“Kendrick!” And this time it was a shout.
The two dealers sat up and took notice. Perhaps here came some of the family strife that was such a constant backdrop to the ghetto. This was entertainment. For two young men on the fast track to oblivion, this would be better than the lame, watered-down fare on television. This was real-life, messy, often action-packed and bloody, and without any commercials.
The man turned around, his body moving as slowly as the glaciers.
He was tall, a full head taller than Lola. That was the first thing that sank in. The next thing that sunk in was how horribly wasted he had become. His shoulders were broad, and so had seemed to give some shape to the trench coat as it hung down. But beneath that coat he wore a Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt and red sweat pants. Both were ratty and had holes in them. And he was skinny. The T-shirt, which must have been a small or a medium, clung to a frame that had once worn extra large. His navel showed at the bottom of it. The clothes had probably come from a mission somewhere that gave out such clothes. Summer clothes in the winter, winter clothes in the summer. He wore old Air Jordan sneakers with no socks.
Sure, wearing somebody’s cast-off sneakers.
He peered at her and she came closer. Closer, she began to get the smell of him, the funk of days without a bath, of nights on benches in train and bus stations. In the light of the street lamp she saw his rheumy bloodshot eyes and she saw that he trembled just slightly. An old, closed scar ran under his chin.
It was Kendrick. Times had caught up with him.
“Lola?” he said, squinting just a bit now. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Lola.” The second time he said it with a nod to himself, as if the sudden appearance of Lola now confirmed everything, as if this was the final rung of his downfall. He smiled a grim smile and showed the black spaces where some of his teeth once were.
“We got you good, girl. Stopped going to school and everything. That’s what they told me. Never saw you on the street no more. Yessir, we got to you good.”
She dropped her bag, much like she had dropped her books four years before. She stepped up, hands protecting her face, and gave him a front kick to the groin. She didn’t try to kick hard, she just concentrated and moved her body properly. This generated more than enough force, coming out in a line from her torso, her buttocks and finally the big leg muscles above the knee.
Kendrick melted to his hands and knees on the wet ground. He coughed hard as if to clear his throat.
Only a second had passed, maybe two. Lola resumed her stance, then fired a roundhouse kick that caught the side of Kendrick’s head. He fell over sideways and sprawled half on the sidewalk, half on the muddy weeds and dog shit that bordered the sidewalk.
Behind Lola, one of the drug dealers whooped and hollered.
“You go, girl! Bruce Lee, motherfucker. She fucked that ass up!”
The two boys laughed.
And like that, the anger evaporated. It was replaced by a calm and almost bitter disappointment. She immediately understood that it was a feeling to which she would spend a long time reconciling, maybe the rest of her life. For four years she had hated this bastard. No, she had more than hated him. He had become almost everything to her. She had trained for the day when they would meet again and she would be ready for him. She carried a carving knife in her bag in anticipation. She imagined he would be the strong and arrogant and evil Kendrick that he was at eighteen, not this pitiful character, already the walking dead at twenty-two. She imagined theirs would be an epic battle that would take all her energy to fight, and might take both their lives. Her identity, her life had become defined in relation to this man and what he had done. Her revenge had become her obsession.
And here she was, standing over him. But the victory was far from sweet. The ghetto had taken her revenge long before she ever got there. If she wanted to kill Kendrick, she would have to spend six months cleaning him up first, feeding him, keeping him off drugs, buildings up his wasted muscles. Otherwise it wouldn’t mean anything.
Kendrick’s breaths came in rasps. He was down and out, as far down as most people get without being dead. Drug-addicted, weak, cold, and now laying in the mud after a swift beat down from a woman wronged. It was a long walk back, and Lola knew that when someone had come this far, they didn’t even try to make that walk. It was too damned far.
“Bitch,” Kendrick said in that same hoarse voice. “Bitch.” Lola looked closer and saw he was crying. She thought about spitting on him, for old time’s sake, but she couldn’t even bring herself to do that. Everything had once again been stolen from her. She picked up her bag and continued on her way.
When she was half a block away, she turned around to see if Kendrick had managed to get up yet. He hadn’t. He was on all fours on the wide, glistening sidewalk. Like circling vultures, the two boys had moved in after she was gone. When a man was down, a man was down. The law of the jungle prevailed. They took turns kicking him and jumping up and down on his carcass.
From where she stood, their laughter was carried to her on the breeze. It was the laughter of childhood. In another time and place, two boys might laugh like that on their way down to the creek to go fishing.
It was time to go home.
Smoke arrived at the apartment knowing how late he was.
It was full dark. He parked his little Toyota half a block down from the apartment. He killed the headlights, then waited and watched. No one was moving on the street. TV lights flickered from homes on his left and his right. His sense of dread was so complete that he felt he might vomit. All along, he had made mistakes, and now it had probably cost Lola and Pamela their lives. He should have told Lola long ago about his life before now. Scratch that – he shouldn’t have become involved with Lola, or anyone.
A breeze kicked up and the trees along the street creaked and swayed. Shadows moved. A young couple, bundled up and leaning on each other, laughed together as they walked along the sidewalk.
He had killed the kid without thinking of the fallout. It had been an instinct. Kill the kid. Kill them all. Get away. But of course he hadn’t been able to kill them all. That big guy, Moss, it would be hard to kill a guy like that.
He should have let them take him in – maybe he could’ve escaped some other way. Lola’s death was a horrible price to pay for his own life.
He had been unable to go back to the apartment – the neighborhood was crawling with cops and firemen. His car was around the corner, so he had simply climbed in and driven off-you mention earlier that he had to go back and get his car. It’s a little confusing as written. He didn’t know when he would go back there. So the long and the short of it was he couldn’t pick up his guns. They were trapped in the apartment. In the old days, he had loathed guns, but over time he had made a certain peace with them. Since he had been on the run, he had kept three of them. Two, fully loaded, safeties off, hidden in the apartment, and one small two-shot derringer here in the car, tucked away under the driver’s seat.
At least he had the derringer – the Bond Arms Cowboy Defender. He held it in his big hand. Five inches long in total, with three-inch, over-under barrels. It was so small that it looked almost like a toy cigarette lighter. But it packed a wallop. It fired two. 45 rounds, and was fully loaded. The barrel was so short that the gun was useless except for the most up-close fighting. That’s why he kept it in the car. You couldn’t hit the side of a barn with it if the barn was more than ten yards away, but if somebody was sitting in the car with you, or standing right in front of you, you might just kill them. He thought of Moss again. He looked at the tiny Derringer in his hand.
Jesus.