The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace Read online

  Jackie wanted to move, particularly once Rob grew old enough to engage in arguments himself, something he did with particular tenacity. She experienced a spiritual erosion when watching her four-year-old scrap his way indignantly through an argument with an equally indignant adult, and do so with increasing tactical skill. The aggravated environment was no place to nurture qualities like reason and sensitivity. She had the money to move, barely, but nowhere comfortable and nowhere permanent. Renting an apartment in East Orange, the only neighborhood she could afford, was a massive and insecure endeavor. First came the actual search, which meant riding unfamiliar bus lines through neighborhoods that changed from livable to dangerous to mortally dangerous quickly and with no defined boundaries between—a street sign, a dogwood tree, an unthreatening housefront containing a drug den within. Then came the taut negotiations with landlords who were always ultraskeptical because they’d been had so many times before, the rules and restrictions and deposit she’d never see again regardless. Then came the maintenance issues, the expenses of furniture and fixes, the fighting neighbors, the cronies of prior tenants knocking on the door in the middle of the night. And above all, the constant wondering—the fear—of her job going away. Jackie had been through it all a few times before and each attempt had ended with her back home.

  And now Rob was about to turn five. She was thinking about elementary school, determined to send her son to a private school. That cost money—not much, but “not much” was relative. She knew that the security required to afford tuition would be a stretch to maintain anywhere else except on Chapman Street.

  Skeet tried to make the extraction easier for her by renting an apartment on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from the house on Pierson. His plan was to conduct his business from the apartment and leave the house free and safe for his family. Jackie remained reluctant. She knew that in the deeply layered world of drugs, the nexus of commerce was the person, not the place. Too, in the very possible event that Skeet was arrested and sentenced to a few months or years in jail, she had no interest in being knotted to any property bearing his name.

  “Look at me,” he told her. “I’m thirty-eight years old. Nothing’s ever happened to me, and nothing’s ever going to. I’m cool.” And Skeet was cool about his involvement with the drug trade, as far as she could see.

  Jackie didn’t like to talk about or even reference obliquely the drugs that Skeet sold. She had never gravitated toward the dealers in high school or the years after, the way many women around her had, enticed by the gifts of coats and jewelry, the bravado and relentless charm, the respect these men commanded from their peers. However, Skeet wasn’t like the other dealers. He never flaunted the money he made—which didn’t seem like all that much, just enough to even out the math between work paying x and life costing y. He drove a boxy Volvo that had constant problems. He had jobs during the day—nothing permanent, but there was always something; the man wasn’t lazy. His friends were for the most part people from childhood, decent-seeming men who’d stayed around and paid attention to their mothers if not always their children. He coached a youth basketball team. He was always casual, never anxious. Most important to him in terms of safety, he didn’t try to run with or compete against the younger generation of hustlers, with their codes and protocols always evolving toward brutality. “I got too much respect for human life to mess with all them young ’uns,” he assured her. “I stay the hell out of their way.” Skeet was loud and sometimes arrogant about his own intelligence and prospects, but he was quiet and conservative about drugs.

  What made Jackie wary was the huge extent to which Rob’s father was known. To her, it seemed as though everyone living in the three square miles of East Orange—all fifty thousand people—knew Skeet Douglas. Wherever they went out, she heard the constant hoots and waves and incantations of “You call me now!” He told her that this was just the kind of person he was—friendly, with a lot of friends. Jackie knew that friends and friendliness weren’t always directly related. Skeet had a huge smile, a beautiful smile, and he bent the truth very well from behind it.

  She didn’t have to make a final decision on his offer, because the house on Pierson Street burned down. She never found out why. Skeet hadn’t called her for a week—rare even for him. She needed to figure out the day-care pickup situation for the month to come, and so she went to the Pierson Street house after work, ready for a fight. The smell of combusted carbon still hung in the air a week after the fire. Skeet was sitting on the front step, hunched over, talking to an elderly acquaintance from the block, his expression one she’d rarely seen on him before: resigned, tired, damned. The house was completely gutted, just an assortment of heavy beams scarred black and ashy objects that had once been furniture. He muttered something about faulty wiring, and she got out of his way.

  And the house on Pierson Street just stayed like that, a torched shell, while Skeet moved into his rented apartment on Chestnut Street but continued to pay the property taxes on the now-useless plot of land.

  OAKDALE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL was on Lincoln Avenue, just a few blocks west. Redbrick, two stories, with a footprint in the shape of the Chevrolet logo, the local public school looked like a nice enough place to send a six-year-old. When Jackie’s younger siblings had gone there, it had been. When Rob began kindergarten, it was no longer. The school’s decline wasn’t immediately evident. The interiors were generally well maintained, the curriculum in keeping with federal guidelines, the other kids more or less what they were: kids, just barely past toddlerhood. Jackie would walk Rob there and watch him join the stream of children his age going inside with backpacks and lunches, usually turning at the door to wave. But she observed something less tangible in the expressions and movements of the teachers, the laissez-faire attitudes of fellow parents. Most of these children, Jackie felt, were being sent here to be watched for a few hours, not to be taught.

  She had gently floated the idea of private school past her parents, and they’d both shaken their heads. He’s six, they told her. He’s not reading Shakespeare. He’s not learning cutting-edge chemistry. Kindergarten was about being with people his age and maybe picking up some simple letters and arithmetic. Paying significant money for an elementary education was silly, considering what she earned. They told her to spend her income on feeding, clothing, and sheltering him. Education was what they all paid taxes for—a whole lot of taxes in this state.

  Still, she talked to Skeet about it. Catholic schools, the cheapest of the private options, generally cost $200 a month. If they split it, then Jackie would be paying only a quarter of her own salary toward education: manageable if not ideal. Skeet looked at her and said she was being “uppity.” Though he was speaking off-the-cuff, the word carried weight. Where they lived, being known by this label meant that you thought you were better than everyone else around you, that you deserved more, and that—given the opportunity—you would leave this place behind without a second thought. There was shame in thinking like that. Jackie didn’t understand what the term had to do with her wanting the best education they could afford for their son, but Skeet had deployed it at just the right moment to make her second-guess.

  So Rob went to Oakdale, where by Skeet’s reckoning he would learn how to stop being a mama’s boy and become a man respected, listened to, and followed by other men. This was more important than humanities and sciences.

  The transition to school brought another transition—Skeet began buying Rob things, mostly clothes and music. Jackie resented these purchases heavily, especially coming from a man who refused to pay $100 a month for school, but she stayed quiet about it, which was hard for her to do. The rap group N.W.A. was the worst, with songs like “One Less Bitch” and “Fuck tha Police” that contained not even a nod toward grammatical consistency let alone morality. Skeet worked out in a boxing gym on Halsted Street a few times a week, and a punching dummy soon appeared in the corner of the room she still shared with the boy, a
bottom-heavy rubber bowling pin featuring a cartoon white man with a handlebar mustache that righted itself regardless of the force with which it was knocked over. Like a salty manager, Skeet worked with the boy intensely. He taught Rob to swing his arms laterally from wide angles, so that a fist to the temple could be followed by an elbow to the chin.

  “Elbows, elbows, elbows,” he would chant. “No one ever sees them coming.”

  It was okay, Jackie told herself in spite of all the ragging she’d endured for spoiling the boy herself. It was okay because there was no denying, or interfering with, the degree to which the son worshipped the father, a kind of worship she hadn’t anticipated. Skeet wasn’t the type to understand an infant or toddler; he didn’t possess the physical and emotional patience required by the very young. As such, the rhythm of Rob’s first four years had been mother heavy, with Skeet present to a degree slightly beyond what might be expected. But all of a sudden, to Skeet, the child became a human being who could process situations, who formed opinions about people, who had muscles growing beneath the skin of his chest and back and arms. He looked like his father, too, with the overhang of his brow giving his eyes a hard, caged expression even at rest.

  Whenever his father was due to pick him up, Rob waited in the parlor just to the right of the front door. Jackie didn’t let him peer out of the glass, which was always shrouded by three layers of curtains to preclude even a sliver of visibility from the street. All the windows on Chapman Street were treated like this to prevent any canvassing by potential burglars; the crack addicts who squatted in the abandoned apartments on Chapman and Center would take anything. But the moment Skeet’s Volvo choked around the corner and his footsteps shook the front porch, Rob stood, beamed, and his breaths grew short with anticipation. When his father appeared in the doorframe, Rob would run and drive his shoulders into the powerful man’s thighs. Then Skeet would bend over and grab the boy’s legs and somersault him upward until Rob was over his shoulders, arms around his neck, and the boy would piggyback on his father upstairs. Then they’d work the punching bag for a half hour, and Skeet would take him out around town. When Jackie got her son back in the evenings—always before nightfall, a steadfast rule—Rob would be talking about the four or five people they’d gone to visit. He gave little in the way of details, not because he couldn’t remember but because he seemed to relish these adventures, these characters, shared only with his father. The boy kept them close to the vest, the hours he spent with other men.

  ONE WEEKDAY MORNING in the spring of his first school year, Rob wouldn’t get out of bed. He moaned about an aching stomach. He had no temperature, so Jackie was skeptical. But she was also tired and late for work, so she made sure Frances would be around to watch him.

  As Jackie opened the front door to leave, she heard him call. Reluctantly, she went upstairs.

  “What?” she asked. “You want soup?”

  “Your son’s sick and you’re going to work?” he asked, the question an accusation.

  “I don’t get personal days.”

  “Whatever,” he mumbled and turned away from her.

  She stayed home. As the day progressed, he began writhing and crying, the hardness cultivated under his father’s watch slowly crumbling beneath the physical pain. Though Frances told her she was making a fuss over a faker and thus encouraging these manipulations, Jackie took him to the hospital in the late afternoon. After three hours in the ER waiting room—standard, even though she was employed there—she finally harassed their way into an examination room.

  His appendix was swelling fast. Late that night, it was removed. The doctor said it could have ruptured at any moment, and Jackie might have saved her son’s life that day by not doubting him.

  JACKIE KNEW SKEET better than he knew himself. And so she knew that no matter how authentically he presented himself as the tough guy—acidly cutting down the concept of private school, instructing the boy on dirty lyrics and dirtier fistfight tricks, driving Rob around East Orange while giving coded shout-outs to the hustlers—Skeet valued intelligence above all, and the early manifestations of Rob’s intellect (picture books notwithstanding) excited him truly. The image became regular and nourishing: father and son crouched over second-grade homework assignments splayed across the coffee table, going back and forth over simple sentence structure and arithmetic. The same intensity with which Skeet could battle her he brought to that coffee table three or four evenings a week.

  Skeet harped on particulars that Jackie, in her own childhood, had never even considered: penmanship, consistency of format, and above all, the importance of memory. With an old wisdom in his attention to detail, Skeet would drill Rob heavily on vocabulary, definitions, states and capitals, until the facts became embedded in the cerebral circuitry. She could not believe how patient and tireless they could be, the father and the son, both with the work and one another. She would pretend to be cleaning in an adjacent space, but really she’d watch Skeet as he watched Rob set his lips and point his eyes upward to ponder some elusive connection. And their son—sometimes prompted but usually not—would invariably make that connection. Skeet would grin and squeeze the back of the boy’s neck in his hand, then look at the subsequent entry to make sure the handwriting was clean. These quiet, unassuming moments, embedded as they were within her harried days, gave her not only pride but also a simple beauty she’d always sought but never known—made more powerful by the fact that she participated only as an observer. Something positive could happen without her wrangling it through sheer force of will, and it could be shared within the trinity of mother, father, and son.

  IN THE SHADED rear compartments of her mind, Jackie had always expected the call to come in the middle of the night, when it would jar her awake from the pleasant seclusion of dreaming.

  When the call did come, on August 9, 1987, she was at work, just before the lunch surge on a Sunday. Frances told her anxiously that the police were looking for Skeet. They hadn’t said why.

  “What’d you tell them?” Jackie asked.

  “I said I don’t know where he lives or anything about that man.”

  Jackie asked her to pick up Rob from summer camp at Branch Brook Park, since Skeet now wouldn’t be able to.

  She kept working, eyes and ears in a heightened state of alertness as she waited for men in uniforms to arrive and pull her aside in front of her coworkers. She thought mainly of what excuse she could give to her boss. After that, she thought about money and time. One of the maintenance staff had a record for dealing; it was all she could do not to ask him about the particulars of a man’s being arrested for selling drugs. How much was bail? How much was a lawyer? What was the average sentence? But the police never came, nor did they call. In this moment, more than any other that had come before, she was thankful for the domestic arrangement she’d wrought. Because she didn’t share Skeet’s name or address, she would be free to manage the consequences this event would have on her and her son’s future.

  She went home that evening and assumed Skeet’s role with homework; the summer camp assigned short exercises to keep the children busy. She was relieved that Rob, who had turned seven two months earlier, didn’t ask her why. Jackie was less patient than Skeet when it came to addition and subtraction problems and subject-predicate structure. She did her best, though, and only when Rob fell asleep did she start calling around, starting with Carl.

  “When they find him, how long’s he going to be away for?” she asked.

  “They found him already. He was at Irving’s house.”

  “How long? How long for dealing?”

  Carl paused, the silence a reply. Then he told her that Skeet hadn’t been arrested for drugs. He’d been arrested for murder. Two, in fact—both young women, neighbors of his in that apartment building on Chestnut Street.

  Chapter 2

  FIVE DAYS AFTER Skeet’s arrest and three days after his arraignment hearing, Jac
kie went to Essex County Jail for the first time. She went alone. The jail was a two-story, blue-and-white modular structure made of cinder blocks, surrounded by two concentric rectangles of ten-foot-high chain-link fences. Sandwiched between the Passaic River and the New Jersey Turnpike, the atmosphere smelled of toxic, unfamiliar elements due to the General Chemical plant directly across Doremus Avenue, a towering cistern of polyaluminum hydroxychloride used in wastewater treatment.

  Passing through checkpoint after checkpoint—and asked at each what her relationship was to the prisoner, to which she replied succinctly, “He’s my son’s father”—she felt herself racking up distance from the outside world. She knew only as much as Carl did, which was hardly anything. Her lone hope, aside from the whole situation turning out to be a wrong place–wrong time misunderstanding, was that it would be resolved quickly. She knew that this impulse was selfish; she was thinking about the adjustments she’d have to make to get on with her life. She still hadn’t told Rob. That a week had passed without her son seeing his father was uncommon but not truly strange. The boy hadn’t asked, but she knew he was attuned to the anxiety coursing through the house on Chapman Street; she knew that the question was coming.

  A guard escorted her down a hallway, past the reception room for prisoners held here on lesser offenses, who were allowed to sit in open air across a table from their friends and family. Jackie was led to a narrow room with concrete walls, tight cubicles, low stools, guards stationed on either side of the Plexiglas partitions. Knowing that her son would ultimately come here to visit, she’d hoped the place would be less than completely grim. It wasn’t. A buzzer sounded, the steel-reinforced door across from her opened, and Skeet entered wearing bright orange, with his wrists manacled together and palms facing toward her.