From an armchair, his Common Projects sneakers propped on the footstool, Aleem Sutter says, “Girl, you’re still seriously fresh.”
She halts, rocking slightly on her heels, as if she’s walked into a glass door.
He says, “Time don’t work on you. How is it you look cherry as you ever did?”
Nina says nothing. She’s thinking about the pistol clipped to the bed frame in her room.
“Wasn’t you I come here about, but now I seen you up close, damn if I don’t got that old feelin’。”
“Go away.”
“Nowhere better to go.” He swings his feet off the ottoman but remains in the armchair, relaxed and insolent. “Back when, wasn’t nothin’ you liked better than a ride on the Aleem machine. My taste runs to high-school skirt, but you want to ride again, it don’t cost you even a quarter.”
“You’re a disgusting pig.”
His soft laugh is warm, but his eyes belie the pretense of amusement. “You always had some fire in you.”
“This is my house.”
“A shitty little place to raise a kid.”
“I told you to get out.”
“You said ‘go away.’ Ask a lawyer, he’ll explain ‘imprecise is just advice. To get a conviction, use the right diction.’ I learned me a lot of law since back when you was makin’ my baby.”
“Get the fuck out, Aleem.”
He rises from the chair and stretches extravagantly, arms extended as if he’s nailed to a cross, rolling his head to loosen his neck muscles. After a yawn, he says, “What you just done there is you undermined your status as a victim. Every word you say, you got to think to yourself how sayin’ it might be like pissin’ on your precious status as a victim. A pretty girl talks dirty, a man might think she comin’ on to him, so what he does don’t count as crime.”
“I’m calling the police.”
His voice is laced with mockery. “Why would you do that ’stead of you just break up with me? We got somethin’ beautiful, how you know my needs and I know yours, how we satisfy each other, our old flame burnin’ bright again. But, hey, if you go hormonal on me, you say hit the road, I got so much respect for you, baby, I’ll leave, no argument. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
The house is warm, but Nina is cold in flesh and bone. Cold but steady. She won’t give him the pleasure of seeing her tremble. “Your crazy talk doesn’t scare me.”
He feigns puzzlement. “Crazy? Nothin’ crazy about love, baby. It makes the world go round.”
When he steps past the footstool, she does not back away. Any sign of weakness will encourage him.
As he retrieves something from a pocket of his jacket—an Our Legacy jacket that costs God knows what—he says, “And nothin’ proves our love more than this.”
A key. It’s how he got in here.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Where I get it? You don’t remember?”
“Don’t say I gave it to you.”
“You know me, sugar. I only say what’s true.”
“Don’t say it’s from me.”
“You want it back?”
“I want it. There’s no ‘back’ involved.”
“You want the other one, too?”
She says nothing.
“Remember? You give me a second, case maybe I lost this one.”
“You can’t have him.”
“Him? A key don’t have no him or her about it.”
“Damn you.”
“And here I thought you was a church lady.”
“Put both keys on the table there.”
“You want the third? The fourth?” He takes a step toward her, then another. They are five feet apart. He returns the key to his jacket pocket. “Got me a homeboy used to work for a locksmith. You want, he can come change out the locks, make you feel safe.”
John steps out of the hallway, into the living room. He has retrieved the pistol from his mother’s bedroom. He holds it in both hands, aimed at the floor.
Aleem says, “You gonna pop a cap, boy?”
John looks to his mother.
She tells him to put the gun down, but he doesn’t.
“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.”