Joe

by H. D. Gordon

  Jenny’s head tilted back a fraction and she raised her eyebrows. “What?”

  “Trippin’,” Eric laughed, bending down to give her another kiss on her head. “I’ll be back soon, babe. Don’t you worry.”

  Eric left Jenny’s house and jumped in her old red Camaro. Before he pulled out of the drive, he removed his pack from underneath the driver’s seat and took inventory of his merchandise. Inside of his purple Crown Royal sack were two ounces of top-grade marijuana. He was going to have to pick up some more from his cousin down on Fifty-First Street after he made his first two runs. But that was cool, the money made it all worth it. No bosses, no in-times, and best of all, no taxes, baby. Take that Uncle Sam, ya bearded old bastid!

  But if he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t just the money that made him want to sell. It was everything, the whole lifestyle. Riding around the city with the wind in his hair. Cruising the mean streets with a gun on his lap. You never know, he’d tell Jenny, if you’d have to the check the haters who might take a stab at stealing your pack, at robbing you of the goods. Hands beating the steering wheel to Lil Wayne, CrazyE, Biggie Smalls blasting from the stereo. He turned it up now, tucking his Crown Royal bag under his seat after weighing out on his battery-operated scale two quarter sacs of bud for his first two runs. He pulled out onto Blue Ridge Boulevard, rapping along with the CD playing through his pregnant girlfriend’s speakers.

  It’s a hard life, hustling, hustling

  And I won’t be coming home tonight

  Cuz the streets is calling, bay-bee

  But don’t you worry, bay-bee

  Everything will be alright

  Eric repositioned the .45 on his lap. He had never had to use it. Though he would never admit it to anyone, he hoped he would never have to. But, shit, when you got right down to it, Eric had been dealing since he was fifteen years old. He was turning twenty next week. Never once had he been busted or held up. He was too smart for that shit. He picked his clientele wisely and used different cars (always legally registered and insured, because to not would just be stupid, and Eric wasn’t stupid) and different routes to make his runs. It wasn’t until after he had spent his time in prison that he found out that most criminals felt they were too smart for that shit. Impervious, even. Yeah, that’s what he was.

  He didn’t plan to deal forever. He just wasn’t ready to quit just yet. Eric truly loved Jenny and the baby that she had growing in her belly, which was even more reason to keep on the hustle a little while longer so that he could save more money. At the moment, he had twenty-five thousand in his mother’s bank (split up into three different accounts). Another two grand in cash was stashed at her house, and another five grand back at Jenny’s place. He figured he would stop after he reached fifty thousand. Eric only wanted to give his family a better life. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t see that.

  It was late, or early, depending on how you look at it. The sun wouldn’t be making its show for another hour or so, but the sky had just barely begun to lighten, almost unperceptively. It was that time of morning when the day has just gone from dead-dark night to more of a deep, slowly-breathing blue. Eric liked this time of day best, had ever since he was a boy. He would get up early, when the birds were just sounding and the world was still sleeping, and go out to the front of the house and practice basketball.

  By the time he reached high school he had become the best player on any team he joined. He made varsity his freshman year, becoming the starting point guard right out of the summer tryouts and practices. His coach, a forty-something white man with a bald head and a handlebar mustache had taken him aside on the last day of summer practice. He’d slapped his calloused hand on Eric’s shoulder. “Boy, you gon’ be starting point this year, and you gon’ do us proud. You play well fur me, and I’ll see you make it through this place with a three-point-oh.” Eric held up his end of the deal, taking his team all the way to State and walking away with the enormous trophy his sophomore, junior and senior years. The coach held up his.

  Eric’s mother attended every game, beaming and screaming at the top of her lungs every time Eric scored a point or made a steal or rebounded. “That’s my baby! That’s my boy!” she would shout, jumping up and down in her jersey with her son’s name and number printed on it. The whole family had been proud, too. They all believed that if any one of them was actually going to make it to the big time that it would be Eric. “He’s goin’ to the NBA that boy, Yes sir, he’s a goin’”.

  But things hadn’t gone the way everyone planned, had they? Eric was offered full scholarships to universities in California, Michigan, Florida and Ohio. In the end, though, he couldn’t bring himself to leave his momma, his family, his friends. And he had some not-so-good-for-him friends. Yes sir.

  In truth, Eric was just a small minded Kanna (Kansas) City man. He liked the mentality of the place, when you got right down to it, though he wouldn’t have been able to express it in so many words. Kansas City was a sprawling city, spread out over many miles, with a small population in comparison to other major cities. But it was a dangerous place, too, its murder rate always ranking in the top ten national percentile. There was a lifestyle here for a young black man, especially for a young black man attending the inner city schools.

  So he’d skipped the whole college nonsense. Let the white boys have that shit. Life in Kanna City wasn’t so bad. He was raking in eight to ten grand a week. He had a girl he loved and a baby on the way. Shit, life was not too bad at all.

  Eric reached down to the center console of the Camaro and plucked a Newport from a half-empty pack. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, holding the wheel with one hand and rummaging around the seat for a lighter. His eyes left the road for only a moment. He would swear it was only a moment, but that was enough.

  What jerked his head up was a blood-curdling scream ripping through the air, muted beyond the closed windows of his girlfriend’s car. The first thing his eyes settled on through the windshield would remain the worst, most frightening thing he would see for the rest of his life.

  A little girl had run out into the middle of Bannister Highway. Her mother, the one who had released that terrific scream, was racing across the lanes to catch her, a look of true terror corrupting her features. She was too far behind the girl and she knew it. Too far behind. A few other people (it was still too early in the morning for a crowd) waiting at the bus stop had their hands cupped over their mouths, the air having stopped up in their lungs in horrid anticipation of what was surely about to happen.

  But Eric saw none of this. All he saw was a flash of the girl’s pink Dora the Explorer dress, then just the top of her head. He slammed the breaks so hard that the red Camaro’s tires released a terrific scream of their own. Then a hard thud! The worst sounding thud! that no one could ever just imagine, a thud! that was the epitome of ah-man-you-just-had-to-be-there. The car came to an abrupt, lurching, screeching, final stop.

  Eric would only be able to recall what followed in the way that we remember dreams, as though it hadn’t really happened, as though it was something he had read about or seen in a movie once upon a time. He can remember sitting behind the wheel, his foot mashing the brake pedal against the floor, hands gripping the steering wheel as one might grip a ledge–afraid to let go, afraid to move or breathe. Then, putting the car in park, his hands fumbling on the lever, opening the door, and the wave of nausea that struck him like a tightly-wound cord as he stepped out into reality. And the screaming! The endless, agonized, screaming! And the blood. And the tears. Yes, it was just like a dream.

  The police came. They removed the car, whose front end was smashed in considerably. They removed the hysterical mother and the body of her four-year-old daughter. They removed Eric, searched his car, and threw him in a jail cell, soon to toss away the key for a good while.

  Before the trial, which took over a year to fully commence and conclude, he ached over what he had done. He’d sat in his cement room in a Kansas
City jail cell and thought about pink Dora the Explorer dresses, about the child whom he had mown down wearing a pink Dora the Explorer dress. He thought about the mother whose child had been taken from her. He thought about his own mother, and his unborn child whom he would more than likely not get to see into this world.

  Damn, and it had all happened so fast, that was what he thought about most. How it had all happened so fucking fast. Life be that way, brother. Life be that way.

  Later that day, after long hours of interrogation that gave way after Eric had finally requested a lawyer, after the detectives had laid his .45 and his purple Crown Royal sack and all of its contents out on top of the steel table in the small, fluorescent-lit room with the unnerving one-way mirror along one wall… After all that, he had gotten to make some phone calls.

  He called Jenny first.

  “I knew it!” she screamed. “I just fucking knew it! I told your ass to quit. Right when I get knocked up, too! You just couldn’t fucking quit!”

  And then she’d cried, heart-wrenching sobs that were the equivalent to a sniffle when compared to the screams of the broken mother which he had heard earlier in the day, right before the shit-had-all-happened-so-fast. And he cried too, but his voice steadied, after the screaming and cursing died down. “It ain’t so bad, babe. I got no priors. It was an accident. It ain’t gon’ be so bad.”

  But it had been bad. It stripped him of everything and only offered a brand, a scar on his record that would separate him from the rest of society, in return. A criminal, it says so right there on those files. Yes Sir and thank you very much. A scarlet letter in the eyes of men and God. You bet your balls, baby. It had been bad.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Merion

  The walk up to the building was not so bad. Spring had taken a good hold in the past few weeks. Multicolored tulips sprouted up along the sidewalk. The grass around the flowers was plush and green. Small trees on the grounds were just beginning to split new buds. Merion always took time to enjoy the pleasures that nature offered. But here, outside of this particular building, any new growth, so fresh and full of life, seemed out of place. Or maybe not out of place so much as deceiving, like the shadowed monster in the room that turns into a coatrack when you turn on the lights. Only with this place it was the other way around.

  She turned right at the end of the sidewalk and began making her way toward the electric front doors of the building. Here too, the land was groomed. She tried not focusing on those electric doors that slid away so smoothly to allow entrance and then shut so smoothly—and somehow with more finality—behind you as soon as you made it inside. Merion would not admit it, but she hated coming here.

  The doors slid open easily, seeming to whisper a secret as the metal skated metal. Merion took one last breath of fresh air before entering. It would be her last for the next hour. She considered for a moment that maybe this wasn’t the best way to spend her day off. Well, her taken day off.

  Sure enough, as she crossed the threshold, that’s what hit her first: the smell of the place. In sharp contrast to the fresh blooms just on the exterior, the air inside held a teeth-clenching quality. There was only one word for it.

  Old. Merion bit down on her tongue to keep her face from scrunching up. There were two doors, one to her left and one to her right. Directly ahead was a nurse’s station and a small restroom. In the past two years of coming here Merion had never had the need so urgent as to warrant using that restroom. She could only imagine the stench that box must be housing.

  She went to the door on the right and pushed down the metal handle. The door was heavy, and made purposely so. You didn’t want to go having any of the “guests” escaping. For most of the residents of Hillbrook Retirement Facility the world behind this door was the last one they would know on this earth.

  That’s what it is. Not just old, but dying. It’s the smell of the dying.

  Merion couldn’t help but think such things when she came here. Part of it was because she was pushing sixty-five herself, and over the past two years she had come to fully believe that she would prefer dying to coming and spending her last days in an old folks’ home. The other part was because coming here made her feel guilty. Guilty and selfish.

  She pushed the door open, leaning her body into it because it was so heavy, and shut it behind her. Ahead of her was a long, white hallway. Fluorescent lights glared down from the ceiling, bounced off the stark white walls and rebounded from the off-white linoleum floors. That smell was amplified twelve notches in here.

  No wonder they say you see a white light when you die, Merion thought. They drown you in it here. A lot of folks bite the bullet here.

  It wasn’t so much the lighting, or the cold sterile feel of the place that made Merion so loathe to come to the home. It wasn’t even that stench of approaching death that unnerved her so. It was the people here that made it hard. Some of them stayed in their rooms. Others were spry enough to wheel themselves around in a chair or with a walker. Others were propped up out in the hallway, sitting in wheelchairs that slanted back slightly, not moving, not talking, and some hardly even blinking. To Merion they seemed more like dolls than actual people. Dolls some big child had carried to the living room and positioned upright in the crook of the couch. Dolls with snot running freely from their nose and glue-like crust caking their eyes. She found it all disturbing.

  The first to approach her on this Friday morning was a lady by the name of Joan Crawford. Over the past two years Merion had taken a liking to the old woman. Joan was one of the ones wheeling herself around in a chair, using her feet to drag her along rather than turning the wheels with her hands. But Joan scared her a touch, too.

  When Merion saw Joan, she forced a smile to her lips, her teeth clenching just a little too tight. The old woman spotted her and smiled widely, pumping her feet in short steps to get her chair going. For a moment Merion considered just turning her head and walking swiftly by the old coot, but she could

  (end up here in a few years, too)

  never find it in her heart to do it. Merion slowed her pace, waiting for Ms. Crawford.

  The old lady came to a stop in front of her, smiling up at Merion as if she knew exactly who she was, as if she had been waiting for her to come. Perhaps she had. Merion had never seen any other visitors for the old woman.

  “Do you know who I am?” Ms. Crawford asked, reaching out and clasping Merion’s hand between her bony, age-spotted fingers. Her grip was cold and sickly smooth, but Merion didn’t jerk away. Her own hands had begun to wrinkle as well. As tired as she was of the monotonous world she lived in, she didn’t have a cruel heart.

  “Why, yes,” she said, bending a little at the waist and giving the old woman a real smile. “You’re Miss Joan Crawford. Everyone knows who you are.”

  Merion knew that the old lady was not the Joan Crawford, the once-adored actress, but “Joan” liked to tell people that she was. Or at least she liked to tell Merion that she was, and Merion had no intention of challenging an old woman. Especially not an old woman whose only thing to look forward to was the random visitor who walked through the white-light hall, visitors who were always here to visit someone else.

  Rather die. I’d rather die than live like this.

  But that thought was no good. Because that thought made her feel guilty. Again.

  The old woman’s face lit up with approval. She winked, her grin spreading back to her earlobes, revealing multiple missing teeth and seeming to multiply the deep wrinkles that resided on her face. “That’s right, deary,” she said. She clasped her hands together. “Oh, wait here. I got something I want to show ya.”

  Merion stifled a sigh and nodded at the old woman, who turned in her wheelchair and set off in the direction of her room. She knew the old lady was once again going to retrieve an old black-and-white photograph of herself in her younger years. Preserved behind a thick, golden-colored frame, it was probably the only one she had.

  She waved and smil
ed at a few of the other patients who seemed lucid enough to register it. Two returned her smile, and the other waved back. A minute later Joan came roll-walking out of her room, with the golden-framed black-and-white photograph laid across her lap. She lifted it slowly, holding it out in an unsteady hand to Merion, who took it.

  Merion stared down at the lady in the picture. It was a headshot of Joan while she had been twenty-something. Her hair was curled under in a perfect bob, the make-up on her eyes heavy but tasteful. This was one of the parts Merion hated the most about coming here. It was hard for her to look at the photograph of the young Joan Crawford and equate her with the woman who walked around in her wheelchair, babbling to strangers. It was hard to see the once-smooth cheeks and white smile that time had stolen so completely. It was hard because

  (she was getting old, too)

  she bet that it had all gone by so fast. She bet that Ms. Crawford, who waited for strangers to come by so that she could show them her photograph, thought it all had gone by so fast.

  And it is, ain’t it? Merion thought. It sure as shit is.

  “Well,” Merion said, “weren’t you just lovely? Absolutely beautiful.”

  Ms. Crawford waved a bony hand in dismissal, her chin pulling down a little as her shriveled cheeks grew a bit pink.

  “And I’ll tell you what, Ms. Crawford, you haven’t aged a day.”

  The old woman released Merion’s hand only to grip her by the wrist. Her hold was weak with age, but somehow persistent and demanding. Merion swallowed once. Ms. Crawford’s eyes swept across the nursing home’s white hall, and she leaned close and spoke in a hushed tone.

  “What do ya say me an’ you bust outta here?” she asked, her voice raspy with age but as serious as a sergeant’s. Her eyes continued to dart from side to side. “Gotta get outta this place.” The old woman’s gaze rested on Merion, who had to resist the urge to take a step back.

  Merion tried to give a smile, but found it simply would not come. It was always the same with Ms. Crawford. She was a crazy old bat, and as much as she wanted to be kind, Merion was creeped out by her. A fresh batch of guilt washed over her now as she realized that her kindness for the old woman was mostly out of sympathy. “I have to go now,” Merion said, pulling her arm back a little.