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A deluge of gunfire thundered down upon the tank-like ’72 Impala as it rocked and swerved up G-town Avenue at heart-stopping speeds. It kicked up trash and garbage as it barreled through the somber deserted streets pursued by the gold-encrusted red Beemer. The entire time I couldn’t help but to doubt my sanity.
Why on earth was I trying to save this child? Why hadn’t I just blown him away along with his crackhead mother? It wouldn’t have been the first kid I’d killed. Why was I risking my life for this little crackbaby? Had all that talk from Mom and Yolanda started to get me? Was I developing a conscience? Was I getting soft? Was I looking for forgiveness? Redemption? If so it was too little too late. I had too much blood on my hands to ever be forgiven. Not by myself and not by God.
But then darker questions, more terrifying questions invaded my head making me want to cry out in terror.
Did I really just see Scratch turn into a monster down there? Is this mutherfucker really goddamned Satan? What the hell have I gotten myself into?
I tried to shut those thoughts out. What I thought I saw couldn’t have been real. It couldn’t have.
A cascade of glass rained down upon my head as bullets ripped through the Impala like a stinging swarm of angry bees. I ducked, closed my eyes, and moaned like a bitch. I was scared to death, confused, and lost without that cocky, ignorant, madness that usually protected me from fear and doubt. It had been a long time since I had run from anything outside myself and I didn’t like it. It was funny, just hours ago I would have never doubted that I could take Scratch out with ease, yet here I was fleeing for my life as he chased my black ass all over creation. Under normal circumstances I would have just turned and capped this punk. But these were not normal circumstances. There was no way I could have missed Scratch at that range, even in the dark, yet there he was ten seconds off my ass. And then there was that bizarre transformation. It might have just been the shadows. It was pretty dark down there.
But what if it wasn’t? What if Scratch really is some kind of fucking monster?
Still, running from a battle just wasn’t my thing. I hated the idea of catching a bullet in my back when there was at least the opportunity to die like a man and maybe take him out with me, but I couldn’t risk getting the child killed too.
The tired, old car gasped and wheezed and seemed to cry out in pain—leaking fluids and spraying steam and noxious blue smoke from burning oil. The tires screeched in protest as I forced it into turns that would have taxed vehicles half its years. I was a terrible driver and for the umpteenth time it occurred to me how senseless it would be to avoid Scratch only to kill us both by crashing into a pole.
Burning rubber mixed with the smell of sulfur and oil, the sound of shattering glass, the whine of bullets, and the screams of tortured metal. Yet, the baby lay passively in the passenger seat as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He was staring at me soothingly. A loving, trusting smile played across his face. Even amid the roaring chaos my heart began to lighten. If he lived he’d make one hell of a pimp or a con-man someday. He was playing me like Nintendo. His soft vulnerable-looking, brown skin and carelessly nappy hair alone made me want to protect him or die trying. Looking at him gave me the courage to keep my mind from shutting down and giving in to the desire to curl up on the front seat and just wait for the fatal bullet that would void my brain from my skull onto the dashboard. If any nigga on earth deserved such a fate it was damn sure me. I wondered if this little baby would forgive sins as profound as mine? If he truly knew what I was— a killer without a conscience being pursued to the death by another.
I decided to try to buy us some time by emptying a few rounds into Scratch’s BMW to see if I could slow his ass down. My blood was jackhammering through my veins so hard and fast I could feel it pounding in my ears. My mind felt like it was wading through thick mud and fog. Everything I did seemed a few seconds off. Aiming was a joke. I would’ve been lucky to hit the car at all let alone to hit Scratch.
I held the nine-millimeter Beretta in my lap trying to cock it with my right hand while steering with my left as the accelerator slowly crept toward ninety and traffic grew denser.
Come on, Brother. Get your shit together! I screamed to myself, still trying to fight off panic, emotional exhaustion, and eventual collapse.
This white mutherfucker can’t win! You can’t let that devil win. That bitch-ass peckerwood wouldn’t be shit without you—
That thought chilled me to the bone. Certainly Scratch didn’t owe his entire success to me. He was well on his way to becoming a serious ghetto star before I even met him. But I had helped. I had helped a lot.
Maybe I was supposed to pay for my sins by getting my cap peeled in a moving car and dying with the Baby Christ in my arms?
The Baby Christ? What tha fuck am I talkin’ about? Do I really believe that this little crack baby is Jesus? His pipe-smokin’ mother certainly wasn’t the Virgin Mary. What a fucked up twist of fate that would be for Christ to be reborn as some helpless little crack baby in the middle of a war zone with no one to protect him, but a crazy murder-for-hire nigga like me. Didn’t the church have secret orders dedicated to this sort of thing? Trained Vatican bodyguards or something? Maybe I should get him to a church and let them handle it? I thought as I fought to keep the Impala on the road whipping it around tight corners at over 80 miles per hour.
“Oww! Shit!”
A bullet ripped through my ear and seared a small furrow alognisde my head, inches from my temple. That familiar berserker rage, which had served me in so many street fights, descended on me like a black cloud blotting out fear and reason.
“Oh, you have got ta die now. I don’t give a fuck what you are. You’ve got to die.”
I switched the gun to my left hand and swung it over my right shoulder, aiming with help from my rearview mirror. I could see Scratch’s face through my shattered rear windshield. I slowed down to let the BMW get closer as I pointed my gun right into the face of the devil. White flame leapt into his eyes and his pasty face split wide with a gold-toothed grin. Calmly he raised the big shiny Colt .45 and pointed it at me. At this range he couldn’t miss and he was aiming much better than I was. The back of my head and center of my forehead started to itch and I knew that the bullet would enter and exit there if I allowed him to pull that trigger. I squeezed the trigger frantically and the obnoxious red Beemer swerved into a parked car, going up on two wheels and nearly flipping end over end. When it came to rest I could have sworn I saw something scamper out of the car on four long gnarled legs…something with wings and claws and eyes that burned like stars. It staggered and collapsed in the street and I turned my attention back to the road just as I ran a red light and barreled through the intersection of Germantown and Chelten Avenues.
Twin headlights bore down on me as I hit the accelerator, leaving the wreckage of Scratch’s vehicle behind. I barely managed to maintain control of the car which was now doing over 90 miles per hour when my rear bumper was demolished by an old Chevy Nova heading down Chelten Ave. My bumper dragged on the asphalt shooting up sparks as I continued up the street with my foot firmly planted on the gas. I kept the speedometer at 90 until I hit Tulpehocken Street, then I slowed it down to 35. Now that I had escaped Scratch I couldn’t risk getting jacked by the police for speeding and having them discover a smoking gun in my car. In jail I would be a sitting duck and the child would be left unprotected. I made a right onto McCallum street and flew across Washington Lane. I came to a rest in front of Huey’s house, scooped the child up in my arms and leapt from the car leaving it still running. There were so many bullets in the seats and dashboard that it seemed almost impossible that none of them had hit us.
I know Huey will help me. He’ll know what to do. I know he’ll understand what’s going down.
The Impala belched out its last noxious breath and died as I staggered toward Huey’s front porch. The infant was still eerily calm. I crept up the crumbling concrete ste
ps on legs that wobbled and shook from exhaustion as the adrenaline rush died off and I started to crash. I was staring into the child’s eyes again as if awaiting revelation. None came.
Huey’s house hadn’t changed a lot in the years since our childhood abortively ended in that abandoned lot with a child’s body dropping at our feet, a gun smoking in my hand, and the gold-toothed grin of a blue-eyed gangsta. The porch’s wooden deck was warped and splintered from water damage and neglect and the patio overhead was sagging as if preparing to succumb to gravity and crash down upon me. The cracked windows, old blue and white paint that was peeling and flaking revealing the bare brick beneath, the front door that was so badly warped that you could see light from inside all around the edges of it, was all just as it had always been. Nothing had changed but our ages and my predicament.
Huey answered the door on the first ring. “What’s up, dog? You in trouble?”
He drew his Sig Sauer .40 from his waistband and cocked it, looking past me out the door. His eyes widened when he saw my Impala riddled with holes and then he did a double take when he noticed the baby in my arms.
“Where’d you get the kid, man? What’s goin’ down wit’ you? Somebody after you? You ain’t kidnap this kid did you?”
He looked at me with more concern than my own mother would have shown. Tears welled up in my eyes and I took a deep breath to clear them away and compose myself. From behind him I saw Iesha looking at me with critical eyes. Even at eight months pregnant she was just as beautiful as she’d been when I’d first met her back when I was ten years old. And I still loved her. Her eyes told me she didn’t reciprocate the emotion.
What’s this evil nigga about to get my man involved in now? They seemed to say.
I felt terribly self-conscious and foolish.
“Look, man, maybe I shouldn’t have come. This is my shit. I’ll handle it. I didn’t mean to disrupt your evening and bring all this drama to your doorstep. My bad.”
Huey held my eyes with his and it was evident that he was dismissing everything I was saying. He could tell that I needed help.
“Go upstairs, Iesha. Me and Snap have some things to discuss.”
“Don’t let him talk you into no dumb shit! I don’t want to see you wind up like your brother.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Huey’s head whipped around like someone slammed the brakes on too fast in a speeding car.
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Iesha’s defiant eyes drifted to the floor and she started to stammer, clearly afraid.
“I-I was just saying…I love you and I just don’t want to see anything happen to you.”
“Go upstairs, Iesha. Now!”
His fierce stare pushed the pregnant young girl out of the room and up the stairs. This relationship couldn’t be healthy.
“What kinda trouble you in, my brother? Who did that to your car?”
I took a deep breath and slipped slowly to my knees as the weight of the evening, of everything I had to tell Huey before the night could end, overcame me. Huey lifted the child from my hands before my face hit the stained and tattered wool carpet.
“Scratch… Scratch is tryin’ to kill me. He’s tryin’ to kill me and the baby and…and I don’t even think he’s human.”
Huey’s eyes clouded over with that murderous rage smoldering just beneath his icy cold front. His hazel eyes darkened and narrowed into slits and his deep gravely voice came out as a hoarse whisper.
“Then we gotta do that White nigga first. If that fool wants to try and take you out then he’s gonna have to deal with my black ass. And I swear I’m gonna split that devil’s wig!”
— | — | —
Chapter 19
“…Everlasting good and evil do not exist! From out of themselves they must overcome themselves—over and over again.”
—Friedrich Nietzshe
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“So who’s the kid?”
Huey was standing above me holding the child. I must have passed out or something because I was laying on the couch looking up at him. I cupped my head in my hands as I rose to a sitting position.
“I must have been out of my fucking mind.”
Huey sat down next to me cradling the baby in his lap.
“So who is he? Where’s his parents?”
“I don’t know how to even begin explaining all of this.”
My head was still in my hands, refusing to look at Huey until I had the right words.
“Why don’t you start by telling me where you got this kid so I don’t think you’re some kind of child abductor or kidnapper or something with some perverted interest in babies. ’Cause then I will have to kick ya ass up out of my house.”
Huey’s voice lowered again to that gravely rumble, letting me know that he wasn’t joking.
“That baby…is Jesus Christ.”
“Fuck did you just say?”
Huey grabbed me by my shoulder and jerked me around to face him.
“I know this shit is going to sound off. I don’t know, maybe I just flipped out or something. Maybe I’m losing my mind. I mean, I was all set to blast them, both of them, the kid and his mom, then I got like this hallucination or revelation or something. I don’t know, dog. I don’t know.”
Huey leaned in closer, his voice softening.
“What did you see?”
“I saw Scratch’s face and— and he didn’t look human. It was like he turned into a demon right in front of my eyes and shit. I thought I saw his face tear away, burn away like the celluloid in those old movies that would get too close to the projector bulb and melt. And Yo, underneath his face, there was this other face. Satan’s face. A grinning devil. Then I looked down at this baby in my arms and I’m tellin’ you dog, it was Jesus Christ. There was no doubt in my mind that I was holding our savior in my arms about to blow his damn head off with Satan standing right at my side urging me on. It was like this moment of clarity, you know, like when you’re high and you ain’t makin’ no sense and then suddenly the fog clears and you can think straight. That’s what it felt like, like the fog had cleared and I could see everything for what it really was. And yo, Scratch ain’t fuckin’ human, dog! He’s some kind of fuckin’ monster. I’m tellin’ you, dog. He ain’t human!”
Huey was staring at me as if he was trying to decide whether to believe me or not. He looked down at the kid for a long time before he looked back up at me. His mouth kept opening and closing as he struggled to decide what to say.
“I don’t know, dog. That’s some deep shit. I mean, I can relate to Scratch being a devil and all that, I been telling you that all along, but not like…literally. Not like from hell, Prince of Darkness, Lord of Lies, and shit. That’s some other shit you on right there. And this little crack baby? Jesus Christ? I ain’t no Christian, but don’t that seem a little off to you? Jesus Christ showin’ up here? This ain’t exactly Jerusalem.”
“Yeah, that’s the part I can’t figure out. Why here and why me? But if none of this shit is real then why is Scratch tryin’ to kill me?”
“’Cause you fuckin’ shot at him, fool! ’Cause you don’t want to work for him no more. ’Cause he figures somebody from one of the other gangs flipped you and now you’re out to take him out. Or he thinks you went crazy after all the killin’ he’s had you doin’ for him and he’s afraid of you. Either way he figures you’re too dangerous to have around now. He’s got to kill you.”
I looked down at the baby. It was looking up at me intently as if it had something it wanted to say to me.
“I don’t know why I should care even if this is Christ. He ain’t our savior, never was. He saved the Jews and damned the Black man as far as I can tell. I mean, fuck has he ever done for my Black ass? Christ or Satan, fuck is the difference? Niggas still gettin’ fucked over either way.”
“Fuck do you mean by that?”
“I mean God don’t give a fuck about niggas.”
“Come on now, you know I hat
e when you talk that shit. You can say all you like about that white Christian god, but the black god, Allah, he loves the Black people.”
“Yeah, and look how he shows it.”
“So, what you sayin’?”
“I’m sayin’ there ain’t no way you can believe in no God of the Black people. Not how fucked up shit is for us. Look how we live brother! “
“I’ve heard all this before, Snap. You’re starting to talk in circles.”
“But you ain’t listening. You ain’t feelin’ me though.”
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