Promise Broken, page 7
“What you talking about?” Her remark had gotten Asher’s attention.
Phyllis stepped out of earshot of the young boys in front of the store and motioned for Asher and Cal to join her. “A’ight, you ain’t heard it from me, but you know the boy Zul is home, right?”
Now there was a name Asher hadn’t heard in a while, except from the stories they still told on the streets about him. B-Stone ran the neighborhood, but it hadn’t always been that way. Several years earlier their block and everything within maybe a half-mile square was under the control of a kid who called himself L.A. Ironically, L.A. and Zul had been introduced through B-Stone. The two of them had a relationship that most only those in the know could really make heads or tails of. B-Stone and Zul were from rival gangs but had developed a friendship from both playing football for Central High School. Their two sides may not have gotten along on the streets, but on the field those differences had no place. Thanks to the introduction by B-Stone, L.A. started selling Zul weight. This is how he and L.A. had started to get close, much to B-Stone’s displeasure.
Though Zul was a gang member, same as B-Stone, Zul was also a businessman. He understood the dynamics of the game better than most and was able to set his crew up to run like a well-oiled machine. Gradually he started to expand and the more turf Zul ate up the more drugs he had to buy from L.A. It wouldn’t be long before he would become L.A.’s best customer. Zul was making almost double what everybody else was with only half the resources, and people were starting to pay attention, especially L.A. What had started out as a business relationship between the two of them was developing into a friendship. Zul was one of the few young dudes who felt like he was ready to play on a bigger stage. Unfortunately, before L.A. could attempt to pull Zul in, he was removed from power. His absence created a ripple effect that nearly divided the city.
When L.A. went, so did his connect and the next thing you knew the hood found itself in the middle of a drought. It was a bad time for the neighborhood because the drought had made people start to panic. Nobody knew where their next dollar was coming from so it forced people to get it how they live. Everyone who wasn’t out taking what they needed was trying to find the next plug. L.A. had left a serious void that needed to be filled. It was common knowledge that he who had the supply had the streets.
Zul was the first one to break luck and find a halfway decent connect. Since he was the one who had product at the time, people from different neighborhoods had to come and see Zul to get right. Including B-Stone. Zul always looked out for B-Stone and never charged him the same thing he charged everybody else, but B-Stone was never comfortable with having to depend on someone who he saw as equal or lesser than. It gave off the wrong message. Things would take a turn when B-Stone finally secured a connect outside of Zul and severed ties.
Apparently Zul had gotten it into his mind that since he had been the one supplying the hood that it entitled him to what L.A. had left behind. B-Stone felt differently. He had been a member of L.A.’s inner circle, so it was only right that he filled the void. The two agreed to disagree and this is what kicked off a beef that lasted almost an entire summer.
Asher had only just started getting money in the hood when the war between B-Stone and Zul kicked off, but he remembered how bad it had been. B-Stone had a whole hood full of shooters behind him, and Zul only a handful of loyal men. The intruder was clearly outnumbered, but Zul knew this. For him it wasn’t about how many of B-Stone’s soldiers he could knock down, but which ones. Zul had B-Stone’s guys chasing him all over the city and in the meantime, he had his people burning down B-Stone’s stash houses and clipping his most solid earners. For B-Stone it was a sprint, but for Zul it was a marathon.
Many said that Zul would’ve won that war had he not gotten locked up at the height of it. He had the misfortune of getting stopped by the police while on his way home one night and having a gun in the car. His homie who had been riding with him tried to take ownership of the gun, but the on-scene weren’t trying to hear it. For reasons that were still unknown to that day, the cops just seemed certain that when they ran it they’d find Zul’s prints on it, which they did. The whole setup stank, but Zul pleaded out to the gun charge rather than take his chances with a trial that may have been just as rigged as his arrest. Zul had been sentenced to five years, but according to Phyllis, he had come home in three.
“Nah, I ain’t heard nothing. With news as big as that you’d think there’d be some chatter about it in the hood,” Asher said.
“Unless he was trying to keep it quiet that he was home,” Phyllis suggested. “I hear he’s been home about two . . . maybe three days now.”
This gave Asher food for thought. Two to three days was a hell of a head start for someone like Zul. Rome hadn’t been built in a day, but he had almost taken a city in a month. “B-Stone know?”
“That ain’t my story to tell. I just dropped it in y’all laps in hopes that the information gets where it needs to be. I do drugs, not politics,” Phyllis capped.
“Spoken like a true fiend,” Asher half teased.
“Call me what you want, but at least I’m upfront with my shit. Ain’t no secrets with me.” Phyllis looked Cal up and down with a knowing smirk. “Let me take it on the hope before my slick mouth gets me into some shit. Good looking out again, nephew!”
“You knew about that? Zul coming home?” Asher asked Cal. He knew that the juiciest gossip in the hood always passed through Cal’s mother and his four sisters before it was put out into the hood. This gave Cal access to a lot of information by extension.
“I’d been hearing some chatter about him possibly coming home early, but you know every nigga in the hood thinks he’s a lawyer when discussing someone else’s case, so I never put too much stock in the rumors,” Cal told him.
“He’s probably gonna get out here and get right back on his bullshit,” Asher said disappointedly.
“Maybe, maybe not. I heard the nigga found religion or some shit while he was away. Maybe he’s just gonna come home on some cool shit?” Cal suggested.
“That’s the best-case scenario, but what if it don’t play like that?” Asher asked seriously.
“Ash, I already know where you tryna go and I ain’t tryna go there with you. The last thing I need is for your paranoid nature to rub off and start coming up with phantom scenarios too. Whatever is going to happen with that, will happen. Nothing short of God can change it, but we can’t let something we can’t control take our focus off why we got in this game. This is about a dollar, as it always has been and always will be,” Cal said. He was cold with it when it came to separating business from everything else. With him the dollars would always outweigh the deeds.
“Of course, I do. I just always thought that if the time ever came when I had to go to war it’d be over something I had a stake in, not what belongs to another nigga,” Asher told him.
Cal shrugged. “Every nigga who ever called a shot had to learn to take orders before they gave them.”
“And we got the necessary time in, ya heard?” Asher added. “I don’t care what nobody says, this shit with Zul and B-Stone ain’t gonna get resolved quietly. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool. It’d probably be in our best interests to wait and see how the first few pages of this book read before committing it to our library.”
“Spoken like a true scholar, but I ain’t never mad at deniability.” Cal picked up on what his friend was insinuating. That was one of the things he liked about Asher, his ability to manipulate words. Asher could tell you what he wanted without ever having to directly ask you for it. His wordplay could’ve easily held its own against any modern-day scribe. Asher could’ve made a fortune as a writer had he not already been street poisoned first.
CHAPTER 8
Promise was still floating when she got back to the house. She gave Adelle the cigarettes and instead of saying thank you she said, “Took your ass long enough.” Promise didn’t even care. After her encounter with Asher, not even Dell’s sour ass could bring her mood down.
She smelled something delicious and spicy permeating from the kitchen. Her aunt must’ve slapped something together while she was at the store. That was good because she was starving. Promise hadn’t eaten anything since the day before when she’d grabbed a pretzel from the Auntie Anne’s kiosk at the mall. She walked into the kitchen and saw Brianna standing at the counter, eating an oversized bowl of the leftover chili Adelle had made the night before. If Dell wasn’t good for anything else, she could cook her ass off, chili especially. And always with a side of jollof rice. Promise pulled the lids from both pots on the stove and found them completely empty. She knew for a fact that it had been almost half full the previous night when the food had been put away, but now it was gone. She looked back at Brianna and her oversized bowl, which held easily two servings or more.
“Damn, you couldn’t save me any?”
“I woke up a little hungrier than usual. My eyes must’ve been bigger than my belly when I made my bowl because suddenly I find that it’s too much for me,” Brianna said, before scraping what was left of her chili into the trash. She then tossed the bowl in the sink, which was now full of dishes again even though Promise had washed them all before she went to bed. “If I were you, I wouldn’t let those dishes pile up too high. You know how my mother can be.” She laughed and walked back to her bedroom.
“Little bitch,” Promise grumbled. She proceeded to wash the dishes . . . again. When that was done she made herself a peanut butter sandwich. She’d rather have had the chili, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. As she was heading to her room she paused at the living room, where Dell was sitting on the couch, enjoying a cigarette and a can of beer while she cackled with someone on the phone. For the briefest of moments, Promise thought about how easy it would be to whack the old woman and her daughter and get away with it.
By the time Promise made it to her bedroom she had managed to suppress her thoughts of murder. Her bedroom was the only room in the house where she could find peace, at least in spurts. Promise’s bedroom wasn’t technically a bedroom, but a storage room in the house that Adelle had slid a futon into and told Promise to work it out. There were still racks of clothes and boxes of shoes that belonged to Adelle and Brianna cluttering the room, but Promise managed to carve out enough space to where she could at least move back and forth as needed.
She tossed the paper plate that had held her sandwich onto the windowsill and flopped down on her lumpy mattress. She rummaged through the box of books she kept next to her bed in search of something good. In the box were also a few grade reports from school. Promise managed to keep them hidden from Adelle, but her grades in science and math weren’t looking so hot. And she was also almost failing gym because she couldn’t imagine sweating out her curls for a game of pickup during first period. Promise’s teachers kept telling her to focus on her studies so that she could graduate from high school and make something of herself. In a few classes, she knew she needed to put in extra work. But not in English. She loved English Literature.
Promise was an avid reader and had been since she was a tot. It was something that her mother instilled in her. While most kids were outside playing, Promise was in the house reading. For every one hour of television she was allowed to watch, she had to read for two. From the box she plucked an oldie but goodie: The Fix, by an author who she had become fond of over the years. She had read all three books in the series at least twice but they never got old to her. The main character, Persia, always resonated with Promise. Likely because they were both gluttons for punishment. Much like Persia’s life in the story, Promise couldn’t seem to get hers right either.
Promise had just hunkered down and was about to revisit the book when she heard a tap against her window. She figured it was the squirrels that lived in the tree on the side of the house and was about to ignore it when she heard it again. For a minute her heart fluttered. Asher had threatened to pay a visit to her window, but she doubted that it was him. She reasoned that most of what he was spitting had to have been game and tried not to put too much stock into it, but a part of her was hopeful. She tipped to the window and pulled back the pillowcase that served as her curtain. There was indeed someone trying to get her attention, but sadly it wasn’t Asher.
* * *
Promise came outside to find Mouse and Keys waiting on her. They were huddled along the side of the house like two burglars. “What y’all doing?” she asked, looking at them in amusement.
“Make sure your aunt Dell don’t see us,” Mouse answered, peeking up at the front window nervously like Dell was going to jump out of it.
“She’s running her mouth on the phone and drinking beers. She’ll probably be asleep before long. You know that lady got a low tolerance,” Promise told them. “What are you two misfits doing skulking around so early? It’s Saturday, so ain’t no school. And Mouse, you know you don’t crawl out of the bed before a certain time, even on a school day.”
“We come with gifts.” Keys held up a sloppily rolled blunt. Mouse wanted to skill it up, but he insisted upon doing it. The boy was learning, but still not quite there.
“And tea!” Mouse added. “Girl, I got some shit to tell you!” she said excitedly.
“Well, you ain’t the only one with some news. Guess what happened to me today?” Promise dangled. She was spoiling to tell Mouse about her encounter.
Before Mouse could cast her guess, Brianna came walking out into the front porch. She was drinking a glass of cherry Kool-Aid, peering over the rim of it at Promise and her friends. She had seen them gathering from the window and was being nosey.
“Can we help you?” Promise asked with an attitude, knowing why she was there.
“What? I can’t stand on the porch of my own house? Ain’t nobody trying to get in y’all business,” Brianna said, snaking her neck and rolling her eyes.
“You need to be cool, Bri,” Keys warned, forever the peacemaker.
“And you need to pay your rent.” Brianna clicked her tongue.
“Man, I’m about to rock this little bitch.” Mouse took a hostile step toward Brianna. She knew that Promise couldn’t touch her without getting in trouble, but she wasn’t under Dell’s care. She’d made it up two of the porch stairs before Promise snatched her back.
“Chill, Mouse. You hit that scary-ass girl and she ain’t gonna do shit but call the police,” Promise told her friend.
“One of these days I’m gonna give this little bitch just what she keeps asking for!” Mouse fumed. She’d always carried a genuine dislike for Brianna because of the way she and her mother treated Promise.
“I know,” Promise cut her eyes over her shoulder at Brianna, who was looking at them smugly. “Just not today. Let’s go to the park and chop it up.”
* * *
Before going to the park Mouse decided that she wanted to hit the liquor store. Keys complained because he wasn’t really a drinker, but Promise was all for it. She hoped she might have a second run-in with Asher. To her surprise, Mouse didn’t want to go to their usual liquor store, instead opting to go up the block to the one on MLK. This stuck Promise as odd, because Mouse didn’t like to go up that block. There were some girls on that end that she didn’t get along with. If she was willing to risk potentially getting into a fight that meant that there was someone on the strip that she was trying to avoid.
When they got inside the liquor store, Promise thought that maybe they were about to cop some beer or something cheap that they could split three ways and still catch a nice buzz, like maybe some Mad Dog, but Mouse bypassed the cooler with the cheap stuff and headed for the hard liquor. “This is the one,” she grabbed a bottle from the shelf that Promise knew cost at least twenty bucks.
“Ummm . . . Mouse, I only got maybe three or four bucks on me.” Promise told her. She couldn’t afford to throw in on that. She looked at Keys.
“She already owes me twenty from the weed,” Keys told Promise.
“I got it,” Mouse informed them and pulled out some folded bills. There were at least eighty bucks in her hand, twenty-five of which she slid across the counter to cover the liquor and a small cranberry juice to chase it.
“Fuck did you do? Hit a lick?” Promise asked in surprise. It was rare that Promise had money on her, but she had her moments when she could come through. Mouse was almost always broke.
“Something like that.” Mouse winked at her friend. “And here.” She handed Keys a ten.
“But I let you have twenty,” Keys reminded her.
“You wanna get high? Or you want me to run your money back and you can watch us smoke?” Mouse challenged. Keys shoved the ten in his pocket. “That’s what I thought.”
Once that was established they continued their journey. The trio took the long way to Lincoln Park, walking north on Washington Avenue. They found a dog shit–free patch of grass and squatted. Mouse handed out three plastic cups and proceeded to pour them all several fingers full of vodka, adding a splash of cranberry juice to chase.
Keys took a sip and made a face. “I don’t see how people can drink this shit on the regular.”
“To chase the pain away,” Promise joked, taking a sip from her cup. She wasn’t a big drinker either, but after the last couple of days she’d had, she needed it.
“If this is too strong maybe next time we’ll get some sacramental wine for your church-going ass,” Mouse teased him. “And pass that blunt off since you wanna be holding it. We’re trying to get blazed.” She plucked it from his hand. Mouse fired it up, took a deep pull, and held it in her lungs before expelling it. She immediately began coughing, much to Keys’s amusement.
“Good for your thirsty ass.” Keys took the blunt back. His pulls were a bit more cautious, and he managed not to choke himself as Mouse had done. The trio smoked, drank, and talked shit for a time. By the time the blunt was halfway done they had put a healthy dent in the bottle of vodka. Everybody was feeling pretty nice, especially Keys. His eyes had taken on a glassy look, and his words slurred a bit. If he wasn’t already drunk, he was halfway to it. “So,” Keys picked up, “what’s this big news the two of you are holding onto?”
