The Street (32 page)

‘You ain't sleeping in the bedroom tonight?' she asked.

‘No,' he said absently. He glanced briefly at her shapeless, hesitant figure. This was her way of inviting him to sleep with her again. I think I fixed you, too, with this little key, he thought. And I hope I fixed you good. ‘No,' he repeated. ‘My headache's too bad.'

The next afternoon Jones stood outside the building and waited for Bub. The street was swarming with children who laughed and talked and moved with gusto because school was out.

When Bub ran in from the street, he was moving so swiftly that Jones almost didn't see him. All of him was alive with the joy of movement—his arms, his legs, even his head. Kicking up his heels like a young goat, Jones thought, watching him. A little more and he'd jump right out of his skin.

‘Hi, Bub,' he said.

‘Hi, Supe'—he was panting, chest heaving, eyes dancing. ‘Hi, Mrs. Hedges'—he waved toward the window.

‘Hello, dearie,' she replied. ‘You sure was going fast when you turned that corner. Thought you couldn't put your brakes on there for a minute.'

He laughed and the sound of his own laughter pleased him so that he laughed louder and harder in order to enjoy it more. ‘I can go even faster sometimes,' he said finally.

‘How about you and me building something in the basement this afternoon?' Jones asked.

‘Sure. What'll it be, Supe?'

‘I dunno. We can talk it over.'

They went into the hall and Jones opened the door of his apartment.

‘Thought you said we were going into the basement.'

‘We gotta talk something over first.'

Jones sat down on the sofa with the boy beside him. The boy sat so far back that his legs dangled.

‘How'd you like to earn some money?' Jones began.

‘Sure. You want me to go some place for you?'

‘Not this time. This is different. This is some detective work catching crooks.'

‘Where, Supe? Where?' Bub scrambled off the
sofa to stand in front of Jones, ready to run in any direction, already seeing himself in action. ‘How'm I going to do it? Can I start now?'

‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute: Don't go so fast,' he cautioned. This was the easiest thing he'd ever done in his life, he thought with satisfaction. He paused briefly to admire his own cleverness. ‘There's these crooks and the police need help to catch them. They're using the mail and it ain't easy to get them. You gotta be careful nobody sees you or they'll know you're working for the police.'

‘Go on, Supe. Tell me some more. What do I have to do?' Bub implored.

‘Now what you have to do is open mail boxes and bring the letters to me. Some of them will be the right ones and some won't. But you bring all of them here to me. You gotta make sure nobody sees you give them to me. So you bring them down in the basement. I'll be down there waiting for you every afternoon.'

He took the slender key out of his pocket. ‘Come on out in the hall and I'll show you how she works.'

The key was stiff in the lock. It turned slowly. He had to force it a little, but it worked. He had the boy try it again and again until he began to get the feel of it and then they returned to his apartment.

‘Don't never open none of them boxes in this house,' he warned. He put one of his heavy hands on the boy's shoulder to give emphasis to his words. ‘This ain't the place where the crooks are working.'

He hesitated for a moment, disturbed and uneasy because Bub had been silent for so long. ‘Here,' he
said finally and extended the key toward the boy. ‘You got the whole street to work in.'

Bub backed away from his outstretched hand. ‘I don't think I want to do it.'

‘Why not?' he demanded angrily. Was the little bastard going to spoil the whole thing by refusing?

‘I don't know'—Bub wrinkled his forehead. ‘I thought it was something different. This ain't even exciting.'

‘You can earn a lot of money.' He tried to erase the anger from his voice, tried to make it persuasive. ‘Mebbe three, four dollars a week.' The letters would yield at least that much. Yes. He was safe in saying it. The boy didn't answer. ‘Mebbe five dollars a week.'

‘I don't think Mom—'

‘Your ma won't know nothing about it. You're not to tell her anyhow,' he said savagely. He made a superhuman effort to control the rage that burst in him. He must say something quickly so that the boy wouldn't tell her anything about it. ‘This is a secret between you and me and the police.'

‘No,' the boy repeated. ‘I don't want to do it. Thanks just the same, Supe.'

And before Jones realized his intention, Bub had run out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. He was left standing in the middle of the room still holding the key in his outstretched hand and with the knowledge that the kid could ruin him by telling Lutie what he, Jones, had suggested.

He cursed with such vehemence that the dog walked over to him, thrust his muzzle into his hand. He kicked the dog away. The dog howled. It was a
sharp, shrill outcry that filled the apartment, reached to the street outside.

Mrs. Hedges nodded her head at the sound. ‘Cellar crazy,' she said softly. ‘No doubt about it. Cellar crazy.'

IT WAS TIME for intermission at the Casino. The men in the bandstand got up from their chairs, shoved the music racks in front of them aside, yawned and stretched. Some of them searched through the crowd, seeking the young girls who had eyed them from the dance floor, intent on getting better acquainted with them, even at the risk of incurring the displeasure of their escorts. Others headed straight for the bar like homing pigeons winging toward their roosts.

The pianist and one of the trumpeters stayed in the bandstand. The trumpeter was experimenting with a tune that had been playing in his head for days. The pianist turned sideways on the piano bench listening to him.

‘Ever hear it before?' he asked finally.

‘Nope,' replied the pianist.

‘Just wanted to make sure. Sometimes tunes play tricks in your head and turn out to be somep'n you heard a long while ago and all the time you think it's one you made up.'

The pianist groped for appropriate chords as the man with the trumpet played the tune over softly. Together they produced a faint melody, barely a shred, a tatter of music that drifted through the big ballroom. Conversation and the clink of glasses and roars of laughter almost drowned it out, but it persisted—a slight, ghostly sound running through the room.

The soft rainbow-colored lights shifted as they slanted over the smooth surface of the dance floor, softening the faces of the couples strolling by arm in arm; making gentle the faces of the Casino's bruisers as they mingled with the crowd. The moving lights and the half-heard tones of the piano and the trumpet created the illusion that the people were still dancing.

Lutie Johnson and Boots Smith were sitting at one of the small tables near the edge of the dance floor. They had been silent ever since they sat down.

‘When will my salary start? And how much will it be?' she asked finally. She had to know now, tonight. She couldn't wait any longer for him to broach the subject. The intermission was half over and he was still staring at the small glass of bourbon in front of him on the table.

‘Salary?' he asked blankly.

‘For singing with the band.' He knew what she meant and yet he was pretending that he didn't.
She looked at him anxiously, conscious of a growing sense of dismay. She waited for his answer, leaning toward him, straining to hear it and hearing instead the faint, drifting sound of music. It disturbed her because at first she thought it wasn't real, that she was imagining the sound. She turned toward the bandstand and saw that two of the boys were practicing. Boots started speaking when her head was turned so that she didn't see the expression on his face.

‘Baby, this is just experience,' he said. ‘Be months before you can earn money at it.'

Afterwards she tried to remember the tone of his voice and couldn't. She could only remember the thin, ghostly, haunting music. But he had told her she could earn her living by singing. He had said the job was hers—tied up and sewed up for as long as she wanted it.

‘What happened?' she asked sharply.

‘Nothing happened, baby. What makes you think something happened?'

‘You said I could earn my living singing. Just last night you said the job was mine for as long as I wanted it.'

‘Sure, baby, and I meant it,' he said easily. ‘It's true. But I don't have all the say-so. The guy who owns the Casino—guy named Junto—says you ain't ready yet.'

‘What has he got to do with it?'

‘I just told you,' patiently. ‘Christ, he owns the joint.'

‘Is he the same man that owns the Bar and Grill?'

‘Yeah.'

The music faded away, returned, was lost again. She remembered Junto's squat figure reflected in the mirror behind the bar. A figure in a mirror lifted a finger, shook his head, and she was right back where she started. No, not quite; for this still, sick feeling inside of her was something she hadn't had before. This was worse than being back where she started because she hadn't been able to prevent the growth of a bright optimism that had pictured a shining future. She had seen herself moving away from the street, giving Bub a room of his own, being home when he returned from school. Those things had become real to her and they were gone.

She had to go on living on the street, in that house. And she could feel the Super pulling her steadily toward the stairway, could feel herself swaying and twisting and turning to get away from him, away from the cellar door. Once again she was aware of the steps stretching down into the darkness of the basement below, could feel the dog leaping on her back and Mrs. Hedges' insinuating voice was saying, ‘Earn extra money, dearie.'

‘No!' she said sharply.

‘What's the matter, baby? Did it mean so much to you?'

She looked at him, thinking, He would like to know that it meant everything in the world to me. There was nothing in his expression to indicate that the knowledge that she was bitterly disappointed would concern him or that he was even faintly interested. But she knew by the eager way he was bending toward her across the table, by the intentness with which he was studying her, that he was seeking
to discover the degree of her disappointment.

‘I suppose it did,' she said quietly.

She got up from the table. ‘Well,' she said, ‘thanks for the chance anyway.'

‘Yeah,' he said vaguely. He was fingering the scar on his cheek. ‘Hey, wait a minute, where you goin'?'

‘I'm going home. Where did you think I was going?'

‘But you ain't going to stop singing with the band, are you?'

‘What would be the point? I work all day. I'm not going to sing half the night for the fun of it.'

‘But the experience—'

‘I'm not interested,' she said flatly.

He put his hand on her arm. ‘Wait and I'll drive you home. I want to talk to you, baby. You can't walk out on me like this.'

‘I'm not walking out on you,' she said impatiently. ‘I'm tired and I want to go home.'

‘Okay'—he withdrew his hand. ‘Junto sent you this—' He pulled a small white box out of his vest pocket and handed it to her.

The cover stuck and she pulled it off with a jerk that set the rhinestone earrings inside to glinting as the rainbow-colored lights touched them. They were so alive with fiery color that they seemed to move inside the small box.

‘Thanks,' she said, and her voice sounded hard, brassy to her own ears. ‘I can't imagine anything I needed more than these.'

She turned away from him abruptly, hurried across the dance floor, down the long, massive staircase to
the cloakroom. She took her coat from the hat-check girl, put a quarter on the thick white saucer on the shelf. As she went out the door, she thought, I should have left the earrings with the girl, she probably needs them as badly as I do.

The Casino's doorman, resplendent in his dark red uniform, paused with his hand on a taxi-door and looked after her as she walked toward Seventh Avenue. He thought the long black skirt made an angry sound as she moved swiftly toward the corner.

She was holding the earring box so tightly that she could feel the cardboard give a little, and she squeezed it harder. She tried not to think, to keep the deep anger that boiled up in her under control. There wasn't any reason for her to be angry with Boots Smith and Junto. She was to blame.

Yet she could feel a hard, tight knot of anger and hate forming within her as she walked along. She decided to walk home, hoping that the anger would evaporate on the way. She moved in long, swift strides. There was a hard sound to her heels clicking against the sidewalk and she tried to make it louder. Hard, hard, hard. That was the only way to be—so hard that nothing, the street, the house, the people—nothing would ever be able to touch her.

Down one block and then the next—135th, 134th, 133d, 131d, 131st. Slowly she began to reach for some conclusion, some philosophy with which to rebuild her shattered hopes. The world hadn't collapsed about her. She hadn't been buried under brick and rubble, falling plaster and caved-in sidewalks. Yet that was how she had felt listening to Boots.

The trouble was with her. She had built up a fantastic
structure made from the soft, nebulous, cloudy stuff of dreams. There hadn't been a solid, practical brick in it, not even a foundation. She had built it up of air and vapor and moved right in. So of course it had collapsed. It had never existed anywhere but in her own mind.

She might as well face the fact that she would have to go on living in that same street. She didn't have enough money to pay a month's rent in advance on another apartment and hire a moving-man. Even if she had the necessary funds, any apartment she moved into would be equally as undesirable as the one she moved out of. Except, of course, at a new address she wouldn't find Mrs. Hedges and the Super. No, but there would be other people who wouldn't differ too greatly from them. This was as good a time and place as any other for her to get accustomed to the idea of remaining there.