All day long Isaiah scraped gravy and potato salad off the plates and racked them in the dishwasher, imagining Dodson and his gangsta friends turning the apartment into a shambles. After he got off work he ran all the way home and bounded up the fire stairs. The hallway smelled like fried meat but he didn’t hear rap music or the TV when he got to the door. He made extra noise with the keys, afraid he might surprise somebody and get shot. “Hey,” he said.
Everything was the same as when he left this morning. Neat as a pin. Nothing missing, nothing broken. He could smell fabric softener, Dodson’s T-shirts and underwear were folded neatly on the sofa. A frying pan and some dishes were in the drying rack but the kitchen was spotless. So was the bathroom but it was disturbing, smelling a different shampoo, the air humid from a stranger taking a shower. Isaiah checked the drain, not a hair in it. “Well I’ll be,” he said.
Isaiah had gone to work by the time Dodson got up. He felt good, his life settled for the time being. He took a shower and put his dirty clothes in the machines downstairs. He decided to make breakfast and went to Vons for groceries.
Dodson grated some potatoes, melted butter in a pan, and got the hash browns going. Then he fried some ham and scrambled three eggs the way Lupita taught him. He remembered her in those panties that said CASH ONLY on the back, whipping the eggs so hard she jiggled under her T-shirt.
“You have to get air in them,” she said. “That’s what keeps them light. Stop looking at my ass, pendejo.”
Dodson’s eggs came out moist and fluffy. By then the hash browns had a crust on them, the ham was still warm, the sourdough toast slathered with butter. He took a moment to admire the plate. “Like the cover of a Denny’s menu,” he said.
Dodson ate slowly, shaking his head with pleasure, timing it so there was just enough toast left to wipe up the last bit of egg. After, he watched some classic Mike Tyson fights on TV, clipped his toenails into a wastebasket, and thought about calling Kinkee and them. Get them to come over, see the new place, smoke some weed, play GTA. But Kinkee and them would raid the fridge, spill their drinks, drop their joints between the sofa cushions, miss the toilet, and piss on the wall. Better to leave the fellas out of it, tell them he was staying with a girl somewhere.
Dodson and the fellas dealt drugs out of an apartment on the backside of an old commercial building. The landlord had cut the building up into individual units, eight or ten people living in a tiny room, two bathrooms per floor. They called the apartment the House. They moved it every few weeks for security reasons but no matter what the location it was always the same. Cavelike and musty, windows too milky to see through, the drapes in shreds, black patches on the floor where the linoleum was torn off, the walls covered with gang signs and pictures of big dicks. The bathrooms were always terrifying. The rent was shared by Dodson, Kinkee, Sedrick, and Freddie G. Everybody strapped. Get bold enough to try a robbery and you’d be hard-pressed to get out alive.
Dodson got his dope from Kinkee, who got his dope from Junior, top of the food chain. Nobody knew if Junior was the name on his birth certificate or if there was a Senior Junior running around somewhere. Junior didn’t come to the House much and seemed to spend most of his time getting chauffeured around in a massive white Navigator with blacked-out windows, gold BBS rims, and a sound system you felt through the sidewalk before you heard it. Junior liked to use big words to make himself sound smart but it usually had the opposite effect. Once Dodson heard him say: “This female had the most magnanimous titties I have ever substantiated.” Michael Stokely was his wheelman, Booze Lewis rode shotgun, both of them looking like their mug shots and armed like SEAL Team 6.
Junior bought kilos of raw cocaine from a cartel connection in Boyle Heights. He added his cut and sold it in halves, quarters, and eighths to block captains like Kinkee. Kinkee added his cut, cooked the cocaine into crack, and sold it rocked up to low-level dealers like Dodson, everybody doubling their money. On most days Dodson made more than his colleagues. He never hyped his product, didn’t make fun of his customers or demand a blow job, and he put a little extra in the bag when the quality was low.
The worst thing about the job was the working conditions. Serving it up to a sad parade of glassy-eyed dope fiends; twitching, scabs on their faces, brown teeth gapped as gravestones, rambling on about a situation with their associates or the government drone that was following them around night and day. Some of the customers lit up right in front of you, the crack fumes smelling like burnt rubber, clouds of it swirling into an atmosphere already thick with weed smoke, Thunderbird, and body funk. It was a wonder you didn’t get cancer just being there. Most of the fiends came and went as fast as they could but there were always a few more discriminating shoppers who held the rock up to the light and said is this the good shit?
Dodson was bored and restless. The House was more suffocating than usual and business was slow. Kinkee was down to kibbles and bits, the crackheads finding better product elsewhere. Dodson went outside to get a breath of fresh air that smelled like dirt, weeds, and dogshit. There wouldn’t be any new product until Junior did his reup run to Boyle Heights. Until then, it was a lot of waiting around. Dodson knew he needed a new hustle, something more worthy of his talents; something that wouldn’t get him arrested, shot, or killed by asphyxiation. What exactly that hustle would be he hadn’t figured out.
An hour went by and no more customers came in so Dodson went back to the apartment. He took a long shower, scrubbing himself with a loofah to get the stink off. Isaiah was almost never home. On the rare occasions when they were in the apartment together they were self-conscious and careful, like there were hidden rules and neither of them knew what they were. It wasn’t hard for Dodson to figure out who the apartment belonged to. There was an older guy in the photos on the bookshelf who was probably Isaiah’s brother, who was most likely dead and that was no doubt the reason Isaiah was so messed up. His face was either blank as Dodson’s math assignment or his eyes were tight and his jaw hard-set like he was about to smack somebody. He stayed out on the balcony for hours, holding his head in his hands or staring into the dark. Late at night, Dodson could hear him pacing around the bedroom talking to himself; low and fierce with some crying mixed in. Dodson was afraid the boy was cracking up.
When Dodson got out of the shower, he changed and went to the kitchen to get something to eat. Isaiah was on the floor messing with the back compartment of the refrigerator. There were tools, wires, and electrical parts scattered around him and his hands were black with grime. “What’re you doing?” Dodson said.
“Fridge had a leak on the low side,” Isaiah said. “Condenser’s shot.”
“I got food in there.”
“Everything’s in the sink.”
Dodson was impressed. The refrigerator was a scary appliance, that cage on the back holding in a nest of killer bees, the ones that kept buzzing on and off.
Isaiah grunted, struggling to remove what looked like a midget kettle barbecue.
“What’s that?” Dodson said.
“Condenser,” Isaiah said. He put it aside and maneuvered another one into the vacated space. “This one might be in worse shape than the one I took out.”
“Where’d it come from?” Dodson said.
“One-oh-four. Got it out of that fridge.”
“The door was open?”
“No.”
“What, you picked the lock? Used a bump key?”
Isaiah didn’t answer, focusing a little too hard on what he was doing. Dodson smiled. “Damn, Isaiah,” he said, “if I’d have known you was into thievery we could have robbed the whole building.”