We get on the road. The way he drives, you blink and you’re on the freeway, whipping lanes, his engine revving in low gears and whistling at a high speed. Off the bridge, we almost miss our exit for the highway heading east. He keeps the music off, and we end up trading stories. The road trip where Champ locked him out the car while we stopped to get gas. The night I punched his prostitute for cursing in front of the boys, the year we all flew to Canada for the Fourth of July. He and I have always had such an easy time. It reminds me how often between men — between brothers even — that a girl chooses wrong, and how, after a time, the wrong choices become us. Chris whisks the east highway in high gears and nothing else. The wind twirls my hair into a swarm. We get off the exit and catch the light and I tell him how an ex anything brings me down. He lets the car coast down the slope. Sis, you know it wouldn’t hurt for you to try and see the world sunny side up sometimes, he says. We ride the next lights in pinched quiet. He pulls over just inside the subdivision. I’d drop you right out front, he says, but it might be best for you if I don’t.
This hair, I make to smooth it and thank him for the ride and sling out the car. Hold up, he says, and reaches in his glove box for a napkin, and scribbles his number. He tells me to remind him of the court date: And I’m so serious about the job, he says. He backs out rather than risk a drive by his brother’s.
Kenny’s neighborhood is a world of its own, a world away from the Piedmonts. Boys shoot baskets at a curbside hoop; a man trims his front hedges; a couple power-walks toward a distant cul-de-sac. I stutter up to Kenny’s house, a sight in this season, a spread of lush grass cut sharp at its edges, bark dust smoothed over blooming weedless flower beds, paint that almost gleams. You can see how tired I am — the wrung eyes, the pillows in my cheeks — in the glass of Kenny’s front door. I take out a tube of gloss and paint my lips and practice a mock smile. Right now I could leave. There’s a feeling in me to leave, to whisk past the boys, beyond these perfect lawns and cheery strolling pairs, to sprint till I reach the other side of the brick walls that cleave this place from what could never equal up. Kenny throws his front door wide and frights me. I didn’t hear him walk up.
Figured you’d show anyhow, he says. You never was one for listening.
Where are my sons? I say.
They gone, he says.
That’s a lie, I say. Where are they?
Lie to you for what? he says. Who are you to lie to?
He looks over my shoulder and I turn to see what he sees. It’s a car coming towards us. Kenny struts down the pathway and waits on the slope while I’m held stillest. Helen pulls up and he helps her out of the car and makes a show of whispering to her. She frowns and tucks a bag that cost my life, all of my life, to her side and waves a ring awesome even in this failing light. KJ climbs out and squints at me as if I’m a thing made of steel and wood, and stands in place with his arms at his sides. It takes him forever to lope over and begrudge me a limp squeeze.
Aren’t you happy to see me? I say.
He answers too low for me to make out.
My youngest climbs out and stands, looking doleful, his eyes on this man, this woman, on his brother, settling on me. We step to meet each other and he presses his head in my chest and pulls me close. His heart knocks against mine and when we break, he takes his time slugging for the house. He gives me a farewell glance before crossing the threshold. Then it’s me and this man and this woman face-to-haughty face. Kenny kisses Helen on the head and cossets her ring. They beam at each other in a way that makes me want — the lucky ones get more of a life than they’ve earned — to do them harm. She huffs and flounces off, and Kenny stands back, arms folded. You’ve never seen a man this smug.
Yous about a dirty, I say. Plain dirty, I say. What you been telling my boys?
Grace, you don’t get it, do you? You still don’t get it, do you? he says. The boys got eyes. They can see.
Chapter 38
That’s why we do business.
The come up.
Try one without them.
My first regular was this cluck who called himself Showtime who used to rush for me during my second go ’round on the curb. He was as old as one of my unc’s and had a hairline caught in a permanent zeek — a push back to the fulfillity. For a pinch off one of my fatter pills (if you ain’t peeped it yet among othings we call them pills) he’d roam a shout distance off and wouldn’t show his face until he had a buy. He was good for hustling up twenty licks, forty licks, the odd fifty, miniscule end in retrospect but business that popped my profit cherry.
Then there was this white man across the water in Vancouver who wore black biker leathers and a long-ass ponytail. He ran with a band of methheads turned crackheads or methcrackheads, most of them longshoremen or truckers by trade. Clockwork, he’d hit my line for a few hundred dollars worth of dope (pill for pill too so choice profit!) for him and his seafaring, long-haul buddies. We used to meet in this department store on Mill Plain and do the swap in a vacant aisle. You should have seen him after that, a hirsute blur out the store. But me, more cautious then, made habit of lagging, would drift into a longer line, buy a load of knickknacks, and stroll out proxy-blithe.
You want to come up? Trust, you ain’t coming up without them.
Without clientele like this full-time hustler/part-time basehead. Picture this husky dude with skin three times onyx, eyes that shine hepatitic gold, and a flat-backed head swathed yearlong in a linty skull cap. But don’t let aesthetics or the fact that he partakes of the occasional beam-up throw you. Homie is oh so serious about his (our) bread. Orders an ounce every other day and by the day near the first of the month and has never once dickered for a bulk deal, complained the dope’s discolored, nor said a foul word about an aftertaste.
No bullshit. Where would I be without them?
Without dude I’ve been dealing with off and on, more steady than not, since I first started getting fronted whole ones. He’s this OG Crip with fat cornrows and a cold-ass effluvium and who, on the low, might be part bigfoot — a size to, with no windup at all, slap a bantamweight non-pugilistic nigger such as me into forever sleep. But rancidness aside, homie orders a minimum of four-and-a-half and most times more with the drawback being a drawback I can bear: he rathers I deliver to one of his spots (boarded shacks where hordes of destitute clucks burn through settlement checks, SSI and state checks, through what’s left of their crippled pride), pop-up dopehouses he runs with crews of young blue-rag deuces.
Nah, wouldn’t be shit without them, minus the one I’m here to meet tonight. Best customer of the bunch. Past or present.
I’m parked by the corner store, shadowed, solicitous, half a whole thing (the shit was too bulky for my boxer briefs) stuffed in a Ziploc in a paper sack that’s crammed inside my sleeve. Half a whole one is a big fucking lick, could put a nice dent in whatever down payment (no, not if but when and how much) Jude works out. This happy shit is what’s on my mind when a car pulls up in the rear and flashes its lights. Budging for headlight blinks while hitting a solo lick for a half kilo? You would think not, but … I stick my head out the window and see an arm waving me back, hear a voice, Todd’s voice, calling my name. The part of my brain that makes sound, the most sound, decisions says let him come to me and do the deal in my ride, but you know how I do.
This a new ride? I say.
Rental, Todd says.
Oh, okay. What kind? I say.