by Ritz, David
“Don’t have my license yet.”
“But you know how, don’t you?”
“I can drive. I learned on a pickup truck.”
“Good,” said Slim. “This motherfucker is stick.”
I got behind the wheel and, after some nervousness, settled in. It shifted easy and I couldn’t help but get excited. The thing was a rocket.
Slim directed me where to go.
“Gotta make a few stops.”
The first was at one of his wing joints. As we pulled up, a guy came running out and handed Slim an envelope stuffed with cash. The next stop was a pizza place, where the routine was repeated. After four more transactions, Slim had so much cash he had to get another briefcase out of the trunk just to hold the bills.
By the time we reached the crib in Cascade Heights, he had collected more cash than I’d ever seen.
“Put the car in the garage,” he said. “You can give me the keys tomorrow.”
It felt great to be trusted.
I let Slim off at the front door and parked the Corvette. I looked at the main house and saw that Beauty’s lights were off. She was already asleep. I walked up the stairs to my apartment above the garage. My mind was spinning from the evening.
I got undressed and was wearing nothing but my pajama bottoms when I heard a knock on my door. I figured Slim had come back for his keys. But it wasn’t Slim. It was Rita and Joanie, the waitresses. They were wearing halter tops and short shorts.
“Slim said you won a big game tonight and deserve a big prize,” said Rita.
“We’re the big prize,” said Joanie. “Mind if we come in?”
I didn’t mind. Didn’t mind at all.
September
In August both Beauty and I turned sixteen—her birthday is the tenth, mine’s the twentieth. Slim wanted to give her a lavish sweet sixteen party in a fancy hotel, but my sister refused. Beauty wanted nothing to do with Slim.
“She uses my house like a goddamn hotel,” he said. “Wanda picks her up, takes her to work, brings her back, she goes to sleep, and they start all over again. She never even eats here. The little bitch won’t even look at me. I’m offering to give her the party of her life, and all she does is snub me. What’s wrong with your sister?”
“It’s hard to lose a mother. She’s lost two.”
“Hey, man,” said Slim. “You can keep telling your fuckin’ sob story for only so long. My mother had seven kids by four different men. She got wasted by a drunk bus driver when I was eleven. My daddy sent us to live with an aunt whose old man was pimping bitches outta the corner barroom. That’s just life. You moan for a hot minute, and then you move on. I see you moving on, Power, so why can’t she?”
I didn’t have an answer. As much as Slim might have been thinking about Beauty, I was thinking about her a lot more. The night after Moms was killed never left my mind. I relived it a million times. The night that Slim sent Rita and Joanie to fuck me was exciting. Shit, it was goddamn thrilling. But for all the moves they put on me, for all the freaky things they did to each other, when I was actually making love to them, I couldn’t come until I fantasized about Beauty. In a silent voice, I even called out Beauty’s name.
I was ashamed of that—ashamed of what I’d done with Beauty and ashamed of having to put the picture of her naked body inside my head while I was loving on other women. After it happened with Rita and Joanie, I was sure it wouldn’t happen again.
Because word got around that I had this dope apartment above Slim’s garage, other older women got interested in me. Slim gave me my own private line—just as he gave Beauty hers—and I started getting calls. As a young dude at the height of horniness, I wasn’t about to turn down pussy. That’s against the religion of the hood. But no matter how good the pussy, no matter how beautiful the chick or how hot the fuck, I still had the same problem: I couldn’t bust a nut until I imagined that I wasn’t balling the girl I was balling; I had to imagine Beauty.
I kept this secret to myself.
I also knew that Beauty kept it to herself. She couldn’t look at me any more than she could look at Slim. Every time she saw me, she had to be remembering what had happened between us. And she also had to be remembering how much she loved it. For all the wild times I was having with these willing women—and, man, they were some wild-ass willing women—nothing even compared to the nuclear explosion I’d felt with Beauty.
June, July, and August had been all about going with Slim on his collection runs, playing ball, and partying. The culmination was my sixteenth birthday party. Slim opened up the main house for me; brought in Bonafide, the hottest rapper in the city; and told me to invite whoever the hell I wanted. I invited everyone, more than a hundred people, and we kicked it till sunrise. Beauty never showed up. The night of the party she stayed at Wanda’s.
Two weeks before school started in September, I started getting in serious shape for sports. Slim vacated one of the garages beneath my apartment and turned it into a gym. We went down to the sporting goods store, where he peeled off five one-thousand-dollar bills to pay for the latest in high-tech cardiovascular and weight-training equipment.
I liked the way Slim operated. When he wanted something, he got it. When he saw I wanted something, he got it for me. Sometimes when we drove around, he’d start talking.
“You know the reason I never had kids?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“ ’Cause I couldn’t. My sperm don’t swim. Doctor says the little motherfuckers don’t got no tails. When I heard the news, man, I was one happy nigga. That meant I could prove that any woman claiming to have my baby was a lying bitch. And believe me, Power, over the years I’ve done just that. I got four different copies of those medical papers saying I can’t father no children. My lawyer’s got a copy and my doctor too. You best believe those papers have saved me a fortune. You should see the faces of those greedy hos who come at me with their fancy lawyers. I just kick back, wave my papers, and laugh my ass off. But then what I thought was a blessing started feeling like a burden. Man gets to a point where he feels like he wants to share some of the shit he learned along the way. Also the goodies. The goodies are there to be shared. All that workout gear, for instance, is good for you in a way that it ain’t good for me. When I was your age, I didn’t have your discipline. I like that about you. I liked sports, but I wouldn’t work out. I knew I had a good mind, but you couldn’t get me to read. I see you reading all the time. That’s good. Keep the mind sharp. Keep the body lean. That’s what makes a warrior, and I see you got what it takes to wage wars and win wars. I’m always in a war. Fuck, life’s a war. I built me up an army—you’ve seen some of my lieutenants—but none of them, even those twice your age, got your brains. They depend on me to make all the decisions. They scared of me. Well, that’s good, ’cause on one hand, they need to be scared of me. But on the other hand that ain’t good ’cause they don’t got the balls to challenge me. They ain’t thinking of better ways to expand our businesses. Businesses either expand or die. I gotta think of everything. I gotta figure out the odds and place the bets. I gotta breed the horses. Gotta feed the horses. I gotta run this motherfucking race all by myself. Now ain’t that a bitch?”
“It doesn’t sound easy.”
“It ain’t. You ever play chess, Power?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I play. Not with my lieutenants. They too dumb for chess. So I got a couple of guys from the university who come up to the house and play. You’ll meet them. One guy teaches French. The other teaches history. Both PhDs. Case you don’t know, that means doctors of philosophy. Well, neither of those doctors of philosophy have ever beat this nigga at chess, not even once. And you know why?”
“Why?” I asked, eager for the answer.
“ ’Cause I didn’t learn how to play out of a book or in some university, but at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia.”
“I didn’t know you were in prison.”
“There’s a whole lot about me you
don’t know. It was in Reidsville that I met my master. Cat called Sylvester Brooks Sanders. We called him Mr. S. He was a white man who worked for the biggest bank in the state. Finance guy. He’d figured out some scheme to skim millions, and he would have gotten away with it except that pussy tripped him up.”
“Pussy?”
“Pussy will make a smart man dumb. See, Mr. S was married for twenty years. He was pretty loyal to Mrs. S except for the strip joints. Couldn’t stay outta the strip joints. One stripper in particular caught his eye and turned him out. Mrs. S found out and went crazy. Mrs. S did him in. She guessed he’d been scamming the bank, and going through his safe, she found the evidence. She wanted to put him away—and she did. So Mr. S winds up my cell mate. That’s where he started talking this philosophy about how life is a chess game. He thinks if you can win at chess, you can win at anything. He studied the game his whole life. Won tournaments and shit. Says there ain’t no one who will ever beat him, short of a few cats in Russia. I say, ‘Teach me, Mr. S, and I’ll whip your sorry ass in a year.’ A year is all I was in for.”
“For doing what?”
“That’s another story. This story is how after a month or two, I was playing quality chess. I took to it like a duck to water. It all made sense to me, especially the part that said you gotta think six steps ahead. I saw that if I had thought six steps ahead, I would have never wound up in jail. I took the game seriously, Power. Studied it with a mighty concentration. Mr. S had to admit I was a natural.”
“You beat him?”
“That’s the funny part, son. It was a month before my release and I still hadn’t beaten him. We’d played at least twenty thousand games. I’d come close—real goddamn close—but this dude was sharp. If I was two steps ahead, he was three. If I was four, he was five. And then one afternoon, the sun came out. It had been raining for days. Lightnin’-and-thunder rain. But on this day the little window above our beds was flooded with light. Sunlight just pouring through. Sunlight lighting up the chessboard where me and Mr. S were head-to-head in a ferocious match. The light was what I needed. It lit up my brain. For the first time, I saw his master plan. I knew what to do. I saw how to corner him. I was on the verge of declaring checkmate and claiming victory. I saw him straining. Saw him sweating and twisting. Oh, man, I was excited, I was ready to pounce on him, when just like that, the motherfucker keeled over and died. Massive heart attack. Dead two days before his fortieth birthday. What do you think of that?”
“He wanted to die undefeated.”
“That’s how I saw it. He wanted to go out the champ. You interested in being a champ? You interested in learning chess?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Heart to Heart
First day of a school was a Monday. That Sunday Beauty called up to my room. It was seven a.m. and I was fast asleep.
“Power,” she said. “We gotta talk.”
“You wanna come up here?” I asked instinctively. The thought of Beauty coming to my room excited me.
“No,” she was quick to say. “Let’s just take a walk.”
“We can take a ride on my moped.”
“I don’t want to ride on your moped. I just want to talk.”
Slim had given me a super-slick touring-style moped scooter to ride to school. It was jet-black with red pinstripes, a customized windshield, thirteen-inch wheels, a chrome muffler, and a rear trunk for my books. He even threw in a helmet with a black-and-red color scheme that matched the bike perfectly. I was in love with the thing. He said it was a gift for my having read more books on chess in a week than he’d read in a lifetime. I learned the rules quickly and threw myself into it. I wasn’t at all intimidated. I had a feel for the strategy and immediately understood why Slim loved the game.
“Meet me outside the gate,” said Beauty. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and threw on a pair of Hawks basketball shorts and a Braves tank top. When I got to the gate, Beauty was already there. She was wearing narrow-legged jeans that fit her like a glove. Her black-and-white-striped T-shirt was loose, but I knew what was underneath. I’d never forget what was underneath. Sometimes she wore her hair in a ponytail; sometimes she wore it loose. This morning she wore it loose so that it fell below her shoulders. She smelled of flowers and fresh soap. The morning smelled of fresh dew. The air was chillier than I had expected.
“Where we walking to?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. We need to talk. And we can’t talk in the house.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got it wired.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re paranoid.”
“Am I? I found the wires in my closet. He’s also got hidden cameras in my room. They’re even in my bathroom. I know where they are. I found them the first day, and I busted the lenses. A week later I saw that the lenses were fixed, so I just covered them with towels. He’s crazy.”
“He’s different—that’s all.”
“He’s dangerous.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Holy shit, Power! How can you say that?”
“I’ve been around him more than you.”
“That’s the problem,” said Beauty. “You’re blinded by all the shiny new toys he’s given you. And he wants to keep you blind.”
“For what purpose? I don’t have anything he needs.”
“He needs to rid himself of the guilt he feels for killing Moms.”
“What? That’s fuckin’ whack, and you know it. It was an accident. He loved Moms. He had no reason in the world to harm her.”
“You don’t know that.”
I stopped Beauty in her tracks.
I took her hand, looked her in the eye, and said, “What happened to Moms has fucked us all up—you, me, Slim, everyone. But it’s making you crazier than anyone, Beauty, it really is. You don’t do anything but hide out in your room. You’ve cut off your friends. You’ve barely said a word to me in three months.”
“You know why.”
“I know what happened between us, and we promised it wouldn’t happen again. We promised that no one will know—and no one will. But that doesn’t mean we can’t even look each other in the eye.”
Beauty looked away. We started walking again. The morning was starting to warm. A little kid rode by on a bike. He was throwing copies of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the driveways of the mansions that lined the street. The suburb was silent except for the birds chirping in the trees.
“He’s the devil,” said Beauty. “He’s the creepiest man I’ve ever met.”
“I think he sincerely wants to help us.”
“I think he sincerely wants to jump my bones and is just waiting for the chance.”
“He’d never do that. He had too much respect for Moms to hurt her kids.”
“Then how do you explain the cameras?”
“I can’t. But why don’t you just ask him?”
“I’m not about to have a conversation with him. I can see how he seduces people. He buys them. I love Wanda, but he’s bought her, just like he’s buying you.”
At the end of the street was a little park. In the center was a white lattice gazebo that was empty except for a circular bench.
“Let’s just sit down for a while,” I said. “Let’s just look at this thing objectively.”
I sat on one side of the bench; Beauty sat on the other. She wasn’t about to sit next to me.
I started in calmly. “Okay, let’s look at this guy. We know he’s not all bad or else Moms would have never tried to help him with his books.”
“Bullshit. Moms thought everyone had a good heart. That was her problem. That’s what got her killed, Power.”
“You keep saying that, but you don’t have a single piece of evidence.”
“I have my instincts.”
“And your instincts are fucked up because of everything that’s happened to us. Your instincts are feeding your imagin
ation, and your imagination is making you nuts.”
Beauty swept her hair away from her face, leaned forward, and looked me straight in the eye. I couldn’t help but think that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Her features were perfect—the shape of her eyes, the sheen of her skin, the slight flare of her nose, the delicacy of her hands, the way sunlight bounced off her long lustrous black hair. I tried to forget what it was like when she was caught up in that fire of passion, urging me on, crying out my name. I tried to block the memory, but as she sat there, I undressed her in my mind. I saw her naked.
“Look, Power,” she said. “We can go back and forth like this for hours, but there’s really no point. I just called you to say that I’m leaving.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“What about school?”
“I’ll be going to school in New York. I found an arts high school there that has courses in fashion design.”
“How are you going to pay for it? Where are you going to live?”
“Moms left us some savings.”
“That’s hardly anything.”
“Wanda has a friend in New York. I’ll be staying with her for a while. But Slim can’t know that Wanda’s helping me. Wanda’s scared that he’ll be pissed. I’m not even telling Wanda that I’m telling you.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“Because I think you should get out too.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere. Just out of Atlanta.”
I moved over to sit next to Beauty. When I took her hand, she let me. “I know you have big problems with Slim,” I said, “but I swear this man will help you. He’ll help you get whatever you want. I’ve been with him. I know him. By leaving, you’ll just be making an enemy out of a friend. You’ll be leaving the most comfortable situation imaginable to go to a place where you don’t know a soul. Why in hell would you do that, Beauty?”
“To save my life. I’m telling you all this, I’m trying to reach you”—and with those words she squeezed my hand—“because I want to save your life too.”