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LADY SINGS THE CRUELS
DON’T GET IT TWISTED
GETS NO LOVE
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Lady Sings the Cruels
“Your girl gonna win, Bodie?” Ro asked in his laid-back drawl, thick like molasses from a can.
“You know what time it is. Think somebody out here got a better voice?” I answered over the screwed and chopped verses of Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones.” The trunk of the old Cadillac convertible rattled violently with each lazy note as if about to fly off its hinges. My niggas, the Fontenot brothers, rode up front, tossed back on that syrup. When they were mixing the codeine ’n’ shit, I passed.
Need my head on straight for my boo, Amelia
, I proudly thought. She was downtown at the Four Seasons tryin’ to change things in her life, so why shouldn’t I?
“That show’s full o’ shit, if you ask me,” Aaron volunteered as he wheeled the big orange slab down North Main, his normally blue eyes dyed bloodshot red from all the drank he’d been hittin’. Both the Fontenot brothers looked like white boys if a nigga didn’t know better. I guess that’s why they were always overcompensatin’ ’n’ shit—permanent scowls and always ready to break a nigga down if they got outta hand.
“That’s just it. Nobody asked you,” I snapped back. Ro laughed but you could barely hear him. He’d plopped a couple Xanax in his drank back at the crib. Even with all that, only half his edge had been taken off. Of the two, he was the scary one. If Aaron was the sound, Ro was most definitely the fury.
Aaron continued in spite of me. “Them stupid TV shows all outta a nigga’s control ’n’ shit. Dressin’ folk up like some dolls and makin’ ’em sang that gay shit. Who wanna hear some Barry fuckin’ Manilow? Ya know? Shit ain’t real like it is out here. What we do is real. If one of them judges came up in my face, tellin’ me how bad I handle my business, I’d show him he’s a wrong motherfucker. One time.” He looked around for his Glock .40 to wave for emphasis, but couldn’t find it. I just shook my head.
“Just drive, man. I wanna pick this up before she finishes. I wanna see her face when she walks out from her audition and I plant that boulder on her finger. Ya know?”
At the EZ Pawn, Aaron and Ro let me out the car so I could handle my business. Abdel, the Arab cat I’d been dealing with, recognized me and buzzed me in when I rapped on the door. I’d been to his store three times this month, putting some ends down on my shit. Well . . . Amelia’s shit.
I was a Northside nigga and Amelia was a South-sidegirl from Missouri City, or Mo City as we called it here in Houston. She was my ride-or-die chick and had put up with much noise from me since we’d met. We’d almost broke up again last week when I realized she was out for good if I didn’t quit my ways. Sometimes a nigga gotta burn shit out his system, y’know? I ain’t gonna front. What I was gonna do today was big. Life changin’, y’know? Yeah, I was scared.
I was giving Abdel a pound when Ro and Aaron caught the closing door. He stared at them, thinking they were white boys at first . . . and in the wrong neighborhood, until I spoke.
“They with me, bruh,” I vouched, exchanging a look that told him not to sound an alarm or reach for whatever he kept behind the glass case. They were supposed to stay in the car, but true to their nature they did whatever the fuck they wanted.
“Oh,” he replied. As he watched their demeanor, he smiled, realizing he’d been fooled by their features.
“Yeah, they’s niggas too. Got that Louisiana shit in ’em.” I laughed, just low enough for them not to hear. They were prowling around the other cases, eyeing all the good shit people had pawned. Abdel had clued me in on my last visit. High-end niggas losing their jobs at Enron had allowed gutter niggas like us to get high quality for cheap.
I reached in my pocket, pulling out the fat roll of bills to seal the deal. Abdel’s eyes lit up at the sight. He still had some reservations about my boys fawning over the items behind the glass, but went in back to get the ring for me.
“Damn, look at that one,” Aaron said to Ro, bringing his attention to a bunch of new jewelry on display. The glow reflected in his hazed eyes.
Ro shuffled over in his white tee and baggy jeans and scratched the brownish-blond fuzz on his chin. He nodded as if responding to voices unheard by the rest of us. His gaze was clear and focused when he twisted slowly in my direction. “Bodie, why you didn’t tell us ’bout this here?” he asked.
“ ’Cause I know how you crazy motherfuckers be actin’,” I replied. In fact, the only reason I was catching a ride with them today was because 1) they were my boys and 2) my Lac was off Westheimer getting dipped in some fresh candy paint. A lapse in judgment was nothin’ new on my part. I’d have Amelia’s ring soon, so it didn’t matter.
“How much you payin’ for her shit?” Ro asked.
I held up the fingers, each one indicating a grand.
“Daaamn,” Aaron gushed. Ro said nothing.
Abdel came back with my ring in a jewelry box. “She’s going to love this,” he said. He opened it, allowing me to inspect. I didn’t trust anyone when it came to matters of money. I held the solitaire up to the light and my world changed.
As slow as the Fontenot brothers had been previously,it was like someone lit a fire under them. I’d seen that fire in action before. And it was nothin’ nice. Abdel’s eyes spoke to me as I paused from admiring the ring I was to propose with. His gaze met mine, wondering how I could betray him. I was shaking my head in denial when Ro’s 9 mil swung across his head, leveling him. Dumbstruck, I just stood there.
“Don’t even think about an alarm, boy.” Ro slid around me like I was a store fixture and hopped the counter in one smooth move. He leveled his 9 on Abdel, on whom he’d opened a nice cut. Aaron followed his brother’s lead. After checking the front door, he pulled out his gun. I guess he’d found his Glock after all. They were wildin’.
“You gettin’ that ring for free, bruh,” Aaron gleefully proclaimed. “And then some.”
Abdel began pleading for his life, to which Ro shouted, “Shut the fuck up!”
“Get the tape, bruh! Get that shit!” Aaron yelled at me. I didn’t come here for this, but the time for talk was done. Without hesitating, I was back in that fucked-up mode too. Abdel wouldn’t be telling anyone anyway. Not if he didn’t want us coming back to pay him a visit. I stowed Amelia’s ring in my pocket and ran to the video recorder in the back office. Coming from the front of the pawnshop, I could hear cases being shattered and glass shards tumbling to the floor. The store tape was in my hand when I looked at my watch. I was gonna have Aaron drop me off at the Four Seasons when we got outta here. It was a “when.” An “if” never crossed my mind. It should’ve.
“Check for the money while you’re back there!” one of them urged as I left the office. My stupid ass listened, stopping to look around. On Abdel’s junky desk, I saw a framed photo of his family. I didn’t get a chance to find anything else.
A raucous scream I recognized as Ro’s rang out. I heard Aaron curse before the alarm went off and shots rang out. I dropped the tape and ran back to investigate. On the floor behind the counter lay Abdel’s twitching body, a piece of his head having been blown off. In his dying grip, he held one of those taser guns. Aaron was helping a limping Ro out the front door and didn’t even bother looking back for me. Torn between wanting to help the dying man and get the fuck away, I went on instinct and ran like O.J. It would’ve been all good except my foot caught the blood gushing from his wound. Slipping, I took an express trip to the concrete floor, where my head hit with a hollow thud.
It took a second for me to get back up and shake it off, but by then I could hear the loud exhaust on the orange Lac as it sped out the parking lot. Fuck this. I wasn’t getting tagged for something that wasn’t my idea. Alarm still blaring, I burst out the front door and ran for daylight.
Just make it home,
was what my racing mind repeated again and again.
The corrections officer, or CO, at the end of the row repeated him. The second time in two weeks my cell had been through shakedown. I came closer to check things out.
“Don’t know why you’re diggin’ around my mattress,” I said, looking over his shoulder. I maintained a safe distance while, on his knees, he checked the mattress frame for a shank. “You won’t find nothin’.”
He didn’t answer but, finishing his inspection, moved to my pictures pinned on the cell wall. Winters, a CO about the same age as me, was better than most motherfuckers. Some of them liked makin’ your life a living hell. He made sure you knew he was just doing his job. That earned him a nigga’s respect on most days.
Winters lifted the pictures, making sure no contraband was hidden behind them. We weren’t supposed to put shit on our walls. He could’ve been a dick and yanked them down. When he lowered them back in place, he stared at my girl’s for a sec. Next to a wrinkled picture of my custom Lac was a picture of Amelia taken a year before I went away. She was just a young’un then, posin’ all seductive in this camisole I’d gotten her.
“Nice, bruh.”
“Ain’t she though.”
“Waiting for you when you get out?”
I laughed. Ten years is a long time. “I dunno. Ain’t seen her in a minute. She special though.”
“Sure seems like it,” he muttered before moving on.
Winters thumbed through the pages of my book,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, leaving the page I’d marked undisturbed. Rather than tossing it on the floor, he handed it to me. “Great book,” he said. “Sure made me get my act together. Maybe if you’d read it sooner, you wouldn’t be in here.”
I wanted to punch him for trying to talk down to me, but it wouldn’t have done any good in the long run. Each day on the inside was helping me understand how I should handle things on the outside.
After sentencing, I’d done my first two years in Huntsville before being transferred to this new facility by the airport. Every day, I’d hear the planes flying overhead, imagining I was on one of them in a first-class seat to Mexico or maybe Rio for Carnival, where bronze, boomin’ asses would shake in my face all night long. Yeah. Prisons are a booming crop in Texas, and folks like me are the seeds they water to make them grow.
“Close five!” Winters hollered, his search completed. My cell door clanked shut. Before he left, he lingered by the bars. “Don’t mean to preach, Bodie.”
“S’all right. I know. Instead of ‘hangin’ with you, I should be with my girl on the outside. She could sing her ass off, y’know? Without even tryin’.”
His face grimaced. “She doesn’t sing anymore?”
I paused. “No.”
He didn’t say anything else. Just moved on to the next cell on his list.
I set the book down to fix my mattress. As I bent over, I heard a tapping sound behind me. I thought Winters had returned and expected to hear his voice.
“Nice ass, Antoine.”
No one but my grams called me by my birth name. And this bitch wasn’t my grandmomma. I ignored her and kept putting things back in place.
“Ain’t gonna talk to me, Antoine?” I heard her say something into the radio on her shoulder. My cell door started opening. I counted to ten before acknowledging her.
“Cell check,” CO Arnold proclaimed as she stood there, ready to mace me if I got out of hand. The HNIC on this block, she was one of the worst ones. Don’t get me wrong. Arnold was fine as fuck. She was around five-six, the color of a good cigar, and thick in the hips, and her hair was always done up. Today, she rocked one of them bought ponytails. I would’ve tapped that country ass on the outside. But because she was an evil ho who liked making life miserable for niggas on the inside, she was never getting it from me. That seemed to make her angrier.
“Winters just came through,” I snapped, knowing she really didn’t care.
“And it looks like he missed something.”
I looked around the tiny space, imagining some crevice he hadn’t touched.
“There,” she said, pointing at the wall near the head of my bunk. My pictures.
She kept her hand on her radio, daring me to make a sudden move to stop her. I wasn’t getting my head caved in today. She smiled as her leg brushed against mine. I wanted to trip her.
“You know you’re not supposed to hang anything on the wall.”
I raised an eyebrow, keeping my hands on the bunk and my mouth shut.
She snatched down the pictures of my Cadillac and Amelia and looked on the back of each.
“This your car?”
“Yeah.”