The Way Home

THREE

Where you about to go, dawg?” said Jason. His face showed no fear or care, and it amped Chris further. “We blocked in behind us.”

“Not on the right,” said Chris.

“That’s one-way to the right, comin in. You’ll be going against traffic.”

“I can deal with that.” Watching as a uniformed officer in the lead car stepped out of his vehicle. “ Fuck this.”

Chris pulled the console’s transmission arm toward him and locked it into drive. He cut the wheel right and gave the Trooper hard gas. The SUV went up the driveway, toward a car coming in, and Chris took the Trooper up onto the sidewalk. People shouted out behind them, and Chris swerved and drove across the sidewalk, behind the bus shelter on McKinley Street. A panicked pedestrian leaped away from their path, and then they were off the curb and straight onto the street.

“Red light,” said Jason, indicating the signal at Connecticut.

“I see it,” said Chris, and he blew the red. A sedan crossing north on the green braked wildly and three-sixtied, its tail end sweeping and missing them, and Chris punched the gas and blew up McKinley’s rise going east.

“Ho, shit!” said Jason.

“They’re comin,” said Chris.

One of the squad cars had hit its sirens and light bar and was maneuvering through the intersection, which had been blocked by the car that had spun and stalled.

Chris stepped on the pedal and kept it pinned to the floor. The gas flooded into the carb, and the Isuzu wound up and took the hill fast, sailing over the crest. It was a narrow street, and a boxy sedan was headed straight for them. Jason said, “Chris,” and the sedan swerved to the right and swiped a parked vehicle, sparks illuminating Chris’s side vision as they passed. He ran a four-way stop and in the rearview saw the squad car gaining on them, and the one behind it doing the same. The sirens grew louder.

“They about to be on us,” said Jason.

“Hold on,” said Chris.

He made a right on Broad Branch Road, barely braking. The first squad car squealed a right and fell in behind them. As they neared the Morrison Street intersection, Chris saw a car coming in from the east and Jason gasped as they jetted through the four-way and the oncoming car braked into a ninety-degree skid. They heard a metallic explosion as the skidding car pancaked the squad car behind them, and Chris made a crazy sharp right onto Legation Street. The top-heavy Isuzu went up on two wheels, and Jason’s face turned white as milk as he raised his arm to grip the handle mounted on the headliner. Chris kept the wheel steady and put the Trooper back on four, then quickly turned into an alley that he knew elbowed off to the left. He followed the angle of the elbow and when he felt they were out of the sight line of Legation, he put the Trooper beside a wooden fence and cut the lights and engine.

Chris and Jason laughed. They stopped and got their breath, looked at each other, and laughed some more.

“You dusted ’em,” said Jason.

“They don’t live here, man. They don’t know these streets like we do.”

“The po-po gonna be angry like hornets,” said Jason.

“Word.”

“When you ran that red on Connecticut… shit, I thought that car was gonna do us.”

“That car had brakes, too.”

“We gonna be legends, son.”

“Yeah,” said Chris.

Colored lights faintly lit the alley as one of the squad cars slowly passed by on Legation. The boys sat there, hearing sirens that were different than police sirens, closer to those on fire trucks or ambulances, and voices coming from speakers, and they speculated on that. After a long while it was quiet and Chris decided to risk it and make their way from the alley, which had been a good hiding place but was also a trap. He did not hit the headlights until they were back on Legation.

Carefully, Chris crossed Connecticut Avenue and then took 39th Street south. Down near Fessenden, Jason claimed he saw a stripped-down Crown Vic, which could have been a police vehicle, creeping a nearby street, and because of this, and because they still felt invincible, Chris put the Isuzu into four-wheel drive and jumped off-road and onto a hill. They caught air going over the hilltop, and with exuberance Jason said, “Rat Patrol!” and then they were down the hill and rolling across the wide expanse of Fort Reno Park, where Chris and Jason had seen Fugazi and others perform in the summer, and where Chris’s father, Thomas Flynn, had come as a teenager in the seventies to see hard rock bands do Deep Purple and Spanish bands try to do Santana. Satisfied that they had not been followed, they dropped back down onto asphalt at Chesapeake and took it east, back across Connecticut and into the beautiful upscale neighborhood of Forest Hills.

It was a section of Northwest whose residents were wealthy in a living-off-the-interest way. Large homes of brick and stone, deep and wide, lushly landscaped lots, Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs, many embassies, and, down Brandywine toward Rock Creek Park, towering contemporaries housing gyms and indoor movie theaters. In the past, Forest Hills had been the exclusive base for Washington’s most wealthy Jewish residents, so for many years D.C.’s less enlightened had called it Hanukkah Hills. Chris and Country knew it as a good place to get high.

Chris pulled into their usual spot at the dead end of Albemarle, where it ran into a striped barrier at the woods of Rock Creek, and cut the engine. Their place was past the light of the last streetlamp on the road. It was dark here and very quiet. Unless they turned around, there was no exit, but they weren’t worried; they had never been hassled here before, not even by embassy police.

Chris pulled a couple of beers from the brown paper bag resting on the floorboards behind his seat and opened them both. Jason rolled a tight joint, sealed and dried it with fire, then lit it. They passed it back and forth, drank warm beer, and listened to the radio turned low.

“You used to come here with your mom and pops, didn’t you?” said Jason, when they had smoked the joint down. Both of their heads were up, but without the new-high joy of the first smoke of the night.

“Once a year, in the spring,” said Chris. “Darby, too, back when he was a puppy. We’d hike that trail they got. You get onto it back up Albemarle, near Connecticut.”

He meant the Soapstone Valley Trail, a one-mile hike up and down hills, through an arm of Rock Creek Park. It was one of those city secrets, a wonderful green place, old-growth trees and sun glinting off running water. Chris had thought of it as his family’s place when he was a kid, because they rarely saw anyone else on the trail, and because they had claimed ownership on a tree. There was a big oak down there, rooted in the valley floor, on whose trunk his father had carved their names with his buck knife. Thomas and Amanda in a heart when they’d been married, and then, in another heart, Chris when he was born. His father had put Darby’s name in a smaller heart as well. When they were down there, Chris and his father would throw rocks and try to skip them in the creek, and sometimes his father would pick up a stick that was shaped like a gun and Chris would find one, too, and they would play war, his father coming from behind a tree and pretending the stick was a machine pistol or some such thing, his mouth making the sound of it spitting bullets. In his mind he could see his father doing this, younger, without that disappointment on his face. But it was just a memory. It didn’t make Chris feel anything at all.

“Chris?”

“Huh?”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Go home, I guess.”

Jason stubbed out the roach in the ashtray and put it inside a matchbook, which he stowed in his jeans. “What if Johnny Law’s waitin on us?”

“Why would they be waitin on you? No one even saw you, Country. You stayed in the car the whole time.”

“True.”

Chris stared out the windshield. “You think someone wrote down my plate numbers?”

“Not the way you shot out that parking lot,” said Jason with an unconvincing smile. “I don’t see how they could.”

Chris sat there, stoned, hoping and wishing that this were true.

“I can’t take the weed home,” said Jason. “This funk is potent. It stinks.”

“I’ll stash it under the deck of my house,” said Chris. “We can bag it up at your place tomorrow, after your parents go to work.”

Chris took a circuitous route back to their neighborhood and stopped the Trooper a couple of blocks away from Jason’s house, a Dutch colonial on the corner of 38th and Kanawha. Jason and Chris shook hands and said good-bye.

Jason walked down the street. When he turned the corner, Chris drove off, but not in the direction of his own house. He had too much energy, and he needed to work it off. He headed south, where his girl, Taylor, stayed with her mother, on Woodley Avenue, a street of modest row houses in Woodley Park, between Connecticut Avenue and the zoo. Taylor’s mother would be sleeping now, but Taylor would be up and ready. She’d let him in.

Taylor Dugan had put Chris’s two remaining beers in the freezer to rechill them quickly, then brought them back down to the basement, where Chris was sprawled out shoeless on the couch. Taylor’s mother, a divorcee who worked as a lawyer for a trade association downtown, was in her bed and snoring, two floors above. Though it was tempting, Chris and Taylor never raided the mother’s liquor cabinet while Chris was visiting late at night. Taylor’s mother, like many alcoholics, counted her drinks and memorized the levels of the bottles, no matter how trashed she got, and Taylor did not care to get busted by her mom.

Taylor was a slim young woman with short dyed-black hair, a nose ring, freckles, and blue eyes. She had changed into boxer shorts and a V-neck white T-shirt after going upstairs to get the beer.

Taylor handed Chris his beer and put hers next to a 35 mm camera that was on an old table set before the couch. She went to a bookshelf, removed a paperback, and found a stash pipe with a hole in each end, one to light, one to draw from. In the middle, a small amount of marijuana was fitted in a screened chamber.

“You want some?” she said.

“Sure,” said Chris.

He got up on a chair and cranked open a casement window, and then she joined him. The chair wobbled beneath them and they giggled as they each took a couple of deep hits and blew the exhale out into the night.

“Whew,” she said, as she stepped down onto the carpet.

“You need some more?” said Chris.

“No, I’m good.”

“Because I copped tonight. I got a pound out in my truck.”

“That’s not all you did tonight.”

“Oh, man. You should have seen me.”

“Were you scared?” said Taylor, flopping down onto the couch. Chris had already told the general story, but she was buzzed now and wanted to hear the details.

“Nah, not really,” said Chris, walking to the table to get his beer, careful not to step on the sketchbooks scattered about the carpet. “I mean, I didn’t think on it all that much. It’s like that shrink said to me, the one my parents made me go to? ‘It’s all about choices, Chris.’ Well, I made one.”

Taylor picked the camera up off the table, framed Chris through the lens, and snapped a photograph. “Why’d you take off?”

“I dunno. That boy practically begged me to hit him. I mean, what, I was supposed to take the weight for that? I hate the police. I don’t like explaining myself to them. I don’t even like to speak to them if I don’t have to.” Chris took off his T-shirt and dropped it on the floor. “Hot in here.”

“Uh-huh,” said Taylor.

Chris tipped his head back, took a long swig of beer, and let her have a look at his flat stomach. Taylor took several more photographs of him like that and placed the camera back on the table.

“How far did they chase you?”

“A good long while,” said Chris. “It was like Cops, only they didn’t get me. Shit was sick, Taylor. I blew a red light on Connecticut Avenue at McKinley, and cars were spinning out in the intersection.”

“Bad Chris,” said Taylor.

“That’s me.”

Taylor was at that public arts school, Duke Ellington, and liked to paint and stuff. Chris had met her at a Blessed Sacrament dance when they were both in middle school. She had come over to him. Told him later that she’d noticed him straight off, that he looked different from the other boys, that he wasn’t trying too hard and that she liked his aloof manner, whatever that meant. They had been together, friends and lovers, for a couple of years. He wasn’t worried about the other boys at her school, who she said were “fey.” He guessed that meant they were faggies or something, ’cause it rhymed with gay.

“I’m just a bad boy,” said Chris, smiling slowly.

“Did you bring any protection?”

“Didn’t know I’d be seein you, girl.”

“We’ll improvise,” said Taylor.

Chris said he was good with that, and Taylor laughed and opened her arms.

Chris put his beer down and went to the couch. His jeans were tight before their mouths met. She stroked his belly, and her breath was hot and smoky as they kissed. She moaned as they made out, and Chris thought, God, this girl can do it. Taylor pushed him away, crossed her arms, and drew her T-shirt over her head. She came back to him naked above the waist, and Chris ran his strong hands over her slim hips and up her ribcage, and he found her small breasts, circling her hardening nipples with his thumbs, and she took one of his hands and put it inside her boxer shorts. He did what she liked until Taylor couldn’t stand it any longer and she climaxed under his touch. She finished him deftly the same way.

It would be a long time before he would get with a female again. Later, when he was masturbating at night in his cell, bitter because she had stopped taking his calls, but still, wanting Taylor again so badly he thought he would shout out her name, he would regret settling for a hand job in her basement the last time he saw her. He should have put it in her. So what if he didn’t have a condom? Okay, she could have got pregnant. What difference would that have made to him then?

“Are they going to get you, Chris?” Taylor was in his arms on the couch, on top of him, her breasts crushed against his chest.

“Nah, I’m straight. I can get the Volvo’s paint off my bumper, and there’s plenty of Troopers out there the same color as mine. Long as they didn’t read my plates, I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe you got lucky.”

“I could have.”

“Why’d you hit that boy?”

“I was really tryin not to. Used to be I’d get angry and just fight, but this time was different. I tried to hold back, Taylor. If he hadn’t pushed me so hard, run his mouth like he did, all this shit tonight, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“It’s over now.”

“No doubt.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“They can’t hurt steel,” said Chris with a weak smile.

Taylor hugged him tightly. “I applied to a college I want, Chris. I’m trying to get into the Rhode Island School of Design.”

“That’s the art school, right?”

“My counselor says it’s one of the best.”

“I hope you get in.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Don’t know. First thing, I need to get out my house. I can’t take livin with my father. When I turn eighteen I figure I’ll get a job. Me and Country will find an apartment somewhere. Maybe sell weed on the side, but do it real quiet.”

“That’s your plan?”

“For now,” said Chris. “Yeah.”

Taylor said nothing else and soon fell asleep in his arms. Chris untangled himself without waking her and covered her with a blanket. He dressed and left the house quietly, went to his Trooper, and drove toward his house through backstreets. There were few cars out. It was very late.

He drove west on Livingston, the street where he lived, and a car turned off 41st and fell in behind him. The car was a big square sedan, and it was then that he knew. Several squad cars were parked on his block, and their light bars were activated as he neared his house. The air had gone out of him, and he simply put the Isuzu in park in the middle of the street and let them come to him. They leaned him over the hood of his Trooper and cuffed him, and one of the uniformed men said, almost in admiration, “That was some real fancy driving, son.” Chris said, “I guess someone got my plate numbers,” and the uniform said, “ Oh, yeah,” and Chris remembered that he had a pound of marijuana in the back of his vehicle and he idly wondered what that would do to compound the charges. “You don’t even know the trouble you’re in,” said the uniform. “The woman who hit our cruiser at Morrison, where you blew that stop sign? Mother of three. She’s in Sibley’s emergency room with severe injuries. They collared her and taped her to a gurney. And that kid in the parking lot is gonna be breathing through his mouth for a while. You broke his nose.”

Chris raised his head and squinted through the red and blue shafts of light coloring his yard. His father was standing outside their clapboard colonial, framed beneath the portico he’d built himself, his hands buried in his pockets, his eyes black and broken.

“You made your folks real proud tonight,” said the police officer.

Chris didn’t care.