Double Dippin' (11 page)

Too traumatized to care about his belongings, Tariq nodded absently.

Half a block away from home, Shane saw his brother being carted off. Feeling like a coward, he skulked into the shadows, unwilling to expose his presence and have to endure the Children’s Home or most likely, another foster home.

He’d figure out a way to get Tariq after he’d gotten his bearings.
At least one of us is still free
.

He’d known that drunken bitch would mess things up. Unwilling to risk letting nosey neighbors see him entering the house through the front door, Shane ran around the back, creeping through an alley that led to an unlocked kitchen window. Filled with rage, he climbed up the drain pipe, pushed the window open, and shimmied inside. He entered the house with a great crash. Ms. Holmes had sobered up enough to rush toward the commotion.

“Why’d you let them take my brother?” Shane spoke between gritted teeth.

She shrugged helplessly. “That social worker took him away. I couldn’t stop her.”

“Where’d she take him?” he demanded. When Ms. Holmes shrugged, he lost all semblance of self-control and slapped her hard across the face. Ms. Holmes started to dart toward the stairs and just as her hand grabbed onto the railing,
Shane caught her by the back of her collar. He pounded her head against the wooden railing until she lost consciousness and slid to the floor.

Shane glanced down at Ms. Holmes’s mountainous body and began pacing. Imagining his frightened brother, he gripped his head in frustration. He had to locate Tariq, but he didn’t know what to do or where to begin. He picked up the phone and then smashed it back into its cradle. He was just a minor; no one would give him any answers regarding Tariq’s whereabouts.

Ms. Holmes was regaining consciousness. With a painful groan, she struggled to lift her head.

Shane regarded her with a sneer. “You better stay right where you at because if you get up, I swear I’m gonna knock your ass back down and stomp your stupid brains right outta your head.” There was froth at the corners of Shane’s mouth. His voice was a growl.

He felt like he was going insane and judging by the way his foster mother recoiled when he glared at her, he figured he looked the part as well. The hatred he felt for her was intense. He despised her for neglecting his brother—for letting those people take him.

Rubbing her head and moaning, Ms. Holmes heeded Shane’s warning and remained on the floor.

“Shut up! I’m trying to think.” Shane bellowed as he stepped around her body. Ms. Holmes curled into a ball on the floor. The moaning ceased.

Exasperated, Shane flopped down on the couch and massaged his head. A helpless whimper escaped his lips as he tried to come up with a resolution to the terrible predicament. “This is fucked up; my brother ain’t deserve this shit,” Shane lamented.

Unable to come up with a way to remedy the tragic situation, a lump began to form in his throat. Then he thought about Miss Goldie. Feeling hopeful, he took in a deep breath.

He knew LaDonna was due to get off work soon, but taking a chance that Miss Goldie would answer the phone, Shane dialed the number.

“Hello.” Miss Goldie’s voice sounded like music. Shane smiled. His luck had just changed for the better.

“Is LaDonna home yet?”

“Why?” Goldie asked, sounding like a jealous woman.

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“Oh! No, she’s not here. She came home and ran back out. For all I know she’s probably gonna lay up with that drug dealer all night. You should have stuck around a little longer,” Miss Goldie said with a sigh. “So what’s up, you wanna come back over?”

“Yeah, but um—I need you to do me a favor. Those foster care people came and took my brother away. They’re probably out looking for me. I need somewhere to hide out and I need you to make some calls. Can you find out what you gotta do to become a foster parent? I was thinking maybe you can help me find out where they took my brother.” Shane held his breath as he waited for Miss Goldie’s response.

She was silent for a long time. “I don’t know about all that, Shane. I’m not trying to get all caught up in the system, you know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t know what you mean. You talked a lot of shit when we was goin’ at it, but now that I need you, you mean to tell me you can’t come through?”

“Shane,” she said softly. “You’re asking a lot. If those foster care people are looking for you, that means the police are involved. That’s putting me all up in the middle of some bullshit I don’t need to be involved in.”

“Oh, it’s like that?” Shane sucked his teeth, shook his head, and quietly hung up the phone. Miss Goldie, along with his drunken foster mother, was officially on his shit list. Frustrated and mad at the world, he gave up and allowed the tears to fall.

Shane needed a drink to calm him down. Miss Goldie had him feeling worse than before. He felt helpless and used. Tariq couldn’t make it in no foster home without him. He had to do something. If he could just find out where Tariq was, he’d get a gun and break his brother out.

“Where’s your liquor at, Mom?” he asked, sniffling as he spoke.

“You want me to go get it for you?” she asked, sounding eager to assist Shane.

“Yeah, go get it. I need a drink.”

When she came hobbling back with the bottle, Shane was whimpering again. “Damn, I hate that you let them bastards take my brother. Wasn’t there something your drunk ass could do?”

Giving Shane a guarded look, Ms. Holmes shook her head sadly.

Shane turned the bottle up to his lips and passed it to Ms. Holmes. She chugged down two big gulps and handed the bottle back to Shane.

The alcohol didn’t have the calming effect he expected. He was still mad as hell at Miss Goldie. All the dick he’d given that bitch and she had the nerve to do him like this. His rage started building. His breathing increased, his hands began to tremble, and his lips started moving as he mumbled furiously.

Ms. Holmes was too busy getting intoxicated to notice Shane working himself up.

He was unable to wrap his hands around Miss Goldie’s no good, selfish-ass neck, so his foster mother was the closest target. The whole mess was all her fault anyway. With narrowed eyes, he watched her guzzle gin. He crept up on her and slapped the bottle out of her hand. It shattered when it slammed against the coffee table. Ms. Holmes yelped.

Enraged, Shane yanked the petrified woman off the sofa.

She looked around helplessly, then came to the realization that there was no one who could help her. She suffered in silence as Shane dragged her massive body down to the floor. He quickly pulled up her housedress and roughly tugged at the elastic waistband of her big baggy panties.

Lying on her back, Ms. Holmes parted her fleshy thighs. Shane poked her in the shoulder. “Turn over,” he demanded in a gruff voice. He slapped her rear end. “Get on your knees.”

He hadn’t bothered her in such a long time, he noticed her old rug burns had healed.
Tough!
he thought bitterly. The skin was about to be rubbed off the old bag’s knees again.

“Why’d you let them take my brother?” Tears streamed down Shane’s face as he mounted his foster mother. “Your drunken ass could’ve done something to help him,” he said, choking and sobbing.

“I tried…” she wailed, but Shane punched her in the back of the head. He covered her mouth to muffle her screams as he roughly penetrated her from behind. Shane raped Ms. Holmes with such force and savagery the poor woman dropped her head and cried.

Shane could feel her hot breath against his palm as she pleaded and moaned,
but he was relentless in his quest to cause her pain. Her knees gave out at the moment he climaxed.

The pounding on the door caused both Shane and Ms. Holmes to jump in alarm.

“Oh Lord, please help me cover my sins,” Ms. Holmes wailed as she grappled to pull up her panties.

But it was too late. The front door, kicked off its hinges, was flung to the middle of the living room floor.

“Police!” Two men and one woman from the Philadelphia Police force stood in the living room, guns drawn. An hour earlier, a neighbor had reported seeing a burglar climb through the kitchen window. In the city of Philadelphia, handcuffing a young street hustler over a ten-dollar drug deal had priority over a ghetto home invasion. Thus the police arrived an hour after the call was made and caught the teenager and his guardian with their pants down.

Before Shane was allowed to see his brother, he had to have a psychiatric evaluation. During his interview with the psychiatrist, Shane spoke about his relationship with Dolores Holmes. He appeared fidgety and anxious, and spoke in a soft embarrassed whisper as he recounted the unrelenting sexual molestation he suffered at the hands of Dolores Holmes, his foster mother. He began to bite his nails; his knees knocked visibly when he spoke of his forced sexual encounter with Goldie Randolph, the parent of his girlfriend. “I trusted both of them—Miz Holmes and Miz Goldie,” Shane said, wiping away a tear.

Sobbing, he told the psychiatrist that Miss Goldie had sodomized him numerous times and threatened to have a drug dealer kill him if he ever told a living soul. Ms. Holmes had ordered him into her bed soon after he’d moved in, forcing her breasts into his mouth and smacking his head until he sucked them. Forced breast-feeding and a long list of other depraved sexual acts had been going on since the day he arrived in what he thought to be a Christian home, Shane confessed, weeping.

The psychiatrist, unable to maintain a professional demeanor and unwilling
to contain his abhorrence, grunted, twisted in his seat; and at one point banged his fist down on his desk. Looking heavenward, the psychiatrist said, “What’s this world coming to? Our children are being handed over to predators, and society wonders why they become criminals and sexual deviants. You poor children don’t stand a prayer,” the doctor said to Shane.

Sniffling and wiping away crocodile tears, Shane looked sadly at the psychiatrist and nodded a silent agreement.

Later, the social worker drove Shane to the youth center where Tariq had been placed. She assured him that both women who’d abused him had been arrested. “If I had it my way those two child molesters would remain behind bars for the rest of their deviant lives.”

Shane had to bite down hard on his inner lip to keep himself from breaking into an enormous grin,.

Tariq was in the TV room. Shane snuck up behind him and placed his hand over Tariq’s eyes. “Guess who, my nigga,” he said and then gave his brother a big bear hug.

Shane and Tariq were right back where they’d started, but they were together and that was all that mattered.

Shane and Tariq finally got a day pass from the Children’s Home.

Tariq spent his four-hour pass visiting Shiree, and Shane went looking for the closest crap game. He found one on the corner in front of a deli on Chester Avenue. When the police swooped down, everyone was caught unaware. There was a chorus of cuss words as the young men were ordered to lie on the ground with their hands behind their heads.

The police, frustrated with breaking up never-ending crap games at the same location and seemingly with the same players, lawlessly filled the participants’ pockets with enough crack vials to get them locked up and off the streets for at least six months to a year.

“Man, I’m a juvenile. You can’t take me to the Round House,” Shane grumbled as he was being driven toward Eighth and Arch Streets.

Being almost six feet tall, and lanky, which made him appear even taller, Shane didn’t look like a juvenile. Treating him like an adult, the police filled his pockets with enough of the illegal substance to ensure that Shane served some hard time.

“Show me some ID,” the cop shot back.

“I ain’t got no ID, I’m a juvenile. What kind of ID am I supposed to have?”

“Man, talk to the judge in the morning,” the police officer said as he shoved Shane in the police van with the others.

“I can’t sit in no jail overnight. My little brother is waiting for me.” Shane sounded distraught. He knew Tariq would be wondering where he was and would soon start to trip. “Well, can I make a phone call when I get to the Round House?”