Ray talks easy: “You gonna tell me what I wanna know?”
Skunk’s talk is still full of air: I got no part of that deal, man.
Ray takes the knife edge and nicks Skunk’s throat like shaving. “You gonna tell me what I wanna know.” But Ray is telling this time, not asking.
DC looks at me like he’s thinking: What the shit? Ol’ Skunk give us Orange Crush when we kids. Skunk opened up the Hollywood during Handy Fest Week and paid that famous Muscle Shoals trumpet man to teach kids like us how to blow without spitting. DC says out loud, “Hey man, Skunk got no money. Just chump change over in the cash box.”
But Ray pays DC no mind and cuts Skunk’s cheek — not deep, just enough to make it bleed.
Skunk never pisses his pants or nothing. Looking sad, he says, Boy, what you lookin’ at is being dead, ain’t it?
Ray takes the point of Skunk’s own knife and makes like to stick Skunk’s ribs. “You see this on my arm?” he says right in Skunk’s face, breathing the man’s nasty breath. “I’m already dead, man.”
The way Ray says it, Skunk’s gotta know Ray means it. Ray lets him go, and me and Ray and DC leaving slow. Because we want to leave. Not because we struck out. Ray and me and DC make three, picking up our shit real slow while Skunk doubles over and rubs his face.
We’re almost out the door when Skunk gets his voice back enough to yell out at us: You wanna die, just go past that sheriff deputy and take the trail that starts at the willow!
Ray doesn’t even act like he hears. We out the door, and me and DC go back down the hill. We’re headed back to Ray’s girl’s place, back to chill and catch a buzz, hanging, maybe Ray and Yo knock it in the next room and me and DC turn up the tunes loud ’fore my own stick gets hard just listening. Whatever it takes to chill Ray down.
“Hold up,” Ray says.
“What?” DC says. “What you wanna go hustle Ol’ Skunk for?”
“I’m goin’ back to Yolanda’s house,” I say, heading to that big bottle of cognac mostly full we left sitting on YoGirl’s table.
But Ray don’t move. “You wi’ me or not?” He’s serious. Not the same Ray played tight end last year Friday nights hoping somebody see his excellent shit and give him a ticket out.
DC done had enough. “Look, man, whatever shit you in, count me out.” He starts on up the hill toward the cognac.
“Don’t work that way,” Ray call to him. “If I go down, all go down.”
DC starts back down the hill. Me and DC are all ears.
“Won’t waste me first,” Ray says.
And then we see the scam. Ray don’t pay up, his friends and fam be the first to get whacked. And he ain’t got no family ’cept his mama that nobody know of. That’s the money-man’s way to let folks know the money-man means business. Dead dude can’t pay like a scared dude can. A scared dude is what you call motivated.
So me and DC follow Ray through the edge the woods by the road, Ray walking like a ghost he’s so quiet, me and DC stepping on sticks and dry-ass leaves and all kinda shit making racket. When we see the sheriff deputy car hid behind brush down low on the side road, Ray motions us to get down and we squat there till the gray daylight is enough for the sheriff deputy to think night is over and he takes his dumb-ass self back to his office. Sheriff deputy thinks he knows what’s going on. Sheriff deputy don’t know squat.
Ray starts up the willow path just like Skunk says not to do unless we wanna die, and we’re right behind. Light’s coming fast now. Before we know it, we’re standing on the edge of this big-ass rock, looking way down on Buzzard Creek below. Real name is Cypress Creek, runs right into the Tennessee River, but we all call it Buzzard Creek since the old garbage dump and the new garbage dump both right on the creek so that on and off you can see fifty or more buzzards in the trees here, right here at this rock where the trail ends. Me and DC looking at each other, studying what’s next. Ray sits down in the beat-down dead yellow grass under a big pine. I sit down myself and lean up ’gainst the pine. When my eyes shut, my head spins, so I open them quick-like again.
“What we looking for?” I ask. I’m thinking: kilos, cash money. Maybe ice, Oxy.
Ray’s not saying nothing for a minute. Then: “Maybe we lookin’ for the shit got ripped off me. Or maybe we lookin’ for cash-money.”
DC’s making water off the rock edge, seeing how far he can shoot his stream in the creek way down below. He’s looking around, looking across the creek, looking up in the air, as he makes water. “What’s that?” he asks.
“What’s what?” I ask.
“That,” he says, and points up in the pine tree.
So that’s how me and Ray and DC come to be hunkered down behind some needle-ass-stabbing green bush on the coldest day of the year, feet numb, snot running out my nose, hungover, waiting to kill somebody I ain’t never seen before when they come back to get their black L.L.Bean backpack stacked full of hundred-dollar bills. Ray had taken it down, looked at it, then grabbed the black plastic rope and pulled it back up there, back up in that tall ol’ pine tree.
First off, Ray says it could be a trap by the police trying to sucker some poor unsuspectings like us to take the money so’s they would have somebody to put in jail and make the police look good, pretend like they’re making the world safe. Nothing in the world makes rich folk feel better than to read in the paper that people like me/Ray/DC been caught doing some something and headed for jail. Even if it’s something made up, like DC’s uncle that paid his child support but they claim it ain’t been paid and he’s got no paper says he did pay it so he’s back in jail. Always some piece of paper, somewhere, with words saying you messed up. Ray says it’s all fixed, it’s all a trap.
Then, after ’bout an hour of talking that shit, Ray up and changes his mind and says, “Maybe this is the money due to me, the money made off what got stole from me. Maybe I’m the rightful owner of this money.”
“One thing for sure,” says DC, “you not the one throwed that prep-ass backpack up in that pine tree with that rope tied to it. Whoever did that, they comin’ back for it.”
Even Ray can’t deny that. “This is life or death. Our life or death. We have to watch who comes back for this.” He starts coughing like he’s about to cough out a lung.
I let him catch his breath. “And when we see ’em?” I ask.
“Then we find out if they on the up-and-up. See if it’s one dude or a crew. My guess is one dude. Alone. Us three find out easy from one dude what we need to know. That cash money gonna be ours. Pay off the money-man and let the rest sit around just waitin’ till the time is right. Then we invest. In product.”
DC speaks up: “Somebody talks. Somebody gonna know it’s us. Then payback come knockin’.”
Ray laughs. Then he’s quiet, talking low: “Nobody will be in no shape to talk.”
“But Ol’ Skunk’s the one told us to come here. Ol’ Skunk knows,” DC says.
Ray looks at me and DC and raises up his left eyebrow and I know he means Skunk, too, will be in no shape to talk when Ray finishes with him.
I feel sick enough to puke, and DC don’t look no better. Ray’s eyes are leaking water. And when Ray’s feeling sick, he only gets meaner.
Then Ray starts in on the money: “How much you think is in that pack?”
We take turns guessing just before we take turns telling what all we gonna do and buy with all that money. I think: Ray’s gonna tell how he will be the man for Yo, provide for her and all. But all he says is: Yo’s just a trick and he’s gonna leave her ass, maybe go to LA where he’s got cousins. Take me and DC with him. “We gonna make so much money scammin’,” he says, “that this money in this pack will look like chump change.”