Reed was scared shitless, but Malcolm seemed oblivious to the fact that he had almost gotten shot. Reed was impressed. He wanted that kind of power.
The AMPM was still there and there were still drug dealers all around it. Reed turned down Washington Lane and headed for Burbridge Street, where Rick lived. Reed remembered the day he met Rick. He and Malcolm were walking to the corner store. They passed dozens of people in the street, on the corners, sitting on porches, and no one spoke to him. No one said hi. Conversations seemed to halt when Malcolm walked by.
“Don’t you know any of these people? Ain’t some of them your friends?” Reed had asked.
“Yeah, I know ’em and no, they ain’t my friends. These are the same muthafuckas that used to tease me when I was little. Made my life hell. Now that I’ve gotten big they ain’t got shit to say!” He raised his voice and glared at a bunch of girls on a porch across the street. There were two guys on the porch as well who were not all that small themselves. They appeared ready to stand up and say something then seemed to think better of it.
“Muthafucka’s all scared now. Fuck ’em!”
“Yeah, fuck you too!” a voice called out from the porch that sounded almost identical to Malcolm’s, same inflections, same rumbling bass. Reed turned to see who the dead man was and was surprised when a short, skinny, light-skinned black kid came off the porch, smiling. He was even more surprised when he saw Malcolm was smiling, too.
“Aw, this is my dog right here. This little nigga’s crazy!” Malcolm was grinning from ear to ear when he slapped hands with the skinny black kid. If Malcolm thought the kid was crazy then he must be ready for a padded room, a daily cocktail of lithium and Prozac, and a jacket with the sleeves in the back.
“Who’s the white boy?” Rick asked, staring at Reed greedily like he was a toy that he wanted and he was just waiting for Malcolm to say he could have him. Reed was pretty sure Rick was the type who broke all his toys.
“He’s cool. Reed meet Rick.”
Rick just smiled at him with the tip of his tongue sticking out between his teeth. He looked both goofy and dangerous, like a hyena. Reed didn’t offer to shake his hand. He was afraid he’d draw back a nub.
“Damn, and I was gonna suggest we go over to Chestnut Hill and jack some of them rich ass white boys. I guess that’s out now.” He scowled at Reed, looking both hurt and angry at him for spoiling his plans. He didn’t look so goofy anymore.
“Well, let’s at least go find some bitches.”
“Nah, nigga. Me and Reed gotta work on some shit for school. I’ll check you later.”
Rick scowled at Reed, flaring his nostrils, curling up his lip, and rolling his eyes.
“Punk ass white muthafucka.” He hissed venomously. He spit through his teeth then walked back up to the porch. Malcolm continued walking down the street, oblivious to Rick’s subtle tantrum. Empathy was not a part of Malcolm’s make up.
“That nigga right there, you never want to fuck with. He’ll kill your ass just ’cause he can’t think of nothin’ else better to do. He just don’t give a fuck. He ain’t headed nowhere but to the pen. He’s one of them dumb muthafuckas that’ll still be standin’ over the body kickin’ it and spittin’ on it when the cops pull up. If I ever kill a muthafucka, I’ll get away with that shit ’cause my ass ain’t never goin’ to jail. Rick expects to go to jail. He can’t see any way to avoid it. That’s what makes that nigga dangerous. Jail don’t scare him.”
“Does it scare you?” As soon as Reed asked it, he knew he shouldn’t have.
Malcolm stopped in mid-stride. His head turned so slowly it was almost mechanical. Thick veins and cords bulged in his neck as his head swiveled ninety degrees. Reed tensed for the blow he was certain would come. Then a bone deep dread settled on him like a weight as he realized that if Malcolm struck him he wouldn’t stop, not until someone stopped him or Reed stopped breathing. Malcolm was staring down at Reed like he was trying to hold back a storm. His face seemed ready to fly apart under the strain of keeping the murderous emotions contained. Then it slowly began to harden, to lose all animation, nothing on his face looked alive except his eyes, and they were burning through Reed like lasers. When he spoke, his neighborhood dialect was gone. His voice was a deep harsh bark. His nostrils flared and his lips curled back. He sounded like he did at school, intelligent and deadly serious.
“It’s a non-issue, because I’ll never see the inside of a jail cell. Never. If it ever comes down to it, I’ll hold court in the street.”
Reed nodded without comment. His eyes were as wide as the barrels of a shotgun. He couldn’t break Malcolm’s gaze, frozen like a deer in the oncoming lights of an eighteen-wheeler. He trembled from head to toe as it slowly dawned on him exactly where he was, in the middle of a black ghetto, the only white face for miles, standing in front of a very large kid who was probably a psychopath, a very large psychopath. It was all he could do to hold onto his bowels. Malcolm was still staring down at him and he was not smiling.
Reed felt like a man who had been read his last rites, strapped into the electric chair, and then suddenly released and taken back to his cell, still tasting his own death. Malcolm had issued no threat, verbal or physical. It had been a spiritual awareness that had come from Malcolm’s murderous gaze, an awareness of just who and what the man was. That was the first time he’d realized that, despite their friendship, Malcolm was fully capable of killing him. It had been too late. By then, he’d already started sleeping with Renee’.
That was seventeen years ago and now Reed was back in the same place. He hadn’t learned his lesson. And this time, Malcolm was not his friend.
The Ford Taurus wagon looked completely out of place, like a poodle in a wolf’s den, as it rolled warily down Duval Street amongst the old Cadillacs, Lincolns, Fords, and Chevys that lined the block. He passed Ambrose Street and gripped the steering wheel tighter, clenching his teeth. He peered cautiously down the narrow dead-end street and spotted Malcolm’s old house. Of course, Malcolm wasn’t there, but what was undoubtedly an unmarked police car was.
A white Crown Victoria with a spotlight mounted beside one of its oversized side view mirrors sat midway down the block with the silhouette of two bored and frustrated detectives in its windshield. It was parked just a few houses down from the weathered three-story row home where Malcolm had once vivisected a cat in front of him to see how long it would live with its guts hanging out. Reed remembered watching it crawl around the basement floor, howling in pain, dragging its entrails behind it. His stepfather had stormed down into the basement, enraged by the noise and had beaten Malcolm severely, the way you would beat a grown man, using his fists instead of an open hand or a strap, then he threw Reed out of the house and locked Malcolm down there with the dying cat all day.
Reed brought the car to a halt, remembering how Malcolm’s eyes lost their feral intensity when he heard his stepfather coming down the basement steps. He seemed lost and afraid, like the teenager he was. Reed felt sorry for him then. Now he was ready to kill him.
Reed stared hard at the two detectives in the unmarked cruiser. He could almost make out their faces. They appeared to be taking a long look at his car as he passed. He hit the gas and sped past before they could recognize him. He knew the cops were probably looking for him almost as vigorously as they were hunting Malcolm. For all they knew, he’d killed Detective Baltimore himself and he was running the streets with the dead cop’s gun, irrational with grief. Reed chuckled nervously when he realized that was exactly what he was doing.
The very next street after Ambrose was Burbridge Street, where Rick lived. Burbridge was on a long hill paved with red cobblestones and lined with lush trees. Three-story houses with stone facades rose like monuments on either side of the street. Reed was amazed at how the neighborhood changed so drastically from block to block. Compared to Ambrose Street, Burbridge Street was middle-class splendor. But, compared to the cozy little street that Mark and Jennie grew up on, the hou
se where he and Linda consummated their marriage, it was a slum. Reed’s bottom lip trembled and his eyes welled up with tears but he fought them back. He picked up the Glock from the passenger seat and chambered a round as he slid the Taurus into an empty spot between a Mustang 5.0 and a Hyundai Excel in front of Rick’s house. His eyes scanned the block. No sign of the Impala. No sign of Malcolm. He slid from the car, took a deep breath, and walked up the front steps, the Glock held behind his back, safety off, hammer cocked, forehead and hands sweating, trembling.
You are about to die. You’re going to join Linda and Jennie and little Mark. It’ll all be over soon.
Reed could hear the voice as plain as day. It froze him right in his tracks. The voice was coming from inside his head and it wasn’t his. It was Malcolm. Quickly he looked around, pointing the Glock at the bushes on either side of the steps, at the parked cars, up at the porch, the roof over the porch. Malcolm wasn’t there. He was in his head. Only crazy people heard voices. Reed knew that but he’d heard it.
You are about to die!
The voice frightened him because he knew it shouldn’t be there, because it meant that he was going insane, but the words didn’t frighten him. They were simply points of fact. He was going to kill Malcolm so, in all likelihood, he himself would die because Malcolm was the killer and he was not. He was prepared for this. He had been living on borrowed time ever since he fucked Renee’ and Natasha. He owed the devil his due. But Malcolm would die, too. He was sure of that as well. And he didn’t need a voice in his head to tell him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
The voice startled Reed, but at least it wasn’t coming from his head this time. There was a rotund, elderly black woman standing on the porch with her thick meaty hands on her rather substantial hips. She wore huge Bermuda shorts that came to just above knees that were half swallowed in fat. Her plump feet ballooned out of a pair of broken down sandals and her titanic breasts swung like bulbous pendulums in an oversized T-shirt bearing the face of Mickey Mouse. She wore her hair in curlers covered by a hair net. It was Rick’s mom.
“I’m looking for Rick. I’m a friend of his . . .”
“I know who you are, Reed. I remember when you used to come ’round here with that devilish nigga, Malcolm. I didn’t want Ricky hangin’ out with either one of you. I saw the way you got off on slummin’ with Malcolm, how you fed off that nigga’s evil. I heard about how that evil came back at you. I heard about what happened to your family.” Her eyes bore down on him full of accusation and not a shred of pity. “Now you comin’ around here lookin’ for Ricky. For what? So you can find Malcolm and get yourself killed, too? You should’ve never come around here in the first place. Should’ve stayed up there with the rest of the white folks.”
“Ma’am please, is Rick here? I just need to talk to him and then I’ll be gone.” Reed was struck by the irony of his words. They sounded exactly like what Detective Baltimore had said to him.
“Rick ain’t here. He moved out years ago, right after college when he got married.”
College? Married? That didn’t sound like the Rick he had known.
“Where did he move?”
“You’re a fool if you go after him. You know Malcolm will kill you.”
Reed knew. The voice in his head was telling him the exact same thing.
You’re going to die, white boy!
“Please Mrs. Brown.”
“South Philly. He moved to South Philly.”
She gave him the address and watched him turn to walk back to his car. He had shoved the Glock down the back of his jeans and the butt of the pistol was sticking out from under his shirt.
“Rest in peace,” the old woman said solemnly at Reed’s back.
Reed cringed. Even with the gun, he knew he was a dead man if he managed to catch up with Malcolm. It was like a caterpillar hunting a preying mantis. Prey stalking predator.
The drive to South Philly was a blur. Reed was on autopilot, taking the hairpin turns on Lincoln Drive at lethal velocity without thinking. His mind was on Malcolm and the very real threat he would pose when they met face to face. Reed was no killer but he had to try. Malcolm was.
The Taurus wagon’s steel belted radials squealed in anguish as they burned across asphalt, leaving long skid marks on the road. Reed stomped down hard on the breaks and fought to keep the wagon from slamming into the meridian.
I’ve got to slow down, Reed thought.
There was plenty of time for him to die. No need to rush things. He flew down Kelly Drive, past the art museum, and down the parkway. He had no choice but to slow down now. He was approaching Center City. There would be cops.
Cops out to stop him from getting to Malcolm.
Thoughts of Malcolm turned to thoughts of his dead family. He remembered how he’d yelled at Mark and Jennie for cursing. The last words he’d spoken to them had been words of anger. Over and over, he rehearsed alternative ways he could have handled the situation.
If only he’d known. He would have held them, told them he loved them, played Crash Bandicoot with Mark and whipped Jennie in Duke Nuke’em. He thought about all the times he hadn’t told Linda he loved her because he was too tired, and his novel wasn’t going right and he just wanted to lay down and shut out the world. He even thought about the times when he had ejaculated too quickly even though he knew he could’ve held back and waited for Linda to orgasm. But he’d been tired and selfish and now she was gone and making love to her, holding her, telling her he loved her, were the only things in the world he wanted to do . . . besides pulling Malcolm’s heart out of his chest and stuffing it down his throat.
He turned onto Eleventh Street and fought to keep the wagon below thirty-five miles an hour. When he passed Catherine Street, he could hardly look at the huge, four-story, red brick institution where he, Malcolm, Renee’ and Natasha began their fatal courtship. In his stomach, thousands of huge Monarch butterflies began their migration. His hands were shaking again. He was almost there.
The street on which Rick lived looked surprisingly affluent. As affluent as South Philadelphia got anyway. Manicured lawns were creatively landscaped with trees and shrubs. Some even had stone fountains on the front lawn. The houses all looked as if they’d been recently painted and they even had garages, an almost unheard of feature for a home in Philadelphia, least of all South Philly. Further down the block, the houses regressed back into the claustrophobic row homes that, no matter how well maintained, still looked like the immigrant ghetto it had been when the Italians, Jews, and Irish first came over the bridges from New York and New Jersey after their initial landing at Ellis Island. It wasn’t depressing like a black or Latino Ghetto. In fact, you could almost call it quaint, but Reed couldn’t help noticing how much these homes resembled the houses in Germantown and North Philadelphia, but were just better maintained.
Reed checked the address he’d written down and pulled up in front of a house that was almost a carbon copy of Malcolm’s house on Ambrose Street. He kept driving further down the block, thinking it might be safer and less conspicuous to approach on foot. He double-parked the wagon and left the motor running. He hoped that Rick’s wife wasn’t home because there was a new voice in his head; it sounded like little Jennie and it was screaming for revenge. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. A wife for a wife.
Kill him, Daddy. Kill the bad man.
Reed cringed and fought back tears, squeezing his eyes shut and clenching his teeth as Jennie pleaded with him.
He hurt us, Daddy. He hurt me and Mommy and Mark. He hurt us real bad. Kill him, Daddy. Kill him. Kill his friends. Kill them all. Make those motherfuckers pay! An eye for an eye, Daddy. An eye for an eye!
Jennie still talked too much and cursed too much, but Reed was in no mood to scold her. Even in her fury, it was good to hear her voice. He could hear Linda as well, cool, calm, humanitarian, pacifist, vegetarian for ethical reasons, echoing Jennie’s wrath and screaming for Malcolm’s blood. Death seemed to hav
e changed her political outlook.
He has to die, Reed. You know what you have to do. He hurt us, Reed. Kill him! Kill that FUCKING NIGGER!
The cacophony continued in Reed’s head as he walked up the street toward Rick’s house. A wild, nervous energy seemed to be vibrating through him. His face was a riot of ticks and twitches. Restless ghosts raged and stormed through his fragmented mind. He tried to quiet the voices by pressing his hands over his ears and closing his eyes. He stood on the sidewalk for nearly a full minute with his hands cupped to the sides of his head. It felt like his brain was flying apart. He knew what he needed to do, the only way to quiet the ghosts. Find Malcolm. Kill Malcolm.
Reed knew he was going insane. He surprised himself with how easy the idea was to accept. His sanity had been severed cleanly. It hadn’t shattered. It had simply snapped like the stem of a dandelion in a harsh wind. Now he had the voices. The voices of the vengeful dead. He didn’t mind. As long as the voices were there, he wasn’t alone. He had his family. But now he needed to focus and it was hard with the voices nagging him. Reed reached into his waistband and closed his hand around the Glock. Feeling its cold, deadly, weight seemed to calm him. Suddenly his head was clear again. Quiet. He was ready.
XXXI.
Malcolm showed up unexpectedly at Rick’s door. He needed a place to lay low. He knew that Rick was married, but that didn’t matter. Bros before hoes. That was law.
“What up, my nigga?” Malcolm slipped easily back into the lingo of the streets. It was as familiar to him as breathing.
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