D'n'd

By Rudy Gray

It is the early 1980s. The nice suburban North Bronx neighborhood of Baychester inches downward. Its courage and self-pride wane. Burglaries and gang activity increase. Murders, unintentional or plotted, are up. The police who care are discouraged. Crack-cocaine proliferates, particularly among the young.

But the neighborhood is DND (deaf and dumb), minding its own business and keeping its collective mouth shut. Avoiding retaliation. Avoiding its own conscience.

One ninth grader ignores the rule and loses his life.

Hollis Gault, an eighth graderformerly DNDsurprises even himself and opens his mouth. He and his family are now in the crosshairs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 24, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469759142

Rudy Gray

RUDY GRAY is an award-winning playwright and former Bronx junior high school teacher. A Ph.D. in Drama, he now teaches Thematic Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He’s a member/Playwright of The Workshop Theater Company in NYC, the Writers Guild of America, East, and The Dramatists Guild.

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D’N’D

Rudy Gray

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

D’N’D

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by Rudy Gray

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

iUniverse, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-469-75914-2 (ebook)

ISBN: 0-595-27243-6

Contents

C H A P T E R 1

C H A P T E R 2

C H A P T E R 3

C H A P T E R 4

C H A P T E R 5

C H A P T E R 6

C H A P T E R 7

C H A P T E R 1

They’re both at the fuckin’ window,

A dark brown ’78 four-door Ford Sedan with tinted windows had slid into position on the quiet suburban street. Its four occupants, ranging from seventeen to twenty years old, had the ferocious look of malignant sociopaths.

All we gotta do is waste’m both—see what I’m sayin? This suggestion was made by Juggs Brock, a thin black youth of nineteen who wore a fake pearl earring and needed dental attention he would obviously never get unless he was in lockup.

Four young thugs sat in the car, scratching themselves, compulsively rubbing their noses with the heels of their hands, watching the house diagonally across the street and four buildings away.

Rocky Amsterdam, the driver, light-skinned with unkempt corn rows and a wicked scar shaped like a bent finger on his cheek, turned around in his seat and glared at Jugs.

Hey, awesome thinking, he said. Waste the woman too who ain’t done a fuckin’ thing to us. That way, we make the whole goddamn neighborhood our problem. Got any more brilliant ideas?

Just tryin’ to get this jive show on the road.

Y’know, you been pushing in the bush with too many clapped up ‘ho’s. That dripsy’s getting all up in your brain.

The other two, Burley Diablo and Max Montoya, laughed.

One more time, pressed Rocky. What’s the plan?

Jugs shifted uncomfortably in his seat and pouted. We let Terry get the mothafuckin’ little rat in the school…send the message to the other kids. We just watch the house. Then park near the woods. Let the dickhead pigs roust us if they come around. Take them outa the play.

Who’s the man?

Terry.

Now you my homey again. Lean forward lemme give you a kiss.

Up yours. Burley and Max giggled this time and slapped each other five.

Y’all stupid asses go ahead’n laugh all you want, grumbled Jugs as he glared out the window. Betcha I take his fuckin’ ass out myself and, while he’s dying, he can watch me stick my thang up the bitch and make her beg for more.

The others whooped.

Then they focused on Mirabella Abramson’s house, a modest light tan three-floor stucco building. The ’80 red Dodge that she drove to her job as supervisory bank officer seemed to stand guard in front. The garden was a small neatly maintained archipelago of sweet-smelling miniature floral beds—yellow daisies, purple and white hyacinths, mini-beds of bright pink and green camellias, multihued sweet williams. Midget shrubs lined her front sidewalk. Overlooking it all was a snug front porch.

Five minutes earlier, sighing quietly, Officer Roscoe Gittens had slid into the passenger seat of the double-parked blue and white and stared ahead momentarily, slowly shaking his head. Standing at the front door of the house he’d just left, Mirabella Abramson, her hazel-tinged face filled with fright, had watched the officer trudge along the flat stone-paved front path to the vehicle.

Through the front window could be seen the back of a young head.

No go, huh, Officer Russ said.

Kids’n their stupid pride, said Gittens. He’s gonna go to school. He’s gonna sneak outa that house and go to school. His aunt knows it too.

And we would be shorthanded, said Russ as he started the ignition. As the vehicle cruised off, Gittens watched an orange calico cat dash across the street and disappear under a parked blue-green Jeep Rambler. You better get your feline butt off this street, he said.

I wouldn’t worry about that animal, said Russ as he wheeled the car right at the corner. They have better sense than we do.

Gittens studied the line of well-kept lawns in front of the neatly roofed, one-and two-family houses covered by ivy and morning glory vines. He was as saddened by the snippets of angry graffiti on the picket fences as he was by the occasional FOR SALE sign stabbing the grass of a front lawn. (Were the owners escaping or just unable to keep up payments?).

A few early-bird students strolled toward the school, glancing nervously at the passing patrol car. He wondered if they knew anything. Of course, it would stand to reason they would. He wanted to stop and question them, but why bother? They’d only stonewall him as others had. Instead, to distract himself, he focused on the sparrows joyously chittering in the newly leafing branches overhead. Clearly, they were trying to add cheer to this grim morning.

In his early thirties, Gittens was a lithe, well-built mahogany skinned man with a close-cropped mustache and a slight frown. There was a faint hint of sideburns on his handsome face. He had high cheekbones, flaring nostrils, and a well-defined mouth. His piercing eagle’s eyes seemed to look into one’s very soul.

He always kept his street roughness just beneath the surface under control. He could not use that side of himself too much. He would fizzle out before he retired. Besides, he’d grown up here. He’d been a handful himself in his early days. He knew the dynamics, and he disdained old-fashioned, confrontational police methods. He was mainly about persuasive communication, not coercion; that was what putting on his uniform in the morning was all about.

He glanced at his partner, who swung the vehicle left up a narrow gravelly street flanked by a few small rundown tenant buildings, an empty tin and wood shack and dead-ends buried in woodsy overgrown car graveyards. Officer Russ—first just his partner, now his pal and fellow harried missionary. They’d been together two years now. A few times, admittedly, the ride for them had been bumpy—Russ could be a royal pain in the butt with his staunch conservative streak but then so could he, not that far from conservatism himself. Par for the ironic course, he supposed.

Russ had a thin crop of reddish dirty chestnut hair, somewhat curly, the front edge invading his brow. A few freckles scattered his nose. He had a tendency to flush and clam up whenever anything upsetting happened. But that was a sign to anyone who knew him well enough that his personal radar system was in high gear, not that he didn’t know how to respond.

He’d become a good cop and partner—together, on the ball—and Gittens was more than thankful to have him watching his back. They were a good salt and pepper team.

They passed Nichols standing in front of a candy store, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup, a smoking cigarette held between two fingers holding its bottom, the other hand hidden in his pocket as if it were colder than the morning chill.

He was a dark-skinned man, gaunt and shifty-eyed as if he expected someone to jump out at him from one of the nearby alleys.

A matted ponytail sat askew at the nape of its neck, looking like a hair-filled boil had burst there in the back of his unkempt ‘fro. His skin was sallow, obvious even through its darkness, indicative of a poor diet—probably pizza, hot dogs, cheap wine, chocolate bars, greasy hamburgers and God knows what undisciplined else.

As this wraith-like loiterer leaned against a nearby mailbox, he watched the students walking past him, particularly the girls. He said something to a few of them that made them look at each other in open mouthed shock and outrage before they giggled and walked away shaking their heads. Gittens frowned.

He and his partner detested Nichols. They had nothing on him and could find nothing. Nichols’d never been caught wrong, which itself irked them. Still, they’d heard about the nasty suggestions Nichols’d made to young girls. It was hearsay, but it was enough to make the two policemen watch him like hawks.

Inside the house, Mirabella sat on the long window sofa next to her nephew Reese. She was a stately woman in her late forties, with faintly graying hair, vivid laughlines, full lips, and an anxious look on her matronly face. She regarded her nephew at great length.

Reese, a skinny high yellow fourteen-year-old with prominent Bantu features and faint peach fuzz forming just under his bottom lip, stared behind them out the front window with a frown of terror on his face. The street in front of the house was empty now except for the students strolling by. To Reese, clenching his jaws furiously, the area was an ominous black forest full of unholy monsters.

He looked at her with indignation.

Her eyes flashed back at him in surprise and confusion. Reese! she exclaimed. Look at you. You’re scared out of your wits.

Aunt Mirabella, I don’t show up for school today I might as well move to Mars.

You’re talking comic book nonsense. Didn’t you hear what Officer Gittens said?

Reese answered with silence.

Listen. You go upstairs and study. I’ll go to the school and get your homework and any other assignments you have. If this doesn’t blow over, then we’ll see what we can do about transferring you to another school.

But—

You go upstairs, y’hear me, Reese? Upstairs. Do not, under any circumstances, leave this house! That’s an order! And you don’t answer the door for anyone!

Reese continued to stare out the window.

Neither noticed the dark brown Sedan across the street, far to their left

Down the block, a few houses in from the far corner to the right, was the home of Carlos Gault. The house was three stories of mauve brick covered with thick vines working their way toward the dark green roof. Somehow, the place had an air of quiet contentment. It was well kept up, had a small porch like Mirabella’s and a wide driveway shared with its neighbor on the right.

Inside this house, however, was great frenetic activity. Downstairs, Francine Gault, helped by her twelve-year-old daughter Imogen, rushed about making bologna and cheese sandwiches, pouring the corn flakes and orange juice, cursorily checking homework. Generally, with as little angst as possible, she was helping her two children get ready for school. A middle class black family in a scurry.

Carlos, the man of the house, was in the shower trying to sound like Barry White and marvelling to himself that he wasn’t half bad. He was a large bespectacled man who looked like an athlete in an accountant’s frame. His musculature was still crisp despite early-stage love handles and a slight hint of a belly. In two hours he was due at the West Manhattan car dealership where he worked as a sales representative. He was at peace with his world.

Her shiny black hair pulled back in a tight bun tied in a magenta ribbon bow, Imogen seemed like a small dynamo in the house, almost outdoing her mother. Her tiny face was almost babyish. Her dark brown skin reflected the morning lights. Two deep dimples appeared in her cheeks whenever she smiled. Imogen’s button nose still so delighted her parents that they often teased her by holding it between their thumbs and forefingers, ant-mandible-like. She still had the lankiness of a pre-teen, but she was becoming aware of the beginnings of a womanly figure, especially around her still skinny hips and behind.

Imogen willingly accepted whatever overtures of love and approval she could get, and this drove her to move about the house with an energy and poise far beyond her twelve years.

Her mother, Francine, was a mature version of Imogen. With her beautiful face and dark brown skin, she could have been a fashion model. She kept her hair in a pageboy that complemented her deep dimples. She was a striking combination of sexy patrician beauty, worldliness and child-like purity. It was a combination with which she could easily have conquered the world. But she was more than satisfied with having conquered her husband Carlos, a good man. She counted herself very lucky indeed, with the stories she constantly heard from friends and acquaintances of their marital woes, of their misbehaving men. Her family was her treasure. Their returned love was her central energy source. Her own beauty played a role in her consciousness only when she interacted with people. It was always there as men’s eyes flashed as she assisted them in the library. Someday, when she obtained her degree in psychology, she would use it to help her patients see the beauty inside their souls.

Upstairs, Hollis lay sprawled across his bed, his tempo rhythm at odds with the rest of his family. His legs were toward the door, his head toward the window. His arms dangled over the edge as he played a kind of miniature hockey, a hockey stick ruler in each hand, slapping a protractor back and forth on the floor. His earphoned head bobbed to the rhythms of Michael Jackson’s Thriller as his eyes followed the occasional dust ball waltzing around under the bed. He would get to it someday if his mother didn’t first.

Hollis Gault was a tallish thirteen-year-old angular boy, immature but graceful in his movements, and sporting a few zits on his café au lait cheeks. He concentrated on the conflict under his bed between his rulers. He still hadn’t decided which one was the good guy and which the bad. He didn’t pick sides easily. He only knew what side not to be on.

He let his mind wander to the day ahead of him.

Another corny day, full of boring teachers and doofy students. What for? Folks looking for jobs all over and Reagan don’t seem to care. Standing on the employment line and trading educations with each other while waiting for the lady at the desk to say, Sorry, can’t help you today. Well, okay, maybe we should try to get some education in our heads but…why does it have to be so boring? If it wasn’t for this real dyno Burt Reynolds movie coming up and a new X-Man comic due on the stands, I don’t know what I’d do short of go to nut city.

Mom’ll be calling me soon to get ready for school. Have to walk Imogen and Erika through that army of crack heads, pushers, nincompoops, dorks, nerds, jerks, weirdos and slobs, too many to be worth thinking about.

What the hell. Maybe I’m a jerk too. Maybe walking the girls to school is my only claim to fame. Who cares anyway? Hey, maybe the school’ll burn down. I should live so long.

The Northeast Bronx still seemed like the outskirts of the city but was gradually losing that distinction. The sub in suburb was fading, and many residents who could afford it were already escaping—to their north, east, westward toward the Hudson River and beyond, or to the New South. But many of those places, too, had been overrun by the problems they’d been trying to escape—by loud, dirty, hostile, sometimes violent loiterers, by a general lawlessness fed by the drug trade.

So Mirabella Abramson, the Gaults and others like them battened down and tried to keep their neighborhoods decent places to live. And, to a large degree, they succeeded.

Baychester, like many other areas in the infamous Bronx, was now actually doing better than some upstate suburbs. In fact, a few of the families who had moved away were already moving back. And the community was thoroughly integrated: African Americans, Latinos, Italians, Irish, Germans, Greeks, some newly arrived Eastern Europeans, East-Indians and Asians lived there in what passed for peace.

A few of the gravelly streets and paths led to dead ends where there were rotted fallen tree trunks, old tires, discarded rusted auto frames and ragged old sofas. They usually fronted large wooded areas, remnants from the outskirts of the city era.

In the belly of this section were the Seton Houses, a cluster of high-rises intended for the hard-working lower-middle and working-class families who lived there. But a small group of criminals had settled in, too, using the stairwells and grounds for their business. They pretty much ran the place.

Near the housing project was a small scattered group of elementary schools and, on the other side of Baychester Avenue, one large four-story junior high school attended by Reese Abramson, Hollis and Imogen Gault, and most of their friends.

The Benjamin Franklin Junior High School had a large, fairly well maintained front lawn and an adjacent concrete schoolyard with handball courts, an asphalt softball diamond and outfield, and basketball courts. Many students used the large wooded area behind the school for shortcuts, but most walked along the main commercial streets that led to Franklin—Baychester Avenue, Boston Road and 233rd Street. Schieffelin Avenue, which ran along the eastern side of Seton Houses, formed a short fork, both prongs of which cut in front of Franklin.

On the other side of Schieffelin was a gigantic athletic field for Sheen Catholic High School taking up almost the rest of the area going toward Boston Road. Only a small percentage of Franklin graduates had the grades needed to go there. Most went to other parts of the city or north.

Crack-cocaine was beginning to find its way into the area’s bloodstream, bringing with it criminality and violence. Neighbors petitioned the local community council but got little other than the usual cant. The police—those who were committed—did all they could to stem the tide, but they had limited resources and manpower.

Then there was the crack house near but not inside the Seton Houses. It was an irritant but not a major problem except for crack vials on the sidewalks. People complained to local officials, who did very little.

The secret nucleus of the crack trade was Moncrief Whitman. He was only in his late forties, but he was already thought to be a pillar of his community, admired as a successful black businessman. He looked the part, bald at the top of his head but not at the sides and back, always clean-shaven and smelling of Polo. His elegant house, exquisitely appointed, stood