What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

guy had dropped them and handed them to her. She asked if the boy was going to die, and when Eddie said no, she said she didn’t want to take the car then since she figured he would really kill her if he got himself together and she had left him stranded. Eddie nodded like that made any kind of sense. I’d have taken those keys and rolled that big old piece of car back and forth across that Negro until I got tired, but that’s just me.
    Next thing I know, Eddie’s opening the door and she’s squeezing in next to me so we can drop her off at home. Her face is pretty swollen and she’s so out of it, her skirt is still bunched up around her waist. Eddie hands her the baby, who definitely needs a diaper change, and who takes one look at me and starts crying again. His mother doesn’t seem to hear it for the first mile or so, but it must have had a cumulative effect on her nerves because when we were almost there, she reached down and pinched his leg so hard that he gasped and tried to holler, but he couldn’t make another sound and didn’t for the rest of the trip. Once he shut up, the girl started muttering to herself like we weren’t even there.
    “Muthafucka just lying. He know he my baby daddy. Look at his damn face. Look just like him. Nigga know I ain’t been fuckin’ nobody but him since his ass got here and he can’t give me five dollars a week? What the fuck I’m ‘spose to do for money? What the fuck I’m ‘spose to do?”
    We took her to a tiny cinder-block house at the bottom of an overgrown, unpaved road with no lake at the end to redeem it. The yard was full of trash and broken toys and an ancient Ford Mustang on its own set of cinder blocks. She mumbled a quick thanks and jumped out as soon as Eddie stopped the truck, dragging the baby out behind her and finally pulling her skirt down over her little narrow behind, which she had the nerve to be switching as she went on up the walk to the house.
    “Sorry about that,” Eddie said, turning the truck around and heading back toward Joyce’s.
    “I wasn’t expecting to see anything like that up here,” I said.
    He looked at me and smiled. “Welcome home.”
    I remembered how fast he had moved back there. The kid never saw it coming. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
    “Army,” he said. “He’ll be all right as soon as he catches his breath. That was a move the MPs used to use on us, so it’s just to slow you down, not kill you.”
    “An important distinction,” I said, realizing my hands were shaking. I kept seeing that girl’s head flopping around when the guy was slapping her.
    “I know that kid,” Eddie said.
    I was surprised. “You do?”
    He nodded. “He’s trouble.”
    Seems the kid came up from Detroit a couple of years ago to stay with his sister, who, coincidentally, is the woman Joyce took to the hospital. Small world.
    “There’s another sister, too. Mattie,” Eddie said. “They’re supposed to be providing a more stable environment for the young brother, but whoever sent him didn’t bother to check out the house.”
    “Bad?”
    “Crack.”
    I couldn’t believe it. “Where do they get crack way up here?”
    “From the city,” he said. “All these little towns are virgin markets for these young wanna-be gangsters. People sitting around here with nothing to do and a police force with two cops who share one squad car. They probably don’t even know what crack looks like. It’s easy money.”
    I shouldn’t have been surprised. Crack is an epidemic with a life all its own, just like AIDS. Small-town living doesn’t save you anymore.
    “I didn’t scare you, did I?” He turned sideways to peer over at me since it was almost dark now.
    I shook my head. “No. He wanted to hurt that girl. I’m glad you knew how to handle it.”
    “The army teaches you a lot of stuff like that,” he said, turning down the road to Joyce’s house. “The problem is, most of it is stuff you wish you didn’t need to