“In my own home. You betrayed me.”
“It was never your home, Davey. You said that yourself. You couldn’t wait to leave. Your home is far away now, and has been for a long while. You took us for fools. Now you can go and stew on it once again, and figure out where you went wrong.”
I shook my head at her. I would not let her win. The police arrived and I submitted to the handcuffs as if I were a Pentecostal penitent in the arms of rebirth. I looked away from Bella, and at the priest. Maybe I’d seen the light, or at least I could make do with what I had. “I will espouse you the right of justice,” I told him, keeping my eyes on his horrifled face as the cops led me out to the car. “I open myself to a God who loves me.”
Numbers up
by Miles Marshall Lewis
Baychester
Kingston believed he wasn’t a regular at Golden Lady, seated at the bar sipping a plastic cup of whiskey. Silky served his Scotch and amaretto without asking only because she had a great memory like most bartenders, he thought. Kingston considered the cup in his hand and reminisced over the club serving bottles of beer and glasses of mixed drinks years back, before some brawls with smashed Coronas forced a policy change. He also recalled gonzo tricks Silky used to perform with Heinekens in her dancing days, way before her transition to barkeep. Kingston raised his Godfather to Lacey, onstage sliding down a silver pole at the center of her baby-oiled, spread-eagle legs, eyeing him from upside down. Lacey was just the thing to take Kingston’s mind off the hundreds he’d lost earlier at Yonkers Raceway, the robbery of his house days ago, and other recent troubles.
Disorienting strobes bathed Lacey and two other bodacious young women pacing the stage, gyrating hips and stripping under the synthesized pulse of Ciara’s “Oh.” Kingston didn’t consider himself a regular but Lacey’s partners knew from experience not to bother trying to entice money out of the black guy in the stingy-brim fedora. Lacey sauntered over to the head of the crowded bar, bent down, and flashed her fleshy ass just for Kingston, flexing the muscles of each cheek to the beat. Kingston shifted her garish yellow lace garter belt with a finger to place one, two, three paper-cut-crisp twenty-dollar bills between her thigh and the elastic band. Lacey undulated her thick behind in ecstatic waves of motion.
Come 2 o’clock, Golden Lady’s neon sign — a naked blonde lounging in a martini glass — quickly faded into the distance. Kingston and Lacey sat in his onyx Buick zooming up the Bruckner Expressway and out of Hunts Point. Full-blast cool air circulated new-car smell throughout the ride. Kingston’s radio, per usual, tuned in to CD101.9: “I’m in the Mood for Love,” King Pleasure. Plastic jewel cases of smooth jazz CDs cluttered the floor and butter-leather backseats. En route to Baychester Diner, Lacey peered into the illuminated sun visor applying foundation, lipstick, and eyeliner, bitching about the shady tactics Butterfly and Sunflower used to dominate lap dances all summer long. Kingston’s characteristic silence was so typical that Lacey never considered that her sugar daddy might be disturbed.
The all-night Baychester Diner harbored the same two wisecracking women in kempt hairweaves found at the counter every weekend past midnight. Each sported something slightly outré signaling her street profession. One wore a bright Wonder Woman bodice with deep cleavage on display, the other scarlet fishnets with a spiked leather dominatrix collar. Both brandished five-inch stilettos. At the far corner banquette a young couple argued in Creole patois.
“Si ou pa vlé bébé-an, ale vous an,” hissed the pregnant teen in the pink Von Dutch cap.
Kingston and Lacey found an isolated booth and ordered breakfast from a homely waitress. Rain broke the August humidity, slicking the asphalt of Boston Road, while Kingston explained all about the Hernández brothers pushing their numbers turf further down Washington Heights into Harlem, their violent efforts to force him out, and his contingency flight plan to New Orleans.
“King. You gonna up and leave just like that?” Lacey asked. She craved a Newport.
“They ain’t runnin’ me out,” he bluffed. “I done made plenty these past fifteen years. I don’t mind it. Business ain’t like it used to be nohow. Playin’ the numbers is old school, kiddo. More white folks is movin’ into Harlem now and they don’t know nothin’ about me. They play Lotto.”
Lacey laughed.
“You never talked about retiring to New Orleans before.” Not to me, she thought.
“I done told you ’bout the house. We ain’t never been together, but it’s down there. Since 2000. My cousin look after it, she over in Baton Rouge.”
“When are you talking about going?”
“I ain’t right decided yet. Could be two weeks.”
“Two weeks? That’s enough time for you to wrap up everything?”
“We gon’ see.”
Kingston held the door for Lacey and a trucker hand-in-hand with the collared mistress from the counter. Outside all four smelled a faint aroma of barbecue sauce wafting from the local KFC. The illicit couple commiserated on the corner and crossed Baychester Avenue, stilettos clicking on concrete, to a motel with three-hour rates.
Kingston pulled his sedan out of the lot and down Boston Road blaring “This Masquerade.” By the song’s end he’d parked again, less than a mile away at Boston Secor Houses. Lacey grabbed his humidor from the glove compartment.
On the red leather sofa Kingston silently flipped stations searching for baseball scores and fiddled with his cigar while Lacey showered. His sky-blue fedora rested on the adjacent pillow, revealing the receding hairline of his freshly cut Caesar specked with gray. He clicked off her TV and leaned over to untie his Stacy Adams, tightening abdominal muscles buried underneath a stout stomach. His growing belly caused him to chuckle at his own jealousy, wondering what sort of younger man her own age a sexy girl like Lacey would attract once he was gone. Lacey would adapt easily, Kingston imagined. She was all of twenty-two. Life adjustments would come harder to Kingston. Comfortably set in his ways, he never vacationed away from his St. Martin time-share, never ate anything outside of the standard ten dishes he either bought from takeout restaurants or Gussy cooked for him, never deviated from his usual Yankees game, jazz concert, or horse race for recreation. Deciding to uproot his life from 1839 Bruner Avenue to the bayou sprang as much from Kingston’s recent unidentified angst as the threats from Héctor and Eddie Hernández. Kingston finally took a lighter to his cigar.
“One of us has too much clothes on,” Lacey said.
She left her cream silk robe untied at the waist, smoking her own tobacco of choice. Tracey Lott bore only fraternaltwin resemblance to her onstage character, always fragrantly oiled, primped, oversexed. Nearly naked again for the second time tonight — clean, shea-butter-exfoliate scrubbed, and nail-polished in her own apartment now — Tracey looked softer, younger.
Kingston called her Tracey at times, Lacey most often, but it didn’t bother her. The last time they saw one another Lacey had dropped X before his unexpected arrival at Golden Lady and rambled all sorts of private personal information afterwards, about her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, her strict mother (the neighborhood crossing guard), her young cousin’s molestation, her absent dad, and her first fuck at fourteen. Maybe too much for Kingston, she thought.
Lacey flicked cigarette ash into a seashell and sat in Kingston’s lap. The leather sofa farted. As she unbuttoned his shirt both their thoughts clouded with notions of tonight maybe being their last tête-à-tête.