Pistol Poets

A black man in a purple suit knelt in front of Moses. He grinned, no humor touching his eyes. Moses felt hands and feet along his body, keeping him pinned down. He wouldn’t have tried to move anyway. He froze, kept his mouth shut, waited to be told what to do.

“They call me Red Zach. You heard of me?”

“No, sir,” Moses said. He chanced a look, swiveled his eyes around the room. A bunch of coons. Hell. Just his luck. Some kind of damn poetic justice maybe to die in the hands of a mob of coons. Maybe they were with that Ellis son of a bitch. Maybe they knew Moses had been looking to splatter some buckshot across Ellis’s face, and these coons were here to kill him.

No, that didn’t make sense. Ellis was hanging with those two white guys. The mob in his living room was strictly an all-coon outfit. Hell and shit.

“Well, you going to hear a lot more about me real soon,” Zach said. “As a matter of fact, we’re going to get acquainted because you work for me now.”

Moses opened his mouth to protest, but a heavy hand on the back of his head pushed him down. Moses kissed the floor, bumped his front teeth against his upper lip. A trickle of blood.

“Think of this like a hostile corporate takeover,” Zach said. “Just how hostile is up to you, but maybe you should consider the perks.”

Moses Duncan was not going to work for no goddamn nigger coon in a purple pimp suit. Daddy would roll in his grave. But he shut up and kept his ears open.

Someone dropped a bag next to his head, a suitcase. He looked at it from the corner of his eye. It was his, the one he used to stash his merchandise. They must’ve gone through the whole house. Maybe even found the sawed-off, single-shot.410 he kept duct-taped to the back of the toilet in case somebody came at him when he was on the crapper.

“The bad news,” Zach told him, “is that your freelance days are over. You answer to Red Zach now. That piss you off? I see it in your eyes. Don’t try to hide it. Good. I’m glad. I don’t want no cunts working for me. But I don’t want no fools either. You play it smart and it works out for everybody. You hear what I’m saying?”

Moses thought a second before answering. “I hear you.”

“Good,” Zach said. “Now here’s the part maybe you’ll like. Once you start working for me, you going to do a lot more business than what you got in your little suitcase here. We going to talk about some real greenbacks. You got a college town here. Ripe. I’ll show you how to work it. Somebody else starts poaching your territory, I send my boys down, stomp it out quicker than a forest fire. You see the potential?”

Moses said that he saw.

“You got any objections?” Zach asked. “Can you see any reason this business arrangement won’t be mutually beneficial?”

The hand on the back of his neck tightened just slightly.

“Sounds like a good deal to me,” Moses said.

“Excellent. What happened to that guy’s face?”

It took Moses a second to understand he’d meant Eddie. “Glass. Cut him all up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I get up now?” asked Moses.

“Nope. We got just one more thing to talk about first.”

“Okay.”

Zach softened his voice, friendly, put his hand on Moses’s shoulder. “I think a brother maybe came to you recently with a big score. A shitload of premium coke. Why don’t you tell me all about it. Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

thirty-five

Don’t you ever go stir-crazy in here, man? Don’t you ever want to stick a gun in your mouth and blast your fucking brains out?” Jenks asked.

Tad Valentine scratched his wild, white beard and considered the question. This Sherman Ellis/Harold Jenks person obviously didn’t like being cooped up. He’d offered him the pick of his library, had even suggested some Langston Hughes or Etheridge Knight that Valentine mistakenly believed would appeal to Ellis/Jenks’s ethnicity.

But the young man had instead latched on to a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. The novel’s nonstop atrocity fest seemed to hold a special horrified fascination for him. Jenks frequently consulted a Webster’s Dictionary between chapters. Valentine decided-not for the first time-that he was simply not in tune with the multicultural complexities of today’s youth. Ellis/Jenks puzzled him not only for being black, but for being young and part of a world that did not need or want men like Valentine. They wanted MTV and PlayStation and the Internet and soft drink commercials with half-naked teenagers and many other things that scared the hell out of Valentine.

And this young black man made him nervous, on the lam and in some kind of peril from what Valentine could gather. It wasn’t that he disliked Ellis/Jenks. But the kid was a bold symbol of everything out there, and now he wanted to hide in here. Valentine worried Ellis/Jenks would bring the world and its troubles with him.

And just what the hell was the kid’s name anyway? Sherman Ellis or Harold Jenks. It seemed there was a halfhearted effort under way to conceal the man’s identity. Wayne DelPrego had started with Sherman Ellis and had gradually abandoned it for Harold Jenks.

Valentine had decided to think of the black kid as Sharold Jenkis. It seemed a reasonable compromise.

“Sometimes,” Valentine said.

Jenks looked up from The Painted Bird. “What?” He’d forgotten that he’d asked Valentine a question.

“Sometimes,” Valentine repeated, “I think about putting a gun in my mouth. But it’s not because I’m cooped up as you say. It’s the thought of going out there.” He pointed at the rest of the world through the dirty window. The glass was badly smudged.

Jenks looked out the window. “It’s just a parking lot.”

“Hmmmm, yes. Where’s Mr. DelPrego today?”

“Snuck out,” Jenks said. “He’s stir-crazy too.”

“It wouldn’t fit anyway,” Valentine said.

“Say what?”

“The gun. I couldn’t get it into my mouth.” Valentine went to the other window, the big one. A thinly padded bench ran the length beneath it. He flipped the lid, hinges squealing, and pulled out three and a half feet of something wrapped in cloth. He lowered the bench lid again and set the bundle on top, peeled away the cloth slowly, and revealed a long, double-barreled shotgun.

“It’s a twenty-gauge,” Valentine said. “I wouldn’t be able to reach the trigger.”

Jenks set the book aside, came over to look at it. “It’s pretty.”

“My father gave it to me as a graduation present. We hunted duck quite often before I went off to New Haven.” He picked up the shotgun, cradled it lovingly, broke it in half, and looked down each barrel. “Still clean.”

The darkly polished wood gleamed, ornate silver scrollwork. An expensive firearm. Valentine had not held the weapon in over a year. The cold metal in his hand sparked a memory. A duck blind before dawn, the sun rising pink-orange over the lake. The last morning they’d gone hunting before Valentine had left for the East. His father had wanted him to be an engineer. Oklahoma oil had paid for the shotgun, the private lake, Valentine’s education. Father had been bitterly disappointed when his son turned poet. Poet. The word had struck his father like a tomahawk between the eyes. Poet was code for communist-faggot-slacker to an Oklahoma oil man. His father had died before the Pulitzer Prize, before the New York Times interview, before everything.

Jenks took the gun from his hand. “Cool. Let me see.”