CHAPTER ONE THE BOULEVARD
My name is Darius Calloway, and I have been dead since the third Monday of January, two thousand and one.
I grew up on Martin Luther King Junior Drive in Atlanta.
Out here we just called it the Boulevard.
Almost every major city in America has a street named for that man, and most of them run through the part of town the city would rather forget.
Ours was no different. The Boulevard ran southwest out of downtown, past the old warehouses and the chicken wing spot and the beauty supply and the bail bondsman, all the way out to the edge of the city where the streetlights got fewer and the night got thicker.
I had gone away. Howard University, class of ninety-four, bachelor’s in political science, minor in community development.
I came back because the Boulevard raised me and I owed it.
I came back to clean it up, or to die trying.
I did not know, when I said that to my wife over pancakes the morning I moved my office onto the Boulevard, how literally I meant it.
I am telling you this from the other side of the living.
I do not have a body anymore. What I have is a kind of attention.
I can put my attention on a street, a room, a man’s breathing, and I am there.
I cannot move a chair. But I can move a mind.
I learned that after I died. I learned it the hard way, and so did the men who killed me.
There were two crews that ran the Boulevard in those years. Neither one was famous. They were not the Crips or the Bloods and they were not on the news. They were local, small, mean, and territorial, which is the most dangerous kind, because they had something to prove and nowhere to go.
The first was the Glenwood Saints. They held the stretch from the old laundromat up to the rail underpass.
Glenwood Avenue fed into the Boulevard there, and the Saints took the name.
They were run by a man named Darnell Mayfield.
Darnell was twenty-seven, soft-spoken, and had killed his first man at sixteen over a parking spot.
He had a stillness about him that people mistook for calm.
It was not calm. It was a man deciding, every second, whether today was the day.
The Saints sold crack and ran girls. The crack came up from the south in the wheel wells of old American cars.
The girls were young, most of them runaways the Saints kept in two houses off Glenwood.
The money was good enough that Darnell could buy his mother a new transmission every six months and keep a Cadillac in a garage he never drove, just to know it was there.
The second crew was the Candler Road Jackals.
They held the Boulevard from the rail underpass down to the gas station where I died.
The Jackals were run by Curtis Hargrove.
Curtis was thirty, loud, and loved being the boss the way a child loves a toy.
He wore gold. He had a laugh you could hear across a parking lot.
Under the laugh he was a coward, which is the worst kind of man to give a gun, because a coward with a gun will fire it at anything that startles him.
The Jackals sold the same product as the Saints and ran the same kind of girls, and the two crews had been bleeding each other for the corners between the underpass and the gas station for three years. Three years of drive-bys and funerals and a quiet, awful arithmetic of who had lost more.
I knew all of this. I grew up on the Boulevard.
I went to school with some of the dead. I had been shot at twice before I turned eighteen, once by accident and once on purpose, and I had run both times, and I had lived, and I had taken that living and turned it into a purpose.
I organized. I held meetings in the church basement.
I got the city to fix the streetlights on the three blocks where the most people had been shot, because streetlights save lives and the city only fixes them when a man with a degree and a microphone makes them.
I was building something. I was building it slow.
I had a wife. Wanda. She was smarter than me and she knew it and she let me pretend otherwise because she loved me. We had two children. Trey was ten. He wanted to draw comic books. Maya was seven. She wanted to be a judge. I believed both of them would.
On the third Monday of January, two thousand and one, the city held its celebration of Doctor King’s birthday at the convention center downtown.
I had been asked to speak. Not the keynote.
A ten-minute slot before the keynote, the slot they give the local man, the one who does the work.
I was honored. I wrote a speech about the Boulevard.
About what it could be. I wrote it in longhand on the back of my daughter’s homework because I had run out of paper and it was the closest flat surface.
I was late to my own speech because the printer at the office jammed and I had to retype the last page by hand. I remember being annoyed about the printer. I think about that now, being annoyed about a printer, and I want to laugh.
The speech ran long. The room was full and they were listening, and when people listen you give them more, and I gave them more.
I talked about the Boulevard. I talked about the streetlights.
I talked about a boy I grew up with named Terrence who was shot at nineteen in front of the beauty supply and how nobody saw anything and how that is its own kind of death, the death of the truth.
I talked about what the Boulevard could be if the city saw it the way it saw its own downtown.
I left the convention center at nine forty at night. Wanda had called twice. The kids were hungry. I was on the Boulevard, ten minutes from home. I needed gas. I pulled into the QuikTrip on the corner of the Boulevard and the access road.
I went inside. I bought gas. I bought a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for Trey and a Capri Sun for Maya and a pack of gum for Wanda because she had mentioned she was out.
I paid in cash. I remember the kid behind the counter, seventeen, acne, named tag said Devon.
He said have a good night. I said you too.
I was pushing the door open with my back, the bag in one hand, when the first car pulled in.
I did not see it well. It was a dark American car, big, the kind with the tinted windows that the crews liked.
A second car pulled in from the other entrance almost at the same time.
I saw the second one. It was the Jackals.
I knew because Curtis Hargrove was hanging out the back window shouting something, and then I saw the Saints in the other car, and I understood what I was standing in the middle of.
There were words. Short ones. The kind of words that are not a conversation but a countdown.
Then there were guns, and the guns did the talking the words had only been warming up for.
Both cars lurched for the exits at once, and the shooting did not stop when the cars moved.
The men kept firing from the windows as they peeled out, blind and wild, rounds going everywhere and nowhere, and one of those nowhere rounds found me.
I dropped the bag. The Cheetos split open on the concrete.
I turned to get back inside the store and the glass door was behind me and the kid Devon was ducking and I was fast, I had always been fast, but a bullet is faster than any man who ever lived, and the Boulevard had been trying to kill me since I was fourteen and it had finally gotten around to it.
I did not hear the shot that hit me. I heard the others.
I heard the cars. I heard glass. I heard Devon screaming.
I did not hear the one that was mine. I felt it.
A hot punch below my left collarbone, and then the ground came up, and the fluorescent light of the QuikTrip canopy was above me and it was very bright and very white and then it was not anything.
The last thing I saw was the spilled Cheetos on the concrete, red and bright, and I thought, those are for Trey, and then I was gone.
I have been gone ever since. I am telling you what happened after.