Bonded by Blood

by Cash

  The hood breed ‘em official like that, at an early age.

  “You know, you gotta walk the walk, you can’t just talk it.”

  “I gotcha, big homie. You gonna see.”

  “Aight. I’m a hold you to that,” Q said. “Check it, I’ma break bread witcha for handling that business, but I don’t want you to be running around the projects flashing the money I’ma give you,” he warned.

  “You don’t owe me nothin’ for what I did, big homie. You looked out for me and my sister plenty times. But I do wanna ask you to put me on your team?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, big homie—man, you know my mom’s is on dope and me and my sister ain’t got shit. Rats in the gutter living better than us. I ain’t asking you to give me nothin’, Q. Just put me under your wing so I can grow up to be just like you.”

  How the fuck could Q say no to that?

  Over the next month, Q schooled young Vashon on every aspect of the dope game that can be taught without the student having to actually live it to learn. That included weighing dope, cooking it, whipping it, the whole nine. He talked to Vashon about the necessity of having a solid name in the streets.

  And, above all else, “Never shit where you sleep,” Q advised him, amongst many other jewels he dropped on the lil’ soldier, who was about to turn thirteen.

  “And,” he added, “don’t have a loose tongue around bitches. Most of ‘em can’t help but to gossip, putting a nigga’s business all in the streets. Even if they don’t mean to get a nigga cased up, they will.”

  “Check dat, big homie,” acknowledged Vashon, listening attentively to every jewel being passed on to him.

  “Don’t trust niggas no farther than you can see ‘em; even then, expect the worst. Niggas can’t stand to see another cat rise up. Jealousy is a dangerous emotion; envy, too. Muthafuckas like crabs; they’ll pull you down in order to rise up themselves. Fake right at they ass and go left.”

  Vashon rode shotgun with Q everyday soaking up game. As far as going to school, he deaded that. He already knew how to read, write, and count money. The rest of his education would have to come from the streets.

  For Vashon’s thirteenth birthday, Q took him to Teaser’s and let him stunt in VIP. He paid Sinnamon, and another stripper to leave the club with his young protégé and break him off at the mo-mo, all night long. The next morning, when Q scooped Vashon up from the motel, he told him,”You official now,” half smiling.

  “His young ass like ta wore us out!” Sinnamon’s couterpart said.

  Q became to Vashon, like Baby is to Lil’ Wayne, and vice versa. Soon Vashon was handling grown man weight; making drops alongside his mentor; strapped—eyes always open to detect any funny-style shit.

  At five-ten, Vashon was tall for his age and could easily pass for seventeen. So when he whipped through Thomasville Heights in his Tahoe, the cops weren’t more likely to pull him over than they would any other young black male.

  It was an unseasonably warm day for January in the “A” so the hood was live. People were out on the block doing what hood niggas and shawdies do when the weather is nice.

  “I’m a hustler” by Pimp C was bumpin’ through his speakers. The flip-flop paint on his whip was killing ‘em, and the twenty-six inch rims sparkled as Vashon parked in front of his mom’s crib and hopped out. He was rocking Roc-A-Wear from head to feet with a phat chain around his neck, wrist froze. When he waved back at an astonished shawdy and smiled, his new platinum grill set his profile the fuck off.

  Q had put youngin’ in the game.

  Vashon went inside to holla at his people. He had been staying with Q, and hadn’t seen much of his fam for the past few months.

  Gloria hugged her son. “Hey, baby! Whose car is that I saw you pull up in?”

  “That’s me, ma.”

  “Take me for a ride, Vashon!” six-year-old Val asked excitedly.

  “Next time, lil’ stuff,” he promised, bending over and scooping her up. “You been a good girl?”

  “Yep.”

  “Humph!” Gloria shook her head.

  “I have!” Val refuted her moms.

  “It don’t matter, you still my heart,” Vashon said, kissing his little sister’s forehead.

  He kicked it with mother and little sister for a minute, gave them both some money and headed out the door. Back in his whip he switched Pimp C to T.I. turned on all four TVs, with the press of one button, just to stunt on niggaz. When he was eating nothing but hope sandwiches, he used to pray for the day he could be ballin’ like the Big Dogs in the hood. He had to floss a little bit now. He owed himself that.

  Vashon saw her standing outside with her girls. Every one of them, but the one that mattered was going crazy over the whip as he pulled up to the curb, even though they couldn’t see past the tint to see who was driving.

  “Vashon!” one of the shawdies screeched with excitement when he rolled down the window.

  “What it do, Cierra?” he spoke.

  “Boy, whose whip you done stole?”

  “Girl, don’t insult me like dat. This my shit.”

  “You lying!” accused another shawdy.

  “Whateva. I ain’t tryna prove nothin’ to y’all silly asses. Anyway, back up off my whip before ya breath ruin my paint!”

  “Naw, you didn’t just try to clown me!”

  “Chill out Cierra, I’m just fuckin’ wit you, homegirl,” Vashon said, smiling platinum.

  “Damn, nigga, you done came the fuck up.”

  Cha-ching! Cha-ching! Her sixteen-year old eyes saw dollar signs.

  “I’m just tryna build my weight up,” he replied with a bit of modesty. “Yo Jaid, let me holla at you fo’ a minute,” Vashon called past Cierra and ‘em, to the object of his interest.

  Jaid was a super thick sixteen-year old redbone whom Vashon had always wanted to holla at. But back when he was busted, he didn’t have the confidence to step to her. Jaid had a baby, but she wasn’t out there like that—shit happens sometimes. She had always had an easy smile for Vashon when he spoke to her. She knew that he liked her, but like any sixteen-year old shawdy, especially one with a child, she considered a thirteen-year old a little boy, despite Vashon’s height and maturity.

  “Hey, Vashon,” Jaid spoke from where she stood, on the sidewalk.

  Seeing that she probably wasn’t going to come up to his whip, Vashon opened the door, and got out. Cierra and ‘em stepped closer to admire the leather seats, the wood grain dash, and the four small flat screens. Their teenaged pussies throbbed.

  Vashon strolled up to Jaid, his platinum chain matching his smile. His Roca-Wear gear was crisp and new.

  “What’s up, Vashon?” Jaid asked, looking like she was tryna keep her cool, even though she couldn’t believe her eyes. Shawdy looked super thick today.

  Vashon’s confidence wasn’t phased. Not anymore. He was no longer busted. These days his swag was turned all the way up. He fucked grown-ass women twice his age. So he wasn’t lacking confidence as he replied, “I came to claim mine.”

  “What?”

  “Damn, what I gotta do, spell it out? You know I been wanting you for a long time.”

  “You ain’t but thirteen or fourteen, boy—how you gon’ be wanting anybody a long time?” Jaid brushed him off.

  “Oh, you got jokes, huh?”

  He smiled back at her.

  “I see I’ma strike out if I try to holla at you around your girls,” he said.

  “They don’t influence me.”

  “Well, I wish they could. Look at ‘em! Over there acting like they ain’t never seen a phat whip before.”

  “That’s their business. The whip don’t make the man—or boy, in your case.”

  “What a boy know ‘bout dis?” Vashon flashed the weight on his wrist.

  “That don’t impress me. You ain’t gon’ be able to take it to prison with you.”

  “Prison? Ha! Shawdy, me and prison go together like two dicks—a bad mix. It a
in’t happenin’.”

  “I hope not, Vashon. Nice seeing you. I gotta go in the house and check on my baby.”

  Jaid bounced.

  Vashon was walking back to his whip, head down in defeat—about to tell Cierra and ‘em to get out of his goddamn whip when he heard Jaid call his name from her porch. He turned to hear what put down she would hurl at him this time.

  “You are looking damn good though, lil’ daddy,” she yelled to him. Then the door closed behind her.

  Q and Vashon had just dropped two bricks off to a nigga on Fulton Industrial Boulevard. Q had fucked with Slim a coupla times before, serving him four and a baby the first time, a half a block the second time. Apparently Slim had been really stacking his chips to jump from a half a block all the way to two of them guys. Slim had explained that he and a friend were going in together to cop the two bricks. Q hadn’t wanted to meet Slim’s partna; he just served Slim the blocks for twenty stacks apiece and told him to get at him when he needed to re-up.

  At Q’s stash crib they began counting the stacks Slim had given them. In total the money added up to just twenty-six thousand and five hundred dollars! Q called Slim on his cell phone, heated.

  “What it do, homeboy?” Slim answered.

  “What it do? Nigga, this paper is short!”

  “What?” Slim dummied up.

  “You heard me, nigga?”

  “How short is it?” asked Slim, as if he didn’t know already.

  “Thirteen and a half stacks!” barked Q.

  “Damn, nigga—who you hollerin’ at? I ain’t no bitch. Tell you what, folks! Whateva I owe you, get it like you live!” Slim hung up.

  “Check,” Q said to himself . Then he said to his protégé, “How deep you in with me in this shit, lil’ soldier?”

  “Ten toes down, big homie,” vowed Vashon.

  Two nights later Vashon caught Slim coming out of the poolroom over on Fulton Industrial. Vashon creeped up on the careless nigga before he could react.

  “Rock-a-bye baby, bitch nigga!” Splacka! Splacka! Splacka! “Get it like we live, huh?” Splacka!

  Corlette was visiting her moms, so Q and Vashon were at the townhouse by themselves. Two days had passed since Vashon nodded Slim. They was just chillin’, staying out of the streets as a precaution against whateva. Q still couldn’t figure out why Slim tried a monkey stunt like that. Somebody should’ve told him that Quantavious Jones was no longer taking any shorts!

  Still, there was a lesson learned.

  “From now on, we ain’t hittin’ nobody off until we check the money,” Q told Vashon.

  They were eating buffalo wings and chili cheese fries and playing video games. Switching subjects Q asked, “What’s up with that shawdy you fiendin’ for? What’s her name again?”

  “Jaid.”

  “What’s the business? She still won’t give you no holla?”

  “Naw, shawdy straight won’t come in. I went through there again yesterday. I got her number from her girl, but when I called, Jaid still stressin’ I’m too young for her. Plus, she talkin’ bout I’m throwing bricks at the penitentiary.”

  “Shid, I done already told her ain’t going down like that. I’ma stay two steps ahead of a downfall, in case I slip. I’ll still be one step ahead. Ain’t dat what you taught me, big homie?” said Vashon.

  “Fo, sho.”

  Q gave him a pound, and was dropping jewels on him when the doorbell chimed.

  “What it do, bruh,” Q spoke, letting Khalil and Sinnamon in. “What’s up, Sin.”

  “Hey, Q. Hey Vashon,” Sinnamon spoke. “Vashon, you ain’t been ripping them lil’ girls’ coochies up, have you—with your big dick, young ass.”

  “Oh, shawdy packin’ like dat?” Q laughed.

  “Shid, that young nigga gon’ catch a murder case with that shit between his legs if he put it up one of them lil’ young virgin pussies,” Sinnamon declared, half-serious, causing them all to laugh.

  “Nigga, you can’t trick with my ho no more. Fuck around and steal my Number One,” joked Khalil.

  “Neva dat, daddy,” Sinnamon jumped back in.

  Q, to the embarrassment of Vashon, told them of Vashon’s failed pursuits of Jaid.

  Khalil said, “Shawdy, don’t be taking advice on females from Q. Holla at me for that; you see how I’m doing it.”

  “Tell him, daddy!” Sinnamon tossed gas on it.

  “Check this, shawdy. You got this lil’ ho’s phone number. This Jaid girl, who can’t recognize a thorough young nigga when she’s in the presence of one?”

  “Yeah. I got her number.”

  “Call the lil’ hooker up and tell her your uncle wanna holla at her.”

  Vashon pulled out his cell phone and punched in Jaid’s digits.

  “May I speak to Jaid? Hey, shawdy, this Vashon. Can you talk? Ain’t nothin’ up—not really. My Uncle Khalil wanna holla at you. Huh? I don’t know; he just wanna holla at you.”

  Khalil accepted the phone from Vashon.

  “Watch this,” he whispered.

  A half hour later he passed the phone back to Vashon.

  “Yeah, shawdy, what’s up?”

  “You can pick me up Friday night around eight o’clock. Don’t stand me up, either,” said Jaid.

  “What she say?” asked Khalil, with a knowing grin, when Vashon got off the phone.

  “She told me to pick her up Friday night at eight.”

  When Friday came Vashon arrived at Jaid’s crib at 7:45, not wanting to chance being late. He waited downstairs in the living room, talking to Jaid’s mother, while Jaid put her fourteen-month old son to bed and finished getting dressed. When asked his age, Vashon said that he was eighteen. As for the expensive whip parked outside, he said that it belonged to his uncle. He didn’t like lying to Jaid’s mom, but there was no way in hell he was gonna tell her the truth about his age or his hustle.

  They went to the movies, and then afterwards chilled at Jaid’s crib for a while. Vashon’s maturity had all but extinguished Jaid’s apprehension. The only hurdle left for him to get over was her reluctance to get involved with someone who was throwing bricks at the penitentiary. She had heard that he was cliqued up with Q. Her baby’s daddy used to be in the streets like that. Now he had a life sentence. Though they had already broke up when he got cased up, after her baby’s daddy got sent away, Jaid had shied away from dating hustlas. The uncertainty of a hustlaz fate was more than she could handle.

  “Everything in life is a gamble,” Khalil told her, when he had convinced her to give Vashon a chance. Jaid could feel him on that, and she was beginning to feel Vashon.

  When they locked tongues on the couch, cuddled and tongued some more, Jaid was saying to herself, I can’t believe I’m sitting here kissing a thirteen-year old! By their third date, though, Vashon’s age no longer was an issue. That night they rented a hotel room and made love for the first time.

  After trickin’ with Sinnamon an ‘em, Vashon had learned a lil’ something to put on Jaid. Plus, listening to Foxy Brown spit on that cut “Big Bad Mama”, featuring Dru Hill, one day while rolling with Q, Vashon had heard Foxy rap: got ‘em strung, let ‘em know I’m like an ICEE, for the best effect you got to use your tongue. So he gave Jaid some of that, too. Though it was his first time getting down like that, he knew to search for that little button, with finger and tongue. Jaid directed him to the pace that pleased her most, and after twenty minutes of this foreplay, she was calling out her ecstasy. A few minutes later when she covered Vashon’s erection with a Magnum condom, Jaid wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to handle all of him. But that young pussy had stretched wide enough for a baby to come out of it, so it damn sho’ adjusted to what Vashon was packing.

  After their first night of love-making, it was a wrap.

  Q noticed the similarities between the way he had fiended for Persia, before finally getting her, and the way his young protégé followed the same course with Jaid. He took note of it, but he wasn’t too co
ncerned. Jaid didn’t seem all that materialistic. Besides, Q had bigger concerns occupying his thoughts.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  A Dude; Q dropped weight to on consignment, had just called saying that he’d gotten jacked. Usually, it wouldn’t have mattered that the niggas got jacked for the product; once the work touched their hands, they were responsible. Fuck dat! Pay me! Q would’ve said. But what the dude told him caused Q concern.

  “It was your brother and that New York nigga he be with.”

  This was the third time in two weeks it had happened. Q knew it was on the up and up, ‘cause the three cats who’d claimed to have been jacked by B-Man and Bed-Stuy didn’t know one another. Q knew for sure that B-Man knew that he fucked with them niggas, on the work consignment tip. B-Man had rode with him more than a few times to hit ‘em off with work.

  “What’s that nigga’s problem?” Q asked, exasperated. “What, he wanna war with his own fam?”

  Rapheal offered no answer to the conflict. He knew that there was no such solution as the right one. Q had to either war with his brother, or let B-Man’s violations go unchecked. B-Man was a bully-type nigga, the type that preyed on any sign of weakness, Khalil pointed out.

  Natural instinct was to advise Q to do whatever he had to do, but for Khalil that meant telling one brother to body the other. Bonded by blood, Khalil reminded himself. That meant he couldn’t just have Q’s back, he had to hold B-Man down, too. But the hell if B-Man wasn’t tryna make that an impossible.

  “Let me try to talk to that stupid ass nigga,” Khalil advised Q.

  “Somebody better talk to dat fool! He gon’ make me treat him like we really ain’t brothers!” threatened Q, biting his bottom lip in frustration.

  “That nigga talkin’ crazy,” Khalil announced after he had called B-Man and tried to get some understanding re-established between them all.

  Fire was in Q’s eyes.

  “What you gon’ do?” Rapheal wanted to know.

  Q exhaled. Then he fired up a Newport, inhaled, blew smoke rings up in the air. For a while he said nothing. Finally he spoke.