Horace and Loneese Perkins—one child, one grandchild—lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens at 1202 Thirteenth Street NW. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made love for the last time—Loneese kept a diary of sorts, and that fact was noted on one day of a week when she noted nothing else. “He touched me,” she wrote, which had always been her diary euphemism for sex. That was also the year they retired, she as a pool secretary at the Commerce Department, where she had known one lover, and he as a civilian employee at the Pentagon, as the head of veteran records. He had been an Army sergeant for ten years before becoming head of records; the Secretary of Defense gave him a plaque as big as his chest on the day he retired, and he and the Secretary of Defense and Loneese had their picture taken, a picture that hung for all those twelve years in the living room of Apartment 230, on the wall just to the right of the heating-and-air-conditioning unit.
A month before they moved in, they drove in their burgundy-and-gold Cadillac from their small house on Chesapeake Street in Southeast to a Union Station restaurant and promised each other that Sunset House would be a new beginning for them. Over blackened catfish and a peach cobbler that they both agreed could have been better, they vowed to devote themselves to each other and become even better grandparents. Horace had long known about the Commerce Department lover. Loneese had told him about the man two months after she had ended the relationship, in 1969. “He worked in the mail room,” she told her husband over a spaghetti supper she had cooked in the Chesapeake Street home. “He touched me in the motel room,” she wrote in her diary, “and after it was over he begged me to go away to Florida with him. All I could think about was that Florida was for old people.”
At that spaghetti supper, Horace did not mention the dozens of lovers he had had in his time as her husband. She knew there had been many, knew it because they were written on his face in the early years of their marriage, and because he had never bothered to hide what he was doing in the later years. “I be back in a while. I got some business to do,” he would say. He did not even mention the lover he had slept with just the day before the spaghetti supper, the one he bid goodbye to with a “Be good and be sweet” after telling her he planned to become a new man and respect his marriage vows. The woman, a thin school-bus driver with clanking bracelets up to her elbows on both arms, snorted a laugh, which made Horace want to slap her, because he was used to people taking him seriously. “Forget you, then,” Horace said on the way out the door. “I was just tryin to let you down easy.”
Over another spaghetti supper two weeks before moving, they reiterated what had been said at the blackened-catfish supper and did the dishes together and went to bed as man and wife, and over the next days sold almost all the Chesapeake Street furniture. What they kept belonged primarily to Horace, starting with a collection of six hundred and thirty-nine record albums, many of them his “sweet babies,” the 78s. If a band worth anything had recorded between 1915 and 1950, he bragged, he had the record; after 1950, he said, the bands got sloppy and he had to back away. Horace also kept the Cadillac he had painted to honor a football team, paid to park the car in the underground garage. Sunset had once been intended as a luxury place, but the builders, two friends of the city commissioners, ran out of money in the middle and the commissioners had the city-government people buy it off them. The city-government people completed Sunset, with its tiny rooms, and then, after one commissioner gave a speech in Southwest about looking out for old people, some city-government people in Northeast came up with the idea that old people might like to live in Sunset, in Northwest.
Three weeks after Horace and Loneese moved in, Horace went down to the lobby one Saturday afternoon to get their mail and happened to see Clara Knightley getting her mail. She lived in Apartment 512. “You got this fixed up real nice,” Horace said of Apartment 512 a little less than an hour after meeting her. “But I could see just in the way that you carry yourself that you got good taste. I could tell that about you right off.” “You swellin my head with all that talk, Mr. Perkins,” Clara said, offering him coffee, which he rejected, because such moments always called for something stronger. “Whas a woman’s head for if a man can’t swell it up from time to time. Huh? Answer me that, Clara. You just answer me that.” Clara was fifty-five, a bit younger than most of the residents of Sunset House, though she was much older than all Horace’s other lovers. She did not fit the city people’s definition of a senior citizen, but she had a host of ailments, from high blood pressure to diabetes, and so the city people had let her in.
Despite the promises, the marriage, what little there had been of it, came to an end. “I will make myself happy,” Loneese told the diary a month after he last touched her. Loneese and Horace had fixed up their apartment nicely, and neither of them wanted to give the place up to the other. She wanted to make a final stand with the man who had given her so much heartache, the man who had told her, six months after her confession, what a whore she had been to sleep with the Commerce Department mail-room man. Horace, at sixty, had never thought much of women over fifty, but Clara—and, after her, Willa, of Apartment 1001, and Miriam, of Apartment 109—had awakened something in him, and he began to think that women over fifty weren’t such a bad deal after all. Sunset House had dozens of such women, many of them attractive widows, many of them eager for a kind word from a retired Army sergeant who had so many medals and ribbons that his uniform could not carry them. As far as he could see, he was cock of the walk: many of the men in Sunset suffered from diseases that Horace had so far escaped, or they were not as good-looking or as thin, or they were encumbered by wives they loved. In Sunset House he was a rich man. So why move and give that whore the satisfaction?
They lived separate lives in a space that was only a fourth as large as the Chesapeake Street house. The building came to know them as the man and wife in 230 who couldn’t stand each other. People talked about the Perkinses more than they did about anyone else, which was particularly upsetting to Loneese, who had been raised to believe family business should stay in the family. “Oh, Lord, what them two been up to now?” “Fight like cats and dogs, they do.” “Who he seein now?” They each bought their own food from the Richfood on Eleventh Street or from the little store on Thirteenth Street, and they could be vile to each other if what one bought was disturbed or eaten by the other. Loneese stopped speaking to Horace for nine months in 1984 and 1985, when she saw that her pumpkin pie was a bit smaller than when she last cut a slice from it. “I ain’t touch your damn pie, you crazy woman,” he said when she accused him. “How long you been married to me? You know I’ve never been partial to pumpkin pie.” “That’s fine for you to say, Horace, but why is some missing? You might not be partial to it, but I know you. I know you’ll eat anything in a pinch. That’s just your dirty nature.” “My nature ain’t no more dirty than yours.”
After that, she bought a small icebox for the bedroom where she slept, though she continued to keep the larger items in the kitchen refrigerator. He bought a separate telephone, because he complained that she wasn’t giving him his messages from his “associates.” “I have never been a secretary for whores,” she said, watching him set up an answering machine next to the hide-a-bed couch where he slept. “Oh, don’t get me started bout whores. I’d say you wrote the damn book.” “It was dictated by you.”
Their one child, Alonzo, lived with his wife and son in Baltimore. He had not been close to his parents for a long time, and he could not put the why of it into words for his wife. Their boy, Alonzo, Jr., who was twelve when his grandparents moved into Sunset, loved to visit them. Horace would unplug and put away his telephone when the boy visited. And Loneese and Horace would sleep together in the bedroom. She’d put a pillow between them in the double bed to remind herself not to roll toward him.
Their grandson visited less and less as he moved into his teen-age years, and then, after he went away to college, in Ohio, he just called them every few weeks, on the phone they had had installed in the name of Horace and Loneese Perkins.
In 1987, Loneese’s heart began the countdown to its last beat and she started spending more time at George Washington University Hospital than she did in the apartment. Horace never visited her. She died two years later. She woke up that last night in the hospital and went out into the hall and then to the nurses’ station but could not find a nurse anywhere to tell her where she was or why she was there. “Why do the patients have to run this place alone?” she said to the walls. She returned to her room and it came to her why she was there. It was nearing three in the morning, but she called her own telephone first, then she dialled Horace’s. He answered, but she never said a word. “Who’s this playin on my phone?” Horace kept asking. “Who’s this? I don’t allow no playin on my phone.” She hung up and lay down and said her prayers. After moving into Sunset, she had taken one more lover, a man at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, where she went from time to time. He was retired, too. She wrote in her diary that he was not a big eater and that “down there, his vitals were missing.”
Loneese Perkins was buried in a plot at Harmony Cemetery that she and Horace had bought when they were younger. There was a spot for Horace and there was one for their son, but Alonzo had long since made plans to be buried in a cemetery just outside Baltimore.
Horace kept the apartment more or less the way it was on the last day she was there. His son and daughter-in-law and grandson took some of her clothes to the Goodwill and the rest they gave to other women in the building. There were souvenirs from countries that Loneese and Horace had visited as man and wife—a Ghanaian carving of men surrounding a leopard they had killed, a brass menorah from Israel, a snow globe of Mt. Fuji with some of the snow stuck forever to the top of the globe. They were things that did not mean very much to Alonzo, but he knew his child, and he knew that one day Alonzo, Jr., would cherish them.
Horace tried sleeping in the bed, but he had been not unhappy in his twelve years on the hide-a-bed. He got rid of the bed and moved the couch into the bedroom and kept it open all the time.
He realized two things after Loneese’s death: His own “vitals” had rejuvenated. He had never had the problems other men had, though he had failed a few times along the way, but that was to be expected. Now, as he moved closer to his seventy-third birthday, he felt himself becoming ever stronger, ever more potent. God is a strange one, he thought, sipping Chivas Regal one night before he went out: he takes a man’s wife and gives him a new penis in her place.
The other thing he realized was that he was more and more attracted to younger women. When Loneese died, he had been keeping company with a woman of sixty-one, Sandy Carlin, in Apartment 907. One day in February, nine months after Loneese’s death, one of Sandy’s daughters, Jill, came to visit, along with one of Jill’s friends, Elaine Cunningham. They were both twenty-five years old. From the moment they walked through Sandy’s door, Horace began to compliment them—on their hair, the color of their fingernail polish, the sharp crease in Jill’s pants (“You iron that yourself?”), even “that sophisticated way” Elaine crossed her legs. The young women giggled, which made him happy, pleased with himself, and Sandy sat in her place on the couch. As the ice in the Pepsi-Cola in her left hand melted, she realized all over again that God had never promised her a man until her dying day.
When the girls left, about three in the afternoon, Horace offered to accompany them downstairs, “to keep all them bad men away.” In the lobby, as the security guard at her desk strained to hear, he made it known that he wouldn’t mind if they came by to see him sometime. The women looked at each other and giggled some more. They had been planning to go to a club in Southwest that evening, but they were amused by the old man, by the way he had his rap together and put them on some sort of big pedestal and shit, as Jill would tell another friend weeks later. And when he saw how receptive they were he said why not come on up tonight, shucks, ain’t no time like the present. Jill said he musta got that from a song, but he said no, he’d been sayin that since before they were born, and Elaine said thas the truth, and the women giggled again. He said I ain’t gonna lie bout bein a seasoned man, and then he joined in the giggling. Jill looked at Elaine and said want to? And Elaine said what about your mom? And Jill shrugged her shoulders and Elaine said O.K. She had just broken up with a man she had met at another club and needed something to make the pain go away until there was another man, maybe from a better club.
At about eleven-thirty, Jill wandered off into the night, her head liquored up, and Elaine stayed and got weepy—about the man from the not-so-good club, about the two abortions, about running away from home at seventeen after a fight with her father. “I just left him nappin on the couch,” she said, stretched out on Horace’s new living-room couch, her shoes off and one of Loneese’s throws over her feet. Horace was in the chair across from her. “For all I know, he’s still on that couch.” Even before she got to her father, even before the abortions, he knew that he would sleep with her that night. He did not even need to fill her glass a third time. “He was a fat man,” she said of her father. “And there ain’t a whole lot more I remember.”
“Listen,” he said as she talked about her father, “everything’s gonna work out right for you.” He knew that, at such times in a seduction, the more positive a man was the better things went. It would not have done to tell her to forget her daddy, that she had done the right thing by running out on that fat so-and-so; it was best to focus on tomorrow and tell her that the world would be brighter in the morning. He came over to the couch, and before he sat down on the edge of the coffee table he hiked up his pants just a bit with his fingertips, and seeing him do that reminded her vaguely of something wonderful. The boys in the club sure didn’t do it that way. He took her hand and kissed her palm. “Everything’s gonna work out to the good,” he said.
Elaine Cunningham woke in the morning with Horace sleeping quietly beside her. She did not rebuke herself and did not look over at him with horror at what she had done. She sighed and laid her head back on the pillow and thought how much she still loved the man from the club, but there was nothing more she could do: not even the five-hundred-dollar leather jacket she had purchased for the man had brought him around. Two years after running away, she had gone back to where she had lived with her parents, but they had moved and no one in the building knew where they had gone. But everyone remembered her. “You sure done growed up, Elaine,” one old woman said. “I wouldna knowed if you hadn’t told me who you was.” “Fuck em,” Elaine said to the friends who had given her a ride there. “Fuck em all to hell.” Then, in the car, heading out to Capitol Heights, where she was staying, “Well, maybe not fuck my mother. She was good.” “Just fuck your daddy then?” the girl in the back seat said. Elaine thought about it as they went down Rhode Island Avenue, and just before they turned onto New Jersey Avenue she said, “Yes, just fuck my daddy. The fat fuck.”
She got out of Horace’s bed and tried to wet the desert in her mouth as she looked in his closet for a bathrobe. She rejected the blue and the paisley ones for a dark-green one that reminded her of something wonderful, just as Horace’s hiking up his pants had. She smelled the sleeves once she had it on, but there was only the strong scent of detergent.
In the half room that passed for a kitchen, she stood and drank most of the orange juice in the gallon carton. “Now, that was stupid, girl,” she said. “You know you shoulda drunk water. Better for the thirst.” She returned the carton to the refrigerator and marvelled at all the food. “Damn!” she said. With the refrigerator door still open, she stepped out into the living room and took note of all that Horace had, thinking, A girl could live large here if she did things right. She had been crashing at a friend’s place in Northeast, and the friend’s mother had begun to hint that it was time for her to move on. Even when she had a job, she rarely had a place of her own. “Hmm,” she said, looking through the refrigerator for what she wanted to eat. “Boody for home and food. Food, home. Boody. You shoulda stayed in school, girl. They give courses on this. Food and Home the first semester. Boody Givin the second semester.”
But, as she ate her eggs and bacon and Hungry Man biscuits, she knew that she did not want to sleep with Horace too many more times, even if he did have his little castle. He was too tall, and she had never been attracted to tall men, old or otherwise. “Damn! Why couldn’t he be what I wanted and have a nice place, too?” Then, as she sopped up the last of the yolk with the last half of the last biscuit, she thought of her best friend, Catrina, the woman she was crashing with. Catrina Stockton was twenty-eight, and though she had once been a heroin addict, she was one year clean and had a face and a body that testified not to a woman who had lived a bad life on the streets but to a nice-looking Virginia woman who had married at seventeen, had had three children by a truck-driving husband, and had met a man in a Fredericksburg McDonald’s who had said that women like her could be queens in D.C.
Yes, Elaine thought as she leaned over the couch and stared at the photograph of Horace and Loneese and the Secretary of Defense, Catrina was always saying how much she wanted love, how it didn’t matter what a man looked like, as long as he was good to her and loved her morning, noon, and night. The Secretary of Defense was in the middle of the couple. She did not know who he was, just that she had seen him somewhere, maybe on the television. Horace was holding the plaque just to the left, away from the Secretary. Elaine reached over and removed a spot of dust from the picture with her fingertip, and before she could flick it away a woman said her name and she looked around, chilled.
She went into the bedroom to make sure that the voice had not been death telling her to check on Horace. She found him sitting up in the bed, yawning and stretching. “You sleep good, honey bunch?” he said. “I sure did, sweetie pie,” she said and bounded across the room to hug him. A breakfast like the one she’d had would cost at least four dollars anywhere in D.C. or Maryland. “Oh, but Papa likes that,” Horace said. And even the cheapest motels out on New York Avenue, the ones catering to the junkies and prostitutes, charged at least twenty-five dollars a night. What’s a hug compared with that? And, besides, she liked him more than she had thought, and the issue of Catrina and her moving in had to be done delicately. “Well, just let me give you a little bit mo, then.”
Young stuff is young stuff, Horace thought the first time Elaine brought Catrina by and Catrina gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “I feel like I know you from all that Elaine told me.” That was in early March.
In early April, Elaine met another man at a new club on F Street Northwest and fell in love, and so did Horace with Catrina, though Catrina, after several years on the street, knew what she was feeling might be in the neighborhood of love but it was nowhere near the right house. She and Elaine told Horace the saddest of stories about the man Elaine had met in the club, and before the end of April he was sleeping on Horace’s living-room floor. It helped that the man, Darnell Mudd, knew the way to anyone’s heart, man or woman, and that he claimed to have a father who had been a hero in the Korean War. He even knew the name of the Secretary of Defense in the photograph and how long he had served in the Cabinet.
By the middle of May, there were as many as five other people, friends of the three young people, hanging out at any one time in Horace’s place. He was giddy with Catrina, with the blunts, with the other women who snuck out with him to a room at the motel across Thirteenth Street. By early June, more than a hundred of his old records had been stolen and pawned. “Leave his stuff alone,” Elaine said to Darnell and his friends as they were going out the door with ten records apiece. “Don’t take his stuff. He loves that stuff.” It was eleven in the morning and everyone else in the apartment, including Horace, was asleep. “Sh-h-h,” Darnell said. “He got so many he won’t notice.” And that was true. Horace hadn’t played records in many months. He had two swords that were originally on the wall opposite the heating-and-air-conditioning unit. Both had belonged to German officers killed in the Second World War. Horace, high on the blunts, liked to see the young men sword fight with them. But the next day, sober, he would hide them in the bottom of the closet, only to pull them out again when the partying started, at about four in the afternoon.
His neighbors, especially the neighbors who considered that Loneese had been the long-suffering one in the marriage, complained to the management about the noise, but the city-government people read in his rental record that he had lost his wife not long ago and told the neighbors that he was probably doing some kind of grieving. The city-government people never went above the first floor in Sunset. “He’s a veteran who just lost his wife,” they would say to those who came to the glass office on the first floor. “Why don’t you cut him some slack?” But Horace tried to get a grip on things after a maintenance man told him to be careful. That was about the time one of the swords was broken and he could not for the life of him remember how it had happened. He just found it one afternoon in two pieces in the refrigerator’s vegetable bin.
Things toned down a little, but the young women continued to come by and Horace went on being happy with them and with Catrina, who called him Papa and pretended to be upset when she saw him kissing another girl. “Papa, what am I gonna do with you and all your hussies?” “Papa, promise you’ll only love me.” “Papa, I need a new outfit. Help me out, willya please?”
Elaine had become pregnant not long after meeting Darnell, who told her to have the baby, that he had always wanted a son to carry on his name. “We can call him Junior,” he said. “Or Little Darnell,” she said. As she began showing, Horace and Catrina became increasingly concerned about her. Horace remembered how solicitous he had been when Loneese had been pregnant. He had not taken the first lover yet, had not even thought about anyone else as she grew and grew. He told Elaine no drugs or alcohol until the baby was born, and he tried to get her to go to bed at a decent hour, but that was often difficult with a small crowd in the living room.
Horace’s grandson called in December, wanting to come by to see him, but Horace told him it would be best to meet someplace downtown, because his place was a mess. He didn’t do much cleaning since Loneese died. “I don’t care about that,” Alonzo, Jr., said. “Well, I do,” Horace said. “You know how I can be bout these things.”
In late December, Elaine gave birth to a boy, several weeks early. They gave him the middle name Horace. “See,” Darnell said one day, holding the baby on the couch. “Thas your grandpa. You don’t mind me callin you his granddad, Mr. Perkins? You don’t mind, do you?” The city-government people in the rental office, led by someone new, someone who took the rules seriously, took note that the old man in Apartment 230 had a baby and his mama and daddy in the place and not a single one of them was even related to him, though if one had been it still would have been against the rules as laid down in the rule book of apartment living.
By late February, an undercover policeman had bought two packets of crack from someone in the apartment. It was a woman, he told his superiors at first, and that’s what he wrote in his report, but in a subsequent report he wrote that he had bought the rocks from a man. “Start over,” said one of his superiors, who supped monthly with the new mayor, who lived for numbers, and in March the undercover man went back to buy more.
It was late on a warm Saturday night in April when Elaine woke to the crackle of walkie-talkies outside the door. She had not seen Darnell in more than a month, and something told her that she should get out of there because there might not be any more good times. She thought of Horace and Catrina asleep in the bedroom. Two men and two women she did not know very well were asleep in various places around the living room, but she had dated the brother of one of the women some three years ago. One of the men claimed to be Darnell’s cousin, and, to prove it to her, when he knocked at the door that night he showed her a Polaroid of him and Darnell at a club, their arms around each other and their eyes red, because the camera had been cheap and the picture cost only two dollars.
She got up from the couch and looked into the crib. In the darkness she could make out that her son was awake, his little legs kicking and no sound from him but a happy gurgle. The sound of the walkie-talkie outside the door came and went. She could see it all on the television news—“Drug Dealing Mama in Jail. Baby Put in Foster Care.” She stepped over the man who said he was Darnell’s cousin and pushed the door to the bedroom all the way open. Catrina was getting out of bed. Horace was snoring. He had never snored before in his life, but the drugs and alcohol together had done bad things to his airway.
“You hear anything?” Elaine whispered as Catrina tiptoed to her.
“I sure did,” Catrina said. Sleeping on the streets required keeping one eye and both ears open. “I don’t wanna go back to jail.”
“Shit. Me, neither,” Elaine said. “What about the window?”
“Go out and down two floors? With a baby? Damn!”
“We can do it,” Elaine said, looking over Catrina’s shoulder to the dark lump that was Horace mumbling in his sleep. “What about him?”
Catrina turned her head. “He old. They ain’t gonna do anything to him. I’m just worried bout makin it with that baby.”
“Well, I sure as hell ain’t gonna go without my child.”
“I ain’t said we was,” Catrina hissed. “Down two floors just ain’t gonna be easy, is all.”
“We can do it,” Elaine said.
“We can do it,” Catrina said. She tiptoed to the chair at the foot of the bed and went through Horace’s pants pockets. “Maybe fifty dollars here,” she whispered after returning. “I already got about three hundred.”
“You been stealin from him?” Elaine said. The lump in the bed turned over and moaned, then settled back to snoring.
“God helps them that helps themselves, Elaine. Les go.” Catrina had her clothes in her hands and went on by Elaine, who watched as the lump in the bed turned again, snoring all the while. Bye, Horace. Bye. I be seein you.
The policeman in the unmarked car parked across Thirteenth Street watched as Elaine stood on the edge of the balcony and jumped. She passed for a second in front of the feeble light over the entrance and landed on the sloping entrance of the underground parking garage. The policeman was five years from retirement and he did not move, because he could see quite well from where he sat. His partner, only three years on the job, was asleep in the passenger seat. The veteran thought the woman jumping might have hurt herself, because he did not see her rise from the ground for several minutes. I wouldn’t do it, the man thought, not for all a rich man’s money. The woman did rise, but before she did he saw another woman lean over the balcony dangling a bundle. Drugs? he thought. Nah. Clothes? Yeah, clothes more like it. The bundle was on a long rope or string—it was too far for the man to make out. The woman on the balcony leaned over very far and the woman on the ground reached up as far as she could, but still the bundle was a good two feet from her hands.
Just let them clothes drop, the policeman thought. Then Catrina released the bundle and Elaine caught it. Good catch. I wonder what she looks like in the light. Catrina jumped, and the policeman watched her pass momentarily in front of the light, and then he looked over at his partner. He himself didn’t mind filling out the forms so much, but his partner did, so he let him sleep on. I’ll be on a lake fishin my behind off and you’ll still be doin this. When he looked back, the first woman was coming up the slope of the entrance with the bundle in her arms and the second one was limping after her. I wonder what that one looks like in a good light. Once on the sidewalk, both women looked left, then right, and headed down Thirteenth Street. The policeman yawned and watched through his sideview mirror as the women crossed M Street. He yawned again. Even at three o’clock in the morning people still jaywalked.
The man who was a cousin of Darnell’s was on his way back from the bathroom when the police broke through the door. He frightened easily, and though he had just emptied his bladder, he peed again as the door came open and the light of the hallway and the loud men came spilling in on him and his sleeping companions.
Horace began asking about Catrina and Elaine and the baby as soon as they put him in a cell. It took him that long to clear his head and understand what was happening to him. He pressed his face against the bars, trying to get his bearings and ignoring everything behind him in the cell. He stuck his mouth as far out of the bars as he could and shouted for someone to tell him whether they knew if the young women and the baby were all right. “They just women, y’all,” he kept saying for some five minutes. “They wouldn’t hurt a flea. Officers, please. Please, Officers. What’s done happened to them? And that baby . . . That baby is so innocent.” It was a little after six in the morning, and men up and down the line started hollering for him to shut up or they would stick the biggest dick he ever saw in his mouth. Stunned, he did quiet down, because, while he was used to street language coming from the young men who came and went in his apartment, no bad words had ever been directed at him. They talked trash with the filthiest language he had ever heard but they always invited him to join in and “talk about how it really is,” talk about his knowing the Secretary of Defense and the Mayor. Usually, after the second blunt, he was floating along with them. Now someone had threatened to do to him what he and the young men said they would do to any woman that crossed them.
Then he turned from the bars and considered the three men he was sharing the two-man cell with. The city-jail people liked to make as little work for themselves as possible, and filling cells beyond their capacity meant having to deal with fewer locks. One man was cocooned in blankets on the floor beside the tiered metal beds. The man sleeping on the top bunk had a leg over the side, and because he was a tall man the leg came down to within six inches of the face of the man lying on the bottom bunk. That man was awake and on his back and picking his nose and staring at Horace. His other hand was under his blanket, in the crotch of his pants. What the man got out of his nose he would flick up at the bottom of the bunk above him. Watching him, Horace remembered that a very long time ago, even before the Chesapeake Street house, Loneese would iron his handkerchiefs and fold them into four perfect squares.
“Daddy,” the man said, “you got my smokes?”
“What?” Horace said. He recalled doing it to Catrina about two or three in the morning and then rolling over and going to sleep. He also remembered slapping flies away in his dreams, flies that were as big as the hands of policemen.
The man seemed to have an infinite supply of boogers, and the more he picked the more Horace’s stomach churned. He used to think it was such a shame to unfold the handkerchiefs, so wondrous were the squares. The man sighed at Horace’s question and put something from his nose on the big toe of the sleeping man above him. “I said do you got my smokes?”
“I don’t have my cigarettes with me,” Horace said. He tried the best white man’s English he knew, having been told by a friend who was serving with him in the Army in Germany that it impressed not only white people but black people who weren’t going anywhere in life. “I left my cigarettes at home.” His legs were aching and he wanted to sit on the floor, but the only available space was in the general area of where he was standing and something adhered to his shoes every time he lifted his feet. “I wish I did have my cigarettes to give you.”
“I didn’t ask you bout your cigarettes. I don’t wanna smoke them. I ask you bout my cigarettes. I wanna know if you brought my cigarettes.”
Someone four cells down screamed and called out in his sleep: “Irene, why did you do this to me? Irene, ain’t love worth a damn anymore?” Someone else told him to shut up or he would get a king-sized dick in his mouth.
“I told you I do not have any cigarettes,” Horace said.
“You know, you ain’t worth shit,” the man said. “You take the cake and mess it all up. You really do. Now, you know you was comin to jail, so why didn’t you bring my goddam smokes? What kinda fuckin consideration is that?”
Horace decided to say nothing. He raised first one leg and then the other and shook them, hoping that would relieve the aches. Slowly, he turned around to face the bars. No one had told him what was going to happen to him. He knew a lawyer, but he did not know if he was still practicing. He had friends, but he did not want any of them to see him in jail. He hoped the man would go to sleep.
“Don’t turn your fuckin back on me after all we meant to each other,” the man said. “We have this long relationship and you do this to me. Whas wrong with you, Daddy?”
“Look,” Horace said, turning back to the man. “I done told you I ain’t got no smokes. I ain’t got your smokes. I ain’t got my smokes. I ain’t got nobody’s smokes. Why can’t you understand that?” He was aware that he was veering away from the white man’s English, but he knew that his friend from Germany was probably home asleep safely in his bed. “I can’t give you what I don’t have.” Men were murdered in the D.C. jail, or so the Washington Post told him. “Can’t you understand what I’m sayin?” His back stayed as close to the bars as he could manage. Who was this Irene, he thought, and what had she done to steal into a man’s dreams that way?
“So, Daddy, it’s gonna be like that, huh?” the man said, raising his head and pushing the foot of the upper-bunk man out of the way so he could see Horace better. He took his hand out of his crotch and pointed at Horace. “You gon pull a Peter-and-Jesus thing on me and deny you ever knew me, huh? Thas your plan, Daddy?” He lowered his head back to the black-and-white striped pillow. “I’ve seen some low-down dirty shit in my day, but you the lowest. After our long relationship and everything.”
“I never met you in my life,” Horace said, grabbing the bars behind him with both hands, hoping, again, for relief.
“I won’t forget this, and you know how long my memory is. First, you don’t bring me my smokes, like you know you should. Then you deny all that we had. Don’t go to sleep in here, Daddy, thas all I gotta say.”
He thought of Reilly Johnson, a man he had worked with in the Pentagon. Reilly considered himself something of a photographer. He had taken the picture of Horace with the Secretary of Defense. What would the bail be? Would Reilly be at home to receive his call on a Sunday morning? Would they give him bail? The policemen who pulled him from his bed had tsk-tsked in his face. “Sellin drugs and corruptin young people like that?” “I didn’t know nothin about that, Officer. Please.” “Tsk tsk. An old man like you.”
“The world ain’t big enough for you to hide from my righteous wrath, Daddy. And you know how righteous I can be when I get started. The world ain’t big enough, so you know this jail ain’t big enough.”
Horace turned back to the bars. Was something in the back as painful as something in the stomach? He touched his face. Rarely, even in the lost months with Catrina, had he failed to shave each morning. A man’s capable demeanor started with a shave each morning, his sergeant in boot camp had told him a thousand years ago.
The man down the way began calling for Irene again. Irene, Horace called in his mind. Irene, are you out there? No one told the man to be quiet. It was about seven and the whole building was waking up and the man calling Irene was not the loudest sound in the world anymore.
“Daddy, you got my smokes? Could use my smokes right about now.”
Horace, unable to stand anymore, slowly sank to the floor. There he found some relief. The more he sat, the more he began to play over the arrest. He had had money in his pocket when he took off his pants the night before, but there was no money when they booked him. And where had Catrina and Elaine been when the police marched him out of the apartment and down to the paddy wagon, with the Sunset’s female security guard standing behind her desk with an “Oh, yes, I told you so” look? Where had they been? He had not seen them. He stretched out his legs and they touched the feet of the sleeping man on the floor. The man roused. “Love don’t mean shit anymore,” the man on the lower bunk said. It was loud enough to wake the man on the floor all the way, and that man sat up and covered his chest with his blanket and looked at Horace, blinking and blinking and getting a clearer picture of Horace the more he blinked.
Reilly did not come for him until the middle of Monday afternoon. Somebody opened the cell door and at first Horace thought the policeman was coming to get one of his cellmates.
“Homer Parkins,” the man with the keys said. The doors were supposed to open electronically, but that system had not worked in a long time.
“Thas me,” Horace said and got to his feet. As he and the man with the keys walked past the other cells, someone said to Horace, “Hey, Pops, you ain’t too old to learn to suck dick.” “Keep moving,” the man with the keys said. “Pops, I’ll give you a lesson when you come back.”
As they poured his things out of a large manila envelope, the two guards behind the desk whispered and laughed. “Everything there?” one of them asked Horace. “Yes.” “Well, good,” the guard said. “I guess we’ll be seein you on your next trip here.” “Oh, leave that old man alone. He’s somebody’s grandfather.” “When they start that old,” the first man said, “it gets in their system and they can’t stop. Ain’t that right, Pops?”
He and Reilly did not say very much after Reilly said he had been surprised to hear from Horace and that he had wondered what had happened to him since Loneese died. Horace said he was eternally grateful to Reilly for bailing him out and that it was all a mistake as well as a long story that he would soon share with him. At Sunset, Reilly offered to take him out for a meal, but Horace said he would have to take a rain check. “Rain check?” Reilly said, smiling. “I didn’t think they said that anymore.”
The key to the apartment worked the way it always had, but something was blocking the door, and he had to force it open. Inside, he found destruction everywhere. On top of the clothes and the mementos of his life, strewn across the table and the couch and the floor were hundreds and hundreds of broken records. He took three steps into the room and began to cry. He turned around and around, hoping for something that would tell him it was not as bad as his eyes first reported. But there was little hope—the salt and pepper shakers had not been touched, the curtains covering the glass door were intact. There was not much beyond that for him to cling to.
He thought immediately of Catrina and Elaine. What had he done to deserve this? Had he not always shown them a good and kind heart? He covered his eyes, but that seemed only to produce more tears, and when he lowered his hands the room danced before him through the tears. To steady himself, he put both hands on the table, which was covered in instant coffee and sugar. He brushed broken glass off the chair nearest him and sat down. He had not got it all off, and he felt what was left through his pants and underwear.
He tried to look around but got no farther than the picture with the Secretary of Defense. It had two cracks in it, one running north to south and the other going northwest to southeast. The photograph was tilting, too, and something told him that if he could straighten the picture it all might not be so bad. He reached out a hand, still crying, but he could not move from the chair.
He stayed as he was through the afternoon and late into the evening, not once moving from the chair, though the tears did stop around five o’clock. Night came and he still did not move. My name is Horace Perkins, he thought just as the sun set. My name is Horace Perkins and I worked many a year at the Pentagon. The apartment became dark, but he did not have it in him to turn on the lights.
The knocking had been going on for more than ten minutes when he finally heard it. He got up, stumbling over debris, and opened the door. Elaine stood there with Darnell, Jr., in her arms.
“Horace, you O.K.? I been comin by. I been worried about you, Horace.”
He said nothing but opened the door enough for her and the baby to enter.
“It’s dark, Horace. What about some light?”
He righted the lamp on the table and turned it on.
“Jesus in Heaven, Horace! What happened! My Lord Jesus! I can’t believe this.” The baby, startled by his mother’s words, began to cry. “It’s O.K.,” she said to him, “It’s O.K.,” and gradually the baby calmed down. “Oh, Horace, I’m so sorry. I really am. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” She touched his shoulder with her free hand, but he shrugged it off. “Oh, my dear God! Who could do this?”
She went to the couch and moved enough trash aside for the baby. She pulled a pacifier from her sweater pocket, put it momentarily in her mouth to remove the lint, then put it in the baby’s mouth. He appeared satisfied and leaned back on the couch.
She went to Horace, and right away he grabbed her throat. “I’m gonna kill you tonight!” he shouted. “I just wish that bitch Catrina was here so I could kill her, too.” Elaine struggled and sputtered out one “please” before he gripped her tighter. She beat his arms but that seemed to give him more strength. She began to cry. “I’m gonna kill you tonight, girl, if it’s the last thing I do.”
The baby began to cry, and she turned her head as much as she could to look at him. This made him slap her twice, and she started to fall, and he pulled her up and, as he did, went for a better grip, which was time enough for her to say, “Don’t kill me in front of my son, Horace.” He loosened his hands. “Don’t kill me in front of my boy, Horace.” Her tears ran down her face and over and into his hands. “He don’t deserve to see me die. You know that, Horace.”
“Where, then!”
“Anywhere but in front of him. He’s innocent of everything.”
He let her go and backed away.
“I did nothin, Horace,” she whispered. “I give you my word, I did nothin.” The baby screamed, and she went to him and took him in her arms.
Horace sat down in the same chair he had been in.
“I would not do this to you, Horace.”
He looked at her and at the baby, who could not take his eyes off Horace, even through his tears.
One of the baby’s cries seemed to get stuck in his throat, and to release it the baby raised a fist and punched the air, and finally the cry came free. How does a man start over with nothing? Horace thought. Elaine came near him, and the baby still watched him as his crying lessened. How does a man start from scratch?
He leaned down and picked up a few of the broken albums from the floor and read the labels. “I would not hurt you for anything in the world, Horace,” Elaine said. Okeh Phonograph Corporation. Domino Record Co. RCA Victor. Darnell, Jr.,’s crying stopped, but he continued to look down at the top of Horace’s head. Cameo Record Corporation, N.Y. “You been too good to me for me to hurt you like this, Horace.” He dropped the records one at a time: “It Takes an Irishman to Make Love.” “I’m Gonna Pin a Medal on the Girl I Left Behind.” “Ragtime Soldier Man.” “Whose Little Heart Are You Breaking Now.” “The Syncopated Walk.” ♦
