Only the Strong (24 page)

On rare occasions, however, wine combined with afterglow to inspire more playfulness and curiosity in her than usual. Curled up on the sheets she brought from home, she would seem in no hurry to leave. Goode, noticing the change, felt uneasy. He convinced himself to relax. After all, wasn't this what he'd been after?

She turned toward him on one such night. “I want to know more about you,” she said.

“No you don't.”

“You're right, I don't.” She kissed him. “Except tonight I do.”

“Hmm?”

Sitting up, she propped her head against the pillows. “I do. I want to know more about you.”

“Why?”

“Because you're in my bed.”

“This ain't your bed.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You never wanted to know before. Matter of fact, when you did find out something about me, you slapped me. Before you, the last person who raised his hand to me pulled it back with a finger missing.”

Goode swung his legs over the side of the bed, resting his feet on the floor. He reached for the wine bottle on the nightstand and poured himself a glass.

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Nope,” Goode replied, taking a sip. “Just telling it like it is. Come to think, why
aren't
you scared of me?”

“Everybody's got a weakness,” she said, batting her eyelashes as Goode climbed back under the blanket. “I happen to be yours.”

She reached under the covers, her fingers roaming confidently. “Go on,” she said.

Goode closed his eyes. A sigh escaped. “Hmm?”

“You were telling me about yourself. Go on.”

“You know I can't think—can't talk—when you're touching me like that.”

Artinces removed her hands and primly placed them atop the blanket. “There,” she said in her best schoolmarm voice. “Satisfied?”

“Hardly. Just keep 'em where I can see 'em.” Goode cleared his throat. “It must have been about 19—”

Artinces slipped her hands back under the blanket and began to tickle him.

He chuckled helplessly before grabbing her wrists and holding them both in a single fist. He squeezed gently.

“Come on now,” he said, “you play too much.”

“Ooh,” she said. “I feel so helpless.”

“Are you done?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“For real?”

“Yes. I'm listening.”

“Finally.” He released her hands. “I made my first bankroll down on the docks, behind the train station. I threw dice with the dockhands and Pullman porters, took their hard-earned wages. Special dice I brought with me from Liberty.”

“They never tried to get their money back?”

Goode drained his glass and poured another. “Oh, yeah. One night, Miles and me were still sleeping on the cobblestones down by the river. Three of them tried to take us. May they rest in peace.”

“Really? Are you leveling with me?”

He turned and looked at her. “What do you mean? Did we really kill them or do I really wish they're resting in peace?”

“No. You didn't.”

“It's kill or be killed, Tenderness.”

“You're a Darwinist, Ananias Goode.”

“I don't know about all that. Sometimes it's the thing to do. Scratch any man, there's some killer in him. Women too, you push 'em hard enough.”

“You sound so sure.”

Goode turned and looked directly at her. “Look at it this way. Would your father die for you?”

“He would and he did.”

“Would he kill for you?”

Artinces frowned. “Why must everything be about killing?”

“I didn't make life the way it is. I just deal with it. It takes blood, is all I'm saying.”

“To do what?”

“Anything.”
Especially when it comes to the likes of Ike Allen
, he thought.

Artinces reached for her empty glass and waved it. Goode filled it for her.

“What about Miles?” she asked. “Rev. Washington?”

“What about him?”

“He helped you. He willingly got blood on his hands.”

“Miles can speak for himself, but he'll tell you that faith takes blood too. Jesus didn't die easy, he'll say.”

“And you never got in trouble for that? Arrested?”

Goode laughed. She usually liked his laugh. She didn't then.

“They were black. Nobody cared.”

“Nobody,” she said, her voice rising slightly. “Except for their wives. Girlfriends, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Cousins, nephews, frien—”

“You know what I mean. The people that count didn't care. Now, the people they worked for? They might have missed them for a minute. You know what a white man does when his nigger doesn't show up to slave for him? He tells somebody, ‘Find me another nigger as soon as you can.'”

“You know I don't like that word.”

“Lots of stuff I don't like too. Like when you judge me. Talk to me in that siddity voice like I'm dirty or stupid. I've bled too, more than once. And I've never moaned about it. When you saw me in the alley that time? Wasn't I smiling like my number hit?”

Artinces recalled him in the doorway. The suit, the rakishly tilted hat, the devastating grin. She closed her eyes and each detail faded away until there were only his teeth. “Siddity?”

“You heard me. Anybody can see how you strain to be all damn dignified with your careful walk and educated talk, your white gloves and church-lady hats. Who do you think you're fooling? Honey Springs is more than skin deep, baby. You can't hide it that easy.”

“You're right. I can't hide where I come from because nothing can cover it. Just like nothing can cover you. Not even pinstriped suits and custom boots.”

“It's different for me,” he protested. “I'm a businessman.”

“You're a gangster! Your business is hurting other people. Taking their hard-earned dimes and when they've got nothing left for you to take, you gut them like a fish.”

“People have to know that I ain't gentle. That ain't how the world works.”

“I know! It takes blood. You've already told me. I'm not going to bleed for you.”

“I'm not asking you to. I don't do what I do because I like it. I do it because I'm good at it. People know it. When I'm gone from this world, nobody will say I went down easy.”

Artinces smirked. “Like Jesus, right?”

Goode ignored her. “People will remember me. My name's gonna ring out.”

She laughed outright. “To whom? ‘The people who count?' Or the people you stole from? What about those bodies you put in the river? What about the bones? Someday they might float to the surface with your fingerprints on them.”

Goode rolled away from her, already reaching for his pants. He stepped into them and grabbed his shirt, buttoning swiftly, erratically. Propped up on her elbow, Artinces watched him tug on his socks and wrench on his shoes. She wanted him to stay, to fight with her like a husband who knew that after all was said and done they'd still end up side by side, sleeping off their anger.

But Goode was halfway out the door. He stopped and turned around. His gaze was level.

“I didn't go to medical school,” he said, “but there's plenty I know. Them bodies I rolled into the river didn't come back and they won't. Because I weighed 'em down just right. See? That's something I know.”

He left. They didn't share a bed again for nearly two years.

She immersed herself in her practice, devoting herself to the city's children with such passion that a
Citizen
columnist dubbed her “Saint Noel.” Some admirers even mounted a campaign to elect her to the school board, an effort she quickly discouraged. Her mission was to keep children healthy, she declared. Someone else would have to make them wise.

Meanwhile, Goode began cleaning up his image, if not his act. In the fall of 1962, he gave Thanksgiving turkeys to needy families and made sure a photographer from the
Citizen
was on hand to record it on film. When the North Side Home for the Aged needed landscaping, he proudly—and loudly—paid for it all. He spent the next year buying legitimate businesses and making sure he was seen going in and out of them. In addition to his policy and lending “enterprises,” his holdings by the fall of 1963 included a taxi company, racehorses, a print shop, an artist-promotion agency, prime real estate, part ownership of a beer distributor, and a piece of the popular Nat-Han Steakhouse. He joined the boards
of directors at a few charitable nonprofits. At the reception after a church-sponsored event for the North Side's most generous benefactors, he ran into Artinces. They shook hands in front of the refreshments table.

“Nice to meet you,” she said a little too loudly, when the event chairman introduced them. When the chairman moved out of earshot, Artinces smiled more warmly than she intended.

“Looks like you're moving up fast,” she said.

He nodded but didn't return the smile. “I've come a long way from making moonshine, but I know my limits.”

Bootleg whiskey
, Artinces thought.
Didn't know that
. “Wasn't Joe Kennedy a moonshiner?” she asked.

“So they say.”

She cradled her wine glass with two hands, as if it were too heavy to hold. “Well, look at his son,” she said.

Goode half turned away from her. Studying the last sip of bourbon in his glass, he swirled it before swallowing it down. “Yeah, well, my son's not going to be president.”

“You never know. We have black men in Congress now. Maybe Rev. King was right. All you have to do is dream.”

“Actually I do know,” he said, “because my son's dead.” He put his glass on the table. “Nice to meet you, too,” he said.

Artinces watched him walk away.
Didn't know that, either
.

A month later, the president was shot, plunging the country into shock. Thanksgiving hardly felt like a holiday at all. Not even Ananias Goode's turkey giveaway, complete with fanfare and performances by local talent he'd personally handpicked, could dispel the aura of gloom. Experience had taught North Siders that whatever misfortune fell on the country at large would land on them with considerably more weight. They had hardly been surprised when, earlier that year, Birmingham police turned fire hoses on black children. That kind of barbarity simply served as continuing evidence in a long and endless trial. But there was something very disturbing about a white man—whose wealth and staggering power only amplified his whiteness—shot down in the street like a common Negro. The Space Age, they feared, would tumble to earth before they even had a chance to lift off.

Like any engaged citizen, Artinces felt bad for the country, but her sadness inevitably reverted to its usual, distinctly personal shape. Having lost her appetite, she decided to forgo lunch in favor of an extended session with
Life
magazine and other periodicals that covered the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath.

Sitting at her desk piled high with files, she fixated on photos of the First Lady. In unsettling detail, they showed Mrs. Kennedy crazy with panic as she scrambled across the trunk of the limousine, entering the ambulance carrying her husband's body from the hospital to the airport, and kneeling at his flower-covered grave with a herd of officials and relatives waiting at a respectful distance behind her. What, Artinces wondered, would it feel like to experience such a soul-shattering loss? She'd known heartbreak a time or two, but, having pursued her calling with missionary focus, she had never entertained the possibility of falling so deeply in love that she couldn't climb out. In keeping with this philosophy, she felt she'd managed to confine her affair with Goode to purely physical concerns, simply a matter of two grown people taking care of each other's needs. Or had it been more than that? Artinces refused to pause long enough to give herself a chance to reflect. The one thing she was certain of was the sensation his absence created. Sighing, she conceded to calling it what it was. Pain.

Artinces's door flew open. She jumped, scattering her magazines. Billie stood over her, hands on hips.

“Um, come in,” Artinces said.

Billie ignored her boss's sarcasm. “Do you know what Our Lady of Sorrows is?”

Artinces rubbed her temples. “What?”

“Lady of Sorrows. What is it?”

“It's a church,” Artinces replied. “A few blocks from here.”

Billie strutted across the room and opened the blinds, flooding the office with light. Artinces groaned and put her hands over her eyes.

“Wrong,” Billie said. “It's the staff's nickname for you. You mope around here like a goddamn nun.”

“Billie!”

Moving swiftly, Billie snatched up the magazines. “All that melancholy wrapped around you like a fucking lab coat.”