Karma's a Bitch (11 page)

“Get up!” ‘Short and Stocky’ commanded, furious. “Yo Poo, this nigga think I need this gun to whoop his scrawny ass up. Take this, I’m about to show him something,” he snarled as he looked over at his boy and threw the gun, which Poo caught with ease and put in his large pants pocket. ‘Short and Stocky’ then reached down and grabbed Tony by the collars of the new button down shirt Jenny had bought for him the week before. He snatched Tony up, while blood dripped down the right side of Tony’s face. Tony grasped onto ‘Short and Stocky’s wrists trying to pry himself free but with no luck. Once Tony was up on his feet, ‘Short and Stocky’ pushed him back against the car and threw a right upper cut so fast and clean on Tony that it would have put Joe Louis to shame. Blood splattered in the air and along the hood of the car. Tony reeled and his head sagged to the side.

“Tone!” Instinctually, Scoop ran around the front of the car towards his friend to try to defend him, but Poo stopped him in his tracks and punched Scoop in the stomach. When Scoop tried to fight back by hitting Poo in the chin, Poo stunned Scoop with a hard left hook causing him to fall face forward on the hood of Tony’s car. Poo pulled out the gun his boy had thrown him and pinned Scoop down on the hood with it. Scoop could only watch as he saw Tony continue to get punched, elbowed, kicked and beaten relentlessly by the short brother. He was short but unhumanly powerful.

“Come on ya’ll, I think he got the point... Come on man!” Scoop tried to reason with them as he saw Tony fall to the ground on his knees, his entire face soaked with blood, trying to crawl away. ‘Short and Stocky’ booted him in the side and then kicked him in the face as if he were kicking a soccer ball. Tony fell to the side, staining the street with his blood. 

“Shut the hell up and be the fuck happy you ain’t the one catchin’ this ass whoopin’,” Poo answered Scoop, who was making all kinds of grunting and gasping sounds as he tried to free himself. “Ya boy a real dumb ass you know?” Poo asked rhetorically. 

By then Tony was getting stomped in the face by a size 10 black Timberland boot. ‘Short and Stocky’ was jeering at Tony between stomps. “You wanna be callin’ somebody a midget huh?...I’ll show you a motherfucking midget...bitch. How ‘bout I pound ya pussy ass into the ground!”

“Yo Trek, I think I hear 5-0, let’s go,” Poo said, finally releasing Scoop a little. Trek stopped stomping on Tony and looked over at his friend for a moment. Tony was no longer moving but Trek could still see his chest moving in and out. Remembering in his mind again how Tony had had the nerve to call him a “bitch ass,” Trek leaned forward and grabbed Tony by his shoulders to balance him up on his knees. Holding Tony up by the collar with his left hand, Trek reached his bloody fist high into the air and struck Tony across his cheek bone so hard that Scoop heard something ‘crack.’ 

“No!! Tone! Awwww, come on ya’ll he’s dying!” Almost wanting to shed tears for his boy, Scoop’s voice trailed off as he finally stood all the way up and witnessed his best friend slump back down on the concrete in a pile. Trek let him fall, and shook his own hand a few times to recover from the impact on his knuckles as he walked back towards his car. 

“Aiight, let’s go,” he said as Poo shoved Scoop one last time and then followed Trek back to the car. Scoop immediately ran over to his friend on the ground. Tony wasn’t moving and Scoop wasn’t even sure that he was breathing. He stood back up and looked around, watching as Trek and Poo drove off with their money and possibly Tony’s life. Poo had taken Scoop’s cellphone, but he remembered that Tony usually left his cellphone in the car instead of on his body. He stepped over his friend and quickly opened the driver’s side door to retrieve Tony’s cellphone from the seat. But it wasn’t there – Trek must have taken it.

Thankfully Scoop didn’t need the phone. Less than a minute later, he watched two police cars pull up on the narrow block and stop in front of Tony’s body. 

Chapter 6

Quanisha sat in the house watching the Maury show on her barely functional television. It was her day off and she would normally have her feet up relaxing, but instead she was uptight and disturbed. 

For one, she was upset because she had been getting a series of hang-up calls on her home phone ever since Tony had come back. The day before when she came home from work, she checked her voicemail and heard 12 hangup clicks. Her caller ID read 18 new callers, one of which was from her mother, one from her friend Saria, and the others were all private calls. She figured it was just a telemarketer. 

The previous night, Tony had left her a note on her dresser saying he loved her, was committed to making things work, and promised on his heart to be back by 2:30am that night if she wanted to talk. Quanisha had waited up all night for him to arrive, giddy about the fact that Tony had finally said the words she had been waiting for him to say for over six years.
Well, he didn’t actually say it out of his mouth yet, but he did write it in so many words
, she reasoned. She loved Tony too, despite all of his faults.

But when the clock struck 3:10am Tony still wasn’t home. So being that she didn’t know how to get in touch with Tony besides at his Grandma’s house, she had gone and found Scoop’s number from the black address book she kept in her panty drawer. 

She had listened to Scoop’s phone ring four times before she heard someone pick up and fumble with the phone. She heard some male voices in the background that didn’t sound familiar and someone referred to as “Poo.”
Who the hell is Poo?
she thought to herself as she repeatedly said “hello” into the phone before the line was finally hung up by whoever was on the other end. She tried to call back but Scoop’s voicemail picked up from then on. She left a message for Scoop and considered going out on the block to see if she could find Tony herself. She had stayed up until 5:00am, when sleep had finally gotten the best of her. 

“In regards to Talisha Evans, Tyrone, you are NOT the father,” Maury said as Tyrone leapt from his chair almost breaking his neck on stage. The mother of the child ran off the stage crying.

“Yea, yea! I told you!! Didn’t I tell you!?!” Tyrone yelled at the cheering audience, who just minutes before were booing him. He did his ghetto dance on stage, a combination of the chicken dance and the perkulator before ‘peacing’ everybody and walking off stage to go taunt the mother. 

“I
knew
that bitch was suspect,” Quanisha said to no one in particular. “See that’s why I can’t be going through all that, uh uh. I’m just not ready to be dealing with all that bullshit,” she said as she rubbed her tummy and looked down sadly. She shook her head at herself, because she couldn’t even be honest talking to her own self. The truth was, the three abortions Quanisha had in her teens had caused her to be unable to bear children, or at least carry them to term. She had been pregnant twice after the abortions and miscarried on both. The doctors were telling her that it was very unlikely that she would be able to have a child. It tore her up inside, and she would never admit it to her family and friends. 

Just as she was becoming more involved in her sad thoughts, her phone started ringing. Making a beeline for the cordless in her bedroom, she picked up on the middle of the second ring. 

“Hello!” she yelled into the phone, thinking it was Tony. 

The person on the other line hesitated, so she said ‘hello’ again, even angrier this time, and finally the person spoke. “Uh yea Nish? This Scoop.” 

“Scoop? Scoop, where’s Tony, he didn’t come home last night...” her voice trailed off as she realized that something must be wrong if Scoop was calling her instead of Tony. 

“Yea, listen, don’t go all crazy on me aiight? But something bad happened to Tony and me last night...”

“What?!?” Quanisha half asked for an answer, half screamed. 

“We got robbed, and it was bad Nish.” Scoop paused for a few moments trying to collect himself. “Tony was running off at the mouth and they beat him up, real bad Nish. Real bad.” 

“So... huh? What... Where is he Scoop? Scoop. Please. Don’t tell me—” 

“No, no Nish, he’s not gone but he don’t look good. He got some broken ribs, his face is really fucked up, and his eyes are sealed shut. He even lost some teeth they said. He’s at the Mercy hospital in Darby. It just crossed my mind to call you as soon as I got home and remembered I had his phone—”

“It JUST NOW crosses your mind? What if he woulda died overnight or something and you’re just calling me now!!” Quanisha screamed into the phone and then immediately hung it up. “Dumb ass niggas!! He knows my motherfucking number! Shit!” she said to herself as she grabbed some clothes out of her drawer. She threw them on, grabbed her car keys and ran out of the door. 

Tony was laid up, with half of his torso, as well as his entire head, bandaged in thick white gauze. The doctors had him restrained on the bed so that he wouldn’t attempt to move around and do more damage to his rib cage. He couldn’t open his eyes past a thin slit and was in excruciating pain until the doctors knocked him out with several doses of very strong muscle relaxers. They had him in the intensive care wing of the hospital until he finished going through some tests.

When they brought him in the night before, he was still unresponsive. He hadn’t finally fluttered his eyelids a little until 8am that morning. The doctors took that as a very good sign, but were still unsure of Tony’s condition. In addition to losing a lot of blood and a few broken ribs, Tony had been hit in the head so many times that they were concerned about brain injury and were almost positive that he may have lost some of the hearing in his left ear. 

The cops had questioned Scoop about what went down, but all he could say was that they had gotten robbed, and that the thieves had beat up Tony. He gave descriptions of Trek and Poo, but knew in his heart that there was no chance that the cops were going to track down those two and hold them accountable for this crime. 

Tony’s door creaked open and in walked Jenny, bubbly as ever, with her hands in the pockets of her nurse uniform. She had asked to be specifically assigned to Tony’s room during his stay, claiming that he was her fiance. She was in bliss at the thought of personally nursing Tony back to health. She figured that when he did get on his feet they could be back together again.

Jenny walked over to the side of Tony’s bed nearest the door and sat down. She placed her hand on top of his hand, which was restrained at the wrist by his sides. Tony stirred a bit. 

“Baby, how are you feeling?” Jenny asked, trying to sound like a mother. Of course, there was no audible response. 

“Do you like the flowers I got you honey?” she asked, pointing up at the vase of flowers she had brought in for him early that morning. “Let me read the message I wrote to you.” 

Jenny stood up and reached for the vase, grabbing a small card out of the top. She stood, leaning over his bed and began reading the card. “ ‘Anthony: They say that everything happens for a reason. Whether you’re well or whether you’re sneezing, you’re the reason for my breathing. And now that God has brought you to me again, I promise to love you like this paper loves my pen. Together with you forever; Love Jen.’ So poetic. I can hardly believe
I
wrote this! Even my name rhymes!”

Tony stirred again, and almost seemed to shake his head ‘no.’ Jenny continued talking. 

“Baby, I mean what I said on this card. I love you, and I promise I’ll never let anything bad happen to you ever again. Once you are back to good health, which the doctors say could be a few weeks, you’ll move back into my house and I’ll get you a job here at the hospital. That way you can stay off the streets. You shouldn’t be among all that violence. Maybe we can get married. That way I can really take care of you the way you need me to, and then I can put you on my health insurance to help cover the doctor bills from this stay.”

Tony moved slightly and his eyes fluttered a bit. He mumbled something under his breath and then whined something out a little louder. To Jenny’s ears, it sounded as if he said the word ‘yes.’

“What was that baby? Did you just say yes?” Jenny’s heart jumped and she gasped as she threw her hand with the card still clenched in it up to her chest. “Oh baby, you want to marry me! I do too! I mean, no I want to marry you too!”

Tony tried to lift his head to make it easier to speak, but it only caused an excruciating pain in the back of his neck. When he dropped his head back down quickly, it looked as if he had nodded. Tony just closed his eyes and groaned in pain.