“She didn’t pay her rent,” Sherrena said. “Do y’all have her rent to pay?”
“I don’t give a shit, man,” the stepfather was saying almost to himself. What he didn’t give a shit about wasn’t the eviction but whatever was going to transpire there, at that very moment, on that dark street.
“I don’t either!” Quentin shot back.
“I’ll whip that motherfuckin’ ass, nigga….Don’t say I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”
“You don’t!” Sherrena yelled as Quentin tugged her back to the Suburban. “You don’t!”
Days after the tenant left, Sherrena took a call from a caseworker at Wraparound, a local social services agency. The caseworker had a client who needed a place to live with her two boys. Wraparound would pay her security deposit and first month’s rent, which sounded good to Sherrena. The new tenant’s name was Arleen Belle.
2.
MAKING RENT
Sometime after Sherrena paid him a visit with her eviction notice, Lamar was back in his apartment on Eighteenth and Wright, playing spades with his two sons and their friends. As always, they sat around a small kitchen table, slapping the playing cards hard on the wood or sending them spinning with a calm flick of the wrist. The neighborhood boys knew they could show up at Lamar’s place day or night for a bite to eat, a drag off a blunt if they were lucky, and a romping game of spades.
“You ain’t got no more spades, Negro?”
“Look, we gonna set they ass.”
Lamar was partnered with Buck. At eighteen, Buck was the oldest of the crew and went by Big Bro. They sat across from each other, playing Luke, Lamar’s sixteen-year-old son, and DeMarcus, one of Luke’s closest friends. Eddy, Lamar’s younger son at fifteen, worked the stereo while four other neighborhood boys stood around, waiting their turn at spades. Lamar sat in his wheelchair. His prosthetic legs, each one foot to top-shin, stood beside his bed, casting a humanlike shadow on the rough wood floor.
“Police crazy,” Buck offered, inspecting his hand. He was finishing high school and working part-time in its cafeteria, where he had to wear a hairnet to cover his thick cornrows. Buck slept at his parents’ house but lived at Lamar’s. If someone asked him why, he would study his size twelve boots and just say, “?’Cause.” The boys usually walked to the store or football practice together, strutting nine-or ten-deep down Wright Street. Being stopped by the Milwaukee PD had become routine. This was why, when someone made a run to the weed spot, he usually went alone. “Next time, I’m a be like, ‘What you stoppin’ me for?’?” Buck went on. “?’Cause you have a right to ask ’em….They gotta see, smell, hear, or something.”
“They ain’t gotta see nothing,” Lamar replied.
“Yes they do, Pops! They teachin’ me this at schooool.”
“They teaching you wrong, then.”
DeMarcus laughed and put a cigarette lighter to a blunt he had just licked shut. He drew in and passed it. The game got under way—quick at first, then slower as players’ hands thinned. “When the police come up,” Buck persisted, “even if they pull you over, you ain’t even gotta let your window down. You just gotta roll it down a little bit.”
“It ain’t that sweet.” Lamar grinned.
“Na, Pops!”
“Don’t be trying to change things, man,” cut in DeMarcus, who had just been arrested—because of his “slick mouth,” according to Lamar. “A hard head makes a soft ass.”
The laughter lifted higher when Lamar added, “Can’t call me collect.” He took a drag off the blunt. “Baby boy,” his voice was tender, “I’m fifty-one. If it’s happened, I been through it.”
“The police ain’t protecting us,” Buck said.
“I feel you on that. But all polices are not the same….If I was in the neighborhood, and it was rough, I’d want the police to clean that shit up too.” Lamar tossed out the king of diamonds and looked left to DeMarcus. “Go ’head, son. Get it outcha hand.” The ace had already been played, and he figured DeMarcus had the queen. DeMarcus looked back at Lamar, poker-faced through thick glasses.
“Pops, your neighborhood protect you….If somebody comes through shooting, everybody on the block, everybody who got, haulin’ off shootin’.”
“Man, I’m a Vietnam veteran. I know I can shoot.”
Lamar had joined the navy in ’74, after seeing a commercial. He was seventeen. The navy was a blur of boring oceans, exotic locations, shore-leave parties, pills, and blown checks. Lamar couldn’t see why all the floppy-haired college students down in Madison had gone crazy over Vietnam, getting their noggins thumped by police batons and blowing up a university building. Lamar was having a blast. He was dishonorably discharged in 1977.
“But a bullet ain’t got no eyes,” Lamar continued. “Man, look here, we went to court with DeMarcus.” The game stopped while Lamar told the story. Before DeMarcus’s case was called, Lamar said, they had watched a teenager sentenced to fourteen years for accompanying his older brother when he beat a crackhead to death. “He’s in the courtroom bawlin’ his eyes out.”
“They on some bull ’cause he a little black boy,” Buck said.
“Well, then that should make you think, being black.”
As Buck laughed, DeMarcus slapped his card down: the eight of spades. “Ah! That’s what my momma taught me,” he yelled. Next to all other suits, the spade was the most powerful. DeMarcus slid the book to his pile.
“Damn,” Lamar said. Then he looked back at Buck. “It ain’t worth it, doing stupid stuff….Prison ain’t no joke. You gotta fight every day in prison, for your life.”
“I know. But when I get mad, to the extent that I wanna do something, ain’t nothing stoppin’ me.”
“You better grow up, kid.” As Buck took a long hit off the blunt, Lamar added, “And you need to slow down, smokerrr.” He drew the last word out, using a high-pitched, tinny voice.
Buck laughed so hard he lost his hit, but the point got through. “I’m straight,” he demurred the next time the blunt was offered.
When his sons were at school, Lamar listened to oldies while he cleaned and drank instant coffee with sugar. He pushed forward in his wheelchair, set the brake, and swept the dirt into a long-handled dustpan. Instead of stacking the boys into a single bedroom, Lamar had given Luke one bedroom and Eddy the other, their twin beds resting on metal frames. Lamar’s bed sat in the corner of the living room. On the other side was a moss-green couch, team photographs from past football seasons, white silk flowers, and a small fish tank with guppies. The apartment was spare and tidy, full of light. Its pantry bordered on obsessive-compulsive. The Spam was stacked neatly in its place; the cereal boxes lined up at attention; the cans of soup and beans organized by kind and all forward-facing. Lamar had repurposed a Clos du Bois wine rack to hold a small stereo, dishes, and the Folgers can where he kept his tobacco and Midnight Special rolling papers.