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Back Dead of Winter Save as PDF
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“Yes,” Tatina said. “Listen to me as one listens to the rain.” Then she kissed me and whispered, “Soon, my love.”

“Soon.”

Then she was gone.

When I got home, Jimmy Radmon was seated in the middle of my sofa. “Hey, Mr. Snow,” he said. “I figure maybe you can help me with this.”

On the coffee table in front of him was a box.

Inside the box was a gun.

I went blind with rage, grabbing the back of Jimmy’s shirt collar, lifting him off the sofa and slamming him hard into a wall near the downstairs bathroom.

“What the fuck do you need a gun for?” I said.

“I—I know were you in a ruckus,” Jimmy said, apparently as shocked as I was that I’d pinned him against the wall. “Put you in the hospital. You ain’t askin’ for no help, so I thought—”

“So, you thought you’d help me out by learning how to shoot?” I said. “How to kill? Jesus, kid! What the—You’re fucking better than that, Jimmy. Better than me—”

“Friends help each other out—”

“I don’t need your goddamn help!” I said. “I don’t need anybody’s fucking help! Go home! Go home and pull your head outta your ass, okay?”

I pushed him toward the door.

“Ain’t nobody on this street wouldn’t hesitate to help you, boss man,” he said. “Least of all me. You done gimme what ain’t nobody else in this whole dang world ever gimme: a chance. That don’t come around to too many folk in this world.”

“Jimmy, I—”

“Let me have my say; then you can talk,” he said with a defiant power in his voice I’d never heard before. “‘A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.’ Proverbs 17:17.” “I’m yo friend and yo brother. You took a chance on me when the world had written me off. See what I’m sayin’?”

I was speechless. Something I hadn’t been in a long time.

“Grown man do what a grown man gotta do,” Jimmy said as he slipped on his parka. “Y’all need to know that—I’m a grown dang man, Mr. Snow. Whatever child I may have been went gone when I was eight.”

Then he left.

My wounds were still tender, and the stitches tugged at the rejoined flesh. My ribs throbbed and my groin burned from the antibiotic salve they’d given me at the hospital. If not for an additional notch in my belt, my pants would have fallen to the floor. All of this in addition to the silence of a house that had recently held Tatina’s laugh.