Read an Excerpt

Dominion

MULTNOMAH BOOKS

Chapter One

He took out a bag of crack cocaine already packaged for the next day's delivery. He picked up one of the crusty rocks, smelled it, touched it with his tongue, debated whether to smoke it. Maybe it could make him forget what he could never tell his homeboys.

"They played me. Fools got it all wrong. Ain't their hood. Ain't their set. Can't tell my little homie, that's sure. What'm I gonna do now?"

He pointed the gun toward the pictures on the wall, setting his sights on people in the newspaper clippings, on one in particular. He slowly rotated his wrist, brushing the muzzle against the bridge of his nose, then pulling it back three inches. He peered deep into the seductive barrel, holding it so the light shone just far enough into the darkness to make him wonder what lay beyond. His trembling index finger fondled the trigger.

* * *

The barrel-chested man moved through the Gresham Fred Meyer supermarket aisle with surprising agility. He negotiated the aisles purposefully, pushinghis shopping cart in and around the late Friday afternoon amblers, who seemed to have all the time in the world and nothing to accomplish.

His black tailored Givenchy suit and Cole-Haan dress shoes suggested he might be a CEO or corporate attorney. In fact, he was a columnist for the Oregon Tribune, where most of his colleagues dressed informally. But Clarence Abernathy calculated his dress for image.

Geneva had called him on his car phone and asked him to pick up a few things on the way home. He headed to the produce section to get the Granny Smith apples. "Granny Smiths are the green ones," she'd reminded him. As if he didn't know.

He headed toward the checkstand, bobbing and weaving just far enough down an aisle to snag a large box of Cheerios, when a loud angry voice invaded his private world.

"Shuddup! You hear me? I said shuddup! Keep your hands off!" The words spewed as if from a geyser.

A wiry man in his forties, about Clarence's age, stood fifty feet away at the far end of the aisle. He wore a tattered red-and-white Budweiser T-shirt. Clarence watched the man grab hold of the ear of a boy who couldn't be more than six years old. The boy's legs momentarily left the ground, his eyes dancing wildly.

The bloodcurdling scream pierced the store like a fire alarm. As the boy's tears flowed, the man pulled harder on his ear, then slapped his head.

"Shuddup, I said!" He cocked back his hand again, like a tennis racquet poised to serve. The arm came down powerfully but stopped just inches above the child's clinched eyes, stopped as if hitting a concrete wall.

The man in the Budweiser shirt looked at the big hand clutching his arm like a vise grip. The intruder had strewn five cereal boxes behind him in the moments it took to run the fifty feet.

"What the heck do you ...?" The wiry man whirled to stare down the meddler, but he stared not into eyes but at an Adam's apple. The intruder was tall and thick, built like a redwood stump. He was the kind of man you'd grab hold of in a windstorm and run from in a dark alley.

"You're hurting the boy," he said, in a calm measured voice, deep and resonant.

The wiry man glanced to the side, suddenly aware of the gaping supermarket audience.

"Who do you think you are, you ..." he sputtered, as if unsure what to say next.

"Doesn't matter who I am. Just matters you stop hurting the boy." He smiled broadly at the little man. But he didn't release his arm. "This your son?"

"Yeah."

"Then treat him like a daddy ought to treat his boy."

"It's none of your business."

"It's everybody's business. Now, tell me you won't hurt the boy again."

"I don't have to tell you nothin', you-"

"That's not the right answer," Clarence whispered, clamping his fingers harder, twisting the wedge on the vise grip. The man's arm throbbed, his eyes watered.

"Try again." The smile appeared nonchalant and unthreatening. The grip suggested otherwise.

"Okay," the man gasped.

"Okay, what?"

"I won't hurt the boy."

Clarence loosened his grip, removing his hand without the slightest twitch of uneasiness. He put the same big hand down on the little boy's head, covering it like a wool cap.

"Take care of yourself, son." The boy nodded, eyes big. Clarence turned to the father. "Have a nice day," he said, as if they'd just had a discussion about whether the economy size Cheerios was really the better deal.

As he walked back to his shopping cart, Clarence smiled reassuringly to the onlookers, some of whom nodded their approval, some of whom weren't so sure.

Clarence reached unconsciously to the two-inch scar just beneath his right ear. It was a thirty-two-year-old scar, compliments of some teenage boys in Mississippi who'd pummeled ten-year-old Clarence and his six-year-old sister with a dozen beer bottles, most of them broken before being thrown. One of the jagged missiles cut the gaping wound that became the scar he now fingered.

He headed for the checkstand, still smiling pleasantly, the outward calm masking a raging storm within. Everyone gave him a wide berth.

* * *

The next morning was the second day of September, a sunny Oregon Saturday, the air fresh and exhilarating, suggesting an early fall. It was the kind of day people who live elsewhere think Oregon never has, just as Oregonians want them to think.

Clarence Abernathy rose early, grateful for the weekend. After reading a few chapters of Biblical Keys to Health and Prosperity, he put in two hours work on the yard, mowing and trimming and edging, getting it all just right. He always managed to have the best looking lawn on the block.

"Give Daddy a hug," he said to eight-year-old Keisha, proudly wearing her tights. She wrapped herself around him unreservedly. "Have a nice ballet lesson, okay?"

Clarence playfully punched eleven-year-old Jonah in the stomach. "And you have a good soccer practice. Use those Abernathy genes and fake 'em out of their socks!"

"Okay, Dad. Later."

Clarence grabbed a worn children's book from the shelf and put his tools in the car. Geneva came out by the car and hugged him. "Love you, baby," she said.

"You too. Have fun being the kids' taxi."

"What time you comin' home tonight?"

"Well, Jake and I won't be done tearing out Dani's carpet till late in the afternoon. Then playin' with the kids and dinner and hangin' awhile. Maybe ten or so?"

"Just make sure you're home by eleven, okay? I know how you and Dani get to talkin'." Geneva smiled. "I'll be waiting for you, but you know I can't stay up much past eleven."

"All right." Clarence said. "Maybe this time I'll bring you home some Granny Smiths."

"That's okay. The Golden Delicious are good eating. We didn't need a pie anyway."

Clarence took off in his bright red metallic 1997 Bonneville SSE, settling back in the plush champagne leather. He drove through the tidy suburbs toward the city, listening to oldies and dreaming about moving farther out to the country, which they planned to do in just another three weeks.

He pulled into a visitor's space outside the apartment of his friend and fellow Tribune columnist, Jake Woods, who walked out the door as soon as Clarence came to a stop.

"Jake! How's my man?"

"Hey, Clabern." Jake called Clarence by his computer ID at the Tribune, a short form of Clarence Abernathy. "Beautiful Saturday morning, huh?"

The men talked shop as they drove toward Dani's, everything from the Trib's changing editorial policy to the latest exploits of the multiculturalism committee to ideas for upcoming columns.

"Looking forward to finally meeting your sister," Jake said. "Tell me more about her."

"Dani's four years younger than I am. Thirty-eight now."

"Not married, right?"

"Not any more. Husband left her five years ago. He took to drinking and doing drugs, freebasin', did some selling. Dani didn't tell me for the longest time. Finally she came to me when Roy was snortin' coke in front of the kids."

"So what'd you do?"

"I came over and flushed the crud down the toilet."

"The cocaine?"

"Yeah." Clarence didn't mention Roy's head had spent some time in the toilet too. "Next day he took off. Never heard a word from him since. Finally she admitted he'd hit her. We're close, really close, but she didn't tell me while it was going on. Said, 'If you go to the joint for killin' somebody, Antsy, make it for somebody more than Roy.'"

"Antsy?"

"Just a nickname."

Jake raised his eyebrows.

Clarence sighed. "When I was a kid, Mama would call us in from playin' ball. Of course, we never came after the first call. About the third time she'd yell, 'Clarants.' Dani was only three or four when she started thinking that was my name. She just turned it into Antsy."

"Thanks for sharing that with me, Antsy."

"Only Dani calls me that. And don't go telling anybody. I'd never hear the end of it."

"Your secret's safe with me, Antsy."

Clarence turned north off the Banfield Freeway toward Dani's house. After a few miles he saw a car with four flats, tires slit, windows broken, and insides stripped. He saw small businesses that had invested months of profit in steel bars so their merchandise would be there in the morning. They passed Sojourner Truth Middle School, with its heavy wrought iron fence surrounding the schoolyard. They had a metal detector there now to screen out weapons. He saw two teenage boys wearing T-shirts, both of which he'd seen in the suburbs. One said, "No Fear"; the other, "Life is short. And then you die."

"More gangbangers all the time," he said to Jake, looking at a young Crip strutting like a peacock and flashing his handsign, daring a Blood set to take on him and his homeboys. He watched obvious drug deals happening on two street corners. "Where are the cops when you need them?"

Clarence looked at the kids with baseball caps worn backwards, some tipped to one side, some to another, some with colorful bandannas. He knew it all had meaning, but he was a suburb dweller and tried not to think much about that sort of thing.

He saw boys dressed in gray oversized Dickeys and khaki beige work pants, sagging low. He noticed several black stretch belts with chrome or silver gang initials forming the belt buckle. White tennis shoes with black laces and black tennis shoes with white laces. Gold chains and black woven crosses around the neck.

Clarence looked at Jake out of the corner of his eye. His friend seemed to be studying the surroundings as a man would study the far side of the moon.

Clarence inhaled the smell of North Portland, the musty scent of aged buildings freshly baked in the last few weeks of summer sun. It wasn't the clean urban showpiece of Portland's renovated downtown, a stretch and tuck job done on the face of an aging movie star. This lacked even the appearance of a facelift. It had its highlights, its nice storefronts and well-preserved homes, but as a whole it seemed to Clarence a forsaken boneyard.

He glanced down the side streets at broken-down houses and lawns the size of pocket handkerchiefs. There on his right stood the rotting carcass of Zolar's shopping center, one of the last old-time mid-sized stores. Abandoned for at least fifteen years, the building still advertised bargains on faded colorless signs in the window.

"Thirty-nine cents a pound?" Jake asked. "Wonder what that was."

The numbers on the sun-bleached yellow tagboard were barely visible, the name of the product having long ago disappeared. Petroglyphs on glass, the remains of a civilization that once prospered, but now lay in ruins.

Clarence turned right on Jackson Street. About every fourth house was well kept, with flower gardens looking to Clarence like oases in the desert. But most of the houses on this street had sagging roofs, peeling paint, and weed-choked lawns. Some of the driveways were littered with junk-rusted sheet metal, rotting plywood, abandoned appliances. Clarence pulled up to number 920. He scanned his sister's house, noticing the dull gray duct tape on her bedroom window facing the street.

Something else I need to fix.

Felicia and Celeste, Dani's twin five-year-olds, ran out in synchronized fashion, yelling "Uncle Antsy, Uncle Antsy." Both forty inches tall and forty pounds soaking wet, they jumped into his extended arms and he curled them like dumbbells, holding one in each arm effortlessly. He lifted them up high like a shoulder press, while they clutched his arms, giggling hilariously. He proudly displayed the girls for Jake, who smiled broadly, nodding his approval.

Clarence waved to Dani, who was working on the left side of the house, tending her little rose garden, a stark contrast to her neighbor's, ramshackle and grown over with weeds. Though they'd reached their peak two months ago, under Dani's watchful eye the last of summer's roses still barely held on.

"Hey, little sister!" Eyes on Dani, Clarence passed the girls to Jake like two sacks of potatoes. Surprised, Jake grinned, and they touched his face with immediate familiarity. Any friend of Uncle Antsy's was a friend of theirs. Clarence made a beeline for Dani.

"Hey, big brother!" Dani's girlish smile spread like a wave across her round moist face. Her skin was smooth except for one blemish on the right side of her throat, a discolored scar left by another jagged beer bottle that same Mississippi night.

Jake watched as Clarence lifted Dani off her feet, him laughing, her giggling. He envied Clarence for having this kind of relationship with his sister.

"Jesus is my best friend," Felicia announced to Jake, as if this was the most important thing he could know about her. It seemed to Jake only yesterday his own daughter Carly, now nineteen, was just this size.

When Clarence introduced Dani to Jake, she reached out her hand. "I've heard all about you," she said with a toothy grin.

"Not as much as I've heard about you."

They went in and sat at the kitchen table. Clarence wondered if she'd ever get a new one. He'd offered to buy her one many times, but she'd always refused. She poured them both a berry-red glass of Kool-Aid. The ice clanked against the glasses as they talked.

"Where's Ty?" Clarence asked.

"Who knows? I'm havin' trouble with that boy, Antsy. I know he loves me, but he's fourteen and he just won't listen to his mama. The boy needs a daddy."

Clarence nodded.

"I've put an ad in the Trib lookin' for one," Dani glanced at Jake with a deadpan expression. "Course, maybe I shouldn't have included my picture." A low squeal of a laugh came out of Dani, rising to a crescendo. Jake smiled. He liked her already.

"You look great, Sis," Clarence said, despite the rapid aging of her face, the gray hairs and extra pounds.

Tyrone, wearing a blue durag, swaggered in the front door. His teenage sensors detected the presence of adults, and he made a quick turn toward his room.

"Ty, get over here-it's your Uncle Antsy," Dani called. "And his friend Jake Woods. From the newspaper."

Ty came out mumbling something under his breath, maintaining steady eye contact with the floor. An eighteen-year-old independence rose out of this fourteen-year-old boy, who disappeared immediately after his command performance. Clarence noticed the distinctive blue of his bandanna.

"What's he doin' wearin' Crip colors?"

"That's what I been tellin' you, Antsy. I just don't know. He says those colors aren't a gang thing any more. Some people say it's so and others say it ain't. Truth is, I'm losin' him to the hood. He's startin' to run with bangers. I think he's a wannabe. He's losin' his straight A's. Studies are slippin'. Boy needs a daddy, or at least a man he can look up to. Don't know what to do, how to stop it."

"We've been over this a hundred times, Sis. Move! Just get out of here. I'll set you up with a down payment. I'll find you a place out by us."

"Out in the burbs? They're not for me."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Dominion by RANDY ALCORN Copyright © 1996 by Eternal Perspective Ministries
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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