"THE TURNAROUND," by George Pelecanos. Little, Brown; 294 pages; $24.99
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A couple of white kids in a car are goofing off, cruising Washington's mean streets in the summer of 1972. They're in the wrong neighborhood - on purpose. They pass a couple of black kids on the corner. They hurl a cherry pie out the window and say "Eat this." They say some other things. The car speeds up, but they're on a dead end street.
They're trapped.
One kid jumps out of the car and runs. One kid is shot and killed. Another gets the living hell kicked out of him. Another kid goes to prison.
Everybody's life changes.
It happens all the time - kids juiced on beer and testosterone, with no destination except trouble.
That's the beginning of George Pelecanos' "The Turnaround." We cut, and it's 35 years later. Alex Pappas, who sat in the back seat that day and didn't say anything one way or the other, is running his father's luncheonette at Connecticut and N streets. Alex takes great pride in the family business, just as his father did. It's the sort of place where the waitresses know what everybody orders before they sit down, because everybody's been coming there for 20 years; where Alex knows exactly what time it is by the way the light hits the window.
The remnant of the fight for Alex was a crushed eye socket from the beat-down, along with some damage that limits his vision in that eye. Most people notice the damaged eye once and then forget about it, but for Alex, it's always with him, part of his consciousness. In some way, he doesn't even seem to mind it; maybe it's penance for the death of his friend, Billy.
Alex has a good marriage, but the hurt keeps coming - one son, his favorite, died in Iraq, and the other one has assumed a crucial importance no child should have to endure. Every day, Alex drops off cakes and pies to Walter Reed Hospital for the wounded.
Across town, there are two black brothers, Raymond and James. Raymond is a physical therapist at Walter Reed, who tries to keep his brother, James, on the straight and narrow. James was convicted of Billy's murder that day, spent time in prison, then some more time in prison. He works on cars now, a big man with a beer gut. Charles Baker, Raymond and James' friend that day, has become a street criminal, mean and troubled.
The prologue is the windup; the pitch is what follows after Alex Pappas runs into Raymond at Walter Reed. Raymond recognizes him and searches him out, to find out what went down that hot summer day. The men form an uneasy bond, which Raymond tries to broaden to include his brother, James. And then Charles comes calling.
"The Turnaround" is Pelecanos writing a Richard Price novel — there's no plot, just a simmering situation involving race and manhood that's set up in the beginning and a temperature that slowly rises as the book goes on. In other respects, it's straight Pelecanos - the Washington that you never see on CNN, where everybody knows "who Tony Montana was, but not Nelson Mandela," where men are defined by their degree of overt masculinity and defined by a mix tape of musical likes.
The novel is animated by the depth of its characters, almost all of whom are sympathetic, and the peril represented by Charles Baker, whose only saving grace is the fact that he's a low-end predator - street-smart, but not smart. Get him off the streets, and he can be had. Or, alternately, sick a high-end predator on him.
Pelecanos examines the boy's transition into becoming a middle-aged man, and how a minute's worth of confrontation can echo down through decades.
Billy, the boy that got shot and died, was, says Alex, "a good friend. He was looking out for me, even at the end. I really believe that he would have turned out fine. If he had lived, if he had gotten ... into the world, on his own, he would have been fine. He'd be sitting here with us today, having a beer. He would. If he had only lived through that day."
Pelecanos ends his book on a note of hope, of a mutually agreed upon sense of transcendence of the past. It feels good, but not completely truthful, as if Pelecanos was willing the ending because he likes his characters too much to let them strangle, even as experience teaches us that the rope, once put around the neck, usually tightens.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: seyman AT pbpost.com