Authors: Amaleka McCall
Hard Candy (3 page)
Rock knew when Candice was hurting or happy. He was there for her when she got her first period and when she had nightmares about the murders. More importantly, he helped teach her the necessary skills for surviving in the streets.
At first Rock tried to hide his profession from Candice, but she was too sharp. Candice watched Uncle Rock leave on some days, dressed in all black with his long, black military bag thrown over his shoulder. She would take those rare opportunities to search his bookshelf and his nightstand drawers. Uncle Rock always had addresses written on small slips of paper, and each time he returned, he'd burn the papers in an ashtray. He also owned a large box filled with brand-new black leather gloves. Candice noticed he would get a new pair from the box each time. She even recalled her father instructing him to “make that nigga ghost.”
One day after Uncle Rock had prepared Candice a sandwich with chips and a soda, her favorite meal, she pushed away from the table as he was preparing to leave and confronted him. “Uncle Rock, I know you kill people for a living,” she blurted out matter-of-factly. “I want to learn how to do it, you know, so I can get back at the guys who killed my family.”
Rock, caught off guard, dropped his black bag on the floor and swiped his black knitted hat off his head. Nostrils flared, he stormed into his bedroom and slammed the door.
Candice stood in the middle of the floor at a loss for words. She had never seen Uncle Rock react so strongly to anything she had said. She began to cry. She knew she had overstepped some unknown boundary. She thought for sure he would kick her out, and her family's murderers would then find her.
Candice pleaded with him through the door to come out. She apologized over and over again, until she finally fell asleep on the floor in front of his bedroom door.
When Uncle Rock finally emerged, he picked her up from the floor and put her in her bed. He sat and stared at her for hours, contemplating how to handle her request. The next day, as soon as Candice had awaken, Uncle Rock sat her down and gave her a stern lecture. He told her he was not a killer or hit man, but a “cleaner.” He explained that cleaners simply rid the world of despicable people who make the world unsafe, while hit men killed for their own selfish gain.
That made sense to Candice, who had listened intently. Then she begged Rock to teach her everything he knew about being a cleaner.
Reluctantly, Rock went about training Candice, little by little, showing her the real way to hold a gun and how to use her sights. He also warned her against using the “sideways cowboy style” that hood niggas liked so much, where they ended up always missing their intended targets and shooting innocent bystanders. He also taught her the two-handed, thumb-over-thumb hold and worked with her for hours on her grip.
“Squeeze with your support hand and relax your strong hand,” he told her, after explaining the different role each hand played.
Candice found that this method was quite effective at keeping the weapon from flying up out of her small hands whenever she shot.
Uncle Rock made her stand with the gun in her hands in the proper hold and with her arms extended for long periods of time.
“This is so you never get tired in a gunfight,” he explained. “You need to be able to shoot until the threat is eliminated.”
He also tested Candice on the nomenclature of several types of weapons, including the MP5. Rock took Candice to a gun range in New Jersey and trained her until all of her shots were center of mass on the targets. He even taught her about different types of cover, showing her how to blade her body behind something as skinny as a pole and become nearly invisible to a distant target.
Candice had the most fun when Uncle Rock showed her how to shoot from a prone position and from a fetal position with the gun between her knees. Hitting a target center of mass while lying down on her side and stomach was exciting.
“See, as long as you use your sights and have the proper trigger pull, you can hit anything from any position,” Uncle Rock told her.
Uncle Rock spent an entire week using himself as a crash test dummy as he taught Candice how to make a person catatonic with pressure points on the body, like the jugular notch and brachial stun. When she placed her index and middle fingers into his jugular notch and applied pressure, she forced his large body to his knees.
Gasping for breath afterwards, Uncle Rock told her she was a natural. He'd even tested her on the arteries she needed to hit “to make someone bleed out in less than ten seconds.” Candice had remembered the term
femoral artery
by equating the word
femoral
with
female
, she being a female that now knew how to kill someone in ten seconds.
femoral artery
by equating the word
femoral
with
female
, she being a female that now knew how to kill someone in ten seconds.
Rock didn't know if it was his overwhelming sense of loyalty to Easy or guilt that made him take care of Candice and guard her with his own life. Today he watched his protégée prance toward his apartment door as she prepared to leave. She'd grown into a beautiful young lady, a far cry from the rail-thin tomboy that had shown up on his doorstep.
Rock had protested initially when she first told him she planned to move out. He knew deep down inside that one day she'd grow up and leave his home. He also knew of her intentions on the streets. Rock had failed to take revenge on the people responsible for the massacre of the Hardaway family. At the time, he felt he was too emotional after the murders to exact revenge, but he'd also been very preoccupied with caring for Candice. He refused to carry out hits while his emotions were running wild. Being emotional while working could cost him his life. Rock's philosophy was that emotions weakened one's natural instincts.
In the end, all of the suspects ended up literally getting away with murder. Rock knew who they were and their street affiliations. The streets were always talking. He had even taken pictures of them and done a history workup on them, complete with addresses and criminal histories, and had stored the information in a secure hiding spot from Candice. Or so he thought.
Rock watched Candice as she walked out of the door. He started coughing fiercely as soon as she left. He coughed until he began to gag. He looked down at the towel he held to his mouth and stared at the Rorschach inkblot pattern of bright red blood. He didn't know how much longer he'd be able to hide his illness from Candice, whose face he could see in his mind's eye.
He closed his eyes and felt nostalgic about how far he'd come and how much he had grown to love the little girl who had shown up at his door so many years ago.
Rock had been drafted into the United States Marines when he was just seventeen years old. He never protested the draft because he'd grown up extremely poor. When the United States first went to war with Vietnam, he'd heard on the streets that the soldiers were being paid high salaries and provided with great benefits, so he didn't bother to dodge the draft like some of the guys he knew from his neighborhood. When he left for the war, his mother never shed a tear for him. He had been a great burden to her, another mouth to feed. He'd been sent to Vietnam a boy and returned a man.
Rock joined the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command and became a trained Scout Sniper. He had served the United States proudly until he was assigned to a POW (prisoner of war) rescue mission. Rock was to be the countersniper assigned to assist the Force Recon officers, a group of elite reconnaissance Marines who carried out deep reconnaissance operations.
When he and the other highly trained Marines arrived in the remote village in Vietnam, they had instructions and intelligence information necessary to find the American POWs. But all of those plans went out of the window when they arrived and found nothing but women and children in the camp. Some of the Recon Marines, believing that the women were hiding and covering up for the Vietnamese soldiers, began beating and torturing some of the women and children, cutting them with knives and pouring salt on their wounds, and removing fingernails and toenails. Of course, these methods didn't work. The intel was bad from the very beginning, and the Vietnamese civilians suffered enormously because of it.
Rock witnessed a Marine attempt to rape and sodomize a five-year-old Vietnamese girl. The white Marine had been behaving erratically throughout the entire mission. He would laugh at nothing in particular, and he liked to collect bones from dead bodies they'd pass in the jungle. The Marine grabbed the little girl, kicking and screaming, from her mother's arms. He used a hunting knife to cut away her clothes. Then he threw her tiny naked body down on the ground and dropped to his knees in front of her, as her mother let out bloodcurdling screams from behind.
“Shut the fuck up!” He cracked the mother in the face with the butt of his gun.
Some of the Marines watched, while others turned away.
Rock's heart throbbed against his chest bone as the Marine attempted to mount the girl. He quickly took action, by grabbing him by his neck and dragging him away from the little Vietnamese girl.
Some of the white Marines yelled at Rock.
“What the fuck you doing, Barton? You nigger!”
Rock ignored them. He took the Marine by the scruff of his neck and proceeded to bang his head face-first into a huge tree trunk, rendering him unconscious instantly. The Marine's face split open like a watermelon.
But Rock was possessed. He continued to bang the Marine's head on the tree. When he fell to the ground, he started to kick him all over his body.
Rock ended up beating his fellow Marine to death and shooting two others who tried to stop him. Rock went on the run in the Vietnamese jungle for two weeks after that, surviving on sheer instincts and highly classified countersniper training he'd received from the military.
When American soldiers finally found him, they treated him worse than some of the Vietnamese prisoners being held by the Americans. He was beaten and tortured. Rock was dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps and held in a military prison for a courtmartial.
However, it wasn't long before the CIA heard of his superior abilities to move alone in the jungles of Vietnam. And they offered Rock a deal he could not refuse. Rock became a covert operations officer for the CIA in lieu of being court-martialed and sent to prison for the murder of his fellow soldiers. Serving as a CIA covert ops officer was ultimately where Rock learned how to make himself invisible and to make people disappear. The government had trained him to be a first-class “cleaner.”
When Rock finally returned to the United States after the war, he chose to live a demure, circumspect life. He ended up in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where he rented a small apartment and began his very low-key life. Rock would leave his apartment once a day to purchase food and staples he needed for that day, frequenting the same store each day, a small bodega two blocks up from his apartment, which was where he'd first met Eric “Easy” Hardaway. Rock always felt that their meeting was predestined.
It was a hot summer night, and Rock had already turned in for the day. He'd gone on his morning store run and purchased some of his usual food items, like green tea, whole wheat bread, and skim milk. On that particular day, after the sun had gone down, Rock started feeling slightly ill. Rock was never one to get sick and could count on one hand the number of times he'd had so much as a common cold. But, that day, he had an incessant pounding in his head and a very high fever. He'd tossed and turned for hours before deciding he needed to get some pain relief.
When he got to the bodega, he noticed several guys hanging around talking and several skeletal-looking men and women passing the guys every couple of minutes. Rock wasn't stupid. It was clear to him that there was drug dealing going on. He wasn't judgmental about anyone's hustle. Some of the guys noticed Rock, and a few of them made comments.
“Look at old dude walking around like the grim fuckin' reaper,” one of the young guys commented about his all-black clothes and his size, garnering laughs from the others.
“I see that big-ass nigga e'ery day, and he always look scary as hell. That m'fucka taller than Shaq,” another one of the guys joked.
“I don't care how big that bitch-ass nigga is. His ass better be scared of this,” the first guy said, lifting his shirt to display a firearm in the front waistband of his pants.
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