they were talking about.”
He looked at me again, and this time the look took in the color of my skin, which told me a few things. He seemed to decide that a friend of mine might possibly live out there, because he nodded and said, “Yep. I bet that’s it. That old airport, it’s out in the boonies.” By the boonies I figured he meant a mostly black part of town, somewhere that he might feel uncomfortable going.
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
“I’d be glad to. You might want to wait to go, though, mister. If I was you, I’d go tomorrow morning. It’s after dark now, and that’s a rough side of town, out there.”
He gave me directions and I thanked him. I felt a tingling, like I had happened onto a door in a dark room. Mary hadn’t changed her plans or missed her appointment. She’d been right on time. I was simply in the wrong place. What business she could have in the night, at an abandoned airstrip on the wrong side of town was intriguing, to say the least. Mary Wiggins was shaping up to be one very interesting woman, and I hadn’t even met her yet.
~
I was out on the end of town in no time, where the road flattened out and became nothing but a gray strip, flanked by power lines and neglected shoulders, a textbook example of dying urban sprawl and civic neglect. As I hit the tail end of the streets, the city fell away, and the urban aftermath was a mixed pedigree of buildings and lots of sprawl that was about half-urban, half-rural.
There were small scattered forests of trees and thick, wild gouts of vegetation that had flourished and overshadowed the boarded-up houses and the rusting cars that sat in mute ruin in abandoned lots. People loitered in doorways and on street corners, and many stared openly through the windshield at me. There was a hostile vibe. I was a stranger, which to most of them put me squarely in the “probably a cop” category.
There were young men in gang colors on most corners, and sometimes young women hanging out with them. Whether they were selling something, looking to buy something, or just marking their turf, they were clearly ready for trouble. They didn’t dress like Don Ganato, or talk like Longshot Lonnie O’Malley, but they represented the same enterprise. Those young men and women were the present and the future of Organized Crime. They were the merger between the old time gangsters and street hoodlums of the American past. The dapper Don and his Irish counterpart were old school. This was the wave of the future.
Now, it was the young minority kids who openly professed themselves ‘gangstas,’ the self-styled drug lords and vice kingpins of the new millennium. For them there was no college but prison and no code but one of macho violence and drug deal protocol. They kill each other on a daily basis and keep the status quo simple, brutal and depressingly obvious. They long to make every city into the projects from which they sprang, bettering nothing. They long to make every person into a user or a seller, because they do not know that man can be bettered. They want to make every block in every city into gang turf, over which they have absolute rule. Their name is legion, and they never tire.
I avoided their malevolent gaze as much as possible, and made my way past that last human outpost on the road to nowhere, and came to a place where the pavement became blacktop. It was the end of the city, all right. I was looking back in the direction of Birmingham now, and its lights made a faint glow in the distance.
I drove slowly over the bumpy road until I finally reached a sign, barely legible but still standing on the shoulder. “Bessemer Municipal Airport” the faded legend informed me, and proclaimed that there were “Regional Flights to all Points.” I continued my creeping progress along the road, and I drove out to the old airfield. Although it was just outside the Bessemer city limits, you might never know it was there. The airfield
He looked at me again, and this time the look took in the color of my skin, which told me a few things. He seemed to decide that a friend of mine might possibly live out there, because he nodded and said, “Yep. I bet that’s it. That old airport, it’s out in the boonies.” By the boonies I figured he meant a mostly black part of town, somewhere that he might feel uncomfortable going.
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
“I’d be glad to. You might want to wait to go, though, mister. If I was you, I’d go tomorrow morning. It’s after dark now, and that’s a rough side of town, out there.”
He gave me directions and I thanked him. I felt a tingling, like I had happened onto a door in a dark room. Mary hadn’t changed her plans or missed her appointment. She’d been right on time. I was simply in the wrong place. What business she could have in the night, at an abandoned airstrip on the wrong side of town was intriguing, to say the least. Mary Wiggins was shaping up to be one very interesting woman, and I hadn’t even met her yet.
~
I was out on the end of town in no time, where the road flattened out and became nothing but a gray strip, flanked by power lines and neglected shoulders, a textbook example of dying urban sprawl and civic neglect. As I hit the tail end of the streets, the city fell away, and the urban aftermath was a mixed pedigree of buildings and lots of sprawl that was about half-urban, half-rural.
There were small scattered forests of trees and thick, wild gouts of vegetation that had flourished and overshadowed the boarded-up houses and the rusting cars that sat in mute ruin in abandoned lots. People loitered in doorways and on street corners, and many stared openly through the windshield at me. There was a hostile vibe. I was a stranger, which to most of them put me squarely in the “probably a cop” category.
There were young men in gang colors on most corners, and sometimes young women hanging out with them. Whether they were selling something, looking to buy something, or just marking their turf, they were clearly ready for trouble. They didn’t dress like Don Ganato, or talk like Longshot Lonnie O’Malley, but they represented the same enterprise. Those young men and women were the present and the future of Organized Crime. They were the merger between the old time gangsters and street hoodlums of the American past. The dapper Don and his Irish counterpart were old school. This was the wave of the future.
Now, it was the young minority kids who openly professed themselves ‘gangstas,’ the self-styled drug lords and vice kingpins of the new millennium. For them there was no college but prison and no code but one of macho violence and drug deal protocol. They kill each other on a daily basis and keep the status quo simple, brutal and depressingly obvious. They long to make every city into the projects from which they sprang, bettering nothing. They long to make every person into a user or a seller, because they do not know that man can be bettered. They want to make every block in every city into gang turf, over which they have absolute rule. Their name is legion, and they never tire.
I avoided their malevolent gaze as much as possible, and made my way past that last human outpost on the road to nowhere, and came to a place where the pavement became blacktop. It was the end of the city, all right. I was looking back in the direction of Birmingham now, and its lights made a faint glow in the distance.
I drove slowly over the bumpy road until I finally reached a sign, barely legible but still standing on the shoulder. “Bessemer Municipal Airport” the faded legend informed me, and proclaimed that there were “Regional Flights to all Points.” I continued my creeping progress along the road, and I drove out to the old airfield. Although it was just outside the Bessemer city limits, you might never know it was there. The airfield
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