Lloyd Jupiter’s mother, Berneice, had been sixteen when he was born, and she hadn’t done so bad by him. Not great, but not particularly bad, all things considered. She had pretty good judgment about the men she brought home, if you didn’t include Lloyd’s father in the mix. He was locked up or dead. At any rate, he hadn’t been around for years. Her latest man, father to Lloyd’s youngest brother and sister, was downright reliable, sticking with her two years now. Which was good for his mama, but not so good for Lloyd, ’cause Murray was one of those Jamaican tight-asses who had some definite ideas about what Lloyd should be doing, like school, and not doing, like just about everything else.
Given the tension between Murray and him, Lloyd hadn’t been around to see his mama for a while. She was beginning to ride him, too, which wasn’t like her. Before Murray, Lloyd had always been able to charm her, get his way, shake a few dollars loose from her billfold. After all, he was her firstborn, and she felt guilty about so much-his useless father, how her attention got stretched with the addition of each new kid. In her way, she loved him best.
But the last time Lloyd had dropped by, she’d been out-and-out pissed at him-furious over the rumor that he’d been working for Bennie Tep, even more furious at the news that he’d been let go. The truth was somewhere in between. Lloyd didn’t work for Bennie, but some of his buddies did, and they let him hang. Bennie liked Lloyd. People always liked Lloyd, if he wanted them to. But he wasn’t allowed any role in the main business, not after a few disastrous attempts at playing tout. He could do the math, but those fiends were fierce, rushing him so that he lost his place in the count. Which was fine with Lloyd. He hated all work, hated anything with a boss-jobs, school, family. He needed to find a way where he could be the man in charge, but he wasn’t sure what that was. Dr. Ben Carson had come to his grade school when he was a kid, and that had seemed kind of cool, a black man opening up little children’s hearts and fixing them, but it meant so much school, and Lloyd was through with school the moment he turned sixteen last fall.
“I heard about you,” his mother had said, her voice shrill, her finger in his face. “Getting high and shorting the count. You incompetent, a fiend, or just a thief?”
He had shrugged, refusing to align himself with any of those piss-poor choices.
“You know, you can’t even work at McDonald’s if your cash register is light at the end of ev’ry shift.”
“I ain’t gonna work at no fuckin’ McDonald’s.”
“Honey, that’s what I’m saying. You ain’t gonna work anywhere, you don’t get your act together.”
It was a lot of shit to put up with, just for five or ten dollars. He could panhandle that much in a good afternoon.
He hadn’t been getting high anyway, not really. He smoked a blunt now and then, nothing more. What was wrong with that? Look at these two, guzzling all that wine with dinner. Well, okay, they didn’t guzzle exactly. It wasn’t like they were tipping Thunderbird from a paper bag. But that stuff fucked up all different parts of your insides, while weed just messed with your lungs a little, and you had to smoke a lot to do real damage. He had learned all that back in school, the various dangers of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and while they tried to say that weed was bad, Lloyd knew it wasn’t. Sick people got to smoke it in some states, so how bad could it be?
He crept out of the half-ass room they had stuck him in and paused in the hallway, listening. The dogs were his main concern, especially the Doberman. The big, rat-looking dog didn’t seem so much a threat, not unless it got close enough to breathe on you. Dog’s breath was nasty. He waited, his lies ready-just going to the bathroom, needed a drink of water-but nothing happened. No boards creaking, no long toenails clattering on the wooden floors, no lights coming on.
Time to go.
Part of his brain warned him to do just that, only that. Go. Just get away from these people, put some distance between him and them, and hope he never saw them again. In the most paranoid part of his brain, he had almost persuaded himself that he’d been set up, that the woman had sent her whipped boyfriend to go looking for him and drag him back here, knowing what he’d done. But naw, that couldn’t be. It was just his usual shitty-ass luck, the life of Lloyd. Try to make a buck, nothing more, end up with this gungho dude and his detective girlfriend, who seemed to know something that nobody was supposed to know. Why wouldn’t she stop saying that name? Youssef. Youuuuuuuuuuuuussefffffffff. Like she could read his mind. No, the smart thing was to get out.
Thing was, he had come over the threshold with plans, and Lloyd always fell in love with his own plans. If he pictured himself doing something or having something, no matter how small, he had to try to follow through. There had been a poem in school about how bad that was, putting off a dream. Lloyd had allowed this guy to bring him here because he thought there would be something in it for him, and he had been clocking stuff from the moment he got inside the house, calculating what he could carry, what he could sell. In his head he had already made fifty, a hundred dollars easy.
He retreated into the study and surveyed the portable goods available to him. It was some trifling shit. The jewelry would be in the bedroom, obviously off-limits now. He should have sneaked back there earlier. No, never mind, the woman didn’t look like someone who went in for good stuff, judging by her watch and the small gold hoops in her ears. But there was the laptop and a digital camera. Also some DVDs, although they didn’t look like the kind that would generate much cash. They all had the same title. He sounded it out silently: Cri-ter-ion Collection. Wasn’t that the guy who wrote the book about the dinosaurs? Lloyd had liked that book, even better than the movie, because the book didn’t let anyone off the hook. The mad-scientist dude was pecked to death by his own little monsters, while the movie made out that he was some white-bearded Santa Claus guy. Villains needed to be punished proper, in Lloyd’s opinion, although he didn’t always agree with the movies on who the villains were. Like, Spider-Man 2. That octopus dude had a right to be pissed.
No, wait: “Criterion Collection” must be the company that made these DVDs. The real titles were for sure bizarre. Yojimbo. Rashomon. Ran. Ran from what? They were in black and white, too, which meant they weren’t worth carrying out of here. Too bad, because they looked kind of interesting, like old-fashioned kung fu movies. Throne of Blood. That one he had to take, even if he didn’t have a DVD player his own self. Dub did.
There was a big jar of change, but it was too large to carry, and fishing out the quarters would make too much noise. The other electronics were all too big, too, and not at all up-to-date. No flat screen, no plasma, just a shitty-ass Sony no more than nineteen inches, although it would still bring a little something. Then again, he was taking the Lexus, so he could carry more. But he had to travel part of the way on foot, at the end. So this was all he was going to get, one armful’s worth.
At the last minute, he opened up a little box he had spied on her desk, a blue oval with a horned horse painted on it, to see if jewelry might be hidden in it. Unicorn, that was what you called it. Not horned horse, unicorn, and this unicorn was hiding a stash of weed. They had weed. Fuckin’ hypocrites, like all grown-ups. Okay, not exactly, it wasn’t as if they had been in his face, wagging fingers, saying no-no-no like his mama, who used to say yes an awful lot, pre-Murray. She was clean now, which should have been good, but it wasn’t somehow. Man, it pissed Lloyd off for reasons he couldn’t quite explain even to himself, this stash tucked away in a painted box. He pocketed the box, then headed out into the hall, laptop under his arm.