EPILOGUE
Despite the cold evening, the neighborhood
was jumping. Police lights bathed the rows of condos, red light
reflecting from all the windows. The police loaded some fool into
the back of their squad car. Not just some fool, he was a frequent
flyer of foolishness. The family was obviously new to the
neighborhood and hadn't quite divined that this neighborhood wasn't
quite the same and didn't play by the exact kind of ghetto nonsense
that they were used to. The whole mess started a week earlier when
the matriarch of the family, all of twenty-five, needed new plates
for her car. Indiana license plates were more inexpensive thanks to
the tax on the poor that the state called Hoosier Lotto, but they
still cost more than the nothing she wanted to pay. So she removed
the plates from Big Momma's car, taking the time to crawl into the
car and help herself to any spare items, which amounted to spare
change, a few CDs, a Bible, and a child car seat. She then
proceeded to place the license plate in the back window of her own
car. The main flaw in her plan was that her car was two parking
spaces down from Big Momma. Big Momma, who also knew the price of a
license plate, immediately recognized her plates and raised a
ruckus. The lady denied it, of course, but King had Wayne back the
Outreach Inc. van up to block the lady from simply taking off. They
all stood guard until the police came to settle things.
"Let this be a warning to all the
drunk uncles trying to pop, lock it, and drop it at the next family
reunion," Merle said.
"Big Momma scraps like she has
cerebral palsy," Wayne laughed to himself then winced as the
movement tugged at the stitches in his shoulder. "I'm scared of
her."
"I'm done with women." Merle
plopped on the sidewalk. "I'm not saying I'm ready to suck a dick
or anything, I just don't want to be in a relationship."
"You know what that heifer had
the nerve to ask me?" Big Momma asked, more rhetorical than
anything else, on the verge of a full-on rant.
"What?" Lady G played
straight-woman.
"Would I take care of her kids
while she was gone."
"No, she didn't," she said with
mock shock.
"I hate her monkey
ass."
"I ain't mad at you." Lady G
high-fived her then collapsed in a squeal of laughter.
"No. I mean hate." Big Momma
played to her audience. "Oh, Lord, I want to paint her picture on
my windshield so it looks like I'm running her over all the
time."
"That's some hate," King
interrupted. His T-shirt had the portrait of Malcolm X painted
within the shape of the letter X.
"I'll see you, girl." Big Momma
stood up, preparing to head inside. Some unspoken message passed
between her and Lady G, but King was not a member of the estrogen
club, and thus couldn't divine its meaning.
"You looking good." Lady G
planted her comb in the half of his hair that remained unbraided.
King plopped between her open legs. He brought his idletoo-long
hands up on both of her calves, running them up and down. She
tensed, a panicked freeze, then relaxed, radiant and
poised.
"I'll be back." Merle admired the
gathering, but couldn't tarry. Lott and Rhianna would soon join
them and the circle would be complete. He still had one last errand
to attend to before then.
Dred nervously chewed on his tongue, the
movement compounding his throat's swollen veins, thick as
serpentine coils, and threatened to stop his breath. The power
rippled through the knots of dead muscle. The pain might have
killed another man, but his body had been trained by years of
abuse. The drugs. The women. The violence. The hate. His blood was
the venom of the streets, concentrated succor, and he savored its
pulse coursing through him despite its burn. His chair rattled as
he convulsed in it, his fingernails digging into the vinyl arm
rests. His scream the sound of a soul raped, then cleaved from its
body.
Baylon rushed in to check on him,
faithful to the end. The umbra tendrils knotted around Dred, their
foul energy like black lightning. The unfocused slits of his eyes
turned toward Baylon. Dred spat a tendril at him, an ebon tongue
lodging on his mouth, the two locked in a dark kiss. Baylon
back-pedaled, his body skittering from beneath him as the leeching
strand smothered his inhuman cry. It scorched holes into his skin,
searing it like tissue paper over a match. Like digging out chunks
of his face with shards of glass, the pain was his desperate night
of the soul. His muted screams reduced to a dull lowing, his large
eyes embracing the inevitable. His flesh reduced to red chaos,
puddles sopping under the tread of the wheelchair. Hate his only
coping mechanism against the pain.
Dred hyperventilated, choking on
the stink of hot blood, trying to find meaning in a meaningless
world arriving only at the pure white depths of his loathing. The
plasma screens of his televisions flickering to life. With a wave
of his hand, the cable spread of channels all shifted to the same
image. King.
Psychosis. Self-annihilating
violence. Sociologists only guessed to make themselves feel better
and justify their own useless existence. They didn't know what it
took to survive on the streets, where the rules of the civilized
world didn't apply. Where polite society had turned its back. They
wouldn't keep him away, sealed away in this chamber, away from the
game. His back spasmed. He knew when it all went wrong. He could
hear the manic screams of people as he unremembered the pain of the
bullet ripping through him. Devoured whole by the shadow and
absolved from what he would have to do in the name of his holy
cause. His left leg kicked out, wracked with exquisite pain. The
metamorphosis happened quickly now, much like giving birth to
himself. The throes of labor pain, with Baylon's vitality as a
mystic Pitocin. He regretted that King couldn't be here to witness
it, nor know the hand he played in his rebirth. A phoenix rising
from the ashes of his own body.
"I am…" His mouth opened and
closed around the syllables letting the word break in the echoing
emptiness, a stillborn child given voice. An awful laugh of a
broken soul knitting itself back together. The laughter of the
damned. He wiped flecks of Baylon's blood from him.
He rose from his wheelchair and
stood. Walking stiffly on undead legs, he shuffled to a shelf and
the box that sat in the middle of it. Opening the box, he lifted
the gold gun. His Caliburn.
Soon it would be his
time.
"None of it was real." Prez scratched at the
frayed edges of the peeling wallpaper. Some pieces pulled free in
strips, lifting patches of drywall with it. Still, he continued to
channel his nervous energy focused on the last bits of paper. A
distraction to break the tedium, he wanted to dig his fingers into
something real. Most of the homes on the block stood abandoned,
boarded-up windows proving little deterrent for a body looking to
get out of the cold. Stacks of stuff waited to be hauled out, the
previous owners prepared to take everything not nailed down. Clay
tiles from the roof. Iron grates from vents. Pile of fixtures. Door
knobs and jambs. Cabinet handles.
He sat down on a couch, in direct
eye line of a mirror. To wear his game face, as affectless as a Noh
mask, all day every day. He washed it, shaved it, presented it in
every way, treated it as his own until it became the only face he
knew. He scraped behind his ear at an itch of the greasy build-up
hidden there. He stank of unwashed armpits and a sweaty
crotch.
"Ain't no one up in here but
niggas. Niggas can't get a job, got no place to be. You want to be
black? You want to be African American?" He emphasized the "can"
syllable of each word with a sarcastic bite. "You need to move your
ass to the suburbs."
He thought he knew what life was
about. He thought he knew what he wanted. Gold-capped teeth. A fine
whip with fresh rims and a bumping stereo. Gold chains were still
chains. And a blast was still a good high. The idea of life and
success putrefied in his mouth. His past a horror of broken
promises, his present bleak, his future one of dying dreams, he
threw a cabinet handle and shattered it. Putting flame to the
blackened bulb, he sucked on the glass dick. Prez let the smoke
issue from his mouth. The tendrils slowly swirled around his
head.
"Me? I don't want to feel
nothing." Tears burned down his face. Angry that they'd come so
easily, he lacked the will to wipe them away. "I don't want to feel
nothing…"
Only history could tell you certain truths.
Puddles of shadow darkened the streets from failed street lamps.
The truth was people were slow to learn, if they ever truly did. A
stiff-necked bunch, the lot of humanity, destined to repeat their
follies, re-live the same hurts, and need the same
healing.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan
Police Department announced that it would soon open a command
center within the Phoenix Apartments. Captain Octavia Burke was put
in charge over it. The recent spate of tragic deaths awoke the city
to the forgotten blight within itself, where poverty and crime had
been given free rein. There were talks of organizing crime patrols
and offer job training and mentoring programs. Community leaders
applauded themselves, joined in choruses of a community coming
together and staying together.
(120 Degrees of) Knowledge
Allah's gait dipped with each step of his limp. The pain bothered
him more when rain threatened. No clouds dotted the skies but he
knew a storm was coming. The mathematics of circles. The sidewalk
stopped abruptly giving way to a worn-down-to-the-dirt grass path
which cut in front of the beginnings of a construction
site.
To little trumpeting, the mayor
announced the ground-breaking on a new set of apartments. A
high-rise with an emphasis on security. Camlann. The Camlann
Apartments.
Though not a playwright himself, with no gift
for words or even the subtleties of speech because those sprung
from understanding the human condition, the human heart, and he'd
stopped trying to be human long ago. But he understood the gift.
How writers often stood outside of their own lives, watching
people, the intricacies of their interactions, the interplay of
bodies and language as they danced around certain truths. Observers
in their own lives, unable or unwilling to live them, contenting
themselves to scribble their accumulated elucidations in lieu of
having to participate in the messy thing called life. And he pitied
them.
Merle saw things with the double
vision and distance of a writer. He saw the here and now, but he
also saw the story being played out and the characters, the roles,
they played out. He knew his part in the greater scheme of things
and he pitied himself.
Merle withdrew a bud from the
inner pocket of his coat and dug his finger into the earth. A
squirrel ran up to him then stopped, scratching around for an
acorn.
"Sir Rupert. Where have you been?
The days were dark and dangerous, not the time to be running around
willy-nilly."
The squirrel rested on its
haunches, turning its head left and right on the look-out for
predatory eyes.
"We must take care of the old
ones. Preserve the ways as best we can." Placing the bud within the
hole, Merle gently folded the pile back over it. It was his seed to
plant, but he hoped the next age treated Green better than this one
had. He thought of King and his brethren with a pang of regret as
he understood how things had to end.
That was the way. The streets had
their own legends, their own magic.