Hells Kitchen

About the gangs burning down your building. Your mother hit you when you started to tell me something. I won’t say anything to her.”
    He looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten the slap.
    “I heard Corcoran’s gang might’ve had something to do with it. You know ’bout his crew?”
    “How you know Corcoran?”
    “I don’t. I’m trying to find him.”
    “Man, that fucked-up, you doin’ that. His set, they some bad O.G.s.”
    Original gangstas. Senior members of the crew, who’d earned the status by killing someone.
    The young face grew agitated. “Nigger, spic—anybody—dis him, don’t matter who, Corcoran wax him. He see peoples he don’t like, bang, they ass be gone, you know what I’m saying?” Ismail closed his eyes and leaned his head against the fence, looking at the school. “Why you axing me all this shit?”
    Pellam asked, “Where’s his kickback? Corcoran’s?”
    Impressed that Pellam talked the talk, Ismail said, “I ain’t know were they hang, man.” He kept his eye on Pellam and did a few layup shots. “Yo. You got a daddy?”
    Pellam laughed. “A father? Sure.”
    The grin was gone. “I don’t got one.”
    Pellam reflected that a large percentage of black households were missing an adult male. Then felt ashamed this news bite was his immediate reaction to the boy’s comment.
    The boy continued, matter of factly, “Got hisself shot.”
    “Hey, I’m sorry, Ismail.”
    “There these cluckheads outside on the street, okay? Selling rock. My daddy go out and they just smoke him right there. I seen ’em do it. He didn’t do nothing. They just smoke him.”
    Pellam exhaled in shock, shook his head. “They find who did it?”
    “Who, the jakes?”
    “Jakes?”
    “You know, jakes. Joey. The man. The Man. The poeleece?”Ismail laughed with a frighteningly adult sound. “Jakes do shit, you know what I’m saying? My daddy gone. And my mama, she sleep a lot. She do copious shit. Where she be, the shelter I’m saying, there shit all over the place if you got the green. Rock mostly. She do lotsa rock. Men come by eyeballing her all the time. I don’t think I go back there. Where yo’ crib, Pellam?”
    A Winnebago, currently stored. A two-bedroom bungalow in L.A., currently sublet. A four-flight walk-up under short-term lease.
    “I don’t really have one,” he told the boy.
    “Check it out, you just like me! Damn! ”
    Pellam laughed at this then decided the parallels were unsettlingly accurate.
    John Pellam, single, former independent film director and itinerant location scout, sometimes missed family life. But then he’d laugh and try to picture himself attending a suburban grade school PTA parent-teacher night.
    “Where’re you going to go?” he asked the boy.
    “Dunno, cuz. Maybe get my own crew together. Ain’t no nigger crews ’round here. Get a kickback on Thirty-sixth. I’ma call it the Trey Six Ghosts. How that sound? ‘I from the Trey Sixes.’ Shit, that’ll fuck ’em up. Fuck up their minds good.”
    Pellam asked, “You have lunch?”
    “No. And I ain’t have breakfast neither,” Ismail said proudly. “You sit at the shelter, men come up and they, you know, be dissing you and touching you. They ax you come into the back with them. You know what I’m saying?”
    Pellam shook his head, gripped the strap of the camera bag. “Come on, I’m hungry. I saw this place up the street. Cuban. Let’s eat, you want to?”
    “Rice and beans. Yeah! An’ a Red Stripe!”
    “No beer,” Pellam said.
    The boy grabbed the bag from Pellam’s hand and slung it over his shoulder. He listed against what was probably half of his own weight.
    “I’ll get that,” Pellam said. “It’s heavy.”
    “Shit. Don’t weigh nothing.”
    “Yo, over there.”
    *   *   *
    “There?”
    “No, more back. Yeah. Yo. Back is what I’m saying. Back! ”
    Ismail was pointing out to Pellam where he thought the fire had started. “I smell smoke then see all these flames, cuz. Right here. An’ a big pop. Yeah.”
    “Pop.”
    “And I run inside th’apartment and I go, ‘Yo, all y’all gotta get out! There this fire!’ And my mama, she start to scream.”
    “You see anybody by the window before the fire?”
    “This old lady is all. She live upstairs, on the top floor.”
    “Anybody else?”
    “I dunno. People hanging. I dunno.”
    Pellam looked at what was left of the back door. It was metal and had two large locks on it. Would’ve been a tough job to