Midnight (57 page)

I could tell Cho had been observing me. I guess it was easy for him to see I was a bit anxious. Holding his reliable old knife in his thick swollen working hands, he took a side look at me and said, “Japanese girl make you into nervous wreck.”

•   •   •

Friday evening after Umma and Naja were secured, me and Ameer met up and went over to Chris’ house. Since he couldn’t get out, we went to him. His family was at church. He was home alone.

We kicked back at first and listened to some music. Ameer had some cassettes of new joints that weren’t even released on radio yet. It wasn’t so hard to get his hands on them, since all of the rappers coming up were straight out all of our hoods and could even be living in the same building with us even after their joints were banging on the radio.

Chris’ refrigerator was stacked, and the cupboards too, with juices, sodas, chips, and cakes. Seemed like they had more shit than the corner store. All of us chose something different than the other to eat and we each made it ourselves.

“Nice house,” Ameer said as he made a roast beef sandwich. “You over here living like a king. Don’t you know better than to let some project niggas in your place?” He laughed.

“This is my father’s house,” Chris said. “Don’t you remember the speech? Everything in here belongs to the Christian Broadman Corp. That’s dad. If I want something, I got to start up my own business and make it happen,” Chris said.

“It can’t be that bad. You got more than what I got. And your pops pays your expenses too,” Ameer said.

“Hold up. Far as I remember, I’m the only one here who has to go to work in the morning. Ameer, your pops pays your expenses too,” I joked for true.

“Yeah but I’m living like Hotel Six. Chris is chilling like the Hyatt Regency.” We laughed.

Later we played ball on his court. While I shook Ameer to the hoops, I told him, “Now me and you is gonna have to work even harder to win that money. If we get it, we still gotta cut it three ways.”

He laughed regular at first then his laugh grew louder and louder.

“What? If me and Chris won in the league, you’d want your cut too!” I told him.

“Yeah, but if he’s
not even putting in work
in the league no more, then it’s like he’s getting
more
free gravy.”

“True, but remember you said three is better than two. Two is better than one,” I reminded him.

“What the fuck does that have to do with this situation?” Ameer asked.

“We gotta stick together, watch each other’s back, keep our word to one another,” I said, and sunk the ball in the net at the same time.

“Oh yeah, what’s up with you letting us in on what Sensei been teachin’ you. You haven’t showed us shit.”

I turned to Chris. “You got any rope?”

“Yep, in the garage.”

“Go get it. I’ll show both of y’all something.”

Late Friday night when I got back on the block, everybody was outside like it wasn’t almost 1:00
A.M.

I couldn’t miss Heavenly seated sideways on the back of DeQuan’s Kawasaki. DeQuan was deep in a conversation with one of his brothers, named DeMon, full grown and twenty-two years old now, but DeQuan was still telling him what to do and how to do it, and how much heart and intensity to put behind it.

“You got something for me?” Heavenly asked softly as I walked by. I didn’t answer her or bother looking her way. I acknowledged DeQuan instead.

“Hold up, let me get in your ear,” DeQuan said to me.

“I’ll be back,” I told him as I kept it moving.

When I came back down I handed him the gold chain with the “Heavenly” pendant on it, wiped clean and wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag. I finally had a chance to get it out of my hands without stepping into one of her traps. Since Conflict’s only been dead for two weeks or so, she probably had not had enough time to start fucking with DeQuan’s head and to cause a rift between me and him who been cool for all these years.

“Take this,” I told him. “I found it.”

“It’s cool, man.
I know her
. She don’t give out gold. She collects it,” he said with a smile.

“What was it you wanted?” I asked him.

“Oh, sorry I couldn’t get up to watch your game. We had to work a lot of shit out at the wake. Some of Conflict’s side girls was up there fighting in front of his moms. Superior was tore up about his loss. The shit was fucked up,” he said.

“When’s your next game?” he asked.

“Next Saturday, May third,” I told him. “Brownsville Park, nine
P.M.
”

“A night game in the Ville, huh? A’ight, I’m in there.”

“I see you got Conflict’s girl on your bike,” I said, without looking at Heavenly.

“War booty,” he responded and gave me a pound.

I wanted to warn him but I didn’t. I knew that he was street-smart and used to dealing with the snakes. But she was a snake with no rattle and no hiss. She strikes, but there’s no warning or clues. By the time a man finds out something is wrong, she has already injected too much poison in his system and he can no longer be saved.

There was really no way for me to express it, without it seeming like I had something to do with her.

“I was speaking to Temirah Auntie last night,” Umma said at the breakfast table after
Fajr
prayer early Saturday morning. “She wanted me to come by her house tonight and discuss an idea that her husband had for her and I to offer a culture class for the Sudanese daughters who are growing up here in America. She says that people would pay to have their daughters properly trained and are scared to death of the changes they are seeing in their children who are being raised living in this country. What do you think about a class? Do you think it’s good business?”

“I’ll come home from work and take you over to their house this evening. Let’s sit down and see what they’re talking about,” I answered.

It was warmer today than it had been any other day this season. No use for a jacket, hoodie, or sweater. The sun took over the sky, flaunting its power.

I knew it was a good day when at around noon, Cho mashed his finger onto his picture on the wall, the one with him standing at the helm of a fishing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and asked me, “You coming?”

I smiled and answered, “No doubt.”

“Yes or no?” he asked again.

“Most def,” I told him.

“What?” he asked.

“Yes, Cho, I would like to come along on your boat. When are you taking it out?”

“On U.S. Memorial Day. The whole day, me, brother Chan, brother Yin, and you,” he said.

I was ecstatic. Nine months of dedication and hard work had finally brought forth the invitation I wanted to receive from the start. It was the birth of a real camaraderie between Cho and I, outside of cutting and cleaning fish and hauling boxes.

At quitting time, I was feeling sticky. It was too warm to wear my usual heavy rubber apron and plastics over my clothes. So I rocked today with only a T-shirt and jeans. My welding glasses were dangling from my neck. My gloves were stuffed in my back jeans pocket and I was sweating some.

I washed the guts off of my counter and hosed everything down.

In the bathroom I washed my face, arms, hands and feet just to cool down, feel comfortable, and smell good enough to ride the train. At home I would jump in the shower before taking Umma to Mr. Ghazzali’s house.

My gun was stashed and locked in Cho’s basement.

Downstairs, Cho’s cat must’ve been feeling the heat. She was giving up a constant purr. Or maybe she was just talking to the other two new cats who were trapped in the cage while she was walking around free. Maybe she was trying to figure out how to get her boyfriend out of the cage so they could make sweet noisy love in the dark corridors of the basement. I laughed at my own imagination.

When I reached down to soothe her by stroking her coat, I plucked a rose petal from her fur. I flicked it off and thought it was a strange find, a flower blossom in a cement cave.

At my locker, I shined my key light to get my combination right. I unlocked the lock, put my glasses back on the top shelf, and checked for my nine. I took off my T-shirt, put my gloves on the top shelf, and reached for a clean tee
when I thought I heard something. I stood silently to listen. Maybe the people next door were moving something on their side.

When I got silent, the noise I had heard turned to silence also. I put my nine in my pants and took a short walk around. I ran up on a camper’s knapsack, the kind the student tourists used to wear back in the Sudan. Theirs were packed and stacked and looked like they were carrying their whole life in the compartments of the sack held up by two metal bars. They even had rolled-up blankets and thin bedding on those things.

I got serious thinking how I always thought this underground place was a great hideout. If someone were on the run from the police, they would never think to check in the Chinatown underground.

In the winter it would be torture. But now that April was coming to its end, the floors were heated, the air was warm and thick, and the water underground ran hot, producing a steam room effect. There was a toilet. If someone had a grill or a burner, they could really escape from the clutches of the law living down here. The only thing missing was windows that led to the sky, moon, and the stars, and of course the light of the sun.

I decided to walk back upstairs and ask Cho if he knew about the camper’s knapsack down here.

When my foot hit the third step on the fifteen-step staircase, I heard the shower water turn on. And that sound was definitely coming from Cho’s section.

“What was I bothering Cho for?” I asked myself. I’m the one with the gun and the lethal feet and hands.

I walked down the three steps and moved carefully. I was trying to think like the trespasser. Maybe he turned on the shower to make me think he was still in one area, but had really moved somewhere else. Maybe he wanted me to walk
up casually so he could catch me off guard and bang me over my head.

I was up against the wall like a detective. Cho’s cat was looking at me like I was an asshole. I figured if the cat would run down the corridor, the trespasser would expose himself out of fear that someone was approaching. But Pussy saw the steam coming from the stall around the corner, which we both could not see into because of the way the stall was positioned.

As I inched down the corridor, making it up to the wall of the shower stall, I checked on the right side of the darkness before turning left into the thick of the steam.

A silhouette was seated in the corner clouded by a full blast of continuous steam. It was too pretty to be an invader. It was Akemi.

She laughed softly, covering her mouth to lessen her voice with her hand. The sound down here multiplied and bounced around the walls. I put my nine away, reached around and turned off the shower water to lessen the steam. I wanted to see her clearly. The water splashed all over my bare chest before it shut off.

As the smoke cleared, she was really there, wearing a paper-thin light beige dress, wet and pressed against her exquisite body. She had no shoes on her feet, her diamond toe ring glistened, her legs were twisted into a simple yoga pose for my pleasure.

She was seated on a fluffy blanket. On top of the blanket was a white linen cloth and a load of rose petals. She had made a bed for us in a hot cave, below the streets of New York, surrounded by steam. I loved it.

“
Mayonaka
,” she said, and placed her hand gently on the linen cloth beside herself, asking me to come over without words.

She didn’t even have to ask. I approached her, bent down, and laid my gun pointed away from her in the corner.

I could feel her fingers tracing my bare shoulders in the dark. My eyes were adjusted now. She ran her hands slowly over my neck, and both her hands were now exploring my face, like a sculptor. She went down my arms like she wanted to be familiar with each and every muscle and groove in my body. She began caressing my chest, then let her hand be still on my abdomen.

I stood up and removed my pants, my shorts, and my socks.

I lifted her off of the bed and carried her into the shower stall, where I switched on a dim yellow light. I wanted to see her. I wanted to see everything. And I wanted her to see me too, see everything.

In the soft yellow light she leaned against the wall in her paper thin dress, which was held together by only three white strings tied like shoelaces on the side of her body. Pull the string and the dress unravels, incredible.

When the thin cloth fell to the floor, her dark hair lay on both sides of her pretty shoulders. She was the definition of art. As my eyes moved down her body, some delicate and intricate body design was revealed. At first I thought it was an expertly drawn tattoo. Within seconds, though, I realized it was Sudanese henna. She had drawn a henna belly chain, each link life-sized and perfectly situated from her navel leading around her side to her back. The design was so perfect it clung and hung and rode her curves like a real piece of jewelry. I spun her around and the design wrapped around her tiny waistline. Like a real chain, it had a clasp, which was drawn above the split of her ass.

She put her arms up on the wall she was facing, stretching the length of her body so that I could get a rear view. She pulled her hair, which had now spilled down on her back, to the front so that I could see the detail of her second design. It swirled up and around her spine, a vine with tiny leaves.
The design ended with a drawing of two small leaves resting at the nape of her neck. A Japanese spin on a Sudanese tradition, unlike anything I’d ever seen. No henna hands or feet. Henna, for even sexier secret places.

When I looked up amazed from admiring the curve of her back and the wicked canvas her skin made for her artistry, she turned only her face towards me. I leaned in and kissed her. Her body slowly turned to face front, her nipples fully extended and brushing against my chest. She had her eyes locked into mine. “Please,” she whispered and smiled. I decided she was the sneakiest feline roaming around down here. And I knew she felt she had waited too long for me to give her what she wanted.