I screamed and jumped back, looking down at the bloody brother who was balled up on the ground moaning and crying. His head had rammed the door so hard the metal was still shaking as G fumbled for his keys. I stared into the man’s face and he looked back at me with pleading eyes, begging for help.
“Stupid motherfucker!” Pluto kicked the guy in the stomach so hard he spit out blood. I stood there with my hand over my mouth as G unlocked the Dungeon’s door. All I had a chance to see was blackness with the hint of a light coming from the bottom of the stairs, and then Pluto kicked ole boy straight into the darkness and G, his eyes glowing mad, gave me a look, then stepped through the doorway and locked it behind him. It took me a minute to get my shit together after witnessing that. I kept thinking about how bad the man looked, the scared look on his face, that darkness down in the Dungeon.
Pluto came back upstairs after that, sweating like he had just run a race. I figured he had kicked old boy’s ass real good, maybe even killed him, so I walked real close to the wall when I passed him and acted like I didn’t see him grab his dick and shake it at me.
A few hours later I was sitting at the bar drinking a ginger ale when I felt somebody plop down beside me.
“Juicy!”
I turned around and smiled. Dyneatha Jones was a live one. She was about thirty-five, and had a big yellow pie face that was covered with freckles and a head of kinky red hair that wouldn’t lay down no matter how many times she permed it. Dicey had a loud voice and a loud personality. She was one of the few people Grandmother had trusted around me and Jimmy when we was little, even though she took a fall when she was in her twenties and had just gotten back on her feet a few years ago. As a kid I’d looked up to Dicey a lot because she did things for me that nobody else did. She took me shopping on Delancey Street and down in Chinatown, rode me and Jimmy around City Island and bought us ice cream, and a couple of times we spent the day at South Street Seaport, just chilling like tourists. Dicey was the first person to tell me about sex, hustling, and even my period, giving me the whole low-down on Kotex, tampons, and whatnot the year I turned eight.
But G couldn’t stand Dicey. He said her mouth was too big for her own good. Dicey had only been working at the Spot for a couple of weeks. She’d been living with her sister in Queens for a while and had just come back to Harlem recently. Even though he didn’t like her, G had hired her anyway. He gave her a job working upstairs in the cut room because he used to be good friends with her father, and some even claimed G was Dicey’s godfather.
“Hey, Dice!” I said, and reached out to hug her. I looked at my watch as she climbed up on a stool beside me. “What you doing down here so early?”
Dicey shrugged and touched her stomach. She’d put on regular clothes to come downstairs, but up in the cut room Dicey had to wear what everybody else wore: a paper-thin smock and not a damn thing else. G didn’t take no chances in his distribution center. He was paranoid like a mother that somebody might try to steal some dope from him. Females who worked upstairs weren’t even allowed to wear panties to work, and they were barred completely from the cut room when their Aunt Mary was visiting.
“I got my period, girl. Shit came on without me even knowing it, so you know what your man said. ‘Care your bloody ass on home!’ ”
We laughed because as street as G was, he could sound real country when he was mad. “But at least he still pays us full-time while we’re on the pad,” Dicey said, and signaled Moonie for a drink. “And that’s more than I ever expected from a coldhearted playa like G.”
“G ain’t all that bad,” I said. Moonie sent his stuttering sidekick Cooter down to us, and Dicey ordered a double shot of gin and I asked for another ginger ale.
Dicey turned to me. “Is that right?” She laughed and threw that gin down her throat like a natural man. “I forgot, Juicy. You a young thing so you probably can’t remember some of the stuff the rest of us here remember. You been fuckin G for what, two, three years?”
“We been together two years.”
Dicey chuckled, then sat back and rubbed her fat stomach again. “Like I said, you don’t know jack shit.”
Cooter brought her another drink and Dicey tossed it back so fast I almost missed it. She nodded toward the door. “Here comes that mining-ass I’ll-suck-your-brains-out-through-your-dick country-apple bitch from Alabama.”
I looked toward the door and saw that Money-Making Monique had just walked in, rolling her firm body and turning heads left and right. Everything about her was perfect, from her weave down to her shoes, and men laid out top dollars just to watch the way she stepped out of her panties.
Dicey laughed again. “You need to check that ho around your man, with her three-titty self.”
“I ain’t worried about G. Monique ain’t his type cause titties ain’t his thing and he don’t roll like that.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Dicey nodded. “That nigger’s particular.” Then she leaned in toward me and said, “You a cool girl, Juicy, and I love you. Your grandmother was my ace, and I used to see your mother and Ree up on Lenox Avenue back when I had just come out and was still selling pussy. You know, before I got myself cleaned up.”
I groaned. Everybody knew how stupid my mother had been, and how much it had cost me and Jimmy. I hated hearing about her, even if it wasn’t on the regular, because people like Dicey seemed to give my mother life from the grave.
“Your mother was a little older than me, Juicy, and I looked up to her and even tried to swing my ass the way she used to be swinging hers. But don’t you get fucked up by the game the way she did, baby girl. The worst thing Cara coulda done was dip on Big Sonny. Maybe she ain’t know whose dope she was stealing when her and Ree tricked Ice Man up, but who else’s fuckin dope could it have been? Sonny was a blackhearted motherfucker who owned every nigger in Harlem back then, including G. But look at who’s long gone, and who’s here still here now, standing on top. As mean as Sonny was, he didn’t have shit on G, cause when G stepped up strong he treated Sonny like he was somebody’s bitch. Took everything Sonny had, except his woman. I bet you ain’t heard nobody talk about laying eyes on Big Sonny since right after Cara got shot, have you?”
“G is a businessman,” I said, wishing Dicey would stop scaring me and take her cramping ass on home. “He’s all about making money, and you know yourself that when people try you, you gotta put them in check. And that don’t make G no monster, Dicey. He feeds his people lovely and he’s really a good-hearted person when you get to know him.”
“Tell that shit to the Haitian sister used to be around here a few years back. Real cute chick. Built just like you, but shorter hair and not as pretty. Ain’t nobody seen her well-fed ass lately neither. Or”-she pointed toward Cooter and Moonie at the top of the bar-”how bout you run that ‘good-hearted’ shit past Cooter Jackson. His baby sister used to lay up with G, too. But I bet you can’t even get Cooter to stutter her damn name up in here, and that girl wasn’t much older than you when she turned up dead.”
I swallowed hard. If it was one thing I had learned from my grandmother it was to heed the wisdom of warnings. “What you trying to say, Dicey?”
She lit a cigarette and took a drag that was so long it steamed the tip. “I ain’t sayin shit, Juicy. I know better than to fuck with G. Especially up in his Spot. But let me ask you this: He ever tell you about his wife? The fine Puerto Rican girl from over on Saint Nick he had his son by? The boy who goes to college out in Cali?”