The DJ had to be snatched by Big Momma as the mic had to be protected from the errant freestylers. As it was, the music spun featured lyrics quickly running out of superheroes to do things with their hos. Pastor Winburn bobbed his head. "The neck knows," he said to Big Momma's mildly disapproving gaze and the giggle of some of the pre-teens.
Three BBQ grills kept the meat coming. Geno wiped thick smears of sweat from his forehead with his apron. He manned the racks of ribs personally, not trusting anyone else's eye. He had a burger man and a chicken man, each flipping stacks of meat like a wellrehearsed orchestra.
An area of tables had been cordoned off, the tablecloths flapping in the wind, but held down by duct tape. Chairs allowed the grown folks to eat in peace, hold court, or play cards and dominoes. Having run out of those, some of the kids had to make do with milk cartons. Seven year-old boys flashed gang signs when out of the eyeline of any other adults.
On the other side of the church, The Boars and other young men crouched in the shadows hunched over their piles of cash. He shook a set of dice, eyes heavy on him, all still conscious of the beat-down he took, but now it was business as usual and none dared speak of it. They gave him room to lick the wounds to his pride and they feared his eruption to reclaim it if provoked. Money spread on the concrete. The Boars rolled the bones and snapped his fingers. The dice came up sixes. Money changed hands amidst grumbles about the boxcar roll.
"Y'all want in?" The Boars asked.
"I'm in," Rok said, throwing a few ends onto the pile. They were still a crew and not only didn't he throw and punch, he was equally unnerved by the invisible assault. It also helped that he lost the last roll to The Boars.
"Who's up? Who's up? Who's up?" The Boars continued.
"If I ain't steppin' on something…"
"Yeah?" The tentative way Rok approached getting into The Boars' business, almost deferential, appealed to him.
"It true?"
"What?"
"I heard you got them boys."
"Who?"
"Dred's crew."
"Walked straight up on a buster and capped him in the head," another echoed.
"Served him up. One in the face," a third chimed in.
Rumors swirled about the bodies dropping all over town. Some with a simple bullet to the head. Some scenes described as straight out of a horror film, with bodies tore up, raked through, and blood everywhere. The Boars didn't mind some of that name recognition landing on him. Though he didn't want to directly claim it either. It was a dangerous business taking another person's credit.
"Same blood, not the same heart."
"You ice cold, man. There's no forgiveness to you."
"I hear that. A lot." The Boars snapped his fingers at the dice roll.
"It's all that Cobra you be drinking."
"I don't drink that watered-down piss. The KKK runs that shit."
"Shut up, fool. You think the KKK runs everything," Rok said.
"It's why he don't wear no Sean Jean gear," another voiced added.
"But that's P Diddy's line," Rok said. "Sound like maybe his competitors started a rumor."
"Klan. I'm telling you," The Boars said.
"I never did trust that too-pretty nigga no way," a peewee said. They all turned to see who had snuck into their circle.
"Why do so many niggas have to be such sugar drops?" The Boars lightly shoved Rok. "You too, nigga. You have to come strong. We need to get you on a workout bench. Get you pumped up."
Still rattling the dice in his hand like dead men's bones, he paused when he noticed the duo approaching.
Mulysa wanted his name to ring out, the sole ambition of his eyes jacked up by drugs. A stain dirtying everything he touched, he was a melanoma on the skin of his family. One they attempted to scrape off. For as long as he could remember, he learned to take the beatings, the abuse. And learned to smile – that dangerous half-smirk ready to jump off – because in the back of his mind he thought "one day." One day he'd be big enough. Like a pit bull bred to fight, he responded to what he'd been taught. He dined on pain and suffering every day and internalized it. It got in him, built his muscles, wired his thinking, flowed through his veins. The pain, the anger, the hate. He closed the space between them, meaning to crowd them. His hands shook when his blood got to racing. His arm twitched, the flinch that signaled he was about to go hard.
A tightness clutched his stomach as he remembered the child he had been. Sneaking a cup of sugar and a packet of Kool Aid in a sandwich bag for him and his friends. They'd all lick their fingers and swipe at the pile of powder until there was nothing left but a gooey pile. Every break between what few high school classes he attended spent smoking blunts. Weed affected him in ways different from his friends. More deeply. Something he couldn't identify drove him and he couldn't stop. He smirked at the idea of his friends. He couldn't recall any of their names now, and even their faces were vaguely recalled silhouettes.
Mulysa took a corner, sold dime bags of marijuana for his cousin who had a supplier out of the eastside. Then came juvenile, which completed his education. Confined with gunmen and killers, it kept him low and it killed anything good in him. Something he planned on passing along to Tristan.
"What's up?" Tristan asked.
"I'm drunk. That's what's up."
"Recognize." She knew that fire dancing in his eyes. That rush which at any moment might spring at her. "What's with these fools?"
"Let me milk this cow. Y'all just hold the tail," Mulysa said.
"I ain't trying to do no jail."
"See this here? This is a pack of dogs. Each one scrappin' for their piece. Times are a little lean and they a little wild so it's easy for them to scrap too hard over a little piece of meat. Some try to go off by themselves, some try to set them up as the big dog."
"And you here cause you the Alpha dog?" Tristan asked.
"Naw. Colvin's the Alpha dog. I'm the stick he uses to train them. You, too."
"Train them for what?"
"Shit. You beat a dog when he a young pup, he thinks twice about rising up on you later on."
At the sight of Mulysa, thickly muscled, an upright pit bull, and Tristan, rangy yet sturdy, no play in her eyes and scattered. The boys with the appointment knew it was pointless to run. They eye-fucked the locals to scare the need to witness out of them.
Mulysa menaced a smile.
Tristan lagged behind without having to be told. A sign of intelligence, Mulysa thought. She knew her business. The first time Tristan hooked up with Mulysa, she and Iz were completely ass-out. She dozed during the day under a bridge while Iz went to school and stayed up to guard them at night. One time while she slept, some fool jacked all her stuff; just grabbed her backpack and took off. She never cried when she told Iz, only took her hand and leaned her head onto her shoulder. A rare moment of lowering her guard.
They'd have left then but Indianapolis was all Tristan knew. Then Mulysa showed up. Said he recognized talent when he saw it. The bullshit didn't matter, the money did. Though she felt no obligation to him, in a way, he was there for them when no one else was. He was a predator of the first order and she was every bit on guard around him as when she was on the streets. The money was straight though.
Rok opted not to move as Tristan attempted to brush by – a tacit challenge she understood but had little patience for.
"What we got here? A little game among gentlemen?" Mulysa dropped to his knees and hovered over the money. "Civility is the name of the game."
"What you here for?" The Boars asked.
"You do the speeding, you get a ticket."
"Whose street are we speeding on?"
"Colvin's," Mulysa said.
"Colvin? Shee-it. I thought you were talking about someone serious. Not that high yella, wannabe peckerwood." The Boars assessed his six-to-two advantage and confidence crept into his posture. "He's another one. Got a little sugar in his tank."
"You sure that's the tone you want to take with m
e, nukka?"
"You might want to look around you, dog. You and the missus… you a little out-gunned up in this piece." The Boars challenged with his eyes, though a skim of sweat trickled along his hairline.
Born on Christmas Day, Mulysa was taken in by CPS at two. A dealer friend called CPS, having been given the boy to pay off a debt. He was five years old when he was first raped and beaten in a foster home. With no place else to go, he went back into the system.
"What led to arson?" Arson followed battery as juvenile followed boys' school. All sort of docs tried to crawl into his head. He suffered headaches. Adderall, Wellbutrin, a prescribed menagerie to address his anger problems, they often found it safer to sedate him with drugs. None helped. His mom and dad came into money, a settlement from an accident from when a security guard wrenched his mother's arm in a store (the fact that she was there to shoplift notwithstanding) and they got him back. Even sent him to a private school. His thoughts drifted to jail and the ordered life there, the peace of the streets. So one day he left. Most times he lived in an abandoned bank. Some times he dropped by the Camlann Apartments complex. The streets were his home, his headache his sole companion. No matter where he went, no one saw him. He knew he was just a joke to them. A nigger joke.
Mulysa withdrew a knife and twirled it in his hands, the six-inch blade stopped, handle in his palm. The Boars' mouth went dry.
"As big as your dick. Bigger."
"It ain't the size, it's how you use it," Tristan said, her handcrafted blades curled around her fists. They were overkill, she thought, and put them away. She attacked with sudden ferocity, catching The Boars off guard. Speed and guile on her part made up for the mismatch of his bulk versus hers. Most of the shorties scattered, probably racing back to sound an alarm. Her movements were smooth and elegant. The edge of her hand chopped at his throat followed by a punch to his solar plexus. Without passion, it was nothing personal. She directed a blow to a nerve cluster in his arm, painful, and would leave him in a mood to not continue a fight. In another finesse move, she leg-swept the approaching boy, toppling him, then kicked him in the side until he curled up in surrender. They were perfunctory blows. Other than The Boars, these were boys, not hardened soldiers. Water pumped in their veins.
Mulysa took greater relish in his attack. The crunch of bone beneath his pummeling fist only drove him to greater heights of bloodlust. His nostrils widened as if snorting the blood scent. His lips pulled back in a mad rictus. His name would ring out for sure. To march into the heart of Rellik's territory, to put a beat-down on some of his troops in the middle of his own party. Shit. He grew heady on waves of his soon-to-beswelling rep. He drew his dagger – damn near a machete, his bottom bitch – and turned to go at Rok. Tristan stepped between them.
"Enough. I think they got the point."
"Let's bounce before these bitches find their heart."
"And gats." Tristan glanced back at Rok with a nod. "Deuces."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hot Trimz had only been open a few months. Some of the barbers from Stylez across the street didn't like the booth rent arrangement and launched their own shop, taking up the space next to the Hoosier Pete convenience mart. They constantly handed out postcards to the Hoosier Pete regulars and had an ongoing special of a ten dollar haircut to any customer before 1 pm. An Obama '08 plackard hung alongside other signs: "Walkins welcome." "Multicultural." "Stylists Wanted." Several outdated issues of XXL, Vibe, and Scoop, the newspaper for the local night scene for black folks, lay scattered along the benches. The Commodores' "Lady" played in the background.
A white linoleum-tiled floor lined the thin strip of a shop, black mats beneath each station. The unsturdy benches were flush against the wall, hard on the ass and back. Three barbershop hairstyle guides were on display on the walls. From the beauty salon on the other half of the shop, female stylists talked crazy to the barbers over the dividing wall.
"Bunny!" Davion "D" Perkins, an earpiece always on his ear, said.
"I told you not to call me that," a female voice cried from the other side of the dividing wall.
"Grow up, D," Old School said in a tone of mock chivalry.
"Ain't that the pot calling the kettle negro?" she said.
"Old School, handle that," D said. "You ain't got your girl in check."
D had fast eyes and missed nothing. In a black vest over a white T-shirt, a casual display of his former athletic build, he swept the hair from around his station.
"Look at Old School. He like a little kid, hiding his hair under his chair."
"Look here, when you got it going on like me, you forget little details like a little hair."
"Yeah, you know all about a little hair." D went ahead and swept under Old School's chair.
"Why they call you 'Bunny'?" Old School asked.
"Uh oh, hurry up, here she comes," D said.
Before she could come around the corner, a cowbell clanged against the front door as it opened. A darkskinned woman, her skin made darker against her sunflower-yellow dress, walked in. Her swollen breasts and plunging cleavage made Old School lower his glasses. No more than twenty years old, she towed a wailing four year-old.
"Boy, sit down and be still." She plopped him down in D's chair. "Up here looking crazy."
"We all big boys in here," D said, draping a drop cloth around the boy's chest. Then he clicked on a set of clippers and waved them about to let the boy get used to the noise. The child continued to bellow, inconsolable. His attention shifting from D to Old School, back to his mother. The boy's tiny hands rose and made grasping motions toward her.
"He just cutting you up." The woman crossed her arms in a practiced pose of defiance, daring someone to cross her.
"Get your hair fresh to match your outfit," Old School said.
"Want to check out these keys?" D pulled a jangling mass out of his pocket. The boy paused mid-bellow, an uncertain air as he studied the keys. "You got them boys. Go to that escalade out there."
"Let him push buttons," Old School said.
The child burst into a renewed fit of tears, squirming out of the raised perch as the clippers neared his curly, light brown locks.
"Put some muscle in it. He'll be all right." His mother sucked her teeth in impatience.
"You got this, D." Old School tip-toed away from her to ease back into his chair. He flipped open the latest issue of Scoop and pretended to read.
"I know he ain't stronger than you. Just rip him."
"He keeps moving around and I don't want to nick him," D said.
"Hold him down. Who's the adult?"
"I ain't trying to lay hands on someone else's kids."
The show went on for a few more minutes, D angling clippers at the boy's head, each time as if considering the best attack approach. His mother clucked, sucked her teeth, checked her watch, and muttered loud enough for all to hear about how real men could handle a crying boy. The cowbell clanked again – D made a note to get a real chime – as King strode in. Prez followed behind him scratching his arm, in a skittish manner as if ready to break out in a full sprint at the next low sound. The boy stopped crying.
In his late forties, not a speck of gray on his head or in his beard, and wearing a black lab half-coat, Old School slapped the seat of his chair. Prez wandered into his chair, first checking to see if anyone else stirred for it, and chewed on his lower lip as he eyed the line of King's hair. Old School wrapped the paper neck cuff around Prez, then his huge arms draped the cloth around him in a flourish. Turning up his nose after catching a whiff of Prez's funk, he leaned the young man's head back over the sink and began washing his hair first. "What we need today?"
Prez's eyes caught King's, almost seeking permission to answer – if he were sure at all.
"Let's just bald him up. Go clean all the way around and start fresh," King said.
"Change the hair, change the image," Old School said.
It had already been a long day. King and Prez had played basketb
all for a few hours. It had been a while since King had been on a court. Too long. His legs lacked the grace and coordination which made the game come alive for him so long ago, like he had to learn to run all over again. Not that it mattered as Prez huffed and puffed before the score reached 2-2, having no wind and nothing close to stamina in his rubbery legs. Their game was complete slop, spending more time chasing down errant rebounds than playing. Despite his wheezing and slow gait, Prez continued to ball, jogging around the half-court, amiably hounding King and calling it defense. No one joined in their game, sensing that the game wasn't the point. There was the sense of intruding on something personal.
King's Justice: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 2 Page 17
