by D
Ten seconds later, Jamar comes running down the stairs.
“It’s here,” he announces, his heart beating out of his chest.
“It” is the product, and here and now, just after 10, Old National is quiet enough. The two of you follow piss boy up the stairs to the back, where the truck is just coming in.
You’ve got about five guys there to make sure the shipment comes in okay, dudes who have been around the block, done a little time on weapons charges. The oldest, Frank, is in his thirties and did a long stretch for manslaughter. Most of them came from Meechie, one from Alonzo. They seem reliable enough, their eyes darting every which way in search of potential threats.
The first twenty kilos come in courtesy of a school milk truck. Two designated crates (blue instead of the usual gray) have the powder packed into empty milk cartons. There’s not a whole lot to carry, but with everything in the worst kind of transition, you can’t be too careful.
Meechie is out at the rink and Alonzo is back at Duronté’s place on weed detail. The driver, a fat man whose race is hard to figure out, comes around back and struggles to slide the trailer open. You and Jamar step in to get the two crates, which are both light as feathers.
One goes into Duronté’s car and the other into yours. Jamar rides shotgun with you, Frank with your cousin. The drive to the chemist out in Stone Mountain is going to be pretty long.
It’s both good and bad that there’s so much distance between things. It’s good because all the different shops aren’t connected, which means that any problem at one place can’t easily spread to any of the others without a drive. It’s bad because if something jumps off, you can’t get there quickly, especially when there’s so few people in management positions. You’ll have to work on that, sooner than later.
You don’t know anything about making crack, though you’ve heard it’s a lot simpler than heroin. But little Jamar apparently does—some cousin of his had some uncle who did the baking soda thing long ago.
You soon need fiends for the taste test. But that’s one kind of staffing that won’t be in short supply.
You’ve been missing New York since the day you left. There aren’t enough lights here, not enough sounds. Sometimes you think you’re waiting in a vacuum, almost like sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Jersey Turnpike. You can remember making runs with your foster dad from the Ikea in Elizabeth, and that one time you went with him to visit his great-aunt down by Trenton. In traffic there was nothing to do but listen to the radio (or the commercials, depending on the station) or to your government-appointed old man ramble on and on about how things used to be out here. You miss his little lectures. But you really miss him.
You also miss Brooklyn, the Caribbean place up the street that was better at jerking off than they were at jerk chicken. You miss your truck, which has most likely been auctioned off to some eighteen-year-old by now as part of a seized-property sale. You miss watching the fireworks from across the river on the Fourth of July. You miss the only place you’ve ever really known, and now it’s gone, dead to you all, because of one blowjob too many. The suck that emptied a thousand clips, or whatever you want to call it.
From what you’ve heard, Stone Mountain, Georgia was once a haven for the upwardly mobile. Nothing but green lawns, nice-sized houses, and neighbors who invited you to barbecues and cocktail parties. But according to Jamar, things have been changing with the new folks moving into the city from all kinds of places.
You’ve grown up your whole life being taught that New York is the center of the world, that no one can touch you, that the streets you walked on were made of some kind of concrete you couldn’t find anywhere else. But in this new place, the world now seems so much bigger, so much more complicated. And it scares you sometimes. It really scares you.
“How much shit you got?” our much-older-than-expected chemist asks. He is 5’3” at best, a small wiry Jewish man with thick glasses and a clubfoot, not exactly the type of “cook” you’ve been expecting. You imagined some tatted-up dude with his shirt off and a mask over his face.
But the garage seems to be equipped with all that you might need, though ventilation is a question. He points to the electrical vacuuming system built into one of the walls, like the kind of thing they have in chemistry class. It takes toxins out before they come close to killing anyone.
He says he’ll need overnight to get it street ready. It’s going to cost your cousin five grand, which is quite a hit. The twins didn’t tell him that the operation was going to run you some start-up dough. Even with what Duronté has put away, turning a profit is going to cost him. If this was a legit business, he might have to mortgage that car wash to the hilt. But then again, you’ve only been here for a little bit. You don’t know what he has stashed and where.
Duronté pays the man in hundreds and Frank and Jamar take the goods out of the trunks. In twenty-four hours you’ll officially be in business, whatever that means.
You’re heading down the walk when Duronté’s phone rings. He puts it on speaker just in time for us to hear the gunshots and what sounds like Alonzo screaming, then the line goes completely dead.
All four of you stand there for a second, asking yourselves whether or not this might be a joke of some kind. Sure, you’re pretty far away from both Halloween and April Fools’, but Alonzo could have this much bad taste. That moment doesn’t last though.
“Where the fuck is he?” you ask your cousin, who’s as frozen as George W. Bush on 9/11.
“My house,” he says. Once again, you’re going to have to take charge of the situation.
You move as fast as you can back toward the SWATS, a forty-minute run at a speed that threatens to put cops on your tail. With every other breath you’re kicking yourself for not trusting your own intuition, for telling family to go fuck themselves and getting involved in yet another losing venture. But here you are, racing to rescue a man you don’t even know, even when it could be the worst kind of trap.
You go from the long strip of 85 to 20 to Ashby to Fair and are about to make the turn to Duronté’s crib when you see the fire engines and emergency vehicles everywhere. The sky above your cousin’s block is gray. There’s a house on fire. And it looks like the one you’ve been staying in.
You can imagine what’s going through your cousin’s mind in the other car. But since you’re in front of him, you set the pace by proceeding at a slow speed, heading up the block and then making a quick turn in the other direction, moving back toward your own house down on Palmetto.
All of a sudden you’re thinking of your shoes and your clothes, the only pictures you had of both sets of parents. You’re thinking about Alonzo. You hope that he went quickly, a single shot to the head followed by that final scream you all heard. You almost lose control of the wheel when you consider the fact that the cops will be looking for your cousin, that he’ll have a dead body to answer questions about, not to mention the several pounds of weed and multiple firearms that will be found on the premises. He’s fucked, completely fucked. And you’re not far behind.
Your house is dark and quiet, as it should be. Luckily the power’s been turned on, but there’s no furniture. Still, it’s a place where no one would think to find you, a safe house for the time being. You park at the bottom of the hill and walk back up to the place. The others follow suit. Your future is as clear as day: One way or another, blood has to be spilled.
5.
“Man, what the fuck?” Duronté yells, as he kicks one of the empty buckets the contractors left behind. It slams against the exposed brick wall and rolls into a corner off in the shadows. Bringing them here was a bad move.
Since there is no furniture, everyone plants his ass on the redone floors. The dishwasher has been fixed and the paint on the ceilings no longer peels. The section of the roof that needed to be reshingled has been taken care of. And there are new windows, to prevent heat loss in the winter.
Now your close-to-ten-thousand-in-repairs is playing
host to a gang of killers and dealers grieving over the unexplained loss of a homeboy, the burning down of the crib his body is inside of, and the potential death of a new operation at the hands of men you don’t even have voices to identify with.
“Whoever it is, they tryin’ to take us out piece by piece,” Meechie says, stroking the barrel of the shotgun in his lap. “Maybe that shit with the house was just a warning.”
“Warning?” your cousin shouts. “Burnin’ down a nigga’s house is not a fuckin’ warning! We gotta find these muthafuckas! These niggas got to go!”
He is bouncing around the living room like some kid on Ritalin. It’s like the rest of you aren’t even there, as if you perished in the fire along with the rest of his life. And the house itself is just the tip of the iceberg. Mabel is most likely en route to the scene of the crime, where she will have to answer questions about that pungent marijuana scent coming from the fire. And then there’s Alonzo’s body, to be found with bullets in it, inside of the inferno. She’s not going to eat charges like those when she’s got to see what happens on Days of Our Lives tomorrow afternoon. She’ll have to drop Duronté’s name.
Then comes the warrant. He’s got an alibi for the murder, but telling it straight potentially puts him in the slammer for the bodies at the motel, or a distribution charge if they can get someone to talk.
“You gotta get outta here, D,” you say. “If Five-O ain’t got you on one thing in this deal, they got you on another, plain and simple. You need to scrape up the cake and get somewhere else until the heat dies down.”
“I ain’t goin’ out like a bitch. Fuck that! We gotta find the muthafuckas that did this shit!”
It’s clear to you that your cousin has never dropped a body, that he doesn’t understand how it becomes a death sentence within itself. Snatching a soul from a temple launches a razor-sharp boomerang that will come right back for your own neck. He doesn’t understand that getting the trigger men won’t do shit but add to the body count, that it will only serve to send more people after you.
“You ain’t played this game,” you say to him. “Ain’t no last level. The shit just keep on goin’ until you dead or locked up. Why the fuck you think I’m so pressed to go to school? Why the fuck you think I got the fuck outta Brooklyn?”
“Sound to me like you runnin’ outta heart,” Frank says.
This is one of those moments where you hate the game even more. As you stand there in front of an old man who just has to fucking test you, you want to remain calm, to stay focused. But then you see those bodies in the dumpster and the fire and your bitch-ass cousin’s wide eyes when the Wonder Twins came through his door with the deal of a lifetime. You think back to Star and Will and Her, and the dial to the safe that keeps your anger back starts to spin the opening combination on its own. The lever that opens the door is pushed.
You need a target. You need to establish dominance. Frank will serve a dual purpose.
“The fuck did you say?”
The words stun his ears. He apparently never thought too highly of you. He has apparently been just tolerating you. You’ve just been the silly nigga that rolls with Duronté.
D is the powerful one and you are the fucking joke.
“You heard me, nigga,” he growls. His eyes darken. In a split second he is possessed by the animal that earns him his paycheck.
He starts to stand, but you don’t give him the chance. You kick the wind out of his chest and he goes back down, coughing. You could stop there, but then he wouldn’t have learned the lesson.
Your kicks turn into stomps. You hold him by the collar of his crew neck, ramming your fist into his face over and over. You kick that Beretta of his across the room. You bring a foot down on his face and hear the crack of his nose bone. Blood comes forth like a faucet, water exploding from what was supposed to be a stone.
You stop when he’s just a hair away from passing out. You want him to see you there, standing over him. You want him to understand mercy and loyalty and survival of the fittest.
You can feel the others looking on; any doubts they may have had about your past, about your cousin’s devotion to you, end right there. They don’t understand that this isn’t who you were in Brooklyn. This is merely what you became on that last night. And now there’s no going back.
It takes Frank close to ten minutes to get to his feet. Meechie and Jamar untangle his limbs and grab a wad of paper towels to press against his bleeding nose. He’ll need to go to the hospital to have the bone reset. Then he’ll either decide to respect you or find someone else to roll with, plain and simple.
Duronté stands behind you speechless as he takes in the whipping you put on the best man he could find to hire. He glances at you with a kind of a fear far beyond the admiration that got the two of you to where you are. This is your moment to do what’s needed. This is your moment to take charge of this whole situation.
“You got a ATM card?” you ask Duronté, making sure his eyes meet yours.
He nods.
“Then it’s time to get that ticket.”
“Ticket for where?”
“Anywhere but here. Cops as much as pull you over for speeding, you’re looking at a minimum of five, probably ten.” You don’t know this for sure, but you want to scare him.
“But ain’t shit in my account,” he argues. “All that’s at the box at the bank, and it ain’t open until morning.”
For once he has done something smart. But it’s risky. He’s gotta take money with him. Even so, waiting until morning means that there will be more cops on alert, maybe even someone at the bank. The minute he walks into that branch, ten plainclothes will take him to the tiles and that’s that. Someone else is going to have to handle it.
“9 a.m., right?”
Duronté nods back.
“All right then, where’s the key?”
Your cousin looks around the room, scanning the faces of his Cabinet nervously. He’s becoming the kind of paranoid he should have been from day one. Now he knows he can’t answer my question in the open.
“I got it stashed,” he tells you. “We can get it on the way in the morning.”
Frank begins to murmur something as he sits there, holding himself. He’s looking away from you, out of what seems like embarrassment. At some point you may admit to him that you had to play it dirty, that if you’d let him get to his feet it would have all been over. But not today, as come tomorrow it seems that you’ll be running the show yourself, at least for as long as you can handle it.
Everyone else just sits quietly. You’re sure that some of the silence is mourning. None of them had been expecting this side of things. None of them had understood just how serious this whole deal was.
“We still gon’ try and find him, right?” Jamar asks.
Everybody other than Frank looks to you. Vengeance is their only motivator to stay in this game, as job security just went out the window.
“Hell the fuck yeah, you is!” Duronté answers, even though you’re sure the question wasn’t addressed to him. “Bring me that muthafucka’s head and we can get back to business.”
Your cousin’s back to being not-so-sharp again. He’s back to thinking he’s still sitting in the big chair, when you’ve snatched him out of it to save his life. The bigger question is whether or not you can still save your own.
It’s just after 2 when everyone takes off except for you and Duronté. He rolls a joint and the two of you try to hide your fears in the smoke that begins filling the room.
“I didn’t think it was gon’ be like this,” he says, as he lays flat on the floor, spitting a geyser of smoke into the already-hazy air.
“I know you didn’t,” you say. “I knew you didn’t hear me.”
“Why didn’t you say shit?”
“It’s like The Last Dragon,” you say. “You wanted that glow but you didn’t know what came with it. And that shit always comes sooner or later. For you it came sooner.”
“But what about
Mama?”
“You can’t reach out until you got some wiggle room, until you leave the cops an answer to the question.”
“What you mean?”
“You find the gun that killed Alonzo, then you find a way to stick the gun to whoever pulled the trigger. You gotta know that whoever did this shit ain’t gonna stop. So you know they’re gonna go after something else. We gotta beat ’em to the punch, leave ’em someplace where the cops can find them with that gun and connect one thing to the other.”
“There ain’t gonna be no bullet left after a fire,” he argues.
“They find all kindsa shit after a fire,” you explain. “Them arson muthafuckas is no joke. But you gotta get rid of the body. Nobody gives a shit about the weed. It’s the murder they’ll want to clear.”
“Where the fuck am I supposed to go in the meantime?”
“I can’t help you there.”
“I ain’t fuckin’ wit’ Detroit,” he says. “But I always wanted to see Memphis. You know, be up there chowin’ down on some barbecue and fuckin’ wit’ the hoes out there. I been wantin’ to do that shit ever since I was Hustle and Flow.”
You imagine him blowing through town on a Greyhound and getting taken for his dough by some dime-store nigga trying to sell him thirty keys of baking soda. Though maybe you’re being too hard on him. Maybe he’ll actually survive.
You drift in and out of sleep. The wood floor seems harder than anything you’ve ever slept on. But it probably has an awful lot to do with your nerves. Since when have you been the one to go hunting down hit squads? Since when have you been stomping out convicted felons just to establish dominance? You’re a salmon swimming in shark-infested waters with not a dolphin in sight.
You open your eyes just after 8. Duronté takes a shower but has to put the same drawers and clothes back on, as they’re all he has left in the wardrobe department. You have coffee and bacon and eggs at that Waffle House you both like. And then you head to the bank.
