Trick Baby (10 page)

She'd probably be thrilled to meet and to advise her nephew she'd never seen. Her girlhood hang-up on the color thing was most likely now a dim, humorous memory. After all, she was now at least in her late forties. She shouldn't have any color regrets.
With her dark brown skin, she had done better in life than my near-white mother.

It took a while to scan through all the listed Grigsby's. There was no Pearl Grigsby in the book. I'd have to pay her a personal call. I went back to the apartment and dressed. On my way out, the whore across the hall stuck her head through her open door.

She whispered, “Come in here, Johnny, quick.”

I went in. She shut the door. She was wearing a pair of transparent lavender panties. Her withered udders were deformed by a navy-blue network of cable veins. A ragged mound of frizzly gray hair jutted against the crotch lavender. I wondered how she made a living. Perhaps all her tricks were blind men.

I stood fidgeting, looking down into her yellow gargoyle face. She patted her palms against my chest. She said, “Johnny, the district cops was here looking for you. I guess they got questions about your mother. Johnny, those bastards ain't no good. After they grill you, they could take you in to the juvenile people. You're a minor with no support or family in Chicago.

“Johnny, Phala ain't coming back for a long time, if at all. I got an idea for you. I could look out for you. I'd hide you here. How about it, honey-long-legs?”

I backed away toward the door and opened it. I said, “Sure, beautiful, it's a fine idea. I'll be right back after I go out to see Phala.”

I went across the hall and got my painting kit. I took my pajamas off and put on a tan slack suit. I went out the back door. I walked to South Park and Oakwood Boulevard. I took a jitney cab for a dime to Garfield Boulevard. I walked west to Calumet. I went into the foyer of Pearl's building.

I pushed the manager's bell on a lettered panel. A release buzzer for the inner front door sounded. I twisted the doorknob and stepped through it into the ground-floor hallway. I heard a hinge squeak to my right. I looked.

A mountainous bulk filled the doorway. It was a dark brown-skinned
woman in a peach-colored housecoat. Well, at least partly in it. The front of her nightgowned belly poked through the front gap in it like a midget blimp, half-hangared.

I said, “Good morning. I'm trying to get in touch with Miss Pearl Grigsby. Could you help me?”

The Saint Bernard jowls quivered. The pea-sized eyes flickered malevolently. A bizarre doll-hand stroked across the scraggly mop of dyed-red hair. The tiny mouth opened and finked on a decayed jumble of uneven teeth.

She said, “I'm Pearl. Who the hell are you?”

She had the sweetest softest voice I'd ever heard. It was hard to believe it came out of her.

She said, “Oh yeah, I heard about you. Come in.”

She dredged herself aside. I stepped into her apartment. She had a severe sanitation problem. I held my breath when I passed her. She smelled like a bitch-dog's afterbirth. I could sympathize with her. She probably found it impossible to reach her disaster areas.

Her apartment was cluttered with gaudy fixtures and furniture. I sat in a shocking-pink chair in the living room, near a window looking out on the street. She sat on a matching sofa next to me.

She said, “Damn if you don't look like a peckerwood. How is Phala? Did she send you?”

I said, “She's in terrible trouble. She's out of her mind at County Hospital. I was able to find you because she mentioned your building here a long time ago.”

She shrugged and said, “No wonder, them freakish peckerwoods would drive anybody crazy.”

I said, “No, it isn't like that. I think she was raped by a bunch of niggers last night. I don't know what to do. What would you do?”

She said, “You're full of shitty baloney. Who the hell would have to rape Phala? She'd gap her legs open for any bum. All he'd need to do was bullshit her that she was beautiful. She thinks she's the prettiest woman walking the earth.

“And listen, don't use the word nigger in my house. It's like I'm letting a peckerwood get away with it. I would do what I've been doing, and that's forgetting she was ever born.”

She was hurting me badly, and she was doing it in that same soft, syrupy voice. I fought for control.

I said, “Aunt Pearl, you're all wrong about her. And from what I know you've always been wrong. Don't you feel anything for your only sister?”

She said, “I knew that dizzy bitch before you were born. You ain't got the nerve, I hope, to sit in my house and preach to me.

“She ain't never had nothing. She's been poor as Lazarus all her life. That color-struck fool could have had herself a black doctor and even a lawyer. But no, she had to fuck that tramp peckerwood father of yours.

“Hell no, I don't feel a goddamn thing. She's found out now that light skin and white folks' hair ain't all of it. I'm black, fat and ugly, but I amount to something.”

I checked a murderous impulse to split her skull with a heavy lamp on a table beside me.

She stopped to catch her breath. I got up and walked to the door. I knew I was going to cry. I had to get out of there fast. I couldn't let her see my tears.

I said over my shoulder, “Pearl, you are a big funky liar.”

I heard her grunting up from her sofa as I went into the hall and slammed her door. I went through the foyer to the street. I walked to Garfield. I heard a sliding sound behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder. Pearl's black hog body was thrust across the windowsill of the open window.

She screamed, “Don't you ever put a foot on my property again, you white nigger sonuvabitch.”

I had stopped crying when I noticed the elevated train station on Garfield. I paid a fare and walked up the stairway to the train platform.

I got on a Howard Street train going to the Loop. All the rest of the day, I rode from South to North. I'd get off at one end of the line, then cross over to the opposite platform going in the other direction.

I couldn't go home. The old whore was probably right about those juvenile authorities. At nine
P.M
. I got off at Forty-third Street on the Southside. I went into a chili joint for a bowl of chili.

I sat at the counter near the front window. Five black teenagers were at a table in the rear. The old Mexican behind the counter kept stealing frightened glances at them.

I was eating my chili when a young brown-skinned girl in shorts came in. She stood next to my stool and ordered chili to go. She reached down to the paper-napkin holder beside me. She said. “Excuse me, will you push that bowl of pepper to me?”

I said, “Yes.”

I pushed the red dried pepper across the counter to her. She dumped a load of it into a napkin and put it into her purse.

Then she said, “Say, don't you live around Thirty-Ninth and Cottage?”

I said, “I did until a short time ago. Why?”

She said, “Oh, nothing. I just remembered seeing you around there.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I half-turned on the stool and looked up. One of the loud-mouth teenagers was standing behind me, glaring down at me.

He said, “Man, why you fucking with this girl? You got pussies in you own neighborhood.”

The girl cut in. She said, “He didn't hit on me.”

He said, “You dumb bitch, get on the dummy.”

I said, “Hell, buddy, what's the matter? You high or something? This is a free country. I got a right to—”

The punk sucker-punched me hard in my right cheek bone.

The room reeled. I fell to the floor next to the counter. I held my hand against my cheek and looked up at him.

He reached into his pocket. I heard a metallic click and saw the
wicked gleam of the switchblade in his hand. His eyes were spinning in his head. He bent over toward me.

I rolled away toward the door and threw my feet up to keep him from gutting me. The door opened and a pair of khakied legs stepped across me. It was a young soldier. He was between me and the shiv man.

The soldier looked down curiously at me. I scooted backward through the closing door to the sidewalk. I got to my feet and raced down Forty-third Street.

I heard pounding feet behind me. I looked back. The whole pack was running toward me.

I hollered as loud as I could, “I'm a Nigger! I'm a Nigger! I'm a Nigger!”

I turned into the el station. I threw a handful of coins across the fare collector's counter. I raced up the stairs to the train platform. A Jackson Park el was closing its doors. I slipped through the closing slit. I fell into a cushion and looked down on Forty-third Street.

The pack was down there looking up at me. Three of them waved knives that glinted under a street lamp. I settled back in the seat, closed my eyes and started to figure my next move.

The train had stopped at Fifty-first Street. I realized that I didn't have the leatherette case filled with my paintings and art materials. I had left it on the floor beneath the stool in the chili joint. I wouldn't have gone back for it if it had been stuffed with Rembrandts.

A pair of hippy-dippys came into the car. They had two fancy brown-skinned broads with them. They sat down in the two seats directly in front of me.

The train pulled out toward Garfield Boulevard. The young broad with the hippy just in front of me turned her head back toward me. She smiled hotly at me. My eyes scrambled to the coach ceiling. I felt the throbbing lump on my cheekbone. I escaped down the aisle to another seat.

An elderly black woman was nodding next to the window. Her
purse was on the seat between us. I eased my right hand across my thigh to the side of the purse. My fingers touched the heavy brass clasp on the top of it.

I looked at the wrinkled side of her face as I slowly worked her purse open. My fingers were suddenly frozen numb. I jerked my hand away to my lap. I couldn't rob her. The old lady's coarse kindly face had reminded me of sweet Grandma Annie.

The train stopped at Garfield Boulevard. In the distance I saw Aunt Pearl's building. I wondered if she had felt any regret after she had driven me away. I had an urge to go back to see if she had had a change of heart. Then I remembered that sweetly poisonous voice. I just couldn't understand, how could she have been so cruel? Phala and I needed her so much.

I rode to the Sixty-third Street stop. I got off and went to the opposite platform. I took a Howard Street train going toward the Loop.

I tried to think of someone who could advise me about Phala. There was no one. I felt lost, lonely and desperate.

I decided to get off at Forty-seventh Street. I wasn't due to report for work at the theatre until three o'clock. I wasn't excited about going to work in that darkness, the way I was feeling and all.

I walked east down Forty-seventh Street. I didn't know what to do about Phala or anything else. I was friendless and homeless in the cold heart of Chicago's Southside.

I got to Calumet Avenue. I walked around the corner to a poolroom. A silent crowd stood watching a straight pool game at the front table.

I stood next to a glass cigar case near the door. For almost an hour I watched a slender black man run one rack of balls after another. He controlled the cue ball like he had it on an invisible string.

I turned to an old man standing beside me. He had clucked his praise of the thin wizard's skill. I whispered, “I wish I could shoot pool like that guy. I could sure get rich in a hurry.”

He whispered, “White boy, if wishes were cars, damn fools would
ride. He is one of the best big-buck pool players in the country. I wish he'd play me. But he won't. Since you just wishing, wish for his feet. Them slick dogs of his done made him more dollars than Carter is got pills. That's Bill Bojangles Robinson in the livin' meat.”

The wizard telescoped his stick. He slipped it into a leather case. The crowd moved away.

I said, “Listen, Mister, I'm not a white boy. I'm colored like you. Honest, I'm really colored. My mother is about your color.”

A very black zoot-suited kid strutted and stood in front of us on his way out the door. He ignored me.

He said to the old man beside me, “One Pocket, ain't life a mother-fucker? My old lady must of fucked hundreds of peckerwoods for three bucks a hump.

“Didn't one of them silky-haired, straight-nosed bastards knock her up. Hell no, the blackest, kinkiest-haired, ugliest trick on Thirty-first Street rammed me up her ass.

“Now, Pocket, I ain't hip to a white trick baby so square he's passing for a Nigger. I just ain't never heard of it, Pocket. Shit, a dumb bastard like that oughta' have his ass kicked to the top of his stupid head. And by me.”

I slugged my fist into the side of his jaw. I heard a flat crack like a bat against a baseball. I felt the shuddery shock of it to my elbow. He fell backwards and bounced hard. He lay flat on his back moaning. A snake of mustard vomit wiggled across his cheek.

Through a red haze of fury I went to the wall rack for a cue stick. He had driven me out of my mind with his wise crack about Phala.

I stood over him and raised the lead-loaded butt of the cue stick high over my head. I was going to crush his ugly face into a blob of black jelly. I drew a deep breath for the downward slam.

Then something locked my upraised arms to the sides of my head. I felt myself pulled away from the terrified eyes on the floor.

There wasn't a sound in the crowded poolroom. I half-twisted my head around. It was One Pocket holding me. That Irish in me was
raging. I was screaming, “Let me go! I'm going to murder that signifying sonuvabitch.”

One Pocket had one hell of a time holding me until after the wise apple had struggled to his feet and fled to safety.

I walked through the door and stood on the sidewalk. One Pocket came out and stood beside me. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk. He was sweating and panting like a thirsty pooch. I was ashamed that I had lost my temper.