One more time.

“Trouble of this world … Yes, Jesus …”

The sermon went on a little longer than it usually did and I opened the refrigerator and saw that mama had picked up a little taste. I poured myself some of the rum, drowned that bad boy in some Coke, and drank it. Then I asked her if she had finished shopping, and she went into how she had to give some other mother’s son fifty cents to carry the package up the stairs that her son should have carried. Amen.

I looked in the refrigerator, and it was jammed full of food. I was glad I hadn’t been around to carry that load.

I kissed her and split.

I went over to Highbridge and went into the store that cashed the checks. It was in an arcade. I looked through some of the magazines, which were supposed to be for sale but were months old. The whole time these junkies kept coming in and heading for the back, and I knew they were back there shooting up on whatever they were on. The cat that ran the place was named Ugly. That was what his daddy named him when he was born. They got the name wrong because they should have named him Ugly Damn Dog, because that’s what he was. He was always running around talking about he didn’t believe in black power, he just believed in green power, the power of money. But he didn’t sell his dope to nobody green, just black people.

“Brother Lonnie.” Ugly came over to me and gave me five. “First time I seen you in about five years you ain’t got a ball in your hand.”

“No big thing,” I said. “Say, you seen Paul?”

“I ain’t seen my man for about a week now,” Ugly said. “He into that ball thing too, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, he into it,” I said. “What you got in the way of some extra dust over here?”

“Well, what you need, youngblood?”

“I need a pull,” I said. “It don’t have to be too heavy. You know, something like Paul got.”

“That’s safe,” Ugly said, “but it ain’t that tough. He got to be messing with the Big Man’s boxes, and if the Big Man catch you, you know you gonna catch some calendar space. Plus I can’t let him have but fifteen dollars a digit ’cause there’s just too much paper floating around. If you be needing dust, it’s angel dust that’s pulling in the bucks.”

I told him I didn’t like to mess with no angel dust because too many heads was messing with it. He said that was the chance I had to take.

I called the club to see if Mary-Ann was there and she was and I told her to meet me over at the Grant. She said okay. On the way over I tried to piece together what was going down. Paul was snatching them checks and selling them to Ugly for fifteen dollars apiece. But I couldn’t figure out why Tyrone was getting them. The only thing I could figure was that Paul was snatching them for Tyrone. But if he was doing that, why was Ugly involved in the thing? None of it made any sense, and I didn’t want to talk to Mary-Ann until I could say something. So instead of going into the Grant, I turned around when I got to the corner and went over to the center.