You, l’il’un, you can sleep it off in the empty cell. No drunken moseys on my streets.
Officer Peanut glowered at Buck, and he said, “I ain’t havin’ you walkin’ round my town wit’ chubbies, Haystack. You gonna scare our white ladies. Stick him, this is Hassle, he a bucket trustee. You know what that is?” He ain’t wait for an answer from Buck. He glanced down at Cody. “You, l’il’un, you can sleep it off in the empty cell. No drunken moseys on my streets.” He walked away and kept talking. “Nuh-uh, whiteboys, y’all keep it indoors in Goober’s town. Sh’riff Terwiliger don’t like men walkin’ wit’ a stiffness — we got nice wimmin in this town fo’ real, shit…” He prolly tongued on but ain’t nobody could hear him cuz he done gone out the jailhouse into the police station proper. The jailhouse was silentious, ‘cept for the drunken bodies snoring away they bubbles in the front cells.
Saul’s pawnshop was gray and smoky, with a must-choked odor like a throwback to a 1950s pool hall, Avery thought, though there were no pool tables. There were just pawned guns and air-conditioners and wedding rings, all of which gleamed with polish and lysol and desperation.
He stopped laughing, and Cody serioused up too, as they walked into the crackhouse. A bevy of dour Hispanics and black men stood around like they were waiting for and disappointed in Bernardo and Cody. All was silent as a sunrise, except for the bare-chested crackhead shadowboxing and screaming obscenities, which everyone in the traphouse ignored. Bernardo led Cody upstairs, where rat-scented bedrooms overflowed with the tinny smell of crack smoke and passed-out whores.
Thumper done stop outside a rundown house with boarded-up windows. The light that leaked out came from flashlights, not lamps or light fixtures. Ignored city red-tag notices was tacked onto the off-hinge front door. It was a traphouse. Inside, Jaekwel and Deon expected to find rat beds and crackheads lacking threads among the stacked syringes, wrinkled-up foil and doors off they hinges. Jaekwel’s nose binged on the smell, and he cringed like hell. Inside was about twenty rat-face niggas drinking forties and hooting like hardhats at one among ’em who boxed a invisible pig. Jaekwel wrinkled his nose when he walked in. It was exactly what he thought it would smell like: armpits and stale puddles of piss. Couple of ’em got crackpipes in they hands.
Malcolm had said Big John’s room was also the laundry room and the “gym” — a bench press and some free weights lay scattered around by the bed — he’d assumed this door led to a hallway that connected Big John’s room, the laundry room and the gym. But in fact those were all one room, which was much bigger than any of the others. It also had the fusebox and a storage area under the stairs.
Nowadays the basement was a halfway house that got eleven men living there. One was Big John, the groundskeeper of the church, who got a room to his own self. The other ten was split among five rooms. The room Malcolm showed him to was small, just a bed with a desk, a Bible, a shelf and a lockable foot locker for each resident. He went to that last bedroom, the caretaker’s room, which was really just the laundry room. It stank of both dirty and clean clothes in there, and piles of both rose like haystacks in the center of the room. It was also the bedroom for Big John, the church’s caretaker and the longest resident of the halfway home
Malcolm Chesway gladhanded up and down the sunshining churchgoers filing into Ebenezer Baptist. The men wore suits of pastel or white, and the women sported vibrant colors on elegant dresses and elaborate hats. Folk came through swimming in smiles and handshakes on this fine Sunday morn. They marched past the leaves dropped by the magnificent magnolia in the center of the parking lot. Malcolm knew all them folk by name because he was the deacon at Ebenezer Baptist in Dynamite Hill, which meant he did lotta the day-to-day running of the church. He ran the scheduling for the meeting hall and basement, read the emails and arranged all the vendors for the annual fundraising drive.
The semicircle of shanty shacks contained sleeping cots, except for one, inside which was a still… The sharecroppers were divided into campsites, this one for white men and the other for white women and families.
The sharecroppers lived north of that rutabaga field in a little circle of shacks, each one just a bed and a stove, cluttered up with refuse and remnants of a sinful life. They got buckets of water for bathing and whatnot, and they ain’t need no electricity. Only one sharecropper was there right now, the rest of them off harvesting hops for the homemade hooch bubbling away in one of the shacks.
The oil rig was loud and dirty and somehow both hot and cold at the same time. It was all right angles and grimy corners, pipes belching steam. Unpainted steel, the smell of cigarette butts and spilled gasoline. Lift this, screw that, loosen those, tighten these. It was all so pointless. It was ugly. It looked ugly, it smelled foul, it sounded alien and harsh and hateful, it felt anodyne and sterile, and the air tasted of poison and loneliness.
Their home was at one end of a long hall. It wasn’t a real barrack, it was a dead-end hall with a disused first-aid clinic in it. They done bunk down here cuz it was more private and roomy than the barracks, and this whole part of the rig was mostly unused. Rig E19 was made for a bigger workforce than it required — automation at work, factories on autopilot, solar power smokestacks be colliding hadrons, barcodes as the Mark of the Beast, black holes for souls, this nigga knows which way the wind blows! — so Lem and Steel shacked up in this big empty dead-end away from the resta the rig. They done set up curtains where they living area began.
Steel spread out the blankets on the floor to provide insulation. Covering up the cold steel would help bunches, he thought. The remaining blankets he hung up on the outside wall with duct tape. It got cold as hell — Rig E19 was in the North Pacific, near Alaska. Santa Claus wouldn’t even go here. Rudolph’d go on strike for sure. For sure! That outside wall faced the cold Pacific seaspray, so it was icy as a snooty bitch. The blankets was thin, but they would do for now. The resta the rig was cold, but the living areas was all heated and done up with blankets and even more space-heaters. It was toasty as toast in there. Fresh out the toaster!
This rig was built for more workers than there were — lots of the job had been automated in recent years — so whole wings were no longer used. Mr. Chow said they could bed down wherever they wanted. Buck and Lem chose a corridor that dead-ended at a disused room. They claimed everything from the intersection with another corridor to the dead-end, and they used the extra room for storage. The dead-end was curtained off with sheets and done up with extra mattresses, pillows and space heaters. He tapped the sheet being used as a curtain. A mat lay right there, like a welcome mat but Mason knew Lem well enough to know it’s real purpose — there were peanut shells under the mat. Lem and Buck stepped over the mat when coming in and out of the dead-end. If anybody snuck in when they were gone, the shells would be smashed under the mat, and they’d know someone had been there without permission. Mason stepped over the mat.
Most nights, Buck and Lem showered with each other. This was the winter contract, which was understaffed — more than half of the roughnecks here a couple days ago had left during their leave. Buck didn’t realize how many fewer workers there would be. That was because, Lem explained, the rig was less efficient in the winter, and Mr. Chow actually lost money pumping oil until it warmed up. He kept it going regardless because otherwise the rig would fall apart and be inoperable in the spring, but it continued with a skeleton crew mainly tasked with maintenance. The drill did run, and oil was pumped, but only the minimum needed every day to ensure smooth operation. Otherwise it was a lot of cleaning, inventory, weatherproofing, organizing, etc. It was intensely boring and not much work. The chill was intense in the unheated corridors now that it was winter. Buck got a thrill out of walking to the shower every night, which he still did in his briefs and sandals (though he now wore his sandals with two pairs of socks). He thought it was hilarious how steamy his chest was, and it set his heart racing. Most night it was literally cold enough to take his breath away, and he could barely breathe the whole way to and from the shower. Lem did not do that. He was leaner and lankier than Buck, and like the other roughnecks, Lem wore several layers of clothes in the corridors. So Buck got naked in the showers in seconds, while Lem lazily undressed and smoked a cigarette (which he did only to annoy Buck, because Buck kept hassling him about hurrying up).
He and Lem got to know each other as they shared a living space — not a real barrack or even a room, they claimed a disused dead-end corridor. They hung up sheets and blankets and towels to make a wall blocking off the dead-end from the rest of the rig, and they covered the floor with mattresses and pillows. With enough space heaters, it made a cozy home fer a nine-month contract.
Buck was sprawled out on the “bed” — just a stack of pillows and cushions and blankets on the floor. That was where they both slept. They used their bunks for storage. That’s because sleeping on the floor was more comfortable than the bunks. For Buck, the main reason was that he was six-foot-eleven, and the bunks were seven-feet-long exactly. He had to squeeze in, couldn’t stretch his legs, couldn’t raise his arms, couldn’t sit up without banging his head, and getting out was an awkward and ungainly struggle. The other big reason was that rig E19 was as cold as a witch’s clit. It was in the North Pacific, and it was cold enough that the inner decks — which were exposed to the water — grew gardens of icicles. The bunks were built into the walls of the corridors, and the corridors were mostly unheated. A few corridors were heated thoroughly, which was where Mr. Chow told them all to bunk. He let them choose though, and Buck and Lem preferred the privacy of the dead end. They rigged it up with blankets and pillows and space heaters — Mr. Chow provided plenty of space heaters — which gave off enough warmth for the both of them. The space heater made the bunks much too hot. Some of the other roughnecks jerry-rigged up a system to aim the space heaters indirectly, but it was tough to find a good temperature in those little bunks. If the heat was aimed directly in, the bunk turned sweltering. If the heat was aimed elsewhere, the bunk froze solid. Most of the living areas were, like the dead end, set off with makeshift walls made of blankets and cardboard. Nobody came to this dead end. There was a door marked “clinic”, but inside was just a bunch of old toolboxes and stacks of rotting first-aid gear. That was all there was, aside from six bunks, in this dead end. That meant they could string up blankets to form a wall, making the dead-end corridor a room. The corridor itself was narrow, but the bunks were like shelves, and the clinic-cum-closet provided extra space. They kept the door open, so Buck’s feet could aim that way. He had plenty of room to stretch. The blanket-wall insulated the “room” from the cold corridor, and it was heated by space heaters. The one downside was that the bathroom was far away. They kept a piss bottle, but dookies required hotfooting it down the glacier-like steel hallway to the nicely heated bathroom. That was where they showered too.
Smashwood Trailer Park was on the outskirts of town. It was a haphazard jumble of trailers and roads made by piling gravel atop endless streaks of mud and clay in a clearing slashed from the dense Appalachian forests. It rained enough here — and the snow meltwater from the nearby mountains added enough — to keep this little hollow lightly swampy year-round. In the winter, it was a frozen, firm swamp, but it still stank of swamp even then. But it was summer now, and here, it was humid and dank like a stashbox. It would be depressing living here. He could sense it. His upcoming loneliness loomed in front of him, sparkling, inky, sticky, just like the detritus that clogged the trailer park. There was trash everywhere — not just humdrum bottles and shopping bags, but abandoned appliances, a shattered washing machine, a rain-ruined box of ammunition (empty) and even a dead frog crawling with maggots on a log near the entrance to the park.
The Smashwood showerhouse got nine showerheads, but Buck was in there alone. T’was a Friday night, t’was why. It’d be crowded ar’y weeknight. Buck stood there and let the water run down his back. The showerhouse was primitive, without even a roof. He liked showering outside. The shower”heads” was li’l more’an holes cut in a hose.
There were a bunch of burned-out and abandoned trailers here. This was a hobo part of the park. Omar wasn’t even sure it was officially part of Smashwood, it seemed like more of a shantytown addendum to the real trailer park, which was itself a glorified shantytown. This was a shantytown’s shantytown.
In the other half of Smashwood Trailer Park the trailers had running water. Those trailers were for women and families with children. Nobody cared about men pissing in the grass in an area fulla other men. When they got into the showerhouse, they went to the row of toilets. They weren’t in stalls, they were wide open, and the showerhouse too had no door, simply a little bend in the wall that blocked outsiders from seeing in. It had no roof either.
The park was just as he remembered. All the little details had changed, of course: there was a playpen in front of a trailer that hadn’t had one two years ago; the Tanners got a new mailbox, shaped like a church; the trailer at that corner had a new deck. But it was still the trailer park Buck remembered. The barbecue-and-beer-and-peeling-paint smell still hung in the air, and a dog still incessantly barked somewhere. It was a different dog though. Yappier. From The Redneck Ex-Con
Most of the trailers in this park didn’t have hot water — Lucy’s was an exception, so her boyfriend must have a good job — and the residents shared the showerhouse. There was a small area for women and one for children too, but they were separate; they were roofed and had a door, and no one really used them. There were not many children here, and what women there were mostly lived in the west side of the park (where there was hot water). So the men’s area was the only one in use. It was small, rickety, barely functional — exposed pipes, no roof, some extra showerheads added via garden hoses with holes drilled into them; the floor was cold concrete worn down like sandpaper so that it was painful to walk on without sandals. He knew that’s what everyone who saw him thought, especially with his unkempt beard. He ignored the stares of folks waiting at the bus stop by the entrance to the park. He didn’t get on a bus. He just walked a half-mile or so away, then slipped into the woods and around to the back of the park. He suspected the south end of the park still had a bunch of abandoned trailers. That was the trashy end, the area where Mr. Clay didn’t even usually go. A bunch of winos and dealers hung out there. Buck cast a harsh gaze at the only wakeful man in sight when he tromped out of the woods. It was some tweaky dude Buck didn’t know, scuttling about and twitching as he took apart an alarm clock. He was shirtless, his skin pockmarked with sores and too tautly stretched across his bony frame. He looked away from Buck, who went to the nicest-looking yet obviously abandoned trailer, a big graffitied one with a giant hole in the roof partially plugged with a collection of car parts. It smelled bad in here, he thought, but it just smelled like spilled booze, not shit or rats. Those were the two smells he couldn’t live with anymore (he had had plenty of that in prison).
His pale moonlit ass looked vaguely feminine in the dim starshine of the night — the Smashwood showerhouse was open-roofed. The shower sprayed hard cuz only one head was running, they ran weak when the place was crowded but pounding like a hose when only one person was in there. That was cuz it was a hose, a glorified hose, not a proper plumbing system. It was plenty hot though — same problem: not much hot water when the joint was crowded, but plenty now that only one showerhead ran. Since it was a cool night, the hot water steamed up the moment it touched the floor, and the foggy steam billowed, like mad billowing, throughout the showering area before dissipating as it rose in the heavens. Wojo stepped into the cloud of steam and approached Avery. The ground in here was rocky and dirty — not filthy, just covered in gravel and stones and sticks that had fallen in or been tracked inside. Wojo wore bare feet, but Avery had on shower sandals.
The Manor was a run-down mansion overwhelmed by ivy and dinge. It looked to have sunk into the Arctic mud and now was clawing its way outta forever ago, foundation part-submerged, first-floor windows too low to the ground, its eaves and soffits crumbling, windows browned around the edges, roof pockmarked and mossy. All the shutters was sigogglin, with patches of peeling paint like seeping sores, and it smelled of body hair and earthy African soap.
T’was the main attraction in town though, cuz it was a brothel. T’was the only attraction in town really. And the inside was plenty homey. Buck done growed up in a trailer park, and mosta them trailers ain’t had running water even. Lem growed up in the projects. So’n they was usedta a worn-down home, and nary the numerous mouse-nibbles visible upon the furniture inside plussed Buck or Lem. Whole thang was sumpshuss, damn sumpshuss. There was all kinda like… velvet or sump’in, Buck don’t know fabrics, but there was curtains thick as rugs, and them Asian folding room-dividers, carpets and furs, gold and silver stuff. T’was fancy, fancy as France.
These were fine-ass ladies, some of them classy too, Buck thought, with feathery thangs and ruffles and boas. Buck was foot-rooted and slack-jawed, his cleanest pants tented. They had all kinds too — Asian chicks, fat ladies with sheer fabric keeping their jiggling bits in place, a pair of twins cooing alongside each other, a girl with purple hair and tattoos on her neck. Buck was dumbfounded.
“Who was that girl who waved at me?” Buck asked when they walked down the hall from the bathroom. His mullet was jet-black and shiny with moisture and shampoo. “She waved at me,” Lem said. “Nuh-uh, she was lookin’ right at me-“ “She wave at everyone,” Rayquandius said with a scowl. “That’s Felicity.” “Oh that’s a pretty name…” Buck said. “I want her. No, no, that redhead-“ “You ain’t nevuh answer me about a black girl,” Lem said. Rayquandius turned to look at them. “Shut the goddamn fuck up. Miss Hellendra say it lowers the tone to talk about girls like they different cuts of meat,” he said. “You two trashy necks don’t get to pick anyway.” He pointed to a small half-staircase that led up to a door — this mansion had been renovated so many times that this was the attic. “This is Annie’s room,” Rayquandius said. He pointed to the door. “Go on in. Five hundred bucks. You two got a hour-“ “We don’t get to pick?” Lem asked. “I did last time.” “Miss Hellendra want you wit’ Annie, nigga,” Rayquandius spoke simmerously curt. He pointed to the room. “Annie’s cool. She’ll take ya both all night long. Well… an hour, unless’n you wanna pay more. Two grand for the night. Eight hundred though if you come back at midnight-“ “What’s she like?” Buck asked. “Is she pretty? What’s her tits like?” Rayquandius rolled his eyes again pointed to the door. “Go in there and stick ya dick in her! You hillbilly mothahfuckah. Miss Hellendra don’t want you two stretchin’ one of the nice girls wit’ ya ugly old hillbilly hogs-“ “He the old one,” Buck said. “He the hillbilly!” Lem said.
Kayshawn done enforced some discipline on some homeboys in the neighborhood, and since he was pushing nineteen years old, ain’t no court gonna go easy on him.
Kayshawn Henderson got his foolish ass arrested, not for no kiddie charges neither — he was accused of burglary, possessating burglar tools, resisting arrest, arson, menacing a court officer and a whopping nine malicious-wounding beefs. Apparently, Kayshawn done enforced some discipline on some homeboys in the neighborhood, and since he was pushing nineteen years old, ain’t no court gonna go easy on him.
As they went back to the church, Kayshawn explained that he was extorted into working for the Crips. He had needed money to buy shoes to impress a girl — it always went back to impressing a girl, if you traced it far enough, in Malcolm’s experience — and so he done sold some weed for the Crips. They wouldn’t let him stop. They made him burglarfy some households in Norwood. They told him they was protecting him from the po-po.
Shanaiyah that the good Lord already knows about her ladyparts.
She shouldn’t be wearing nothing like that to church, Malcolm thought. He’d have Emma Jean Bartlebee tell Shanaiyah that the good Lord already knows about her ladyparts, she ain’t gotta show ’em off in God’s house. Her curves be disruptionating the whole congregation.
