Gutter

by K'wan

  “Drama, cuz?” Top asked.

  “Nah, a birthday present for a friend. Let’s go, Danny.” Gutter said his goodbyes and led Danny from the unit.

  NOT LONG after Gutter left, Sharell got ready to start her day. It was her day off and as much as she wanted to sleep in, she knew she couldn’t. After taking a long hot shower, Sharell sat on the edge of the bed and began to apply lotion to her body. When she got to her protruding stomach, she smiled.

  She and Kenyatta were expecting their first child. The pregnancy wasn’t planned, but abortion was never an option. God had blessed them with the most precious of all gifts and she had no intentions on going against his will. With all the stress she had been under, it was a wonder she hadn’t miscarried. With Gutter being hell-bent on his insane quest for vengeance, she feared that the child would grow up without a father. She just hoped that fatherhood would get him to calm down.

  Since Lou-Loc’s murder he had ate, slept, and breathed revenge. Diablo and Cisco were dead, but that wasn’t enough for him. In his heart, Gutter felt like he was responsible. Sharell tried to convince him that he wasn’t at fault, but he still carried the burden. He was determined to make anyone affiliated with the rival gang feel his pain.

  “Pain,” Sharell said aloud. She was no stranger to it, physically or emotionally. Since she was a little girl it had always been with her and it probably always would.

  Sharell was a devout Christian, putting God and family above all else, but it hadn’t always been like that for her. She came up hard on the Harlem streets, right off of 143rd and Lenox Avenue. Her father was a hustler and her mother was an on-again, off-again junkie. Daddy spoiled Sharell when she was little, making sure she was always fly and wanted for nothing. Though her mother spent most of her time nodded out, Sharell had a relatively pleasant childhood. But all that came to an abrupt end shortly before her thirteenth birthday.

  Her father had been murdered by a rival drug crew over some money he owed them, or so the police had deduced. The streets told a different story: one where his right-hand man and lieutenant had set him up so he could take his spot. Her father’s soldiers promised to make sure Sharell and her mother were good, but of course it didn’t play out like that. For a while they would come by to check on things or drop a few dollars off, but as time went on and the memory of her father began to fade from the streets, the visits slowed and eventually stopped altogether.

  Though Sharell took the death hard, her mother became completely unglued. She stopped going to work and let herself go physically. She wouldn’t eat or wash her ass for days on end. All she did was sit in her room shooting up. As her mother’s grip on reality began to slip, so did her hold on her children. Her younger brother, Malik, took to the streets, determined to pick up where his father left off, while Sharell was left to explore the very same ghettos her father had always tried to keep her sheltered from. It wasn’t long before she was staying out all night, trying different drugs, and living life at a million miles a minute.

  It was the freest Sharell had ever felt in her life. For the next few years she was on a high horse that no one could knock her off. This newfound feeling of liberation lasted up until the point when they got the call that Malik had been killed. You would’ve thought that losing her baby boy would’ve sobered her mother up, but it didn’t. She would go to rehab just to come back out and relapse. What most people don’t realize about addiction is that it’s something that never leaves you. No matter how long you stay clean, you always hear the call in the back of your mind. There was only one real escape from addiction, and Sharell’s mother found it when her heart finally gave out on her.

  Sharell now found herself a nineteen-year-old high school drop-out, alone in the world. She would spend her days hiding under the covers and her nights clubbing and smoking weed. Her life seemed to be heading in the same direction as her parents and sibling until a chance meeting with a homeless woman one night.

  It was about three in the morning when she and her friends were staggering out of a club, drunk and high as kites. As was their ritual, they stopped by White Castle on 125th for a late night-early morning snack. Outside there was a homeless woman begging for change. Her friends passed the woman by, but Sharell stopped and gave her a dollar, which from the woman’s reaction might as well have been a winning lottery ticket.

  “Bless you, child.” The woman smiled, revealing a mouth full of crooked and yellowing teeth. “Bless your heart.”

  “It’s all good,” Sharell told her, about to rejoin her friends.

  “The Lord is truly gonna shine on you for your kindness,” the woman called after her, stopping Sharell short.

  “The Lord?” Sharell snorted. “Ma, your god ain’t got a whole lot of love for little ghetto kids.”

  The woman’s face took on a look of shock. “No, child, you’re wrong. The Lord loves everyone, we are all his children. All we gotta have is a little faith.”

  “Well, I guess that rules me out because I’m all outta faith.”

  The woman looked at Sharell sadly. “Don’t fret, child, we all waver in the faith from time to time, but whether we know it or not it’s always there. But don’t you worry none, I’m gonna pray for you and the Lord will show you that he has not abandoned you, no matter how bleak it seems.”

  “I hear that hot shit,” Sharell said, walking away.

  “I’m gonna pray for you, child!” the woman called after her. “The Lord loves you, all you gotta do is let him in.”

  Sharell was dead tired when she got home, but found that she couldn’t seem to get to sleep. The old woman’s words kept ringing in her head. “The Lord loves you,” yeah right. God had taken everything she ever cared about and left her alone in the world. If that was the kinda love he showed than she didn’t need it or want it.

  Before she knew it, the sun had risen high in the smog-filled sky. Sharell decided to take a walk and try to tire herself out so she could crash. Though she didn’t have a particular destination when she left the house, she found herself on the corner of 132nd and Fifth Avenue, staring up at a huge stone church. For reasons that she still couldn’t put into words, she stepped inside the house of worship. Sharell hadn’t been inside that church in almost ten years and even that was on Easter. Her family had never been very religious, but her mother made sure she and Malik were in church every holiday. The inside was the same as she had remembered it. Wooden benches polished to a high shine, and stained-glass windows that reflected rainbows on the floor.

  She walked down the aisle, gently touching the backrest of each bench as she passed it. She could almost see her mother sitting there decked out in her good blue dress and white handbag. Being forced to go to church had always been a pain in the ass for her and Malik, but they dealt with it because it was one of the few days that their mother was guaranteed to be as sober as a judge. A lone tear rolled down her cheek, snapping her out of her daydream. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, but there was another one behind it. The next thing she knew the tears were flowing freely down her face. She tried to walk away, but found that she didn’t have the strength to do more than plop down on a bench at the foot of the aisle.

  “Why, God,” she whispered, looking up at the large cross that was mounted on the wall, just behind the diesis. “I haven’t been the best person, but I could be worse. I was going to school and trying to live my life the right way, even if people around me weren’t. If you love me so much then why shit on me? Why leave me all by myself?”

  “Something that is a part of you can never leave you,” a voice called behind her. Though he was a little heavier and his hair had gone completely gray, Sharell still recognized Reverend Greene. He was dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt and gray slacks, his ever present Bible tucked under his arm.

  “I’m sorry, Reverend Greene, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Sharell said, trying to compose herself.

  “This is just as much your house as it is his.” He pointed his Bible heavenwar
d. “I haven’t seen you in a while, Sister Baker.”

  “I’ve been kinda busy,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

  “So I’ve heard.” He sat down on the bench behind her, so she had to turn around to speak to him.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” she asked defensively.

  He shrugged. “It means that just because you don’t come by to check up on me doesn’t mean I haven’t been keeping abreast of you.” She was about to say something, but he raised his hand and silenced her. “Sharell, I’ve known your family since before you were born. I’ve watched you go from a promising young lady to a lost little girl who doesn’t know trouble when it’s staring her in the face.”

  “I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself,” she told him.

  “Just because your ID says you’re grown doesn’t mean you are. I’m fifty-something years old and there’s still much that I have to learn before my time is done here. What’s weighing so heavy on you, child?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Sharell said. She wasn’t even sure that she did.

  “You’d be surprised what I understand. I’ve been around a long time, Sharell, and have seen a great many things.”

  “No offense, Reverend Greene, but I don’t think me and you have seen the same things, the hood is a little different than the church. I don’t think you could even begin to grasp my grief.”

  Reverend Greene laughed and placed his Bible on the bench next to him. “Grief,” he said, rolling the sleeve of his shirt up and holding it out so Sharell could see the old track marks and scars. “I live with grief every day. The grief of what I’ve done and what I’ll never do. See, this church wasn’t always my life; I was a child of the streets. I’ve sold dope, coke, and my body for all in the name of the devil and his vices. I ain’t proud of it, but neither am I ashamed. We make mistakes so that we can learn from them and pass the lesson on to others.”

  “And what lessons would you pass on to me, Reverend,” Sharell asked, in a half sarcastic tone.

  “That there is light at the end of even the blackest tunnels,” he said seriously. “Listen, Sharell, I know your grief, and God knows that my heart goes out to you, but you can’t let the devil and your own sadness take you out of the fight. You’ve got to go out into the world and make something of yourself. You’ve got to show your family that you learned from the lessons they passed on to you.”

  Sharell shook her head frantically. She tried to maintain a cool façade, but couldn’t hold it together. “I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t tackle this world by myself.”

  “You don’t have to.” He hugged her. “Sharell, you aren’t too far gone to pull it together. If you need a crutch, I’ll be there for you to see you through it.”

  “I don’t want charity, Reverend.”

  “It ain’t charity, Sharell, I owe this to you.”

  She pulled away and looked up at him. “Owe it to me?”

  Reverend Greene nodded. He took a few minutes to examine a scuff on the hardwood floor before speaking. “Thirty years ago this up-and-coming little punk came to me to front him a package. The boy didn’t look old enough to be off his mama’s bosom, but he was hungry, and I liked that about him. So, after a little bit of convincing I fronted it to him, which turned out to be one of my biggest regrets in life. Three decades later I find myself looking into the face of his ailing daughter, trying to figure out how to help her pick up the pieces.”

  “But, Reverend, you didn’t take my family,” she told him.

  “Oh, but I did. I might not have tied your mother off for that last hit, or put them bullets in Malik, but I set off the chain of events. Sharell”-he took her by the shoulders and stood her up-“I couldn’t save your father, but I will save you. Let me help you, child. Let us help you.” He nodded toward the cross.

  A million and one thoughts flashed through Sharell’s mind as the weight of his words washed over her. Looking up into the eyes of the man she had known since birth, but actually didn’t know anything about, she felt a tingling in the center of her chest. The tingling became a swelling so intense that she felt as if she was having trouble breathing. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can and you will.” He tightened his grip on her arms. “All things are possible through God, but you have to be willing to let him in. Are you willing to accept the lord Jesus Christ as your savior?”

  With tears stinging her eyes, Sharell looked up and whispered, “Yes.” Just like that the bubble in her chest burst and she sucked in the cool air. For the next two hours she sat in the pew with Reverend Greene and talked about her life. It felt like the things that had been weighing her down for years began to fall away piece by piece the more she talked. Sharell went on and on and the reverend sat quietly and listened. He wasn’t preaching or judging her, just listening, which is what she needed more than anything else.

  True to his word, Reverend Greene helped Sharell get her life back on track. He gave her a part-time job at the church to help her keep up the rent on her parents’ apartment and got her into a nursing program that allowed women to take their GED test while studying to be a registered nurse. From that point on, Sharell devoted her life to the church and helping others find their way. Ironically, the soul she was having the most trouble saving was that of the man who was to be her soul mate, Gutter.

  Most of her friends thought that she was out of her mind falling for a gangster, but Sharell saw more than just what was on the surface. In Gutter she saw a brave and loving man who would go above and beyond to provide safety and shelter for his family… a man much like her father. Gutter was way rougher around the edges than her father had been, but still she found comfort and love in his arms. At the end of the day it didn’t really matter to her what the church or anyone else thought about Gutter, what was important was that she would ride for him whether he was right or wrong. The heart was funny like that.

  After dressing in a peach sweat suit, Sharell went downstairs and got into her vehicle. It was a candy-red X5 that Gutter had bought her when they moved to Brooklyn. He wanted to keep her sheltered from the violence that was erupting in Harlem, but she still wanted to be in arm’s reach of her friends, so Brooklyn was the compromise.

  The ride to Connecticut took her about two hours. Sharell hated driving long distances, but it was for a noble cause. She pulled up to a security booth that sat in the center of a block-long iron fence. After giving the security guard her identification and the name of the patient, Sharell was buzzed through the gate. The grounds of the facility were well kept and smelled of fresh-cut grass. Sharell parked her car in a visitor’s space and began the short walk to the main building.

  Orderlies patrolled the grounds and escorted patients on walks. A woman of about thirty gave Sharell a childlike grin. Sharell replied with a wave and a smile. She felt bad for the people who made their home at the facility. As much pity as she felt for them, she knew it was a necessary evil.

  Sharell walked through the front doors and made her way down a long corridor. At the end of the corridor was a spacious waiting room. A few people sat around in hard plastic chairs, but the room was relatively empty. When Sharell approached the desk she was greeted by a portly nurse.

  “Hello, Ms. Baker.” The nurse smiled. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Sharell replied.

  “I see you made it this week.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to come more often, but it’s hard for me to get off from work on visiting days. How is she?”

  “Up and down.” The nurse sighed. “Some days it seems like we’re making progress, while others she’s totally nonresponsive. She’s eating on her own now, but not doing much else. Come on, I’ll take you to her.”

  The nurse led Sharell to a door that required a card to be opened. Beyond the door was another hall with rooms on either side. Each room contained one patient. Some were busy with different activities while others just occupied space. Sharell tried not to stare too long and followed th
e nurse to the last door.

  “You can go on in,” the nurse said, opening the door. “If you need anything, just ask one of the orderlies. Enjoy your visit.”

  “Thanks.” Sharell smiled. After the nurse had gone, she took a deep breath and entered the room.

  Satin sat in a recliner, staring out the window. Whether she heard Sharell come in or not, she didn’t acknowledge her. It had been about a month or so since she had last seen Satin. She would’ve liked to spend more time with her, but in addition to it being a long drive to the facility, the visits were painful. She couldn’t bear to see what Lou-Loc’s soul mate had become.

  Before the murder Sharell hadn’t really had a chance to get to know Satin. They had spoken on the phone once or twice, but that was about as far as it went. They all planned to vacation in Miami Beach when Gutter came out of his coma, but they never got the chance. Gutter had come to visit her when she first came to the facility, but he too found the scene heartbreaking. His visits became less and less frequent, but Sharell still came when she could.

  “Hey, baby,” Sharell said, pulling a folding chair beside Satin’s. “How you been?” Satin turned and smiled at her, but she didn’t respond. Sharell was used to this. Sometimes she and Satin would pass a few words between each other, but most of the time, Sharell did most of the talking.

  Satin didn’t look anything like the pictures Sharell had seen of her and Lou-Loc. Her hair was uncombed and she had deep circles under her eyes from sleepless nights. She was still beautiful, but she looked worn. The glow appeared to be returning to her color, but she was still pale. Her lips were chapped and she looked like she had put on a few pounds since Sharell’s last visit. At least she was eating.

  “Do you feel like talking today?” asked Sharell. Satin just continued to stare. “Satin”-Sharell took her hand-“I know you can hear me. Baby, I’m not even gonna front like I know what you’re going through, ’cause I’ve never walked a mile in your shoes. You’re probably still in a lot of pain, but trust that the Lord will make things right.”