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  The Battle for Jericho

  “This is a character-driven novel and Mr. Gant is an amazing developer of characters who live, breathe, believe, love, and make mistakes.”

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  “This is an authentic coming of age story following one boy’s journey to find himself. The author does a wonderful job of bringing across the opposing viewpoints, as well as showing Jerry’s hard-fought battle to reach his own conclusions. There’s no denying Jerry is a brilliant protagonist”

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  “This was a great coming of age story with realistic characters who are struggling with difficult issues and emotions.”

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  “Oh my, the emotional charge this book has is beyond words.”

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  Published by

  Harmony Ink Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Suite 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  [email protected]

  http://harmonyinkpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Lessons on Destroying the World

  © 2014 Gene Gant.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 Aaron Anderson.

  [email protected]

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-64838-792-9

  Library ISBN: 978-1-62798-794-3

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-793-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  February 2014

  Library Edition

  May 2014

  For my nieces and nephews. You have taught me so much.

  1

  YOU’RE NOT going to believe this, I know. Something strange happened to me. Actually, something strange happened to everybody, everywhere, only nobody else remembers any of it. I remember it all, and I’ve got to tell somebody or I’ll go crazy. When you get through reading all this, you’re going to say I am crazy. But so what? I’ve been through worse.

  The strange stuff started on a Friday. It was June 16. I wasn’t all that good at grammar then. On my ninth grade English midterm, I couldn’t even name the elements of speech, let alone explain them. But I was really good at cussing. By the time I turned eight, I had such a reputation in the neighborhood that kids twice my age were having cussing contests with me where the crowd of hooting listeners picked the winner. I was the undefeated champion.

  On that Friday, I really outdid myself. When the clock hit 6:00 p.m., I shot off a stream of curse words so nasty the restaurant’s cashier—a talented trash mouth herself—whirled from the line of customers at her register to look at me with shocked embarrassment. I didn’t care one bit who heard me. It was an hour past the end of my shift, and my replacement, Little Moe, hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t even called, so I didn’t know if he was going to make it to work at all, which would have just been my luck.

  It had already been a long, hard day for me. I was one of two cooks assigned to the day shift at a little barbecue joint in the heart of South Memphis. The other cook, a middle-aged woman named Henriette, had called in sick that morning. The old cow had apparently come down with that awful, incurable disease I called Friday Flu, because she had also been teetering on death’s doorstep last Friday. After working the peak period of the establishment’s busiest day all by my lonesome, I was just a little bit anxious to get the hell out of the place.

  Leaving the kitchen unmanned, however, was an unpardonable sin. Bebe Banks—sole owner of Bebe’s Bar-B-Que—hated to pay overtime. But he hated even more having to haul himself into the stifling kitchen of his greasy spoon to cover for a cook who wouldn’t wait until relief arrived. If I took off before Little Moe appeared, I would be out of a job come Monday morning.

  By the way, Little Moe wasn’t keen on his name, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. I, however, liked my name: Micah McGhee. Micah is a book in the Bible. Even so, when most people met me, they couldn’t seem to wrap their brains around the name. I’d been called “Michael” so many times over the years that I stopped bothering to make corrections. Hell, if I’d ever gotten the money, I would’ve legally changed my name to save everybody the trouble.

  I liked my job too, because it was one of the few things in this world that I was actually good at. June was my sixth month working for Bebe. In that time, amazingly, I’d climbed my way from gofer to janitor to cook. Mr. Banks was cheap and lazy, but I was so grateful the man took a chance on a desperate, inexperienced, sixteen-year-old dropout. I was also grateful that he wasn’t the type to ask a lot of questions. When I went to him begging for a job, I told him I was eighteen. I didn’t look eighteen. According to people who knew me, I looked more like thirteen. I’m sort of a runt. I’m also a white guy living in a mostly black neighborhood. So I sort of stick out.

  I climbed my way up at the restaurant so fast by working hard. Bebe always reminded his other employees that yours truly was the best worker he had, someone who was quick, accurate, and actually came to work when he was supposed to. At first, I couldn’t understand why the man made such a big production out of it, because I was just doing what he paid me to do. After putting up with coworkers like Little Moe and the moo-moo suffering from Fridayitis, I sort of figured out why the man was so hard on the rest of his staff.

  Cooking in a place like Bebe’s isn’t all that hard. It’s like putting a model airplane together; you just follow the steps. At the moment, I had two burgers sizzling on the griddle, a basket of fries and a basket of chicken parts deep-frying in a vat of hissing oil, a catfish fillet baking in the oven for a health-conscious eater, and a pork shoulder smoking in the pit out back. I was working eight orders and could prepare them all to the customers’ desires without referring again to the slips written up by the cashier.

  But my mind was hardly on my job. I’d planned to start my weekend that evening with a relaxing stretch in Cotton’s Lounge on Beale Street. Cotton’s Lounge was adults only most of the time, but from six to ten every Friday night, the club catered exclusively to the sixteen-to-eighteen crowd, a liquor-free, drug-free party zone that I attended every chance I got. The thought of being stuck at work sent a fresh gush of anger ripping through me, and in a fit of rage, I rammed my fist into the refrigerator door.

  The refrigerator won that fight. Pain shot up my arm to the shoulder, making me want to scream. I gnashed my teeth and grabbed my stinging hand at the wrist, doing something like a buck-and-wing around the kitchen. More
bad words started flying from my mouth seconds later.

  “Micah?” It was the cashier, Rita, calling out from the stool where she sat at the register. The sound of my fist meeting the fridge, followed by a second round of curses, must have worried her. “You okay back there?”

  “Oh yeah…,” I squeezed out in a grunt as I kept hopping across the floor. It took almost two minutes for the burning ache to lose its edge. Once the pain died down, I wriggled my fingers carefully. Nothing seemed to be broken. Taking that as a sign of providence, I decided to turn my frustration to more useful activities.

  I scooped the steaming burgers onto toasted buns, slapped cheese, lettuce, pickles, and mayo on one, mustard, tomatoes, and onions on the other. Both sandwiches were then wrapped tightly in waxed paper and pinned with a toothpick through the middle to hold everything in place. I lifted the basket of fries from the vat, shook off the excess grease, dumped the fries into the serving bin, and dashed them with salt. I filled two cardboard pouches with fries, shook open two paper bags, placed a burger and fries in each bag, and stapled the order slips to the corresponding bags.

  “Order up!” I called out as I slipped the bags into the pickup window, which was little more than a rectangular hole cut into the wall separating the kitchen from the cashier’s station. The bags promptly disappeared as Rita snatched them away.

  I got a glimpse through the pickup window at the lady who had ordered one of the burger and fries combos. She was a petite, pretty little thing, around eighteen or nineteen and maybe an inch or two taller than me. She had on this green shirt with the top two buttons open, and that meant I could see her smooth cleavage. I had to turn away to keep from getting completely turned on. Something else you should know about me is that I daydreamed about sex a lot. There were fine girls everywhere, it seemed. They were in the neighborhood where I lived. On the streets. In the parks. In the stores. Everywhere I went, I saw spicy young females, and I wanted all of them. But I’d never had sex, and I figured I probably never would because the ladies who turned me on were so hot, and I was just this little shrimp nothing nobody would ever want.

  Wait. It’s not exactly true that nobody was ever interested in me sexually. There were two guys, back in high school, who were attracted to me for some mysterious reason. One of them seemed to have this fixation on me that was creepy and weird and made me feel really bad. I should tell you about him, but not just yet. For now, I’m going to stick with what happened on that Friday, June 16.

  As I hauled the basket of chicken from the fryer, there was a single bang at the back door. That was Little Moe’s signature announcement of his arrival. I tossed the chicken onto a large metal tray lined with paper towels. As I walked mechanically to the rear entrance, fury blazed in me again. I yanked the double deadbolts back, and caught up in the sudden, spiteful impulse to knock Little Moe over, I violently shoved the door open. The thick metal slab wasn’t impressed with either my strength or my nasty attitude, and it swung away at a casual pace. Little Moe had plenty of time to step back. Then he stood there, taking care to not look me in the eye.

  “Hey,” Little Moe said. There was actually a hint of guilt in his voice. Then he suddenly flinched, waving his arms at the wall of heat that blasted him head on. “Man! Bebe still hasn’t fixed the air conditioner back here? No wonder we stay skinny as hell.” Twenty-four years old, Moses “Little Moe” Harper was five foot seven and as thin as a corn stalk. His spindly frame got him the nickname, of course, one that would most likely follow him to the grave. I’m sorry to say that he looked like a steroid-swollen linebacker next to me.

  I was probably the only person Little Moe knew who was smaller than he was, so you can imagine how happy he was when I got hired. He’d been ragging me about my size since the day I started work at the joint. I doubted he would try that mess with me today, however.

  “You. Are. Late,” I said, pronouncing each word with emphasis, and bitterness peppered my voice despite my effort to keep a civil tone. My mom, Celeste McGhee, had often told me there was something therapeutic about simple, honest work. That had to be true because nothing else could explain why I didn’t wrap my hands around Little Moe’s neck then. I headed back into the kitchen, calmly took off my grease-spotted bib apron, wadded it, and swabbed my dripping face and neck.

  “Yeah, sorry, little guy,” Little Moe replied, stepping inside and letting the heavy door bang shut behind him. “My ride conked out at Parkway and Bellevue. I got no money right now, so I had to walk here.” He met my flat gaze and looked quickly away. “Without bus fare, I’m gonna have to walk all the way back home when I get off tonight, by myself, in the dark.”

  He threw another look my way, showing me the kind of woe that made you think of puppies that have been kicked, starved, and left shivering in the rain. He would collect a paycheck from Bebe today, just like the rest of the staff, but being on the night shift, he wouldn’t be able to cash it until tomorrow.

  I was so pissed with Moe that I actually snarled at him. I stomped toward the broom closet. Although I’m only five foot three and weigh about a buck ten, Little Moe wisely hopped out of my way.

  I stuffed my dirty apron into the laundry bag at the back of the closet and slammed the door. Stomping furiously, I made it all the way to the time clock before pity finally hit me. With an inward groan at my stupidity, I pulled two crumpled one-dollar bills out of my pocket and slapped them on the counter.

  “Aw, thanks, man,” Little Moe gushed. He dipped his head in a motion that stopped just short of a bow, and then he snatched up the bills and slid them into his wallet. “You’ll get it back on Monday, I swear. Lord knows, you’re a merciful little fella.”

  “Save that crap, Moe,” I snapped, already angry with myself for giving up the two bucks. “You got six orders to prep. The slips are over there by the pickup window. There’s a shoulder in the pit that’s just about ready, and I left four slabs of ribs in the oven. That oughta keep you set for a bit, but I’d start some more now if I were you.”

  Moving quickly, I grabbed my time card and clocked out at 6:08. My math skills weren’t sharp enough to calculate what the extra sixty-eight minutes had netted me at time and a half. At the moment, I didn’t give a damn whether I was paid for the overtime at all. I was ready to vacate. I yanked off the hairnet mandated by the Shelby County Health Department, setting free thick, damp, curly, light-brown hair that was getting a little too long for my taste, and tucked my maroon-and-gold “Bebe’s Bar-B-Que” cap in its place.

  “I’m outta here.”

  “Yeah, okay. Have a good one. Peewee.”

  God, I hated Little Moe.

  2

  THERE WAS an old Mountain Dew sign with a thermometer in it outside on the wall next to the employee entrance. The temperature was hovering at eighty-five degrees when I stepped outside, which felt blessedly cool after my long stretch in Bebe’s little hellhole. My mood did a complete about-face, and I wallowed in that really good feeling that comes with leaving work on a Friday afternoon. I made my way around the side of the building to Third Street, where the air over the asphalt shimmered with heat and the thick gray fumes from the last of the rush hour traffic.

  Oh, perfect. There was the southbound 19, the bus that would have ferried me home, two blocks past the barbecue joint and rumbling on its merry way without me. The next bus was at least one hour away. I had no intention of waiting for it, not when a half-hour walk would put me home. Tucking my hands into the pockets of my greasy, low-hanging jeans, I set off down Third at a brisk pace.

  At the corner, waiting for the light to change, I looked eastward along McLemore. From my mother, I’d learned that, long ago in prehistory, this street was a bustling business district of banks, medical offices, cafes, and boutiques. Now it was virtually deserted, the businesses gone, and many of its buildings torn down. On the southeast side of the street, diagonally across from me, only dust-covered lots were left, used by neighborhood kids as playgrounds and shortcuts.
/>   South Memphis was in the last stages of a long and painful death. It had an abundance of liquor stores and churches, a few mom-and-pop operations, but no major department stores, full-service restaurants, or new-car dealerships. The houses were old and crumbling, far too many of them abandoned and boarded up.

  About ten minutes later, I crossed the next major street, South Parkway, and came upon an oasis in the middle of all the blight. Several decaying houses facing Third had been cleared away, and in their place, a sprawling white structure of stone and glass rose majestically into the sky. This was the new home, as the banner draped across the building’s crucifix-topped dome proudly proclaimed, of the Greater Blessing Missionary Baptist Church. I glanced at the place as I walked by and shook my head.

  Congregations in poor neighborhoods across the city raised millions of dollars through their tithes and offerings, but not for the Lord’s work, it seemed. Very little of those funds went toward feeding the hungry or housing the homeless, at least as far as I could see. Nor did the congregations use their money to ramp up economic development in their communities. The funds mostly went into building ever more elaborate buildings to house the church itself.

  That just boggled my little brain. Thanks to Mama, I’d spent a pretty good portion of my formative years in Sunday school, where the virtues of a loving God were repeatedly pressed into my head, a God who wanted his followers to make the suffering of the less fortunate their business. The building that had previously housed the Greater Blessing family was so old and dilapidated it violated municipal codes that hadn’t even been written yet. The city council was inspired to write them after an inspector condemned the place. It only made sense that the members of the church wanted to build themselves a new sanctuary. But with the area’s crushing poverty, I just couldn’t see what vital, spiritual purpose was served by the addition of a gymnasium, theater, swimming pool, and coffee shop. Other, that is, than to enable the members to raise their noses at others and say, “Look what we’ve got.”