TWENTY-ONE

ALVIN JONES PARKED his Special on the corner of 2nd and Thomas, and walked north into the heart of LeDroit Park. As he moved along, he hard-eyed young men and let his gaze travel soft over the women. He had left his gun in the apartment but hadn’t come out naked. He carried a straight razor in the pocket of his slacks.

Soon he came to the intersection across the street from the market. It might have been that the owner of the shop or someone who worked there had gotten suspicious, seen them sitting in Kenneth’s Monterey on Sunday night. Maybe it was them who called the police on Kenneth after taking down the number on his plates. Didn’t seem like the MPD would arrest someone on just a hunch, but still. Jones wanted to make sure.

The door was tied open with a string. He stared at the market pointlessly, knowing he wasn’t going to get any closer or go inside. Then he saw a couple of boys a half-block down, riding bicycles over a piece of plywood they had leaned up on some bricks in the middle of the street. Jones went over to where the boys were playing and observed their game. They were getting some speed on the approach, riding their bikes up the shaky ramp, trying to get the bikes into the air. The kid who got up highest would win a bet of money that, Jones figured, neither of them had. But the bikes were old and heavy, and it wasn’t working out the way they’d planned.

Least they had bikes. Jones had asked his father for a bicycle once, back in the early fifties, and his father had laughed. Jones asked him again, and his father slapped him so hard he saw stars, just like in the cartoons. Wasn’t his real father anyway. Just some man his mother had ordered Jones to mind. When he wasn’t laughing at him, the man used to beat him with a belt or closed hands. If Jones could see him now, he’d kill him. But the man had been dead for ten, twelve years. Got his heart stabbed in a fight over a woman, lived one floor down from where they all stayed.

Jones whistled to the boys. They rolled on over to him on their bikes, apprehension and curiosity on their faces. He introduced himself and told them what he wanted, holding two folded ones in his hand as he spoke. Telling them how he’d grown up around here, asking them, What was the name of that man owns the market down here, and the other man, works there, too? Claiming how he wanted to go in there and say hello but was ashamed because he wanted to call them by their names and couldn’t recall. And, Oh yeah, had they seen this other cat hanging around the market or somethin’ yesterday? Jones describing Dennis Strange and the kids not knowing any damn thing, but wide of eye and licking their lips over those dollar bills.

“Don’t we get the money, mister?” said one of the boys, watching as Jones slipped the bills back into his pocket.

“Ask for the money up front next time,” said Jones.

Y’all should have paid me for the lesson I just gave you, thought Jones, walking away. He always went to kids first for information, ’cause they were trusting and the first to give it up. But these kids here, they weren’t worth a damn.

Jones went back down the street. He passed the market and at the next intersection cut right and walked into an alley that ran between two residential blocks. At the end of the alley, Jones could see the back door of the market, an overturned milk crate by its stoop. Cats of all kinds scattered as he moved along the cracked concrete. Up ahead, a boy in a striped shirt threw a tennis ball against a brick wall.

Jones came up on the boy and stood beside him. The boy didn’t move away. He had an old face for his years, with eyes that had lost their innocence too soon. All of this, to Jones’s mind, was good.

“What’s goin’ on, young man?”

The boy said nothing.

“You got an arm on you like Bob Gibson, boy.”

The boy whipped the ball against the wall.

“All right,” said Jones. “You just listen.”

Jones fed the boy the same stories and questions he had given the kids on the bikes. The boy continued to throw the ball, catching it bare-handed off one hop, as Jones spoke. When Jones was done, he waited for the boy to say something. But the boy did not react at all.

Jones had lost half his patience. He put fire to a Kool and looked the boy up and down. “Somethin’ wrong with your tongue?”

The boy shook his head. “My uncle told me not to talk to no police.”

“He told you right.”

The boy held the ball and stood straight. He looked Jones in the eye for the first time. “You got money?”

“I might.”

“I might know somethin’, then.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Where the money at?”

Jones chuckled low. He reached into his pocket and handed the boy two one-dollar bills. “Say it.”

“White man who owns the market, everyone calls him Mr. Ludvig. Man who works for him, we all call him John.”

“John’s a black man…”

“Dark-skinned, got gray in his hair.”

“What about the rest?”

“Rest of what?”

“What I asked. Did you see a young brother come and talk to those men yesterday? I’m sayin’, someone who wasn’t from the neighborhood. Like a stranger. Most likely, this cat would’ve talked to John.”

The boy frowned as he thought. His frown broke as the image came to his mind. “There was this one man, came around early. Right back here.”

“In the alley?”

“Man walked by me. Talked to John behind the store. Tall, young dude, had an Afro that was all messed up.”

“He ain’t say his name, did he?”

“Nah.”

“Anything else about this man?”

“Nothin’, I guess. Except -”

“What?”

“Man was carrying a book.”

Jones smiled. “He say anything to you?”

“Nothin’ important. Knowledge is power, somethin’ like that.”

“That’s bullshit right there,” said Jones.

“I know it,” said the boy.

“Street’s the only teacher you ever gonna need. And books are for faggots, too.”

“I aint’ no punk.”

“I can see that,” said Jones. “Listen, you and me didn’t talk today, hear?”

“For two more dollars, we ain’t never talked any day.”

“Boy,” said Jones, reaching for his wallet, “you about to drive me to the poorhouse and drop me off out front, all those brains you got.”

THE TROUBLE STARTED after dark, at the Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U, where trouble was not uncommon. Fourteenth and U’s four corners marked the busiest and most notorious of all intersections in black Washington, a major bus transfer spot in the middle of D.C.’s Harlem, a hub for heroin addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and all manner of hustlers, as well as law-abiding citizens and neighborhood residents just trying to move through their world.

The Peoples Drug sat beside the Washington, D.C., office of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, housed in a former bank. The SNCC and NAACP offices were nearby as well.

Hostility between juveniles and the store’s black security guards had become a regular occurrence at this particular Peoples in the past few weeks. On this evening, the guard on duty, employed by an outside service, confronted a group of young men who were swinging a dead fish outside the store and bothering passersby with lewd gestures and remarks. The security guard told them to move on, but the boys did not comply. They called him “punk” and “motherfucker,” and when he retreated, a couple of them followed him into the store. The manager phoned the police. A physical altercation ensued between one of the boys and the guard, and the boys were expelled. The manager locked the front door. By now a crowd had begun to form outside the Peoples. As was common in the inner city, word had spread quickly via the “ghetto telegraph,” and the story had mutated to suggest another beat-down of a black boy at the hands of the authorities. Confusion and curiosity turned to anger as the crowd grew. The crowd pushed against the plate glass of the front show window. The glass imploded just as MPD patrol wagons and squad cars began to arrive.