The Heavenly Table (27 page)

“Well, maybe he don’t like…” Cane started to say, but then he stopped. He looked over at Cob, at his cowboy hat and the red bandanna tied around his fat, sweaty neck and the pistol hanging at his side. He was the spitting image of the drawing on the last wanted poster they had seen, the one the store clerk had carried. Jesus Christ, why hadn’t he thought of that before? By the time Chimney found the bowler and made it back up to the road, Cane was in the process of changing their names and working on a line they could use. From here on out, he announced, at least until they crossed the border, he and Cob were Tom and Junior Bradford from Milledgeville, Georgia, and Chimney was their cousin, Hollis Stubbs. They were on their way to Canada to find an uncle.

“That’s it?” Chimney said. “Seems a little thin to me.” He set the bowler between his horse’s ears.

“We need to keep it as simple as possible. That way there’s less chance of screwing up.”

“What brought this on?”

“Something Cob said about the colored boy. I should have thought of it before.”

“You must be startin’ to slip if you got Cob giving you advice,” Chimney said.

“We got to change our looks, too,” Cane said, ignoring him. “Get rid of those cowboy hats and the neckerchiefs. And stick your pistols in your saddlebags.”

“You mean all of them?”

Cane stopped and considered for a few seconds. “No, you’re right. Maybe we better each keep one handy just in case.”

As they got ready to leave a few minutes later, Chimney said, “I still don’t feel right about you takin’ that shot away from me. I need to keep in practice.”

Without a word, Cane grabbed the bowler off the horse’s head and tossed it to the ground a few feet in front of them. “Go ahead then, have at it.” Chimney smirked a little and pulled out his Smith & Wesson. Every time he fired, the hat skidded and tumbled a little farther down the road. He didn’t stop until the gun was empty. “There, ye satisfied?” Cane asked.

“I don’t know,” Chimney said, as he dug some bullets out of his pocket to reload. “But I reckon it’ll do till something better comes along.”

38

C
RAWLING ON HIS
belly until he reached the woods, Sugar then ran for another quarter of a mile or so before collapsing behind a fallen tree. He stayed there barely moving a muscle for over an hour. At one point he counted six shots being fired, and he hoped that maybe the motherfuckers had killed one another before one of them picked up his bowler. Finally, he got up the courage to sneak back to the field to look for it, but it was nowhere to be found. He kicked at the weeds and cursed his bad luck. The finest hat he had ever owned and now some sonofabitch dressed like Billy the Kid was going to take a dump in it.

He made his way through the field and back up the bank. Yellow-winged grasshoppers flew up in front of him. He hadn’t gone but a few yards down the flat road when he came upon the remains of the bowler, still smoldering a little around the edges of the bullet holes. Goddamn them! What kind of sick sonsofbitches would do something like that? He would have given anything just then, even the rest of his time on earth, for the chance to slit that skinny ferret-looking bastard’s throat with his razor. Or, if not that, at least to be shacked up for the night with a whore and a bottle and a good dinner. He didn’t think that was asking too much out of life. The thought of it swept over him like a tempest, driving him half insane, and he flung his arms about in frustration and anger. As his rage mounted, he thought again about his people in Kentucky, that poor bunch of God-fearing, Hallelujah-shouting, ass-kissing sharecroppers. Not once had they ever given him credit for anything. Everybody was against him, even his own mother. And when she finally kicked him out, he had made his way across the Ohio and headed for Detroit, telling them all when he left to go fuck themselves, that he was going to get a job building those fancy motorcars everyone was talking about, and bragging that the next time they saw his black ass, he’d own a whole fleet of them, one for each day of the week. Not only that, he’d have a white man for a chauffeur, and another just to keep them shined up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

That had been over a decade ago, and he had lasted exactly two weeks working for Mr. Ford. With his first paycheck, he had bought a cheap suit and a toothbrush and went out for a drink. Five days later, he woke up sick with a hangover in a damp basement room curled up next to a woman he’d met in an after-hours club out celebrating her fifty-seventh birthday. She gave him the first blow job of his life that morning while he chewed on a piece of the tough flank steak she fried him for breakfast; and he realized, as he watched her gray head bob up and down in his lap, that with as many women as there were in a city the size of Detroit, a young man could get by without hitting a lick if he wasn’t too particular about what he laid with at night. He had stayed with her two months, until he’d spent every last dime she had saved up for her old age, and then he had moved on to a friend of hers whose husband had just died of a heart attack. Over the years he had pretty much stuck to the same strategy, squeezing all he could out of them, and then finding some excuse to leave as soon as they started hinting around that he needed to find a job. But then he met Flora, a pretty woman in her forties with an appetite for young bucks and a big, round ass like two ripe pumpkins fitted together. She made good money managing a laundry over on Beacon Street for a white man, and Sugar decided that maybe it was time to settle down. Every evening for the next eight months she came home to a clean apartment and supper cooking on the stove, and he thought everything was going just fine until one night she appeared in the kitchen with a long-legged, freckle-faced boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. “Who this?” Sugar said as he set out the plates on the table, thinking it was probably another one of her goddamn relatives looking for a free meal or a corner to sleep in.

“This here be Winston,” she said. “He’s my new man.”

“Your what?” Sugar said, whirling around to look at the boy again, standing there with a cocky grin on his face. “What you talkin’ about, woman?”

“Look, honey, I ’preciate all this moppin’ and tater peelin’ you been doing, but truth is, I got no use for a maid.”

“Maid! I’ll show you a goddamn maid.” He took a step toward her, brandishing a fork in his hand.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” she said calmly. “You’ll be packing your fuckin’ clothes and gettin’ out, that’s what you be doing. And just in case you think you goin’ to start some trouble, you better look out the window first. All’s I got to do is say the word and they’ll be in here on you like stink on shit.”

Sugar stepped over and pushed the curtain back. A pair of squat, burly men he’d seen a few times at Leroy’s, a gin joint he and Flora frequented on Saturday nights, were standing on the steps looking back at him. One was tapping a truncheon against his leg as if he were keeping the beat to some song in his head, and the other was peeling an apple with a pig-sticker. Jesus Christ, she was serious. He turned and looked at the brown gravy simmering in the skillet, the pork chops stacked on the platter in the middle of the table. “But why?” he asked, his voice now sounding almost plaintive.

“To be honest, I need somethin’ with a little more pep when I crawl under the covers at night, that’s all.”

“Well, shit, why didn’t you say so? You want more meat, by God, let a man give it to you. You don’t need this young punk.”

“No, you done had your chance, and I done made my decision,” she said. She opened her purse and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Here, you take this and go get your stuff packed up. There’s some things me and Winston need to discuss.” The boy winked at Sugar, then pulled a chair back at the kitchen table and sat down. After adjusting the bulge in his pants, he reached over and picked up one of the pork chops. Before he took a bite, he ran it back and forth under his nose several times, loudly sniffing it.

Sugar grabbed the money from her hand and stormed out the door past the men. He was three blocks away before he remembered his clothes. Fuck it, he thought. He’d go back after the bastards left, stick a shiv in the boy’s guts the first time he dared to step outside Flora’s door. But then it started to rain, and he ended up down by the railroad tracks in a dive called the Depot. He spent the next several days drinking and bemoaning his predicament to any barfly who would listen, going on and on about all the cooking and ironing and pussy licking he had done for the bitch; and then, although he couldn’t remember doing it or why, he’d hopped a train headed south.

Standing in the road beside his ruined hat, looking down at the hoofprints of the horses in the thick dust, he went over everything that had occurred since he’d left Detroit. When he came to in that empty freight car with no idea of where he was or how long he had slept, the first thing he saw when he looked out the open door was a sign announcing Mansfield, Ohio. The train slowed down long enough as it passed through town for him to jump off, his only intention being to find a bottle or something to eat, whichever came first. He was walking along the tracks when he spied an old white woman sitting on her porch fanning herself with a piece of cardboard. He hid behind a stack of rail ties and bided his time. Finally, just before dark, she got up and shuffled inside. A light popped on and then went off a few minutes later. He waited awhile longer and then climbed through a window into her kitchen. He searched all around, but to his disappointment there was no liquor or meat to be found. He was buttering some stale bread and gulping his third glass of water from a bucket on the table when she awoke in the next room. Fifteen minutes later, and twenty-four dollars richer, he went back to the tracks and caught another freight.

By the next morning, he figured he’d put enough distance between him and Mansfield to be safe, and he got off when the train made a stop in Meade. It only took a couple of breaths of the stinking, sulfurous air emitted by the paper mill for him to realize that he’d passed through here once before, on his way to Detroit years ago. Walking around, he finally found a colored diner on the south side of town. He was halfway through a big breakfast when the old woman’s bloody face appeared in his plate and he shoved the food away. “Something wrong?” the waitress asked. He looked up at her. She wasn’t as dark-skinned as he liked them, but she had a nice set of cocksucker lips and fine white teeth and a way of swiveling her hips when she walked that he figured probably got her some good tips, even in a dump like this. She smiled and refilled his coffee cup, and he was just beginning to imagine following her home and screwing her little brains out when he noticed the wedding band on her finger. Despite his many faults, Sugar had never lain with a woman whose husband was still living. It was the one rule he stuck by. Even the weakest and most cowardly of men could become outright dangerous if they were cuckolded, and there were too many unattached females out there to risk getting your head blown off in a fit of jealousy. “No,” he told the waitress, shaking his head, “just tired is all.” He was relieved in a way. In the past few days, he had lost Flora in Detroit and then lost himself in Mansfield, and he needed something more substantial than a quick piece of ass to make him feel better about himself, this time anyway. He finished off the coffee and stood up, laid a dollar on the table.

As he recalled what had happened next, he cursed and stomped what was left of his hat into the dusty road. He had stepped out of the diner and noticed a small shop across the street. A cardboard placard advertising
FINERY FOR ALL AGES
had hung in the single, flyspecked window. He counted his money, then entered the store. A few minutes later, he purchased the bowler from a bald, hunchbacked man in a white linen suit. He had never owned such a nice hat before, and he immediately felt better, like a different man almost. “What about some new clothes to go with it, young buck?” the cripple had asked him. “Those ye got on are looking pretty rough.”

“No,” Sugar said, as he looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted the hat’s angle, “this is all I need.” And it was, at least for the length of time it took him to walk up the street to a joint with no name and rent a room for the night.

After sleeping fitfully through the hot, sticky afternoon, he had gone downstairs and bought two bottles of cheap whiskey and a fat black whore named Mabel. By the time she sucked him down to the nub, he had finished off one of the bottles and was down to his last four dollars; and he wondered, in his insane drunkenness, just how much was a white woman’s life worth anyway? Not much, he calculated sadly, as he watched the whore wipe his seed off her chin. A greasy breakfast and a sporty hat and two bottles of rotgut hooch and a fishy-smelling slut with a wart on her lip. That was what a white woman’s life amounted to in the end.

He and the girl kept drinking, and around midnight she puked her guts up in the washbasin. The windowless room filled with her stench, and she dropped to her knees and started crying about leaving her sick baby at home by itself, and shit like that always brought Sugar down. He climbed out of bed and punched and kicked her until she rolled over on the filthy brown rug and farted once before passing out. Her impertinence enraged him even more, and he spread her ass cheeks apart and fucked her from behind, the salty sweat pouring off him and splattering like raindrops on her broad, bruised back. When he was finished, he wiped himself off in her nappy hair and got dressed. The sour smell in the room was suddenly overwhelming. He slipped down the back stairs with her comb and the money he had paid her in his pocket. Stumbling down an alley, he curled up on a pile of garbage with his bowler and awoke the next morning with his head pounding and his tongue dry as leather. Lying there in the trash, he looked up at a pigeon perched on a wire and swore to God Almighty that he was going to straighten up. And since he was so close anyway, he thought, why not go down to Kentucky and show his folks his new hat? It wasn’t a shiny car driven by a white chauffeur, but it was better than nothing. He could see them now, gathering around and slapping him on the back, asking a million questions, his mother hugging him until he couldn’t get his breath. He had picked himself up and begun walking. Two blocks away, he came across an old man on his knees pulling weeds out of a little vegetable patch and asked him for a drink of water. “Got the dry pipes, have ye?” the old man said, looking at Sugar’s bloodshot eyes. “I ’member what that was like. Why, I used to wake up so thirsty I’d pay ’bout anything for a nice cool drink.”