South Street
A Novel
David Bradley
Dedicated to my father, Reverend David H. Bradley, and to my mother, Harriette Jackson Bradley, with special thanks to Ian Mowatt and to Hiram Haydn.
PART ONE
1. Lightnin’ Ed’sSouth Street
South Street runs from the eastern river
To the western river’s farther shore—
Flees the slimy-stinking water,
Slides through dark dead-ended days,
Skulks through black thief-pleasing nights,
Silent in the city-roar.
South Street’s pavement is cracked and broken,
Choked with beer bottle litter from a hundred bars.
It bruises and batters the feet that walk there,
And sucks at the tires of the passing cars.
South Street’s shit-clogged sewers carry
The salt-sweaty liquor of men made wild—
Puke-flavored blood from a barroom battle,
The diamond tears of a hungry child.
South Street crawls for thirty blocks—
Concrete links in an urban chain
Shackling long-simmered hatreds;
Or an obese burgher’s bulging belt,
Dividing the stale urine pubic ghetto
From the skyscrapers’ overhanging paunch—
Watches the intrigues of bums and junkies,
The assignations of loud-mouthed whores,
Sees them fight love fuck and die,
Crosses the river and changes its
Name.
—Brown
T
HE STREET LAY LIKE
a snake sleeping; dull-dusty, gray-black in the dingy darkness. At the three-way intersection of Twenty-third Street, Grays Ferry Avenue, and South Street a fountain, erected once-upon-a-year by a ladies’ guild in fond remembrance of some dear departed altruist, stood cracked and dry, full of dead leaves and cigarette butts and bent beer cans, forgotten by the city and the ladies’ guild, functionless, except as a minor memorial to how They Won’t Take Care Of Nice Things. On one side of South Street a chain food market displayed neat packages of precooked food sequestered behind thick plate glass—a nose-thumbing temptation to the undernourished. On the other side of South Street the State Liquor Store showed back-lit bottles to tantalizing advantage and proclaimed, on a sign pasted to the inside of the window, just behind the heavy wire screening, that state lottery tickets were on sale, and that you had to play to win.
There was no one on the corner where Grays Ferry met Twenty-third and Twenty-third met South: the police, spying any of the local citizens, assumed they were there to rob the liquor store or the food market, and ran the duly convicted offender away. But a little way downtown, near the junction of a nameless alley and South Street, was a dim entranceway, a hole in the wall with a thick wooden door hanging open, and out of it came belches of heavy-beating jukebox music and stale tobacco smoke.
The traffic light at the intersection changed. A flood of cars accelerated away from the corner, their lowered headlights reflecting in pools of the soft tar of the street. One set of headlamps, undimmed, lanced ahead, raking over the fronts of dingy brown-brick buildings and glinting in the eyes of a big black alley cat, scruffed and scarred from a thousand battles-royal. Blinded, the cat darted into the street and was caught beneath the rear wheel of the last car in the string. The car swerved slightly and pulled over to the curb and the driver, a balding man dressed in baggy gray slacks and a blue coat-sweater, got out. “What on earth did I hit?” he muttered, looking around.
“Oh, God, George!” said the woman in the right front seat. “It was probably just a bump in the street. There’s enough of them, Lord knows. Why don’t they
do
something about the streets in this neighborhood?”
“It couldn’t have been a bump in the street,” George said. “The front wheel didn’t hit it and the back wheel did. I just hope it wasn’t a child.”
“A child? At this time of night? It was probably just a dog or a cat. Or a rat,” she added, looking around with a shudder.
“What’s wrong?” demanded a sleepy voice from the back seat.
“Your father’s trying to convince himself he’s a murderer because he ran over a dog or something.”
“Daddy, did you kill a dog?”
“Be quiet, Stacey,” said George. “If it was a dog or something, then I want to make sure it isn’t lying injured somewhere to go mad.”
“
You’re
mad, George. Here we are sitting in the middle of this … this …
place
, about to be robbed or knifed or … worse, and all you’re worried about is a stray dog.”
“Cat,” said George, who had walked around to the back of the car, where he could see the mangled body dripping red blood and yellowish intestines on the pavement.
“Good God!” exclaimed the woman, leaning out her window and staring at the mutilated mass. “Did it scratch the paint?”
“Daddy,” Stacey said accusingly, “you
are
a murderer.”
“George, let’s get out of here. That cat smells terrible. This whole neighborhood smells terrible. It’s giving me the willies.” George looked up and down the street, hands on hips. Then he turned and began to walk toward the open doorway beside the alley. “George? George! Where are you going? Don’t you dare leave us alone.”
“Just right here, Martha. Somebody may want to do something.” He walked on. Behind him he heard the windows being rolled up and door locks being engaged. He smiled to himself. Then he looked around at the dilapidated buildings and the overflowing garbage cans and the dark shadows, and he stopped smiling.
Leo, the two-hundred-and-fifty-eight-pound owner-bartender-cashier-bouncer of Lightnin’ Ed’s Bar and Grill, looked up from the glass he was polishing to see a one-hundred-and-fifty-eight-pound white man walk into his bar. Leo’s mouth fell open and he almost dropped the glass. One by one the faces along the bar turned to stare at the single pale face, shining in the dimness. “Yes, sir, cap’n,” Leo said uneasily, “what can we be doin’ for you?”
George looked around nervously. “I, ah, had a little accident. I, ah, ran over a cat in the street, and I, uh, don’t know what to do about it.”
“Whad he say?” a wino at the far end of the bar, who claimed to be hard of hearing, whispered loudly.
The jukebox ran out and fell silent just as somebody yelled to him, “Paddy says he run over some cat out in the street.” The sound echoed throughout the bar. Conversation died.
“Goddamn!” said the wino.
Leo leaned over the bar, letting his gigantic belly rest on the polished wood. “Yeah?” he said to George. “Didja kill him?”
“Oh yes,” George assured him. “I made certain of that.”
“Whad he say?” demanded the deaf wino.
Leo stared at George. “You pullin’ ma leg?”
“Of course not,” George snapped. “I ran over a cat in the street. Right outside.”
“Well,” said Leo, “there’s a pay phone over there you can use to call the cops. But listen, was it right out in front a here?”
George nodded.
“Well, listen, cap’n, seein’ as you’re in trouble anyways, you think you could maybe drag him down the street a ways ’fore the cops get here? All that fuzz hangin’ ’round out front, bad for business, you know what I mean?”
“Whad he say?” demanded the wino.
“Look,” George said, “I don’t want to call the po … the cops. There’s no need for that. The car wasn’t damaged. All I wanted was I ran over this cat and it’s all smashed and it’s lying right next to the sidewalk and I wanted a shovel or something to move it and put it in a garbage can or something.”
Lightnin’ Ed’s knew a rare phenomenon—complete silence. It lasted for a long ten seconds before Leo sighed. “Whad he say?” demanded the deaf wino.
The answer was a multivoiced rumble. “He says he killed this cat on the street an’ he wants a shovel so’s he can hide him in a garbage can.”
“Ain’t that just like a fuckin’ paddy?” said Big Betsy the whore.
“Look a here, cap’n,” said Leo, “I don’t want no trouble. This ain’t like Alabama, you can’t just go around hittin’ an’ runnin’ an’ tossin’ bodies into garbage cans.”
“Solid!” said a rat-faced man who clutched at a beer bottle. “You tell this sucker somethin’, Leo, ’fore I lay this bottle upside his head.”
“Look,” George said, spreading his hands and looking down the long row of hostile faces, “it was just one stray al—”
“Will you listen to the honky muthafucka,” snapped a dark-skinned man wearing a black beret. “Listen to him! Cocksucker probly cheered when they offed Malcolm an’ cried buckets over Bobby Kennedy. We oughta waste the muthafucka, that’s what I say.”
“You got it, brother,” said the rat-faced man, brandishing the beer bottle.
“Whad he say?” demanded the deaf wino.
“Buddy,” said Leo, “if I was you, I’d split.”
George looked at him in confusion. “But it was only an alley cat.”
“Look,” Leo said, “I’d just as soon kick the shit outa you maself, but I got ma business to be thinkin’ about an’ I can’t … Whad you say?”
“I said it was just an alley cat.”
“We oughta string the muthafucka up an’ cut his pasty balls off,” the man in the black beret was saying. “That’d teach ’em they can’t be comin’ ’round here runnin’ the People down in the street like we was animals.”
“Amen, brother,” said the rat-faced man.
“Hold it, people,” Leo said, waving his big arm. “It wasn’t nothin’ but an alley cat.”
“An
alley
cat?” said Big Betsy the whore. “Then what the hell’d he wanna go makin’ out like he done killed somebody for?”
“He’s crazy,” Leo said.
“Shit,” said the man in the black beret, “he’s a goddamn muthafuckin’ pale-faced honky.”
“That’s what I said,” Leo snapped, and went back to polishing glasses.
George stood by the bar, looking around and realizing that nobody was paying any attention to him any more except for the man in the black beret, who looked up from his gin occasionally to glare and snarl and mutter something under his breath. “Hey,” George said finally.
Leo looked up at him. “What you want now?”
“What should I do about the cat?”
“Damn if I know,” said Leo. “It ain’t ma cat.”
“It’s in front of your bar.”
Leo regarded him sourly. “You drinkin’ somethin’, cap’n, or you just causin’ trouble?”
George looked at him for two seconds and then backed hastily out of the bar. When he reached the car he had to tap on the window four times before his wife would let him in.
“George, where have you
been?
Why, Stacey and I could have been raped five times while you were in there! Let me smell your breath.”
“I thought they were going to kill me,” George said softly, staring through the windshield at the street. Suddenly he came to life, twisted his head, stared at Martha. “For a minute I honestly thought they were going to kill me.” He shook his head as if to clear it and began fumbling with his seat belt, trying to buckle it with shaking hands.
“Of course they were,” Martha told him. “They’d do it in a minute and think nothing of it. They aren’t normal. Look at this neighborhood. Just
look
at it! I don’t know why they live like this, I swear I don’t.”
George started the car and pulled away from the curb. As the car accelerated, turned the corner, vanished into the night, the bloody remains of the cat dropped off the fender and onto the street.
Leo corked the bottle of Old Colony gin and set the shot glass in front of the man with the black beret. “Rayburn, your woman ain’t gonna let you ’lone when you gets home half dead,” Leo warned.
“Shit,” said Rayburn, adjusting his beret so that it hung down over his eye. “Shit. That bitch ain’t gonna be messin’ wid me. She knows who the man is. You gimme some beer to chase this here down with, an’ quit mindin’ ma wife.”