The chance of finding Nina and John in one of these buildings is low, and the likelihood that the plan Aleem cooked up to deal with the four SUVs will work is even lower. However, this world doesn’t reward second-guessers. You can change direction if a fork in the path appears and has promise, but you can’t back up and rethink, because in this business, to both your enemies and your homeys, that looks like retreat. Retreat is seen as weakness, and the weak die young, which they deserve to do. The only thing that Aleem despises is weakness. Once you commit to an operation, you have to drive forward hard, never doubting, never relenting. If the result isn’t what you hoped, even if it’s a disaster, you can learn from it after it’s done. Anyhow, no mistake he can make is so bad that it can’t be erased with enough violence and cash. With a shitload of money, he can buy his way out of most trouble, and when money isn’t enough, he can kill his way out, which is why he has the respect of his homeboys and not just of his homeboys, but also the respect of all those who are gangsters disguised as pillars of their communities, as friends of the working man and woman. You can’t win a war if you don’t drive forward hard and harder even when fighting seems hopeless. And to Aleem Sutter, life is war.
THE ONLY WISDOM WE CAN HOPE TO ACQUIRE
To Nina’s right, pressed against her, felt but unseen, John sits in two inches of cold water, deep in the rat hole, under the artfully rearranged trash, his back to the wall. He has wrapped his arms around the duffel bag that rests on his lap, less to safeguard the money than to anchor himself against the nervous spasming of muscles that might rattle the rubbish heap around them.
The Tac Light is switched off, propped across Nina’s thighs. She grips the pistol in both hands, though she can’t imagine how she can effectively use it. The gun has a ten-round magazine. She’s not a bad shot, but she can’t take out eight men who are heavily gunned up. To her left is the opening to their hiding place, concealed by a splintering and delaminating sheet of fungus-riddled plywood over which is draped a long, rumpled length of filth-encrusted, opaque plastic like the cast-off ectoplasm of some ghost that has finally ceased to haunt this world.
She feels swallowed up and helpless, the room as dark as the belly of a whale. The air reeks of many forms of foul matter and the putrefaction of perhaps a rat or two. She’s shivering and can feel John shivering against her. She hesitates to caution him about his rapid, anxious breathing. He’s smart and brave, and when he hears someone in the building, when the door opens to this room, he will fall silent and still.
Some moments, she can hardly believe that she has come to this, fugitive and cornered with her child. But those moments slide into others when it seems that she could have expected nothing else but what was befallen her. For a long while, she holds terror at bay by remembering what previous darkness she has endured and what truths have sustained her.
Her seduction by Aleem, when she was sixteen, was not one sorry misstep by a girl who otherwise followed a safe and sensible path. She had begun to rebel against her parents when she was thirteen. Her father and mother, both gainfully employed, worked hard and lived frugally, paid their taxes, went to church, drank little, and were satisfied with simple pleasures like television, library books, and board games. They lived without complaint and by the rules, but to what avail? Money was a constant worry. Their only assets were a twenty-year-old Ford and a tiny blue house in a neighborhood where no one dwelt by choice. In the fever of adolescence, Nina came to see them as kindhearted fools whose contentment with their lot was in fact surrender to the meanness of the world. She saw others who were not so weak, who refused to accept what was ladled out to them, who went after what they wanted by whatever means necessary. They drove flashy cars and wore the latest styles, both men and women, some of them only a few years older than she was. She knew what they did, what they dealt in, and she knew it was wrong. But if poverty was the reward for doing right and success was the reward for doing wrong, then Earth had become so grievously distorted in its turning that no one possessed the power to restore it to its intended shape. In her daydreams, she became one of the fast crowd. And in her daily life, she indulged in petty rebellions—using language her parents would have found shocking if they’d heard it, taking a few tokes of a girlfriend’s joint, leaving home buttoned to the neck but showing cleavage when she got to school. All these years later, she can’t remember how all those little insubordinations abruptly became a revolution against the future that she saw her parents crafting for her, but it seemed to happen in a moment, and the moment’s name was Aleem.
Her moral fiber had stretched with elastic ease, but it had not broken, and it snapped back into proper form when at last she came to understand the cruelty inherent in the life that the fast crowd lived. Aleem’s reaction to her pregnancy was cold, uncaring. Marry you? Only pussy-whipped feebs get married. Any fool gets married, he’s puttin’ some pump like you above his homeys. That don’t go down good. Not good at all. I got no time for daddyhood, sugar. Aleem Sutter, he’s on his way up. Ain’t nobody gonna hold me down. That thing in you, it just a tumor, that all it is to me. Your problem. Douche it out, use a coat hanger, whatever you got to do, just don’t come round to me no more. We done, you hear? The way you cling, a man got a future can’t be dragged down by that. Push this on me, I’ll knock you out sure as I knocked you up. Never was no baby born from a bitch nine months dead. You hear me? You want a future of your own, then it be your little pig, not mine.
Even though Nina was sixteen and foolish, she understood the irony of where her hunger for the fast life had led her: into deep mortification and into the shelter of her parents’ arms, into their small but stable home, where in time she came to understand that they weren’t the losers she’d imagined them to be. They were wise enough to know that the limited extent of their education and the nature of their skills, with hard work, would provide them with a refuge from turbulence, wise enough to know that this was a great blessing in an ever-turbulent world. Simple pleasures are no less pleasurable than costlier pursuits. Pleasure is all in the heart, a matter of delight rather than dollars. A faithful dog can provide more joyful moments than a yacht. It’s only envy, a sickness of the mind, that causes disdain of simple things and greatly overvalues extravagance. In her parents’ loving care, in time and with some effort, Nina arrived at the one virtue essential to peace of mind—humility. We can work hard to better our lives, but the world is not ours to rule or to shape other than it was first shapen. Her mother said there was no wisdom greater than humility, and her father said it was the only wisdom we can acquire that allows us to progress successfully and happily in life.
Now, eight years after losing her parents, she misses them no less than she did back in the day. She is not given to the conceit that her mother and father look after her even now that they are no longer of this life. She needs no ministering ghosts. She would not call them back from their higher place to this lower world even if she knew how. Yet she feels—or needs to feel—that she and John are not in this squalid place alone, that there is mercy in the matrix of the world and that they will be shielded by an act of grace until the gangbangers leave and Michael arrives. As the minutes mount into half an hour, as the second hand on the radiant dial of her watch sweeps her and John into an unknowable future, the pervasive smell of death has so suffused her that it has also become a taste on her tongue.