Apple Brown Betty (2 page)

“C
urb. Step up, Dare,” I say.

Darius Slay been my partner forever, so it pains me to see him like this. You can smell the whiskey without him even opening his mouth, just seeping out his skin I guess. His unlaced, no-name brand sneaker falls off his right foot as he tries to make the six-inch step up on the curb. His tube sock is dingy and has a big hole by the toe. One toe sticks out and I can see that it was recently cut and filed. His wife Nancy's still giving him them foot manicures, but I can see she no longer picks out his socks and clothes. She probably stopped because of Dare's lack of appreciation. Me personally, I'd love to have her doing my feet, especially that part toward the end where she rubs lotion on them. I've sat in Dare's living room more than once and watched Nancy tending to his crusty feet while I pretended the television had my interest.

I bend down and pick up the stray sneaker and then ease it back on Dare's foot. He doesn't seem aware that he came out of it in the first place or that I put it back on.

“Riley had them Lakers boys running,” he slurs. “Philly ain't know what hit 'em, did they, G?”

I shake my head and place a steady hand under his arm so as to help him climb this small mountain of a curb. Anything is a mountain when you drink booze like he does. “You've got to slow down with the drinking, Dare. Doctors done warned you about your liver,” I caution him.

“Liver smiver.” He waves his loosey-goosey arm at me like I'm a Philly Sixer and he's an L.A. Laker.

“You want to see your little angel walk down the aisle and little knucklehead fight for the heavyweight title, you'll straighten up,” I add. He's got two little ones, Cydney and Shammond. I've got two of my own, Georgette and Georgia. I made sure my wife, Mildred, got my name in there for each of them, figuring if they ended up like me, and not Mildred, the world would be all the better for it. All you need to know about Mildred is that she spends all her time singing gospel songs that nobody else ever heard of. Been that way since her mama died. Since she said she lost the only person in the world she could talk to. I've felt like Dare's sock, dingy and full of holes, since my wife told me, in a roundabout way, I wasn't someone she could talk to. We haven't been much as a couple ever since.

Darius giggles now and salutes me as if he's a private in the army. “Yessuh, Dr. J., I'ma lick the liquor as you prescribe.”

“I'm serious, Dare,” I say.

“Damn, G, relax your mind. Thank God my old lady gives it up on the regular,” he answers, “else I'd be uptight all the time like you is.”

Funny how his speech clears up the minute he starts in on ragging me.

We reach his little bungalow and I help him up his front porch without another word. Dare knows how sensitive I am about the relations I got at home. Why'd he have to go and make light of it like that? Good a friend as I am to him. I fight the urge to let him fall on his stoop, for his two children and wonderful wife to pick up like garbage. “Nancy left the porch light on for you, Dare, and the door open,” I say to chase away my evil thoughts.

“She'd better,” Dare answers. “I ain't trying to be outside my own home screaming for that woman to let me in like I'm Freddie Flintstone…or George Aloysius Williams.” He starts a laugh that breaks off into a full-fledged cough.

I tighten my jaw and make a mental note not to share my low moments with Dare anymore, lessen they'll come back to bite me.

Sweet-as-brown-sugar Nancy appears in the open doorway. I crinkle my nose. I swear you can catch the heaven scent of that woman from two blocks away. She looks out and around the area for nosy neighbors. I remove my cap and hold it against my chest. Dare will have to take the rail for himself and climb these few steps. Nancy looks past her drunken husband to me. I smile her way, and she doesn't smile back, but she caught my smile; she caught it gladly. I couldn't tell you the last time Mildred smiled at me. She grunts, shakes her head, sings those awful songs to drown out my talking, but never, ever, a smile.

Nancy props open the screen door and Dare passes through without speaking. He raises his hand and waves bye to me before disappearing into the darkness of his house.

Nancy steps outside because I'm lingering like her scent in my nostrils. “Thanks for seeing him home,” she says. “You must get tired of this.”

“Watching the games without him wouldn't be the same,” I reason. “I take the good with the bad. I like to thank I keep his drinking down a bit, too. No telling how much he'd put down if I wasn't in his ear all night.”

“Well, thanks,” she says. I can tell she's embarrassed. I want to do something to set her mind at ease, let her know that embarrassment has no place between us.

“I think you know that I really bring him home just so I can see you,” I say. I'm like the man who has been told he has twenty-four hours to live and throws caution to the wind. My own death is just around the block. The redbrick house on the corner with the porch light out and the door closed and locked.

Nancy grips the collar of her shirt, the night air suddenly chilling her. “He might hear you. That doesn't bother you?”

“You know he's dead to the world by now, Nan,” I say.

Nancy shakes her head. “I told you that Nan mess is too comfortable, Mr. Williams.”

“Want to get even more comfortable, Nan?” I say back to her. I'm taunting that coming death.

Nancy sighs in despair. She can't take her eyes off me and her legs are being downright stubborn, refusing her brain's instructions to turn and head on back inside. I know all this 'cause I know this woman. Been studying her like a test. Dare'd have to look at my notes to know his wife's favorite color. Blue—everything from her clothes to her mood. I plan on changing that though.

“You're crazy,” she says.

“Run away with me,” I respond. “You and Cydney.”

“And Shammond?” she says, and then shakes her head. I imagine she realizes asking this question of me is improper, that she should be saying, “Good night, Mr. Williams” by now.

Ain't no way I would really want any part of that boy. Hard to even believe he came up out of Nan.

“He's a five-year-old carbon copy of his old man. Shame I can tell it so early, but I can. Let him stay right here and he and Dare can take turns beating up on each other,” I tell her.

“George I—” The creak of the screen door behind Nancy steals her thought. Shammond's head barely clears the door. “Go back to bed,” Nancy snaps. He glares at me before disappearing into the darkness of the house that welcomed his father just moments before.

Nancy turns back to me. I know our time is coming to a close and that a living death awaits me at home. “I've got to go,” she says.

I smile and nod. “You might want to change Dare's shirt, he puked on it earlier.”

Nancy purses her lips, goes inside without a further word, turns off the porch light and closes the door.

I smile all the way home. Smile until I place my key in the lock of my front door and realize Mildred placed the dead bolt—for which she refuses to give me a key—on. Death, I think to myself, as I rap my knuckles hard against the door, nothing but death.

T
hey stood eyeing one another. She was on the inside of her apartment, the door slightly cracked, latch still on, he on the outside looking in. It was late, too late for a personal visit, but here he was just the same. Instinctively, she looked down to see that no weapon was in his hand. Then she glanced at his chest to see if he was breathing heavy, just come from some nighttime mayhem seeking the safety of her place. No weapon, she noticed. He appeared to be breathing smoothly.

“You gonna let your brother in, or what?” he asked.

She sighed but undid the latch just the same. He passed inside and went directly to her living room.

“I usually have folks take off their shoes before they walk my carpets,” she said to him.

He nodded but kept his shoes on, sat in a heavy clump on her sofa.

She sighed again, crossed over to him and sat on her love seat.

“So, Cydney, how you been doing?” he asked. “You look good.”

“I've been well, thanks. You look good, too, Shammond.”

He smiled, appreciative of the way she said his name, the only person in his life that didn't call him Slay, the only person he allowed to call him by his first name. She'd earned the right, just by being his loving sister.

“Up and about kind of late,” she noted.

He nodded, strained his eyes as he looked around. “You got all new stuff up in here, what you do with the old furniture?”

“Curbed it,” Cydney said.

“You bought this with the money I hit you off with?”

Cydney nodded reluctantly. “The old furniture didn't even make it until sanitation could pick it up, though. Some woman and two teenage boys snatched it up. I watched them out of my window. They looked like they had hit the lottery, getting someone else's furniture with stranger's stank soaked into the cushions.”

Slay shook his head. “Not too long ago you were sleeping on a pissy mattress, don't forget that shit.”

Cydney rolled her eyes.

“But that's kinda why I'm here,” Slay said. “I need to forget the pissy mattresses, too. I need your help, Cydney. I need you to get me like you.”

Cydney frowned. “Like me?”

Slay nodded, placed his feet on the coffee table, leaned back real comfortably. Cydney eyed his feet but said nothing.

“Yeah, you know, kind of stuck up and shit—” Slay raised his hands “—no disrespect intended. Better than the average nigga out here. I gotta be able to talk and act like some Will Smith-type nigga. By like, Friday.”

Etiquette 101, the crib notes version.

Cydney frowned. “That's a difficult thing to ask, by Friday.” She sort of laughed. “I don't know what to say, Shammond.”

Was she making fun? His feelings for her shifted a bit, about as much as they could ever shift for his beloved Cydney. “Slay,” he corrected bitterly. It was his last name, his street name.

“Shammond,”
Cydney said. “You can start your rebirth by using your correct name.”

“Slay
is
my correct name. My government name. It's on my birth certificate and everything. You were a Slay one time, too, before King George came and adopted you…but left me hanging.”

Cydney ignored his rant. Same bitter, woe-is-me tale she'd been hearing from Shammond for years. How their stepfather had done Shammond dirty by not legally adopting him. “So why do you need this transformation, Shammond?”

A gleam came to Slay's eye. “There's this shorty I got my eye on. Let's just say she's on a higher level than the chicks I usually deal with. Theresa. She pronounces it Tear-ess-a. Honey got a good head on her shoulders. Thick-assed chick, got a badoonka donk and one of them Pamela Anderson chests.” He eyed Cydney. “You and Theresa could be twins. Both of y'all got that sophisticated-ladies shit going on.”

Cydney hunched her shoulders and rubbed her arms; goose pimples waddled from her wrists to her shoulders. It was a bit cold. She rose and adjusted the heat. She could feel Slay's eyes on her as she moved through the apartment.

“You can help?” Slay asked.

“Where did you meet this Theresa?”

“She goes to MU.”

Cydney frowned. “You're using college girls now, huh? An expensive private school, too.”

“You can help?”

“I don't know what you want.”

“Start with books, name me some of them joints you read. I know Theresa is into books. I think she might like that dude you were always reading.”

Cydney regained her position on the love seat. “Eric Jerome Dickey? This Theresa is a black girl?”

“Mixed,” Slay said. “Black and someshit.”

This was a serious departure for Slay; his usual girls had skin that pinked to the touch, and deferential personas. Gullible-ass white girls he called them. Easier to manipulate. “I don't feel comfortable helping you corrupt a black woman,” Cydney said.

Slay moved to his sister, grabbed her hands. “Come on, baby. This shit is on the up-and-up. I like this chick. I ain't planning on using her for that other shit. I wouldn't get her caught up in that stuff.” He crossed his heart with one hand, the other holding on to Cydney. “You got to trust your baby brother on this one.”

Cydney sighed. “Shammond, I swear—”

“On the up-and-up, on daddy's life,” he said, looking upward.

“You know that ‘daddy's life' stuff doesn't sway me,” Cydney said.

“That's still our blood, Cydney, no matter how you see it.”

Cydney eased from his grasp. “You have a beautiful smile,” she began slowly. “Get rid of that bling-bling stuff on your teeth. Get yourself a nice V-neck sweater and some khaki pants. What are you driving these days?”

“A BMW quarter to eight.” Slay turned his lips up in a mischievous smile. “The lease papers, the registration, the insurance cards…all that shit looks realer than a mug, legit. Authentic, the dude that fixed it up for me said.”

Cydney shook her head. She hated hearing him talk of that life, that dangerous world her brother moved through with ease and comfort. “This isn't going to be easy.”

“Few things are. I'm used to
not easy.
”

Cydney looked off to some faraway place. “How is Mama doing, and Pop G?”

Slay let out a sigh, crinkled his brow. “Mama, she's burned out bad.”

Cydney didn't reply; she expected as much. “Pop G?”

“Eff that nigga,” Slay barked.

“He's our father, don't talk like that.”

“Don't even get me started on that shit. That nigga is not my father. Yours maybe, but not mine, Cydney. I ain't a Williams. I'm a Slay.”

“You have to stop romanticizing our birth father. You barely even remember him, Shammond. I don't either, too much. We're lucky George came along or we would have been two more statistics.”

“Whatever. All I know is a dude that would run up into his partner's lady soon as his partner died…ain't about jackshit.”

Cydney moved on. “So Mama's still using?”

“She's the Jordan of crack, keeps coming back.”

“Sad,” Cydney said.

“You should come by the crib sometime, let Mama know you ain't totally shut her out. It might do her some good. I was by there yesterday.” Slay smiled. “I left a few of my things.”

Cydney said nothing. That was the thing—she had shut her mother totally out. She wished she could do the same with her brother, but he had the staying power of a roach. “I'm so busy with college, writing the music and restaurant reviews for the magazine, and my little part-time job at Macy's.”

“No gentleman to keep you warm at night?” Slay asked.

“No.” She was happy her word was the truth. Even though he asked her with nonchalance, she knew Slay had a greater interest. They had a weird relationship like that; he couldn't stand the thought of her that way, his sister with some man. It was just another reason why she worked so hard at distancing herself from him. Why she kept the few men she encountered at arm's length.

“So,” he said, “you think you can hook me up, bring out the white boy in me?”

Cydney sighed. “I'll try.”

 

Cydney sat in the chair across from her couch watching the rise and fall of her brother's chest. She couldn't bring herself to close her own eyes. Not with him here. Her feelings for Shammond were an unhealthy mix of contempt and love. To the outsider, the two emotions seemed implausible, but to Cydney they made perfect sense. Her brother, after all, was two very different people: Shammond and Slay.

Shammond was a protector, a provider, a giver.

Slay was a destroyer, a neglector, a taker.

As Cydney continued to watch him sleep, his baggy jeans hanging below his waist and showing off his boxers, a copy of
Essence
about to fall from his fingers onto the carpet, Cydney wondered which of the two, Shammond or Slay, was stronger.

The phone rang and interrupted Cydney's thoughts. She glanced at the time stamp on her digital cable box. It was well past midnight. She knew without checking the caller ID where the call had originated from. She eased to her feet and tiptoed across the carpet to the kitchen. She checked to make sure her brother didn't stir and then removed her cordless phone from the base. She pressed the talk button on the phone's face.

“Hold on,” she said into the receiver and then she placed the phone to her chest and tiptoed into her bedroom, closed the door behind her and locked it. She took a deep breath and sat down on the bed. “Hello.”

The voice on the other end was deep, sexy. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No, Stephon,” Cydney said. Stephon James, her editor-in-chief at
Urban Styles
magazine, until recently the sometimes, late-night warmth that she lied to her brother about not having. “Why are you calling me this late?” And she added sarcastically, “Your wife away or something?”

“I was just checking on a fellow night owl. I couldn't sleep,” Stephon offered. “And my wife's with the painkillers again. She won't be awakening anytime soon.”

“I don't know why you think you can bring your drama into my life whenever you want to,” Cydney said. “I don't appreciate your calling me this time of night.”

Stephon sounded wounded. “I'm sorry—I—just wanted to talk to you. You're whispering. I imagine that must mean someone's there with you.”

“I'm not whispering,” Cydney corrected, though she was. “And no one is here with me.”

Stephon sucked his teeth like an adolescent boy. “Yell out my name then.”

“You must be crazy. It's almost one in the morning.”

“I was joking,” Stephon said, even though he wasn't.

Cydney could hear the loneliness and longing in Stephon's voice. She recognized the timbre from her own experiences. She knew how it felt to be trapped in darkness with no light apparent anywhere. “Tell me about your wife,” she told him.

Stephon sighed. “She's at it again. Been taking Vicodin, Percocet, Advil. Claims none of them work, though I know the dosages she takes are strong enough to down a horse.”

“I know the Advil's over-the-counter, but how does she get ahold of that other stuff?”

“Don't know. She hid them from me this time. I found the bottles inside a can of bread crumbs.”

“What were you doing looking through a can of bread crumbs?”

Stephon laughed for the first time since he'd gotten on the phone, for the first time really in the past few days since his discovery of the painkiller medicine. It felt good to laugh, take his mind off the worries, the blues setting in on him. “That's a long story.”

“Something freaky I bet,” Cydney teased.

“Come on now,” Stephon objected, “you know me better than that.”

“Exactly,” Cydney answered. “So what where you planning to do with bread crumbs? You got me interested now. I know about that thing you do with chocolate.” She sucked her teeth. “Oh, and that other thing you do with whipped cream.” Stephon's boom of a laugh prodded her on. “Ditto for cherries,” she continued. “But bread crumbs? I can't imagine.”

“You are something, Cydney Williams,” Stephon said, his voice rich with desire. “Why can't we be together?”

Cydney clutched the fluffiest pillow on the bed close to her chest, wrapped her arms around it as she would a lover's waist. “I got two reasons for you,” she answered. “Your daughter and your wife. I'm ashamed I let our thing go on as long as I did.” She didn't mention her lunatic brother as a reason, but she thought it.

“You know there's no love in this house,” Stephon reasoned.