The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man (20 page)

“You really cookin', Jake!” Leo exclaimed.

“This paper is strictly legit too. Now then, what we gonna have to do is pull our shit out from under wraps. Our thang is that we been doin' the very best we could on our very own, not askin' anybody for a single bit of help of any kind, doin' maximum good for the community, but now, with times the way they are, we've reached the please-throw-us-a-bone stage.”

“With plenny meat on it,” Leo added.

“Right on! brother It'll take a lil' work to set things up, but we can do it if we all pull together with no negative vibes.”

“Where we gon' get the right kind o' whiteys for this thing?” Rina asked.

“What do you mean, the right kind?”

“Well,” she answered petulantly, “you know, the kind that don't need a lot o' whippin' 'n shit. I ain't about to get off into the business of solvin' no honkie's problems, dig it? I mean, like, this is supposed to be an interracial setup, right?”

“I hear ya, baby I hear ya,” Jake con-smiled at her brightly. “Nawww, dig, we ain't about to become a legit group, under no circumstances. What we'll have, on the white meat side, is a few ol' jive liberal nuns, some o' those do-good protestant ministers, a few unitarian Jews, a few long-hairs, if we can keep 'em from being loaded all the time, three or four ‘sensitive' niggers with no prison records and ourselves. Each of us will be like a a counselor.”

“I just thought I'd lay it out beforehand. I got too much on my own head to be havin' some ol' white broad lay her problems on me too.”

“Hey, don't worry “bout it, Rina baby. We can fake it clean through. Any other questions before we go through our first drill uhh rehearsal?”

“Yeah, I got a few,” Harry eased in.

“Spill it out, man, 'cause once we go off into this, any doubts, any bad vibes at all will fuck our whole thang up.”

“O.k.,” Harry began slowly, ticking off points on his fingers. “We got a proposal here that would make me dig down into my pocket for a few coins, if I had any.” He paused to lean over to slap Chili's outstretched palm appreciatively. “You got the front we need and we make up the people to pull the sting off. Now then, what I wanna know is this, how can you be so damned certain that we can put this thing into the works and not have it come up a lemon?”

Jake the Fake smiled slightly, his forty years of minor cons having prepared him for such skepticism. He stood and leaned his knuckles on the table. “Brother Mathews, I'm sho' 'nuff glad you asked that there question,” he continued, using a Kingfish approach before going on to the serious. “I was gonna save a lil' bit, just in case we had a dropout or two, but seein' as how everybody is deeply involved.”

His eyes spun around the group, probing for dropouts, “Since everyone is committed
and
involved with the project, I see no reason to hold back the most vital part of what guarantees the success of this plan.”

He paused to take a couple hits on one of the three joints circling the table, enjoying the play of it all.

“Through one of my contacts, a well-placed black executive in the Minority Groups Development Office, I found out that they have $150,000 in excess monies. This is dough that was placed in a fund to aid in the development of an interracial group therapy program, somethin' that was supposed to help the races see eye to eye.

“O.k., now here's the kicker. The money is, was goin' to revert back to the government if such a program was not established.”

He paused, checking out the gleaming eyes around him. “Of course, the Development Office couldn't openly broadcast the fact, so this is how it got to me. My well-placed black executive friend, along with a buddy of his, knew they couldn't rip off the whole one-five-oh grand. So, they put a wire out for yours truly.

“The deal we make is this; they get the small end, fifty grand, and we get the big end.”

“You still ain't got into why this won't come up a lemon,” Harry cut back in, more decisively.

“It won't come up a lemon, brother Harry, because my well-placed black executive friend and his friend are the one-two guys of the organization, and all they needed was an airtight proposal to approve of, to justify their approval to the Great White Father, and we got a helluva one!”

He held up the Cynthia-Chili document to clench his point. The house was suddenly bubbling over with good spirits.

Leo pulled out a pencil and began to calculate the split six ways. “Jake, why did you come up with that bullshit about mau-mauing the poverty offices 'n shit, awhile back, when we first started into this?”

“That was my side tracker, baby sweets. My other thang was still in the negotiations stage, and I didn't want to breed any false hopes in the wrong directions.”

“Heyyy man,” Leo called out to Jake, his lips pursed, “a hundred grand between six people ain't.…”

“Ein is a helluva lot better than nein,” Jake answered foxy quick. “A hundred grand between us may not be a fortune, but it sho' as hell beats workin'.”

“How long will it take?”

“Sixty days,” Jake answered promptly. “Within sixty days, we got to be lookin' like a bunch of well-established, minor league psychologists, addicted to sittin' in a circle and talkin' all the latest jargon just like the rest o' them jiveass groupsters.

“My friend ran the whole scam down to me, exactly who has to write the check out 'n everything but just to be on the safe side, we got to have stationery 'n cards printed, a telephone, you know, stuff like that.”

The group fell silent for a minute, thinking of the work to be done. Rina slowly raised her fist in the air and shouted, “All power to the Tricky Six!”

The other five people, completely in tune, responded boisterously, “All power to the Tricky Six!”

Chili mumbled under his breath … and my rich educated white bitch.

Kwendi and Lubertha sat looking at each other tenderly, across the glass-paneled partition. Exchanging looks and a thousand profoundly felt feelings was the way each of their visits started and ended.

“You really lookin' good, baby,” Kwendi started the flow, unable to bear the weight of what the deep silence between them was saying.

“You lookin' pretty good yourself,” Lubertha replied softly, wishing that her spirit or some part of her being could fly across the artifical barrier between them.

The silence fell between them again, interrupted by announcements over the visiting room loudspeakers, frenetic conversations to the left and right of them, anxious people trying to say everything possible in an hour the guards roving back and forth behind the seats of the visitors and prisoners.

“Did I tell you about what Buddha is doin' these days?” Kwendi asked brightly, always the first to try to shove them away from the emotional doldrums.

“No,” Lubertha smiled back at him wistfully, her eyes straying to the summer sunlight streaming down onto them from the window at Kwendi's back.

She listened carefully to the story, alert for the coded words that might indicate he was really talking about something else. He finished the story with an attempted flourish that fell flat and looked away, trying to keep the tears from coming out of him.

“Yeah, Buddha is really something!” Lubertha commented strongly, helping him past the urge to cry. “It's too bad he doesn't write some of the lies he tells.”

They both laughed cautiously, gently, as though at an old joke. Kwendi balled his fists up suddenly and pounded on his thighs, trying to massage away the tingling he felt.

“What's wrong, baby?” she asked, all love and concern.

“Ohh, nothin', nothin' really. I just been pushin' a lotta iron lately and your muscles get all tightened up sometimes doin' that, you know what I mean?”

Lubertha nodded numbly, wishing that the hour was over and wishing that it had just started, wishing that she could open her legs under the long counter and receive her man's frustrations, love him then and there.

They avoided each other's eyes for a few moments, trying to reorder themselves.

Kwendi gained control of himself first and stared lustfully at the woman he loved. How many summertimes had they sat across from each other? Wanting to touch, kiss, love. How many? “Lubertha?”

She stared back at him, surprised to hear him call her that, … over the years he had coined the nickname, Cush, for her and had used nothing else.

“Yes?”

“Do you know how much I love you?”

A temporary attack of shyness forced her to lower her eyes. “I … I think so.”

He opened his mouth to say more, but the guard's stick tapping him on the shoulder canceled it out. “Time's up, Jones.”

They both looked at the guard in disbelief. Their time couldn't be up, they had just sat down, had just begun to talk about important things. Nothing had been said.

“I said, time's up, Jones,” the guard stressed each word.

Kwendi felt the corners of his mouth pull down, his temper begin to rise.

“Be cool, baby,” Lubertha said across the barrier, unable to stand up, afraid that her tension would force her legs to buckle. “Be cool, baby,” she said again, as Kwendi was led away, back to his tier.

Kwendi sat on his bunk, leaning his back against the wall, feeling the pressure from his homemade knife as he leaned, brooding. Motherfuckers He glanced apprehensively at the open cell door from time to time, thinking back to the too brief conversation he had had with Lubertha a few short hours past, about what they had said, … nothing. And what they would have liked to have said, everything.

My Dearest Cush, you like that, don't you? his mental letter began. Once again summer is here and this no-longer-young man's thoughts turn to his love. I'll warn you at the beginning, everything is on my mind, so don't pay any attention to how it's put. Six brothers have been stabbed already this month, I guess the prison sap is rising a little faster this year.

He shook his head, erasing the imaginary letter, bounced from his bunk to snatch a pencil and pad from his storage shelf and remounted the bunk to write a real letter. Impulsively he began, “I'm happy about your book, so happy I don't even know how to express my feeling in words. I hope you become rich and famous (no shit!).”

He dropped the pencil and felt for the shiv stuck down in the back of his belt when he heard the footsteps.

“Writin' again, young warrior?” the Great Lawd Buddha asked him, looming up in his cell door.

Kwendi relaxed. “Yeah, bruh Buddha … I thought I could put my time to better use than watchin' a ten year old racist flick.”

“Yeah, me too, I'm deep into a book on spiders.”

They smiled warmly at each other.

“Stay well,” Buddha said, goin' on, “and watch your back.”

“Right on!” Kwendi snapped and sat staring at the bars, the cages across the tier, after Buddha's departure.

“You know something, baby?” he continued scribbling impulsively, as though just beginning his letter disregarding all attempt at cohesion, “prison can be a strange thing. I reach a point sometimes when it seems that I don't care. Realty 'n truly. Maybe it's some kind of hypnosis. I don't have a name for the feeling, but I recognize it when it comes down on me. Call it fatalism if you like.

“Awww, but that's not where I want to go. I
do
hope your book is more than a damn success, I hope it's read, especially by those ego trippers in the Club. They need a whole lot more truth laid on them. Too bad they couldn't understand why you had to leave them, squabbling and ripping each other up as usual.

“I've tried to lay some weight on Abdul's head but he's so far off into being a savior that he can't relate to reason anymore. Too bad.

“Big Momma as a Muslim sister? Beautiful. I guess if Baby June could make it into the Nation, as fouled up as he was, no reason why Big Momma couldn't give up snuff Inshallah!

“Rudy got a kite through to me last week, did I tell you? Talking about his law studies, I really appreciate the help he has given on my case, but mostly it was about his feelings for Phyllisine Evans, once again, Inshallah!

“No, baby, I haven't become religious, not in that sense anyway, but Inshallah (God be willing) is a beautifully poetic expression that the Muslim brothers here use and I kinda like it.

“Onward!

“My day was made when I heard that Taco, Rina, Leo, Harry, Chili and Jake the Fake had cleaned the Office of Systematic Black Devaluation out for $300,000. The figure sounds a little high to me, but no matter, if they only beat them out of $300, at least some of that money finally reached some of the people who've had to habitually steal for a living, or worse. More power to the sisters 'n brothers!

“What fantastic times we live in. I can remember a time when those particular sisters and brothers would've never taken themselves beyond a spontaneous ripoff. Maybe having an authentic, unrehabilitated crook as the ex-vice president of the country and an outright criminal with murderous tendencies as the president of the country has been an inspiration to a lot of people.”

Kwendi calmly stuck his pencil behind his ear when his eye caught sight of the shadow cast by someone standing beside his cell door. He and the shadow remained in place for a few tense seconds.

Smitty, the guard, tired of the cat and mouse game, eased into view, almost causing Kwendi to pull his weapon out. “No pitcher show for you tonight, young waryer?” he asked slyly, sarcastically, peering across at the tablet on Kwendi's lap.

“Not tonight,” Kwendi answered drily creep.

“Too bad, good pitcher lotsa action.”

Kwendi straightened his back, sitting on his bunk, and gave the guard such a dignified, mean, cold, merciless look that he simply walked away without another banal word, unable to cope with what the look said to him about his mother, his father, and all of the elements that made him feel proud of being a “guard.”