They hadn’t been on the road ten minutes before it became clear that Tony’s “way to get a deal” did not involve a dealership.
He directed Muffler out past the edge of the city, through the gates of a derelict vehicle-processing yard, and then through a maze of stacked wrecks and weeds until they reached a spot at the back that couldn’t be seen from anywhere.
A Cherokee rolled into view, an ’88, so clean it looked like it had come off the truck last week, and it sat there radiating a kind of arrogance.
Several unfriendly-looking Black guys were standing around it.
Not that they meant any harm — they were there to do business.
The one in charge, who went by Mouse, quoted Tony four thousand, and from his tone there was room to come down.
Something is wrong here.
Alex ran the numbers.
A new Cherokee went for somewhere around twenty thousand dollars right now.
Used didn’t get you down to four.
Beside him, Muffler picked up on the doubt without a word being said and made a small, discreet gesture: fingers pinching, lifting.
Lifted.
“That’s a stolen car?”
Alex felt a wave of regret.
He had come into a chunk of money and it had gone straight to his head — letting Tony lead him out here, walking into a place like this with four thousand five hundred dollars in his pocket and a swagger on.
He’d floated.
Tony had floated higher.
Not content with laughing it up with Mouse, he accepted the hand-rolled blunt the man offered him, took a long pull off it, then went and fetched the pistol Muffler kept in his car and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Cherokee.
“The room in this thing is really something. Alex, where’s the best spot for the gun, you figure? Here? Or here?”
He shoved the pistol under the driver’s seat, considered it, decided he didn’t like it, and clambered into the back to hunt for a better hiding place.
“Hey! Hey — we’re not buying it, come on, we’re going.”
Alex’s temper went.
He hauled Tony bodily out of the Cherokee and toward Muffler’s car.
“Are you an idiot? A car this new? It wouldn’t sit in front of our house three days!” He said it loudly, inventing the excuse on the spot, and made sure Mouse and his people heard every word.
“It ain’t that bad—”
Tony still didn’t want to leave.
Alex worked his eyebrows at him furiously until he finally folded himself into the car.
“Never mind. My brother’s got a thing about it,” Alex said, and raised a hand toward Mouse and the rest.
“Thanks, though.”
“It’s all good, brother.”
Mouse didn’t push it.
He waved them off.
They were barely out of the salvage yard before the two of them had the worst fight they’d had since Alex woke up in this life.
“You gonna make me look like that? In front of them?”
The blunt hadn’t finished doing its work; Tony was close to roaring.
“I brought you out there, so there was no problem, understand? There’s more stolen cars on the South Side than the cops could ever count. They don’t care. The only time a cruiser came into our neighborhood was when ET got killed, and even then — did they come in? They don’t dare come in—”
“Listen to yourself! You’re gambling on odds and calling it a fact!”
Alex had a full head of steam of his own.
“If we’re driving that car and the police pull us over, did you once stop and think what happens?” He ticked them off on his fingers.
“The car is stolen. One man in it is full of weed. And there’s a gun under the back seat. Did it occur to you what those three things together get us? Years. Years in a cell. I’m telling you right now, I have a future in front of me, and I am not going to get buried under some stupid nonsense like that.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!”
“There it is.
A Plus made himself a little money!
So what’s the deal now?
Now you’re ashamed of your brother?
Now I’m holding you back?
Let me tell you something!
Without me, would you ever have gotten your song in front of Lil Lori?
I’m your brother.
What I say goes around here.
And for your sake, Lori’s gone cold on us — you didn’t notice that?
Me and Muffler are the ones making sacrifices for you!”
“Right, right. You resent sacrificing your shot at being a flunky, and the way you get even is to shrug at the risk of putting yourself and your brother behind bars.”
“How many times I gotta tell you, it is not a flunky, it’s a brother! Me and Lori are brothers!”
“It’s a flunky. Dress it up however you like, it’s still a flunky.”
“Brothers! Partners! Lil Lori’s a star! We’re his star partners!”
“Sure—”
They were shouting loud enough that Muffler simply stopped the car and turned around to look at them, and only then did they realize he had already delivered them to an enormous used-car lot.
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck!”
Both doors slammed.
The yelling stopped there, because a salesman was already on his way over.
“Pickup,” Muffler said, and walked straight toward the pickup section.
“Huh?” Alex found himself standing in front of one particular truck, staring at the Volkswagen badge on it, transfixed.
“Hey — how much can you come down on this one? Uh-huh. Right. Really, that’s not bad. Does it burn oil, though?” Why am I even— who thinks like that here?
“Son, you’ve got an eye,” the salesman said, launching in immediately.
“That’s the Volkswagen Rabbit pickup, and we’re running a serious discount on that one—”
“Forget that thing, a two-seater’s no good for us.” Tony was standing beside a Ford and waved Alex over.
They picked and picked and in the end settled on a four-door Ford pickup, eight years old, condition no better than fair, but cheap: a little over two thousand took care of everything, papers included.
Tempers around here came up fast and went down fast.
Behind the wheel of the “new” truck Tony looked like a simpleton, humming to himself, testing the throttle, testing the brakes, testing everything.
“Where to next?” he asked.
There was still money left.
Alex thought about it.
“The used appliance market. We’ve got a refrigerator in the house. Let’s add a washing machine, so Aunt Susie doesn’t have to haul a mountain of clothes down to the laundromat anymore.”
“Yeah!” Tony said, pointing out the turns as he drove.
“Ali, you’re a good brother.
Real talk — I used to think the same way you do now.
Back in, what, seventh grade?
I was the tallest, strongest kid my age, first-string on the football team.
All I wanted was a college scholarship out of football, maybe go pro.
That belief is what let us say no to everything the projects threw at us.
But then it all changed.
The other kids caught up on height, and I couldn’t keep the weight off.
No hope of a scholarship.
And then the road was just closed.
Day after day after day, and it turned into this.”
“I understand,” Alex said.
He put out his fist; Tony tapped it, and the two of them looked at each other and grinned.
At the used appliance market they started with a front-loading washing machine and an oven.
Alex bought Muffler a VCR, bought Tony a Nintendo and a small television, picked out an electronic metronome for himself, and then paid for a guitar, a trumpet, and an armload of odds and ends.
Secondhand things had been tangled up in this life of his from the beginning.
Even the first piece of good fortune that had come to him since the switch had happened in a thrift store.
Partly that was because the used market in America was so deep and so convenient.
Partly it was because you genuinely could not put new things on display in that house — new appliances least of all.
The welfare office sent people around on a schedule and sometimes turned up unannounced, and if they found that the family’s standard of living had jumped noticeably, or that there was a man of the house and it wasn’t a single-parent household anymore, the benefits would be cut hard.
On what Alex was bringing in now, there was no possibility of supporting the whole family off relief.
So: no new appliances.
Don’t even think about it.
With his personal errands out of the way, Alex put his energy back where it belonged, which was the recording.
That was the only thing that mattered.
It had kept him out of school for days, which turned out not to matter much either; the school had contacted Aunt Susie once, the guardian had raised no objection, and that had been the end of it.
A few days more, and the version that came back from the professional mixing studio met with everyone’s approval without a single dissent.
Which meant that Lori’s new album, the thing they had all been working on day and night, was finally ready to go into production.
“Yes!”
Old Joe and Pablo had both left for the plant, and quiet had returned to the studio.
Alex and Eric were collapsed on the couch, neither of them willing to move.
Privately, Alex knew this version was still a long way from the one in his head.
Some of that was technology.
Old Joe’s chorus vocal and old Morgan’s saxophone had nowhere near the cut of the original — in plain terms, it didn’t get into your skull the way it should.
There were plenty of other shortcomings.
Lori’s rap naturally fell short of the original too, and Alex hadn’t been able to push him much in the booth; he was a total newcomer here, and there was the relationship between the two of them to consider.
All things considered, he didn’t think this song would reach the heights the original had.
But that was where it stood, and he had done what he could.
“Hey, Eric.” He’d just remembered what Old Joe had said about Eric and girls.
“What?” Eric was nearly asleep.
“Those girls down on the street. Can you really take your pick of them and have her upstairs on the spot?”
“More or less. You want to learn?”
“Well…”
Eric smiled.
“Still playing shy with me? You little pervert. Come here. Let me teach you. It’s not hard at all.”