“Your call,” Isaiah said. He bristled at the threat but knew Dodson was bluffing. If they had a fight he’d have no place to stay. Dodson pivoted.
“For two-fifty I should get the bedroom,” he said.
The idea of Dodson sleeping in Marcus’s room was sacrilege. “Not gonna happen,” Isaiah said. “Don’t even think about it.”
Dodson was a member in good standing of the H-Town Deuce Trey Crip Violators. He was jumped in at the age of fifteen. A dozen or so of his future colleagues beat the shit out of him in the parking lot behind Vons. Afterward, as they were peeling him off the asphalt, it was nothing but love. You one of us, nigga. You in for life, nigga. It’s real now, son, you rolling with the VIPs. You in the uppa level, dog, you bangin’ with the big ballas now. Yeah, uh-huh, and now that he was homeless all the VIP big ballas had a damn excuse and he was sleeping in Keenya’s ten-year-old Ford Escort with the Saran wrap windows and cat hair embedded in the dusty seats. He did his washing up in the men’s room at the Econo gas station and ate microwave burritos from 7-Eleven and Value Meals at Mickey D’s. He’d seen Isaiah around, hanging with some unaffiliated kids, the kind that wore backpacks and had carrot sticks in their lunch bags. At first, he thought Isaiah was running some kind of game; all hunched over like his Auntie May, his eyes red, lint in his hair, clothes like he’d just rolled out of bed. No way in the world a fucked-up seventeen-year-old kid could have a place that wasn’t fucked up too. Except it wasn’t. The apartment reminded Dodson of his parents’ house. Everything clean, put away, and done up nice like somebody cared. He absolutely wanted to stay here but he’d never paid full retail in his life.
“You short on the rent or I wouldn’t be here,” Dodson said. “Without me you out on the street.”
“Without you I’ll go find somebody else and you can go back to living in that plastic shed.”
“Straight up? I need some slack here, brutha.”
“Don’t call me brother.”
“Two-fifty’s out my tax bracket. How ’bout we make it one-fifty?”
“How about we make it three hundred?”
“How ’bout one seventy-five?”
“How about five hundred?”
“You a hardheaded li’l nigga, ain’t you?”
“You in or you out? Make up your mind.”
Dodson knew he had to give in, at least for now. He needed to take a shower, put on some clean clothes. He’d find a way to recoup later on. “I’m in, aight? I’m in.”
“Where is it?” Isaiah said.
“Where’s what?”
“The money.”
“I’m a little short this week. How ’bout I give you a hundred now and the rest next week?”
“How about you come back when you got the two-fifty?”
Dodson felt a wave of humiliation, bested by this chump. He stood there looking at the ground, head slightly tilted, one fist clenched. He wanted to pop the boy a few times, let him know who he was messing with. Instead, he sneezed. Fucking cat hair. Dodson turned and walked away, thinking, This ain’t but the first round, muthafucka.
CHAPTER THREE
Where’s My Samitch, Bitch?
July 2013
Dodson was sitting in a metal folding chair on the auditorium stage at Carver Middle School. He vaguely remembered being a student here, although calling him a student was a stretch. His attendance was so bad his history teacher said he should wear a visitor’s badge. Homework was like a strange ritual they did in some foreign country where everybody was blond and wore wooden shoes.
Dodson was sharing the dais with a firefighter in a big canvas coat, a Filipina nurse in green scrubs, a bulky-looking woman in a gray uniform who worked as a prison guard, and an old man in oil-stained coveralls and an STP cap who owned a wrecking yard. Above them hung a banner in blue and green tempera that said: CAREER DAY. Dodson saw Isaiah slip into the back of the auditorium and he smiled to himself. This could only mean one thing. Isaiah needed money and he needed it bad.
The old man was up first. He started his presentation with a joke. “All right,” he said, “so this black man walks into a bar, you see, and he’s got a parrot on his shoulder. Big beautiful bird, all kinds of colors in it and everything, and the bartender says, man, that thing is beautiful. Where’d y’all get it? And the parrot says, Africa.”
It was all downhill from there. The nurse had an accent and that was the end of her and the firefighter put everybody to sleep talking about good grades and character. The woman prison guard said her job was tough but it was union and they couldn’t fire you unless you smuggled in dope or had sex with an inmate.