Pretty Boy was the first to wake up, but that wasn’t unusual. He liked being the only one awake, to be the first to use the only bathroom they had, to get ready before his grandmother and brother awoke. Both of them got on his case in different ways. G-Ma was the only mother they had so she tried to play the role the best way she could. Kriminal got annoyed with him just because—well, because his older brother was easily annoyed.
This morning he felt different and he knew it should have been because of what they did last night. That should be the reason, but deep down he knew it wasn’t because of that. They took off with a boring van not worth much last night. He didn’t have a reason to feel proud or guilty about that. He still didn’t know how to feel about the van or even why they’d taken it in the first place. But his thoughts kept going to the guy with the cross, the one who had literally dared Kriminal to shoot him.
It coulda all gone down differently.
He wondered what it would feel like waking up knowing he’d helped kill a man. Not pulling the trigger, but being a witness to the murder. What were those called? An accessory. That’s what he would have been. Because he was sitting next to his brother. He was watching but didn’t try to stop him. Pretty Boy didn’t say a word or do anything.
The van was nothing compared to what coulda happened.
Blood on the cross belongin’ to the wrong man can’t take my guilt ain’t got command.
Pretty Boy wondered about writing down those thoughts but let them go. If the lines really were any good they’d come back to him.
The dream of making those mixtapes into some kind of reality was simply a dream, especially since he didn’t want to highlight the sex and violence. If there was one thing his grandmother detested it was “the filthy mouth,” as she called it. He and Kriminal spoke like anybody else, but around her they had to keep it clean. So the thought of him making rap music like the other Chicago rappers were making it . . . there was no way. G-Ma would come after him. Rolling in her wheelchair and carrying a shotgun in her lap.
He went to the kitchen and pulled some eggs out of the fridge. G-Ma liked having big breakfasts before church. She was still religious about going to church, but then again weren’t you supposed to be? Pretty Boy sometimes still took her even though he’d tried getting out of it. But G-Ma needed help with the wheelchair, though sometimes he wondered if she was just using that as an excuse to get one of them to accompany her.
He went to rinse his hands and noticed the trickle coming out of the faucet. It was like the thing was spitting instead of running. It was ridiculous. He shut it off and then he just looked at the small kitchen and the round table in the corner.
A cross hovered above the table on the wall. It had been there for years, ignored like G-Ma’s other simple decorations. Her Bible and her pictures of Jesus and His angels. But she grew up in a different era and a different time. When Chicago wasn’t referred to as Chiraq, when it wasn’t the murder capital of the world, when kids weren’t getting killed.
G-Ma said they needed the blood of Christ, but Pretty Boy had seen too much blood in his lifetime.
But none last night.
He stood looking at that cross on the wall a little.
I’m ready, what about you?
Sometimes his skin felt too tight, his soul too restless. Pretty Boy knew something. He wasn’t ready. No way. He wasn’t even close to being ready. There was a big world out there, a place he could do well in. A place where he could do something, make something, even be something. He just needed to get away from this place. Chicago and the black hole inside it. He would’ve done that already, long ago. But he couldn’t, not with his grandmother and his brother still there. He’d never leave them.
But one day he would. He knew this the same way someone might believe in the meaning of that cross.
His father had abandoned them and his mother had died on them and that was the way life went. His grandmother did the only thing she could do. She stayed there and raised them. So Pretty Boy was going to do the only thing he could do. And that was stay in this little coffin in the hood until she ended up passing away.
She’s gonna probably live to be a hundred and outlive Kriminal and me both.
There was a shuffling in the back room and he knew it was G-Ma. Another reason to get up early was to go back there and help her. Those legs and hips of hers sure weren’t going to survive to be a hundred. They’d already given out on her now in her mid-eighties.
Everything eventually gave out. In time.
Pretty Boy just knew it wasn’t his time yet. He had a lot more living left to do. A lot more songs to come up with. A lot more heart to seep into some stories. And all of that would be a long ways away from this place.
• • •
HIS BROTHER ATE like a horse, just like he usually did. All those muscles and mean energy needed fuel to keep them going. Of course, food wasn’t the only thing that did it. Kriminal had help in other ways, too. Ways that Pretty Boy had avoided so far in life. He intended to keep avoiding them, too. Those were the things that made Kriminal unpredictable, even for someone who had been around him for twenty-three years.
“Not hungry?” Kriminal asked as he doused his eggs with more ketchup.
“I get a stomachache watching you eat,” Pretty Boy joked.
“Why don’t you come up with a rap round that?”
“Will be better than anything comin’ out of you.”
Kriminal was soon done wolfing down his food. There was a busy day ahead and Pretty Boy was surely going to be a part of it, too. His brother pushed aside the chair and then gave his grandmother a kiss on her head.
“Later, G-Ma,” Kriminal said.
The wrinkles and the kind eyes didn’t mean G-Ma was a pushover. Hardly.
“How about clearin’ off the table before you get on out?” she asked him.
Kriminal looked at Pretty Boy.
Uh-uh.
“I did it last night.”
“So you got experience then,” Kriminal said.
He started heading to his bedroom. G-Ma let him take half a dozen steps until she stopped him cold.
“Joseph, you’ll get back here and do those dishes if you know what’s good for you.”
Pretty Boy was standing now, grinning as he watched his brother step back into the kitchen like some grade school boy being sent to the principal’s office. He threw Kriminal a towel.
“Nice try,” he told his brother.
Didn’t matter how old they were. As long as G-Ma was around, they were the boys and they lived under her roof, no matter how leaky it might be; they also lived under her rules. Sometimes it got old. But then again, maybe it had kept them out of more trouble.
Pretty Boy thought of all those prayers G-Ma prayed for them. Maybe those had helped. He wasn’t sure.
I’m gonna pray for you. For all of you.
The words played in Pretty Boy’s mind.
Now we got two crazy people praying for us.
The question he asked, time and time again, the one that always put that big question mark in his heart and soul was this:
Who hears those prayers? And what’s ever done about them?
Yeah. That’s the question all right. The one that those preachers and those righteous folks and his grandmother and the zealots on the streets never answered. Because at the end of the day, they didn’t have an answer.
You shoot off your prayers but they stay empty like the shells remaining afterward.
Pretty Boy was tired of the shooting and the praying. There had to be a better way.