Dark Stain (14 page)

“You!”

Angered, he swept the covers from her, shouting raucously. “Wake up, old girl. Get some life into you.”

She lifted the blanket and sheet back over her body. He had seen her full breasts and upper body behind her filmy green nightgown. She wasn’t alluring to him now. He felt that he could have smashed both fists into her breasts, beaten her with a club, screamed like a maniac at her, anything to change the distant expression in her eyes. “Don’t you want to get up?” he forced himself to speak calmly.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t annoy me.”

“Isabelle, for Christ’s sake, don’t start in sulking on a day like this.”

“What will I do on a day like this? Wait for your highness to get in when and if he does get in.”

“I’ve told you a dozen times to be patient. As soon as we leave this town — ”

“ — you’ll bare your heart to me.”

“I will. Honest, Isabelle.”

She sat up in bed. “What is your schedule for today if I may ask?”

“You got up on the wrong side.” He straddled the chair at the desk, facing her, smiling wistfully. “You were sleeping so snugly on my side of the bed as if you loved me, even asleep.”

“What is your schedule?”

“Oh, Christ, what’s the use. I’ve got an appointment at eleven. I may have to be busy all evening.”

“Bill, why did you bring me to New York?”

“Oh,” he groaned.

“Why did you?”

“I love you. What would I do without you?”

“What you are doing now.”

“Isabelle — ”

“I suppose you needed some woman and I’m it. Somebody to be kept in a hotel room. A hotel woman with whom you can fornicate at your convenience.”

He glared at her. In all their three years together, she had never spoken in such a tone and in such words to him. “You’re completely unfair to me. Damn unfair. Damn, I know where I heard that gem you just used. Theresa! Your cousin Theresa. That damn old maid, that spinster nun! I know. At that wedding Sunday back home. There was talk of what would the young girls do with the boys in Army.” He saw she wasn’t listening to him, pretending not to listen, and his fury was black in his eyes and the black was riven by Theresa’s face, her silver crucifix around her neck. “Theresa! She and her Saviour Lord Jesus! She said something about it being better to burn than to fornicate. That’s where you got the gospel message.” He chose his words deliberately, anything to make her acknowledge that she was listening to him. “Damn good we left home! The holy Carreaus, damn ‘em all!”

“You contemptible person,” she lashed out.

“Hah hah, contemptible. Damn you with ‘em, you bloody Catholic bitch!” White and stricken, he lifted his hand before his lips as if he would snatch back what he had said. Then his hand dropped and he staggered backwards until the desk hit him. Staring at her, he chewed on his lips. “Isabelle — ” Tears were streaming from her eyes but she didn’t wipe them away. Through the tears she stared at him and piercingly, their life together, all the goings and comings, the weekends on the old Carreau mansion owned by her lawyer brother with its pecan and banana trees but no more sugar acreage, all the Carreaus and their relatives, and his prestige with a few of them who suspected the nature of his work, ex-Governor Heney visiting in New Orleans with the local A.R.A. arranging intimate parties in his honor, and always Isabelle with him, Isabelle on his arm, Isabelle smiling at him, Isabelle loving him — everything flickered in his brain that second, all the years and all the days, a host of candles in a darkness. For a darkness was upon him for now he knew that she had loved him truly and he had never given her what her love demanded. That was the darkness at last acknowledged, at last admitted into the most secret coil of thought. Still she stared at him and he felt his guilt, he who had made her childless.

Her mouth twisted open like a drowning woman’s and she flung herself over on her side, burying her face in his pillow. And again he lifted his hand before him as if to give her at long last what she had long wanted and again his hand dropped.

Downstairs, Bill bought a newspaper, folded it under his arm and stepped out to the bright street. The sun was yellow on the cab rank and he climbed into the lead cab. He gave the driver One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street as an address in a flat morning voice as if he had travelled there for years. He spread the newspaper across his knees, refusing to think about Isabelle. The black war headlines danced in front of his eyes but he didn’t focus on them, turning to the second page, to the third and a small headline attracted his restless eye: PROMINENT SOUTHERNERS DENOUNCE LATEST LYNCHING. He read through the story quickly. The organization was busy all right, he thought and wondered why Heney was coming north? Hayden hadn’t said. Heney, of course, wanted to be on the scene when things were breaking in Harlem. But why? There must be some connection with the lynchings South and the riot planned for Harlem? Heney would return to D.C. and in a week or so somebody would rise up in Congress and make a speech about the North. Bill knew what would be said. It would be something about the North minding its own business; the North ought to stop all these protest meetings and sending delegations to Washington; the Negro problem was a serious problem and nobody on God’s earth had a right to tell the people of the South that their policy of racial exclusiveness was not a proper principle; et cetera. Christ, Bill decided; that was the real reason the organization was working in Harlem. To rub the niggers into Northern noses. That was the insider’s strategy, Hayden, that secretive bastard, hadn’t bothered to reveal to him. A Harlem race riot’d be a blow not only to all the nigger-lovers up north, the kikes, the Reds, the New Dealers, but to all those turncoat Southerners who were shouting against lynching these days.

He glanced at another headline: ITALIAN BAR BOYCOTT BEGINS IN HARLEM; on the same page there was another headline: TWO WHITE MEN BEATEN BY MUGGERS. He read both stories almost simultaneously. The first story reported that forty-two owners of bars and grills, all Italians, had notified the police of the beginning of a boycott movement and had appealed to all responsible Negro organizations to protest such a boycott in the interest of national unity. National unity, Bill thought bitterly; up in this bastard North, niggers’d soon be eating with whites and taking out white women. The second story reported that two white men had been beaten during the preceding night. One attack had taken place on One Hundred and Thirty-First Street and Eighth Avenue, the other on One Hundred and Forty-Sixth Street and Lenox Avenue. The names of the beaten men were given. Meyer Gershoff. Max Witkin. Bill gripped the newspaper with tightening fingers, reading: “The shooting of Fred Randolph by Officer Samuel Miller may have something to do with these mugger outrages. Officer Miller is of Jewish faith and both Mr. Gershoff and Mr. Witkin stated that they were called a number of insulting epithets.”

The damn kikes, Bill thought, reading with satisfaction that Meyer Gershoff had been attacked on the same street where Randolph had been killed. Both of Gershoff’s eyes had been blacked, his nose broken and he had been stabbed repeatedly in the arms and legs. At the hospital, he had informed the police that six or seven Negroes had jumped on him as he was coming home from his grocery, that he thought that a Negro in a blue slipover jersey had been loitering in front of his store all day. The muggers had ordered him to get out of Harlem. As for Max Witkin, he, too, like the grocer was accustomed to closing up late at night. Bill folded up the newspaper. The damn kikes should’ve been killed, he considered. But who’d done the job on them? Was it the work of muggers? Was Big Boy operating on his own? Big Boy! It was Big Boy, that damn nigger ape, sly as an animal. Bill slumped into the cab’s leather seat. How in hell was he going to do business with Big Boy? Wasn’t he a white man? How could any white man know what a nigger’d do next?

As the cab drove Bill across Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, the Negro delegated to do the synagogue job was strolling down Lenox Avenue on his way to a side-street poolroom. His name was Fleming. He was a short squat man of thirty-two, by profession a number book in Big Boy’s organization. His face was scarred on the left cheek. Five years previous, a girl Fleming had tricked into prostitution with the old marriage act — he had promised to marry her but first he had to pay off some debts or go to jail and he knew how she could help him get the money from some friends — had slashed him with his own razor. Fleming was whistling as he walked. His suit was gabardine, his felt hat white as snow and wide-brimmed as a sombrero. In his wallet he was carrying three of the A.R.A. twenty dollar bills. Under his arm, he clasped a bundle wrapped in brown papers. He swung his shoulders as he walked, admiring the better cars. Some day, he would have a big Packard with an octoroon in the driver’s seat. Fleming alternated in his dream life between an octoroon and a white blond.

He entered the poolroom; even now at noon the ivories were clicking at the three tables. The proprietor nodded, “Dey waitin’ for you.” The number book’s eyes had narrowed after the sunlight. Here in this poolroom, his felt hat seemed whiter than ever. He waved his hand at the pool players, thin Negro adolescents in old basketball sweaters, and swaggered across the cigarette-stub spotted boards to the back room. Four boys, none of them over sixteen, were sitting on Coca Cola boxes and two chairs. “Git up,” one of the kids on the Coca Cola boxes said to the kids on the chairs.

He smilingly accepted a chair vacated by a small boy in black sneakers. He had been instructed by Big Boy’s right-hand man, Chappie, to get kids without previous arrests or police records. Chappie had said that there was a chance the dicks might be on the prowl for fingerprints. It hadn’t been an easy job getting kids with clean slates but neither would it be easy getting that Packard with the octoroon in the driver’s seat.

“Fellers,” Fleming said. “Les waste no time. Who knows where the Jews got their church?” One of the kids said there were two Jew churches. “I mean the Hundred Fifteenth Street church,” Fleming continued. “This here night, fellers, you gonna bust in. It’s a wooden door the Jews got there and it’ll bust easy like a cherry. You fellers go into the middle of that church and you gonna see that Jew altar and that altar got Jewish writin’ all over it. It’s the writin’ like on the winders of the kosher butcher stores. It’s Jewboy writin’. In that altar they got their bibles.” He pulled his hands wide apart as if playing a concertina. “They open like this. They got that kosher writin’ all over ‘em. You fellers gonna have scissors to cut it up. Those bibles, they gonna be like feather pillers that got busted when you get through.” He showed them the brown paper bundle. “Scissors in here and a jimmy in here.” One of the kids said he didn’t know how to use a jimmy. Fleming explained. “It’s like usin’ a crowbar. Anybody can use a jimmy. That don’t need no sense.”

He took off his white felt hat, inspected it for spots of dirt. He pulled out a white silk handkerchief and flicked it across the crown. “That’s all there is to it,” he said. The boy who didn’t know how to use a jimmy, asked if the Jews kept their money in their churches like people said. Fleming led the laughter of the three other boys and then put on his felt. “You fellers remember!” he said. “That white cop killed a nigger. Piss all over that church. That Jewboy cop, he goes to that there church. Shit all over it.” He gave each of the boys two dollars. “Do like I done say and you each gets a piece in the best house in Harlem.” He swaggered to the door. “O’ course, them that ain’t man enough to tear off a piece jive, I’ll give another buck or two. You got it straight, fellers?” They laughed and they said they got it straight.

As the cab drove Bill across Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, a Negro preacher in a wooden church in the South was preaching over a pine board coffin. “Brethren, an’ sisters of this congregation. He’s gone from us. He’s gone from us, a loss to his wife Dora, to his two daughter, Lena an’ Rose, to his son, Charley, ‘an’ to his other son, Dick. He’s a grebous loss to all of us people for he was a good hard wukkin’ man, a good husban’ an’ a good friend. The white folks took an’ lynch him an’ all we got of our dear brother is what’s in that there coffin an’ that ain’ much. That ain’ a man. That ain’ a husban’. That ain’ a father. That ain’ a friend. That jus’ a lynch poor colored slave. The white folks say he run out from under that bridge an’ that he grab that white woman an’ that he drug her under that bridge an’ that he there attack her. He done no such thing not that there ain’ some ‘mongst us full of evil an’ wickedness like there’s some ‘mongst all the chillen of the Lawd. For we all born in sin an’ the days of our lives, they full of temptation. They full of sufferin’. They full of the hate the white folks got for us an’ sometimes the temptation, the sufferin’ an’ the hate they make some amongst us crazy wild like a tiger or wolf in a trap. That wasn’ the man the white folks took an’ lynch. He come of staunch Christianized people. He carry his burden like the slave in the old time. He carry an’ carry like that slave an’ then he say he want to be free. That’s why the white folks took an’ lynch him. In the old time, the slaves had to steal out an’ go north an’ they stayed out of the way of the ole marsters so they could get away. They had to be whipped an’ be killed. In this state, now, in this whole South now, it seem they want as much slave now as I can git out of the histories. The white people runnin’ the Negroes like the robins an’ the birds. That bad. They have all the pribileges an’ the slave he have nothin’ but the tongue to keep quiet in his head. Our brother, he use his tongue the Good Lawd gave him. He not want to perish away. In the time back, they was leaders astin’ for the people to be free. Moses grew in the home of Pharaoh an’ he had the right God give him to lead a people. The white folks took an’ lynch our brother, for he, too, like Moses try to loose the people. Brethren an’ sister, we goin’ to be loosed or else the whole world be wound up an’ perish.”

After talking with Big Boy Bose and Bose’s lieutenant, Chappie, Bill drove out of Harlem in another cab. His face was flushed and he only wished it was evening so he could prove to Hayden that niggers couldn’t be trusted. His visit to Big Boy was the final proof. He was already rehearsing what he would say to Hayden. “Bose had a nigger with him, a nigger called Chappie, a big bone-dry coon. Chappie was there to cross-examine me. I thought Bose hated whites but that other coon was worse. All he did was keep on saying that Big Boy ought to pull out of the Miller job. He said if Miller was killed, every white dick in Harlem’d be after Big Boy. This coon acted as if I weren’t in the room. When Big Boy mentioned Aden vouching for me, Chappie said he didn’t give a damn for Aden. He said Aden was just a goofy Haile Selassie nigger in a red fez and lived nobody knew how. Big Boy got sore at that and said Aden was preaching for the black man to fight the white and not take everything lying down. But, hell, he couldn’t convince that other coon….”