Welfare Wifeys Read online

  “What the hell are we doing back here? I thought we were going to see Ashanti at the boys’ home?” Nefertiti asked. He wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with the way Brasco had stopped them in the middle of nowhere. His mind suddenly began to have flashes of how they did the kid in Alpha Dog and it filled him with dread.

  “We are,” Brasco said, never bothering to look up from the magazine.

  Nefertiti was about to question him further when he heard shouting coming from somewhere on the other side of the woods. He looked over at Brasco, who was just smiling as the shouting grew closer. Nefertiti swung around nervously when he heard the bushes ruffling a few yards away. By this time his imagination had him so wound up that he almost shit his pants when Ashanti came bursting out of the shrubbery, with two angry-looking men hot on his heels.

  Ashanti was dressed in a green sweat suit that looked like it was two sizes too small and a pair of strap-up sneakers. He wove this way and that in a complicated pattern like he was trying out at a football combine, occasionally bounding over logs and fallen branches. The dark-skinned man, who was wearing a blue shirt and khakis, tried to tackle Ashanti, but the lithe boy made a sharp cut and the man went skidding into the dirt. The second man, an older white gentleman with salt and pepper hair, managed to get out past Ashanti and stood between him and the car. He smiled arrogantly knowing that he had Ashanti trapped, but froze when the heard the telltale slide of a shotgun behind him.

  Brasco stood wide-legged in the dirt with the shotgun braced against his shoulder, drawing a bead on the man’s back. “Break yo self, white boy,” Brasco snapped.

  “Hey, take it easy, kid,” the man said. When he attempted to turn around Brasco pressed the shotgun in his back.

  “They don’t pay you enough for what you’re about to do,” Brasco whispered in the man’s ear. “Let’s go, lil homey!” he shouted over to Ashanti.

  Ashanti made sure that there was extra swagger in his walk when he moved past his former jailers. He stopped short of the man Brasco was holding at gunpoint and sized him up. All of the counselors at the boys’ home were assholes, but this one had been especially cruel to little Ashanti. Without warning Ashanti drew his hand back and slapped the man so hard that the sound scared off a family of geese that had been swimming in a nearby pond. The man went to the ground in a heap holding his jaw that had already turned bright red and was beginning to swell.

  “I told you one day I was gonna get ya ass back, pussy.” Ashanti kicked him for good measure before jumping into the backseat of the car and making his escape.

  “You should turn this bitch around so I can let one of them pussies hold something,” Ashanti said, stroking the shotgun with a look of lust in his eyes. It had been quite some time since he held a gun, and the feeling was akin to a junkie relapsing.

  “Shut up and give me that damn gun before you shoot one of us by accident.” Brasco snatched the gun from him and handed it to Nefertiti.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Nefertiti asked, looking from the gun to Ashanti nervously. He kept checking the mirrors to see if they were being followed.

  “A jailbreak, what the fuck does it look like?” Ashanti laughed.

  Nefertiti shook his head in frustration. “Only y’all two niggaz can cook up some shit like this and manage to rope me into it too. We’re gonna fuck around and go to jail.”

  “Stop crying, Nef. Their system is so jammed up that they ain’t even gonna bother to look for me once we cross the county line. If anything I just freed up a bed for the next poor bastard they toss in that bitch. Brasco, I can’t tell you how happy I was when you sent word that you were busting me out, even if it did take your ass forever to make it happen. If I had to spend one more month in that joint I was gonna lose it.”

  “You know you wouldn’t have been in there that long if we were still heavy in the streets. Dawg, a nigga was on twist when they laid me down. When I touched the streets again I had to build from the ground up,” Brasco explained.

  “I thought Nef was out there holding it down from the kites he was sending me. Son, sent up mad pictures of him with mad bitches and popping bottles with some lame ass niggaz from uptown,” Ashanti said.

  Brasco looked at Nefertiti and then at Ashanti. “Holding it down? Man, this nigga was working in the stockroom at B.J.’s while we were locked up.”

  “Chill, son, you know with all the heat on us I had to keep a low profile. Me working up there was just a front,” Nefertiti boasted.

  “Front my ass, Nef. The only reason your monkey ass ain’t still working at B.J.’s is because they caught you stealing them frozen shrimp and fired you!” Brasco laughed.

  Ashanti shook his head. “Shrimps, dawg?”

  Nefertiti tried to act like he was mad but couldn’t hold back the laugh any longer. “Shrimp, steak, and whatever else I could get my hands on. Every first, third, and fifteenth I’d be posted up right in front of the check-cashing spot getting my sling on. Them government checks were going from the state to the broads to my hands. I was killing ’em!”

  “Nef, your ass is crazy,” Ashanti said, wiping a tear from his eye. “Yo, Brasco, let me see the kite, son.”

  Brasco handed him the letter that had been tucked in the magazine. Ashanti was so shocked that he read it twice. “I can’t believe it, dawg. Son, do you know what this means?”

  Brasco nodded his head and grinned wickedly. “It means that all these bitch ass niggaz are about to fall in line.”

  Chapter 2

  Malika stood under the warm spray from the shower head as it beat down on her shoulders and back. She lathered up the loofah and began to wash her breasts one at a time. She took extra care around the areolas, relishing in the sinful sensation that traveled the length of her body. It had been quite a while since Malika had been with a man and even as her body craved one’s touch, she refused to settle just to get a nut.

  She grabbed the nearly empty bottle of Mane & Tale shampoo and began lathering her long auburn dreads. It took her almost a full ten minutes to make sure she had washed them thoroughly, and she knew they would take almost three times as long to dry. On more than one occasion she’d thought about cutting them but could never bring herself to do it. Malika was rinsing the last of the shampoo out of her hair when the water suddenly became ice cold. She staggered back, almost slipping in the shower. She quickly adjusted the knobs this way and that, but the water was still cold.

  “You can’t be serious!” Malika huffed. Housing had cut the hot water . . . again. From the pissy elevators to the abrupt hot water interruptions, Malika hated public housing. Growing up in the affluent neighborhood of Jamaica Estates all her life, she was totally underprepared for the bullshit that came with living in public housing. She’d thought she was spiting her parents when she’d left the nest, but had she known what was waiting for her behind door number two she would’ve listened to her mother.

  Malika had been the pride of their household. She had an older brother and sister; she was the baby of the family and the one who showed the most promise. Her father was a respected professor at NYU and her mother an RN at Jamaica Hospital. As a child she wanted for nothing, but her parents also made sure she was kept on a very tight leash. Her father was a devout Muslim, but her mother wasn’t, so this often caused conflict in the house. When the issue of religion was raised her father reluctantly agreed to let the children choose their own path but he always made sure that the presence of Islam was felt in their house.

  Like most young girls, Malika started feeling herself when she hit high school. She attended MLK in Manhattan as opposed to Stuyvesant like her parents had wanted. They thought it was because she hadn’t been accepted, but unbeknownst to them Malika had intercepted the acceptance letter and destroyed it so they’d have to agree to let her go to King. From the first day Malika had taken the long train ride to Manhattan to attend her new school she was hooked on her newfound freedom.

  Attending high school in itself was excit
ing to Malika, but to be so far out of her parents’ reach only added to the thrill. It didn’t take long for the boys to notice the pretty caramel shorty with the supermodel smile and silky locks and Malika soaked up the attention she got. While attending school in Queens she often came across the same faces from year to year, but at King all the flavors were different. It was like a great big stage and the once quiet and reserved Malika found herself auditioning for the leading role.

  The summer before her junior year Malika was a victim of her first crush. He had been a Brooklyn cat named Suede who hustled in the projects near her neighborhood. Suede had money, cars, and the attention of every girl within a ten-block radius. Suede had chased young Malika for almost three months before she would even entertain a conversation with him. Their courtship went from the chase, to dating, to her being pregnant by the older man.

  Malika’s father went through the roof when he found out she was pregnant and had it not been for her mother he surely would’ve beaten the baby out of her. He was angry at his daughter for deviating from what they’d taught her about being careful, but he was also very hurt. He had watched his own mother struggle to raise him and his sisters, and couldn’t bare the thought of having his own child throw her life away. Malika’s father had given her an ultimatum: abort the child or get out of his house. So she left.

  Suede got them a small apartment in the Bronx that they could call their own. It was only a studio, but it was theirs. Malika continued to go to school, but as the baby grew in her stomach it became more and more of a struggle, and Suede’s moodiness didn’t make it any easier. It seemed like the further along she got in her pregnancy the more distant he became, often not coming home for days at a time. Suede was totally out of order, but she put up with it rather than risking him leaving her. The more she put up with the more Suede attempted, even giving her an STD during her sixth month of pregnancy. When she confronted him about it he slapped her and accused her of giving it to him from her whoring, even though he was the only man she had ever been with.

  Suede eventually got arrested and left Malika to take care of the bills and him while he was away. She continued to go to school and work a part-time job at Wendy’s, but the stress of juggling both of them in her current condition eventually became too much, forcing her to give one up. School wasn’t paying her bills so she let it go and toiled at Wendy’s until she was thirty-two weeks into her pregnancy. She was scared, alone, and broke, but she held it together and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy that she named Solomon. From the first time she held him she knew that it was impossible to love anyone or anything the way she loved her new son. The first years were the roughest for them, with Malika having to go without eating some nights so that her son wouldn’t. Just before Solomon’s third birthday she got the news that Suede had been released from prison, but for some reason he hadn’t bothered to tell her that he was getting out. She found out through a friend that he was staying with his mother in Manhattan, so one snowy day she bundled little Solomon up and took the long trip into Manhattan.

  She wanted to surprise Suede, but she was the one who ended up surprised when she showed up on the doorstep only to find Suede living with another girl, who was also pregnant by him. Suede looked at Malika like she was the dirt on the bottom of his shoe and told his new girlfriend that she was just an obsessed little girl who was trying to pin another man’s baby on him. Malika showed him obsessed when she opened his forearm up with a box cutter. That was the last time she saw Suede. Her first crush had damaged her heart beyond repair so Malika threw herself into raising her son and trying to get her life back together. From that moment on she vowed that the only man she would ever let into her heart again would be Solomon.

  Malika hadn’t realized that she was crying until she blinked and a tear rolled down her cheek. She laughed because her tears were warmer than the water. Ignoring the frigid cold Malika hurriedly washed away the rest of the shampoo and soap and jumped out of the shower so she could finish getting dressed. With towels wrapped around her body and hair she stepped out of the bathroom and tripped over a sneaker that had been carelessly left in the hallway.

  “Damn it, Solomon,” she cursed, snatching the sneaker up and making her way down the short hall to his bedroom. Before she reached the door she could hear the music coming from the room. It was a lewd song about money, clothes, and of course hos. She recognized the cut from a new mix tape that Big Dawg Entertainment had released called “Welcome to the Jungle,” featuring Don B. and his newest artist The Animal. Malika pushed the door open and looked at her son in shock.

  At the age of twelve Solomon was almost as tall as Malika, but weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet. He was dressed in a red Black Label T-shirt she’d bought him for Christmas and a pair of skinny jeans that she certainly hadn’t bought. More of a shock than the feminine jeans was the red bandana hanging from his back pocket. He never heard Malika when she walked into the room, but he felt it when she suddenly smacked him upside the head.

  “What the f—” Solomon started but caught himself. “Ma, why you hit me for?”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t punch you in the damn face.” She snatched the bandana. “What the hell is this?”

  “Huh?” Solomon asked dumbly.

  Malika grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt and hauled him in close. “Boy, don’t play with me. What are you doing carrying this damn flag?”

  Solomon looked at the flag as if he were seeing it for the first time. “That ain’t no flag, Ma. Flags have stripes and stars. That’s just an old sweat rag.”

  Malika gave him another pop with the hand holding the sweat rag. “Solomon, you know I ain’t no square, so cut it out, okay? The people and things you choose to identify yourself with can have life-altering consequences, especially this little game right here.” She waved the bandana in his face. “In certain neighborhoods this piece of cloth could cost you your life. I’ll kill you myself before I let the streets have you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mommy,” Solomon said timidly.

  “And where did you get those tight-ass jeans, because I know I didn’t buy them?” She frowned at the jeans.

  “These joints are fly, Ma.” Solomon spun around so she could get a good look at them. “I used the money Grandma sent me for my birthday to buy them. Do you like them?”

  “No I don’t like them. Boy, it looks like you’re wearing spandex.” Malika tugged at the jeans, but they had no give.

  “Ma, you bugging. All the kids are wearing these,” Solomon told her.

  “Well, not my kid,” she shot back. “Change them jeans before you give yourself a yeast infection.” She snapped the bandana at him playfully and left the room. Fifteen minutes later they were both dressed and ready to face the world.

  As Soon as Malika and Solomon stepped into the hallway they smelled it. It was like the smell of burning paper, with an acidic bite. Malika sighed and made her way to Stairwell A and peered inside. Then she shoved the door to Stairwell B open and scared the daylights out of Shakes, who nearly dropped the crack pipe he was sucking on.

  “Damn it, Shakes!” Malika snapped.

  “Girl, you know better than to be sneaking up on an old man like that.” Shakes gave her a rotten-toothed grin. He was dressed in a wrinkled business suit and dirty overcoat. At one time Shakes had been a master booster, but now he was just another addict trying to escape the reality of his life.

  “And you know better than to be smoking that shit on my floor. I asked y’all not to do that.” Malika folded her arms.

  “Come on, baby girl, it’s cold on them streets.” Shakes pulled his jacket collar up as if the chill had suddenly made it inside the stairwell.

  “Then smoke them rocks in your own damn house.”

  Shakes gave her a bewildered look. “And have my mama kill me? I don’t think so, baby. So, other than busting the balls of honest crackheads like myself, what you been up to, Malika?”

  “Trying to keep crac
k heads from trying to get high in my staircase,” she joked. “Nah, I’m just out here trying to get in where I fit in.”

  “Malika, girls like you don’t fit in, you carve your own niches. You ain’t like the rest of these little girls.”

  “Shakes, how do you figure that and we all live in these same nasty ass projects?” she asked.

  “Because you’ve got the good sense to see outside these project bricks,” he replied. “Malika, I know you ain’t no angel, but you ain’t into all kinds of foolishness like the rest of these chicks. I watch the young girls floating around these projects from sunup to sunup keeping company with different men and cussing like they ain’t got no sense.”

  “Shakes, one could question your sense for still smoking them rocks,” Malika said.

  Shakes looked at the pipe that he had only just realized that he was still holding and shrugged. “Old habits for an old fool. You know how it can be.”

  “Ma, elevator!” Solomon called. He was holding the elevator door open and tapping his foot impatiently.

  “I’ll catch you later, Shakes.” Malika waved and got into the elevator.

  The tiny steel car was hot, greasy, and rank, as it was most of the time. Malika and Solomon had to stand nearly pressed against the door to avoid stepping in the puddle of urine in the center of the elevator floor. After what seemed like an eternity the elevator reached the first floor and they rushed off, holding their noses. As usual the local knuckleheads were standing in front of the building, taking up space. It seemed like no matter what time of day or night Malika came in they were always there. Most of them were relatively harmless, but there were the few who were just trouble, which was the case with the young boy holding the door for Malika and Solomon.