Driving through the neighborhood that night, my mind flashed back to a time, years earlier, when I had a regular job, with regular-ass people who didn’t show up for work armed like they were going to war.
Before I had my babies, when I lived with Mama on Baldwin Street, our neighbor, Miss June, had taken me with her to work at a big warehouse across town, where she had a gig as a day laborer filling cardboard boxes with Care Free Curl Activator. I made thirty dollars a day, minus the ten dollars I paid Miss June for driving me to the warehouse and lying to the foreman about my age, telling him I was sixteen—old enough to work—when really I was just thirteen and pregnant. I only worked a few weeks before Mama moved us to Vine City. But I remember the job wasn’t all that bad. At least it was safe.
Stephanie wasn’t far from her mama’s house when I asked her to turn the car around. “I want to stop by Miss June’s real quick,” I said. She pulled a U-turn and stopped at the big white house with the wide front porch that Miss June and her husband had lived in for as long as I could remember. Miss June was like the kind of mother I would see on TV. She cooked and cleaned and went to church every Sunday. She always had a kind word and a cool drink for me whenever I came by. I liked Miss June, but I hadn’t been by to see her in years.
“My goodness!” she exclaimed, when she opened her front door and saw me standing there. “Girl, it’s been too long.” Miss June waved me to the kitchen and I followed her down the long hallway to the back of the house. She had an apron tied around her waist, and walked with a limp because part of her left leg was missing. Her husband, who was ex-military, had shot it off years before. Miss June said it was an accident. But that’s what everybody said when they got shot by the same person they share a bed with.
“How’s that sweet little baby of yours doing?” she asked, pouring me a glass of sweet tea.
“Actually, I got two babies now,” I said. “A girl and a boy.”
“Lord have mercy! Rabbit, two?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Both of them by that same boy you was going with?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head. “Never much cared for him. Not one bit. But I’m gonna send up a prayer for you and your precious babies.”
Miss June had seven children, six of them boys. I used to come by her place all time to hangout with Petey, her youngest. Sitting in her kitchen, it struck me that the last time I’d seen Miss June was right after Petey’s funeral. He’d been shot dead, at fifteen, by a police officer who said Petey fit the description of somebody they’d been looking for. All those hours Miss June had spent on her feet packing boxes of Care Free Curl Activator, what good had it done her? She’d still come home to find the police on her front steps telling her they’d made a mistake and killed her baby boy. Suddenly, it felt like nothing was safe, not hustling at Techwood, not having a regular job. If Miss June, in all her goodness, wasn’t able to keep Petey safe, what chance did I have? The thought of it made me want to lay my head down on Miss June’s kitchen table and cry.
“Rabbit?” Miss June said, interrupting my misery. She was standing by the window, looking into her back yard. “You mind doing me a favor? Go out back and tell Duck to come inside and get something to eat. I don’t know what he’s out there doing.”
Duck was Miss June’s oldest boy. His real name was Tony, but I never heard anybody call him that. When I pushed open the back screen door and stepped onto the porch, I could see him standing on the far side of the yard, by the fence. He had his hands in his pockets and he was staring onto Baldwin Street, which ran behind Miss June’s house.
“Hey, Duck,” I said, walking over to see what he was looking at.
“Hey, Rabbit,” he answered, quickly glancing my way, before turning back to the street. I couldn’t imagine what had grabbed his attention. Nothing ever happened on Baldwin except folks sitting on their porches to catch the night breeze. All I could think of was maybe a dog had gotten hit by a car, or a couple was having a fight in the middle of the road. But as I stepped up beside Duck and peered through the fence, I froze.
The block looked like a scene from a zombie movie: there were halfway-dead-looking junkies roaming up and down the street, itching and scratching, stooped over and scanning the ground. I knew they were searching for a stray piece of rock they hoped they might find. At Techwood I’d once seen a crackhead on all fours crawling on the sidewalk, feeling around the pavement for some imaginary crumbs. That’s what the comedown from a crack high did, it brought folks to their knees.
“What’s going on?” I asked Duck.
“These crackheads all looking for a hit,” he said.
“Where’d they come from?”
“Around here, I guess. Probably some of them walked over from Harris Homes.”
Duck was ten years older than me, and he looked just like somebody’s daddy. He was dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt tucked into his carefully ironed jeans. But the crackheads must have been so blinded by their hunger, because they didn’t seem to notice that this was not drug-dealer attire. As we stood by the fence, they kept coming over, asking Duck if he was holding.
“Yo, you got anything?” asked a guy in a torn Falcons jersey.
“Nah, man,” said Duck.
“Got a dime?” asked a woman shuffling down the street in bedroom slippers.
“Unh-uh.”
A middle age man approached us, holding the hand of a boy who couldn’t have been more than three years old. “Y’all got any of that butter?” the man asked Duck.
Duck smiled at the child, then said to his father, “Man, I ain’t got shit.”
When they were gone, Duck turned to me: “You see this shit? All these crackheads and nobody out here selling nothin’. If a brother had some dope, he’d be getting paid tonight.”
I reached into my pocketbook for my Ziploc bag. “Duck,” I said. “I got some right here.”
Chapter 15
Partners in Crime
Duck and I sold those fifty rocks on Baldwin in a smooth fifteen minutes. It would have taken me days to sell that much at Techwood. Spending all that time running from shootouts was obviously keeping me from living up to my full dope-dealing potential.
“Man, that was crazy,” Duck said, shaking his head. “They was like kids at a candy store.”
“That’s how they do,” I told him. “The minute they finish smoking that shit, they ready for more.”
Duck didn’t say anything for a while. He just looked out onto the street with his arms crossed in front of his chest, shaking his head “no” to the steady stream of crackheads who kept coming by looking for a hit.
Duck turned to me: “How much that package cost you?”
“Two fifty.”
“And how much you reckon we just made?”
“Five hundred.”
Duck let out a long whistle. “You got any more?” he asked.
“Not on me.”
“But can you get some?”