Cake Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2008 D

  eISBN: 978-1-617750-86-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-54-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007939599

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  The Armory

  c/o Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  START

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  11.

  START

  There’s no time like the first time. Because it’s the first time that you can never shake loose. You see the make-believe version of murder all the time. You cheer for that shit on the big screen. You can’t wait for the point when the bad guy’s soul evacuates its temple so that he can be judged from up above. But it ain’t the same thing in the real world.

  In real life, the aftermath is a walking daymare. You can still see her face: eyes swollen shut, teeth cracked and chipped, cuts and bruises and broken ribs. You see your hand extending with a pistol in its grip. You remember just how little effort it took to actually pull the trigger. It was the night that changed your life, a change that did nothing but bring more changes.

  You can still feel the warmth of her mouth around your dick. You can still envision the way she made her titties jiggle as you came on them, white on caramel, your exchanges hidden from view by glass painted black. You remember the depth of her voice as she whispered what you paid her to say. You can’t believe that they made her into the bloody mess you capped out.

  But it wasn’t like you did it in cold blood. The men all around you in that house had clear instructions. If you didn’t pop her, they were going to pop you. Plain and simple. There was nothing you could do but the deed.

  “Trustin’ bitches is like trustin’ junkies,” Star used to say. He’s been dead for weeks now, his nine lives having finally run out, not from a bullet but some head-on collision in Kingston. What he was doing there you’ll never know. It turned up on your Google alert one morning. Another loose end tied. Chief and Will couldn’t reach that far, or at least you don’t think so.

  If Death wants you he’s going to take you, guaranteed.

  You thought it was your turn on that night all those months ago. But it wasn’t. You’re still waiting though. You know the sound that other shoe will make when it hits the floor. That’s why you pray every day. That’s why the first thing you did when you got back to town was get a new tool, a Glock 19 fresh from the gun fair in Conyers.

  It’s like the Brady Bill never happened down here. You tell some redneck’s girlfriend that you want to make a quiet sale. A few Benjamins later you’ve got a burner in a shopping bag and not a lick of paperwork to show for it. You keep it close—not close enough to catch a charge if some rib tip pats you down, but close enough that if you need to make a point you can get to it in time, wedged between the cover and the spare in the back of your ride.

  The other bodies that came after her didn’t carry the same weight on your soul. It had always been self-defense. And it had been God who made your bullets hit while others missed. You had just been a boy making deliveries. You hadn’t lived by the sword until that night.

  Six months have gone by like nothing. You don’t know whether Will and Chief are alive or dead. You don’t know if there’s a warrant out on you, or if there were any witnesses to your deeds. You walked away with a quarter of a mil and an Amtrak ticket out of town. You slept like a baby all the way down. That was one of the last times you didn’t expect to open your eyes and find a pistol in your face.

  You still have this funny feeling that it ain’t over, this sense that someone from your old life is still on your trail. It’s harder to change your name in a post-9/11 world, harder to hide when the right people can get all kinds of info about you with the click of a button. You feel like there’s this clock inside your soul counting down to the end of the line, and the only one who can stop it is the Man upstairs, if he so chooses. But that’s a call he’s never going to make for an asshole like you.

  1.

  “Watch this part right heah, nigga!”

  You don’t think Duronté has ever cleaned a real dish in his life. The whole place is full of napkins and plastic knives and forks, but he’s got a .45 stripped into a thousand pieces on the coffee table, polishing every part as if it came out of his mama’s womb.

  He sucks on the roach in his left hand until it starts to burn his fingers. Then he tosses it into the ashtray on top of a pile of what looks like hundreds of others. There’s a half-killed carton of shrimp fried rice on the edge of the coffee table. There’s no way in hell he should be this skinny with as much as he eats. Those particular genes of his must come from the other side of the family.

  The walls have wood paneling on them that probably got put in thirty years ago, back when it was stylistically the shit. There’s a framed photograph of his mother, Mabel, a big woman with Duronté’s name tattooed on her left breast. While most women get their tattoos in their teens and twenties, she got hers at thirty-six, right after he bought her a used car with money he’d put away after an extremely successful six months of selling ’dro to all the local wannabe high rollers, D-boys, and potheads who couldn’t find a connect like his in all of the ATL. As it turned out, that connect was Duronté’s old English teacher, who had been running a grow house out in Alpharetta for longer than either of you had been alive.

  Your cousin, despite his success, makes a lot of mistakes. It’s a three-man operation with no real muscle. His boy Meechie did three on an assault charge. That’s his heavy hitter. If somebody put him to the test, that .45 on the table would be the best he’d have to offer up. And that ain’t good. That really ain’t good.

  “C’mon, nigga,” he barks again, his eyes still glued to the screen. “You gotta check this shit out.”

  You shouldn’t be watching two guys fuck Ayana Angel on DVD, especially not with another man in the room. That’s too many dicks in the same sitting for any straight dude. Him even asking you can be considered a violation of etiquette. But there’s something about the way Ayana’s tremendously round ass swings like a piece on a chain, the click of those suicidally high heels, that makes you say fuck it and plop down on the couch. You haven’t had pussy since Brooklyn. You’ve been too scared, too worried that the life that 250 Gs built for you won’t be enough.

  “You know she live up in Buckhead, right?” he says, as if he’s been plotting on finding the address. You can imagine him showing up at a porn star’s front door in a wife beater, cornrows, and khakis, looking to get laid. Broads like her charge by the hour as a side business, a way to make up for the royalties she doesn’t get paid from her bread-andbutter work.

  You’ve been sleeping on this very couch for a week now. It’s lumpy in the middle and reeks of old cigars and stale french fries. Your cousin’s second mistake is that he deals right out of his own house. His crew takes the bulk of it to some satellite locations like the car wash he has a piece of on Old National and the ice cream truck that circles Piedmont Park in the summer. But if you want a brick, all you have to do is dial his traceable cell, make an appointment, and walk right up to the front door. It’s a thief’s wet dream. Luckily for you, this housing situation is only temporary.

&
nbsp; There’s a place on Palmetto, just a few blocks from here and your soon-to-be campus. Your name is on the deed. But the Hondurans won’t be done with the renovations for another week or two. That’s why you dug up your wild-ass third cousin after finding his mama’s number in the file juvie services gave to you when you turned eighteen. You are their only living New York relative. But the real reason Duronté likes you is that you know how to act in the street, that you can point out the flaws in his operation, that you can help him to be more legit. You don’t need to stay with him, but you want to. He is now the only familiar face in a world full of strangers. Some of the same blood runs through your veins. And for some reason that makes his couch more like home than almost any other bed you’ve slept on.

  You told him about what you did for Star. You told him about the pile of bodies you left behind. From the look on his face you thought he was going to bust all over himself with excitement and admiration. And you used that to your advantage.

  Truth be told, Duronté went to private school growing up. He just didn’t have the grades to get into anywhere other than Georgia State. He takes, like, a class a semester so that Mabel will let him stay in the house rent free, the one she inherited from her mother while she was living it up in a marriage of convenience with some Polish guy in his fifties who couldn’t get a visa because he had a criminal record back in the homeland. She’s shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue while her baby boy sells sacks in the SWATS. That shit is kind of ironic when you think about it.

  But you’ve been playing along with it all, keeping your mouth shut and saying please and thank you at every turn. If there’s one thing Star taught you it was how to sell people dreams. Star had all kinds of muthafuckas walking in his door, some looking to do things for him, others looking for him to do things for them. The key was to make it seem like you needed them as much as they needed you. Use words like family and crew and patna and they’ll do anything for you. You knew what it took to wear the crown. But you wouldn’t have cared enough to do what it took to keep it.

  When it came down to it, the shadows were a world where you didn’t want to live. You had been a guest there way too long, and God had given you a free shot at going completely free. So you moved from there to here, from the capital of the North to the capital of the South on an eighteen-hour train trip that let you sleep better than you have since.

  As the goal is to keep up appearances, you got yourself the lamest hooptie you could find, an economy-size ’88 Honda CRX. You paid for four years of off-campus tuition in traveler’s checks and made your down payment with a money order that turned heads when you bought it at that check cashing spot out in College Park. The rest is in a box at the bank down the street. You’ll need a job soon to make your income look clean. Something quiet. Something that “normal” people would do. You’re “normal” now, after all. You have to remember that.

  Ms. Angel fills her throat with one dick and takes another deep into her pussy. You are both mesmerized. Maybe you will see her at the club or some grocery store, or even better, doing a feature dance run at Magic City or one of the other high-end strip joints in town. Sure, you can’t afford her, and sure, there’s something a little lame about going after what could literally be hundreds of men. But just there, in the grip of the fantasy, when you’ve got no girl and no friends and when you’re in a town you know about as well as the back of a stranger’s hand two towns over, she’s a nice little diversion from the day-to-day bullshit. But dreams can only take you so far.

  You stand up from the couch since your gracious host seems to be bracing himself for the cum shots due to arrive in a matter of moments. The door is calling you. You need to breathe.

  Everyone around here still calls it Ashby Street, though the city has officially renamed it Joseph Lawry. They did the same thing with Stewart Avenue a bunch of years back, naming it International Parkway to try to make the world forget that the hoes used to work it and that Club Nikki’s used to be right there. A lot of phat asses in this town. Too bad you can’t have ’em all.

  The drive-thru to Ms. Winner’s, the chicken joint, is packed like sardines. They give you a gallon of sweet tea with ten pieces of chicken. Nothin’ better than that shit when you’ve got the munchies and don’t want to go too far.

  There isn’t a cloud in the sky as you walk up the hill, passing the college gym on the left. If Brooklyn College had a sports team you didn’t know about it. Here they’ve got football and basketball and tennis courts and more black broads than all of Brooklyn combined. They took almost all of your credits too, which means that you can still graduate in four. Like the old saying goes: The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

  Your cousin explained that there used to be a bunch of projects next to the I-20 underpass but that the school bought them and made them into affordable housing. The only sounds you can hear are passing cars and the little yells of small girls playing double dutch in a parking lot, their skinny legs moving at the speed of light. Soon they won’t have time for these kinds of games as they’ll learn to go after whichever man can buy them the most.

  You and Chief had made a science out of dropping water balloons on double dutch girls from the open window on the fourth-floor stairwell back in the gardens. You liked to make them scream and curse even though they never saw who did it. It’s crazy—just a few years after that, you were both fucking those same chicks and trying to cover them in something other than water.

  You come up a steep hill past the broke-down supermarket and the community center with the park on the other side. You see drugstores and banks. A homeless man dances on a corner, hoping to score change in his Dunkin’ Donuts cup. He almost seems happy to be there. Everybody seems happy to be here, like they just made it through a plane crash the night before or something.

  If you were to head straight you’d find yourself in the no-man’s-land called East Point, a place where you’ve heard it’s good to have friends, where you shouldn’t roll on the solo. So you don’t. When in Rome you do whatever it takes to keep you and yours from getting your ass kicked.

  You turn left onto Cascade. There’s a man in a full suit and hat in ninety-degree weather speaking into a microphone about how the Lord is the only one who can save us from damnation. You wonder why those people think that yelling on the street is going to convince anybody. The only people you follow are those who live by example.

  A half a block later you’re entering what they call the West End Mall, a series of half-assed stores and shops that wouldn’t pose a threat to any mall in Brooklyn. There’s a wig shop and an athletic store, a 99-cent spot and a record shop. Plus there’s a pizza place and a couple of stalls that have shit like incense and hair grease.

  You wonder how in the hell this place has been standing for so long. You wonder what it’s like to grow up in a country-ass city like this one. But you have to admit it’s been good to see this many smiles, this many people asking how you are on general principle. It melts that cold feeling that’s been with you ever since that last night in Brooklyn. It helps you to feel normal, even though you know in your heart that you’ll never be normal again.

  You’re sitting on the kind of cake that could have you living it up at some club with some round chocolate booty grinding you. You could be driving up 85, the summer giving you a whole new layer of caramel. Instead, you park yourself on a bench and just watch the people go by.

  There are shapely sets of legs and potbellies, perfect asses pushing out from stretch pants and poom-poom shorts, baby carriages with squeaky wheels and cooing kids. A mall security guard the size of two Biggies makes his rounds, securing shit that in your mind no one would ever try to steal. This is your new life, kid. You better get used to it.

  “Somebody sittin’ here?” she asks.

  You look up to see a pair of eyes of the lightest brown, with a weave to match. B-cup titties are pushed together to make them look like a C. You can’t see the ass but the hips are perfect, the toes French-manicured and p
ainted a glittery gold. She’s definitely from in-town. But that’s not altogether a bad thing.

  “Nah,” you say.

  She plops down, holding a small bag from the greeting card shop in the mall.

  “So why you sittin’ heah lookin’ all sad?” she asks. Her voice is honey-coated with that real strong Atlanta twang. The vowels are extra long, the consonants extra short.

  “I’m just takin’ a minute,” you say. “Lookin’ at the people.”

  “Ain’t no people worth lookin’ at heah.” She grins.

  “Then why you sittin’ down next to me?”

  “You ain’t from heah, is you?”

  You shake your head.

  “New York supposed to have a tidal wave or sumthin’?”

  “What you mean?” you ask, surprised that she picked up on your accent so quickly.

  “Seem like it’s more a you down heah than us.”

  “A decent house might cost you close to a million in Brooklyn.”

  “Do it come with a pool?”

  You laugh, not knowing whether or not she’s serious. But from the looks of her, you’re pretty sure she’s never been above the Mason-Dixon. She may have never even been out of this neighborhood. But she still seems pretty smart, all things considered.

  “Nah,” you answer. “But these days you can usually sell it for more than you paid. Problem is, most people ain’t got a million dollars.”

  “I know that’s right,” she says.

  You glance down at her purse and see that she smokes Parliaments. Anything above Newports says you’ve got class. As she adjusts the heel on one of her shoes, you can see they’re from Nine West. Nothing to write home about. But at least her wedges didn’t come off some discount rack.

  “What’s your name?” you ask her.

  “Jennifer.”

  “Jenifa oh Jenny,” you say, remembering that De La Soul song Will used to play all the time.

  “What?”

  “It’s a song my boy used to play.”