistol into his pocket, head out the door, and go to work. Walk the streets until he came up on people who looked to be weak, older females and men he could punk, then take them off for what they had. He fancied himself a beautiful, strong animal, like one of those cheetahs walking out on the plain. Going to work natural, doing what hunters did.

That was before his most recent stay in prison. In the federal facility in Pennsylvania, toward the end of that last long stretch, he had crossed over into old. Sure, he had lifted weights and done the usual push-ups in his cell. He continued to look men in the eye and he walked tall. But no doubt, age had come up on him and it had slowed him some. Upon his release, his plan was no plan, as it had been many times before, but now the lack of a road map scared him. He realized that the physicality and fearlessness of his youth would no longer carry him in the world. He had no desire to live straight, but he could read a mirror and see that his strategy had to change. He would become a manager. Use his wiles and charm to make others do what he had grown too old to do himself.

He’d need to find some young ones and put them to work. Wasn’t hard to rope in the pups. Though his rep had died with those who were gone or incarcerated, anyone could look into his hazel eyes, drained of light, and see that he was real. Not in the sentimental way that graying uncles and tired rappers were afforded the OG tag. Real.

Baker’s cell, a disposable, sounded.

“Yeah, where you at?” said Baker.

“Comin up on you,” said the white boy, Cody.

Baker closed the phone.

A black Mercury Marauder pulled up out front of Leo’s. Charles Baker dropped beer money and a meager tip on the bar and walked out into the last of the day’s light. He crossed the sidewalk, stepping around one of those do-good types leading a dog out the Humane Society offices, and got into the spacious backseat of the car.

Deon Brown sat under the wheel of the Mercury. Cody Kruger was beside him. Deon looked in the rearview, and Baker studied his eyes. He had taken his pill, which was good.

“Go, boy,” said Baker.

Deon pulled off the curb, swung the Marauder around in the middle of Georgia, and headed south.

Latrice Brown owned a duplex row house in Manor Park, a middle-class neighborhood east of Georgia near the Fourth District police station. She stood in her second-floor bedroom, beside the window that gave onto a view of Peabody Street, looking down at the curb where her son, Deon, his friend Cody, and Charles Baker were stepping out of Deon’s car. Looking at Charles, she heard that voice in her head, which was her begging, saying, Please, let him be kind.

She worked for the Department of Labor as an administrative assistant. She had come from a strong family with roots in Southeast. She had held her government job for nearly twenty years, attended church regularly, did not smoke cigarettes or reefer, drank moderately, and had been a good mother to Deon and his older sister, La Juanda, now married and gone. Everything was right about her but one thing: she had always hooked up with bad men. Many women were attracted to reckless men in their youth. Most outgrew this attraction and learned, but La Trice Brown never had.

Deon’s father was dead, shot in the face for who knew what many years back at a house party in Baltimore. La Juanda’s father was a two-month error, a hustler she’d dropped off at the bus station in the way that soiled clothing got dumped at a homeless shelter. Charles Baker was La Trice’s latest mistake.

To be fair, he had seemed like a good man, a knight even, when they met. La Trice’s grandmother L’Annette had checked in permanently to the nursing home in Penn-Branch, suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and plain old age. When La Trice visited, she would sometimes speak with Mr. Baker, one of the cleaning men. Though there was something about him that suggested a kind of hard edge, he was always polite and asked after her grandmother, telling her that he would make sure “the old girl” was comfortable when he was on shift.

He was older than her by ten years, but attractive, with a shaved head and greenish eyes that reminded her of that movie star who played the pimp with the golden heart. To her, the scar on his face did not ruin him, but instead gave him character. He had told her straight-up that he had made some bad decisions in his life and was currently on paper. Her reply was that she believed in redemption and second chances. That was her again, being blind.

La Trice had bought her grandmother a small bottle of good perfume as a birthday gift, and one day, while sitting in the room with her, noticed it was not on the dresser where Miss L’Annette kept her precious things. She mentioned this to Mr. Baker, who said he’d look into the matter. The next time La Trice visited, the perfume bottle was back on the dresser. She found Mr. Baker pushing a mop and bucket down the hall.

“Was it you?” said La Trice.

“I took care of it,” said Mr. Baker. “One of the nurses, Haitian gal, thought she was slick. She ain’t gonna take nothing from grandmoms again.”

“How did you get it back?”

“I just, you know, politely showed this girl the error of her ways.”

Mr. Baker moved into her personal space, looming over her, powerful. La Trice was a short thing, and he was so tall.

“Thank you, Charles.”

“That’s the first time you called me by my Christian name.”

“Would you like to have some coffee with me sometime?”

“Oh, I’d like that very much, La Trice.”

He had seemed like such a good man then. La Trice heard the slam of the front door as he entered her house, and felt herself flinch.

The young men went off to play Xbox back in the TV room. Cody rented an apartment nearby where he and Deon stored, scaled, and bagged the marijuana they moved. It was also where Cody kept his gun. Deon still stayed in his mother’s house, partly to keep an eye on his mom and partly because he felt it was the wise thing to do, given Cody’s reckless nature.

Baker told them he’d be back shortly. He wanted to have a word with Deon’s mom.

Baker went up the stairs. La Trice had been acting funny lately. Talking back, getting annoyed when he spoke on his plans for the future, like she had heard his bullshit stories one too many times. The worst thing was, she sometimes recoiled at his touch. Once you lost that sexual hold on a woman, the relationship was done. You could only get it back temporary, but never all the way. Not that he cared about her. But he needed her son and his friend. He would have to get the girl in control of her emotions until he used the boys up.

La Trice was standing back in the corner of her bedroom when he entered. She was very short, with big breasts that were too big, if there was such a thing, when the brassiere hit the floor. She was all-right looking when she smiled, but she didn’t do much of that anymore, and when she was brooding she had that cartoon character thing going on, thyroid eyes, lips out, like some animated canine. He was sick of looking at her.

“What’s goin on, girlfriend?” said Baker pleasantly.

“I just got home from work. You?”

“Been lookin for work.”

“Weren’t you on the schedule today?”

“Called in sick.”

“A condition of your parole is that you have gainful employment. You need that job.”

“Need got nothing to do with it. I’m done with that place. I’m telling you, I can’t stand the smell of it anymore.”

He didn’t like working with all those foreigners, either. Like that Haitian nurse. He knew it was her who stole that perfume from La Trice’s grandmother. Wasn’t the first resident that girl hit. Always took from the ones who were mixed up in the head. When he confronted the Haitian about the theft, she denied it, so he went ahead and pushed her into a vacant room and pinned her to the wall with a forearm across her neck. Squeezed one of her nipples hard between his thumb and forefinger, right through the fabric of her uniform, until a tear ran down her cheek. She brought that bottle of perfume to him the very next day. His gallant act had made him a hero to La Trice.

“I got what I wanted out of that nursing home, anyway,” said Baker. “I made the acquaintance of a sweet old lady named Miss L’Annette. And I met you.”

Baker remembered when words like that would dampen La Trice’s panties. But now she just looked away.

“We gonna be all right, girl,” said Baker. He stepped to her and lifted her chin with his hand. He bent forward and kissed her still lips.

She wanted him to go away. She didn’t love him. She didn’t care for the influence he had on her son. They were doing some kind of dirt together, Charles and Deon and Cody. Whatever it was, it had to be wrong.

“I’m out,” said Baker.

“Where you off to now?”

“Over to the apartment with the fellas. ’Less you want me to stay here with you.”

“No,” said La Trice. “You go ahead.”

Charles went downstairs, found the boys, and told them it was time to go.