Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (18 page)

“I am or not, what’s it to you?”

“Dude, that sumbitch, he’s got you wired up. John, dude is a turd looking for a place to dry up. How can you not see that? When we were growing up you and I didn’t deal with dudes like him. Sumbitch won’t work, in and out the penitentiary, selling that shit to kids. A turd not worth digging a hole for, John, you know that.”

“Yeah, he is, Dokes. And you’re a backstabbing bastard!”

That stopped him, made him start blinking.

“So you know about Doreen and me. Who told you?”

“A birdie. Does it matter? You’re
my
friend
? The second my back is turned you hitting on my wife.”

“She’s not your wife anymore, John.”

“The hell she isn’t! We’re still married! You think--”

“Hey, hey, hey. We’re two grown men--no need you shouting at me. Look, I
am
your friend. If I thought for a second you and Doreen were getting back together I’d step back.”

“Newsflash for you, Dokes, we
are
getting back together. You might as well step back now.”

Dokes shook his head. “I don’t think so, John. Doreen filed for divorce. She told me you and her are over. She’s that type of woman. With her, when it’s over it’s over.”

“How the hell you know? You don’t know shit!”

“You wanna fight me, John, that’s what you wanna do?” Getting angry. “You’re not going to sit here and talk to me any ole way. You wanna fight or talk like two civilized men? Either way I’m willing to accommodate you.”

“You doing it with Doreen?”

“That’s none of your damn business!” Dokes said, and stood up, his fists raised. “Let’s do it. You wanna fight, let’s do it!”

I leaned forward, reached back and pulled out the gun, then sat back, crossed my legs, put the gun in my lap.

Dokes looked stunned, his hands splayed now, the frog in his throat hopping up and down.

“You doing it with her, Dokes?”

“That’s how we are now? You bring a gun to my apartment, shoot me with it? Dude, we grew up together.”

“You doing it with her?”

“Dammit, John, put the gun away! I’m not telling you anything with that gun in your lap!”

“Answer the damn question, man! Are you doing it with her?”

Dokes stared at the gun. “No.”

The cordless phone on the end table rang, startling Dokes. On the sixth ring I said, “You gonna get that?”

Dokes moved to the phone like it was a rattlesnake. “Hello,” he said, his eyes on me. “Hey, can you call me back, I got company right now…John…Yes, he’s a little upset.” I noticed his hands were shaking. “No, don’t do that. Call me back in--”

“Is that Doreen?” Dokes nodded. “Let me talk to her.” He gave me the phone and I said in a pleasant voice, “Hello, Doreen. Remember me? Your estranged husband of what, three, four weeks?”

“What are you doing, John?” Nervousness and agitation in her voice.

“Dokes and I are having a friendly little chat. Guess the main topic. You!”

“I’m calling the police, John.”

“Dokes, Doreen? My so-called friend? Tell me that ain’t skankish! Tell me!”

“John, listen to me, I’m calling the police.”

To hell with the pleasantries: “How you explain Dokes to Lewis, Doreen? Married to one man and cuddling up with his friend. I’m sure he’s confused as hell. Not to mention he’s already wondering who’s his real daddy.”

Breathing hard, Doreen said, “John, you’re nothing but a crackhead. A damn crackhead! You’re nothing to me and Lewis! Nothing but another damn crackhead!”

Fazed momentarily, I looked at Dokes, just standing there looking at me, and said, “Doreen, did you tell Dokes about your problem? You know, that sex thang that flares up on you every now and then? You tell him about that?”

Dokes’ eyes bucked wider than when I pulled the gun and he said, “What you talking about, John?”

Doreen screamed in my ear, called me a few more crackheads and slammed the phone down.

As I tucked the gun in my waistband, Dokes said, “Were you serious, John?”

“Serious about what, Dokes? Wanting to shoot you or Doreen having an STD?”

He didn’t say and I walked out the door.

The Caddy was empty. Good. I didn’t care to deal with Fifty just now. Then, just as I was starting the engine, Fifty strolled up as if he’d hailed a cab and hopped in the back seat.

First thing he said, “I didn’t hear shots. I get my gun back?”

Sirens warbled in the distant.

“Doreen called the police,” I said, and watched him in the rearview hunker down in the seat. Three Little Rock Police cruisers, sirens and misery lights on, zipped past south on Baseline as we were going north.

Doreen called me a crackhead; I couldn’t get that off my mind.

“Doreen was there?” Fifty asked, looking out the back window at the cruisers turning into Dokes’ apartment complex.

“She called on the phone.”

“You still got my gun?”

The highway seemed the best bet; Doreen or Dokes might have given the police the tags on the Caddy.

Fifty inquired about his gun again and I said, “What’s up with you, man? Everybody telling me you bad news. Dokes talked like he knows something about you I need to know. What’s up with you, man?”

Fifty said, “Old days, magicians used to get killed performing the bite-the-bullet trick. Put a fake bullet in the gun, slip a real bullet between the teeth, and bang! Simple enough, huh? Uh-uh. See, once the magician handed over the gun, he no longer had control. The cat he trusted, the one he called partner, switched the fake one for a live round. Instead of a bang and applause you got a magician with a big hole in his head. Proves you never know what’s on a cat’s mind.”

“What the hell that got to do with what I asked you?”

“Nothing,” Fifty said. “Just something I wanted to share with you. What you talking I know nothing about. Seems to me, a cat backed to a wall, a cat drops outside his litterbox, will say anything. Dokes know he played you dirty. He can’t justify his shit he throw crap on me.”

Lies and more lies.

It was time for me to get the hell out of Little Rock before I killed someone.

Fifty said, “You want me to, I’ll hold that gun, put it up for ya.”

I handed Fifty the gun over the seat and said, “It ain’t mine. It’s yours.”

Fifty sighed in relief. “A minute there I thought you forgot that.”

* * * * *

Cindy was halfway under the couch again when we stepped in. The familiar smell of burnt carpet was stronger than usual. A rock and a pipe were on the coffee table. Toby Keith played soundlessly on the television as snores emanated from under the couch.

Fifty waved at me as I was getting my clothes out of the closet and nodded toward Cindy. Again her bottom was exposed. Grinning, Fifty nodded and whispered something I didn’t catch. Then he scooted the coffee table away from the couch and knelt behind her.

“She’s stuck like Chuck,” he said, and Cindy came to life, said, “Fifty, is that you?” and tried to push out but Fifty held her firm with one hand on her bottom. “Fifty, stop it! I’m serious! Stop it! Let me out!”

One-handed, he unbuckled his belt, dropped his pants and shorts.

I started for the door, stopped, came back and scooped up the rock and pipe and walked out. The second time in my life my own erection scared the hell out of me.

* * * * *

A few miles past Grady, Arkansas, on Highway 65, I saw the lights of Cummins Prison, set back off the highway amid acres of cotton fields. The last time I’d made this trip, almost twenty years ago, my mother was at the wheel, it was daylight, and we rode past groups of mostly black men in white clothes working the fields while austere, portly white men sat on horses with shotguns held at the ready.

Mama praised the Lord when I called her at two in the morning and told her I needed directions to Uncle CJ’s house in Dawson. She said a new environment and hard work would get my mind off that dope.

The horizon was turning a bright orange when I finally turned off the highway onto Willie Powell Road, named after my great-grandfather, a sharecropper who parlayed his small plot into a large farm during the black exodus North in the fifties.

Much had changed since my last visit. A white fence instead of barbwire running the length of the dirt road. More cows. Where once stood two green triple-wide trailers was an expansive three-story log cabin, a cobblestone walkway leading up to it. Several new-model trucks and cars were parked in front. A short distance away to the left was a another cabin, a scale version of the main house, on concrete blocks. Farther, in that direction, was a huge open-bay Quonset hut with big green machines inside it.

The stink of cow shit hit me when I got out of the Caddy. A pack of barking hounds, ten or more, raced down the road, two puppies holding up the rear, heading my way.

I hurried to the front door. Unlocked. Stepped in and said hello to a huge boar’s head above a stone fireplace in the middle of a circular living room. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea after all. A digital clock on the mantle below the boar’s head said five o’clock. Everyone here was probably asleep, and wouldn’t even know I’d come if I left now. Besides, how in the hell could I get Doreen back a hundred miles away?

Go!

Go where? Back to Fifty’s? No. Fifty was a crackhead; I wasn’t, contrary to what Doreen said. The rock in the Caddy proved I wasn’t a crackhead: a crackhead would’ve smoked it by now. A crackhead stole; I didn’t. A crackhead begged; I didn’t.

Man, I wished she hadn’t called me that.

“Who the hell are you?” a voice said, and I looked in the face of an elderly light-skinned woman with intense gray eyes below a red-and-white polka-dot head scarf. She clutched her lavender bathrobe at the neckline as if she had a real need to hide her chest.

I told her my name, my mother’s name. “Ma’am, you’re Aunt Jean, right?”

The left side of her face twitched. Excluding that guy in the Clint Eastwood movie, I’d never seen a face do that.

“Kinda early for visiting, ain’t it?” she said.

I remembered why I hadn’t come back here after my first visit. I hit a chicken or a rooster with a board, killed it, and Aunt Jean came outside, told me to come here, offered a closed hand and said, “You want some candy?” her other hand behind her back, a switch sticking up behind her head.

I ran. And that old heifer caught me and beat the shit out of me, a bar code of long welts on my back. Mama gasped when she saw the abuse, but didn’t say a word, not even when her sister said, “Bring him back next summer, I’ma beat his ass again.”

“Yes, ma’am, it’s kinda early.” Changing the subject: “Where’s Uncle CJ and everybody at?”

“He and them boys went hunting. I ain’t here by myself, though. Jackie and Beverly, they upstairs. They got guns too. Hear something happening to me, they come running down here looking to pop somebody in they ass.”

I told her she had no need to fear me. “You whooped me, that was a long time ago. I was a kid. I don’t hold that against you.”

“I whooped you? When?”

A heavyset girl wearing a white blanket-size dress came into the room.

“Beverly?” Last I’d seen her she was a string bean tomboy who could outrun me with a head start.

Without hesitation she came over and hugged me. “John! Haven’t seen you in years. How’s your mother?”

I told her mama was fine, and thought her acknowledgement of me would lay Aunt Jean’s suspicions to rest, but she pointed a knobby finger at me and said, “He say I whooped him. You remember me whooping him?”

Beverly said, “No, I don’t remember that at all.”

I started to argue but caught myself.

Staring at me but addressing Beverly, Aunt Jean said, “Wonder what he done in Little Rock, come running down here early in the morning.” She squinted at me and said, “What you done did, boy?”

“Nothing, ma’am. I couldn’t find a job in Little Rock. Mama told me Uncle CJ might have something for me to do here.”

Aunt Jean grunted and said, “On the TV I saw a man collecting cans and hubcaps up there in Little Rock. Man can’t make it up there he can’t make it nowhere. You done something. What’s really going on?”

The sound of engines nearing the house saved me.

Uncle CJ, his three sons--Vince, Dexter, and Isaac--and a guy I didn’t know came inside, all wearing a bright-orange vest and carrying a rifle.

Aunt Jean said, “Didn’t I tell you? We keep a buncha guns round here.”

Beverly told them who I was and we all shook hands. Uncle CJ was a stocky man with a leathery face and an easy smile, graying at the temples, his skin much darker than his sister, who he also called Aunt Jean.

Cutting to the chase I asked Uncle CJ for a job.

He told me he was sure he could find something for me to do, told me not to worry about that now, to make myself at home, relax a spell, get something to eat. “You’re skin and bones.”

Aunt Jean said, “Hold your horses, CJ. Ain’t it odd to you this boy come hightailing outta Little Rock all a sudden, passed all them aluminum cans on the way, to come down here and work? All you know, he mighta kilt up a buncha people. Beat up a defenseless old woman--you don’t know! Ask him what he did. Look at his eyes…sneaky and creepy. Ask him what he did. Ask him!”

Uncle CJ said, “Aunt Jean, what way is that to treat family? Man wanted us to know something he’d tell us.” He gave me a wink. “You haven’t killed anybody, have you?” I shook my head. “There, it’s settled. Beverly, you and Jackie get some breakfast on.”

“Wait a damn minute!” Aunt Jean said. “CJ, you joking, I’m serious. You ain’t the only one live here. First we find out what he did, then we decide if he can stay here or not.”

Uncle CJ shook his head. “Aunt Jean, a woman read her Bible as much as you do I can’t believe would talk to family like this.”

“You read the Bible, too, CJ,” Aunt Jean said. “Show me scripture say take a nut or a killer in your home. My eyes bad, I mighta missed it. Show it to me, CJ.”