Street Divas

by De'nesha Diamond

  Alice started crying. “I . . . I don’t . . . know. I can’t . . . I wouldn’t.” She looked around for a sympathetic face but didn’t find one—not even from her son. “Terrell, I didn’t. You gotta believe me. I would never . . .”

  Terrell, holding his baby brother’s stuffed teddy bear in one hand and his pet grass snake in the other, turned his back on his mother.

  “Terrell, baby. Please. Listen to your momma.”

  “All right. Get her out of here.” The one cop closed his notepad and shook his head.

  “No, wait!” Alice screamed. “Terrell, baby!”

  I gathered myself and shook the cops off of me. “Terrell, sweetheart. Come here.”

  Terrell waltzed over to me with his head down.

  “You, bitch,” Alice seethed as the police tried to drag her out of the apartment. “You’re tryna turn my children against me. You got my baby. I know you do!” She glanced at the police tugging her. “She has my baby. Arrest her! I know she has my baby!”

  I shook my head, not believing that she was seriously going to try and pin this bullshit on me. “Not going to work this time, Alice. This shit is all on you! You fucked this up—not me!” I was so angry that I was trembling.

  Terrell dropped his teddy bear and grass snake and then wrapped his small arms around my waist. “It’s all right, Momma Peaches. The police is gonna find him. You’ll see.”

  Shit. The fuckin’ cops in that goddamn city couldn’t’t find their assholes while shitting on a toilet.

  “I’M GOING TO GET YOU FOR THIS SHIT, MAYBELLINE! YOU FUCKIN’ WATCH!”

  More tears burned the backs of my eyes. That bitch was never gonna grow the fuck up. No matter how many times I put myself out to try and help her, she couldn’t see past Leroy. It was like his ass was still raping her from the grave or some shit.

  Terrell and I had to stay up in that shitty-ass apartment for hours, answering the cop’s retarded-ass questions. How many ways can you say that you don’t know shit? When we were able to leave the apartment, there were so many news cameras shoved in our faces I could hardly think when reporters started shouting questions.

  “Ma’am, can you tell us what happened?” one reporter managed to shout above the others.

  “Yes . . . somebody stole my nephew,” I said, stopping and looking around. “If anybody knows anything, please, please tell us. We really want him returned to us.”

  Terrell’s arms tightened around my waist.

  “Is there any truth to the rumor that the child’s mother sold the baby for crack?”

  “Who told you that shit?” I belatedly try to cover Terrell’s ears. “Do these gossiping muthafuckas got any witnesses?” I don’t know what in the hell had me tryna defend my sister, because there was a real possibility that her triflin’ ass did just that. “C’mon, baby. Let’s get in the car,” I told Terrell, directing him to my car.

  “B-but . . . what about Mason?” Terrell asked, with his eyes wetting up.

  “That’s what the police is here for, honey. They are going to find your lil brother.” I opened the car door, but reporters still came at us, shouting questions.

  “But you said for us to never trust the police,” he said, right into this one blond reporter’s microphone.

  I smiled awkwardly into the camera as I almost shoved him into the car. “Kids say the damnedest things.”

  “But, Ms. Carver, do you have anything to say to the people who may have taken your nephew?”

  Slamming the door behind Terrell, I stop and stare straight into the cameras. “Yes. Please. Bring my nephew back. He’s an innocent little boy in all this. I swear we won’t press any charges. We just want him back. Thank you.” I swiped away a few tears rolling down my face and then thanked the reporter.

  “How long has your sister had a drug problem?” another reporter shouted.

  I shove past her and rush to the other side of the car so I can climb in.

  Terrell watched everyone crowd around us as I started up the car. “Does this mean that we’re going to be on television?” he asked.

  “I guess so, baby.” I swallowed hard as I watched the police car carrying Alice pull away. In the backseat, my sister was still screaming and hollering like a maniac. At the last minute, she turned around and spotted me in my car. That shit made her go into hyperdrive. “This is some fucked-up shit.”

  Terrell glanced over at me. “Are they going to put her in jail?”

  I sighed. “Don’t know, baby. Try not to think about that right now.” I brushed my hand across the top of his bushy head. “Damn. We need to see about getting you a haircut.” I started up the car and then had to creep forward until the reporters got the fuckin’ hint and got out of the damn way.

  When we returned to Shotgun Row, Terrell shot out of the car like a bullet and raced over to his best friend’s house across the street.

  I was stunned to see Isaac’s Monte Carlo still parked in front of the house. I could’ve sworn he said he had some business that he needed to handle before I left. I dismissed the shit as my memory fucking with me and headed on into the house. Hell, I didn’t even know how I was going to tell him this shit about Alice and Mason. One thing was for sure—he wasn’t going to be all that surprised. He had heard all my stories about how much of a fuckup Alice had been over the years. In fact, he didn’t miss an opportunity telling me that I needed to cut my ties to her ass and call it a day. I was sure that I was about to hear the same thing.

  However, the moment I walked into my house, the hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention. I closed the door and got as quiet as possible. Something told me not to call out for Isaac, and I couldn’t say that I felt the need to grab my gat either.

  Slowly, I moved through the house, straining my ears for every little sound. When I reached the living room, I heard the first sound and I knew exactly what it was.

  Walking faster, I headed straight to my closed bedroom door and threw that muthafucka open. Now, I think it takes one hell of a bold muthafucka to be fuckin’ another bitch in my bed, but I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw my best friend, Josie, riding my nigga’s dick like she was born on the muthafucka.

  “YOU BACKSTABBING, STANK-ASS, PUSSY MUTHAFUCKA!” I launched toward the bed like a missile, and before Josie could get off my nigga’s dick, I got a chunk of her hair in my clenched fist. When I snatched that bitch back, I got a plug torn out of that muthafucka from the fucking root.

  “OWWWWW. FUCK!” Josie yelled, falling out of the other side of the bed and then busting her lip on my nightstand table.

  I followed her ass right over that muthafucka, landing punches on every part of her body. “You sleeping with my husband, bitch? Is that how the fuck you get down?”

  “Peaches,” Isaac tried to grab me and pull me back.

  The only thing he managed to do was snatch my prosthetic leg off while I whaled on this bitch’s ass.

  “Peaches, I’m sorry,” she yelled, covering her head and scrambling to get off the floor.

  “Oh, you ain’t sorry yet, bitch. Let me show you how sorry your ass is.” I snatched open the nightstand drawer.

  Isaac, seeing that I was going for the .38 I kept in the muthafucka, doubled up his efforts to stop me.

  POW! POW! POW!

  “Aaaaaargh!” Josie screamed, racing toward the bedroom door. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  POW!

  The dresser mirror exploded.

  POW!

  A bullet slammed into the closet door as Josie jetted by it.

  POW!

  One bullet hit Josie in her ass before she’s able to clear the door.

  “Aaaaaargh!” she yelled two octaves higher, but she didn’t stick around to see if I could hit that other ass cheek.

  Isaac is the last to fall over, grabbing me by the waist while—

  “You shot her in the ass?” Cedric asks, interrupting my story.

  “Damn right I did,” I huffed. “That was not the
day for that bullshit. With that shit with Alice . . . and Mason.” I sniff and then turn to the next page in the photo album to the only picture I have of my nephew. “Here he is. I made a lot of copies—circulated them all over the city. We never found him.”

  Cedric shakes his head and then leans in for a closer look at five-year-old Terrell holding Mason and cheesing for the camera. “Humph.”

  “What?”

  He shakes his head and then points. “His neck.”

  I glance to where he’s pointing, and another smile drifts across my lips. “Oh, yeah. His birthmark. It’s shaped like a horseshoe. Python has one, too, in the same place, but it’s hard to see because of his tattoo.”

  Cedric levels his beautiful gaze on me and then reaches over and brushes my hair back to expose my own horseshoe birthmark.

  “You pay attention,” I say, smiling.

  “Especially when it comes to you.” He leans over and brushes a kiss against my lips.

  I can’t help but smile. Why couldn’t Manny have been this attentive back in the day? I stop my roaming thoughts and pull in a deep breath. “Anyway, as far as I know, all the Carvers have that same tattoo. I depended on that small detail to help us find lil Mason, but . . . I was wrong. For a long time, while Alice was in jail, she blamed me for his disappearance, and then once her sentence was reduced to child endangerment, she started blaming everybody else—including some bitch named Dribbles.”

  Cedric laughs. “Dribbles?”

  “Chile, please.” I roll my eyes. “Don’t get me started on those crack-high characters she came up with every other week.” I think about it some more and then shake my head. “Dribbles. You’d think that she would’ve come up with something a little more creative than that.”

  27

  Essence

  The streets are hot.

  There’s so many fuckin’ bullets flying between Vice Lords and Black Gangster Disciples that the muthafuckin’ police stop answering calls and let niggas have it out. At least that’s what the fuck it feels like. The few times that the police do come out, it’s to interrogate everyone where the hell Python is hiding. Seems they want his ass as bad as the Vice Lords. For the moment that big nigga is ghost. Both him and LeShelle. They pop up every now and again, let niggas know that they are still in charge and running shit, but when you blink they’re gone.

  Hell, I wish I knew where they are hiding out at—at least then I would get this evil bitch Lucifer off my ass. Because right now she’s riding me so hard I’m going to turn dyke any minute now. Since I can’t snitch out LeShelle, I gave Lucifer the next best thing: Treasure and Mario. Shit. Those niggas were telling everybody who stood still long enough how they busted the head Queen Gs’ sister in on her prom night and watched as LeShelle emptied a whole clip into Fat Ace’s baby brother. Fuck. I was happy to do that shit.

  Less than an hour after I gave their names to Lucifer, those niggas were found facedown in the back of the Pink Monkey with their own cocks shoved down their throats. That shit let me know that Lucifier’s ass is a sadist, and she is certainly not the one to fuck with.

  Now when my ass isn’t dodging bullets, I’m driving all the way to Memphis Mental Health Institute to visit my girl Ta’Shara. That’s where she’s been for the past month, sitting in a chair and staring out a window. She hasn’t said or done shit since that horrible night. She just sits there.

  Like I do every day, I park my car, take several deep breaths, and try to get the energy up to walk into this place. It’s depressing. Old people creeping toward you like zombies in a Michael Jackson video. Some talk to themselves, some yell at you, and the others beg and cry for you to take them home. The place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.

  “Hello, Mrs. Douglas,” I greet. She’s sliding her purse strap over her shoulder and gathering up her knitting stuff.

  She turns and tries to flash me a smile, but it dies before it gets to her eyes. “Hello, Essence.”

  I swallow and shift my gaze to Ta’Shara, who, of course, is sitting before the window, staring out at everything but seeing nothing. “No change?”

  Tracee’s large eyes instantly fill with water. “No.”

  Silence fills the space between us like it does every day. Tracee and Reggie still don’t know that Drey and I were the ones who had dumped Ta’Shara on their doorstep, but I sense that she believes that I know more than I’m telling—or maybe that’s my guilty conscience trying to trick me into confessing.

  “I better get going,” Tracee says. “I have a lot of errands to run, but I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “I’ll still be here,” I say. She rewards me with another flat smile and then rushes past me and out the door.

  “I don’t think your stepmom likes me,” I tell Ta’Shara.

  No response.

  Exhaling a long breath, I walk over to Ta’Shara and try to see whether I notice a change in my friend for myself. I don’t. Her eyes are as glassy and vacant as they have been for the past month. “Ta’Shara, please. I know that you’re in there somewhere. Please, snap out of this shit.”

  I wait, but there’s no response.

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  Startled, I jump up and jerk toward the door. There, an old black woman with long silver hair leans against the door frame with a lit cigarette.

  “That girl there has checked out,” she says. Her voice is low and raspy like she’s been sucking on those cancer sticks her entire life. “If I’ve seen that shit once, I’ve seen it a million times. She’s long gone.”

  I shake my head. “She’ll snap out of it.”

  The woman stretches her brows up at me. “You want to put some money on that?”

  Frowning, I turn up my nose. “You’re talking about my friend.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought y’all were sisters.”

  “Fuck. That’s how you would talk to me if I was her sister?”

  She shrugs. “I thought you should hear the truth. None of these muthafuckas around here is going to tell it to you.”

  I blink at her and then glance back down at Ta’Shara. “You mean that she can stay this way for . . . forever?”

  “It’s more likely than not. She’s suffering from some kind of shock. What happened to her?” She flicked her cigarette, giving no mind to the ashes that flutter to the floor.

  “She, um, was brutally attacked.”

  “I think the black and blue marks that are still healing on her face told me that,” she says sarcastically. “What? Did her man do that to her?”

  “What? No.” I shake my head and then lower my voice. “Her boyfriend was attacked as well. Took seventeen bullets.”

  “Fuck.” She flicked her cigarette. “Who the hell did he piss off?”

  Why the hell is she asking me so many damn questions? “What makes you think that they pissed anyone off?”

  “Because I’m not stupid, and I know how the streets work.” She smirks sarcastically. “Not everybody in the funny farm is crazy, you know.”

  “You’re a patient?”

  She rocks her head while she thinks it over. “Let’s just say that I’m on an extended vacation. I have a roof over my head, a bed, and three squares a day. All in all, you can’t beat it for the money, honey. But I’ll be out of here soon.”

  While she blows out a long stream of smoke, I don’t even know what to say to that shit.

  “Is the truth too much for you to handle?” she asks, stretching her brows up again.

  “That’s your truth, not mine. Ta’Shara is a lot tougher than she looks. She’ll pull through this.”

  “You sound like her momma earlier.”

  “You told Tracee that crazy shit?”

  “Figured that she needed to hear the truth. Every time I walk past here, she’s crying and beggin’ that child to talk to her. I think her father is coming around, though. I ain’t seen him in about a week.”

  I shake my head. “You shouldn’t have told them that.”


  “They’re her parents and—”

  “They are her foster parents,” I snap. “What if they throw up they hands and walk away? They can, you know.” Just like they did with LeShelle.

  The old woman is quiet for a long time before she says, “If it’s in their hearts to do that, then they’re going to do it anyway.”

  Then Ta’Shara would become a ward of the state. I try to blink back my tears, but one escapes and skips down my face.

  “Damn. You really do care about her.”

  “She’s my best friend.”

  “Then take my advice and find yourself a new one.” She gives her cigarette another flick and then strolls off before the ashes hit the floor.

  “Now that’s one crazy old bitch,” I mumble under my breath, but when I turn back to Ta’Shara, I see the same old glassy-eyed stare. What if she doesn’t snap out of this? What then?

  I try to shake the question as I pull up the vacant chair next to Ta’Shara and sit down. “What are you thinking about in there? What’s going on inside your head?”

  28

  LeShelle

  I can’t believe my life has come to this. Python has pulled me off my throne on Shotgun Row, and he’s hidden me in this piece-of-shit warehouse in West Memphis, Arkansas. And to add insult to injury, I’m in this bitch taking care of his and Melanie’s wet stain, Christopher.

  Maybe I could put up with this shit better if I had at least gotten my fuckin’ ring by now. But for two months all I’ve gotten from Python are sweet words and a wet ass. Sure. We’re in the middle of a gang war and shit. Blasting crabby-ass Vice Lords is part of the fucking job. It certainly ain’t no reason to be reneging on promises.

  “Word is bond, my ass,” I mumble under my breath while I roll a fat joint. Shit, I need something to relax me before I snap, crackle, and pop up in this bitch. After I put some fire to the end of this herb and fill up my lungs, my body chills the fuck out, but my mind is still tripping on this bullshit. How can it not? There’s so much of it piled all around me.