Uncle Janice (9 page)

A young lion, whose name would turn out to be Brandon Hughes, aka Bam-Bam, and who had a warrant open for his arrest after skipping a domestic-assault court date, watched what must’ve been the surliest-looking bitch in all of Queens marching toward him. Man, something about him just seemed to attract these sourpusses. She was small, how he liked them, a spinner, half black and half Indian, and once upon a time, before she’d dropped down the pipe or into the bottle, he might’ve asked for her number. Now? Forget it. Her nose oozed mucus. Purple hives splotched her face. He couldn’t see much of her hair beneath her wool cap, but he imagined at best it was greasy, at worst infested with lice. Honest to God, someone oughtta put her out of her misery. As she came toward him, she broke stride only twice, once to blast a sneeze into her armpit and again to pick a penny off the sidewalk. Both times he was surprised she didn’t spill coffee out of her Dunkin’ Donuts cup. Probably because there wasn’t any in there. Probably because she used the cup only for begging. Her eyes were bloodshot and cloudy and getting closer. He rolled his shoulders back to make himself bigger than he already was, worried she might charge right through him and leave a body-shaped hole in his chest, cartoon-style, morning light shining clean through him.

“You got twenty?” she asked.

He peeked into her cup and it was empty, boom, just like he’d called it. Now that he was this close to her, though, he had to put a hand up over his nose. “Girl, you need to go on home and change.”

“Motherfucker,” she said, “I am not in the mood.”

They never were. It is what it is. If Bam-Bam wanted a classier clientele, he should’ve sold shoes. To get this stinky skank out of his face and on her way, he swapped her some heroin tar in wax paper for her crumpled twenty-dollar bill. She of course did not thank him. As she walked away, she pulled off her dockworker’s cap and a dark ponytail spilled down her back, the hair not as greasy as he’d imagined, but then again he couldn’t be right about every goddamn thing, could he?

Twenty-six days until the end of the month, and her shift here just starting. One buy down. Three more to go.

The uncles parked in a legal spot outside a 99-cent store, around the corner from the Archer Avenue meth clinic. It was their last stop of the day. Technically, according to the TAC plan, she should’ve been ghosting, but everything got fucked up when Tevis had been unable to find the Elmhurst Hospital meth clinic. They’d tried, though. They had walked around the perimeter of the entire hospital, even asked an oncologist on a smoke break for directions, but they eventually gave up and returned to the Impala. Janice was supposed to ghost in Elmhurst and make buys in Rego Park, but now she had to ghost in Rego Park and make buys with Tevis on Archer Avenue. Or at least attempt to make buys. When she got out of the car, she rapped her knuckles against a tree trunk.

It was late. It must’ve been late. With her phone battery drained, she didn’t know the exact time, but it had to be close to ten o’clock, or even later, because only a few people were left outside the clinic. Most of them, especially the younger ones who’d already copped, stood far apart from one another, balanced on their flamingo legs with one foot propped up against a stone wall or streetlamp. They smoked cigarettes just to have something to do, to delay the return home to their mothers
and mothers’ couches. A trio of older black men, the more social of these asocial addicts, huddled close together for company. They talked about al-Qaeda, the Sean Bell trial, yesterday’s Knicks win, the lesbian stripper who won an Oscar the other night, the malignant snow clouds darkening the sky farther east. Janice was just guessing here. She couldn’t actually hear what these old men were talking about, because Tevis had reached them first. Forced to work the other side of the street, she counted—let’s see—only six people outside the corner post office, five of them with care packages to send back home to Bangladesh, El Salvador, East Africa, wherever. The sixth, a bearded black man, sat smoking on the hood of an idle Volvo.

“You got twenty?” she asked him.

“What?”

She narrowed her stance so she’d look less like a cop. “I said, ‘You got twenty?’ ”

“I don’t know.” He took a drag off his menthol, white smoke pouring from both his mouth and the Volvo’s exhaust. “Twenty of what?”

She didn’t really know. Or, more accurately, she didn’t really care—a buy was a buy—but she couldn’t ask for heroin then change her mind if he was holding down only methadone. You bought one or the other, not whatever was in stock, unless of course you were an undercover narc. So the question then became: was this guy an addict or a dealer, more likely to have methadone or heroin? His pupils were normal size, or at least not constricted, but his poorly groomed beard crept all the way down his neck. And he smoked 100s, the better value. And without a hat or a scarf or a particularly heavy coat, he looked ill prepared for an extended stay in the cold, so she guessed addict, not dealer, and hoped he still had his shot on him.

“You know,” she said. “Your dose. I can give you twenty for it.”

“My
dose
?” he asked. “You think I got drugs on me? Bitch, I oughtta smack you upside your face.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize you was such an upstanding citizen.”

“You seriously need to back up off me right now.”

She backed up off him and walked slowly down the block, past Puffy, who was ordering breakfast from a bagel cart. Except for Elmhurst,
where they hadn’t had any time, he’d bought her an apology gift at every stop: a roll of paper towels from a bodega in Long Island City; a can of V8, her special hangover cure, in Rego Park; and now, it seemed, a bialy that she’d have to eat on the drive back to the rumpus. Under a red awning that advertised
AFRICAN WIGS AND HUMAN HAIR
, Richie Nextel’d a car full of investigators around the corner. Across the street, Gonz window-browsed an adult bookstore.

She looked for a working pay phone, but the closest one was too far away, down at the end of the block outside a greasy Crown Fried Chicken joint she used to make secret trips to with her father. She did, though, find a second penny on the sidewalk. One more and when she got home she’d be able to toss the
I Ching
, forecasting her future, yet another daddy/daughter ritual. She had three ghosts malingering around her, but it was Brother Itwaru, her father, who did the real haunting. She spun around, back toward Tevis. She had an ultimatum to reach. With its extra-wide street and two-story buildings and sunken-eyed men, Archer Avenue resembled a Wild West gold town, primed for a shootout, but surely this stretch of sidewalk outside the meth clinic was big enough for both her and Tevis. He seemed to have whiffed with the trio of old men—he was walking away from them with his hands empty and coat unbuttoned, his positive signal unsignaled—but she thought for sure she’d have better luck. Old people pretty much loved her.

“Can you guys help me out?” she asked them, a poor choice of words, for Tevis had long ago taught her to appeal always to self-interest, never mercy or gratitude. “I got money,” she quickly added.

“Boy, they out tonight,” said one old man to the others. Small and soft looking, he cupped his chin in his hand to make a show out of scrutinizing her. An ebony stone sat in a gold ring on his pointer finger. “We was just telling your partner there,” he said, gesturing to Tevis, who was working on one of the solitary smokers propped up against the wall, “that if he wanted that methadone high, all he had to do was get himself on the list. But he didn’t seem too interested.”

“Partner?” she said. “That guy over there? Are you kidding? That’s my dad.”

“You serious?”

“Not at all,” she said. “You think he’s what—a cop?”

“More and more every second,” he said. He put his arm around her waist, as if to pull her close and point out all Tevis’s policeman giveaways, as if to check the small of her back for a pistol or kel wire, but as soon as he’d grabbed her he let her go. “Good golly, Miss Molly! What’d you do, wet yourself?”

One of his buddies started laughing, but the third old-timer, a gentle-seeming man with a pink scarf around his neck, told his friend to be nice. A lifetime of either too much coffee or too much nicotine had browned his front teeth. He was the grayest of the three men and clearly the sweetest, and if the investigators were going to head-steer one of them into the back of a p-van it was going to be him. Assuming he still had his dose. Assuming she did her job. She called out to Tevis:
Hey, yo!
Got him to turn away from his smoker and look over at her, annoyed, his lips so chapped that she wanted to peel them.

“You a cop or something?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “Are you?”

She gave the old-timers her cockiest shrug. “Well, there you go,” she said proudly. “They got to identify themselves if you ask them. Even the undercovers. It’s against the law for cops to lie.”

“That’s a myth,” the third man told her.

“You sure?”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure. Police? All they do is lie.”

“Well, let me ask you this,” she said. She leaned slightly away from him, to make him lean slightly toward her. “You think maybe you could pour like half your dose in this cup? I can’t go twenty on a half, but I could probably do ten.”

He appeared to be thinking about it, tugging on the fringed ends of his scarf. “Why don’t you just put your name on the list?” he asked her. “It’s cheaper than the alternative, believe me.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying. I still gotta get all that paperwork together, but right now I’m just worried about today, you know? I’m trying not to get sick out here and—”

“Janice?!”

She turned toward this strangely enthusiastic, strangely familiar voice, and saw a young black man, her age, coming out of the meth clinic with a big smile and even bigger aviator sunglasses. My God, she thought. Jimmy Gellar. Recognized him right away, as quickly as he had recognized her. Beneath a thrift-store blazer he wore a thin T-shirt, not the old green one with the lamp, or the old red one with the lightning bolt, but a plain white generic, a promising blue ink spot staining its collar. He was probably Jim now. Or maybe even James. With the addicts, dealers, and narcs looking on, James or Jim or Jimmy Gellar—whoever he might be—spread his twiggy arms out for a hug.

Nine years earlier he had asked her if she wanted to be a superhero or supervillain. This was around midnight, back when her parents were still together. She had a test early the next morning in Mrs. O’Regan’s Ancient and Medieval History class, on the pharaohs or something, but she’d smuggled Jimmy into the house anyway, the first rule she’d ever broken without her father’s assistance. Both he and her mother were sleeping. She hoped. The living-room sofa, the Bollywood magazines flipped open on the coffee table, her grandfather’s grandfather clock, the family photos along the mantel, the crystal dolphins in the glass cabinet, they all watched Janice, a famously good girl, take her new friend by the hand and lead him up the stairs, the two of them hugging the wall to avoid creaking any steps. She brought him into her bedroom, where he took a seat at her desk and began softly tapping his graphite pencil against a blank sheet of drafting paper. The joint he’d smoked on the walk over had reddened his eyes, but he smelled of lemons more than weed, from the Citrashine he rubbed into his natty hair by the palmful. He was fifteen years old, a colossal nerd who smiled easily and danced with his eyes closed, and Janice was in love with him.

“Superhero,” she said.

Hunched over at the desk, he got to work. He drew her, or rather he drew the comic-book version of her: older, with basketball breasts that
strained the stretchy fabric of her unitard. He gave her a domino mask, which would allow him to render facial expressions, and a long rectangular cape modeled on the Guyanese flag. While adding shadows and cheekbones, he barely looked over at her—sitting Indian-style on the bed, in a pair of gray cotton gym shorts that cut off above her knees—and she realized, with a honeyed warmth filling her throat, that he was working from memory.

“We need a name,” he said.

Neighborhood-proud, they called her Captain Richmond Hill. Why not? As Jimmy too loudly explained, Forest Hills had Spider-Man, Hell’s Kitchen had Daredevil, Westchester had the X-Men, and now Richmond Hill would have its own hero, a West Indian crime fighter trained in ancient martial arts and blessed/cursed with the supernatural power of the ghetto touch, which was based on Jimmy’s own unfortunate propensity to fuck up—without entirely breaking—pretty much anything he laid his hands on, e.g., the inky nib-holder that now required duct tape, e.g., the plastic lettering guide that had cracked in half but still remained functional.

He said, “We’ll need to—”

“Shh!” she said.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “We’ll need to explain how she got her powers. Like the origin or whatever.”

Like everyone before who’s ever been stuck for ideas, she looked out the window. An ancient wooden tree spread its branches between the Itwarus’ alleyway and a gas station on the corner, the branches studded with a year-round fruit, genus unknown, as large and heavy looking as mangoes, but not mangoes, not exactly. When they fell, they fell hard. No one, or at least no one Janice knew, had ever dared eat one, but the neighborhood’s younger children sometimes used the fruit as ammo in their bruise-inducing games of War. Seedy purple stains blemished the pavement.

She said, “What if she has an alien tree growing magical fruit in her alley? And she gets her powers from, like, its juice?”

Perfect!

They gave her alter ego an appropriately alliterative name, Gabby Guyana, and made her a hardworking homicide detective in the NYPD. Frustrated with the bureaucratic limitations of the job, she made sure in her off-hours to dole out vigilante justice from behind the mask. Obviously the police backstory idea came from Janice, but Jimmy got behind it right away. He told her Barry Allen, one of the Flash’s many alter egos, had been a cop. And Nightwing, too, and the Specter and the Guardian and Martian Manhunter and—