Tremont’s peeps.
After four weeks Thomas went to Bruno’s house. His friend’s elderly aunt Till answered the door.
“Hello, young man,” she said, with eyes that held no memory of him.
“Is Bruno home, Aunt Till?”
“No,” she said, looking as if someone had just kicked her in the stomach. “Bruno died.”
“No. From what?”
“It’s the leukemia got him. He was in so much pain.”
“Hi, Lucky,” Monique said. She had come up from behind the bent-over older woman.
“Hi, Monique,” came Thomas’s joyless greeting.
The older woman turned away, and Thomas could see Monique’s big belly.
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“Come on in,” the young woman said.
She took Thomas into the kitchen and served him a glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid.
“I thought the county took you away, Lucky,” Monique said after lowering herself into the kitchen chair.
“I runned away from them.”
“When?”
“Long time ago.”
“Where you livin’?”
“With a woman named Cilla,” he said. Thomas didn’t want to tell her that the police hadn’t changed the lock to the cellar at the back of his clubhouse. He found the key where he’d left it — under the crate next to Alicia’s hidden tomb.
“An’ what you doin’?” the girl asked.
“Nuthin’. What about you?”
She put her hand on her belly. “I’m havin’ a baby. It’s Tony Williams’s boy, but he got shot. We got a studio ’partment ovah on Hooper, but now I’m there by myself. But I cain’t hardly pay no rent so I guess I’ma be in the street.”
“Why don’t you stay here?”
“I could but they wanna treat me like a baby, an’ here I’m havin’ a child’a my own.”
“I got three hundred dollars,” the boy said to the big girl, now made bigger by her pregnancy.
“You do?”
“I could give it to you,” he said. “I mean, I was gonna go out wit’ Bruno an’ buy a whole lotta Fantastic Fours with it.
But I bet he would want me t’give it to you.”
M on i que ’s apartm e nt was just a room. One wall had a stove against it, and there was a big footed bathtub next to the 1 6 2
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window on the opposite wall. Between these was the bed.
Thomas slept in the bed with Monique that night and every night after for the next three years.
With the money he made from drug dealing, he paid the rent and bought the groceries. During most days he’d leave Monique to stay in his alley and on the roof of his apartment building. There he’d visit with Alicia and commemorate his friend Pedro. In the afternoon he went to work for Tremont delivering ecstasy, cocaine, crack, and sometimes heroin.
Two month s a f te r he and Monique had moved in together, Thomas came home to find that Monique’s mother had come over and helped deliver Monique’s daughter —
Lily. Thomas loved the little baby girl and thought of her as his baby sister. Now he had two sisters.
O ne n i g h t, toward the end of his first year working for Tremont, Thomas went to a house where a big, fat black man, wearing only a ratty bathrobe, answered the door.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I brought you sumpin’ from Tremont,” the boy said.
The man looked around and then grabbed the boy, pulling him into the darkened apartment. He shoved Thomas into a big room where the only light came from a giant television set. The scene on the screen was like when Thomas had come in on Wolf and May. There was a laughing black man with a large erection that he was pressing into a white woman who cried out in pain.
“I’ma do you like that man doin’ that woman,” the large man said.
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The big man opened up his bathrobe, and Thomas could see the erection rising up toward his captor’s belly.
“Gimme that rock,” the man said.
