“No. From what?”
“It’s the leukemia got him. He was in so much pain.”
“Hi, Lucky,” Monique said. She had come up from behind the bent-over older woman.
“Hi, Monique,” came Thomas’s joyless greeting.
The older woman turned away, and Thomas could see Monique’s big belly.
“Come on in,” the young woman said.
She took Thomas into the kitchen and served him a glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid.
“I thought the county took you away, Lucky,” Monique said after lowering herself into the kitchen chair.
“I runned away from them.”
“When?”
“Long time ago.”
“Where you livin’?”
“With a woman named Cilla,” he said. Thomas didn’t want to tell her that the police hadn’t changed the lock to the cellar at the back of his clubhouse. He found the key where he’d left it — under the crate next to Alicia’s hidden tomb.
“An’ what you doin’?” the girl asked.
“Nuthin’. What about you?”
She put her hand on her belly. “I’m havin’ a baby. It’s Tony Williams’s boy, but he got shot. We got a studio ’partment ovah on Hooper, but now I’m there by myself. But I cain’t hardly pay no rent so I guess I’ma be in the street.”
“Why don’t you stay here?”
“I could but they wanna treat me like a baby, an’ here I’m havin’ a child’a my own.”
“I got three hundred dollars,” the boy said to the big girl, now made bigger by her pregnancy.
“You do?”
“I could give it to you,” he said. “I mean, I was gonna go out wit’ Bruno an’ buy a whole lotta Fantastic Fours with it. But I bet he would want me t’give it to you.”
Monique’s apartment was just a room. One wall had a stove against it, and there was a big footed bathtub next to the window on the opposite wall. Between these was the bed. Thomas slept in the bed with Monique that night and every night after for the next three years.
With the money he made from drug dealing, he paid the rent and bought the groceries. During most days he’d leave Monique to stay in his alley and on the roof of his apartment building. There he’d visit with Alicia and commemorate his friend Pedro. In the afternoon he went to work for Tremont delivering ecstasy, cocaine, crack, and sometimes heroin.
Two months after he and Monique had moved in together, Thomas came home to find that Monique’s mother had come over and helped deliver Monique’s daughter — Lily. Thomas loved the little baby girl and thought of her as his baby sister. Now he had two sisters.
One night, toward the end of his first year working for Tremont, Thomas went to a house where a big, fat black man, wearing only a ratty bathrobe, answered the door.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I brought you sumpin’ from Tremont,” the boy said.
The man looked around and then grabbed the boy, pulling him into the darkened apartment. He shoved Thomas into a big room where the only light came from a giant television set. The scene on the screen was like when Thomas had come in on Wolf and May. There was a laughing black man with a large erection that he was pressing into a white woman who cried out in pain.
“I’ma do you like that man doin’ that woman,” the large man said.
The big man opened up his bathrobe, and Thomas could see the erection rising up toward his captor’s belly.
“Gimme that rock,” the man said.
Thomas reached down into his underpants and handed over the package.
The man on the screen said, “Take all of it, bitch.”
The woman screamed.
“Take off your pants,” the man told Thomas.
The boy fumbled with the snap while the man tore open the paper.
“I gotta go bafroom,” Thomas said.
“You bettah not have nuthin’ on when you come out.” The man already had the first rock in his glass pipe. He was lighting the match as Thomas closed the bathroom door. The boy turned the lock and jumped up on the toilet. There was a little window over the commode.
Thomas tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Hurry up in there!” the man yelled.
Thomas could see the doorknob jiggle.
“Unlock this goddamned do’!”
There was a loud thump, and the door shuddered.
“Open up!”
Thomas wondered if he should unlock the door.
The loud thump came again, and the doorjamb buckled and cracked.
Thomas found a thick green bottle of aftershave and threw it into the glass. The window shattered, and the door caved in. Thomas jumped through the window, cutting his left thigh and right forearm as he did. He could hear the man’s heavy footsteps across the floor behind him. He stuck his arm out after Thomas, grabbing the boy by his shoulder.
“Let me go!” he cried.
Thomas moved from side to side, scraping the fat man’s arm on the jagged glass that lined the window frame. Suddenly he was free and running down the street in his underwear and T-shirt.
When he got to the secret door in Tremont’s alley, Chilly let him in.
“What the fuck you mean you ain’t got my money, niggah?” Tremont bellowed. He surged up out of his chair and lifted Thomas by one arm.
“He made me take off my pants and showed me what he was gonna do to me in a movie,” Thomas whined. “I had to jump out the windah.”
“Where the money, li’l man?”
“He didn’t pay me. He was just naked, an’ his thing was big.”
“I’ont care about that. I want my money.”
“You know Lucky ain’t stealin’, Tree,” Chilly said in a calm, slow voice. “All he do is what you say, man.”
Thomas’s right arm was bleeding, and his left was in pain from the way the powerful drug dealer held him.
“Look at him,” Chilly continued. “He bleedin’. He ain’t got no pants.”
“RayRay cut you like that?” Tremont asked.
Thomas nodded and sniffed. The drug dealer’s biceps was bigger than his head.
Tremont put Thomas down and then said, “Com’on wit’ me.”
They got to the door, and Tremont turned to Chilly. “Give the li’l man yo’ pants,” he said.
On the way Tremont promised Thomas that he’d kill him if he was lying.
“If you stealin’ from me I’ll kill you,” he said.
Thomas knew the threat was real. Tremont had killed man and boy before.
Tremont banged on RayRay’s door with the butt of his pistol. When nobody answered, he knocked the door in with his shoulder.
In the dark room the DVD was still playing. Now it was a scene of two men having sex with each other. A woman was kissing one and then the other while they groaned. When the screen got very bright, it shone on RayRay, who was sitting in a big chair, the glass pipe still in his hand. His other arm hung down at his side. Below it there was a great deal of gelatinous blood.
“Mothahfuckah daid,” Tremont said, amazed. “Got so high he bleed to death an’ didn’t even know it.”
When Tremont turned on the light, Thomas could see that the fat man’s eyes were half open and sightless, as Alicia’s had been.
“Mothahfuckah cut himself tryin’ to grab you, but he was so fucked up that he just did more rock. Damn. I guess you ain’t lyin’, li’l man.”
Monique cleaned and dressed Thomas’s wounds, but the next day he had a fever. By evening he was talking out of his head.
She brought him to the emergency room with a story about them being brother and sister. He had forgotten his key and locked himself out of the apartment so he broke the window but cut himself climbing in.
“I tried to clean it up, but then he come down with fever,” she said.
The nurse saw her with the infant Lily in her arms and admitted Thomas without alerting social services.