Hold Tight (11 page)

“Yes, suh. Right away, suh.” But Juke only ushered Hank inside and closed the door. The cracker was looking over the room as if he’d never seen furniture before.

It was early and the steward was the only customer. The half dozen others, sitting on the long, black camelback sofa beneath the black window shade or on the love seat or around the card table, were whores. The music was turned up loud enough for a party, but it didn’t look like a party here. Everybody was waiting for something. The guys playing acey-deucy at the table looked up when Juke brought Hank in, then went back to their cards when they saw it was only more competition. The steward went back to trying to coax a response out of the unresponsive Bunny. Things never picked up until more money came into the room.

“Bigger than when it was downstairs,” said Hank.

“Uptown, we do up a place like this with
style
,” Juke scoffed. “Fancy drapes and colored lights. That overhead light makes everybody look like they’re at the morgue. But Mrs. Bosch’s too cheap for any of that. She could get herself a classier line of whore, too,” Juke whispered. “Instead of trash.”

A sharper man would wonder if Juke were calling
him
trash, but the cracker only nodded and looked at Mick and Smitty on the sofa, thumbing through Mick’s copy of
Strength and Health
magazine. Mick was older than the others and worked out at a gymnasium. Smitty worshipped him, which was a laugh. Everyone was taken by Mick the first time they saw him, or at least by the biceps stretching his rolledup sleeves. It hurt Juke to find his cracker eyeing him.

“Watch out for Mick,” Juke whispered. “The muscles? He’s cuckoo in the head.”

“Uh huh,” went Hank. “Do you remember that soldier from the night we got arrested? A wop? Or spick, maybe.”

“Soldiers are soldiers, honey. I see so many.”

“This one danced with you. He seemed to know you pretty good. You two did one of those Mexican dances.”

“Oh him. I kinda remember. Why?” Juke didn’t remember, but he wanted to hear what the cracker was driving at.

“Does he still come around?”

Juke laughed. “Baby! This place is Grand Central Station. You almost never see the same dick twice!” What a Willy Cornbread this boy was. And romantic? He had come to a whorehouse pining after an old trick. “You poor dear. Whoever he was, he’s out getting his cookies off in Japland or somewhere. Take it from me—you
can’t
fall in love with trade.”

Hank dug in his ear, then shook his head and laughed. He was so slow he had to
decide
if something was funny. “Get out of here. I was just asking. Anyway, I don’t fall in love with guys.”

“You’re one of those?” cried Juke in mock horror. “You just do it for the green?”

“Well, no. I do it cause it’s fun. If that’s what you mean.”

“Well, thank God.” Juke pressed one hand to his chest. “Then you
are
queer. I was afraid you were one of those poor dears going against nature just to make a dollar. Times are rough, and a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Even if it means a little cocksucking.”

The cardplayers glanced over, looking uncomfortable.

“It’s a good time,” said Hank. “That’s all.”

Juke felt he was wasting his spiel on the cracker. The boy had no irony, but he didn’t take offense, either. “Then count yourself one lucky girl, Blondie. Because everybody else here thinks it’s work.” The cracker didn’t even nettle at being called a girl. But Juke felt the others in the room listening. He could always play to them. “Nasty and unmanly. Nothing but real men here. Real men who have to make money. That’s what I admire about white people. Their discipline. No colored man could go down on a dick unless he really enjoyed doing it. Shiftless. But these tough white boys?” Juke swept his hand at the room. “They just close their eyes and suck. Give them some jack and they’ll swallow their pride. Swallow just about anything.”

“Hey, coon!” shouted one of the cardplayers. “Put a sock in it!”

“Ignore him,” said Smitty. “Just nelly crap from a nelly nigger. We got to put up with it all the time.”

The angry cardplayer was a sailor who had never been here until last night. He seemed tough. Juke had to see how deep that toughness went. “Put a sock in it?
You
put a cock in it. Darling.”

The sailor hunched over the table and clutched his cards. “Somebody ought to knock that fairy on his ugly black ass.”

“Fairy, huh? Fairy!” Juke struck an indignant pose, perching the back of one hand on a tilted hip. “I may be more ki-ki than some of you trade. But today’s trade is tomorrow’s queen. And I know for a fact that that big old stevedore you took upstairs last night settles for nothing less than the deep, brown eye.”

The sailor jumped up, cards flying. He grabbed Juke by the front of his shirt and shouted, “Shut up, nigger, or I’m punching your headlights out!”

Juke was up on his toes, thinking of the new shirt he didn’t want ripped. “Oh, but I love being touched by a real man.”

“You think I’m kidding? You think you’re funny?” The guy wasn’t twenty yet. He had more pimples than hairs on his chin.

But before Juke could needle him about his skin, the cracker elbowed his way between them. “Come on. The kid didn’t do anything to you.”

“The hell he didn’t. I didn’t come here to be called fairy by no nigger.”

“You just come here to
be
a fairy,” said Juke.

The sailor’s grip on Juke’s shirt tightened and the big Southerner tried to elbow them apart.

“Back off, squid. This is between him and me.”

“Yeah, swab,” called out another cardplayer. “Let the shine get what he deserves. He’s been asking for it.”

Smitty chimed in with, “One good bop. Put that nigger back in his place.”

The cracker glanced around him, surprised by everybody’s reaction.

Juke wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t live with who they were. And he could. They hated him for that, and Juke basked in their hatred, like envy. It was worth it, even if it sometimes cost him a punch in the nose.

What did surprise Juke was the cracker. Majority rules, but the cracker didn’t back down, even when he saw which way the wind blew here. He stood between them, his face all screwed up in disgust. Juke remembered another time this had happened, only then it was the cracker that wanted to slug him. Maybe the man was so itchy for a fight, to prove he was still a man, he didn’t care whose side he was on. Maybe he was defending Juke only because he didn’t know any better. It was exactly what Juke had hoped to get out of the man, but he didn’t know what to make of it when it happened without him having to trick it into happening.

Juke took his feelings and made a joke of them: “My hero.”

“Shut up,” said Blondie, and he turned back to the sailor. “I said let the kid go. He’s smaller than you.” Even angry, the cracker still looked slow and stolid. “What kind of man are you he can’t take a few names?”

“And what kind of man are you he wants to stand up for a coon? You think you’re Mrs. Roosevelt or something? A nigger lover?”

The arm that blocked Juke suddenly knocked Juke back and swung forward. The cracker hit the sailor in the stomach. The sailor let out an abrupt, loud groan and doubled over.

“Oh, yes!” cried the steward. “Just like the movies. Go to it, boys!”

Others jumped up and hollered, eager to see the sailors fight it out.

But the slugged man remained bent over, arms clutched around his stomach.

And Hank just stood there, fists at his side, looking almost embarrassed. “I ain’t no nigger lover,” he said.

The door flew open and Mrs. Bosch charged in. “What is the hubbub? Juke! Are you making trouble?” She looked around, saw the doubled-over sailor and the guilty Hank, then settled her fury on Juke. “What are you doing up here? You loll about and we get nothing but trouble. Shoo! There are things in the kitchen that must be done.”

Her hand shot out to cuff him on the head, but Juke knew how to duck Mrs. Bosch’s blows. He gave her a put-upon sigh, to show he wasn’t intimidated, then stepped toward the door. He watched Hank, wanting to see if he could tell by looking at him why he’d done what he’d done.

“Calm down, everybody. We are all family, remember. There is a war on and we must not fight with each other,” Mrs. Bosch told the room.

Hank only glanced at Juke, angrily narrowing his eyes at him. Then he looked away, folded his arms across his chest and made a face at the floor.

“Everybody. Sit down and listen up. You—there is a problem with your tummy?” Mrs. Bosch asked the sailor.

Juke pulled the door closed, took a few steps down the stairs, stopped and listened.

“Boys,” began the Witch-woman. “We have a new member to our establishment tonight. I know you will make him feel at home. His name is—”

“Hank,” went the cracker’s voice.

He was definitely a cracker, even if he had forgotten himself for a moment and stood up for a nigger. Juke was from Alabama and although he had run away to the North and Harlem when he was thirteen, he remembered how unpredictable poor whites were with coloreds: treat you like cousins one minute, like dirt the next. It was worse than with whites with money or Yankee whites, who never let you forget they thought you were dirt. Juke went down the stairs, telling himself he wasn’t going to get mixed up with any cracker, especially one so ignorant he didn’t know it was bad to be queer. That only made the cracker more unpredictable than ever.

Back in the kitchen, there was bread and meat to be sliced for the fools upstairs. Instead, Juke sat down at the oilcloth-covered table and flipped through an old issue of
Life,
his revenge on the Witch-woman for blaming everything on him. He was to blame, of course, and he was proud of that, but it didn’t lessen his anger at Mrs. Bosch. If she was going to treat him like a no-account nigger, he was going to act like one. He turned the pages and looked at the pictures. It was the usual lies. There were no colored faces, of course, except for two bare-assed cannibals on a desert island where the Americans were building an airstrip. Everybody looked so clean and wholesome and apple-pie good. Seeing through the lies made Juke feel very smart. For some reason, he badly needed to feel smart again.

The doorbell rang. Juke stood up and sauntered out to the hall to answer it. He recognized the two men through the peephole, so he didn’t have to clear them with Mrs. Bosch. The way he felt tonight, he could have let anybody in, plainclothesmen, G-men, whatever, although the Witch-woman really did seem to know someone important in a high place.

The two men were dressed in tailored suits, although Juke had figured out long ago that they were Army officers of some sort. You’d think they could have any enlisted man they wanted, instead of having to come here for it.

“Hello, boy. Valeska’s expecting us. What’s tonight’s selection look like?” One of the men handed Juke their hats and a dollar bill.

“Very good, suh. Just up the stairs, suh.”

And they went up the stairs, as bland and normal as two prosperous businessmen in
Life,
to suck and fuck with white boys. They looked so damn smug. They thought their secret didn’t show.

Juke saw nothing for them to be proud of. His nature announced itself in every wave of his hand and he liked it that way. He could at least be honest about that, even as he samboed the white money. Men of color were just as bad, strutting about like preachers, puffed up with the notion that their high-toned neighbors never dreamed they had so much in common with nelly queens and street trash. If Juke was going to watch people make fools of themselves, he preferred to do it downtown, where the fools were white. The condescension of “real men” felt less personal when it came mixed with white condescension. Juke had been kept for three months by a Harlem deacon when he first came north, and the man had treated him as no better than a slut, a piece of ass, a woman. The people downtown might not appreciate his conk or his “collegiate” clothes, but their indifference beat a colored man’s possessive contempt any day. There were even customers who asked for Juke—Dutchmen and limeys, mostly—and there was one man who slipped Juke a fiver, just to sit in a chair on the other side of the room and watch while the man was cornholed by Mick or anyone else who didn’t mind an audience. That was another reason why he preferred to work downtown: the spectacle of white people acting like donkeys. He wasn’t here because he found white men attractive. He wasn’t, he often told himself.

He was back in the kitchen, the magazine turned to a picture of Joel McCrea, when the doorbell rang again. When he came out to the hall, Mrs. Bosch was clomping down the stairs, like a horse.

“I am taking care of this, Juke. You take the beer and sandwiches up to the boys.”

“Right away, Miz Bosch.
When
I make the sandwiches.”

“
Juuuk!
What have you been doing all this time? You lazy…No, you take up the beer and glasses.
I
will do the sandwiches.” She was exasperated, but the Witch-woman spoke more kindly to Juke when there were no witnesses.

Juke went back to the kitchen while Mrs. Bosch answered the door. He took several milk bottles full of her homemade beer from the icebox—the woman was too cheap to buy a good refrigerator—and poured them into the big glass pitcher. Even cold, it was cloudy, dreary stuff. Resentful once over a humiliation upstairs, Juke had added his piss to the pitcher, and nobody noticed a thing. He set the pitcher and badly assorted glasses on a tray and carried them out.

“Mr. Johnson sent you?” Mrs. Bosch was asking a rat-whiskered man in the hall. Two other men were already climbing the stairs. “But
which
Mr. Johnson? That’s right, Juke. Upstairs, and tell them that the sandwiches are shortly coming.”

“Yes’m.” Juke went up the stairs, beer splashing out of the pitcher into the tray. One of the two newcomers stood shyly in the open door and Juke called out to his back, “Gangway, darling. Coming through.” He steered around the man into the room.

“About frigging time!” shouted the steward. “I only asked an hour ago, you lazy black bastard.” Bunny still sat in the steward’s lap, his shirttail out and fly undone, blinking over something that had nothing to do with the steward.