The System Has Failed

by Ms. Michel Moore

  I should do what ol’boy just said and teach her trifling butt a hellava lesson. Shoot, out of all the females I deal with, she the only one who acts up. If that crazy, out-for-self whore wouldn’t go down to put me on child support, I’d dip! Flat out! Matter of fact, a guy like me needs to make a trip to go see Maury.

  Taking his cell off silent, he couldn’t do anything but shake his head in utter disgust over whom he’d ultimately been cursed with as his alleged child’s mother. Each time he’d try using his phone to place a call, he was met with the annoying sound of NayNay’s assigned ring tone, “Bust It Baby,” along with several urgent voice messages where his son’s mama was practically begging him to come over. Damn this chick is really bugging out! Eighteen back-to-back calls in a row! She needs to be medicated! Bad! Now she texting me! Stupid bitch!

  Cruising the violent inner-city neighborhood, he reclined deep in the seat of his chromed-out Beemer. Moe Mack turned on his favorite jazz CD in a much-needed attempt to drown out NayNay’s relentless tirade. Still amazed at the sometimes-ruthless, poverty-driven behavior of the Motown residents and the things they did to survive, it was soon utterly clear to him why Detroit was number one in crime. “Bust It Baby.” I’m gonna call her back as soon as this song go off and cuss that bitch all the way out! She done lost her rabbit-ass mind! Don’t nobody need a pack of Newports that damn bad!

  * * *

  “Why you doing them like that?” NayNay questioned with contempt, no longer holding back her anger. “You ain’t about nothing, you punk-ass, broke nigga!”

  “Broke?” Justice grew more outraged, practically smacking the dog shit outta her. “If the hell I am broke, it’s because of ya baby daddy and his shady, stepped-on dope!”

  “You just a jealous hater,” she alleged, taking the hit to the face like a trooper.

  “Jealous of what? A little nappy-headed slut like you? Bitch, please!”

  “Yeah, well, why you all up in my crib taking the next person’s property?”

  “’Cause the fuck I want to! Now shut up! I don’t even wanna hear you breathe!” Justice reached for NayNay’s cell phone, once again calling Moe Mack, who obviously shot the call immediately to voicemail. “It’s probably that smart mouth of yours that’s making dude not even wanna deal with you. I mean real rap, ya sitting over here with his seed in the back sick and no doubt that nigga somewhere posted up with his true wifey, a bitch who can probably cook and clean!”

  “Whatever.” NayNay arrogantly twisted her lips, rolling her eyes in denial as if she weren’t tied up on the floor of her filthy, unkempt rental house, looking like a certified stank-a-dank, “girl why don’t ya get yourself together,” hot ghetto-ass mess. “You just wish a female like me would deal with your lowlife ass! Boy, you need to buy a clue. Don’t nobody, especially me, want your crazy-looking ass!”

  “Is you high or something? Shittt, what you been smoking?” Justice taunted, leaning over in her face as the two traded insults. “I need some of that weed! That must be some of that purple!”

  “Naw, you need to brush ya motherfucking teeth! That’s what in the fuck you need to do!”

  Tuning the silly bickering out, a concerned Cree was in his own world worrying about the young, frightened boys and the horrified expressions that graced their tiny faces. “Can y’all breathe or what?” he sympathetically asked, removing the dirty sock from the smaller child’s mouth.

  Moments later, interrupting NayNay’s last comeback, Justice and Cree were both amazed when her cell phone rang. It was flashing Moe Mack’s name and number across the screen. The living room was motionless as if this weren’t the moment they’d all been on pins and needles waiting for.

  “Oh, shit! It’s that guy,” Justice panicked, grabbing his pistol, which was now on the mantle.

  “Y’all kids better not say anything, okay? I’m not playing around.” Cree acted as if they had a choice in the matter.

  “Yeah, that goes for you too! I’ma put this shit on speaker, and you better not say no dumb shit or else!” Justice shoved the gun into NayNay’s ribcage as Cree stood guard near the two boys. The cell rang once more.

  “Hello.”

  “Yeah, NayNay, what the hell is so important that you keep calling me like you crazy?” Moe Mack went straight into flip-out mode.

  “I . . . I . . .” She fought to get her words out. “It’s the baby. Maurice got a high temperature.”

  “And?”

  “And I need for you to come over.” She felt the pressure of Justice’s huge gun stab her side as she tried convincing her son’s father to show up.

  “For what? I ain’t no damn doctor!” Moe Mack wasn’t showing any signs of sympathy for NayNay and her fictitious tale. “And even if I were, I still wouldn’t stop what I was doing because your trifling ass called! You doing too damn much, Nay! Matter of fact, I don’t think I’m coming that way for a couple of days!” Moe remembered what Keith said earlier.

  NayNay momentarily glanced over at her young defenseless nephews taped to the chair. With the eldest slowly losing a battle fighting to breathe as a sock still blocked his airway, she gave Maurice’s father her best “nigga, please come help a ho” routine.

  “Look, sweetie,” she said, trying to come at him from a different angle as Justice’s rough, ashy hand held her cell up to her trembling lips. “I’m sorry for keep calling you like I did, but I didn’t know what to do or who else to call. You know my sister and ’em is out of town and the boys are with me. You know how they be getting out of hand!”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot.” Moe Mack slightly let down his irritated demeanor as he slowed his expensive car down, letting an older woman carrying several bags of groceries cross the street. “But dang, still. Calling a Negro that much is outright ridiculous. I told you earlier I was about to take care of some business, and ya pesky ass was still out of pocket. Embarrassing me in front of all my boys like you’s a stalker! You got a nigga not wanting to deal with you at all!”

  “Baby, please, I said I’m sorry.” NayNay’s eyes shut tightly as she hesitated but reluctantly continued trying to lure her son’s father to her house and to what could very well be his last day on earth. “Can you just come see me? I need you. I’m begging!”

  Knowing he was gonna give in sooner or later, Moe Mack let his baby mama off the hook, saying the words Justice and Cree were waiting so desperately for hours to hear come out of his mouth. “After I make a few more runs, I’ll be on my way. So now you can stop perpetrating like my son is over there dying, okay?” Moe Mack checked the time, informing her to expect him about eight o’clock.

  Abruptly he ended their conversation.

  “Good.” Justice sinisterly grinned, leering at NayNay while flipping her cell closed. “And when ol’ boy get here, he better come correct!”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Although Cree was to some extent relieved, there would soon be a conclusion to the long, drawn-out day of terror he and Justice had perpetrated. Along with the fact that by the time the sun went down his pockets would most likely be on swoll, he still couldn’t shake the cold, eerie feeling that somehow, someway, things wouldn’t go as planned. Shit never did for him. That would be too much like right in his forever-corrupt, fucked-up existence. If it wasn’t one thing, it was sure a goddamned other where Cree was concerned.

  Hell, keeping things a hundred, since the first day his heroin-addicted mother suddenly abandoned him, when he was only seven, his two sisters, and their matted-hair, three-legged, flea-infested dog on his granny’s front porch in search of the ultimate high, an ongoing cloud of doom seemed to follow him on a daily basis. From the word go, Cree felt it was always him against the world. Now lately, from time to time, just as he’d ended up mercifully putting a BB gun to Ava’s head, putting her out of her never-ending misery of catching the short end of the stick when it came to a dog’s life, he himself was contemplating checking out. Fortunately, the only thing keeping him sane and thinking rational was th
e thought of becoming a new father.

  Watching the small boys squirm around in the chair and hyperventilate with panic, not knowing what was gonna happen next, made him have flashbacks to being hungry, being mistreated, and also being left night after night alone with his sisters to fend for themselves. Cree remembered those horrible days he was consumed with vulnerability, scared of his own shadow. It was those very memories that made him stop resenting his mother so much for giving them away and more thankful to his granny for saving their lives.

  He was indeed a drug dealer. So what? Big deal! That was an accepted and expected line of work in Detroit, but fuck the rest of what was transpiring. Cree’s granny didn’t raise him to be no baby killer, and there wasn’t no way in sweet, hot hell his homeboy Justice was gonna persuade him otherwise. Knowing right from wrong, Cree was taken over by compassion. With compassion, he removed the sock still stuffed in the older child’s mouth so he could at least breathe, despite Justice’s disapproving frown.

  As NayNay mouthed the words “thank you,” Cree made a mental note to tell his grandmother he loved her. Maybe Sunday morning he would even go to church with her.

  Suddenly he heard a noise in the rear of the house that captured his full attention.

  Finally free from gagging for air, the two usually talkative, mischievous brothers sat immobile, duct-taped tightly to the chair, sharing the same thoughts while staring at their auntie Nay begging the men who’d intruded their once-secure home to spare all of their lives. The one man who’d taken the socks out of their mouths seemed like he was the nicer of the two and would maybe let them go if they did as they were told. Even at a young age, the boys weren’t fools. They were hood raised and knew the odds weren’t in their favor. It was apparent to them that the other man, the one with the gap in his teeth like Florida Evans’s from the Good Times reruns they watched every day, was the leader and called most of the shots. He didn’t play and meant business. So for the time being, they followed instructions. Yet in the back of the older boy’s naive mind, he still plotted to escape and beat up the man who’d slammed him to the ground.

  NayNay closed her eyes for a few seconds, trying to restore her self-control. Thankful to Cree for taking the sock out of her nephews’ mouths, she felt some sort of momentary connection with him. There was something in his expression that seemed familiar. It was a look she’d seen plenty of times in the mirror herself while growing up in a single-parent household with a neglectful mother who cared more about partying, fucking, getting blown, and running the hardcore Detroit streets than her own children. Maybe that was the true reason she and her sack-chasing sister turned out the way they did. Nevertheless, NayNay didn’t have time to figure out the strange link she and Cree appeared to share or rehash her tragic past. Right now, she had to try to bargain with the both dudes into letting the kids free, letting her loose, and lastly, letting her son’s daddy live.

  Lost in thought of the speech she was going to try to concoct to convince Cree and Justice to leave, she was soon brought back to the present reality of the awful moment as her small son Maurice, who was whining, made his way from the room he’d been sleeping in. Luckily the summer cold he was suffering from, along with the Children’s Tylenol drops he was given, had blessed him with avoiding the life-lasting nightmarish sights and sounds of his mother and cousins being tortured up until now. Once again looking up at Cree as he was her personal savior, a still-restrained NayNay hoped he would shed one more act of kindness toward her and her family in the way of allowing her innocent baby to come to her side.

  Look at these suckers, Justice reflected as he watched his boy and NayNay share some sort of magical dumb-ass moment in time. I oughta take that slut in the basement and put some of this hot lead up in her ass, he considered. Peeking out the front window, he saw an old lady in the yard across the street handing Last Chance a few empty bottles to add to his collection. Glancing back, he saw NayNay’s son, clad only in a diaper, emerge from a rear bedroom, wiping sleep out of the corners of his eyes. Listening to the child repeatedly call out for his no-good mother, Justice felt a sudden surge of hate come over him.

  Born addicted to prescription drugs, with a lazy eye, Justice was seemingly cursed from conception. He’d been told his mother was serving prison time and he came into the world behind bars. Suffering from a severe learning disability, he learned to fend for himself. By hook or by crook, Justice had to make it happen. The forever-heartless alleyways, pimps, whores, drug addicts, and old-school, real-life gangsters from back in the day were his parents and the sole reason he was alive today.

  Justice was 100 percent a product of his environment, not believing in any consequences to his often-outrageous actions or savage lifestyle. He was Detroit! The only thing he was loyal to daily was his own survival. Whether it meant robbing, killing, or stealing from a human being from eight to eighty, if it put food in his stomach, clothes on his back, and a roof over his head, it was all fair game.

  The fact that Justice allowed Moe Mack to get away with giving him and his boy Cree a weak-ass package twice in a row without some sort of a fatal confrontation jumping off was nothing short of what Detroit homicide detectives down at 1300 Beaubien jokingly referred to as a motherfucking miracle in the hood.

  After three or four grueling minutes of the irritated baby unsuccessfully trying to get his still-restrained mother to hold him, Cree couldn’t take it any longer. Finding out that the child was probably hungry, as well as wet, he went into the filthy kitchen. Shortly, he returned with a small cup of milk and a couple of saltine crackers to soothe the baby’s cries. Picking the boy up, he took him back to the room he’d been sleeping in, changed his diaper, and placed him in a playpen instead of on the mattress he was originally asleep on. Making sure the little boy was content, Cree then rejoined NayNay, Justice, and the two older children in the front room of the house. There he was met with different comments from each adult.

  “Listen, I appreciate you helping my son.” NayNay choked back the tears after seeing a man who wasn’t her child’s father or even someone whose dick she sucked be so nice to Maurice Jr. “I would’ve done it myself but—”

  Seeing her trying to manipulate his boy with that yin-yang bitch shit hoes tried to run on niggas, Justice intervened, throwing major salt in NayNay’s game. “Stop playing! You wasn’t gonna do jack shit. That li’l bastard probably been running around here heavy in the diaper for hours with your trifling, no-good ass!” He then turned his verbal assault on Cree. “And damn motherfucker! Who the hell ya ass trying to be, the stepdaddy or something? Bet money, if this trick weren’t tied up, she wouldn’t have no words for ya gullible ass!”

  “Nigga, chill.” A fed-up Cree shook his head. “What you want me to do, let the li’l fella starve? What you got against kids anyway? Damn!”

  “What?” Justice’s head tilted to the side. “Fuck a kid! Them motherfuckers ain’t shit but another mouth to feed and a child support case waiting to happen! You’ll see when ya girl drag ya ass down in front of the judge and they gang rape ya pockets! Talk that shit then!”

  “Whatever, dude.” Cree laughed. “Ain’t Greedy over there on the east side with a big belly?”

  “So fucking what? It ain’t mine, and even if it were I ain’t claiming the bastard! Trust that! It’s every man for himself in Detroit, nigga!”

  Almost seconds apart, interrupting their little disagreement, both guys received text messages from none other than their intended target for the evening, Mr. Moe Mack himself. He informed them both to meet him up on Linwood and Davison at the KFC, seven forty-five sharp to grab some new work.

  “Ain’t this some shit! No, that faggot ain’t trying to push no more of that weak garbage on us!” Justice fumed as he paced the floor with malice in his heart and revenge in his mind. “He got me all fucked up!”

  Cree felt the same way when it came to his money. That was one issue he and Justice definitely had no problem with. “You right! I know ol’ boy
don’t think we about to pay him off so soon on this garbage!” He tossed onto the table a brown paper bag filled with the rest of the pathetic dope they couldn’t sell to a rookie undercover cop trying to arrest a nigga for jaywalking. “Fuck Moe Mack in the ass! I ain’t ’bout to take no more losses! Shit! I got people to feed too!” He looked at another incoming text, this time from his pregnant girlfriend.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “Oh, well, fuck it! I guess when they finish tricking somewhere or shooting dice they’ll get back so they can get their package tightened up.”

  It was nearing 8:00 p.m. and Moe Mack had sent texts to Justice and Cree three more times, not receiving a reply from either. Before heading to NayNay’s, he stopped at the liquor store to grab, of course, her pack of oh-so-important Newports. He also needed a bottle of Grey Goose. He knew he’d need it to take the edge off of him having to suffer the headache of hearing NayNay’s complaining voice the rest of the evening until he hooked back up with his homeboy Keith. Not being able to get out the car, he was met by a drunk but sincerely pissed-off Last Chance.

  “Those bad-ass nephews of yours knocked my buggy over earlier, and the big one spit on me!”

  “Look, I done told you a hundred different times them kids is my baby mama’s family, not mine!”

  “It’s the same thang to me, Maurice!” a still-aggravated Last Chance slurred rebelliously, following him into the same store he was thrown out of just hours earlier. “Them boys ain’t got any kind of respect for old people like y’all did! Just because I’m messed up now ain’t no call for them to treat me like I ain’t still a man!”

  Moe Mack, knowing Last Chance ever since he was a small child himself growing up across the street from where his own son lived now, gave the old man the decency to listen to his complaints. In all actuality, back in the day, before he got smoked out, Last Chance, who used to work the midnight shift at Chrysler, had a wife and a son, who was Moe Mack’s best friend until he went away to college. It was for that trip down memory lane and that reason alone he even entertained any sort of conversation with the dirty, unshaven, drug-addicted alcoholic.