The Street (37 page)

‘She don't either,' Bub said indignantly. ‘And you stop talking about her.'

‘Yah! Who's going to make? Your mother's a whore. Your mother's a whore.'

Bub doubled up his fist and reached for and found the boy's nose.

‘Why, you—' The boy aimed a blow at Bub—a blow that slanted off as Bub ducked. Gray Cap pushed close against him, then knocked him off balance so that he went sprawling backward on the
pavement. Bub got up and the boy hit him squarely on the nose. His nose started to bleed.

The others closed in, forming a tight knot around him, their hands reaching, ready to explore his pockets. Gray Cap spied Mrs. Hedges sitting in the window imperturbably watching the proceedings. He was so delighted with the thought of this young and tender victim ready for the plucking that he yelled out, ‘Yah! You're a whore, too!'

‘You, Charlie Moore'—Mrs. Hedges leaned out of her window. ‘Leave that boy alone.'

Their faces turned toward the window—sullen, secret, hating. Their hands were still extended toward Bub, reaching for him.

Gray Cap glared at her without replying.

None of them moved. ‘You heard me, you little bastards,' she said in her rich, pleasant voice. ‘You leave that boy alone. Or I'll come out there and make you.'

‘Aw, nuts.' Gray Cap's hands went down to his sides. The boys backed off slowly, turned toward the street, staying close together as they went.

Gray Cap was the last to leave. He turned to Bub. ‘Get other people to fight for you, huh? I'll fix you. I'll catch you coming home from school and I'll fix you good.'

‘No, you won't neither, Charlie Moore. That boy come home all messed up and I'll know you done it. Don't you fool with me.'

He backed away from her hard eyes. ‘Aw, his mother's a whore and so are you,' he muttered. It was a mere shred of defiance, and he didn't say it very loudly, but he had to say it because the gang
was standing at the curb. Their hands were in their pockets as they stared up the street in apparent indifference, but he knew they were listening, because it showed up in every line of their lounging bodies.

‘You go on outta this block, Charlie Moore.' Mrs. Hedges' rich, pleasant voice carried well beyond the curb. ‘And don't you walk through here no more'n you have to.'

Mrs. Hedges remained at the window, her arms folded on the sill. She and Bub looked at each other for a long moment. They appeared to be holding a silent conversation—acknowledging their pain, commiserating with each other, and then agreeing to dismiss the incident from their minds, to forget it as though it had never occurred. The boy looked very small in contrast to the woman's enormous bulk. His nose was dripping blood—scarlet against the dark brown of his skin. He was shivering as though he was cold.

Finally their eyes shifted as though some common impulse prompted them to call a halt to this strange communion. Mrs. Hedges concentrated on the street. Bub went into the apartment house, his nose blowing bubbles of blood.

He was afraid. He examined his fear, standing in the hall. It was as though something had hold of him and refused to let go; and whatever it was set him to trembling. He decided it was because he had been lying and fighting all in one day. Yet he couldn't have avoided the fight. He couldn't let anyone talk about his mother like that.

He rapped on the cellar door under the stairs. He was still shaking with fear and excitement. The
slow, heavy tread of the Super coming up the stairs sounded far away—menacing, frightening. When the Super opened the door, he followed him down the steep, old stairs to the basement in silence.

When they reached the bottom step, he began to feel better. He always delivered the letters to Supe down here. The fire was friendly, warm. The pipes that ran overhead with their accumulation of grime, the light bulbs in metal cages, the piles of coal—shiny black in the dim light—even the dusty smell of the basement, turned it into a kind of robbers' den.

It was a mysterious place and yet somehow friendly. The shadowed corners, the rows of garbage cans near the door that led to the areaway gaping wide and empty, the thick hempen ropes of the dumb-waiter, helped make it strange, secret, exciting. Those long brown ropes that held the dumb-waiter offered a way of escape if sudden flight became necessary. He could almost see himself going up, hand over hand, up and up, the stout ropes.

There was so much space down here, too. As he looked at the small dusty windows just visible in the concrete walls, at the big pillars that held the house up, he forgot about his bloody nose. The sudden sharp pain of hearing his mother talked about while the other boys laughed slowly left him. Only the memory of the horrid-sounding words that had come from Gray Cap's hard, wide mouth stayed with him.

This was real. The other was a bad dream. Going upstairs after school to a silent, empty house wasn't real either. This was the reality. This great, warm, open space was where he really belonged. Supe was captain of the detectives and he, Bub, was his most
valued henchman. At the thought, the memory of Gray Cap's jeering eyes and of the hard, young bodies pressed suffocatingly close to his slipped entirely away.

He lifted his hand to his forehead in salute. ‘Here you are, Captain.' He pulled the wadded-up letters from his pockets.

The Super held them lightly in his great, work-worn hands. ‘I'll turn 'em over to the 'thorities tomorrow.' He looked at Bub curiously. ‘You been in a fight?' he asked.

Bub wiped his nose on his jacket sleeve. ‘Sure,' he said. ‘But I won. The other guy was all messed up. Two black eyes. And he lost a tooth. Right in the front.'

‘Good,' Jones said. And thought they oughtta killed the little bastard.

‘Supe,' Bub said, ‘oughtn't those letters that ain't the right ones—oughtn't those others be put back?'

‘Yeah,' Jones nodded in agreement. ‘The other fellows put 'em back.'

‘Oh,' he said, relief in his voice. And then eagerly, ‘Have they caught any of the crooks yet?'

‘No. But they will. It takes a little time. But don't you worry none about it. They'll catch 'em all right.'

‘I guess I'll do a little more work, Captain,' he said. Mom wouldn't be home for a long time yet. The street was better than that clammy silence upstairs. And this time he would keep a sharp eye out for Gray Cap and his gang. He wouldn't walk right into the middle of them like he did just now.

‘That's good,' Jones said. ‘The more you work, the sooner the cops'll catch the crooks.'

MIN came out of the apartment house with a brown-paper bag hugged tight under her arm. It contained her work clothes—a faded house dress and a pair of old shoes, the leather worn and soft and shaped to her bunions. She paused before she reached the street to look up at the sky. It was the color of lead—gray, sullen, lowering. Wind clouds of a darker gray scudded across it. She frowned. It was going to rain or snow; probably snow, because the air was cold and the wind blowing through the street smelt of snow.

The street was wrapped in silence. It was dark. The houses across the way were barely visible. Even the concrete sidewalk under her feet was recognizable as such only there where she was standing. By now she ought to be used to this early morning darkness,
only she wasn't. It made her uneasy inside, and she kept turning her head, listening for sounds and peering across at the silent houses while she shifted the brown-paper bag from one arm to the other. It was the overcast sky and the threat of snow in the air that made her feel so queer.

Last winter there had been more mornings when the sky was a clear, deep blue and the sun spread a pink glow over the street. She had been filled with content then because she was free from the burden of having to pay rent and she was saving money to get her false teeth and getting little things to make Jones' apartment cozier and more homey.

She looked at the gloomy gray of the sky, at the dark bulge of the buildings, at the strip of sidewalk in front of her, and she saw the whole relentless succession of bitter days that had made this the longest, dreariest winter she had ever known. And Jones was the cause of it. She was used to going to work in the early morning dark, to coming home in the black of winter evenings; used to getting only brief and occasional glimpses of the sun when she made hurried purchases for Mis' Crane, and she had never minded it or thought very much about it until Jones changed so.

The change in him had transformed the apartment into a grim, unpleasant place. His constant anger, his sullen silence, filled the small rooms until they were like the inside of an oven—a small completely enclosed place where no light ever penetrated. It had been like that for weeks now, and she didn't think she could bear it much longer.

Things had only been nice that time he had the headache. He had talked to her all evening and
come to stand close to her while she washed the dishes and he wiped them, and then later on for the first time he asked her to do something for him.

When she went to get the key made for him, a happy feeling kept bubbling up inside her. She waited impatiently while the man fiddled with the metal that would eventually come out of his machine as a key, for she had been certain that Jones would move back to the bedroom that same night, would once again sleep beside her.

That was another thing. Though the apartment had grown smaller, the bed had grown larger; night after night it increased in size while she lay in the middle of it—alone. It wasn't right for a woman to be sleeping by herself night after night like that; it wasn't natural for a bed to stretch vast and empty around all sides of her.

But when she came back with the key, he said his headache was too bad, that he'd stay outside in the living room. The next evening she had hurried home from work, looking forward to a repetition of the pleasant evening they spent together the night before, and he had acted so crazy mad that she stayed in the bedroom with the door closed, so she wouldn't see him and wouldn't hear him. But the hoarse wildness of his voice came through the closed door in a furious, awful cursing that went on and on.

The sound of his own voice seemed to increase his fury, and as the minutes dragged by, his raging grew until she thought he would explode with it. She sat down on the bed close under the cross and put her hand in the pocket where she kept the protection powder the Prophet gave her.

Maybe she should go see the Prophet again. No. He had done all he could. He kept her from being put out, and Jones still wouldn't try to put her out, but she didn't want to stay any more.

Her eyes blinked at the thought. Her mind backed away from it and then approached it again—slowly. Yes, that was right. She didn't want to stay with him any more. Strange as it seemed, it was true. And it just went to show how a good-looking woman could upset and change the lives of people she didn't even know. Because if Jones hadn't seen that Mis' Johnson, she, Min, would have been content to stay here forever. As it was—and this time she acknowledged the thought, explored it boldly—as it was, she was going somewhere else to live.

Jones had never been the same after Mis' Johnson moved in, and he got worse after that night he tried to pull her down in the cellar; got so bad, in fact, that living with him was like being shut up with an animal—a sick, crazy animal.

Worst of all, he never looked at her any more. She could have stood his silence because she was used to it; could even perhaps have grown more or less accustomed to the rage that forever burned inside him, but his refusal ever to look in her direction stabbed at her pride and filled her with shame. It was as though he was forever telling her that she was so hideous, so ugly, that he couldn't bear to let his eyes fall upon her, so they slid past her, around her, never pausing really to see her. It was more than a body could be expected to stand.

Yes, she would move somewhere else. It wouldn't be on this street and she wasn't going to tell him that
she was going. She took a final look at the sky. She would try to get her things under cover in some other part of town before the snow started. Mis' Hedges would get a pushcart man for her. She glanced at the street. It wasn't somehow a very good place to live, for the women had too much trouble, almost as though the street itself bred the trouble. She went to stand under Mrs. Hedges' window.

The window was open, and though she couldn't see her, she knew she must be close by, probably drinking her morning coffee. ‘Mis' Hedges,' she called.

‘You on your way to work, dearie?' Mrs. Hedges' bandanna appeared at the window suddenly.

‘Well, not exactly'—Min hesitated. She didn't want Mis' Hedges to know she was moving until she was all packed up and ready to go. ‘I ain't feeling so well today and I thought I'd stay in and do a little work ‘round the house. I was wondering if you saw a pushcart moving man go past if you'd stop him and send him in to me.'

‘You movin', dearie?'

‘Well, yes and no. I got some things I want moved somewhere else, but I haven't got my mind full made up yet about me actually moving.'

Mrs. Hedges nodded. 'Bout what time you want him, dearie?'

Jones had gone out of the apartment wearing his paint-splashed overalls early this morning, so he was probably painting upstairs somewhere and wouldn't come back down until around twelve o'clock or so, and the man could load her things on the cart in a few minutes. It wouldn't take her very long to get
them together, so by nine o'clock she should be gone.

‘Tell him 'bout eleven,' she said, and was startled because her mouth seemed to know what she should do before her mind knew. She hadn't thought about it before, but she needed to sit down in the apartment and really decide that she was going to get out, for it never paid to do things in a hurry. At the end of an hour or two, she would have her mind full made up, and she'd never regret leaving, because she would know it was the only thing she could have done under the circumstances. Queer how her mouth had known this without any prompting from her mind.