Soul Circus(15)

“We’ll roll on back in a little while,” said Dewayne.

Jerome Long watched them go down a hall and through the kitchen. When he heard the back door open and shut he head-motioned to Allante Jones and the two of them got up from the table. They went back to the kitchen and looked out the window over the kitchen sink, the only window in the house that had not been boarded up.

“Check them out,” said Long, looking past Dewayne and Walker, on the concrete walk now, to the Yuma Mob members sitting on the back steps of a house on the other side of the alley.

“All bold and shit,” said Jones.

“I’m tired of sittin’ at that table.”

“So am I.”

“You ready to make some noise, Lil’ J?”

“Drama City.” Jones elaborately shook Long’s hand. “’Bout time someone in this town remembered our names, too.”

Long forced a smile. He felt he had to talk this way sometimes, so his friend and the others would believe that he was hard. But he wasn’t hard for real. He didn’t want to kill no one, and he didn’t want to die.



GOING out the back door, Dewayne and Walker went down a concrete walk split with weeds cutting a small yard of dirt. Past the alley, where Mario stood leaning against Dewayne’s Benz, Dewayne could see the fenced backyards of the street that ran parallel to Atlantic. About three houses down, on the back steps of another duplex, a group of boys sat drinking out of bags in the late-afternoon sun, listening to their own box, passing around a fat one and getting high. These were members of the Yuma Mob, headed up by Horace McKinley, who had risen under Granville Oliver, Phillip Wood, and them. Crazy boys, ’cause they were trying to make a rep, the worst kind. Especially those two cousins, the Coateses, who had come up from the South. Dewayne briefly locked eyes with one of them, because this was what he was expected to do, then kept walking toward his car.

Dewayne didn’t sweat behind the competition. He expected them to be there. Shoot, you didn’t go openin’ no MacDonald’s, then get surprised when a Burger King moved in across the street. There was business enough for everyone down here, just so everyone knew their place and kept to it. That is, if you stayed on your strip. Once in a while, at night, if anyone was still down here, his boys would fire off a shot in the Yuma Mob’s direction to let them know they were still around, and they’d fire one back. Turf etiquette: We’re down and there’s peace if we stay behind our imaginary lines. Even the square motherfuckers lived on these blocks, had payroll jobs and kids and shit, got used to the sound of occasional gunfire. Long as those boys didn’t come into your house and start shittin’ on your bed, then everything would be cool.

“Little brother,” said Mario, stepping off the car.

Dewayne shook Mario’s hand, hanging off a wrist you could circle with your thumb and pinkie, then pulled his older brother in for the standard half-hug. To say Mario was thin was to say that Kobe had a little bit of game. Mario was famine-in-Africa kind of thin. You saw a photo of him, you’d start sending money to that company on TV, claimed they could feed kids for eighty-nine cents a day.

“Zulu,” said Mario, “how you been?”

Walker allowed him a nod. “Twigs.”

It hurt Mario to hear Walker call him that name, but he managed to hold a friendly smile.

“What’s up, son?” said Dewayne.

“Wanted to get up with you, D. Let you know I’m gettin’ close to finding the girl.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Hired me one of those private investigators to do it.”

“Okay. And what you gonna do then?”

“I’m gonna make it right.”

“You find her, you let me know where she at, I’ll make it right.”

“Nah, man, this here is me.”

“’Cause you can’t be lettin’ no bitch do you like she did, and I don’t care how good that pussy was. She took me off, too, and I can’t have none of that.”

“Said I’m gonna square it.”

“Don’t tell me. Show me that you will.”

“We’re kin,” said Mario. “I won’t let you down.”

Kin. Who would know it? thought Dewayne. Boy looked like a water rat ain’t had nothin’ to eat for, like, forever. They shared the same mother; that was true. Mario’s father, a nothing by all accounts, had died in a street beef when Mario wasn’t nothin’ but a kid. He must have been one ugly man. Dewayne had never known his father. His mother, Arnice Durham, had claimed that he was handsome. He was doing a stretch, last Dewayne had heard, in some joint in Pennsylvania. Didn’t mean shit to Dewayne anymore, if it did mean something to him to begin with. Whateva. Anyway, he had promised his mother he’d look after Mario, and there wasn’t anything Dewayne wouldn’t do for his moms.