'He's coming into his own now.'
'What the fuck does that mean?'
'You think Jesus always knew he was Jesus? You think he burst out the womb thinkin' 'Damn, I'm the Son of God. Let me get a little bigger so I can drop some miracles on your ass.' He had to grow into it. I mean, maybe he grew up reading about who the Messiah was. Studying, learning, a nag in his spirit about how it was starting to sound familiar. Then one day it clicks. 'Oh snap. They talking about me. They been waiting on me.'
'I bet he had to sit on that shit for a minute. Sure, he had all the hype. Folks been waiting for him to show up from the jump. Been persecuted, living hard, got all sorts of Romans walking up and down they space. They were looking out for him to show up. Thing is, it also came with a price: the burden of knowing.
'Don't get me wrong, he step up and accept his title, his mantle, his responsibility and BAM… his days are numbered. In the end, he's gonna get got. Everything in its own time.'
'See what I mean? Too many games.'
'Look here, I'm about business and business can't get done if we're steady beefing. It'd be one thing if there was serious drama, but I want to head things off before it gets to that point.' Dred was in the game for the power. When all was said and done, this was a business with margins more thin that people realized. After payroll, houses, cars, and the accoutrements expected for a man in his position — granted, it was the accoutrements which tempted people into the life — not much was left over. However, he provided a sense of family for his men until jail or death caught up to them. Dred didn't know about jail and he had no plans to know about jail.
'Agreed. Agreed,' Night said.
'I'm just saying, there's plenty of money to go around…'
'Plenty of that product. You seem to have a steady enough pipeline.'
'I get mine direct. No middle-man, no mark-up. You get your supply out of New York, right?'
'Something like that.'
Dred's heavy-lidded eyes cast a knowing gaze on Night. They would continue to dance around each other with verbal feints, testing for weakness, and teasing out information. Dred knew that Night was supplied from New York after he split from the Egbo Society to go on his own. Dred's drug connect was locked into him. Dred's name rang out for several reasons. His hands no longer touched drugs, instead he operated a community center by Avalon Park and made sure the park's basketball court always had fresh nets. When he had two able legs, he got to know the neighborhood kids from Haughville to Woodruff Place. For those youths, Dred was a role model of respect. And he gave back to the community, donating to church fundraisers, passing out turkeys at Thanksgiving, buying Christmas gifts for neighborhood kids, and sponsoring ball teams. No charges stuck to him, the police was the enemy; he was the folk hero wronged who kept his head up and stayed true to the game. Kids dreamt of one day being him.
Night hadn't learned the finer points to establishing himself as a folk hero; and if he couldn't be loved, he'd be feared. Dispatching Green for any of a number of perceived infractions or slights to his accorded respect, his name was whispered more as the boogeyman of Breton.
'Say I let you in on part of my package,' Dred said. 'You let my people ease into some of the Breton Court territory. Off my package and with what you pull in from Li'l Nam, you'll be doubling your profits.'
'What's in it for you?'
'Spread in territory. Another revenue stream from distribution through you. And peace. No business gets done if bodies keep dropping and the police come in to grind things to a halt.'
'True dat.'
This was a temporary measure at best. Once he got a feel for the new set-up, at his first opportunity, Night would slit his throat and leave his body for all to see as he took over the entire operation. Dred understood that. He also understood that soldiers were trained for combat. So every now and then, there had to be a war.
Fountain Square Mortuary was no stranger to burying the far-too-young. Just the other day, the old man who managed the mortuary had to watch a family grieving over an eight year-old. Those were the hardest on him. Funerals for teenagers, though often just as tragic, caused his blood pressure to rise for other reasons. Jowly with a graying mustache, his body with the contours of a cruller donut, he mopped his beaded brow with a handkerchief. Wisps of his good hair, combed over to cover his thinning pate, clung to his forehead.
The funeral of Alaina Walker was well attended with the requisite friends, family, police, media, and publicity seekers. The mayor gave a brief address decrying the rising tide of violence in what was proving to be the most bloody year in the city's history. The concerned clergy took turns denouncing gangs, hip hop, and Republicans. The newspapers ran columns on the story, but the incident would be forgotten in the next day or so once some famous- for-no-reason would-be actress did something equally vacuous in public.
Everyone would return to their steady state of benign neglect, the numbing consistency of the violence silencing them. With eyes both friendly and frightened, the old man did his best to greet each mourner neutrally, but the ways of this generation eluded him. The mourners came in, most not much older than the girl. Sagging pants. Underwear showing. Untied shoes. Basketball jerseys. Tattoos on any exposed flesh. Piercings in their ears, noses, lips, tongues, and chins (and those were the ones he could see). Gentlemen not removing their hats. Ladies revealing their bras and wearing pants with words written across their bottoms. The art of decorum lost on the lot of them.
Towards the rear, studying each face, the police weren't too hard to spot. The girl must've been caught up in something fierce, though no one could tell from today. Dressed in her Sunday best, she was the spitting image of a lady of occasion. The woman she could have been juxtaposed against the trappings of the woman she was, judging from the flower arrangements made into gang symbols and guns.
King arrived at the funeral escorting Lady G, not that he felt obligated or anything. She wished to attend the funeral and he thought it prudent to accompany her. He recognized few of the people, but all of the faces — set hard with no tears, impassive and inscrutable — were masks of barely checked rage. He stepped closer and put his arm around her. Lady G didn't object to his proximity. It was a non-threatening intimacy.
Regret was a powerful emotion. It gave weight, if not words, to ideas and feelings unable to be expressed in life. Things like mourning the waste of her life. The futility of their constant fighting. The lost opportunity to have been friends. No, these things were sealed behind another layer of armor as she stared, hard-faced. She knew her presence might upset a few folks, but Alaina was… she didn't know what Alaina was, only that they had been connected somehow. She knew that she owed Alaina some measure of respect in death that she never had the chance to give in life.
The graveside service was at Bethel Cemetery. The casket lowered into the ground, another seed planted though what fruit would come of it King didn't venture to guess. He eyed the crowd warily. Car doors slammed shut as most of the mourners departed. An air of unchecked resentment lingered. Word had it that no one knew who fired the shot. Just the same, blood was in the air and demanded more to be appeased. He knew where the trouble would come from as a few boys tarried, pointing to King and Lady G, and laughed.
'He do one of us, he's got to fall,' one of them called out, daring King.
King had his fill of violence for one week. For one lifetime, really. One of them caught his disaffected sigh.
'What 'chu lookin' at nigga?'
'I'm tired is all. Not everything is about how you carry it.'
'Might be time for you to tip on out,' the young one said.
'We will when we're ready. We've come to pay our respect. When we through, we're gone.' King had to stand tall or else those chump-ass busters would think he was shook.
The boy, tall and good-sized — barely out his teens, if that mattered at all — stepped forward, inches from King's face, nearly bowling him down with his butt funk. He had some flex in him, but having no fear was easy when you had little to live for. No dreams of tomorrow. For next year.
Lady G let go of his slowly balling fists.
King met his eyes without fear. He could feel the flare of his heated blood. The boy said something to him, but King didn't answer, just hard-eyed him with a hint of disdain. By the code, the boy couldn't back down. The eyes of his boys were on him.
The boy put his weight on his back foot, preparing to throw a punch. When it came, King sidestepped and countered, planting his fist solidly in the boy's kidney, turning him, then shoving him into the wall of a memorial. The anxious squawks of the crowd had suddenly been reduced to mumbles. From the corner of his eye, King spied a
