by Tayari Jones
It wasn’t until they stood under Maddie’s dock, across the filled-in grave, when Maddie smiled at Emma, truly smiled at her partner in crime, that Emma experienced a wave of elation. It was done. She’d helped kill an innocent man. And he was innocent. She had no illusions about that. She wasn’t as stupid as Maddie thought. As gullible. She knew the true reason Maddie had wanted to kill the man. She was just bored. She wanted to prove to herself that she could. To prove to herself that she could get Emma to do anything for her. Poor insecure, pliable Emma, who worshipped the ground her goddess walked on. But what Maddie didn’t understand was . . . Emma didn’t care what the reason was. All that mattered was Maddie could never leave her now. Because Emma knew Maddie far better than Maddie knew Emma. Just the mention of prison, the thought of her loss of freedom—Maddie would do anything to avoid that. She could never leave Emma now. So it was just the two of them, only them, until the day they died. Alone. Together. Trapped in their own little bubble. What was the life of one stranger compared to her own lifetime of happiness? She was entitled to it. She deserved to be happy.
Emma held out her hand across that grave to her best friend, now her soul mate, and they walked back to the boathouse and didn’t leave until it was time to watch the lake rise, toasting with rum and Cokes as the water hid away all their sins.
“To us,” Maddie said.
“The baddest bitches in the PTC,” Emma finished before clinking glasses with her BAE. “Together. Forever.”
A Moment of Clarity at the Waffle House
by Kenji Jasper
Vinings
for “Belle”
1. The Spark
“You sure you don’t want it?” Cam had asked you twenty years before, while cramming chicken-fried steak into his mouth at The Beautiful. Despite its reputation for being Atlanta’s best, the mac and cheese was always kind of bland to you. You preferred your Grandma Sally’s, because she used cheddar and Velveeta. And it was dark and crispy on the top. So you got a little bit of crunch in every first bite.
Back then The Beautiful was the closest thing you had to an office during the week. Neither of you kept day jobs. But it wasn’t safe to plan and plot anywhere other than places familiar. You knew both exits, where the parking lot let out to, and the intervals that the cops rolled by. The night manager sold smoke on the side (wholesale only) to cover what he owed to the bookies. They knew him well at Grady Hospital’s Marcus Trauma Center. But that part ain’t have nothin’ to do with you.
The words were a young man’s question, powered by his pumped-up ego. You’d pulled pistols on the right targets and walked away with some cash. No problems with the cops and you’d never done time because you only chose marks who wouldn’t run to the Red Dogs the minute you burned rubber toward the closest freeway. Your thing was to never set up anywhere you could possibly get blindsided.
Even though you and Cam ran the show, Bebe was the slim end of your isosceles. She was studying chemistry at Spelman but had grown up in the Calliope projects in NOLA. She knew the game and she’d actually run the same hustle for her man back in high school. So it wasn’t no thing to up the stakes. The J.R. Crickets tee and heeled ankle boots matched her silver shorts perfectly. The cocoa butter on her legs made them gleam.
Just the weekend before you’d been outside of Club 112 (this was in its last days). You’d sent her in with the tightest dress she could find at BCBG. And she had brought some college chicks with her, square broads from Carolina and J-Ville, chicks who only knew a setup when it came to place settings and blind dates.
All five of them went in there dressed to the nines, and in no time Rico Wade from Organized Noize was all up on Bebe. His platinum chain, covered in chunky diamonds, was at least six months of living expenses. You had seen him out a bunch of times before and knew that he always had it on ever since ATLiens had gone platinum. Word had it that he bought the chain right after he got the plaque for the songs he produced on the record.
Rico let Bebe and the girls into the VIP area and took them along for food when he left. You and Cam were parked in the lot and followed them when they all came out. You waited for their crew to peel down to four and then you hit the quartet in the parking lot at the IHOP on Peachtree, and hit 85 South with twenty grand worth of stones and precious metal in Cam’s glove box. By the next day Webster’s had a picture of Rico next to the word slipping in the dictionary.
You were a success . . . again. But something about it all just didn’t sit right with you. It felt too easy, like you were missing something, like there was some thread hanging from the action that might choke you to death if you weren’t careful. And you couldn’t have been more right.
With hindsight being as clear as water, the truth was that you were starting to look for bigger game, for less attention, for something more than what you could snatch off some rapper’s neck at the right intersection. You might have even been thinking about getting out of the game at twenty-one, which was probably what you should’ve gone with.
“Nah, man. I ain’t feelin’ it,” you said, voting nay on Cam’s next proposed jack move, which had something to do with breaking into Erick Sermon’s house while he was off on the Def Squad tour.
“You know how much we could get outta dat?!” Cam had argued, desperately searching for interest in your eyes that just wasn’t there. The look he gave you was cold and calculating, like he’d just solved some equation that had been stuck on the blackboard for as long as he’d been alive. You were too young to get that this was the moment when you stopped being the little man under him and started being a threat. To you there was weed in the air, Crown Royal in the belly, Scarface on the system, and nothing but time for you to make all your dreams come true.
“We need to step up our game, folks,” you proposed as a counter. And after that the stakes went up like a city on fire.
You hit Body Tap with a six-man crew and walked out with a quarter-mil to split. You had taken Jermaine Dupri for a drawer full of platinum pieces at his crib in Parrot Cay. But your best work had been cracking the count room at the Gold Club and walking off with close to 350 G’s while the entire floor choked on the exploding FedEx package filled with pepper spray.
Cop specialists were on the lookout. You got kinda notorious. But Cam was getting out of control.
He graduated from a BA in blunts to an MFA in H. And with that shift his money stacks melted like soft serve on summer concrete. You knew he had a problem. You didn’t even trust him anymore. But you were so used to the whole Butch-and-Sundance thing that you made yourself believe it wasn’t the biggest mistake of your life.
“I know where there’s some real money at,” you had proposed as an alternative that afternoon at The Beautiful, ready to reveal the secret that you should’ve kept hidden for just a little longer. You told him about Jamie, the dude who owned Club Garage, and the million in the safe at his crib, and all the jewels he rocked, and how his security system was, and well . . . that was ALL Cam needed to hear.
You did the job. Then Cam snitched you out to Club Garage security when you took the lion’s share (because it was your plan and your contacts that got you the in). So you had to empty a .45 into the two dudes who came to your crib looking for the repo (and then safely tossed the pistol). But when the cops arrived, they matched up jewels to photos on file with Jamie’s insurance company, and found your prints on a shell casing in the living room. You ate seven for the burglary and eight for third-degree murder.
Your years inside were not particularly pleasant. The environment taught you everything you needed to know about breaking bones and snatching limbs out of sockets. You welcomed those with size and weight advantages, as you were so thoroughly convinced of your imminent death that you got to a place where you literally feared nothing (other than the next day of the same).
You came in with a soul fat with hope and left with one as slender as Rihanna on a deck chair. You spent most of the first five years down trying to put it behind y
ou. But you couldn’t once Bebe started writing you the letters. She and Cam had a kid and got married, but somewhere in the middle of the Family Matters life she started thinking about you. She came all the way up to Augusta to see you on a weekend when he and kids were out of town.
It turned out that he was back on that shit, and he’d already hit her a few times when she called him out about the sixteen-year-old he was fuckin’ at the house while she was at work. You were hesitant, clinging to loyalties shorter than the time you’d done. But that changed when she told you she was in love with you.
You didn’t know what love meant outside of that high school bullshit, blood family, and what rappers said on the tapes you heard at the prison barber or what you read in the books to keep each grain in the hourglass of your sentence from killing you. She wore that same perfume that she had on when she used to run with y’all back in the world. But there was a tiny scar over her left eye and these cute freckles on her arms that she said ran in the DNA.
Back in the world you had known plenty about getting nuts off and breaking headboards in cheap motels off 20. But you wanted more than that. You wanted to spend a month with her, or maybe a year, or maybe forever. Time is an illusion behind the walls.
You wanted her to fry you catfish on Saturdays just in time to watch the college games and suck your dick when she was happy that you helped her keep the house in order. The partner who had kept you apart from her was the same one who had put you inside over nothing but ego. This time, even without your money or the hunter-green Impala sitting on Daytons, she made you feel powerful. She made you feel like she was where you belonged.
2. Thunder Rolls
Scarface’s “A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die” oozes out of your earbuds as you weather the commuter tram from Concourse C to the baggage claim at Hartsfield. After parole was up you took the last of what you’d stashed in bonds and treasuries in Grandma’s attic and bought a barber shop in Charlotte.
Bebe started selling Mary Kay for her cousin as cover, just to make the trips to come see you. She’d got him out of the house with a separation, but he wouldn’t give her a divorce, threatening to name her as an accessory in some hustle she’d helped him run. So she kept the two kids and the condo in that tower sandwiched between Phipps Plaza and Georgia 400, with his name latched onto hers like a leech in swamp water.
You’ve only got one night to get it done. But you’ve been planning it for weeks. Greyhound is a shitty way to travel but they take cash and you can carry blades without getting searched. There is a car waiting in short-term parking. It has been rented under the name of someone else, someone with a face and credit history that is not yours, someone willing to look the other way just long enough for you to do what you need to do.
The 2014 Dodge Challenger came equipped with a leather overnight bag full of prearranged tools. Someone hacked the server at the rental car place and made some changes in the system records. Someone else filled in all the bogus details and made the pickup. The keys are in a small envelope taped to the inside of the wheel well. When you turn it over, Travis Scott’s “Antidote” spills out of the speakers like you’d made a request (even though you can’t request songs on the radio anymore). You turn it down while checking your mirrors, certain that you haven’t been seen.
On the drive north toward the city you think about things: the length of your layover, the forty-degree temp outside, the Empire Christmas special on Fox, and your dinner date a few hours into the future. There was a time when this place was your home, when you might have kissed the cheap carpet at Hartsfield when you landed. You knew you were gonna be in the A forever. But Joe Louis said it best: “Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit.”
Thunder rolls.
It’s midnight at the corner of Ponce and Federica. You watch the video feed from the nanny cam you placed in his crib a few weeks ago. Your perch is an empty studio apartment across the street. The rain patters like brushes on a snare.
Cam’s watching Stevie J & Joseline Go Hollywood on the flat-screen and swigging Coronas in succession. It’s the portrait of a divorcé working for MARTA when he once had millions. There is an enlarged poster from New Jack City in a frame next to a basketball jersey behind glass. It’s been twenty years since the boss’s glory days have passed him by.
The signal booster attached to the webcam keeps the image on the tablet stable as you enter the front door of the building. You copied the master key to the building weeks before, a gift from a well-paid “friend.” You make a note of his status on the tablet. He’s just taken a swig of his beer from the same sitting position.
It’s a good thing Fellini’s delivery guys don’t need uniforms. All you need to look the part is the pizza box and the credit card receipt. The pizza you bought with the toppings you know he’s a sucker for. No security in the building. The only cameras are in the lobby. Nothing a long brim and the shadows can’t neutralize.
You slide the tablet into your bag. You don’t need it anymore.
You ring his cell phone, using a Nigerian accent, with “pizza” and his apartment number as the only comprehensible words. He opens the door, his hunger the sole tool needed to bring about his demise. He eyes the pie before he sees your face. And when he looks up at where your face should be, you jab the blade into his gut and push him inside.
It’s not personal when you slash his jugular. That’s just to keep him from screaming. You stab him underhanded until he falls backward onto the floor. The blood is pooling, getting all over you and the carpet, couch, and coffee table. The bloody knife almost slips out of your hand. But it’s okay; you planned for that.
There are two full bottles of rubbing alcohol inside the pizza warmer. You unscrew the caps, punch through the safety seals, and douse the body in a liquid that’s 91 percent flammable. The clear liquid fuses with the blood. You remove one layer of clothing to reveal a shirt and pants underneath, unseen by anyone, and toss the bloody rags onto the pyre. Then you the light the match and close the door behind you.
You don’t need his body to burn to a crisp. You just need to get rid of your own DNA and everything that connects you to the crime. The camera, the tablet, the pizza, and the clothes are best served as ash. You can hear sirens off in the distance as you climb back into the car you rented under someone else’s name.
The sky is pitch black. The rain begins to come down, but you know where you’re headed—to that tower in Buckhead just past the Ritz-Carlton, on the other side of Phipps. She is waiting for you at the door when you arrive at her tenth-floor abode.
“You do it?” she asks, looking deep into your eyes to see if she still has that hold on you.
You nod. She loosens the belt on her robe and motions you inside.
“Good,” she says.
Her condo is a series of glass walls framed by iron and steel atop a concrete floor and carpet. There’s a framed pencil drawing on the wall, a sketch of a zydeco band playing for change on Bourbon Street done by a distant cousin. You know she misses the kids who are staying with Grandma. But you can tell she’s missed you more.
The storm finally arrives. Lightning strikes, illuminating the endless rows of tall and slender trees that hide the 75/85 junction in dark and flooding rain. She speaks in French creole, doing it just to fuck with you (and because you like it). These moments are a decade and a half in the making, a tape on auto-reverse.
She has this scent that kind of reminds you of Lotus Flower Bomb mixed with Halston. You cut her panties off with a paring knife from the block in the kitchen.
You rolled the L in the ashtray that’s now down to a half, and her second bottle of Veuve is almost empty. You trace the inside of her left thigh with your tongue. She giggles when you get to the ticklish place just above the knee. She touches herself before you can get to it, her ring and middle fingers brushing her clit gently until your tongue arrives.
Then your lips take over, drinking it in like she poured it for you in a glass. You hold her
other leg in place over your shoulder. And out of all the times for talk, she decides to ask you a question.
“You don’t get tired down there, do you?”
“Not when I’m motivated,” you murmur.
Even in the dim light, with the rain hitting the glass like hail, you can see the thickness of her nipples in the darkness while she fumbles with your belt. One shoe is on the other side of the room, where she threw it on the way in.
You claw each other out of your clothes like warring leopards on a savannah. She gets your zipper down and reaches inside. Her grip is strong as she guides you toward her, rolling the rubber on in just the nick of time.
She exhales as you enter her, parting waters that begin to run down the insides of her thighs, which you hold open as you thrust deep, coming out slow and then slamming again. You find your rhythm but she doesn’t let you enjoy it as she flips you over. You think of suggesting that you should move this to the bedroom. But the upholstery is soft and she straddles you, your hands all over a phatter ass than the one you remember. It’s her show . . . all the way until the end.
Lightning flashes again.
She bites your nipple so hard that you think it’s gonna bleed. Then you tell her to do it again. She rides you so hard that one end of the couch jumps up off the floor. You turn her over and enter from behind. She says she can feel your balls hitting her clit. She backs it up like the lethal weapon it is.
She comes out of nowhere, tightening around your Magnum force, her words smothered by the arm of the couch she’s biting. Her thighs tremble from the effort and you climax along the way, hands on her hips until you collapse against her. You lick the crease in her spine. She reaches back and strokes your face with a soft and slender palm.