The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom Read Free Book Online Page A

meant that when we came home from late dinners or clubs, back when we still went out on Sunset and pretended we were somebody, we often had to park two or three blocks from our front door. We had noticed Hermes and his crew, and the cars that slowed, the handshakes through the window before they sped off.
     
    ‘Do you think they’re dealing?’ Stacey had asked.
     
    ‘They’re not waiting for the school bell to ring,’ I answered.
     
    We were two frightened white kids from Tulsa, progressive but still essentially Middle American. But the idea of crossing the street, in our own neighborhood, to avoid threading our way through a pack of six black men blocking the sidewalk, seemed wrong. The first time we met them, it was after midnight and the block was dead silent. Dew on the lawns, a gritty mist in the air. When we were ten feet away, I cleared my throat.
     
    ‘Hey, guys, how’s the night?’
     
    ‘What up, dawg,’ one of them said very slowly, exhaling a raft of blunt smoke over our heads.
     
    ‘Late dinner, drinks,’ I said as we stopped and joined them. ‘We’re in the white house up on the left. Just moved in a few months ago.’
     
    ‘I’m Stacey, this is my husband James,’ Stacey cut in. ‘You guys should come by some time for a cocktail tour. We’re still remodeling but you’re welcome anytime.’
     
    I tried to mask my alarm at my wife’s invitation.
     
    ‘Right on,’ the tallest one said, his eyes going up and down Stacey’s one-piece Adidas dress. He was built like an NFL linebacker and handsome enough to make a black dress shirt and track pants look formal. He had long dreads and his eyes were the color of a dragon’s. ‘Hermes,’ he said, offering me the other blunt making the rounds.
     
    ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’
     
    Stacey stepped up, hit it and quit it. Hermes grinned in approval, first at her, then at me. That was my girl. Neither of us liked to smoke pot. We were bar kids, kept to the sauce. Later Stacey discovered pills, for different reasons. But leave it to my wife to go the extra mile in order to bond with our neighbors. To her, this small act was no different from the yellow chocolate cake she had baked and delivered to the Gomez’s two weeks earlier. It was the right thing to do.
     
    ‘Yo, Herm,’ a man leaning against the Navi said. ‘Dis nigga look like Ghost.’
     
    ‘I get that a lot,’ I said. I did not feel like explaining my job just then, though that would prove useful later. The black community respected Ghost, and some of that respect naturally spilled over to me, even after they learned I was his fugazi .
     
    ‘You the ones with that howlin’ diggy?’ one of the others said. He was short and his Lakers jersey fell to his knees.
     
    ‘That’s Jaysun,’ Hermes said
     
    ‘Henry is Stacey’s beagle,’ I said.
     
    ‘Rawr-ooo rawr-ooo!’ Jaysun said, and we all laughed.
     
    Hermes and Jaysun came by a few weeks later and had a beer on our porch, filling us in on some of the local flavor. I confessed my role as Ghost’s untalented twin and hooked them up with some tenth-row tickets to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. It was all good. No one - from within our sketchy neighborhood or trolling from another part of the city - ever fucked with our house or the car. This was something, considering I had just bought Stacey a loaded S5, the down payment for which came from that skit Ghost and I did on MTV. The one where it appeared as though Ghost was performing an autopsy on himself, before returning from Heaven with a machete to carve up those who dared to try and take his place. The skit was later licensed by one of the ‘edgy’ soda companies, became a hit in Japan. Hastings gets a bonus.
     
    So when I decided I needed a gun - just for some added security - there was no question of who I would turn to. I just took a short walk down to the corner and waited by the hydrant, chinning in his direction. Hermes’s driver, a