Durty South Grind

by L. E. Newell

  After Ms. Violet had settled into the seat, she looked up as the bus was passing by. Spotting him in the rear window, she rolled the window down, stuck her head out and waved. She even surprised herself when she broke out into a wide smile when he waved back. The smiles stayed on their faces as the bus rolled out of sight down the sloped street. She started rubbing her fake stomach, wondering if she was rushing things. She quickly decided that she didn’t really care if she was; she wanted that nigga and she was going to get him.

  After surviving a bumpy ride over the railroad tracks, Sparkle sat back contemplating how he was going to lock old gal in. He leaned forward in the seat, resting his elbows on his knees, having drawn his conclusion. From that look in her eyes, he already had her. It was now only a matter of when and where. And the closer to the future, the better, as far as he was concerned.

  A few minutes later, when he disembarked in front of the apartments, his attention was drawn to some loud honking from across the street. He immediately recognized Debra’s bracelet-laced arm waving out of the window as she pulled into the BP service station.

  “You ready for some poker, bro?” JJ leaned across the seat, shouting over some Busta Rhymes flow booming from the speakers. He waved him to the car. “Man, you got here just in time. Get your ass in the car; it’s already popping over there.” His head was bopping steadily to the funky beat.

  Sparkle jumped in the backseat and they headed toward I-20. As soon as they made the turn onto the expressway, his thoughts immediately turned to the Red Roof Inn sign. He tapped JJ on the shoulder. “Yo dog, last night when I was heading back to the crib, there was a whole rack of police down there making folk jump into the pool and shit. Man, who in the fuck are the Black Cat and Red Dogs?”

  JJ arched his brow, eyeing him in the rearview mirror, before replying seriously, “My nigga, since we got locked up, they done come up with some nasty drug squads. Aw man, those bastards are straight-up terrorizing shit; bad news, dog, real bad news.”

  Sparkle stared at the bust scene until it faded out of view before he responded, “You know what, dude? I couldn’t help noticing a little bitty muthafucka stomping around like she was running some marshal law-type shit. Who the hell was that? I got some really fucked-up vibes watching that shit, man.” He sat back and lit a Kool cigarette.

  Debra shook her head, answering, “Bro, if I was you I’d stay as far away from that drug thang as I could.” She paused and rolled her eyes at JJ, who made sure that he was concentrating on the road ahead. She pushed on, “Hell, even I know about that little monster bitch.”

  “Monster what? Monster who?” Sparkle asked, swerving back and forth between them.

  She spun around in the seat. “That crazy-ass ho, Lieutenantkicka-nigga-in-the-face Woo. Bro, that ho’s got the baddest of the bad shutting shop at the thought of her fucking name. Whew, she rough, yo.”

  “Damn, she really some kinda bitch, huh? Fuck, she hard like that?”

  “Hell yeah, she hard like that, and more,” they said in unison.

  Sparkle sat back; he had heard enough. It was time to concentrate on what moves he was going to use this time in the poker game.

  As they pulled into Al’s circular driveway, Debra said, “Hey, I forgot to tell you that your girl, Yolanda, was out here the other night. She’s probably in there tonight.”

  “Johnny B’s Yolanda?” Sparkle asked.

  JJ jumped in. “Damn, those two been doing it since the kindergarten, aight they? At least that’s what I done heard.”

  Debra spoke over her shoulder as she pressed the doorbell to the garage. “Shit, how a bitch put up with a nigga like that all these years amazes me.”

  Sparkle and JJ looked at each other and hunched their shoulders mouthing, women, before Sparkle said, “Damn, I betcha they are still killing each other.”

  “Every day, every motherfucking day.” Debra giggled as she pressed the bell again.

  Out of his peripheral vision, Sparkle noticed the curtain flutter at one of the windows. He didn’t say anything, figuring it was one of Al’s forms of house security. Instead he smiled. “Uh-huh, they’ve been doing that from way back. Shit, way back to those days when we used to play doctor under the tent blanket trying to get the stinky finger.”

  Debra laughed. “Ooh, ya’ll was nasty back in dem days, for sho. Doing the su-la su-la, humping like ya’ll was really fucking something. Uh-huh, with baby finger dicks and baldheaded pussies. I used to wonder if that old stuff was for real.”

  “Hell yeah, it’s true. Moses and ’em was probably getting the stinky fingers and those folk up in the manger. Then again, don’t be sitting up there like you didn’t do it.”

  “Oooh ya’ll, so damn nasty.” Debra frowned.

  “We nasty? Ya’ll the nasty ones,” JJ added, snickering. Debra wrinkled her nose and continued to press the button. Suddenly the porch light started blinking, causing all of them to jump before the door cracked open. A blonde, red-boned honey stuck her head out the door and looked over their heads at the surrounding neighborhood like she was expecting one of the neighbors to be playing I Spy. Seeing no one she opened the door only enough for one person at a time to pass through as she said in a husky voice, “Ya’ll coming in or what? I can’t stand here all night; damn.”

  “Aw, geeked-up-ass bitch, shut the fuck up and step yo ass back,” Debra hissed as she brushed by her, followed by Sparkle and then JJ.

  In the dimly lit garage, Sparkle could see that she was wearing a red silk dress, split up to the thigh, revealing a nice creamy thigh. His eyes were roaming slowly up her voluptuous figure when he felt Debra’s elbow dig into his ribs. “Hey, girlfriend, this here’s my brother, Sparkle; Sparkle, this is…” She paused and slapped him lightly upside the head, knowing what his freaky ass was thinking. “Nigga, can you please keep your eyes anywhere near your head? Whew. Sparkle, this here’s Honey. She works at the shop with me.” Debra didn’t wait for either of them to respond and headed for the door to the game room.

  He dove right into his mack attack. “Hi there, Honey, mmmh that name there sho do—” He didn’t get to finish his initial move when JJ shoved him along.

  “Hey, partner, later for that shit there. Let’s get our asses to this cheddar.”

  There was a seductive smile on Honey’s sweet face as she waved a dainty hand to let him know that there was indeed an opening if he played his cards right. With the way she was handling herself, it was obvious that she was thoroughly in the game. He chalked her up for further investigation, right along with all the others, whenever the time allowed.

  He let the moment pass when he was mashed between Debra and JJ before they headed up the short set of stairs that led to the main house. Sparkle met her smile as he followed them until Debra shoved him across the sill and closed the door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rainbow Works The Younguns

  Rainbow and a group of rock-slanging thugs were sitting around the glass table in the dining room of his crib across from Turner Field. They were in the middle of a Georgia Skin gambling game. He started rubbing his chin with his elbow resting on the table as he studied each youngun individually. He was full of confidence, knowing they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

  Behind his ever-present aviator sunshades, his eyes glittered as he thought, Now that’s a damn shame. These so-called slick-to-the-bone-ass niggas don’t have the slightest hint that I’m cheating their stupid asses to death. The fools are probably thinking that I’m laughing at all that fake-ass gangster lingo they keep tossing around.

  He forced a fake frown as he waited for the next hand to be dealt. It was a mask he constantly displayed while dealing with these young fools. He couldn’t afford to let either of them ever think there was anything soft about him. For dealing with these clowns was sort of a must with keeping his ear to the pulse of the hood.

  Little Bird, decked out real fly in a candy-apple red short set, was the smallest of the crew. He
tried to maintain a hard-as-nails mannerism to enforce the image that nobody had better take his mini size as a sign of weakness. He had already lost a considerable sum of his hard-earned pusher money, so he wasn’t in the mood for any bullshit. “Nigga, will ya please stop finger-fucking the cards and let a nigga scoop a winner out of that raggedy-ass deal you just shuffled up. I need to get my baby boy some new Air Force Ones with ya’ll niggas’ hard-hustled money,” he hollered at Billy, who kept right on rifling the deck.

  Billy, a real runt of a dude himself, was slightly bigger than Little Bird at five-feet-seven inches. He was dressed in a black denim short set, with a Yankees baseball cap cocked acey-deucey on his head. He was as crazy as the rest of the young fools who thought that slinging rocks gave them the swagger to be gangster. He set the deck down, snorted as he sat back in his chair and rubbed his baby fu-Manchu mustache. His complexion was as dark as midnight, leading his crew to jokingly call him “Inky.” Outside of the guys there, very few were allowed to tither along his extremely short fuse.

  But the other players around the table were just as mean, or so they thought. They couldn’t care less if his little short ass getting riled up. Nor were they the least concerned about him being short of his re-up money. The less he had to work with, the more their pockets had the chance of staying fat.

  Rainbow leaned back in his large African bamboo chair, observing the slick back-and-forth banter of the young drug dealers. They had no idea that every deck on the table—hell, in the house—was rigged in several ways to skim them for their digits. Seldom did he have any sympathy for whatever situation they were in; especially with the way the old-timers had made him pay his dues way back in the day. Now it was his turn to take advantage of those that didn’t know the game. It’s called paying your dues, nigga; plain and simple, he thought as he prepared to study the deck for the best pick.

  Sitting to Rainbow’s left was Chopper, a young, light-skinned stud with a bad case of acne, whose shiny bald head, mouth full of gold teeth and thick gold rope chain draping his neck were all competing for the most glitter. His idea of style went way back to the days when gangsters sported suspenders the same color of their pants and whatever style hat they were wearing at the time. Today it was a beige derby that coordinated well with his navy blue silk shirt and gator wing tips. Rainbow had to admit that the nigga stayed fly; he had to give him that much. He was a little over six feet tall, with a well-toned muscular body that was built for the boxing ring. His feet were so big that you could surf with them. He was also one of the main shit talkers, but tonight his facial expression was one of total concentration. It meant that he was either short on his re-up money or one of his baby mamas was tripping on his ass. For whatever the reason, he was strung really tight.

  Rainbow had a credo to take it light on whichever of his regular suckers appeared to have their back against the wall. He smiled to himself as he thought about his old card cheat teacher, Googie, who had always preached, Keep ’em happy, keep ’em on the edge of being broke, but by all means keep ’em smiling. Realizing from experience that Slim was in a strainful way, he shied away from betting him or at least tried to keep his losses to a minimum. Still he wasn’t about to run away if he threw money his way.

  He shifted his eyes over to the right to check out Stack-a-dime, the one he considered the most dangerous of the crew, who was shuffling his money and a sack of dime rocks from one hand to the other. The tallest of the group, he was dark complexioned as well, around six-feet four-inches with an arm span like a condor and dark penetrating eyes. He stayed clean-shaven with thick cornrows lacing his head. He wore a large plaid shirt buttoned all the way to the neck and gold-tinted aviator glasses resting on the top of his head. He was chewing gum and had the nasty irritating habit of making it pop very loudly several times a minute; especially when he was losing and right now he was losing big time, so his attitude was snotty as hell.

  But not a soul around the table gave a flying fuck about how he felt as long as he kept tossing his dollars and rocks in the pot. Win or lose, he considered himself a hardcore stud and wasn’t about to let the shit talking get by him, so he jumped right in there with Billy and Little Bird. “Yeah, little muthafucka, set the godayum deck down. Folk in here are serious about dey bucks, nigga. And about winning that little-ass sack of yours.”

  Billy, who many people mistakenly took for being gay because of his girlish looks and long curly hair, was really the deadliest of them all. He nibbled on his lips and wasted little time to reply, “Hey, fuck you, dick head. You be damn near scraping the cover off the cards as many times as you be walking the muthafuckas, so chill your big ass down, nigga.” In mock anger, he slammed the deck onto the table so hard that his Omega watch snapped open and rode up on his hand, which aggravated him that much further.

  Little Bird laughed so hard that spittle flew out of his white gold-filled mouth. “See there, little nigga. I knew all yo shit was cheap as hell. Uh-huh, damn, look at dat raggedy-ass watch about to jump off your arm like it don’t wanna be there. Where ya get that shit from; one of them flea markets out there in College Park?”

  There was a loud crackling sound as Billy rotated his neck a couple of times before he raised his arm and shook the watch back down his wrist, then snapped it shut with enthusiasm. “Okay, ya’ll greedy-ass bad boys go ahead and get a card that’ll help to keep my stack fat,” he growled as he slid the deck to the center of the table.

  “Aw hell naw, nigga. It’s about time for ya’ll scrubs to make a playa a real mint. Ya’ll know how TLC be saying how dey don’t want no scrubs. Well, I sho do,” Little Bird shot back as he picked a card out of the deck first since he was the end man.

  “Aw, little nigga, why didn’t you cut the damn cards? You know damn well that you can’t be trusting this little slimy-ass pretty boy with his half-slick ass,” Stack-a-dime cried out as he scooped a card from the middle of the deck.

  “Come on, crybaby-ass nigga, take a peek at that loser you just pulled out of the deck and chunk some of that money over this way. Your black ass always been a sweet lick for a player anyhow,” Chopper spat angrily while he also scooped his card from the middle of the deck before sliding it over to Rainbow.

  While they had been doing all that jaw-jacking, Rainbow had been studying the side of the deck for the tics he’d made days ago with the magic ink only he could see with the special glasses he had propped on his nose. He smiled inwardly as the red, green, blue and yellow dots gleaned clearly through the lenses. Immediately spotting the red ones at the bottom, he expertly scooped one of them and slid the deck over to Little Bird to make sure that it didn’t bump with the ones the others had picked. At the same time he saw that Billy’s and Stack-a-dime’s cards were the furthest down the deck, so he started trash-talking to pump them up to toss bets his way. And with their young pumped egos, he knew that they would be chunking big dollars trying to make a quick hit.

  Before the first card was turned over, he felt his Trac phone buzzing on his hip. Lifting his sweatshirt, he saw a familiar number blinking up at him. He got the attention of one of his girls, who was watching a video in the living room, to bring him a telephone. He had a thing about discussing his biz over the airwaves of cell phones. The other end picked up before the first ring was complete. He nodded as he listened for a while and then answered in a gravelly tone, “To tell you the truth, ‘B,’ I was really waiting for him to get in contact with me whenever he felt the need. Figured he wanted to get his feet wet in his own time; you feel me.” He listened for a half minute or so. “Tell ya what; drop a little hint on him to see if you think he’s ready and I’ll get back with ya’ll later and we can see where it goes from there, aight. Yeah, cool, partner. I’ll holla.”

  He locked off and put his concentration back on the game and immediately went straight back to the trash-talking. It was time to bring the game to an end. He had gotten enough enjoyment out of toying with these kids. And talking with “B” reminded him that his
main girl, Lady, was on her way back from scoring his package from his boy, Duke. He had to go and resupply his crew of girls scattered around the city. He wasn’t about to lump these young niggas’ dope with the bomb he usually sold, leaving it for his girls to do, instead of digging into the stuff to be sold.

  Less than a half-hour later, the game was dwindling down to the end when he heard the voices of Lady and Princess coming through the door from the hallway.

  Billy and Stack-a-dime were the only ones left at the table when the girls entered the room. Little Bird and Chopper, with their broke asses, were sitting on the edge of the couch watching some porn videos with a couple of his other girls. They had their hands in their pants, rubbing themselves. Like that shit was going to turn them hoes on. Dream on, fellas. Them girls there are cold as freezer ice.

  Lady and Princess eyeballed them disgustedly before they broke out in smiles when they saw all the rocks overflowing out of the crystal ball mirror beside Rainbow on the table.

  Lady, at forty-something, was still sporting a youthful girlish figure. Only the crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes gave away her real age. And Princess, who had just gotten picked up by Lady at the Motel 6, strutted pure sex appeal as she stepped into the room dressed in a skintight cream-colored denim outfit with a red flowery blouse and red cowgirl boots. Her sexy attire was in stark contrast to her jet-black skin tone. With her brick-house shape she was definitely bootylicious.

  The similarly dressed pair glided along like they were on a model runway. They batted their long eyelashes at all the younguns.

  “I see ya’ll young and dumb ballers done donated ya’ll hard-earned goodies to my baby again,” Lady said. “Ya’ll just so good to us. Thanks.” She swirled in a circle and curtsied with her arms spread out wide. “I really do appreciate ya’ll generous contributions. I really do,” she added in a Southern belle twang.