Yaccub's Curse (20 page)

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Scratch was feeling desperate. Sweat bulleted down his pale face as his eyes darted from one side of the street to the other, probing every shadow for signs of life. His expression was no different than that of the drug addicts he passed. Each shambling corpse-like crack-fiend alerted his senses like a shark smelling blood in the water. His prey was somewhere close. He could almost smell her.

Trash blew down the street like tumbleweeds pushed by a gentle breeze. Packs of mongrel dogs hunted through the alleys for garbage, growling cautiously at the dope fiends who proliferated there as well. Most of the streetlights had long been broken and only one or two on each block remained lit. The night was concentrated into solid opaque curtains of black on either side of his headlights. He felt like an invading army as he accelerated through the dark, cutting a swath through the night, reveling in his alienness. Both his conspicuous affluence and his skin tone set him apart from his surroundings. He was out of place amid the honest working people who lived here as well as the welfare recipients and drug addicts. Even among the other criminals his lack of ethnicity set him apart. He liked it that way. Everything about the ghetto disgusted him. Even though it was the source of his wealth he was glad he’d never truly be a part of it. His relationship with the people who lived here was simply a predatory one. They were the nourishment he thrived on. They kept his pockets and his stomach filled.

Tonight Scratch was out alone. He had to find the whore and kill the baby without interruptions or long explanations to any of his underlings, not even Yellow Dog. Scratch was still hoping he could murder the bastard before it was born. He’d raped and killed nearly two dozen crack-whores in the last few years and still he could feel the baby’s presence. It was alive and it would be born soon.

The streets were desolate. The same five-dollar whores shambled along peering wide-eyed into the Beemer hoping for a drug-dealer who’s dick they could suck for a rock or two. The extravagantly dressed crack dealer waved them away like flies, his platinum custom Rolex reflecting starlight into their half-conscious faces. They were all too far gone. Their wombs were barren and dry from drug abuse and would probably never hold a seed again, least of all the one he was looking for.

Scratch drove the side streets deep in the heart of Germantown. He was far away from the Avenue now, but crackwhores could be found anywhere in G-town. He knew where every crack den and shooting gallery was for six miles in every direction. Rock cocaine’s influence here was nearly omnipotent. Mothers lit up after sending their kids off to school. Fathers hit the pipe after work before coming home to face their depressed and disappointed families. Kids smoked rocks behind the gym at school. And every one of them was just one or two hits away from sucking dicks in alleys for the next rock.

Even in the more residential areas nearly every alleyway flickered with the glow of heated glass and boiling cocaine. The corners on every major intersection were crowded with dealers, talking on cell phones and eyeing every passing car for a potential customer, rival, or cop. Most of them worked either directly or indirectly for Scratch. And wherever the dealers were, crackwhores circled like buzzards sniffing carrion. But none of them were who he was looking for.

Scratch turned onto Tulpehocken Street passing row after row of small rundown houses crammed together like dominoes waiting to fall. Their windows were darkened except for one or two on each block where the flickering blue light of television sets illuminated sleeping figures or where lights were left on in front rooms and on porches to discourage burglars who preferred to work under cover of night. A massive old church squatted on one corner looking dark and ominous like the structure itself was the embodiment of God, waiting to pass judgement on the sinners proliferating around it. Scratch shook his head in amusement as he peered through the front window of the church at the enormous statue of a crucified Jesus with skin as pale as his own. He wondered how it felt to worship a God rendered in the image of the race that had oppressed your kind for centuries. Perhaps the Black people who lived here took some comfort in seeing the most powerful white man on earth nailed to a cross and bleeding to death. Scratch laughed out loud when he saw the familiar glow of a crackpipe coming from behind the tall hedges surrounding the church. Crack had made church all but obsolete. Both heaven and hell were now just one hit away.

The BMW turned down Ambrose Street and Scratch smiled. This was where his most feared enforcer lived. He wondered if Snap was still awake. He thought maybe he should take the kid with him if he was going to start crashing crackhouses, but he knew that Snap and his partner Tank had just finished taking down a rival drug crew and were probably already drunk or high and trying to sleep it off. He cruised silently past Malik’s house chuckling over the irony of the man working.

“I should have that nigga, Snap, snuff the baby. I’ll see how down he really is. Even after all the fools he’s bodied, he still believes in some kind of redemption. I bet you puttin’ a bullet in a pregnant woman will kill all that noise.” He laughed again as he turned the corner.

His headlights slashed across the road illuminating a woman wearing tight jeans that had probably been baggy at one time, but were now so restrictive that she couldn’t button them or zip them up in front. Her swollen belly protruded through the open fly with her T-shirt riding high above her navel. She wore plastic flip-flops on her feet and Scratch could tell by the way she shuffled that she’d been hooked on drugs for a long time. Scratch pulled the car up next to her.

“Want to smoke with me?”

He held a glass pipe out the window with a rock of cocaine already loaded inside. He watched the pregnant woman’s eyes widen and seize on the crackpipe.

“Nuh, no. I can’t. I’ve got to stay clean for my baby.”

She was still staring at the pipe and almost drooling.

“When was the last time you had a hit, huh? A week ago? Two days ago? Quitting now ain’t goin’ to do a damn thing to help your baby. The damage is already done. So why don’t you get in here and suck on this dick. The glass one and this one.” Scratch unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis.

“I ain’t no fuckin’ whore! I got a job. You suck your own dick. Now get the fuck away from me!”

“Sorry, bitch, but I ain’t got no more time to play around with you.”

Scratch slid out of the BMW. The woman tried to run, but being in her third trimester slowed her down and Scratch seized her by her hair and dragged her to the floor.

“Helllllp! Raaape! Raaaape!”

Scratch smiled at her revealing two rows of gold plated teeth. Then he brought his fist down into her face sending several of the woman’s teeth tumbling down her throat. He struck her again and again until he realized that she wasn’t going to stop screaming until he killed her. It didn’t matter anyway. People tended to mind their business in this neighborhood.

Let the bitch scream. I’m still taking that ass.

He used his hands and his teeth to rip off her jeans and shirt. The woman’s breasts were enormous, bloated with milk. Scratch latched onto them with his fourteen karat canines greedily sucking them dry and biting into the massive glands until both blood and milk drooled down his face. He caressed her swollen stomach with a hand studded with platinum rings as he slid her jeans down to her ankles. He then took himself in hand and forced himself inside her tearing his own foreskin as much as her vaginal walls and caring equally little about either. Scratch sucked all the fluid from the woman’s breast as he drilled up inside her. His modest erection continued to grow in proportion to his excitement as if engorged by the same blood he was draining from her breast. When he finally grew tired of her screams he withdrew his cock, pulled out his knife, and cut open her belly. He reached up inside of her, pushing aside her intestines and stomach as he felt around in her womb. He then pulled out the fetus, covered in blood and amniotic fluid, sliced its head off and tossed it into the street. The woman’s screams redoubled.

“MY BABY! MY BABY!!!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

He stuck both of his hands up inside her and pulled out her uterus, intestines, and whatever organs he could get his hands on,

“Aaaaaarlllllggh! Noooooo!” she seized his wrists and tried to pull his hands out of her. Scratch grabbed hold of something inside of her and pulled hard, ripping it free. Her body shuddered from head to toe then lay still.

Scratch stuffed his limp penis back into his pants and climbed into his Beemer, leaving the woman’s vandalized corpse bleeding on the sidewalk. He cursed aloud as he slammed the car door and stomped down on the accelerator peeling off down the somber street. Once again he had killed the wrong whore. The baby was still alive somewhere. He could feel it.

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Chapter 12

“The nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for.”

—Aristotle

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I laid awake peeling the lead paint off the hundred-year-old window sill and watching the moon travel across the sky. The chittinous scurrying of hundreds, perhaps thousands of roaches click-clacked across the linoleum floor accompanied by the sound of large sewer rats scampering through the ceiling, bumping and thumping like they were carrying something heavy, stressing the already large cracks in the ceiling. It seemed ridiculous to me that after all the bodies I had made in pursuit of wealth I was still living like this.

I often sat with the window open on these stifling humid July nights listening to the activity out on the streets. Moans, and laughs, shouts, and laughter, off-beat rapping, bullshitting, and teasing, fighting, gunshots, and the wailing peel of the ambulance as they arrived to take away the wounded. It was all a part of my little ghetto world and it was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to a lullaby.

I would lie there trying to put faces and actions to all the noises and voices, to share in what they were experiencing. I would sit there in the dark wondering who was throwin’ down, who was poppin’ off rounds. And who was getting’ capped. Women’s sweet sighs and men’s passionate grunts would drift on the thick steaming air and I would wonder who was getting fucked and why I was alone. If it was someone’s wife or girlfriend. If she was enjoying herself or gagging beneath the smell of stale sweat and beer as some Neanderthal beast grunted and strained inside of her. This night however I knew that the woman who screamed out over and over again was not enjoying herself. Just as I knew the man who cursed her and struck her repeatedly wasn’t in it for his own enjoyment but for catharsis. Trying to transfer his own hopelessness and fear onto someone else thinking he could free himself of the pain. Just as I knew that it wouldn’t work. It never does.

A scream of mortal anguish pierced the still night air. I imagined I could hear the death rattle that followed. Whoever had been raping that woman had just graduated into murder. There was silence for a moment and I began to drift off to sleep. Then I heard it, a low chuckle that turned into cackling laugh, a familiar laugh. I could have sworn it was Scratch. But why would he need to rape a bitch when he had pussy being offered to him everyday from women desperate for his product or blinded by his cash and jewelry. It was absurd so I dismissed the notion and by the time I woke up I had forgotten all about it.

Mom was cooking breakfast and the smell of bacon and sausage pulled me up from my bed. I was wide awake by the time the aroma of buttermilk pancakes and syrup joined the chorus of delicious fragrances. Mom was humming to a George Benson tune on the stereo while she prepared breakfast. Her voice was as warm and wholesome as the smell of the pancakes and sausage.

My Mom is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen outside of movies and television. When I was younger and the kids would tease me about my ragged clothes, nappy hair, and too wide nose, and I would wind up bloodying them and getting suspended from school, I was always proud when my mother came to pick me up. Seeing the expressions on the other kid’s faces when she walked into the office with her long gazelle legs and her smooth flawless mocha skin was almost worth the ass-kicking I would get when we got home. Everyone would “Ooooh!” and “Aaaah!” as she strolled the hallways because, if I was an ugly street urchin, my mother was an African Goddess with a beauty and majesty uncommon in the ghetto. None of those kids had ever seen a woman like my mom before. There was no more lovely sight anywhere in our neighborhood. Not the way the sun set behind the projects looking like the world was on fire. Not the way the stars filled the sky from one end to another when you stood on top of the roof at Duval Manor on a summer night. She was a Goddess to us and she was mine.

In the early seventies she had been a moderately successful model and even did a brief stint as a sort of Black Vanna White for a local game show before she quit to find more stable work after she left Darryl the first time. She didn’t think it was healthy for her to spend so much time away on photo shoots and thought a regular job would allow her to be the type of mother she thought I needed. It was funny to me because it seemed like we lived better when she was modeling than when she got her regular job and I definitely saw her more then despite trips to New York for modeling shows and the long hours spent filming the gameshow. Still, she remained a shocking beauty and I loved her more than anything on earth. She doesn’t really speak to me anymore though. Neither does Tank and Huey’s mom. They’re both disgusted with my choice of occupations and they don’t even know the half of it.

Mom thinks I sell drugs like every other common thug in the neighborhood. I’ve never sold so much as a single rock in my life, not even a joint. I kill people. Scratch had originally hired Tank and I as bodyguards but that was just the lure to get us in. We were slowly groomed to be hitters and enforcers, taking out competition, disciplining or retiring other dealers in the crew when they got out of line, eliminating witnesses before they could talk. It was all routine now.