Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  I breathe.

  I fall ‘sleep looking at it.

  At school Mister Wade tells me I won’t see Miss Orozco no more.

  I feel like somebody bust a cap in my chest. I ask how come.

  He say somebody shot her in the parking lot after school yesterday.

  He say they found her car out by the reds. He say it was too nice a car to drive around Cabrini and she ought to have knowed better.

  I get up and go. Mister Wade tell me to come back, but he don’t do nothing. Like always.

  I go out to the parking lot. I see some yellow tape, but it rained sometime last night and they ain’t no blood. They ain’t nothing left of Miss Orozco. It like I dreamed her. I feel worse than when Lateesa died.

  I stare at her picture. I want to believe it could be like that. I got to believe it.

  But she say the picture got to come from my mind. So I leave her picture layin’ in the parking lot. The water makes it gray.

  I go home and I wait. I breathe like she taught me, till the hurt in my chest and in my neck hurt less.

  I wait in the Killing Field between the reds and the whites, where the crack heads go and the po-pos won’t ‘cause they get shot at from the windows. Them windows is like hundreds of eyes, and the red and white buildings be like giants looking down on you. I wait by the wet mattresses and the busted stones and the bottles and the pipes and the crinklin’ chip bags and the yellow grass that ain’t never been green.

  I stare at the ground while I wait. It’s wet from the rain. Rain s’posed to make things grow. They ain’t no reason it shouldn’t be green. They ain’t no reason they can’t be flowers.

  Yes they is. The poison. The poison in the dirt from the blood and the rock and the puke and the dog shit and the people shit and the glass, which is the only green they is.

  I think about the grass bein’ green. I breathe.

  From where I sit, it turns green, like it always should’ve been.

  The green spreads out across the whole lot. The grass drinks up the rain and spits out the poison into the street where it belong. It grows up my ankles, so thick you can’t see the glass and the garbage no more. There are pink and yellow flowers like the ones in my picture.

  I get up. I know what I can do now. I got conviction.

  I go to the liquor store.

  * * * *

  “Know what I’m sayin? This is how we do, folk. All day every day, nigga. Right-right. LK Killa! ‘Ay nigga! Who this ‘lil nigga? Who you steppin’ to, nigga? What set? What set? Man chill BillDawg, s’that trick nigga Punkinhead. Whatchoo lookin’ at, Punkinhead? Ugly ass bitch! God-damn you ugly! Go on in nigga, get yo grammaw’s diapers.”

  They laugh and jump. They pound they fists and twist they fingers and throw signs.

  The pictures are in my mind. I breathe, and I think about the field, how I made the picture real.

  They stand there lookin’ at me. They stand in front of the wall.

  They tags is all on the wall like dog piss. They stars and pitchforks and sixes. The upside down crowns, dissin’ the LK’s who don’t even come around Cabrini. They wearin’ they blue and silver, they Georgetown gear and they nice big coats and they jumps, all bought with dope. They saggin’ and I can see they straps. They like the minutemen on the ave. Grinnin, laughin, like they own me. Like that night with Lateesa.

  But I ain’t afraid, ‘cause this ain’t the picture in my mind.

  I start with Caveman, ‘cause he the biggest. I scratch him out like that smile on the sun. I color over him. I use red. They hate red. They jump you, just for wearin’ it. Red for Vice Lords, red for Kings. But Caveman goes all red. I use his blood to color him with, and the pencil’s in my mind. To get at the color, I open him up right in the middle and dip my mind in his chest. He screams, but it sound like he underwater, the blood bubbling up in his mouth, runnin’ out his eyes, over his face, all down his expensive gear.

  Caveman’s big. I need more red for the others. Most of his is all over the wall and the street. I pull Mike-Mike’s skin and clothes off him like a glove. He falls down screaming, painting red wherever he rolls.

  This all goes down as fast as I can think it.

  TreySix and BillDawg are still laughing when Mike-Mike rolls over their kicks, paintin’ em. They kill you for that, but killin’ Mike-Mike would be the best thing they could do for him now. He wanna die. He cryin’ like a bitch to die.

  “Whatthefuck, Dawg?” TreySix say.

  I don’t want him to die yet.

  BillDawg gives me an idea. He takes out his strap, a big silver one, shinin’ like ice cream money from his belt. He don’t know it’s me he needs to shoot. He looks stupid, looks up and down the ave, tryin’ to figure out what poppin.’

  I think about him eatin’ his own gat, and just like that he does it. I think about him painting TreySix and he does. He blows red from his dome all over TreySix.

  TreySix takes out his gat.

  They found Miss Orozco by the reds, the Extension building of the projects where TreySix and his clique slang. I don’t know if it was him, but I bet it was. I want it to be. I take his gat away so fast and so hard his whole arm comes off with it and flies off down the street.

  He falls on his knees like Lateesa, the blood pourin’ out his shoulder.

  He looks at me, and for the first time that loud mouth nigga ain’t got shit to say.

  I know how to do this now. It’s easier than breathing. All it takes is conviction. I like it. I put up my hand like they do on Star Wars, and TreySix floats off the ground, the blood slappin’ on the curb sounds like when the pipe bust under the sink at Grammaw’s.

  Believe your feet touch the ground with every step, Miss Orozco said. But I believe TreySix’s don’t, so they don’t.

  I do like they do in them movies. TreySix hits the wall hard. I bring him back, and I push him to the wall again. Again. I smash him against his stupid GD sign, in the middle of the stupid star and the pitchforks and all the shit they tag on the walls of everything they see. Their stupid ass cartoon drawings of big tittied g-queens with fat onions that look like a baby drawed ‘em. I’m a better draw-er than any of ‘em. I spread my fingers and turn the star into a red sun, and parts of TreySix come apart and out like a map of the planets.

  The man at the liquor store looks out the window. His eyes is all white. He on the phone.

  I let what’s left of TreySix slide and drip down the wall. I go home to Grammaw’s. I hear the sirens, and a ghetto bird goes across the sky. The light shines down on the liquor store and the picture I made there.

  “You get my smokes?”

  I go to the TV.

  “You know that mo’fuckin’ thang’s broke, you dumb shit,” she say.

  But I turn it on, and it does work. Because I want it to.

  They show the liquor store on the news. They’s lots of yellow tape and flashin’ lights. The man on the news talks a lot but don’t say nothin’ cause he don’t know what happened. The man at the counter din’t say shit. I know he din’t, ‘cause wouldn’t nobody believe. The writing on the screen say ‘Gang Violence At Cabrini-Green.’

  I don’t like that. I ain’t in no gang.

  Then I think about Miss Orozco’s picture. All the GD’s under the red bricks with the grass over ‘em. That’s what I want to happen.

  That’s the goal I visualize.

  * * * *

  I don’t go to school no more. I walk the projects all day and night. I go to the reds first. On the left of the building by the street is where they slang weed. I go there night after night and the popo’s come night after night with they yellow tape to clean up the mess. Pretty soon they ain’t enough GD’s in the reds to slang weed no more.

  Then I go to the front gate. The GD’s are scared now, but they don’t know what to be scared of. They smoke water and they carry shotties and zoo-zoos, street sweepers and Tec-9’s out in the open like soldiers.

  “Whatchoo want, nigga?”

 
“Rock,” I say.

  “Who know this nigga?”

  “That Punkinhead. He live with his grammaw up in the whites.

  He ain’t no crack head.”

  “The fuck you want, son?”

  “Abassi.”

  “The fuck you say?”

  “My name Abassi.”

  They don’t want me to go in. They shout and they holler, but I take the iron gate off and I go in anyway. When the elevator opens the one inside starts shooting soon as he peeps all the red. I make all the bullets stop in the air and go back into the end of his Tec. It blows his hands right off.

  I ride the elevator up to the fourth floor where the crack is. I pull the drippy ceiling down on the crack heads and I push the GD’s through the walls and through the floors like nails. When I’m done there I go up to the ninth and I get rid of the heron and all the slangers and bangers and hangers there too. I send ‘em through the bars the white folks put over the balconies to stop us from throwin’ each other over, and they drop out in little pieces on the other side.

  They ain’t no livin’ GD’s in the reds when I finally leave.

  I go to Miss Orozco’s field and I sit on an old chair with the pink flowers and watch the po-pos across the way. They all in blue and silver like the minutemen too. They stand around a lot. More come and go. They lights bounce between the buildings and the hundreds of eyes look scared. Others come and clean up the pictures I made. It takes till morning.

  I go upstairs and watch TV.

  On the news it say Gang Massacre At Cabrini-Green.

  “Fuckin’ animals,” Grammaw say. “Somebody ought to kill ‘em all.”

  “Maybe somebody is,” I say.

  “Shut the fuck up, boy, and go buy me my smokes.”

  I go, but not to the store. I walk around all day. I walk away from the projects. I don’t think about going back. Pretty soon the houses get nicer. It’s crazy how short a walk it is. It’s crazier that I never been here. Everything is so clean, and each house got its own patch of green grass and flowers. I would eat off the streets here before I’d eat off Grammaw’s kitchen table. White faces turn to look at me.

  Pretty soon the 5-0 roll up. Two big fat one-timers get out, so big the car sits up when they get out.

  “You lost?” one of them say, steppin’ up to me like he own me.

  “Naw.”

  Then he say what he mean.

  “You’re lost, boy.”

  “Get in the car,” his partner say. “We’ll take you home.”

  But that ain’t my home no more.

  “Come on,” he say.

  I keep on walking.

  “Hey motherfucker,” say the first cop. “Get your black ass back here.”

  I keep walking.

  “Get the fuck back here or I’m goin’ light you up.”

  I turn around and look at him. Minutemen. GD. Blue and silver.

  All the same. Always fightin’ the red.

  He point somethin’ at me. Look like a space gun.

  “Go on Carl,” say the other one. “Fry that stupid nigger and let’s haul his ass back.”

  Somethin’ come outta the space gun, slower than a bullet. It’s easy to catch. It’s a pair of hooks on wires. They hang in the air for a minute, then I turn ‘em around and put the hooks in the fat cop’s eyes. He screams and jumps around, and I hear this fast clickin’ sound. I make it faster. Hotter. He starts to smoke.

  The other cop don’t grab a space gun, he pulls his strap. I wave my hand at him and paint him red, so red there ain’t nothing left of him but his gun.

  Across the street a white lady screams.

  I sit down on the curb. I pull up my hood. It’s cold.

  The fat cop shakes on the ground, blacker than I am now.

  More one-timers come. More than came to clean up the GD’s even. They close off the street, they come in big vans and I crush ‘em like pop cans, they climb up on roofs where they think I can’t see, but I seen movies. I do to them what they try to do to me and they roll off the roofs with no heads.

  I never even get up off the curb.

  Night comes, and the ghetto birds buzz around in circles over my head like the hungry baldheaded birds in the cartoons when somebody’s dyin’ in the desert. They shine they lights down on me.

  I paint the light red, and what comes down is on fire, and smashes through the roofs of the nice houses. Ain’t nobody inside.

  The white people have all run away. I let ‘em go.

  On a dead man’s radio, I hear them say they goin’ send soldiers next, and tanks. I never seen a tank, but I seen soldiers. I think about how they tanks’ll look comin’ apart.

  Over the roofs of the burning houses I can see the reds and the whites a ways off like big mountains.

  The moon is behind ‘em. I can see the light, but I can’t see the moon, so I put up my hand and I pull the projects down.

  When the dust clears, I see the moon real nice. It’s not the sun, but I put a smile on it anyway. I think about the moon shinin’ down on the green field, of the pink and yellow flowers openin’ up to catch the light. I know flowers ain’t s’posed to open at night, but the ones in my picture do.

  Miss Orozco would’ve liked that.

  Originally titled Don’t! Date! Vampires!, this one was written as a direct response to the proliferation of, let’s say approachable and inoffensive vampires that were all the rage when I conceived of it.

  Peter Pan is my favorite children’s story.

  Crocodile

  Gwendolyn could not entirely suppress the girlish shudder that began in the pit of her stomach and somehow spread through her torso to the tips of each extremity as Brendan took her hand in his and led her toward the forest.

  Brendan.

  Her dark angel.

  Her Peter Pan.

  His hand was cold, as if scoured by a winter wind, though it was a sultry August evening after a rain, the remains of it rising as steam off the moonlit pavement and hanging in the air. Yet despite his coldness, wherever he touched her, warmth spread as if kissed by an noontime sunbeam.

  She followed him. She would follow him anywhere. Particularly tonight.

  She was reminded of the first time he had taken her hand and led her like this into the wild night.

  Like any night, she was working the counter at the Pizza Hut at the Flying J on the edge of town, that sprawling neon and flickering fluorescent complex situated alongside the I-10 like an island of light in a dark delta, always busy with the roar of the big trucks, always stinking of diesel. Haley, the cashier, was interrupted the looping Merle Haggard music to announce the vacancy of another shower.

  So many big bellied men leered at her from behind their whiskers across the counter she had ceased telling them apart. Though they came from every corner of the country, they were almost all one. One hairy, endless flannel and mesh back cap parade of Skoal chewing, pig knuckled fathers, so like her own; inappropriate, unmannered, too-loud and overpoweringly male.

  Noodler, as she mentally called the man who had approached her in the parking lot at the end of her shift while she sleepily rode her tired feet to her Honda may well have been her father for all either of them knew. Daddy had climbed up into the beaded seat of his Peterbilt when Gwendolyn was four, sent his rig groaning down the driveway, turned the corner, and never looked back.

  The only impressions she still had of Noodler were the same sort of dull, musky, beer sweat feelings she’d let pass over her like inclement weather every six hour shift for the past two years.

  Ron, her assistant manager, had warned her time and time again never to clock out and head to her car without having him come along, but Ron looked at her the same way so many of the customers did. Never mind his non-threatening clean-shaven face and pitiable acne scars. When he walked her to her car she felt just as uncomfortable. What was the difference between Ron hanging back in the name of chivalry to watch her ass and some forty year old pervert directing a tobacco stai
ned grin squarely at her tits while he ordered a greasy personal pan and a suicide?

  The employees parked their cars at the edge of the lot behind the pumps. Flying J required that so there was always ample parking for the endless array of customers stopping by on their way to somewhere else.

  Those were the people that interested Gwendolyn. Not just the hot young guys (pickups and sports cars) and the young couples (U-Hauls), or the contented, slow moving retirees (Winnebagos or blinding, silver Streamlines) but even the families, the beleaguered fathers trying to hold down the spasmodic little kids, exploding with energy after having been confined to the minivan for untold hours, while the haggard looking mothers ordered from the menu and didn’t look at her once. She extrapolated their lives by the music she heard drifting from their cars, the Kenny Chesneys, the Rihannas, the Wiggles.

  Categorized as they might be, these were people with lives. Commitments, responsibilities, they might have, but they were free. They moved on and never returned.

  Not like her.

  Not like the truckers.

  The Flying J was their home. Gwendolyn’s even more so. The truckers lived out of their vehicles, but at least their scenery changed. She spent most of her life right here at this counter, wishing for something, anything to happen.

  Beyond the ringing pumps were the line of employee cars, and beyond that, the rows of glittering rigs, maybe a small light in a sleeper now and then, maybe on occasion a burst of wheezy laughter or a four letter word, but otherwise nothing but the incessant rattle and roar of trucks arriving or departing, the hiss of brakes.

  That was the overnight parking, where the drivers slept and woke at all hours, dreaming maybe of their destinations, always leaving, always returning.

  There were women who moved among the trucks. Lot lizards. Hopping from rig to rig, tucking wrinkled dollars into their animal print bras or their garish bags, stinking as if they rode between the exhaust stacks, women who smelled of diesel machines and were little more than that, really.

  There was no way Noodler could’ve mistaken Gwendolyn for one of those. She still had her Pizza Hut shirt on, her stained black apron over her shoulder, her tennis visor.