They walked northwest through Manor Park, across the green of Fort Slocum, and soon were up on Georgia Avenue, which many thought of as Main Street, D.C. It was the longest road in the District and had always been the primary northern thoroughfare into Washington, going back to when it was called the 7th Street Pike. All types of businesses lined the strip, and folks moved about the sidewalks day and night. The Avenue was always alive.
The road was white concrete and etched with streetcar tracks. Wood platforms, where riders had once waited to board streetcars, were still up in spots, but the D.C. Transit buses were now the main form of public transportation. A few steel troughs, used to water the horses that had pulled the carts of the junkmen and fruit and vegetable vendors, remained on the Avenue, but in short order all of it would be going the way of those mobile merchants. It was said that the street would soon be paved in asphalt and the tracks, platforms, and troughs would disappear.
Billy’s neighborhood, Brightwood, was mostly white, working- and middle-class, and heavily ethnic: Greeks, Italians, Irish Catholics, and all varieties of Jew. The families had moved from Petworth, 7th Street, Columbia Heights, the H Street corridor in Northeast, and Chinatown, working their way north as they began to make more money in the prosperous years following World War II. They were seeking nicer housing, yards for their children, and driveways for their cars. Also, they were moving away from the colored, whose numbers and visibility had rapidly increased citywide in the wake of reurbanization and forced desegregation.
But even this would be a temporary move. Blockbuster real estate agents in Brightwood had begun moving colored families into white streets with the intention of scaring residents into selling their houses on the cheap. The next stop for upper-Northwest, east-of-the-park whites would be the suburbs of Maryland. No one knew that the events of the next nine years would hasten that final move, though there was a feeling that some sort of change was coming and that it would have to come, an unspoken sense of the inevitable. Still, some denied it as strongly as they denied death.
Derek lived in Park View, south of Petworth, now mostly colored and some working-class whites. He attended Backus Junior High and would go on to Roosevelt High School. Billy went to Paul Junior High and was destined for Coolidge High, which had some coloreds, most of whom were athletes. Many Coolidge kids would go on to college; far fewer from Roosevelt would. Roosevelt had gangs; Coolidge had fraternities. Derek and Billy lived a few short miles apart, but the differences in their lives and prospects were striking.
They walked the east side of Georgia’s 6200 block, passing the open door of the Arrow cleaners, a business that had been in place since 1929, owned and operated by Bill Caludis. They stopped in to say hey to Caludis’s son, Billy, whom Billy Georgelakos knew from church. On the corner sat Clark’s Men’s Shop, near Marinoff-Pritt and Katz, the Jewish market, where several of the butchers had camp numbers tattooed on their forearms. Nearby was the Sheridan Theater, which was running Decision at Sundown, another Randolph Scott. Derek had seen it with his dad.
They crossed to the other side of Georgia. They walked by Vince’s Agnes Flower Shop, where Billy paused to say a few words with a cute young clerk named Margie, and the Sheridan Waffle Shop, also known as John’s Lunch, a diner owned by John Deoudes. Then it was a watering hole called Sue’s 6210, a Chinese laundry, a barbershop, and on the corner another beer garden, the 6200. “Stagger Lee” was playing on the house juke, its rhythms coming through the 6200’s open door.
On the sidewalk outside the bar, three young white teenagers were alternately talking, smoking cigarettes, and running combs through their hair. One of them was ribbing another, asking if his girlfriend had given him his shiner and swollen face. “Nah,” said the kid with the black eye, “I got jumped by a buncha niggers down at Griffith Stadium,” adding that he was going to be looking for them and “some get-back.” The group quieted as Derek and Billy passed. There were no words spoken, no hard stares, and no trouble. Derek looking at the weak, all-mouth boy and thinking, Prob’ly wasn’t no “buncha niggers” about it, only had to be one.
At the corner of Georgia and Rittenhouse, Billy pointed excitedly at a man wearing a brimmed hat, crossing the street and heading east. With him was a young woman whose face they couldn’t see but whose backside moved in a pleasing way.
“That’s Bo Diddley,” said Billy.
“Thought he lived over on Rhode Island Avenue.”
“That’s what everyone says. But we all been seein’ him around here lately. They say he’s got a spot down there on Rittenhouse.”
“Bo Diddley’s a gunslinger,” said Derek, a warmth rising in his thighs as he checked out the fill of the woman’s skirt.
They walked south to Quackenbos and cut across the lot of the Nativity School, a Catholic convent that housed a nice gymnasium. The nuns there were forever chasing Billy and his friends from the gym. Beyond the lot was Fort Stevens, where Confederate forces had been repelled by the guns and musketry of Union soldiers in July of 1864. The fort had been recreated and preserved, but few tourists now visited the site. The grounds mainly served as a playing field for the neighborhood boys.
“Ain’t nobody up here,” said Derek, looking across the weedy field, the American flag flying on a white mast throwing a wavy shadow on the lawn.
“I’m gonna pick some porichia for my mom,” said Billy.
“Say what?”
Derek and Billy went up a steep grade to its crest, where several cannons sat spaced in a row. The grade dropped to a deep gully that ran along the northern line of the fort. Beside one of the cannons grew patches of spindly plants with hard stems. Billy pulled a few of the plants and shook the dirt off the roots.
“Thought your mama liked them dandelion weeds.”
“That’s rodichia. These here are good, too. You gotta get ’em before they flower, though, ’cause then they’re too bitter. Let’s go give ’em to her and get something to drink.”
Billy lived in a slate-roofed, copper-guttered brick colonial on the 1300 block of Somerset, a few blocks west of the park. In contrast with the row houses of Park View and Petworth, the houses here were detached, with flat, well-tended front lawns. The streets were heavy with Italians and Greeks. The Deoudes family lived on Somerset, as did the Vondas family, and up on Underwood lived a wiry kid named Bobby Boukas, whose parents owned a flower shop. All were members of Billy’s church, St. Sophia. On Tuckerman stood the house where midget actor Johnny Puleo, who had played in the Lancaster-Curtis circus picture, Trapeze, stayed for much of the year. Puleo drove a customized Dodge with wood blocks fitted to the gas and brake pedals.
On the way to the Georgelakos house, Derek stopped to pet a muscular tan boxer who was usually chained outside the front of the Deoudes residence. The dog’s name was Greco. Greco sometimes walked with the police at night on their foot patrols and was known to be quick, loyal, and tough.
Derek got down on his haunches and let Greco smell his hand. The dog pushed his muzzle into Derek’s fingers, and Derek patted his belly and rubbed behind his ears.
“Crazy,” said Billy.
“What you mean?”
“Usually he rises up and shows his teeth.”
“To colored boys, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“He likes me.” Derek’s eyes softened as he admired the dog. “One day, I’ma get me one just like him, too.”
Table of Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
A Preview of Hard Revolution
May
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
August
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
By George Pelecanos
Praise for George Pelecanos’s Soul Circus
Copyright
About the author
George Pelecanos is the author of several highly praised and bestselling novels, including, most recently, The Night Gardener, The Turnaround, and The Way Home. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, and the recipient of numerous writing awards. He was a producer and an Emmy-nominated writer for The Wire and currently writes for the acclaimed HBO series Treme.
By George Pelecanos
The Way Home
The Turnaround
The Night Gardener
Drama City
Hard Revolution
Soul Circus
Hell to Pay
Right as Rain
The Sweet Forever
Shame the Devil
King Suckerman
The Big Blowdown
Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go
Shoedog
Nick’s Trip
A Firing Offense
Praise for George Pelecanos’s
SOUL CIRCUS
“Clear any breakfast meetings off your calendar—you’re gonna be up late reading this one.”
—Jonathan Miles, Men’s Journal
“Soul Circus serves up what George Pelecanos’s fans have come to expect, and once again, the effect is sharp and satisfying: a richly textured tapestry, a quirky plot, a large, multicolored cast of lawbreakers, law enforcers, misfits, malfeasants, and innocent bystanders…. The novels of Pelecanos are passionate, vital, and vigorously demotic. If they have sense, historians will plumb them for evidence of how men and women lived, feared, and coped in the war zones of everyday life: not only when they preyed on each other, but when they talked, loved, listened to music, or just wasted time.”
—Eugen Weber, Los Angeles Times
“In the realm of crime noir, few contemporary writers connect criminal acts and the society that spawns them as efficiently as Pelecanos. His writing in his eleventh novel is as polished and as exquisitely honed as the guns that wreak havoc in the neighborhoods where his novels are set. You’ll want to reread scenes of violence for the beauty of the language and the cinematic quality that pushes readers to envision urban evil in all its forms.”
—Carol Memmott, USA Today
“George P. Pelecanos covers Washington, D.C., like a police-beat reporter. He attends trials, rides with cops, burns shoe leather, keeps his ears open…. Soul Circus may be his most moving venture yet.”
“Pelecanos’s most satisfying Derek Strange novel.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Last year Pelecanos hit the bestseller list for the first time with the critically lauded Hell to Pay. His latest, Soul Circus, is a worthy successor, because Pelecanos has the first-rate writer’s ability to entertain you and break your heart on the same page. His storytelling keeps you turning pages to determine the guilt or innocence of a drug lord on death row…. Derek Strange is one of the realest creations in contemporary fiction, whether he’s solving a crime or worrying about getting a haircut. Just for the record, he’s an admirable guy too. The only unbelievable thing about this powerfully affecting character is the notion that Pelecanos made him up.”
—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
“Like Walt Whitman in ‘Song of Myself,’ Pelecanos plays ‘not marches for accepted victors only’; he also plays ‘marches for conquer’d and slain persons.’ And what eloquent literary ‘marches’ they are, swelling with the music of Philly soul, rap, the soundtracks from spaghetti Westerns, and a bit of Springsteen…. Pelecanos writes with intelligence and complexity, as well as with a sober recognition of the evil at large in the world. His latest novel, Soul Circus, may be his best yet—but I’ve been declaring that clichéd judgment about a lot of his novels ever since I’ve been reading him…. Soul Circus grapples with some of the Big Questions, along with the relatively mundane ones that Strange and Quinn are hired to investigate. The American racial divide, the existence of God (and, especially, a God that would allow harm to children), the meaning and transience of life—they’re all on the board here. What’s so brilliant about Soul Circus, and Pelecanos’s novels in general, is that he raises these questions not only in meditative passages but also in scenes of the rawest violence.”
—Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post
“Pelecanos balances several stories with amazing skill. Tension and outrage build as the pages fly by…. Thanks to Pelecanos’s insight and talent, readers will agree that they can’t wait to see what happens next.”
—Michele Ross, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Pelecanos is fascinated with the way things work, and he takes apart the gun trade like an urban anthropologist, fitting the pieces into the drug business and the gang culture with an exactness that is breathtaking—and depressing. At the same time, he treats his criminals like human beings, talking their talk, driving their cars, listening to their music, getting into their world with something that can only be called sympathy.”
—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
“When George P. Pelecanos began his current series featuring an unlikely pair of D.C. private investigators, he told readers he intended to make a trilogy. Well, Soul Circus is the third of these novels, and it is such an outstanding effort that the author will no doubt be hearing howls of protest as people plead, ‘Don’t stop now!’… Soul Circus should both solidify Pelecanos as one of the best crime writers working today and boost his sales into the bestseller regions.”
—John Clutterbuck, Houston Chronicle
“Pelecanos expertly constructs both a gripping thriller and a tense internal drama. As always, his deeply textured portraits of the victims of poverty and violence add an almost Dickensian breadth to the novel. Throw in a shocking conclusion with far-reaching ramifications for the series, and you have one more superb installment in what has become a remarkably revealing portrait of urban life and the most intimate matters of heart and mind.”
—Booklist (starred review)
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by George P. Pelecanos
Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by George P. Pelecanos and Little, Brown and Company
Excerpt from Hard Revolution copyright © 2004 by George P. Pelecanos
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Second eBook Edition: March 2011
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ISBN: 978-0-759-52757-7