The Coldest Winter Ever

  “How you figure that?” I played it off.

  “Don’t play dumb. I never forget a face. It could cost me my life. I never liked that cat. He was too quiet. Never knew what he was thinking. I watched how he moved. When Santiaga’s empire started crumbling, that cat just started scaling his shit down. I know some cats who ran up in his spot. They said that nigga didn’t have nothing. Just a mattress on the floor, a sheet, toothbrush, and a fucking candle. I mean, no jewels in the place, no money, nothing. Dude didn’t even have a phone. It was like he knew they was coming. In the whole team, he was the only one who walks away free and standing. Cats said he was clean, not a fed, snitch, nothing. He had to put all that dough he stacked somewhere. Anyway, my niggas down in the Baltimore area keep an eye on him for me. But ain’t nothing popping with him. He ain’t pushing no weight.”

  “Why you telling me this?” I asked, as if I didn’t care.

  “In case you got any ideas about the trip. That man don’t have what it takes to keep you,” he warned.

  “I don’t want him.”

  “Yeah, whatever. So check this out. Let me tell you how we gonna do this. A lot of cats roll south in Benzes, Lexes, and BMWs. They got the tint, rims, music blasting, car full of niggas. They getting pulled over by the cops. Point blank. Police search the car. They end up doing ten, fifteen, twenty years. We gonna think smart. First, we gonna rent a car. You’ll get it with your credit card.”

  “I don’t have no credit card.”

  “Yeah, it came in the mail for you the other day. I was holding it for you. We’ll play the part. I’ll dress up, slacks, shoes, dress shirt. You’ll rock a conservative dress. We’ll play something on the radio, like light FM.”

  “What difference does it make what station plays?” “I could swear the fucking police got some kind of nigga radar. If they hear you pumping hip-hop, you get pulled over. If we get pulled over, we’ll both tell the same story. We’re in the church. We’re on our way to a revival; we sing in the choir.”

  “You’re fucking crazy.” I cracked up.

  “I’m dead serious. You gotta rehearse the small stuff. They’ll catch you on a technicality. I got a bunch of close call stories. I know how this shit works. Are you scared?”

  “I’m not afraid of nothing.” I told him the truth.

  “Good. Keep it natural.”

  At the apartment, Bullet made a few calls and finalized arrangements. He came out of his walk-in closet with three teddy bears.

  In the bedroom, he told me what to wear. I changed. He got did up like a Sunday school teacher in a suit. Me, him, the dogs, and the teddy bears, headed to the car rental spot in his car.

  At the spot, he pointed out a lady standing in front with a big, pink sweater on. He told me to go in, use my credit card and her driver’s license. She’s the driver, you’re the payee.

  “But who the hell is she and where did she come from?”

  “She’s just a chick from around the way who doesn’t mind doing a favor for me.”

  I looked at him, then looked back at her. She was homely, so I said OK. He told me to ask for an infant car seat. We rented a Buick LeSabre family car. The Rent-A-Wreck people were just so happy to have a customer! After awhile, I understood why Bullet had involved this chick. She was twenty-six years old. They had all kinds of discounts for people over twenty-five. It seemed he had thought of everything. She drove the rental out of the place. I hopped back in the Lex. She followed us.

  “Now where are we going?”

  “Brooklyn. I gotta give the Lex to my man for safekeeping. She’s going home. She’ll drive the rental to Brooklyn. Me and you, we gotta drop the dogs. Then we hop in the rental and be out.” Bullet saw how skeptical I looked at going to Brooklyn. “You want to hold the burner?” he asked.

  “When we get there,” I told him.

  Something wasn’t right. You know how you just get that feeling? As we turned onto our old Brooklyn neighborhood block that midday afternoon, it was crowded with fire trucks and emergency vehicles.

  “Maybe we ought to turn around and come back when the commotion dies down,” I mentioned to Bullet.

  “It’s a four-hour drive to Baltimore. We gotta make good time,” he said. We pulled up to a parking space. Donna, the chick with the pink sweater, pulled up and parked the rental behind us. She got out and knocked on the driver’s side of the car, and handed Bullet the rental keys. She stood crouched over at the window like she was expecting something. He stepped out of the car. I was watching that bitch like a hawk. I saw him slide her a yard. Then she bounced. Bullet reached back in the car and grabbed the dogs. “I’ll be right back.” He was going to drop the dogs off.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked him, looking dead in his eyes.

  “What?” His face was blank. “Oh, yeah.” He leaned into the car, opened the special compartment, and passed me the .22. “Keep the doors locked,” he ordered.

  Ten seconds after he left a white guy in a car pulled up alongside us.

  “Fire Marshal. You’ll have to move this car.” I smiled pleasantly and agreed. Yet my stomach was like a butterfly cage. I threw the gun under the driver’s seat. Then I opened the door, walked around to the driver’s side, used the key in the ignition, and started the car. On exactly the opposite side of the curb, I parked. Through the tinted window I sat and watched as the courtyard filled up with people filing out of the building. The way everything was positioned on an angle, I couldn’t get a full view of what was happening, but I saw the smoke. I saw the long water hoses running from the fire truck through the courtyard and toward the building. Now my eye is like a zoom lens. I’m trying to check faces in the crowd so I could be on the offense instead of the defense.

  Shame and disgust are the only things that could describe my state of mind when I spotted Momma in the crowd. She was wearing purple hot pants in the winter, a red T-shirt, runover Reeboks, and carrying a dirty yellow crochet bag. She was bumping into people in the crowd, pushing them out the way the whole time, staring at the ground, looking for loose change or a vial, the way crackheads do.

  Oh no, I hope she don’t come over here, I thought to myself. But she did. When she saw Bullet’s Lex she scuttled right on over. She knocked on the window. When she didn’t get no response, she started mashing her face against the window to see if anyone was inside. By now, I’m curled up like a snail trying to get as close to the floor as possible. When she got to the window on the passenger side and pressed her face against the window, she saw me.

  “My baby, Winter … Is that you? Come out here, girl.” When I didn’t move, she demanded, like she was in charge, “Winter Santiaga, this is your mother speaking, get out the car.”

  With my legs tired of being jammed, I crawled back into the seat but wouldn’t open the door.

  “Oh, I know … I got something for you.” She started digging in the dirty yellow bag. I’m thinking, there ain’t shit in that bag that I want. Just then I saw Bullet walking back toward the car. His stride was rhythmic, like a leopard. He looked real important in his suit. He was moving swift, but trying to keep it natural, as he would say. When he recognized my mother, he yelled from a distance.

  “Hey! Move away from the car!”

  Just then, my mother pulled some dirty envelopes out of her bag. She had a big smile on her face, like she was very pleased with herself. “Winter, these are letters to you from your father. I been holding them for you. I didn’t know if I would ever see you again.”

  I felt a shock wave shoot through my body. At that split second, those letters became the most important thing in my life. Just as Bullet arrived at the door, I jumped out to get the letters.

  “She don’t want that shit,” he swatted my mother to the side like she was a fly.

  “I want those letters, Bullet. My father wrote those letters to me and you can’t keep me from having them.” He saw the fire in my eyes.

  “Bullet, what you got for me? What you got for me?
” My mother hopped around like a three-year-old waiting on a lollipop.

  “I don’t got nothing for you,” he growled at her, while steadily looking in my eyes.

  “Come on Bullet, we friends, we friends. Tell Winter we friends,” Momma said.

  “Give me the letters.” I stepped up and extended my hand to my mother. She pulled her arm, securing the letters behind her back, teasing me. “You want the letters. She wants the letters. What y’all got for me? You look good, Winter. You look like you got a whole lotta money. Do you owe me some money? What you got for me?” my mother sang.

  I lunged at her. She fell on the ground. I fell on top of her. I grabbed the envelopes out of her weak fingers, clenched into a fist. Bullet lifted my body off the ground and into the air, “Go get in the rental.” From the look on his face I knew to follow his instructions. I didn’t care ’cause I had the letters. He threw a ten-dollar bill on the ground and told Momma go get what you need somewhere else. She picked it up and disappeared as fast as she came. Bullet placed the teddy bears in the backseat of the rental, next to the infant car seat.

  “Don’t fucking move,” he threatened me. I saw him signal to his man who was standing on a car watching the firefighters put out the fire. His man got in the driver’s side of the Lex. Bullet leaned in the passenger door. He put all his guns from the compartment in a carry bag. He walked back and threw the bag in the trunk of the rental.

  As he returned to the driver’s side of the rental, I asked him, “Did you get the .22? It’s under the driver’s seat in your car.” His man was pulling off. Bullet trotted in his church suit behind the car to catch up with him.

  “Yo, hold up. Hold up, man.”

  I didn’t even have time to turn my head a little bit. A brick came crashing through the window of the passenger side of the rental.

  “You stupid fucking bitch. You had the nerve to bring your ass back around here.” The car door swung open, Simone charged in. With her heavy hands around my neck, her weight was holding me down on the front seat. I started throwing mad punches, swinging at her face, punching her in the eyes to get her off balance. The car was rocking. People started gathering around the car, cheering. I could hear people walking on top of the car roof, the whole nine. Me and Simone was still thumping. I bit her. She tore open the top of my dress.

  Next thing I know, we both fell out of the car into the street. We was wrestling. I was using my knee to kick her in the belly. Laid out on the ground she reached her big arm toward the gutter and grabbed a dirty bottle. I tried to shake it out of her hand, but she was a big buffalo. She broke the bottle. I caught flashes of the faces in the crowd that now had us pinned in. I saw nasty, little Natalie standing there, egging Simone on. “Cut the bitch, cut her,” she called out. Simone kept coming at me. I was lighter on my feet, so I ducked and dodged. For a second, I looked up ’cause I saw Bullet coming through the crowd with the gun in his hand. Just seeing him got me feeling pumped. Now I had super powers. But Simone took advantage of that split second when I looked away. Her big arm came swinging down, slicing a seven-inch gash on the left side of my face. I felt my face open up, I grabbed my head and blood was all over my fingers. My face felt hot, like it was surrounded with heat. Bullet shot the gun in the air, everybody started running. Even Simone bounced. Some bold people stood right there and kept watching.

  “Ah baby,” Bullet said when he saw my face and the blood. He led me to the rental. He sat me down in the car. For seconds, he just kept saying, damn, damn, damn. Then whoop, whoop, police sirens. I could see the red lights bouncing in the rearview mirror as the police cars ripped down the street. Bullet closed the passenger door and ran around to drive the car. Suckers in the crowd pointed our car out to the police.

  That wasn’t as shocking as me watching Bullet walk, pass the driver’s side, pass the car, onto the sidewalk, and down the street like he had nothing to do with it. I opened the door on my side and tried to get out, but the cops was up on me.

  20

  Twenty-five hundred and fifty-five days later, I checked the calendar on my wall. I had twenty-nine hundred and twenty days left to serve on a mandatory fifteen-year prison sentence.

  But this particular day was special. What made this day special was simply that it would be different than the rest. In fifteen minutes, I would be walking out of this cell, down the corridor, and out the doors to attend my mother’s funeral. She had died suddenly. Whatever that means, ’cause she was dying all along. Some type of blood clot to the brain. And since mothers are so important, I was about to enjoy the only legitimate method of leaving this institution before a prisoner’s time is served. Of course, I would be chained at the feet and at the wrists. I would be escorted around like a preschooler. I would be returned to this cell within hours. Then the routine would resume. But at the age of twenty-five, in the twenty-first century, a small trip to the graveyard was about as much excitement as I was gonna get.

  Because I was gonna get a few hours outside of these walls, I was like a superstar. Everybody in here wanted me to be sure to tell them everything and everybody I saw outside as soon as I returned. Other than people’s relatives, there was no real way for us to know what was going on outside. Even relatives were hard to come by. Who really wants to take an almost eight-hour trek out to this joint, which damn near sits in Canada? In my seven years served, I never received one visit.

  I had to work several hustles to keep my commissary in livable condition. Then, of course, there were always the suckers who could be shook down if things got too bleak. Fighting didn’t mean nothing to me now. There was no nervousness or nothing. I just did whatever was necessary.

  There ain’t no special clothes or fashion in here. When I first came, I tried to make myself stand out the way I always did. But after while, you’d figure, what the fuck for? You can’t get no dick. I don’t want no pussy. There’s no one to impress here except those broke-down broads. Every now and then, I do hair for cigarettes or stamps or cookies. Most of the time, I keep my own hair braided. It’s so long that bitches get jealous. I have to braid it, then roll it up and tuck the ends under just not to have extra beef.

  But me, Natalie, Zakia, Chanté, and a bunch of Brooklyn girls got a crew up in here. We got a little name for ourselves. Even Simone’s tryna be down with us for her own protection. She finally stopped blaming me for the death of her daughter. Or at least she puts up a good front. But that’s how it goes in here. There’s all kinds of strange alliances.

  Everybody got drug-related charges stemming from their own little situations. But we wasn’t nothing but the girlfriends to niggas moving weight. Sometimes when we be playing cards and listening to the radio, it’s almost like we at home. I got enough family and friends on the inside. That’s why I don’t get no visits. Everybody’s already here.

  “As far as mail goes, I get letters from Santiaga, that’s it. We just always gonna be close like that. I still got the letters from that wild day in Brooklyn. That day plays over and over in my head. I calculated about 263 what-ifs. What if I had done this? What if I had done that?

  What really blew my mind was finally reading Santiaga’s letters while I was in the holding cell the night of my arrest. He admitted killing two dudes in prison. Both of them was my mother’s brothers, who used to work for him. But he broke it down so I could understand it. He just had a justifiable hatred for weak men, said there is nothing worse than a snitch. He told me he knew he was never coming home. He was right. It turned out he got two consecutive life sentences, with no chance of parole. The crazy shit was he gave me Dulce Tristemente’s phone number in those letters. He told me to call her because he didn’t want any more money wasted on his trial. He instructed her that I would be calling. She was to meet me and hand over fifty thousand dollars. There was only one condition. I had to get my mother and place her in a rehab, he even gave me the name of the place. That’s what he had wanted Midnight to take care of. After collecting the money, I had to promise to take c
are of my moms after she came out of the rehab. But, I wasn’t supposed to mention to Dulce what I was going to do with the cash. I called that bitch Dulce collect from the jailhouse. Once she found out I was incarcerated, she changed her phone number and never passed off the money. That hoe was living lovely. If she was supposed to give me fifty thousand, imagine how much she had stashed for herself.

  That’s neither here or there. I don’t even think of getting out. I take one day at a time the eight years I have left. I cross out each day as I survive it. I know I’m not guaranteed to see the next day or the outside ever again. It’s not like I miss anybody other than Daddy, anyway.

  Two guards came to get me. “Santiaga, let’s go. Keep it moving.” I walked on the right side of the corridor, on the inside of the white line the way we were trained to do. They took me into a room I had been in hundreds of times before. I stripped naked. Naked wasn’t nothing to me. I done seen thousands of breasts and hundreds of asses by this time. It was almost the same as seeing somebody fully clothed. In the beginning, I would try to cover myself up. But surprise searches in the middle of the night would have sixty chicks standing side by side, butt-naked, then squatting for a rectal inspection. We are naked in the wall-less shower. Naked in the bing, naked, naked, naked. It meant nothing.

  Dressed in a jail jumpsuit and an army jacket, with an officer in front of me and an officer in back of me, I proceeded down the hallway and out of a series of automated doors. My prison number was checked and rechecked at each checkpoint as if they didn’t know who I was already. Hell, I’m here every day. Once outside of the building, I was placed in a van with bars in the windows and driven across the facility field where snipers and officers were stationed every couple of yards, twenty-four hours a day.

  When we passed the last checkpoint, my way of breathing changed. It might be hard to believe, but the air in prison is different. There’s like one thousand people sucking on the one little piece of fresh air until it turns stale. Then all you suck in is recycled oxygen and bad breath. In the van I could feel the breeze. I could even smell the trees, the sap, and the flowers in the spring air as we drove down the road, headed to the airport.