Hi Five

by Joe Ide

  Grace came up behind her, put one hand on her neck to hold her down, and with the other she yanked the gun from her back holster.

  “Hey!” Samantha said. Grace stepped away and aimed the gun.

  “Fuck around and I’ll kneecap you,” she said.

  “I knew it. I knew it,” Samantha said. “I sensed it right from the start.”

  “Shut up,” Grace said. “Sit down by the wall. Face the other way. Lace your fingers over your head.” She’d seen somebody do that in a movie.

  “You’re fucking up big-time,” Samantha said, but she did what she was told. Grace put the gun down and used her pocketknife to cut the rope connecting Isaiah’s wrists with his ankles. She took the duct tape off his mouth. He grunted with relief, lay flat and breathed deeply.

  “Hold on,” Grace said. She started cutting the duct tape around his wrists.

  “Stay right there,” a hard voice said. Grace turned. It was Ida and Jenn, pointing her assault rifle. “Drop the knife and step away from the gun.” Grace obeyed. Samantha got to her feet, picked up her gun. She walked over to Grace and stuck the barrel under her chin. “You’re going to die tonight, bitch. And so is the nigger.”

  The women had gone upstairs. Isaiah pretended he was unconscious. He didn’t want to be hog-tied again. He was bruised, in pain and exhausted from the rope and the beating. He could hear the women upstairs, screaming at Grace. There were scuffling feet and chairs knocked over. They were beating her up. He tried every way he knew to loosen the duct tape. Nothing worked. The beating went on. He heard Grace crying out, telling them to stop. Isaiah cursed and thrashed, rolling over and over, but all that did was exhaust him all the more. He sobbed, grime and dirt sticking to his face.

  The beating stopped. He wondered what was worse—listening to the beating or wondering what they’d done to her. In addition to all his other fuck-ups, he’d brought Grace into this.

  The women dragged Grace into the living room and slammed her into the wall. Ida had a gun pressed to the back of her head. “I say we kill her now,” Ida said.

  “We should wait for Sidero,” Samantha said.

  Then Jenn huffed and shook her head. “Why? So he can give us orders for something we can do ourselves?”

  “We can bury her near the old septic tank,” Ida said. “Nobody ever goes back there.” A teenage boy was standing in the doorway. He looked terrified.

  “Mom? Are you going to kill her?”

  “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” Ida said. “Go on home, Chip.”

  “But are you? Are you going to kill her?”

  “I said, go on home!”

  The kid left, and for the second time since Grace had known Isaiah, she knew she was going to die.

  Chip didn’t go home. He stood outside next to the window, listening to the women argue. Samantha was making excuses for why they should wait for Sidero. To make it official, she said, to make sure there was a consensus and what if Angus had other plans? Ida and Jenn were yelling at her, calling her a coward and a fucking phony.

  Chip was more afraid than he’d ever been. Was his mom actually going to take part in double fucking homicide? His mom? No, she wouldn’t, she’s not that crazy—but she sure sounded crazy. Go home, Chip, he thought. If you don’t know about it, it didn’t happen. But he knew that was bullshit. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, the fucking tree is still dead and if the guy who didn’t hear it went looking for it, he’d find it full of termites and lying on the ground.

  Chip was sweating even in the cool air, things his mom and dad said to him rushing through his head in a torrent. There’s a kike infestation and people don’t know it, Chip. It’s a scientific fact that blacks are genetically inferior to whites in every way you can think of. The so-called native Americans have never done anything for this country except kill white settlers. Jews are at the root of the sand nigger problem. No Jews, no problem. We’re fighting for survival, Chip. The liberal elite are trying to exterminate the white race. Hell yeah, build a wall and throw out the ones that are already here. Fuck the dreamers. Aren’t white people dreamers too? Even if there was a Holocaust, which there wasn’t, so what? Hitler did us a favor. The president is speaking in code, Chip. He’s on our side. It’s dog eat dog, Chip. It’s kill or be killed. It’s us against them.

  Chip didn’t understand why his parents kept believing in things that were obviously wrong. It didn’t matter where the information came from, if it didn’t line up with what they were already thinking, they ignored it. Chip understood now, that facts didn’t matter to people like his mom and dad. Facts were raw clay—adaptable, malleable, useful when you’re building a wall between the hateful and the hated. What’s that you say? We hate minorities? Oh, no, not us! We’re just honest, God-fearing Americans trying to rescue our country from the niggers, spics, wetbacks, gooks and faggots. Didn’t you hear what the president said? We’re very fine people, Chip.

  Really? Chip thought. Were his folks very fine people? Were Samantha and Jenn and Sidero very fine people? Were the Starks? Was the guy who ran over people in Charlottesville? Was Chip? His mother and her friends were about to murder two people and bury them near the old septic tank. No, he wasn’t a very fine person. Not if he went home and didn’t hear the tree being blown to shit with an assault rifle. It’s not us against them, Chip decided. It’s us against me.

  Isaiah lay on the cement floor in utter despair. He’d been helpless before but nothing like this. There was always an option, always something to try. But this time there was nothing. They would kill him and Grace too.

  He heard a noise and looked up. It was the Junior from Anywhere High. He was scared, his breathing short, sweat making his acne gleam. He had a box cutter in his hand. He hesitated, torn between his loyalties and his conscience. He knelt down and cut Isaiah loose.

  “Thank you,” Isaiah whispered.

  “Here,” he said, giving Isaiah a gun. “There’s no bullets in it. I don’t want my mom to get hurt.”

  Isaiah nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Chip.”

  “You’re going to be all right, Chip. You’re going to be fine.”

  Isaiah stood in the darkness of the hallway, getting his strength back. The women were arguing. Two of them had pistols; the redhead’s assault rifle was lying on the table. Grace had the side of her face pressed to the wall. She saw him and narrowed her eyes. A signal. He didn’t know what she was going to do but he knew he’d have to move fast. The women grabbed Grace and were moving for the door when suddenly Grace groaned, went limp like she’d fainted and collapsed to the floor.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” one of them said.

  Isaiah burst out of the hallway with his arm straight out, his gun aimed at her head. “Don’t you fucking bitches move!” he shouted like a crazy nigger who hated white people. “Go for your gun, aight? I want you to!”

  Grace jumped up and disarmed the women, sticking their handguns into her belt and picking up the assault rifle. They had to get out of here, Isaiah thought. There was no time to tie all three of them up. “Get in the bathroom!” he screamed. “RIGHT FUCKING NOW!” The women paraded into the bathroom with their hands up. “Come out of there and see if I don’t blow your muthafuckin’ heads off!” He slammed the door behind him and gestured for Grace to give him one of the women’s guns. He fired two shots through the door, aiming too high to hit them. BLAM! BLAM! “I ain’t playin’, bitches!” he added.

  He and Grace slipped quietly out of the house. When they got outside, they popped the magazines out of the handguns and scattered everything in the bushes. They raced across the road to the sound of roaring engines. Headlights hit them. The Starks were back.

  Grace and Isaiah limped into the trees. It was dark and they were hurt and they couldn’t move fast. They heard car doors slamming and Sidero shouting and the women yelling and then a wild uproar of voices. Isaiah looked back. Flashlights. A bunch of them.

  “Spread
out!” Sidero commanded. The Starks began moving in a line, orbs of light like cyclops eyes, flashing through the naked trees.

  Isaiah and Grace stopped to catch a breath.

  “We forgot our phones,” she said.

  “They’re too close,” Isaiah said. “Slow them down.”

  Grace aimed the assault rifle high and pulled the trigger, the rounds cutting a swath through the tree branches. The recoil surprised her and the gun nearly jumped out of her hands. In less than five seconds, she’d emptied the magazine. “That’s all?” she said. She dropped the rifle and they continued running. The flashlights were farther back. Isaiah heard the mastiff barking but it wasn’t a tracking dog. It would stay with the Starks.

  “Give it to ’em!” Sidero bellowed.

  The Starks opened up. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! The rounds shredding bark and snapping off branches, killing squirrels and beheading the stunted pines. Two assault rifles went off but the bursts were brief, like Grace’s. Grace and Isaiah ran with their backs directly in line with a tree so they couldn’t catch one in the back of the head.

  They reached a gulley and ran through it until they reached the parking lot. They were cut off from the street by the chain-link fence and the entrance to the parking lot was too far away. They’d get caught before they got there.

  “Isaiah?” Grace said.

  He didn’t say anything. He was in the zone. He thought about what he’d seen the first time he was here: men in orange hard hats driving forklifts, delivering building supplies to a warehouse through the big roll-up door. The voices were getting louder. The mastiff was barking.

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  They raced across the lot to the warehouse. The door was heavy and sheathed in metal but the lock was an ordinary Schlage.

  “What are we doing?” Grace said.

  Isaiah stared at the door, gathering his energy. He heard Ari’s voice. Kick through the bag. Like you’re trying to kill someone on the other side. He raised his knee and kicked the strike plate, his leg like a cannon shot. Three kicks and the dead bolt was torn right out of the wooden frame.

  He pulled Grace inside and shut the door. He looked around, his gaze stopping on a pile of sixty-pound sacks of cement. He picked up one and set it down next to the door. He and Grace worked together, lifting bags, grunting from the effort, piling up five more on top of the first one. Three hundred and eighty pounds’ worth. They carried three more bags across the warehouse to the fire door and set them down in the same way. They were exhausted, in pain, bent over, hands on their knees, sucking in air.

  “I can’t…I can’t do this anymore,” she said, and Isaiah knew he couldn’t either.

  “Quick,” he said. He grabbed a length of rebar and braced it against the door, the other end buttressed against a stack of cinder blocks. They got three more in place before the Starks arrived. They kicked and pounded on both doors but they held.

  “You’re in for it now, motherfucker!” Sidero shouted. “All you did was trap yourself.”

  Grace was realizing too. Isaiah grabbed her hand and pulled her behind a forklift just as the Starks started shooting through the door. It was a tremendous, deafening barrage, a mob of racists unleashing their unfulfilled lives and splintered dreams in sound and fury. It was as if the Confederacy had awakened and an army of zombie rednecks had risen from battlefields to take their revenge and release their long-held inexplicable fury against the blameless. They concentrated on the front door. Dozens of shots were fired into it, the metal sheathing holding the wooden core together. The salvo was surprisingly brief, dwindling to a few scattered shots and then stopping.

  “Cease fire,” Sidero said unnecessarily.

  Isaiah had counted on this. The Starks had given chase quickly and fired off a lot of rounds. They had few, if any, spare clips.

  “Johnny, Lowell,” Sidero said, “go back to the house and get more ammo. Everything we’ve got.” Sidero pounded on the door, exuberant. “You and that bitch are fucked! We’ll run a train on her and then we’ll lynch you, motherfucker. We’ll string you up by your goddamn neck just like the old days!” The mob laughed and hooted and banged on the walls. Isaiah calculated it would take Lowell and Johnny about fifteen minutes to get to the Den and back. Fifteen minutes before the door was demolished by gunfire and barbarians breached the gap. Isaiah stood there, staring at nothing. He knew what he was going to do. He had visualized the steps. He wondered if it was possible.

  Grace couldn’t hide her fear. She imagined Lowell and Johnny, skipping and laughing through the trees with their arms full of ammo.

  Isaiah came out of his reverie. “Give me one of your shoes.”

  She knew questioning him would waste time so she handed him her shoe and didn’t say a word. He stuck it into the back of his pants and climbed into the forklift’s cab. The engine sputtered to life, chains rattling, spewing black exhaust.

  “Hey, what’re you doing in there, Sambo?” Sidero shouted. “Digging a tunnel?”

  TK had a forklift at the wrecking yard and Isaiah had driven it a hundred times. He deftly picked up a stack of wooden pallets and placed them directly beneath the transoms. He estimated they were twenty-five feet off the floor.

  The max height of the forklift was eight feet. The stack of pallets was six feet and that left an eleven-foot gap between the top of the stack and the transoms. Isaiah maneuvered the forklift, picked up a second stack of pallets and placed them on top of the first. Then he carefully picked up the whole arrangement and raised it as far as it would go. The top of the stack was five feet from the transoms.

  Isaiah got out of the cab and clambered onto the roof of the forklift and then up the mast to the elevated forks. That was easy, but now he had to ascend a twelve-foot tower of wooden pallets and hope they wouldn’t topple over and send him headfirst into the cement floor. He used his fingertips and the toes of his shoes, inserting them into the sides of the pallets, going slowly and methodically like a sloth or a rock climber. He could hear the Starks cheering. The ammo must have arrived. Shit, that was fast. There were laughs and whoops as the Starks loaded fresh clips into their Glocks, Sig Sauers, Berettas, S&Ws, Tech tens and AKs.

  Sidero shouted, “Let ’em fucking have it!”

  The mob let loose another tremendous salvo. Isaiah tried to stay calm. Sweat was running into his eyes and the barrage was unrelenting. It was like walking a tightrope with a klaxon blasting in your ears and sharks circling beneath you. Keep going, Isaiah. Focus.

  Grace watched him, wondering what the hell he was doing. Didn’t he know the same long drop was on the other side of the transom? He was climbing the second stack of pallets when his foot slipped. “Oh, no!” She hurried closer to catch him. He held on. The tower had moved slightly; it was out of balance. Isaiah climbed more cautiously but that slowed him down.

  The Starks had blasted a hole in the door big enough for Jack Nicholson to stick his head through. Sidero looked in but didn’t have the angle to see them. He stuck his gun through, curved his wrist around and emptied a clip.

  “Here we come, motherfucker!” he roared.

  Ida screamed, “You’re dead, bitch!”

  The shooting commenced again. Soon the door would be one big hole and that would be the end. The women would be turned loose on Grace. They would beat her, torture her and kill her while the men did the same to Isaiah.

  Isaiah was still climbing. She watched him, her hands clenched together, her breathing fast and shallow. “Come on, Isaiah,” she whispered. “Come on!” When he reached the top, Grace had a moment’s relief. She expected him to pull off some genius move she never expected, something right in front of her that she hadn’t seen because she wasn’t Isaiah. But all he did was break the transom with her shoe.

  Two minutes later, most of the door was gone. The Starks bulled through the bags of cement and stampeded into the warehouse. They saw the forklift and the pallets and the broken transom.

  “Shit!” Sidero
shouted.

  The whole group ran out and around to the side of the building. They found a girl’s shoe and some broken glass. Sidero looked up at the transoms. “That’s a long drop. She must have busted her ankle.”

  “He’d have to carry her,” Hugo said. “They couldn’t have gone far.”

  “Split up!”

  A few minutes later, Grace crawled out of the cement mixer and Isaiah slithered from beneath rolls of chicken wire. They looked outside. The Starks were gone. Sirens approached. She took his hand and they ran off.

  Dodson finished up for the night. He dumped the mop water at the curb, wrung out the mop, put everything away and locked up the truck. When he got into his car he saw a lunch bag on the seat that wasn’t there before. At first, he was pissed. A prank, he thought. The bag was full of peanut shells or dog shit. But that made no sense. Somebody took the trouble to break into his car, left a bag and didn’t bother to rip out the stereo or rifle through the glove box?

  Dodson got in the car. Warily, he gently squeezed the bag. He knew instantly what it was. A stack of bills bound in a rubber band. It was the money Ponlok had given Isaiah as a gratuity. “That’s my boy,” Dodson said, with an affectionate shake of his head. He wondered at the time why Isaiah accepted it. For him, it was blood money. Dodson, however, had no such scruples, and his eagerness to restore the partnership was a tip-off he was broke. Isaiah took the money because he knew he would give it to Dodson.

  Dodson would quit his job tonight. A relief but it was only temporary. Cherise would insist the lion’s share of the money go to Micah’s college fund. Whatever was left wouldn’t last long. Gloria would call it welfare and another kind of food stamps and she wouldn’t be wrong. He had to make Cherise proud of him. He had to make Micah proud of his father. He sighed. He was right back where he started. Adrift.

  He started the engine and sat there a moment, listening to it idle. He stared through the windshield at the food trucks, a herd of shiny moneymakers lined up getting their rest, another long week ahead. That pang went through him again but he stifled it. And then he went still, brow bunched up, a realization sweeping over him. He’d stopped believing in himself. He’d stopped believing that the world didn’t happen to him, he happened to the world. Would he fail again, quit trying and go back to the streets like every other punk-ass loser in the hood? End up visiting Micah on Sundays, buying him birthday presents with drug money and beating himself up for losing his family for the rest of his life? Fuck no. He was Juanell Dodson. The Juanell Dodson. The quickest, most streetwise, fearless ex-hustler this side of the Long Beach Freeway. He’d forgotten, that was all. He nodded, resolute. “Do your thing, son,” he said to himself, “and y’all gonna be all right.” He called Cherise and told her he had a surprise for her. He took off the do-rag and tossed it out of the window. Then he put on some Tupac and drove out of the lot, bobbing his head to the beat.