Five
TWO MEN SAT at a bar, drinking slowly from bottles. The day was warm, and the front door had been opened to cool the space and air it out. Beenie Man toasted from the house stereo, and a man and a woman danced lazily in the center of the room.
“Say that name again?” said Conrad Gaskins.
“Red Fury,” said Romeo Brock. He dragged off a Kool cigarette and let the smoke out slow.
“That ain’t too common a name.”
“Wasn’t his given name,” said Brock. “Red was what he got called in the street, you know, ’cause of his light skin. Fury was on account of the car.”
“He drove a Mopar?”
“His woman did. Had personalized plates with her name on ’em, said ‘Coco.’ ”
“All right, what happened?”
“Lotta shit. But I was thinking on this one murder he did. Red shot this dude dead in a carryout on Fourteenth Street, place called the House of Soul. Coco was waitin on him outside in the car. Red comes walkin out slow, the gun still in his hand. He gets in the passenger side real calm, and Coco pulls out the space and drives off like she just taking a Sunday cruise. Neither of them was moving too fast, is what people say. It was like nothing special had gone down.”
“Ain’t too smart, leavin off a murder with a car got personal plates.”
“This man didn’t care about that. Shit, he wanted folks to know who he was.”
“Was it a Sport Fury?”
Brock nodded. “Red over white. Seventy-one, had those hidden headlights. Auto on the tree, V-eight, four-barrel carb. Faster than a motherfucker, too.”
“Why they not call him Red Plymouth?”
“Red Fury sounds better,” said Brock. “Red Plymouth don’t ring out the same way.”
Romeo Brock drank the shoulders off a cold bottle of Red Stripe. A loaded revolver sat snugly inside the belt line of his slacks under a red shirt worn tails out. An ice pick, corked at the tip, was taped to his calf.
The business was owned by East African immigrants and located on a soon-to-be-reconstructed stretch of Florida Avenue, east of 7th, in LeDroit Park. An Ethiopian flag was painted on the sign out front, and Haile Selassie’s framed image hung beside the wall of liquor behind the stick. The bar, called Hannibal’s by the locals because that was the night tender’s name, catered to Jamaicans, mostly, which appealed to Brock. His mother, who worked as a maid in a hotel up by the District line, had been born and raised in Kingston. Brock called himself Jamaican but had never set foot on the island. He was as American as folding money and war.
Beside Brock, on a leather-topped stool, sat Conrad Gaskins, his older cousin. Gaskins was short and powerful, with broad shoulders and muscular arms. His eyes were Asiatic and his facial bones were prominent. A scar from a razor blade, acquired in prison, ran diagonally down his left cheek. It did not ruin him with women and it gave men pause. He stank of perspiration. He had not changed out of his work clothes, which he’d been wearing all day.
Gaskins said, “How he go down?”
“Red?” said Brock. “He’d done so many murders, assaults, and kidnappings in three months’ time that he couldn’t even keep track of who his enemies was.”
“Man was on a regular crime spree.”
“Shit, police and the Mob was both after him in the end. You heard of the Genovese family in New York, right?”
“Sure.”
“They had a contract out on his black ass, is what people say. Whether he knew it or not, he killed some man was connected. I guess that’s why he left town.”
“He was got, though,” said Gaskins.
“Everyone gets got; you know that. It’s how you roll on the way there.”
“Was it the police or the Corleones?”
“FBI got him down in Tennessee. Or West Virginia, I don’t know. Caught him sleepin in one of them motor courts.”
“They kill him?”
“Nah. He got doomed in the federal joint. Marion, I believe. White boys murdered his ass.”
“Aryan Brotherhood?”
“Uh-huh. Back then they kept the whites separate from the blacks. Now, you know that some of the Marion prison guards were hooked up with those white supremacists. People say they saw the guards passin out knives to the ABs right before they cornered Red out in the yard. He held them off with a trash can lid for an hour. It took eight of those motherfuckers to kill him.”
“That boy was fierce.”
“You know it. Red Fury was a man.”
Brock liked the old stories about outlaws like Red. Men who just didn’t give a good fuck about the law or if and when they’d go down. Having other men talk about you in bars and on street corners after you were dead and gone, that’s what made a life worth living. Otherwise, wasn’t anything about you that was special. ’Cause everybody, straight and criminal alike, ended up covered in dirt. For that reason alone it was important to leave a powerful name behind.
“Finish your beer,” said Brock. “We got shit to do.”
Out on the street, Brock and Gaskins went to Brock’s car, a ’96 black Impala SS. It was parked on Wiltberger, a block of bland row houses fronted by stoops rather than porches, a street that looked more like Baltimore than D.C. Wiltberger ran behind the storied Howard Theater, once the local stage for Motown and Stax artists and chitlin circuit comics, the south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line version of Harlem’s Apollo. It had been a charred shell since the time of the riots and was now surrounded by a chain-link construction fence.
“Looks like they finally gonna make somethin out the Howard,” said Gaskins.
“Gonna do it like they did the Tivoli,” said Brock. “They tryin to fuck this whole town up, you ask me.”
They drove out of LeDroit, into Northeast and down into Ivy City off of New York Avenue. For many years this had been one of the grimmest sections of town, off the commuter path of most residents and so ignored and forgotten, a knot of small streets holding warehouses, dilapidated row houses, and brick apartments with plywood doors and windows. It was the longtime home of prostitutes, pipeheads, heroin addicts, dealers, and down-and-out families. Ivy City was nearly framed by Gallaudet University and Mount Olivet Cemetery, with an opening into the neighborhood of Trinidad, once known as the home base of the city’s most famous drug lord, Rayful Edmond.
Now properties were being purchased and refurbished all over town, in places that doubters had said would never come back: Far Northeast and Southeast, Petworth and Park View, LeDroit, and the waterfront area around South Capitol, where ground was set to break on the new baseball stadium. Even here in Ivy City, For Sale and Sold signs could be seen on seemingly undesirable properties. Apartment buildings that had been shells for squatters, shooters, and rats were being gutted and turned into condos. Houses were bought and flipped six months later. Workers had begun to remove the rotting wood, put glass in the window frames, and brush on fresh coats of paint. Roofers hauled shingles and tar buckets up ladders, and real estate agents stood on the sidewalks, nervously aware of their surroundings as they talked on their cells.
“They gonna fix up this shithole, too?” said Gaskins.
“Like puttin a Band-Aid on a bullet hole, you ask me,” said Brock.
“Where those boys at?” said Gaskins.
“They always around that corner up there,” said Brock. He drove slowly down Gallaudet Street, passing a row of boxy brick apartment structures opposite a shuttered elementary school.
Brock curbed the SS and cut its engine.
“There go that boy Charles,” said Brock, chinning in the direction of a thirteen-year-old who wore calf-length shorts, a blue-and-white-striped polo shirt, and blue-and-white Nikes. “Think he slick, too. Duckin my ass.”
“He just a kid.”
“They all just kids. But they gonna grow tall soon enough. Punk ’em now, and they won’t have the mind to rise up later on.”
“We don’t need to be hurtin no kids, cousin.”
“Why not?”