Underneath some wit had written in red drawing crayon:
Beats Picasso
Pinky studied the old man, took in the battered straw hat, the bulbous red nose, the white stubble of two days’ whiskers, the ragged cuffs of baggy pants and the beat-up shoes with one sole flapping loose showing beneath the signboards. He tabbed him as a bum from Hoboken.
He cut across the traffic lane and approached the old bum.
“Is it true what they say?” he asked, shuffling from one foot to another and acting like a natural son of Uncle Tom. “Ah just come from Mississippi and Ah wants to know is it true.”
The old bum looked up at him from rheumy eyes.
“Is what true, S am?” he said in a whiskey voice.
Pinky licked his purple lips with his big pith tongue. “Is it true all them white women shows theyself mother naked?”
The old bum grinned, exposing a couple of dung-colored snaggleteeth.
“Mother naked!” he croaked. “They ain’t even that. They done shaved off the feathers.”
“Ah sho do wish Ah could see ‘em,” Pithy said.
That gave the bum an idea. He had been down there all morning hustling up trade among the truck drivers and longshoremen, and the barmen wouldn’t even let him enter the bars wearing his sign.
“You hold this sign while I go inside and see a friend and I’ll see what I can do for you,” he promised.
“Ah sho will,” Pithy said, helping the old bum pull the boards up over his head.
The old bum beat it for the nearest bar and disappeared inside. Pinky took off in the opposite direction and turned out of sight at the first corner. Then he stopped and hooked the boards over his head. It was a tight fit and the boards stuck out back and front like some newfangled water wings, but he felt covered. He walked toward Columbus Circle to catch the Broadway subway without any qualms.
He got off at 145th Street and Lenox Avenue. As soon as he came up from the subway kiosk, he took off the sandwich boards. He was in Harlem now and he didn’t need them anymore.
He walked to Eighth Avenue and started to enter a doorway to one side of the Silver Moon Bar.
“
Pst, pst
,” someone called from the adjoining doorway.
He looked around and saw an old colored woman beckoning to him. He went over to see what she wanted.
“Don’t go in there,” she warned him. “They’s two white ‘licemen in there.”
She didn’t know him from Adam’s tomcat, but it was the rigid code of colored people in Harlem to stick together against white cops; they were quick to warn one another when white cops were around, there was no telling who might be wanted.
He looked around for the prowl cr, tensed and ready to take off.
“They’s plainclothes dicks,” she elaborated. “And they snuck up here in that ordinary-looking Ford.”
He gave one look at the parked Ford sedan and took off down Eighth Avenue without waiting to thank her. His real cool brain was thinking up a breeze. He figured the only reason two white dicks could be in that tenement at that particular time was they were looking for the African. That was just what he wanted. The only thing wrong was they were looking for the African too soon. That meant they had got something on the African he didn’t know about.
After covering two blocks he figured it was safe enough to turn into a bar. Then he remembered he didn’t have any money, so he had to keep on down to 13 7th Street where he had a friend who ran a tobacco shop as a front for a numbers drop and a connection where the pushers dropped by and sold teen-age school kids sticks of marijuana and doctored up decks of heroin.
His friend was an old man called Daddy Haddy who had white leprous-looking splotches on his leathery tan skin. It was choking hot in the small, dark, musty shop but Daddy Haddy wore a heavy brown sweater and a black beaver hat pulled down low enough to touch the rims of his black smoked glasses. He looked at Pinky without a sign of recognition.
“What you want, Mac?” he asked suspiciously in a high falsetto voice.
“What’s the matter with you?” Pithy said angrily. “You going blind? Can’t you see I is Pithy?”
Daddy Haddy looked at him through his smoked glasses. “You is ugly as Pithy,” he admitted. “And you got the size for it. But what is you doing in that skin? You fall in some blackberry juice?”
“I dyed myself. The cops is looking for me.”
“Git out of here, then,” Daddy Haddy said in alarm. “You want to get me knocked off?”
“Ain’t nobody seen me come in here, and you seen for yourself that don’t nobody know me,” Pinky argued.
“Well, say what you want and then beat it,” Daddy Haddy conceded grudgingly. “The way that dye is running you ain’t going to be blue for long.”
“All I want you to do is send Wop up to the corner of 145th Street to look out for a African and warn him not to go back home ‘cause the police is looking for him.”
“Umph!” Daddy Haddy grunted. “How he going to know a African from anybody else?”
“This African don’t look like nobody else. He wear a white head rag and a Mother Hubbard dress in four different colors over his pants.”
“What’s he done?”
“He ain’t done nothing. That’s how he dress all the time.”
“I mean done for the police to be looking for him.”
“How I know what he’s done,” Pinky whined irritably. “I just don’t want him to get caught yet.”
“Besides which, Wop is high,” Daddy Haddy said. “He’s so high everything looks like four colors to him and he’s liable to stop some old woman, thinking she’s the African.”
“I thought you was my friend,” Pinky whined.
The old man looked at his purple-dyed face knotting up and gave the matter a second thought.
“Wop!” he shouted.
A coal-black boy, wafer thin, with a long egg-shaped head and slanting eyes, came in from the back room. He wore the white T-shirt, blue jeans and canvas sneakers of any other black boy his age in Harlem. The difference was he had long, straight black hair and there were no whites to his obsidian eyes.
“What you want?” he asked in a gruff, unpleasant voice.
“You tell him,” Daddy Haddy said.
Pinky gave him the picture.
“What if the ‘licemens already got him?” Wop asked.
“Then you hightail it away from there.”
“All right,” Wop said. “Press the skin.”
“I’ll see you tonight at Sister Heavenly’s,” Pinky promised. “If! ain’t there I’ll leave a sawbuck with Uncle Saint.”
“All right, daddy-o,” Wop said. “Don’t make me have to look for you.”
He took a pair of smoked glasses from his blue jeans, fitted them to his head, put both hands into his hip pockets and opened the door with his foot and stepped out into the light.
“Don’t bet too much on him,” Daddy Haddy warned.
“I ain’t,” Pinky said and followed Wop outside.
They went off in opposite directions.
“I know she got it,” Uncle Saint muttered to himself as he dug up the half-pint bottle of nitroglycerin he had buried in the garage. “Trying to look so innocent that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Think she can con old Uncle Saint. Long as I has knowed that double-crossing bitch.”
He muttered to himself as he worked. He was in a driving hurry, but he had to be careful with the stuff. Only five minutes had elapsed since Pinky left the house, but there was no telling when Sister Heavenly would return and he had to have it and gone by then.
“Don’t believe any more she’s going down to see Gus off than I believe in Santa Claus,” he muttered. “The truth ain’t in that lying bitch. She’s just as soon gone down to sell me to the police for some more protection as she is to have gone to fence the stuff, whatever it is.”
The nitroglycerin was in a green glass bottle filled to the tip and closed securely with a rubber stopper to make it airtight. He had buried it there fifteen years before when she had started thinking about getting rid of him because one of her lovers had objected to having him around.
“She going to get rid of me all right,” he muttered. “But she going to pay for twenty-five years of service.”
He had wrapped the bottle in a section of rubber inner tube, binding it with a roll of adhesive tape. The ground had hardened during fifteen years and the bottle seemed to have gone in deeper. He dug at first with a spade, measuring the excavation with a wooden folding ruler. He had buried it two feet deep. When he got down to twenty inches he discarded the spade and began digging with a kitchen spatula. But he had to go another ten inches before he scraped the top of the package and it had been slow work with the spatula. Time was passing. Sweat poured from him like showers of rain. He still wore the ancient chauffeur’s uniform and cap and he felt like he was inside a coke oven.
But now he worked very carefully, scraping the dirt from around the rotten package with a kitchen spoon.
Both the tape and the rubber had disintegrated and came away from the bottle like rotten cork. He went to extreme pains not to touch the bottle with the spoon.
“Wouldn’t that bitch be happy?” he muttered. “Come home and find me gone. Wouldn’t even have to bury me. Just have to fan away the dust.”
Finally the green bottle was uncovered. When he lifted it carefully, inch by inch from its resting place, the top of the rubber stopper fell away, but a thin layer remained covering the nitroglycerin. He held his breath until he straightened it right side up, then he gave a deep sigh.
The loaded shotgun lay on the ground beside him. Holding the bottle of nitroglycerin in his right hand, he reached out with his left hand and picked up the shotgun, then got to his feet like a weight lifter arising with two tons of steel.
He didn’t want the nitroglycerin to get in the sunshine so he held it over his heart beneath his coat. Sweat trickled from the band of his chauffeur’s cap and stung his eyes as he picked his way across the uneven surface of the dried-up garden like a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls.
When he came to the kitchen door, he propped the shotgun against the wall and opened the door with his right hand, making a complete turn to step into the kitchen to be certain of not bumping the edge of the door with the bottle. Inside he eased the door shut and looked about for a place to set the bottle. The kitchen table looked as safe as anywhere. He placed it on the center of the top of the oilcloth cover.
Now he had to go back to the garage for another package containing an electric drill with a 3/8-ińch diamond-pointed bit, a 12-inch length of fuse, and two feet of 1/4-inch rubber tube.
The package was wrapped in a plastic doily and hidden inside of an old tire hanging from the rafters. He had gotten hold of these things eleven years after he had buried the nitroglycerin, during his second serious crisis with Sister Heavenly. That one had resulted from Sister Heavenly’s conclusion that his hanging around was the chief reason she was so unsuccessful in getting a reliable new lover.
He had only left the kitchen for a few minutes, but during his absence the nanny goat had opened the screen door and entered and was in the act of eating the oilcloth table cover. She had eaten a hole several inches deep, pulling the cover toward the edge as she ate. The bottle of nitroglycerin had been moved more than six inches and was perilously nearing the edge, but it still remained upright.
She was just about to take another bite when he cried, “Hah!” She paused and looked at him through her cold yellow eyes, then turned sack to continue eating.
He jerked up the muzzle of the shotgun and aimed it at her head. “Git away from there or I’ll blow your motherraping head off,” he said in a dry, dangerous voice.
Sweat broke out in the palms of his hands, but he didn’t dare shoot.
Slowly the goat turned her head about and looked at him. The goat didn’t know he was scared to shoot. He looked to her like he was going to shoot and she believed him.
Maintaining her dignity, she turned and walked daintily from the kitchen, pushing the door open with her head. And he didn’t dare kick her in the rear.
He moved the bottle of nitroglycerin back to the center of the table and placed the other package beside it. Then he sat on his bunk and pulled out his lockbox, unlocked the big padlock, took out his lamp and spoon, and cooked a shot of straight heroin to calm his nerves. His hands were trembling violently and his mouth was working but no sound was issuing forth.
“Ahhhh!” he moaned as he banged himself straight into the vein at the wrist.
He put away his paraphernalia, locked the box and pushed it beneath the bunk, and sat waiting for the drug to take effect.
“How she got it? What I care?” he started muttering again to himself. “That tricky bitch could steal the cross from under Christ without him ever missing it.” He let out a dry cackling laugh. “But old Uncle Saint going to out-trick her.”
By then his hands had steadied and his head was filled with a sense of omniscience. He felt as though he could make a
four
by two deuces with the first roll of the dice.
He stood up and opened the package, fitted the bit into the electric drill. Holding it in his right hand, he stepped over to the bunk and retrieved his shotgun with his left hand, and went into Sister Heavenly’s bedroom.
He placed the shotgun on the floor in front of the chest of drawers, then unplugged the cord to the bed lamp to plug in the cord to his drill.
The outside lock didn’t give him any trouble. He bored a series of holes around it until the flap fell forward. Then he began drilling a hole into the safe about an inch to the right of the dial. The hard safe-steel didn’t give like butter; it had almost worn the diamond point from the bit before it broke through.
Now came the ticklish part. He inserted the ź-inch rube into the 3/s-inch hole until it struck bottom inside of the door. More than a foot hung out. He cut it off so that only an inch protruded. Then he made a funnel out of a sheet of white writing paper and fitted the small end into the rubber tube.
He went back to the kitchen and picked up the bottle of nitroglycerin and took it into the bedroom. With the end of a safety pin he fished out the thin layer of rubber in the neck of the bottle. With infinite precaution, holding his breath all the while, he emptied the bottle into the funnel, pouring in a thin steady stream. When it was finished he stood the empty bottle on the floor and let out his breath in a long heartfelt sigh.