Patrick Quinlan - Smoked

Lola read the book in two days, stopping only to eat and use the bathroom.

Still, she didn’t buy it right away.

The next day, a flyer slid through the crack under her bedroom door. It showed an Asian man flying through the air, kicking and shattering a brick that must have been suspended ten feet from the ground.

DEFEND YOURSELF! The flyer read. Learn devastating self-defense techniques from a master. At the bottom of the flyer it said Special Women Only Classes Available. Below that, her grandmother had scrawled in pencil.

Interested?

So she joined. What else was she going to do? She couldn’t stay in that room forever. At first it seemed like a joke. The basic techniques she was learning, she didn’t think they’d work on anybody. But times passed, and months later she wasn’t so sure.

She started to come alive again.

And as part of being alive, she began to think of revenge. They had stolen her old life from her, but now she had this new life. She was increasing in confidence, and with that newfound confidence came a new question. Could she get back at them somehow?

If so, how?

She began to keep alert for news of them. Five boys, one older than her by a year, a couple her age, one a year younger and one a year younger than that. Kendrick. Tyrone. Abel. Michael. Ishmael.

A whole year went by and she was still musing on this subject. She had changed – she was astounded by the things her body was capable of. It still didn’t mean she could take her revenge with that body, though.

Michael died in a drive-by shooting. A week later, Tyrone and Abel were arrested for the crime. A year after that, Ishmael was shot in the groin and then in the back by an unknown assailant or assailants. He lived, but he was paralyzed from the waist down. The rumor went that not only was he impotent, but that his member was actually obliterated. That left only Kendrick alive and on the streets. And he had disappeared.

Five years ago, it came to pass on a chilly evening in March that she climbed off the bus three blocks from her apartment and her dying grandmother, and began to walk home. It had been raining all day, and had just stopped recently. The ground was wet, the air was wet, and she could see her breath as she moved along. Just in front of her, a big man shuffled along in a long and ratty trench coat. From behind him, all she could see was the slope of his back, the shake, rattle and roll of his legs, and the fluffy crown of unkempt nappy hair piled on top. She moved along behind him, walking slow, watching the tall man weave.

The back was familiar, but she almost couldn’t believe it was him.

On this strip, nobody was around. Two young crack dealers lolled on a bench to their right. One said something to the other and they both laughed. Tall and skinny, they looked to be about twelve years old. They both wore big bubble TROOP jackets, their legs sticking out the bottom like pipe cleaners. They looked like some new kind of dinner bird, fattening up for Christmas.

Lola watched the big man approach them. He said something, but they shook their heads. “Ken, you used up all your credit already. Go on back to Gary, you want credit.”

The big man shuffled on.

The kid called him Ken. Her heart did a lazy barrel roll. It had been years since she had seen him.

She let him get another ten yards past the prepubescent dealers. Then she moved in. “Kendrick?” At first her voice came out as a croak and the man heard nothing. He just shambled along, bopping to some music only he could hear.

“Kendrick!” And this time it was a shout.

The two dealers sat up and took notice. Perhaps here came some of the family strife that was such a constant backdrop to the ghetto. This was entertainment. For two young men on the fast track to oblivion, this would be better than the lame, watered-down fare on television. This was real-life, messy, often action-packed and bloody, and without any commercials.

The man turned around, his body moving as slowly as the glaciers.

He was tall, a full head taller than Lola. That was the first thing that sank in. The next thing that sunk in was how horribly wasted he had become. His shoulders were broad, and so had seemed to give some shape to the trench coat as it hung down. But beneath that coat he wore a Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt and red sweat pants. Both were ratty and had holes in them. And he was skinny. The T-shirt, which must have been a small or a medium, clung to a frame that had once worn extra large. His navel showed at the bottom of it. The clothes had probably come from a mission somewhere that gave out such clothes. Summer clothes in the winter, winter clothes in the summer. He wore old Air Jordan sneakers with no socks.

Sure, wearing somebody’s cast-off sneakers.

He peered at her and she came closer. Closer, she began to get the smell of him, the funk of days without a bath, of nights on benches in train and bus stations. In the light of the street lamp she saw his rheumy bloodshot eyes and she saw that he trembled just slightly. An old, closed scar ran under his chin.

It was Kendrick. Times had caught up with him.

“Lola?” he said, squinting just a bit now. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Lola.” The second time he said it with a nod to himself, as if the sudden appearance of Lola now confirmed everything, as if this was the final rung of his downfall. He smiled a grim smile and showed the black spaces where some of his teeth once were.

“We got you good, girl. Stopped going to school and everything. That’s what they told me. Never saw you on the street no more. Yessir, we got to you good.”

She dropped her bag, much like she had dropped her books four years before. She stepped up, hands protecting her face, and gave him a front kick to the groin. She didn’t try to kick hard, she just concentrated and moved her body properly. This generated more than enough force, coming out in a line from her torso, her buttocks and finally the big leg muscles above the knee.

Kendrick melted to his hands and knees on the wet ground. He coughed hard as if to clear his throat.

Only a second had passed, maybe two. Lola resumed her stance, then fired a roundhouse kick that caught the side of Kendrick’s head. He fell over sideways and sprawled half on the sidewalk, half on the muddy weeds and dog shit that bordered the sidewalk.

Behind Lola, one of the drug dealers whooped and hollered.

“You go, girl! Bruce Lee, motherfucker. She fucked that ass up!”

The two boys laughed.

And like that, the anger evaporated. It was replaced by a calm and almost bitter disappointment. She immediately understood that it was a feeling to which she would spend a long time reconciling, maybe the rest of her life. For four years she had hated this bastard. No, she had more than hated him. He had become almost everything to her. She had trained for the day when they would meet again and she would be ready for him. She carried a carving knife in her bag in anticipation. She imagined he would be the strong and arrogant and evil Kendrick that he was at eighteen, not this pitiful character, already the walking dead at twenty-two. She imagined theirs would be an epic battle that would take all her energy to fight, and might take both their lives. Her identity, her life had become defined in relation to this man and what he had done. Her revenge had become her obsession.

And here she was, standing over him. But the victory was far from sweet. The ghetto had taken her revenge long before she ever got there. If she wanted to kill Kendrick, she would have to spend six months cleaning him up first, feeding him, keeping him off drugs, buildings up his wasted muscles. Otherwise it wouldn’t mean anything.

Kendrick’s breaths came in rasps. He was down and out, as far down as most people get without being dead. Drug-addicted, weak, cold, and now laying in the mud after a swift beat down from a woman wronged. It was a long walk back, and Lola knew that when someone had come this far, they didn’t even try to make that walk. It was too damned far.