King Maker: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 1 (37 page)

  
Plink. Plink. Plink.

  With its passing, the chamber resolved itself into the penthouse proper. Suspended on a web of smoke on the far side of the room was Night. His emaciated form held aloft on tendrils of mist. Reed-thin arms raised in objection. Open sores oozed, bloodshot eyes of turgid flesh, he stank of putrefaction. His ashy skin parched with a filigree of veiny cracks and pockmarked by abscesses.

  "It is finished." Night's eyebrows whitened. Wrinkles etched his face.

  "Was it worth it?" King asked.

  "I took what I had to. In this world, you only have yourself to depend on. You can't wait around for folks to give you what you want." A side of Night's face drooped, a palsy of withdrawal, his face appeared to melt. Perhaps the dragon's death severed some connection, the echo of an empowering presence. The vile odor of spoiled offal scourged King's eyes and nose and brought to mind images of maggot infested beef. Fungus crept along Night's skin, a slow parasitic digestion no longer kept in check, devoured the way rust consumes steel.

  "Dress it up any way you want. You were a bully and a punk who fed on your own."

  "We all live in service to something. Turn on the television and see all those commercials promising what should be ours. Taught to want and get from the time we learned to flip the remote." Night coughed. His wizened arm lifted in protest, but then lowered. Reflective eyes focused on King. "I started at the bottom of a crew, worked my way up, eventually set up my own stand and franchises. I am the American Dream. You can turn your back on me and forget I exist, but I'll feed in the shadows. I'll always get mine."

  The battered body gasped for breath, the coils of smoke slackening their grip on him. King finally answered him. "At what cost?"

  "My coach once talked about how he couldn't retire from coaching. About how it was all he knew what to do and couldn't leave it behind. Athletes. Coaches. Us. Anyone who is about the game. Once we're done, we die. Or we die and we're done."

  With a last gasp, Night's emaciated husk, fully desiccated, toppled from its fading perch and smashed into bits when he hit the ground.

  "Yeah," King said. "It's finished for now."

 
 

Despite the cold evening, the neighborhood was jumping. Police lights bathed the rows of condos, red light reflecting from all the windows. The police loaded some fool into the back of their squad car. Not just some fool, he was a frequent flyer of foolishness. The family was obviously new to the neighborhood and hadn't quite divined that this neighborhood wasn't quite the same and didn't play by the exact kind of ghetto nonsense that they were used to. The whole mess started a week earlier when the matriarch of the family, all of twenty-five, needed new plates for her car. Indiana license plates were more inexpensive thanks to the tax on the poor that the state called Hoosier Lotto, but they still cost more than the nothing she wanted to pay. So she removed the plates from Big Momma's car, taking the time to crawl into the car and help herself to any spare items, which amounted to spare change, a few CDs, a Bible, and a child car seat. She then proceeded to place the license plate in the back window of her own car. The main flaw in her plan was that her car was two parking spaces down from Big Momma. Big Momma, who also knew the price of a license plate, immediately recognized her plates and raised a ruckus. The lady denied it, of course, but King had Wayne back the Outreach Inc. van up to block the lady from simply taking off. They all stood guard until the police came to settle things.

  "Let this be a warning to all the drunk uncles trying to pop, lock it, and drop it at the next family reunion," Merle said.

  "Big Momma scraps like she has cerebral palsy," Wayne laughed to himself then winced as the movement tugged at the stitches in his shoulder. "I'm scared of her."

  "I'm done with women." Merle plopped on the sidewalk. "I'm not saying I'm ready to suck a dick or anything, I just don't want to be in a relationship."

  "You know what that heifer had the nerve to ask me?" Big Momma asked, more rhetorical than anything else, on the verge of a full-on rant.

  "What?" Lady G played straight-woman.

  "Would I take care of her kids while she was gone."

  "No, she didn't," she said with mock shock.

  "I hate her monkey ass."

  "I ain't mad at you." Lady G high-fived her then collapsed in a squeal of laughter.

  "No. I mean hate." Big Momma played to her audience. "Oh, Lord, I want to paint her picture on my windshield so it looks like I'm running her over all the time."

  "That's some hate," King interrupted. His T-shirt had the portrait of Malcolm X painted within the shape of the letter X.

  "I'll see you, girl." Big Momma stood up, preparing to head inside. Some unspoken message passed between her and Lady G, but King was not a member of the estrogen club, and thus couldn't divine its meaning.

  "You looking good." Lady G planted her comb in the half of his hair that remained unbraided. King plopped between her open legs. He brought his idletoo-long hands up on both of her calves, running them up and down. She tensed, a panicked freeze, then relaxed, radiant and poised.

  "I'll be back." Merle admired the gathering, but couldn't tarry. Lott and Rhianna would soon join them and the circle would be complete. He still had one last errand to attend to before then.

 

Dred nervously chewed on his tongue, the movement compounding his throat's swollen veins, thick as serpentine coils, and threatened to stop his breath. The power rippled through the knots of dead muscle. The pain might have killed another man, but his body had been trained by years of abuse. The drugs. The women. The violence. The hate. His blood was the venom of the streets, concentrated succor, and he savored its pulse coursing through him despite its burn. His chair rattled as he convulsed in it, his fingernails digging into the vinyl arm rests. His scream the sound of a soul raped, then cleaved from its body.

  Baylon rushed in to check on him, faithful to the end. The umbra tendrils knotted around Dred, their foul energy like black lightning. The unfocused slits of his eyes turned toward Baylon. Dred spat a tendril at him, an ebon tongue lodging on his mouth, the two locked in a dark kiss. Baylon back-pedaled, his body skittering from beneath him as the leeching strand smothered his inhuman cry. It scorched holes into his skin, searing it like tissue paper over a match. Like digging out chunks of his face with shards of glass, the pain was his desperate night of the soul. His muted screams reduced to a dull lowing, his large eyes embracing the inevitable. His flesh reduced to red chaos, puddles sopping under the tread of the wheelchair. Hate his only coping mechanism against the pain.

  Dred hyperventilated, choking on the stink of hot blood, trying to find meaning in a meaningless world arriving only at the pure white depths of his loathing. The plasma screens of his televisions flickering to life. With a wave of his hand, the cable spread of channels all shifted to the same image. King.

  Psychosis. Self-annihilating violence. Sociologists only guessed to make themselves feel better and justify their own useless existence. They didn't know what it took to survive on the streets, where the rules of the civilized world didn't apply. Where polite society had turned its back. They wouldn't keep him away, sealed away in this chamber, away from the game. His back spasmed. He knew when it all went wrong. He could hear the manic screams of people as he unremembered the pain of the bullet ripping through him. Devoured whole by the shadow and absolved from what he would have to do in the name of his holy cause. His left leg kicked out, wracked with exquisite pain. The metamorphosis happened quickly now, much like giving birth to himself. The throes of labor pain, with Baylon's vitality as a mystic Pitocin. He regretted that King couldn't be here to witness it, nor know the hand he played in his rebirth. A phoenix rising from the ashes of his own body.

  "I am…" His mouth opened and closed around the syllables letting the word break in the echoing emptiness, a stillborn child given voice. An awful laugh of a broken soul knitting itself back together. The laughter of the damned. He wiped flecks of Baylon's blood from him.

  He rose from his wheelchair and stood. Walking stiffly on undead legs, he shuffled to a shelf and the box that sat in the middle of it. Opening the box, he lifted the gold gun. His Caliburn.

  Soon it would be his time.

 

"None of it was real." Prez scratched at the frayed edges of the peeling wallpaper. Some pieces pulled free in strips, lifting patches of drywall with it. Still, he continued to channel his nervous energy focused on the last bits of paper. A distraction to break the tedium, he wanted to dig his fingers into something real. Most of the homes on the block stood abandoned, boarded-up windows proving little deterrent for a body looking to get out of the cold. Stacks of stuff waited to be hauled out, the previous owners prepared to take everything not nailed down. Clay tiles from the roof. Iron grates from vents. Pile of fixtures. Door knobs and jambs. Cabinet handles.

  He sat down on a couch, in direct eye line of a mirror. To wear his game face, as affectless as a Noh mask, all day every day. He washed it, shaved it, presented it in every way, treated it as his own until it became the only face he knew. He scraped behind his ear at an itch of the greasy build-up hidden there. He stank of unwashed armpits and a sweaty crotch.

  "Ain't no one up in here but niggas. Niggas can't get a job, got no place to be. You want to be black? You want to be African American?" He emphasized the "can" syllable of each word with a sarcastic bite. "You need to move your ass to the suburbs."

  He thought he knew what life was about. He thought he knew what he wanted. Gold-capped teeth. A fine whip with fresh rims and a bumping stereo. Gold chains were still chains. And a blast was still a good high. The idea of life and success putrefied in his mouth. His past a horror of broken promises, his present bleak, his future one of dying dreams, he threw a cabinet handle and shattered it. Putting flame to the blackened bulb, he sucked on the glass dick. Prez let the smoke issue from his mouth. The tendrils slowly swirled around his head.

  "Me? I don't want to feel nothing." Tears burned down his face. Angry that they'd come so easily, he lacked the will to wipe them away. "I don't want to feel nothing…"

 

Only history could tell you certain truths. Puddles of shadow darkened the streets from failed street lamps. The truth was people were slow to learn, if they ever truly did. A stiff-necked bunch, the lot of humanity, destined to repeat their follies, re-live the same hurts, and need the same healing.

  The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department announced that it would soon open a command center within the Phoenix Apartments. Captain Octavia Burke was put in charge over it. The recent spate of tragic deaths awoke the city to the forgotten blight within itself, where poverty and crime had been given free rein. There were talks of organizing crime patrols and offer job training and mentoring programs. Community leaders applauded themselves, joined in choruses of a community coming together and staying together.

  (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah's gait dipped with each step of his limp. The pain bothered him more when rain threatened. No clouds dotted the skies but he knew a storm was coming. The mathematics of circles. The sidewalk stopped abruptly giving way to a worn-down-to-the-dirt grass path which cut in front of the beginnings of a construction site.

  To little trumpeting, the mayor announced the ground-breaking on a new set of apartments. A high-rise with an emphasis on security. Camlann. The Camlann Apartments.

 

Though not a playwright himself, with no gift for words or even the subtleties of speech because those sprung from understanding the human condition, the human heart, and he'd stopped trying to be human long ago. But he understood the gift. How writers often stood outside of their own lives, watching people, the intricacies of their interactions, the interplay of bodies and language as they danced around certain truths. Observers in their own lives, unable or unwilling to live them, contenting themselves to scribble their accumulated elucidations in lieu of having to participate in the messy thing called life. And he pitied them.

  Merle saw things with the double vision and distance of a writer. He saw the here and now, but he also saw the story being played out and the characters, the roles, they played out. He knew his part in the greater scheme of things and he pitied himself.

  Merle withdrew a bud from the inner pocket of his coat and dug his finger into the earth. A squirrel ran up to him then stopped, scratching around for an acorn.

  "Sir Rupert. Where have you been? The days were dark and dangerous, not the time to be running around willy-nilly."

  The squirrel rested on its haunches, turning its head left and right on the look-out for predatory eyes.

  "We must take care of the old ones. Preserve the ways as best we can." Placing the bud within the hole, Merle gently folded the pile back over it. It was his seed to plant, but he hoped the next age treated Green better than this one had. He thought of King and his brethren with a pang of regret as he understood how things had to end.

  That was the way. The streets had their own legends, their own magic.