A Deeper Love Inside (30 page)

I couldn’t accept the idea that Riot was more real than me. It felt that way, though. I never front on the feelings I feel. I opened my money-box, unfolded and counted out my money. I put the bills in order according to amounts, faces all facing the same direction, smoothed ’em out and stacked ’em. I pushed the tall stack over to Riot. “A promise is a promise,” I said, quoting her. “You got me back to Momma. I give you the five thousand. We became partners, fifty/fifty. The five thousand is the investment. How long will it take you to flip it?” I asked her.

She sat still. Finally I had silenced Riot. I had done my part. I had been as real with her as she was with me all the time.

“I’m staying with Momma. How long before I see you? I trust you, Riot. You are the only one I ever didn’t leave my handprint on, for talking about my family. It’s only because you been family to me during the worse times,” I confessed.

“I can’t leave you with nothing,” Riot said quietly.

“I had $1,100 from working jobs on the reservation,” I said truthfully. “Oh, minus the things I bought for myself and for Momma. Now I got $750 left over,” I said, counting in my head.

“I don’t want to leave you at all,” Riot said, looking regretful. I guess my silence, our silence that fell on us and remained for a minute, confirmed our separation.

Riot counted out one thousand dollars in twenties and gave it back to me. I counted out three hundred dollars and slid it back to her. “Buy me some more cigarette cartons,” I said. “You hustle on your side. I’ll hustle on mine.”

“We’re fifty/fifty on a four-thousand-dollar investment,” Riot said. “I’ll meet you in sixty days on Halloween, Thursday, October 31, in Manhattan. Let’s meet in front of Macy’s since we both know it, at 6:00 p.m. If I don’t show, I’m captured or dead. No matter what . . .,” she said. I already knew, so I interrupted Riot.

“No matter what, we never give up NanaAnna. We always protect her, and her property. We lie or die with our secrets. If you tell on me you tell on yourself.”

Chapter 29

Relieved and stressed, is it possible to be both things? I was. The only solution was music and dance. “Momma, do you still have your record collection?” I asked as we rode the train back to Brooklyn. We were carrying all of my possessions packed into four sturdy shopping bags, plus my side pouch. Me and Momma each carried two.

“Yeah, right,” she said, rolling her eyes and turning her head in the opposite direction.

“Let’s go to the record shop before we head home.”

“It’s the CD shop or the music store.
Where you been?
” she said.

“I know. I was just saying . . .” My words trailed off.

Momma roamed in between soul and rhythm and blues. I was excited in hip-hop. I had been playing music mostly in my mind for the past three years or listening to no-name rhyming chicks on lockdown. Or, hearing a girl in the bed besides me beat boxing or Siri humming beautifully, sometimes even surprising me, by singing a song. Being able to choose my own music, instead of having to listen to whatever the upstate DJs spun while we were using the Department of Corrections’ radio in limited time amounts, under supervision, was so sweet to me. Seeing the CD covers, the artwork and images, instead of passed-around bootleg cassettes, was fascinating to me. Hearing a Brooklyn neighborhood record shop’s speakers booming and blasting into the Brooklyn streets even on a holiday made me feel alright.

“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t have a record player?” I asked Momma.

“A CD player,” she corrected me.

We were both overlooking and purposely ignoring the fact that Momma’s “living space” had no front door. Momma had stopped on Fulton Street in the Ft. Green section of Brooklyn, she made a left and walked behind a store in a slim alleyway. She bent down and pulled a thin rusted metal bar out of a lock holding together two rusted iron slabs that laid slanted over the cement sidewalk. Her thin
arms lifted one side of the iron gate. It creaked. Momma took six steps down the cement stairs and into the ground.

“Come on, what you waiting for? These bags are heavy,” she said impatiently.

I stepped down slowly, feeling déjà vu.
I’m headed back to the bottom,
I thought to myself.

Once I was down and in, Momma let go of the iron gate and it dropped down, eliminating any light from the street lamps and store signs. It sounded final and permanent, like prison doors slamming shut behind my back. Doors to enter and never exit, with locks that had no keys that I could ever hold, touch, or be in charge of.

“Stay still,” Momma said. She began moving around in the darkness. “That’s why I don’t be here a lot of time. I gotta look all over for the damn light,” she said.

I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I stood still cause she said so. I heard her fumbling, something falling, glass breaking open, then being crushed beneath the weight of a shoe or sneaker. I was used to listening carefully to sounds in the dark especially, footsteps coming from down long corridors, or keys jingling, or breathing, heavy breathing of overweight officers, greedy guards, or horny authorities. I could even hear the sounds of rubber-sole shoes, sneaky nurses, and drugging doctors. I knew the sounds of dirty mops swishing around the dirty water on dirty floors. I even could detect slight sounds, like someone withholding a burp or fart or letting it rip. Or, the gentle pull of a smoker smoking in the dark in a no-smoking area. I was an expert in listening for the sounds of secret crying, someone else’s tears or, sometimes, my own.

“There it is,” Momma said. A switch got flipped. No, a string got pulled, the light of one bulb swinging on a wire flashing here and there. Momma tried to catch it and stop it from swinging. Soon she steadied it over her head. Now I could see clearly a living space bigger than a living space for a prisoner, but too small for anyone who had never done anything wrong. There was a mattress on the floor, a dirty sheet half hiding an ancient pee stain. There was a stove covered with grease and gook, two rusted pots with molded and maggoty burnt
leftovers left sitting on two opposite burners. There was a half refrigerator, perfect for half a human.

Momma snatched the dirty sheet off the mattress and tossed it in a corner, where empty liquor bottles lined the wall. The sheet landed on top of them. Did she think I hadn’t already seen them? Or did she toss the sheet as a distraction for my eyes to follow, while she hurried and grabbed the pipe and empty vials, pushing them down into the front pockets of her charity dress. Nervously, she searched for and found the broom. She grabbed an envelope from a stack of envelopes and papers and newspapers. As she swept the glass that had just shattered beneath my new Air Max, which were still on her feet, I saw the seal of the court on the envelope she was using to sweep the glass onto. It was an unopened court notice of something. My eyes surveyed the floor. There were stacks and stacks of unopened mail; some of them were stained with red Kool-Aid or maybe wine or something like that.

There were no windows. There was a second set of iron steps leading up to somewhere. Momma pulled off the yellow Halloween princess wig.

“I did say I had some cleaning to do,” was all she said to me.

“I’ll do it,” I said, sounding upbeat so Momma wouldn’t turn too sad.

“Where’s your record player?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t have one when we were both just in the music store?”

“I don’t know how much money you have. I don’t have none! There’s a store upstairs. I get paid when I work. When I don’t work, I don’t get nothing,” she explained.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Stack newspapers, tie them up, so he could put them on the curb. I sweep up the floors and dust the shelves. I wipe down the canned goods and put ’em in perfect lines, labels facing outward. I wash dishes and clean up in the back room of the store.
But I ain’t been here in ten days or so.
Big Johnnie be acting funny sometimes,” Momma said.

“Like what?” I asked, wanting to know everything we were dealing with.

“Sometimes he keeps that door locked so I can’t come up into the store. How am I supposed to do my job if I can’t get in?” she said.

“How come you don’t go out the same way we just came in and walk around to the front door to the store?” I asked.

“Because I’m supposed to do my job from 3:00 in the morning till 6:00 a.m. before the front door opens for business and the customers start arriving. He acts like he don’t want nobody to see me, like he don’t want to admit that I’m working for him. And one week that nigga tried to pay me with four cans of Spam and a pack of cigarettes. He lucky he keep that register empty. He takes all the money with him when he leaves every night. When I’m cleaning and working up there, there’s not a penny in the whole place! When I’m done up there, I gotta get out and stay out from when the store doors open at 6:06 a.m. every morning until it closes at 11:00 p.m. each night. So I can’t come back here till after eleven. How that sound?”

Momma was making a strange and funny face, her hands on her hips and one leg bent like she was about to leap.

“I can do that job. You don’t have to work. From what you’re saying, I go up these stairs and could be in and out. He wouldn’t even know,” I planned.

“How you gonna get up and go to school if you been working from three in the morning?” Momma asked.

I moved from the last cement step where I had still been standing still. I pulled the one wooden chair away from the one-woman wooden table and said, “Please sit down, Momma.”

I explained in detail that her daughter, Porsche L. Santiaga, is a girl gangster, a Gutter Girl and a Diamond Needle. Her daughter won’t be doing nothing official, like school, or going any place where anybody official might be looking for me. Her daughter won’t be telling anybody her real name or showing them her real feelings or sharing any information about our family or family business.

“I’m here for you, Momma. I’m gonna work till I drop. I’m gonna hustle like crazy. I’m gonna make you love me,” I said, staring up to her.

“I don’t know what you talking about. I love all my kids,” Momma said casually. I couldn’t feel her words swelling in my chest or racing through my veins and into my heart.

“Please believe in me, Momma. I’m gonna take back all our shit that got tooken.”

• • •

Early morning I came up from the underground and into the Brooklyn streets. This definitely wasn’t Bed-Stuy where the Santiagas were infamous. I was glad. The man Momma called Big Johnnie was first on my work list. I needed to take a look at him and his store. I had tried to climb up the iron stairs and through the ceiling door that led to his store at 3:00 a.m., but like momma said, it was locked down tight. My little mind was organizing my opportunities and my necessary lies.

“Do you sell peanut butter?” I asked.

“Second aisle in the back,” the man at the register said. He had to be Big Johnnie, I thought. He was big and black and serious looking. I went and got peanut butter. The price was way too high. I wanted to put it back, but I knew I had to buy something to get a decent conversation going. I got peanut butter and a loaf of bread and walked it up to the counter.

“That’s whole wheat,” the man said.

“I know,” I said without an attitude.

“Good, cause you can’t bring it back. No refunds,” he said. Then he pointed to a sign behind him that read no refunds.

“I won’t bring it back. This is for me. I’m gonna eat it,” I said, laying my five-dollar bill on the counter.

“That’s even better,” he said, and smiled.

I took the smile as an opportunity and jumped right in.

“How much for a pack of cigarettes?” I asked.

“Five-fifty but I don’t sell cigarettes to kids.” He placed my change on the counter.

“My aunt said . . .,” I started explaining.

“Who’s your aunt? She knows better. Everybody round here knows. You ain’t from around here,” he said. The store door opened. Two customers walked in.

“I’m visiting. My aunt’s the lady from downstairs.” I pointed down as in through and under the floor. His face turned sour. His eyes were following his customers as they each moved down different aisles.

“Who left a nice little girl like you with her?” he asked without looking.

“Aunt’s nice, too. She’s been down there trying to come up to work, but the door has been locked.” He placed one big long finger over his lips to signal me to stop talking. I did. He rang up the two customers and they left.

“So, you say you just visiting?” he asked with a serious face and a suspicious look.

“Yes,” was all I replied.

“For how long of a visit?” he asked.

“One month,” I said swiftly, surprising myself. Then I added, “My mother is in the hospital. Before they took her into an ambulance, she told me to go to this address and stay with her sister-in-law.”

“She gave you this address?” he asked doubtfully. “What about your daddy?” he asked. I didn’t answer, just gave him a sad stare. A few more customers came. I stayed quiet since I seen that was the game he was playing.

“Does my aunt owe you some money?” I asked after they left.

“Why would you concern yourself with that?” he asked me.

“Oh, I thought that was the reason you keep locking her out. If you don’t open the door so she can work, how can she make some money to pay you back for what she owes?” I asked sweetly, my two hands up in the air. He laughed a big laugh.

“She doesn’t owe me no money. She doesn’t want to work either. But I see that you do,” he said.

“I can help her,” I told him.

“She
needs
some help,” he emphasized with some disgust.

More customers came. I stood to the side watching them. Watching him. Cigarettes, coffee, chips, and candy were the main things moving.

“Let me get a baloney sandwich, hurry up, I’m late for school,” one kid disrespected.

“A baloney sandwich, please,” the man corrected the kid. “How many times do I gotta tell you? One of these days I’ll take you out back and kick your little ass like your daddy should’ve done,” Big Johnnie told him with no fears.