He shook her awake. “Did she eat? Does she have any other clothes? What do you feed a kid like this?”
He pulled out his blade and cut the bonds on her little arms and legs. He checked her neck and face for bruises, and he was glad when he saw that there were none. She awoke as he was removing the tape from her mouth. She looked about to cry, but they made eye contact, and he told her with his eyes, Don’t cry. She held it back. She was a brave kid. She didn’t cry.
He gave the stripper a hundred to follow him home. Crip lived, if you could call it that, on the second floor of a distressed property in the 1400 block of Vegas Valley Drive, in the shadow of the South Maryland Parkway, and not too far from the hospital where he sent a lot of the people who owed the Gold Man money. Degenerates who borrowed more than they could ever pay back. Like this Air Force boy from Nellis with the pretty little daughter. The scoop he got from Goggles was that the boy was typical. A country boy from Tennessee. Second year in the service. Stationed in Las Vegas. First time in Las Vegas. He gambled more than he could afford. He moved up to borrowing from the high interest check cashers, one of which was owned by the Gold Man. When he couldn’t pay them back, he started writing bad checks. When his CO found out about it, it was too late. The Air Force has its standards. The best the CO could do was to arrange an honorable discharge. So now the kid is cut loose. He gambles, he wins. He gambles, he loses. He’s got a baby he left back home from some girl he knocked up in high school. The girl gets killed in a car wreck. The sickly grandma ships the poor little orphan off to Las Vegas to be with her military man daddy — only he’s not in the Air Force anymore, but is too ashamed to tell anyone. The Gold Man gets tired of waiting for his money and calls the boy in for a little chit chat. So the Mustard Man gets to babysit the collateral until the Gold Man gets his dough. Typical. Typical stuff.
Crip opened the door to his apartment, and both the stripper and the little girl gasped. There was a mattress with a pillow on it. That was it. Other than that mattress, there was no other furniture. No TV. No bookshelves. No tables and chairs in the kitchen area. Nothing on the stove. If you opened the cabinets, nothing in the cabinets, no plates, no glasses, no forks and spoons, nothing. If you opened the refrigerator, you’d find a bottle of water and two bottles of bourbon. There were two bedrooms in the apartment, and both the doors were locked from the outside. At the moment, he was not babysitting anyone except the girl, but it was his practice always to keep those doors locked. There was stuff in there that maybe you didn’t want to see. There was one closet, the hallway closet; if you opened that door, you’d find his clothes in it — his other suits and underwear and shoes and whatnot. But that door was locked too. There was stuff in there that maybe you didn’t want to see.
The stripper set the bag of groceries and other supplies down on the kitchen counter. Now she understood why they had gone to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and bought a fry pan and paper plates. A bottle of Crisco. Crip led the little girl to the mattress and made her lie down. There was a clean sheet on the mattress, and he covered her with it.
The stripper, who was called Sapphire, threw up her hands. “Shit. I’m gonna need more than this. I’m gonna need lettuce and apple juice. Some cups. Some milk. Some of everything. Shit, you got nothing in here, Crip.”
He gave her three more hundreds. “Get whatever you need. Get it quick and get back here. And don’t curse in front of the kid no more, you hear? Don’t make me hafta smack you around a little bit.”
While the stripper was gone, he sat down on the floor next to the little girl on the mattress. He listened to her sweet, innocent breathing.
He said to her, “Sleep, little girl. Sleep.” Poor thing, to have a father like that. Poor little thing. Bad parents was one of those things Crip put on his Don’t like it list. Owing money was one of those things he put on there too. Hurting kids? Well, that was at the top of the Don’t like it list. But that was one of those things he had control over because this time, it was he who was the babysitter.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, he had a mother and a little sister and a babysitter who was not in her right mind. He would watch her do things to his sister that he should have told his mother about, but didn’t. He loved his baby sister Ta’Shana and he did not believe the woman when she said that she was Ta’Shana’s “other” mother, but he didn’t do anything about it. All day long the babysitter would keep changing Ta’Shana’s clothes, dressing her in outfits that she had snuck into the house in her bag and asking him, How does she look now? Doesn’t my baby look nice now? And he would say, She looks fine, and go back to watching cartoons with a heavy heart. When the babysitter opened her shirt and pulled out her creamy peanut butter brown breasts, he would feel a coiling of his privates in his pants. She would sit there with her shirt open tugging her thick brown nipples and asking him how they looked. Were they big enough yet? Did they look big enough to suck on yet? He would say, They look fine, and not do much else because he really did not know what to do about it at six or seven. Then she would pick up Ta’Shana and push one of the thick, wrinkly nipples into her mouth, and say, There, there now, my baby, as Ta’Shana sucked. This troubled him so much that he would go into his room and stand in the corner like somebody had put him on punishment.
He always blamed himself for what happened the day the babysitter’s boyfriend came over, because he should have told his mother about all the other stuff, he should have told her, he should have told her, but he didn’t.
The babysitter’s boyfriend, who was not supposed to be there when his mother was not home, had snuck over many times before to be with the babysitter, so he was no stranger. This time, like all the others before, the boyfriend and the babysitter took their clothes off and got on top of each other on the couch and started pumping and huffing and growling and panting and screaming and laughing and shouting profanity.
Crip, who was called Leon back in those days, had seen it all before so he went into the room he shared with Ta’Shana and closed the door. A few minutes later, the boyfriend and the babysitter burst into the room and started punching him and slapping him around, accusing him of being disloyal and spying on them, and they said they knew all about his plans to tell his mother on them, but they knew a way to punish his black ass, Oh, they knew a way — they would take their baby and leave him behind. He cried and screamed and pulled at them and begged them not to take his sister, as they grabbed Ta’Shana from her crib and dressed her in a sailor suit and red shoes the babysitter had in her bag. They laughed at him and slapped him some more. He ran into the kitchen and came back with a butcher knife. He was going to stab them and save his sister, but the boyfriend snatched the knife from him, then picked him up and threw him against the wall three times. It could have been more than three, but after three is when he blacked out.
When he woke up, he was in a hospital. There were police there. There was his mother crying hysterically. His sister was gone. His body was broken. His face. His legs. A few years later, his mother was gone too. Out a window.
Two nights in a row, Crip got to his throne four hours later than he normally did. On the third night, he did not show at all. On the fourth night, when he got there four hours late again, Snake was waiting for him.
“What the fuck?”
Crip said, “What do you mean, what the fuck?”
“I mean what the fuck when I say what the fuck. Where you been? What’s been happening to you?”