“The alley,” the voice said in a melodic, Spanish accent. “Lessgo.”
His thick brows were knitted together and beneath them his lids dipped slightly as if he was nursing a deep grudge.
They stood in the alley behind Louis Bailey’s building, on greasy cobblestones. The smell of rotten vegetables and rancid oil filled the heavy air. Pellam stood, crossed his arms, glancing down at the tiny black automatic pistol.
Then he studied his captor again. A pink, leathery scar traversed the man’s forearm. It was recent. On his hand, in the
Y
between his thumb and forefinger, was a blurred tattoo in the form of a dagger. Pellam lived in L.A.; he recognized a crew insignia when he saw one.
Pellam asked, “
Habla inglés?
”
The man looked down into the bag. Keeping the automatic trained on Pellam’s chest he bent down and lifted the Betacam partially out.
“Appreciate your leaving that alone. It’s—”
“Shut up.”
The man didn’t find the Colt. He lowered the camera, stood up.
“You’re a
Cubano
Lord,” Pellam said.
He was as tall as Pellam. Most Latinos he knew were shorter. “I’ve been looking for you,” Pellam said.
“Me?”
“One of you.”
“Why?”
“To have a talk.”
His eyebrows twitched in surprise. “You talking now.”
“I’m doing a film on Hell’s Kitchen. I want to talk to some of the people in gangs. Or is it a club?”
“The other day, what you doing?”
“The other day?”
“What you looking for? Talking to people? On the street here. You taking pictures. What you do that for?”
Pellam remained silent.
The young man let a disgusted sigh ease from his lungs. “You gonna say we did it? You gonna say we torch that building?”
“I’m making a film. I—”
The terse young man’s brows nestled closer. “There a TV news show here. In the city. Latino station. You never hear of it, I know. They slogan is ‘
Primero con la verdad.
’ You believe in that? Is
la verdad siempre primero
with you? The truth?” Arms crossed again, he lifted a hand to his chin and with a callous thumb rubbed a short, deep scar below his mouth. “You some kind of
reporter?
You some kind of Geraldo?”
Pellam nodded toward the cobblestoned alley. “This where you play basketball? Have bake sales? Pony rides for the kids? All those things a club does?”
“What’re you asking me, man?”
“I heard some of your boys were hanging out here just before the fire.”
“You
heard . . .
So that make it true? A
white
man say
los Cubanos
burn down a building, so it true. A
black
man say it, so it true.” Pellam didn’t answer and he continued, “You no think this old nigger lady do it. You think
I
do it. Why? ’Cause you like niggers more’n you like spics.”
Pellam didn’t think more anger could be inside the young man but more anger now flooded his face. He shifted his weight on expensive running shoes and Pellam wondered if he was going to shoot. He glanced sideways for a place to roll. Wondered if he could get to his Colt in time. Decided he couldn’t.
Make the call—apologize or get tough?
Pellam frowned, leaned forward. He spat back, “I’m here to do a job. You don’t want to answer my questions, that’s your damn business. But I’m not interested in any fucking lectures.”
The dark eyes narrowed suddenly.
I’m gonna get shot. Hell. Should’ve kissed ass. Knew it.
But the man didn’t pull the trigger. And he didn’t pistol-whip him either—the second option, Pellam’d figured.
He put the gun away and walked around the front of Ettie’s building, gesturing Pellam after him. He ducked under the police line and walked up the stairs to what was left of the tiny entryway. Pellam dug the Colt out of the bag and slipped it into the back waistband of his jeans. He lifted the bag and walked out to the sidewalk.
With a booted foot the young Latino was kicking in the shattered front door of Ettie’s building. He shouldered his way inside, filthying his T-shirt on the charred wood. Pellam heard breaking glass and loud crashes. The man returned a minute later with a rectangle of
metal. He tossed it to Pellam, who caught the heavy frame. It was the building directory. With a long finger the
Cubano
Lord tapped a name.
C. Ramirez.
“She my aunt. Okay? She live there with two
niños.
My mother’s sister! Okay? You figure it out? I’m not gonna burn down no building my family living in.
“And you wanna know something else? That lady, my aunt Carmella, she see one of Jimmy Corcoran’s micks drop the hammer on some guy last month and she testify against him. He up in Attica now and Jimmy, he no so happy about what she say. How you like
that
story, my friend? You like the truth now? The truth about a white mick? Now, get outta here. Get outta the Kitchen.”
“Who’s that? Corcoran? Jimmy Corcoran?”
The man wiped the sweat off his forehead. “You go back to you news station, you go back and tell them the
Cubano
Lords, they no do this kind of shit!”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“So now you no have to
talk to
me. You know
la verdad.
”
Pellam asked, “Your name’s Ramirez? What’s your first name?”
The man paused and held a muscular finger to his lips, silencing him, then pointed it at Pellam’s face. “You tell them.” His eyes sank down to Pellam’s boots then rose again as if he were memorizing him. Then he walked slowly out of the shadow of the ruined building into the crisp hot sunlight.
* * *
But Jimmy Corcoran was a ghost.
No one had heard of him, no one knew
any
Corcorans.
Pellam had wandered around the neighborhood,
stopping in Puerto Rican bodegas, Korean vegetable stands, Italian pork stores. Nobody knew Corcoran but everybody had a funny lilt in their voices when they said they didn’t—their denials seemed desperate.
He tried a bodega. “He hangs out around here someplace,” Pellam encouraged.
The ancient Mexican clerk, with an immensely wrinkled face, stared at his fly-blown tray of lardy pastry, smoked his cigarette and nodded silently. He offered nothing.
Pellam bought a coconut drink and stepped outside. He ambled up to a cluster of T-shirted men lounging around a Y-stand sprinkler hookup and asked them. Two of them quickly said they’d never heard of Jimmy Corcoran. The other three forgot whatever English they knew.
He decided to try further west, closer to the river. He was walking past the parochial school on Eleventh when he heard, “Yo.”
“Yo yourself,” Pellam said.
The boy stood in a tall, battered Dumpster and looked down, hands on scrawny hips. He wore baggy jeans and, despite the heat, a red, green and yellow windbreaker. Pellam thought the mosaic haircut was pretty well done. The razor notch mimicked the grin that was etched deep into his dark face.
“Whassup?”
“Tell you what. . . . Come on down here.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you. Don’t jump, climb around the back. No—”
He jumped. The boy landed on the ground, unhurt. “You don’t ’member me.”
“Sure I do. Your mother’s Sibbie.”
“Straight up! You be CNN. The man with the camera.”
On the playground behind him four baseball diamonds stood empty. Two basketball courts too. The gates were chained. Easily a hundred cans of paint had been sacrificed to decorate the yard.
“Where’s your mother and sister?”
“Be at the shelter.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Ain’t no school, be summer.”
Pellam had forgotten. Despite heat or snow, cities are virtually seasonless. He had trouble imagining what summer vacation in Hell’s Kitchen might be like. Pellam’s Augusts had been filled with sneaking into movies and trading comics and occasional softball games. He remembered many summer mornings bicycling like a demon, zipping over smooth concrete marked by the slick paths of confused snails and slugs.
“What’s your name?”
“Ismail. Yo, what’s yours?”
“I’m John Pellam.”
“Yo, homes, I ain’t like John. Slob nigger I know called John. He ain’t down to do nothing, you know what I’m saying? I’ma call you Pellam.”
Wasn’t
Mr.
an option?
“How’s the shelter?”
His smile faded. “This nigger don’t like the peoples there. Slanging all the time. Cluckheads all over the place.”
Drugs, the boy was saying. A cluckhead was a crack addict. Pellam had worked on several films in South Central L.A. He knew some gangspeak.
“It’s only for a little while,” Pellam said. But the reassurance
sounded leaden; he had no idea how the boy took it.
Ismail’s eyes suddenly flashed happily. “Yo, you like basketball? I like Patrick Ewing. He the best, you know what I’m saying? I like Michael Jordan too. Yo, ever see the Bulls play?”
“I live in L.A.”
“Lakers! Yeah! Magic, he be fine. I like Mr. B. The Barkley. He the man to have at yo’ back ina fight.” He sparred against an unseen adversary. “Yo, yo, you like basketball, cuz?”
Pellam had been to a few Lakers games though he gave that up when he found that a good percentage of the spectators were in the Industry and bought season passes just to see or be seen. As Jack Nicholson does, so shall you do. “Not really,” he confessed.
“And Shaq too. Man be ten feet tall. I wanna be that nigger.”
Ismail danced around on the sidewalk and performed a mini slam dunk.
Pellam glanced at the boy’s tattered high-tops and dropped to his knees to retie a dangling lace. This made the boy uncomfortable; he stepped back and clumsily tied it himself. Pellam rose slowly. “You started to tell me something the other day. About the gangs burning down your building. Your mother hit you when you started to tell me something. I won’t say anything to her.”
He looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten the slap.
“I heard Corcoran’s gang might’ve had something to do with it. You know ’bout his crew?”
“How you know Corcoran?”
“I don’t. I’m trying to find him.”
“Man, that fucked-up, you doin’ that. His set, they some bad O.G.s.”
Original gangstas. Senior members of the crew, who’d earned the status by killing someone.
The young face grew agitated. “Nigger, spic—anybody—dis him, don’t matter who, Corcoran wax him. He see peoples he don’t like, bang, they ass be
gone,
you know what I’m saying?” Ismail closed his eyes and leaned his head against the fence, looking at the school. “Why you axing me all this shit?”
Pellam asked, “Where’s his kickback? Corcoran’s?”
Impressed that Pellam talked the talk, Ismail said, “I ain’t know were they hang, man.” He kept his eye on Pellam and did a few layup shots. “Yo. You got a daddy?”
Pellam laughed. “A father? Sure.”
The grin was gone. “I don’t got one.”
Pellam reflected that a large percentage of black households were missing an adult male. Then felt ashamed this news bite was his immediate reaction to the boy’s comment.
The boy continued, matter of factly, “Got hisself shot.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, Ismail.”
“There these cluckheads outside on the street, okay? Selling rock. My daddy go out and they just smoke him right there. I seen ’em do it. He didn’t do nothing. They just smoke him.”
Pellam exhaled in shock, shook his head. “They find who did it?”
“Who, the jakes?”
“Jakes?”
“You know, jakes. Joey. The man. The
Man.
The poeleece?”
Ismail laughed with a frighteningly adult sound. “Jakes do shit, you know what I’m saying? My daddy gone. And my mama, she sleep a lot. She do copious shit. Where she be, the shelter I’m saying, there shit all over the place if you got the green. Rock mostly. She do lotsa rock. Men come by eyeballing her all the time. I don’t think I go back there. Where yo’ crib, Pellam?”
A Winnebago, currently stored. A two-bedroom bungalow in L.A., currently sublet. A four-flight walk-up under short-term lease.
“I don’t really have one,” he told the boy.
“Check it out, you just like me!
Damn!
”
Pellam laughed at this then decided the parallels were unsettlingly accurate.
John Pellam, single, former independent film director and itinerant location scout, sometimes missed family life. But then he’d laugh and try to picture himself attending a suburban grade school PTA parent-teacher night.
“Where’re you going to go?” he asked the boy.
“Dunno, cuz. Maybe get my own crew together. Ain’t no nigger crews ’round here. Get a kickback on Thirty-sixth. I’ma call it the Trey Six Ghosts. How that sound? ‘I from the Trey Sixes.’ Shit, that’ll fuck ’em up. Fuck up their minds good.”
Pellam asked, “You have lunch?”
“No. And I ain’t have breakfast neither,” Ismail said proudly. “You sit at the shelter, men come up and they, you know, be dissing you and touching you. They ax you come into the back with them. You know what I’m saying?”
Pellam shook his head, gripped the strap of the camera bag. “Come on, I’m hungry. I saw this place up the street. Cuban. Let’s eat, you want to?”
“Rice and beans. Yeah! An’ a Red Stripe!”
“No beer,” Pellam said.
The boy grabbed the bag from Pellam’s hand and slung it over his shoulder. He listed against what was probably half of his own weight.
“I’ll get that,” Pellam said. “It’s heavy.”
“Shit. Don’t weigh nothing.”
“Yo, over there.”
* * *
“There?”
“No, more back. Yeah. Yo.
Back
is what I’m saying.
Back!
”
Ismail was pointing out to Pellam where he thought the fire had started. “I smell smoke then see all these flames, cuz. Right here. An’ a big pop. Yeah.”
“Pop.”
“And I run inside th’apartment and I go, ‘Yo, all y’all gotta get out! There this fire!’ And my mama, she start to scream.”
“You see anybody by the window before the fire?”