Joe (10 page)

Chapter
Seventeen

Eric

He
wanted to go get her something, but when you’ve never met someone it’s hard to pick
out a gift. Eric supposed that because his daughter was only six years old, she
would like a toy or something, but the more he thought about what to get her,
the more he panicked. He knew nothing about her. He had missed so much.

Stabbing a paper cup with his metal
trash-grabber, he opened the trash bag he held in his other hand, plucked the
cup from the nail at the end of the stick, and tossed it in the bag. The sun
hadn’t fully risen yet, but there was just enough daylight to see by. Cars
whizzed by him on both sides of the median he was cleaning on Highway 71. The
grass was thick here, up past his knees. Since he had been doing this community
service–three years now–there had only been a handful of times when the
vegetation had been trimmed. He wondered why the litter needed to be removed
when they didn’t even bother to cut the grass.

Eric woke up at 4:30 AM, Monday through
Friday, to complete his community service. He worked from 5:30 until 9:30. Then
he went straight to school from there. From school he would go to work, and
from work he would get back to his studio apartment at eight o’clock, have a
microwave dinner, and go to sleep. His days since being released from prison
had been hard and long, but he had no complaints.

Nothing was worse than going back there.
He took nothing for granted.

“Hey, Toni?” Eric called.

Toni, one of people Eric met when he
began doing his community service, stabbed a soda bottle and lifted his left arm
to check his watch. “S’only seven in the mornin’, my friend. We ‘bout halfway
there,” Tony said.

Eric sighed and continued filling his
trash bag. He didn’t mind paying his debt to society, but he wished that his
tasks could be less busywork and more something that would occupy his mind. He
had spent three and a half years left with nothing but his thoughts, and he’d
found that he couldn’t stand to be alone with them. Life was better and much
easier when he kept moving. There were too many bad things that he preferred to
leave hidden within the recesses of his mind.

But, in the middle of the highway, as
the sun was just beginning to show and the world was still dark enough to keep
your eyes comfortable, everything was too reminiscent of that night. That night
that changed everything. The night of the accident.

As he skewered another improperly
disposed item, he replayed the events of that night in perfect order. You
always remember the rapid change. You usually remember it perfectly.

Chapter
Eighteen

Eric,
six and a half years ago

“Don’t
go,” Jenny said, tugging on the bottom of his shirt from her spot on the bed.

Eric kissed her on the forehead and
smiled. “Got to, babe. The streets are calling me.”

Jenny sat up, rubbing her belly, which
was just beginning to swell. Her face was scrunched up in concern. “You have to
stop this shit, Eric. Things are different now. We’ve got a baby on the way.”

Eric sat down beside her on the bed,
taking her hand into his own. She was so cute when she was concerned. “That’s exactly
why I gotta hustle, babe. We’re gonna need a lot of money to raise a baby,” he
said.

Jenny threw her hands up. “Do you even
hear yourself, Eric? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The baby
needs us to be there for it. You can’t be here if you’re in jail.”

Eric struggled not to roll his eyes. He
loved Jenny very much, but he had heard this shit too many times before, from
everyone. No one complained, though, when he paid to get their cars fixed or
their rent when they were behind. His mother and Jenny were always telling him
to quit hustling, but they had no problem with reaping the benefits.

“I’m not going to jail. I’m just going
down the street. I’ll be back in an hour. I’ve only got a few runs to make.” He
grabbed her car keys off the nightstand.

Jenny crossed her arms, offended that he
was blowing her off. “You know what you are, Eric?” she asked.

Eric pulled a hoodie over his head.
“What’s that?”

“Someone who always has to learn things
the hard way,” she said.

Eric stopped and turned back to face
her. “You know what you are?” he asked.

Jenny’s head tilted back a fraction and
she raised her eyebrows. “What?”

“Trippin’,” Eric laughed, bending down
to give her another kiss on her head. “I’ll be back soon, babe. Don’t you
worry.”

Eric left Jenny’s house and jumped in
her old red Camaro. Before he pulled out of the drive, he removed his pack from
underneath the driver’s seat and took inventory of his merchandise. Inside of
his purple Crown Royal sack were two ounces of top-grade marijuana. He was
going to have to pick up some more from his cousin down on Fifty-First Street
after he made his first two runs. But that was cool, the money made it all
worth it. No bosses, no in-times, and best of all, no taxes, baby. Take that
Uncle Sam, ya bearded old bastid!

But if he was being honest with himself,
it wasn’t just the money that made him want to sell. It was everything, the
whole lifestyle. Riding around the city with the wind in his hair. Cruising the
mean streets with a gun on his lap. You never know, he’d tell Jenny, if you’d
have to the check the haters who might take a stab at stealing your pack, at
robbing you of the goods. Hands beating the steering wheel to Lil Wayne,
CrazyE, Biggie Smalls blasting from the stereo. He turned it up now, tucking
his Crown Royal bag under his seat after weighing out on his battery-operated
scale two quarter sacs of bud for his first two runs. He pulled out onto Blue
Ridge Boulevard, rapping along with the CD playing through his pregnant
girlfriend’s speakers.

It’s a hard life, hustling, hustling

And I won’t be coming home tonight

Cuz the streets is calling, bay-bee

But don’t you worry, bay-bee

Everything will be alright

Eric repositioned the .45 on his lap. He
had never had to use it. Though he would never admit it to anyone, he hoped he
would never have to. But, shit, when you got right down to it, Eric had been
dealing since he was fifteen years old. He was turning twenty next week. Never
once had he been busted or held up. He was too smart for that shit. He picked
his clientele wisely and used different cars (always legally registered and
insured, because to not would just be stupid, and Eric wasn’t stupid) and
different routes to make his runs. It wasn’t until after he had spent his time
in prison that he found out that most criminals felt they were too smart for
that shit. Impervious, even. Yeah, that’s what he was.

He didn’t plan to deal forever. He just
wasn’t ready to quit just yet. Eric truly loved Jenny and the baby that she had
growing in her belly, which was even more reason to keep on the hustle a little
while longer so that he could save more money. At the moment, he had
twenty-five thousand in his mother’s bank (split up into three different accounts). 
Another two grand in cash was stashed at her house, and another five grand back
at Jenny’s place. He figured he would stop after he reached fifty thousand.
Eric only wanted to give his family a better life. He couldn’t understand why
they didn’t see that.

It was late, or early, depending on how
you look at it. The sun wouldn’t be making its show for another hour or so, but
the sky had just barely begun to lighten, almost unperceptively. It was that
time of morning when the day has just gone from dead-dark night to more of a
deep, slowly-breathing blue. Eric liked this time of day best, had ever since
he was a boy. He would get up early, when the birds were just sounding and the
world was still sleeping, and go out to the front of the house and practice basketball.

By the time he reached high school he
had become the best player on any team he joined. He made varsity his freshman
year, becoming the starting point guard right out of the summer tryouts and
practices. His coach, a forty-something white man with a bald head and a
handlebar mustache had taken him aside on the last day of summer practice. He’d
slapped his calloused hand on Eric’s shoulder. “Boy, you gon’ be starting point
this year, and you gon’ do us proud. You play well fur me, and I’ll see you
make it through this place with a three-point-oh.”  Eric held up his end
of the deal, taking his team all the way to State and walking away with the
enormous trophy his sophomore, junior and senior years. The coach held up his.

Eric’s mother attended every game,
beaming and screaming at the top of her lungs every time Eric scored a point or
made a steal or rebounded. “That’s my
baby!
That’s my boy!” she would
shout, jumping up and down in her jersey with her son’s name and number printed
on it. The whole family had been proud, too. They all believed that if any one
of them was actually going to make it to the big time that it would be Eric.
“He’s goin’ to the NBA that boy, Yes sir, he’s a goin’”.

But things hadn’t gone the way everyone
planned, had they? Eric was offered full scholarships to universities in
California, Michigan, Florida and Ohio. In the end, though, he couldn’t bring
himself to leave his momma, his family, his friends. And he had some
not-so-good-for-him friends. Yes sir.

In truth, Eric was just a small minded
Kanna (Kansas) City man. He liked the mentality of the place, when you got
right down to it, though he wouldn’t have been able to express it in so many
words. Kansas City was a sprawling city, spread out over many miles, with a
small population in comparison to other major cities. But it was a dangerous
place, too, its murder rate always ranking in the top ten national percentile.
There was a lifestyle here for a young black man, especially for a young black
man attending the inner city schools.

So he’d skipped the whole college
nonsense. Let the white boys have that shit. Life in Kanna City wasn’t so bad.
He was raking in eight to ten grand a week. He had a girl he loved and a baby
on the way. Shit, life was not too bad at all.

Eric reached down to the center console
of the Camaro and plucked a Newport from a half-empty pack. He stuck it in the
corner of his mouth, holding the wheel with one hand and rummaging around the
seat for a lighter. His eyes left the road for only a moment. He would swear it
was only a moment, but that was enough.

What jerked his head up was a
blood-curdling scream ripping through the air, muted beyond the closed windows
of his girlfriend’s car. The first thing his eyes settled on through the
windshield would remain the worst, most frightening thing he would see for the
rest of his life.

A little girl had run out into the
middle of Bannister Highway. Her mother, the one who had released that terrific
scream, was racing across the lanes to catch her, a look of true terror
corrupting her features. She was too far behind the girl and she knew it. Too
far behind. A few other people (it was still too early in the morning for a
crowd) waiting at the bus stop had their hands cupped over their mouths, the
air having stopped up in their lungs in horrid anticipation of what was surely
about to happen.

But Eric saw none of this. All he saw
was a flash of the girl’s pink Dora the Explorer dress, then just the top of
her head. He slammed the breaks so hard that the red Camaro’s tires released a
terrific scream of their own. Then a hard
thud!
The worst sounding
thud!
that no one could ever just imagine, a
thud!
that was the epitome of
ah-man-you-just-had-to-be-there. The car came to an abrupt, lurching,
screeching, final stop.

Eric would only be able to recall what
followed in the way that we remember dreams, as though it hadn’t really
happened, as though it was something he had read about or seen in a movie once
upon a time. He can remember sitting behind the wheel, his foot mashing the
brake pedal against the floor, hands gripping the steering wheel as one might
grip a ledge–afraid to let go, afraid to move or breathe. Then, putting the car
in park, his hands fumbling on the lever, opening the door, and the wave of
nausea that struck him like a tightly-wound cord as he stepped out into
reality. And the
screaming!
The endless, agonized,
screaming!
And
the
blood
. And the
tears
. Yes, it was just like a dream.

The police came. They removed the car,
whose front end was smashed in considerably. They removed the hysterical mother
and the body of her four-year-old daughter. They removed Eric, searched his
car, and threw him in a jail cell, soon to toss away the key for a good while.

Before the trial, which took over a year
to fully commence and conclude, he ached over what he had done. He’d sat in his
cement room in a Kansas City jail cell and thought about pink Dora the Explorer
dresses, about the child whom he had mown down wearing a pink Dora the Explorer
dress. He thought about the mother whose child had been taken from her. He
thought about his own mother, and his unborn child whom he would more than
likely not get to see into this world.

Damn, and it had all happened so fast,
that was what he thought about most. How it had all happened so fucking fast.
Life
be that way, brother. Life be that way.

Later that day, after long hours of
interrogation that gave way after Eric had finally requested a lawyer, after
the detectives had laid his .45 and his purple Crown Royal sack and all of its
contents out on top of the steel table in the small, fluorescent-lit room with
the unnerving one-way mirror along one wall… After all that, he had gotten to
make some phone calls.

He called Jenny first.

“I knew it!” she screamed. “I just
fucking
knew
it! I told your ass to quit. Right when I get knocked up,
too! You just couldn’t fucking quit!”

And then she’d cried, heart-wrenching
sobs that were the equivalent to a sniffle when compared to the screams of the
broken mother which he had heard earlier in the day, right before the
shit-had-all-happened-so-fast. And he cried too, but his voice steadied, after
the screaming and cursing died down. “It ain’t so bad, babe. I got no priors.
It was an accident. It ain’t gon’ be so bad.”

But it had been bad. It stripped him of
everything and only offered a brand, a scar on his record that would separate
him from the rest of society, in return. A
criminal
, it says so right
there on those files. Yes Sir and thank you very much. A scarlet letter in the
eyes of men and God. You bet your balls, baby. It had been bad.