Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
Lucky’s Auto & Food Mart
Bayou Crest
Houston, Texas
RICH
I can’t hear.
After the second thump to my face, a high-pitched ring echoes through my eardrums and drowns out the yelling around me. Now all I see are mouths moving every time my face gets knocked to the left and to the right.
I choke out a grunt, fighting through the stinging pain in my jaw after another jab lands on the side of my face.
My head flies back.
I stumble until it stops spinning, but I don’t fall.
This is the part where darkness is supposed to come, but it never happens. I never understand what folks mean when they say they “black out” at Lucky’s. Shit, if anything, my world gets brighter here.
Crimson red blood dribbles down the side of Darryl's head in a slow crawl as he throws a jab at my nose.
I duck it.
The white crust around his lips cracks as he opens his mouth, flashing his deep maroon gums and missing front tooth.
He throws a right hook.
It lands on the area of my jaw that Dr. Borrowitz says I need to baby.
Another hard thump rocks my skull, and Darryl calls me a “bitch” under his breath—at least I think he did. All I know is that his floppy lips moved and spit trickled out.
All of my comebacks float around in my head, but never come out. Arnez always says only a weak motherfucka got time to pillow talk in the pit and it ain’t like I can talk anyway.
“Stop playin around, Pup!” she yells.
The bitter taste of metal seeps through the wires in my mouth when I step forward, bend, and take a body shot at Darryl.
My knuckles crack from being sandwiched between the pressure of the punch and the part of his body where Senior says a man holds all of his breath.
It’s like landing a jab on a brick wall with nothing but tape to absorb the impact.
He stumbles into me.
His eyes balloon into big yellow circles while he tries to hold himself up with my body.
I push him off and bury my fist into his scarred face. It’s a lot softer than his chest, so I feel all the little details that come with sinking my fist into it, like his front tooth cracking and the soft tissue of his nose caving under the pressure.
“Yeah, he ain’t talking no more!” Arnez hollers, breaking through the silence in my head. “Put his ass on the floor so we can go home, Pup. We need that. The bills is due.”
Like that bill from Dr. Borrowitz’s office and the rest of Arnez’s tuition and rent because she wants to live in an empty apartment instead of at our house she asked me to remodel.
But nobody here cares about my bills, or that Kenny has me training for nothing, or that I still can’t eat solid foods.
Lucky’s is always the bloodiest on the first of the month.
Darryl wobbles from side to side like my neighbor Smitty does when he gets drunk.
He pushes his arm out, grasping at nothing because there ain’t no real ring in the garage bays at Lucky’s—only the pit.
It’s just a big slab of oil-stained concrete with a circle of people hanging around its edges, so there’s no ropes for Darryl to fall into.
He sways into a group of old-heads until one of them reaches out to nudge him upright with their elbow. Arnez’s loud whistle rings in my ear, and the grey-haired man’s arm freezes midair.
“Aht. Aht. Men hold themselves up around here!” she squeals. “Touch him and you’ll be on the ground right next to him.”
I don’t know how I always hear her voice over all the other noise in here. She ain’t belligerent or running from one side of the pit to the other to get my attention. It just feels like she’s always right on my shoulder, buzzing in my ear.
“He likes that shit, Pup. That crazy motherfucka likes to eat fists!”
And I believe her.
Supposedly it’s Darryl's first time fighting here, but he came out of the crowd with a grin on his face. Some nigga told Smitty he heard Darryl bragging about driving all the way from South Dallas just to “knock the breath out of my body” while they shot dice on the side of Lucky’s.
He said Darryl told somebody he was gon’ stomp my ass so far into the ground that my people wouldn’t have no choice but to scrape me up.
Me and him never even met before today. I never came across him in the crowd here or bumped into him around the city, but that didn’t matter.
There’s a lot of other Darryls out there that hate me just off the strength of my name.
He gurgles out a breath and stumbles toward me again with his bloody fist up. It sways in front of his face while his eyes cross. His floppy lips ain’t moving no more. I guess he’s done pillow talking.
“Do it, Pup,” Arnez says. “Make him pay up.”
There’s no real rules at Lucky’s. There’s only a crooked “NO WEAPONS” sign somebody strung across the top of one of the rusty garage doors, and nobody is stupid enough to pull out a phone to record.
So a man doesn’t take a knee unless he wants to ruin his reputation, and the only time fists stop raining are when somebody hits the cold concrete.
Kenny says none of it’s right, but Arnez says he thinks he’s Jesus or something.
I wouldn’t know. The only time we went to church growing up was when Senior’s girlfriend brought us.
The most I know about Jesus is that he turned water into wine, and sometimes his name flies out of nigga’s mouths when I stop playing around and make them pay up like Arnez says I should do to Darryl.
Now this is the part where I’m really supposed to black out, but if I do, I’ll miss the best part of fighting.
I blink away a dribble of blood trickling over my eye while Darryl tries to take one last step back. His yellow eyes are lit just enough for me to see the moment he regrets stepping foot in here.
I lift my right arm and bury my fist into the part of his head where Senior says a man holds his strength.
His teeth clank together.
His eyes roll back into his head.
His knees buckle.
Then his beefy body folds into itself, landing on the floor with a loud thunck.
“Now go get his ass off the ground and run my baby brother his money…” Arnez says from somewhere in the crowd. “I don’t know why y’all out of town niggas think y’all special.”
“One-thousand…two-thousand…three-thousand…four-thousand…” Ms. Kathy counts my payout from behind the cashier’s counter. “And you got a thousand dollar bonus for that knockout. I saw it on the camera. I swore Darryl was gon’ bury your ass.”
She snorts, looking up at me and Arnez with the last few bills between her long ruby-red nails.
“Fourteen hundred goes to the house.” She flings up one of the bill clips inside the register and sticks the money underneath it.
Arnez clears her throat, resting her pale arms on the counter and ignoring the jar of Laffy Taffys she used to dig through every Sunday while I cashed out. “You know how much we got lef—”
“You know I don’t do balance inquiries. You wanna know how much you owe? Go talk to Rasheeda and set up an appointment with Melo. He’ll tell you. I just disperse and collect. I don’t get paid enough to do more than that.”
We’ve spent thousands of Sundays at Lucky’s, and Arnez has been asking this same question for the last ten Sundays.
She cuts her eyes at me and sighs.
I don’t know why she even bothers with Ms. Kathy.
Ms. Kathy’s been a bitch since before we were born.
Senior always said if Lucky’s ever burned down, she’d be the only part of it still standing because “old ornery bitches like her lived forever.” He said it was the reason Lucky asked her to take over the payouts when she finished ushering at New Bethel on Sundays.
He needed a neutral party to keep order over the money, and who better to do it than a so-called “saint.” Somehow she still kept her job even after Melo Barnes took control of Lucky’s.
“Here,” she grunts, sliding the rest of my money through the open slot in the bulletproof window. “Don’t spend it all in one place. Gon’ on away from my window now.”
Arnez huffs while I reach over her to snatch the money before Ms. Kathy takes it back. One time I saw her keep a nigga’s whole payout and give it to the house all because he asked her too many questions. She called it an “inconvenience fee.”
I thumb through the bills and count them once, twice, and then a third time even though there’s a whole line of dudes behind us nursing bloody lips and swollen limbs just like me. The hot skin around my eyes is so tender that it throbs every time I blink.
Ms. Kathy narrows her eyes at us over her cat-eye glasses. “Y’all holding up my line.”
Arnez backs away first with her eyes set on the line of hair above Ms. Kathy’s lip.
“Don’t…you…say…shit,” I mutter, yanking her arm and pulling her off to the side of the line while shoving the money in the pocket of my shorts.
She snatches out of my hold. “That old bitch been counting money behind that counter for over thirty years and you believe she can’t see how much more we owe? They even gave her ass a whole computer. She can see something.”
The fucked up part about having Arnez as my mouthpiece is that she doesn’t think before she speaks sometimes. Senior was always getting on her about it.
I pull one of her long braids until she snatches it from between my fingers and slaps my sore chest.
“Do you see me trippin?” I garble the words out because I can’t open my mouth all the way.
“It’s the principle. How’re we supposed to know what we owe if he never tells us or gives us anything in writing? Are we supposed to pay fourteen hundred to the fuckin house until we die?” she yelps.
The rest of the line looks over at us.
I pull her arm again and hold it tight this time. I yank her all the way past the line, back through the dank garage and out to the parking lot. I don’t stop until we get to my truck’s tailgate.
I pull the money out of my pocket and peel off ten hundred-dollar bills. “Hm.”
She frowns at it. “Tell me you’ll talk to Rasheeda and make that appointment with Melo.”
I nod.
“Pup…” she whines. “Don’t lie to me.”
It’s times like these that remind me that Arnez is still a woman no matter how comfortable she is in a garage full of men or how baggy her clothes are.
She still has that air of naivety about her that women carry no matter how old they get.
She still doesn’t understand that some things in life are permanent and crying won’t change a damn thing.
Her eyes well with tears and a ball forms in my throat.
She ain’t used to cry like this back when shit first went down.
But then the shock wore off, and we kept paying fourteen hundred dollars to the house like we were told, then all the Sundays started blurring together.
Now she cries every time we leave Lucky’s like she wasn’t just telling me to end somebody.
I push the money out toward her again. “Take it.”
She swipes her red nose and looks away while the setting sun shines on the tiny mole next to her bottom lip.
She doesn’t look anything like me or Senior.
He always said she looked just like her mama, Denise.
He met Denise in Galveston at The Kappa in ‘93 and she asked him if she could give him a baby as soon as they brushed arms on East Beach. She said he “looked like he needed some love.” He put Arnez in her that same night in the back of Smitty’s Mustang.
Her family called him nine months later to pick Arnez up from CHRISTUS so she could go back to school at Wiley and forget about him and the mistake she made.
Denise ain’t even bother naming Arnez, so Senior and Smitty did when they got to the hospital.
They named her after Smitty’s older brother.
Senior always said Arnez was the best mistake he ever made.
She wipes away a tear.
I try to tell her to take the money again, but my jaw locks.
The week after Dr. Borrowitz wired it shut, Smitty taught me how to relax my muscles long enough to spit a few words out. Now I can grunt out a sentence without feeling like I’m gonna rip my teeth out, but Arnez was pushing it.
“Take,” I murmur with a grimace.
She snatches the crumpled bills then stomps toward the passenger side of my truck.