Jitterbug (16 page)

On the radio, Pete Gray, one-armed outfielder with the St. Louis Browns, hit a long foul off Dizzy Trout, a 4-F pitcher with Detroit. If the war went on another year they’d be using blind shortstops. Steve O’Neill called for a time-out and went out to talk to his flat-footed hurler.

“Where’s Elizabeth?” Dwight had let himself in when there was no answer to his knocking.

Earl stood a bottle up in his mouth, set it down empty among the others on the table, and belched loudly. “Work.”

“I thought she only cleaned houses Tuesday and Thursday.”

“She got another house. This keeps up she’ll hire on help. Just like Henry Ford.”

Dwight could tell when his brother was drunk. “Ain’t you got the afternoon shift this week?”

“I got a hour. Shit!” Gray sent a grounder between Joe Hoover’s legs and ran to first. “Son of a bitch is a cripple, you know.”

“I know. They called him up when Walker went in.”

“Wonder who we got to declare war on before they call up a nigger.”

“Mars, probably.”

“Got me a double sawbuck riding on this game.”

“What’s the score?”

“Six-two St. Louis.”

“Say good-bye to Alexander Hamilton.” Dwight lowered himself into the rocking chair. He’d filled in for a sick-out on the midnight to 4
A.M.
to make up for missing his shift yesterday and he was exhausted. He felt as if he’d been dragging his bones behind him in a gunnysack. “Earl, where you getting the money?”

“Get me another beer, will you? Grab one for yourself. I told Lizzie to pick up a case on the way home.”

“Too early for me. What about the money?”

“You know about the money. You bailed me.”

Dwight hadn’t told him the terms under which he’d taken him from police custody. His brother hadn’t slept in jail and the lights in the interrogation room hadn’t let him. By the time Dwight saw him he was punchy. “You doing business with the guineas?”

“Listen to him. ‘Guineas.’ You never saw a Eyetalian in your life.”

“How many you seen?”

“I look like George Raft? I do my own selling. No partners.”

“Where you steal the stamps?”

“My brother, you be surprised how many folks right here in the neighborhood don’t lock their back doors.”

“You a burglar now, Earl? Dress up all in black and fuck with grappling hooks, shit like that?”

“I just walk through doors. Folks got no imagination, you know it? They all of them keeps their stamps the same places: dresser drawers, cookie jars, ceegar boxes. You going to get me that beer?”

Dwight got up and went into the kitchen, a narrow box painted cheery yellow to make up for the lack of a window. It had a two-burner Hotpoint gas range and a Servel refrigerator that banged the wall behind it when it kicked in and purred like a lion at feeding time. There were two hordes of Pfeiffer inside. Fuck it. He found the opener, a giveaway advertising job, in a drawer and pried the tops off both of them. He brought one out to Earl and sat down in the rocker and took a swig. The cold beer tasted better than breakfast. Good enough anyhow to make him decide never to drink another one in the morning.

“Mr. Ford ain’t paying good enough, I guess,” Dwight said.

Earl drank his beer and said nothing.

“Elizabeth know?”

“She does now. I heard everything you’re going to say from her. Hey, hey!” York and Bloodworth retired the side with a double play.

“Where you selling ’em, Earl?”

“Why, you want in?”

“I want you out. I made a deal with the cops.”

Earl turned his head for the first time since Dwight had entered the house. His eyes were bloodshot and he hadn’t shaved since leaving police headquarters.

“This is federal shit you’re mixed up in,” Dwight said. “Don’t you care who wins this war?”

“What’s the difference? Whoever wins, we lose. Things won’t change for you and me, little brother. We still be black. And they still be on top.”

“And you be busting up rocks in Kansas when Shirley Temple’s a old lady.”

Earl thumped down his bottle and stood up. He caught his balance on the arm of the sofa and reached to hook his shirt off a floor lamp. “Let me know how the game comes out.”

“Where you going?”

“Anyplace else.”

“I’ll drive. They won’t let you on the bus. You’re too drunk.”

“Just don’t talk.” Earl gave up trying to button the shirt straight and left it open.

Dwight kept his mouth shut in the car. His brother looked out at the scenery. Stopped for a light at Grand River, Dwight watched a pedestrian, blond and lanky in a blue work suit with company patches on the sleeves, start across. When the STOP sign swung up on the pedestrian signal he picked up his pace, then caught sight of Dwight’s face behind the windshield. He slowed to a stroll.

“Fucking redneck.” Earl reached over and punched the horn button.

Dwight actually saw the man flush to the roots of his fair hair. Almost clear of the car when the horn blatted, he spun on both heels, retreated two steps, raised both fists so high over his head Dwight could see the scabby, unwashed flesh of his elbows, and brought them down on the hinged hood, popping loose the latch on one side and making twin egg-shaped dents he could see from behind the windshield.

“Step on it, Dwight! Run the fucker down.”

He advanced the hand throttle, expecting the man to dodge when the car lurched forward. But he’d forgotten to downshift when he’d stopped; the frame clunked, the motor coughed and died.

The man’s face now was purple. He lunged along the left side of the car. Dwight punched down the lock button just as he seized the handle. He wrenched the floor lever into first and tromped on the starter. The motor ground, ground, caught, ground, ground, ground, caught and held. Dwight let out the clutch and pushed down on the throttle. The man’s hand was still on the door handle, and Dwight felt the jolt when the Model A shot, forward, yanking the man’s arm straight out from the socket. In the rearview mirror a moment later he saw a lanky figure standing in the traffic lane with legs spread and a middle finger thrust skyward.

“You got to move faster than that, little brother,” Earl said.

“Any faster and I’d of run right over him.”

“What I said.”

Dwight looked over at his brother. He couldn’t tell if Earl was serious. He hadn’t been able to tell much of anything about him since they’d come north.

“Look what the wind blew in. You boys thirsty so early?”

Beatrice Blackwood was behind the bar of the Forest Club, mixing Bloody Marys in a big pitcher. Her ingredients were lined up along the bar’s glossy varnished surface: a fifth of Smirnoff’s; Tabasco in a quart jug, available only to wholesalers and professional furniture-strippers; four small cans of Del Monte tomato paste; a fifth of Teacher’s; a jar of hot peppers; a pint of Old Grand-Dad; and a tall stainless-steel container filled to the rim with liquefied tomatoes, blended from scratch.

“Born thirsty, sugar. Highball for me, rye and Vernor’s. Strawberry milkshake for my little brother.” Earl swung a leg over a stool cowboy fashion.

Dwight slid onto the next stool. “Coffee, if you got a pot on.”

“It’s percolating. Hold on till I get this right.”

Beatrice was a tall Jamaican, fine-featured and light-skinned, with blue-black hair permanent-waved over to one side like Lena Horne’s, and she prided herself as a mixologist, fussing with her pourers and siphons like an artist with his brushes. Ordinarily, Dwight liked to watch her measuring out her portions with a jigger and an eyedropper, pouring sea salt and cayenne pepper into her palm, dusting it into the pitcher, and stirring the contents with a long-handled glass spoon. Today, those fine details only irritated him. For distraction he looked around the room, which seemed smaller by daylight, the naked pipes and old-fashioned exposed wiring shabby in the extreme. The jukebox dozed in the corner, uselessly garish when not engaged in its purpose. The floor hadn’t been swept of last night’s litter. Cobwebs hammocked in the rafters.

“I needs that drink, darling. Dwight and me just fought the Battle of Gettysburg all over.”

“Who won?”

“Come in here on our own legs, didn’t we?”

She used a funnel to empty the pitcher into a big Mason jar, screwed on the cover, gave it three vigorous shakes, and put it in a boxy Westinghouse refrigerator with the compressor coil on top. Then she cleared the clutter from the bar and mixed Earl’s highball. A two-gallon blue enamel coffeepot stood with its lid rattling on a hot plate on the back bar. She wrapped a bar rag around the handle and poured Dwight a cup. “You want a nail in it?” she asked.

“Just some cream.”

She added cream from a container in the refrigerator and set the thick white china cup and saucer in front of him. “Who’s buying?”

“Shit. I done left my roll at home.” Earl sipped his drink.

Dwight got out his wallet. “What’s the damage?”

“For you, eighty-five.” Beatrice showed her brilliants.

He laid a dollar on the bar and told her to keep the change. She rang it up in an old-fashioned brass register and slipped a nickel and a dime into her apron pocket. “I hear I missed some excitement the other night,” she said.

“Just a roust,” said Earl. “Cops won’t stop till we’re all on our way back to Africa.”

She fitted a cigarette into a jade holder and lit it off a slim matching lighter. She was the only woman outside the movies who Dwight thought looked natural smoking that way. “I heard they were looking for that Kilroy character. What you think, colored?”

“They thought that, they’d turn out every joint in Paradise Valley.” Earl drank. “They’d take a torch to the whole fucking street.”

“What’s Dwight think?” She was smiling at him.

Dwight concentrated on his coffee. He was shy around Beatrice. He could never tell if her interest in him was genuine or if she was making fun of the new kid. She was ten years older, and she’d been around. He knew she’d worked the streets, both here and in Jamaica, and the rumor was she kept her hand in when rent time came around. Even if it turned out she liked him, he doubted he measured up.

“I think it don’t matter what I think,” he said.

“I bet you got a theory. You’re the thinky type.” She put an elbow on the bar and rested her chin in her hand. Smoke coiled out of the cigarette in its holder clamped in the corner of her mouth. Earl, who never missed an episode of
Terry and the Pirates
, referred to her as the Dragon Lady when not in her presence.

Dwight said, “My theory is he’s going to step in a hole and the cops are going to fill it in.”

“That’s the cops’ theory.”

“No, that’s their plan. It ain’t the killing, they don’t care about that. It’s the stamps. That’ll bring in the feds. They’ll bury the guy if it means using the army and stretching the war out another year.”

“You called it right the first time,” Earl said. “It don’t matter what you think.”

Beatrice said, “It makes sense to me.”

“That’s ’cause you think he’s talking about Kilroy.”

“Oh. Forgot. You got a call.”

Earl grinned. “Count Basie looking for a road manager?”

“If he was, I’d take it. I got a big heart for that Joe Williams. My, my.” The smile stayed in place. “Gidgy wants you to call him.”

Dwight said, “Who’s Gidgy?”

“Search me, little brother. I never heard of the man. It was a mistake, sugar.”

“I make a lot of those.” She came up off her elbow, tapped ash into a tin embossed L&Ms tray on the bar, and touched her hair with a slim hand with red-lacquered nails. “Freshen that cup, Dwight?”

He looked at the Burma-Shave clock. “Better not. I got to get Earl to the plant.”

“Soon’s I take a leak.” Earl drained his glass, hopped off the stool, and took the narrow sloping hallway to the rest rooms in back. He was whistling “Let Me Off Uptown.”

“War effort getting along without you today?” Beatrice scooped up Earl’s glass, mopping up the ring with the bar rag in her other hand. Her every movement was as graceful as a dancer’s.

“Even Henry Ford gets a day off now and then.” He drank the last of his coffee. “I can’t remember if you got telephones in back.”

“Seems to me we do.” She turned her back to plunge the glass into the soapy water in the double sink.

“Who’s Gidgy?”

She rinsed the glass thoroughly. “I don’t know him any better than your brother.”

“I believe that,” he said.

She wiped the glass dry with a clean towel, placed it bottom side up among the others on the back bar, and turned to retrieve her cigarette and holder from the ashtray. Her eyes were mahogany-colored. “God decides the order, Dwight. If He meant for you to be the big brother He’d have had you born first.”

“I just asked who’s Gidgy.”

She shrugged a padded shoulder, turned away, and looked over the collection of posters and framed pictures crowding the wall behind the back bar, searching with the concentration of a librarian looking for a particular book among stacks she saw every day. Finally she came to a framed newspaper clipping, brown and spotted, with a photograph of ten colored men in hats; cloth caps, and pinstriped suits, lined up against what looked like one of the wainscoted walls at Detroit Police Headquarters. The headline read
TEN QUESTIONED IN NEGRO RACKETS WAR.
She pointed to the third man from the left, standing with his hat in front of his face.

“That’s Gidgy,” she said. “He’s just as camera-shy now as he was in ’31.”

G
UNTHER
L
ENZ APPROACHED HIS
father with caution. The old farmer—he was eighteen years older than Gunther’s mother, having buried his first wife in Bavaria before shipping to the U.S. in 1909—was seated on the front porch in his hardrock maple chair, drinking his thick bitter coffee and scowling at the train like profile of the Willow Run plant on the horizon, backlit by the setting sun. His mood, always subject to sudden change, was never good when his thoughts rested on that architectural non sequitur in the midst of farm country. He had been in negotiation to buy a fine virgin wooded section for clearing and planting when Washington condemned it out from under him to make room for an employee parking lot. Baldur Lenz was the son of an old Prussian Junker, whose features, hewn out of straight-grained
Nordwald
and decorated with a white imperial, glowered out of a tinted photographic portrait in an oval frame in the dining room, and his sympathies in the current war were clear. He called the president “Rosenfeld,” blamed the surrender of Berlin on Jewish betrayal, and bore a hideous pattern of wormlike scars on his back from having been pulled into a field by hooded men in March 1918 and horsewhipped for his Germanism. Gunther looked with dread upon the day he must explain to his father that he had registered for the draft, and when called intended to serve. Right now he only wanted to ask a favor.