by Jarret Keene
So that night he left his throne and went upstairs, where Snake told him, “Gold Man wants you to babysit.”
Crip nodded and went into the nursery. Crip was surprised to find an actual child sitting there, because it was not really a nursery. It was where they held you and sometimes worked you over to make an example of you. He took his seat next to the child. She didn’t look like trouble, so he relaxed and rested his cane and hat in his lap, and waited for the Gold Man’s door to open.
Through the walls, he heard the Gold Man say, “Her? Don’t worry about her. She’s okay. For now. It’s you that you should worry about.”
And the nursery door swung open. A beet-red face, the child’s father, peeped in. Got a good look at his precious little one sitting next to the big mustard suit. That black skin. That twisted face. Then the door closed. Through the walls, Crip could hear Snake’s cruel laughter. Then he heard the Gold Man laying down the terms. The other voice, the sobbing voice, that was the girl’s father.
The little girl said, “How’d you get so black? I’ve never seen anybody so black.”
“Huh?”
He looked down at her. Usually he tried not to look at them, unless they seemed like trouble. He looked down at her, and she was staring up at him as though she expected an answer. Well, little blond-haired, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked child, one day I took a paint brush and dipped it in a big can of black and slapped some more on my face because I didn’t think I had enough problems already. Instead of answering, he scowled at her, trying to scare her, but she kept staring at him until he turned away.
Through the walls came, “Scumbag. Degenerate. You piece of shit. I want my money. I want my money or I will do bad things to you. Very bad things.”
The little girl said, “I like the color of your suit, though.
It’s pretty. Where’d you get it from?”
Hand tailored. A gift from the Gold Man. Got three more just like it at home. One of them’s double breasted. One of them’s got tails. One of them’s got a matching vest. Got an image to uphold. I am Crip, the Mustard Man. He felt something on his knee. The little girl’s hand. He glanced at her. Her smile was gone. Tears were rolling out of her eyes, down her cheeks into the lacy collar of her nightgown. The kid was probably in bed dreaming about sugar plum fairies when Snake and Radney and Goggles went to collect her and her old man. The kid was leaking tears, but she was quiet about it—just a sniffle here and there. A brave little girl she was for eight or seven.
The Gold Man’s voice: “If I don’t get my money, I’m gonna lose my temper. I haven’t lost my temper yet but I will.”
“The payment plan,” the father sobbed. “I’ll stay on the payment plan this time, I swear it.”
“You’ll stay on the payment plan, you’d better. Five hundred every five days.”
“Ohmygod. God. God.”
“Five hundred every five days, and you don’t owe me seven grand anymore. Now you owe me ten.”
“Ohmygod. God. My daughter.”
“I’m done talking to you now. Snake, Radney, show this bum the door.”
“My little girl—”
“Show it to him hard.”
The little girl had her hand in his lap and tears in her eyes and he took her hands in both of his and said to her, “I painted it on.”
She sniffled, “Painted what?”
“I painted on an extra coat of black.”
She smiled. “You can’t paint yourself. You’re lying. People are born with skin.”
“And I grew the suit from pumpkin seeds.”
She was smiling, sniffing back sobs. “No way. That’s silly. You can’t grow suits from pumpkin seeds. You buy suits in a department store.”
He winked at her with his twisted face. He made his bug eye jump in the socket to spook her. The little girl wasn’t afraid of it at all. She was holding his hand when Goggles came through the door and called him over, whispered to him: “Gold Man says to pack her up.”
“What do I know about kids? I never done a kid before.”
“Pack her up is what he said.”
“What do they eat? What do they drink? Kid’ll end up dead living with me. Do they drink bourbon? All I got is bourbon.”
“With a father like what she’s got, this one’ll probably end up dead anyway. He’s into us for a lot of dough. He’s in over his head.”
Crip looked over at the little girl in the cotton nightgown and she looked back at him, rubbing the redness out of her nose with her little hands. He said to Goggles, “Well, I’ll figure it out. It can’t be that hard. We was all kids once, right?”
All night he thought about the kid. At 5 in the morning, things had slowed down enough for him to get off the throne and head on home. He went upstairs to collect her. She had fallen asleep in the chair. Her hands and feet were bound, and she had duct tape over her mouth. There was no need for that, but the Gold Man was trying to send a message. This is not kid’s play. People could get hurt. The stripper who had been assigned to watch her was snoring in the other chair.
He shook her awake. “Did she eat? Does she have any other clothes? What do you feed a kid like this?”
He pulled out his blade and cut the bonds on her little arms and legs. He checked her neck and face for bruises, and he was glad when he saw that there were none. She awoke as he was removing the tape from her mouth. She looked about to cry, but they made eye contact, and he told her with his eyes, Don’t cry. She held it back. She was a brave kid. She didn’t cry.
He gave the stripper a hundred to follow him home. Crip lived, if you could call it that, on the second floor of a distressed property in the 1400 block of Vegas Valley Drive, in the shadow of the South Maryland Parkway, and not too far from the hospital where he sent a lot of the people who owed the Gold Man money. Degenerates who borrowed more than they could ever pay back. Like this Air Force boy from Nellis with the pretty little daughter. The scoop he got from Goggles was that the boy was typical. A country boy from Tennessee. Second year in the service. Stationed in Las Vegas. First time in Las Vegas. He gambled more than he could afford. He moved up to borrowing from the high interest check cashers, one of which was owned by the Gold Man. When he couldn’t pay them back, he started writing bad checks. When his CO found out about it, it was too late. The Air Force has its standards. The best the CO could do was to arrange an honorable discharge. So now the kid is cut loose. He gambles, he wins. He gambles, he loses. He’s got a baby he left back home from some girl he knocked up in high school. The girl gets killed in a car wreck. The sickly grandma ships the poor little orphan off to Las Vegas to be with her military man daddy—only he’s not in the Air Force anymore, but is too ashamed to tell anyone. The Gold Man gets tired of waiting for his money and calls the boy in for a little chit chat. So the Mustard Man gets to babysit the collateral until the Gold Man gets his dough. Typical. Typical stuff.
Crip opened the door to his apartment, and both the stripper and the little girl gasped. There was a mattress with a pillow on it. That was it. Other than that mattress, there was no other furniture. No TV. No bookshelves. No tables and chairs in the kitchen area. Nothing on the stove. If you opened the cabinets, nothing in the cabinets, no plates, no glasses, no forks and spoons, nothing. If you opened the refrigerator, you’d find a bottle of water and two bottles of bourbon. There were two bedrooms in the apartment, and both the doors were locked from the outside. At the moment, he was not babysitting anyone except the girl, but it was his practice always to keep those doors locked. There was stuff in there that maybe you didn’t want to see. There was one closet, the hallway closet; if you opened that door, you’d find his clothes in it—his other suits and underwear and shoes and whatnot. But that door was locked too. There was stuff in there that maybe you didn’t want to see.
The stripper set the bag of groceries and other supplies down on the kitchen counter. Now she understood why they had gone to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and bought a fry pan and paper plates.
A bottle of Crisco. Crip led the little girl to the mattress and made her lie down. There was a clean sheet on the mattress, and he covered her with it.
The stripper, who was called Sapphire, threw up her hands. “Shit. I’m gonna need more than this. I’m gonna need lettuce and apple juice. Some cups. Some milk. Some of everything. Shit, you got nothing in here, Crip.”
He gave her three more hundreds. “Get whatever you need. Get it quick and get back here. And don’t curse in front of the kid no more, you hear? Don’t make me hafta smack you around a little bit.”
While the stripper was gone, he sat down on the floor next to the little girl on the mattress. He listened to her sweet, innocent breathing.
He said to her, “Sleep, little girl. Sleep.” Poor thing, to have a father like that. Poor little thing. Bad parents was one of those things Crip put on his Don’t like it list. Owing money was one of those things he put on there too. Hurting kids? Well, that was at the top of the Don’t like it list. But that was one of those things he had control over because this time, it was he who was the babysitter.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, he had a mother and a little sister and a babysitter who was not in her right mind. He would watch her do things to his sister that he should have told his mother about, but didn’t. He loved his baby sister Ta’Shana and he did not believe the woman when she said that she was Ta’Shana’s “other” mother, but he didn’t do anything about it. All day long the babysitter would keep changing Ta’Shana’s clothes, dressing her in outfits that she had snuck into the house in her bag and asking him, How does she look now? Doesn’t my baby look nice now? And he would say, She looks fine, and go back to watching cartoons with a heavy heart. When the babysitter opened her shirt and pulled out her creamy peanut butter brown breasts, he would feel a coiling of his privates in his pants. She would sit there with her shirt open tugging her thick brown nipples and asking him how they looked. Were they big enough yet? Did they look big enough to suck on yet? He would say, They look fine, and not do much else because he really did not know what to do about it at six or seven. Then she would pick up Ta’Shana and push one of the thick, wrinkly nipples into her mouth, and say, There, there now, my baby, as Ta’Shana sucked. This troubled him so much that he would go into his room and stand in the corner like somebody had put him on punishment.
He always blamed himself for what happened the day the babysitter’s boyfriend came over, because he should have told his mother about all the other stuff, he should have told her, he should have told her, but he didn’t.
The babysitter’s boyfriend, who was not supposed to be there when his mother was not home, had snuck over many times before to be with the babysitter, so he was no stranger. This time, like all the others before, the boyfriend and the babysitter took their clothes off and got on top of each other on the couch and started pumping and huffing and growling and panting and screaming and laughing and shouting profanity.
Crip, who was called Leon back in those days, had seen it all before so he went into the room he shared with Ta’Shana and closed the door. A few minutes later, the boyfriend and the babysitter burst into the room and started punching him and slapping him around, accusing him of being disloyal and spying on them, and they said they knew all about his plans to tell his mother on them, but they knew a way to punish his black ass, Oh, they knew a way—they would take their baby and leave him behind. He cried and screamed and pulled at them and begged them not to take his sister, as they grabbed Ta’Shana from her crib and dressed her in a sailor suit and red shoes the babysitter had in her bag. They laughed at him and slapped him some more. He ran into the kitchen and came back with a butcher knife. He was going to stab them and save his sister, but the boyfriend snatched the knife from him, then picked him up and threw him against the wall three times. It could have been more than three, but after three is when he blacked out.
When he woke up, he was in a hospital. There were police there. There was his mother crying hysterically. His sister was gone. His body was broken. His face. His legs. A few years later, his mother was gone too. Out a window.
Two nights in a row, Crip got to his throne four hours later than he normally did. On the third night, he did not show at all. On the fourth night, when he got there four hours late again, Snake was waiting for him.
“What the fuck?”
Crip said, “What do you mean, what the fuck?”
“I mean what the fuck when I say what the fuck. Where you been? What’s been happening to you?”
“The hell with you. What are you, my mother?” Crip pushed past him and sat down on his throne, and set his hat and cane in his lap. He scowled at Snake, which usually would have been enough to scare him off. But tonight, something was missing in his scowl. Snake stood his ground. Crip grumbled, “What do you think has been happening, man? What do you think? I gotta take care of the kid. I gotta feed her. I gotta make sure one of the girls is there with her while I’m here. Last night, the kid was sick. Had a temperature of a hundred and one. Sapphire was supposed to come sit with her. That bitch Sapphire never showed up. I’m gonna wring her neck when I get ahold of her. I got this kid, what am I supposed to do? Leave her there watching TV all night?”
“You got a TV now?”
“Yeah, I bought a TV. And a VCR with tapes. Cartoons and stuff. Yeah, that’s right. Is that a problem? What am I supposed to do? She’s a kid.”
Snake said, “You should just tie the brat up like you do the rest of ’em. She’ll still be there when you get back.”
“She’s a kid. You think I’m gonna tie up a kid?”
“I would.”
Crip’s voice was cold as ice. “I would fucking tie you up, Snake. I would tie you up real tight. So tight you couldn’t breathe.”
This time the scowl was working. Snake backed away with his hands raised in surrender—he backed all the way into the club. It was only when Snake was gone and Crip sat back down that he realized he had stood up out of his seat as though ready to go after Snake. Little Josh Ho the security guard and Candy Apple were staring at him. They had never seen him talk so much. He gave them the scowl too, and they went back to doing their jobs.
On the fifth night, he had to get there early, he just had to, but he got there late once more (Sapphire didn’t show again—he had to wait for Diamond to show up, but she showed up high, so he had to wait for Ebony Rainbow, who was drunk, but what the fuck, he had to get to work), and just as he got there, lucky break, he saw the father go into the club. Crip put on his hat and he gripped his cane, and he waited. When the father came back out, with a blackened eye and a kerchief against a bleeding nose, Crip gripped him by the arm and took him around back where the cars were parked. He drove off with him in his Lincoln, took him to an alley that was nice and dark. He said to him: “You know you have a sweet kid. Do you know what you have?”
The father whimpered, “Ohmygod. What have you done to her? What have you done?”
“I’ve done nothing to her,” Crip said. “What have you done to her? She’s got no mother. She’s got no grandmother. And you, you, look at you. She’s got no father. Do you realize the Gold Man will kill you? He will do it. I’ve seen him do it. I’ve helped him do it. He will kill you, and then what’s gonna happen to your kid? Look at me. I grew up with no mother, no father, no beauty to me at all, and this goddamn limp. The world is an ugly place. Your beautiful girl will become a whore, I can tell you that. She will suck dick and take it up the ass from the ugliest forms of life you have ever seen, and I know because I have seen these ugly forms of life. I live with ’em. I’m one of ’em. We’re like this goddamn city. We’re all dressed up, and we twinkle with all these bright lights, but behind it all we stink rotten like a sewer. You’re her father. You’re supposed to protect her. You’re supposed to give her a chance at the good life. This kid, you know what she tells me she wants to be when she grows up? She wants to be a nurse. I tell her, Nurse? Why not be a doctor? She says, Okay, I’ll b
e a doctor. I can be anything I want to be, she says. And she can be, but not if her father is throwing away every penny he has in these goddamned casinos. Casinos are for suckers and men who want their daughters to sell ass. I don’t wanna see that happen to that kid, do you hear me?” At that point, he had the father by the collar and was shaking him. The bloody kerchief fell from his nose. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
The father whimpered, “I hear you.”
And Crip released him and patted down his shirt, which he had rumpled up in his rage. The father’s eyes were the little girl’s eyes. He was a man with beautiful eyes, despite the shiner. They were teary eyes. Crip said to him, “I got something for you. I got some money for you.”
“What?”
Crip reached into his mustard jacket and pulled out the envelope with the ten grand in it and pressed it into the father’s hand. “It’s all there. It’s everything you need. Give this to the Gold Man the next time you come. Then be a father to your daughter.”
“Ohmygod,” the father said, looking at the thickness of green bills in the envelope. “Ohmygod. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. I gotta get back to my life. Babysitting kids is way too hard.”
On the sixth night, Crip got there on time. Slap her around a little and Sapphire not only stays off the weed real good, but she shows up where she’s supposed to show up and on time. Crip was happy. In a few nights, it would all be over. The father would pay the Gold Man and the kid would be free to go on and grow up to be a doctor. Plus, it was a nice crowd tonight, no troublemakers, no college guys, mostly tourists, men in their fifties and sixties wanting to see the titties dance, wanting to maybe get a little bit of the old special treatment in one of the back rooms.
When Goggles came out, Crip was on his throne, sipping his bourbon like the way it used to be, with his hat and his cane in his lap. He smiled at Goggles trying to put the moves on Candy Apple, riding his hand on her ample buttocks during a slow spot in the line. Candy Apple was a good kid, working her way through college. A man like Goggles was not her type. Thank God.
