Mom had been some weirdo book-reader and had tried giving him some kind of important name. His friends though, they just called him J.R. Just like Mom and other relatives, friends had become scarce over the last year or two. That’s why he was flopping in vacant houses down in the hood. But just now, thanks to his farsighted ingenuity, J.R. had placed himself in a money-making situation.

The handicapped shopping cart hummed beneath him as he tooled around the supermarket. He hit the glove rack and got one pair. Pockets would not do in that snowy mess outside. He hit the baking aisle and got himself some salt, just one canister for the hard-to-get spots. He then cruised around to the snow shovel display and was hit with sticker shock.

“What, twenty-fo-ninety-nine jus’ ‘cause it got a bigfoot on da box?”

A voice to his right agreed, “Sheee, I come all dis way ta shovel some fat white folks out ‘en now no shovel.”

J.R. looked over to see Gerald Dee, sitting in the other handicapped cart, shaking his head. He immediately determined that he had a rival for some sidewalk shoveling here. On top of that Gerald was looking really fit, and had always been able to work his ass off. So J.R. hit upon a plan, and as geniuses are want to do, executed it straight away. You see, Gerald lacked imagination. That was J.R.’s ticket to the CEO spot of this new enterprise.

“Ma Brutha! Come up outa da hood fo some work too. How you doin’ Gerald? Still laid up whit Mamma?”

The other man shook his head, “Naw, out on ma ass, sleepin’ in vacants.”

J.R. was thrilled to hear of his good friend’s misfortune, but kept that on the down-low. He pulled alongside his fellow oppressed brother and clasped hands.

“I got this Ma Brutha. Lez cruise on up ta checkout and ged ta work—hood style!”

Gerald, as the unimaginative who fail to see the wisdom of innovation often do, failed to see the upside, and his voice cracked in doubt, “What, up in dis white bread joint? Is you crazy boy?”

J.R. just smiled and cruised off past the clerk who had been following them around. “Yo, I got this. Jus’ follow me.”

Jerome and Gerald waited in line behind a big food stamp order, seated comfortably in their handicapped scooters. Being the CEO of J & G Enterprises Unlimted, J.R. also paid for Gerald’s gloves. He now had 32 cents to his name, but things were about to look up. They rode the carts over to where the two old ladies with the canes had been standing waiting for them. Once parked, they headed out the door, putting on their gloves and dropping the tags and receipt on the sidewalk where they belonged

They walked in the driving snow up the way until they got to that Stevenson Lane Joint, where all of them money-flush white folks lived; all of the folks who would pay to have two strong brothers shovel their walk, and their driveway. The snow was piling up good. Then, to their horror, they saw this old dude on a snow blowing machine that you drive cruising around wiping out the snow!

Gerald moaned, “Yo, dis shit sucks. Besides, what we gonna do with no shovels?”

J.R. took charge, and walked up to a porch that had been swept clean, and grabbed the broom and the shovel. He then stepped back to the roadside and handed the shovel to Gerald and kept the broom for himself. They walked on for a ways but Gerald still could not see the light, and began to gripe, “Ma Man, this joint ain’t got no street sidewalks, only the walk-up sidewalks en driveways. En Joe Blow back dare wipein’ dat shit out. Whaz up?”

Up ahead, J.R. saw the answer, a side street. This is what a leader does, sees an opportunity to inspire, and then seizes it!

He pointed at that side street and patted his man on the back.

“I got you Gerald. We gonna work dat bitch right dare, work dat whole street clean. Dare will be cars piled with snow. Lez roll yo!”

The two hard working men made off for the side street and then walked briskly down it, looking about for Escalades and other big money vehicles that might indicate a willingness to pay extra. Then, after a few blocks, as the street wound around toward York Road—he assumed—they saw her, the good deed money meal ticket.

“Gerald, check out the little old lady in da shawl, sweeping her old ass off. Lez take care a dat. Shee, we’ll be local heroes.”

Gerald, as the dull-witted tend to do even when inspired, carped, “But where all da cars? Dare only two cars on dis street—that extra money cars iz.”

“Ma Man, dis joint has churches en shit—dese people in church. When dey get back, we got Granny taken care of, all dem rich people parkin’ spots cleaned, paths shoveled to dey doors so dey can herd the kids into da livin’ room ta watch da X-box—en we flush Brutha!”

Gerald, snot beginning to run over his lips, and snow caking his old hat, looked up at him admiringly, and intoned, “You always was the smart somebody. I gotch you man.”

Gerald then began to approach the old lady, and J.R. noticed his pants cuffs were not tucked in, which made him look like some homeless fool in this snowy joint. J.R. made a verbal note, “Yo Gerald, cuff dem pants into you boots before da church crowd get home so you don’t look like some homeless somebody, but a Snow Removal Engineer. See here, see how I got’s my shit hooked up. Sweats stuffed in socks, and pants stuffed in boots. Good ta go!”

Gerald just gave him a stupid nod as he began to shovel the walk for the lady. The lady did not look in good health, all pale and whatnot. She was struggling fiercely with one little patch of snow with her long straw broom. J.R. made the grand entrance and took over her sweeping chores, sweeping with one hand and salting with the other, as he chatted her up. “Granny, we got this.”

The ancient and tiny white lady looked at him with deep hollow eyes, like she had cancer or something. Her face was made all the more pale from her hair being coal black instead of gray. Her voice crackled in some kind of strange Olympic skier accent, “I cannot pay. I am poor.”

“Granny, we got this. This is fo free. We buildin’ neighborly relations. Just tell all yo friends we done a good job en recommend us.”

She seemed relieved of some great weariness, and sighed, “You are so kind. I will leave the door open. Please come in for some hot chocolate when you finish.”

With that she turned and walked up the paved way, leaving the tiniest footprints he had ever seen, footprints without a toe part on the shoe—just kind of round. J.R. noticed this, then looked at how slow she walked. She must have been taking tiny steps, though he could not exactly see as her legs were hidden beneath her billowing gray dress that dragged in the snow, wiping out the prints even as they appeared. He returned to Gerald, “Ma Man, dis old lady got amputated feet en shit—in a bad way. We gonna be da neighborhood handymen before da day is out. We buildin’ relations here.”

Dreams of sharing an apartment in some nice garage without a car, behind one of these nice houses, as he and Gerald expanded their business across this prosperous joint, occupied his thoughts as he swept and salted behind Gerald, who was a regular workhorse. They were done in mere minutes—a world beating team of hard working men. Not wanting some thief to grab their tools, they carried the shovel and broom up the walk, and hid them behind the extensive shrubbery with the salt, before stepping up onto the covered porch, overgrown with snow-covered ivy. They took a breath, smiled at one another, and knocked on the storm door, the safety door behind it open.

“Oh, dats right. She said just to come in. Come on Gerald.”

The men tramped through the front door as the snow fell behind them, into a curtained entry way, lit by a ceiling bulb—one of the old pull-cord kind—and shrouded on all side by red curtains. He pushed through the curtain ahead of them and came into a large dimly lit room, with all kinds of lady’s things about; shiny glasses, polished silver spoons, all kinds of old-fashioned phones, and one of those hanging things with all of the lights on it, that always fell on sword fighters in old movies, which had dusty light bulbs inadequately illuminating the room. There was a stairway to a second floor. The windows themselves were completely curtained, as was the arched doorway to their front, which he assumed would lead to a dining room.

J.R. and Gerald stood for a moment, looking at the many end tables and coffee tables that made a maze of this room, heaped as they were with so many shiny old things, from ivory white cups to silver candlesticks. Gerald raised an eyebrow. “Yo, dis is some Adam’s Family shit here. If Lurch comes out dat curtain my black ass is gone!”

J.R., as the CEO, did his duty, and soothed his partner with a hushed tone, “Yo, old folks can be weird.”

A faint accented voice came from beyond the curtained doorway, “Come my honeys, your water is steeped.”

J.R. pushed through the curtain and Gerald followed reluctantly. The room was a bit gloomy, not a curtain pulled aside to admit the light, or to view the falling snow, as normal people would do. The lighting came from another one of those hanging light things with the chains and many bulbs. There were two steaming hot cups of chocolate set out on the large wooden table that dominated the room, before large wooden chairs on either side of the table. There were two doors, one probably to the kitchen and the other probably to the basement. There was a tea pot sitting in the center of the table.

The little old lady sat at the far end, her shawl gone, a lace cap now sitting atop her head of jet black hair. The chair she was seated on was high, too high for her to have sat up in on her own. The hollow quality was still there in her eyes, but they sparkled blue now, and did not have that empty gray they had outside. She sipped her drink from a tiny white cup and nodded to their clay mugs. “Drink up my honeys.”

They both sipped a drink of the chocolate and found it to be delicious. The lady seemed to relax now, and spoke with a softer voice, “Would you men like some cake?”

Gerald looked at J.R., leaving it up to him, and J.R. felt the pang in his stomach from not eating all day. “Yes Mamm, that would be great if you don’t mind.”

She smiled kindly, and whispered, seemingly to no one, “Eddie Dear, bring the cake.”

Gerald whispered to him, eyes, big and bulging, “If this is some Lurch shit I gone!”

The door behind her, to the kitchen it appeared, opened with nary a creek, and a skinny Asian man, wearing white cook’s clothing, and without a hair on his age-splotched head, limped out to the table with a China plate piled with little lemon cakes, and placed them on the table between Gerald and J.R. He seemed to have no personality at all, and just limped off back into the kitchen.

The lady seemed happy. “Eat up my honeys.”

As they grabbed the sweet lemony cakes and took a taste, J.R. would have to say that they were the moistest and most lemony cakes he had ever eaten. He raised his eyes to ask the lady her name, and noticed that a rat was sitting on her shoulder, a rat which was staring intently at Gerald. When Gerald saw the large gray rat he spit out his chewed cake and bugged his eyes, exclaiming, “A rat, a rat!”

The lady smiled into Gerald’s eyes. “Duke Elzear is his name.”

J.R. came to the rescue. She might be crazy. That did not mean they could not use her to get in good with the neighbors, or maybe even go out and do shopping for her and whatnot. He spoke up diplomatically as Gerald began to stand, dragging the heavy wooden chair legs across the wooden floor with a rasping moan that rang throughout the house he supposed, for it gave him a chill. “So Miss, is Duke what’s-his-name, your pet?”

She smiled and tickled the rat under the chin without turning to look at it. “Oh, he is far too imperious to tolerate any such arrangement. We have a partnership you might say.”

A scratching, and scraping, and humming sound, like someone dragging canvas up a staircase, came to their ears, just as the lady’s smile broadened, into a pretty grin that should have belonged to a much younger woman. J.R. was beginning to feel a bit faint, a little sick to his stomach. He lurched to his feet and turned for the door, catching his toe on a chair leg, and fell face first on the hardwood floor.

As he made to pushup he looked across the floor directly at Gerald’s ankles, and saw a gap in the floorboards beneath the china cabinet, and up out of that gap poured an upward flowing river of gray, greasy, fur-matted, red-eyed rats, tumbling over one another in their hundreds, even as the sounds of the army of which they were but a spearhead, came to him through the floorboards. The sickening vibration caused by thousands of rats rushing upward from a basement that must have been Hell itself, propelled him upward like a human spring. J.R. did a pushup that turned into a leap and stood to the right of Gerald, two steps closer to the doorway to freedom than his friend.

He was feeling a little dizzy. Just as the realization that they had been drugged hit him he saw two up-rushing streams of rodent fury darting up under each of Gerald’s pants legs. Rats were jumping off of the walls, dropping from the ceilings, flying up from the floor, and even biting Gerald on the head. Gerald crushed them in his hands and threw them. More and more and more rats in their ceaseless hundreds climbed his body like ravenous demons taking down a dinosaur. Then he was bitten. J.R. could feel his ear light on fire. Another bit stung his finger, another his knee—though dully through his sweats and jeans.

J.R. threw a rat at the lady. She merely smiled as she sipped her drink, even as the big rat on her shoulder seemed to peer through him.

“Oh hell no!”

J.R. went ballistic and grabbed Gerald, now covered by rats, and screaming as many seething forms could be seen pushing up inside the legs of his pants, “My junk, my junk!”

Three or more little sets of nasty teeth then bit into the fingers of J.R.’s right hand, the hand that he was using to drag Gerald to safety, causing him to flinch and lose hold of his friend, who was now being dragged as if by a creature made of a thousand rats, down to the floor, even as more rats poured up from below.

He heard his own scream as if it had been expelled from some distant throat, for it could not have been Gerald’s scream, clogged as his mouth was, with three rats jamming his mouth in some mad rush to be first down his throat.

His own scream echoed dully through the haze of his clouding mind and he ran, ran for his life, ran for his everlasting soul, out through the end tables crowded with crystal, china and old phones, out through the glass panel of the storm door that they had thankfully forget to shut behind the heavy safety door, and into the life-affirming light of the snowy day. He ran across the snow-covered lawn toward the sidewalk, and was struck by a defiant thought.

Jerome Ronnie Ringgold Thompson turned on his heels as he ran, and continued on his way, backward across the walk and out into the street, mouthing his manhood, “I’ll be back bitch. You messin’ whit da wrong dude whit yo Adam’s Family bullshit. I’m gonna burn dis—”

He heard the snapping of the leg, but did not really feel it, drugged up as he was on that fiendish hot chocolate and lemon cake. The flight through the air might even have been described as pleasurable, as he floated above the speeding sports car that had hit him. The landing though, that sucked!

The sound of something crunching brought him to for a few seconds, as the hurried footsteps of two young people rushed to him across the snow-covered street. He looked up to see two worried faces, a blonde girl and a red-haired boy, who said, “Mister, mist…”

He woke in a hospital bed, with nary a pain in his legs, though his back hurt some. He looked up into the face of a very busy doctor, who was writing some stuff down on a clipboard held by a nurse. The doctor looked down at him and spoke, “How are you feeling Jerome?”

He said, “A lot better doc.”, however, nothing came out, not a sound. He could move his mouth and tongue, but could not make a sound!

The doctor kept questioning him and checking him, and telling people Jerome was ‘a para’ not ‘a quad’, and so on. Other doctors came in and went. This went on for days. They had questions for him. Unfortunately, even though his hands worked—which was fortunate since he had been informed that his legs would not work again—he had never learned how to write beyond signing his name. He could not communicate.

For days, and then weeks, this went on. The people were nice to him. He even had his own room, which seemed strange. Then, one day, just after the nurse opened the blinds so that he could see the snow fall out the window, a nice lady doctor came in, with a suited lady of the kind that had generally made decisions about his home placement and such when he had been a boy and Mom was locked up or strung-out. The ladies seemed to have already discussed him a great deal. He looked up to both of them questioningly. The lady doctor spoke first, “Jerome, we have not been able to determine the cause or nature of your mute state.”

This term confused him, and it must have showed, so the lady doctor explained, “We do not know why you cannot speak. We will be releasing you into home care this morning. With the right therapy you will be able to move around your residence without mechanical aid. And of course, there are a wide range of mobility chairs for you to choose from. You will also be instructed in sign language and receive speech therapy—the best I am told. Mrs. Chapel here has some good news for you along those lines.”

The lady in the suit spoke with a smile, “Jerome, you are so lucky. You have no hospital bills, and will have the best care possible. The lady whose walk you were shoveling when you were hit, Mrs. Ulster, she has seen to your every need. She is waiting just outside. We’ve taken care of your processing. We just want you to receive the best care possible. She’s even talking about adoption. You see Jerome, doing good things for people pays off in the end, even in tragic circumstances.”

He tried to speak, even bugged his eyes out in fear. But nothing seemed to work. They thought he was happy. A few moments later a nurse came in pushing a wheelchair, with two big dudes to lift him into it. The lady doctor and Mrs. Chapel stepped aside to let the small figure of the black-haired granny in her shawl step forward, covered from neck to toe in her gray dress, a warm smile on her lips, and a cold hunger in her eyes. Jerome Ronnie Ringgold Thompson swallowed hard, and tears welled up in his eyes.

Mrs. Chapel said, “Awes.”

The evil old lady they were calling Mrs. Ulster stepped forward without a sound, and took his hand in both of her ice-cold ones. “Oh My Honey, it will be so nice to have you back. Eddie is waiting downstairs with your new powered chair, and Elzear is preparing a room for you as we speak!”

He burst into involuntary tears, and those standing around erupted in applause, a subdued yet heartfelt clapping of hands to mark a good deed done on behalf of an unfortunate soul.