Love and Other Wounds (5 page)

“No hard feelings, Geat. But when you next see old Jackie, you tell him that I don't take too kindly to being banned, hear?”

“Now that's a message that you can deliver yourself, if that's what you want,” I told him, heading out the door. I was talking to a dead man who wasn't smart enough to know it yet—a man who'd try to send a message like that to old Jackie Blue. I wish they never named that boy Mad Dog.

A few weeks later I got a call from Ricky Beal, a fellow who cooks up Nazi dope down around Fair Grove. He told me that him and Bill Houser were planning up “a big ole swap.” I knew what he meant—they'd trade a couple of ounces of meth for a bale of Houser's weed, simple as can be. They did it every once in a while, and they'd done business enough that they mostly didn't even bother with me riding along.

“Well, I don't mind it,” I told him, “just so long as you know that I do all of Houser's watchdogging and that's not a
problem for you. Either way, no one's going to rip no one off on my watch.”

“Yeah, well, that's the thing here, Geat. I guess you ain't heard yet, but Houser done found himself a new watchdog, much as I hate to tell you. And seeing as how I don't know his new guy, I thought I better bring you along.”

Now that I thought about it, I hadn't heard from Houser in a few months. I hated to hear he'd found someone new, though—he was good for quite a bit of my green. It happened every once in a while, though, when someone thought they could save a little money by going outside my circle. Never bothered me none, as those folks usually ended up getting ripped off on the other guy's watch. One way or another.

“Geat? Geat, you there?”

“What? Oh, sure. Sure, I don't mind coming along. Say, what's the name of that new fellow Houser got?”

“Shit, man, it's Mad Dog McClure. See why I want a little muscle on my side?”

Bill Houser's place sat on a couple of acres just outside Busiek State Forest. Houser didn't grow his weed on his land. He grew it on the government's. More than that, the weed he grew he didn't sell here. He bought Mexican shit weed off the I-44 pipeline and sold that around here, and moved his bud north up the pipeline to Chicago where he could get real money for manicured smoke. The trade was some of his homegrown for some of Ricky Beal's Nazi dope.

Mad Dog was late—I knew he would be—and me and Ricky and Houser leaned against the house playing with the dogs. They'd each brought two men with them for doing the heavy lifting and for just a little more comfort. I turned down the beer Houser offered, but those boys had several.

“Now, Geat,” Houser said as he drew back the beer I'd waved off, “I hope that there's not any bad blood between us, what with me giving Mad Dog a day in court.”

“Variety is the spice of life,” I said. “No hard feelings at all.”

You could hear Mad Dog coming before you could see him. That kind of frog-throat heavy metal that he liked came roaring up the driveway, like he had some kind of devil choir announcing him. The car was one of those little Japanese things with a spoiler on it, red with black flames crawling up the hood. He parked it next to my old truck and got out with a pump shotgun in his hands and that hammer still hanging from his belt. He nodded and swung the shotgun up on his shoulders as he walked our way. I bet the others saw what he wanted them to see, the bad guy making his entrance to the movie. I saw the joy kidlike behind his eyes.

“Evening, boys.”

“I told you eight thirty,” Houser said.

“And I ain't but ten minutes late, so what?” Mad Dog gave Houser a glare. Houser might have asked what the point of a watchdog was if he wasn't there before the merchandise, or he might have said how I had been there almost an hour already. But all he did was look down and give that cup of his a little more spit. I pushed one of the dogs away from me and stood up.

“Hey there, Mad Dog. Good to see you.”

“Same, Geat.”

“Boys,” I said to the rest, “before this goes down, me and Mad Dog are going to step inside the house and go over a couple of ground rules.

“Ground rules?” Houser asked. “What all is that? I don't recall nothing about there needing to be ground rules.”

“And I don't remember you ever being around when a swap's
had two watchdogs,” I said. “It ain't the normal way, and I know an old hand like Mad Dog can see it clear enough.”

I took the pistol out of my waistband and tossed it in the gravel. Mad Dog took the hint and laid his shotgun up against the house as he followed me inside. I turned around once we were inside so that Mad Dog had to shut the door and lean against it to face me. Once we were inside, he gave me a smile.

“Man, this is a fucking rush. You've got the life, Geat, for real.”

“That I do.”

“You ain't really got any ground rules, right? I mean, look, Geat, if this is about that night in the bar, my buddy was being a jerk. I told him off. I'm awful sorry about the whole thing. Friends?”

And he held his hand out to me.

“I'm awful sorry, too,” I said. I kicked him in the chest. My boot hit him flush. He went back and took the door outside with him.

“Holy shit!” someone yelled as I came through the empty doorway. The dogs started up howling. Mad Dog looked up at the stars, struggling for breath. He fumbled his hammer out of his belt. I mashed his hand against the gravel. He screamed. I went down on his chest and pulled out my Crosswhite blade. I looked down at his face and there wasn't a Mad Dog there. Just Joe McClure. I put the blade in behind his collarbone and pushed down until you couldn't see the cross on the blade. I locked eyes with him. First there was fear and then there was pain and then there was knowing and then there was nothing.

I wiped the blade on his shirt as I stood.

“Boys, we've got a deal to do, then I got a piece of trash to dump out in the forest.”

Houser dropped his spit cup so the brown gunk splashed out. In the moonlight it looked a lot like Joe's blood.

“He killed Mad Dog. Geat killed Mad Dog McClure.”

That was what he said. And I knew that pretty soon that was what everyone would be saying. The power of that name would come to me, the way it does for a cannibal who eats his enemy's heart.

“Geat killed Mad Dog McClure.”

I am sorry that they named that boy Mad Dog. But I don't blame you if you don't believe me now.

We got greedy, every one of us. Greed's fine. Greed gets you up in the morning. But we got soft, too. That's how Birdie catches us slipping.

Sloppy. All the coke is laid out on the table. Sloppy. Kody's on watch with his gun on the other side of the room. Sloppy. I never got that dead bolt that Devin told me to get. It was just a matter of time.

It happens fast. One second we're talking shit and cutting the coke with vitamin B. The next the door explodes and the Port Side Massive comes through. Big bad Birdie leads the way with an AK pointed at my head. I don't recognize the rest, aside from Birdie's brother Little Bird, and I can't decipher their yells. The yardies talk in that Jamaican patois, thick syllables
that bounce off American ears. But anybody can translate a gun to the head. In the front room a couple of them toss the six keys of coke into duffel bags. They make me, Kody, Skinny, and Dap strip down butt-ass naked. They yank the gold right off our necks, even yank the fronts off Skinny's teeth. They herd us into the bathroom, into the clawfoot tub. I press up against the tiles so my crotch don't dangle against Skinny's fat ass in front of me.

“Move you backsides, Brooklyn boys,” Birdie says as he herds us into the tub, dropping enough of the accent so we can understand. “Don't need no cuss-cuss nor fuckery. Come an' get baptized, now.”

He pushes Skinny aside with the barrel of the gun to get in my face. His eyes are the color of old hard-boiled eggs. His dreads hang woolly and thick. Even in the stank-ass bathroom, his smell of ganja sweat and grease cuts through.

“Oi, it be Liver Johnson.” Birdie taps my skull with the barrel. “Big 'bout you, mon. Tell me, Mr. Liver—where I be finding you bloodclot friend Devin? I can't find no hide nor hair of the bumbaclot boy.”

The crack game in Brooklyn ran smooth through '92, at least compared to the craziness up north in Queens. Then the Jamaicans showed up last year. I'm talking real island boys, not the Fat Cat crew from Jamaica, Queens. The Jamaicans don't play nice. They drop bodies and rip off anything they can grab. Don Gorgon ran the Port Side Massive up until last week. Devin caught him slipping outside a curry-goat shack on Fulton. Gorgon had ripped off a safe house like this one near MDC Brooklyn, and Devin put a sunroof in his dome for his troubles. Back a week Birdie was just Gorgon's number one rudeboy. Now he's in charge. He ought to say thanks.

“I don't know where Devin's at,” I say, “and that's real.” It's
true, not that I'd say different if it weren't. “That shit's between him and you. You want to jack us, jack us, but I'm not snitching to you any more than I'm going to snitch to the cops.”

He splits a smile, but it doesn't touch those rotten eyes.

“If ya kyann catch Quaco, ya catch him shirt,” Birdie says, pouring the island sounds on thick. But I understand and my guts turn to water. I thought maybe this was just a scare tactic, herding us naked into the bathroom like this. But it's not.

“Nigga, what? What shirt?” Kody asks. I could tell him, but I'm too busy getting set to die. I'm not ready.

Birdie turns on the shower. We jump and bump each other in the ice-cold spray. I press against the tiles. Skinny's big ass shimmies. I don't want to look, but that's all I get in my field of vision, and I don't want to die with my eyes closed. It's Auntie Ruth who brings me back down from the hysteria. She's going to find out that I got put down in a safe house bathtub, bare-ass and dead in a pile of coke-slingers. Scandalous.

Kody turns around and it's like he wants to say something like I'm sorry or Make it stop, but he doesn't. Shit, I'm not mad at him for not covering the door. Not one of us had a gat bigger than a .32. What were we going do when five yardies with AKs bust through the door but die? Over Skinny's shoulder I see Birdie spit something to his brother, Little Bird. Birdie walks out of the room. His brother raises his machine pistol.

“Drop them bloodclots,” Birdie says.

Just before everything explodes, Skinny barks a laugh.

“Shit, little nigga, bring it.”

The world goes thundercloud.

“If you can't catch Quaco, you catch his shirt.” Devin says as he's opening the trunk. Six keys of pure base in a duffel bag waits for me. It's the last six before Devin goes underground.
With the Port Side Massive gunning hard for him, he knows his shelf life on the street is milk-short. “That's what those goat-eatin' motherfuckers say.”

“Quaco?” I ask. “Who names somebody Quaco?”

“I know I'm not hearing you talk that shit. Who named you Liver?”

“You did, motherfucker,” I say, and then we're laughing. They call me Liver because I'm high yellow as a motherfucker, with a white mom and all, so back in the day Devin said I looked jaundiced. A bunch of the kids on the block had to run to the dictionary before they laughed at that one.

“Let it slide,” he says. “Quaco ain't the point here.”

“All right, then. If you got a point, lay it out.”

“It means if you can't catch a slippery motherfucker, you catch what you can reach. Put a hurt on his homies, his pad, his family and shit. Don't matter if they did anything wrong or not. If you can't catch Quaco, you catch his shirt. You see what I'm saying?”

“You saying that you got beef with the Port Side, and you plan on getting real slippery. So if these dreadlock motherfuckers can't get at you, they're coming to get at me?”

“Liver, I ain't promising you they gonna come. I'm just saying, it's in the realm of possibilities. It's no secret that you and I put in work together. I ain't trying to fuck with you. If I knew these motherfuckers got so damn tribal, I might have thought twice before lighting up Don Gorgon. I'm telling everyone I know to watch out. Don't get a big head over it.”

He gave it to me straight up. I don't blame him. I'm a grown-ass man and I could have taken care of myself. But deep down I never thought the posse would come for me. Last week I thought I was going live forever. Now I'm counting seconds.

Skinny saves my life three times. The first time was when he opened his mouth just before the yardies light us up. Every single one of them starts the killing with him. When the first claps come, I just drop. Bullets puff plaster and tiles over my head, but none of them touch me. That's the second way Skinny saves my life. Motherfucker is so big that none of the yardies see that they don't hit me. The third way Skinny saves me—wait on it.

Skinny's head hits the wall while most of him falls on top of me. My breath goes out. More weight crashes on my legs. I smash my nose against the tub floor. It's gritty. No one's cleaned this tub in an age. The shooting stops for the time it takes me to take one gasp of air and then it starts again, bullets raking the pile. One shot, slowed from going through Skinny, clangs loud against the side of the tub so close I can smell it. Each second I think it's over, but nothing stops. There's smoke and blood and booms and stench and mist and white noise from the showerhead.

I'm not even grazed. The bodies on top of me shudder the last drops of life out of them. I wish those yardies turned the water warm. Not because I'm cold, I'm way past worrying about that, but because I can feel the difference between the cold water and the blood dripping hot off the corpses of my friends. A weight slams down, pressing my face harder against the floor of the tub. Dap fell out onto the floor when they turned him to a rag doll, and now they dump him back in. He empties like a tipped garbage pail.

I try to listen. These boys have done their dirt. Now all they have to do is pack up the coke and hit the road. I can play dead until they leave. Then I find Devin and we go hunting for the rest of our days. Show these yardies what a war is. Just as soon as they leave. Just as soon as—

The water rises. Some part of Kody blocks the drain. Shit's
been inching up and now it's starting to fill my nose. If I twist my head, then Skinny on top of me will shift and the yardies might see it and do some double-checking. My arm's extended over my head. I move it sloooow.

“What you mean I'm'a stay and watch them boys?” It sounds like Little Bird. “Bumbaclots going nowhere—dead don't walk.”

“Yeah, them boys is going to move.” That's older brother Birdie. “Them coming with us, once we fix them right. Got to get them ready for travel—for easy packing. The rest of us is goin' to make a run to get the tools.”

Water plugs my nostrils—it takes all I've got to stop from blowing out. I take little tastes of air with the high side of my mouth. I've got less than a minute before that's gone too.

“What tools?” Bird asks.

Kody's forearm blocks the drain. I get my hand under, so it's my palm blocking the drain. It might slurp and that'll get Birdie and Little Bird's attention. Or might not. I tense up and get ready to chance it.

“Cutlasses. Machetes. We going take these Brooklyn boys to pieces and leave Devin with a mystery, see? So you sit tight, little rudeboy, until we come back with the proper.”

The drain slurps, one quick burst. I piss one warm trickle. My breath comes back in short hard draws as I wait for Birdie to come poking. But there's nothing but the shower static.

I can't make out much in the front room. It sounds like it happens the way Birdie said. Him and the posse leave to get carving tools to chop up me and the boys like jerk chicken. I'm blind and half deaf at the bottom of the tub with no idea if Little Bird is out on the stoop or sitting on the shitter three feet away. But I do know they left him with something, which puts him up on me.

But now's better than never, and never is showing up when Birdie comes back with the machetes. You can't play dead through a dismemberment. My body's aching all over from ice water and dead weight all pressing on me. I pull in my arm, playing Twister with stiffs. My elbow pops—I wait for the bullets—the bullets don't come. I raise up from under Skinny, not looking at his face. His half-a-face. I break out to the surface. Pushing Skinny aside sets something loose. He barks a death rattle. For a second I think it's mine. I look around. The bathroom is empty. I live a few more minutes at least.

I'm standing in the spray, stepping out of the tub. Our clothes are gone. The yardies stole my drawers. The door is open. I can't see Little Bird. I'm looking for something to split his dome. Looking and seeing nothing. I don't have long. Birdie has to have his machetes stashed someplace. I don't think the yardies are at the hardware store shopping right now. I take a peek through the doorway. Little Bird's sitting in the same chair I was in thirty minutes ago with his back to me. He thinks any threat to him is coming through the door, not from the tub full of corpses. Maybe he's right. Back in the bathroom I can't find anything to kill him with. I could rip off the towel rack, but it's flimsy fake brass. There's one old toothbrush. It'd work to shove that through the eyeball straight into the brain, but that's crazy kung fu shit and I can't take that kind of chance. That leaves a bottle of shampoo and a dirty-ass towel. Even covered in the blood of my friends I can't think of anything murderous to do with a shampoo bottle, so that leaves the towel.

I soak the towel over Dap's body. I twist it tight into a rope and come creeping on Little Bird. My feet stick as I go through the kitchen. We kept it sloppy here. Real sloppy. But that's over now. I cross my arms, slip the towel over Little Bird's neck, and straighten my elbows like I'm ripping something apart. He
claws at it. He makes noises like a busted radiator. He kicks his life out onto the dirty linoleum.

His drawers got piss in them, so I wear his baggy jeans commando and slip on the fat flannel shirt. Baggy gear means everything fits everybody. I'm ready to make a break for it when I hear Birdie and his men coming back. Dance hall garbage from the car stereo gives them away. I think quick, stuff Little Bird's hat with newspaper like it's full of dreads. They left Little Bird holding a MAC-10. I check it. Locked and loaded. I step to the midnight air just as the yardies roll up. In the dark they just see the Rasta shape standing in the doorway, not my liver skin.

I light them up. Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. I don't run. In this part of Brooklyn, cops wouldn't check out a mushroom cloud. I come up slow, covering them—if one of them is playing dead, that'd be some funny shit. Pot smoke snakes out the bullet holes—the yardies went out so high they might not know they're dead yet. I jerk open the door. The dome light shines through a film of blood and brains onto three dead yardies. Three. No Birdie.

Well, fuck that shit, I think, I'll see that nigga another day, and I start to break out—and then stop.

If you can't catch Quaco, you catch his shirt. When they find the bodies of Kody, Dap, and Skinny back there in the tub, not cut up, and my body nowhere to be found, Birdie can do the math. He knows me. He'll figure me for a playacting motherfucker who rose from the dead to cap his brother.

I wanted to know who Quaco was, and now he's me. I'm him. And if Birdie can't catch me, he catch my shirt. Auntie Ruth, my cousin Kianna, friends from grade school I don't even remember. Birdie will kill them all now that I've smoked Little Bird.

I can't have it. Maybe Devin can live with his shit spilling all over the damn place, but not me. I'll chew on this MAC before I let that happen. And I realize that maybe that's my only choice. Leave myself just one more body in this big pile that's growing bigger by the minute. Better that than what happens if Birdie finds out I'm alive.

If they find the other three bodies. But if I make Skinny and the boys disappear the way Birdie wanted us to be gone, Birdie won't have a fucking clue what happened, and he sure won't figure I raised up from the dead. Let him put Little Bird on Devin. That's where it belongs in the first place. Make it look like they caught me, and they won't have to look to catch my shirt. If I do what I'm thinking I have to do, it means that I play dead for real. This life would be as over as if I'd caught one back in that bathroom. It means being a ghost. I already feel like one.