Chapter 6 - Joining the System for Real

Machete kept the routes in his head, not on paper, and he expected Teo to do the same.

"Third Avenue, between 148th and 150th, belongs to us," he said. He was driving, one hand on the wheel, the car holding a steady twenty-five through the light at Willis. "The corner at Port Morris. You've been there. Everything between Hunts Point Avenue and Barretto Street on the south side. The corners at Bruckner. The stretch on Southern Boulevard that runs up to 163rd." He paused. "You following?"

"Yeah," Teo said.

"The club is the center. Money comes from the corners, moves to the club, gets separated there. Some goes up, some covers expenses, some goes into the week's float. The float is what pays you." Machete glanced at him. "You don't need to know where the top of it goes. You need to know your territory, your collection schedule, and who on the block you go to when something's wrong."

"And who's that?"

"For now, me." Machete let the pause run long enough to mean something. "After you know the routes in your sleep, it's whoever I say it is."

They went over it twice that afternoon, once going in and once coming back. On the first pass, Machete drove and named streets and corners and days. Teo watched the streets go past the window and put what Machete was saying into them as they passed. By the time they were on the way back, the city had reorganized itself around the routes. Hunts Point was no longer a neighborhood; it was a Tuesday. Southern Boulevard was the second leg of the run, the one with the camera on the bus shelter at 156th that he was not supposed to walk past without his hood up. On the second pass Machete asked the questions and listened to how Teo gave them back. Teo gave them back fast. Once, Machete made a sound that was low and was neither praise nor its absence.

The second pass ran in a parking structure near the Bruckner, Machete's car idling on the third level while the daylight dimmed outside the open walls. Machete asked each question once and waited. The phones stayed in pockets. A man on the corner without his phone out was a man in his neighborhood.

"Hunts Point collection, which day?"

"Tuesday. Second and fourth Tuesday."

"If a corner is short?"

"Call you. Don't handle it."

"If a corner is hostile?"

"Walk. Call you. Don't come back alone."

Machete nodded. He was looking at the parking structure's wall, not at Teo. "And if something goes wrong with a third party. Not one of ours, not the Albanians, just someone who doesn't know what the corner is."

Teo thought about it. "Minimum necessary. Don't escalate what doesn't need to be escalated."

"Why?"

"Because escalation draws attention and attention costs more than the thing you were trying to protect."

Machete was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're going to be good for this." He said it the same way he said everything: like he had said it before and found it to be true.

Teo held his face flat. His hands stayed on his lap. Machete set the words down and watched him carry them.

---

The Third Avenue corner ran different by daylight. The night corner was shadow and proximity, who was in the car and who was on foot at two in the morning. The day corner was a bodega next to a laundromat, a Dominican hair salon two doors down, an auto shop with three guys visible through the open bay door across the street. It was a regular neighborhood. The operation ran parallel to it and slightly below it, legible in thirty seconds to anyone who was looking.

Cris was already on the block when Teo came up Third from the south, outside the laundromat with his back to the wall, wearing the black fitted with the small gold crown. He saw Teo and dropped his arms and straightened up off the wall.

"Ey."

"Ey," Teo said.

Across the street the auto shop guys were making noise. A woman pushed a stroller past them without slowing.

A car came up the block slow. Both of them tracked it the same way, attention going out and snapping back when the car turned at 148th. Teo looked down at Cris's feet. Nike Dunks, clean, in a colorway that ran a hundred and twenty retail. Cris had been on the corner two months. The shoes were either new this week or they had been bought before the corner had been paying for them.

"They got you running Three today too?" Cris said.

"Passing through. Machete's running me through all of it this week."

Cris made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "First month he had me everywhere too. Then it levels out. You get your spots." He kept his eyes on the street. "You been over to the club yet?"

The question came in soft, attached to the rest.

"Yeah."

"Wild over there." Cris shook his head once, not disapproval, just registering. "Ricky runs that thing tight. He's got eyes on you the whole time." A beat. "There's a girl over there." He stopped. He looked at the street and then back at Teo. "Forget it. I'm just saying. Be careful what you're doing in there. Ricky knows everything."

The block was quiet. Three blocks west, the elevated train on the Third Avenue tracks made its sound and was gone.

"I know," Teo said.

Cris talked then about the corner setup: the hostile super in the building across the street, the camera on the third-floor window of the building two doors down, which apartment to walk past faster, which to slow. He pointed with his chin, never with his hands. The details were clean. Cris kept looking over every twenty seconds, checking what they did to Teo's face.

A delivery van slowed at the curb on the other side of the street and idled. Cris's attention went sideways and stayed there until the driver got out and unlocked the back doors of the van and pulled out a hand truck full of boxes. The driver was in a uniform with a name tag. Cris's attention came back to Teo. The whole thing had taken six seconds.

"All right," Teo said eventually. "I've got the rest of the route."

"Yeah, go ahead." Cris lifted his chin. "Come by tonight if Machete's got you free. Block's different at night."

"Maybe," Teo said.

He walked south on Third without looking back at the corner. Cris was watching him go. That was information too.

---

He passed the bodega on his way toward Courtlandt. Don Félix was out front with the late-afternoon plantains, stacking them onto the slanted wooden frame one at a time. The gray cat was on its crate. The door was propped open, the radio going on a Spanish-language station, someone talking about traffic.

Don Félix looked up when Teo passed the rack's edge.

"Teo." He picked up another plantain. "¿Cómo estás?"

"Bien." Teo stopped. He had meant to walk past. He was stopped anyway. "¿Y usted?"

"Igual." Don Félix set the plantain on the rack and did not pick up the next one. He looked at Teo for longer than the question had earned. "You look different," he said.

"Same as always."

The sound Don Félix made was not agreement and not disagreement either. He picked up another plantain and set it on the slope of the rack with the others. The gray cat shifted on its crate. Inside, the radio on the counter had moved to a song neither of them was listening to.

Teo stood there a second longer. His weight on his feet was something he was aware of, and his right hand had found his back pocket without his asking it to. He took it out and put it at his side.

"I've got to get home," he said.

"Sure." Don Félix did not look up again. "Give your uncle my regards."

Teo said he would. He walked the rest of the block and took Courtlandt north toward the apartment. He had not passed the bodega without going in for four years.

The 6 train at East 149th was a sound above him, the grinding deceleration of a southbound car pulling into the platform. People came down the stairs and went around him on both sides. The stairs were not for him tonight. He kept moving north. He had somewhere to be.

---

Fernando was in the kitchen.

Teo heard it before he saw it. The TV was on but low, lower than usual. The refrigerator door opened and closed. A dish moved on the counter. He came through the apartment door and took the left-hand read: no bottle on the counter, which was not the same as no bottle, but was still information.

Fernando was at the stove in a clean shirt, his concentration on the pot. The room smelled of rice and of sofrito heating from the jar, garlic and pepper in oil.

"You're early," Fernando said. His back stayed to the room.

"Thought I'd come home first," Teo said.

"There's enough for both of us. Give it twenty minutes."

Teo put his jacket on the hook inside the door, went into his room and shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it for a second. The room had not changed. The window was still painted shut and the crack in the ceiling corner ran above the shoebox under the bed where it had run for a year. He pulled the box out and counted the roll inside it. It was bigger than it had been two weeks ago. He counted it twice, put it back, and sat on the bed for a minute. Outside, the 6 train passed, the elevated sound coming in under the bedroom window's sill even with the window painted shut. The tracks were three blocks east. He could set a clock by them if he wanted to.

He went back to the kitchen.

Fernando had turned the heat down on the rice. He was at the counter with a glass of water, not a bottle. He looked at Teo when Teo came in and then back at the counter.

"How's work?" Fernando asked.

"Fine."

Fernando drank the water and set the glass down. "What kind of work is it, exactly."

It was not quite a question. Fernando was not three beers in. This was the other voice, the one Teo had heard four times in four years, slow and careful, the remnant of the shop steward who used to know how to conduct a meeting.

Teo looked at the stove. "Night work. Security."

Fernando looked at him. His hands were flat on the counter.

"Teo," he said. He used the full name, not mijo. "Escúchame. Lo que estás haciendo —"

Teo's jacket was already off the hook. He did not remember picking it up. Somewhere between the stove and the door his feet had turned, his pulse a beat or two higher than it had been. The sofrito smell was still in the kitchen and the rice was still on the stove and Fernando's hand on the counter was an open palm, fingers slightly spread.

"I've got to go," he said.

Fernando stayed at the counter with his hands flat and the water glass beside them and the rice on the stove and the TV low in the next room, and his mouth was still open around the end of the sentence he had not finished.

Teo went through the door.

In the stairwell the building's smell came at him in the order it always did: fried food from somebody's apartment, and on the second-floor landing the chemical bite of the super's cleaning supplies that always overrode the third-floor dog. He went down the four flights without stopping. On the ground-floor landing the laugh track from an upstairs neighbor's TV came muffled through the ceiling, the same channel every night.

The front door took him out into the street. Evening had come in while he was upstairs, the July sky going dark orange in the west past the expressway sound, and he walked and held Fernando's hands flat on the counter and the open sentence in the apartment above him at arm's length where they belonged.

He had somewhere to be.

The sentence followed him anyway, down Courtlandt and up to Third. It was half a sentence with nothing on the other side of it. Fernando's voice had not been the drinking voice. Teo walked faster.

---

Back on Third Avenue, the block was changing over from its daytime self to its night self, the daylight gone, the streetlights up. Cris had said to come by. Teo came by. In the evening the corner ran itself through a set of men who knew their positions and held the block and managed the traffic that knew where to find them. Teo took up the laundromat wall and watched.

The men on the corner stood easy. They were not performing menace and not creating friction with the neighborhood that continued around them. They knew who was on foot and who was in cars. The block had its own logic. Teo's body registered it as the same thing it had registered in Machete's car and in Ricky's office, the click of something that worked.

Reading it came easy to him. Rooms had always come easy to him. The gang was a room he knew how to read, and the thought arrived intact and he did not chase it. Nothing else had come easy since sophomore year, when school had stopped being a system worth the work.

He watched the block for ninety minutes. The work ran itself. The streetlight at 148th flickered twice in the first hour and then settled. A man came out of the bodega across the street with a tall can in a paper bag and stood drinking it under the awning for eleven minutes before walking south. Two of the men holding positions came past Teo at the laundromat wall to ask his name and where Machete had put him. He gave them both, plus the minimum necessary acknowledgment that the corner was theirs and he was passing through.

One of them was named Dario, mid-thirties, posture still, no tension left in his shoulders. Corners had stopped being events for him a while back. Dario was who Teo would go to if Machete was not reachable. Teo kept Dario's face and his position by the building's entrance: angled toward the door and the corner of 150th at the same time. Cris had not been on the block since nine, which was useful without being actionable.

At ten-thirty Teo's phone buzzed. L: Finished for tonight. Go home or wherever.

Teo read it, typed Ight, put the phone away.

His feet took him toward home and then past it. At the corner of Courtlandt he stood for thirty seconds and looked at the building entrance and the lit lobby and the elevator that had been out since February. Fernando was four flights up, probably on the couch now, the TV back up to its usual volume, the rice put away or not, the sentence still unfinished. It would be unfinished tomorrow and the day after. That was how they handled things in that apartment: in parallel, the silences doing the work of conversation.

Teo turned around. The car was on Willis, on the residential block where the meters stopped. He got in and sat with his hands on the wheel and did not start the engine.

Fernando's voice came back at him, slow and careful. Lo que estás haciendo. It had not been an accusation. The sentence had been moving toward him, and he had left before it could land.

He started the car.

The service road took him to the Bruckner, and the expressway carried him north, and then the exit brought him down toward the industrial corridor where La Reina Roja sat between the tire shop and the storage facility. The sign was where it always was: the two Rs in red neon, one letter still dimmer than the other, the cursive hanging over the parking lot and the whole block. The drive had taken eighteen minutes. The radio had stayed off. His hands had done nothing the whole drive except hold the wheel.

Teo pulled in and cut the engine.

Nobody was expecting him. Machete had told him to go home. Saturday's pull was tomorrow; tonight the schedule was dark, which meant the people inside were people with specific reasons to be inside. None of those reasons were his. For thirty seconds he sat and breathed. The neon was making the inside of the car red at the edges of his vision. The dembow came through the walls, quieter than it would be tomorrow but present in the concrete, the bass running up through the brake pedal under his foot.

He had known he was going in since the corner.

Teo got out of the car. The man on the door knew his face now, four nights in, and lifted his chin. Teo went through.

The heat hit him in the threshold, even at a Thursday crowd, the compressed warmth of bodies in a closed room. Lower than he had heard it, the dembow was running easy under the DJ's hand in the hour before the midnight set. Teo took a position along the north wall.

The stage was empty. The runway lights were at their transition level, warm yellow from where he was standing.

At the far end of the stage the dressing room corridor opened. The red curtain over the door swung wide as one of the dancers came through, an older one whose name Teo had not gotten, and crouched at the corridor wall by the row of lockers visible through the gap. She opened her locker. From his angle, the locker beside hers was already half-open, somebody's bag inside it folded back against the hinge. A pair of street shoes sat on top of the folded clothes, not the kind anybody danced in. The dancer closed her own door and the curtain swung shut behind her.

Teo kept his eyes on the room and his hands at his sides. He had walked the corner tonight and done the arithmetic of the block and come here because here was the place he had decided to end up.

The stage stayed empty.

He watched his hands and kept them still.