Deacon King Kong(99)

When he was satisfied, he ducked his head back inside and closed the window. He sat down at his dining room table, glanced at the headlines of the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Amsterdam News that lay before him, then at the pretty young woman across the table. She was regarding her nails.

Haroldeen the Death Queen was in the same spot where Earl, that lowdown grizzle-faced stupid son-of-a-bitch snitch, had sat. She was working at her nails with a nail file. He stifled an impulse to curse at her and then said, “How’d you get here?”

“The bus.”

“You ain’t got a car?”

“I don’t drive.”

“How do you get around in Virginia?”

“That’s my business.”

“You fucked up bad. You know that, right?”

“I did my best. What happened was unavoidable.”

“I ain’t paying for that.”

“I’ll fix it. I need the money. I’m going to college.”

Bunch snorted. “Why you wasting your talent?”

Haroldeen took that in silence as she continued to work on her nails. He neglected to mention that he’d taken advantage of her other “talents” when she was fourteen, living on a street just like this one with her mother, hauling everything they owned in shopping carts from place to place.

He continued. “The basement door leads to the backyard. At the end of the fence there, if you push on it, it’s a gate. Leave here that way.”

“All right,” Haroldeen said.

“Where you staying?”

“With my mother in Queens.”

“That ain’t smart. For a college girl.”

Haroldeen worked her nails in silence. He neglected to mention, she noted, that her mother was busy cooking heroin with baking soda, flour, and water in one of his processing houses out in Jamaica. He thought she didn’t know. He also thought she didn’t know that he’d taken advantage of her mother’s “talents,” too, back in the day, when her mother was young. But that, she thought bitterly, was how she’d survived. Pretending not to know. Pretending to be dumb. A dumb cutie. Fuck being dumb. She was done with it.

“I’m gonna study accounting,” she said.

Bunch laughed. “You’d be better off learning to milk a camel. There’s no money in that.”

Haroldeen said nothing. She pulled a bottle of nail polish from her purse and started to paint her nails. She hadn’t been comfortable with the hit on those two boys. They weren’t grown-up hardened men like Bunch, men who knew the game and who had done so much to her when she was young and pretty beyond her years, with her long hair and milky brown skin and thick legs, wandering around with her shy, gentle mother who pushed their things about in a shopping cart after her father died, the guys squeezing her mother’s tits for a quarter and letting dope dealers use Haroldeen as a whore and a lure to set up drug robberies. “Bunch saved us,” her mother liked to say. But that was her mother’s way of processing pain. It was the daughter who saved them, they both knew. The social worker who helped them said it best. Haroldeen had read the social worker’s report after she left New York. “The daughter raised the mother,” the lady wrote, “not the other way around.”

Her saving came with a price. Every bit of hair on Haroldeen’s pretty head, care of her handsome Dominican father and pretty African-American mother, had vanished. At twenty, she had been bald. Her hair just fell out one day. A result, she assumed, of the difficult life she had lived. She wore a wig now, and long sleeves to cover her back, shoulders, and upper arms, which were burned, care of a job that had gone horribly wrong two years ago. Nothing was certain now, except for her lovely apartment in Richmond and the medicine she occasionally ate at night to keep the howls of the men she killed out of her dreams. They were horrible sons of bitches—men who set upon one another with welding torches, scorched each other with hot irons, and poured Clorox into one another’s eyes for the sake of dope; men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh. These were the men her mother allowed in her life. Her stay with her mother was more out of a sense of duty than anything else. She bought her mom some food, gave her a little money. But the two hardly spoke anymore.

“I’ll make enough money in accounting. I’m a saver.”

“How’s your ma doing these days?” Bunch asked.

As if he didn’t know, Haroldeen thought. She shrugged. “What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”

“You sound like a college kid already. Can you count your fingers and toes too?”

Haroldeen considered this thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I have to leave in two days. I’ll finish by then. After that I’m heading home.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I got another job in Richmond.”

“What kind of job?”

“I don’t ask your business,” she said.

“I’m the one paying.”

“I ain’t seen a dime yet,” she said. “Not even train fare.”

Bunch pushed back from the table. “You’re awful loose around the mouth for someone who fucked up bad.”