Half a them got snatched up by RICO for long bids, the other half is dead, all the hardcores, so now it's like just the Old Heads out there sippin' forties and telling stories about yesteryear, them and a bunch of Similac niggers, stoop boys, everybody out for themselves with their itty-bitty eight balls, nobody runnin' the show."

"Maquetumba?" Tristan's pillowcase was nearly full.

"Dominican dude. Dead now. My brother told me him and his crew had the Lemlichs sewed tight."

"What kind of name is that."

"I just said. Dominican."

"What's it mean, though."

"Maquetumba? Man, you should know, you Dominican."

"Puerto Rican."

"Same shit, ain't it?"

Tristan shrugged.

"Sss," Little Dap sucked his teeth. "Like, 'he who drops the most,' some shit like that."

"Drops what?"

Little Dap just stared at him.

"Right." Pretending like he got it. Tristan was just glad to be hanging with Little Dap, glad to be hanging with anybody, with him having to live 24/7 with his ex-stepfather, the guy's new wife, kids, rules, and fists. Even how he got here, picking up Bible paper on this shitpile, seemed a little bit of a miracle; after having dropped off the hamsters-his not-really brothers and sisters-at their schools this morning, he hadn't felt like going to school himself.

So he'd been sitting outside Seward Park High School at ten, not knowing what to do or having anyone around to do it with, when Little Dap cut out of the building, passed him by with a nod, then shrugging, walked back and asked him if he wanted to make some change at the Jew cave-in.

It always seemed like whenever he chose to cut school, everybody else picked that day to go in and vice versa; if he didn't have to be dropping off the hamsters first thing every morning, he could just hang out in the candy store by Seward having a Coca-Cola and Ring Ding breakfast with everybody from the Lemlichs when they decided what to do that day, but he could never make it there in time; same for the afternoon, everybody coming together after last class and deciding whose place to go to; Tristan once again stuck doing the reverse hamster run and not having a clue where they went. And his ex-stepfather wouldn't allow him a cell phone.

"Yeah, the PJ's wide-open now," Little Dap said again.

"What about your brother?"

Tristan knew all about Big Dap, everybody did, the only nigger in history to ever get into a fight with a police in an elevator, wind up shooting the guy in the leg with his own gun, and beat the case.

"Dap? Pfff . . . Nigger's too lazy. 1 mean, he could run the Lemlichs, at least if he wanted to, got everybody up in there so scared a him, you know, if he put in the effort? But shit, all he wants is get the cheese easiest way he could. Go up on a corner, 'Yo Shorty you slingin'? It's a hundred a week.' Collect, go back to Shyanne's crib, smoke his brains out and watch the TV. That ain't no life."

"Times ten corners?"

Tristan only made $25, $30 on a delivery for Smoov, and Smoov only came to him if nobody else was around.

"Wide-open . . ." Little Dap shaking his head like it was a tragedy.

"So, what. You gonna go all kingpin out there?"

"Hell no. And wind up in some underground supermax? This Old Head round the way said them joints age you ten years for each real one, guys be laying there twenty-four/seven daydreaming 'bout how to kill themselves."

"For real?"

"I'll take another bid in gladiator school over that anytime."

"For real."

Tristan had never been to either juvie or, since he turned seventeen last year, the Tombs, just ROR'ed a few times like everybody else for the usual shit: possession, trespassing-aka hanging in the park after curfew-for fighting that one time, pissing out the bedroom window.

"I tell you what I am gonna do, though," Little Dap said. "Get up on a package tonight? Work it, sleep in tomorrow and party."

"Pay your own brother corner rent?"

"He ain't charge me."

"You got the money for a package?" Tristan asked.

Dap did what Tristan did, deliver, maybe more often because he was more popular, but he also got money from his grandmother and occasionally made collections for his brother.

"Not right now as such, but I'll get it tonight. Come back out here to the midlands, jux me a head, and I'm good to go."

"All right." Tristan not really following.

"There's this barbershop up in Washington Heights? If you're an hermano dominicano, they sell you a gram for twenty dollars, so I'm thinking let's snatch us a head out here, take the kibble, go up there, let you do the talking, come back down around Tompkins Park, resell the g for a hundred to the white boys coming out the bars, you know what I'm sayin'? We go up with, say, two hundred for ten grams, come back out here, sell for a grand, you do the math."

We . . .

"Yeah, huh?"

"Oh hell yeah."

But Washington Heights. Or even just back out here. They were only five or six blocks from the Lemlichs, but Tristan could almost count the times he'd been this deep away from home when he wasn't making a delivery. He didn't like going north of Houston or west of Essex, and he hated delivering dope to the doctors and nurses up at Bellevue or NYU Special Joints, both so far uptown they might as well be in another country. In fact the only place he didn't mind delivering to was the lawyer's office on Hester Street, close enough, although that redheaded lawyer there, Danny, sometimes when he got his head on, he'd start calling Tristan "Che" because of his goatee, Tristan having no idea how to tell him to quit it.

It was amazing to him how Smoov, only a year older than him, had the confidence to go into all those uptown bars by the hospitals and chat up all those doctors, nurses, and lawyers and whoever to drum up new customers. Shit, he wouldn't even be here in this junk field now if Little Dap hadn't just said, C'mon.

"So you up for this?"

"I don't know." Thinking about his curfew, those fists. "I might got to watch the kids."

"See?" Little Dap addressed the rubble. "Similac niggers, everywhere I look."

"Maybe I can get out of it," Tristan murmured.

"Ey, yo," Little Dap called out to the rabbi or whatever he was. "What you gonna do with them candlesticks back there?"

"That's not your concern."

"What?" Little Dap starting to trip.

The bearded guy, back on his cell now, ignored him.

"I ast you a civilized question.