'Jesus loves the little children…'
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Without a home, Mulysa was his own master with nothing to lose. While part of that meant he was free to go wherever he wanted, in his heart he knew that he was a man without a home. Dred hadn't reached out, too busy grooming his next pet, Garlan. Dred had a habit of discarding people who were no longer of any use to him. Or were used up. Broken. It wasn't as if Dred didn't discard Baylon as soon as he was done and Baylon was his boy, yet he followed that fool fake Jamaican like a hobbled puppy. Somehow Mulysa convinced himself that it would be different with him. And though Mulysa still possessed his skills and ferocity, he was tainted. Marked. That was what he assumed, as he slid in the booth at Marble's Cafe. The owner, a Seventh Day Adventist, fisheyed him, not wanting any foolishness, as he didn't put up with dealers or wannabe pimps. Mulling over a plate of Marble's thick, potato- wedge fries, alongside the remains of a sandwich of ham, turkey, and bacon fried up and topped with three cheeses, Mulysa could have been either. Carried on waves of nostalgia — like an old man reflecting on his life, despite barely being out of his teens — Mulysa knew he'd run out of life. The days wound down for him. He was as certain about that as he was about the fact that he had a tail. He had the sense that the sword of Damocles about to fall and split his skull. A fatal intuition he couldn't shake. The engine which drove his life had simply run out of gas and he was exhausted.
He had checked out one of his old spots, a place he stayed before the Camlann, but it was little more than a lot grown over with weeds. He pulled back the flimsy plywood sheet which covered the door, part of which broke off in his hands as he bent to it, to slip into the abandoned house. Beer cans littered the floor. The house had pockets of shadows as little light poured in around the boarded-up windows. The pungent tang of soured meat assaulted his nostrils. Dirty dishes piled in cold, gray water with a strange orange film on them. With a molding layer of macaroni and cheese burned to the bottom, the pot turned on its side provided shelter for a stream of cockroaches. He had stayed here for several months. That was how he had lived and he'd thought he had life by the balls. But seen in dim light against the backdrop of peeled paint and ripped-up carpet, his life amounted to a waste. No one would mourn him if he died.
Pain was something they all had in common, but it looked different on everyone. For Mulysa, no, for Cheldric, the old wound had the voice of his uncle.
'You're ugly. No one will want to get with you. Might as well get used to paying for it. We all do, one way or another, anyway.' Then his uncle would get his head up in some herb, some Crown Royal mixed with Pepsi in his glass, and stare at the television whether it was on or not.
'You're dumb. No sense in doing anything that will make you any dumber or careless. So don't do drugs.' Then his uncle would clear the books from the table with an angry swipe and glare down on him like he was a ghost of his past, pull out his belt, and beat Mulysa until he was spent.
'You're fat. Watch what you eat. You're young now, but don't become slow or let your body betray you.' Then his uncle would send him to his room, without dinner, confining him to the dark to amuse himself or at least be out from underfoot.
'No one wants you. I took you in after they abandoned you. You're lucky you have me.' Then his uncle's eyes bulged in surprise and his neck opened up like a screaming mouth vomiting blood when Mulysa ran a box cutter across it. He was eleven.
Ducking out of the hovel, the sun mocked him. Someone jogged after him or something put him on edge. Hunted him. He forgot how paranoid the drugs made him.
Mulysa had never thought much of what it meant to be a man. Women were casualties of his conquests. Bitches. Hos. Chickenheads. Skanks. Less than human. Barely a collection of orifices on which to pleasure himself, reflections of his selfhate upon which he could vent more of the same.
Ever since he'd been out of the Shoe, he'd been directionless. Dred never summoned him, nor set him up with his own package to sell and get on his feet. Didn't use him for any work. Acted like Mulysa was dead to him. Without explanation or warning. Suddenly he was a pariah to all the folks he knew. So he'd come full circle.
There was a bridge under 19th and MLK, across from the Children's Bureau, where he now stayed. The four culverts on either side of the bridge were like little apartments. Crystals hung from the top between the cracks like salt stalactites. The dirt floor, white like chalk, had a moldy mattress, almost a part of the hill, resting on it. The fine sand got into everything: his backpack, his blanket, his clothes, but the concrete walls sealed him up nicely. Entombed him. Alone, in the dark, he reflected on his life. Sometimes he had to chew over the pain of his life in order to write his story. Sometimes that was easier to do with the distance of fiction.
He ate in peace. Despite being the only person in the spot — and the owner having a penchant of passing the time by waxing philosophical with his customers — Mulysa ate alone. In uninterrupted silence. The best sort to speed him on his way. He recognized the hardened eye, the one-handunder-the-counter style readiness, prepared to grab a bat or gun or whatever in case Mulysa broke bad.
In his time, Mulysa might have robbed this place, mugged the man's kin, or killed someone he knew. Mulysa was bold with it. He came up admiring folks like Green, who knew how to get shit done. Folks knew his name, his face, and the details of his do, but no one spoke out. Mulysa modeled his own stalwart career with the same approach. It only took one to speak out, but if no one did it meant he didn't have a wake of ardent admirers.
No one was immune to life's little tragedies just like no one was immune to the potential of drugs to make a good person do bad things. The theory assuaged the emaciated thing he called his conscience. That was what he would say to them, any of them. That it wasn't their fault. His neither. It was the drugs. Faceless, nameless, blameless, because ultimately they were a force of nature and blaming them for the destruction wreaked in your life was like yelling at a hurricane. He tried it out loud to see how it might play.
'You can't blame me. Drugs, they like a tornado or some shit. Can't be mad at them neither. They just do what they do.' It sounded like every bit of bullshit to him. Dabbing his mouth with a napkin, he dropped the wadded napkin into his half-eaten piece of peach cobbler and pushed away from the table. He left a five-dollar tip on the ten-dollar tab and didn't know why. He left the building unsettled, something nagged at him. Some detail he'd missed.
The last thing he saw was an empty forty bottle coming toward his head.
How did one refer to the recently dead? They were still alive, still real in the memory of those who knew them in the present. But they were still gone. Past tense. Alive in name only. Baylon had been without power or control for so long he wasn't about to go back to either state without a fight.
'What brings you to the front lines?' Baylon asked Dred.
'Just checking on things.' Dred's voice a conveyer belt of shifting accents. A hint of Jamaican patois in one breath, formal English in another, and relaxed hood-cent in the last. Shifting with his identity of the moment.
'Surprised.'
'By what?'
'That you still remembered the ones you came up with,' Baylon said sardonically.
'I remember.' Dred let the slight pass. He'd allowed Baylon the one as long as he didn't cross the line.
'Those you hurt.'
'You hurt, nigga?' Dred desired to control everyone and everything around him by the tools at his disposal: fear, threat, intimidation, violence, and death. Remorseless eyes marred his prettyboy looks.
'Look at me. I gave everything to you.'
'Listen to you. You sound like my bitch.'
'You right. Shit.' Baylon hated this. What he wanted to do was break out a sawed-off. But he couldn't raise a weapon to the man. It was as if, despite all Dred had done, Baylon was still bound to him. To the end.
'Guess you had to get that out your system.'
'Something like that.'
'Now can I get to the business I came to speak on?'
'What's that?'
'Them Julios.' Every Mexican was 'Julio' to Dred.
'What you need?'
