2022 North East Baltimore, Low Noon
Danny was a darling old girl, about 60, and obviously still missing a former beauty that she still embodied in her smile.
‘Needy is right.’
“He is amazing,” she admired, as Banjo held the door. “Doc said you are sleeping in a gym and need a place to stay. My renters stopped paying me and won’t leave and the police won’t come. If you could ask them to leave, I think they would. If you could repair the damage they have done, that would serve as rent. If you can escort me to buy groceries so I don’t get mugged, that would cover food.”
She looked up at him searching for a savior.
He smiled kindly, “That would be nice. All of my stuff smells like sour sweat.”
The Front Stoop Negotiation
On the short drive home, which convinced him that this woman should never drive on the interstate, Danny gave him the situation at her home, which she shared with renters who had lost their jobs during Covid and had stopped paying rent, buying groceries and looking for work. She was “being bled dry,” “eaten out of house and home,” and “felt violated.”
The street was green with two-tiered lawns on each side and two sets of concrete stairs to each house, as if the street had once been a stream bed. The early spring day was pleasant enough, with only one parking spot left for Danny. After five minutes of parking got her before her house, she sneered and looked up past him at a nice corner-of-row brick row house with old metal green awnings. Two men were sitting on the front stoop.
“There, Banjo, that is my house, though you wouldn’t know it. Those loafers will not even cut the grass. I pay the man next door to do it.”
“That ends now, Danny.”
His blood was up, his war face painted in a heart beat against the slothful minions of this Kali Yuga world.
“Alberto of Liberia—well enough behaved until Bradly corrupted him, and Bradly the huge African American, piece-of-shit,” were sitting on Danny’s porch drinking wine from the bottle as she narrated bitterly, “The last of my Carolina Muscadine for my arthritis, going down their greedy negro necks!”
“Pah!” she pretended to spit like a gypsy and he imagined her and Old Stump at breakfast over coffee while he eased out of the car.
Her safely around the car and on the first flight of stairs, he whispered, “Any weapon in the house?”
“Bradly has a bag that I think has a gun in it, it would be a little bag, so like a pistol.”
‘Oh, she can’t whisper. They heard that. Accelerate.’
Banjo took over, leaving her behind, trying to crib from Doc’s confidence of command book, striding up the sidewalk to the men sitting on the concrete steps before the small concrete slab porch girded in old wrought iron that needed painted, “Bradly, I’m Banjo, your new roommate.”
He said this extending his hand with a cold smile.
The hulk stood and towered and soared at the shoulders over and around him, but was mostly flab. Bradly did have good instincts and absolutely knew what was up, “You a bit light fo dis, ain’y ya?”
Banjo felt the soft hand and squeezed. The soft flesh and bird bones gave, so he broke it.
Bradly went to his knees, “Whad da fuck?” and Banjo snapped his wrist clean, below the two broken medicarpals. He searched the hand with his.
‘Nice, they are broken clean, won’t heal for months.’
The skinny Nigerian was wide-eyed, still holding the wine bottle that should have been upside Banjo’s head.
“Alberto,” he asked, in a kind tone of command, as he let go of the broken hand and grabbed the thumb of the big, soft left hand, “is Bradly ambidextrous?”
“Ambo what?” drowled the skinny primate.
Danny laughed and Banjo asked, “Can he use his left hand for stuff like cooking?”
“Oh, yes, he’s as handy with the frying pan as the spatula!”
Banjo snapped the thumb in two, cleanly, and did not break the skin and cause a compound injury. Bradly groaned and crumpled as the big black man next door retrieving his newspaper nodded to Banjo with respect and said, “It’s about time this got set right!”
Banjo nodded and asked, “Do you want his gun—I heard there were home invasions?”
“Sure,” said the man.
Banjo turned to Alberto, “Now, you will bring that man Bradly’s sneak bag with the gun in, you know the one.”
Alberto nodded, “Yes,” with wide eyes.
“Then, you will gather all of your things that can be carried—I will burn the rest. Leave his stuff, he’s getting off with his life. You will bring those things here, then you will take your friend, with his twigs for bones, to this Doctor.”
Letting Bradley fall to the grass on his side whimpering like a baby, he placed one of Doc Landon’s cards in the front pocket of the white button shirt stained with wine.
Banjo continued, hoping he was not asking to much of the 70 IQ memory, “First though, you will return The Lady’s wine, promise never to return, and pray that I don’t come for you in the night.”
Alberto’s eyes bugged, so Banjo piled on, working that superstitious landscape in the savage brain, “I can smell you, I’m a hillbilly, y’all have a scent that is keen to me.”
For emphasis, Banjo stomped that fallen sloth in the kidney, and cheered to the man next door exclaiming, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout! No accounts be owned!”
He then looked to Alberto, his sleek ebony skin now glistened, “Do you understand… everything that was said here?”
“Yes, I do as you command,” and handed the bottle of fine wine to Danny as if it were radioactive, “Sorry, Miss Danny—been a bad boy and you will see me no more.”
Alberto disappeared inside and Danny looked up to him, “I could get used to this! If you have any scary tattooed friends, please invite them for dinner. I sense you’re not a man that sticks around.”
He nodded, and she knew, again, he could tell, as she shrank demurely, wishing that she still had the glow of past youth to keep such a man around.
…
Notes
-1. This chapter was a combination of actual events experienced among kangly kind by Banjo, the author, and Doc Dread, my good friend. It is dedicated to Danny, who deserved better than me and hopefully found him. -JL, 9/21/24
