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What am I supposed to say? I have to learn to talk like the guys down the Hill. The “cats” down the Hill, that is. I have to be hip.

“Will you be paid for this work?” Ella asks.

“Sure. And probably tips on top of it.”

“Well, all right, then,” Ella says.

“You must be Red,” Freddie says. It’s weird to shake a guy’s hand while you’re standing in the middle of the bathroom.

“Yeah. Red. That’s me.” I’m owning it, fast.

Freddie chuckles, a kind of high-pitched whine beneath it. “Shorty wasn’t kidding. You’re green as grass.”

What can I say to that?

“How long you been in the city?” Freddie asks.

“Three months,” I tell him. A lie.

Freddie scoffs. “Full of it,” he says. “No wonder you’re getting on with Shorty.”

I don’t understand.

“You’ve been here a month if it’s been a day,” he says. Catches me spot-on. I fight off the urge to say,
How’d you know?
To ask would be to give up the lie.

“Step into my office,” Freddie says, sweeping his hand toward the shoe-shine corner. It’s a big bathroom, with stalls and a long row of sinks. Along the wall Freddie leads me to, there’s a raised wooden chair with footrests where the guy will sit while you shine. Various bottles line the counter, beside stacks of towels and bowls of mint candy.

“So this is how it goes,” Freddie says. “They wash their hands, you hand them a towel. Usually you get a nickel. Not everyone’s gonna tip, but that’s just life.” He touches the ceramic bowl strewn with coins.

Freddie demonstrates the shining process on his own shoe. “You take the brush, like so.” The stiff bristles scrape the shoe along the sides and over the top.
Buff, buff
.

“Then the polish.” The bottle makes a puckering sound as he squeezes a dark dollop onto the toe.

“And brush it in.”
Buff, buff
. His hands move fleetly. I try to imitate it, turning my wrists in the air.

“Then the rag.”
Swipe, swipe.
Freddie whisks away the excess, finishing with a snap of the rag, loud like a firecracker.

He slaps the brush into my palm. Drapes the rag over my wrist. “Your turn. Do the other one.” He jumps into the chair and offers me his other foot.

Buff, buff. Pucker. Buff, buff. Swipe, swipe
. I pull the rag up to finish with a flourish, but it only hangs limply from my fingers.

“Not bad,” Freddie says. “But you gotta get much faster. They’re in here just between dances, you know?”

“How’d you do that snap?” I ask, yanking the rag taut. It makes no sound at all.

“It takes practice,” he says. He takes back the rag and shows me the basic move. “But you get better tips off it.”

I snap the rag till my palms sting.

“Getting there,” Freddie says. “It’s all in the wrist.” He shows me again.

“One more thing,” he adds. “You go down to the drugstore, and you pick up a couple packs of rubbers.”

“Rubbers?”

“Yeah, you know,” he says, making a humping motion with his fists beside his hips. “They’re a quarter each down the store, but you can sell ’em in here for a dollar. Sometimes you get a tip besides. For going the extra mile, right?”

I nod. “I can do that.”

“Some nights you might go through a pack of ’em, easy.”

“Wow.” I’m already thinking about all those dollars.

“Yeah.” Freddie looks me up and down. “I think you’ll do just fine once you get the hang of it.”

There’s something in his expression that makes me ask, “So that’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s the basic gig,” Freddie says, eyes darting around the room as if checking to see what he might have forgotten to show me. But he still has this look. I’ve been around the block enough times to know when someone’s hedging.

“What are you leaving out?”

“You’ll figure out the rest,” he says. “There’s more to the job in terms of giving people what they want. But you gotta work up to it.”

“Up to what?”

Freddie sighs. “Look, you’re new,” he says. “All you gotta have for now is rubbers.”

“OK.” I’m starting to feel uneasy. “For now?”

“Later on, you might be wanting to offer some more extras.” Freddie leans in conspiratorially. “Cats’ll be asking for hooch from time to time. Or reefer. Or . . . well, you’ll get to see how it goes.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Up to you what you want to go in for.”

“OK.”

Freddie leans back and gives me a strong finger point. “But don’t move up from rubbers until you’re one hundred percent sure you can pick out who’s a cop.”

“OK.”

Freddie laughs. “You’re like a broken record, man. I’ll be right back,” he says. He points again. “Towels only. Don’t shine anyone’s shoes till I get back.”

“OK.”

Freddie glides out with a grin. I spin a slow circle on the tile, taking it all in. It might be just a men’s room, but it’s the fanciest men’s room I’ve ever set foot in. The shoe-shine chair gleams in the low light, the faucets and fixtures all clean and polished. Freddie reigns in this room — I can see that. People coming to him, asking for things, money changing hands. Freddie is king — and that mantle is about to be mine.

Once the dance is in full swing, the music becomes a constant distraction. It seeps up the stairs from the ballroom, in loud and soft bursts as the men’s room door opens and closes with traffic. Freddie lets me do a shine, but all the while he watches over my shoulder.

“It must be hopping down there,” I say.

“You’ve never seen one of the dances?” Freddie says, giving me that look again, the one that makes me feel green as a dollar bill.

I shake my head. I hate to admit all the things I don’t know, but Freddie’s been sharp enough to see through my bluffs so far.

“It’s slow right now,” Freddie says. “You can go look. But don’t go down.” It’s a white crowd tonight. No Negroes allowed.

Eagerly, I rush out of the men’s room, onto the landing over the stairs that lead down to the ballroom. I can’t believe my eyes.

The room positively swirls with dancers. White men in the crispest, slickest suits — black and navy and tweed, some with loosened ties and coats unbuttoned or cast aside over chairs. White women of all sizes and shapes, in bright puffy gowns that spin gracefully as they step and twirl and rock their hips.

The music strikes me as familiar, and I realize it’s the Glenn Miller band, playing live! We’d listened to their records back in Lansing. I hold back the urge to laugh out loud. If the kids at Mason Junior High could see me now, they wouldn’t believe the magic that was right in front of me. They couldn’t even imagine how their little Negro mascot was quickly surpassing them all. I lean on the railing.

I couldn’t go to the dances at Mason, either, but leading up to it everyone would be dancing in the hallways and after school to get ready. I tap my feet in a semblance of what’s happening below.

I try not to think about how bad I want to go down there and walk among the dancers. Just to feel what it’s like to be close to the music and swinging. But it’s whites-only on the dance floor. Negroes are allowed to serve, and that’s as far as we can go.

Freddie calls me. “Red. You got a shine.”

I dart back into the men’s room. More than anything, I want to be down there in the throng. Someday, maybe. Freddie tells me they often hold Negro dance nights, and he promises they’ll be even better, more exciting and vivacious than anything I’ve ever seen. Ooh, I’m looking forward to those nights.

Ella doesn’t hear me come in for the night. I climb the stairs, stepping long over the two that tend to creak.

In my room, I sink onto the bed and close my eyes. The swirl of syncopated rhythms sticks with me. I feel myself swaying on the mattress. I don’t want to sleep. It’s hard to come down off the feeling of being in that room. The walk back up the Hill couldn’t shake it.

I lie in bed, thinking I’ll fall asleep, but I don’t. The house’s creaks and settling groans swell around me. Start to make me feel small.

I reach into the desk for my stack of notepaper. Who do I feel like writing to? I’m dying to tell all those kids from school what I’ve seen and done tonight, but I won’t write to them. Ever. One clean sheet under my wrist and a pen in my fingers, I pour it all out to Philbert instead: the music, the dancing, the snap of my rag. I’m getting the hang of it, and fast, I tell him. It feels good to report it. Like it’s proof or something. I’m moving on. Moving up.

There’s so much to tell, but only so much I can actually say. How do I describe the heat and the swirl and the lights and the sounds? How can I possibly bottle that on a flat page? I sign off and fold the letter.

When I finally stretch out again and slide my bare feet between the sheets, I huddle against myself, trying to get warm. I don’t need to tuck so small. I have all the space I can imagine. A bed all to myself. Nobody there to kick my feet, to hog the covers. To whisper with. Compared to the coziness of sharing with my brothers, my bed for one seems large and lonely.

Boston, 1941

In addition to setting me up with the shoe-shine gig, Shorty schools me on everything to do with the street life. No matter what crazy thing he starts talking about, I just nod like I understand. Most everything is pretty clear once you got the hang of it.

Like the numbers. On the surface it’s easy enough. You pick any three numbers, like 346 or 937, and then you place your bet. If you place your bet on Tuesday, then on Wednesday you get up and look at the paper and flip to the finance page. You see where the stock exchange closed on Tuesday night. If the last three digits of the total value of stock sales match your numbers, you get to collect winnings.

It’s a good system. Easy, because the stock exchange guarantees there’ll be a new random number every day. And it always posts in a place where any old body can look it up and know for sure if they hit.

There’s a thousand possibilities, no one of them any more likely than the other. You can play a quarter a day or a dollar, or more; any amount you choose. You can play straight, so that your number has to come up exact, or you can split your bet six ways to cover the mixes. For a split, if you bet 347, you’d also win with 743, 437, 473, 374, or 734.

Some people play the same numbers every day, like a religion. Their birthday, maybe, or some other lucky digits they arrive at somehow. Others build a whole superstition around it, looking for numbers all over the place. Like if the grocery bill lands at $9.25, they might run around the corner and place the change on 925. As if there’s divine writing on the checkout slip or something.

The payout is six hundred to one, so when you bet a dollar and hit, you’ll come away with six hundred dollars. Most people are more likely to bet a penny for a six-dollar payout, or if you split the bet, a penny will bring you a dollar for any combination hit.

However you come about the numbers, and however often, everybody plays. Hustlers and hookers and schoolkids and grandmas, working stiffs and even upper-crusters who are in it for the rush.

Shorty tells me all about it. He tells me everything, and he introduces me to just about everybody. He greets the other guys by slapping hands. It isn’t really a handshake. They come in from the sides, arms outstretched, and then meet in the middle in a kind of slap. Just the quickest of grips, maybe, then a slide away.

“In this world, everything’s a hustle,” Shorty tells me. “If it doesn’t look like a hustle, you got to look at it from another angle.”

We stroll through the neighborhood, checking out the knots of people hustling one way or another. Fat Frankie, it turns out, is known for hustling at Three-Card Monte. The seven bucks he took off me still smarts, even though we’re friendly now.

“I shoulda listened to you that day,” I tell Shorty as we’re passing Fat Frankie’s spot.

Shorty does a kind of halfway smile. “Yeah.”

Frankie’s hunched over the car hood out front of the barbershop, as usual. “Find the lady. Where’s the lady? Who wants to ask her out? Step right up.” As Shorty and I scoot past, Frankie and Shorty exchange a glance. Shorty tips his chin up, and in response Frankie shakes his head. It was so subtle, I barely even caught the exchange. But it sticks in my mind. Something just happened. We keep on walking.

It dawns on me. “You were in on it, weren’t you? With Frankie that day.”

Shorty grins wide. “Don’t take it personal, Red. I was just doing a favor for a friend.”

“Everything’s a hustle, eh?”

“You know it.”

“What was the point? I was already going to play. You tried to stop me.”

“It made you want it more, didn’t it?”

I thought back. “Yeah, I guess. But I would’ve bet anyway.”

“Let me show you something.” Shorty stops walking. “Reach into your pocket,” he says. “Like you’re about to bet.”

He’s a half step behind me now, so I turn to face him.

“No,” he says. “I came up behind you, remember?”

I turn back. Put my hand in my pocket. “Hey, man,” Shorty says, laying a hand on my arm. The same arm that’s reaching for my thin stack of folded bills. I automatically look at him when he speaks to me. “I really want to show you this thing I can do that’s pretty neat,” he says. Then he lets go of my arm.