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    james-grady

    James Grady

    Contributor

    Smoked Mirror Windows, Part 2 of 'What's Going On: A Political Fiction'

    Posted:
    09/22/09
    3 Comments  + 
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    Episode 2: Smoked Mirror Windows
    Previously: A cell phone call ruins the after-dinner drive of Dante Jones and his wife Rhea with news of a shooting near Washington, D.C.'s Liss Gardens neighborhood where Dante, who is a community organizer, had negotiated a street truce in the shadow of a gangster named Luther. Dante spots a black SUV with tinted windows parked across from their house, so he makes sure Rhea is safely inside a neighbor's house before parking. Then he steps out of his car.
    Dante stood in the night street in front of his home.
    The cell phone in his shirt pocket buzzed like a rattlesnake.
    September leaves rustled in the trees.
    He smelled fresh pine mulch chips in his neighbors' garden.
    Pollution-dimmed stars, the pale glow from a foot-printed moon, vaporous cones of low-bid city streetlights, the yellow twinkle of zone-approved porch fixtures, and rainbow flickers of Federal Communication Commission-reined TVs inside his neighbors' houses illuminated the parked black SUV but not who waited beyond its tinted windows.
    Told Rhea that what I do is politics.
    Said: Politics is who you choose to be. The rest is just the doing.
    Doors stayed closed on the black SUV. Tinted windows stayed up.
    You wait for the black car to find you or you go to the black car.
    Like smoked mirrors, the black SUV's tinted windows captured Dante's image walking closer from across the street. Closer.
    Six steps away from the black SUV and the smoked mirror windows.
    Five.
    Dante saw his reflection growing in the SUV's dark glass.
    Knew this make of vehicle got created to win World War II.
    He stopped two steps from the SUV.
    The rear passenger's smoked mirror window slid down, swallowed Dante's image into a black steel slab to replace it with the grinning, goateed face of a man who'd notched about half the number of Dante's 60 years into life.
    "My man, Dante Jones." White teeth glowed inside the goatee. "Walking over here like you're some kind of stone citizen."
    "My house, my street, our country."
    "That ain't what you want to say," said this goateed man in the backseat. Dante intell'ed the other three men in the Jeep: Don't know two. Seen the Fat Man before. Can't see their hands. The goateed man wore a black silk sports jacket that cost more than Dante and Rhea's two old cars. That jacket draped open over a blue shirt.
    Over his colostomy bag.
    Over what else?
    "What you want to say," the goateed man told him, "is: Get off my turf, ______!"
    "Your words, not mine, Mr. Kross."
    "Mister? Now we back to being like that?"
    "Respect."
    "Word, right? `R-E-S-P-E-C-T.' That's big for you and all the other ex-cons – My bad: all you other ex-offenders -- down at your Coalition Of Committed Citizens. You guys shut down what, a dozen street wars?
    Course, that's not counting Liss Gardens," added the goateed man.
    Don't take the bait.
    Dante said, "The Coalition helps the community negotiate truces."
    "Taking on other people's beefs."
    "No, stopping the killing for all of us."
    "You ever drop a body?" The goateed man crawled his eyes over the old guy standing in the street. "I know you did large time for Dillinger work, but before, you was in the Vietnam. 'You waste your time over there, or did you put a couple down for Uncle Sam?"
    The phone in Dante's pocket buzzed just as a cell phone rang in the front seat. Dante ignored his call. Fat Man in the Jeep's front passenger seat answered his: "Yeah?..."
    Dante made silence for the goateed man to fill.
    "You know why I come on your home street, Dante?"
    Fat Man talking on the cell phone: "Yeah...Naw, we on it now."
    His goateed boss said: "I'm here 'cause I want to be. Because I can be. Because this is America. Land of the free, home of the better be brave."
    "Better be smart, too," added Dante.
    "Good to know you know that." Goateed man smiled. "Call me Luther, like I told you to back before when you lied to my ______ face."
    Breathe, take a breath.
    Say: "No lies. Never happen."
    Fat Man closed his phone.
    Goateed Luther said: "Wasn't that you who promised if I ignored what's what there was gonna be no more crazy bullets making police cruise Liss Gardens like `the community' was giving away donuts?"
    "I told you that we were working out a truce in the Gardens' war, guys living across from each other with a tangle of beefs that we were asking you to help us resolve by you standing back."
    "You say tomato," said Luther, "I say squish."
    Dante's cell phone buzzed.
    "Ain't you gonna answer that?" said Luther.
    Change the focus. Move him off balance – but not too much.
    "What I wonder," said Dante, "is why you ride in the backseat."
    "Nobody gets behind me." Lips curled inside Luther's goatee.
    "What can I do for you tonight?" said Dante.
    "Tonight, tomorrow, last month, next _______year, you can be smart enough to not do me like some punk. You told me how it was gonna be, and come to find out tonight, you were wrong. What am I supposed to do when I been done by you and life ain't right?"
    "The only promise I – we – made you was to do our best."
    "Well you best do a whole lot better, Mister Jones."
    Luther mumbled something to the Jeep's driver that Dante could have heard back when he was a younger man. The Jeep growled to life.
    The goateed man set his eyes hard on the old wolf. Said: "Life makes everybody stand and deliver. From where I stand, you ain't delivered."
    "You get what you can."
    "Naw," said Luther: "I get what I want."
    The smoked glass window whirred up, closed.
    The black Jeep pulled away.
    Left the old man standing in his own street.
    Invisible in the night sky above him, Dante heard a jetliner fly from the airport re-named for a movie actor who won a second act as President of the United States.
    Somewhere a dog barked.
    The cell phone buzzed in Dante's pocket.
    Buzzed again.
    Dante grabbed it, answered: "Yeah, 'Trey....What? You're where?"
    What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious.
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    James Grady

    Best known for his first of 14 novels SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOR that became a Robert Redford movie, James Grady has been a U.S. Senate aide and a national investigative reporter... more

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