King Maker: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 1 (5 page)

  "The Night's too long. Night's daddy was a crackhead. Got hit in the head with a shovel."

  "Do what?"

  "He was sitting on a curb, people acting stupid. Crackhead just bopped him straight in the side of the old noggin." Merle tapped the side of his head, dislodging his aluminum cap. He sprayed food with each sloppy bite, losing almost as much as he ate while he spoke.

  "My daddy was crazy, so I hear," King said. He fought to be legally emancipated from his mother years ago. She had two little ones at home and he was old enough to live on his own so that she could concentrate on providing for the young ones. According to his grandma, she was never quite the same after his father's death. Whenever she spoke of him, it was with a mix of awe and sorrow, as if either she had been betrayed or her idea of him had been. At any rate, he had to get his social security benefits transferred into his name but to her address so that she could spend it. They'd make it without him. As would Nakia. More family he'd abandoned.

  "An OG OD'd on the streets. Brought down in a fight over a woman. He had to have her, though."

  "My pops wasn't no drug addict."

  "Never said he was. Heavy is the head… and all that." Merle wiped his hands in the grass. "Prisons and graveyards are full of fools who wore the crown."

  "Truth and all, I didn't know my father at all to speak of. I just sort of fill in the blanks here and there, the way I'd want them." King froze, not understanding why he gave up that bit of personal information at all much less to a stranger. A white stranger at that. Like he thought, maybe Merle had one of those faces. Before he could speak again, the homeless man spoke.

  "Can I tell you something?" Merle leaned in, still chewing on too big a bite of his burrito.

  "Sure."

  "Last night, I dreamt of the dragon."

  "You sound like that's supposed to mean something." King had an air of being trapped in himself, of not knowing who he was, that came off as rather petulant. "You act like you ain't right in the head and yet you seem so…"

  "Content. I am what I am. I know who I am. I accept who I am."

  King heard a bit too much bite in his tone. "What does that mean?"

  "You war with yourself. You're the 'should've' man. You–"

  "Should've finished high school. Should've gotten involved in something larger than myself. Should've let myself fall in love," King said.

  "Instead you hide, afraid of betrayal. A spectator in your own life."

  "Until lately. I don't know how to explain it."

  "You felt the call."

  "The call?"

  "To action." Merle thrust the remaining bread into the air, a makeshift sword jabbing at clouds. He turned the jousting loaf toward King and engaged him in a one-sided duel, waving the bread about in strokes and feints. "Feelings overtook you. Who you really are wants to take over."

  "And who am I?" King kept turning to face the loaf-wielding man. As much as instinct might have told him to, he couldn't write Merle off as either a bum or a lunatic. He had too much gravitas, too much presence, to be easily dismissed.

  "That is the question. I can't answer it for you. Some people are built to lead, some to follow. Which are you, lion or lamb?"

  King inspected the stretch of Breton Court like there were parts within the sphere of his influence and the hinterlands, those areas on the outskirts, out of his influence. Prez. Damn. What happened to that brother? Everyone seemed infected with the same sickness, on edge. King saw the fear, the frustration, the cauldron of terror and rage with life reduced to desperation and survival. So many stood by and did nothing; sick of gangs and violence, yet suffering in silence.

  "You get off on knowing the rule book without having to share anything."

  "Knowledge," Merle tapped his aluminum foil helmet with the loaf, then returned to feeding the birds and squirrels, "is power."

  "Power is power, too."

  "Ah, the first lesson in ruling. That wasn't so hard, now was it?"

  "What wasn't?"

  "Making a decision. Making the hard choices is a gift."

  "What do…" King didn't know why he sought Merle's advice, or approval, nor could he explain the strange sense of kinship between them. "What's my next step?"

  "Take hold of your destiny."

  "How do I do that?"

  "Either you seek it out or…" Merle stood up as if dismissed. "Here come your boys. Anyway, I have places to be and fey to annoy."

  "What?"

  "You're the right guy, my guy. If you were another guy, you'd be the wrong guy."

 

  Evenings were made to sit out and King relished the few quiet moments. He had grown up in the area though now he spent some time away, maybe to come into his own. His boys were still his boys. So they drank some, listened to the sounds of kids playing, the occasional car horns, and dogs barking from the fenced back patios of the rowhouses.

  "Ain't nothing changed," King said.

  "Look around you. Why would it change?" A hard-faced man, with a scar on the back of his neck, Wayne had the build of a defensive linesman, stocky and chiseled, with the swinging step of someone who knew how to use their size should the necessity warrant. Thus also explaining why the plastic chair wobbled every time he shifted his weight. A mane of long dreadlocks furled down to his shoulders. Wayne was King's case manager down at Outreach Inc., a ministry that worked with homeless and atrisk youth. He'd helped King with his emancipation and got his benefits straightened out. Even though Wayne was four years older, the span of attaining his college degree, he hung out with King now out of true friendship as much as anything else. King had a spark about him that drew folks to him.

  "You know what your problem is?" King asked.

  "What's that?"

  "You pessimistic. Now me, I'm a glass half full of Kool Aid sort of man."

  "Just something in the air." Wayne carried his survival instinct, too. The eyes in the back of his head that let him know when something was up. King respected and depended on it.

  "I know. I feel it, too. A vibe. Like a whole lot of anger bubbling out there waiting for an excuse to blow up."

  "Yeah, something like that," Wayne said.

  "Want another one?"

  "Nah, I'm good with this one. Don't need to be setting a bad example for you young 'uns."

  "Sure."

  "What about you?" King raised a beer to Lott.

  Lott bobbed his head to beats and rhymes only he heard, keeping his own counsel. He was a week past getting his hair tightened up and his large brown eyes drifted with the activity of the court. His FedEx uniform – a thick sweatshirt over blue slacks, his name badge, "Lott Carey" with a picture featuring his grill-revealing smile, wrapped around his arm – girded him like a suit of armor. Lott put on his pimproll strut for all the eyes to see as he moved toward an open seat, a puffed-up exaggerated gait with a cool blank stare, his face locked into a grimace of put-on hostility purposefully designed to make old ladies clutch their purses and white suburbanites cross the street if they were in his path. A row of faux gold caps grilled his teeth. He was a wrong time/wrong place sort, always getting caught up in situations he didn't start but felt compelled to finish, with jail being the typical finish line. These days he kept his dreams simple: dreaming of holding a job and breathing free air, not like some of the other talkers on the block.

  "You know I don't drink."

  "It's still polite to ask."

  "And where would we be without politeness?"

  King nodded then popped open the beer. There were too few evenings with anything approaching peace, so he opted to enjoy the time he had.

  It was a glass half full of Kool Aid evening.

 

A nest of fine braids lined Omarosa's head, not a hair out of place as if she had just stopped from the beauty salon. Hers was a cultivated beauty, but where would her kind be without beauty? With skin like heavily creamed coffee, almond eyes that missed nothing, and the high cheekbones with accompanying aquiline nose of a European aristocrat, her pointed ears were the only tell of her mixed fey heritage. The pair of handcuffs clicked in her hand as she spun one spindle through the rest of the cuff.

  Invisible to all, she strolled along the court sidewalks. Only three kinds of people generally remained invisible: fiends, homeless, and pros. Such a station in life supplied invisibility because as fixtures in the neighborhood, most folks averted their eyes from them either in sympathizing shame or due to the desire to not be approached by them. Folks tended to assume she was a pro, though few dared ask her for sex. She allowed them to carry on in their assumptions, for her kind also valued the power of illusion. After all, few suspected the need to be on guard against the sawed-off 12-gauge that rarely left her side.

  "The game begins again." She didn't turn her head to address him nor otherwise betray any surprise at his presence. Few managed to sneak up on her, with her battle-hardened senses keen as the edge of the blade strapped to her thigh. However, Merle had a way of appearing when least expected. "All the players are almost in place."

  "Indeed," he said. "They've woken the dragons."

 
 

Juneteenth Walker wanted more. Trapped in the corner of the fevered nightmare of his life, he suffered from the epiphany of a fuck-up's resignation: he was never going to rise higher. Baylon kept him on the crew out of what passed for goodwill, but Dred was the main man and if Dred got word of his latest fuck-up, he was done.

  The slow growth of keloided needle tracks trailed along his arm. Too many black moles dotted his skin. The spike rested in his vein though he'd already pushed the plunger. His head lolled back and the heroin rush took him to dark places. Images of a flesh-stripped baby sucking at the damp skin of the elongated tits of an emaciated old woman with too much paunch and lank hair danced in his mind's eye. The resounding closeness of the dark thundered in his ear.

  The picture of this scene froze like a bootleg DVD in need of cleaning before resolving into his present or at least not-too-distant past. Half-formed shadows entwined in the night. The dirty mattress stank of liquor and blood, the close squalor of rusted pipes and cracked plaster walls around him. A woman with a large nose and a numb smile gazed up at him in the approximation of a come-hither stare that at one time might have been sexy. Her body remembered her poise and flirting coyness despite her now-sagging skin and dusty complexion. Her toothless mouth wrapped around his engorged member, still mewling from his lap for a taster package. A transaction of flesh for a free dose. As if electric wires stabbed into his thigh, he convulsed, her filthy fingernails digging into him as she bared her gaping mouth full of his seed. Far from pleasing, the entire concerto of writhing flesh played out with the pleasure of him crawling along a hill of razor blades. Anything to divert his attention. To numb him.

  Junie tripped over a body in the debris-littered corridor. A series of doorless rooms lined the hallway. Alone with the ritual madness and his thoughts, a long drag from the cigarette helped him to ride down his high. It was almost time to get back on the clock and start grinding, if he still had a place on the crew. In a straight-up dope fiend move, after he screwed up the count, he blamed it on being jacked by a notorious street thief. He knew he had better keep hiding the truth because if Baylon knew, goodwill notwithstanding, they'd beat his ass before putting him out of his misery.

  Back in his spot, he set down the controller for his PlayStation and spat out the last of his sunflower seeds when Parker Griffin hit him up on his cell for them to do a run. For appearance's sake, he wanted to appear busy or, if nothing else, at least not at the immediate beck and call of Baylon as, after all, he was no man's errand boy. He told Parker to be at 30th and MLK and he'd pick him up in a half-hour. Nearly an hour later, practically punctual in his world, he saw the skinny man with a boy's face, with his eager eyes and teeth too large for his mouth. It was his hair, a Mohawk with the hair on either side of it braided into corn rows. Five-O would always be picking him up if he worked a corner.

  "'Sup, Junie," Parker said.

  Junie hated the nickname, but it wasn't as if he were in love with his given name, either. "'Sup, big man. You still got that hair."

  "What took you so long?" Parker changed topics. The last thing he wanted was to become one of those nondescript fools. He envisioned himself like Samson in the Bible; his strength, his image, was in his hair and he'd be damned if he'd cut it for a woman, much less a dude.

  "You interrupt a man while he's in mid-stroke, you should expect him to take a minute to get his rhythm back."

  "I heard that." Parker reached out to give him a pound.

  The easy acceptance of the lie pleased Junie. It meant that his rep was set. Truth be told, he already had five kids by five different baby mommas, none of whom he bothered to know. But he had rather informally taken Parker under his wing and enjoyed the way Parker clung to his words. Junie was overprotective of him to the point of being too quick to take knucklehead bullshit to the next level.

  For his part, Parker, though young, was anxious to prove himself both to Junie and to Baylon. It was just like Parker to admire a no-heart pretty boy with too much flash and too much to prove like Junie. He rolled with Parker's older brother – "Griff," as the right of the firstborn included the claim to his own name – and Parker worshiped both of them. It had been three years since Griff was killed.

  "Where we heading?" Junie asked.

  "Over to Breton Street. Night's boys playing our corners a little too close."