Young Junius, page 13
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
The car stopped at the lobby, and Meldrak held his hand up at a few older women who wanted to get on. “Wait for the next,” he said. Marlene wanted to stop him, to welcome the ladies into the car and see them safely to their homes, but the doors were already closing.
She’d glimpsed the bright of the sunlight in the lobby coming in through the glass, but hadn’t seen any police or flashing lights. That much was good.
Maybe soon the ambulances would show up, but most likely that would still be a while, if they showed up at all. Not much an ambulance could do for a dead man, and all the more reason for the cops to just leave him be, up on the roof as a reminder for the rest. If they took Jason in, brought the body to the morgue, it would just mean paperwork. She knew how things worked, even tried to explain them to her idealistic Anthony, though he’d never believe.
The doors opened onto the twentieth floor, Malik’s floor: where he still had his apartment waiting for him to come home to.
Marlene followed Raphael and Seven out into the hallway. Meldrak and Pickup stayed behind in the elevator. They passed two more of her soldiers, Sean Dog and Corwin.
Sean Dog followed them into Malik’s apartment, holding his rifle, the one with the big sight. He still thought he could hunt Rock’s crew from the rooftops, insisted on carrying a big gun and trying to scope soldiers like a sniper. Marlene knew he’d never hit anything, no matter how long his scope. But it kept him happy, so she usually left it alone.
“I got one of them,” Sean Dog said. “I think I clipped his shoulder. That boy bleeding bad.”
“Uh huh.” Seven waved it off like a stupid idea.
Marlene sat at the small four-chair table just outside her brother’s kitchen.
“Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “Tell me something else, though. Like what the fuck really happened up there.”
37
Clarence sat in his 98 on the other side of Rindge Ave., watching the police cars all over the front of the towers. He’d driven up to Davis again after giving the fuck-off to Roughneck. Punkneck is what they should be calling him. He was about good for little else.
At Davis, he’d checked in at Mike’s Diner and bought a fresh pack of Kools. Willie’s boys were up there waiting, but said the two were still no show—the little fucks he was supposed to be finding.
He left Ness and Derek to hang and see if they showed. Truth was, he was probably better without those two if it came to getting anything done. Now that they were stoned out and slowed—damn if he was giving them a toot of his coke—he was better off alone. He sat in the heat of the Olds, listening to Marvin Gaye, watching the towers go up in flashes of red and blue lights.
“Motherfucker,” he said in a slow drawl.
It was still possible that the boys had walked to Harvard or gone up the tracks walking, but Clarence didn’t believe it, not enough to bet his day on it.
He knew they took that outbound train out of Porter. So where else could they have gone? Other than back to Marlene, there weren’t many other possibilities.
He was thinking about giving up on the morning, just going up to his place to take a long shower and hit that Ready, or just hit that Ready and fuck off to the rest of the day, when he saw Pooh walking up Rindge on his own. He looked low, staring at his feet as he walked, his coat pulled up around his ears. Clarence honked the horn, and Pooh saw him across the street, then started toward the car. When he did, Clarence could see bruises on his face: around his temples and under one eye.
He thought about just rolling down the window and making Pooh wait outside, but he’d get colder that way and the kid looked like he could use a friend, so Clarence unlocked the doors using his automatic button.
He locked and unlocked them twice again before Pooh got to the car, each time enjoying the bump and click as the button activated. When Pooh opened the door, a cold wind blew in. Clarence told him to hurry up.
Pooh put on his safety belt when he was finally in the car.
Clarence turned down the music. “You not going anywhere. We right here, so tell me what you seen. Who came up on you?”
Pooh pursed his lips. “Came up on me?”
Clarence reached out, but then thought better of it. These kids nowadays didn’t like to be touched; someone told them stories about fags and boys, so now they always got freaked out about shit. Now the thing that scared them most was someone thinking they were gay, or if they thought someone else was gay. Clarence snorted. It was a real concern for them. More evidence of how the world was fucked.
“Son, someone been busting up your face.”
Pooh turned to his window. Anything to cover up weakness.
“Who you see today? They did this?”
“Yeah. I seen your boys.”
Clarence got more interested. “My boys who killed Lamar? Young buck and his dwarf?”
Pooh nodded. “Junius.” He wasn’t more than sixteen himself, barely old enough to be trusted.
“You ride on that inbound train before? Thought I saw you.” Clarence caught the shifter on the steering column, already dropping it into reverse to head toward Boston. “Where they at?”
“I seen them on the Red Line. They was coming out here. Probably up in the towers right now.”
Clarence checked the kid’s face for the hint of a smile or a sign he was joking, but it wasn’t there. He had been through some shit. “I saw you go inbound. You see them up Boston?”
Pooh shook his head. “They was on the train out to here. I picked them up at Davis, but this big dude made me ride back to Boston with him, wouldn’t let me get off.”
“Big dude?”
“E-Parish, Marlene’s boy or some shit.”
“Yeah,” Clarence said, nodding. “I know that niggah.”
Clarence knew Eric Parish well: they’d come up together, separated by only two years, and Eric was always the straight one who worked at the supermarket in the summers, tried hard in school, got big lifting weights, played football—all that shit. But look where it got him: the motherfucker worked nights in a garage, still lived in the towers just like Clarence. Always had grease under his fingernails, hands that would never come clean.
That was what trying and hard work would get you.
Clarence stared at his own hand, his nails clean and manicured on the leather steering wheel of his new car.
“E-Parish do this to you?”
“Junius came up on me before I was ready. Caught me off guard.”
“So what about E?”
“Made me get off at Park and wouldn’t let me catch another outbound ‘till he was gone. I been trying to get back up here like a hour!” Pooh shook his head.
Clarence smiled. He had to give it to old Eric. “He protecting them? Trying to shield those bitches?”
Pooh noticed the new pack of Kools on the dashboard, asked if he could have one. Clarence shook one out for each of them. They could use a smoke.
Across the street, the cops were already breaking up: six cars had responded to the call and now only four remained. An unmarked had shown up about ten minutes ago. That would be the detectives. They let a few of the patrolmen leave, then went in to keep working.
Outside the building, a tall black cop stood leaning against his patrol car in dress blues, his shaved head wrinkled like a raisin. Clarence could swear he was staring right across the street at them, directly into the 98.
The cigarette lighter on the dash popped out, and Clarence lit his smoke, then Pooh’s.
“What’s all this up here?” Pooh waved his cigarette at the towers, the police cars.
“Don’t know. Just got here myself.” Clarence lipped the cigarette to the side of his mouth and shifted the Olds into reverse. “Let’s go see.”
He backed out to make room and then drove out onto Rindge, waited for a break in the traffic, and crept straight across into the lot for the towers. He drove slow, just rolling the car, enjoying the heat, turning Marvin Gaye back up a little to get more sound.
That bald cop stared them down the whole way, trying to eye-fuck Clarence into submission. Instead he drove right up and rolled down Pooh’s window. The cop would like that, seeing the window go down automatically, knowing he couldn’t afford it on his own car.
“What’s up today, my black brother?” Clarence asked.
The cop stood still. Across the front seat, Clarence could see his chest, his arms still folded across it with his hat tucked under one of them, and below that his belt. His gun was right there next to Pooh’s face.
“You eighteen, son?” the cop said to Pooh. “You know it’s illegal to smoke tobacco if you’re under eighteen?”
“Yeah,” Pooh said. “I turned eighteen last month.”
“Got any ID?”
“No, sir. Mr. Officer. I don’t got no car, so I got no license.” Pooh smiled a little at that one, and Clarence knew it was a mistake. The cop reached in through the car window and took Pooh’s cigarette right out of his mouth. He dropped it to the ground.
“Now you need a license to smoke. So you better get one.”
Clarence took a deep drag from his Kool and ashed it into the tray underneath the radio. He blew smoke in the direction of the officer. “Everything ok here this morning? As a concerned resident of these towers, I just want to make sure things is all right, you know what I mean?”
Clarence leaned over to the middle of the car and craned his neck to see the officer’s face. The cop was still trying to eye-fuck him, his lips pursed like he wouldn’t smile to taste pussy. He even had a short mustache shaved tight across his lip. This boy was all regulations. Clarence smiled, showing his gold front tooth.
“We got a call about a disturbance. You know anything about a disturbance here this afternoon?” The cop checked his watch.
Clarence stuck out his lower lip, shook his head just enough to convey the message. “No, sir. No, I don’t. I’m just a concerned citizen trying to make sure everything is safe in my community.”
“Johnson!” one of the other cops called from the building—a white cop, heavier and with his hair mussed, his uniform messier than the black cop’s but with more bars on the shoulders. “Johnson, let’s go!”
The black cop bent down now, leaned forward with his face at Clarence’s level. He put his forearms on the car door at the window. “It’d be a shame to have to pull you out of there,” he said. “To have to search this car and see what we can find. Keep you standing out here in the cold.” He wrinkled his nose like he was smelling the weed Clarence smoked with Derek and Ness. “Truth is, we got a call here today about a number of gunshots. You wouldn’t happen to have a gun in there, would you?”
Clarence frowned. He took a last drag of his Kool and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “No gun today, sir.” His .38 was under the seat, zipped into the cushion in a way he could get at it but that Clarence knew the cop would never find. “No, sir. No gun.”
He hit the window button accidentally on purpose with his elbow, raised it just a bit into the cop’s arms. The cop started, pulled his arms back fast.
“Gary!” the white cop called again.
The cop looked behind him to where the white cop was waving at him to come over—this white cop who would already be with the program and know what Rock was paying for.
“Be seeing you now, Officer.” Clarence pulled forward. “Better go see what your boss wants.”
The cop said something else, but Clarence was already rolling up the window, driving away from 411 to loop around back of 412.
He checked his rearview and saw the black cop taking down his license plate, even as the fat white cop was already storming toward him, his face showing how pissed off he really was.
38
On the TV, Lucy and Ethel were stuffing their faces with chocolates. They were working in a factory on an assembly line and fucking up. Junius wasn’t sure why, but for some reason they had to keep eating the chocolates to keep the line from going crazy. Instead they were going crazy on the chocolates. Elf and the kid were laughing their asses off, but Junius was somewhere else, thinking back to what happened on the roof: how they saw Roughneck and he told them to do their thing, even though he was supposed to be down with Rock and a friend to Lamar. How Elf let off with the Tec and what that had brought. He still saw what that did to Jason.
Compared to grown men like Seven Heaven and Big Pickup, Junius knew he wasn’t shit. He knew too that Seven and Marlene had brought him in now; where Big Willie didn’t have his back, they did.
Like it or not, he was indebted to them, and Marlene telling him about Rock and Black Jesus wasn’t necessarily a favor as much as a command or her price for protection. He could do it though—make good on what she wanted—and if it wrapped things up about Temple, then that was ok too.
But he didn’t know if he could do it with Elf along. They were best friends, but Elf looked at home on the couch watching daytime TV, even with two guns in his pants. Seven gave them the Tecs with silencers for a reason, not just to make them hard to fit down their pants. But Elf didn’t listen.
Elf noticed him looking over at the side of his face and turned toward Junius, winked like they were doing just fine.
But they weren’t doing fine.
Junius had felt Temple’s death that week, felt Lamar’s, and now Jason’s. He knew he’d be thinking about these, playing the shots back in his head.
Elf wasn’t like that: he thought more about how the other pushers back in Teele Square and Davis would look at them. And that wasn’t how your mind had to work if you were going to get through this—to survive.
Junius stood up. He rubbed out the wrinkles in the thighs of his jeans, saw scattered spots of blood on his right leg. That was what decided it.
“What up?” Elf asked.
“I’m going in the hall to see if I can find Seven. I want to ask him one question.”
“What you want a ask him?”
The kid said, “Pretty much anything he can answer I can tell you as well.”
“I just need to see what’s going on.” Junius waved at Elf to stay on the couch, but it wasn’t necessary: Elf looked pretty much planted. “You hold up here, wait in case he comes back. Pickup too. If either of them roll up, just say I went to sixteen to look for them.”
“You better not go up on twenty-two,” the boy said.
“Yeah. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Elf turned back to the TV. “Ok. Check it out and come back before you do anything else, alright? Maybe we get some lunch soon. I’m hungry as shit.”
“Sounds good. I’ll come back and we eat.”
“My mom left some chicken nuggets in the freezer that we can heat up. They just take twenty-five minutes.”
“Word?” Elf held his palm out for some dap, smiling like it was the best thing he’d heard in a while.
Junius stepped toward the kitchen and the door. His own stomach had been churning since they started waiting on the roof, but he figured if he left it alone it would calm down after a little while, like usual. Breakfast was a meal he didn’t bother with, and when the school lunch looked nasty, which was most of the time, he just waited to hit the pizza parlor across the street after school ended for the day.
He’d get a slice or two and an order of fries that he always ate right out of the white paper bag. He liked to tear off the top and then spill the fries out into the bottom, spray them down with ketchup, and eat it with a fork.
Yeah, he could get into eating, but the clock on the stove said it wasn’t even one yet. His stomach would have to wait. Plus there was no pizza parlor near the towers. Whenever they played baseball, an ice cream truck sold slices; otherwise there was no place to get food in the Rindge Towers neighborhood at all.
Junius stopped with his hand on the knob. He took one look back at Elf sitting on the couch and opened the door. “I check you,” he said.
Elf held up his hand, and then Junius was gone.
39
Rock sat at his glass table by the windows, drinking coffee and smoking a filtered Kool. He wore a gray robe over his boxers, could feel it clinging to the sweat on his back. Bonnie barked once as the bathroom door opened, and she got up from where she lay on the floor behind his chair.
“No,” he said. “Bonnie, sit.” Bonnie sat. She had better for the amount he spent on her trainer.
Berry Rich came out of the bathroom with his white bathrobe tied loosely around her waist so he could see her chest from the belly button on up. He hurt inside just to see it—the way the robe barely covered half her breasts, letting him see their inside curves bulge against her sternum but not her nipples. It melted something inside him.
He wanted to take a drag of his cigarette, but instead he found himself just thinking about it. No action. She actually made him nervous, he realized—a feeling he couldn’t remember having in a long while. She stepped across the rug to him barefoot, her dark red toenails something he’d pay for down the road. If he was really going to take her on, install her in her own spot in this tower, then he’d have to pay for every detail on down to her beautiful feet.
He could live with that, he decided.
After Shirleyann, he was ready to step it up again, get with a woman who could hurt him inside just from how she looked. Fuck if it didn’t do things to him that his boys would say to stay away from: Black Jesus, the rest of them, they’d speak out if he gave them the chance, but that wasn’t their function. They brought in the money, worked the streets, corners, and hallways with their boys, carried out his orders, but did not speak on how he should handle his heart.
She took the Kool right out of his fingers, ashed it into the tray next to his coffee, and sucked it hard enough for the cherry to burn white. She winked at him, exhaling through her nose. “How you feeling, my man?”
“Rich,” he said. “I’m feeling Berry Rich.”
She smiled her smile, the one that was going to make him give her an apartment on eighteen, fill it with furniture, a TV—whatever she wanted—buy her clothes. Without taking another drag, she laid the Kool down in its ashtray, then pushed out her lips.
