Dirt Merchant

by T. Blake Braddy

  “And your cousin got in the middle of it,” the druggie said. “That’s going to make it difficult to sort out. They don’t talk, and they sure as hell ain’t going to talk to no black boys. No offense.”

  “All’s we need is a start. Somebody you know is on the low end of the scale. Somebody’s got his head so far up his ass, he doesn’t realize he’s bought and paid for.”

  “I know some muh’fuckers like that,” Javvy said. “They live over off Ramona…or maybe it’s Murray Hill where they stay at. It’s a brown house. Old pile of bricks over that way, near where them dudes got shot. If you go to King and College, that’s too far. I don’t know the address, but I can lead you over to ’em.”

  Javvy provided directions, and Reginald turned in long, slow arcs, even when Javvy seemed confused. I floated untethered in my seat, rolling around as I tried — without much success — to grab the words from the air around me. It was a conversation I understood inherently, but could not follow with any real fidelity.

  “I’m high,” I said.

  “This ain’t skag, my man,” Reginald said. “This is the good shit. If you weren’t baked, I’d be worried.”

  “I’m really, really baked,” I said.

  “You don’t smoke much, huh?”

  “Never.”

  “Shee-it. Hang around me, that’s fixing to change.”

  I leaned into the back of my seat and drifted into another world for a few minutes. There was the darkness, penetrated only by the glow of the dashboard and passing headlights. If I did not peer directly at them, the lights themselves looked detached from the car. To me, they were bright flashes of insight, moments of clarity between the lolling periods of deprivation.

  I couldn’t quite tell if I was hallucinating when I saw people hovering among the trees, or standing atop nearby roofs. Were these images of the dead, or were they silhouettes of treetops passing by and creating a grand spectacle in my head?

  I saw my father. Saw Vanessa and my mother, too. I even saw the man I had shot and killed on a beach in Savannah, not one week before. They were rotten, worm-filled versions of themselves, and they didn’t appear as benevolent spirits. I had some auditory hallucinations. Not only could the dead talk, but muffled screams tingled in my eardrums

  When I finally found myself capable of lifting my skull off the headrest, Reginald was knee-deep in a monologue about the pervasive nature of the Illuminati. He was talking in thoughtful paragraphs about the meaning of Jay-Z’s hand signals in photos and the skepticism with which Tupac Shakur had regarded the whole secret society nonsense. Deuce might have been asleep, but Javvy was all eyes and teeth, riveted by the whole thing. Were he a reporter, he’d have been taking notes.

  “Right there!” Javvy said suddenly. “That’s where them niggas live.”

  Reginald eyed the both of us in the rearview mirror, and Javvy shrank in his seat. I shrugged at the guy and stared out the window.

  “You sure?” Reginald asked. “You gots to be sure on this one.”

  “I’m positive, man. I smoked up with them not a month ago.”

  We rolled by, noting the house number, before pulling a U at the end of the street.

  “Don’t creep too slow,” Javvy said. “Somebody’s apt to be checking the street from the window, and you don’t want them identifying your ride. And I definitely don’t want to be identified from sitting in with you fools.”

  “What do you know?”

  “They’re weak. This one guy, Benji, he’s prone to showing his piece, but I seen this big, prison yard son-of-a-bitch pop his nose like a pimple. Blood streaming everywhere. I think he’s been off deliveries since then, but he’s still walled up in the organization. You get to him, you’ll be fine. I bet he’d tell you what his mother sounds like through the walls of his trailer, you get him scared enough.”

  We cruised neighborhoods until Javvy popped up in his seat, looking like somebody had poked him from below.

  “This is me,” he said, pulling the hood from the dirty gray hoodie over his head and straightening out his denim jacket.

  The street was dotted with prostitutes. Deuce’s cousin slipped a small baggie into the junkie’s palm, and he nodded once before slipping the item into his pocket. Then, he made himself as small as possible and turned the collar up on his denim jacket.

  Javvy knew what was up. He didn’t wave, didn’t acknowledge us in any way. Anybody that saw him would think he was just hustling on a bad street in a worse neighborhood. I could tell this was not a new gig for him.

  “He’ll be all right,” Reginald said. “He’s smart.”

  Some underweight ladies in heels and skirts sauntered over, but we pulled away before they could begin their sales pitch. In turn, they flipped us off as we disappeared around the corner.

  It started to rain as we rolled in the direction of our target. Cold drops popped on the roof, creating a distraction under the music’s thud-thud-thud.

  “It’s about to get messy,” Deuce said.

  I was along for the ride. If the people who murdered his little brother were as ruthless as they said, I had little compassion for them.

  We turned down a quiet street, flipped off the headlights, and came to a stop.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Follow my lead,” Reginald said, and that was that.

  The target was a dilapidated house at the end of the street, surrounded by places with overgrown lawns and bars on the windows. We crept along the sidewalk, the sound of our feet echoing against the music and voices which poured through windows and across yards at us.

  A pornographic image had burned into the TV in the living room, the outline of a woman straddling her partner. What made it worse was the pixelated woman looked hauntingly like my ex-wife. I could see the worried eyes above a small nose and thin lips. The man beneath her vanished in a sea of writhing flesh and lascivious close-ups, the pulsing tug-and-pull of filth rendering the overlaying image moot.

  Two men sat on opposite sides of a cigarette-burned couch, ashes and butts smeared into the upholstery. One of the men dribbled a long, thin rivulet of drool onto his shirt, the hand not holding his member clutching a small, glass pipe. The other man was wide awake and had an agitated, fierce look about him. Like a partisan locked into a presidential debate.

  Deuce kicked the door. He put too much momentum on it, because the bastard frammed against the wall and busted off the hinges. The two junkies snapped to, but their reaction times were not up to snuff. Deuce and Reginald were in their faces, guns brandished, before a scene could even get started.

  “Sit your happy ass down,” Reginald said, “before I open up your brainpan.”

  “We ain’t got shit,” said the one who had been sleeping. “We smoked what we had, and—”

  Reginald pressed the barrel of the gun against the speaker’s temple, and the dude fell silent.

  “We’re going to ask all the questions here tonight,” he said. “You feel me, bruh?”

  The guy, tearing up, nodded.

  “Now, then,” Reginald said. “You know me? Know my friend here?”

  The one on the left shook his head, and the one on the right did when Reginald moved the gun to his forehead.

  “That’s good. The less you know about us, the better. You got any homies headed this way? Anybody coming to get blowed out with you?”

  Again, an emphatic shake of the head.

  “You serious? If you’re lying, shit’s going to pop off in this rickety ass building in a real way.”

  “Ain’t nobody coming over, man. I’m dead serious.”

  “You better be one of those things, or you’ll end up being the other.”

  Reginald was good.

  “They telling the truth, Rol?” Deuce asked.

  “I don't know, man,” I responded, and it was in that moment, I really became aware of my function in this triumvirate. I had a gun, yes, but they didn’t expect me to actually use it, not unless the roof got ripped
off this whole scenario.

  I was the carnie with the weird ability. The Stephen King character, peering through the looking glass at the normal folk.

  Reginald produced some duct tape, and Benji and his friend were strapped to half-broken chairs we found in the kitchen. They hadn’t started begging yet. It was apparent they were playing it cool, trying to show they wouldn’t be intimidated. What they didn’t realize was all we had to do was look at their eyes. Their eyes revealed just how afraid they really were.

  I plucked a trio of beers from the fridge and passed them around. Reginald opened his and placed it on a nearby table, but Deuce refused his. I shrugged and popped the cap on it anyways, taking a good, long tug before setting it down.

  A dim haze returned to my field of vision, creating a buffer between my paranoid high and the buzz which might help me be the person Deuce thought I could be. I was a highly specific instrument, and—

  “The fuck you looking at, white boy?”

  When I glanced at him, I saw not the kid who had been abusing himself on the couch a few minutes earlier, but a guy I had sort of known back in Lumber Junction. I almost called him by the name that still sometimes appeared in my dreams, but somehow I refrained from saying Emmitt.

  “You getting a read on either of these guys, Rol?” Deuce asked me, face full of concern.

  I eyed them and shook my head. “It don’t work this way. I’m not Professor X. I can’t read minds.”

  “Anything at all?”

  Benji spat at me, so I flipped the double-deuce upside down and shattered the end against his temple.

  Glass doesn’t explode at all the way it does in movies. Yeah, sometimes it goes ricocheting in all directions, but for the most part it kind of splinters, creating raw, jagged edges.

  And it fucking hurts to get cut by glass like that.

  Once the bursting glass stopped echoing in my ears, it was replaced by a livid, breathless screaming and some curse words I didn’t recognize.

  Deuce stepped in and rested the barrel of his handgun against Benji’s temple. “Screaming doesn’t suit you well,” he said. “How’s about you take it down a notch?”

  Benji quieted, though his eyes remained wild and unfocused. The pupils bounced between the three of us, as though he were looking for the answer to a question we hadn’t asked.

  “Taj Gaines,” Deuce said. “What did you know about him?”

  “I didn’t,” Benji responded.

  Deuce backhanded him. Not hard enough to really hurt, but hard enough. This was Deuce’s element. This was Deuce’s place. He’d spent years “convincing” grown-ass men to face justice rather than run. It was evident he could do the same with two addicts in search of another fix.

  “Try again,” Deuce said. “Taj Gaines.”

  Blood seeped from Benji’s left nostril. “He’s dead, nigga, so what?”

  Deuce’s jaw clenching. Muscles tensing. “And?”

  “And nothing. He was doing dirt for some niggas; that’s it. Must have stepped on somebody’s toes. Now, he dead.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Nope.”

  Deuce brought the butt of the pistol down on Benji’s right hand. Fingers snapped like old twigs. He screamed.

  “Try again,” Deuce said.

  “Man, shit. Okay. Goddamn! I saw him a week ago. Two weeks ago. Something like that. He was nervous, sweating. Looked like he might have been on something.”

  “You think he was using? Stealing from his employers?”

  “Maybe. Shit, man. Can you loosen my hand, man? It fucking hurts!”

  “When you’re done.”

  “I am done.”’

  Deuce snapped the pistol butt down on the same hand. The howl this time was altogether inhuman. Fingers bent and splayed in all the wrong directions. Made my own fingers hurt.

  “You done?”

  “No, no. Okay, no, man. Ow. Jesus, ow.”

  Deuce said, “Taj was nervous, sweaty. Looked like he was using. What did he say to you?”

  “Man, nigga. I don’t remember.”

  Deuce raised the pistol again.

  “Okay, all right! Shit. Okay. He was real nervous. Talking a mile a minute. Said he was worried about somebody, about something real close to him. Asked if we could get him an untraceable piece. Protection - that type of thing. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it was going to be something more violent than that.”

  “What’s your name, man?” Reg asked.

  “Yakamura,” said Benji’s friend. His pants were unzipped, but the offending member had disappeared.

  “You’re a black dude, though,” said Reginald, a half-question.

  “My father’s Japanese,” he slurred. “Well, mostly Japanese.”

  “You and your friend should really think about that word, man.”

  Both Yakamura and Benji gaped.

  “Nigga. That word — man, I’m telling you. It’s the root of evil here in this country. The whole of this country’s loss of innocence is tied to that word.”

  “O…kay.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No, man. I’m with you. I got it. No more nigga.”

  “You want me to tell you why?”

  “I get it. Racism and shit. Makes sense. I won’t say it. I got you.”

  Reg paced the room. Yakamura started to nod off again, but Reginald patted him across both cheeks to keep him involved in the interrogation.

  “Well, Yakamura, we’re going to get on the same sheet of music here. You like music, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “What kind of music you like?”

  “Hip-hop, man, shit.”

  “All right. Me, too. Fact, I bet we like some of the same artists. You like ’80s hip-hop?”

  “What, like 2Pac and Biggie? Shit like that?”

  Reginald smiled, looked back at Deuce, one finger pointing at the quarter-Japanese captive. This fucking guy. “See, that’s what I’m talking ’bout. I feel like I could give you a whole lecture’s worth of information about shit you don’t even understand?”

  A bewildered nod.

  “You don’t have enough historical knowledge about the topic to realize that Biggie ain’t even released his first album until 1994, so yeah, I could dig on some back-and-forth on that topic. And you know what you could help me out with, knowledge-wise?”

  “Why your breath smells like white boy’s dick over there?”

  Reginald chuckled behind his hand. Again, he turned and regarded Deuce. Fucking guy. This time when he turned around, however, he brought his hand around with him and backhanded Yakamura with the full force of his hand.

  Yakamura screamed, pushed his chin down, trying to hold his face against something, anything, to make his fried jaw calm down a little bit.

  “Nah, nigga, what I need from you is any and every bit of knowledge you have about them muh’fuckas that be dealing dope around here. The ones you work for. That sound like something you might be able to help me with?”

  To his right, Benji’s head sagged, the bloody cuts where I’d smacked him with the bottle leaking dark rivulets onto his filthy lap. He was moaning, half-awake, and miserable. About to get a whole lot more miserable when things really got started rolling.

  “The major question I want answered is: who do you run with and where do they stay?”

  “I got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” Yakamura said. “This pad is just where we get high and shit.”

  “We’re looking for some people,” Deuce said, more calmly than his cousin would have. “They’ve got a debt to pay to us, though it ain’t in dollar bills. We need to find them. That’s where you come in. No one has to know you told us. If they’re as legit as people claim, there’s a lot of places could leak information, no?”

  The two men regarded one another. Yakamura’s shoulders spasmed in an attempt at apathy.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about,” Reginald said. He paused then, a
s if he’d just forgotten something. He turned to Deuce. “Cuz, you good?”

  “I’m good,” he replied.

  “I don’t want to be jumping in on your business here, man. You need me to take the sidekick position?”

  Deuce did that scratch-your-nose-with-the-hammer-of-the-gun thing. “Consider yourself the face of this operation.”

  “Cool, cool. See, we partners. We boys. I been knowing that dude since we was in the crib, no lie. You and your homie there got that kind of bond?”

  Yakamura shrugged again, that weird half-spasm thing.

  “You think if we split the two of you up that he’d have your back?”

  “I think so,” said Yakamura.

  “You dumber than I thought, then. But you tell me who’s running drugs over this way, maybe give me a sense of when they head out this way, when they might be most vulnerable, and I’ll forget how stupid you really are.”

  “I already told you, man. I don’t know shit from Shinola. Elbows and assholes. I got no idea what the difference is between them.”

  Reginald rested his eyes in his palms. “See, I ain’t going round and round with you. I just am not doing that. You are going to tell me everything, lay it out, so our white friend over there can write it all down and we can be on our way. You dig?”

  He racked a round into the chamber and pressed the muzzle against Yakamura’s temple.

  “You’re making me show my ghetto side here, broski, and I’m not into that shit. I’m trying to turn over a new leaf, be one of them self-enlightened niggas — one that doesn’t say ‘niggas’ — but you’ve got me tripping. Let’s start small. You know a guy named Taj?”

  “Heard the name,” said Yakamura.

  “He’s dead,” Benji offered. He managed to lift his chin from his chest. His face was a mess of jagged red lines. Blood and glass and skin desperately in need of stitches. “He got dumped last week. Found him half-eaten in the swamps.”

  Reginald smiled a joyless grin. “See now, my quarter-Asian captive. We’re getting somewhere. Shit’s starting to come out. Now, let’s move this along.”

  “I don’t know,” Benji said. “I heard he was a snitch, and that’s why they popped him. Started turning over for the police, so they stuffed him in a dumpster behind a Taco Bell.”