“Holmes was waiting for us outside—he was this guy Jax had been running with for a time. He had this real sharp goatee that made him look like an exact replica of Malcolm X. We all stood outside the barbershop for a minute, shivering, cupping our hands and breathing into them for warmth. Holmes nodded to Jax. ‘You ready?’
“？‘We really doing this?’ Jax asked.
“Holmes nodded. ‘Let’s roll,’ he said and opened the swinging door to the barbershop.
“Right there in his barber’s chair, with a shotgun laid across his lap, was a massive bear of a man. That was Red.
“Red had two enormous front teeth with a gap between them the Hoover Dam couldn’t fill, and two prostitutes he pimped out, and five children he saw on Christmas, sometimes Easter, and a bright red shirt he always, always wore, and a ruby the size of a chicken heart on a chunky pinky finger. He was as big as a barn. You can see why the name ‘Red’ stuck.
“？‘What in the entire fuck are you doing with that?’ Holmes said, nodding his head at the rifle.
“？‘For y’all, nigga,’ Red said back. ‘I made an appointment with you, Negro. You. I don’t know these other dusty niggas’—and he makes this sweeping motion with his right hand—‘from Cain.’
“Jax spoke up: ‘I look like a cop to you?’
“？‘Nigga, was I speaking to you? I swear to God I wasn’t.’
“？‘God would be right, as He tends to be. You weren’t. But I’m speaking to you now, aren’t I, you fat motherfuckin—’
“That’s when I stepped into the center of the room and threw open my leather jacket. Red was stupid, but the nigga wasn’t blind. Any man could’ve seen the black gleam of my nine-millimeter.
“Holmes spoke: ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen. In the city of Chicago tonight…no, in cities across this country, can we not concede that there are a significant number of Black men killing other Black men? Let us not add to that number recklessly.’
“Holmes had a way of speaking like some old Confederate general. Elegant. Slow. He took a seat in an identical, but smaller, barber’s chair across the room. Crossed his long legs, pulled a pack of Kools from his right pocket, a lighter in his left. He held the lighter like a baby mouse in his hands, cupped around the shaft of the cigarette, and lit it. He looked like a daddy longlegs in that chair. Waiting. Smoking. Patient. Then the floor began to shake with the arrival and departure of another L train.
“？‘Here’s how I figure’—Holmes took another drag off his cigarette, blew the smoke above him in a halo—‘You can take my money right here.’ He tapped his breast pocket. ‘And we can continue our mutually beneficial agent-procurer relationship, or I can release them’—he pointed his finger at me and Jax—‘this storm of men, upon your Black ass and your Black establishment. Trust me when I tell you it would be wise to choose the former.’
“Red spit on the floor. ‘I don’t do business with niggas I don’t know.’
“That’s when Holmes went in. Said, ‘The Wanika tribe of East Africa eat their king when the old man dies. Take his bones and boil them in a broth they all sip for days, lamenting with hands and cries and drums. Red, which one of us niggas here you think will suck on your bones, old man, before this night is through?’
“Let me tell you something. That nigga had it coming. While Holmes was making his speech about niggas eating each other, Jax signaled ‘quiet’ at me. Red was creeping his fingers up the trigger of that rifle. He may have seen my nine-mil in my holster, but he didn’t see Jax’s thirty-six come out the inside lining of his new winter coat. Before Red could do anything, Jax shot that nigga twice in the heart. Pop. Pop.
“We rolled out after. Cut the Shelby’s engine in front of an abandoned cathedral on the corner of Dobson and Seventy-eighth. We partied all night. It was something. The nave of the cathedral was all mahogany and elm and pine that extended one hundred and fifty feet above and mounted to an invisible point somewhere in the darkness. The ceiling shone with gold. Every buttress and arch and stained-glass setting was painted in gold fleck. The gold paint within reach had all been chipped away: Addicts had stood on pews and altars excavating the gold, had left bits of fingernail lodged in the wood. There were fires in the holy water. The urns that had once held the promise of redemption were now makeshift hearths filled with red fire. And moving in the halo of the burning red glow, bodies huddled for warmth. There were bodies everywhere, August. Bodies strewn across pews with still faces of half orgasm, the settled look of the high. Humans huddled around the holy water fires warming brown, bandaged hands. It was the Sistine Chapel in reverse: skinny Black bodies crawling, clambering on the ground, searching this hard earth for a savior and coming up short. It stank of piss.
“Sugar ran it. Big redbone who Holmes was sweet on. Had been for years. Sugar was a big woman. Built like Cleopatra must have looked sitting atop her gilded chariot crossing the Nile; she was six feet tall and the color of a saddle. She let us in muttering to herself that it was always her curse to trust Black men, that they’d be the death of her, that Holmes was her favorite Achilles’ heel. She took Holmes’s hand and led him behind a heavy crimson curtain that half-hid a long line of confessional boxes.
“I don’t remember much after that. Must have fell asleep in a pew. High out of my mind. But I do remember waking up to screaming. Jax was just hollering. Calling out, ‘Holmes! Holmes!’ over and over.
“Holmes was sitting upright in a pew, but something about the angle of his body didn’t look right. His head was hanging all the way back on the top of the pew, as if he had thrown eyes to heaven and asked God directly what it was that He wanted. A trail of white spit dribbled from his open mouth to his cheek, then farther to his ear. His glasses—just like Malcolm X’s, too—lay crooked in his lap.
“Jax loosened the leather belt that was still tied and twisted around Holmes’s left bicep, all the while talking to him in lovely, choked, cooing whispers in the same tone of encouragement kind adults bestow on children lost in a store: It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be just fine. His hands were shaking.
“I had to drag my brother out of that hell screaming and crying, snot everywhere, kicking at the air itself and cursing God. A week later, I held the gas can as Jax shot his pistol into the dome of the cathedral, exclaiming that if these niggas wanted to see another day, they would all file out, and they did—filed out into the snow tweaking and scratching their faces.
“We set the damn thing on fire. You say what you want about the South. But I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life—that wretched church first in flames and then, later, crusted over in frost and icicles from the fire station hoses. That house of God morphing into an igloo of death. Damn.
“That same week, Jax enlisted. Figured he couldn’t take it. Riding around Chi in that Shelby without Holmes. He pulled that car into the nearest Marine Corps depot he could find, and I was the one drove him to the bus station early one morning.”