The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs Read Free Book Online

year, even if one of the least physically comfortable, to be outside. This was the time of year when Skeet and Rob, wearing matching sleeveless undershirts, would normally walk from Chapman Street to Taylor grocery, where Skeet bought ice cream for Rob and cigarettes for himself, and then just keep walking together, farther and farther east, into thecenter of East Orange, stopping multiple times on every block to chat with people Skeet had known his whole life as well as people he was meeting for the first time. Skeet was not old but certainly not young, and he enjoyed that temporal in betweenness. He could watch a hoops game from the sidelines and comment on the sloppiness or talent on display with the other retired veterans, or he could take his shirt off and enter the game himself and usually hold his own. Despite the heat, this time of year had always been Skeet’s favorite, and so it had always been Rob’s, too.
    A memory, which must have seemed innocuous at the time but which ultimately Rob would hold close, began with a Yankees game that two strangers were listening to on their stoop as Skeet and Rob walked past. Skeet asked what the score was; it was close. They stopped and listened to a few at bats. Someone else walked past and began chatting and listening, too. Teenagers who lived in the house came outside to convene with their friends. The game remained tight. The crowd of listeners grew, overflowing onto the sidewalk, then the street: middle- and lower-middle-class people who worked and raised families in this neighborhood, whose primary desire was for their children to have better opportunities than they had, and who had long since accepted the fact that, though they represented the majority population of East Orange, their home would always be characterized by the few thugs and dealers whose presence kept them inside on most other evenings like this. The radio’s owner kept turning up the volume. Suddenly a glass of lemonade was in Rob’s hand; he didn’t know who’d put it there. Late afternoon became early evening, and amiable sand-colored light slanted across to the east side of the block and made the houses there momentarily luminous. The temperature dropped, only a couple degrees but just enough. And as the game ended with a Yankees win and the cheers erupted and the back-talking Yankee haters scowled, Rob looked around at the crowd of people that had amassed here together and felt the kind of kinship with his world that his father had always spoken of but that Rob, overprotected as he was, had never before known.
    That day had been in August 1986, one year ago. Now, in the middle of August 1987, Rob’s football game ended with the side mirror of a car being taken off by someone’s shoulder. The boys dispersed quickly, and Rob walked back to Chapman Street. Over the past week, more than a few acquaintances had asked in passing where his father was, and Rob was eager to see him and have a day together like the one that had culminated in the Yankees-themed block party.
    Jackie couldn’t tell him. Not that day, not the day after, not the day after that. She let her son call the apartment on Chestnut Street and get no answer. She lied and said that Skeet had taken a last-minute trip to see extended family, knowing that every hour that passed increased the likelihood that one of the kids on the street would hear the gossip and take it upon himself to tell Rob that his father was locked up. Lord knew that the concept wasn’t exactly new or novel among Rob’s peers.
    Frances urged her to tell him before the school year started. “Don’t put it all on him at once,” she said. “Summer’s over. Father’s locked up. It’s too much for a boy his age.”
    â€œI know, I know,” Jackie replied, and still failed to tell him.
    A few days before first grade began, Jackie found him alone in the front living room, past dusk, kneeling on the sofa