Maurice Broaddus - King Maker

Percy leaned over her. Rhianna. The warmth of her brushed against his cheek. He took in a deep breath. Flowers and powder, a gentle scent. Peaceful. The ring grew hot in his hand. He lost the heart to continue going through her things. It was a violation. He ran his finger along her face. Gripped by the panic that always seized him when around her, that sense that he might break her, he scuttled out the window.

"Anything?" Miss Jane demanded.

"No, Momma." The ring burned in his pocket. A memento.

Miss Jane read his face. The boy was flushed to the point of blushing and refused to meet her eyes. He was lying about something. His pants bulged in front. She smiled.

"Come on. Nothing going on out here. Let me see if I can get you taken care of."

Burger Chef to Hardees to Burger King to Big Belly; the restaurants which occupied this spot changed with the neighborhood. Ghetto to projects to hood. The evolution of poverty. The names changed but the problems remained the same. Miss Jane leaned heavily against a car.

"What are we waiting for, Momma?"

"Between your father and mine…" She broke off her initial sentence, re-thinking the tack she wished to take with him. "Pussy makes you stupid. Remember that, boy. You can't be in it for love. There's no love in pussy. Only want."

The bad words made Percy turn his head.

"You like Superman."

"I am?"

"Yeah, you know. He all super strong an' all, but he has to go through life all cautious. He can't just relax. He fuck around and break a ho. That's you. Everything you do is so… tentative."

"Tentative." He rolled the word around in his mind. "I like that."

"Here's my girl now."

A woman sauntered toward them in an exaggerated gait. Her burnt almond complexion and high cheekbones framed a generous mouth, with lips filled to an exaggerated fullness. Her blonde extensions twisted into braids. Wearing low-cut blue jean shorts and a green halter top, her full breasts too easily visible, Percy was embarrassed for her.

"Girl, how you been?"

"Still in the game," Miss Jane said.

"You a soldier to the end. Who do we have here?"

"This is my oldest. Percy."

"He turning out to be quite the man."

Percy wondered if he ought to open his mouth and let her check his teeth, the way horses did when being appraised.

"Sometimes a momma has to look out for her boy. Teach him to be a man." Directly in front of him, Miss Jane unbuttoned his shirt and lifted it over her head. She beamed with pride at her baby boy. His premature "out of shape with middle age spread" of a body not all that different from the baby she bathed in the kitchen sink so long ago. She tugged at his belt, slipping it free from the pant loops. His pants fell to the ground, but his gaze remained fixed on hers. "He's always been a shy boy."

"I don't mind the shy ones." Her friend ran her hand up along the inside of his leg. He was suddenly aware of two things: one, just how close he had been standing to her, and two, that he had a raging hard-on that threatened to poke her eye out if she leaned in any closer. "I wanted to confirm how deep you were."

"Momma?"

"Hush, baby. Momma knows what she's doing. You'll be all right."

She stripped him to his boxers and thermal kneehigh tube socks — it was cold out and he always made a point of dressing properly. Folding his clothes, she set them in a pile next to her. He didn't want to lose his virginity, especially this way. Percy began to cry.

"Look at this motherfucker here."

"He always had a problem dealing with people," Miss Jane said.

"He's obviously not ready to handle all of this." She passed her hand down her body to show off her voluptuous figure. "Tell you what, though. I'll suck him off real good."

Her hands encircled the outline of his penis. His eyes fixed on her mouth. Brown lipstick smoldered on lips traced with black liner. A mole dotted her chin on the left. She might as well have drawn a bull'seye on her face. She took him into her mouth and seemed to hold him there for eternity.

Lott Carey woke from strange dreams every hour. That was when fatigue got to him so much as to allow him to drift off into the fitful thing he called sleep. He dreamt of blood and battles, of swords and death, of love and pain. It was his calling, his destiny, and his gift. He knew he'd never know peace. So he flipped through the motel cable channels as if on this third time through there might be something on worth watching. Better the perils of late-night television than the visions that tormented him whenever he closed his eyes lately. A baleful glare over a reptilian spread of teeth, no more than a glimpse, but the familiar sensation sent terror spreading through his soul like embalming fluid poured into a corpse.

On the outskirts of Speedway, the Speedway Lodge, formerly a Howard Johnson's, cost just over a hundred a week to stay. Just off the Crawfordsville Road thoroughfare that led to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the stretch was tourist-friendly year-round; but if there wasn't a race going on, the motel was largely deserted. And worse, it offered few amenities to alleviate boredom. Lott couldn't even distract himself with his cell phone as it had been cut off earlier that day. He had let his cousin talk him into sharing a plan with him because his cousin couldn't get a plan on his own. Ignoring the voice warning him not to do business with family, Lott agreed. The first bill arrived and his cousin had run up over three hundred dollars in texting charges alone and offered to pay him fifty bucks on it out of his next check. Lott never even received the fifty. Another in the long list of reasons for him to stay away from family.

His mother was a fiend. Always working an angle, she named him for a missionary in hopes of impressing some deacons at the church. It worked until they caught her breaking into the office to steal the petty cash. They moved into Section 8 housing, his moms little more than an industrious junkie who knew how to work the system. Even now, Lott suspected that her head bobbed up and down in the lap of a neighbor so that she could score enough to get back to sucking on a glass dick. Of his two brothers, one was barely functional and the other in the ground. He was staying with his sister, but she abruptly kicked him out. He couldn't tell if she was bipolar or simply back on drugs.

Turning off the television, Lott decided to indulge his one vice and went out for a smoke. It was needless, too, because he wasn't addicted. There was no physical urge, his brain didn't get the rush others did. He smoked… just cause. It was something to do and gave him time to think. The outside view didn't offer much by way of distraction. His neighbors mostly paid for their rooms by the hour. One glance of his concrete dour expression and they let him be, though he took no joy in appearing hard. At the thought of having to adopt that affectation, he spat on the sidewalk. However, the role of being hard was a community expectation, a fixed mask, though he had no heart for death, his or anyone else's. Occasionally, he forced a smile for one of the regular pros whose faces he'd come to recognize, otherwise he continued the pantomime of armor needed for survival. Thus he rose up quickly on the streets with a reputation for being a loner until he hooked up with King. They had been boys for a minute, though, truth be told, while Lott was tougher and a better fighter, King had greater heart and will. He'd told King to stop through, but the parking lot remained empty and bleak.

His evening's boredom sufficiently broken up, Lott flopped on his bed and opened one of the six books he picked up from the library. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. Walter Mosley's Futureland. Machiavelli's The Prince. Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Gary Braunbeck's Destinations Unknown. And the book which caught his attention this evening, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. He remembered his fifthgrade teacher who rarely spoke to him and never called on him in class. She had already written him off as another street tough and had no expectations of him beyond, hopefully, him not disrupting class so that the other students could learn. Public school became a death by discouragement with him, the memory of which often had him wondering how many boys she'd derailed by not believing in them, by teaching them that they had already been written off. College was a dream he clung to as he struggled to pull together ends. Once he passed his GED. After he got his license. After he paid off the tickets from driving his sister's car without a license. There was always some roadblock in his map of plans.