"I'm not going to tell anyone, I swear."
"That we're all for damn sure. What we have here is an opportunity for an object lesson."
His chinchilla coat hung from his broad shoulders like the mane of a lion, Green reached into the folds of his burnt orange suit jacket. The woman flinched, the correct impulse, though he withdrew only a tiny box. The children were a chorus of stifled cries and hitching breaths.
"Open it." Green placed it in her trembling hands. Complying, she found three brand-new razor blades. "Chew them."
The woman's eyes flared open in disbelief. Green stood, fixing his impassive gaze on her. The box shook in her hands.
"I can't."
"No, you won't. A distinct, though subtle, difference. You simply lack the proper motivation. Prez, shoot one of the children."
"No!" the woman screamed.
Prez glanced over at him with questioning eyes. The night he shot Conant Walker, his shot hadn't gone wide on accident. While many thought him a stone-cold killer, one stare into Green's terrible eyes… he knew that Green knew different. Prez was in, but he still had to prove himself to Green. The children huddled closer together. The youngest girl burst into fresh tears.
"I didn't stutter, nigga. Shoot one of them," Green reiterated.
"No, wait. Please don't hurt my babies."
"Do what you have to do."
The woman closed her eyes and opened her mouth. Green, dark priest of the streets, placed the blades like a communion wafer on the flat of her tongue. She closed her mouth gingerly around them. Hot tears trailed down her face. Her eyes pleaded with Green for this gesture to suffice, that she'd learned her lesson and her place. She swallowed involuntarily, the blades shifted in her mouth, and she let loose a muffled whimper.
"I said chew. Don't make me tell you again."
She lowered then clamped her jaw. With each action the blade sliced through her tongue, sharp knives through the tenderest of veal. She coughed up a mouthful of blood to the raised wails of her children. A blade slashed through her cheek.
"That's enough."
The words echoed from down a long tunnel the way the woman heard them. Still, carefully as she could muster, she let the blades fall from her mouth.
"Good girl." Green knelt down, his coat draped about him like James Brown preparing to be walked off stage. He met her eye-to-eye but spoke loud enough for the children to hear. "You even think about talking to po-po and there is a price to be paid. Gentlemen, can you wrap up this little lesson?"
Prez watched as Dollar stepped to the woman and fired once into her face. Blood mixed with brain matter splattered her clean kitchen walls and her blood pooled on her freshly mopped floors. Dollar took out his penis and peed on her, nodding to Prez to join him. Prez started to turn to Green, but opted to avoid the gaze that bled into an eternity of nights. Instead, he pissed on the woman.
With that, Green led the men out of the apartment. Before closing the door Green whispered to the children: "Tell everyone what you saw here. Everyone except the police."
CHAPTER FIVE
The floorboard creaked at the scurry of movement from the other room. Percy laid already awake, though never truly asleep. Not as long as there was another man in the house. A jumble of legs and arms, the three babies slept next to him. The family referred to his young charges as "the babies" despite them all being in elementary school. Oblivious to the sounds from the next room, they slept with a hail of snorts and snores, under his guard, sprawled out like Power Rangers caught in mid-action. Percy tried to cover his ears to block the rutting sounds from the next room. The moment itched against his skin and ached his stomach; even his unintended eavesdropping intruded on something private. Something dirty.
It wasn't as if he had snuck into his mother's room and hid under her bed in order to divine why so many "uncles" stopped by to stay the night. Or the hour. Or the quick fifteen minutes. It implied her having a bed, instead of the stained mattress hauled from down the street after it had been set out for heavy trash pick-up. A "ghetto garage sale" Miss Jane called it, then she convinced several of her fellow partiers – she always called them partiers, with her always in search of the next party – to haul the thing back to where she stayed. They squatted in one of the dilapidated houses boarded up by the city which had long been zoned to be demolished. The plan was to build a few affordable houses, a Section 8 oasis among the older homes in the neighborhood. Those houses too run-down to be refurbished were to be razed. Until the paperwork went through, bids submitted then chosen, and contracts signed, the houses were free game for whoever chose to live there.
And Miss Jane never missed an opportunity.
A man, his voice gruff and low, called out her name as if he were in church and struck by the Holy Ghost. Percy all but pictured him jumping down the aisles caught up in the throes of the spirit that moved him. His mother's name. God's name. A stream of words people shouldn't use. All to the staccato rhythm banged against the thin wall separating them. His eyes squeezed shut even tighter, Percy acted as if that would block out the sounds. He began to sing softly to himself: "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so…"
Finally, mercifully, it stopped.
The knob turned noisily, furtive whispers exchanged after the long creak of the door, barely on its hinges, opened. Attending to his final duty, Percy rose and positioned himself formidably in the hallway, his large frame shadowed by the dawn light through the cracks of the plywood boarding the windows. He was a looming shade in a faded Polo T-shirt stretched by his bulbous form and a pair of five yearold jeans, his size carried the day as the man paused upon seeing him. Disheveled, shirt unbuttoned and untucked, pants hastily put on, the man glanced back toward Miss Jane half-flustered. Percy nodded, the way his momma taught him. The man reached for his wallet and peeled off a few twenties.
"Later." The man stumbled toward the door, carefully avoiding Percy's gaze.
"Later, baby," Miss Jane said, an echo of exaggerated seduction to her voice. As easily as she turned it on, she turned it off. "How's my big man?"
"Tired." Percy rubbed his eyes. With the man gone, his body slouched in an exhale.
"Couldn't sleep?" Miss Jane played at naive innocence, the wisp of a devilish grin at the edge of her mouth.
"What we going to do for breakfast?"
"We got any cereal left?"
"No." Percy had hidden the remaining half of a box before Miss Jane and her parade of would-be suitors returned from their nightly routine of running the streets foraging for highs. He would divvy it up among the babies for dinner, before the idea to sell the box occurred to her. He made that mistake last week after restocking the shelves with food stamp-bought groceries. What her paramours, his "uncles", didn't eat, she sold the next day. Before then, he had to learn the hard way his lesson about letting her have the food stamps card directly. They went without food for a month, getting by on church pantries and neighborhood moms who pitied them and gave out of their own meager food supply.
"Guess we going to have to get to work early this morning." Her breasts peered unapologetically through the flimsy material. She stretched, her shirt raised to expose her belly, fully revealing that she wasn't wearing any panties. A smile with too much knowing inched with devilish glee across her face. "Send them off early, maybe they can catch a free breakfast at school. Then hook up with me at the spot."