He was pulling on his shirt when the man got in his face. Bon Bon stepped in then, trying to protect him, but she was 110 pounds soaking wet, and when the man pushed her out of his way, she fell onto the bed in a soft thud. There was nothing between them now, and T.C. couldn’t do anything but back up when the man pushed closer. Before he knew it, he was cornered against a wall between the bed and the dresser; there was nowhere else to go.
“Look, man,” T.C. said. “I didn’t know nothin’ about you. I thought she was free, we wasn’t dating or nothin’ like that, it wasn’t nothin’ serious. Let’s just put it behind us.” He had never been in this situation before, but because he was always the peacemaker among his friends, because he didn’t love this girl, and because the comfort of his own bed beckoned to him, his words streamed out like gravy on a plate of rice.
The man didn’t budge. It wasn’t that T.C. was scared to fight, but he was tired. He’d had to become someone he wasn’t the first few weeks of jail. You would think his height would have been a deterrent, but men made knives out of metal scraps from the ceiling, hid them in their boots in the Orleans Parish Prison, pulled them out if you so much as stepped in front of them in line. He would never lose the scar that stretched like a Y alongside his belly, and that was enough. The idea of bustin’ this nigga’s head open, which he was sure he could do, was like asking a man who had just finished a marathon to climb Mt. Everest. No, if he wasn’t going to bust a nut, he needed to excuse himself and call Tiger. Maybe he should have gone home in the first place, to see if his mama made him a welcome-home meal.
T.C. repeated himself. “I told you, wasn’t nothin’ going on between me and her,” but the man still didn’t move.
“Nothing, Bakari, I swear, nothing,” Bon Bon added, in her squeaky little-girl voice.
“Look, I promise you, you don’t want none of this,” T.C. said, his voice more solid this time. “I will crush you,” he added when the man still hadn’t backed up. “I will crush you,” he repeated, his voice like stone.
The man pushed him now. T.C. didn’t fall, but to his surprise, he staggered a bit. He began to wonder if the accumulation of his day—watching his hopes dashed, being on the other side of jail and still running into it—had taken something vital out of him. The man pushed him again, harder this time, and in the seconds it took him to regain his footing, the man pulled out a knife. Bon Bon had been trying to mediate from the sidelines still, but when she saw the knife, she stopped talking and started screaming.
T.C. looked at her instead of the knife itself. The adrenaline he’d experienced during altercations in jail, that force of survival, seemed to drain out of him now, and he didn’t know if he was going to be able to get the knife out of the man’s hands without slicing himself up, maybe somewhere you couldn’t simply bandage up again.
He looked into the man’s face. Where had he seen him before? Of course everybody in New Orleans was light bright and damn near white, but this man had red hair too, and those eyes—he recognized him from somewhere, even if it was just a picture. He was certain of that now.
Then the man waved the knife under T.C.’s chin, and he would have swiped him if T.C. had snapped his head out of the way a second later. T.C. looked up at the window behind him. He could try to climb up, but the man could cut his legs while he figured out the lock. He turned back to Bon Bon, begging her for help with his eyes the way he had been begging her a few minutes earlier for a different matter, but she was just as paralyzed as he was, her screams like sirens from that night four months back when he had been only a mile from home, and the door to his world had come crashing in. T.C. looked back at the knife and heard the click of a burner cocking across from him. They all turned to the doorway. Bon Bon’s mama was there, pointing a Glock 19 in the air with both hands.
“I’ll blow both y’all motherfuckers’ heads off if you don’t listen up,” she said. “I tried to raise Bay Bay right,” she went on. “I guess it wasn’t enough, but I did what I could. Now I’m going to give you one minute to get your shit and get the fuck out of my house.”
The man slipped the knife in his pocket and sprinted out of the bedroom door. T.C. wasn’t cornered anymore, but he stayed where he was. What was he going to do? If he ran out now, he would just get sliced in the street, maybe more brutally because there was no mama to defend him. He looked at Bon Bon again. She was crying this time.
“Mama,” she said in a soft, shaking voice. “It wasn’t T. It was Bakari. You know how he is.”
“All I know is I won’t have that in my house,” her mama said, looking as if she were mad enough to turn the burner on her own daughter. She was still aiming at T.C. though. Bon Bon got up and pushed her arm down. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay,” she repeated.
But her mama was shaking her head. “It’s not this kind of house. I won’t have people thinking I’m running that kind of house.” They were both crying now.
“Nobody thinks that, Mama. It was just a silly argument. Everybody has these silly arguments.”
“No, they goddamn don’t.” The mama’s hands were shaking and T.C. thought the burner might fall on the floor and go off.
“And not goddamn here.” She turned to T.C. still shaking her head. “Now I know that nigga is out there waiting for you. You can stay for a few minutes, long enough for him to leave or for you to get your lil’ skinny ass a ride. It’s one o’clock. I’m gon’ go in my room and watch my stories. If you still here when I’m done, I’m gon’ call my husband. He got a permit for this gun, and he know how to use it, and I swear to God if you here when he get back, you gon’ wish that man out there had sliced your dick clean off.”
“Mama,” the girl shouted.
“Don’t you ‘mama’ me.” The woman wobbled toward the door, the hem of her muumuu trailing behind her. “With your fast ass.”
Bon Bon closed the door.
“What the fuck?” T.C. said, not as loud as he wanted to; he was still mindful of Mama Muumuu in the next room.
“I’m so sorry.” Bon Bon was all over him once the door closed, petting him and kissing his face. “I didn’t know he was coming.”
“I guess you didn’t,” T.C. said. “And get offa me with all that.” He shrugged her off of him, and she slid to the side of the bed.
She started crying again. “Don’t do me like that,” she whimpered. “I waited for you.”
“You couldn’t have waited that long, you got the green-eyed monster coming in here like he had some claim to you.”
“No, baby, you don’t get it. I haven’t been with that nigga since back in the G, and even then that was just my lil’ trade, but he’s crazy. He won’t leave me alone. He shows up every few months; I thought it was done ’cause I hadn’t seen him in a while, but here he is. He’s crazy, you gotta believe me, I waited for you.” She edged closer to T.C. as she talked, rubbing his chest. “I waited for you,” she repeated. By the time she was finished, she had wrapped her arms around his stomach.
“He always threatens me, but it ain’t never got that ugly before.” She leaned her head against his chest.