One morning at about 2:00 A.M., Possum was malingering in the parking lot of Azalea Mall, eyeing the ATM and hoping someone had forgotten to get their cash out of the little slot he was shoving a Slim Jim down, and a Land Cruiser pulled up. Possum started running, but Smoke was too fast for him. Next thing, Possum was tackled to the pavement and a white boy with dreadlocks was sticking a gun to Possum’s head and ordering him into the Land Cruiser. Possum had been a road dog ever since, and sometimes he missed the basement and thought about his mama. Once–and only once–he had called her from a pay phone.
“I got me a good job working at night,” he told his mama. “But I can’t say where, Mama, ’cause Daddy would come get me, you know. You doing all right?”
“Oh, honey, sometimes it ain’t so bad,” she said in that defeated, depressed tone Possum knew so well. “Please come home, Jerry,” she added, because Possum’s real name was Jeremiah Little. “I miss you, baby.”
“Don’t you be worrying none.” Possum got a big lump in his chest as he talked inside the graffiti-scarred phone booth. “1 gonna get enough money to get you out of there and we go live in some nice motel where he ain’t never gonna find us!”
The problem with his plan, Possum had since learned, was that Smoke kept the prize money to himself. He gave cash to his dogs as needed and wouldn’t allow them to accumulate any on their own. Possum got plenty to eat and all the alcohol and pot he wanted. He wore nice basketball shoes and huge jeans that were always falling off. He was equipped with a pager, a cell phone, a handheld Global Positioning System, a gun, and his own room in the RV. But he had no savings and it was likely he never would. He thought about this as his face stung and the inside of his lip bled. Possum missed his mama and realized that Smoke was even worse than Possum’s daddy.
“You can’t be killing him right now,” Possum tried to reason with Smoke. “It’s better we wait and make the Big Move. Then we can blow away all them motherfuckers at once, including Popeye.”
Smoke turned back onto Huguenot Road and sped off. “Don’t worry, I ain’t taking Brazil out tonight in front of all these people. But I’m going to get him bad when the time’s right–just like I’m gonna get that bitch Hammer. Hey. Maybe I’ll feed her fucking dog to a pit bull and leave the carcass in her yard.”
“You do that, you ain’t got nothing to fuck with her about no more,” Possum said with feigned nonchalance. “That dog the biggest prize you got, Smoke. You know that lady cop do anything to get that dumb dog back, right? So you gotta play your cards and be patience. Maybe you could use that dog to get Hammer and Brazil at the same time. What you wanna bet Brazil knew Pop-eye and don’t like it none, either, that the dog disappeared, huh?”
“Yeah. I’ll set both of them up. Fucking yeah. At the same time!” Smoke tried to follow the helicopter that was fast moving out of sight toward the lit-up city skyline. “Then we’ll take them to the clubhouse,” as he referred to their RV, “and I’ll have a shitload of time to really make them hurt bad before I blow their brains out and throw their fucking bodies in the river.”
The road dogs knew that Smoke’s specialty as a child was to bury rabbits and chipmunks alive, jump on frogs, trap birds and throw them out windows, and do other unspeakable things to helpless creatures. It wasn’t lost on Possum that Smoke had christened each of his road dogs with an animal’s name, as if to imply what he would do to them if they ever got out of line.
“Yeah, set ’em up.” Possum pretended to sound mean-spirited and tough. “And maybe kill some other people, too,” he added. “And maybe tell Cap’n Bonny we ain’t paying him nothing and he tries to mess with us, we shoot him and throw him in the river, too.”