2. Hammer
HAMMER
Funerals always had a way of forcing you to face how fast life goes by.
In retrospect, the years rolling by seemed slow, but when it was time for someone you loved to be in that casket, you never seemed to have enough time.
Pops would always tell us death was a part of life, and what mattered most was what you did while you were here.
I didn’t realize how crazy his family and lifestyle was for that to be something he ingrained into my and my brother’s brains at such a young age.
Back then, we’d go to a family member or friend’s funeral at least eight times a year.
And before my pops died, he expected both my brother and me to follow in his bloody footsteps.
As I followed behind the hearse to bury my oldest friend, guilt consumed me.
When I left the hood and denounced my family’s plans for me, I lost touch with a lot of my first friends.
Nathan was at the top of that list. He was a hood legend who had no plans to ever leave…
or stop selling drugs for that matter. Out of all the violent, crazy, illegal shit the fifty-one-year-old had been getting into since he was a kid, it was cancer that claimed his life.
That was one enemy he was unable to beat, unfortunately.
About two years had passed since the last time Nathan and I had seen each other, and even then, it was at another homeboy’s funeral.
He looked significantly different… smaller, darker, hollow in the cheeks…
but I chalked it up to him aging. It never crossed my mind that my boy was sick and would be transitioning soon.
Though we hadn’t seen each other in years, we still checked in with each other twice a month and sent each other monetary gifts on Christmas and our birthdays.
But now that he was gone, I realized that wasn’t enough.
I’d rather him be on Earth and we not talk or see each other by choice, than to know he was gone, and we’d never be able to see each other again.
That was a different kind of pain when you couldn’t talk to or see someone because they were no longer here.
I replayed his sister’s words of comfort at the funeral—grief was just leftover love that you can’t give to that person physically—as tears filled my eyes.
This shit was going to be harder than I thought.
Once I’d parked at the cemetery, I took a shot of whiskey and headed toward the plot. His people had already started turning up. A small smile lifted the corners of my mouth at the sight of them smoking and drinking. Quite frankly, I was surprised they hadn’t done so at his funeral.
“You good, Hammer?” Cujo asked, squeezing my shoulder.
I turned slightly to shake his hand, and it turned into a brotherly hug. “You were at the funeral?” I confirmed because I hadn’t seen my brother there.
“Yeah, but I didn’t go in. Couldn’t.” Nodding, I turned back toward the casket. Couldn’t take my eyes off it—off Nathan. “Your cousins here too,” Cujo added just as two of them stepped in our direction.
“Surprised to see y’all here,” I said, shaking Terry’s hand while Gordon mugged me.
“Just ’cause you lost touch and left the hood don’t mean we did,” Gordon snapped, as if his words were supposed to offend me.
Before I could check him for the disrespect, my big brother stepped in, as if I really needed him to.
“Fuck around, and you gon’ be in that casket with Nate,” Cujo warned, bumping into Gordon’s shoulder as he stepped closer to the casket.
It didn’t surprise me that Gordon, or GD as the family called him, had an attitude with me.
On my father’s side of the family, they couldn’t stand Cujo and me, and it had nothing to do with us.
Back in the day, our grandfather Bart sent my father, Gatlin, on a death mission.
I didn’t know exactly what happened, but things went south with Grandpa Bart and his partnership with Rey.
Rey wanted to part ways, and I think Grandpa wasn’t okay with that.
He sent his shooters after Rey, and my father was included in that.
Rey hired Merc to take them out, and he took out my father too.
For a while, both Cujo and I rampaged. We caught body after body, did drug deal after drug deal, and we paved the way for Gordon’s father and the rest of our elders to take our importing and exporting business to new heights.
Eventually, Mama got so scared she threatened to call the police on us herself if we didn’t sit down somewhere, but even that threat wasn’t enough to stop us.
Merc had taken out my father and grandfather, and since I couldn’t kill him, everybody else became a target.
It wasn’t until I almost lost my brother that I realized how senseless what we were doing was.
Had my brother died, I probably would have killed myself.
Once he learned how to walk again, we both decided to get out of the family business, leave the hood, and never look back.
Uncle Gordon hated the fact that Cujo and I left.
He said we were not only disloyal, but we also crossed a line because we didn’t allow him to risk our lives for his use.
That wasn’t his exact words, but him telling his nephews to go to war for him in the streets was basically the same thing.
His hate for us transferred to his namesake and the rest of my father’s family too.
The only people on Pops’ side of the family that we fucked with were Terry, his mama, and Grandma Charlene.
Everybody else alternated between treating us like trash or like we didn’t exist, which made it even easier to stay away from them and not give the loyalty they swore they were owed.
What they didn’t know was, over twenty years later, I got my revenge.
Not on Merc but on the man who paid him to kill my father and grandfather—Rey.
The hit wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been, because so much time had passed, and he’d gotten up there in age.
Rey had gotten so comfortable in his legit life that he didn’t even have guards on him at that point.
He begged me not to go after Merc, assuring me that him accepting the hit was strictly business.
I agreed, not because of some business-versus-personal shit, but because I knew if I went after Merc, his people would come after me, and that would be a war I left the streets to avoid.
I didn’t feel like I needed to avenge my father’s and grandfather’s deaths, but I also knew I’d feel guilty if I had the chance and didn’t take it.
In my adulthood, I was at peace knowing the man who pulled the trigger was still alive and well since the man who ordered the hit was gone.
Plus, my father knew what he was signing up for when he decided to live that lifestyle.
I vowed to not shed any more blood because of the choices made by my elders.
Not bothering to exchange further words with Gordon, I went and stood next to my brother.
“Don’t ever let him make you feel bad about doing what was best for you and leaving the hood,” Cujo said, cupping his hands in the center of him. “Our names alone prove what our father wanted us to be—strong monsters. That might have been his will for us, but it doesn’t have to be ours.”
A shaky breath escaped me as I accepted his words and locked them in my mind and heart.
I knew that already, but hearing him confirm it further solidified that we’d done the right thing by leaving.
It wasn’t lost on me that Gordon focused on just me and not my brother too.
He could act crazy, but he was no fool. I might have given grace, but Cujo had never been on that.
He was known to pop a nigga in his mouth just for saying some shit he didn’t like.
“I got so much blood on my hands I can’t even sleep,” he muttered with a dismissive shake of his head.
“Don’t matter what pills they give me; nothing helps.
I literally have to smoke or drink until I pass out to sleep.
Never mind the fact that I got bullet fragments in my chest and a rod in my leg behind this shit.
Trust me when I say we did the right thing, young one. ”
Patting his back, I confessed, “For your life alone, it’s worth it.”
Silence found us for a while until we saw Nathan’s father putting weed in his grave while his brother poured vodka inside. I chuckled and shook my head. Just when I thought I’d seen it all, his cousin put a lit blunt in the crease of the casket lids.
“We gon’ get you high one last time, Cuh,” Jason said, and neither I nor Cujo could hold our laughter in.
“Yo, now I done seen some hood shit, but this has got to be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes.
“These folks crazy as hell,” was Cujo’s reply as he stood upright from laughing so hard.
We stood around, surrounding the casket.
The funeral director mentioned to Nathan’s sister that they wouldn’t come lower him into the ground until everyone stepped back, and she said we knew that.
That was why we were hovering so close. Regardless of how much we wanted to prolong the inevitable, it had to be done.
It took the women in his family shooing us away, and once they did, they lowered my boy into the ground.
Hearing his grandmother sob and yell, “This the hard part!” was what broke me down.
I’d been able to hold my tears in until her voice brought that truth to life. I wanted to yell, to curse, to scream, to punch some shit. To rage. But the truth was, no amount of violent anger would dull the hurt and sadness consuming my heart.
I’d never forget my boy, and his death was the reminder I needed to not only live my life but also fill it with the things and people who truly mattered.
My blood family would probably always be small because I refused to go back into the business or apologize for doing what I believed was right.
If it was just going to be my brother, my mama, and me, I’d be more than okay with that.
But maybe it was time for me to get married and start my own family.
Because regardless of the bad influence my father had over me, there was one thing he’d said that was irrefutable: death was inevitable.
What mattered most was what you did while you were here on Earth.