—But how did the cookies get from Townhouse’s locker into Tommy’s? asked some helpful half-wit, right on cue.
By way of response, I took a look at my fingernails.
—Let’s just say they didn’t walk there themselves.
The boys all had a good laugh over that one.
Then the never-to-be-underestimated Woolly Martin asked the pertinent question.
—If Bo gave Tommy two boxes of cookies and one of the boxes ended up in Tommy’s locker, then what happened to the other box?
On the wall in the middle of the barracks was a big green board painted with all the rules and regulations we were meant to abide by. Reaching behind it, I retrieved the narrow blue box and produced it with a flourish.
—Voilà!
Then we all had a gay old time, passing around the cookies and laughing about Tommy’s sputtering and the flipping of the mattress by Bo.
But once the laughter subsided, Townhouse shook his head and observed that I had taken quite a chance. At that, all of them looked at me with a touch of curiosity. Why did I do it, they were suddenly wondering. Why did I take the risk of pissing off Tommy and Bo for a barrackmate I hardly knew? And a black one at that.
In the silence that followed, I rested a hand on the hilt of my sword and looked from visage to visage.
—Took a chance? I said. No chance was taken here today, my friends. The chance was given. Each one of us has come from disparate parts to serve our disparate sentences for the commission of disparate crimes. But faced with a shared tribulation, we are given an opportunity—a rare and precious opportunity—to be men of one accord. Let us not shirk before what Fortune has laid at our feet. Let us take it up like a banner and march into the breach, such that many years from now, when we look back, we will be able to say that though we were condemned to days of drudgery, we faced them undaunted and shoulder to shoulder. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Oh, you should have seen them!
They were rapt, I tell you, hanging on every syllable. And when I hit them with the old band of brothers, they let out a rousing cheer. If my father had been there, he would have been proud, if he weren’t so inclined to be jealous.
After all the backs had been slapped and the boys had returned to their bunks with smiles on their faces and cookies in their stomachs, Townhouse approached.
—I owe you, he said.
And he was right. He did.
Even if we were a band of brothers.
But all these months later, the question remained: How much did he owe me? If Ackerly had found those cookies in Townhouse’s footlocker, Townhouse would have been the one sweating in the penalty shed instead of Tommy, and for four nights instead of two. It was a credit to my account all right, but as credits go, I knew it wasn’t enough to offset the eight strokes of the switch that Townhouse had received on his back.
That’s what I was mulling over when I left Woolly at his sister’s house in Hastings-on-Hudson, and what I kept mulling over all the way to Harlem.
* * *
At some point, Townhouse had told me that he lived on 126th Street, which seemed straightforward enough. But I had to drive the length of it six times before I found him.
He was sitting at the top of a brownstone’s stoop, his boys assembled around him. Pulling over to the curb across the street, I watched through the windshield. On the step below Townhouse sat a big fat fella with a smile on his face, then a fair-skinned black with freckles, and on the bottom step, two kids in their early teens. I guess it was arranged like a little platoon, with the captain at the top, then his first lieutenant, his second lieutenant, and two foot soldiers. But the order could have been reversed, with Townhouse on the bottom step, and he still would have towered over the rest of them. It made you wonder what they had done with themselves while he was in Kansas. They’d probably bitten their nails and counted the days until his release. Now with Townhouse back in charge, they could exhibit a studied indifference, advertising to any who passed that they cared as little about their futures as they did about the weather.
When I crossed the street and approached, the young teens rose and took a step toward me, as if they were going to ask me for the password.
Looking over their heads, I addressed Townhouse with a smile.
—So, is this one of those dangerous street gangs I keep hearing about?
When Townhouse realized it was me, he looked almost as surprised as Emmett had.
—Jesus Christ, he said.
—You know this cracker? asked the freckle-faced one.
Townhouse and I both ignored him.
—What are you doing here, Duchess?