The Pie Man shrugs and tosses his jacket on a wheelbarrow. He has ink on his bicep. An eagle, perched above an earth and anchor, flaps its wings whenever the Pie Man flexes.
“You ever shot somebody?” Baby says.
The Pie Man slings a wide shovel onto his shoulder and says he shot two people.
“Did they die?”
The Pie Man shrugs.
They work their way into the library, where red wall pennants form a frieze near the ceiling. Bookcases lean at odd angles, having dominoed during the flooding. All the books are on the floor, mush. As little boys, Baby and Chaney filed these books for the librarian as punishment after starting a food fight. Today, the books look like cream of wheat.
They both died, says the Pie Man, but he’s not entirely sure about whether he killed the second dude. The second dude he shot was an insurgent with his finger on a trip wire. The whole convoy unloaded on him and any one of them might have gotten the kill shot, he says. Or, he tells Baby, maybe the hajji died of fear.
“What about the first one?” Baby asks.
The Pie Man shovels books into the wheelbarrow on top of his jacket. He says it was his friend Freddie Lane, the first person he met when he enlisted. He murdered Freddie dead. He tells Baby he’s not sure if either situation matters because at war it’s legit to kill, but if you kill one of your own you’d better have your reasons clean as a fresh latrine, which is what the Pie Man had. Freddie had flipped the fuck out and tried to mow down the boys in the mess with a fifty cal. The Pie Man capped him from behind with his M240, which took Freddie’s arm clean off above the elbow.
The Pie Man says Baby and his boys shouldn’t be so ready to go settle scores with that Spanish guy. Baby can go any way he wants, but that doesn’t mean he has to. The Pie Man says he should just sit on his hands. Baby notices a corroded picture of Nat Turner clipped to one of the wall pennants.
“People will roll you, if you let them,” says Baby as he points a finger from the Pie Man to himself. “I’m done getting rolled, you heard me?” Baby straightens to his full height. “We getting him tonight.”
The Pie Man pops a pill and says he can’t argue with that much. He says he can’t argue with much of anything except that the VA could stop screwing around and send him better medication. The Pie Man’s face is scrunched up again like he’s confused. He says he ain’t slept since Kirkuk.
“What made you join the Marines?” Baby asks.
The Pie Man says it seemed like a good way to go. They needed a chef, and he needed a job for the future he had mapped out. A fair exchange, he thought at the time. But he never baked a single pie in the military. When he came home, he’d forgotten how to. Whether you get Sanchez or he gets you, the Pie Man tells Baby, you end up in the same place.
The Pie Man and Baby put on respirator masks. Baby thinks the Pie Man looks like a futuristic rat. Baby grabs a sledgehammer and zeroes in on the face of Guy Bluford, the first brother launched into outer space. He swings and before long the walls are coming down all around him.
It’s an hour to sundown and the Pie Man left Baby once they finished work for the day. Touché and Turtle skate up the driveway in front of the school.
Touché does a 360 from a ramp angled over a mound of bricks and stops near Baby.
“Welcome back to Genitalia.” Touché’s got a faux-hawk and his striped hoody makes it look like he’s still spinning. General Taylor and Peniston are the streets closest to Crocker facing downtown. They’ve called the streets Genitalia and Peniston since the sixth grade. Dry Ass Street runs perpendicular to them both, a few blocks closer to the streetcar line. “You still got your Oreo ’fro, little man?”
“Man, my mama can’t make a brother cut off his trademark,” says Baby. He hates it when Touché makes fun of his size almost as much as he hates when he makes fun of the fact he’s practically half white. It isn’t Baby’s fault his mom’s pops wasn’t black like everyone else. Touché seems to know where everyone’s buttons are. He’s like a video-game champ who’s got all the secret codes memorized. X to kick you in the gizzards. Z plus turbo to take out your knees and dump you in Lake Pontchartrain. Sometimes you don’t even know it was Touché who got you. Touché’s manipulations bug Baby sometimes, but more often than not Baby is silently praying he learns how to do it himself.
“Yeah, I asked your mama for a haircut. She gave me a blowjob instead.” Baby pokes his tongue against his cheek and pumps his fist. “The bitch still don’t understand English.”
“Your mama so fat,” says Touché, “I pushed that ho in the Mississippi River and rode her to the other side.”
“I heard in Sunday school,” Baby says, “your mama so old she was Jesus’ nanny.”
“Your mama so fat she went to an all-you-can-eat buffet and ate the Chinese waitress,” says Turtle, adjusting his thick glasses. “She be using Ethiopians as toothpicks.”
“Your mama—” says Touché, but he stops and punches Turtle in the shoulder. No one makes fun of Turtle’s real mom. Not even Touché. Not since the last time they saw her, dry-skinned and strung out, begging for change on Canal Street. She wore a tank top and jeans so small they could have fit a ten-year-old, but loose enough to reveal her soiled lace underwear. “We need to get that Sanchez and pop him. Whap.” Touché clutches his board and brings it down on Sanchez’s imaginary head. “Or drag him across town by a rope.”
“Kill that noise,” says Turtle. “We ain’t getting nobody.” He grabs Baby’s shoulder. “I saw the Pie Man’s van earlier.” Turtle is nearly blind from getting his head kicked in.
Baby always thinks he’s staring at him from another world through those binoculars. A scarier world. Turtle’s pops is a scary dude. He’s in Orleans Parish Prison for drugs and guns. Two life sentences.
“He playing camp counselor again?” Turtle asks.
Baby nods.
“Come on.” Turtle skates off with his glasses in hand. He doesn’t need them to get where they’re going.
All three boys glide to the lot behind the school. Scraggly grass forms a crescent along the edges of the fractured concrete. Baby is reminded of the Pie Man’s receding hairline. They enter a rusting cargo container where the Mighty Black Ninja Krew keeps the gas canisters.
The Mighty BNK is what Baby and his boys do when they’re bored. And for fame. Like the time they went berserk-boarding through the Catholic church by the house where Turtle’s foster family lives. Baby videoed the others zipping across the checkerboard floors and leaping from the altar. As Touché spray-painted MBNK on the wooden doors during their escape, Baby noticed statues of old men in the gallery above. They wore flowing pink sheets, one statue dangling a key, the other a sword. They looked like they wanted to kick his ass. He gave them the finger, and the Mighty BNK got away clean.
Touché posted the video, which went viral on the web. The Mighty Black Ninja Krew was right behind a video of a white guy demonstrating stupid dance moves and that toothless cat trying to slurp up that mouse.
If he were being totally honest, Baby would admit he joined the Mighty BNK for the same reason as the others: to get laid. They hide their faces on camera with white stockings, but everybody at school knows who they are. It’s worked out great for the rest of the Mighty BNK. It hasn’t worked at all for Baby.
He doesn’t have the swagger of Touché or the brains of Turtle or the wicked determination of Chaney, shot dead when the Mighty BNK tried to loot Sanchez’s garage. Baby’s fourteen, but looks closer to nine since he’s two heads shorter than the others and has no stubble on his chin, chest, or groin. It’s caused trouble for him with the girls at school, and when they call him Baby, they mean it.