Iron Gut, Golden Lung Pt. 4

Merry Christmas, everyone.

12

They parked in front of Bio House on a quiet residential street. Before the garage lay a dozen boxes of clothing, tools, toys, molding rugs, warped cassette tapes, purses, portraits and Lord-knew-what-else. “You crazy,” Jeremiah told Donyelle. “Trying to de-clutter Bio House?”

“You know I don’t do messy,” the man replied. “If nobody comes to claim it, it’s trash or Goodwill.”

Technically a two-story home, Bio House consisted of a bungalow built on top of a garage. Cumbersome, pitiful, brown and mottled with cracked paint, it reminded Jeremiah of an ancient toadstool, the dream project of a retired shrimp farmer with more money than architectural sense. When he died in 2005, his children quickly put the eyesore on the market and a millionaire alum purchased it for the team, a dubious gift. Besides the former owner’s detritus, the castoff possessions of residents had been allowed to accumulate, and Jeremiah could only imagine the living, dead, and fungal things they must be uncovering.

Impressed so far, he ascended steep steps to the verandaed front porch. He entered through the door into a combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. It shocked and pleased him to find the place mostly tidy, the junk of the ages pushed against the left wall. The dining area to the right contained an oval mahogany table, as well as an intimidating rosewood cabinet on the spot where the kitchen began, its three shelves crammed with racist china depicting happy slaves. The left side of the room had a parlor elevated a foot above the floor with polystyrene walls made to look brick, furnished with two corduroy recliners, a ratty couch, and a TV hooked up to five game systems. The kitchen had different flooring from the rest of the room, ten square feet of linoleum over birch.

The smell of jambalaya drew him to the steaming pot on the stove. Hungrily, he fixed himself a bowl and sat at the cabriole-legged table. Donyelle cooked jambalaya with a buttery roux and cayenne; one cautious sip sucked the moisture from Jeremiah’s tongue, good stuff. As he ate, an electric fan in the window doused him in pleasingly icy fingers of wind.

“This place looking better’n last year,” he told Donyelle, who sat across from him in a wicker-backed chair.

“Thanks Lungs,” Donyelle replied after a proud inhale.

A boy carrying a heavy and sodden box appeared from the laundry hall behind Donyelle, no doubt the Lidder he’d spoken of. The boy had dark brown skin, medium height, thin, short dreadlocks, pug nose, and sleepy eyes advantageous for a competitive blinker. Grunting with exertion, he dropped the box on the table.

“Can you check if these are fresh?” he asked Donyelle in a trembling voice. “We should throw them out if they ain’t.”

Donyelle peered into the box while Jeremiah regarded the freshman. He wore baggy blacks jeans with a studded belt, black boots, black shirt with THE BIRTHDAY MASSACRE in purple lettering across the chest. He looked like one of the glue-huffers who did skateboard tricks outside Walmart.

He ain’t know what he signed up for, Jeremiah told Jaelin. He join us thinking, ‘I’m weird! They weird!’ This ain’t no charity home for misfit niggas. I don’t need to know his name. He ain’t gone last a week.

“Looks fresh,” Donyelle concluded, and slapped the boy on his arm. “Good look.”

Curious, Jeremiah examined the organs, pinkish brown and wrapped in comic strips, unremarkable until a closer glance made his stomach heave. “They got animal parts in here.”