Strivers Row (23 page)

“Couple days later, sometime when you know she gonna be out, you split the hammer, let yourself in, an' clean out everything. Everything she got—money, jewelry, clothes,
everything
. Even her pictures, any personal letters she got. Her address book. That part's important. You dig?”

Malcolm kept nodding and smiling as if he understood completely.

“Then—you got her,” he said, releasing his hand so suddenly that Malcolm nearly fell over. “Then, she all alone in the world. She ain't got a thing to her name, with all her pictures and her letters gone—even her momma's phone number. She don't even know who she
is
anymore, all alone in the City. Except for you. An' you let her cry on you shoulder, and tell her ain't that a shame, an' then you give her a little stake to get back on her feet.”

“And then?”

“Then she owe you, Red. An' soon she owes you more than she ever gonna be able to repay. An' now she realized she
needs
you, too—that no woman is ever safe on her own.”

“I dunno. It's that simple?”

“Ah, Red, you blind in one eye and deaf in the other.”

Sammy had stopped smiling now, his eyes clouded in the light from the streetlamp.

“I don't care who it is, Red, or what she got. You take everything away from a woman, she do whatever you want. They not like you an' me. They weak that way.”

He thought about everything that Sammy had said, the next day at Small's. Thinking of how the faceless woman in question would be—how Miranda would be—when she came back and found her apartment completely gutted, right down to her family pictures.
Remembering how it had been during the last months before they had taken his mother away. The house emptying out as they sold off everything, just to have enough to eat, until there was nothing left but bare lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling.

But then he would think of Miranda with Archie again, and his blood would boil over. Telling himself,
I'm just as much a man as he is—

The next afternoon some pitiful young soldier boy had come wandering into Small's by himself. The regulars had all laughed to see him walk through the door, nervously wringing his army cap in his hands, his legs jerking as if he were walking on stilts. Just a big, shy, blue-black boy from somewhere deep in Georgia, obviously not even out of his teens. He took a seat in the farthest corner of the bar, next to a plastic potted plant, and tried to order corn liquor— his mouth so full of country that Malcolm could barely make out anything he said.

“We don't have none a that, son, this ain't no rent party,” Malcolm told him scornfully.

“Well, den,” the boy had said, and sat back in his chair as if he had to start thinking all over again.

“Dig the square from Delaware!” Dollarbill was laughing behind his hand by the time Malcolm got back to the bar.

“Fresh from the cotton patch!”

Malcolm had taken him five scotches in a row—the cheapest label they had in the well, watered down with as much ice as he could fit in the glass. He thought for sure the boy would leave once he saw how much they were. But each time he went back over, the young soldier looked up at Malcolm with a pleading, hangdog expression—as if he knew what it was he wanted, but could not bring himself to ask for it.

Finally, on the fifth scotch, Malcolm had leaned in close, pretending to wipe the bare tabletop with his towel. Asking him, in a low voice, when he was just over the soldier's ear:

“Hey, Jack, is it a girl you want?”

The soldier had looked back up at him with an expression that was more pitiful than ever. Nodding mutely, his face beaming with gratitude.

“All right, then, young lane,” Malcolm said magnanimously, writing down Bea's address at his apartment house, though he had never told her he would take her up, had no idea if she was already on someone else's hook by this time. The idea just coming to him, pleasing him with what he knew, and how far ahead he was of this Georgia country boy. He remembered what Charlie Small had said, but there was before him, also, the sight of Miranda on West Indian Archie's arm, the way she had turned away from him—what Sammy the Pimp had said to him. The wretched, despairing, vengeful thought creasing his brain,
Every woman need a daddy. Whether they know it or not.

“You just tell her De-troit Red sent you. You understand? She know exactly who you mean.”

“Thank—thank you, suh. Thank you mos' kindly!” the cottonmouthed soldier said, his face still so doggishly grateful that Malcolm had to turn away.

“You go on now, she be waitin'. You just pay me my commission—” he added, shooing the boy out, but not before snatching up the twenty-dollar bill, and a five-dollar tip the soldier pressed eagerly into his hand.

But almost as soon as he was out the door, Malcolm had a bad feeling about it. There was something about the way that country boy had walked out of Small's—his stride no longer so awkward, but quick and purposeful, not wobbling in the least with the five well scotches he had had. Malcolm had put it down to his eagerness to finally get to the woman—but then he thought of the money he had given him.
A twenty and the five.
Fewclothes putting it into words first, shaking his head when he looked over the bills Malcolm had shown him so proudly—some extra meaning in his voice:

“Lot a money for a country boy. Livin' on what Uncle pay—”

Malcolm rummaged around in his waiter's jacket, pulling out the bills, looking them over closely. Then he saw it, there on both the finiff and the hickory stick. The eyes of the presidents inked in—and a very small but clearly discernible, five-digit number written in the bottom right-hand corner of each bill.

He looked back down at where the country-boy soldier had been seated, searching all around his little table for any hint. The first thing he noticed was the muddy black patch, spreading across the ornamental dirt packed down around the plastic palm.
Of course. That was where the scotches had gone—

He ran out into the street, trying to flag down a cab. Starting to walk, then to run when he couldn't find one, too nervous now to wait for the subway, or a streetcar. Panting as he raced the seventeen blocks uphill to his building, mopping sweat with his waiter's towel. He burst through the front door, pounding on up the stairs to Bea's apartment, slapping as hard as he could on the door with the flat of his hand. When she didn't open for him, he hollered her name and banged again, until some of the other whores began to gather sleepily on the landings above, tittering or cursing languidly down at him where he kept slapping at the door.

The door finally opened a crack and Bea's head appeared, her hair turbaned up in a towel, a bottle of nail polish in her hand. Behind her he could see the mad white cavewoman, still staring mutely at him—her wild hair also wrapped up in a towel.

“Hey, Mr. Man,” Bea said as dreamily as ever, opening the door a little wider. “We just doin' each other's hair an' nails. 'Course, if you gotta 'mergency—”

“There a soldier up here just now?” he asked, praying he was sequestered somewhere back in the gloom of their apartment, even if they had doped and killed him there.

“No-o—” Bea said carefully, as if she were trying to remember.

“Pitiful young Nome from home? Sayin' I sent him?”

“Why, no, Jack, ain't been nobody since the rush hour,” Bea told him, beaming wider at him. “I didn't know you was already lookin' out fo' me an' Baby—”

“I
ain't!
” he cried violently, backing away from the door and running back down the stairs. “I ain't got nothin' to
do
wit' you. Anybody come askin' about it, you tell 'em that, you dig? Say you got nothin' to do with me!”

“Oh, Mister Man!”

Before he had reached the door, though, he realized that it was already too late. They were unlikely to even bother sending a man up to check on the girl. What they wanted was
him
—and the bar. He thought of himself writing down Bea's address—writing down his
own
address—and he felt sick again. Forcing himself to go over what there was left for him to do. Thinking that he could leave right now. Go up to his rented room, put the few things he had in his train bag, try to cop a free ride on his rail pass out of Penn Station or Grand Central. Or he wouldn't even have to risk going downtown, just go on up to the Port Authority at the George Washington Bridge, take the bus right over to Jersey—

But when he stepped back out into the humming, milling street, he realized that he would have to give it all up. Small's, and Creole Pete's, and all the other clubs and bars. His apartment where he could watch the City streaming toward him, every night.
Miranda
—

And go back—where? To Ella's back up in Roxbury, popping his rag at the Roseland? To the Pennsy, trying to hump his way up to porter for the next twenty years? Like the other graying, dyspeptic colored men he saw working the trains. Lording it over their own and tomming it up for so long with the white passengers they could no longer tell when it was and wasn't real—

He turned his feet downtown and began to walk grudgingly back to Small's, knowing what he had to do. Walking as slowly as he could, the way he had walked back home from school in East Lansing, after his mother had begun to let everything go. When he reached the club he went directly to see Charlie Small, working on the books back in his office.

“I just did somethin', Charlie,” he told him. “I don't know why I done it.”

Charlie Small looked at him closely, then nodded—as if he had somehow been expecting this, too.

“Siddown, Red. An' tell me all about it,” he said.

Charlie had heard him out, kicking back in his own chair and folding his arms behind his head, his paunch jutting up over his belt. Interrupting Malcolm a few times with questions to clarify things, but mostly responding with grunts and uh-huhs until he was through. Not seeming to get angry even when he heard the worst of it, but leaning forward again when Malcolm had finished, nodding his head grimly.

“I wish you hadn't done that, Red,” Charlie told him. “You was a good worker, I'm gonna miss you 'round here. But they got you on impairing morals for sure, an' we can't have that.”

Malcolm sat silently before him while the older man lit a cigar butt in his desk ashtray and thought for a moment.

“Lemme try to head this off before it gets started,” he said, and picked up the phone. “Meantime, you go change and wait for me at the bar. I'm sorry, Red, but you're done here.”

Malcolm nodded and left the room. Doing as he was told, carefully folding up his white waiter's jacket as if in a trance, and leaving it back in the little alcove storeroom where he had stood with Miranda just the day before. He sat with his back to the bar, staring at the door—wanting to order one last drink but not daring to, afraid he would not be able to hold it without his hand shaking, and not wanting the regulars to see that. There were a few of them at the bar, but with their usual hustlers' sixth sense they left him alone, and he had nothing more to say to them.

After a few more minutes, Charlie Small came out of his office, and at nearly the same moment Joe Baker, the undercover man from the Thirty-second Precinct walked in, head down and hands in his pockets as usual. Malcolm looked at Charlie, the fear growing in him, wondering if he had been betrayed.

“This is the only way,” Charlie explained, placing a hand gently on his shoulder. “Get you out of here before the MPs. They get you on impairin' the morals of a serviceman, you do time. Joe here'll take care of you.”

The detective nodded, pausing at the bar only for his usual shot and beer. Charlie said something in his ear, and Malcolm watched him slip some bills into the detective's hand. Baker finished his boiler-maker, then came over and grabbed Malcolm by his arm with surprising delicacy.

“One thing, Red,” Charlie called to him just before they left, Joe Baker halting obligingly.

“You can't never come back. You hear me? You can't never come back a'tall, even as a payin' customer. That's the deal.”

Malcolm nodded numbly, then hung his head as the plainclothesman led him away. He wanted to say something snappy back at Charlie Small; something, anything to show it really didn't matter to him at all. But he was so choked with sorrow and self-pity that he could not trust himself not to start bawling right there in the barroom.

Instead, he walked out of Small's Paradise without another word and let Detective Baker steer him up Seventh Avenue, then around the corner to the precinct house on 135th Street. He marched Malcolm right in through the scarred, wooden front doors, past all the beefy, leering Irish faces of the uniformed cops. Past the bullpen full of more detectives sitting at scarred wooden desks—jackets off, ties loosened before little, ineffectual electric fans—peevishly pecking away at their reports.

In front of each desk sat a black man, his hands cuffed behind his back. Some of them looking defiant, others frightened or stoical or simply weary, but all of them with their hands cuffed, almost as if someone had cut off their arms. They had trickles of blood on their shirts and jackets, or mouses under their eyes, and swollen lips and cheeks. Answering the interminable questions they were asked without inflection or expression, keeping their faces turned toward the white men who were questioning them, but their eyes staring down at the desks. As they went by, one of the white detectives rolled his form out of the bulky metal typewriter and hoisted his prisoner up by one arm, holding his chair out with the other as if to offer it to Detective Baker. But he only shook his head.

“No, this boy's goin' back in the pen,” he said, and the white detective gave him a small, impish grin.