After Death(17)



“You know what it means—pop a cap?” Aleem asks.

John says, “No.”

“It means shoot someone. You gonna shoot someone, boy?”

“Leave him out of this, Aleem.”

“Can’t leave him out of a thing that’s all about him.”

She says, “John, go to your room.”

Favoring her with a cobra smile, Aleem adopts a sweet tone at odds with his words. “Sugar, much as I love you, sometimes you’re a dumb cunt. This’ll go down nicer iffen you keep your mouth shut when I’m talkin’ to my son. Can you do that, sweet thing?”

She has sheltered John, kept him from all influences of the street. He’s a good kid, but short on hard experience. He’s not imprudent, certainly not rash, but there’s no telling what he might do if Aleem strikes her. He might interpret a slap to the face as prelude to homicidal violence. Even if he only wounds Aleem, what happens to him then? Not juvenile detention. But something. He’ll be taken by child-welfare authorities for psychological evaluation, be separated from her for days, maybe longer, maybe a lot longer. Bad things sometimes happen to kids when they’re in the custody of the state. She feels as if she’s on a wire, above an abyss.

To John, Aleem says, “They teach you nothin’ but ignorant shit at that Saint Anthony School?”

The boy stares at the gun in his hands.

“You pull a piece on a guy, be ready to use it, ’cause he’s gonna pull his on you, ’less he’s your father.”

From the moment that Aleem first spoke to her, Nina has not heard the rain beating on the roof. For her, the house has been submerged in the stillness of some horrific potentiality. Suddenly she once more apprehends the drumming cataracts, a sound that fills her with dread, as if a grievous and unstoppable fate is rumbling toward them on tracks from which it can’t be derailed.

Aleem says, “Do them priests teach you it’s righteous to pop your own father, a good way you get to Heaven, see Jesus?”

John is fixated on the gun that he holds.

“Only future matters, boy, is here in this one world. You seen your future, Johnny?” Aleem waits, and John doesn’t respond, and Aleem says, “What kind of altar boy don’t got the courtesy to answer his own daddy? Tell me now—you seen your future?”

“No.”

“Well, I seen it clear. You drink Jesus poison at school, get womanized here in this shithole house, then the rest of your life, you be jammed and jacked up by every guy with balls, till you can’t take it no more, till you go on the pipe, maybe one you’re freebasin’ coke with, maybe one comes at the business end of a fuckin’ twelve-gauge, suckin’ buckshot to get outta your nowhere life. You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You believe me?”

After a hesitation, John says, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t.”

“You better think about it. Think real hard. Better get down for yours like I got down for mine. I’m holdin’ down this whole county, boy, holdin’ it down tight. I got the power to smooth you into the set, get you up on it, make you a Vig. By the time you’re sixteen, you be rollin’ high, makin’ bank big-time.”

John raises his head and looks at his mother. He’s embarrassed for himself, for her.

“Look at me, boy.”

John looks at him.

“Don’t be no pussy. Don’t be no trick. Tell me you won’t.”

“All right.”

“Tell me. Say it. Come on, boy, let me hear it.”

“I won’t be a pussy.”

“Say it all.”

“I won’t be a trick.”

“You know what a trick is?”

“I guess so.”

“A trick is a phony and a sissy.”

John chews on his lower lip.

“No son of mine gonna sit down to piss or get on his knees for anyone.”

“Enough,” Nina says.

The face Aleem turns on her isn’t his, but instead the face of something that lies curled eternally at the bottom of the pit of the world, waiting for its hour to devour. Such fury, such malevolence, such thirst for power, such an appetite for violence have never before so keenly whetted his stare and clarified in his features. “You want to keep your teeth, then shut your damn mouth.” He means it. He will badly hurt her.

John issues a thin sound of pure torment. Although the pistol is still pointed at the floor, it swings back and forth like the pendulum in a grandfather clock, as if counting seconds toward a moment never to be forgotten or redeemed.

To the boy, Aleem says, “You my own blood. I can’t but love my own blood. You know how much I love you?”

John continues to make that grievous noise.

“I love you so much, I won’t never let no Christer or no Oprah wannabe take the starch outta you, turn you into a pussy lawn boy or head-duckin’ wage slave. I’ll kill you ’fore I see you brought down from a full man to some pathetic crawlin’ thing that shames me ’fore the world. Thirteen is old enough to make your name, be where it’s at, makin’ the rules ’stead of livin’ by the man’s rules, do a bitch whenever you want one. I’m gettin’ a sweet place ready for you. I’m settin’ it up nice and tight. So you better get yourself ready.”

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