Linc sat on a porch step a couple feet away, the rest of the house gone behind him. Sydney, sitting a step above his, had her legs around his while she braided his hair. He had his head leaned back in her lap, eyes closed, and could hear Snowflake holding counsel with Mercedes and Timeica not far away. Snowflake—only Rodney ever called her Alison—had her touchpad in front of her, tapping furiously, then holding it up to take pictures of the stackers getting ready to play.
One of them, before the game, said, “You really wanna chance it with that deck? I don’t wanna lose no friends on account of a bootleg deck o’ cards.”
Jayceon chuckled while he shuffled. “Nigga, you done lost family for less. This is Spades; you ready to get read for filth or not, nigga?”
Sydney was gentle with his head and would occasionally massage his scalp beneath his ’fro where the sun itched him, always a step ahead of him asking. The sky was purple over them, but the heat told him it was still around midday. The type of heat that would follow you into shelter, the type that no shadows could beat back. So they took it. Like a whip-scar over your entire body.
“Hell, you can play Spades anywhere. ’Course you can play on a shuttle,” Timeica was telling Snowflake. “If you’re somewhere and someone says you can’t play Spades, they’re not trying hard enough. You might only be missing a table to flip when some bum-ass nigga reneges.”
Mercedes, chuckling, lit up a Newport.
Linc didn’t hear Snowflake’s question, but Timeica responded, “You sit down at a Spades table at your own risk. You finna get called everything but a child of God.”
“I didn’t talk to my husband for a month after a Spades game,” Mercedes said around her cigarette.
Kendrick shook his head, walked away from the table, and sidled up next to Linc on the porch. “I don’t play Spades with Black folk,” he breathed. “I got too much to live for. Niggas act like they playing for freedom papers.”
Timeica turned to Snowflake, her new coconspirator. “You play Spades like your whole reputation, your 401(k), and your credit score are on the line. A person will form their entire opinion of you based on that Spades game. How valuable you are to them.”
“Shit is irrevocable,” Mercedes opined.
The journalist shook her head in wonderment.
Mercedes shrugged. “You don’t have to be a genius or anything like that. You just can’t renege.”
“Don’t you ever renege,” Kendrick said loud enough for Mercedes and Timeica and Snowflake to hear.
Mercedes gestured with her cigarette. “See that table over there? All stones and shit? Probably weighs over a hundred thirty-five pounds. You see how it’s mostly old bambalans at that table? Veterans and shit. Jayceon’s probably the youngest by at least a decade, maybe two. If he reneges, any one of them old heads would probably flip that table all the way the fuck over.” She laughed like she was watching someone do it. “Eighth deadly sin, reneging.”
Timeica took a stone to the claw of her hammer, banged against its edge to bend it while she talked. “You renege? That reneging will follow you for the rest of your damn life. Don’t matter if you was two years old when you did it.”
“How do you not renege?”
Mercedes mimed holding cards in her hands, cigarette smoke winding around shiny, curled fingers. “When you get your cards, arrange them by suit. Alternate the colors.” She winked at Snowflake. “You’re welcome.” She leaned back on the column behind her, elbows out. “Spades, you either choose to learn or you stay in the absolute fucking dark. There is no middle ground. None whatsoever.”
A clang from Timeica. “Reneging ain’t the only way to suck. You can overbid, underbid, cut your partner. But understand this: Not taking the pill is an accident. Burning your house down because you left the hot plate on is an accident. Cutting your partner? That’s grounds for an ass-whooping.”
Snowflake paused. “What’s the worst thing your partner ever did in a Spades game? How did you react?” She spoke with a professional reporter’s mechanical detachment. She was curious and earnest, Linc knew that much. But he couldn’t tell if she really cared. If he had told her Spades wasn’t a game, it was a way of life, she probably would have made that a pull quote and thought nothing more of it.
Timeica barked out a laugh, stopped forging her hammer. “Ay, Jayceon! What’s the worst thing your partner ever did in a Spades game? He still breathing?”
Jayceon dealt the cards, stared intently at his. “She cut my lil’ Joker with a big Joker. Started breathing maybe five minutes later after I throat-chopped the fuck outta her.”
Linc spat out a choked laugh, his scalp twinged. Kendrick hiccupped his mirth. Mercedes murmured, “Word.”
Timeica turned to Mercedes, “You, Cedes?”
Her cigarette burned down to the butt. She tossed it down, stamped it out with her boot heel. “Let’s just say there’s some cabrona in Paterson, New Jersey, with a bald spot that a weave can’t cover.”
“Oh, Lord,” Timeica said, her hand over her mouth in mock horror.
Kendrick craned his neck. “I seen a girl get smacked with a Sprite bottle because she missed one book to have a bubble.”
Mercedes laughed herself into a blood-thick cough. Linc felt Sydney grin behind him.
One of the old heads, his face shadowed by his fedora, itched his salt-and-pepper stubble. “I’ll never forget it.” His voice was a flattened tire rolling over gravel. “Last Christmas. My sister-in-law cut over me with a big Joker. There was liquor involved. Also, I already couldn’t stand that bitch. So you know all hell broke loose. I was half-blind with the whiskey and stumbled my ass outside into the snow. Took a box a sugar with me outta the kitchen. Poured it all up in that bitch gas tank. She wanna underbid and shit. I’m like ‘bitch all we need is a seven, we made four!’ And I asked her specifically, are these Whitneys and Bobbys strong? That’s what I called my books: Whitneys and Bobbys. So I went out with a box of Dominos sugar and filled that bitch gas tank.” His shoulders shook with chuckles. “To this day, she still don’t know who did it.”
Linc watched the expression change on the white girl’s face. Watched her shit fall all the way into her shoes. She looked at Jayceon like he was on the verge of losing his life.
Rodney patted his leg, moved his cards around with his free hand. “My mom went into labor with me during a Spades game. I was born during a seven and a possible…”
The others howled. Sprinkled it with “get the fuck outta here” and “you are a cotdamn fool, Rodney” and “you know that nigga’s serious.”
Kendrick smirked. “Grandmama is legally blind in one eye, but I bet three books in, she know what everybody got in they hands.”
Snowflake gave Timeica her whole face. “So, would you say Spades is the precursor to a lot of violent crime?”
Only Sydney could tell she was joking.
Linc nudged Kendrick and reached into his pocket. Out came a small canister with “G4S” in red and black labeling along the side. “Check it.” He handed it to Kendrick. “Sydney and I found it over by West Rock.”
Kendrick held it up to his eyes. Turned it over. “Air canister.”
“Yeah.”
“Who the fuck’s walking around with air masks?” He flipped it through his fingers. “Ain’t that old, either.”
“No, it ain’t.”
