Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 61: Brown 303
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 103
Rain pursued them down the street as they hurried home from Hannah Johnson’s shack diner. The temperature in early December was pleasant, even if the humidity remained high. With the storm sending a line of drops fifty feet behind them to hit the roadway, they powerwalked. Still, a hundred feet before they got to the front door the rain caught up to them, and gave them a light rinsing.
They were happy to get inside, until they saw everything flipped over and damaged. Angry, Derek drew his good knife, and began stalking about the house. Maurice and Pierre worked together, going out back, looking for signs of anybody, and Lei He stayed near Vashti. She was visibly upset by the violation of her home.
The damage was not severe. Most could be fixed by just flipping the chairs back upright, or putting the bed mattress back in the frame. No one was in the house, but the money they had earned from playing music was gone, as was Mister Hunter’s food pot. But Derek found himself raging. This was his home–a loan, he thought, but for the time in this world, his home. It had been broken into by burglars who knew when he and the others were going to be at Hannah’s place, so it was someone who was familiar, at least someone in the neighborhood.
He came back to the living room, and saw that Lei He had been standing guard over his wife. Derek bowed, both hands together as if praying, in gratitude. Not that he thought Vashti needed it as she was probably much more dangerous than Lei He, but he appreciated the thought. Maurice and Pierre came back looking furious as well.
“They’ze come up from the river in a rowboat. I saw the dent where they’ze pushed it in.” Maurice said. Pierre just grunted in agreement, with his eyes glittering brightly. He was quiet, but a cold, brittle fury was on him. “I’ll bet I can find out who did it. It's going to be some no-account local boys.”
“Remember what we talked about right after Mama Sho came?” Derek asked Maurice. Maurice blinked, and then nodded slowly. They had explained being versers to the young Black man. “Well, along with that, we can track items that–belong to us.” Pierre and Lei He looked confused, but Derek was not sure he wanted to bring them into everything, so he left it that way.
Maurice whooped with laughter. It was the joy of a righteous man about to see justice done. The five of them fixed up the house, dried off in the process, and waited for the summer rainstorm to end, which it presently did. Then Maurice and Pierre both produced knives. Maurice’s was a cheap thing, and Pierre’s was silver embossed, but both were sharp. Lei He just shook his head at the idea of needing a knife.
They began to walk down the road toward the city, and then left at the first, right, left, back again when that turned to a dead end, left at the next intersection, and then down two blocks and left again, and one block. They stopped outside a rough looking shanty, and Maurice whistled.
“I shoulda knowed. Widder Malcolm’s boys. And don’t be wastin’ any sympathy on the mean old widder. Everyone knows, includin’ the police, that she killed her husband, ‘ceptin’ they can’t find the body. We ‘spect it was fed to the gators.”
Derek heard footsteps along the road behind them, and he turned to see three Black men walking their way. Turning back, he saw five brothers exit the front of the Malcolm shack to stand in the weedy, uncut front yard. In the doorway was a fat Black woman, her face twisted with long held scorn and anger, who stared contemptuously at the group.
The oldest of the brothers, who was perhaps Pierre’s age, held Derek’s laser rifle casually in his arms.
“I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood. You need to leave.” He looked directly at Maurice then. “And you, a fellow Black brother, leading Whitey’s to our door. A filthy traitor.”
“He’s our friend,” Derek said.
“I think I don’t want to hear what a White Man says, I want to hear what your boy says for himself.”
Derek quieted, and Maurice just stared for a long burning moment, and then spoke very slowly.
“You’ze call me a traitor? What ‘bout you’se Mamma, she murdered your Papa, everyone knows it. You’se the traitor. Did you hep drag his body in a rug to the swamp?”
A guilty start showed that the barb had hit home, and from the door, the mother began to curse in a long disgusting stream, intermixed with spitting tobacco out on the front lawn, if one could call it that.
Derek calmly spoke next. “I think you want to return our property. I can forgive you for the mess you made of our house; that’s been mostly put right. But you don’t want me for an enemy, and you don’t want to fight me. In fact, I dare say you don’t even want to fight my wife. We’re a lot tougher than you would expect.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #506: Characters Involved. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
