South Street (20 page)

“Can’t you say three words without—”

“See!” Brown shouted.

“Oh, God, now he’s screaming. Just like a five year old. Look at him gritting his teeth. Ooooh, aren’t we fierce?”

“Shut up,” Brown mumbled.

“Rough, too. He gives orders. I wonder if he can dress himself?”

“Shut up,” Brown said.

“But he
does
tend to repeat himself. I think I liked him better drunk. At least then he’d go to sleep.”

“Will you please shut up?” Brown said.

“Please? He said ‘please.’ Maybe he’ll put his paws up and beg.”

Brown’s hand shot across the chair back and grabbed her wrist. The jelly jar upset and beer ran in a foaming wave across the table. Brown hauled her to her feet, kicking over the chair between them, and squeezed her wrist until a little yelp of pain escaped her throat. Then he let her go, suddenly, and bent over to retrieve his chair. He sat down in it, breathing heavily. She stood looking at him for a while, then took a step toward him, her foot making a soft splashing sound in the beer that had dripped from the table to form an amber pool on the floor. “Adlai?”

“I remember,” Brown said, not looking up at her, “when I would have done my best to kill anyone who touched you like that.” He got up and went to the sink, took the rag that hung over the gooseneck in the rusty drain pipe, wet it. The plumbing gave an agonized screech as he turned the faucet. He went back and knelt by the table near Alicia’s legs and began to wipe up the spilled beer, listening with insane intensity to the slapping sounds made by the wet rag, the small noises of her clothing, and the creak of the chair as she sat down again.

“Adlai?”

“What?”

“I don’t see why you have to do whatever it is you have to do right
here
. It’s so ugly. Why couldn’t we find you some place—”

“No,” Brown said. “I have to do it here. Because …” Brown stopped and looked around at the peeling walls. “I don’t know. There’s something here. It explains something to me.”

She looked at him, nodding her head. “So
that’s
it. A research project. An anthropological study of the natives in their native habitat. Or maybe it’s political science or whatever they’re calling Marx now. You know, a quest for reality in the capital-H heart of the capital-G ghetto with the capital-P people. You can be the capital-PP proletarian poet, only in blackface. Reality and truth and virtue all add up to poverty. That is so
stupid
. …”

“No,” Brown said. “It’s not a research project. And the middle of the ghetto isn’t real. You don’t cut with the side of a knife. Only the edge is real. And this is the edge. One block away is Lombard Street, and the houses cost sixty thousand, and they worry about brownouts cutting down on their air-conditioning. Here it doesn’t even matter what the houses cost because they’re all condemned anyway, and you don’t think about air-conditioning, you half expect they’re gonna cut off the air.”

“But
you
don’t have to be here.
You
don’t have to live here.”

“We
all
live here,” Brown said. “And all the carpets and college degrees in the world won’t do anything but help you forget.”

Alicia looked away. “I don’t think you
want
to forget.”

Brown smiled. “No,” he said, “no, I’d love to forget. Only we don’t get to forget. That’s the one big difference between white folks and black folks: black folks never get to forget. Not for very long, anyway.” Brown looked at her, then turned his gaze back to the wall. They sat in silence.

“Do you still go over to Franklin Field to run?” she said finally.

“What?”

“Franklin Field. Do you go over there to run?”

“Oh,” Brown said. “No. I run on the street. Franklin Field’s too crowded.”

“Even in the summer?”

“Yeah,” Brown said.

“Oh. Well. I guess …” She stood up abruptly. “Thank you for the beer.”

“I spilled most of it.” Brown rose too and went to the sink to wring out the rag.

“I don’t like beer much anyway.”

Brown hung the rag back on the gooseneck and wiped his hands on his tee shirt. He walked to the door and stood awkwardly beside her, rubbing his hands across his chest long after they were dry.

“Adlai?” She reached out, lightly touched his bare arm. He pulled her to him, held her tightly against him, kissed her.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Brown said.

“You want me.”

“It doesn’t matter if I want you. It wouldn’t do any good.”

“If you want me to beg, I’m begging.”

“All right,” Brown said.

“I’ll let you come right back. I promise I won’t try and make you stay.”

Brown looked at her, smiling faintly. “I have a bed here.”

“You want to—here?”

Brown smiled sadly. “I told you it wouldn’t do any good.” He stepped away from her.

Her lips tightened. “You’ll never make it, Adlai. You don’t belong down here. No matter how hard you try, you don’t belong down here and you never will.” She spun away, moving toward the door.

“I don’t belong with you and the cocktail parties and the duplex Cadillacs,” Brown said. “I don’t need all that.”

“You’ll be back,” she said. She pulled the door open and stepped out into the hall.

Leo reached up with his hammy hand and clicked off the TV set, making that mundane action and gesture of total disgust. “Shit,” Leo said. “I’ma open me a bar in Pittsburgh, where leastways they can win some damn ball games.” The row of disgruntled faces which, until the final out, had been crowded in front of the TV set, nodded in agreement. Leo’s strange customer bobbed his head emphatically. Leo poured him another shot of tequila and took payment from the change reposing on the bar. Leo watched in the mirror as the weird customer solemnly sprinkled salt on a wedge of lemon, bit it, and swallowed the tequila. Leo shook his head and rang up the sale.

“You know, Leo,” said the strange customer, “I still have a ticket to the nineteen sixty-four world series.”

“Yeah,” said Leo. “What was they? Eight games in front with ten games to go? An’ then they blow it. Ain’t that a bitch?”

“I’ve been in this town for almost ten years and we haven’t won a thing in all that time.”

“We got pitchin’ problems,” said Leo.

“Yeah. And hitting problems. And fielding problems. And base-running problems. And it’s not just baseball. There isn’t a team in town that wins.”

“Yeah,” said Leo, “things is so bad the only thing they give even odds on is the school-board elections.”

“Even odds?”

“Yeah,” said Leo. “You know. Odds.”

“Oh yes. Of course. Odds.”

“My God,” muttered Leo, moving away in response to a lifted eyebrow. “My God.”

Big Betsy had been sitting in dejection at the far end of the bar, musing on the ravages of time, the inequities of age, and the unendurable perversity of a world in which a man would rather watch a bad ball game than buy drinks for a lady. After one round against the baseball game Big Betsy had failed to answer the bell, and had stayed in her corner contemplating the human condition and nursing her skin milk. But the sudden death of all the frustrated moans that had been roiling around Lightnin’ Ed’s cinderblock walls caused Big Betsy to emerge from her brown study and once again respond to her surroundings. She noticed that Leo was filling orders without annoyance and that the men were no longer crowded in front of the TV set but were ranged out along the bar, and those who had come with women were paying attention to their companions once again. The TV speaker was silent, the screen dark. Big Betsy took in all these data and concluded that the baseball game was over. Clutching her handbag, Big Betsy vacated her stool and marched to the door marked, in block letters,
BROADS
.

Locked in what she preferred to call the ladies’ powder room—a sour-smelling cubicle containing a commode, a dirty washbasin, a roll of toilet paper suspended by a twist of coat-hanger wire from a spike driven partway into the wall, a paper-towel dispenser (empty), a sanitary-napkin dispenser (full), and a wastepaper basket (overflowing), and the inevitable cracked mirror—Big Betsy prepared to fill the power vacuum created by the expiration of the baseball game. While she had conceded the battle she had not given up the war. Behind the door marked
BROADS
Big Betsy prepared her counterattack. Opening her purse, she took out the tools of her trade and laid them out on the flat top of the toilet tank. She meticulously cleaned the sink and set to work with eye make-up, and Murine for her reddened eyes, lipstick—two shades, one darker to de-emphasize the dimension of her dangling underlip—for her mouth, blusher for her sagging jowls. She removed her dentures and scrubbed them vigorously. She checked her fingernail polish and adjusted the black wig that covered the gray wool that topped her head. She examined herself in the mirror and pronounced herself passable. She packed her equipment back into her purse, hiked up her skirt, pulled down her white linen drawers, and sat down on the toilet seat, which strained at its mountings, and micturated with a sound like the firing of a battery of Gatling guns.

Big Betsy emerged into the barroom and advanced on the weird John with a glint of steely determination in her eye. Seeing that the stool next to him was unoccupied, she cut her engines, put her rudder hard over, and dropped anchor. “Hi there,” said Big Betsy. She smiled, tilting her face around to make sure he got a good look at the fake beauty mark that adorned her left cheek.

“Uh, hello,” said the weird John. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Can I do something for you?”

Big Betsy stared at him. She had never liked it when they gave up without a struggle, and she wasn’t used to it either—nobody had given up to Big Betsy without a struggle in at least fifteen years. At least nobody who was both sober and sighted. Big Betsy wasn’t even sure he had given up; it had sounded more like he was propositioning her. Big Betsy’s mind was about to reject that idea as being totally impossible, but her ego rescued it and sent it back for further consideration.

“Huh?” said Big Betsy. The weird John smiled at her. He reached out and picked up the saltshaker, licked the back of his hand, sprinkled on some salt. “Uh, I don’t know,” said Big Betsy, recovering a trace of composure which vanished as soon as the weird John calmly squeezed some lemon over the salt on the back of his hand, licked the mixture off, and downed the contents of a shot glass in one gulp. “Well, you could buy me a drink,” Big Betsy said.

“I,” announced the weird John, “am drinking …” He paused and looked surprised. “Leo,” he called, “what am I drinking?”

Leo turned away from the cash register and peered at him. “Tequila,” Leo told him. “You want another one?”

“Please. Two.”

“Two?”

The weird John nodded toward Big Betsy. “Oh, no,” said Big Betsy, who was quite flattered at what she took as a subtle attempt to erode her defenses, “I’ll have me somethin’ else.”

“You want the usual, Betsy?” Leo inquired, pouring out a fresh slug of tequila.

“Naw,” said Big Betsy, “I’ll have me some gin. I’ma need it.” Leo wordlessly reached for the gin bottle and poured Big Betsy a double shot.

Big Betsy took a large swallow to fortify herself before she turned back to business. She was just in time to watch the weird John pour a little tequila over the salt-and-lemon mixture in the palm of his hand and lick it off. “Are you sure you sposed to do it that way?” said Big Betsy. “I don’t think you sposed to do it that way.”

“I was experimenting,” said the weird John.

“You’re just like the dude was in here the other night,” said Big Betsy. “You both talks funny.”

“How so?” said the weird John.

“My God,” said Big Betsy, grabbing for the gin.

“Mine as well,” said the weird John. He looked at Big Betsy, his gaze piercing. “To be honest, I was not experimenting at all. I just forgot the correct way to do it.”

“That I can believe,” said Big Betsy. “I bet you forgot how you sposed to drink that there whatever it is, too.”

The weird John looked confused. Big Betsy smiled to herself, feeling that once again she was steering the conversation into businesslike channels. She leaned forward, allowing her left mammary to press insistently against the weird John’s arm. The weird John seemed to get the message; he leaned toward her. “You want to know something?” said the weird John.

“Baby, I know it already,” said Big Betsy, “but I’d love to hear you say it.”

The weird John looked around, leaned closer. “I’m on a secret undercover assignment.”

Big Betsy straightened up. “Aw shit! Don’t tell me you’re one a them goddamn cunts from the goddamn vice squad! Well you listen here, you honky-rented asshole, if you think you gonna be haulin’ Betsy off to the pokey you got another think comin’, ’cause I ain’t goin’ nowhere, an’ it’s gonna take a damn sight more than a skinny little shit like you to move me. Now you wanna try an’ haul me in, you go right ahead.” Big Betsy glared at the weird John for a minute, then climbed indignantly off the stool, gathered up her purse.

“Huh?” said the weird John.

“You heard me,” snapped Big Betsy. She shot him a final glare and waddled away, muttering dire threats and swearing to drink skim milk until her welfare check came through.

B
ROTHER FLETCHER SAT BY
the window in his lumpy overstuffed chair, letting the golden morning sunlight warm his throbbing head, holding his Bible in his hands. He was not reading—but it gave him comfort to hold it. The morning air belched over him, already hot and sticky and charged with exhaust fumes. At his elbow was a glass of iced tea, lemoned and sugared, all but stirred by Mrs. Fletcher, who, guessing Brother Fletcher’s mood (if not his condition), had withdrawn, leaving him to his meditations.

Brother Fletcher wished that she had stayed.

He opened the Bible, his hands moving absently over the thin rice-paper pages that rustled softly in the breeze. His eyes picked out a word here and there, and from the glimpses of words whole verses took shape in his mind. But the verses did not blossom, as they usually did, into larger and grander understanding; something cackling in his mind made the verses sound irrelevant.