Dirt Merchant

by T. Blake Braddy

  “Good to see you, too,” I responded, and I meant it.

  “And how is Lumber Junction these days?”

  “Dying on the vine.”

  “Oh, so, nothing’s changed?”

  “Only the names and the faces.”

  “And I bet even that’s not totally true. The Brickmeyers—”

  “They got a comeuppance. That family is scrambling to find itself, but last I heard, it had turned into a pit of vipers, arguing over the property.”

  She pursed her lips. “I never cared for that family,” she said, “but as of late, I’ve taken to ‘live and let live’ when it comes to personal tragedies.”

  “Not a bad philosophy,” I said.

  “Get a glass of white wine in her, and then ask her about the Brickmeyers,” Deuce said, and Miss Dorothy smacked him on the shoulder.

  “They tried to put a stranglehold on the town,” she replied, “and that’s all I’ll say on the matter right now. Still, Rolson, I do say, I miss your Aunt Birdie something awful. She was a beautiful, terribly kind lady.”

  “I know,” I said. “I miss her, too.”

  “And she did you right, raising you the way she did. You just make sure you don’t go and screw it all up by ruining your name.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” I said.

  She looked at me dubiously. “Might not hurt for you to dry out. You smell like a days-old bar rag.”

  “Inside of my mouth tastes like one,” I said, and this set Dorothy to laughing. It was a short bark followed by a silent row of giggles, but even that strained her. She had to grab a tissue to dab at the sides of her eyes.

  “Well,” I said, “don’t let me get in the way of your hosting duties.”

  “Nonsense. You go and make yourself at home. While you’re here, you’re family, and I’m sure if Mr. Deuce — never got used to that nickname — wants you here, it’s for a reason. We’ve got a spare room, if my son can waddle back there and get it ready.”

  Deuce took a moment and then seemed to understand. He nodded gravely and set to work while I chatted with other family members. Dorothy escorted me around the room and introduced me to the extended family as “Darron’s adopted cousin,” a compliment I readily endured.

  Once she had finished the how-do-you-dos, Deuce’s mother took Willie to the laundry room and fed him some table scraps. After that, the old dog was sold on his new situation. He followed Dorothy Gaines around the house, tap-tap-tapping his little claws on the linoleum at her heels, barking every so often to demand her attention. She’d kneel down and pat him on his bottom, which would send his tail to wagging.

  Willie’s optimism made me hope my own personal life was looking up, even if I was mired in Deuce’s family tragedy.

  “Best get some sleep,” Deuce re-entered, interrupting my musings. “We’ve got work to do tonight.”

  2

  I slept but did not dream.

  My wavering sobriety kept me tense and jittery. I jerked awake a few times, and though I slipped into darkness, no one from my past came to visit.

  Some time later, a hand shook me awake. I sat up, snapping to like I’d been waiting for that moment all along. Deuce was leaning over me.

  “We’ve done become famous,” he said.

  The room was dark. The people had disappeared. Reginald sat in a recliner, light from the big screen illuminating his face, grim features etched out of shadow.

  Deuce plopped down beside me as I yawned and wiped my eyes. I half-expected to see us smiling unwittingly back at ourselves. On the screen, however, it wasn’t Deuce’s face but my own. A six-month- old picture. I looked bad. That was the drunk me. The broken me. The me who had crawled toward despair on the broken shards of my past.

  “Police are in search of this man, Rolson McKane, a former police officer on the run from police. He is presumed to be armed and extremely dangerous. He is wanted for questioning in the recent shooting at a Savannah church, where an Alcoholics Anonymous group was having a special event…”

  Then, on with the details. I noticed that the word manhunt was used, but Deuce’s name never came up, which was at least one check in my favor. If they didn’t yet know the “accomplice,” they couldn’t be aware of the Jacksonville connection.

  In other words, we still had time.

  Deuce’s cousin was none too pleased by this revelation, however.

  “They ain’t gonna let this go,” Reginald said. “They’re coming after you. Best be locked down and loaded up when they knock on the door.”

  “Reckon so,” I said. “They’ll have to find me first.”

  Reginald laughed. “I like you, man. You not like most white folks. Nothing against white people, but I can’t stand an uptight white dude.”

  “I’ve got nothing left to be uptight about,” I said.

  Reginald got out of his recliner. He said, “These niggas we fixin’ to see, they’re the minnows in this here swamp. Doesn’t take much for them to be fed to the drug dealers that control this side of town.”

  “Well—” Deuce began, but his cousin cut him off.

  “’Scuse me, cuz, but let me start this thing over. I’ve been trying to give up the word ‘nigga’ for a little bit now, and I can’t just let myself slide on it.”

  “All right,” Deuce said, leaning back and rubbing his knees.

  “It don’t work,” Reginald continued. “Using that word don’t do nothing but drive a wedge between people. My people. Our people, man. I hope you understand, my brother, that I’m trying to be better than the values reflected at me from society.”

  “I can get on board with that,” Deuce said.

  “I used to be all, ‘niggas this’ and ‘niggas that’ because it was just what people said. I ain’t saying people can’t say it and be justified in saying it. I’m just saying I ain’t going to be that dude, bruh. It’s about time we be more uplifting toward each other, and nigga’s just another word people be using without really thinking about it.”

  “Right on,” Deuce replied. “I don’t feel the same way, but you go on and do what you got to do, little cousin. You’re the one helping us out.”

  “But, for real,” he said, grinning slyly, “I mean it when I say it this way: these niggas we going to be dealing with tonight are cupcake frosting. They aren’t my people. They aren’t with me, if you can dig what I’m saying. They are the gateholders to the seventh circle of hell around these parts, and if they go down, I got no complaints. They are the steps to the steps to the steps leading up to the men and women responsible for Taj’s death, and I got no sympathy for them. You feel me?”

  I nodded, and Deuce got up to hug Reginald.

  “We ’bout to make things right,” Reginald said. “It starts tonight. For Taj, man. He ain’t deserve the way he went out. He didn’t deserve that.”

  They shook hands, and Deuce pulled Reginald in for a hug. Deuce patted him on the back, as his cousin sobbed quietly into the big man’s shoulder.

  “Reg, what do you know about the night Taj went missing?”

  Reg shrugged, wiping his eyes. “He was in and out of the house. Last few months, he treated your mom’s pad like a rest stop. Always on the road. Wouldn’t come home for days sometimes.”

  “He was dealing, right?”

  He puffed out his cheeks, nodded. “Yeah, he was running cakes for somebody, but he was real secretive about it.”

  I asked, “But you don't know who he was supposed to see that night?”

  Reginald shook his head.

  “When was he found?”

  “Few days after he went missing.”

  “Anybody see him between that night and when he was found?” I asked.

  “What does that matter?”

  “Establishing a timeline,” I said. “The more I know about his whereabouts, where he was supposed to be, that might help out with where he actually was.”

  Reg said, “You want to jump into this, go look for a brother sporting a spec
ific kind of tattoo. All the bangers down here do that now. If he was dealing, he was working with one of the crews down here.”

  “Doesn’t help us find out who pulled the trigger. It’s like sticking your hand in a hole full of scorpions. Nothing pleasant about it, and the best you can hope for is a trip to the hospital.Anybody else you know of I can speak to?” I asked.

  “His girl. He used to go out with this chick. Name slips my mind right now. She turns up, she might be able to help you figure out some more details. The fuck you get all of this?”

  “I was a cop. Bad cop, but a cop nonetheless.”

  Deuce smiled, eyes waxed over with tears. He said, “Reg, was you with us that time we caught Taj smoking for the first time?”

  Reg, also smiling, said, “Nah. Think I heard the story, but no, don’t think so.”

  “Had the wrong end in his mouth. Defiant and shit, like he knew something we didn’t. He was always, you know, trying to prove something to the older kids, thinking he wasn’t missing out. So, here he was, telling us we didn’t have the balls to be smoking — he couldn’t have been older’n six — and he had lit the goddamned filter end of the cigarette.”

  Deuce started to giggle at the rawness of the memory. Tears streaked from eyes squinted into ridiculous slits. “All the while, trying to take a reverse puff, pulling the cig out and spitting little flecks of unlit tobacco on the ground, and we was just dying, man.”

  Reginald fell into a fit of laughter himself. I was left only with a blank space, a generic kid smoking a cigarette, but I was struck with the infection coursing through the room, as well, and went at laughing like the two of them.

  After a while, I followed the pair to the back bedroom, where Reginald slid a false shelf from the chest-of-drawers and produced three handguns. He passed them around like playing cards and stuffed his in the back of his jeans. He nodded, fist-bumped the both of us, and that was that.

  Time for business.

  The drive was quiet. Reginald had queued up some wavy, thumping instrumental music, and it sent me into a daze. I caught some old jazz samples locked into the groove, but was bereft as to the sources of the rest of it.

  At a certain point, Reginald lowered the music. “Northwest Jacksonville is where most of these motherfuckers hang out. You got Cutt Throat, PYC, and LOC, among other groups. They run drugs and guns into the city and sling trouble in all directions. Now, them ain’t the folks we going to be dealing with. They’re established. They got money and a front, trying to present themselves as a record label or some shit.”

  “Huh,” Deuce said.

  “Right. These fools are not established. They’re hungry, out to prove something, so what they’re doing is dropping bodies all over the city.”

  “Taj being one of them,” Decue replied.

  “Right, man. He stepped in the middle of a beef between two rival groups and ended up face-down in the river outside town.”

  “Is he innocent in all this?” Deuce asked.

  “What you mean?”

  “He didn’t do something to draw it up, did he?”

  “You think he deserved to die?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. What if he— I mean, what if he was slinging with the rest of them? What if he…I don’t know, did something to piss them off?”

  “He probably did, probably got involved in some shit. But that don’t mean—”

  “I’m not saying he deserved it,” Deuce said. “But if I’m going all in, I need to know what he was into. Won’t keep me from doing it, but I need a clear head, man.”

  “Darron, he wasn’t tied up. I’m telling you, bruh. He was trying to play gangsta, but he wasn’t all the way up in it.”

  I didn’t buy it. Rarely does a guy get cut to pieces over the things he wasn’t involved in.

  Reginald parked in front of a house sporting no noticeable electricity and said he’d be right back.

  “Take your piece,” Deuce warned him, but he waved the suggestion off.

  He hopped the chain link fence and disappeared in the darkness, before emerging again under the dim glow of the moon. He topped some rickety steps and banged on the screen door until somebody answered. A lolling, half-interested head bobbed against the door frame until its owner seemed to catch Reginald’s meaning, and then the doorway was dark again.

  We both watched him in a fixed silence, until I asked, “What’s your plan, Deuce?”

  “Don’t know,” he replied.

  “You want to scare some people, maybe do some unsponsored detective work, I’m all in.”

  “I want to take this thing as far as it will go,” Deuce said, his voice bent a little sideways. “Reg knows people who know people, and they might send us some names. That’s all I know, for now.”

  “And how do I fit into this?” I asked.

  Deuce sighed. “I trust you.”

  “That it?”

  “You’re crazy. You’ve got nothing to lose. I suspect you might have a working relationship with the dead. If anybody’s going to be able to help me find out who killed my little brother, it’s you. Dig that?”

  I nodded, and he must have felt me, because he didn’t say anything else.

  On the porch, Reginald turned and proffered an upturned thumb before turning back to the house. A few minutes later, he returned with a shivering, long-haired dude with scabs on his face.

  “Hey, man,” he said to the whole car. “I’m Javier-Angel. Call me Javvy.”

  He was wide-eyed and spoke with a crispness I didn’t expect from a junkie. As we peeled back around to the main street, he gave us a rundown of himself like he was applying for a job.

  His name was Javvy. Half-Hispanic, half-black. A fact he conveyed as if his cred with Reg and Deuce depended on it. He never really looked at me, but when he did, the whites of his eyes seemed to glow.

  He smelled like rotten diapers and body odor, but he was keen for the streets, knew where all the drug dealers lived and who they were connected to. He picked at a particularly oozy wound by his left ear.

  Every street we passed, he would stick one hand out the window and provide a tour guide’s level of detail about what set ran that area and what people needed to do to keep their asses intact when traveling through there.

  “Up here,” he was saying, just as Reginald took a veering left, “is where the two Puerto Ricans went Tony Montana on some teenagers for breaking into their pad and boosting their TV and video games. Hacked them up with something gas-powered. Chain saws or circular saws or some shit. Nailed their hands to an abandoned house on the corner. Real fucked-up stuff, man. This city’s getting out of control.”

  Javvy dug a pint of Night Train from his pocket and swigged. “I like the taste, but goddamn does this stuff give me weird dreams.”

  When I didn’t respond to an offer to partake, he shrugged and swilled some more before recapping it. He powered the window down to its base and let the wind blow through his thinning hair.

  “Who’s been dropping bodies in the rivers, Javvy?” Reginald asked him.

  “You going to have to be more specific, hombre,” he replied. “Bodies tend to end up on the banks of the St. Johns like human litter. People look not-too-different from me, though I’ve managed to stay right ahead of the garbage collector, if you catch my meaning.”

  “Recently,” Reginald said. “Like, the last few weeks. Lot of people been getting capped. Nobody knows why.”

  “If nobody knows why, how you expect me to be able to tell you?”

  “Don’t start that shit with me, Javvy,” Reginald replied. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “That your cousin?” Javvy replied, ignoring him. “The football player? The Saint?”

  “That’s right,” Deuce said, staring straight ahead. “It was my brother they found on the river last week. You feel me?”

  “Oh, man, no, I do,” replied the druggie. “It makes a whole lot of sense. You live up in Georgia, right?”

  “Did. I’m in Flor
ida right now.”

  “You think you can make the transition from hurting folks to killing folks?”

  “The fuck d’you say to me?”

  “You got used to bashing in people’s heads. You think you can take ’em off, now?”

  “Who said anything about taking off people’s heads?”

  The junkie cut a glance in my direction, then smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me. I got nobody to tell. I ever got in the habit of biting the hand that feeds, I’d end up feeding the scaly, green bastards that end up in people’s backyards. I just find it funny, the irony of a violent Saint.”

  He laughed, clapping his hands together for emphasis.

  “I’ll help you, though, man. I’m a Jaguars fan, but that don’t mean shit anymore. Long as I didn’t like the Falcons or the Bucs, I should have no problem giving advice to a Saint, right? Right?”

  His voice had begun to turn a little rubbery, so Reginald procured a joint from his front pocket and handed it to our passenger, who toked mightily several times and then handed it back to the driver. Even I started to feel something warm course through me.

  On the music played, a swell of bass and drums, sonic waves crashing against the rocky outcropping of my head and my ears. The music flowed into me, around in my hair, tickling each individual filament as it passed over, making me desperately want to giggle. It was the way I used to feel when school was unexpectedly closed, or when I managed to convince my Aunt Birdie I was sick when I really wasn’t.

  “So, Javvy, out with it. Who’s the big bad wolf over in these parts? Where do we start?”

  “Black Reapers rep this neighborhood. Same with the Mad Nameless.”

  “They both black?”

  “Yup. The only hispanic gang over this way is the Copperbloods. They’re creeping on both hoods, but they don’t want that drug money. They’re into guns and hoes and shit. The drug game is pretty well locked up.”

  “Unless the recent set of deaths has something to do with it,” Deuce said.

  “Could be,” Reginald replied. “Maybe they’re making a play.”