Yaccub's Curse

by Wrath James White

  “I should have that nigga, Snap, snuff the baby. I’ll see how down he really is. Even after all the fools he’s bodied, he still believes in some kind of redemption. I bet you puttin’ a bullet in a pregnant woman will kill all that noise.” He laughed again as he turned the corner.

  His headlights slashed across the road illuminating a woman wearing tight jeans that had probably been baggy at one time, but were now so restrictive that she couldn’t button them or zip them up in front. Her swollen belly protruded through the open fly with her T-shirt riding high above her navel. She wore plastic flip-flops on her feet and Scratch could tell by the way she shuffled that she’d been hooked on drugs for a long time. Scratch pulled the car up next to her.

  “Want to smoke with me?”

  He held a glass pipe out the window with a rock of cocaine already loaded inside. He watched the pregnant woman’s eyes widen and seize on the crackpipe.

  “Nuh, no. I can’t. I’ve got to stay clean for my baby.”

  She was still staring at the pipe and almost drooling.

  “When was the last time you had a hit, huh? A week ago? Two days ago? Quitting now ain’t goin’ to do a damn thing to help your baby. The damage is already done. So why don’t you get in here and suck on this dick. The glass one and this one.” Scratch unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis.

  “I ain’t no fuckin’ whore! I got a job. You suck your own dick. Now get the fuck away from me!”

  “Sorry, bitch, but I ain’t got no more time to play around with you.”

  Scratch slid out of the BMW. The woman tried to run, but being in her third trimester slowed her down and Scratch seized her by her hair and dragged her to the floor.

  “Helllllp! Raaape! Raaaape!”

  Scratch smiled at her revealing two rows of gold plated teeth. Then he brought his fist down into her face sending several of the woman’s teeth tumbling down her throat. He struck her again and again until he realized that she wasn’t going to stop screaming until he killed her. It didn’t matter anyway. People tended to mind their business in this neighborhood.

  Let the bitch scream. I’m still taking that ass.

  He used his hands and his teeth to rip off her jeans and shirt. The woman’s breasts were enormous, bloated with milk. Scratch latched onto them with his fourteen karat canines greedily sucking them dry and biting into the massive glands until both blood and milk drooled down his face. He caressed her swollen stomach with a hand studded with platinum rings as he slid her jeans down to her ankles. He then took himself in hand and forced himself inside her tearing his own foreskin as much as her vaginal walls and caring equally little about either. Scratch sucked all the fluid from the woman’s breast as he drilled up inside her. His modest erection continued to grow in proportion to his excitement as if engorged by the same blood he was draining from her breast. When he finally grew tired of her screams he withdrew his cock, pulled out his knife, and cut open her belly. He reached up inside of her, pushing aside her intestines and stomach as he felt around in her womb. He then pulled out the fetus, covered in blood and amniotic fluid, sliced its head off and tossed it into the street. The woman’s screams redoubled.

  “MY BABY! MY BABY!!!”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  He stuck both of his hands up inside her and pulled out her uterus, intestines, and whatever organs he could get his hands on,

  “Aaaaaarlllllggh! Noooooo!” she seized his wrists and tried to pull his hands out of her. Scratch grabbed hold of something inside of her and pulled hard, ripping it free. Her body shuddered from head to toe then lay still.

  Scratch stuffed his limp penis back into his pants and climbed into his Beemer, leaving the woman’s vandalized corpse bleeding on the sidewalk. He cursed aloud as he slammed the car door and stomped down on the accelerator peeling off down the somber street. Once again he had killed the wrong whore. The baby was still alive somewhere. He could feel it.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 12

  “The nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for.”

  —Aristotle

  ««—»»

  I laid awake peeling the lead paint off the hundred-year-old window sill and watching the moon travel across the sky. The chittinous scurrying of hundreds, perhaps thousands of roaches click-clacked across the linoleum floor accompanied by the sound of large sewer rats scampering through the ceiling, bumping and thumping like they were carrying something heavy, stressing the already large cracks in the ceiling. It seemed ridiculous to me that after all the bodies I had made in pursuit of wealth I was still living like this.

  I often sat with the window open on these stifling humid July nights listening to the activity out on the streets. Moans, and laughs, shouts, and laughter, off-beat rapping, bullshitting, and teasing, fighting, gunshots, and the wailing peel of the ambulance as they arrived to take away the wounded. It was all a part of my little ghetto world and it was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to a lullaby.

  I would lie there trying to put faces and actions to all the noises and voices, to share in what they were experiencing. I would sit there in the dark wondering who was throwin’ down, who was poppin’ off rounds. And who was getting’ capped. Women’s sweet sighs and men’s passionate grunts would drift on the thick steaming air and I would wonder who was getting fucked and why I was alone. If it was someone’s wife or girlfriend. If she was enjoying herself or gagging beneath the smell of stale sweat and beer as some Neanderthal beast grunted and strained inside of her. This night however I knew that the woman who screamed out over and over again was not enjoying herself. Just as I knew the man who cursed her and struck her repeatedly wasn’t in it for his own enjoyment but for catharsis. Trying to transfer his own hopelessness and fear onto someone else thinking he could free himself of the pain. Just as I knew that it wouldn’t work. It never does.

  A scream of mortal anguish pierced the still night air. I imagined I could hear the death rattle that followed. Whoever had been raping that woman had just graduated into murder. There was silence for a moment and I began to drift off to sleep. Then I heard it, a low chuckle that turned into cackling laugh, a familiar laugh. I could have sworn it was Scratch. But why would he need to rape a bitch when he had pussy being offered to him everyday from women desperate for his product or blinded by his cash and jewelry. It was absurd so I dismissed the notion and by the time I woke up I had forgotten all about it.

  Mom was cooking breakfast and the smell of bacon and sausage pulled me up from my bed. I was wide awake by the time the aroma of buttermilk pancakes and syrup joined the chorus of delicious fragrances. Mom was humming to a George Benson tune on the stereo while she prepared breakfast. Her voice was as warm and wholesome as the smell of the pancakes and sausage.

  My Mom is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen outside of movies and television. When I was younger and the kids would tease me about my ragged clothes, nappy hair, and too wide nose, and I would wind up bloodying them and getting suspended from school, I was always proud when my mother came to pick me up. Seeing the expressions on the other kid’s faces when she walked into the office with her long gazelle legs and her smooth flawless mocha skin was almost worth the ass-kicking I would get when we got home. Everyone would “Ooooh!” and “Aaaah!” as she strolled the hallways because, if I was an ugly street urchin, my mother was an African Goddess with a beauty and majesty uncommon in the ghetto. None of those kids had ever seen a woman like my mom before. There was no more lovely sight anywhere in our neighborhood. Not the way the sun set behind the projects looking like the world was on fire. Not the way the stars filled the sky from one end to another when you stood on top of the roof at Duval Manor on a summer night. She was a Goddess to us and she was mine.

  In the early seventies she had been a moderately successful model and even did a brief stint as a sort of Black Vanna White for a local game show before she quit to find more stable work after she left Darryl the first time.
She didn’t think it was healthy for her to spend so much time away on photo shoots and thought a regular job would allow her to be the type of mother she thought I needed. It was funny to me because it seemed like we lived better when she was modeling than when she got her regular job and I definitely saw her more then despite trips to New York for modeling shows and the long hours spent filming the gameshow. Still, she remained a shocking beauty and I loved her more than anything on earth. She doesn’t really speak to me anymore though. Neither does Tank and Huey’s mom. They’re both disgusted with my choice of occupations and they don’t even know the half of it.

  Mom thinks I sell drugs like every other common thug in the neighborhood. I’ve never sold so much as a single rock in my life, not even a joint. I kill people. Scratch had originally hired Tank and I as bodyguards but that was just the lure to get us in. We were slowly groomed to be hitters and enforcers, taking out competition, disciplining or retiring other dealers in the crew when they got out of line, eliminating witnesses before they could talk. It was all routine now.

  Like Huey, Mom thinks I’m a menace to my own people. I am. I’m a menace to just about everyone, but my friends. Still, she hasn’t had to walk home in the snow without winter boots or a heavy winter coat or with holes in her underwear since I started taking care of business in the streets. Grandma hasn’t shed any tears over overdue bills and mortgage payments. Mom hasn’t had to think about selling her body to put food on the table or clothes on our backs like many other moms in the hood often have to consider. No dating men she doesn’t even like just to have someone to borrow money from should she need to. But more to the point, I didn’t have kids laughing at my old, cheap, out of date clothes and calling me dirty anymore. I didn’t intend on doing this forever. The plan was to save up enough money to pay for college and pay off the mortgage on the house and then I’d be done with this shit.

  “’Sup, Mom?”

  “Don’t talk to me like one of them ignorant street niggas, boy. I ain’t no damn ghetto trash.”

  “I just said, hello,” I said shrugging my shoulders

  “You said, ’Sup’, like some ignorant ass street nigga. You know how to talk English you save that ghetto slang for when you’re out with your drug dealin’ friends.”

  “Well, good morning anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose you plan on coming to church with me this morning?”

  “Since when did you start going to church?”

  “Since you started runnin’around in the streets and worrying me to death.”

  “I love you too, Mom. I gotta bounce though. If you leave before I get out of the shower the car keys are in my jacket.”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Aw, Mom come on! If you give me a sec I’ll drive you and grandma.”

  “Your grandmother left an hour ago while you were sleeping off your hangover. Your food is on the table. I’ll be back by three o’clock.”

  She kissed me automatically, lovelessly, then left quickly as if she couldn’t stand to be in my presence anymore. My heart ached.

  I showered and left without eating. The bright morning sun seared into my skull giving me an instant headache. My nerves were fraying, raw and bleeding. I needed to calm down and take my mind off my work and family. I needed some pussy.

  I didn’t really have a girlfriend. The truth was that I was still kind of sprung on Iesha even though she was having a kid by Huey. I still fantasized about making her mine, falling in love and treating her right. I wanted to do all the things for her I could never imagine doing for any of the cheap money-hungry hoes that got passed around the neighborhood from one thug to the next, their virtues vandalized and pillaged until they wound up catching a disease and burning some poor fool and getting fucked up so bad nobody wanted them anymore. Then they’d wind up turning to crack and selling that thang to the fools who didn’t know or didn’t care. It was funny how girls who nobody ’round the way would touch could still sell their ass to guys outside the hood. I had started looking at every woman I saw in the hood as just a future crackwhore. Not one of them was worth my time—except Iesha.

  Deep down I knew Iesha would stay with Huey forever if for no other reason than that he was pretty and there were too few things of genuine beauty in the ghetto that didn’t get spoiled quickly. Iesha would feel like it was her duty to preserve this one beautiful thing. And I was far from pretty. Sure, I had money and a brotha with cash could have just about any woman he wanted and her momma, but I wasn’t about supporting a woman just for some pussy and Iesha was one of the few who wasn’t like that anyway, though I might have made an exception for her.

  Lately, I had been bangin’ a neighborhood girl named Yolanda and, even though I knew I wasn’t the only stud she was dirtying the sheets with, something about her raised her above the rest of the hood rat hoes the local thugs passed around like trading cards. Yolanda commanded respect around the way. She was not a small woman, five-foot-ten inches tall and one hundred and eighty pounds or more. For such a big girl she was as fast as a viper. Idiots foolish enough to try to diss her usually ended up with a straight razor against their balls and her thirty-eight pressed to their temple. She was a true player who knew every aspect of the game. One hard-ass gangsta bitch.

  Yolanda seemed to be involved in everything. She sold alcohol after hours that she brought over from New Jersey by the caseload. She also sold the best weed in the neighborhood. Besides that she knew everybody’s business and was more accurate and reliable than the six o’clock news. She was the type of person whose name happened to pop up in every conversation. You couldn’t talk about G-town without mentioning her and any argument concerning G-town street history could be settled with one word from her. No one had ever had any reason to contradict her and I doubt they ever would. Even the old-heads consulted her when it came to anything that had happened in her lifetime. Yolanda was the first woman I’d ever had and the best by a long shot. No matter how many girlfriends I had since her I always wound up back in her bed.

  She was gorgeous in her own way. Big black eyes with long lashes that covered her half-lidded eyes almost completely giving her this sultry satisfied look that gave you the impression she had just gotten finished smoking a blunt or having one hell of an orgasm. Both guesses would probably be right at any hour of the day since sex and weed were her two favorite vices and she indulged them both obsessively.

  Her lips were obscenely full and curvaceous as was the rest of her body. They seemed to pout, smirk, and sneer all at the same time. If she licked her lips around any group of men it was a sure bet that somebody’s dick would get hard. That dick sucker pucker of hers was a perfect argument that fellatio was not an unnatural act and that at times nature even seemed to favor it. Her breasts were pornographically exaggerated. They burst through her shirts like over-ripe fruit ready to explode with nectar. She had an ass that was perfectly round and firm, but it too was exaggerated beyond all sane proportions like two basketballs squeezed together into a skirt that usually crept high up her chocolate thighs so that the bottom of each ass-cheek was visible as was the neatly manicured mons.

  You could almost hear the wetness between her thighs as they swished together as if the rubbing of her own flesh against her sex kept her constantly aroused. Her lascivious curves, her movements, her voice, her attitude, even her scent was a fuck me, bitch-in-heat musk, thick with pheromones. She never wore a bra and so her tremendous mammaries bounced and swayed with her every movement. Even though she had hair that looked like it had never seen a comb, even with those worn down flip-flops she wore on her feet in the summer and the tacky white pumps she wore the rest of the time, even though her clothes were always a little shabby and she didn’t look quite clean enough, or neat enough, or proper enough for anyone to ever call their girlfriend, her very essence was sexual and you’d have had to be half-dead not to notice. She had the best pussy in town and she knew it.

  Yolanda had been my babysitter when I was seven and ei
ght years old. She was only twelve years old herself then and already far from innocent. All my homies had her as a baby-sitter and almost all of us had our first sexual experiences with her. I remember she used to sit me on her lap and pretend like I was her baby. I would suckle on her breasts, which at twelve were already 44DD and she would fondle my genitals and masturbate herself. I guess, looking back on it now, she had molested all of us. But we didn’t look at it that way and still don’t. If she had been a guy or something or if she had been old or unattractive then I might feel differently. As it was, I always looked forward to her visits. She made me feel special. In the hood fucking the babysitter was normal. It was just a part of growing up.

  When I was ten I got my own key to the front door and Mom decided I no longer needed a babysitter. I didn’t see her again until I was twelve and puberty was kicking my ass. It was her that I fantasized about when I woke up with the sheets tacky with semen. I thought I was going crazy. All I could think about was tits and asses. I used to get into fights two or three times a day just to give my mind something else to think about. Then one day during the worst of my pubescent satyriasis I went to visit Yolanda. My mind felt like it was rending itself to ribbons with tension and frustration. I thought I was turning into some kind of sex fiend.

  “Boy, you just becomin’ a man is all. It’s how your body gets prepared for you to make babies someday. Thinkin’ about sex all the time is just part of it. That’s normal. Fuckin’ is all men think about anyway. It’s just worse for you now because you ain’t really done it yet. I can take care of that for you though. Come on upstairs to my room.”

  She led me by the hand up to her room. I wasn’t nervous at all when she undressed me. After all, it was Yolanda. She’d seen me naked dozens of times. When she touched me though, it felt better than I could ever remember it feeling.