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He dropped his head and sniffed.
“My tat-too… means… Jeeeewd, hasss… my… back. Hisss tat-too, un-der…hisss…eye…means… heee… watch-chess… oh-ver… meee… Tween-kull, tween-kull, lil-tull, star… Hooow… I… wond-der… what… you… are… My…fav…or…ite… song… as…a… bay-bee… He… helped… feed… me… He…read…to…me… When… he…be-came… a… man, he… got me… out… of… the baaaad… home… where… they…called me… re-tard-dead… I looooove… Jeeeewd!”
She wiped a tear from her own eye then. “It all makes sense now, how protective he’s been over you, the way he looks after you, even the stipulations he gave me for how to best deal with you. Now that I look at you, really look at you, I see it. Y’all got similar features. Not exact, but there’s a definite likeness.” She swallowed a gasp. “He’s your blood brother…”
Eli lowered his gaze again and nodded.
Jude knew itwas a set up.
He twisted a piece of twine around his fingers, over and over again as he first checked his cellphone, then slipped it back into his pocket. He’d gotten a strange text from Iris out of the blue, during her scheduled visit with Eli, asking him to come by the Adult Center. She said she wanted him to see something. His intuition was always on the money, and in this case, it was no different. She hadn’t confirmed a damn thing, but she wasn’t as slick and sneaky as she believed herself to be.
She knows.
He refused to go, knowing the woman was probably going to try and cause a scene in front of everyone who worked there, and so he told her to meet him over at Old Henry. He needed privacy for there was a lot to say, and it was long overdue.
Old Henry was actually Henry Street. An old road few travelers knew about, the source of ancient stories about old cowboy fights, illegal moonshine shanties, then in later years, money-drunk moguls. These ghosts still wanted to sling a hammer. Once his father had told him about a worker who was so pissed off at the world, he jumped from one of the highest buildings on Henry Street, to his death. At one time, back when he was knee high to a grasshopper, it was bustling with people and shops. The annual Christmas parade came through, too, and everyone knew it was the spot to get the best Halloween candy. Those days were long gone, like broken promises whispered in a lover’s ear during the height of a climax. Now, there was nothing there but dead weeds, broken bottles, discarded junkie needles, and abandoned brick warehouses visited by squatters and scurrying vermin.
It was the middle of the day, the place was filthy, devoid of light and joy. The sun acted shy on Henry Street. But at times he came here to think, to get his mind right. He felt comfortable there, for it reminded him, oddly, of home. The odor of wet, rotting wood was forever ingrained in his mind, along with the stench of stagnant water when the plumbing would act up. Knowing the seedy area was a nightmare to many, he figured she’d refuse to come, and he’d have to face her the next day when she was off work. But much to his surprise, Iris agreed to drive over after she and Eli were finished eating their grilled cheese sandwiches and watching the Peter Rabbit movie.
He looked up at the cool blue sky. The sun was bright and blinding now, giving a bit more of herself after all. Yet on the ground it was nothing but dank shades of gray, the darkness of a neglected creation, and long forgotten remnants of a time gone by.
He stood by a large building with a good frame but a sunken roof, reading the graffiti sprayed along the sides of it. Fresh gang signs that hadn’t been there a few months prior were etched in big and bold designs. Next to these, old sexually explicit messages that had been there since he was a teenager: ‘Debbie McDaniel stuffs her bra,’ ‘Ashley’s pussy is hairy and bigger than the Grand Canyon,’ ‘Troy Mitchell got a little dick,’ ‘Shaquana is a ho.’These had been immortalized by people who were either dead or had moved on to greener pastures.
He walked around, thinking about his future. His past. He stepped around a homeless person who was fast asleep. In the present. One time he heard a car door close and turned to see Iris darting towards him, her hair wild in the wind. She wore a purple leather jacket, black leggings, and an oversized white T-shirt she’d stolen from his closet days prior.
“I ain’t here to fuck around wit’ you,” she yelled out before she even reached him. “I got one question, and then I’m leavin’ to go pick up Ayanna,” she stated out of breath, now mere inches away from him. “Why in the hell didn’t you tell me that Eli was your brother?”
“Because the less people know, the better.”
“That ain’t a good answer, Jude. Now let’s try this again. Why don’t you want people to know?”
“Iris, damn… Just think about who I am, and what you’re askin’ me.”
She put her hand on her hip, and then, he saw the realization hit her.
“All right, you wanna protect him from yo’ lifestyle. Why doesn’t he have your last name?”
“It’s not just protecting him from my lifestyle, but yeah, that’s a big part of it. That last name is fake. On legal records, he’s a Cooper. His I.D. and room tag show his last name is Houston. That was my grandmother’s maiden name. When our parents died, Eli went somewhere else, away from me and Cain. At first I was angry. I was a child and wanted to be with my brothers. I realized later, that was for the best, and as he grew, became an adult, he went to a different home that wasn’t as nice. When I got old enough, I got him out of there and he and I decided on the place he is at right now. I wanted to keep him safe.”
Her lower lip shook as she glared at him. Chest heaving, he supposed she expected him to lie when confronted. He wasn’t afraid of the truth; he simply wanted to deliver it on his own terms.
“How could you keep somethin’ like this from me? You were talking all that shit about us being together, about honesty, but—”
“Do you have any idea what the hell is going on, Iris?! Do you understand what they’ve done to my brother, Cain?!”
“What… what happened to Cain?”
“Exactly what the hell I predicted would happen! Everything is fucked up! If they’ll do that to Cain, a man who is feared because his temper is like a timebomb, and he has connections and pull, what in the fuck do you think they’ll do to poor ol’ Eli?!” His throat burned and his heartbeat quickened. “Cain’s eye was practically knocked out of its fuckin’ socket, two broken ribs, a smashed wrist, dislocated finger, sprained ankle, and a nasty infection due to a fuckin’ stab wound with a makeshift prison knife that was dirtier than a whore fuckin’ five mud-covered horny bastards in a dust storm! This all happened because their plan backfired in their fuckin’ face, they were embarrassed, and now I have to take matters into my own hands to fix this shit!”
He took a deep breath and ran his hand down his face. “And before you go there, get on that little high horse you like to ride off into the sunset, it wouldn’t matter if I was sellin’ drugs or cotton candy, Iris. If you got somethin’ somebody else wants, baby, and you don’t just hand it over when told to give it up, you’re a target in prison, and in this town. It happened to my own parents, friends, everyone I knew. I’ve had people gunnin’ for me since I was a kid. It starts with a fuckin’ football, graduates to lunch money, then before you know it, the keys to your damn Honda are in the hands of a one-toothed bully named Mason.
“People buzzin’ around, countin’ your chickens instead of mindin’ their own livestock is the order of the damn day. A motherfucker don’t have shit, then you shouldn’t have shit, either. They’d steal the hair right off your legs if they could cash it in for coins. Oh, and don’t think there’s loyalty in the family.” He shook his head, then laughed dismally. “Our own uncle was jealous of us, ’cause he didn’t amount to shit. My daddy wasn’t shit, either, but everyone loved my father ’cause he was funny, charismatic, smart, and witty—all the things you need to be to do what he got away with, with those banks, and my uncle despised him ’cause of the attention he’d get. This was before he even knew his own brother was the one the police were lookin’ for. When my daddy died, that motherfucker treated us like shit.”
“You and Cain?”
“Yes. After our Uncle Danny demanded custody of us, thinkin’ he was gonna get his hands on that money my parents took, he acted real nice in court, talkin’ about we’d been through enough. Lied and said he loved us. The courts handed us right over. Didn’t even look into his history. He was the last person in Nashville who needed to be saddled with two growin’ boys. Nobody found that money, just like I told you, and each damn day that passed, the angrier my uncle got about it, and the more he beat me and Cain. He looked in mattresses, old luggage, under floorboards… no luck. He was a fuckin’ drug addict, a drunk, and mean to his damn core. I learned a lot from him. I learned how to not care.
“After me and Cain had enough bruises on us I suppose, social services got involved and took us away… put us in foster care. Nobody else in the family wanted another mouth to feed, and once word got around that nobody could find the money my folks had stashed away from all of those bank robberies, didn’t nobody come for us. They’d have three boys to tend to if they went and got Eli out of that home. That was just too much I suppose. I ain’t mad about that. That’s a lot to take on, but the result was, me and Cain got split up for about a year. Whatever house he went to must’ve been pure hell, ’cause he didn’t talk for months afterwards. I had been in several homes during that time period. Some were just okay; others, not so much.”
