Free When the Thrill Is Gone by Walter Mosley Page B

was lying on his side, wondering how to breathe right.
    The gesture said that if they wanted more I had it for them.
    Working together, they managed to get to their feet and stumble away.
    To my surprise Tally had not fled. He hadn’t helped in the fight, but he was standing in front of the shack with a fist-sized rock in either hand.
    “You were waiting for me to soften them up?” I asked the frightened young man.
    Tremors traveled from his shoulders down into his hands. He showed his teeth in a rictus that might have been anything from a laugh to the beginnings of a heart attack.
    “Shall we go inside?” I said.
    He looked back the way his attackers had gone.
    “They’ll need medical help before coming back here,” I said. “You think they might send some friends?”
    He shook his head and then gazed at me with those unhealthy orbs.
    Dropping the stones, he said, “You know how to fight.”
    “Comes in handy in back alleys and jail pens.”
    Tally pulled a key from his pocket and turned toward the entrance. He went through the rough-hewn door into a dwelling that was most likely a temporary workman’s shed when it was first thrown up.
    It was a medium-sized room with no windows, a cot against one wall, and a huge plank table against another. There were clothes on the floor and comic books strewn around. Taped and tacked up on the walls were blue-lined sheets of notebook paper that had drawings of faces on them. Lots of native talent with little follow-through. The doodlings of a talented but hyperactive mind that the teachers never got through to—if they ever tried.
    There was no bathroom that I could see but he had a chrome sink filled with dirty dishes. This was a poor, uneducated man’s home, replete with the earmarks of poverty in the twenty-first century. There was a brand-new laptop computer and an Xbox on the desk amid the empty pizza cartons, Avengers comic books, and reams of lined paper, either scrawled upon or waiting their turn.
    “Nice computer,” I said.
    “Chrystal gave me that stuff.”
    “That was nice of her.”
    “She just wants me to stay away, so she gives me stuff not to feel guilty.”
    “Who were those guys?” I asked.
    “Big Boy an’ Two Dog,” he said. He pulled out a metal-and-vinyl folding chair from a corner and set it out for me.
    He plopped down on the cot and said, “They give me some weed to sell but the cops busted me and took what I had left and all my money. But, you know, them two expect to get paid, or kick somebody ass.”
    I had yet to sit down. I was still wondering what I could hope to get out of this hopeless brother.
    The shack smelled of Tally, that hint of rot that you might find in the wing of a hospital where they put the patients who can’t pay.
    I sat and asked, “What does Chrystal have against you? You’re both artists.”
    “You like my drawings?” he asked.
    “They have a lot of power. Portraits mainly, huh?”
    “I like faces. Sometimes I ride the subway all day long and just draw one face after the other. They got every race in the world right down on the F train.”
    “That why you have problems with Chrystal?”
    “What you mean?”
    “Maybe she thinks you’re competing with her,” I suggested.
    “The last time I went to her house some kind of silverware went missing,” he said. “I didn’t steal it. What I want with some old forks and spoons? Probably one of the servants did it, but they blamed me ’cause when I come around is the only time they check.
    “But you right about that art, man. It was me who first asked Dad if maybe I could have a welding set to copy comic-book characters on steel. He got it for me but then, after a while, it was Chrystal doin’ it all the time. She hogged it up and now she famous, married to some rich white man, and blamin’ me for a thief.”
    To punctuate his dissatisfaction Tally took off his fake snakeskin jacket and dropped it on the splintery floor. His black T-shirt showed off arms