Dangerous Men Read online

  When Shahim came by to drop off eviction papers, Jimi-John took it as a sign. “I’m not even going to fight,” he told him.

  “Not fight?” repeated the Turkish handyman, momentarily perplexed. Then he shrugged. “Stupid, anyway, to fight.”

  “The place is a dump,” said Jimi-John. “It always will be.”

  “No,” said Shahim. “Will be co-ops.” He grinned, showing teeth stained yellow with tobacco.

  Jimi-John took the papers and closed the door. It was finished now. A chapter coming to a close. What he needed was a fitting ending.

  Jenny arrived at eight o’clock, wearing baggy shorts and an oversized T-shirt. He’d been waiting since seven, reading the first page of an old novel over and over, unable to make any real sense out of the words. “My God,” she said when she saw the apartment.

  The walls glistened with the still-wet paint. The palm tree stood in front of the window, framed by the vegetation in the abandoned apartment behind it. Jimi-John had read about this in an article somewhere, it was called borrowed landscape—stealing some distant view and making it your own. He’d spread the sand evenly across the floor, and in the middle he’d set out two towels.

  “Piña colada?” he asked her. “I made a whole pitcher full. They’re in the fridge.”

  “Which is in my name, incidentally,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to remind you.”

  “It’s a year since Pepe’s,” said Jimi-John. “Exactly a year this week.”

  “And you decided to destroy your apartment to celebrate?”

  “Use your imagination. Pretend it’s the beach.”

  They sat together on the towels and had drinks. Jenny told him about the play she was working on, not as an actress, but as a props person. “It’s set in the punk period,” she said. “I have to comb the secondhand stores looking for stuff. And we don’t have a very big budget. I bought some barbed wire yesterday that was four dollars a foot.”

  “That’s a lot,” he said, nodding.

  “You know, when you called me, I kind of thought you might be mad.” She looked at him with an earnestness. “But you don’t seem like you are.”

  “No.” He lay back on his blanket and looked up at the ceiling, admiring the job he’d done. The color was even, the roller strokes all in the same direction. “I’m thinking about going back,” he said. “Not immediately, I mean, I’ll need to save a little while to get up the money. But in a month or two, you know?” He paused, unsure whether he wanted to meet her eyes.

  She sipped her drink. “You really are crazy,” she said. She scooped some sand up in her hand, let it drain slowly back down onto the floor. “I’m staying put, at least for a while.”

  He was surprised to find that this didn’t really disappoint him. It was as if the place in him that had ached for her all this time had grown so large that, like an expanding star, it had given up all its energy. Instead, he felt only a quiet, spinning coolness.

  They lay in silence on their blankets, listening to the sounds of traffic from the street below, savoring the light movement of air that came with the occasional breeze through the window. Nothing in particular happened. They were comfortable as long as they didn’t talk.

  “I should get going,” she said. “I’m meeting someone in a half-hour.”

  “Whatever,” said Jimi-John.

  When they stood he tried a kiss, but she slipped her head to one side, presenting him only her cheek. Then she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him as she might have an older brother. She reached up and gave him a tug on the ear, and left.

  Alone again, he wondered, just for a second, what had happened to him. The blueness of the walls seemed so obvious, so calculated. They were after all, still walls, not open air. The palm tree stood stupidly in the sand. It had seemed all along such a brilliant idea, but now, feeling as disconnected as the cord dangling from his toaster, it occurred to him that he had no place to go and no particular goals. When he was in Barcelona, he remembered, a monkey had escaped from one of the vendors’ cages. It ran around in circles a few times screaming with glee, attempted to cross the road and almost got hit. With nowhere else to go, it scampered back onto the median with all the other caged monkeys, then clambered to the top of a tree where it stayed, occasionally hurling debris down at its owner. That’s about the level I’m at, he thought. He tossed his empty piña colada glass out the window, waited to hear it smash.

  His doorknob turned and he went to unlock it. It was Celeste. “Mira,” she said. “A beach.”

  “Go on,” he told her. “It’s too late for you to be wandering around. Where’s your mama?”

  “Watching TV.” She ran over to the tree and grabbed its thin trunk. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a dum-dum tree,” said Jimi-John.

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Yes it is. It’s a very stupid plant. It only grows in warm climates, but you can fool it, as I have done here, by making it think it’s at the beach.”

  “What did you do with all your stuff?” she demanded, wandering further around the apartment.

  “All gone. I’m going to move away.”

  “How far?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She found his harmonica case in the corner with his shoes and clothes, and dumped them out in front of her. He went over and picked up two, giving one to her.

  “Plants like music,” he said. “But a dum-dum tree doesn’t like just any kind of music. It has to be dumb music.”

  She raised one eyebrow skeptically at him. She seemed about ready to put the harmonica down. Positioning the instrument in his mouth, Jimi-John put his hands to the floor and flipped his legs up over his head. His first thought was that his arms had grown weak, because they trembled under his weight, but then he found a balance point and they held. His body was considerably thinner than it had been the last time he’d tried this, so it wasn’t so hard. Blood rushed to his head.

  Without his holder, he could do little more that blow in and out of the harp, but that was enough to amuse Celeste. She screamed with pleasure, put the other harmonica to her lips and began playing. Jimi-John hand-walked his way over to the palm, where his feet came just about even with the top of the tree. The sound of the two harmonicas was delicious and discordant, like a hilariously out-of-tune pipe organ. He lowered himself and rested on his back in the sand.

  Celeste poked at him with her finger. “More,” she said.

  “I don’t know, kid.”

  “More.”

  He cast his eyes around the room. “Look,” he said. “You go downstairs now. If you do that, I’ll make you a deal. You come back tomorrow morning and you can help me paint the sand blue.”

  “Blue!” she screamed.

  “So the dum-dum tree thinks it’s near water. OK?” He stuck out his hand and they shook on it. Then he hoisted her over his shoulders and hiked down to the second floor, where the sounds of a loud TV filtered out into the hallway. He deposited her in front of her door.

  “Don’t forget,” he said. “Bright and early.”

  “I saw your girlfriend,” she confided.

  Standing alone in the dimness, surrounded by closed doors and the phantom hallway smells of cleaning solution, urine, other peoples’ suppers, he wondered if he should just keep going. Tomorrow he would be rootless again anyway. He tried to imagine himself disappearing into the folds of the city, which had been all along his general plan, but right now seemed hugely inadequate. He considered taking a bus to the suburbs, hitching to the interstate and heading west, but this, too, depressed him—he had a good enough idea about California to know he didn’t want to be there. For a moment he stood, leaning in both directions at once, unsure whether to go down the stairs or up, not exactly feeling sorry for himself, more confused.

  Sitting down on one of the worn stone steps, he closed his eyes tight and thought about his brother, James Roy, lying boxed and still beneath the North Carolina earth. When the news came, he’d b
een at first stunned and sad—he was barely thirteen, had never known anyone who’d died. Just plucked out of life, silently, like they’d never really been there at all. Then, slowly, a kind of amazement had set in at the very fact of his own existence. The most ordinary things impressed him. The sun coming through his bedroom window, the way his heart continued to beat all by itself. Stop signs and trees and glasses of milk—for a few weeks they were all equally remarkable. The world had seemed lit from within by a fragile light.

  Behind the door to Celeste’s apartment, the television suddenly grew quiet. Someone was putting her to bed now, wondering, perhaps, just what it was the little girl was smiling about. Jimi-John stood and smacked his hands against his jeans to rid them of the dust. For tonight at least, he would sleep on his own private beach, wake up with sand in his shoes.

  BIG GREY

  It was Tony’s idea to go after Big Grey. We hanging out back at the place, me reading some old comic books I got laying around and Tony practicing his guitar. It’s an electric one, Tony’s guitar, all black and silver. He got it from a junkie in Canarsie who carved the names of all the notes into the side of the neck. Looks like a bird walked along there. Probably took the dude hours, but he sold it anyway when things got tight and he found himself staring at that wall, which will happen. Tony play it through his box. He got this cord and he just plug it right in the back of the radio. His playing ain’t much to talk about, not yet, but he be practicing and practicing, and you work at a thing that hard, something bound to come of it.

  So Tony trying to play something, some tune off the radio, and I’m reading this old Spiderman I read about a million times before, and suddenly Tony puts down the guitar and stands up and says let’s head on down to the park.

  I says why. It’s dark out already, and too damn cold to be drinking no beer out there. But Tony already up and moving all around the place, looking under chairs, behind the sofa, in all the closets. Finally he say “aha!” and come out with a big old softball bat, weighted aluminum. He raise it up, get the feel of it, then send an imaginary one over the center field wall.

  “What you want that for?” I ask him.

  “Big Grey,” he say. “We going hunting.”

  It’s funny, but sometime I have trouble telling when Tony messing around or telling the truth. But he grinning and his eyes looking all fired up and so I didn’t ask no questions. I just said let’s go, and we went.

  Big Grey is this old dog we see almost all the time over in the park. It’s a big old German shepherd with a hurt paw, meaner than hell. He run with a pack of strays that live over there, but most of them keeps their distance from Grey, because they scared of him. He got this old scroungy bitch that stay right by his side, a shepherd like him, and she mean, too, though I think it’s mostly just fear. She’ll growl and bark at you, then jump back a few feet where you can’t get her and bark and growl some more. I thrown a stick at her one time and she run. But Grey be another thing—that boy come at you like he mean business.

  It’s cold out and the park is dead empty. The moon is shining though, and it feels good to be outside. We finds some ducks wandering around and chases them back into the water. Tony keeps the softball bat resting on his shoulder, every now and then swinging it like a cop spinning his nightstick. I picks up a part of a branch off the ground and break the twigs off it until it’s a club. Just holding it I feel like king of the world. Sticks is funny like that—it feels good to carry one.

  So we head on up to the graveyard, back in the woods. It’s up on a hill and fenced off from the rest of the park, and the strays like to hang back there. That’s where you usually see them—if you cutting through the park sometimes they come running at you all barking and going crazy. I hold my stick tighter and follow Tony. He’s not talking and I’m beginning to wonder if he’s on something. But I don’t say nothing. He got his moods just like everyone else, I guess.

  Up by the graveyard Tony start poking around in the dead leaves, looking for something. He muttering to himself and pushing around with the end of the softball bat, and suddenly he bend down and bring up about a half a bottle of wine.

  “See, I was up here this afternoon,” he say.

  “By yourself?” I say.

  “And that crazy dog chase me all the way down to the baseball fields.”

  It makes me laugh picturing Tony dropping his wine and shooting down the hill chased by a big hungry dog. But Tony don’t laugh.

  “Got to get even,” he say.

  I try to laugh like it’s a joke, but Tony got this real serious look on his face, so I stops quick. We drink some of the wine, not saying much, keeping our eyes out for Big Grey. But no sign of him, and after a while drinking Tony start to loosen up. When the wine just about gone, he start faking like he playing the guitar, doing that song I heard him practicing, throwing in a few moves. So I start to get into it, playing drums in the air and making the noises with my mouth. We got a pretty nice jam going right there underneath the trees. Then all of a sudden, Tony stop moving and point.

  At first I don’t see nothing, then I do. He just standing there watching us, maybe ten yards off. It’s so dark you can’t hardly see him, just mostly his eyes, yellow and mean, almost looking like they floating by themselves in the air. I can hear him growling, soft and low.

  Tony whisper to me that we going to surround him. I about to ask how we going to do that with only two of us, but he already gone, slipping from tree to tree, sneaking off to the side so he can come up behind Big Grey. Tony can be real quiet when he want to. Sometime, back at our place, he can come in so quiet you don’t even know he there, until you look up and he in a chair opening up some beer. He’s nearly given me a couple of heart attacks. Me, I can’t take a piss without the whole world hearing me flush.

  Well, I’m holding my stick so tight my hands are beginning to hurt, and I see that dog start moving on me, real slow with a little limp from his busted paw, and the next thing I know, I’m running on down the hill. At the bottom I turns around and see that he stopped about halfway down, looking at me and barking, showing those yellow teeth and pacing back and forth like he marking out his turf. Then I hear a yell, and there’s Tony with the baseball bat over his head running down on the dog and shouting like a crazy man. I think the dog more surprised than me, because he spin around full circle and practically fall over, then hop on down the hill toward me.

  Now we both running, me and Big Grey. They got baseball fields in the park, with big fences around them to keep foul balls in, and being a little drunk and a lot scared, I run smack into one. I bounce right off it and land in the dirt. I don’t bother to get up, just cover my head with my hands and close my eyes tight. The way I see it, I’m dog food.

  But after a few seconds when I still don’t feel no teeth on my neck I get up and look. Tony and Big Grey faced off just a few feet away, and the dog got his back to me. I picks up my stick. Tony stepping toward Big Grey, and Grey growling. I don’t know why, but right then I throws my stick at the dog. I guess I just don’t want to see him get Tony. I don’t really think about it, I just throws it.

  Well, I miss, but I make him jump and turn to see what it is, and Tony take two steps forward and swing. The bat make a soft noise, like a thump, and catch Big Grey right under the ear. He start walking around in circles, just going around and around in the same spot, maybe like ten or fifteen times. Finally he lie down.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Tony say.

  “Done what?” I still got my eyes on Big Grey. Any second now I expect him to jump up and attack. But he lay still.

  “Distract him. It wasn’t fair.”

  “Don’t blame me,” I says. “You the one that hit him.”

  But Tony down on one knee now, inspecting the dog. I come over to him, pick up my stick and give him little poke, but he don’t move. I tell Tony I think he dead.

  “He ain’t. He’s breathing.”

  Well, he breathing all right, but after the way
Tony busted on him, I know it won’t be for long. But I don’t say nothing, I just nod.

  I’m about ready to say let’s head down to the social center for some pinball, because this ain’t turning out to be so much fun. Then I see Tony picking up Big Grey in his arms.

  “You crazy?” I says. “What you want to do with him?”

  “C’mon,” Tony say. “There’s a vet up on Sixth Street.

  Believe it or not, we does it between the two of us, but it’s killin’ work. Big Grey must weigh about eighty or ninety pounds, and he don’t smell none too good. But we get him up the path and out the parkside. We find the vet.

  This a pretty fancy vet, and when we walks in with a big ugly dog that look like he dead, and us definitely not looking like we from the neighborhood, we turns a few heads. It’s mostly cats in the waiting room, two in carry cases and one in this dude’s lap. And then there’s this skinny, rich-looking lady with a little white dog that’s got a bright, pink bow on. She’s eyeballing us pretty good and probably dialing 911 in her head. I give her a big smile and go up to the desk.

  It’s an emergency see, I tell the lady, our dog got hit by a car. I’m not about to tell them the truth because they might call the ASPCA or something. Lady give me a look like she wishing she never come in this evening, then say, OK, take him into this room that’s just off the waiting room. So I call Tony and we move old Grey into this tiny room and lay him down on the floor.

  They keeps us waiting quite a while. Tony being real quiet, just sort of staring down at his sneakers. Big Grey laying on his side, but his eyes open and he watching us. The room got a strong hospital smell that make it hard to breathe. Seem like I’m the only one nervous at all, and I’m not even sure why I should be, but I keep on getting up and sticking my head out the door to see if the doctor coming or what. Finally they send some Jamaican dude in to take a look. He wearing a white coat, but I can see he ain’t no doctor. He probably just some kind of assistant. There ain’t no Jamaican doctors, not in this part of town.