Like now. A couple of the knockers get bored waiting for the wagon and come down Monroe to clear the corner. Two plainclothesmen and a uniform move down the block in tandem, quickly overtaking Curt, but moving past him to tell Shamrock, Kwame, and a few more of the younger ones to get the fuck off the street. Curt stands unmolested in the same spot, unable to rate even a casual eyefuck.
For twenty minutes, the shop stays closed as cops and corner boys alike wait for the Western District wagon. When it arrives to cart the day’s sacrifice to the district lockup, the rest of the herd watches placidly, insulated by their very numbers from worrying the thing too much.
The wagon finally rolls off down Monroe, turning the corner on Fayette, and Curt tries to pick up where he left off. But after roping in a quick sale, he’s overcome with a strange uncertainty.
“Aw shit.”
He hobbles up to Vine Street and looks down the alley at the row of vacant, battered brick. Third one down? Fourth one? Fifth? Who the hell can remember with all the shit going on?
“Oh Lord,” says Curt, petitioning for divine intervention as he pokes his way down the lane. “Where mah dope? Lord, please help me find mah dope.”
It’s another hour before he manages to relocate his bundle where he left it, sell it off, and get back to Blue’s for the midafternoon jumper. Curt’s down in the front room, waiting for Rita to get herself off, when he hears the same damn racket above him. Up he goes to the second floor, his legs aching, his patience thinned. Sure enough, the same asshole is still at it.
“Well, got-damn …”
The fiend looks blankly at him.
“Just leave the shit be now.”
“Fuck you, motherfucker.”
Curt wonders why he cares, thinking to himself that there ain’t much left to Blue’s old house anyway, and what’s left is going to get carted away by someone soon enough. Ever since Blue got locked up, Curt had been making a modest effort to hold the fort. But there was no telling when Blue might get home.
Two weeks ago—about an hour or so after Blue had told Rita to clean up and had put her out of the house—the police suddenly kicked in the front door and charged through the shooting gallery. This quite naturally scared the living shit out of all present, sending Blue himself out the second-floor rear window in a mad leap. It wasn’t much of a raid, in fact. There was no warrant and the police who went charging through rooms with guns drawn weren’t much interested in the handful of vials, syringes, and cookers scattered about. Instead, they were looking for an injured officer; someone, it seemed, had dialed 911 to report that a police was taking a beating inside the shooting gallery. The caller did not identify herself to the police dispatcher, but the gallery regulars figured Rita Hale, her feelings hurt by the eviction, to be the even-money bet.
As the police searched Blue’s house that day, the hardcore soldiers—Curt and Eggy, Pimp and Dennis—sat silent, their hard-won highs ruined. Blue went rabbit because he thought he was supposed to go rabbit, because he was running a shooting gallery and the police were kicking through the door. The fall from the upstairs window didn’t hurt a bit; getting grabbed and tossed around the back alley by a plainclothes detective who was responding to the officer-needs-assistance call—that was the problem. Convinced that there was no injured officer in the house, the raiding party managed to overlook the vials and syringes and leave everybody be—save for Blue and two or three others who had tried to run and had to be punished on principle. For Blue, the charge was burglary—to wit, breaking and entering into his own house.
So the lord of the manor is gone and Rita is back and now Curt is left to stare down a one-man demolition squad. There’s a part of him almost ready to let it go, but something else keeps the confrontation going. For Curt, it goes back to the old code, back to the time when people talked to each other. Fuck it, he figures, it is Blue’s house and Blue is a friend, and messing with the man’s house when he’s over at pretrial ain’t right. He watches the fiend pull at the window-stripping and decides to give it one more try.
“I’m sayin’ …”
But the fiend isn’t listening anymore. Instead, he’s crossing the room, picking up a long piece of jagged aluminum, and swinging hard.
The first blow tears Curt on the side of the face; he can feel the warm blood squirt from his cheek and neck. The second, he fends off, catching a deep cut in his left palm. The fiend brandishes the weapon again and Curt backs up into the front bedroom, assessing the damage.
The tout hears the enemy stalk down the stairs. Pausing for a moment to think it through, he drops his cane, grabs Blue’s wooden chair, drags it over to the closet, and uses it to boost himself up through the trapdoor. In a Herculean effort, he struggles up into the attic’s crawl space, managing somehow to push himself along to the trapdoor to the roof without getting wedged between the beams. He rests for a moment to steady a laboring pulse, then pops the roof cap and lifts himself onto the frozen black tar. A man on a mission, he ignores the wind’s chilly breath on his sweating body, crawling to the edge of the roof. He peeps down on the Fayette Street sidewalk.
No fiend.
Curt takes a look across the roof and spots a loose brick near the chimney stack. He stretches for it and returns to position directly above the doorway. A couple minutes more and, blessed Jesus, the fiend not only steps onto the stoop but stands there. Curt leans over the edge, squares the target in the crosshairs, and it’s bombs away.
The brick lands with a crack on the steps. A near miss.
Damn.
But the fiend continues to stand there, scoping the street. Somehow, the air raid didn’t register. In fact, after a moment or two more, the man actually steps back inside Blue’s.
Curt is flummoxed—how in hell did he miss?—but the initial failure does nothing to stay his anger. It’s back down from the roof and into Blue’s room, where Curt goes under the worn mattress for the old ax that Blue keeps.
Leaving his cane once again, steadied by his purpose, Curt hobbles out of the room, down the stairs, with a pause only at the bottom step, where the asshole obliges Curt yet again by walking past him down the narrow corridor. Curt rears back and comes down with a mighty chop. But no. The ax head flies toward the ceiling and nothing more lethal than the wooden handle glances off the fiend’s shoulder.
“Huh,” says the fiend, startled.
Curt stands there, looking at the wooden handle. The fiend is thinking, too, staring down at the loose blade on the floor. Suddenly, it clicks: “Man, shit.”
Curt says nothing.
“I mean, I’m sayin’ you all actin’ crazy and shit.”
Enough is enough, apparently. The fiend mumbles his way toward the door, talking about how all Curt had to do was say something, talking about it like Curt doesn’t know how to act, pretending like there are still rules left in this game. He leaves Curt there at the bottom of the stairs, still holding the worthless toothpick of a handle, exhausted, bloodied, wondering how so many no-thinking people get to be so got-damned lucky.
To see it in retrospect, to look backward across thirty years on the Fayette Streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology, as the inevitable consequence of forces stronger and more profound than the cities themselves.
Cursed as we are with a permanent urban