I leaned against the railing and showed him the bottom of each shoe.
“Turn.”
I slowly turned around twice while he made sure no paint or nastiness was anywhere on me. I felt like I was doing the Hokey Pokey.
He pointed the remote trunk opener at the car, clicked the button and said, “All right, get the sheet.”
Darnell calls the sheet his anticootie protector. Anytime me or any other hard leg is going to ride in the car I have to get it out of the trunk. He’ll spread and tuck it over the backseat and down into the place where you put your feet. The whole thing takes about five minutes ‘cause he checks and double-checks to make sure no part of his Rivy Dog is exposed. After Darnell finishes covering those seats the greatest forensic scientist from the Cold Cases Network wouldn’t be able to tell I’d ever been anywhere near the car.
Finally he nodded and I climbed in.
The first time he did this, about four or five years ago, I’d thought it was cool. I mean here I was a little kid and I was getting chauffeured from home to my chores in the backseat of a brand-new Riviera just like I was some kind of millionaire! It didn’t take long before I figured out that this was just another way that sour, jealous old men use to humiliate you when you’re young and virile.
One time I’d asked Darnell how come I had to ride in the back. He said, “Because you have the wrong anatomy to be sitting in the front seat of Darnell Dixon’s Rivy Dog of Love.”
I didn’t need any more details beyond that. Besides, if I was in the front seat I’d be that much closer to the lame, old-school R&B songs that Darnell always played, tired old folks like the Temptations, the Funkadelics, Marvin Gaye. That stuff that was so old and played out they didn’t even bother to make a video for it.
On the way back to the home I blocked Darnell’s music out of my mind and kept wondering why I was getting this sign dealing with Madagascar.
Maybe it was sent to show me that I should keep hope alive, that someday I’d leave Flint and head back to the Motherland.
Maybe it was sent because there was some fine Madagascar sister waiting to help me free Chauncey, be fruitful and multiply.
Maybe the Madagascarinians were in a desperate search for a young king who could give a great shave.
Maybe I’d better quit dreaming and get to thinking about that science fair project. I had to get approval for what I was going to do in less than a month.
Darnell interrupted my thinking. “We gotta roll over onto Fourth Street, I’ma need about three gallons. You’d best make good and sure them lids are sealed tight before you put the paint in the trunk.”
Fourth Street is where the Sarge stored the two billion gallons of paint she bought real cheap a long time ago.
And just like that the sign revealed itself! The science fair project was sitting in my wallet sandwiched between Chauncey and my library card and it was shaped just like Madagascar! Madagascar wasn’t what it was about, that was just a sign pointing me in the right direction!
What’d I tell you? Philosophical thinking had paid off again! Just that day in biology Mrs. Bohannon was talking about something that I could blow up into a project! I took out my planner and started making one of my Luther T. Farrell patented lists. This was one idea that wasn’t getting away.
Between school, homework, laundry, shopping, doing dishes, general watch duties, prepping and painting houses, hauling trash, running the clients to therapy, to classes, and to their doctors’ appointments, getting them up, giving them their a.m. meds and shaving them in the morning and bathing them and giving them their p.m. meds and putting them to bed at night, it took every second of the next two weeks to knock out most of the research for my science fair project. All that was left to do now was write it and throw it all together. I could tell when that was finished the three-peat was most likely in the bag.
The only reason I was saying “most likely” was Shayla Patrick, not only the daughter of Flint’s biggest undertaker, but also the curse, and the love, of my life.
Last year I had a close call with Shayla and the science fair and I wasn’t about to let that happen again. Last year’s fair had been full of surprises. When they made the announcements at the assembly the first had been that Bo Travis got third place. Bo is one of those super-quiet and laid-back brothers who never has nothing to say to no one. He works at Halo Burger after school and always wears this black pants and purple shirt uniform. He even wore it in his seventh-grade school pictures, he even wore it when he picked up his award. We all were surprised that he’d done so good. Usually you need some serious cash to put a top project together and Bo was always at his J.O.B. but always seriously broke. Broke with a capital “B.”
The second surprise last year was when Shayla got second place and I got first. Even though I’d doubted myself for a little bit after I’d seen her project I guess the judges knew what was what.
She went so deep into hate-eration that she waited three whole days before she got up the nerve to walk up in my face and say, “You know and I know who really should’ve won first place. I don’t know how you did it, but next year I refuse to be cheated out of my gold medal.”
Even though I’m in crazy love with the girl all I could say to her was “Is that right? Well, listen here, Morticia, why don’t you take some of that dripping bitterness and raging jealousy that are chewing on your heart and have your old man bury them with the next stiff that he gets.”
I don’t know why, but the only time my mind seems to work when I’m around her is when I’m dishing out disrespect. She showed her beautiful, perfect teeth, growled and stomped off.
If I was gonna win this year’s science fair I was gonna have to bring it strong. Shayla Patrick didn’t know it then, but her challenge from a year ago had inspired me to greatness and the project that I’d come up with was the bomb!
The next day I stopped by the Sarge’s after school. I have to drop by her place every day to get briefed on what was happening with inspections, complaints, visitations and other junk. As soon as I pulled into the driveway I knew something messed up was about to jump off. The Rivy Dog of Love was there and the anticootie sheet was spread and tucked across the backseat. To make things worse, the Happy Neighbor Group Home pickup truck had been pulled out of the garage and was parked next to the Riviera.
Aw, no!
That could only mean that Darnell Dixon had given his main flunky, Little Chicago, a ride over here. And that could only mean that they were about to go and evict someone. And that could only mean that I was going to be doing a cleanup and making a dump run. And that could only mean pain.
This is one of the things that I hate the most about working for the Sarge. There’s something that’s straight-up terrible about throwing people out of their homes. I mean these rental places may be the Sarge’s houses but they’re also someone else’s homes.
The begging and crying and wailing of freshly out-on-the-street people is always sad, and before you get used to it, it will cost you a bunch of sleep. What’s just about as bad, though, is having to haul away what these people leave behind. These things always remind me of what’s left over of a nightmare the next morning, all you’ve got is a bunch of scraps and flashes of memory that only give you a hint of how scared you’d been during the bad dream, and it’s even worse because they are only scraps and flashes, they let your imagination fill in the blank spaces with a truckload of made-up horror and sadness.
In a cleanup it seems to me that what’s left behind is what sticks with you longer than the evicted folks’ tears.
There’s no way to know what you’ll find but it’s never going to be something that’s gonna pop into your mind later and leave you smiling.
Just a couple of weeks ago I had to go on a dump run and took Sparky with me. Darnell and Little Chicago had already gotten rid of the people and stacked all their stuff on the curb. All me and Sparky had to do was load the garbage in the pickup and take it away. There was so much junk that
it looked like we’d have to make three trips to get rid of it all.
Sparky climbed into the bed of the pickup and said, “You hand the stuff up to me, I’ll load the truck.”
If he hadn’ta come along I’d be doing this all by myself so I didn’t see anything wrong with him automatically jumping up to do the easiest part of the work.
I started handing the cardboard boxes to Sparky. One of them seemed extra heavy. I hefted it onto my knee, then slid it onto the rear gate of the pickup. As soon as Sparky picked it up the bottom fell out.
Along with the bent forks and coverless books and ripped-in-half lottery tickets that spilled out was the biggest, baddest, ugliest, nastiest-looking rat that had ever walked the streets of Flint. It tumbled out of the box into the bed of the truck, landing with a smack that sounded like someone had dropped one of those great big Polish sausages on a tile floor.
The rat’s tail was as thick as my thumb and as long as my forearm. He looked like he had either been in a fight and got bit or had been chewing at a sore on his back. There was a quarter-size bright pink bare spot there that was soaking wet and oozing neon-green pus along its edges.
If the rat had wanted to kill me and Sparky we were there for the taking because all either one of us could do was hold our breath and stare at him with our mouths and eyes wide open.
The rat looked back at me with black, shiny, marble-sized eyes and shook himself like a wet dog. He jumped off the truck and strolled about two feet past me as calm as anything, then waddled up the front steps onto the porch and back into the house. He was being so cool that I was surprised he didn’t slam the door behind him after he got inside.
Sparky finally squealed and scrambled backward into the trash that was already in the truck. Then he jumped right out of the pickup’s bed onto the street.
I told him, “She must be crazy if she thinks I’m gonna load this mess up.”
Sparky was already inside the pickup’s cab with the door locked behind him.
By the time I got behind the wheel, he was cranking his window up. I locked my door and said, “I’ll tell you what, that’s it for me. She’s gotta get her exterminator out here before I pick up one more box or bag!”
I started the truck.
Sparky was shaking like a cold Chihuahua. He said, “I thought I was through. Man, that rat was diseased, did you see that thing on his back? Looked like he had lurvy or something.”
“Had what?”
“Lurvy, that disease sailors used to get if they didn’t have no vitamin C.”
“Whatever. But that’s one trash pile that won’t be seeing Luther T. Farrell until a professional exterminator can give me documented proof that he’s killed everything in it. And the Sarge doesn’t have all day to get it done, either, I’ma give her two hours or she’s gonna have to get someone else to haul that trash. I got other things I can be doing with my time.”
Sparky and I had a good old time laughing about the rat and telling each other how we were about to go off on the Sarge. But with every block that we got closer to her place, the laughs and the jokes got fewer and fewer.
By the time I pulled into the Sarge’s driveway the inside of the truck was dead quiet.
Sparky looked at me and said, “Well, let’s get this over with. I wonder what she’s gonna say?”
I didn’t have to wonder.
When we walked in the Sarge was just hanging up the phone.
She didn’t even look at me. She picked up a logbook, started writing in it and said, “I know you couldn’t’ve moved that rubbish that quickly. What’s up?”
As a great philosopher, whose name escapes me at the moment, once said, “Fools rush in where wise folks would never stick a toe.”
Sparky blurted out, “Mrs. Farrell, you won’t believe what happened! I picked up this big heavy box and a rat as big as a rottweiler came rolling out of it! Then he strolled up in the house like he owned the place! He had some kind of skin disease!”
She finally looked up. “And …”
Sparky said, “And? Well… and … and Luther said we wasn’t going back out there until you get all of them boxes and junk exterminated. And you gotta get it done quick, Luther says he’s only got two hours before he has to take care of some other business.”
That’s my dog.
I could tell the Sarge liked this. It’s not like she smiled or anything, but there was a certain, I don’t know, cheerfulness in her usual Billy Goat Gruff voice. She said, “Is that right?”
She tipped her head at me. “Listen. I don’t care if you pick up one of those boxes and Smokey the Bear comes strutting out of it.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s currently fourteen hundred thirty hours. When I drive by there at seventeen hundred hours for inspection I want to let you know that there are two, and only two, outcomes to this little drama that I’d find acceptable.
“The first: I go by there and see a nice clean curb in front of a nice clean house. That I’d find acceptable.”
Poor Sparky, he stood there listening and nodding like there really were going to be some choices given here. I took on the right pose for one of these lectures, I kept my eyes on my feet.
The Sarge said, “The second outcome that I can live with is that I drive by there and see that the trash is still on the curb. In that case the next thing I’d better see is signs that a violent confrontation has taken place. And there in the torn, bloodied grass I expect to find your fibula or one of your kidneys or some fragment of your skull covered with giant rat tooth marks, something that shows you put up a struggle of Biblical proportions before you were eaten. That, too, I’d find acceptable. Sad, but acceptable.”
The left eyebrow arched. “Need I say more?”
When we got outside Sparky said, “You do know you’re on your own, don’t you? I mean you do understand where I’m coming from and where I’m going, right? Peace out, baby.”
He started walking home.
Just like most times it was me against the world.
That’s why I was so unhappy to come up here today and see the Riviera with the anticootie sheet and the pickup truck.
I opened the door to the Sarge’s.
Darnell and Little Chicago, or as I call them behind their backs, Satan and Satan Lite, were just getting ready to leave.
Darnell told me, “Forty-three-oh-nine North Street. Give us about a half hour, that crackhead calls herself refusing to leave. It shouldn’t take too long to make her see the error of her ways.”
Little Chicago did his sick stupid laugh. He said, “Oh yeah, she’s gonna see it like she’s got fifty-fifty vision!” He’s the only person I know who really goes “Tee-hee” when he laughs.
As Darnell walked past I could see he’d put his 9-millimeter pistol in the back of his waistband.
Great.
Ever since that time I had what the Sarge called “an irrational, inappropriate episode of misplaced sensitivity” at one of Darnell’s evictions I’ve been excused from going to them. That was way back when I was a young pup and I cried and actually hit Darnell in the face with a box of Sugar Frosted Flakes when he slapped this six-year-old boy that he was evicting.
I was a kid back then and Darnell let me off on the temporary insanity defense.
He took me aside and told me, “You’re messing with my rep, but everyone’s entitled to one mistake. Slapping me with Tony the Tiger was yours. I don’t care who your momma is, don’t make another.”
After the Sarge gave me the 4-1-1 on what was going to happen today I went home to take care of my crew, then chilled for another hour just to make sure Darnell and Little Chicago’d had plenty of time to get these folks on North Street out.
As soon as I pulled up on North I knew I hadn’t waited long enough. There were two police cars at the curb and a tired, old, leaning-to-one-side, four-door hoopty sitting in the driveway of 4309. I parked behind the back cop car and got out.
The hoopty was running, coughing out thick clouds
of smoke and sounding as bad as a big old Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Both windows of the car’s back doors had been busted out and had been covered with cut-up black plastic garbage bags that were being kept up by duct tape. The rearview window, over the trunk, was busted out too. They must’ve run out of duct tape or bags, though, ‘cause it wasn’t covered. Inside the car I could see the back of someone’s head. He was sitting in the rear seat of the hoopty with his chin tucked down into his chest.
The woman who was getting evicted was standing on the porch yelling at two cops. There was a little six- or seven-year-old girl standing next to her. Half of the girl’s hair was done up in real neat cornrows with small blue ribbons on the end of each braid. The other half was standing straight up like it’d just been combed out. The woman’s right hand squeezed the little girl’s shoulder while her left hand pointed and stabbed at the air in front of the cops.
She told them, “How you gonna just stand there and let that fool stick a gun in the nose of a fourteen-year-old boy? I wanna press charges.”
The little girl was standing stiff as a statue, her eyes were clenched closed and both of her hands were balled up in fists covering her ears. Her mouth was wide open.
One of the cops said, “Look, Ms. Wilson, we checked, Mr. Dixon has a CCW permit and he said your son threatened him. Besides, the witness said Mr. Dixon never pulled his gun. There’s nothing we can do.”
She screamed, “If he didn’t pull the gun out how come my son’s nose is bleeding? How’d that happen? You think he bust his own nose up like that? How you gonna let a grown man pistol-whip a boy?”
The cop sighed. “Ma’am, I don’t have time for this. You’ve been legally evicted, and you’ve got to move on.”
The woman yelled, “How’s that legal? I know my rights, they didn’t give me no sixty days’ notice!”
The cop said, “Well, the eviction notice says you were served two months ago.”
“The notice is a lie. That crazy dog Darnell Dixon came by two days ago, on Sunday, and told me I had to get out!”
Bucking the Sarge Page 4