CHAPTER NINE

 
 

No one knew who threw the first punch and for damn sure who fired the shots that dropped Alaina Walker. Truth be told, even when the video was shown and re-shown on the news later that evening, the mob scene in the park was little more than fifteen to twenty girls wilding, a sea of arms and blurred faces scrabbling in a cluster of aggression. Investigators determined the fight actually started at Northwest High School.

  "I need to go ahead and get my GED." Lady G swatted at one of the lazy bees who flitted after her can of soda. A thin trickle of sweat trailed down the side of her face. The heat of the day already fouled her mood and the incessant buzz only furthered her irritation. She tugged at her gloves.

  "What for?" Rhianna's small rasp of a voice scraped at her ears. A sweatband with a skull and crossbones insignia on it encircled Rhianna's head. A dozen jelly bracelets choked each wrist. It didn't matter that she never spoke of things on her mind. She wore them, or rather, they wore her. She shirked whenever men neared, moreso than usual. Chipped nail polish wasted along the fingertips of her ashy hands. Dark circles welled under her eyes.

  "I don't know. Maybe go to college."

  "Why? What you gone be? A toxicologist or something?"

  "Nah…" Her voice trailed, the tan brick walls of the school seeming suddenly formidable. "Just talking I guess."

  The park was next to the Jonathan Jennings Public School 109 elementary school, though that didn't stop graffiti artists from tagging the slide or tables with profanities and gang designations, marking their territory like so many dogs pissing over themselves. Nor did it stop folks from coming up here to get high. The pair, along with a few of their girls, sat along one of the two dilapidated picnic tables under the shelter. Rhianna wanted to get her head up a little since Prez hadn't spoken to her since the night at the bridge. In fact, she and Lady G hadn't said a word about it either. It was like if they never mentioned it, maybe it didn't happen. Sure, they'd been questioned by the police and released, but the evening blurred into a haze of half-remembered conversations. Still, the image of the black tarp spread over two distinct lumps of flesh that had once been Trevant haunted her. That and the sight of all the blood. There was no tarp large enough to cover all the blood.

  "Come on, now. Beyonce sang about doing for her man 'what Martin did for the people'," Lady G chirped to lighten the mood.

  "That song is an earworm. I'm tired of these fools who call themselves singers these days. You see Justin Wiggerlake's ass trying to dis Prince? Come on now." Rhianna scanned the front of Breton Court for any sign of Prez. Prez was alive enough, still selling for Dollar over here at Breton Court, not that he acknowledged them. He certainly wouldn't describe the ineffable dread he felt whenever he thought about being with the girls as fear, but he, too, kept a discreet distance from them.

  "You're still talking about my baby."

  "I'm just sayin'. You never saw Hall and Oates dissin' Earth, Wind, and Fire."

  "Come close so I can cut you." Lady G rolled up her sleeves, in feigned anger, unconscious of how conspicuous her gloves now seemed.

  "Shut up."

  "Someone hold my earrings." Lady G pantomimed removing her earrings and waited for Rhianna to give into her smile. "Some fools need to be cut."

 

In order to put on a pleasant face for rush-hour commuters, Breton Court had been freshly painted. The townhouses were two storey, two or three bedrooms depending on the layout. The end cap of the rows were one level, one bedroom. Its landscape was fairly well maintained, as an old Jamaican fatherand-son team tended the lawns every Saturday morning. Life percolated along at its usual rhythms. A Hispanic family, a grandmother with her two adult children and a few toddlers, chatted amiably in a doorway. A few children rode their bikes unsteadily along the drive. Some teenagers huddled under trees engaged in the play dance of hormone-fueled flirting and banter. Green's people loitered on porch steps or ducked between patio enclaves in order to conduct business.

  As one went deeper into the court, the pleasant façade broke down. A gradual erosion into dilapidation the further away it got from casual eyes. Cars jacked up, tires missing, windshields cracked if not entirely knocked out, glass shards still pooled beneath them. The townhouse window shutters shattered or dangled at odd angles. Chipped paint and rotted wood made up many patios. A couple of end condos had the back patios missing entirely. The siding on the end townhouses missed a few slats. A patch ran perpendicular to the rest and still revealed wood rafters of roof. The disrepair from storm damage when a tornado touched down a few years back. This was where King lived. He removed the 'For Sale' sign from his front window.

  King couldn't pinpoint when he'd developed spiritual eyes – soft eyes some folks would say – able to take in everything, the full picture, and even feel it on some level. He was connected to the court and its people. Up until then, all he'd wanted was to keep his head down, mind his own, and muddle through. No, that was a lie. In his heart, his life had always been one of quiet discipline, despite his circumstances. Reading. Meditating. Working out. Always in a state of preparing for something. Maybe he sensed something was coming. It had to be more than simply knowing that he was meant for something, a purpose, because who didn't have their childhood daydreams fueled by a belief that they were destined for greatness? King sat on the porch of his condo, whiling away most of his days peoplewatching. Every time he wandered toward the front of the court, Green's crew declared a time-out. Lingering at the front of the court, he had an unobstructed view of the park.

  School dismissed barely twenty minutes earlier and those who walked home trickled into the park. A lot had changed at Northwest High School even in the few years since King attended there. Back in his day, before every major holiday break – Christmas, Spring Break, even summer vacation – the school collapsed in a cauldron of racial tension. Too often, the police helicopter circled the school as mini-riots spread throughout the campus, the slightest spark – a jostle in the lunch line, the wrong color boy rebuffed by the wrong color girl – provided all the excuse needed to pit black against white. Now, with the major Hispanic influx, the game had done changed for real.

 

A white Toyota Corolla, a decade old with a rusting bumper, screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, drawing everyone's attention as a half-dozen girls tumbled out. Alaina Walker just got out of juvey and was not allowed to associate with her gang sisters. The crossroads moment of her life was between a boring-ass life with no friends or risking her probation by standing tall with her girls. Some folks couldn't help but gravitate to chaos. If chaos was all they knew, chaos was their comfort. Chaos was safe. Alaina marched her crew into the face of Lady G. The two simply hated each other and neither, if pressed, could tell anyone why. It was as if the air between them poisoned with a pheromonal hatred whenever they neared each other.

  "Perhaps we should, as a community, just put an embargo on bad weaves," Lady G said.

  "What are you doing here? Trying to fit in?" Alaina tossed her hair back from her neck, revealing a tattoo that read "Numba 1 Dick Sucka". Her doorknocker ear rings and gold bracelets combined for a symphony of jangles whenever she moved. Most days, Alaina was all right. East side fools tripped so easily when they thought their man was being stolen out from under them. She had two brothers and one on the way, but she was the oldest. A man, especially one with long money, represented the hope of stability and a way out. Even Baylon. That was Alaina's way. Being too desperate and short-sighted to get out was a contagion which led her to choose bad men to cling to. Lady G had seen her too often around the way with too many bruises for the occasional scuffle. But that, too, was Alaina's game and she played it like the soldier she was.

  "Pissing off mommy and daddy. You should know about that," Lady G said.

  "You want to get down? We can get down."

  "I'm telling you, she's Baylon's girl," a girl stagewhispered to Alaina.

  "I. Am. Not." Lady G bristled, rolling her eyes at the sudden respect by proxy she was given. She could fight her own battles and didn't need the shadow of Baylon as a cloak of protection. She never trusted the chivalry of men.

  A second car pulled up and that's when things truly went to hell. Percy jumped out of the notquite-stopped car. Standing just over six feet, a buck eighty and change, he could have been a running back on Northwest's sad-ass JV team. A soft-spoken boy who carried himself like he was afraid he might accidentally break those around him, he, Rhianna, and Alaina stayed over at the Phoenix. Alaina's mother had slammed the car into park and squeezed her six month pregnant self out of the driver's seat and waddled quickly into the fray.

  "You girls don't need to do this." A sweet, a pure fool, Percy called himself intervening, trying to calm the situation. He had a way about him. Pain didn't become a part of him, wasn't something he marinated in or dined upon like so many others. Like air, he took it in and let it out. Not that he could express such lofty notions himself. Even now, he realized the escalation was a simple misunderstanding, but he lacked the words to communicate it to any of the girls. His hope was that a mother could quell the situation. Poor deluded fool. As if adding maternal estrogen into the mix had any hope of doing anything except fan the flames.

  "You need to mind your own," Lady G said.

  "Stay the fuck away from him," Alaina reared, rarely letting the opportunity to spray her particular brand of venom pass.

  "No one gets to tell me who I can and can't be friends with." Lady G was pissed at Alaina getting loud. She didn't even like Baylon, but the effrontery of being checked by this heifer, well, pride was pride.

  "You spread your legs for any trick who'll buy you a Happy Meal."

  "Don't hate cause you don't know how to keep a man," Rhianna chimed in. Most people dropped their guard around her. She had an angel's face, soft and round, her toffee-colored complexion seemed darker against her white teeth and gray eyes. With her small frame, no one expected her to be able to scrap like she did. But the girls knew. Lady G knew. And Alaina for damn sure knew.

  "You know what? You a nigga and I don't mean that in no nice way!" Despite the three inches Alaina had on her, Lady G neither cut her eyes away nor stepped back. Neither girl was about to be punked, especially not in front of their people. Not to mention that cell phone cameras were already being waved about with nosey folks ready to parade their shit all over YouTube. "He's from our neighborhood. People like you shot and killed my cousin (rest in peace)."

  "Fuck you and your neighborhood." Lady G put her hands on her hips in a now what? pose.

  Sometimes when confronted with situations one couldn't control, instinct dictated either of two responses: fight or flight. The crowd surged forward as Lady G and Rhianna got rushed. Alaina dropped her head and charged Lady G in a tackle. Lady G let her body go slack to take the hit but control the fall to the ground. Her legs sailed over the girl's shoulder. Alaina squatted over her belly, throwing punches into her. Lady G could handle Alaina. A fight wasn't no thing – the cost of doing business out here. Some you won, some you lost; it was about how you carried it afterward and Lady G could carry this and its attendant scars. No matter which way it turned out.

  The flutter of panic which tripped her street antennae was the chaos. The fight had degenerated into a mob. Folks were straight up wilding, fighting just to be fighting. She took a kick to the ribs from a faceless body – barely felt beneath her layers of clothes – her focus on Alaina. The fight had become a stalemate. Without room to maneuver, the two wrestled about essentially entangling each other's arms and interlocking legs so that neither could get in a clean blow. An unspoken message between them as the fight was no longer about them. As they strained against one another, each took a second to do a glancing assessment at the scene about them. The vibe was ugly. They flew under the radar of the crowd, largely unnoticed.

 

• • •

 

Neither claimed a set – the investigating detectives would later breathe a quiet sigh of relief over that. The last thing they, the neighborhood, or the school needed was escalating gang retaliation. A crowd of looky-loos gathered around, cell phones out to capture as much as they could.

 

Folks were their own worst enemy, getting caught up in their own foolishness. "You can't lose if you don't play," King's mother used to say. King scampered toward the melee. Fights happened. The way King saw them, they were healthy. So much stuff kept going down, poor folks struggling to get by, frustrated, pissed off, they occasionally needed to vent some of that hostility off or else they'd just selfdestruct. The girls wrestled about, caught up in their anger and self-hatred. A slap for the parents who weren't there for her. A punch for the system of poverty that enslaved them. A kick for the teachers who didn't give two fucks for her. An elbow to the gut for her even being in this place. A rake across the face for the police baton across her back. Fights were neighborhood sport as long as you weren't caught up in them and as long as folks remembered to use their fists. Folks were too quick to settle things with guns, escalating things to levels past what they needed.

  But King didn't like the… energy… of this brouhaha. There was something in the air, an undercurrent of violence and hate. It looked like a couple ladies beefing, probably over some man, fueled by the need to show out for their girls. But something else was at play. The ground too warm. As if the earth itself spread into the crowd, a cloud of methane waiting for something to spark it. One looked like she had some Mexican blood in her. The other… King's heart tugged at him. The girl, medium-skinned and serious-faced, drew him in, filling his spaces, voids he wasn't aware he had. Not wanting any harm to come to her, he found himself moving toward her. His grim strides turned into a jog.

 

A strong set of hands grabbed Lady G by the shoulders and lifted her up, freeing her from the entanglement of Alaina. With regained leverage, Alaina unleashed a flurry of punches and kicks. Lady G, prepared to defend against them, clawed and kicked in her direction. The man who held her spun her away from Alaina's assault and took the blows himself as he backed away. Bodies jostled against them, but they seemed to bounce off the man. He put himself between her and them, unasked. Then the shots rang out. He wrapped his thick arms around her, his hard muscles cocooning her as he scooped her along.

  "You OK?" he asked, his voice breathy, not from the exertion but from speaking in low, controlled tones as if crazy shit wasn't jumping off all around him.

  "Put me down and mind your own. I got this," Lady G said.

  "I know you do. I'm worried about them if I let you loose."

  The crowd moved like a tangled swarm of cicadas, limbs intertwined and flailing about trying to gain leverage or hold their ground. Girls pulled at each other's tops and hair extensions. Despite the screams and shouts reaching a cacophonous pitch, they couldn't drown out the report of shots ringing out.

 

The fight degenerated into a storm of scratching and clawing and folks wilding out on folks just for the sake of doing so. Part of her thrilled at this. It was exciting, sexy, and dangerous. And made her feel alive. If only for a few moments, she felt.

  Jockeying for position. A hardness in her eyes, she'd quit caring. She held onto the emptiness she always carried inside her. The crowd darted toward her, spilling into the playground, kicking up wood chips in their wake. The mood of the crowd turned uglier. The instant chaos.

  No one needed to yell "gun!" The reports scattered the crowd and the people charged from every direction.

  Rhianna found herself separated from her girl. The melee was like a riptide, pulling folks caught in the undertow of bodies away from the action. If Rhianna stopped moving, she might have been trampled.

  His head lowered, hands raised above it as if he were shielding himself, Percy waded through the bodies. Without trying, he pushed people aside. Heedless of his own well-being, all he knew was that her bloodless face was etched in pain. Despite no foundation, no lip gloss, no nail polish, no blush, no eyeliner, she was as beautiful to him as ever. He was embarrassed to stare at her for too long.

  He stood there, not touching her. Not crowding her in any way. But he remained between her and the danger. He took any blows purposeful or accidental without so much as a wince.

 

Two bodies were left in the wake of the gun shots. Alaina, one eye a pocket of darkness with much of the back of her head missing; her mother shot in the belly. The news would go on to speak of the violence, the irony of Alaina's mother giving birth to one child as she lost another.

  The cops put a knee into Percy's back, dropping him to the ground. Rhianna screamed at them to let him go. Blows rained down on him. Bloodied, but without complaint, he laid on the ground.

  "What's the problem here?" Detective Burke said.

  "Just securing the scene."

  "He's a suspect."

  "He was threatening the girl."

  "No he wasn't. He was looking out for me."

  "That true, son?" Detective Burke asked.

  "I'd never hurt Rhianna."

  "Let him go." Detective Burke's eyes softened. "But we do need to get control of the situation and secure this scene."

  "Yes ma'am."

  "And get an ambo up here." Angry and controlled.

  Another in a trail of bodies leading back to the Phoenix Apartments, it was like a poisoning of the souls emanating from there. A tension settled on the west side of town, an ugly, frenzied spirit of darkness threatening to smother them.