Storm clouds rolled in from the east as the counter current ripped down the street from the west.
I was headed to the Raven Inn to have a few beers and a lot of conversation with Big Ron. Teen thugs hunt this neighborhood in packs at all hours, so I was on my guard. However, the vast majority—some 85% of the residents—are working class Caucasians, doing the best they can, having moved as far out of Baltimore City as you can on the north end, without buying a horse farm on the other side of I-695.
Impeccably groomed lawns with gnomes and bird feeders nearly sparkled in the lush greenery that a month of almost daily rain has bestowed.
Then I here the piercing shriek of dread, entering my right ear, echoing off the surrounding houses into my left ear and screeching in boyish terror, “Nooo!!! Mommy, nohohoo!! Nooee!”
The last “no” breaks into a yawning sob.
I looked across the street to my right and saw two boys of about five on the raised concrete porch of the row house. One boy was clearly mixed race, being light, toasted coconut, brown with curly hair of darker brown and wearing a light blue polo shirt and white shorts.
The other boy was white with light brown hair and white shorts. The shirtless white boy was cringing, fists down by hips with the efforts of his protest, he weighs perhaps 50 pounds.
Standing in the arch of the open door, is the household rented cock, a 20-year-old, dark-skinned, black man, dressed in casual retail attire, not a hoodrat by appearance. This person, at about 5’8” and 130 pounds, seems shaken by the happening, cringing back against the doorframe, wincing with every word shouted by the massive mistress whale.
Within the house, in a large pinkish drapery of a dress with wide shoulder straps, stands a woman that might be white, might be Latina or might be up to an eighth black, but, is by all appearances, a white woman. She has light brown hair to her shoulders and a wide face and yelled in semi-ebonic accent, “I need to know you’ll listen!”
Sobbing, the boy choked out, “Yes, Mommy, I’ll listen.”
She barked gruffly, “Then come here!”
I looked away as the boy whines, “Please, Mommy! Paleaseasease!”
“Get in here, now,” she barked.
I then heard the report of a small caliber gunshot—I totally thought I heard a .223 caliber carbine or a .22 magnum revolver, the closest sounds I can recall to the report echoing from the brick houses.
I looked to my right.
The black breeding done was cringing against the door frame, as if trying to crawl down inside his pearly white shirt.
The brown boy was prancing about as if afraid he would be next, wanting to aid his brother with a worried glance, then looking back at his mother and backing to the far side of the porch.
On the concrete writhed the white boy, arms held over his ears as if ready to weather a barrage of kicks, screaming incoherently, “Eeweweeey—aaahhhh!!!”
The mother had retreated back into the accreted interior of her rented house, her right hand behind her prodigious hip, her left hand motioning to her pathetic paramour, her eyes on me, the boy still writhing beneath the stoop on the concrete porch, his brother now cringing in the far corner against the wrought iron railing.
I looked back ahead, “staying in my lane” as Big Ron would say, and continue on my way, hoping deep down in my soul that that boy kills her in her sleep, but knowing it will never occur to him until he’s old enough to spend his life in prison for doing the only decent thing to be done to the brood mother of the mongrel sepsis pool that some ass once named “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”
Waking Up in Indian Country: Harm City: 2015
