Yaccub's Curse Page 10

  The bodyguard I’d shot was reeling on the floor cursing and groaning in pain and rage. The recoil from the huge gun had nearly torn it from my grasp. My heart was trip-hammering in my chest and my blood raced with exhiliration. I nearly swooned with the rush of adrenalin that hit me as I pulled the trigger. It was nearly as strong as the recoil from the gun and I stood there trembling; visibly shaken by it as the big black leg breaker prepared to aim a shot at my head.

  “Muthafucka! You shot me! You little bastard muthafucker! I’ma kill your punk ass!”

  “Fool, you ain’t killin’ shit.”

  He was too slow and Huey was on the case, silencing him with a kick to the bridge of the nose that shattered the delicate cartiledge and smeared his nose across his face in a bloody spray before he could properly aim. The shot sailed about two feet over my head and ricocheted off a building somewhere off in the distance. Huey collected both the guns from the two fallen killers. Half the size of Scratch’s tremendous bodyguards, Huey’s psychotic ferocity and martial arts knowledge had made him twice their match. They hadn’t stood a chance.

  “What was you gonna try and smoke all of us over this muthafucka?”

  Scratch shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “You can’t blame a muthafucker for tryin’,” and kept staring from me to Demetrious to the two defeated leg-breakers and then to Huey who leveled his eyes, blistering with an inexplicable hatred, at him as if they were lasers that could burn him to a cinder. I looked down at the two guns in his hands and hoped that he wouldn’t shoot. Huey hated white people as if each and every member of the race had done him some grave and personal injustice. A white boy who had just tried to kill him was almost guaranteed a trip to the grave. But we both knew better than to off a guy like Scratch.

  “Okay, so now what?” Scratch asked. He tucked his sunglasses back over his eyes to hide his expression and a bemused smirk creased his face.

  “How you know I won’t smoke your cracker ass right now?”

  “You won’t,” he said flatly.

  I punched Demetrious in the gut with the loaded .45 letting a little air out of his lungs, then I pointed the pistol right at Scratch.

  “You want him that bad?”

  “Yeah. That nigga owes me.” Even though he tried to remain calm, I could tell he was shaken by the quick efficient handling of his bodyguards. He was staring at Huey like he had just stepped out of a spaceship. Huey stared back at the white thug like he was a particularly large and unpleasant pimple that he was considering squeezing the puss out of.

  Scratch’s cunning, televangelist, con-man smile resurrected itself, stretching nearly around to the back of his head and displaying each one of his platinum capped teeth. He looked like a great white shark about to swallow a boatload of sun worshippers.

  “Ya’ll ain’t no killas. How about I let you keep the guns if you give that muthafucka over to me and I promise you won’t catch no static for fuckin’ up my bodyguards either. Punk-ass niggas couldn’t handle a bunch of freshman then they deserved to get broke up.”

  “Well, that’s damned generous and all, but we keepin’ these gats anyway so that ain’t no deal. But I tell you what, you let us keep the cash he took from you and we’ll get the drugs back plus I’ll blast this nigga for you.”

  “Naw! Naw! Ya’ll can’t just kill me! I’m just a kid! I ain’t did shit! I ain’t got shit, Scratch, and if I did, you know I’d give it up. I wouldn’t hold out on you, bro! I ain’t got no drugs.”

  “You ain’t got shit, huh? Then what was all that shit you was talkin’ ’fore he showed up? And stop squirmin’ before you mess around and rip that jacket ’cause once you’re a ghost I own that shit.”

  Demetrious still believed he could just talk his way out of this and walk away with his life. I smacked him hard with the heavy pistol opening a huge gash on his head that began dripping bright red blood. He slumped in Tank’s grasp, his eyes wild with fear. The bloodlust was vibrating in my nerves, churning in my stomach like physical hunger. I wanted to shoot the gun again. But this time…I wanted to kill.

  “Get that fuckin’ jacket off ’fore you fuck it up! That shit’s mine now. And get them sneaks off too!”

  Scratch seemed to relax then. He slid the sunglasses down his nose and looked over them at us shaking his head, finding our vicous greed both amusing and pitiful like lions in a circus. It was the way white people had looked at me all my life and it made me furious. Tank jerked the jacket off Demetrious’ shoulders and I punched the gun into his eye socket again.

  “Don’t think about tryin’a break out cause I’ll cap your ass right tha fuck here! That’s my word, dog. Now try me!”

  Demetrious stared meekly into my eyes and remained still as Tank removed the jacket.

  “But I ain’t do shit!”

  “Shut tha fuck up!”

  I turned back to Scratch.

  “We got a deal or what?”

  “Word, little G. We got a deal. Just don’t bitch when it’s time to fulfill your end.”

  “Fuck that. I don’t never bitch from no two gees.”

  “Hah! You niggers ain’t never even seen two gees.”

  I bristled at the way he pronounced “niggers.” I wanted to cap his ass just for that.

  “So, how you gonna get him to tell where the shit’s at? You bad little thugs got the heart for torture?”

  “I know where the fuck it’s at,” I said confidently, but inwardly uncertain.

  “He had this gat just sittin’ there under that rock where somebody might have found it. I bet the rest of that shit’s right in his bedroom or…”

  Quickly, I turned and smacked Meech with the gun again as hard as I could causing Tank to wince and step back as blood from Demetrious’ forehead splattered his face allowing him to slump to the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head and his forehead continued spraying blood from the fresh wound.

  There was something I loved about head wounds. The blood was brighter, redder, and it pumped out more easily. It reminded me of Darryl’s war stories. When I got older I would be known for shooting fools in the head even though everyone knew the body was an easier target and that someday I would miss and wind up getting my ass killed. It was dumb and dangerous, but it became my thing.

  A lot of wannabe gangstas carried guns, but few actually used them; still fewer of those who used them actually intended to kill. Often they would shoot a fool in the gut where they might be paralyzed if it hit their spine, but not killed. But if you flew some fool’s head it left no doubt in anyone’s mind that you meant the shot to be fatal. I bent down over Meech’s semi-conscious form and began pulling cash out of his pockets.

  “Yeah! I knew that shit! This dumb muthafucka. I knew if he wouldn’t hide a gun in his crib he wasn’t gonna hide no two gees there.”

  I unfastened his pants and pulled them down to his knees. There was more money and a big sack of white powder in his drawls.

  “Little dick muthafucka! I should have known you wouldn’t leave this shit lyin’ around for your momma to find.”

  “That little ass sack ain’t all of it though.”

  I stopped and thought a moment. Had this kid started hittin’ the pipe and smoked that shit all up or had he sold it? If he’d sold it then where was the other money? Then Tank spoke up.

  “Yo, right here man.”

  He reached into the Sixers jacket and pulled two more fat sacks from the lining. The three sacks combined must have weighed five or six pounds.

  “Well there you go, white boy. I guess that means this cash is ours then.”

  “Nuh-uh, nigger. You ain’t finished.” Scratch said pointing to Meech.

  “You know what, white boy. I don’t like no fuckin’ peckerwood callin’ me nigga.” I pointed the gun at his head again and that crazy look was back in my eyes.

  “You stallin’ or what?” Scratch said with a smirk.

  “Step back, Tank.” Tank dutifully stepped away from Demetrious who was just starting
to revive.

  The bodyguard I’d shot in the thigh started talking shit again and I swerved the gun away from Scratch and pointed it at him until I realized he wasn’t armed then I pointed it back at Scratch.

  “He ain’t gonna do it, Scratch. He’s just a little bitch! And I’ma smoke him and his little faggot friends when…”

  I swiveled like a turrent and aimed the gun at Demetrious who was now wide awake and staring at me in horror. I pulled the trigger.

  BLAM!,

  The report from the .45 interrupted the tirade from the larger of Scratch’s bodyguards who now stood gripping his wounded thigh; squeezing it as if to force out the bullet. Blood was caked all over his face from his shattered nose. Demetrious’s chest had blossomed in an explosion of red like some great ghastly rose blooming. The kind that only bloomed in hell. His hands thrust out in front of him as if to ward off the bullet, fluttered limply to the ground with a jagged hole between the middle and index fingers of his left hand, and a long whistling exhalation issued from his lungs as they rid themselves of the now pointless oxygen. His pants were still down around his knees and his briefs turned crimson as his heart pumped his body dry trying to get blood past the ruptured arteries and pulverized organs and up to his brain succeeding only in spurting it out of his ruined chest in a steady fount.

  I stuffed the money in my pockets in big handfuls and tossed the sacks of coke to Scratch. Snatching up the red Sixers jacket I started to retreat then paused to untie Meech’s sneakers and slip them off his feet. If I had seen how much blood had soaked into them I would have left them. Tank wrenched the half-carat diamond out of his ear and held it up to the sun grinning autistically as it refracted the light, then he shoved it deep in his pockets and turned to his brother who showed neither scorn nor approval. I removed the platinum crucifix from around his neck and tossed it to Huey. Huey held the necklace in his hands staring at the tortured effigy of Christ as if it were the most horrible thing he’d ever seen. It dripped with Meech’s blood adding a gruesome realism to the artistic rendering. It was as if we were witnessing the crucifixion in miniature. Huey stared at it a moment more and then stuffed it in his pocket.

  Huey and Tank fell in behind me with their reappropriated weapons pointed right at Scratch whose mischievous smile had once again abandoned his face. His two bodyguards were behind him, licking their wounds in mute shock.

  “That was evil. That was just plain vicious!” The smaller of the two bodyguards said, holding his jaw in place with one hand. Scratch’s smile slowly slithered back onto his face like some alien presence taking over him, but it never reached his eyes. They remained cold slivers of blue ice glaring frostily over the top his Gucci sunglasses.

  “Yeah, I likes that. You boys did just fine. I’ma have to have ya’ll come work for me when ya’ll get older. Yeah, I’ma see ya’ll again. Soon.”

  His words hung ominously in the air like a curse carved into the mouth of a tomb. We slipped out of the lot. We ran up the street and ducked into an alley on Cherokee and Duval streets behind the old laundromat, which was now a crackhouse and shooting gallery. Moments later we heard two gunshots come from the lot. We stopped and looked at each other, but didn’t say a word. Then Tank and I both noticed that Huey was sobbing. This too brought back the recent memory of Darryl’s murder. He had cried then too.

  “Fuck is you cryin’ for, nigga? You actin’ like some kinda bitch!” Tank said as his big dumb smirk twisted into a malicious scowl of disgust.

  Huey punched him in the side of his head. Hard. But of course Tank was just barely fazed.

  “Fool, if you can take another brotha’s life and not be affected by that shit then you ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ monster. You’re a devil just like that white muthafucka back there! Sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do to come up, but still…don’t nobody deserve to die.”

  He stormed off leaving Tank and I standing alone in the piss-smelling alley, shocked and confused.

  Huey was one strange brotha sometimes—too deep and too spooky to really relate to. I thought about what he’d said all night and then dismissed it. It made no sense to me. It only depressed and confused me to think about the senselessness of some brothas dying just so other brothas could enjoy a fleeting moment of success. Niggas lived. Niggas died. And if I didn’t pull the trigger it was just a matter of time before someone else did or they dropped the hammer on someone else themselves. Why cry over what you couldn’t change?

  Still, Huey had made me question myself and think about the little boy whose life I’d stolen, his parents grief, and how his life may have turned out had I not abbreviated it. I fought down the tears not wanting to admit that Huey might’ve been right.

  Later that night we heard on the news that three bodies were found in the lot; two seventeen year-old boys, one with a broken jaw and dislocated knee, the other with a bullet hole through his left thigh and a broken nose. They both had three clean nine millimeter bullet holes through the back of their heads. One had three entrance wounds but only two exit wounds. One in the roof of his mouth and the other in his lower jaw. Three front teeth and the tip of his tongue had been sheared off. The other one had acquired a third eye and been reduced to one nostril. The last bullet had gone through the very top of his head and down his throat.

  “There was also a fourteen year-old boy with multiple blunt instrument trauma to the skull and a gunshot wound in his chest…” The newswoman continued.

  Scratch had retired his two leg-breakers with three clean shots each for getting their asses kicked by ninth graders. Unknowingly, we had taken three lives.

  What the newscaster didn’t say, but I knew, was that all three of them had their brains sucked out of the holes in their skulls. They didn’t need to report it on TV for the news to make its way around the neighborhood. Things like that had a way of getting out no matter how hard the police tried to suppress it.

  The newscaster wrote the incident off as “…yet another in a long series of senseless drug related killings in the Germantown section of Philadelphia…” She had no idea just how senseless these particular killings were. I started sleeping with the .45 under my pillow and locked every window and door before I closed my eyes to sleep, no matter how hot it was. I still can’t sleep in a house with a window open.

  We entered the 8th grade with brand new wardrobes in all the latest fashions and at least two pairs of sneakers each. Our new gear established us in school as bonafide playas.

  Our new status was a drastic change from what we had previously known and we weren’t at all willing to go back to the dirty little street thugs that everyone made fun of. Right then and there we decided that we had to stay suited up properly no matter what we had to do or to whom we had to do it. When our mother’s asked us where we had gotten all the clothes we told them that we had a friend who worked at a clothing store and they had stolen them for us. Our parents scolded us half-heartedly for stealing, but were secretly relieved not to have to buy us back-to-school clothes. In the ghetto the gift horse was so rare that when it came you didn’t just look it in the mouth you cut it open and gutted it out.

  We never talked about how we had really gotten the new gear, not even to each other, and we tried to pretend that we really had stolen them rather than paid for them with money soaked in blood. Black blood. We had all become killers that year and our lives were irrevocably altered.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 8

  “I’m from the place where the church is the flakiest… And nigguz been prayin’ to God so long that they’re atheist.”

  —Jay-Z, “Marcy”

  ««—»»

  In the ghetto, as in the world, clothes make the man. The policeman’s uniform, the prostitute’s latex mini-skirt, the pimp’s gator shoes, the gangsta’s low slung jeans sagging off his ass. They all give clues to the nature of the individual beneath. Books are judged by their covers here and we strolled through the halls of our little Jr. High School covered in
FUBU, Adidas, Nike, and Gucci. Fights were no longer started by insults from others about our outdated clothing. We were stylin’ now. The girls treated us differently now too. They actually asked us over to their houses and out to the movies rather than just laughing in our faces when we tried to ask them. The clothes made all the difference.

  We acted differently too. In a society where the standard of excellence is wealth, poverty can tax your self-esteem and your entire sense of self-worth. Likewise, a dose of affluence can boost your confidence tremendously. My grades, which had been slowly slipping down into the toilet, made a dramatic recovery. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand in class and ask questions when I didn’t understand something. I didn’t mind calling attention to myself anymore. Not when I was wearing two hundred dollars worth of designer labels on my back.

  Mrs. Greenblade, who credited herself for my transformation from class clown to honor student, began to take a special interest in me. She convinced me to work on the school newspaper writing editorials on school politics and an occasional book or movie review. I loved writing and so I started reading the paper everyday and took elaborate pains to make all the articles I wrote sound professional, just like the ones in the Philadelphia Enquirer. It excited me to finally be appreciated for something other than just being a bad-ass crazy mutherfucker. Even though I knew that hardly anyone but the teachers really even read the damned thing unless, of course, someone had been robbed, or beaten, or shot. Kids were morbid like that.

  Mrs. Greenblade even tried to convince me to give up my lunch period to attend her journalism class, but I had to pass on that. Since I was already staying an hour after school to work on the paper I figured she could teach me all I needed to know about journalism then. Lunchtime was when me and my boys jacked fools for their cash. I couldn’t give that up.