THUGLIT Issue Two (2 page)

A quick count of the bills gave up nine-and-change, still more than two Gs short of what they owed Harry. Sal knew his check wasn’t coming for another ten days, and Harry was not a man accustomed to waiting. Didn’t really matter anyway: Even if payday was tomorrow, he was still a federal employee, paid federal employee wages.

Tucking the gun and money back in the box, he pulled out a gold chain with a Star of David pendant hanging from it, shoved the box under his bed then walked to the living room. Junior and Mel still snored. He yanked the pillow from under Junior’s head. It sounded like a melon when it hit the wooden arm.

“What the shit?” He rolled to the side, rubbing his head. Mel snorted and dropped a forearm over her face.

“Wake her.”

“Huh?”

Sal flicked Junior in the purple splash just below his eye. He howled and Mel startled upright.

“I said, wake her.” Sal smiled.

They sat up, pulling together like magnetic opposites, both rubbing their arms in contrasting directions.

“You guys have anywhere to go?”

Mel looked at Junior, who cocked his head at his dad.

“Anywhere other than here, I mean.”

“Mel’s parents,” Junior started, then stopped. Mel brushed his leg, as if to say go on. “Mel’s parents live over on the shore, past Easton. Got a chicken farm or something out there.”

“Goats,” Mel said. “They raise goats.”

Sal nodded. “I’ve always liked goats. I wanted to raise some when I was little but your Granddad said they weren’t city animals.”

“They’re not,” Mel said.

Junior and Sal looked at each other.

“Anyway, you’re going to go out there, work the land and get yourselves together. Don’t come back to Baltimore for a while.” Sal let the necklace dangle from his left hand. “Get yourselves clean and start over somewhere else. Richmond, maybe.”

Junior pointed at the necklace, asked what it was.

“Your Granddad gave me this when I started working for the post office. His father wore it on the ship over to America, gave it to Dad before he left for Okinawa.” Sal kneeled down and coiled the necklace in Junior’s palm. “I’m giving it to you.”

Junior looked at it like it was snake that might strike. “So it’s, like, old?”

“It’s not worth anything. Not to anyone who isn’t a Bleaker.”

Scooping the chain with his thumb, Junior let it pendulum before his eyes.

Sal stood and patted his shoulder. “Get some sleep tonight.”

They looked from the necklace to Sal.

“You’re coming to work with me tomorrow.”

“You sure you don’t want to do this alone?” Junior glanced back and forth between Mel and his dad, maybe confirming something, maybe searching for some exit in the alleyway. Across the street, he could see a young couple with a stroller chatting with Ari inside the deli.

Sal double-checked his Sig again, pulled the Shatner Halloween mask over his face then motioned for Junior to do the same.

“Just remember,” Sal said. “Those are real bullets in there.”

“Yeah. I know.” Junior waved the gun around, trying to feign nonchalance but Sal could see the tremor in his hand. The couple waved goodbye, wheeling their baby outside and down the sidewalk.

“You wanted to be in.” He chambers a round. “You’re in.”

They rounded the corner to the sidewalk, Sal shouldering open the door with Junior following.

Ari threw his hands in the air, his shocked yelp stifling itself.

Sal shoved the gun in his face, keeping Ari docile while he walked around the counter, then nodded at the register. With a surprisingly steady hand, Ari pressed a button and the till sprung open. His hand went back in the air.

Junior came to the register, scooped out bills from the slots and tossed them into a brown paper bag while Sal kept Ari covered. The man was no liar. He kept himself calm and chose family over money. Sal admired him for that and hoped that Ari would understand his motivation, were the situations reversed. On the wooden counter beside Ari sat a chunk of what looked to be cow, a cleaver sunk into the chopping surface by the tip.

Sal looked up, saw Junior heading toward the back.

“No.”

“What about the safe?” Junior turned and continued walking.

“Get back here. Now.”

Ari cocked his head. “Salvatore?”

Junior froze. Sal swallowed.

“You rob me?”

“Hands up.”

Ari’s hands sunk like deflated balloons. “You are one of them? You are not a man?” His fingers curled into fists.

“I said put your damn hands up.”

“Dad—”

“Shut up.” Sal whirled toward Junior, leveling his gun. “Shut up.”

“
Dad
.” Junior’s yell was muffled by the mask but it didn’t matter. Sal caught a glint of light then a bright blue shock tearing through his stomach. He looked down, saw the bloody cleaver, the red slash across his gut.

“You’re not a hero.” Sal stumbled back against the counter, bracing himself with a slick palm.  “You said you didn’t care about money.”

“It is not money.” Ari stepped forward. “It is honor.”

Sal swung his gun up and fired. Ari’s head flew back, a rooster tail of blood splashing against the wall.

Sal slumped against the counter, holding himself up with his elbow. He felt the blood run from his stomach, trying to push it back in. Ari’s hands twitched as the man fell back against the wall. Commotion in the back room, the back of Junior’s body visible in the doorframe. A click and a long creak. Rustling paper. Junior turned and caught Sal’s eyes. Green bills peeked from the paper bag in Junior’s hands. He glanced at Sal, at the money. He ran.

Sal’s elbow slipped from the counter and he let himself fall.

*****

A car slams on its brakes and blares its horn. Junior and Mel laugh, raise their hands in fake apology then creep to the sidewalk like cartoon burglars.

“Let’s go up Lanvale. Guy up there’s holding the real, I heard.” Mel licks her lips, the edge of a scab catching on her tongue.

“We’re going to ration this, babe. We’re not going to blow it all at once.”

“No, course not. We’re going to be smart with it.” Junior hands forty to Mel, shoves forty in his pants pocket, then folds the paper bag over and slips it inside his jacket. “No one’s ever smart, but we’re going to be smart.”

“Just a little taste, then some for the road, and we’ll head out. Start over, right?”

“Right. Start over.”

They veer left on Lanvale, down to Montford. Junior gives the money, gets the product. Mel gives the money, gets the product. They walk through the alley over to the cemetery and find the headstone they like, the angel with outstretched arms, and sit down.

While Mel unfolds the foil and cooks for them, Junior searches his right pocket, his left pocket, his right one again, trying to find his Great-Granddad’s necklace. Mel nudges his arm and hands him the glass tube. He pulls his hands free, closes his eyes, breathes deep, holds it.

b
y Jen Conley

Tyrell Colton, fourteen, a skinny black kid, one of the smallest students in the freshman class, woke at five-thirty on a Wednesday morning, leaned over the side of the mattress and pulled a two
-inch-wide, two-foot-
long pipe the color of gunmetal from underneath his bed. He lay back against his pillow and twirled it in his hands. The radio was on low and the murmuring of Grandmaster Flash segueing into Van Halen gently filled the room.

After a few minutes, Tyrell stood, set himself into a stance, and held the pipe forward with both hands like a medieval weapon. He swung it into space, a phantom enemy before him. Back and forth, back and forth.

Eventually, the boy dressed in jeans, white sneakers, a gray sweatshirt, and attached a digital watch on his wrist. He brushed his teeth in the bathroom, stole two of his mother’s cigarettes and a pack of matches. Then he put on his father’s green army jacket. Edward Colton had survived a two-year tour of Vietnam but he couldn’t survive regular life. Shot himself four years earlier in ’79 when Tyrell was eleven.

When Tyrell got outside, the morning sky was heavy with mean, gray clouds. Icy drizzle flecked against his face as he hiked down the street, his stride quick, the pipe hidden in his jacket, the one end tucked into an inside pocket while the rest rose underneath his coat and against his tors
o until it reached his shoulder
blade.

The kids from Tyrell’s neighborhood were the only ones who walked to the high school. Every morning they’d tromp to the far right corner of the development, turn onto a wide orange-tinted dirt road and follow it until they reached the paved street which would take them to the high school. The brown brick building sat before a wide field of dry grass and weeds, surrounded by pine barren trees, and beyond that, abandoned cranberry bogs. When Tyrell and the
other
kids walked along the paved road, yellow buses sped by, the growling motors piercing the walkers’ ears. Usually someone inside a bus would press their hand against a window and flip them the bird.

But on this morning, Tyrell didn’t take the regular way. He went beyond the orange dirt road, favoring a trail through the woods. Most of the path was thick with gray sugar sand that was difficult to walk through—not a popular way to go to school unless there was a joint to be smoked. Tyrell didn’t think he’d meet anyone this early, and he skirted along the sides of the sand trail where the terrain was harder, letting pine tree branches slap against the army coat. Sometimes, when the moment was right, Tyrell could smell his father in this jacket—an odor of man’s skin, cigarette smoke, kerosene. His father had spent many nights in the garage, sitting with liquor and a portable heater.

The pipe was riding against his shoulder blade, so Tyrell stopped, opened his coat and took the pipe out. He found his mother’s cigarettes and attempted to light one with a match. The drizzle had stopped but it was still cold and windy. After three tries, the cigarette was lit, and Tyrell stood in nature, feeling the harshness of smoke in his lungs, becoming lightheaded. He watched a cardinal flutter from tree to tree, its red coat pretty against the dull browns, tans, and dreary greens of the scrub pine forest.

Tyrell reviewed his plan. He’d get to school before the buses, before he had to walk through the knots of students—the girls with their feathered hair and tight jeans, smoking cigarettes and cackling; the guys wearing camouflage jackets, dip tucked under their bottom lips, spitting the tobacco into plastic cups or onto the concrete patio of the school. There were black kids and Puerto Rican kids too, and they hung out with their boom boxes on the edge of the patio, leaning against the brown brick walls, playing rap music, raising the volume after one of the guys with a lump of Skoal in his mouth would shout, “Shut that shit off, asshole!”

Tyrell had few friends. Ever since his father had killed himself, he’d been branded as strange, damaged, cursed. He was a quiet kid, never in trouble, good at math, a secret lover of all things science fiction but not obsessed with it. He had a crush on Iris Cruz, the pretty girl from New York whose parents spoke only Spanish.

He dropped the cigarette into the sand and thought about smoking the second one, but that was part of the plan, too. That was the victory cigarette, after he beat the shit out of Mark Horak with his pipe.

Tyrell looked at his watch: 6:46. Homeroom began at 7:22. He placed the pipe in his coat and began to walk again. He’d go into school early, put his jacket and pipe in his locker, and then head over to the library to hide out until the early morning bell. When it was time, he’d take the long way around to homeroom, then to first period. After first period ended, he’d head back to his locker, put on the jacket, sneak the pipe into the pocket, and slip into the bathroom near the science rooms. There he’d wait, eyeing his watch for the end of second period. Mark Horak always strolled by the bathroom at the end of second period, sometimes with his buddies DJ Trout and Scott Parker, but more often by himself. Tyrell was betting on Mark being alone, and he planned to ambush the guy then.

If all three were together, this was a concern. DJ Trout, with a full dark beard, was as wide and thick as any decent high school linebacker, which he was. Scott Parker was so pumped up on steroids, he looked like he’d pop and swirl around like a balloon if you stuck a pin in him. Mark was the smallest of the three, but by no means less threatening. His hands were large and strong, as Tyrell had found out last Thursday when Mark slammed the boy up against the bulletin board in the hallway outside the French classroom, right hand clasped around Tyrell’s little neck, choking him, the French teacher screaming. Fear had ripped through Tyrell and he felt tears drip from the far corners of his eyes.
Please don’t,
he thought.
Please don’t kill me.

It took the vice principal, Mr. Cage, to pull Mark off Tyrell. The man came flying around the corner like a superhero, wrapped his right arm around Mark’s neck and wrenched him away in one jolt. Mr. Cage was a strong, big man. He had a long face, wore square brown-framed glasses, and had a thick dark mustache like bicycle handles. He towered over the students like a giant. It was said he’d killed eighty-three people in Vietnam.

“I’ve had enough of you, Mr. Horak,” Mr. Cage growled, tossing Mark across the hall.

Mark, huffing and snarling, glared at the vice principal.

Mr. Cage stepped up to the teenager and pointed his finger in the kid’s face. “You need to keep your garbage in check. Now move it.”

As he escorted Mark away, Mr. Cage turned and nodded at Tyrell, and this made the boy feel good, vindicated. The French teacher, clearly upset, approached him, put her hand on his shoulder and suggested he go to the nurse. But Tyrell declined, rubbing his neck, relieved the vice principal had saved him. Mr. Cage must’ve been a brave soldier, Tyrell thought as he walked to his next class. Someone you could count on to watch your back.

Mark was suspended for the incident, put out for three days. But Tyrell knew that when he returned on Wednesday, the guy planned to hunt Tyrell down and beat him to a pulp. He knew this because Janine Finn, a ghostly white girl with long black, witchy hair, who was one of the school sluts and known for knowing things, had secretly warned him.

“Don’t you got some brothers to help you out?” she whispered.

Tyrell had no siblings and it took a minute, but he realized she meant other black people.

“I’ll figure it out,” he said.

“I understand you got to stand up for yourself when he ranks on you,” she said. “But you gotta know when you retaliate, when you run your mouth, he’s gonna get physical.”

Since the beginning of the year, Tyrell had been one of Mark’s targets. So had a little dorky kid with a bunch of freckles named Loren. “Loren. Ain’t that a girl’s name? I know you’re confused. Sneak into your sister’s room and put on her pantyhose, don’t you?” Overweight Marcy Puckett was another one. “You’re so fat, we should send you to Ethiopia and have them cook you.” And Lawrence Hawkins, a black kid who was strong and built himself, yet cursed with a feeble brain. He shot back at Mark, but his retorts were stupid and they only made Mark and the kids around him laugh. Teachers yelled at Mark, tried to defend the weak, but there were always lulls, moments, distractions opening up opportunities.

That Thursday, right before the choking went down, Mark had chosen Tyrell to pick on. Just saw him in the hall and sang this jingle:
“If I had a son like you, I’d a killed myself too.”

Tyrell, who’d heard Mark’s jingle a half-dozen times before, got some nerve up, turned and said, “Your dad makes you suck his dick.” The words fired from his mouth without edit, without gates, like he’d accidentally hit the trigger of a machine gun and sent seven bullets into a crowd.

When Tyrell emerged from the woods, the school lay before him like a fortress. 7:01. He walked steadily along the paved road, careful to keep the pipe hidden, his stomach clenched with anticipation. Teachers in their cars passed by. He went across the empty patio, stepping around old spots of brown spit. Inside the building, he followed his plan: locker, stash coat and pipe, library.

In the large room with its rectangular tinted windows, Tyrell picked up
Mad Magazine
and sat at one of the cubby desks, careful to keep his head down. It was unlikely Mark would come to the library, but Tyrell didn’t want to take chances. He turned the magazine’s pages but read and saw nothing, only felt the tightness in his blood and bones that controlled anxiety brought on. When the bell rang, the plan continued. He traveled the long way to homeroom, sat quietly, and then on to first period English. They read and discussed
Antigone
.

Tyrell had left the pipe in the jacket and after first period, as he stood at his locker with other kids, he found it tricky to get the coat on without the pipe falling out. Yet somehow he managed and as he walked to the designated bathroom, he prayed he would not run into Mr. Cage.

When he arrived, Tyrell made his way into a stall, locked the door, and sat down on the toilet.

He pulled up his sleeve and checked his watch. Then he waited. Read some of the graffiti written or carved into the brown walls.
Fuck You, Mr. Petti is a Dick, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, 666.
There were several drawings of pentagrams.

The main door to the bathroom was always propped open by the custodians, a trick to keep the smokers from smoking cigarettes. But halfway through second period, two kids came in and smoked anyhow. They barely spoke, just talked briefly about a job at McDonald’s one of them had just scored. If they noticed Tyrell was in the stall, they said nothing. Just left.

Eventually, the time arrived. Tyrell pulled the pipe out of his father’s jacket, then stared at his watch, waited, heard the bell ring.

He breathed, gripped the pipe in his left hand, his right hand on the stall lock. He studied his watch, eyes following the second counter, his heart punching, his breath short. The plan was to leave the stall at the end of the first minute, whether someone entered the bathroom or not.

56, 57, 58, 59…
Tyrell opened the door and stepped out. Luck was with him—he was alone. He crept to the door
way, leaned against the propped-
open door, clasping his pipe like a baseball bat. A girl walked by and another, but neither of them noticed him. These girls were more luck, though, because Mark Horak called to them. Tyrell was able to hear his location, enabling the oncoming attack to occur at the perfect time.

Go.
He burst out into the hallway swinging, smashing the pipe against Mark’s shoulder, making the guy bend forward, shout in pain. Tyrell swung again, downwards this time, striking him on the back. Mark cried out again but did not fall. Tyrell swung once more, at the kneecap. His enemy finally collapsed to the floor, sobbing like a small child. Tyrell took another swipe, at the face now, busting the nose, blood exploding in dots and splatters like boiling sauce on the stove. The guy begged for mercy,
“Stop, stop!”
and Tyrell did. He stood for a moment, breathing, staring at his work, gripping the pipe. He looked up, saw three kids—one girl and two guys—watching.

“Holy shit,” said the girl.

Tyrell heard the voice of the vice principal and this kicked him out of his stupor. He took off, bolting down the hallway, around the corner, and out through the glass doors. He heard the doors open behind him and the VP shouting for him to stop. Even though Mr. Cage was large and strong, he was a little round about the middle, and he smoked, and he was older—it wouldn’t be long before the man would have to stop, so Tyrell kept going. He raced across the patio, onto the road, then into the field, hoping his pursuer might fall in the grass. Halfway through the field, Tyrell looked back and saw that Mr. Cage had stopped on the patio, but Tyrell
continued to run. He raced into
the woods, to the trail he’d come through in the morning, and once he was deep down the path, he slowed down to a jog, and then to a walk, the pipe still in his hand.

His chest was heaving, so he let himself catch his breath. For the moment, he was safe. Soon they’d call the police, perhaps have a manhunt out for him. Maybe they’d just go to his house, wait for him to come home. Either way, there was no way around it—he was going to get caught.