A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (14 page)

I saw what Chris observed. We had each been in the sunlight, skin blackening. I checked Chris was out of his Air Force Ones and into some Stan Smiths. Those kicks were for tennis players. He was even rocking the green Izod instead of Polo.

“You been on the tennis court?” I asked him.

“Tennis!” Ameer repeated before Chris could answer, as though it was an illegitimate sport.

“My father signed me up for tennis lessons. I had to accept them if I wanted him to ease up and end my punishment,” Chris said.

“Oh, it’s part of the punishment,” Ameer joked him.

“I thought of it that way at first, but it’s an alright game. Try it. The girlies be out there playing in their miniskirts ’n shit, bending over chasing down balls.” We all laughed.

“Let me get two beef patties,” Ameer ordered. “And a ginger beer.”

“Two more and I’ll have the same,” Chris said.

“Give me two chicken patties and a side of cabbage,” I ordered. “And two bottles of water.” We grabbed the last available table and waited. “Let’s get down to business,” I told them.

“Let’s eat first,” Chris said as he jumped up to pick up our tray from the register and pay the cashier from our group fund.

“Why you speeding?” Ameer asked me. “There’s so much to talk about. We gotta update you on some real shit. And you need to tell us something about this fucking ‘voyage’ you went on.” Then he lowered his voice some. “I got your joint,” he said, referring to the burner that I let him hold while I was away traveling.

“Same as it was?” I asked him, meaning had he used the weapon for any reason. It was cool with me if he did, but I needed to know for sure.

“I flashed it on a few, but never fired,” he said discreetly.

“Oh yeah,” I told him. “We handle the cannon same as we handle the sword. Like Sensei taught us, ‘Don’t pull it out unless you’re ready to use it.’ ”

“It worked for me. Next time, niggas that need to know, know,” Ameer said confidently.

“What you gonna do next time you see ’em and you ain’t got it?” I asked him. “That’s why you don’t flash it. Once they know you holding, they gon’ go and get strapped and come looking for you. Then what?” I asked him seriously.

“What y’all talking about? Damn, I stepped away for a few seconds and missed something,” Chris said, holding the tray with all of our orders on it. Neither me nor Ameer said a word. Chris caught on and didn’t push it. He broke the tension like usual. “Grab your shit off the tray. Do I look like a waitress?” Chris barked, then laughed as we each reached in for our food and drink.

“It’s not always serious like that,” Ameer said solemnly after we were all paused and eating. I didn’t follow up ’cause I meant what I said.

On a napkin, I drew a rough diagram of the dimensions of the wall. “The house is here,” I said, drawing a small model to mark the placement of the house. “The wall goes like this . . . It’s nine feet high all the way around. There are three sides: left, right, and back wall, and of course they all have to connect and line up perfectly.”

“A brick wall, right?” Chris questioned.

“Cement blocks,” I said swiftly.

“The owner must have something valuable inside that house. Good for us. He’ll be ready to pay up,” Ameer said.

“The pay is seven hundred dollars for each side. There’s three sides and three of us, so that’s seven hundred for each of us,” I told them. “We get paid when it’s completed.”

“We gotta get him for a deposit. Just in case,” Chris said, thinking aloud and sounding like his father, the Reverend Christian Broadman.

“Word up,” Ameer said. “What if we build it and shit, and the cement dries, and for some reason he’s talking about he don’t like it. Ain’t like we gonna knock it down and start over again.” We were looking back and forth at one another as though we could see each other’s thoughts.

“I’m sure I can talk him into that if I keep it reasonable. Say, one hundred for each of us as a deposit?” I checked their eyes.

“Cool,” Ameer said, and Chris agreed a split second after him. “Seven hundred dollars, nice,” Ameer continued. “It takes all summer to make seven hundred dollars working in that bullshit city summer work program around my way.”

“My pops ain’t gonna say no to seven hundred dollars in my hand. That’s seven hundred less out of his pocket.” Chris laughed.

“We start every morning at eight a.m.,” I said.

“Damn,” Ameer said.

“And we quit at two p.m. each day until the job is done,” I added.

“Why can’t we just bust it out all day long every day until it gets dark? We’ll finish faster,” Ameer proposed.

“No, he doesn’t want none of us on his property before eight a.m. and he doesn’t want none of us on his property after two p.m. each day. Those are his rules, nonnegotiable.”

“Sounds crazy. How did you meet this guy anyway?” Chris asked.

“He got the idea in the hardware store where I was picking up a few things,” I said, intentionally dodging.

“It’s cool. Now that I think about it, if we finish two p.m., we got the whole rest of the day to get a pickup game or whatever else pays,” Ameer said.

“Back to you, black man!” Chris joked me. “What about that footage?”

“Black is beautiful,” I shot back calmly.

“Is that what your girlies tell you?” Ameer asked me, only half joking.

“My women,” I corrected him.

“Whoa . . . that’s right, ‘wife’! Not ‘wifey,’ ” Chris said. “I respect that,” he added, straight-faced, and I could feel he was sincere.

“You come back flexing, huh? Showing off?” Ameer asked me. It didn’t sound like he was joking, either.

“Nah, nothing like that,” I said solemnly, and I meant it. Retreating into my thoughts, I was thinking that I wanted the opposite of showing off. I had not told either of my best friends that in addition to my first wife, Akemi, who they had each met one time only, at our unique and unplanned wedding at our dojo, I now have a second wife. In fact, I never planned to tell them about her, either. If Akemi had not come high-stepping into our dojo that day, unannounced, in her Manolo Blahnik sandals, causing each of the male fighters’ jaws to drop down when they saw those pretty Egyptian cat eyes and thick lips. Black-haired Akemi, so sleek in her silence, her elite feminine fashions, unrivaled and extremely attractive, her walk mean and provocative, yet there was nothing loud about her except her feelings for me. If she had not showed up that day, I never would have introduced them to her. My wives are not showpieces to me. Both of them, when seen by any man capable of recognizing raw, natural, genuine beauty whether fully or partially covered, cause a man to react. So now they stay covered or out of most men’s view, on purpose.

“When do we start?” Ameer broke my retreat.

“Tomorrow, eight a.m. Everything is in place: wheelbarrow, cement mix, the scaffold, the cement blocks, and all the tools we need.
Just wear some beat-up jeans ’n old Tims, long sleeves even though it’s hot, and work gloves. He will supply the hard hats. Be ready to sweat and get dirty.”

*  *  *

“Must’ve been some type of fence here before,” Ameer observed, staring down into the soil. It was day one of our job building the wall.

“Probably,” I said, looking into the deep line in the soil that ran across the perimeter of the backyard. “It’s a good thing for us, though—it shows us exactly where the wall belongs.”

“My pops said if we go even one inch into the neighbor’s property, the neighbor could file a complaint and the city would investigate, then force the owner to knock the wall down.”

“We’ll be paid and long gone,” Ameer said calmly.

“Most def,” I said. “After we complete it, everything else is the owner’s problem to handle. It won’t happen, though. See these markers?” I pointed out the first of six iron stakes in the ground. I pulled out a thick white string and tied it securely onto the iron marker. I walked straight across and linked it tightly to the next marker, until the entire backyard perimeter was lined with a tight white string. “This string will be our most precise guide. Each block will be set evenly up against this line all the way around. With the iron markers from the land survey, and the indentation from the old fence, we’ll get it right,” I assured them.

“Damn, you sound like a real construction worker,” Ameer said.

“Let’s set this first block. Then we’ll all three be real construction workers,” I said, squatting to lift the first block and walk it right into position.

“My father said we are three underage, bootlegged, unlicensed, non-union laborers,” Chris said, smiling.

“Right, but Reverend Broadman liked the sound of that seven-hundred-dollar salary,” Ameer said, laughing. “So your ass is right here working with us at the crack of dawn. And this one-
hundred-dollar deposit feels good in my pocket. So let’s get busy.” We all laughed.

“Word to mother,” Chris said.

*  *  *

“Butter the block, then shave it evenly. Line up the joints,” Ameer said, repeating what I had taught them earlier. “I like a lot of butter on my toast,” he joked as he spread the cement over the block. Chris laughed. We were all three working, stepping back and checking our work, helping each other out. The atmosphere was warming up. From when we first began making the cement, 150-kilogram bags, sixty shovels of sand, three buckets of water, we had become closer as friends, I thought. Converting pounds to kilos caused Ameer some difficulty. Yet Chris was swift with mathematics and quick to teach everything he knew. Carrying the blocks set off a competition of strength and as time moved on we messed around, each trying to carry more than one at a time to see who could lift the most. Seemed like we did more talking and working in that afternoon than we had done in all of our time together combined. And it was only day one, with possibly almost two weeks remaining.

“You ain’t ask me about the Hustler’s League yesterday,” Ameer said suddenly.

“You didn’t speak on it,” I said calmly, still looking at the blocks and filling the voids and checking the precision, then hammering them with the heavy rubber mallet. “So I know my team, ‘the blacks,’ stomped all over your red squad while I was away.” I smiled, after having a look that was dead serious. Chris laughed.

“One point only!” Ameer shouted, dropping the block in his hand into the soil and then holding up one finger and raising then placing his foot on the block he had just dropped. I didn’t react, just kept working.

“Losers always say it just like that,” I said, rubbing it in. “ ‘If we could’ve, if we would’ve,’ ” I said, straight-faced. Then I added the burn. “But the fact is you couldn’t.” Chris cracked up.

“What you laughing at?” Ameer barked at Chris. “You ain’t even in the league no more!” he reminded Chris.

“I still get one-third of the purse whether the red team or the black team wins the tournament. I ain’t mad at that,” Chris fired back, and he was right. When Chris’s father pulled him out of the Hustler’s Junior League as a form of punishment, me and Ameer both agreed that same as when we each joined up for the league, if any of our three teams won, or if either of us three got most valuable player money, we would divide it three ways.

“You were gone more than a month. Your boys had to hustle like hell to keep the black team undefeated. They probably threw your ass out the league too,” Ameer pushed back at me.

“We’ll see,” is all I said. I had called Coach Vega crazy long distance, using a phone card on a pay phone, while I was in Asia. As soon as I realized my trip was definitely going to take more than a week’s time, like I had told him at first, I let him know I would be “missing in action” for a while ’cause my situation had gotten “a little hectic.” That’s all I told him. I cut the call before giving him a chance to think and ask me any follow-up questions that I was not gonna answer. I cut the call knowing that Coach had no idea where I was, and no option to call me back. Now that I was home, I had scheduled a face-to-face with the coach. He accepted the meet-up eagerly, telling me, “Yeah, face-to-face, that’ll work. You’re a little brief on the phone.”

Chris, slathering the next cement block, looked up and smiled at Ameer, then said, “If both of us are kicked out of the league and you’re still in, we’ll need you to play real hard for us, brother. Get that cheddar and break both of us off our portion.” We all laughed, even Ameer.

*  *  *

Break time, because we had to let the blocks we laid dry. I had learned that if we heaped them up too high while wet, the weight and the pressure would cause a shift and the wall would be lopsided
by the next day of work. We cleaned up, put all of our materials and tools neatly in the corner of the backyard, on the inside of the low wall that we had built so far, and left.

As we walked down the block to get something to eat, Chris said to me, “You messed up the negotiation on this deal. We should have got the owner to get us a Porta-Potty. How’s he going to have us working when we can’t use the bathroom in his house?”

“Just take your dragon out and pee in the woods on the side of the house. Don’t be so fucking spoiled,” Ameer told him.

“I’m just saying, if I was setting this up, I would’ve negotiated for use of the bathroom and a big water cooler, ’cause it’s damn sure hot. I would’ve even tried to get him for per diem,” Chris said.

“Per diem?” Ameer asked.

“Yeah, like a small daily fee to cover our lunch expenses while he got us out here,” Chris explained. “Hell, we ain’t from Queens. Apparently he couldn’t get any of these Queens cats to do the job for him. Still he’s treating us like we ex-cons, locking up his house and confining us to his yard!” Chris said. I smiled. I agreed with Chris, but mostly I liked his business mind. I knew he was already calculating how much lunch would cost for each of us and multiplying it by however many days he figured the whole job would take, and then subtracting it from the seven-hundred-dollar payment that we would each get in the end. That’s why he was tight.

“Fuck it, we can’t negotiate after the deal was made, the deposit was paid, and the work has already gotten started,” Ameer said. Tomorrow, I’ll bring my own lunch. Brown-bag it! Get one of my
women
to organize that for me!” Ameer emphasized, then looked toward me. I caught it. He was still uneasy because I’d corrected him to address my wives as women, not “girlies.” Now he would call his girlies women too. I didn’t say nothing back. He could call his girlies women if he wanted to, no problem. Yet we each knew that his were not wives, and that was the real big difference.