A Rage in Harlem (13 page)

Jackson thought of Imabelle for the first time since he’d begun his escape. His heart came up and spread out in his mouth.

“Hey,” he called. “You want to take me down to 121st Street?”

The junkman looked up with an armful of trash.

“You got another bone?”

Jackson skinned off another dollar bill. The junkman threw the trash into the back of the wagon, climbed back to his seat, stashed the dollar and shook the reins. The nag floated off.

They rode in silence.

Jackson felt as though he were at the bottom of the pit. He’d been clubbed, cut at, shot at, skinned up, chased, and humiliated. The knot on his head sent pain shooting down through his skull like John Henry driving steel, and his puffed, bruised lips throbbed like tom-toms.

He didn’t know whether Goldy had found Imabelle’s address, whether she’d been arrested, whether she was dead or alive. He hardly knew how he’d gotten out alive himself, but that didn’t matter. He was sitting there riding in a junk wagon and he didn’t know anything. For all he knew, right at that moment, his woman might be in deadly danger. What was more, now that the gang knew the police were on to them, they might run away with Imabelle’s gold ore. But just so long as they didn’t hurt Imabelle, he didn’t care.

His clothes were wet on the outside from the puddle he’d fallen into, and wet on the inside from his own pure sweat. And all of it was icy cold. He sat trembling from cold and worry, and couldn’t do a thing.

Colored people passed along the dark sidewalks, slinking cautiously past the dark, dangerous doorways, heads bowed, every mother’s child of them looking as though they had trouble.

Colored folks and trouble, Jackson thought, like two mules hitched to the same wagon.

“You cold?” the junkman asked.

“I ain’t warm.”

“Wanna drink?”

“Where’s it at?”

The junkman fished a bottle of smoke from his ragged garments.

“You got another bone?”

Jackson skinned off another dollar bill, handed it to the junkman, took the bottle and tilted it to his lips. His teeth chattered on the bottle neck. The smoke burnt his gullet and simmered in his belly, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

He handed the half-emptied bottle back.

“You got a woman?” the junkman asked.

“I got one,” Jackson said mournfully. “But I don’t know where she’s at.”

The junkman looked at Jackson, looked at the bottle of smoke, handed it back to Jackson.

“You keep it,” he said. “You need it more’n me.”

Goldy was standing in the dark, watching through the glass front door of the tobacco shop, when Jackson got down from the junk wagon. He opened the door for Jackson to enter, and locked it behind him.

“Did you find out where she’s at?” Jackson asked immediately.

“Come on back to my room where we can talk.”

“Talk? What for?”

“Be quiet, man.”

They groped through the black dark like two ghosts, invisible to each other. Jackson begrudged every second wasted. Goldy was trying to figure out where to hide the gold ore when he’d finally gotten it.

Goldy turned on the light in his room and padlocked the door on the inside.

“What you locking the door for?” Jackson complained. “Ain’t you found out where she’s at?”

Before replying, Goldy went around the table and sat down. His wig and bonnet lay on the table beside a half-empty bottle of whiskey. With his round black head poking from the bulging black gown, he looked like an African sculpture. He was so high he kept brushing imaginary specks from his gown.

“I found out where she’s at all right, but first I got to know what happened.”

Jackson stood just inside the door. He began swelling with rage. “Goldy, unlock this door. I feel like I’m just two feet away from jail as it is.”

Goldy got up to unlock the door, shoulders twitching from the gage.

“Aw, God damn it, set down and cool off,” he muttered. “Drink some of that whiskey there. You’re making me nervous.”

Jackson drank from the bottle. His teeth chattered so loudly on the bottle neck that Goldy jumped.

“Man, quit making those sudden noises. You sound like a rattlesnake.”

Jackson banged the bottle on the table and gave Goldy a look of blue violence.

“Be careful, Brother, be careful. I’ve taken all I’m going to take this night from anybody. You just tell me where my woman is and I’ll go get her.”

Goldy sat down again and began shining his cross with quick, jerky motions. “You tell me first what happened.”

“You ought to know what happened if you found out where she’s at.”

“Listen, man, we’re just wasting time like this. I wasn’t back there when the rumble happened. I was setting in a taxi out front when she and Slim came out and got in and he said she was his wife and had taken poison and he had to get her to Knickerbocker Hospital. They rode with me to the hospital then got out and switched taxis and rode over to the place on Park Avenue where they stay. I followed them and that’s all I know. Now you tell me what happened back there in the shack so we can figure out what to do.”

Jackson began to worry again.

“Do they know you followed them?”

“How do I know? Slim don’t know, anyway, unless Imabelle told him. He was in too much pain to notice anything.”

“Did some get in his eyes too?”

“Naw, just on his neck and face.”

“Did they act suspicious of you?”

“I don’t know. Quit asking so many questions and just tell me what you know.”

“What I know don’t matter if they know you followed them. Because by this time Slim will be long gone from wherever he’s at, if he’s still got his sight.”

“Listen, Bruzz,” Goldy said, trying to remain patient. “That woman is sharp. Chances are that she knows I followed her. But that don’t mean she tells Slim. That depends on how she’s playing it. One thing is sure, she has turned you in for a new model. That’s for sure.”

“I know she ain’t done that,” Jackson insisted doggedly.

“No you don’t neither, Bruzz. But whether she’s ready to turn Slim in now for another new model, nobody can say.”

“That just ain’t so.”

“All right, square. Have it whatever way you wish. We’re going to find out soon enough if you ever get around to telling me what happened back there.”

“Well, Grave Digger shot Gus through the head, and Hank threw acid into Coffin Ed’s eyes – that’s when it got on Slim. Then the lights went out and there was a lot of shooting and fighting in the dark. Somebody was trying to cut Imabelle. I got knocked out trying to get to her to help her. And by the time I came to everybody was gone.”

“Holy jumping Joseph! Did Grave Digger get killed too?”

“I don’t know. When I came to he was lying on the floor – leastways I think it was him – and there weren’t anybody left but me and Coffin Ed. And he was going crazy with pain, in there blind, with a loaded pistol, ready to shoot anything that moved. Only the Lord in Heaven knows how I got out of there alive.”

Goldy got up abruptly and put on his wig and bonnet. Suddenly he was consumed with haste.

“Listen, we got to work fast now because those studs is hotter here in Harlem than a down-home coke oven.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along. Let’s go.”

Goldy paused long enough to give him an angry look.

“Man, wait a minute, God damn it. We can’t go in our bare asses.”

He raised the mattress of the couch and took out a big blued-steel Frontier Colt’s .45 six-shooter.

“Great day alive! You had that thing in here all along!” Jackson exclaimed.

“You just look over there in that corner and get that piece of pipe and don’t ask so many questions.”

Jackson felt in behind the stack of cardboard cartons and hauled out a three-foot length of one-inch iron pipe. One end was wrapped with black machinist’s tape to form a hand hold. He
hoisted it once to get the feel but didn’t say anything.

Goldy slipped the .45 revolver into the folds of his Sister of Mercy gown. Jackson stuck the homemade bludgeon beneath his wet, tattered overcoat. Goldy turned out the light and padlocked the door. They moved through the blackness of the store toward the front door, like two ghosts armed for mayhem.

It was snowing slightly when they got outside. The white snowflakes turned a dirty gray when they hit the black street.

“We got to get some way to move her trunk,” Goldy said.

A black cat slunk from beneath a wet crate filled with garbage. Goldy kicked at it viciously.

Jackson looked disapproving.

“Let’s get one of those big DeSoto taxicabs.”

“Man, quit thinking with your feet. That gold ore is hot enough by now to burn a hole through the Harlem River.”

“Maybe we can find that junk wagon I came home in.”

“That ain’t the lick either. What you got to do is steal your boss’s hearse.”

Jackson stopped dead still to look at Goldy.

“Steal his hearse! She ain’t dead, is she?”

“Jesus Christ, man, you going to be a square all your life. Naw, she ain’t dead. But we gotta have some way to move the trunk.”

“You want me to steal Mr. Clay’s hearse to move the trunk in?”

“You done stole everything else by now, so what are you gagging on a hearse for? You already got the keys.”

Jackson felt his pants-pocket. Attached to an iron chain from his belt were the keys to both the pickup hearse and the garage where it was kept.

“You’ve been searching my pockets while I was asleep.”

“What difference does it make? You ain’t got nothing for nobody to steal. Come on, let’s go.”

Silently they trudged up Seventh Avenue.

Most of the bars were closed. But people were still in the street, heads drawn down into turned-up collars beneath pulled-down hats, like headless people. They came and went from the apartment houses where the after-hours joints were jumping and the house-rent parties swimming and the whores plying their trade and the gamblers clipping chumps.

Traffic still rolled along the avenue, trucks and buses headed north, across the 155th Street Bridge and on up the Saw Mill River Parkway to Westchester County and beyond. Cars and taxis
rushed past, stopped short, people got in and out, the cars stayed put and the taxis went on again.

Red-eyed patrol cars darted about like angry bugs, screaming to a stop, cops hitting flatfooted on the pavement, picking up every suspicious-looking character for the lineup. A black hoodlum had thrown acid in a black detective’s eyes and black asses were going to pay for it as long as black asses lasted.

Masquerading as Sister Gabriel, Goldy trudged along the slushy street like a tired saint, holding the gold cross before him like a shield, scrunching to one side to hide the bulging bulk of the Western .45.

Jackson walked beside him, hugging the length of pipe beneath his dirty coat.

A half-high miss coming from an after-hours joint looked at them and said to her tall, dark escort, “He look just like her brother, don’t he?”

“Short, black and squatty,” the tall man said.

“Hush! Don’t talk such way ’bout a nun.”

No police stopped them, nobody molested them. Goldy’s black gown and gold cross covered them with safety.

The garage was on the same street as the funeral parlor, half a block distant. When they came to 133rd Street they turned over to Lenox Avenue and came back on 134th Street to keep from being seen.

Jackson unlocked the door and led the way inside. “Shut the door,” he said to Goldy as he groped for the light-switch.

“What for, man? You don’t need no light. Just get in the wagon and back it out.”

“I got to change clothes. I’m freezing to death in these.”

“Man, you got more excuses than Lazarus,” Goldy complained, closing the door. “We ain’t got all night.”

“It ain’t you that’s freezing,” Jackson said angrily as he stripped to his long damp drawers, stained black from the dye of his suit, put on an old dark gray uniform and overcoat that hung on a nail, and his new chauffeur’s cap he took from a tool chest.

When he turned to climb into the driver’s seat he noticed that the back of the hearse was loaded with funeral paraphernalia. It was a 1947 Cadillac that had first seen service as an ambulance. Now it was used mainly to pick up the bodies for embalming, and to do double duty as a truck. The coffin rack was half hidden beneath a pile of black bunting used to drape the rostrum during a
funeral, plaster pedestals for lights and flowers, wreaths of artificial flowers, and a bucket half-filled with dirty motor-oil changed from one of the limousines.

Jackson opened the back double-doors, took out the motor-oil, and started to unload the other things.

“Leave that junk be,” Goldy said. “All the time you’re taking a man would think you don’t care what happens to your old lady.”

“I want to hurry more than you,” Jackson defended himself. “I was just trying to make space for the trunk.”

“We’ll put it where they put the coffins. Come on, man, let’s hurry.”

Jackson slammed shut the back doors, went around to the front and got behind the wheel. He turned on the switch, read the gauges from habit, told Goldy to turn out the light and open the door. He started the motor and backed into the street, straight into the path of a patrol car.

The cop driving stopped the car. They looked from the nun to the driver, and alighted very deliberately, one from one side, one from the other. Moving with the same deliberation, Goldy closed and locked the garage door, thinking fast. He decided they were just meddling; he had to chance it, anyway. He walked back to meet the cops, touching his gold cross.

Jackson looked at the cops and felt the sweat dripping from his face onto his hands, running down his neck.

“Are you riding with this hearse, Sister?” one of the cops asked, touching his cap respectfully.

“Yes, sir, in the service of the Lord,” Goldy said slowly in his most prayerful-sounding voice. “To take that which is left of him who hath been taken in the first death, praise the Lord, to wait in the endless river until he shall be taken in the second death.”

Both cops looked at Goldy uncomprehendingly.