The Street (29 page)

The thin, sheer curtains were blowing in the breeze that came through the opened windows. Swaying gently back and forth at the front windows, at the fire-escape window. But the fire-escape window was always closed. Jubilee kept it shut because she said it wasn't safe to sit in a room in Harlem with a fire-escape window open. That was how people got robbed. Even in hot, sweltering weather it was closed. They had argued about it the summer before:

‘Christ, baby! Open the window!'

‘I won't. It isn't safe.'

‘But we'll sweat to death in here.'

‘That's better than being robbed—'

He crossed the room quickly, pushed the curtains aside, and looked down. A man was going swiftly down the fire escape. Not looking up, climbing
steadily down, down. He had his suit jacket over his arm. Every time the man passed a lighted window, Boots could see him quite clearly. Finally the man looked up. He had his necktie in his hand. And he was white. Unmistakably—white.

When he turned back into the room, he was so blind with fury he couldn't see anything for a moment. Then he saw her sitting in the chair, frozen with fear.

‘You double-crossing bitch!' he said, and pulled her out of the chair and slammed her against the wall.

He pulled her toward him and slapped her. Then threw her back against the wall. Pulled her toward him and slapped her and threw her back against the wall. Again and again. Her face grew puffed and swollen under his hand. He heard her scream, and it pleased him to know that she was afraid of him because he was going to kill her, and he wanted her to know it beforehand and be afraid. He was going to take a long time doing it, so that she would be very afraid before she finally died.

But she fooled him. She ducked under his arm and got away from him. He took his time turning around, because there wasn't any place for her to go. She couldn't get all the way away from him, and it was going to be fun to play cat and mouse with her in this none too big room.

When he turned, she had a knife in her hand. He went for her again and she slashed him across the face.

He backed away from her. Blood oozed slowly down his cheek. It felt warm. And it shocked him to his senses. She wasn't worth going to the clink for. She was a raggle-tag slut, and he was well rid
of her because she wasn't worth a good god damn.

He took the knife away from her. She cringed as though she expected him to cut her. He threw it on the floor and laughed.

‘You ain't worth cutting, baby,' he said. ‘You ain't worth going to jail for. You ain't worth nothing.' He laughed again. ‘Tell your white boy friend he can move in any time he wants to. I'm through, baby.'

The sound of Jubilee's sobbing followed him down the hall. As he went past the silent doors that lined the hallway, he thought, It's funny with all that noise and screaming no one had tried to find out what was going on. He could have killed her easy and no one would even have rapped on the door, and he wondered what went on inside these other apartments to make their occupants so incurious.

He wanted to laugh at himself and at Jubilee. Him riding Pullman trains day in and day out and hoarding those handfuls of silver, so he could keep her here in this apartment, so he could buy her clothes. Bowing and scraping because the thought of her waiting at the end of a run kept him from choking on those ‘Yes sirs' and ‘No sirs' that he said week in and week out. He paused on the stairs thinking that he ought to go back up and finish the job, because leaving it like this left him less than a half man, because he didn't even have a woman of his own, because he not only had to say ‘Yes sir,' he had to stand by and take it while some white man grabbed off what belonged to him.

Killing her wouldn't change the thing any. But if he'd had a gun, he would have shot that bastard on
the fire escape. He went on down the stairs slowly. He never realized before what a thin line you had to cross to do a murder. A thin, small, narrow line. It was less than a pencil mark to get across. A man rides a Pullman and the woman fools around, and the man can't swallow it because he's had too much crawling to do, and the man spends the rest of his life behind bars. No. He gives up his life on a hot seat, or did they hang in this state? He didn't know, because fortunately the woman cut the hell out of him.

He concealed the slash with his handkerchief, thinking that there was a colored drugstore somewhere around and the guy would fix him up.

The druggist eyed the blood on his face. ‘Get cut?' he asked matter-of-factly.

‘Yeah. Put somep'n on it, will you?'

The druggist applied a styptic pencil. ‘You oughtta see a doctor,' he said. ‘You're going to have a bad scar.' And he thought must have been a woman who cut him. Guys built like this one don't let other guys get close enough to them to carve them with a knife. Probably ran out on the woman and she couldn't take it.

‘A scar don't mean nothing,' Boots said.

‘What was it—a fight?'

‘Naw. A dame. I beat her up and she gave me this for a souvenir.'

There had been a lot of other women since Jubilee. He didn't remember any of them except that he had kicked most of them around a bit. Perhaps as vengeance now that he came to think about it. He only thought about Jubilee when he happened to see a pair of curtains blowing in a breeze. The scar
on his face had become a thin, narrow line. Most of the time he forgot it was there, though somehow he had got into the habit of touching it when he was thinking very hard.

He looked across at Junto patiently waiting for an answer. He wasn't quite ready to answer him. Let him stew in his own juice for a while. There wasn't any question in his mind about Lutie Johnson being worth the price he would have to pay for her, nor worth the doubts that he would always have about her.

Riding back and forth between New York and Chicago he used to look forward to dropping into Junto's place. He was perfectly comfortable, wholly at ease when he was there. The white men behind the bar obviously didn't care about the color of a man's skin. They were polite and friendly—not too friendly but just right. It made him feel good to go there. Nobody bothered to mix a little contempt with the drinks because the only thing that mattered was whether you had the money to pay for them.

One time when he stopped in for a drink, he was filled up to overflowing with hate. So he had two drinks. Three drinks. Four drinks. Five drinks. To get the taste of ‘you boy' out of his mouth, to shake it out of his ears, to wash it off his skin. Six drinks, and he was feeling good.

There was a battered red piano in the corner. The same piano that was there right now. And he was feeling so good that he forgot that he had vowed he'd never play a piano again as long as he lived. He sat down and started playing and kept on until he forgot there were such things as Pullmans and rumpled
sheets and wadded-up blankets to be handled. Forgot there was a world that was full of white voices saying: ‘Hustle 'em up, boy'; ‘Step on it, boy'; Hey, boy, I saw a hot-looking colored gal a couple of coaches back—fix it up for me, boy.' He forgot about bells that were a shrill command to ‘come a-running, boy.'

Someone touched him on the shoulder. He looked up frowning.

‘What do you do for a living?'

The man was squat, turtle-necked. White.

‘What's it to you?' He stopped playing and turned on the piano bench, ready to send his fist smashing into the man's face.

‘You play well. I wanted to offer you a job.'

‘Doing what?' And then, angered because he had answered the man at all, he said, ‘Sweeping the joint out?' And further angered and wanting to fight and wanting to show that he wanted to fight, he added, ‘With my tongue, mebbe?'

Junto shook his head. ‘No. I've never offered anyone a job like that,' saying it with a seriousness that was somehow impressive. ‘There are some things men shouldn't have to do'—a note of regret in his voice. ‘I thought perhaps you might be willing to play the piano here.'

He stared at Junto letting all the hate in him show, all the fight, all the meanness. Junto stared back. And he found himself liking him against his will. ‘How much?'

‘Start at forty dollars.'

He had turned back to the piano. ‘I'm working at the job right now.'

It had been a pleasure to work for Junto. There
hadn't been any of that you're-black-and-I'm-white business involved. It had been okay from the night he had started playing the piano. He had built the orchestra slowly, and Junto had been pleased and revealed his pleasure by paying him a salary that had now grown to the point where he could afford to buy anything in the world he wanted. No. Lutie Johnson wasn't that important to him. He wasn't in love with her, and even if he had been she didn't weigh enough to balance the things he would lose.

‘Okay,' he said finally. ‘It doesn't make that much difference to me.'

Junto's eyes went back to an examination of the bar. There was nothing in his face to indicate whether this was the answer he had expected or whether he was surprised by it. ‘Don't pay her for singing with the band. Give her presents from time to time.' He took his wallet out, extracted a handful of bills, gave them to Boots. ‘All women like presents. This will make it easier for you to arrange for me to see her. And please remember'—his voice was precise, careful, almost as though he were discussing the details of a not too important business deal—‘leave her alone. I want her myself.'

Boots pocketed the money and stood up. ‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘That babe will be as safe with me as though she was in her mother's arms.'

Junto sipped his soda. ‘Do you think it will take very long?' he asked.

‘I dunno. Some women are'—he fished for a word, shrugged his shoulders and went on—‘funny about having anything to do with white men.' He thought of the curtains blowing back from the fire
escape window and the white man going swiftly down, down, down. Not all women. Just some women.

‘Money cures most things like that.'

‘Sometimes it does.' He tried to decide whether it would with Lutie Johnson. Yes. She had practically said so herself. Yet there was something—well, he wasn't sure a man would have an easy time with her. She had a streak of hell cat in her or he didn't know women, and he felt a momentary and fleeting regret at having lost the chance to conquer and subdue her.

He looked down at Junto seated at the table and swallowed an impulse to laugh. For Junto's squat-bodied figure was all gray—gray suit, gray hair, gray skin, so that he melted into the room. He could sit forever at that table and nobody would look at him twice. All those people guzzling drinks at the bar never glanced in his direction. The ones standing outside on the street and the ones walking back and forth were dumb, blind, deaf to Junto's existence. Yet he had them coming and going. If they wanted to sleep, they paid him; if they wanted to drink, they paid him; if they wanted to dance, they paid him, and never even knew it.

It would be funny if Junto who owned so much couldn't get to first base with Lutie. He wasn't even sure why Junto wanted to lay her. He couldn't quite figure it out. Junto was kind of nuts about that black woman on 116th Street, talked about her all the time. He had never forgotten the shock he got when he first saw Mrs. Hedges. He hadn't really known what to expect the night he went there with Junto,
but he was totally unprepared for that hulk of a woman. He could have sworn from the way Junto looked at her that he was in love with her and that he had never been able to get past some obstacle that prevented him from sleeping with her—some obstacle the woman erected.

‘How was the crowd tonight?' Junto asked.

‘Packed house. Hanging from the ceiling.'

‘No trouble?'

‘Naw. There's never any trouble. Them bruisers see to that.'

‘Good.'

‘That girl sings very well,' he said. He watched Junto's face to see if he could get some clue from his expression as to what it was about Lutie Johnson that had made him want her. Because there had been all kinds of girls in and out of Junto's joints and he had never been known to look twice at any of them.

‘Yes, I know. I heard her.' And Junto's eyes blinked, and Boots knew instantly that Junto wanted her for the same reason that he had—because she was young and extraordinarily good-looking and any man with a spark of life left in him would go for her.

‘You heard her tonight?' Boots asked, incredulous.

‘Yes. I was at the Casino for a few minutes.'

Boots shook his head. The old man surely had it bad. He had a sudden desire to see his face go soft and queer. ‘How's Mrs. Hedges?' he asked.

‘Fine.' Junto's face melted into a smile. ‘She's a wonderful woman. A wonderful woman.'

‘Yeah.' He thought of the red bandanna tied in hard, ugly knots around her head. ‘She sure is.'

He turned away from the table. ‘I gotta go, Junto. I'll be seein' you.' He walked out of the bar, cat-footed, his face as expressionless as when he came in.

JONES, THE SUPER, closed the door of his apartment behind him. He was clenching and unclenching his fists in a slow, pulsating movement that corresponded with the ebb and flow of the rage that was sweeping through him.

At first it was rage toward Mrs. Hedges and her barging into the hall, shoving her hard hands against his chest, ordering him about, threatening him. If she hadn't been so enormous and so venomous, he would have knocked her down.

He frowned. How had the dog got out? Min must have let him out. Min must have stood right there where he was standing now, just inside the door, looking out into the hall, and seen what was going on and let the dog loose. A fresh wave of anger directed at Min flooded through him. If she hadn't
let the dog out, he would have had Lutie Johnson. The dog scared Lutie so she screamed and that brought that old sow with that rag tied around her head out into the hall.