The Tragic Flaw (2 page)

B
ullion barbs, approximately one hundred symmetrically aligned, millimeters in width, protrude from a focal point of gold. The entire mass rotates and reflects the radiant sunlight of the cloudless day.

The twenty-four-inch disk is accompanied by three clones in flanking positions, as they all support the weight of a large, pearl-white sport utility vehicle and its driver, currently en route.

The rotation of the SUV's Ohio-made rims is hypnotic. Nothing that big should be that gold. The oyster exterior is luminous. Not a speck nor smudge defiles its brilliance.

Its large black tires hug the Thirty-First Street concrete intimately, as if a love affair had been brewing since the new model left the showroom floor.

The driver is ever vigilant of potholes, swerving carefully to avoid them.

The scenery is bleak. Urban blight festers. Names crossed out in graffiti mark the deceased. On any given day, gunplay can make this place look like the Gaza Strip, or some Israeli settlement on the outskirts of the West Bank, except there's no “Breaking Coverage,” no Wolf Blitzer, and no international outcry. Regardless, cashaholic militants carry out an assortment of transactions and will not hesitate to let Teflon-coated lead fly with the fervor of religious zealots. They'll die for this shit.

Corner after corner, someone's uncle chugs cheap wine and cheaper beer in an attempt to drown his sorrows, but in the ghetto they know how to tread water well. This while someone else's sister solicits every other blue-collar Joe and white-collar Jonathon.

“Hey! Hey, baby!” one clad in cherry hot pants screams to the SUV's driver, trying to flag him down. Her hazel eyes and delicate skin are appealing, but he's focused, and her call goes unnoticed.

The driver's path is fixed. Avenue after avenue, he continues without making a single turn, avoiding stray dogs and children fresh from summer school on this late June day. Empty brick buildings with broken windows abound.

There are signs of commerce, though. Aside from the open-air cash dealings for illegal narcotics, liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, pawnshops, pager shops, and check cashing businesses flourish here.

Residents of this once up-and-coming middle-class community poison their livers with fermented fruits and vegetables, then continue the self-imposed genocide by poisoning their bellies with high-fat, high-calorie fare. It's readily available and a little too convenient.

And yet the gold rims keep spinning.

The driver, clean-shaven and bald, sips expensive cognac from a red plastic cup. Bass lines from rap music send vibrations throughout the truck's peanut butter leather interior, causing the rear view mirror to shake and shimmy.

His tiny metallic digital phone rings. He grabs it from the center console, looks at the device's caller identification box, notices the number, and decides not to answer it, tossing it onto the passenger seat.

He takes another sip of his aged libation, hints of vanilla and oak escaping from the cup.

“Uuhh,” he says, as his full lips curl. The drink is strong, but it's good.

Life in this neighborhood is enough to make anybody drink cordials during the middle of the day, the driver thinks to himself.

After making a right turn on Jackson Avenue and cruising several blocks, the driver pulls in front of a home and stops. He steps out of the truck. His light-blue alligator boots gently kiss the pavement. His blue, short-sleeved Australian-made sweater is intricately woven into eye-catching patterns. It matches his boots to a tee, as well as the picturesque sky above.

He crosses the street and comes before a white, one-story gated house watched by several surveillance cameras. It is extremely clean and well kempt, especially for this part of town.

He pushes a buzzer on an intercom. His diamond-encrusted, European-made watch glimmers in the sunshine. The princess cuts catch and display every color in the rainbow with their many facets. It seems to say,
bliiiing
. The time is 4:06 p.m.

A low male voice answers the driver's page, and asks professionally over the intercom, “Who is it?”

“Cicero,” the driver answers, as he takes another sip from his plastic cup.

With a loud buzz, the gate, pulled by a rusty chain, begins to open, retracting to the left.

Cicero slowly walks in, and the gate begins closing behind him, making an obnoxious clanking noise. He takes one last swig of his auburn beverage and discards his red cup right in the front lawn. There's nothing else in the yard, and the cup stands out in the manicured emerald grass.

The electronic eyes follow his progress from the gate to the covered porch. Bars cover the windows.

Men's voices can be heard, muffled, emanating from within the house. The door is unlocked. Knowing this, Cicero turns the brass knob and walks in.

The place smells like a mixture of rancid marijuana smoke and fruity air fresheners plugged into the outlets, but it is immaculate.

White coats everything: white carpet, a white leather sofa and matching loveseat, white stereo equipment, a white marble-based coffee table with a glass top. Yet the stylish purity clashes subtly with the black African art that decorates the walls, not to mention the mannish and outlandish speech coming from a back room.

One rendering, framed in black wood, hangs above the sofa and features a black, bare-chested tribesman embracing his African queen, whose full breasts are exposed. It's huge, running the length of the long white sofa. In the background is the enchanting Serengeti. The chiseled sunburned peaks in the distance further emphasize the softness of the tribesman's bronze female.

Cicero eyes it, as he has many times, and just for a split second longs to be the man in the painting.

A sculpture of a woman stands nearly four feet and is situated to the left of the loveseat near a long hallway. The full figure and bouffant tresses give away the piece's ethnicity as its back arches and its hands are raised toward heaven as if giving praise to the Almighty.

A black-and-white still shot of Billie Holiday with her signature botanical adornment hangs over the love seat. The framed work beautifully depicts the elegant songstress' defined cheekbones, fine lips, and long flirtatious lashes. Her spread fingers, reacting to the heart-pounding offbeat jazz rhythms, make her hands appear to be in flight. Her lace-trimmed blouse is billowy. She is floating.

Mirrors, lined with white accents, are everywhere. The image of the large oil painting of the loving couple is bounced back and forth all over the wide living room, as is that of our elongated inanimate lady.

Cicero bends down and removes his boots, placing them right next to a pair of brand-new sneakers. This Japanese-based tradition of shoe removal, as requested by the homeowner, is a sign of respect. It is also what keeps the carpet the color of pure cocaine. Tan work boots and colorful tennis shoes line the wall to the left of the front door all the way to the towering white entertainment center that holds the state-of-the-art stereo system (also white) and the corresponding flat-screen plasma television.

“Shoot the fucking dice,” one man says as Cicero walks down the hallway to the source of the hostility. His white socks blend perfectly into the plush Berber carpet, leaving size eleven footprints in his wake.

Cicero enters a back bedroom that has been converted into a recreation room of sorts. Five men occupy it. Four are kneeling. It's a crap game.

High stakes. Three thousand gets you a side bet. Four thousand gets you in the game.

“Man, will you stop shaking the fuckin' dice and just shoot,” one heavily tattooed man says to another who also bears ink, in a frank and quite unfriendly tone. Twin jade serpents intertwine on his right forearm. His hair is tightly braided in straight parallel lanes.

“Chill out, mothafucka,” the young dice holder says as he jostles the red die in his right hand. His left supports the weight of his kneeling body. “The sooner I shoot them the sooner you lose your money, asshole, so you better be happy I'm taking my fuckin' time,” he says with a sinister smile on his face, exposing the gold and diamonds in his mouth. A Spanish inscription in Old English letters runs permanently down the back of his left arm:
El Hijo del Diablo
.

“Come on, mothafucka, I got shit to do,” says another larger man in a black T-shirt, who has an intricate dragon with red eyes and green highlights spanning from his arm all the way up to the middle of his neck. He's extremely overweight.

One man is silently kneeling, looking on with intense eyes, hundred-dollar bills crumpled in his hand. An ink-inscribed name, “V-Dog,” written in cursive letters, draws attention to the bulging bicep on his right arm. He has more than ten tattoos: names, abstract patterns, animals.

His dark-blue denim jeans and matching button-down shirt are heavily starched. His creases are rigid. He briefly glances up at Cicero with cold dark eyes, then looks back at the inactive dice holder.

Besides the men, the room is empty; half of it is uncarpeted, exposing hardwood parquet floors. It's perfect for tumbling dice. A very small stereo speaker pokes out of the wall near the door. The underground hip-hop music is tremendously clear, not too earsplitting.

The man with the rhombus crystals obscuring his teeth gives the dice one last good shake, then lets them fly out of his hand. They crash against the bottom of the wall, near the corner, and slide back toward the gambling quartet. One die stops before the other, showing three ecru circles. The second continues to roll, brushes one man's foot, then stops, displaying a total of…

“Seven,” the shooter yells with excitement, quickly grabbing twelve thousand dollars and sweeping it behind him into an already large, mint-green pile becoming ever more virescent by the minute.

“Fuck,” the large man says, as he reaches into his pocket for a fresh four thousand to get back into the game. The shooter is hot, and his three opponents are down a total of twenty-four thousand dollars.

“I'm out,” says V-Dog. He's disgusted and feeling nauseous. He had planned on breaking everybody else and copping some soft. Now he's the broke one, and T.J., the lucky-ass dude with all his money, is talking shit.

“What's wrong, V-Dog?” the fresh-faced T.J. asks. “You all out of dough?” Everyone else in the room laughs.

V-Dog just looks at him, expressionless.

“Check it out, I'll front you four gees so you can stay in the game, V-Dog,” a grinning T.J. says, and adds, “with one hundred fifty percent interest, mothafucka!” The room again erupts into laughter.

V-Dog looks unamused, and the other three men continue the game without him.

A fifth, dark-skinned man dressed in all black sits in a white, modern, art-deco half-moon chair. He's the homeowner. He looks up at Cicero and gives him a cool nod.

“Hey, what's up with you, Warren?” Cicero asks with his deep voice as he begins to count out three-thousand dollars so he can get some side bet action.

“Just chillin', man,” Warren responds. “Tryin' to maintain.”

“I heard that,” Cicero replies.

He's feeling lucky, and T.J., his friend, is on fire. So why not bet on him, Cicero thinks.

T.J. rolls the dice again. No seven, but it's still a good roll.

“What's your point, T.J.?” Cicero asks.

“What's crackin', C? My point eight, and I'm straight,” he answers with a smile. His mouth brightens the room in a burst of light and sparkles.

“I bet he hits that eight,” Cicero says to Warren, and as he does, he hears a dog barking loudly from outside.

Cicero, looking puzzled, says to the homeowner, “I didn't know you had a pit.”

Warren, who isn't shooting dice, just observing, laughs. It's low and brief. He takes a puff from his freshly rolled joint.

“I don't,” he says, exhaling a plume of thick cannabis smoke.

Cicero looks even more confused. Surely he has a pit bull, he ponders.

Warren then slowly rises out of his chair with a slight grunt. His potbelly weighs him down, but his jewel-encrusted timepiece makes him look like royalty. The chrome face, with its sweeping second hand, is flooded with yellow baguettes, and aquamarine sapphires surround the perimeter. He gets to his feet and walks out the room, motioning for Cicero to follow.

He does.

They walk through the bare kitchen to a back door. Warren slips on a pair of raggedy, navy-blue house shoes and opens the deadbolt lock with a key retrieved from deep within his jeans pocket.

The light-brown pine door opens and Cicero eyes the most massive canine he has ever seen.

“It's a Presa Canario,” Warren declares, smiling proudly. “Fuck a pit bull.”

The two step outside and proceed closer. Warren jokingly slaps the dog's huge head side-to-side while Cicero observes from a few feet away.

The animal resembles a prehistoric mammal that time forgot, a distant cousin of the saber-toothed tiger. Its muscular frame looks cartoonish, almost fake. But in its large square, fish-like mouth, reside very real teeth, and enough pressure per square inch to crush a lead pipe.