King Maker: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 1 (17 page)

  "You feelin' it?" Miss Jane asked, ever skeptical.

  "Mm-hmm," Loose Tooth mumbled.

  "I ain't feelin' shit. What about you?"

  "I'm feelin' somethin', but it ain't like it was yesterday."

  "Product been stepped on so many times, tryin' to make it last till that new package comes through," Miss Jane said.

  "Heard they was gonna re-up in the mornin'. Damn, look at Tae. He's gone f'real."

  "I swear that nigga could shoot water into his veins an' get high."

  Tavon heard them, but didn't care. He didn't want to even open his eyes, but he knew he'd have to eventually, or else Miss Jane might run off with the rest of the stash, convinced that he somehow had kept the good stuff for himself. Both Loose Tooth and Miss Jane had been in deep from when Tavon was a kid. Theirs was a makeshift DMZ. Their spot was on the corner, a bright lime-colored house from the Arts and Crafts era with brown doors and trim; clay-tiled roof, and a wrap-around porch made of stones. Probably a show home in its day, now a board-covered shadow of itself.

  One street over, things were downright civilized. A KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut ("Kentacohut" they called it) recently opened. Twenty-fourth and North Penn, on the edge of what some called Li'l Nam, that part of Indianapolis that no one liked to talk about. Almost two hundred properties owned by the same slumlord. Funny, Tavon thought, how one man had the power to run down a whole neighborhood. Rumor had it that the slumlord was negotiating with the city to sell off a few streets' worth of homes and move to Florida. Especially the homes along the main city thoroughfares, like Meridian, Pennsylvania, and Delaware Streets so that rush-hour commuters wouldn't have to automatically check to see if their doors were locked every time they drove past the houses.

  Tavon slipped his stash and works into his Crown Royal bag and stuffed it into a hole behind him, past the slats that kicked up a cloud of dust (hopefully not asbestos, he heard that shit was cancerous) every time he bumped against it. He could feel the toll of the hunger. Everything grew more difficult. Ideas. Words. Slower, fewer, simpler. A dope-fiend lucidity. He fell into a nod, not caring about the drool oozing out the side of his mouth.

  Tavon's eyes fluttered open, squinting in the sunlight, taking in the familiar surroundings. The dirty mattress cushioned the floor of his room. He kicked his soiled sheets from him in disgust. Not at his condition, but at the fact that since he had help getting to bed, his stash that he'd saved to get started this morning had probably already launched Miss Jane. Only half-awake, he rested his head between his knees, hunched over in the dance of the dry heaves. He hated the nausea, even more than the pounding of his head.

  The hunger called.

  A bottle of lotion wouldn't have helped the dryness of the cratered alligator skin of his needle-scarred hands. Even his scabs had scabs. He soldiered on, another gaunt, dark-skinned fiend in service to the hunger. The hunger that squirmed its way through his intestines pulled at him in a relentless assault. He shuffled with his hunger down to the front porch, sitting on the steps and tamping out a Kool cigarette. Blankets nailed over closets; kung fu posed Power Rangers stood guard over their clothes. The landlord's fix-it guy had patched drywall by nailing a door to the ceiling. Opaque Plexiglas windows partly blocked the wind and might've done a better job if they hadn't been only stapled over the open frame. People actually lived here only a few months ago, but even Section 8 housing said enough was enough as even government housing could only sink so low.

  "The hawk is out." Loose Tooth sauntered over toward him in an Izod T-shirt with holes in it.

  "You know that's right. Winter'll soon be here."

  "Why ain't you in school?" Loose Tooth asked, strictly to give him static.

  "Half-day. Teacher conference," Tavon joked without missing a beat. So black he was practically blue, with his long arms and bowed legs, he looked like an awkward praying mantis. He attended – well, attended was a strong word, but he made a pretense of going to – Crispus Attucks High School as a heldback senior. He couldn't even get a social promotion. The system simply waited for him to drop out. School meant nothing to him, his future even less. Playing at being "gangsta" until he started fiending his own product, he fell to the lure, the allure, of the streets. Now he was half a tout, a one-man walking billboard for new product.

  "Ain't this the third conference this week?" Loose Tooth joked. "You got another one o' those?"

  "Nah, it's my last one," Tavon said, guiltily tucking the rest of his pack deeper into his pocket. Give away one, might as well give away the whole pack. If Tavon had been holding some candy, he wouldn't have bothered with the lame lie. Loose Tooth – born Earl Anderson, one-time prince of the streets who called himself CashMoney – would've sniffed it out. Though he probably knew that Tavon had some more squares, he didn't press the matter. He was a one man 411, old for the streets – well, over forty anyway – and quick to remind anyone "look here youngblood, I'm the last of these cats out here."

  "Got a quarter?" Loose Tooth asked, obviously hoping to score a single cigarette down at the Korean's store.

  "Please. I'm out here hustlin' just like you." Tavon put his cigarette out in the crumbling cement.

  No one flinched at the reports of a few gunshots: too far away to be concerned about. Not as bad as New Year's Eve when that shit sounded like the 4th of July. The shots, however, drove a lightskinned and freckled young man down the street toward them. With a slight limp, his half-strut and Harlem Globetrotters gear was recognizable even without that pinched reserve the bow-tie-wearing set had.

  "Ah, hell," Loose Tooth whispered when he saw him.

  (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah. "Brothas."

  "What's up, Knowledge?" Tavon asked.

  "That's right, today's mathematics is knowledge. Let me break it down for you: know the ledge." Knowledge Allah was a fixture in the neighborhood even if no one knew much about him. When he first started coming around, all Loose Tooth offered was his theory that "Black folks always thinkin' they superheroes or somethin', needin' a secret identity."

  "Here we go. Why you even got to say 'boo' to him?" Loose Tooth asked.

  The problem with Knowledge Allah was that you had to know the code of his language before he made any sense. And it was too difficult to decipher codes while high, or looking to get high.

  "You don't know who you are," Knowledge Allah said. "Take on your true name. Arm. Leg. Leg. Arm. Head. You are the original man. You are gods. Yet you sit here, blind, deaf, and dumb to your potential."

  "I sit here wanting to get high," Loose Tooth growled.

  "They set snares that have been prepared for you. Snares meant to lead you from your path of righteousness. You've let them cave you."

  "They who?" Tavon asked.

  "Don't ask him questions," Loose Tooth chided. "If you ignore him, he'll bounce sooner."

  "Your so-called grafted government's behind it," Knowledge Allah continued undeterred. "The next phase is to destroy us. You think it stopped with Tuskegee? No, they just got slicker. We don't have poppy fields. We don't have planes. We don't have labs. They put chemicals in everything, destroying you cell by cell. Turning you."

  "Sounds like we don't have shit," Loose Tooth said, nudging Tavon. But Tavon listened intently, a little too polite for his own good. He enjoyed the way Knowledge Allah spoke. He loved the idea of big ideas, even ones that he didn't agree with or didn't get. There was something about the way Knowledge Allah appeared. Maybe it was a by-product of his high, but if he caught Knowledge Allah out the corner of his eye, he looked different.

  "Don't get caught in the game of the eighty-five It didn't stop with Tuskegee," Knowledge Allah said, either out of steam or wishing to move on to a more receptive congregation. "It's all about the third eye. Remember who you are. G is the seventh letter made."

  Before Knowledge Allah had strolled even partway down the block, the slow roll of the squad car – once a half-hour – paused their conversation. Timeout. The officers, that cracka devil and house nigga pair, engaged them in a mutual eye fuck, challenging their right to the corner. Their glare read contempt, but it, too, was part of the game.

  "What's all the drama about?" Loose Tooth asked.

  "Someone probably shot Trevant," Miss Jane said. Her breasts hung like floppy hound ears, the nipples poking through her grungy golf shirt. When times got hard, she was the neighborhood ho, but times were rarely that hard for her. She had a hunter's instinct and had been known to run game on folks. Only in her late twenties, practically fifty in street years, she was the picture of a haggard party girl, partied out. Rail thin, many wondered if she had the bug.

  "Who would waste a bullet on him?" Tavon asked.

  "Probably got shot up over selling burn bags. Everyone told him to quit sellin' that Arm & Hammer shit so often," Loose Tooth said.

  "Yeah, he'll be back on it in a few days." Miss Jane focused on Tavon. "Tae, lemme hold twenty for a minute."

  Tavon did the ghetto math. A minute in CP time was bad enough, but in fiend time, shit, that money was hitchhiking to Neverland. Besides, it was time to go. He could parlay aluminum cans into vials with the industry of a fiend. "No need. It's time to go to work."

  Negotiating the minefield of broken bottles, newspapers, cigarette butts, stray couch cushions, and burnt-bottomed bottle caps, Tavon and Loose Tooth stalked through the alleys that were the arteries of Li'l Nam. The hunger drove them. Tavon didn't even know he had a habit until the first day it wasn't around. Now all he had was the hustle, the part of the game that had its own adrenaline rush. Always thinking of the latest dope-fiend move and its accompanying childlike thrill; like when he was a kid and used to boost Star Wars figures from Toys "R" Us or smuggle comic books out of Lindner's Ice Cream Shop to read then sell.

  They scanned the streets for any house undergoing any kind of remodeling. Their hopes were dashed after their escapades on Talbot Street. Rumors of the city's plans to redevelop the area had already made it fashionable for young yuppie couples and homosexuals to buy up the old, stylized homes. Talbot was now a show street – a well-patrolled show street – but when it was first being gutted, fiends were all over the place. Contractors couldn't walk into a house for thirty seconds without all their tools being stripped from their trucks. Copper piping grew legs and walked off every night. The discriminating fiend, such as Tavon, even took off with antique fixtures.

  But niggas got too bold.

  The story went that some contractors spent the day putting up siding on a house. They came back the next day and the siding had been stripped off and by strange coincidence, the Jenkins' place a few blocks up had about a day's worth of new siding on their house. After that, lockdown: constant patrols and overnight guards.

  After a half-hour of scooping up aluminum cans, Tavon was the first to hear it. He caught Loose Tooth's attention and the two of them crept behind the bushes to get a better look at the scene. Dollar and his boys squared off against Miss Jane and her latest dupe.

  Tavon knew Dollar, from another life it seemed. They were childhood friends, having grown up in Section 8 housing back when the Phoenix was still called the Meadows, back when life was all potential. He lived two houses down from Tavon, but they might as well have shared a room for all the time they spent together. In another circumstance, Tavon might have admitted to loving him. Boys never said such things, but they fit, despite how most thought they shouldn't. They liked different teams, different television shows, different music. But they shared copies of
Player
magazine stolen from his dad's closet. They skipped classes together. They ran from the police, after hitting a passing squad car with rocks, together. They played roof tag, diving into snow banks during the thick of winter. Always together.

  Dollar gave himself his own nickname, reasoning that it was better to fashion your own legend than leave it to chance. Soft-spoken and calm, he turned cold and all the way hard, embracing the quiet unnerving certainty of the inevitable. He had an upper-management resume that anyone could admire: he monitored sales and mitigated product loss (no one messed up a count or snorted his product on his watch); he tabulated product (handled distribution); he invoiced shipping (got a package, broke it down, and re-upped); he arranged staff (set up lookouts, runners, touts); he organized and motivated staff (often by the barrel of a gun, but mostly by the implied threat of such); and he oversaw several branches (ran two corners – here and at Breton Court – and had his eye on a high rise). And he was a marketing genius. He was all about brand names, having successfully launched Widowmaker (it helped that it had been spiked and killed a few fiends the first day. Fiends flocked to it the next day, assuming that their dead friends simply couldn't handle their high); and all the fiends were a-buzz about his new product launch, Black Zombie (call the fiends what they were and they would still snatch it up). So excited, that it led one of the more ingenious fiends, namely Miss Jane (behind the body of her dupe) to sell burn bags with the Black Zombie skull and crossbones stamp.

  Tavon had seen this kind of Mexican stand-off before. Dollar – with his roughneck gait, all stiff-legged and locked jaw – waited wordlessly with his hard stare. A pantomime of threat, neither side could back down without losing face, though Miss Jane had a lot more to lose than face. She and her stick-figure physique had only daring for strength, her implied craziness returning his cold glare. She brazenly stood eye-to-eye, even leaning into Dollar's boy, Prez. A bold tactic for sure, but someone had to pay for this sojourn into Dollar's market.