by D
You figure that if shots had already gone off, someone would have called the cops, even in this neighborhood. If Jamar’s sliced up … well, that’s another story. Your gun feels so heavy now, like that ring around Frodo’s neck. You don’t want to pull it out. You don’t want to pull any more triggers.
You take the keys from Duronté to open the front door, but it’s already cracked. You push it open to see Jamar tied to a chair with telephone cords. The crotch of his pants is stained with piss. He looks like he’s the dead walking the earth.
On either side of him are two men in suits. Both are tall and slender, but one is dark-skinned and the other more of a toasted-almond color. They’re both in their thirties, maybe older.
“You Duronté?” one of the men asks.
“I am,” your cousin proclaims, tapping his chest with a fist like a Southern gangsta Tarzan. You would clown him for it if not for the circumstances.
“I guess you got our message,” Almond says.
“And why was the message for him?” you interrupt. You want to see what these suits are made of.
“Because he stands to win where Reggie lost.”
“Look, that shit wasn’t over my weed, was it?”
Darker laughs.
“Not hardly. He owed us some money for some other product that he tried to get away with not paying. We couldn’t let that go unpunished.”
“But why’d you hit him at our thing? Why not before?”
“Because we need a replacement,” Almond says.
“A replacement for what?”
“Reggie was moving a nice amount of weight for us. Good quality. Good price. He was moving away from the weed business. Not enough money in it for all the headaches.”
“And before we continue,” Darker says, “we didn’t touch your boy here. He did the pissing the minute we came through the door.”
You want to laugh again but you force a straight face.
“We can give you a list of every piece of real estate Reggie had, and the workers who are still loyal to us,” Almond explains. “All we need is someone to oversee the operation.”
You immediately think about the conversation the two of you just had in the car, about opportunity presenting itself. Now here it is. You know he’s churning it through his brain like butter.
“What’s the split?” your cousin asks, actually licking his lips after the words hit the air. They have him without having him. But they don’t have you.
“No split,” Darker says. “You buy at our price and sell for what you want.”
You can almost picture the erection in the boy’s drawers. He’s no longer thinking that his partner from high school and his crew are now dead. He doesn’t ask anything about his crew.
“I’m in,” he says. He will think on this moment for the rest of his life.
Darker produces a business card that Duronté reads.
“That’s the number you use for everything,” Almond says. “That’s the gateway to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
You get the impression that this is their job. They are the spokespeople for a someone else far too important to stop by broke-down cribs on Ashby Street, a someone else who unfortunate people never see—until it’s too late.
3.
It stillsurprises you that people can be so blind and so stupid. But this time you know enough to understand that you can only save yourself. So as you watch Duronté shake hands on a deal that you know will spell disaster, you figure that the best thing for you to do is get out of the lane before this whole thing puts its nuts on your forehead.
At the same time, walking out during this negotiation is a one-way ticket to a casket. The Illinois twins might take it as a sign of disrespect and slit your throat before you can turn the key in your car. More importantly, one of your only living relatives could hate your forever. Out of the two, that’s the harder pill to swallow.
So you stand there while the three of them finish things up, looking like the loyal soldier. Neither member of the twins looks in your direction at all, only at the freshly caught fly in a web you know is made of nothing but deceit.
“Do you have an e-mail address?” Almond asks.
Duronté grins. “What you think, that I’m in the Dark Ages and shit? Hell yeah, I got e-mail.”
“Then we’ll send you all the info you need.”
Drop points and corners by e-mail? You’re wondering who these guys work for and why somebody this high-powered can’t find himself people more experienced in the dope game.
You also know that there’s no way that Reggie’s crew is going to jump onboard without things getting shaken up. Even Keyser Söze doesn’t have that much juice. But Duronté’s eyes are completely glazed over with ambition. He’s like that dude in the Shakespeare play you read once, the guy who killed the king just because the witches told him to. But the witches didn’t tell him everything.
Your cousin shakes hands with these dudes like they just sold him life insurance. You watch them walk out the front, get into the Beemer, and drive off like business as usual. Duronté cracks a smile.
“That went better than I thought.”
You have the impulse to backslap him. But you remind yourself that this isn’t your problem, that you’re just a houseguest, that your crib will be ready in a matter of days and then you can go live there. Shit, you could get a room at Pascal’s down the way and ride it out.
“You think so, right?” he asks you, noticing the uncomfortable silence.
“This is your show,” you explain. “You gotta make the decisions.”
“But you my cousin, man. And you know the game. I can’t make no moves without you.”
This is when Alonzo comes up the walk and Meechie enters through the rear.
“I seen ’em drive off,” Alonzo says, a little out of breath from jogging up the street. “What the fuck happened?”
“They made me a offer I couldn’t refuse.”
He tells the whole story like it’s straight out of a comic book. He adds more tension and suspense, making it seem as if he ran two punks out of his crib after he made them give him a piece of their thing. And of course the boys eat it up, as homeboys do, because to think or say otherwise is the worst kind of hood sacrilege a man can commit.
They’ll have the entire city on lock. They’ll get muscle, more guns, as they know plenty of others who’ll want to be down. Blunts are rolled. Brews are cracked. That damn Ayana Angel porno comes on again. This is their night. But it most definitely is not yours.
You excuse yourself after an hour or so. You say you’ve got a broad to go see and step out on the porch to make a call. But for a while you just sit there, watching the occasional lightning bug float through the sky and listening to the sound of a single cricket off in the distance. Eventually you flip the phone open and dial your only current shot at pussy in the greater Atlanta area.
She is wide awake when you hear her voice, even though it’s pushing 4 in the morning. The TV is on in the background. When you ask, she says that it’s Cheaters. She loves watching people get busted, especially black people. Because even when the brothers get caught red-handed they still deny it for the sake of the cameras, thinking that their reputations, that their sense of game, are far more important than the love they feel for the women they betrayed.
You ask her why she’s still awake and she says that she always is, that she’s been a night person ever since she was little, that she only moves around in the day because it’s the time where people have to get things done. You ask what she does for a living and she says, “A little bit of everything.” It really wouldn’t surprise you if that actually meant that she sold dubs herself.
When she asks why you’re up, you say that you and your boys closed down Pleasers on a Sunday night. It was the only place where you could drink and where the dancers were decent for a five-dollar table dance. She asks if you saw any girls you liked. You say you got a dance from a tall girl the color of tar with a bo
oty that felt perfect when she gave you a dance.
She says that lap dancing is against the law.
You say, “So is smokin’ weed, but when has that stopped anybody?”
She laughs. You laugh back. She asks where you are and you tell her. She says she’s close and wants to know if you’ll go for a drive. You say yes. She gives you the address.
You think she’s gonna have jokes about your little economy car. But as you pull up to the address she gave you, you really don’t care anymore. She’s wearing a little half-top with spaghetti straps and jeans that look painted on. The pants match the blue in her jelly flip-flops. Her weave is tied up in a big ponytail. You notice a blond streak on one side that you don’t think you saw before.
“You smoke?” she asks after she clicks her seat belt tight. You nod. She has a sack of weed with a brownish color in one hand and a little thing of papers in the other. The smile she gives you is devilish. “I thought so,” she says.
You drive up to Cascade and then out past the park off of Peeples Street. You pass the Long John Silver’s and the Kroger and all the crackheads on Richland Road. That soul food place, The Beautiful, is all dark, as it should be so early in the morning.
“What’s your middle name?” she asks you.
“Where did that come from? You don’t even know my last name.”
“Your last name’s easier to find out,” she says.
She’s wearing this perfume that you should remember, this scent that you’ve smelled on someone else somewhere else. It still smells so good.
“I ain’t gonna make my middle name that easy then,” you say.
“A’ight then,” she chuckles. Rick James is on the radio. “Fire and Desire.”
She turns it up. She knows all the words even though the song is older than she is. Shit, it’s even older than you are. For some reason, this is the moment when you remember that you’ll be going to school with kids younger than you, that none of them will truly know who you are or what you’ve been doing. You will envy them because 99.9 percent of them don’t have blood on their hands, none of them have an eternity in the fiery depths to look forward to.
You pull onto a side street and she rolls and lights. You pass the joint back and forth. The high kicks in quickly. The tension relaxes. The truth is that you just want to lay your head in her lap, that you want someone to make you forget about four more bodies in a dumpster. But there’s no way she could possibly understand any of that. There’s no way she can understand who you really are.
“So how come you ain’t got a man?”
“’Cuz most men ain’t shit. And the one’s that are don’t know how to handle me.”
You look her up and down. Her words make you want to put your fingers inside of her. You want to see her swallow you whole while you make her come by playing with her clit. That’s what nights like this are for. Right?
“I think I can take it,” you say.
“We’ll see.”
You lean in to kiss her and she gives you her lips. They are as soft as a baby’s flesh. You pull her to you with one hand while the other brushes her breast. You can feel a thick nipple harden against your thumb. Each touch makes you crave more. She brings a hand to your crotch and begins to rub slowly. You reach under the bra and lift it over the breast it protects. Then you bring your lips down to it. She moans.
You try to work on her jeans but she stops you. Instead, she goes to work on your own, unbuttoning and unzipping, reaching into the slit of your boxers to pull out what is now long past hard. She lowers her face without your asking. Her breath is hot as those lovely lips seal the deal. Through the windshield the sun is beginning to shine. It is truly a brand new day.
“What the fuck you talkin’ bout?!”
You can’t say that you didn’t expect him to act like this. You just didn’t think he’d wild out in a Waffle House on a Monday afternoon. There is half a pecan waffle in front of you and some hash browns. You can still smell Jenny’s perfume on you.
“I can’t do it,” you say.
He wants you to help him become the new kingpin of Atlanta (as if there were a single reigning champ), even if there can be no such thing anymore.
“I cain’t do this by myself.”
“You said yeah by yourself,” you reply.
“That’s just ’cuz I thought you was with me all the way.”
“Look, I told you I’m down here to go to school. I’m done wit’ all that shit.”
“Then why wuz you even with us last night? Why the fuck you givin’ me advice?”
“’Cuz you family and I didn’t wanna see you or your boys get hurt. Because I knew you hadn’t never been in no shit like this before.”
“And now you gon’ back the fuck out when we can finally make some real cake.”
“Cake ain’t everything, D. It ain’t. You let them muthafuckas sell you the fuckin’ dream without askin’ no questions. Reggie’s boys ain’t gon’ just follow you because. And even if they do, what about the cops, the DEA? You ain’t got no payroll money like that. You ain’t got no inside info. You do this and you just another nigga on a corner, plain and simple.”
“But how can I not do it now? You seen what they did to Reggie. How am I gonna back out?”
You don’t really have a particular answer for this one. If it was some stranger on the street, you’d probably tell him he was shit out of luck. But this is your cousin, your only cousin. You’ve never turned your back on family, even when they turned their backs on you. So how can you now?
“I don’t know how much difference I can make anyway.”
“I just need you there, man. You know, you been through shit. If them Chicago niggas had tried somethin’, you had the plan in effect right there. I mean, I can handle the business part, but I ain’t so good with the chess board, you know?”
You hesitate, because you know that once the words hit the air you can’t take them back. By saying what you’re going to say, you are putting a target on your own head. You are potentially fingerprinting yourself and standing before a judge to be tried as an accessory.
Duronté doesn’t know about the money you have left. The truth is, he doesn’t even really know who you are. He just sees you as a gateway to being something all the music videos have made to be more glamorous than it is. You know that those glory days are over. The weight still moves but there ain’t no monopolies. People get killed. People get third strikes. A lot of funerals both inside and out.
None of this feels right. But with all the shit on your conscience, all the demons swirling around your head because of what happened that last night in Brooklyn, maybe it’s time you do something for somebody else, even if it costs.
“Look man. I’ll do what I can.”
He gives you this look like he wants to hug you. But the rules of men don’t allow such things. So you pay the bill and hop into your cousin’s ride. You’ve got a business to build.
4.
“I’m a muthafuckin’ soldier,” the dude says. Maybe he’s twenty. About 5’9", 160. He kind of looks like T.I. except he has cornrows. He’s wearing an oversized Falcons jersey and a 4XL white T on a body that should be wearing a large. He’s the tenth person that’s come to see you in the last few hours.
You pretend to be playing pool while he and Duronté discuss the whole membership thing. All of the core crew are there (even Jamar got a promotion as a result of the new development in your cousin’s business). So now you need lieutenants to manage the various venues.
Luckily for Duronté, Reggie didn’t do a lot of corners. He mostly worked out of stores, dry cleaners, and other businesses. It was an even bigger surprise that all of his people went along with the switch-over without much of a shake-up. Maybe it had to do with the fact that Duronté had a rep for doing good business with weed, an area that Alonzo is now completely in charge of. Duronté’s put you in for twenty percent of whatever he gets, which means that your legit job is out the window for the time being
.
There are still five days until registration at school. Your crib will be ready in about twentyfour hours, which means you have a week to put furniture in it while you help your cousin set up shop. Things have been so hectic that you haven’t even had a chance to return Jennifer’s calls. You text her though, and she seems to understand. After all, it’s barely been a day.
School was so close just a day ago, but now it’s kind of off in the distance, like summer vacation in April. Now the whole thing is keeping your cousin from getting killed, even if you’re not so sure you can.
B.I. (the fake-ass T.I.) pulls Duronté into a hug and makes his exit back up the stairwell, never giving you a second look.
You’re glad about that, as the last thing you want is to be a known face in what is soon to become an organization.
“What you think of him?” Duronté asks.
“I think he’s fulla shit,” you say, as you put the eight ball in the corner pocket, even though the stick is seriously warped. “But he’ll do.”
“I figured I’ll put him in the car with Jamar, have him show him the ropes.”
You can do nothing but shake your head. But then, after a minute, you explode: “Nigga, are you out of your goddamn mind? You know this muthafucka for like ten seconds and you put him in a car with one of your main people, the one who pissed himself when the Chicago twins showed up?”
There’s another long pause.
“I guess I didn’t think about it like that.”
Family is meaning less and less to you by the second.
“Let him run for Meechie for a while,” you suggest.
Meechie is in charge of the stash at Golden Glide, the skating rink. He needs somebody to keep an eye out. Sure, it’s the kind of job you’d use some sixteen-year-old for, but in a time crunch you can up the pay and make it worth his while, until he proves some loyalty. Then he moves up.
“You got it.” Duronté nods in approval, as if his approval is the kind of thing that makes you feel better. Part of you already wants to ask for higher percentage. That part knows the longer you stick around, the more of his messes you’ll have to clean up after. But you keep that part in check.
