Ask the Dark Read Online Free Page B

say. He was beat up bad, I hear. Ain’t a good way to go.
    No way’s a good way, Marvin says. You just make sure you don’t go getting in no strange man’s car, you hear me?
    I hear you, I said.
    I was looking up the street at how the sunshine came down through the trees and leaves and still looked green on the black of the street, same color like the leaves.
    Then I say, Marvin, I need forty-eight thousand dollars.
    He looks at me, eyes buggin’. What the hell for?!
    Bank’s taking my daddy’s house, I said.
    For a second he don’t say nothing. Then he looks at me. Shit, he says. You mean your house.
    Same one, I said.
    God’amn, Marvin says, sort’f breathes. Looks at me. Why can’t your daddy make it?
    He’s too bad hurt, I said. Fell off that roof, remember?
    God’amn, he says again. That’s some mean nasty shit you got coming down on you. Some mean nasty shit.
    Uh-huh, I said. But I gotta make it. Th’money, I mean. Promised Leezie. Ain’t got no ideas, though. Least no good ones.
    Now Marvin, he looks at me, and I know what he’s thinkin’, can just tell from the squint of his eyes.
    And he says, You ain’t gonna start slippin’, is you?
    Slippin’ where? I say, but I know what he’s talking about.
    Back to where you was a couple years ago, he says. You was a crazy kid, Billy. Actin’ out every way, saying you was here when you was really there and stealing everything that ain’t nailed down! Used to scare even me, and I’m a man who done some crazy shit in his day. Boy, back then I wouldn’t’ve even let you in the van with me, you was so damn wild. So don’t you slip. I don’t want to see you in jail or no boys’ home, you understand?
    I was smiling now, looking at’m. I said, Naw. Ain’t slippin’. I swore.
    How swore?
    To my mother, afore she died, I said. On her grave, too.
    He looked at me a minute, eyes right on me, his face all empty now ’cause the feeling run out of it. I weren’t smiling no more, neither.
    Well that’s good, Billy, Marvin says. I know what all that meant to you, seeing her pass. Seen the change in you myself, if nobody else round here did. So don’t go slippin’ now that trouble’s come. Listen. I been in shit myself years back, deep shit. No money, no job, and children, too. But it all comes right in the end. You gotta believe that, and hold yourself together.
    It felt good hearing him say all that, so I promised I would. Of course, me I’m thinking, I went after that mower—was that slippin’? Didn’t tell about finding Tommy, what about that? Hell, worst of all is I go and promise Leezie I gonna get forty-eight thousand—and to get that done right is like askin’ for a world of slippin’.
    I guess hearing ’bout the house riled’m—Marvin, I mean—’cause after a minute he pounds the steering wheel and says, Shit! And I mean shit. See, that’s the thing. Boy like you ain’t got money. And your daddy ain’t got money, ’specially now that he got hurt and can’t go to work and your poor mother died, bless her soul. And if there’s one thing I know, nobody gonna dig you out.
    That’s the truth, I said.
    Damn right, Marvin says. Fact is, less you got, the less you get. And that’s true for both black and white. Rich man ain’t ever gonna give you nothing, even if you and yours is right outside his doorway starving yourselves to death. ’Specially in this damn neighborhood. Rich folks, they all plain crazy, and that’s the god’amn truth.
    I hear you, I says.
    All this time we talked we was making deliveries, him stopping and me running up, and now we gone to a couple more houses. One of’m I got to tell you about. I mean Simon Hooper’s house. You prob’ly seen him around, though he don’t get out much, ’cept to walk his dog. I had a whole mess of drugs for ’is mother, who they say lives in the back room and ain’t come out her bed in six years, though I never seen her. Say she’s big and fat and don’t never take a bath,