CHAPTER EIGHT THE CLEAN
I will tell you what the money did, because the money was the point.
The dead can be angry, and the anger can be terrifying, and the terror can clean the corners and empty the houses and send the men running.
But the terror does not feed children. The terror does not fix the streetlights.
The terror does not build what keeps the corners from filling up again, which is a reason for the children of the Boulevard to believe that the Boulevard is a place where a person can live.
The reason has to be made of something real.
The something real, in the world the living inhabit, is money.
The money was in the box. The box was Wanda’s.
Wanda, who was smarter than me, knew what to do with it.
The trust was set up in my name. Wanda’s father had done it, with a lawyer who had gone to Howard with me, because Howard men take care of each other, and the lawyer did not charge, because the lawyer understood what the money was.
The money was not stolen. The money was returned.
The money had been taken from the Boulevard in the first place, and the Boulevard was the rightful owner.
The lawyer took the cash and the deeds and he turned them into clean money, anonymous donations and signed restitution that no bank would question, because a man who went to Howard knows how to make dirty money honest, and the money that reached Wanda was honest enough to build on.
Wanda was the Boulevard’s hand, as I had been its hand.
The money went where the Boulevard needed it to go.
Wanda paid off the house. She paid it off in cash, in a single visit to the bank.
The banker who had been sending notices and threatening foreclosure for months smiled at her and offered her a coffee.
Wanda did not take the coffee. Wanda had learned, in the month since I died, what a smile from a banker is worth.
What it is worth is less than the truth.
The truth was that the bank had been going to take the house from a widow and two children.
The widow was not going to let them. The widow did not.
Wanda bought the yellow duplex on Glenwood.
She bought it for a dollar from the city, which had seized it for back taxes after the Saints abandoned it.
She had it torn down. On the lot where the yellow duplex had been, where the floor had breathed and the boy had risen, she built a community center.
She named it after the boy, whose name was Dante, because Dante had been sixteen and had not deserved the floor he was put under.
The community center had a basketball court, a tutoring room, and a kitchen.
The kitchen served dinner on weeknights, because a child who has eaten can learn and a child who has not eaten cannot.
Wanda had learned this at the hospital billing office, where she had seen the bills for the children who had not eaten.
Those bills were the kind of thing a woman with money and a will can stop. Wanda stopped them.
Wanda cleaned the graffiti. She hired the men who had been on the corners, the ones who had not gone to jail, had not fled, had not broken.
She hired them to paint over the graffiti: the Saints’ tags, the Jackals’ tags, the years of markings the crews had put on the walls to claim the streets.
The men painted. The walls went from gray to clean.
The men who painted were paid. The men who were paid had a reason to not go back to the corners.
The corners stayed empty. The emptiness was the beginning of the Boulevard being the Boulevard again, instead of the crews’ Boulevard.
Wanda started a fund. The Darius Calloway Scholarship Fund.
The first two scholarships went to a girl who wanted to be a judge and a boy who wanted to draw comic books, because Wanda was not subtle, and the children were hers.
The money was for them and for the children who would come after them.
The children who would come after them were the children of the Boulevard, and the children of the Boulevard, for the first time in a long time, had a door, and the door was open.
The door was paid for with money that had been made on the Boulevard and taken from the Boulevard and returned to the Boulevard. The returning was what mattered.
Wanda ran for city council. She ran two years after I died.
She won, because the Boulevard knew her.
The Boulevard trusted her. The Boulevard turned out to vote in numbers that surprised the city, because the city had forgotten that the Boulevard could vote.
The Boulevard had not forgotten. Wanda went to City Hall.
At City Hall she was the woman from the Boulevard, and the woman from the Boulevard did not forget where she came from.
She fought for the streetlights, the schools, and the youth jobs that kept the corners empty, because streetlights save lives and the city only fixes them when a woman with a vote and a will makes them.
Wanda ran for mayor. She ran six years after I died.
The city laughed, the way a city laughs at a woman from the Boulevard who wants to be mayor.
The laughing stopped when the votes were counted.
The Boulevard had turned out again. The wards around the Boulevard had turned out.
The people who had been forgotten by the city remembered that they could vote, and they voted for the woman whose husband had been killed on the Boulevard and who had come back, in her way, the way the dead come back: by refusing to stay down.
Wanda was sworn in on the steps of City Hall.
On that day the gold watch was in an evidence locker.
Royce was in a cell. The file that said NO LEADS, COMMUNITY UNCOOPERATIVE was in a box in the basement of the courthouse.
The box was closed. The file inside it was closed.
The case that the file had held was closed, and closed, and closed.
The first thing Mayor Calloway did was clean the police department.
She did it slow, as I had taught her, because the slow way is the way that lasts.
She found the detectives who had been on the take, and there were more than Royce, because Royce had not been alone.
The department had known. The department had looked away, because looking away was easier than looking.
Looking was what Wanda made them do. The looking found the gold watches and the fishing cabins and the files marked NO LEADS.
The men who owned them went into rooms, and the doors closed, and the doors stayed closed.
The department, which had been what the Boulevard feared, became, slowly, something the Boulevard could call.
I watched this. I watched all of it. I stood in the rooms where Wanda made her decisions, and I could not touch her, and I did not need to, because Wanda had become what I had been trying to be, which is the hand of the Boulevard.
The hand of the Boulevard did not need a dead man to guide it, because the hand of the Boulevard was alive.
The living are stronger than the dead. The living are the ones who get to keep what the dead help them build.
The Boulevard was kept. The Boulevard grew.
The children of the Boulevard grew. The streetlights stayed on.
The corners stayed empty. The houses that had been crack houses became community centers and homes and a tutoring room where a boy who wanted to draw comic books drew them, and a girl who wanted to be a judge studied for the test. The Boulevard was the Boulevard again.
The Boulevard was mine, and it was Wanda’s, and it was the children’s, and it was the city’s, and the city had finally learned to look at it.
I do not visit the Boulevard as I did. The anger is gone.
The anger was a creature with teeth, and the teeth were for the men who had killed me, and the men who had killed me are in cells or in the ground or in rooms with the doors closed, and the teeth are not needed.
I still walk the Boulevard at night, in the manner of the dead, in the attention, in the corner of the eye of the man on the night shift at the QuikTrip, in the flicker of the streetlight that I got the city to fix, in the feeling a child gets on the Boulevard at three in the morning that says you are not alone.
That not-alone is not a fear. What is with you is not what haunts.
What is with you is what watches. The watching is over now, because the Boulevard can watch itself, and the Boulevard has a woman to watch it, and the woman is good, and the woman is mine, and I can rest.
My name is Darius Calloway. I was born on the Boulevard.
I went to Howard. I came back. I died on the third Monday of January in the year two thousand and one, in a gas station parking lot, with a bag of Cheetos in my hand.
The Boulevard did not let me stay dead. It owed me a debt, and it paid.
My children are going to college. My wife is the mayor.
The streetlights are on. The dead man’s work is done. The Boulevard is clean. I am home.