Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (39 page)

“That stuff,” Tremont said, “suckin’ us into the lowdown—coon funny, coon foolish, wind him up and he smile, he shuffle. When I was a kid I said nothin’ ever gonna make me do that. But it made Jim somebody. He always said the
Barber
was a new thing in colored theater. Mr. Dudley played the barber who dreams he wants to shave the president in the White House and then he gets to do it, even though it’s just a dream. And Big Jim said to me, ‘Havin’ a story to go with the ragtime and the cakewalk, that was a different kind of show. We made a little bit of history and we got on Broadway and pretty soon a lot of colored shows had stories and they quit doin’ the old minstrel stuff.’”

“I used to be a barber,” George said. “I shaved the Mayor.”

“The Mayor,” Tremont said. “Big Jim knew all the Mayors, all the politicians. He was the most famous black man in this town, flush and connected, ask Jim and he’ll fix it, if you’re on his side. Hot time in the old town tonight, if Jim says so, and he never had no shame, other people had shame. Jim sang ‘Shine’ so much it got in my brain and now it don’t matter what it means. Means Big Jim to me.”

“Politics,” Trixie said. “Tremont, why you foolin’ with that five-dollar vote? If you needed money you shoulda voted twice and got two fives, not give it back. You ain’t cut out for politics.”

“Never could get into it like Big Jim,” Tremont said. “He got me two, three city jobs but those paychecks wasn’t enough to buy a pair of shoes.”

So Tremont worked his own way, shoveling coal in a South End steam laundry, warehouse helper, short order cook in Chloe’s diner. At night he dressed up, a dude like Big Jim, and played in the Skin game that Rabbit ran in the basement of his pool room on Madison Avenue, a lucky player, Tremont. After a while Rabbit hired him to play for the house and that was very fine until too many players lost too much too fast, fastest card game there is, and Patsy McCall sent the cops in—no more Skin in Albany. Small loss for Tremont. His hand and his eye, they were real quick, but he wasn’t cut out to be a hustler any more than he was cut out for politics. Something direct about Tremont. He never understood it but it kept him straight. He got to be a broiler man in a new French restaurant, okay money.

Big Jim closed his club in the late ’40s, gettin’ old. Also nightclubs were dying from the cabaret tax and everybody was stayin’ home to watch TV. Jim’s wife, Cora, who taught in a colored grammar school, never liked The Gut, so Jim bought a house in the West End of the city, miles from The Gut, but two days before they were going to move in somebody torched it, and Cora went into a depression. Patsy came to see Jim after the arson and gave him a house on Arbor Hill for Cora. It was in tip-top shape and down the block from the Hawkins family, quite a few coloreds up there by now. Jim didn’t own it but he never paid rent or taxes and he spent his last years there with Cora and he needed her. He went flooey at the end, told people he could fly and showed how he did it, wore a watch cap, arms tight to his side like doing a sailor dive. When it rained he took credit for moving the clouds because the flowers kept saying how dry they were.

When Tremont came home from Korea he moved into the Dongan Avenue house and when he married Mary he moved her in too and they had a few good years until Big Jim passed and then Cora went away too, and one day Tremont got a tax bill in the mail. He went to the ward leader and told them who he was, and about Jim, and the ward leader said that’s right, Big Jim had a free ride, but he’s dead. Pay your taxes, Tremont, which he did for a while and then couldn’t, so long, house. Things went like that, jobs, then no jobs, and he and Mary moved someplace else, two rooms. Tremont found Peanut and brought him home from the vacant lot and Mary sewed good for uptown women with money and Tremont drove a truck for a new laundry, so they both had an income and they hung in there and things weren’t that bad. But it slid downhill and there was wine to cool the slide. Mary slid faster than Tremont, who lost his job driving the truck when the Teamsters organized the laundry and wouldn’t let him into the union. He had to go on welfare when Mary got sick and he kept getting busted for drink and they were living in a rat hole and life started to piss Tremont off.

He couldn’t steal and wouldn’t hustle and he got so desperate in the shithouse they were living in that he said a prayer to Jesus, “Dear Jesus, please don’t let me be found dead in this place, and don’t let me ever be taken in by front men or front women.” Those front men never took in Tremont’s daddy, who was hip. So Tremont decided from now on he would be new: I’m gonna do somethin’ that isn’t what somebody says I’m supposed to do. I’m gonna do somethin’ I want to do, or think I want to do, or don’t know I want to do but I’m gonna do it. Nobody said I hadda walk on Roy’s picket line or hang with the Brothers or go to Claudia’s and be a poll watcher or take five and give it back. But sometimes you’re ready for a little politics even if you don’t know you’re ready for it.

Nobody told Tremont to take that gun and go shoot target and then shoot those bums beatin’ on Rosie. Zuki just give him the gun and says we’re gonna have fun, scare a few people. But then he says to Tremont, we oughta shoot the Mayor.

We?

Yes, you.

Whoa, says Tremont, I don’t do what somebody says I oughta do, and when he took a long look he saw clear that Zuki was a front man. And Tremont had already took money and a gun from him. What the hell is wrong with you, Tremont? He started to drink again, nonstop, and when he got that pain he went down to Dongan Avenue and flopped on the stoop of his father’s old house that he couldn’t get into anymore and stayed there till Quinn and the Bish come by, and he told them about the gun and the Mayor.

Trixie tried to faint from shock but it wasn’t in her repertoire.

“Shoot the Mayor, Tremont? Shoot the Mayor?”

Tremont poured himself a shot of Pinch and held up the bottle. “I know you like the Mayor, Trix. Don’t you send him two cases of this stuff every Easter and Christmas? Seems I heard you say that.”

“The Mayor?” George said, “Is that who you want to shoot, Tremont?”

“Don’t wanna shoot the Mayor, George. Some fella said I should but I don’t think so.”

“Fella named Zangara shot Mayor Cermak of Chicago,” George said. “He was aiming at FDR but he missed. He was an Italian with stomach trouble and he lost two hundred at the dog races. They gave him eighty years but when Mayor Cermak died they sizzled him in Old Sparky.”

“Do the police know about the gun, Tremont?” Trixie asked.

“They might. It’s gettin’ around.”

“Then you gotta get outa here right now. I don’t want no part of this. No way I can explain you away if they come lookin’. And Rose, you gotta find your way home. What about that bleedin’? You bandage it up?”

“I can’t go out there yet,” Rosie said. “Gimme a little while.”

Matt had come back and was listening. “All we need is twenty minutes, Trixie. The car is coming.”

Trixie stood up. “Take ten and go down the back stairs and wait. Don’t let Tremont out front with that gun.”

“You got room for one more in that car?” Rosie asked.

“Sure,” Matt said. “It’ll be a squeeze.”

“You leave them be, Rose,” Trixie said. “You done enough. You just sit a while.”

Vivian had been studying the parlor, the mauve drapes, the wallpaper with the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe, the Maja painting over the mantel, the soft, indirect lighting, the oriental rug; and Trixie herself with those green crescent earrings and six bracelets and the long gown Vivian now sees is silk, and her lovely cleavage that was there but not overly, and her legs so elegant in those tall, black heels. Over sixty, must be, but so classy, so sexy. Maybe Vivian could take lessons.

“Miss Trixie,” Vivian said.

“Just Trixie,” Trixie said.

“Trixie. I admire your furnishings and the way you dress. I’ve never been in a house like this and I wonder if I might see the rest. I don’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy.”

“Not much privacy here, honey. Most of it’s out in the open.”

They went out of the parlor and Trixie said, “That’s a bedroom. We got nine of ’em . . . and the wallpaper, it’s French, embossed . . .” and her voice trailed off as they walked down the hall.

“You’re old friends with Trixie,” Matt said to Tremont.

“Years. But I never sat in this room till right now. White dudes only down here. What the black man wants is to hug and kiss the girls, stay all night. The white man wants to get in and out and go home.”

“Black man’s always welcome in my parlor, you know all about that, Tremont,” Rosie said.

“That’s right I know it, Rose,” Tremont said.

“You should put that gun away,” Matt said, and Tremont broke down the AR-15 and counted the remaining rounds in the magazine, twelve gone out of thirty. He packed the gun in its case and dropped it into the sack.

“One for the road,” Tremont said, and Matt poured him a shot, took a Stanwix for himself and passed a bottle to George. “Whose car’s comin’ to get us, Bish?”

“Priest from Siena, a buddy of mine. He borrowed a student’s car.”

“Where we goin’?”

“I thought I knew until you turned into the Lone Ranger. Someplace they won’t shoot you on sight. I tried to reach Quinn to ask him about lawyers for you but he’s on the street, probably going to the protest meeting.”

“What size shoe you got, Bish?”

“Eleven, why?”

“I wanna borrow your shoes. They know I’m wearin’ these two-tones. Everybody know my two-tones and they be lookin’ for ’em.”

“What size are your two-tones?”

“Ten, but they been ten for a whole lotta years.”

Matt gave Tremont his loafers, tried on a two-tone and made it, but with laces loose.

“I be slippin’ around in these,” Tremont said, and he walked a few steps. “Holy boots. St. Francis, here come Tremont steppin’ out.”

“Now they’re gonna shoot at me,” Matt said, and he raised his right foot and shook it for display.

“I got shoes like that,” George said. “Black and white, and brown and tan. And I got a pair of black and gray, dyed the toes black myself.”

“You a dude, Georgie,” Tremont said.

“Drink up, gents. We’ve got to move,” Matt said. And he went to collect Vivian, who was talking with two light-skinned prostitutes in panties and transparent blouses. Vivian was asking how they liked their jobs and saying how difficult it must be to go with total strangers.

“We make friends pretty quick,” one girl said.

Matt gave Trixie the exit gesture, gave Rosie a nod, and went with Vivian back to George and Tremont who were singing,

“I’m gonna dance off both of my shoes,
When they play those Jelly Roll Blues . . .”

Matt ushered them all down the back stairs to an alley that led to Franklin Street. Tremont picked up his gun and put a bottle of Stanwix in his coat pocket. Matt left the three of them standing in shadows on the corner and said he’d come back with the car. He walked on Franklin toward Bleecker and disappeared down the narrow, unlighted street.

“It’s so dark,” Vivian said. “Are you having a good time, George?”

“Life is just a bowl of cherries,” George said, and he put his arm around her.

“I haven’t had this much fun in years,” she said, and she gave George a long, soft kiss. Then she remembered Tremont and turned to give him a smile of chagrin at being caught kissing, but Tremont wasn’t there, and the alley was very dark.

Nick Brady, the Siena priest Matt was closest to, taught Tacitus and Virgil and booked horses ($2 limit) in class for his students, borrowed a car from the student who had led the campus protest against Matt’s silencing (of course take it, I’d do anything for Father Matt) and found Matt half a block from Trixie’s. Martin Daugherty, Matt’s father, was in the passenger seat, two canes between his knees. He looked like an old man but with young eyes. He squinted at his son.

“The sonsabitches kicked me out,” Martin said. “I can’t believe Patsy McCall would do this, but I know he could. But I can’t believe it.”

“I got the letter two days ago,” Matt said. “I told them I’d get you tomorrow.”

“They couldn’t wait. They put me out in the hallway with my valise. I had no money for a taxi.”

“A nurse called the friary twice looking for you,” Nick Brady said to Matt. “They wanted you to pick him up this afternoon. I took the second call tonight but I couldn’t reach you, so when I got the car I went out myself.”

“The bastards,” Matt said. “They did this to get back at me.”

“I know,” Martin said, “and I’m proud of you, son. You’ve done more for the church than Pope Paul. You’ve redeemed the goddamned priesthood.”

“What about you? How’ve you been feeling?”

“I sleep a lot. I’m tired but I’m not sick. I’m just old.”

“You’re no older than you were five years ago.”

“I’m older than most oak trees.”

“How are you walking these days?”

“I walk like that actor with rubber legs. Leon Errol. But I’m all right with the canes.”

“Did you have dinner? Did they feed you?”