Team Seven (18 page)

“Get with it, Daddy, these things go all day. The Killer Bees got four games this afternoon. We’ll see him play.”

Charles gets up and walks over to the team bench after Coach Hedgehog finishes yelling at them. He has a Gatorade in his hand for Aldrich. I follow behind him empty-handed because I guess this is what fathers are supposed to do. I don’t know what to say, so I just sit down next to Andre on the bench. I look across the gym and see three white girls holding signs that say “Battel’s Babes.” Again I feel strangely proud.

“You doing your thing, man.” I look at him.

He’s huffing and puffing, looking down at the floor. Some kind of energy on the guy. Seems I’m the only one with the nuts to be within ten feet of him.

“You need anything?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer me.

“You thirsty?” I ask again, and again he doesn’t answer.

I want to punch him in the side of the head. Fuck’s he so mad about anyway? Look around, he’s got a cheering section and every dad in the gym stiff-dicked wishing he was their kid. The whole place is watching his every move. Such a fucking
ungrateful little bastard. He’s got it a whole lot better than me when I was his age. I get up and walk back over to Nina and we head out the door.

We pull out of the parking lot and again I can feel Nina looking at me. “What are you in the mood for?” I ask her but then see a Dunkin’ Donuts and pull into the drive-through. The sour look on her face says she was expecting more, but shit, I still need to get right today. We both get coffees and breakfast sandwiches. We cruise around for a bit looking for a place to park so we can eat, Nina’s eyes burning on me from the passenger seat.

“Daddy, can I ask you something?” She doesn’t wait for me to respond. “What’s your life like? I just wanna know. Really, what is it you do out there when you’re gone?”

I stare at the road ahead. I hate it when she does this shit and for some reason her voice feels like acid melting my insides and I don’t know what to say. The answer isn’t good enough. It’s too simple: I’m a fuck-up. What am I supposed to tell her? I turn tricks for the devil? Niggas like me just don’t learn. I been caught up in this tumble cycle and can’t seem to stop.

“You don’t have to answer me today but I
do
deserve that much …” she continues.

Back in the day I would’ve popped those overgrown words back down her throat, but she’s not wrong to want to know. I turn the tape deck back on.

“Aw, baby, come on. Why don’t we talk about the good times, ya know?”

“What good times, Daddy?” She’s yelling now. “They’re all dead and cold. Why don’t you care, Daddy?” Her eyes are glassing over with tears and my heart’s racing.

“Baby, I’m sorry.” It’s about the only thing I can offer.

“Yeah, you are sorry. You sure are sorry, Daddy! You sure are.”

Now I’ve apologized and bought the girl a meal and she sits here insulting me. I am her father and she is my daughter and she needs to know her place in the world. I grip the wheel and look at her.

“Since everyone seems to be so curious this morning, why don’t I ask you some questions, Nina? When’d you start wearing your jeans paint-on tight and smearing makeup all over your face like a blinking raggedy nightwalker, huh? When did you get your belly button pierced like a little hoochie mama?”

“So that’s what you care about?” She lifts the flap of her shirt over her belly button and rips the ring out. “It’s a magnet!” She throws it at me and spills her coffee down her lap and throws her breakfast sandwich against the windshield. She’s sobbing. The magnet hits my neck and I swerve a bit looking over at her as we pull past a gray Crown Victoria stopped in the entryway of a mobile mart.

It pulls out after us and I don’t know what the hell we did wrong but he’s turned on the red and blues. I reach into my back pocket and realize my wallet must be back at the house and wonder if I have any warrants.

The officer walks up to the window and it’s Officer McDevitt, one of them South Boston Irish good ol’ boys. We know each other from more encounters than I care to speak of. He looks down at me, braces back smiling, thumbs in his belt loops. He squints his eyes looking at Nina and the mess she’s made.

“Everything okay in there?”

“McDevitt, whatchu want?”

“You know the drill. License and registration.”

That’s when I pause. “I don’t have my license on me but I know my license number.”

He shrugs his shoulders and his eyebrows raise. “Without a license how am I to know who you are? Out of the car!”

“For what? I didn’t do you nothing. Why you even pull me over?”

“Red rejection registration sticker. I smell marijuana. Out. Of. The. Car! Battel!”

“Bullshit you do. Ain’t nothing in this car.”

“Oh, mind if I look around a little bit?”

This is when I hear the sniffer-dog barking and know I’m tripping. How could I not realize he had the fucking dog with him? But shit, it’s Ruby’s car and I felt a tinge of confidence.

“Not a problem.” I look over at Nina. “This won’t take long, baby.” She folds her arms and looks away from me. I step out of the car and stand beside McDevitt’s cruiser with my hands crossed behind my back “for safety reasons,” with another backup officer standing next to me.

A woman cop arrives as more backup and walks Nina to her cruiser and they stand there waiting for McDevitt to start the search. He takes the German shepherd out of the cruiser and walks it up to the station wagon. He walks the dog around the car as he opens all the doors, and then lets it off the leash. It goes berserk and springs into the backseat. The dog jumps back out of the car, chomping down on Andre’s gym bag, trying to rip it in half. McDevitt looks at me and grins, then speaks into his radio as more backup officers arrive.

“Good boy, good boy. Who’s a good boy?” McDevitt pets the dog and takes the bag from him and returns it to the car. He unzips the back pocket and, sure enough, the motherfucker pulls out what I figure to be four ounces of weed.

“Click, click.” McDevitt looks at the officer next to me.

“You fucking planted that shit! No way you’re getting me on that.”

The officer steps behind me and I feel the bite of the handcuffs chomping down on my wrists. At this point pleas are for a later time and the officer pushes my head forward and takes a step.

“No no no no no no no … Officer, please!” The officer pushes me toward the cruiser and I jump up and buck back at him. McDevitt rushes in, slide-tackling my legs out and I start kicking at him. More backup crowds around and they are pig-piling on top of me. I feel a gust of wind and they’re carrying me now, chanting, “Stop fighting!” I watch the female officer restraining Nina.

“Jesus Lord!” Nina screams. She’s giving the officer a run for her money too. They slide me into the cruiser and the door slams. My skull is bleeding somewhere, I can taste it in my sweat. I sit up and look out the window at Nina as I pull away, and in some weird way this seems like one of the better things that has happened to me lately. I’m a piece of shit, it ain’t hard to tell. Maybe it’s time for this prostitute to pay his pimp.

I’d riffled through every bag of nuts, bolts, washers, and screws twice looking for my stash and found nothing. Maybe I shouldn’t have smoked that joint on the way home. My wristwatch beeped. I only had ten minutes until Drop Everything and Read time was over and my midday absence would be noted by my fourth-period science teacher, who would alert the office, whose secretary Mrs. Agnes would pass the message along to Ma and the assistant principal. Fuck, I muttered to myself rapid-fire as I rummaged my hands through the darkness inside Papa Tanks’s toolshed. Detention, suspension, or an ass whooping? Trouble’s a-coming, I know, but it don’t matter none ’cause I ain’t going nowhere without my trees—considering my last lapse in accounting for them, and how it resulted in Pop being accounted for ’round-clock by guard, iron lock, and key.

A cold breeze whistled the shed doors open and I thought I heard some rustling behind me. I turned around but didn’t see anything moving and in my high haze I dismissed it. The doors wheezed shut. Usually I could nose out my weed simply by rustling the bags. Frustrated, I began to throw and kick through the clutter of bags on the floor until I heard a few more distinct thuds behind me and I froze. With the shed doors closed, beams of lights broke through the cracks in the wood. Everything else was tar black. I turned around and
took a few steps, reaching out in front of me. Feeling nothing, I resumed my search and attributed the sounds to a mixture of the blowing leaves crunching outside and my own stomping around—until Papa Tanks clicked on his flashlight, spotlighting my face, breaking his stealth. He lunged at me and snatched me by the base of my neck, kneading his tamarind-thick fingers into the collar of my polo shirt.

“Andre, you crazy ’r wha?”

He thundered his hand across the back of my head. Neon fireworks exploded into my vision and I jolted forward. Papa Tanks spun me around gripping my chest, balling my shirt around his hand, and slowly pulling me closer to him. The veins in his forearm pulsed out his rage. He peered down at me and his eye smoldered. He held me still as I wavered away from him like a little turtle suspended in the air by its shell. Papa Tanks tightened his grip to a choke and continued to tighten it until I rasped out, “Pa-Paw, I can’t breathe,” and tried to squirm away. He took it as an act of aggression.

Papa Tanks drove a hand into my sternum, knocking the wind out of me, and I doubled over. He grabbed me up with both hands and pulled me in close and squatted back gathering his momentum and charged me back into the wall like a lineman. Yoked up on my tippy-toes, I felt my legs give out and I clutched at his forearm for balance. His eyes popped wide, the wrinkles around his temples looked like clenched fists. He reached behind me and rustled free a tire iron and held it above his head. My eyes snapped shut, cheeks quivering with anticipation. After a short pause I peeked at him and he bashed the tire iron into the wall next to my head, splintering the wood onto my cheek. My arms flailed out and Papa Tanks pushed me to the ground.

“Mussy-be dis. De reason yu mashing up de whole place!”
He spiked a crinkled brown paper bag off my chest. The aroma wafted out and I felt a fucked-up sense of relief.

“Mari-Juana! Andre! Why? You nah t’ink I see what you a’do. Me grun-sun running roun’ actin’a Al Capone, like we nah have bread in’ayawd? In truth, we all mus’ tek up our life wit’ God. Jus’ ’memba, an honest man’s sardine taste betta den any devil-steak.”

Shaking his head, he turned and walked away.

“Pa-Paw,” I called after him.

He ignored me and kept walking. He was a boss back home in Costa Rica. He didn’t repeat himself. The flashlight clicked off and he slammed the doors and the room returned to black and he was gone, leaving me clutching my product, lying on my back panting and bewildered. I sat up and glanced into an old mirror leaning against the shed wall but couldn’t see myself through the dust caked all over it. The wind flapped the doors again and I flinched.

“Fuck!” I grumbled. I punched the floorboards, stood up, and stuffed the weed in my pocket. I let out a long sigh. I slowly ran my hands down my face. Time to pull it together. Shit’s all fucked up—it always is—but for a change I sort of wished someone would save me from myself. All I wanted was a summer day when everything tapered off and I could run ball at Kelly Park all day and nothing really seemed to matter.

As I walked out of the shed, the rain stopped and the sky shattered itself into a sunny day. Me and Papa Tanks both know I know better, but the fact remains: morals can’t override hunger. Besides, I can’t stop hustling anyway. Not since Pop blew back into town, fucking my flow in true Pop fashion.

As I started walking up over the hill back toward school the silver spoiler on Smoke’s Honda Civic emerged from a
blind spot over the hill like a shark in shallow water. I wished I could go up inside their house and chill with Beezy, but Beezy’s at school. Plus, since Tunnetta, shit ain’t been the same. She Beezy’s girl now, even though I still touch her from time to time. When I reached the top of the hill I saw the ends of Smoke’s cornrows dangling out from the back of his Red Sox cap in the rear window. My heart sped up and I stopped and turned down a side alley leading to the avenue. Smoke wasn’t being very friendly these days.

Once the high school basketball season was over and AAU ball got under way, I realized I could extend my clientele—until Pop left my basketball game trying to convince Nina he wasn’t a piece of shit. He got himself bagged. If he had his license on him or simply kept his ass at the gym, nothing would have happened.

That shit’s on Pop more than it’s on me. It don’t matter where he is when he is gone. Jail or the streets, he wouldn’t be home anyway. He’d probably be in Lynn with his other family. The bigger problem is that Pop lost sixteen hundred dollars worth of product. The money was a matter I had to take up with Smoke. It was his product, really. Charge it to the game. I started small, but once the clientele’s hunger grew so did the weight I dealt with. This is also the point when the games were over and things began to unravel.

Smoke wasn’t hearing the whole Poppa-got-bagged story. One month. I had one month to get Smoke his money. Or else! And that deadline has come and passed and now I’m working for Reggie. Of course, he fronted me the weight. Trying to pay back two debts at the same time, I’m basically working for free.

As I walked up the parkway looking at the mounds of wet
fallen leaves, my wristwatch beeped again. Fourth period was well under way. I had fourteen gram bags to move and wasn’t going back to school. I still felt a bit hazy from the joint, plus Ma probably already got that call from the school office. I walked by the Tucker, my old elementary school, the shriek of kids playing at recess in the air, and I leaned up against the chain-link fence, watching them play.

A group of little ones stood around a rainbow-patterned parachute and raised it above their heads in unison. The parachute belled up into the air as they all ran inside and sat on the edges of the balloon, hiding as it toppled down on them, a wilted mushroom. In the front of the playground on a patch of concrete a group stood squat-legged around a silver spray-painted baseball diamond playing kickball, waiting for the next pitch. The smell of pizza floated across the playground, making my stomach gurgle.