Chasing Bliss (21 page)

Cyrus was happy to sell his rock and drive his nice car, but his mother wasn’t stupid, and she
knew what he was into. She promptly ordered his dealin’ ass out of the house and told him, “Don’t
you come back up in here till you stop that stupid shit.”

Of course, typical for Cyrus, he blew up at her and cussed her out. “You got a lotta nerve
judging me after the life you been livin’,” he said. “You got three kids with three different daddies,
and you can’t even take care of your babies. You a ho, and you ain’t shit.” And then he walked out
of his mother’s house…for good. The only time he ever came around after that was to put a few
dollars in her mailbox once in a blue moon, just so he wouldn’t be labeled a complete bastard, and
sometimes he’d snatch his brothers up by their collars and slap the backs of their necks if they
were around.

When Cyrus was in his twenties, he and some of the other dealers who worked for Ted and
Maceo—Khalid, Rome, and Herc—decided it was time for a coup. They knew there was no way
Big Ted and Maceo would let them build an empire right alongside theirs, so the plan was to
overthrow the government, to commit a mutiny and start a new regime. Cyrus and Khalid put their
heads together and planned the battle, and Herc and Rome were their enforcers.

Herc and Rome rolled up on Big Ted when he was a little higher than he should have been,
leaving a house party on Hart Street. Rome blasted Elmore, Ted’s bodyguard, in the chest with a
sawed-off, and Herc put his infamous .45 behind Ted’s left ear and pulled the trigger. Needless to
say, it was a closed casket for Ted.

Maceo’s revenge was swift and brutal. He wasn’t as smart as Ted, and he didn’t know who to
trust. He had a whole slew of people gunned down at random, grasping at straws and hoping he got
Big Ted’s killer through the process of elimination. For two weeks, Bushwick was a very bloody
place to be. Then somebody put a bug in his ear about them, and Cyrus had yet to find out who
that rat was.

They told him Cyrus and Khalid were responsible for Big Ted, and Cyrus and Khalid had to go
into hiding once they realized Maceo was gunning hard for them. Herc and Rome, along with a
small crew of dedicated soldiers, held Maceo and his vengeful wrath at bay as long as they could.
Eventually, though, Maceo got frustrated and started playing dirty: He figured if he couldn’t find
Khalid and Cyrus, he would start killing the people they loved.

Maceo had Khalid’s sister, who was eight months pregnant, gunned down when she was coming
out of the supermarket. That was bad—really bad—and Cyrus grieved with him. But then his
world changed.

Cyrus’s mother and brothers were walking home. She’d just picked them up and had barely left
the schoolyard when Maceo himself rolled up on her and shot her in the head. She collapsed to the
pavement, and the two boys went hysterical. She took her last breath with her head in Chase’s lap;
he was screaming, begging her not to go.

Cyrus never wanted the responsibility of looking after his little brothers, but Khalid—whom
Chase now despised—worked hard to convince Cyrus not to let the boys become wards of the
state. Chase was traumatized, shut down, and sullen when they came to live with Cyrus. He was
so sullen that Cyrus’s live-in love Sonia just gave up and moved out. Corey was a little different.
He was traumatized, too, but he was looking for acceptance and love, something like a mistreated
puppy. Cyrus could see it in his eyes. The boy didn’t want to be all alone, and at least for a time, it
felt like Chase had deserted him. He was vulnerable because his fierce protector was gone.

After their mother’s murder, Chase retreated into his own head. He didn’t talk to anybody for
two months. Cyrus didn’t understand him and couldn’t reach him, and he finally got fed up with
it. He even hit him to try to make him talk, but that only seemed to push Chase further away. He
hit him so hard one day that his tooth went through his lip. Cyrus noticed later that night, after the
boys had gone to bed, that the cleaver was missing from the knife rack. The next morning, he found
it under Chase’s pillow.

Cyrus left his crazy ass alone for a long time after that. Then one day, Chase got up and returned
to his life, but there was a look in his eye that he didn’t lose for quite a while, as if it took a minute
for his eyes to get some life back in them.

Chase resumed his life, and he also resumed his role as Corey’s protector—to the point that
he was knocking niggas out in the schoolyard every week—not fighting, but
knocking niggas out!
By the time he turned fourteen, though he was only average height and size, all the kids in the
neighborhood were afraid of him.

Cyrus felt a sudden pride for him, and he found that surprising. All that time, Chase only had one
true friend, a kid named Jayson Taylor; Chase called him J.T. Cyrus thought maybe he was the only
person Chase talked to during the two months when he wouldn’t open his mouth to anybody.

Chase cut Cyrus when he was fifteen, and he caught him totally off guard because it was the last
thing he would have expected. Chase would beat a nigga’s ass, but Corey would take somebody’s
shit. Corey was quite an accomplished little pickpocket. Even now, Corey had the lightest fingers
Cyrus had ever seen in his life. Back then, if Corey didn’t take something he wanted, it was only
because you didn’t bring it with you.

A man named Tyson ran numbers for some dude uptown. One evening, one of Corey’s
little friends dared him to lift Tyson’s wallet. Of course Corey took the dare, and he did it quite
professionally, but one of Corey’s so-called friends let Tyson know it was Corey who’d done the
lifting. Tyson was a gentleman about the whole thing since Corey was just a kid. He simply came
to Cyrus, told him what happened, and asked for his wallet back.

When Cyrus got home, he’d jumped all over Corey. He twisted his arm up behind his back until
he heard it snap, and then he stepped back in shock that he’d broken Corey’s arm. He honestly
didn’t mean to do it.

Chase picked that moment to walk in the door. His eyes took in the fact that Corey was screaming
on the floor and Cyrus was standing over him. Chase never opened his mouth. He just reached into
his pocket and flicked out a silver-handled straight razor. He lunged over the coffee table at Cyrus
and knocked him down. He swiped the razor through Cyrus’s shirt and cut him right above the
heart. “This is how easy it would be. Touch him again and I’ll kill you, Cyrus.”

At that point, Cyrus abruptly stopped putting his hands on both of them.

The following year, when Chase was sixteen, Cyrus found out just how deadly his younger
brother could be. It was one of those times when all three of them were together at once. They both
had been cutting up pretty badly at the time, and they were out of control. Chase couldn’t seem
to stop fighting, and Corey couldn’t seem to keep his hands out of other people’s pockets. Cyrus
figured if he took them out and tried to spend a little time with them, maybe they’d calm down. If
they didn’t, he was gonna throw them little ungrateful niggas out of his house.

He took them to see some action flick he could no longer remember the name of. They were
walking across the parking lot to Cyrus’s car. It was late, because he’d taken them to the last
showing, and there weren’t many people out since it was a weeknight. That didn’t much matter,
though, because those little niggas only went to school when they felt like it, and Cyrus wasn’t
much of an overseer.

Halfway to the car, Corey tapped Chase on the arm. “Look, Chase…it’s
him
! It’s fuckin’ Maceo!”
he whispered fiercely.

“Where?” Chase whispered back. Corey pointed, and Chase stepped away from them, walking
fast and soundlessly across the parking lot in his black Uptowns. “Excuse me, sir?” Chase said
when he reached him.

The man turned around, and sure enough, it
was
Maceo. “What do you want, kid?” he asked,
gruffly but not impolitely.

Cyrus could see Chase’s teeth glint in the darkness, and he saw his razor appear in his right hand
like magic. Cyrus’s own hands went over his mouth like a bitch when he saw Chase flick the blade
out. Everything went down in about twenty seconds.

Chase moved with a terrifying grace, moving behind Maceo and placing his left foot between
his legs. He put his hand on Maceo’s forehead and pulled his head back. The look in his eyes was
dreadful as he brought his blade up. “You owe me a life for killin’ my mother, you sack of shit, so
I’ll take yours.” Chase let his razor come down, and it went into Maceo’s sideburn. Chase dragged
the razor across his throat, severing his carotid artery. Chase grunted with the force of dragging the
razor through flesh, but it was lightning quick. Blood was literally
jumping
out of Maceo’s neck. It
was still so hot in the chilly night air that it looked like smoke was coming off of it.
That
was the
reason Cyrus called Chase Smoke—not because he’d most definitely smoke a nigga, though that
was true too.

Chase pushed Maceo away from him, and he hit the pavement hard, face first—so hard that
Cyrus saw several teeth pop out of his dying mouth. Chase walked away from him and back to his
brothers.

Cyrus became aware that Corey was almost chanting, “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” His eyes
were huge and staring and he was in shock.

When Chase got to them, he didn’t have a drop of blood on him. “Stop now, Corey. Everything’s
gonna be just fine.” He paused and looked down. “You pissed yourself, Corey. Come on.” He put
his arm around his brother and walked him to the car.

Cyrus followed, walking slow, because his asshole was pretty tight. For once in his life, he was horrified…
and very afraid.

Cyrus thought about all that shit now, riding shotgun in Khalid’s car, with Khalid demanding he
force
Chase to get rid of Wolf. The fact of the matter was that he wasn’t exactly sure he
could
force
Chase to do
anything
. Chase had been volatile and unpredictable all his life, and Cyrus blamed
himself for that, at least to some degree. But then again, maybe a lot of it was just the way Chase
was. Chase lived by his own rules. He decided for himself what was right and wrong. Cyrus also
knew there would come a day when he couldn’t use Corey as a pawn; maybe that day had come.
He had to find more than one way to get to Chase. He had to, because time was tight, and sooner
or later, Wolf would put a hit out on him and Khalid. They had to strike first. “I’ll talk to him,” he
said to Khalid.