His eyes narrowed as he regarded me even closer, scrutinizing my face for some clue to my thoughts. Then he smiled and eased back, but his eyes still did not leave my face.
“I’m going to have to keep my eyes on you, Snap. You know a lot more than you let on.”
“Why do you do it? Just to convince the Jamaican posses that you really are the devil? More of that voodoo shit?”
“It’s just part of the ritual, man.”
Scratch reached his hand down into Jah Warrior’s ruptured skull and scooped out the stringy pink pulp that was all that was left of his brains, except for what was now oozing down the wall in back of him. I decided to take his advice and wait out in the car. I was just stepping out of the room when I heard the wet smacking sounds as Scratch consumed his prize.
— | — | —
Chapter 14
—Malcolm X
««—»»
Scratch dropped me off in front of Yolanda’s house with my pockets fat with ten thousand dollars in cash.
“You done good today, playa. I’ll see ya around. I might have another job for you soon.”
“Yeah, okay. Just let me know.”
The gold encrusted red BMW took off down the street creeping slowly. I could see Scratch watching me in his side mirrors as he rolled down the block. He was smiling again. I turned and walked up the steps to Yolanda’s front door.
“What you want now?”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said as I grabbed her in my arms and dragged her back into the house kissing and undressing her. I kicked the door shut while lifting her dress over her head and dropping my pants. By the time we made it to the bedroom we were both completely naked.
I turned her around and bent her over the back of an overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. We made love violently, angrily. We didn’t speak, no apologies, no explanations, we just fucked hard and angry, saying with our bodies what pride prevented us from speaking. We scratched, spanked, and bit each other, shifting seamlessly from one position to the next, from the chair, to the floor, to the bed, as we hammered out orgasm after orgasm until we both collapsed sweating and quivering into each others arms.
I was laying in her bed, still inside her, looking at the semen glistening on her lips and pooling in her belly button, when the doorbell began ringing frantically and Huey’s voice called out from the street.
“Yo, Malik! Yolanda! C’mon and open up! I know that pussy can’t be that good that you got to spend all day up in it. Bros before hos, remember, Snap? Bros before hos.”
A wide grin spread across my face as I rolled out of bed and tip-toed barefoot across the splintering hardwood floor. The window rattled loudly as I yanked it open.
“Man, what you want, Huey? Makin’ all that muthafuckin’ noise down there. You pullin’ me right up out the pussy.”
“Fuck that old tired pussy! Over-sexed hooker gets too much dick as it is. Shit, don’t you know you gotta make them miss it sometimes? That bitch ain’t missed a day of dick since she was twelve. She done got spoiled on it.”
“Fuck your little yellar ass, nigga. You
“If that nigga don’t get da fuck down here I might just come up there and break your big black ass off with some of this.” It was kind of funny to see Huey clowning with Yolanda. It was a mood you didn’t see from Huey everyday. He was usually so serious and intense. I was enjoying their little verbal sparring match.
“You ain’t gonna do nuthin’ with that little yaller dick of yours.”
“Hooker, I’ll slap you in your fat-ass mouth with this yaller dick!”
“Little yaller dick, nigga. Little yaller dick.”
I came out the front door and shook Huey’s hand.
“Man, why that bitch of yours always got to have the last word on everything?”
“Why you always got to be antagonizing her?”
We started walking off down the street before Huey even told me where we were going or what he wanted.
“I’m just fuckin’ with the bitch. Besides, I hate how that hooker always tryin’ to play mommy to everybody. She thinks she knows everything and she ain’t shit herself. Sittin’ on her fat ass sellin’ beer and weed and collectin’ welfare checks. You can do much better than that shit, bro.”
“I could have Iesha, but, since you got her, Yolanda is about the best thing going.”
Huey knew how much I cared about Iesha so he just let the matter drop. In all the years Huey and I had been friends we never argued, mostly due to Huey’s deft handling of my volatile moods, but lately we’d been disagreeing more frequently.
“So, peep this, bro. I’m bored out of my muthafuckin’ mind and Iesha’s getting on my goddamned nerves. I was thinkin’ we could go on one of them payback missions up in the Northeast like we used to do you know?”
It had started back before we all got arrested and sent to reform school. Huey and I would go on these missions in the white neighborhoods. What we would do is go up to Northeast Philly and beat and rob white folks on their own turf just to let them know that there was no insulation from the streets. We wanted to let them know that just because they lived across town from us didn’t mean they were safe from us. It didn’t mean they could ignore us.
It started when my homeboy dirty Frank got stabbed. Frank was a thief who was too stupid to go outside the neighborhood. He would steal from his own neighbors. Any fool could figure out that nobody was making a special trip to our poor-ass little community to steal a few used TVs, stereos, and VCRs. So, anytime something came up missing you’d more than likely be able to recover it by knocking on Frank’s door. I had to step in his ass once myself over my Mom’s VCR, but still he was my boy.
Frank and I went to grade school together and he used to live right across the street from me when he was staying with his grandparents while his mom was in rehab kicking heroin. He still lived only two blocks away and in G-town that almost made him family. Then, one day, he gets stabbed right in front of the police station in broad daylight and his attacker just walks away. Police just yards away saw nothing and no one was ever apprehended. Even worse, as Frank lay bleeding from a gut wound, the cops searched him and then harassed him about a couple vials of rock they found in his pockets, treating him like a suspect instead of a victim. Frank could have died and nobody would have been convicted. There would have been no story on the eleven o’clock news, no public outcry, and no change in police policies and procedures.
Nothing ever changed for the better until it started happening to white folks and they began writing letters, and calling their congressman, and talking to the newspapers, and threatening lawsuits. So we decided to make it happen to white folks. We decided to bring the ghetto to their doorsteps. That very night, while Frank was having his intestines stitched together at Germantown Hospital, Huey and I took a bus up to Northeast Philadelphia for some payback.
In our neighborhood the Northeast was endearingly known as “Whitey Land”. It was notoriously racist, home to the KKK, skinheads, a Nazi biker group, and several other White Power organizations. Back then most people believed that a Black kid would have had to have a deathwish to walk through that neighborhood. It was perfect for what we wanted.
We imagined fat rednecks sitting at home watching Black kids dying in the streets and simply changing the channel, not giving a fuck about drugs and crime as long as it stayed in the ghettos and out of their lily white neighborhoods while their own kids were in the backyard smoking meth and huffing paint. To them every Black casualty was just one less nigger to compete with for jobs and women. It enraged us to imagine them living safe
