"Playing Dead"

by Jordan Harper

(Originally Appeared in Out of the Gutter #3)

It’s Red Hook, Brooklyn in the Wu-Tang years and shit is crazy – crack’s come on like the philosopher’s stone, turning ghetto trash to gold. We got greedy, every one of us. Greed’s fine. Greed gets you up in the morning. But we got soft, too. That’s how Birdie catches us slipping.

Sloppy: All the coke is laid out on the table. Sloppy: Kody’s on watch with his gun on the other side of the room. Sloppy: I never got that deadbolt that Devin told me to get. It was just a matter of time.

It happens fast – one second we’re talking shit and cutting the coke with vitamin B. The next the door explodes and the Port Side Posse comes through, big bad Birdie leading the way with an AK pointed at my head. I don’t recognize the rest, aside from Birdie’s brother Little Bird, and I can’t decipher their yells. The yardies talk in that Jamaican patois that’s no more English than Pig Latin is – but anybody can translate a gun to the head. In the front room a couple of them toss the six keys of coke into dufflebags. They make me, Kody, Skinny and Dap strip down butt-ass naked – they yank the gold right off our necks, even yank the fronts off Skinny’s teeth. They herd us into the bathroom, into the clawfoot tub. I press up against the tiles so my crotch don’t dangle against Skinny’s fat ass in front of me.

“Move you backsides, Brooklyn boys” Birdie says as he herds us into the tub, dropping enough of the accent so we can understand. “Don’t need no cuss-cuss nor fuckery. Come an get baptized, now.”

He smiles, his eyes the color of old hardboiled eggs. He pushes Skinny aside with the barrel of the gun to get in my face. His dreads hang wooly and thick, a crown of wookie cocks – even in the stank-ass bathroom his smell of ganja sweat and grease cuts through.

“Oi, it be Liver Johnson.” Birdie taps my skull with the barrel. “Big bout you, mon. Tell me, Mr. Liver – where I be finding you bloodclot friend Devin? I can’t find no hide nor hair of the bumbaclot boy.”

The crack game in Brooklyn ran smooth through ’92, at least compared to the craziness up north in Queens. Then the Jamaicans showed up last year – real island boys, not the Fat Cat crew from Jamaica, Queens. The Jamaicans don’t play nice. They drop bodies and rip off anything they can grab. Don Gorgon ran the Port Side Massive up until last week. Devin caught him slipping outside a curry-goat shack on Fulton. He’d ripped off a safehouse like this one near the Brooklyn Zoo, and Devin put a sunroof in his dome. Back a week Birdie was just Gorgon’s number one rudeboy. Now he’s in charge. He ought to say thanks.

“I don’t know where Devin’s at, and that’s real.” It’s true, not that I’d say different if it weren’t. “That shit’s between him and you. You want to jack us, jack us, but I’m not snitching to you any more than I’m going to snitch to the police.

He splits that smile but it doesn’t touch those rotten eyes.

“If ya kyann catch Quaco, ya catch him shirt,” Birdie says, pouring the island sounds on thick. But I understand and my guts turn to water. I thought maybe this was just a scare tactic, herding us naked into the bathroom like this. But it’s not.

“Nigga, what? What shirt?” Kody asks. I could tell him, but I’m too busy getting set to die.

I’m not ready.

Birdie turns on the shower. We jump and bump each other in the ice cold spray. I press against the tiles. Skinny's big black ass shimmies -- I don't want to look, but that's all I get in my field of vision, and I don’t want to die with my eyes closed. It’s Auntie Ruth who brings me back down from the hysteria. She's going to find out that I got put down in a safehouse bathtub, bare-ass and dead in a pile of coke-slingers. Scandalous.  Kody turns around and it's like he wants to say something like "I'm sorry" or "make it stop" but he doesn’t – and shit, I’m not mad at him for not covering the door. Not one of us had a gat bigger than a .32 – what were we going do when five yardies with AKs bust through the door but die? Over Skinny's shoulder I see Birdie spit something to his brother, Little Bird. Birdie walks out the room. His brother raises his machine pistol.

"Drop them bloodclots."

Just before everything explodes Skinny barks a laugh.

"Shit, little nigga, bring it."

The world goes thundercloud.
 
###
"If you can't catch Quaco, you catch his shirt." Devin tells me as he’s opening the trunk – six keys of pure base in a duffle bag waits for me. It’s the last six before Devin goes underground – with the Port Side Massive gunning hard for him, he knows his shelf life on the street is milk-short. "That's what those goat-eatin’ motherfuckers say."

"Quaco? Who names a dude Quaco?"

“I know I’m not hearing you talk that shit – who named you Liver?”

“You did, motherfucker,” and we’re laughing. They call me Liver because I’m high-yellow as a motherfucker, with a white mom and all, so back in the day said Devin said I looked jaundiced – a bunch of the kids on the block had to run to the dictionary before they laughed at that one.

"Let it slide. Quaco ain't the point here."

"Alright, then. If you got a point, lay it out."

"It means if you can't catch a slippery motherfucker, you catch what you can reach -- put a hurt on his homies, his pad, his family and shit. Don't matter if they did anything wrong or not-- if you can't catch Quaco you catch his shirt. You see what I'm saying?"

"You saying that you got beef with the Port Side, and you plan on getting real slippery. So if these dreadlocks can’t get with you, they’re coming to get with me? "

"Liver, I ain't promising you they gonna come. I'm just saying, it's in the realm of possibilities -- it ain't so secret that you and I put in work together. I ain't trying to fuck with you -- but it is what it is. If I knew these motherfuckers got so damn tribal I might have thought twice before lighting up Don Gorgon. I'm telling every motherfucker I know to watch out. Don't get a big head over it.”

He gave it to me straight up – I don’t blame him. I’m a grown-ass man and I could have taken care of myself.. But deep down I never thought the Posse would come for me – last week I thought I was going live forever. Now I’m counting seconds.
 
###
Skinny saves my life three times. The first time was when he opened his mouth just before the yardies light us up. Every single one of them starts the killing with him. When the first claps comes, I just drop. Bullets puff plaster and tiles over my head but none of them touch me. That's the second way Skinny saves my life. Motherfucker is so big that none of the yardies see that they don't hit me. The third way Skinny saves me – wait on it.

Skinny's head hits the wall while most of him falls on top of me. My breath goes out. More weight crashes on my legs. I smash my nose against the tub floor -- it's gritty, no one’s cleaned this tub in an age. The shooting stops for the time it takes me to take one gasp of air -- and then it starts again, bullets raking the pile. One shot, slowed from going through Skinny, clangs loud against the side of the tub so close I can smell it. Each second I think it's over but nothing stops -- there's smoke and blood and booms and stench and mist and white noise from the showerhead.

I’m not even grazed. The bodies on top of me shudder the last drops of life out of them. I wish those yardies turned the water warm -- not because I'm cold, I'm way past worrying about that, but because I can feel the difference between the cold water and the blood dripping hot off the corpses of my friends. A weight slams down pressing my face harder against the floor of the tub -- Dap fell out when they turned him to a ragdoll, and now they dump him back in. He empties like a tipped garbage pail.

I try to listen. These boys have done their dirt, now all they have to do pack up the coke and hit the road. I play dead until they leave. Then I find Devin and we go hunting for the rest of our days -- show these yardies what a war is. Just as soon as they leave. Just as soon as –

The water rises. Some part of Kody blocks the drain. Shit’s been inching up and now it's starting to fill my nose. If I twist my head then Skinny on top of me will shift and the yardies see it and do some double-checking. My arm's extended over my head. I move it sloooow.

Then the yardies come back.

"What you mean I'm a stay and watch them boys?" It sounds like Little Bird. "Bumbaclots going nowhere – dead don’t walk."

"Yeah, them boys is going to move." That’s older brother Birdie. "Them coming with us, once we fix them right. Got to get them ready for travel – for easy packing. The rest of us is goin’ to make a run to get the tools."

Water plugs my nostrils -- it takes all I've got to stop from blowing out. I take little tastes of air with my mouth. I've got less than a minute to keep doing that.

"What tools?" Bird asks.

Kody's forearm blocks the drain. So slippery slow I get my hand under, so it’s my palm blocking the drain. It might slurp and that'll get Birdie and Bird’s attention. Or might not. So I tense up and get ready to chance it.

"Cutlasses.  Machetes. We going take these Brooklyn boys to pieces and leave Devin with a mystery, see?. So you sit tight, little rude boy, until we come back with the proper."

The drain slurps, one quick burst. I piss one warm trickle. My breath comes back in short hard draws as I wait for Birdie to come poking. Then nothing but the shower static.
###

I can’t make out much in the front room, but it sounds like it happens the way Birdie said – him and the posse going to get carving tools to quarter me and the boys like jerk chicken. I’m blind and half deaf at the bottom of the tub, no idea if Little Bird is out on the stoop or sitting on the shitter three feet away. But I do know they left him with more than his dick in his hands, which puts him up on me.

But now’s better than never, and never is showing up when Birdie comes back with the machetes – you can’t play dead through a dismemberment. My body’s aching all over from ice water and dead weight all pressing on me. I pull in my arm, playing reverse Twister with stiffs. My elbow pops like a Cristal cork – shit – the bullets don’t come. I raise up from under Skinny, not looking at his face – half-a-face – I break out to the surface. Pushing Skinny aside sets something loose – he barks a death rattle. For a second I think it’s mine.

The bathroom is empty. I live a few more minutes at least.

I’m standing in the spray, stepping out of the tub – there’s one spill of blood on the tiles, these motherfuckers keep their killing clean. No clothes – sick-ass yardies stole my drawers. The door’s open. I can’t see Little Bird. I’m looking for something to split his dome – looking and seeing nothing. I don’t have long – Birdie got to have his machetes stashed someplace, no way them yardies is at the hardware store shopping right now. I take a peek through the doorway. Little Bird’s sitting in the same chair I was in thirty minutes ago, got his back to me. It ought to be – he thinks any threat to him isn’t coming from the tub full of corpses. Maybe he’s right. Back in the bathroom I can’t find nothing to kill him with. I could rip off the towel rack but it’s flimsy fake brass. There’s one old nasty-ass toothbrush – it’d work to shove that through the eyeball straight into the brain, but that’s crazy kung-fu shit and I can’t take that kind of chance. That leaves a bottle of shampoo and a dirty-ass towel. Even covered in the blood of my friends I can’t think of anything murderous to do with a shampoo bottle, so that leaves the towel.

The towel gets soaked over Dap’s body. I twist it tight and come creeping on Little Bird. My feet stick as I go through the kitchen – we kept it sloppy here. Real sloppy. But that’s over now. I cross my arms, slip the towel over Little Bird’s neck and straighten my elbows like I’m ripping something apart. He claws at it. He bugs his eyes. He kicks his life out onto the dirty linoleum.
###

His drawers got piss in them, so I wear his baggie jeans commando and slip on the fat flannel shirt. Baggy gear means everything fits everybody. I’m ready to make break for it when I hear Bird and his men coming back. Dancehall garbage from the car stereo gives them away. I think quick, stuff Little Bird’s hat with newspaper like it’s full of them nasty dreads. They left Little Bird holding a Mac-10. I check it –locked and loaded. I step to the midnight air just as the yardies roll up. In the dark they just see the Rasta shape standing in the doorway, not my liver skin. I walk.

I light them up.

Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap

I don’t run – in this part of Brooklyn, cops wouldn’t check out a mushroom cloud. I come up slow, covering them – if one of them is playing dead that’d be some funny shit. Pot smoke snakes out the bullet holes – the yardies went out so high they might not know they’re dead yet. I jerk the door  -- the domelight shines through a film of blood and brains onto three dead yardies.

Three.

No Birdie.

Well, fuck that shit, I think,  I’ll see that nigga another day, and I start to break – and then stop.

If you can't catch Quaco, you catch his shirt.

When they find the bodies of Kody, Dap and Skinny back there in the tub, not cut up, and my body nowhere to be found -- Birdie can do that math. He knows me. He figures me for a playacting motherfucker who rose from the dead to cap his brother.

I wanted to know who Quaco was, and now he’s me. I’m him. And if Birdie don’t catch me, he catch my shirt. Auntie Ruth, my cousin Kianna, friends from gradeschool I don’t even remember – Birdie will kill them all now that’s I’ve smoked Little Bird and these motherfuckers here.

I can’t have it. Maybe Devin can live with his shit spilling all over the damn place, but not me. I’ll chew on this Mac before I let that happen. And I realize that maybe that’s my only choice – leave myself just one more body in this big pile that’s growing bigger by the minute. Better that then what happens if Birdie finds out I’m alive.

If they find the other three bodies. But if I make Skinny and the boys disappear the way Birdie wanted us to be gone, Birdie won’t have a fucking clue what happened – and he sure won’t figure I raised up from the dead. Let him put Little Bird on Devin  – that’s where it belongs in the first place. Make it look like they caught me, and they won’t have to look to catch my shirt.

If I do what I’m thinking I have to do, it means that I play dead for real. This life would be as over as if I’d caught one back in that bathroom. It means being a ghost.

I already feel like one.

I reach past the dead yardie driver and pop the trunk to get the machete. Turns out Birdie was being poetic with that word – it’s a chainsaw back there. I pick it up and head to the house. I hate to think about what I’m going back in there to do. But shit, they’re all dead in that bathtub anyhow, and now Skinny gets to save my sorry-ass life one more time.