“Did you get your wings?”
I shook my head and took a swig of water. “Nah. They were frying up a fresh batch and I didn’t feel like waiting.” I don’t know why I lied, but I did. Moonie just looked at me for a minute, then he nodded. “Be right back,” I told him, grabbing my purse. “I’ma hit the bathroom right quick.” I could feel his eyes on my back as I walked away. At the entrance to the hall that lead to G’s office and the ladies room, I turned and looked back. Moonie had left the bar, and was heading toward the kitchen, moving fast.
I went in the bathroom and washed my face. I wet a paper towel in the sink then took it into a stall and did my best to wash myself down there. Then I stood in the mirror and combed my hair and put on some fresh lipstick. G hated to see women who had eaten off all of their lip color. He said it made them look busted.
When I went back out to the bar, there was something on my stool. It was my hot wing. Half-eaten with the crown bit off. I frowned and looked up and saw Moonie standing behind the bar and staring dead in my face. I didn’t miss a beat.
“Damn,” I said and poked out my lip. “Greco needs to check his cleaning crew.” I took a napkin from the bar and picked up the wing, holding it out like it was a used tampon. “Some people are so damn trifling.” I switched my ass around to the end of the bar and flung the wing in the trash, then got another napkin and wiped the sauce off the seat real daintylike before sitting down one stool over.
Moonie was still grilling me with his eyes, but so what? Fuck him. He hadn’t been in that coatroom holding no light so he couldn’t tell shit he didn’t know. Besides, I was just getting started. I had finally gotten my pussy licked, and G or no G, I wanted it licked some more.
Chapter Ten
Fletcher Boykin was a kid who grew up with me and Jimmy on 136th Street. His mother had actually ran with our moms for a while until she went down south and got religion. Miss Boykin was too busy preaching and ministering to the sinful souls at tent revivals to come back to Harlem and raise Fletcher, so just like a lot of us he lived with his grandmother and got raised the best he could.
Fletcher was a snotty-nosed kid with buckteeth and thick glasses. He followed Jimmy around like crazy, and all he ever talked about was how one day he was gonna make it rich and buy himself a Cadillac and a diamond ring.
I ignored Fletcher most of the time. He was always in our apartment trying to eat up our little bit of food, and he swore to my grandmother that one day I was gonna be his wifey and he was gonna take care of me like a queen. I was two years older than Fletcher and a whole foot taller. He was more of a nuisance than anything, but Jimmy loved him to death so I tolerated him for my brother’s sake.
When I was in the eighth grade and Fletcher was in the sixth, something happened to him that neither me nor Jimmy ever truly figured out. There was a guy named Macaroni who lived in a building a few doors down from ours, but liked to hang out on the roof of our building. Macaroni was in his twenties and still lived with his mother and grandmother, who both dressed in all white and stood on the corner praying for winos and hoes who passed by. Macaroni was in and out of jail all the time, and Grandmother had warned me and Jimmy to stay away from him because he was crazy and didn’t like little kids, so whenever we saw him lurking around our building we hurried up and booked up, running into the house.
One afternoon Jimmy and Fletcher were playing skelly in the hallway outside of our apartment. Grandmother was taking a nap, and I was laying on the pullout couch in the living room doing some math homework. Jimmy and Fletcher were loud talking each other and plucking caps right outside the door, and with all that hollering and carrying on I couldn’t concentrate. I kept getting up and going to the door to yell at them, but they were both hardheaded as hell and didn’t pay me much mind. I got mad and decided to make Jimmy’s little ass come inside.
“It’s your turn to clean the bathroom,” I went to the door and reminded him. “And you better get it done before Grandmother wakes up.” Now Jimmy was lazy and didn’t care nothing about cleaning nobody’s bathroom. Grandmother had already been cutting his ass left and right about showing out in school and forgetting to do his homework, but he wasn’t scared of her the way I was so my threat didn’t mean much to him. That is, until I said, “Besides. Grandmother got a letter about James Joseph today. I bet he can probably have visitors now, but she sure ain’t gonna take you to see him if you don’t start listening and doing like she says. She’s probably so tired of telling you over and over to do stuff she hopes Bellevue will just gone and give you a bed right next to him.”
Yeah, it was a low-down lie, but so what? Jimmy was still hyped about our father, who was just as crazy as they came. James Joseph hadn’t even tied his own shoelaces since me and Jimmy were babies. Our father swore up and down he was Jesus in the flesh, and was forever talking cash mess out of his schizophrenic head, but Jimmy was blind to his shortcomings and still held out hope that one day he’d get better and Grandmother would take us to see him.
“I’ll be right back, man,” Jimmy told Fletcher, and ran to get the Ajax and the sponge to clean the bathroom. I hurried up and closed the door in Fletcher’s face, just in case he had any ideas about coming inside and waiting until Jimmy was done.
I went back to my homework and forgot all about Jimmy in the bathroom and Fletcher out there by himself in the hallway. The sound of a woman’s scream and running feet on the stairs sent me flying over to our peephole, and then running to look out the window.
“Jimmy!” I yelled as I leaned out the window and stared at the crowd of people running out of the building and others running toward my stoop. Jimmy squeezed in next to me and when we realized just what we were looking at all I could say was, “Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”
“Oh, what?” Grandmother came up behind me. “I know you ain’t grown enough to be cussing up in my house like you paying the damn rent.”
I didn’t even turn around to answer her. I couldn’t. My eyes were fixed on the scene below. Macaroni was laying on the concrete just to the right of the stoop. He was on his back with his eyes open, and a puddle of blood was leaking from the back of his head.
Grandmother looked out the window on the other side of the chair and I heard her catch her breath. “Lord have mercy! That fool done finally fell his ass off that damn roof. He shoulda kept his crazy behind from up there in the first place. Now poor Mother Leland gone have to pray up some money to put his no-good ass in the ground.”
But less than an hour later we were all back at the window again. This time it was the police car we were staring at. The morgue hadn’t even come for Macaroni’s body yet, although somebody had thrown a white sheet over him, and when Jimmy hollered for me and Grandmother to come look again, it was little Fletcher being led out in handcuffs that bucked our eyes this time.
We never did find out what happened to make Fletcher push Macaroni off that roof, but of course we made up all kinds of stories. Whatever it was that Macaroni had done to Fletcher when I made Jimmy leave him out in the hallway by himself, it was enough to make Fletcher kill him. And he ’fessed right up to it, too. Went right in his apartment and told his grandmother what he had done, and stayed there waiting while she prayed over him and called the police.
A few years went by before we saw Fletcher again. We’d heard he got sent to some boy’s home upstate, but by the time I was a senior in high school Fletcher was back in Harlem again. By then his grandmother had died and some Puerto Ricans had moved into her old apartment, but Fletcher said he wasn’t looking to stay there no way. He never did tell us where he lived, but Jimmy heard he was staying with somebody on the Lower East Side, even though he ran the streets of Harlem every day.