T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

As Achilles approached the Hummer, the big guy in the letterman’s jacket held out one hand like a traffic cop. He had a tattoo of a pistol on his palm, drawn so that Achilles was staring down the barrel of a revolver, like those decals that read, This Property Protected by Pistol. The dog pranced back and forth and whined. The man muttered something and the dog barked a few times, but Achilles wasn’t worried. Janice’s brother fought dogs in the old garage bay at the gas station, and Achilles knew what to look for. Even if he hadn’t seen the kid turn the dog over, Achilles would have known that it wasn’t the big man’s dog. The dog wasn’t in a defensive stance and didn’t position his body in front of the man. His ears were loose and his shoulders hunched like he was more anxious than anything else. The pit bull was a pet. He had his ears and tail and no scars. He seemed concerned about the kid who had just left.

Achilles held up the photo. The big man shrugged.

The man in the red jersey still sat in the backseat. Achilles slipped the photo through the half-open window. “Have you seen him around here?”

The window lowered, and the guy in the red jersey returned the photo. He had copper skin with freckles. He wore his auburn hair in cornrows, the rows on the side of his head woven into a diamond-shaped pattern and the braids extending almost to his neck. “This is the city of five-dollar whores and two-dollar hits. There’s a lot of folk around here, comin’ and goin,’ one-six-eight. What’s so special about this one?”

Achilles held out the photo again, holding his hand out until he felt awkward. “This one’s my brother. Look again. They found some of his stuff around here.”

“Brother? Ain’t we all?”

“No,” Achilles shook his head deliberately. “We all ain’t.”

The man laughed, opened the door to stretch his legs, and took the photo again. “I might have seen him around, but I can’t be sure.”

“How long ago? Within the past few days?”

He nodded. “Maybe yeah. If I see him I’ll let you know. You’re over at the old yellow house on Evers Ave, working with Tony Sharon and those crunchers, and Kevin Wexler with the scar.” The man pointed to his neck. “You know, the little one who looks like Prince.”

The big man guffawed.

The man with the cornrows leaned back into the car and stared straight ahead, as if signaling the end of the conversation. With a slight motion of his chin he directed the big man to close the door. Achilles leaned on it. “So you’ve seen him?”

The big man stepped closer. Achilles held the photo out again. Troy’s smiling face hung in the air between them. The dog whined, kids laughed, a window slammed.

The man with the cornrows stroked his chin. He spoke through a big grin, bearing his gold fangs. “Don’t this make your brown ass blue?” He took the photo, studied it for a moment, and handed it back. Leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees, he said, “You need to give up the ghost on this shit. Crunch crushes. The crush crunches. I seen a big fucker,” he spread his arms for emphasis, “a bodybuilder, looked like Lee Haney, get on his knees and gargle mayo. He had that crush. See, maybe this ain’t your brother. Maybe this is an animal.” He cocked his head to the side, studying Achilles, who said nothing.

He continued. “You can’t take him home. Listen to your pretty talk. You got shit. He slips up, pawns all your TVs and shit. Then what? He gets in that hole, they come gunning for him. He’s dying for the bullet, but you get your potato peeled. Then what? He hits your liquor stash. Fa-fa-flashback. He hits the locker room and comes back to your place with a crew of hos, and they fence your shit. Then what? Or you go on a three-day MLK vacation and this zigga turns your shit into a whorehouse before you can say ‘I have a dream.’ Then what? RICO Act, brotha . That’s your shit on the six, eight, and ten. That’s your shit stacking the shelves at the cop shop. All your favorite shit becomes the property of your least favorite uncle. And you still have to pay taxes.”

Achilles inhaled deeply, and deeper still. And held it. Remember to breathe.

“Pretty-talking zigga like you, you know you got matching sheets and an old lady who don’t want to deal with this shit, who does not want to contend with these muchos problemos. I hope I’m not making your record skip. I admire the way you come after your kin. That’s righteous. It’s straight country. Too bad it’s probably a waste of time. Most of these cats end up ziplocked, on the shelf at the cop shop, or on the six-eight-ten. But I’ll keep my eyes open. We’ll talk again.” He smiled wide enough for Achilles to see that the jewels in his teeth spelled Devil Dog , a glint that in some circumstances was an invitation to a bullet, and shined brightly enough that with an ACOG sight, he could reach out and touch him from up to eight hundred meters away, at night.

“We will,” said Achilles, stepping away from the door. Ziplocked? He smiled, picturing the bastard’s grinning head as a ripe melon rolling off a high counter, as Merriweather liked to put it.

“Not even you want to ante up for this. For true.” Wexler even knew their names. Pepper was the man with the cornrows. The big man in the letter-man’s jacket was Cornelius. Even after hearing that Pepper knew his full name, Wexler remained calm, telling Achilles, “My grandmother used to say, ‘Even a crooked limb can cast a straight shadow when the sun is right, and ain’t no one with good sense won’t stand in that shade.’ The dealers do some good stuff around here. They keep people from breaking into cars and houses. It isn’t like there’s a lot of opportunities around here.”

As he spoke, he worked steadily, up on a ladder removing strips of crown moulding with the care of one peeling back a bandage. His movements economical and precise, he moved along the ceiling two inches, removed a nail, pried the moulding out a bit, moved down two more inches, removed a nail, and pried the moulding out a little bit more. Achilles had heard the term “dental moulding,” but only while watching Wexler did he realize that the notches indeed resembled teeth. Wexler said to himself, “Nope. Not a lot of jobs around here. Even the local laborers only get a few hours of work at a time, and they’re paid hot shit.”

For the past few months, Achilles had gophered part-time at Boudreaux’s law firm on Camp Street. He envied Wexler’s focus, that he had a job actually doing something, not running errands for his potential uncle-in-law; that his only coworkers were the day laborers that helped load lumber for a few hours every few days, not guys like Keller, who insisted on speaking to Achilles in slang. After the film Big Dog City was released, downtown came uptown, and the vernacular went mainstream. For the last few months at the office, Achilles had been haunted by underhanded references to drugs because the white-collar workers had started talking like rappers. “Hello” and “What’s up, man?” were replaced by a catalogue of hip phrases that they tossed around like enthusiastic tourists armed with a new phrase book.

They stopped sharing rides to lunch and started rolling to the joint. “Call me” became hit me on the hip. Achilles said, “Hello.” They said, What up, folk? If Achilles made the mistake of saying, “What’s up?” they said, You know how we do it. And when he stopped nodding and starting saying, “No, I don’t,” they laughed. And when he said, “No really, explain it to me,” they only laughed harder, Keller’s sharp cackles ricocheting around the law library like trapped birds. Only a few years older than Achilles, Keller was a prodigy, the newest partner, a shining star, so Achilles said nothing, not even when Keller’s favorite celebratory catchphrase became the Chapelle Show ’s infamous Fuck your couch, Zigga.