The words “fifteen years,” from the judge’s mouth, hit him with a monstrous force. “I haven’t killed no one!” And it was then, in the fury of the moment, with the click of the handcuffs, the cold metallic grips, that he began looking at life differently.
Later, he would tell the pastor: “I was playing a game I could never win, and I guess like a lot of dudes, I got caught up in a false reality. Up was down. Open was closed. No was yes.” And locked up he had plenty of time to think about it. All along, he had thought he was game tight but it took only one mistake: a telephone call to a DEA informant about a few white hot kilos rolling down from Chapel Hill, and it was game over, Cheyenne.
He hated prison. He didn’t like the staff reading his mail. Didn’t like watching his children, Risco and Jimi, grow up in photographs. It was torture not being there for his darling big sis Carmen Rae when she was dying of breast cancer. Didn’t like the food, lots of cream spinach and meatloaf. He missed his mother, and her home cooking, fried chicken and waffles, rice-spiked meatballs, and cornbread, lots of cornbread, all made with that selfless love and oblique tenderness.
“I was miserable; dudes all around me talking dumb-stuff. Repping their neighborhoods. Into nonsense. Living foul.”
Then he met Imam Sharif, and when Sharif told him he was blessed just to be alive—just to be alive, can you imagine?—his head, on backwards for way too long, exploded.
He didn’t know much about the Koran and he wasn’t that versed in Bible scripture, but he began tapping into his spiritual side and he would tell Rawlings, a big-hearted prison guard whom he’d befriended, that it was as infinite as the sky, and he would give thanks to the Lord every day. “Thanks, Most Holy Higher Power.”
So, even though he was surrounded by the gangster mentality, he started believing he could turn things around. He took his own measure, and it wasn’t pretty; he was 41 and had done jack shit with his life. After high school, the streets had swallowed him whole. But he could learn.
He stopped wasting time: lifting dumbbells, hanging out in the yard, tattooing. He dropped talking about rap stars and athletes, arguing for hours about their abilities, money, and women. He opened books: “I acquainted myself with dictionaries and thesauruses. I read dudes like Baldwin and Faulkner. Russians too, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.”
And when he wanted company, he’d play Scrabble or chess or Monopoly, games that made him think, presented challenges.
He started writing about prison. “I passed the scribblings around. A lot of dudes liked them, pastor. Not all, though. Some thought I was getting airs. They mocked me. Guards would join in: ‘The scribes here!’ ‘Badass scribe, be forewarned! He’s writing everything down! It’s just what the cat does!’ ‘The scribe’s going to get us all in trouble with that pen of his!’ ‘The scribe! The scribe! The scribe!’”
But he didn’t give a shit.
* * *
He had no intention of going back to do-or-die Bed Stuy. He knew he would just end up hanging out in projects, messing around with the wrong kinds of women, seeing old street cohorts, playing catch up, and risk going back to his “bad, madd ways.” So when his Uncle Marquez called about the job—Marquez’s ace Chaz J owned an electronics store in a suburban Philadelphia mall—he went for it.
“I was ready. Right after my release, I had gotten my Social Security card and driver’s license and paid my old parking tickets, and what made Philly so perfect was that, Risco’s and Jimi’s mothers, had moved to South Jersey, Marisol to Trenton and Gia to Camden.”
During the day, he’d help folks with cell phones, chargers, laptops, GPS devices, MP3 players, cameras, you name it, and at night he’d hop into his four-door Elantra and head to his newly adopted church, Grace Community in Norristown, or straight to his basement apartment with its bad lighting and stuffy air and write, mostly about the streets and his prison experiences. He wore his new life well, and for the first time he was flowing, really flowing. “I was saving money too, building a future, seeing my kids a few times a week, though like most they’re into wasting time, Angry Birds, PlayStation, Call of Duty, all that noise, but they’re good, and, thanking the Higher Power every day.”
* * *
Being mid-December, the mall was packed with shoppers, each one walking around in a fog of holiday distraction. The pastor was sitting on a bench in front of the Payless Shoes, eating a cinnamon bun and sipping morning tea, and it was as if he were invisible, but the white collar caught Cheyenne’s attention, and those sad, watery blue eyes. Cheyenne had wondered about the church—he’d seen it one day while walking out of Acme with bags of whole grain cereals and breads, the arms and legs of his new, all-healthy diet—so he wanted to talk to him, but he didn’t know what to say, a rare moment for him. After some hesitation, he sat down next to him. The pastor was red-nosed and white-haired. Cheyenne ended up telling him about Grace Community’s ministries and their Men on the Brink outreach program. The pastor nodded politely, finished off his pastry, wiped his little mouth with a paper napkin, and said, “You’re not from around here.”
And it was then that Cheyenne began telling him his story, the entire epic tragedy.
“Small world,” the pastor replied.
“Huh?”
“Small world!” Turns out the pastor’s friend, Father Brady, a North Carolina prison chaplain, had sung Sharif’s praises. “I didn’t want this assignment, Mr. Greene.”
“No?”
He shook his head and gave him a look that seemed to say, what are you kidding me? “I was promised something else. A parish in Boston. In the Back Bay. Not far from the Public Garden. This . . . well, I never envisioned such a thing.”
And Cheyenne understood. His prayer house, sandwiched between a Loft and a Baskin Robbins, the former space of a Banana Republic and Gap and Littman Jewelers, wasn’t exactly Westminster Abbey or St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Trying to cheer him up—he seemed low, somewhat destroyed—he replied, “My church is between a dry cleaner and hardware store.”
But it only made things worse. The pastor got up and said, “Good day, Mr. Greene,” and split.
* * *
Weeks later, Cheyenne was in the food court hitting on Sandra, Nathan’s Famous’s fly sauerkraut girl, and, after some initial back and forth about her not wanting to date anyone who worked in the same mall, she agreed to go out with him. With her two semesters of community college and her wide-eyed, I’ve-never-even-touched-a-drug past, she was like no other woman he’d been with. She was beautiful too—dark, hypnotic eyes, light hair, a fine body and the noblest of faces—and he was pumped, not just looking for action; he wanted love, so he knew he’d have to keep his shit together.
Sunday morning services were letting out, so, reeling with Sandra-induced excitement, he went inside the church. Pastor Walsh, in a dignified white vestment, was standing outside his office, talking with a loudmouthed man, who by his shopping bags, looked as if he’d spent enough money at the Foot Locker to dress a basketball team.
Fool, thought Cheyenne, as he quietly entered the pew and got down on his knees and gave thanks for the gift of Sandra Loretto Perez.
Afterwards, he sat and saw that Walsh’s sad, watery blues were on him. He waved, but Walsh just kept staring at him, the watery blues chocking the bejesus out of him. They seemed to be saying: What are you doing here, jack? Who invited you?
Dude doesn’t want to know me. He doesn’t want me near him or his prayer house. He got up and began making his way out, Walsh looking miserable, as he pretended with a nod to care about the loudmouthed Foot Locker fool. And then as a goodbye, Walsh shook Foot Locker’s hand and hurried after Cheyenne. “He’s going to help with our blood drive, Mr. Greene.”
Cheyenne stopped, his heavy-lidded, searching eyes taking in the stained glass, the brick walls, the imposing wood rafters. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Yes, yes. It’s quite all right, isn’t it?”
* * *
In the pastor’s office, Cheyenne sat his stocky frame in a chair as Walsh took off his vestment. “You caught me at a bad time that day. I’m sorry.”
This is a good time? Dude looks like he’s ready to jump out the window of a motherfuckin’ skyscraper.
Walsh had on a bulky sweater and wool slacks and he hung his vestment on a coat rack. “The stress of the holidays, I suppose.”
But Cheyenne wasn’t there for apologies. “There’s a lot of work to do here, you know.”
The pastor gave him a cowardly look of angry bewilderment, like Cheyenne had just thrown a 90 mile per hour fastball at his head. Then, his face growing solemn, he replied, “There sure is,” and he sat behind his book-cluttered desk and crossed his long, stick-like legs. Everything got quiet, and the pastor said, “We just don’t serve the mall but the entire township. In fact, I would say about half our congregation is separate and apart. Oh, there’s a dear boy over in Plymouth Meeting with a rare blood disorder. I was just visiting; he’s the cutest, sweetest . . . I hope this drive—”
“People in denial about the fact they’re going to die.”
“Huh?”
“Here,” Cheyenne said, and he pointed to the floor. “The shoppers. They’re suckers.” Walsh shifted in his seat and Cheyenne got the feeling that he was parting a curtain the pastor didn’t want to look behind. “Trying to distract themselves,” Cheyenne continued. “All the money tumbling into the wrong baskets. And they have the paper too these people. Let me tell you. Lots of it. Even the ones that don’t. They spend like they do.”
“I see.”
“Buying elaborate kicks, twenty dollar jeans for two hundred dollars, Rolexes, HDTVs, smartphones.”
“Dear me.”
“I call them dumbassphones!”
“You do?”
“None of this stuff was happening when I went in. Internet? Shit! I’m starting to feel not so good about myself. Hocking this crap. But I got my kids. So what do I do? I’ve got to keep it straight. But it’s a legal hustle. Slashing prices. Video games with AK-47 fire, blinding lights. One day sale nonsense.”
Walsh uncrossed his legs and for a while eyeballed him in way that made Cheyenne think that he’d once been locked into what he was saying but had forgotten all about it. As if the mall, the dark tunnel along the way of his ministry, with its four spacious levels and over one hundred shops and restaurants had blinded him to certain truths, and it occurred to him that in all of Walsh’s ego-created misery, his phony white-steeple visions, he’d been caught up in shadows, and so he gave him his best look of compassion as the pastor straightened himself, his face sadly drawn like he’d let the entire world down. “Yes. Cheyenne Greene. You’re absolutely right.”
* * *
No bullshit. Cheyenne and Walsh became somewhat of a team. Walsh had lots of animosity toward his hierarchy for, as he said, “sending me to our denomination’s Siberia,” so he had no qualms about setting off fireworks. From the pulpit, he started out slowly, simply raising questions. “All the goods that you buy, they have to be produced somewhere, right? Do we know where, dear parishioners? Do you, sir? That toy train that you bought your son, was it packaged by a nine year old in Vietnam, working a fourteen hour day? And what about those Christmas trees we had in our homes and that are now lying on curbs everywhere. Was our environment damaged?”
Eventually, he stepped up his game. “We’re measuring our lives by what we have and not who we are. Don’t go shopping after services. They should be paying you to wear those hideous logos. Go home! Be with your loved ones. It’s a nice day! Stop staring at your computer screens. Go for a walk in the woods!”
Pastor Blaster, Cheyenne thought. Man is game tight.
Word got out and shop owners started getting pissed. “He’s getting a little off topic, don’t you think?” they would say, or, “No one would even bother with his little church if it wasn’t for the anchor stores.” And any miniscule dip in revenue they blamed on him. In no time, rumors began taking shape: Walsh was stealing from the collection basket; getting way too friendly with a Macy’s white flower (blond and stacked); supporting three out-of-wedlock children. They said he had IRS problems, that while in the Army he’d been court-martialed for desertion. A few shop owners even wrote anonymous letters to his hierarchy.
Even still, Cheyenne supported him in whatever ways he could. In the electronics store, he’d caution people on what they were buying. “Do you really need a GPS? Shit, where you going, back to your wife and then to work in the morning? Come on! A state map is a couple of bucks. You got kids? Save for college. Save for retirement. Take your wife on that second honeymoon. I know the woman would agree with me!”
One day, Cheyenne’s coworker Kevin, a fat, fast-food junkie and food court fixture, overheard Cheyenne telling a 12 year old that he didn’t need a laptop, and he reported Cheyenne to Chaz J. Chaz J might have been Uncle Marquez’s ace but he sure wasn’t Cheyenne’s. In the stockroom, he waved sheets of paper in his nose and cried about sales being down and, if Cheyenne didn’t cut it out, he’d be down too.
Mornings, they’d meet in front of the Payless, Walsh with his cinnamon bun and tea, Cheyenne with his egg whites on whole grain. They’d talk about creating an awareness pamphlet and, to insulate themselves, recruit people with no connection to the mall to hand it out in the parking lot. All the while, shop owners threw them hard stares that threatened to put them in strangleholds.
Amid the rising tension, they grew close. Walsh even came to Grace Community and, with great confidence and humility, got up on the altar and, with a grateful Minister Pratt looking on, preached cooperation and understanding among the faiths and with the choir sang a bone-chilling rendition of “Almighty One.” Afterwards, in the basement he helped some bonnet-wearing ladies make coffee for the pancake breakfast.
Returning the favor, Cheyenne spoke from the Church on the Mall’s pulpit. Quite honored but a little nervous, he told the congregation, many of whom he knew or at least knew by face, straight up about his sorry-ass past. “I made some bad decisions, terrible really, and I seriously regret them. In the 11th grade, I was getting As and Bs, but to gain the acceptance of my peers, I dropped out. And for what?! To ride dirty across state lines!” He told them how his mother, with no help from his father, had busted her hump raising him and Carmen Rae, giving them what they needed, love and support, and not what they wanted, bling-bling and digs, and how when she came to visit him in the federal prison he could do nothing but watch through the plexiglass as she cried her eyes out.
Word got back to Chaz J. “Now everyone knows you’re an ex-con.”
“So?”
“How the hell am I going to sell anything?!”
And it was then Cheyenne figured his days were numbered.
* * *
“I feel a little guilty, Pastor Blaster,” Cheyenne said to Walsh one day in his office. “You’ve been getting heat. I’ve been hearing it.” Cheyenne buried his round face in his hands. “We’re outnumbered. Maybe this was wrong.”
“No,” he replied, straightening his vestment. “Have faith.” Then his cheeks reddened. “They’ve offered me a transfer.” He hung his head. “It’s what I wanted, right?”
“Yeah, sure, pastor.”
“I suspect it’s the complaints. I haven’t toned it down. Not one bit.”
“Amen.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“Thank you, Most Holy Higher Power.”
“A church in Chicago . . .”
“I’m going to miss you, pastor.”
“The funny thing is I just don’t know anymore.”
* * *
One day, Cheyenne was standing outside the multiplex, thinking about what flick he’d take his Sandra Loretto to see, when she came upon him all teary-eyed and muttering about how they would have to turn the sound down on their thing. At first, he thought she just wanted to chill for a while, and he’d have been okay with that, but he soon learned she’d rearranged the furniture on him and the fact that he was a felon was now in the center of their room.
She had dreams. She saw herself working in a cubicle down at One Liberty Place, surrounded by wire-rimmed glasses and custom-made Italian suits, and his walk-on-the-wild-side, his entrepreneurship, his little foray—she had a lot of playful euphemisms for his hustling—was, if she wasn’t careful, going to cut the wings off them.
He was dazed, stunned. Their love had only just been born—they had gone to a high-end Trinidad restaurant on Frankford Avenue and later had shared a mind-altering kiss on a windy South Street—but unbeknownst to him it had suffered a death and, for a while, he wandered in circles, lost. At one point, he thought he heard her voice, “We’re still friends!” and the hollow sound of it shook his soul. Finally, forgetting his new, all-healthy diet, he went into Auntie Anne’s and bought a cherry Coke and soft pretzel and sat on a bench outside Dick’s Sporting Goods and wondered whether people were really as unforgiving as they seemed.
* * *
It was a day like any other; he was price tagging some new modems, when the guy walked in, his pale face obscured by a prep school hoodie. He said he was only browsing, customer code for, Get the fuck away from me. Like every other teen, he had on white headphones. Shit, thought Cheyenne, if aliens landed, they’d think those strings were parts to a necessary life support system. Cheyenne got out of his way—he didn’t smell so good, like he’d been scaling fish—and continued his tagging; a few minutes later, an old, powder-faced woman with arms overburdened with electronics shouted, “Did you see that?!”
I didn’t see shit, grandma.
“He stole a phone! He took it and ran!”
“Punk!”
It was one of those cheap pay-as-you-go phones. Pushers use them because not even the FBI can trace them. If Cheyenne had had one back-in-the-day, he’d either still be out on the streets or dead, probably dead.
Anyhow, Cheyenne ran out the store and saw punk; he was already halfway to the exit near the American Eagle Outfitters. His immediate reaction was to run after him, but not with his prison knees. Dude can fly, he thought. Made Ricky Henderson in his prime look second-rate.
He wandered back inside. The powder-faced lady looked like she’d just witnessed an execution-style, triple murder. He laughed and told her to stop bugging out, it wasn’t a big deal, a youthful indiscretion, and that on his break, armed with video surveillance, he’d go to loss prevention and fill out a report. “We’ll get him! Don’t worry!”
But he didn’t bother. He just didn’t care enough. It was small time and besides there were more important things. He wanted to see Pastor Blaster. He would be making his should-I-haul-ass-to-Chicago decision any day now.
The church was dimly lit and, except for Frank from J.C. Penney linens and Carol from Abercrombie & Fitch, empty. After saying his prayers, he walked toward the office. The door was locked so he banged. “Anyone home! Pastor Blaster!” He heard some whispering and then the knob turned. Alls he could see were the sad, watery blues.
“Is everything okay?” Cheyenne asked.
“I can’t talk.”
He sounded distressed.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I’m writing a sermon.”
Growing up in the streets, he had to figure out how to read people early, so acting on pure instinct, he forced open the door, and, well, there was fish-stinking, prep school punk standing in the corner.
He had a box cutter in his hand, bulging shopping bags at his feet. He’d probably swiped the blade from Sears hardware, and he started waving it as a warning for Cheyenne to stay away. But unlike Walsh who at this point looked faithless, like the hour of judgment had swept in mid-sin, Cheyenne wasn’t one bit worried. In fact, he had to do everything he could to keep himself from belly laughing.
“I gave him all our money,” the pastor said.
“Now why the hell did you do that?!” Cheyenne said, stepping forward.
“Back off,” punk said, his bloodshot eyes getting steely in a lame effort to get Cheyenne believing he’d use the blade. “I want sanctuary!”
“Huh?”
“The police are outside,” the pastor said.
“Where?” Cheyenne asked.
“By the Hallmark. That’s why he ran in here.”
And though it’d been a long time since anyone had pulled anything on him—and he’d had lots of shit pulled on him: sawed-off shotguns, AK-47s, AR-15s, semi-automatics, machetes, shanks—he still knew the drill. He walked over to punk and, with his right hand, slapped the inside of his wrist and then with his left, the back of his hand, and the blade fell to the floor.
The pastor gasped and Cheyenne threw punk down. There was no flesh on him, so with great ease he put him in a hold. He was on something, thought Cheyenne, hydrocodone, heroin, methamphetamines, maybe all of them, and most likely selling what he shoplifted to pay the piper.
“I’m going to get the police!” the pastor cried, picking up the box cutter.
Wack move, thought Cheyenne, but in a situation like this did he expect anything else from Blaster?
“Now don’t go making matters worse,” he cautioned.
“I don’t want anymore violence, Cheyenne!”
He lifted punk off the ground, pulled out his wallet, and threw him in a chair.
“You need help!” Cheyenne said and, from punk’s wallet, he pulled out his driver’s license. “Your pupils are dilated.”
“No!”
“What are you on?!” Cheyenne slapped his face. “Tell me!”
“Leave me alone!”
From his license, he got his name, Alex Wallace, and his address. There was a phone on the pastor’s desk and he lifted the receiver. “Your choice, punk! Your parents or the police?!”
“Please!”
Punk was scared now and started crying and to Cheyenne’s surprise the helplessness in his eyes moved him. Suddenly, punk was no longer punk; he was kid, a boy, really; a sobbing one. No more than 17. Around the same age he was when he’d fallen into the cesspool. And with the speed of light his entire bad, madd career started unfolding in his head, every twisted scene, playing out in fast forward, beginning with him and his home skillet Tibby standing on the corner of Bedford and Quincy, hustling crack; he and Tibby splitting proceeds in seedy hotels, stabbing a guy in the eye at a roller rink, becoming 25 cohorts deep, alliances with suckers they didn’t even know, spreading out over four cities, down south, the Carolinas, women and more women, freaks, greater heights, five star hotels and restaurants. Until the law bitch-slapped them down.
And then an inferno of guilt started rising inside him, as Walsh in soft tones explained to the boy that he needed help. Though Cheyenne was long out of the game, the boy in that moment became the symbol of his legacy, his perverted gift to the world, and he suddenly understood why so many would never forgive him.
He eventually gave them his parents’ number. They lived in Bryn Mawr, and Cheyenne called. “What have you done with Alex?!” the mother cried. Then the father got on the line. “Are you holding my son for ransom?!”
Cheyenne put Walsh on the horn, and with tact and conviction he convinced them to come down. By the time they arrived, middle-aged and manicured, the police had left. It was late; night had moved in, the father, a dark-haired Brooks-Brothers type, the mother, blond and still alluring, the kind of waning flower Cheyenne might rightly see in the Victoria’s Secret. The pastor recommended Grace Community’s drug and alcohol program. “In that neighborhood!” cried the mother. He then suggested a program elsewhere. “We don’t want a record of this,” the father replied. Then he offered spiritual assistance but they weren’t interested. “Not to be rude, Reverend, but we didn’t come here to be converted.” So the way Cheyenne saw it, it would be up to the boy to pull things together, and he wasn’t holding out much hope of that.
When they left, Cheyenne said to the pastor, “Maybe we should have just gotten the police.”
Walsh was behind his desk and he picked up a pen and smiled and said, “I don’t want to say I told you so.”
Cheyenne pulled a leather jacket out of one of the boy’s shopping bags. “You were right.”
Walsh sighed and said, “I’m not so sure.”
He began rummaging through the bag; shoes, belts, watches. “You were scared out of your mind, pastor.”
“Oh,” and blushing he waved him off. “Tomorrow, I’ll tell security I found the stuff outside.”
“Keeping it on the down-low, huh?”
“I really was writing a sermon,” and he began scribbling on a pad, and it was then, by the aura around him, all defiance and righteousness, that he knew the pastor wasn’t going anywhere. His new home skillet and he were right where they belonged, on the corner of Love and Truth, hustling vials of dignity, all for the cost of a little common sense, and it didn’t matter if anyone wanted them or not. It was all good.
He tried on the leather. It was too small. Peering up from his pad, Walsh said, “That looks good on you.” Walsh went back to writing and Cheyenne took off the jacket and stuffed it back inside the bag. “I’ll close the door on the way out,” he said.
“No, keep it open, Cheyenne.”
“And good night.”
THE END
—
P. J. Gannon is a writer in New York City. His work has appeared in The Alembic, Slow Trains, Amarillo Bay Literary Magazine and other literary journals. John Cheever, T. C. Boyle, and Ha Jin are among his favorite writers.