“What is at your back
Which way do you turn.”
-Tracy Chapmen, Crossroads
One little bald gap-toothed man sat upon his red loveseat.
One big, bald, emasculated—whatever he was now—shivered and hugged himself on a big brown couch.
One tall, thin, broad-shouldered vulture of a man with a forty year-old mop of clotted hair and grease squatted like a gargoyle on the black leather throne couch, looking into the blue flames of the ever-ignited burn barrel, looking incongruous draped in a castoff white lady blanket of rose-patterned white.
They were all silent, listening to the hooting of young voices and the rattle of bicycles coming up the hood trail, until, by the time the train was no longer sounding its snaky call, five boys and a girl in their mid-teens rode their BMX style trick bikes into the Crossroad of the World, with the attitude of invaders.
The leader of the group, a boy about six feet tall, threw his bike down, pulled out a knife, and threatened Otis, “Motherfucker, you stole my sista’s pussy!”
Otis tried to mumble something that looked like, “I’m sorry,” but came out as an animal-like squeal as he pressed his hands hard down into his groin.
The girl, a year younger than the boys, seemingly 14, stepped forward and spit on Otis, “The price was twenty dollas, Bitch! I’m not given this shit away!”
With that, all of the boys pulled knives and dropped their bikes, descending on Otis’s couch-bound form like a pack of dancing devils. Simp was horrified and shaking in fear. Otis was a bad, well, person. But had already paid more than enough for whatever he had done. To see these children plunging their knives into one of his camp mates like a circle of savage Indians wearing out some buffalo soldier gave him a deep dreadful chill all through his body. His little jelly belly quivered, and his gapped out teeth clattered together. He just hoped he didn’t pee on himself, because this was the only pair of pants he had. They leaped in and out and loomed over the couch from behind, stabbing and slashing as the man mewed, whimpered whined, cried and shuddered, and then finally lay silent and gushing beneath them.
The boys all now stood around, as the girl stepped up with a mud-caked board, and smashed Otis’s unseeing face over and over with the rude instrument of hood contract resolution, and then flung the board off into the woods with an angry huff, “Where’s my money?”
Simp spoke up, “Oh, Otis just got out of the joint. He don’t have no money.”
It was troubling Simp that Otis’s death was not bothering him as much as he thought it should.
Te oldest boy then said, “Then you’ll need to pay up. He was your friend, y’all old-ass niggas given him shelta.”
“But we don’t have no money, neither,” Simp protested. “And he weren’t my friend—but mugged me back in the day and threaten ole Reggiemon here.”
The boy next to the leader, who seemed to be of an evil mind, then said, “We need ta do them too, anyhow. They done saw this shit.”
The leader, said, “Yeah, mother—”
That was the last sound he ever uttered.
In one smooth motion Reggiemon had risen, cast off the draped blanket to reveal a naked gray-black physique of bizarre and corded leanness, strapped with an array of blades and such that was too extensive to catalogue at a glance.
A long needle of blued steel about a foot long protruded from the boy’s throat.
As he stood swaying the others all looked to him for a second, then turned to look at Reggiemon, still seemingly in some lethargic state of disbelief. Then the demon was upon them, dancing like a black creature of the night with two broad sugarcane machetes flickering in the silvery moonlight and blue glow of the fire drum.
Two screaming hoodrat heads flew into the air, both caught on the flat of a broad glittering machete, and tossed into the burn barrel, which belched blue flame and white sparks, as if in protest.
Reggie whirled in absolute silence, not even seeming to breathe as he danced among the falling bodies and the remaining two boys ran even as the girl—screaming—attempted to climb back on her bike, her limbs shaking so as to render her too uncoordinated for the activity.
As the two boys neared the edge of the firelight and the rim of surrounding trees two whirling machetes glittered end over end in the moonlight as they tumbled at the speed of a thrown football into the backs of each close cut head, sending the scattering hoodrats face first into the sordid dirt of the world from whence they had been spawned.
Simp did not have the courage to watch the rest, and closed his eyes as the screams of the girl punctuated the chopping of dead bodies into pieces and the blue flames licked ever higher, until finally her screams ended with a sickening, gurgling crunch and the burn barrel roared into an inferno, causing Simp to curl up on his couch and bury his head under his pillow, the pillow that Reggiemon had so thoughtfully bestowed upon him when he had come forty in a hand to The Crossroads of the World
