Dirt Merchant

by T. Blake Braddy

  I stubbed out my second cigarette of the day and slowly made my way outside.

  “This is my boy, Rolson,” Deuce said.

  “Oh, so you’s the one going to help us,” he said. His eyes were obscured by a pair of Wayfarers, but there was a smile somewhere in there. “Good to have you on board, man.”

  He held out his hand, we shook, and then the three of us and Willie piled into Reginald’s boat of a car and took off.

  “You talked to anybody else?” Reginald asked.

  “Granny Josefina,” Deuce said. “She told me about…everything.”

  “Taj,” Reginald said. “He got himself into some shit he couldn't get out of. You can bet I want to find out who did this, but the worst part is, you might regret finding out what the truth is.”

  “That don’t confront me none,” said Deuce. His eyes were fixed on an indistinct point in the distance.

  “Things is getting real hairy down here,” he said. “People are getting tossed into coffins more often than I’d like to admit, cousin.”

  “Real shame we’re going to get ourselves involved in some dangerous shit, then.”

  Reginald turned in his seat and eyed me, as if I could do something about the beast in the passenger seat.

  I just shrugged.

  “It ain’t like the old days, man,” said Reg. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. It’s getting real.”

  “What’s going down?”

  “People getting hacked to pieces. Tossed in the swamps. Families getting broken up. Houses burned down. Whole neighborhoods roped off by the gangs. You name it. They’ve been doing it down here. Police don’t give a fuck. It’s popping off, from the tip of the Miami dick all the way up here to Jacksonville and over to the Gulf.”

  “Sounds rough.”

  “It is. It’s for real. Used to be, you’d get in it, and you’d get scraped up, maybe lose a couple teeth. Get a cut. Get a bruise. But not anymore. One time I saw a dude get his face beat in like it was rotted fruit. But he lived, know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” Deuce said. Calm and cool as he was focused.

  “Way before the gangs moved in, even snitches survived. Might get fucked up something awful, walk around with a limp, but they lived. Somebody had to be the reminder. Now they go off and unload two clips in somebody for saying some shit on the internet. On the internet. What’s the world coming to?”

  “People ain’t got sense fit for a dog,” Deuce said.

  “We ought to know,” I added, and Deuce turned to eye me.

  “Right on,” Reginald said. “It’s like Uncle Mino used to talk about. Said it wasn’t nothing for somebody to kill somebody. But back then, a man got mad enough to haul off and kill somebody, he’d spend his whole life on the chain gang. And it had to be for something. Not solely pride and some breezy definition of what toughness is.”

  I said, “I don’t mean to veer the conversation back to our mutual interest—”

  “Yeah, man, right. Sometimes I be looking up all this political shit, and it affects me. I started looking at the world around me, and it’s, like, eye-opening, man. Last week, even before Taj got his, some dope dealers busted in on some folks, pumped shotgun shells into a whole family because they were relatives of some gangbangers who took off with some product.”

  Deuce said, “It’s high stakes. Lot of money flows through them organizations.”

  “Lot of burnt egos and lost dreams, too,” Reginald added. “It’s sad, but what can you do but shake your head. I’m not going to be hosting any rallies on the town square, I tell you that. I keep my nose out the air and my eyes in front of me.”

  “That’s it, man,” Deuce said. “That’s the only way to go.”

  “Taj, he wasn’t doing that. He put in his lot with some vicious motherfuckers. Swamp folks with a mind toward torture. They needed runners, eyes on the ground, and Taj, he was well-equipped for it. Got caught up, stepped in between two sides in the wrong dispute, and you know what happened.”

  A long silence passed between Deuce and his cousin. We turned right onto a long stretch of the main road, and Reginald wheeled into a corner gas station, where he got out wordlessly and came back with bags full of what I presumed was beer. He passed a tall boy of Bud over his shoulder to me and cracked one open for himself before driving off.

  Deuce slipped a can from the bag and swigged surreptitiously before replacing it between his legs. We drove like that for a while, the wind blowing pleasantly through the car, music thumping sub-sonically from the speakers. It was cold here, but not like further north. It was tolerable, and I thought maybe I could get used to the Florida weather.

  Breaking the silence, Deuce asked, “And Taj wasn’t carrying?”

  “See, they got us pinned down here in Florida. You think they give a fuck about a black man standing his ground when some white-ass dude — no offense — pulls out a nine millimeter because he’s afraid of black people? Hell, no.”

  “It’s the same all over,” Deuce said.

  “But it’s like a shooting gallery in North Florida. White folks think they can just ‘clean up the streets’ by provoking a black kid, shooting him dead, and then calling him a ‘thug’ to a jury. You know that’s just the new way to call us ‘niggas,’ right? Open season on black folks. And don’t even get me started on the fucking cops.”

  “What does Taj’s death have to do with white people?” Deuce asked.

  “Nobody knows what caused somebody to step up and blow Taj away,” Reginald replied. “Taj wasn’t colored up, but he was toying with the idea. He had some friends wanted him to join, maybe start doing the dirt, but he resisted.”

  “Maybe that resistance is what set everything in motion,” Deuce suggested.

  “He wasn’t about to get killed for not joining a gang,” Reginald said. “Truth be told, your little brother was involved in some secretive shit, and that got him ganked. You feel me?”

  Deuce stared out the window. “And you don’t know who it was?”

  “I mean, there’s some big players around Jacksonville, but them ain’t people you just walk up to and start making accusations. There’s some low-level niggas we might be able to put pressure on, but they’re connected, so that will demand reprisal.”

  “You don’t know where to find them?”

  “There isn’t a Craigslist ad, ‘Where to Find High-Level Gangbangers.’ No, man, they stay underground. They got barriers to protect them. If I’m keeping it one hundred, I’m saying there’s no way we come out of this without some…I don’t know — collateral damage. Unless your boy back there is the real deal.”

  “He’s the real deal,” Deuce said. “Rolson, you ready to go in on this?”

  I raised my beer. “Keep me stocked up, and I’m down for whatever.”

  I polished off my first and asked for another, and Deuce’s cousin supplied me with Bud as they slipped in and out of discussion. Whenever there was a lull in conversation, music swelled in the car, the bass dropping so that I felt vibrations deep in my chest. Dudes rapping about what set they rep and what they were wearing.

  Meanwhile, I took in the view. The area outside Jacksonville was a conundrum. Lots of concrete, but also lots of grass and trees. Green and gray, like I’d imagined parts of LA.

  Once the car came to its final stop, I slid out of my seat and leaned against the rear quarter panel, waiting. My nerves were wrecked, despite the Bud.

  Deuce glanced once over his shoulder, seemed to understand why I wasn’t following him, and then turned back to the house in time to see the front door open and a woman come barreling out. She was almost running, and her face was twisted into a look that was equal parts joy and sadness.

  I turned away, watched the sun begin its final descent.

  “Darron, oh my God!” she screamed, a mixture of emotions in her voice. “You made it, oh, Lord have mercy, you made it.”

  They held one another for a long time. Reginald leaned against the porch, thumbing t
hrough his phone. Other people started to pile out of the house.

  There was a lot of crying. Lot of wailing. I tried to give them the space they needed, and I busied myself with another tall boy as the greeting reached its woeful crescendo.

  At a certain point, I heard my name. I looked over to see Deuce wave once toward the house. As I crossed the gate, I felt something, so I glanced over my shoulder and though I caught a glimpse of a hovering silhouette. Could have been my imagination. Could have been the booze. Also could have been the real thing.

  The smell of food nearly knocked me on my ass. There was the clattering of dishes. People moving around, dipping this and that onto their plates.

  “People been bringing food all week,” said the woman who had greeted Deuce. “It’s on the brink of embarrassing. We’re not lifting a daggum finger these days.”

  “It’s not embarrassing,” Deuce said.

  “Freida brought all kinds of casseroles and pies and— you ain’t been shot, have you?”

  “Auntie Lucille, I don’t—”

  “You’re bleeding, boy. That’s why I say it. I am not nearly as foolish as you young kids think I am. Lord have mercy, look at all that blood.”

  It was true. One look at Deuce’s shirt told the whole story.

  “I wondered why you was dressed like some kind of backwoods preacher, but I didn’t know it was because you was involved in some kind of violent nonsense. Here, let me get my cayenne pepper and ice.”

  Deuce looked down the front of his blood-streaked shirt and said, “You don’t have bandages, anything like that?”

  “Lord, child, that won’t stop the bleeding. You’ve got to have something gritty to make it go away. You’ll bleed through them bandages, and then where will you be?”

  “Auntie Lucille, it—”

  “It’s going to get infected,” she interrupted.

  It’s also going to burn like hell, I thought.

  “You come on with me, Darron. And you,” she turned and glared at me, “go in the hall bathroom and wash yourself up. You smell like three kinds of roadkill.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said and headed for the washroom.

  The eyes of a dozen family members, friends, and hangers-on passed over me as I made my way through the house. I didn’t return their stares. Was I a bad influence, or just another white dude? Even without their eyes, I felt the tension in the air around me.

  I flinched at the stranger in the mirror. The face was all wrong, puffy around the eyes and slack-jawed in a slightly disconcerting way. The stubble had grown into a misfit’s beard, and blood spotted the cheeks and forehead like freckles.

  But there was something else, too. Not just in the eyes. Not in the way a few of the teeth protruded from beneath the top lip. There was a leanness to the face, a hungry leer, which made me feel out of place in my skin.

  I splashed water on my face. Scrubbed away the blood with a dingy hand towel. Felt skin and scabs peel away from my jaws.

  When I was done, I peeled the bandages away from the stumps of my fingers and stared at what looked like an alien approximation of my hand. Where the fingers ended, the knuckles were black and blue. By some advanced miracle of science or voodoo, the wounds themselves were not infected.

  I cleaned the wounds, wiping toilet paper against the blunt edges of my knuckles and dabbing the harder to reach spots with a cotton swab. The blood that oozed out was a thick, dark red, and it soaked through the first set of bandages, so I had to rewrap them and adjust the tightness so the aching wasn’t so bad. The phantom pain had receded, but who knew when it might return.

  When I came back up, reaching for a hand towel, it wasn’t my face staring back at me. It wasn’t the skinny, wrecked face from before, either. It was a face of death, one from the other side, and it looked a hell of a lot like Limba Fitz, whom I had murdered in Savannah.

  I yelped, stumbled back, and toppled through the bathroom door into the hallway, where I landed against a wall of framed photos.

  An older man appeared and waddled toward me, tilting from one foot to the other like he was walking on something unpleasant.

  He leaned over on creaky knees, a disconcerted smile on his face.

  “How’s about we grab you in a chair and put some food in you,” he said, helping me up. “Might make you feel better, I reckon.”

  The old man got me to a recliner and sat me down. I thought I might pass out, go dipping into some unknown world.

  The old man tilted his head back, aiming for the kitchen. “Letitia!” he yelled. “Bring this young man here a supper plate.”

  A few minutes later, a plate piled high was brought out to me. I’m usually pretty observant about food, but I had no willpower left. I plowed through porkchops, mashed potatoes, seven layer salad, Hawaiian rolls, pineapple casserole, sweet yams, and three pieces of cracklin’ before taking a breath.

  I looked up to see the old man staring at me.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just wishing I could still eat with that kind of fervor, young man. Damn belly’s overrun with something makes me ill, if I eat that much. But I used to, man. I used to put it away.”

  He laughed a dry, throaty cackle.

  I nodded. “I reckon I’ll keep eating that way until I can’t.”

  “Or until somebody stops you.”

  When he saw my expression change, he laughed and said, “Oh, don’t think I don’t know you and my grandnephew in the back there aren’t in a whole heap-load of trouble.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “You’re running from something,” he said, leaning back on the couch.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Only on account of all the blood,” he replied. “I know something about running.”

  “Any advice to offer?”

  I was beginning to feel more like myself.

  “No advice. Just know, once you start running, it ain’t easy to stop.”

  “Seems like you’ve managed.”

  “At a certain point, they quit chasing you,” the old man said, laughing. He reached into a pair of overalls and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. “I got so goddamned old, they just up and left me alone.”

  “Can I ask what you did?”

  “I ain’t do jack shit, young man,” he said, lighting the cigarette and taking a shallow puff. “I’m old school black. They picked me up for raping a white girl and murdering the cop who tried to arrest me.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Kangaroo court found me guilty and bounced me to a chain gang. Georgia still had them back then. Vile, brutal place, man. I tell you no lie on that.”

  “I can only imagine,” I said.

  “You can’t even imagine,” he said, tugging on the cig. “Worked six days a week, and only for the grace of God did we get Sundays off. For real. Them was the most hateful Christian men I ever laid my eyes on. Beat you ’til the white meat showed, but they’d get up on Sunday mornings and pay homage to the man Jesus Christ like they never sinned.”

  “How’d you get away?”

  This brought him to smiling. “I don’t think you’d believe me, even if I did tell you. It’s a wild story, fit for that Clint Eastwood movie about the prison out in San Francisco.”

  “Something about Alcatraz?”

  “That’ll be the one.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t imagine Deuce is done being doctored.”

  He lingered on that thought for a while. “Maybe save it for another time,” he said. “Time when you ain’t raw with hunger and looking for hair of the dog. Oh, don’t think I can’t see it on you. We can smell our own. I spent half my life fighting the white cause, and the rest of it fighting off the bottle. You’ve got the eyes, and the eyes don’t lie.”

  I decided to return to the previous topic. “You never worried about them trying to come back to get you? Try to seek you out?”

  “I’d like to see them honkeys try. First sumbitch stepped up in here and tried would get a
slug to the guts. But no, I figured they done give up on an old man. I outlived the ideas of the chain gang. They, you know,” he said, making a flitting hand gesture, “got rid of the damned things, and all the people cared that I was in there must have been fired, relocated, or beat to death by the inmates. Least I hoped so. But they never came for me.”

  “That how you ended up in Florida?”

  He nodded his head. “Probably should have fled North, seeing as they were more amenable to black folk back then, but I had some family down this way. Gave me asylum. Let me heal and get on my feet. It was nothing less than traumatic to be broken by them white folks. Had a shadow following me around everywhere, trying to pull me down.”

  I put down my plate and leaned forward, blood chilling in my bones. “A shadow?”

  “Uncle Mino, what kind of nonsense are you talking about here?”

  When Deuce next appeared, he hugged the old man and clapped him on the back. Uncle Mino winked at me so that his grandnephew couldn’t see it.

  We’d talk about it later. Maybe he was speaking in cryptic metaphors. Maybe he wasn’t. Either way, I wanted to spend some time getting to know him a little bit better.

  Deuce’s mother, Dorothy, hugged and squeezed and didn’t let go for a long while.

  “Rolson McKane,” she said. “What have you done to yourself? You look like a waterlogged version of you, do you know that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, pulling back to watch her watching me. “I think the booze got the better of me for a while there.”

  “So you ended up turning into your daddy, after all,” she said, not a hint of embarrassment at mentioning the old man. Rather, her eyes carried a pained steeliness I admired.

  “Reckon I did,” I said, “though I have managed to keep myself alive and out of jail.”

  She looked from me to Deuce.

  “For now,” she said. “Still, I’m glad to have you here. Like hearing a song for the first time in decades.”