Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (25 page)

           
Three-thirty in the morning. Pami’d
only made two hundred twenty-five dollars tonight, but there wasn’t any action
left on the street at this hour. Most of the other whores were already gone.
Three-thirty on a Tuesday morning, traffic up Eleventh Avenue for the Lincoln
Tunnel was down to a couple tired dishwashers and accordion players; not
customers.

           
Pami had to make a decision now: go
home, or hope for just one more twenty-five-dollar hit. It was a tricky
balancing act she had to do here. Rush didn’t like her to come home much after
three on weeknights—because he had to hear all about everything she did before
they could go to sleep—but he could turn mean if she came home with less than
four hundred dollars.

           
Well, it wasn’t going to happen, not
tonight. No more tricks tonight. So Pami Njoroge, the litde twenty-five-dollar
whore, left her Eleventh Avenue stroll and walked to 34th Street and Eighth
Avenue to take the subway uptown. To
wait
for
the subway uptown; sometimes you had to wait a long time at this hour
in the morning.

           
And right there on the subway
platform was one more trick for the night: a half-drunk Spanish man that first
thought he’d just hassle her, but then grinned and got happy when she said,
with her clipped, mechanical-sounding Kenyan accent, “You gimme twenty-five
bucks, I give you blowjob. Else you go away”

           
Down at the far end of the platform
was a five-foot-high orange metal box to put trash in. They went down to the
other side of that, even though they were the only ones on the platform, and
there she exchanged her service for his cash, and at the end of it she saw he
was thinking about knocking her on the head and robbing her—Rush would
really
beat the shit out of her, that
ever happen—so she showed him the little spring knife in her tiny shoulder bag,
and said, “You want that was your last blowjob in the world?”

           
All of a sudden, he couldn’t speak
anything but Spanish. Backing away from her, brown eyes very round, he jabbered
away about his innocence and how she was misunderstanding him, all in his New
World Spanish—which she couldn’t understand anyway, and didn’t give a damn
about—and then he hurried away to the middle of the platform, where he knew he
could be seen by the person in the tollbooth.

           
About ten minutes later a bunch of
drunk black teenage boys came in, loud and full of energy, and Pami tensed up,
but they didn’t pay her any attention and soon after that the train roared in.
She boarded an almost empty car and sat there with her thoughts on the long
ride uptown.

           
The apartment belonged to Rush, on
121st Street
near
Morningside
Park
. The big old building with its gray-stone
facade didn’t belong to anybody—maybe the city—and half the apartments were
empty, all torn up, the sinks and toilets and wiring and wood molding all
ripped out. Sometimes you’d see old mezuzahs on the floor—they looked like
water beedes, only they didn’t move—the parchment inside them gone, shredded to
dust. The people who stripped the apartments were simple and superstitious, and
they knew the mezuzahs were strong religious fetishes of the tribe who once
lived here, so they pried the litde metal containers off the doorposts with
screwdrivers before carrying the wood away They didn’t want bad luck to follow
them out of the building.

           
Nobody who lived in the building now
knew the language or even the alphabet on the parchment papers folded into the
mezuzahs. Nobody knew that the word
Shaddai
on the outside was one of the many names of God, or that the tiny writing on
the inside was from the Hebrew Bible (also called, by others, the Old
Testament), from Deuteronomy 6 and 11.

           
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is
one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee
this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy
children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when
thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And
thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets
between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and
on thy gates.

           
And:

           
And it shall come to pass, if ye
shall harken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to
love the Lord thy God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your
soul, That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first
rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine,
and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy catde, that thou
mayest eat and be full. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not
deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; And then
the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there
be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly
from off the good land which the Lord giveth you. Therefore shall ye lay up
these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon
your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach
them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when
thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And
thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That
your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which
the Lord sware unto your father to give them, as the days of heaven upon the
earth.

           
The people who’d tapped the litde
nails into the soft chestnut and oak and pine wood, holding the words in place
at the doorposts of their houses as they’d been commanded, were long gone. The
latter owners of the building, who also knew the law and the language but who
had for the most part ignored or forgotten it, were also gone. There was no one
in the building now to worry about the coming of the rains or the gathering of
the corn, and it had been long since the grass here was for catde. Nor was
there anyone, in any language, to ponder the warning on those
long-disintegrated scraps of paper: the kindling of wrath, the shutting of
heaven, the quickness of the perishing.

           
Pami left the train at
125th Street
and walked down through dark streets where
people slept on the ground; but they were healthier than the people who slept
on the ground in
Nairobi
. Sometimes more dangerous, too; Pami knew to keep walking quickly, keep
the litde spring knife in her hand, look only straight ahead. Her heels made
nervous sharp sounds on the old cracked sidewalk.

           
The building where she lived with
Brother Rush—he liked to call himself Brother sometimes, when he was trying to
pull one of his political or religious scams—was in the middle of the block,
with smaller brick tenements on one side and brick- strewn rubble where
tenements had once stood on the other. The doorway was always open, the door
itself long since gone. The still-occupied apartments were mosdy in two
vertical lines in the rear corners of the building, where the old chimneys and
flues still existed and the water pipes hadn’t frozen because of the heated
occupied building on the next block which abutted this one at the back. There
was water in the building—nobody was sure why—but of course no heat, so in
winter the residents burned whatever they could find in the old shallow
fireplaces originally meant for coal.

           
Pami and Rush used two rooms at the
rear of a second-floor apartment, one with a mattress for sleeping and some
cardboard cartons for storage and kerosene lamps for light and warmth, and the
other with a table and some chairs and plastic milk boxes to sit on and actual
electricity from an extension cord (a series of extensions cords, heavy-weight
ones) snaking up an airshaft from another building, where a guy Rush knew had
tapped into the incoming electric service, Rush paying him two bags for the
service (both heavily cut).

           
It was in the room with the table
and chairs that Rush mosdy lived. He wasn’t much of a dealer, but what litde
goods passed through his hands he sold at that table. All his schemes and scams
with his druggie friends were talked out at that table (and came to nothing).
He ate and drank at that table, and counted Pami’s earnings there every night.
And they sat there together for her to tell him everything that had happened
since they’d seen each other last.

           
Pami didn’t understand what that
part was all about. She’d known men who got off by listening to their women
talk about fucking other men, but this didn’t seem to be like that. (Rush mostly
didn’t care about fucking anyway, which was a nice relief.) It was like he was
listening for something, some special particular event, his narrow dark head
cocked, his red-rimmed eyes brooding, his hands half-clenched on the scarred
wood of the table. He never reacted to what she told him, never gave back
anything more than a grunt when she was finished; and then they could go to
bed.

           
He was waiting for her as usual
tonight, seated at the table, alone in the room, illuminated by the light from
one dirty- shaded table lamp on the floor over by the hot plate, an empty
Kentucky Fried Chicken carton on the floor at his feet. He was waiting for her
as usual, but
he
wasn’t as usual, and
she picked up on that right away. (She was always very aware of her
environment, sharply aware of anything around her that might be a threat.)

           
“You late, baby,” he said, that
gruff hoarse voice as always sounding as though it was about to conk out
completely, but there wasn’t exactly the same menace in it as usual; something,
whatever it was, had him distracted, kept him from turning the entire weight of
his mean attention on her.

           
Still, she played her normal part:
“Slow night, Rush,” she said. “Very slow night. All I gotis two-fifty, but
there’s nobody on the street an I didn’t wanna come home too late.”

           
She couldn’t quite keep the wheedle
out of the last part of that—when Rush was mean, he was very mean—but tonight
he seemed hardly to notice at all. “Sit down,” he said. ‘Tell me about it.”

           
“Okay, Rush.”

           
She sat across the table from him,
putting her litde shoulder bag on the wood in front of herself, and as she took
out the wads of money and replaced the spring knife in the bag he sat and
listened, his full lips moving sometimes, in and out, as though he was tasting
some old meal. She told him about the johns, about the other hookers, about the
people on the street, every encounter of the night, the Spanish man and the
drunken teenagers and nobody much at all on the subway and nobody except
sleeping people on the streets of the neighborhood.

           
He listened, smoothing out the
money, counting it, stacking it, finally putting it away in his pants pocket.
She finished her recital and sat up, ready for him to nod his permission for
her to get up and go into the other room and get ready for bed, which was the
way it always went, but tonight was different. Tonight, Rush fixed her with
those dark eyes of his with the redness all around them, and sat there in
silence for a long minute while she got increasingly nervous and scared,
wondering what she’d done wrong. And then he said, “I’m gonna say a name to
you. You tell me what that name means when you hear it.”

           
Pami had no idea what this might be
about. “Okay, Rush,” she said.

           
Rush nodded. He seemed almost to go
to sleep. Then he said, very slowly, enunciating much more carefully than he
usually did, “Susan Carrigan.”

           
Pami blinked slowly, thinking. Susan
Carrigan.

           
Rush’s horny fingers tapped on the
table. “Well? Pami? Susan Carrigan. Well?”

           
“I don’t know, Rush,” she said. “It
don’t mean anything to me.”

           
“It damn well better mean something
to you,” Rush said, “I’m
asking
you
what it means.”

           
Pami’s fear and helplessness made
her jittery at the table. Dark masses of shadow moved in the room, echoing
every movement made by either of them. “I don’t
know!
Rush. That’s no kinda name I know. What is that? Some social
worker? Somebody like that?” Then, thinking maybe she saw some corner of what
this problem might be, she said, “Rush? Somebody say I talking against you to
social workers? It’s a
lie.
I don’t
talk to nobody but
you
, you know
that.”