The Cut (Spero Lucas) by George P. Pelecanos Page B

spine.
    They talked some more. It was easy. Lisa roached the last of the joint in the pack of matches, blew out the candles, got up, and gathered the bottles off the table.
    “You want another?” she said.
    “I could.”
    “It’s gotten a little chilly out here.” She moved toward the door and looked over her shoulder.
    “What?”
    “You wanna come in?”
    “Yes.”
    THEY KISSED standing up in her living room. Her mouth was made for it. He admired the curve of her hip as she ran her hand down his biceps. She reached under his shirt and touched the hardness of his abdomen and ran her fingers down the ladder.
    “I knew it,” she said.
    “These are nice,” he said stupidly, as he cupped one of her breasts. His finger and thumb swelled her nipple through the fabric of her shirt.
    “They hold my bra up,” she said.
    The two of them laughed.
    “I’m trippin,” he said.
    “Me, too,” she said, her eyes alive.
    “You know I can’t stay.”
    “Really?”
    “I can’t stay
long
.”
    “That’s better.”
    She stepped forward and came into his arms.
    LUCAS WALKED out onto the street after midnight, satiated, a cocky lilt in his step. He had no misgivings or remorse. For a couple of hours, he had forgotten about Tavon, Edwin, and death. He had not thought about Constance, his brother’s inevitable comments, morality, or anything else. His father had once told him, “Don’t let anything walk past you,” and Lucas knew well what that meant. There are opportunitiesand adventures that are there for only a short period of time, and only available to people of a certain age. He and Lisa Weitzman understood. They’d had fun. He didn’t want to be one of those sad middle-aged guys who think about the women they should have bedded in their youth, if only they’d been less sensible. He planned to age with good memories.
    He started up his Jeep and drove over to 13th Street with the windows down. The ride home was sweet.

TEN

    I T WAS known as the high school up on 13th Street with the fine view of the city below. It was designed in the manner of a castle, complete with crenulated battlements and clean-line walls of brick and sandstone. In the distant past, the building had been described as the jewel of the public school system, but few made that claim anymore. Many students thought of Cardozo as a kind of prison, as students of a certain age are inclined to do, wherever they attend school. Because of this, and because of its imposing structure, dramatically set in relief against the high ground, generations of D.C. kids had simply called it the Rock.
    The school sat on the steeply graded edge of the Piedmont Plateau, on the south edge of Columbia Heights, straddling the border of an area most still thought of as Shaw. For thirty-two years, when it was filled with whites of northern and southern European extraction, it was called Central High. Numerous generals, successful lawyers, committed educators, local department store moguls, and one famousFBI director were alumni. One hundred and forty-seven of its former students lost their lives in World War II.
    In 1950, four years shy of
Brown v. Board of Education
, Central was declared a school for “Negro” pupils. The city needed the large facility for its black students, as their schools had become severely overcrowded, while the student population in white schools had begun to fall. Central’s name was changed to Cardozo High, the moniker of the smaller, all-black high school that had been located down the street. Its white students immediately transferred elsewhere, to west-of-the-park high schools like Woodrow Wilson and uptown schools like Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt. After
Brown
, despite the good intent and goal of desegregation, Cardozo stayed black. Central had boasted of graduating J. Edgar Hoover; Cardozo would claim Marvin Gaye and Maury Wills among its own.
    Cardozo was not the greatest success story in the D.C. public school system. Its