War Zone, Part 5 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

james-grady

James Grady

Contributor
Posted:
09/25/09
Previously: A two-dead gun battle near Washington, D.C.'s Liss Gardens forces community activist Dante Jones to defy his wife Rhea, go "back to the streets" to re-politic a gang truce. Dante negotiates his 22-year-old protégé 'Trey out of a nighttime crime scene jam with the Murder Police, and they convince community stalwart Mrs. Williams to ask her "wild boy" grandson Jerome and his West Side posse for a meeting.
One September night.
Cool, but not like when we were young.
Washington, D.C. A neighborhood called Liss Gardens.
Liss was some forgotten politician with enough glory or clout to buy himself into history or enough of an ego to be bought by getting Congress to OK the D.C. government's christening of a square block of the city that later became one of 28 FUDS (Formerly Used Defense Sites) in Washington, a piece of earth razed by the Corps of Engineers after the War To End All Wars, land that had been a chemical warfare facility and that based on the 1992 lawsuit-generated release of incomplete Army records plus testing by the Environmental Protection Agency contains less than officially toxic levels of arsenic, asbestos and atropine.
Real estate developers laugh when they called Liss Gardens "a triple A zone," sigh about how the subway station five blocks away could have better served – and enhanced – a more pragmatic neighborhood.
The Gardens is packed earth supporting a swing set, a merry-go-round, well-carved picnic tables, and burned down public toilets. Five of the six concrete basketball half-courts have hoops, three with nets of chain.
About half the apartment building complexes and townhouses surrounding the Gardens are among the 8,000 units managed by D.C. government's Housing Authority for citizens who are too broke or busted up with old age or ills to pay for their own shelter. Whoever owns the rest of the buildings matters only on the Darwinian money tree.
When the sun slants just right over the legally-dictated, shorter-than- the-Washington-Monument buildings surrounding the Gardens or when, like that night, pollution lets moonlight shine, the ground of the Gardens sparkles with diamonds of broken glass.
That moonlit September night, no one lingered on the front porches or at building entryways near Liss Gardens. Nobody laughed and lounged on cars parked around the curb. The chain basketball hoops hung silent. The merry-go-round didn't spin.
Two men walked alone around the Gardens.
"What time is it?" asked the gray haired man.
His younger companion checked his blue lit cell phone. "'Bout halfway through the Jon Stewart show. Laughing let's you get it, you know?"
"But I still don't know what time it is."
"Sorry, Dante. Like, 11:13."
"Did you get a wristwatch like I told you? With hands?"
"Why are you so old school?"
"'Trey, I carry a cell phone. Plus a watch."
They walked the cracked sidewalk in silence for a few steps.
'Trey said: "That's supposed to tell me something, isn't it."
"Knowing that shows how far you've come."
Dante's arms goose-bumped. He wished he'd been wearing a jacket when the call came into his car after dinner. Was glad all the eyes in the night could see that the only arms he carried were attached to his body.
"A digital clock makes it always right now 'cause that's all it shows you. A watch with hands let you understand time better because you can watch it happen."
"Shift change buzzers in prison," said 'Trey. "You can't wait for the next one to come and every one of them drives you crazy mad and sad."
Headlights probed in front of them before they heard the car, turned, saw the same police cruiser that had driven past them four times before in their walks around the Gardens, two cops who'd stopped and flashlight I.D.ed them, eventually accepted that they were with the Coalition of Committed Citizens. The cops drove past.
'Trey said: "That heat be here 'bout a week, two. Unless there's another shooting. Or they put a charge on some dudes."
"Or we get the truce back up and working."
"Working again. You 'n' the Coalition been walkin' a long time."
"Few years after I got out of prison, some of us guys had to think up the Coalition or just watch guys your age keep killing and dying."
Like the hands on his watch spun backwards from that autumn night and the scent of street garbage, Dante smelled the pine disinfectant of his mop bucket, the closeness of the classroom, chalk on the blackboard that spelled out a mystery.
"I'd been a janitor at U.D.C.," he told 'Trey. "This woman professor comes back for a book she forgot and I stopped her, apologized...trusted her enough to tell her I was an ex-junkie and I couldn't figure out the white chalk word on the blackboard.
"She took a chance. Said: `Let's look it up.' Pulled out a dictionary. We got to talking. She told me because I was on U.D.C. staff, I could take free classes. Spent days helping me get into the system, but six years later, I graduated from George Washington University."
"What was the word on the blackboard?"
"Hypothetical." Dante said: "I told her I knew all about hypo's."
'Trey took a few steps. "That word means...What could be – right?"
"You got it."
'Trey scanned locked-tight homes, crumbled sidewalk, over-flowing trashcans, the rubble filled park.
"Somebody sure hypo'd us up with some bad 'thetical out here."
Dante said: "You don't need to hold out your arm."
"True that," said 'Trey. "How long we gonna stay out here? Everybody's inside 'cause it's all cocked to jump off."
"Politics." Dante nodded to the invisible people of that night. "If they can't count on you being there, they won't count you in for whatever's going on and you won't be able to change a thing."
"I can find who the shooters were and –"
"No. We don't want to know in any way that makes us an accessory for the police or puts us working for the police so nobody trusts us."
"Or gets us killed."
They laughed.
'Trey shook his head. "Two dead by the subway, three in the hospital. How bad's it gonna get?"
"Back when we started, after the 1980's crack and heroin wars, that shoot first way of doing business spilled over into ordinary living – bullets for beefin', not even about money or drugs or power, just killing for killing.
Dante shook his head. "It's bad enough now, tonight, eleven weeks of truce shot to hell."
"If we get a meet with Jerome's West Side posse – "
"Not if," said Dante: "think when. And how."
"With them West Side boys, Jerome might be our how. Won't do no good 'less we get East Side, too, and we got nothing to bring them in."
"Yet," said Dante.
"You done it before," said 'Trey. "We meet with whoever, what do want me to do?"
"Don't focus on this incident, move them past that. Help me figure out who's a shot caller and who's just a loud mouth or hurtin' bad. Hear what's behind the who did what to who. Maybe one joke or flipped finger at the wrong time and place started a chain reaction. Might somebody working a money or dope beef. Might be all that plus, everything in a mix."
"If it's dope, we got Luther to look out for."
Dante said: "Luther wants this truce, too."
"Yeah, cops coming down here be hurting his business."
Don't tell 'Trey that Luther's leaning on you, thought Dante: The kid doesn't need to carry that weight.
"We might split guys off to talk to them," said Dante. "Build a core consensus. Might need to isolate some guy so he's got to go against his own if he wants to stay wild, work on him special later. If you try to persuade three people onto some common ground, they've got three different sets of reasons 'might get them there. You might never know which is the most powerful one, but you still need to find what works.
"We don't need to change everyone all around," said Dante. "We just need to work the Five Degrees. They don't have to turn 180 degrees straight back the other way, they just need to turn five degrees off of where they're headed now to not arrive at that killing there."
They'd reached one end of the rubbled Gardens.
"What's the difference between the west side and the east?" said Dante, more to himself and the night than to the young man beside him.
"Where you think owns you," said 'Trey. "Who you shoot."
A door slammed behind them.
Whirl! Look!
No one was there.
No one they saw.
'Trey said: "What are we going to do next?"
What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady

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