“Yeah!” Mama said. “He got pretty-ass hair. Don’t Rabbit look just like him?”
“Y’all crazy,” I said. But I couldn’t help smiling. Coming from Mama, this was like telling me I looked like Miss America. She was always good for a compliment when I had a fist full of money. I peeled off a hundred dollars and passed it to her.
“Thank you, baby!” she said with a smile. “You a good girl.”
Al took the handles of Mama’s wheelchair and started pushing her back up Baldwin. They’d only gone a few feet when Al stopped in his tracks and tilted his head in the direction of a noise coming from down the street. I heard it too: the ice cream truck was pulling up to the curb at the other end of the block. Next to alcohol, weed, and cigarettes, Mama and Al loved them some ice cream.
“Ma!” I called out. “Y’all want something?”
“Ooooooh!” she said. “That sounds good to me!”
It had to be ninety degrees out and there wasn’t a lick of shade on the block. I could already taste the icy goodness of a Bomb Pop melting in my mouth. I glanced toward the truck. Little kids, grandmamas, and junkies were already heading that way.
“What y’all want?” I asked Mama, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. She was opening her mouth to answer when suddenly the back of the ice cream truck flew open and half a dozen men, dressed head to toe in black military gear and bulletproof vests, poured onto the street. I froze. This wasn’t a real ice cream truck. This was a drug bust, and I was holding fifty rocks in a baggie in the front pocket of my jeans.
“Get down!” the cops shouted, pointing their guns at the crowd. “Police! Get on the muthafucking ground, NOW!”
I took a step back toward Mama and Al, keeping one eye trained on the police. They were shoving their knees into folks’ backs and pushing their faces to the ground. These weren’t regular cops, either; they were the Red Dogs, a special anti-drug unit of the Atlanta Police Department. They’d been raiding traps all over the city for months.
“Red Dog” was supposed to stand for Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia. But on the block we called them the jump-out boys because their favorite tactic was jumping out of undercover vehicles. Their second-favorite tactic was beating the shit out of black folks. From where I stood, I could see a lone Red Dog had broken away from the pack and was coming up the block headed right for us.
“Baby!” Mama whispered. She leaned forward in her wheelchair. “Gimme your dope.” I looked down and noticed she’d lifted up the pant leg of her bell-bottoms. Without taking my eyes off the cop, I reached over and slid her my baggie. Mama dropped it inside her fake leg and quickly pulled her pants back down.
“Hey!” the Red Dog yelled as he ran up the street toward us. “Get your muthafucking hands in the air!”
Al and I threw up our hands. The officer headed right to Mama. “What the hell are you doing out here?” he yelled in her face.
“I ain’t doing nothin’,” she said.
“Are you attempting to purchase narcotics?” he demanded.
Mama let out a gasp and stared at him in exaggerated shock. “Ma’am,” the cop continued, “this is an area of known narcotics trafficking. Is that what you’re doing out here, buying drugs?”
“Drugs?” Mama said, clutching her hand to her chest. “Officer, I don’t know anything about no drugs. I don’t touch that shit. I’m just out here visiting my baby girl.”
The officer turned to eyeball me, then looked back at Mama, frail and thin in her wheelchair. Then back to me. “What are you doing here?” he asked, waving his gun in my direction.
“I’m with my mama,” I said. “We visiting.”
“Visiting who?”
“Visiting each other. She’s visiting me. I’m visiting her.”
“Is that right?” the officer said, sounding skeptical.
He looked around and his gaze landed on a car parked by the side of the road. “Whose vehicle is that?” he asked, pointing to a souped-up ’82 Cadillac Fleetwood. It was sitting on big-ass twenty-two-inch Trues and Vogues tires with spoke rims, and painted pearl white with gold flecks that sparkled in the sunlight.
The car was mine. I’d bought it a few months earlier, right after I turned sixteen and got my license. It cost eight hundred dollars at auction. I dropped five thousand for the paint job and another G for the tires, rims, and custom-fitted Panasonic sound system with a pop-out radio and state-of-the-art CD player with a floor-mounted joystick to control the volume. Nikia’s baby-blue diaper bag was on the front passenger seat. Inside the diaper bag was another half ounce of dope, wrapped in a Ziploc. Also in the bag was Derrick’s .38 pistol, which he told me to hold on to for protection.
“I never seen that car before,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as best as I could with my hands in the air.
When Duck first saw my tricked-out Caddy, he was heated. “What the hell you doing?” he asked. “Tryna blast the news to every police in Atlanta that you selling dope? Why don’t you just put up a gotdamn billboard?” At the time I thought he was overreacting—after all, Duck had taken his drug money and bought himself a double-wide pickup truck, so obviously we had different tastes in automotives—but looking at my flashy ride with fresh eyes, I had to admit, it did kinda scream, “DRUG DEALER!”
The officer leaned over and peered inside the car window. This is it, I thought, my heart racing. If he sees the gun in my diaper bag, or takes a look inside Mama’s fake leg, I’m busted for sure. I held my breath and prayed to God to get me out of this mess. Please, God, I begged silently. Please please please . . .
Just then, there was a ripple of commotion at the other end of the block. The Red Dogs were loading half a dozen handcuffed men into the back of a police van. I recognized some of them as regular customers, along with a couple of small-time corner boys. They probably didn’t have more than thirty rocks between them.
“You niggers are going down!” one of the cops yelled triumphantly. Then he took his baton and smacked one of the handcuffed boys across the back of his knees, knocking him to the ground. “Gotdamn lowlife!” the cop yelled, kicking the kid in the back. “Piece of shit.”
The officer who was standing with me and Mama looked up and grinned at the display of excellent police work happening down the block. Then he turned back to us. “All right,” he said. “Y’all get out of here. Go on home.”
“I told you, my baby’s a good girl,” Mama called to the cop as he jogged down the block to join the rest of his unit. “You don’t never need to worry about her!” She turned to me and flashed the biggest smile I’d ever seen. If she’d had some teeth, it would have been perfect. “See,” she whispered. “I got you, girl!”
Mama saved my ass from the Red Dogs that hot summer afternoon. She was thirty-nine years old; it was the last time I’d ever see her alive.