THUGLIT Issue One - [25]

Eyes flickering. Images floating.

The world’s gone red and I’m reaching, grabbing for her. She’s only a few steps away but like lost halcyon days, never within my grasp.

Spinning free.

*****

St. Petersburg, Florida-Tuesday, July 10th, 1979

The phone ringing and cutting cathartic tendencies short. I grab the receiver and check the time on a glowing bedside clock-11:00-straight up.

“Yeah.”

“Preston Street. Head south off 15th Avenue, a few houses up on your left. Little white shack, bare yard, maroon Crown Vic in the drive. You’ll know it when you see it. Back door opens into the kitchen.”

Standing and straightening out stiffened knees. Tender skin breaks open and blood trickles down my shins and seeps through brown gabardine pants. The pain feels good.

“How many?”

Freddy sniffs. “Two Bloods and a skinny-ass whitebread. Cats be strapped and straight up flyin'. Bad scene, my brotha.”

“Whitebread-the cousin?”

A grunt. “Dig it. Half-assed prison tats on both forearms. Lightning bolts and I do mean Shazam! mothafucka.”

“My nigga.”

Freddy sneezes. “Just remember that, cuz.”

My pulse spikes as the connection buzzes a flatline. I drop the phone, slip on my shoes and grab a black, sweat-streaked t-shirt from a month-old pile of dirty clothes. I don’t even notice the sour aroma of body odor anymore.

Two clean throwdown pieces sit next to a battered gold shield on my dining room table. I clip the shield to my belt and then remember where I’m going, what I’m preparing to do and the price I’m willing to pay.

What I’ve already paid.

Past and present collide and my head does a drunken dizzy dance. I throw the television through the living room wall. Picture tubes explode. Chunks of plaster scatter across the floor and dust fills the air. I toss my shield into the wreckage and grab the hardware, goose a line of flake off the kitchen counter and make my way out the door.

Rolling. Constricted capillaries distend to make room for the river of blood gushing through my veins. Scenarios circulating. She’s been missing going on three days straight, her country bumpkin jailbird cousin off the grid just as long-and alive or dead, she’s already a statistic.

Childhood gone.

Innocence gone.

Morning headlines:

POOR JENNY HUGHES, TWELVE YEARS OLD AND JUST PLAIN GONE.

I grab another gear, drop the pedal, kill the yellow light at 34th Street.

Running east on 15th Avenue South. Hot. This city at night is a sweat lodge and visions appear in the darkness which I know aren’t there-hope in the faces of the hard young brothers who sit on front porch stoops of cribs gone to wrack and ruin. They’re guzzling malt liquor out of bumpers wrapped in brown paper bags. They’re smoking Kool Milds. They’re yapping about poontang. They see me with anxious eyes but don’t care unless I’m buying. The dollar rules, along with despair and destitution.

Teeth gnashing. Perspiration flows down my back and I’m sweat-stuck to the seat as I ease my foot down on the gas, the rumbling of the 'Cuda’s Hemi losing the battle against fleeting minutes screaming Tick!-Tick!-Tick! in my ears even as a realization begins pounding in my skull:

I didn’t call in backup because I’ve got no one left.

I’ve burned all the bridges.

Chances taken will belong only to me.

*****

Regret drives me. I’d given up being a husband to Audrey a year earlier. The detective shield changed everything. Days, weeks at a time away from her, 1976 as a stone blur. Faces-dead faces and scared faces and blank faces crippled me. Shakedowns and kickbacks were justified in my mind to ease the pain, making myself believe I was right.

I ran the gamut even as the grind wore me down. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. But against my will, she held me together.

She held me together until she fell apart.

*****

Childhood stomping grounds revisited.

Preston Street. Beneath the untrimmed Sabal Palmetto trees and shabby live oaks, faded turquoise and peach-colored houses loiter on barren sandy yards. Rusty bicycles with flat tires and busted chains. Old pots and pans filled with typhoid-infested water being lapped up by oversized mutts on log chains. Trash strewn from here to fucking there.

I cruise by my destination at an idle, a tiny clapboard bungalow with peeling white paint and aluminum foil taped to the windows, a shroud for keeping the heat out or the glare of violence in. I don’t stare and I don’t slow down. I scope the scene-this burg is disco dead. Check it-I’m just another Southside nigger out for a late-night joyride.

One block down, I park in front of a vacant lot void of spillover light from street lamps and kill the engine. One more hit and the blow clears my head, amplifies minutes giving way to seconds yelling TICK!-TICK!-TICK! while sweat runs down my nose and onto the hardware as I re-check their loads by feel in the darkness.

Ready-the.45 in my hand, the.357 backup strapped to my ankle. Jaw clamped shut, teeth ready to crack and implications leapfrogging in my head as I open the car door, knowing I’ve got this one last chance to stop, call it in and do this on the level.