That Saturday, Mama lay in her coffin with a full face of heavy makeup, her Jheri curls glistening with activator. The funeral director had dressed her carefully in the outfit I’d provided. She had on a thigh-high peach-colored satin nightie with a matching floor-length robe trimmed in white lace. The set had come with a matching garter, which I could see had been placed neatly on Mama’s thigh, right above her fake leg. I was pleased with my selection. It looked exactly like something Katherine Chancellor would wear on The Young and the Restless. Mama always used to say, “I wish I had that bitch’s money.” Seeing her dressed up in fancy lingerie, I couldn’t help but think it looked like Mama finally made it.
As I stood by the casket, Dre stepped up beside me. For a few minutes the two of us stood there in silence, our heads bowed over Mama’s lifeless body. Then I heard Dre whisper my name. “Rabbit,” he said, “why Mama wearing these ho clothes? She look like she on her way to sell pussy in hell.”
The funeral was small. Andre and Jeffro couldn’t be there because they were locked up, but Sweetie came with her daughter, LaDontay, and her new baby, Diamond. Uncle Sugar Ray was there too, with Aunt Vanessa and some of her eight kids. Even Mr. John showed up. As the cemetery workers lowered Mama’s casket into the ground, Mr. John sobbed like he’d lost his very best friend. He was the only one who shed a tear.
I went back home after the service and changed out of my black funeral jeans and flats, and into blue jeans and Air Jordans. I threw Derrick’s gun and a Ziploc baggie filled with ten-dollar rocks into Nikia’s baby-blue diaper bag, put the kids in the backseat of my pearl-white Cadillac that sparkled in the sun, and headed back to the trap.
Chapter 17
The Breakup
Duck didn’t know it, but I loved him like a brother. Not like one of my real brothers, who were a bunch of petty criminals. I loved Duck like the kind of brother I could look up to, like a role model. Duck had a way of doing things that I’d never seen before. Every time we had to make a business decision—like how much product to buy, or where to get it, or who to buy it from—he’d ask around, gather information, weigh his options, and only then decide what to do. He called it “being strategic.” In my family I don’t remember anybody having any strategy for anything, ever. Unless you call stealing baby formula from the corner store a strategy. Mostly we just went with our instinct. Like when Miss Betty disrespected Granddaddy in front of his customers, his instinct said, “shoot the bitch in the ass.”
Watching the way Duck handled himself, and seeing all the money it was making us, I began to think maybe there was a different way to go through life than what I’d been taught. Everything about Duck—his calm spirit, his business strategizing, the way he could have money in his pocket and not spend it all at once—was completely new to me. Duck was my inspiration. I never said it to his face, but secretly I dreamed of being more like Duck. So even though I was the one who introduced him to selling drugs, when it came to running our business, I fell back, watched, listened, and followed his lead.
Like most dealers on the west side, Duck and I bought our dope from a dude named Mello, whose specialty was a product called “breakdown.” A couple of times a week, Duck and I would drive to Mello’s trap, buy five or six thousand dollars’ worth of breakdown, take the dope back to Duck’s sister-in-law’s house, lay it out on her kitchen table, break down the rocks into smaller pieces, and bag it up in dime sacks we’d sell for ten dollars a pop. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. Mello’s dope sold on the street for three times what we paid.
Mello ran a strictly wholesale business, only selling to other dealers. But breakdown was so popular, sometimes when Duck and I pulled up to Mello’s trap, he’d be all sold out.
“This is some bullshit,” Duck said one afternoon as we drove away from Mello’s empty-handed. “Can’t make money without inventory. We gotta find a new connect.”
Duck asked around, got some recommendations, and set up a meeting with a big-time supplier at the construction site of a strip mall off Old National Highway. The next thing I knew, the two of us were driving down I-285 in Duck’s cherry-red double-wide pickup truck, with fifteen thousand dollars in cash, on our way to meet some dude called “The Mexican.”
Duck pulled into an empty parking lot, turned off his ignition, and reached into his glove compartment. He pulled out a roll of bills held together with a rubber band and his .38 pistol.
He turned to me: “You good?”
I had Derrick’s loaded .38 in the zippered inside pocket of my black leather MCM pocketbook. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do this.” Neither one of us had ever shot a gun before. But everybody knew you didn’t show up for a drug deal without protection.
Inside the empty strip mall, planks of wood and dusty cardboard boxes were piled in the corners. Leaning up against a wall smoking a cigarette was the Mexican, dressed in a black-and-white Raiders starter jacket, with a matching cap pulled low over his eyes.
“You Duck?” he asked when he saw us.
“Yeah,” said Duck in a voice several octaves lower than usual. I felt like I was doing a drug deal with Barry White.
The Mexican nodded in my direction. “Who the fuck is she?”
Duck answered: “She’s with me.”
The Mexican looked me up and down with a sneer. Right away I knew I had to show him I wasn’t a punk. If we were gonna do business together I needed The Mexican to take me seriously.
“Look here, muthafucka,” I said, puffing out my chest and stepping toward him. “You better not be trying to sell us none of that gasoline-tasting bullshit.”
The Mexican took a step toward me so the two of us were standing a foot apart, staring deep into each other’s eyes. If I’d wanted to, I could have leaned in and kissed him on the mouth.
“Yo, bish,” he said, “you better shut your fuckin’ mouth before I smoke your ass.” He pulled open his jacket to flash the biggest gun I’d ever seen, stuck in the waistband of his jeans. It looked like a sawed-off grenade launcher. I felt the blood rush from my face.
I’d been scared before—like the time I was playing craps in a trap house with a couple of dealers; one dude thought his friend was cheating, so he pulled out his pistol and shot him in the stomach, right in front of me—but nothing like this. I didn’t know what the hell got The Mexican so mad. But anger was radiating off him like fumes. He reached for his weapon and I froze. I guess this is it, I thought. I’m either gonna get my head blown off or I’m gonna pee myself.
That’s when Duck stepped in. He held up his hands like “be cool,” and said to The Mexican in his smooth Barry White baritone, “It’s all good. She won’t say shit else. I promise.”
He whispered to me: “I mean it, keep your damn mouth shut.”
Duck didn’t say a single word the whole way driving back to Baldwin. He just gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. When we got to the block, he pulled up to the curb and turned to me. “You can’t be acting like that,” he said. “Talking to people all reckless.”
“Yeah, but—”