Going Nowhere Fast by Gar Anthony Haywood Read Free Book Online Page A

her the information she wanted.
    "Yes, Mother."
    "None of that 'Touch my parents and I'll sue you into the next Ice Age' business, like you pulled at Lake Tahoe. You hear?"
    "I hear you, Mother."
    "Dottie, leave the child alone," Big Joe said.
    "We can't go back to Harrah's now, did you know that? We used to stay there all the time, did almost all of our gambling there, but not anymore. We can't show our faces at the door at Harrah's now. They hear the name Loudermilk and boom!—everyone turns cold as ice."
    "Mom, they were trying to cheat you."
    "Out of three dollars and seventeen cents."
    "A payoff is a payoff, Mother."
    "It was a penny slot machine, Mo."
    "Get off the phone, Dottie," Big Joe said.
    Having ignored him once already, I decided to feign obedience and did as I was told.
    *     *     *     *
    "All right, Theodore. Let's have it."
    "Have what?"
    "Joe, go get me my strap."
    "Strap? What d'you want with a strap?" Bad Dog started to laugh nervously. "Hell, you can't whip me! I'm twenty-two years old, I'm a grown man!"
    "I don't care how old you are. Long as I'm breathing, any child of mine asking for a good spanking is going to get one. Guaranteed."
    "Moms, you're not going to whip me. All right?"
    "And just how do you think you're going to stop me? With your father right here in the same room?"
    He stopped laughing. He hadn't thought about his father, and his silence proved it. If he so much as raised a hand against me, Joe would make him wish he'd taken his whipping, and liked it. Twenty-two or no twenty-two.
    Big Joe turned away from the closet to hand me a wide, black leather belt with a heavy silver buckle. Like me, he was as stone-faced as an undertaker at his own funeral.
    "Want me to hold him down for you?"
    "All right, hold it, hold it, hold it!" Bad Dog said, showing his father and me the palms of both hands in an effort to hold us at bay. "I get the idea, all right? You want the truth. All of it."
    Neither Big Joe nor I said a word. In fact, we didn't move, save for my coiling and uncoiling the black belt around one hand, slowly and methodically, over and over again.
    "Okay. Okay. What do you want to hear first?"
    "Let's start with this person Dozer Meadows," I said.
    "Sure, What about him?"
    "You tell us," Big Joe said. "You're the one who took off like a scared rabbit when he showed up at the trailer park this afternoon. Why was that?"
    "Took off like a scared rabbit? Me? No way, man. I just went for a walk, that's all."
    "Theodore," I said, "you were hiding in the closet again. Remember? We just pulled you out of there twenty minutes ago!"
    "Hey, I told you, Moms. I was lookin' for a quarter. I dropped some change on the floor, and a quarter rolled into the closet under the door. So I went in there to get it. All right?"
    Big Joe turned to me and said, "As I was saying. Would you like me to hold him down for you, or not?"
    "Okay, okay! I was hidin' in there, yeah! I was in the closet hidin'! "
    "From Dozer Meadows," I said.
    "Yeah, that's right. From Dozer Meadows."
    "Why? What's he got to do with you?"
    "Nothin'. 'Cept that he wants to kill me."
    "Kill you? For what?"
    "For gettin' him suspended from the team. What else?"
    "You mean suspended from the Raiders?"
    "Of course I mean the Raiders! Who else would I be talkin' about, the Mighty Ducks? "
    "Oh, Jeez Looweez , " Joe moaned, apparently grasping our son's meaning much faster than I. "You trying to tell us that you're the reason that boy got booted off the team?" The possibility had him near tears.
    "Well, yes and no," Bad Dog said, "dependin' on how you look at it."
    " Jeez Loooweeez ," his father groaned again, stretching the last word out to magnify his distress.
    "That's why I wanna go to Pittsburgh. To get him reinstated."
    "Best player on the 'whole damn team! The one man that pitiful defense can least afford to lose!"
    "You didn't hear what I said, Pops. I said, if you could just get me to Pittsburgh—"
    "Will somebody