A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  congregated in the unit diagonal from Tiger’s; it was the first of the month, and they’d just received whatever check sustained them. All the houses were tagged with graffiti, but the house the addicts streamed in and out of was marked with fluorescent blue bubble letters and read: not a dump.

  Tiger walked out on the porch all paranoid and shit.

  “Get inside and lock the door, mothafucka. I don’t know who tryna come in behind me.”

  “Man, ain’t nobody trying to rob this shithole. You ain’t got nothing to take.”

  T.C. regretted it as soon as it came out; he could see the shame spreading on Tiger’s face.

  Tiger was quiet for a few minutes. Then, “Don’t come at me like that. At least it’s mine. At least I ain’t leeching offa my mama.

  “It came with a sofa,” he added, “but I sold it. Refrigerator too, but I don’t need that shit. It’s just me here, and my cousin, but he gone now.”

  T.C. let him talk, shook his head. “All right, all right, calm down. You right about that,” he said. “You right about that,” he repeated. He thought he could smell mold but how could that be? It had been so long; still there was no question that was it; he would never forget the smell that greeted him when he walked in his own house five years earlier. It was fainter here now, but there it was.

  A few minutes later, Tiger started up again out of nowhere: “You know this is my grandmama’s house,” he whispered, “she came back after the storm, did her best to rebuild so I’d have somewhere to stay, but . . .” He trailed off.

  T.C. remembered the floors; half were hardwood and half were plywood.

  “She took the rest of her money to Birmingham, said she’s not gon’ stand by and get her heart broken again. But this was all I had left.”

  “I’m sorry nigga,” T.C. said. “I shouldn’ta said nothing. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s cool. No sad stories. In a few months I’m gon’ fix this place up, knock everything down, start all over. I already got a crew. That Mexican mothafucka that used to play guard with us at Joe Brown, he’s a foreman now. I ran into him on Bourbon Street and we already handled the logistics. I just need the dough.”

  T.C. smiled, and they dapped it off. “That’s what’s up,” he said. “I’m glad I could help you out then.”

  They laughed like they did, low grunts caught in their throat, and they got in Tiger’s car and drove to Home Depot for filters, fans, and lights.

  T.C. was cutting it close with all the new purchases, but he wasn’t going to ask Tiger to contribute, not after he saw his place. He checked his balance on the way out of the store. With the help from MawMaw he might have enough left to last him the two months it took the plants to flower, but he just wouldn’t be able to eat out or anything like that. He supposed that wasn’t a big deal: He stopped by MawMaw’s every night to see her anyway, and she was happy to send him home with extra helpings of roast turkey, dressing, and gravy over rice.

  That night at Tiger’s place, they pushed their first cut branches into rock wool cubes, sealed them with plastic, and lined them up in a row under the grow lights.

  When they were done, they stood and surveyed the scene.

  “All right, all right, I see about you,” Tiger said. “I wasn’t sure, dawg, I wasn’t sure. I thought they had scavenged you at that place, but you back just as ingenious as ever. Let’s celebrate then, nigga.”

  They sat on the edge of the bare mattress. T.C. couldn’t afford to buy weed, but Tiger pulled a bag out of his pocket, unwrapped a swisher, licked it, and rolled.

  T.C. coughed up the first hit.

  “Damn, nigga, you sound like a Mack Truck; you gon’ be high as a mothafucka.”

  “I haven’t lit up in a while.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I’m trying to save, nigga. Who you think bought all these cuttings and lights and shit?”

  Tiger put the tip of the blunt to his lips. “Well, that’s all gon’ be behind us in a minute, lil’ bro. How long you said it take to flower, two months?”

  “Yeah, but this is to sell nigga, not to smoke.”

  “I know, I know,” Tiger said, “but how I’ma market it if I don’t sample it first?” He passed the blunt back to T.C., a smile spreading across his face.

  T.C. didn’t say anything, just rolled his eyes and passed it between them for a while. This was his favorite part of smoking, the first fifteen minutes. After that, anything could happen, depending on the strain. He might pass out; he might get a ride home and gorge on MawMaw’s homemade jelly cake; he might turn on a movie and try to drown out his certainty that any minute a horde of po-po would bust through Tiger’s front door and send T.C. back to the place he swore he’d never see again. Now, though, he felt an ease in his heart, spreading out and touching everything that even crossed his mind. His problems showed up in different outfits, repositioned as opportunities. Alicia, for instance. He’d been wanting to call her since he came home, but he was afraid of what she would say, that she might try to lock him out of the baby’s life, or her own. Now though, three hits deep, it seemed like if he could just get her on the line, he could explain himself from the most genuine angle. He didn’t know exactly what the words were going to be, but the fact was, he loved that girl, and this baby was his chance to live again.

  He reached for his phone.

  “Who you calling, mothafucka?”

  T.C. shrugged. “I don’t know, I wasn’t sure, but I was thinking about calling Licia.”

  “Aww, hell no, put that phone down.” Tiger stood up as if he were going to wrestle it from T.C.’s hands.

  “This ain’t the time for that, bruh. You all loaded and shit.”

  “I ain’t loaded.”

  “You ain’t loaded, you been over there smiling that goofy-ass smile of yours for the last fifteen minutes, that’s how I know you high.”

  “Anyway when that ever stopped me from doing something?” T.C. asked.

  “Yeah, but you ain’t smoked in a while. You liable to go and say something you can’t unsay, you feel me?”

  “Nah, bruh, I just want to tell her I love her, that I’m always going to be there for her.”

  “Yeah, and that sound all well and good right now, but she gon’ be able to tell you high, bruh, and then how she gon’ feel? You been out all this time, and you got to get out your mind before you call her?”

  T.C. didn’t say anything to that. It sounded too much like sense. After a while, he relit the blunt, inhaled but didn’t cough, passed it back to Tiger.

  “You hear that?” Tiger asked after he tapped it out.

  “Hear what?”

  “Them sirens.”

  T.C. didn’t have to listen to know they were there, not directly but circling like he’d seen lions surround antelopes from all sides on the National Geographic Channel. Either way, he wasn’t worried; surely it was for the crackhouse next door. It was the perfect place to grow in that sense; nobody would be bothering to look out for them. “Mothafucka, you trippin’. Don’t get all paranoid on me now,” he said.

  “All right, you right, you right,” Tiger said. Then, “T.C., that don’t sound right, man.”

  “What don’t sound right? Man, you killing my buzz.”

  “Better it’s me than some nigga with a burner, mothafucka, or worse, po-po.” He walked up to the window, peered through. “Come over here,” he said.

  T.C. walked over. There was nothing out there. The emptied houses were even eerier at night, like gaps in a mouth where teeth had been shattered.

  “You see something?” Tiger asked.

  T.C. looked out into the darkness, the empty fields of brown grass.

  “Hell, no, I don’t see nothing, mothafucka. Everybody’s inside. I told you wasn’t nobody out there. Now sit down.”

  T.C. turned on the TV, looking fo
r a movie. Friday had just started, and Craig’s mama was telling him she didn’t feel comfortable loaning him money without a job.

  “Here, watch this,” T.C. said. “Calm your ass the hell down.”

  They watched until Big Worm pulled his ice cream truck up on screen, and Tiger said he was hungry.

  “Don’t nobody deliver over here but Domino’s though. I could fuck up some Domino’s right now.”

  T.C. didn’t have any money, and he told him that.

  “I got you,” Tiger said.

  “Stop fuckin’ around.”

  “Nah, I’m serious; you always getting me.”

  By the time the movie was over, the pizza had arrived, and they huddled over the box in the dark. T.C. found himself feeling grateful.

  “Thanks, nigga,” he said.

  “I already told you, don’t worry about the pizza.”

  “Not for the pizza, bruh. For that stuff with Alicia. I would have said something stupid, something I couldn’t unsay. You’re right.”

  Tiger shrugged. “I just think it’s rare what y’all have, that’s all. I ain’t never had nothing like it, but if I did, I wouldn’t fuck around with it. I would treat it with respect, you feel me?”

  Over the next few weeks, T.C. spent at least a few hours at Tiger’s every day, feeding the plants, changing their water, testing the pH, applying the chemical adjuster. Meanwhile Tiger started his marketing campaign. T.C. told him the plants wouldn’t finish flowering for at least a month, but he’d come in every day bragging about how perfect the middleman he’d found was going to be: “He got as much ambition as a NBA wife, nigga.” Or how many people were begging him for T.C.’s Blueberry: “They know it’s gon’ be another month, but they still asking about it. That’s the key, to have niggas waiting, hungry on the verge of an attack if they can’t taste your bud so the first week that shit gon’ be sold out from the sheer momentum.”

  One day, the door opened, and T.C. heard Alicia’s voice behind Tiger’s. “What the hell y’all got going on in here, Tiger? You can smell the gas from outside.”

  She stopped in her tracks when she saw T.C. though.

  “I didn’t expect you to be here,” she said. “Tiger said he had something to show me. I wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

  T.C. and Alicia both looked at their friend.

  “What?” Tiger asked. “Y’all need to fix this mess, bruh. I’m tired of watching y’all both suffer.”

  T.C. hadn’t realized he had been suffering. Of course Alicia was always on his mind, she was his life, but he hadn’t known how very much he missed her until she walked in, his seed pressing on her belly so hard he thought there was a real chance she might deliver the child right there.

  “What the hell y’all got going on in here?” she repeated.

  He ignored the question, told himself to calm down. She didn’t seem happy to see him, so he clipped his own joy out of habit; he wouldn’t have it going out into territory it couldn’t see its way out of.

  He looked her up and down though. He couldn’t help that. “You look good,” he said.

  “She big, huh, T?” Tiger shot in.

  Alicia play-slapped him in his chest. “I ain’t big, boy. I’m pregnant.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Tiger said.

  “Then that’s what you say next time,” Alicia went on.

  In all the squabble T.C. wasn’t sure if Alicia would hear his compliment, so he repeated himself.

  “You’re beautiful,” he lightweight whispered, and she looked up at him and smiled.

  Once Tiger left, they went outside and sat on his stoop.

  “I can’t be in that house too long,” Alicia said. “I’d wind up getting some contact high or some shit.”

  T.C. laughed. He had missed her candor. “I feel you.”

  “So when you got out?” she asked.

  “A month ago.”

  She nodded. “I knew it was a month, I was just making conversation,” she said.

  “I was gonna come see you.”

  “Don’t even start, T.C.,” she shrugged, and waved her hand at him. “I’ve heard it all before and I don’t have the energy for it, not today.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. What was there to say? They watched kids jump Double Dutch across the street. T.C. didn’t know where they could possibly be living.

  Banana, banana, banana split,

  What you got in arithmetic?

  Banana, banana, banana for free,

  What you got in geometry?

  “How’s your mama and them?” Alicia asked.

  “My mama? Crazy as ever. You already know.”

  Alicia laughed. “I ran into her the other day at Castnet. She made the owner give me my sandwich for free, said her grandbaby was going to be eating it.” Alicia shook her head, laughing.

  “I didn’t know she knew the owner like that.”

  “She doesn’t, but I think they just didn’t want to cross her.”

  Their laughter was so much a habit only part of them knew they were doing it.

  “So how has it been? The pregnancy and all that?”

  “Easy breezy. My mama was sick the whole first two trimesters with me, and you know she had a miscarriage between me and my sister.”

  T.C. shook his head.

  “Yeah, so I was nervous you know, I was real nervous in the beginning, but now, I’m just ready to go.”

  “You due, what, in a week or two?”

  “Boy, I got about four weeks left. I wish it was a week or two. Nah, lemme stop, I just want him to be healthy. Sometimes if they come too early, they gotta stay in NICU and shit.”

  “Aww, no, not our lil’ dude.” He put his hand around her shoulder out of habit, and she didn’t move. “You thought about names already?”

  She nodded, smiling. “I got a couple. Why, you wanna hear them?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “One is Malcolm Darrell, Darrell after Daryl, may he rest in peace.” She made the sign of the cross.

  T.C. could feel the emotion rushing to his face and he put his head down.

  “And you know I just love Malcolm X.”

  “You still tryin’ to be a Black Panther, huh?” he said, glad to change the mood.

  “Boy, whatever,” but she smiled. “The other one is Malik.” She looked up at him to gauge his reaction. “I just like the name Malik.” She shrugged. “Always have. What you think?”

  “Those sound good,” he said. “Those sound real good.”

  “You got a favorite?”

  “Probably Malik,” he said. “That just sound real cool to me, and unique. Malik Darrell. MD. Maybe he’ll be a doctor or something like that.”

  “I didn’t even think about that,” she said, her face lighting up.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Then Lewis of course.”

  He was too caught off guard to play it cool. He looked up at her with impossible gratitude. He had long since given up on having the last name, being locked up half his girl’s pregnancy, and then he had gone and let the shame over that keep him from being there the rest of the time too. If it hadn’t been for Tiger, who knew when he would have shown up? Kindergarten? High school graduation? But she was going to give him the name anyway.

  “You serious, Licia? You really thinking about naming him Lewis?”

  “It’s your baby, ain’t it?”

  “Of course it’s mine”—he sat up straight on the porch chair—“but I haven’t done right by you. I know that. I’ma do better, but I let so much time pass; sometimes I worry it’s too late.”

  Alicia sighed. “That’s why you didn’t call? You thought it was too late?”

  He shrugged. “Something like that. I thought about calling all the time. I’d pick up the phone an
d actually dial the number. Then I’d imagine your mama in your ear telling you that nigga ain’t shit, then imagine my kid hearing that over and over through the years. That’s how it was for me, you know. I don’t think my mama ever mentioned my daddy’s name without following it with the word mothafucka, and I’d think about all that, and I’d put the phone right back on the hook, roll up. You know how that go.” He was looking at those kids again now, anything to keep his eyes off her. The overgrown weeds were hugging their knees.

  I know something,

  But I won’t tell.

  Three lil’ monkeys,

  in a peanut shell.

  One can read,

  And one can dance,

  And one got a hole

  in the seat of his pants!

  “I just thought you had moved on to somebody else, that you weren’t thinking about me and old Malik,” Alicia said.

  He reached for her hand. “I could never stop thinking about you, Licia. You never have to think that.”

  “Well, you never have to think it’s too late. No matter what happens with us, it’s never too late for you to be part of his life, T.C. You hear me? That’s your son.” She moved his face so it was parallel to hers. He never wanted to kiss somebody more in his life, not fuck her, just kiss her, pour his whole heart into hers and have her pour the new merged contents back.

  Instead he just nodded. They stared into each other’s eyes for a while until the kids changed their song, and T.C. looked up.

  Call the army, call the navy

  I heard Tashica gonna have a baby.

  Wrap it up in tissue paper,

  send it down the elevator

  “They over there ear hustling,” T.C. joked.

  Alicia shook her head, smiling.

  “Anyway, what the hell y’all doing in here, nigga?” She gestured toward the house again. It smells like a high school bathroom. Better yet, it smells like the hallway to prison, that’s what it smells like.”

  “Aww, please, you know it ain’t nothing like that.”