Free Burning by Bayo Ojikutu

Author:Bayo Ojikutu [Ojikutu, Bayo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49558-7
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2006-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

“WASN’T NOWHERE NEAR what you all made it out to be,” I say. It is me avoiding looking directly at Remi now, though I do see him rest his head against the Range Rover’s passenger window in this windshield reflection. “Two of them seem like a couple clowns, truth be told.”

“You think so?”

“Far as I could tell it,” I say. I press the radio controls lined along the steering wheel’s edge, lowering the hum of this unknown R & B tune, though I don’t have much more to say.

Wee Man and preacher cop Phil dropped us off at the White Castle on Stony Island, where Remi’d left the Range Rover just underneath the Chicago Skyway’s rise. I steer us east now back on 79th Street under the blue dark of summertime.

“Wee Man got impatient waiting for nightfall, that’s all that saved you from peeping the scenario,” Remi says, he turns the hum louder. “Once sundown come, their real-deal nature rises up out of them. Become like pigs in blood, my nigga.”

“Pigs live in mud,” I tell him. “Wallowing in mud.”

Remi laughs—I see his teeth in the windshield. “Been sleeping, shitting, fucking in that mud for thousands of years. Got to be some blood in that mud, Cuz.”

“Been a long time,” I agree.

“Ain’t no lie,” Remi says. I look away from the stoplight at 79th and Jeffrey, just down the way from Ascending Queen, the last school I attended without Remi. Or the last until SIU’s rep rode him out to the Greyhound to catch a ride back to 95th. We finally look at each other without blinking or turning now, and my cousin speaks, “Damn shame what goes down when you give a gangster mud to do his thing up in. Can’t help but get it bloody. They sit up and tell you the other muthafuckas is criminal. Dope slingers, thieves, terrorists, whatever the fuck, and you look at these muthafuckas, and they do look like some sick bastards. Then you look at wee men with their badges and uniforms and billy clubs. What you gonna do when they get to dropping bombs on them sick-looking muthafuckas in the mud? What you gonna say—they’re just the pigs, serving and protecting us, doing their job.”

“Making sure the things stays what it is,” I chime. “Like the cop said.”

Remi turns to our front, peeps at his own reflection now— if he sees it like I do—either at himself or at the silver and white full moon beaming on our ride. “You ain’t see him with the sun down. Fuck Wee Man.”

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