Free Underbelly by Gary Phillips

regular Nick Carter.”
    â€œAin’t I? You tell him I had it?”
    â€œOf course not. I’m your Velda, right?”
    They both chuckled. “He’s coming by?”
    â€œSaid for me to meet him ’round one tomorrow at that farmer’s market they have up at the VA in Westwood.”
    Magrady regarded her.
    Her shoulders lifted and fell. “Don’t ask me. Maybe he wanted to avoid Asher.” She referred to the one-armed desk clerk at her SRO. “They don’t get along.”
    â€œMore likely he’s staying out that way.”
    â€œSee, you are a clever dick.”
    â€œI hope you mean that in a good way. And you know for a woman your age you sure talk.. suggestively.”
    â€œIt doesn’t seem to bother you.”
    â€œThis is so.”
    To be polite he called Janis Bonilla from a phone at the Midnight Mission. A case worker Magrady had done a favor for let him do so.
    After some chit-chat, Bonilla cracked, “You got all the dames worried about you, huh?”
    â€œGood night, Janis.”
    â€œGood night, Gracie.”

    Magrady was relieved that Asher wasn’t on the desk at the Chesapeake, though he’d encountered him there during nighttimes in the past. Getting into a hassle now when he was hankering to direct his energies elsewhere would just be a drag. Concentration was everything.
    Sure the rules were no guests after 8 p.m. but plenty of clerks, unlike the anal Asher, let you violate that rule—particularly if you offered money or booze or a hit of something stronger as thanks. In this case, El Cid, Sid Ramos, was on duty. He was a mellow fellow veteran as far as Magrady was concerned.
    â€œEm,” he said in that rasp of his, knocking a fist with his friend. He’d been over there before Magrady, a homeboy from El Sereno who wound up being a Lurp, an LRRP, a long range reconnaissance patrol maniac. These were men who operated insmall teams, going deep in country to scout air strike targets and do recon. It took a certain type who liked being alone with their doubts and fears for days on end yet remain coiled. El Cid had engaged in various activities when he got back to the world, including a jolt in the pen.
    Magrady retorted, “It bees like that.” He grinned at El Cid as the two moved past. The desk man returned to reading his book,
The Last Cavalier
, by Alexandre Dumas. As Magrady understood it back in his time, while Dumas was in bad shape and his work out of favor with the critics, but not the masses, he couldn’t help but do his thing and churned out a daily serial in a newspaper. Nowadays some pipe-smoking academic had come along and put the chapters together and edited them as the last novel by the cat who created the Three Musketeers. Magrady realized these knot-head, pants-saggin’ kids only knew the Musketeers as the name of a candy bar, let alone Dumas was part black.
    Damn youngsters didn’t know squat these days, Magrady lamented as Baine slowly stroked him as they kissed. Thereafter they went at it like caged minks.
IV
    B EFORE LIGHT THE NEXT MORNING , and after another invigorating thrash with the able Ms. Baine, Magrady dreamed of Vietnam. But this wasn’t a sweaty rehash of a firefight or reliving yet again the horror of watching some greenie writhing in the mud holding his guts in while being held down by his comrades as the medic tried to super glue the wounds closed.
    This was an incident on base where a Japanese-American sergeant was walking from the outdoor showers with a towel wrapped around his waist. Two freshly rotated in replacements, one black, one white, saw him and freaked out. “VC! VC!” they started hollering, with the excited black GI bringing up his M-60 to spray the sergeant.
    â€œHey, you goddamn idiot,” the sergeant swore, “I went to Dorsey High School in Los Angeles.”
    â€œHe’s trying to trick us,” the white one told his