South Street (40 page)

Wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, Rayburn stumbled along beneath the footsteps, following them into the bedroom again. Shoes hit the floor, a belt buckle. Rayburn stood in the flickering light staring upward at the ceiling, holding his breath. He heard the creak of depressing bedsprings, the light murmur of voices. He groaned and half staggered to his own empty, sour-smelling bed, fell onto it and lay, spread-eagle, staring up at the pink ceiling that flickered into being every second or so to hang there for a second or so. Rayburn listened to the mocking voices above him, the filtered alto and bass, and hated them. Then the voices faded, stopped, and he hated them even more. Above him the bedsprings creaked once and then were silent. Rayburn rolled onto his side, Rayburn’s bedsprings, too, groaned. But then, above him, the springs creaked again, not once but many times, in the slow cadence of love. Rayburn turned and lay staring once again, the rhythm from above him descending slowly, heavily, out of time with the quick electric flickerings of the neon light. Rayburn thought of the motions above. He closed his eyes, shut out the teasing light. Slowly, in time with the rocking rhythm, he unzipped his fly, unbuttoned his pants, unbuckled his belt, sought inside his underwear with cold dry hands. He caressed his body gently to the slow cadence of the bedsprings, thinking of the woman—her flesh, which had been quietly perspiring into the heat and solitude, now sleek with moisture, salty like the sea, every pore a fountain, every hollow a pool, her mouth twisting, her fingers caressing him, stroking him. Rayburn felt himself harden and grow, thinking of her, feeling her hands upon him. And then he opened his eyes. The pink ceiling materialized above him and Leslie’s face smiled down at him. He felt shame, knowing his hands were on his body, but he kept on, fighting, forcing his mind to the woman above. But it was no use. His hands abraded. His body softened.

Above him the bedsprings creaked and squealed in frenzy for a few moments, then resumed to another rhythm slower still, deeper, before subsiding into silence. Rayburn rolled onto his stomach, then back, lay in the intermittent light, one hand hanging to the floor, the other balled loosely over his groin. The ceiling appeared, disappeared, reappeared above his head. He closed his eyes, but the light came through, dim and mocking. He rolled and lay facing the wall. The light blinked on and off. Mesmerized by that rhythm, he slept.

The window was open, sucking in great syrupy draughts of dirty air, sounds, smells, South Street. Vanessa lay on the sagging mattress, her body covered by a single sheet and a layer of sweat scented with powder, flavored with salt. Her mind flowed out into the darkness, searching for Brown.

She had climbed uneasily up the stairs, knocked hesitantly on the door. There had been no answer. She had thought to go away. She had knocked again. Then she had gone in.

In his absence, Brown’s rooms did not reek of him. She had wandered through them—kitchen, bedroom, bath—trying to find something that would tell her that Brown and no one else lived there. Brown was not spectacularly neat. The garbage bag in the kitchen was full to overflowing with quart beer bottles and odds and ends of paper. She got a feeling of Brown from that. But the trappings of the room could have belonged to anyone—a greasy skillet in the sink, a fork, a cloudy glass, a coffeepot. The bedroom was much the same—a pair of cheap black shoes set close together but at an odd angle, as if they were being worn by an invisible cripple, a pair of blue jeans, two pairs of black pants. In the drawers a few badly folded white handkerchiefs, white tee shirts, black socks, a half-dozen new nylon shirts. Drip dry. Permanent press. The bathroom: shorts, a jockstrap over the tub edge. A Gillette razor. Wilkinson blades. Lifebuoy soap. Prell shampoo. Right Guard deodorant. In the medicine cabinet Bayer aspirin and Alka-Seltzer

In the kitchen she sat in one of Brown’s hard chairs, took a deep breath, and opened the drawer beneath the table. She had to pull hard—the drawer stuck, as if it were trying to resist her—she forced it, then stared uneasily at the sheaf of poems inside. She longed to rip the poems up, to dump them out the window into the alley below. She poked around in the drawer, found something she had missed. It was another poem, not on the yellow lined sheets like the others, but on the panel of a paper bag. She remembered seeing it before, but it was different now—Brown had been over it, changed it somehow. It was about South Street. She didn’t understand why anyone would want to write a poem about South Street—South Street was someplace you tried to forget. But she read the poem, trying to understand not it, but Brown, tried to imagine him coming off the bridge, moving—not walking or riding, just moving, running maybe—down South Street. She read the poem with that picture in her mind. He would move quickly at first, his feet hardly touching the ground, but then he would slow, float like the shadow cast by a cloud as it drifted across the sun. It didn’t sound like Brown thought South Street was pretty, but it did sound as if he thought it was beautiful. And it sounded as though he hated it, in his own way, as much as she did.

She had been startled by the sound of the lower door opening, footfalls on the stairway. Brown. She froze for an instant, then began to put the papers quickly back into the drawer. He would hate her for touching them. She pushed at the drawer but it stuck again. She panicked, shoved it. It wouldn’t go. She felt tears of frustration in her eyes, but then she realized that the steps had halted. Below, a door opened, closed with a bang. The sound echoed, faded. Vanessa pushed at the drawer. It slid obediently shut.

She sat there for a few minutes, wondering why Brown frightened her when Leroy did not, when all the drunks and junkies lined up from one end of South Street to the other did not. She had risen from the table and turned out the lights, drifting in darkness back into the bedroom. She took off her clothes, hanging them neatly in the closet. She had turned down the sheet, climbed onto the bed, and lay, listening, breathing.

South Street stole through the open window, a sour-sweet stench in the soggy air, covered her body with a layer of moisture. Vanessa lay in the heavy heat searching the darkness with her eyes, trying to find what Brown found in it, in half-dead winos and garbage piles, trying to understand what was so inspiring about elephantine cockroaches and rats the size of cannon shells. It made no sense to her. She was tired of picking up magazines and reading articles about the ghetto. All they talked about was rats and roaches. Brown was crazy. She didn’t give a damn. Among the trash cans and garbage in the alley below, a hungry animal—cat, dog, wino—foraged. She wondered what was down there, what it was looking for.

She had drifted off to sleep when Brown came in. He smelled her heavy perfume. He smiled to himself, closed the door, slipped off his shoes, and padded into the bedroom. He stood above the bed, looking down at her. The sweat had soaked into the sheet, and as his eyes adjusted to the dark Brown could see the wrinkled whiteness clinging to her dark, smooth curves, her skin altering the sheet’s color, adding a bluish cast. Brown set his shoes down carefully, slipped quietly out of the rest of his clothing, or tried to—the beer had affected his coordination—eased onto the bed, lay congratulating himself on his quietness.

“You mad?” Vanessa said.

Brown jumped. “Goddamn! Can’t spooks say nothin’ ’cept boo all the damn time?”

“Sorry,” Vanessa said. “I forgot you was so damn jumpy.”

“I ain’t,” Brown said. “I just got hair-trigger reflexes.”

Vanessa snorted. “Well, are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Mad.”

“No,” Brown said. “I am drunk. If I acted the way I act when I’m drunk when I was sober instead of acting the way I act when I’m sober, then maybe I’d be mad. But since I only act the way I act when I’m drunk when I’m drunk, I am usually not considered mad. It is the measure of our sick society that a man is not considered insane so long as he only acts that way when he is drunk, and acts sober when he is sober. But not too sober. True sober behavior is threatening.”

“Anybody ever tell you you talk a whole lot an’ don’t never make no damn sense?”

“How can you expect me to make sense when I’m drunk? I make perfect sense when I’m sober.”

“I ain’t never
seen
you sober,” Vanessa said.

“And with the luck of Ananse, you never will.”

“Who the hell is Nancy?”

Brown laughed. “Never mind.”

“I knocked,” Vanessa said defensively.

“What?”

“I knocked. You wasn’t here, so I just thought I’d come in an’ wait—”

“An’ then you got sleepy an’ crawled into bed. That’s fine. I like that. Only don’t bust ma chair an’ eat up ma goddamn porridge.”

Vanessa giggled. “How ’bout if I turn into a pumpkin?”

“It’s a little late for that,” Brown said.

“A warm pumpkin.”

“How warm?”

“Warm.”

Brown rolled onto his side, shifted closer to her, and laid his hand on her belly. She sighed, rolled, backed up against him. Brown stroked her hip, his exhalation tickling her neck. “Brown?” she said.

“Um hum?”

“You goin’ to sleep?”

“Course,” Brown said. “What the hell else do drunks do?”

“Oh.”

“Why you ask?”

“Well, I just didn’t want you to think you had to—you know. I mean, I just come up here to be—”

“Anybody ever tell you you talk a whole lot an’ don’t make no damn sense?”

“But I—”

“Shup.”

She waited tensely for him to begin, for “the hand that fondled her hip to move on, for his other hand to make the inevitable journey to limp nipples, but Brown’s hands stayed where they were, only the one hand softly stroking. She felt all the tension concentrate on that one hand, sensing the slightest variation in the stroke. The tension coiled inside her and she thought she couldn’t stand it. She squirmed, made impatient sounds, tried to twist and force his hand down. “Shhh,” Brown said. She quieted, tried to relax. She felt as if she were going to sleep. She felt faintly bored. She wondered if she preferred boredom to frustration. She felt Brown’s body pressed against her back, his legs against her legs, his knees in the hollows of her knees, his chin cradled between her shoulder blades. She felt a small urge to scratch somewhere, but she lacked the energy. She felt a slight desire to go to the bathroom, but she did not want to move. She imagined she was paralyzed, that her legs and arms would not work. Then she felt a wetness spring up between her thighs, a slow excitement. She felt Brown, as if suddenly sensing her arousal, come erect and press gently against her buttocks. She tried to roll over but Brown held her where she was, continued with his strokings. She breathed shortly as if she had a pain in her chest. Brown slid lower, insinuated himself between her thighs. She felt him enter her, waited for the usual barrier to come down over her body. It did not. She stared into the darkness, feeling him moving in her, knowing who it was, but seeing no one before her, above her. She felt a sudden lightness, demanding release. The bed rocked. She felt herself softening, felt her body dissolve, tried to hold herself and let go at the same time. She felt a shiver in her belly and her eyes closed, the eyeballs tried to push through the lids. And then the barrier did come down. She hardened. She waited, her body still lubricated, pumping mechanically, until Brown gasped, thrust, subsided. She was glad he was behind her.

“That was good,” she said, making her voice furry.

“Don’t lie,” Brown said. “You don’t need to lie.”

“It almost worked.”

“Sooner or later,” Brown said.

“It’s easy for you to say that, dammit!”

“Yep,” Brown said. “It’s easy for me to say that.”

“It almost worked.” She stared into the night. “Hey,” she said after a while. “You asleep?”

“Yeah,” Brown said.

L
EROY BRIGGS DESCENDED THE
stairs at the unprecedented hour of 10:00 a.m., causing a minor stir in the nearly unoccupied lobby of the Elysium Hotel; the desk clerk stared and stopped eating his breakfast—a bean pie purchased from his friendly
Muhammed Speaks
man—and Willie T. looked up from his copy of the
Wall Street Journal
. “Mornin’, men,” said Leroy in a John Wayne voice.

The desk clerk nodded respectfully.

“Mornin’,” said Willie T. “Somethin’ wrong?”

“Like what?”

“You’re up pretty early.”

“It’s gonna be a long day. We got work to do. Come on, Willie, I’ma take you out an’ buy us some breakfast.” Leroy grinned toothily.

“But, but, but,” stuttered Willie T., “it ain’t but ten o’clock. The bars ain’t open yet.”

“I know that, fool. That’s how come I always stay in bed till noon. But today I want me some
real
breakfast.”

“You mean,” Willie T. gasped, “
food
?”

“Well, Willie, you can eat whatever pleases you, s’long as it ain’t attached to me. But, yeah, I want me some food. I want me some ham, an’ some eggs, an’ some grits—”

“Grits? What the hell’s grits?” said Willie T.

Leroy looked at him and shook his head sadly. Willie T. gulped and clumsily folded his paper. “What you read that shit for anyways?” Leroy demanded. “
Wall Street Journal,
shit. Ain’t no nigger never made no million dollars in the damn stock market. ’Sides, everybody knows how to get rich: buy low, sell high, pay your protection, an’ kill any muthafucka that gets in the way. Now come on, Willie, quit fuckin’ with that honky paper an’ let’s get it on.” Leroy sniffed disdainfully and stepped out into the mid-morning sunlight. “Damn,” he said, and blinking, pulled on his sunglasses. “These things don’t work worth shit. Somebody been fuckin’ with ma shades. I ain’t seen the sun this strong in weeks.”

“You ain’t been outside in the daytime in weeks,” Willie T. said.

“What you mean by that shit?” Leroy asked mildly.

“Ain’t nobody never made no million dollars playin’ no numbers, either,” Willie T. said.

Leroy turned to look at him. “Now, Willie,” Leroy said patiently. “I realize that maybe I ain’t been as
active
as I mighta been lately. I know I been lettin’ things slide a little, not taken care a business the way I shoulda been. I heard about them stories been goin’ around ’bout how I done lost it. But, Willie, those folks been talkin’ like that just don’t know me that well, an’ I’ma have to spend the day gettin’ better acquainted. But you,” Leroy smiled broadly and Willie T. felt his spine turn to jello, “you sposed to be knowin’ me, Willie.” Leroy’s smile faded to be replaced by a look of profound sorrow, a look that was matched by the regret in Leroy’s voice. “You ain’t sposed to be listenin’ to no tales. You ain’t sposed to be thinkin’ ole Leroy done turned into a chocolate marshmallow. You sposed to know that ain’t hardly the case. You do know, don’t you, Willie?” There was a note of pleading in Leroy’s voice.