CHAPTER FOUR THE TOLL
On the third day I went to the crack house.
There were four of them that the two crews ran between them.
The Saints had two, off Glenwood. The Jackals had two, down by the rail.
They were houses that had been houses once, with porches and mailboxes and children’s bicycles rusting in the back, and now they were places where product was cooked and cut and where girls were kept and where men went to put the smoke inside themselves and disappear for a few hours.
The Saints’ main house was a yellow duplex on Glenwood with a pit bull chained in the yard and a sheet over the front window.
Inside it was run by a man named Roland.
Big Roland. Roland was six four and two hundred and seventy pounds and he had a face that had been hit with enough things that it had stopped looking like a face and started looking like a map of the places it had been hit.
Roland was not afraid of the living. Roland was going to learn that the dead are a different matter.
I went to the yellow duplex at noon, because noon is when the house is full of the slow and the asleep, and I wanted an audience.
I did not appear to Roland the way I had appeared to Quincy.
I did not need to. I had learned, in the two days since Quincy, that I could do more than stand in a room.
I could make the room remember. Every house where something terrible has happened keeps a record of it, in the walls, in the floor, in the way the light falls.
The yellow duplex had a long record. I woke it up.
The first thing was the smell. The smell of the product cooking, sharp and chemical, but underneath it the smell of blood, because blood had been spilled in that kitchen, and the floor remembered, and I made the floor give it back.
Then the sounds. A girl crying in a room where a girl had cried.
A man shouting in a room where a man had shouted.
A gunshot, small and flat, in the back bedroom where a boy named Dante had been shot the year before over a short count and no one had ever found who did it, because the house keeps its secrets and the house had been told to keep them.
Roland was in the front room weighing product on a scale.
He felt the room go cold first. He looked up.
The sheet over the window moved without a wind.
The scale in front of him slid an inch across the table by itself.
Roland was a man who did not believe in things he could not hit, and so he did what men like him do: he reached for the gun on the table.
I let him reach. I let him pick it up. I let him point it at the empty room. And then I showed him what the house had in its floor.
Dante came up out of the boards. Not a ghost the way the movies show ghosts, pale and floating.
A stain. The shape of a boy where he had fallen, the color of old blood, rising out of the linoleum like a photograph developing.
Dante had been sixteen. He had been Roland’s cousin.
Roland had not pulled the trigger but Roland had been in the house and Roland had helped dig the hole in the basement and Roland knew, the way a man knows a thing he has spent a year not knowing, that the boy had been short on the count and had been made an example of.
Dante’s stain stood in the kitchen. It did not speak.
It did not need to. Roland shot it. He put three bullets into the floor where the stain stood, and the stain went down through the boards and was gone, and Roland was standing in a room full of gun smoke and the smell of blood and the sound of a girl crying in a room where no girl was, and Roland, who had never run from anything in his life, ran.
He ran out the front door. The pit bull in the yard was cowering against the chain with its tail between its legs.
Roland kept running. He did not stop until he was three blocks away.
Then he sat on a curb and he shook, and he shook, and he could not stop shaking.
The product was still on the table inside.
The money was still in the safe. Roland did not go back for any of it.
The yellow duplex emptied by nightfall. The Saints who had been using it came out one by one and did not go back. They said the house was bad. They said the house remembered. They did not know how right they were.
I did the same to the other three houses over the next day and a half.
The Jackals’ house on the corner of the Boulevard had a woman who had died in the bathtub of an overdose and they had buried her in the crawl space and I woke her up too, and the men who had buried her saw her sitting on the back steps and they could not get to their cars fast enough.
By the end of the fourth day, all four houses were empty, and the product and the cash inside them sat unguarded, and the crews could not find anyone brave enough to go back in.
The Boulevard began to talk. The streetlights that I had gotten the city to fix seemed brighter.
The corners where the runners stood were quieter.
People who had lived with the crews outside their windows for years noticed that the windows were empty.
They did not know why. They did not need to know why.
They only knew that something had shifted, the way a room shifts when a light you did not know was on is switched off, and you realize it had been on the whole time.
Three more men came to me in those days, the way Quincy had. They came because they were afraid, and they came because fear had made them honest, and they each mailed what they had to the box on the Boulevard, and the box was filling, and Wanda did not know yet that the box was hers.
Not everyone was given the chance to mail. Some of the men on the Boulevard had done things that a box could not fix. I will not name them all. I will tell you about one.
His name was Cisco. Cisco was a Jackal. He was twenty-two.
He had been one of the shooters in the parking lot the night I died, the one in the second car, the one who had fired at the Saints’ car after the shooting had already started.
Cisco had not killed me. But Cisco had killed a girl named Tasha the summer before, a girl who was sixteen and who had run away from a group home and who had ended up in the Jackals’ house on the Boulevard, and Cisco had killed her because Tasha had tried to leave and leaving is not allowed when you are a product.
Cisco did not believe in ghosts. Cisco believed in guns and money and not much else. Cisco was the one who laughed when Quincy told his story. Cisco called Quincy a bitch and told him the dead stay dead.
I went to Cisco on the fourth night. Cisco was in his car, parked behind a closed tire shop on the Boulevard, counting money from the day.
I got in the back seat. Cisco did not see me get in.
He felt the car settle, the way a car settles when a heavy person sits in it, and he turned around, and the back seat was empty, and then it was not.
I showed Cisco what Tasha had felt. I made him feel the hands.
I made him feel the dark. I made him feel what had been done to her and what he had done after, and I made him feel it for what felt like a long time, because the dead do not measure time the way the living do, and I had time, and Cisco had done a deed that could not be undone and so I did not undo it.
I let him feel it until he understood it, and then I let him feel it a little longer, and then I left.
Cisco was found the next morning behind the tire shop.
He was alive. He was sitting in the back seat of his car and his hair had gone white, the way hair goes when what feeds its color has been frightened out of it, and he could not speak, and when they tried to move him he screamed, and he screamed, and the screaming did not stop for a long time.
Cisco lived. Cisco was taken to Grady Hospital.
Cisco was put in a room. Cisco did not speak again, not for weeks.
When he did speak the first thing he said was a name, and the name was Tasha’s.
The second thing he said was the address of the house where he had buried her.
The third thing he said was that he was sorry.
The police did not know what to do with a man who confessed to a murder no one had known was a murder.
The Boulevard did not know what to do with a man whose hair had gone white in a night.
The Jackals did not know what to do with a soldier who had been broken by nothing anyone could see.
The men of the Boulevard began to understand that what was happening was not something they could shoot. You cannot shoot the dead. You cannot threaten the dead. You cannot pay off the dead, because the dead have no use for money, and the dead have no use for fear, because the dead are made of it.
The toll rose. A Saint named Terrell, the one who had laughed at Quincy, put his own gun under his chin on the fifth morning because he could not get the sound of a girl crying out of his walls.
A Jackal named Antoine walked into the Zone Four precinct on the fifth afternoon and confessed to three shootings, because the inside of his head had become a place he could not live in anymore and the precinct, he decided, was quieter.
A runner for the Saints, a kid of sixteen who everyone called Man-Man, was found on his knees in the middle of the Boulevard at three in the morning, praying, because Man-Man had been in the yellow duplex the day the house remembered and Man-Man had seen the shape of the boy in the floor and Man-Man had decided, at sixteen, that the life was not for him, and his mother came and got him and took him to the church, and the church took him in, and Man-Man was the first of the runners to get out.
By the fifth night, the Boulevard was quieter than it had been in a decade.
And Royce, at the Zone Four precinct, was beginning to notice that his phone was not ringing, and the envelope from Darnell that usually came on the fifth of the month had not come, and Royce did not know yet what that meant, but the gold watch on his wrist felt heavier, and he could not say why.