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You don't remember a time when he wasn't you.
Even when you were just kids; your names said in the same breath by your momma, his momma: Avon, Russell; Russell, Avon. Smeared together, brushstrokes, top and tail in his bed.
His bony elbows, the way he sleeps; all curled up like a pillbug. Stretching out, mumbling. Crinkle of the plastic under the sheets — he used to wet the bed. Not anymore, he swears, and you wonder what could scare him so bad to have him piss his pants in his sleep.
Summer crackles on the horizon. You watch its birth, tracing the way the orange light runs a greyhound race all through the west side.
“The fuck are you doing,” Avon says. Morning falls half-gold across his bare chest, his hand across his eyes to block the sunlight.
“Sunrise,” you say. You look back out the window. There's a dog sniffing the trash, piebald coat, all its ribs on display. A murder of crows sitting on the buttress of the church a block across. “Looking at our future empire.”
“Too early for this shit,” Avon says. “Get your ass back to bed.”
“I'm in bed.”
“Get your ass back to sleep.”
You'll be too big for this, one day. Too big to fit together, too big to share this bed; lest the space between you will be nothing. You think you'll become the same person. Physical, you in him in you in him; repeat forever.
“You gotta dream bigger than the this,” Avon says. “Else you never getting out of here.”
“Westside,” you say. You settle down beside him, curving around him like an open bracket. He's a scrawny thing, tiny, all this fire in his throat and his gut. “All of the Westside gon’ be ours. All of Baltimore gon’ know our names.”
It feels like a promise, binding, sealed tight. “That's more like it,” he says.
You don’t use. The drugs are everywhere, but you don't use.
That’s what Avon makes you promise, after another funeral, after another dead body in the alley. After another empty seat in class, another motherfucking pledge to the flag that’s one voice quieter; like someone turned the notch down on the stereo.
“I ain’t losing you, you hear me,” Avon says. “I ain’t fucking losing you.”
You’re still Russell, now. Russ to some. Stringer is still incubating, all curled up rubbery and soft in your belly.
“Chill,” you say, and Avon's fingers dig into your biceps, your muscle, your skin and bone and blood, tender flesh of a boy. “You not losing me.”
“I'm not losing you,” he repeats.
His body blurs into yours. Your voice cracks like you're about to cry, but boys don't cry so you just flicker between them instead; man, boy, man.
Two bodies. A boy becomes a man when people start crossing the street to avoid him.
“I find you belly up and I'ma kill you,” Avon says. “The only way you die is with me, you hear me? You ain't going first.”
You punch him in the shoulder, light. Out in the hall the radio chirps, disembodied voices carrying the score of the football game through a haze of tobacco smoke, his momma smoking while she cooks dinner.
“Ain't no reason for you to be all serious,” you say. You don't know what's gotten into him. He has wild eyes. He wets his lips and stares at you, and you stare back, meeting him.
You don't know what's gotten into him. His palms are hot, flat against your skin. Holding you in place, these roots you've set down in his bed.
The springs shift under his weight, the mattress dipping. His knee bumps against yours; dark skin scabbed over and rough, a tumble on the court. You touch it — can't help but touch. All that blood underneath, the way it had oozed and dripped as you helped him wash the dirt and stones from the wound.
You wanted to press your mouth to it. You wanted to stick your tongue into it and taste the inside of him; raw flesh, mangled skin. That thing in your belly is trying to break loose.
“Russ,” he says. You shiver, all your fine hair standing on end. You don't know where to look — can't look at his eyes, can't look at his face — so you stare at his knee instead, that scab lifting at the edges under your bitten down nails.
A drop of blood oozes out. His breath puffs warm and wet on your face. You press the blood into his skin, smear it across.
From the kitchen his momma calls:
“Russell! Avon! Wash your hands and come set the table!”
A boy becomes a man when there's blood on his hands — when he's holding the smoking gun and he should have been wearing gloves, shit, shit, shit.
There's snow on the ground. It runs red, pink. Your breath comes out in short puffs of smoke and you wonder what temperature blood freezes at, how long it takes for it to go cold.
“String,” Avon says. His hand wraps around your forearm and tugs. There's twisted wiring bursting out of the snow, thick rods of iron birthed from shattered concrete. Your ears are ringing. Wedding bells.
You've never been to a wedding.
Avon takes the gun from you. He pulls down your beanie and hands you your glasses. Your hands only shake a little when you fold them and put them in your pocket, and you taste more gunpowder than blood.
“Let's get out of here.”
He's already wiping your prints from the gun. You follow him, and you learn.
You didn't see Avon's father much. You saw the effects of his presence more than you saw him. Avon flinching when the front door slams; the welts across the backs of his thighs, his buttocks, scars split open like ripe cherries. You helped Avon mop it up, soaked it through with a towel more deep red than white at this point. Disinfected it like your momma taught you, and Avon called you every name under the sun when you poured the disinfectant over the cuts.
His father is long dead; buried when Avon was seven. He's fifteen now, and he pisses on his Dad's grave, the two of you taking sips of cheap whiskey under the muted stars. Swallowing each other's backwash, lips slick with another man's spit.
The whiskey burns. Scorches you inside and out. You stare at his dick without shame, the softness of it, the way he holds it in his hand. He catches you looking, and you don't say anything.
The city is a swamp in summer, heat rising from the engines and the asphalt. You take your shirts off and wander through the graveyard, skin sticky, sirens wailing, crickets chirruping, Avon’s drunken singing to complete the chorus.
He elbows you in the ribs and tells you to join in, and you tell him to fuck off, unable to stop yourself from laughing.
They still say your names in the same breath. More curse than prayer. Barksdale and Bell. Akin to twins, and sometimes you think your blood runs the same. Sometimes you can taste it in the air, on the filter paper of your cigarettes, in his sweat where you suck it off your fingers.
You taste the whisky on his tongue. It surges up through your veins, and you push him rough against the stone of the church, under the buttress, the crows cawing as he breathes into your lungs.
A boy becomes a man in your room. A boy stretches out in your bed, stomach down, his ass marred with scars, shirt too big for his lean frame. His biceps bulge, all sinew and muscles, knuckles skinned from boxing. His top lip is split, red gash across the plush skin, and that one is from boxing too. You thumb at the cut, push back his lip to reveal his gum; spit slick and glistening pink.
His eyes flutter open. They're dark, so fucking dark. Always wild, and you know the two of you will rule this city. You know no-one will stop you.
He takes you into his mouth. He's drooling already, and you're so hard it hurts. You can't bear to look at him. You can't bear him to look at you.
You wonder what it's like, seeing yourself.
“Eyes shut,” you say. It licks at the back of your throat, tickles like bile. You wonder if his father knew this every time he shed his blood. You wonder if his father shared his blood at all, or if it's all yours now. “Faggot.”
Killing becomes easy. It's nothing. It's just the game, just business. Guns are best, but sometimes you want to feel it. You like the warmth of the blood, like feeling the flesh give way to blade. The heat of their insides, the same way Avon feels when you're pressed deep inside him; squirming, soft, moans wet with fluid.
You dig your fingers into the scars on the backs of his thighs. He spreads his legs wider.
You think about fucking him with your gun, once, when you're cleaning it. How the metal would look sliding inside of him, a perfect marriage. You know he'd think you were insane, but you think he is, too.
You know he is. He sucks your fingers and says they taste like pussy, and you put your cock in his mouth and fuck his throat so deep he pukes; semen, spit, bile, chewed up chunks of meat all over the carpet.
“String,” he says. There's tears in his eyes. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand. You're disgusted in yourself that you want to kiss him; that the hoarseness of his voice is sweet.
You light a cigarette and pass it to him, because he looks good with something in his mouth. “Yeah?”
“Fuck, man,” he says. He takes a drag and passes it back to you. “You fucking girls?”
“I'm not a faggot,” you say. “Yeah, I'm fucking girls. Why, you think we something?”
He shakes his head. “Forget it,” he says. He rubs his throat absentmindedly, and you cover his hand with yours. “Can you get me off?” he asks.
You let go of his throat and put the cigarette to your lips. With your other hand you reach under the waistband of his sweatpants.
You earn everything you get. The both of you, you build this with your own two hands. With a river of blood soaking the dirt, with fear put on the names Barksdale and Bell. Through everything, through the expansion. The strip club, print shop, all the empty lots, all the money stuffed in pockets of men who think they're better than you because they sit in an office downtown.
Everyone bleeds the same. Everyone wants the same thing. You; the left hand. Avon; the right. Sometimes they ask if you're his brother, if he's yours, your daddies different.
You laugh. You don't think anyone will ever get it. You don't think Avon gets it, sometimes. This thing you have. Melding into each other in the seat of the car, in the snowy January, heaters on full blast. Hurried silence, the same way it was when you were boys.
When it was just the two of you, lying in his bed, his body on top of yours. Before you knew the taste of his lips and the way his guts felt around you. His clothes damp with sweat, the fan oscillating in the corner, the radio on to hide the squeak of the bed.
Nothing to hide anymore. You stare at him wearing baby blue, trapped behind a pane of glass like a captive animal. His palm up, fingers spread wide. You press your hand against his, and the glass is cold, but you can feel his warmth; anyway.