Strivers Row (47 page)

He had grabbed her roughly, then, on purpose. Pulling her over to him with one arm in his anxiety, pressing his lips crudely up against her face. He had done almost no kissing before with any girl, had only had sex the one time behind the church in Lansing, with Bo Bigbee's girl holding his hat over her face. He wasn't even sure what to do, kissing Laura wetly all over, trying to seek out her lips, to hold her head in his hands.

“Wait, wait—” she tried to tell him, but thinking she was putting him off, he had pressed against her all the harder, pushing his body across the seat and into hers.

She had elbowed her way free—but not to get away, just to make him slow down. Putting her soft hands on his, pulling them down. Still speaking to him in that infinitely soft, tender voice, even as she found his lips and kissed him, opening her mouth to him.

“There—there, baby—like that now. Do you like that now, baby?” Her voice was not quite like anything he had heard from her before, suddenly knowing and adult and passionate. She had kept kissing him, and letting him kiss her. Letting him explore her mouth with his lips and tongue, even encouraging him to kiss her down along the soft indentation of her neck.

At first it had been wonderful. The best sensation he had ever felt, obscuring for the first time he could remember every other thought he had in his head, every fear. He had kissed her even more urgently then, leaning back over her, pressing her down along the leather seat of Jarvis's big borrowed Caddy. Scrambling up over her, his hands groping along her body. Pulling at the buttons on her blouse until she made a little wincing sound, sucking in her breath—and he realized that he was being just as clumsy as he had been out on the dance floor, pressing in just as blindly and stupidly when he didn't know what he was doing.

He had sat back up—pulling himself away from her now. Mortified by the very heft of his body, the sweaty, groping ignorance of his hands. She had tried to pull him back down again. Leaning back against the door of the Caddy, and looking at him through the fading darkness, her face very serious now. Beckoning to him, then reaching down and lifting her blouse lightly over her arms and head, just like that. Reaching back and undoing her bra, sliding it just as effortlessly over her arms, so that she was half naked before him. Those fine, gentle brown slopes of her breasts bared to him now, in the distant lights from the city.

“C'mon,” she told him, her soft voice more sincere, even demanding, than ever now to his ears. “C'mon, baby. I want you to. I do, baby—”

Malcolm was shocked, though no more shocked than he had been at the Roseland. All he could think about was how beautiful and above him she had seemed when he first saw her—in her little pleated skirts, spooning up her ice cream, her back straight and proud. Nothing like what she was now, her face and hair dripping with sweat after dancing him off the floor, her shirt off and her breasts exposed, all but begging him for it. She was nothing like what he had expected, and he was unable to move to her again, to risk any further humiliation. Not willing to even look at her while she pleaded softly with him some more, until she had finally given up and slipped her brassiere and her blouse back on, and let him drive her home through the sedate, empty streets of the Hill. Not even able to look at her when he dropped her off at her grandmother's, back on Waumbeck Street, and she had given him a kiss on the cheek—her face warm against his—and told him that she had had a very nice time, and that she would call him the next day.

Even then he had only nodded, and let her get out of the car and go back into her grandmother's home alone. Driving the gorgeous pearl gray Caddy carefully back down into the Town and to Jarvis's where, by the time he arrived, he had recovered sufficiently from his mortification to make up a whole series of winks and struts, and stories.

She had called the next day, and every day after that for a week, until Ella had demanded that he call her back. But he never had, not through all the rest of that month, or the month after.

By then the war was on, and Jarvis had set him up this time with a slave building minesweepers, up at the Casco Bay Shipyard in Portland. But it had been cold as hell there by the water, and lonely, and Malcolm had only had a glimpse of two or three other colored men in the whole town. He was leery of the tall, thin wooden poles that held the ships up in the dry dock, certain they would snap at any moment and send the gray, steel hulls crashing down on their heads. At night, he had to watch out all the time for the white welders and joiners roaming Commercial Street, drunk and mean, and just looking for a black boy to beat up.

But it had gotten him off the Hill for a few crucial weeks, at least, and when he went back down to Boston, there were jobs everywhere. He found work bussing tables at the Parker House, and then on the
Yankee Clipper
, making the long runs all the way down to Washington. He had gone back to see Ella at Christmas, before flopping at a colored trainmen's boardinghouse, but he never went back to Townsend's Drugs. And as much as he would fantasize and plot about what he would say and do, what pose he would strike and how indifferent he would seem if he ever ran into her, he never saw Laura again.

The memory of it still stinging, even now, as he drifted off into another pleasant, light doze before Miranda had to be up for her show. Just as all of his humiliations still hurt, no matter how long ago or otherwise forgotten they were—but all of them at last made good, he thought. All of them redeemed by his having everything he needed and wanted, sleeping right next to him now.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MALCOLM

He had left Miranda's apartment building out the back way. Slipping down the six flights of stairs to the basement as quietly as he could, pausing at each landing to listen for any of her neighbors out in the hall—letting the officious doorman think he had left long ago through the delivery entrance. He had wanted to stride right back through the lobby, as big and arrogant as a waterbug, but he didn't want to get Miranda in any trouble.

He had pleaded with her to let him go with her, to her gig at Café Society that night, but she had told him she was expecting West Indian Archie to drop in, and that it was too dangerous. Instead, he had lain on her bed and watched her shower and dress, reveling in the sight of her naked white body again. She had acted modest, and pulled the shower curtain closed against him, but giggled at him from behind it, pleased and blushing like a girl at his attention.

He had left then, just as she wanted him to, lest they get started again. Though on his way out the basement delivery entrance he had carefully stuffed two chewed sticks of gum into the door jamb, so the door wouldn't quite close all the way—leaving a secret entrance for himself, whenever he wanted.

After that he had strolled back through the Village and taken the A train up to Sugar Hill. It was a mild evening, the heavy heat of the last few days having broken, as it suddenly would in the City, and he had whistled to himself all the way up to Harlem—confident that she was his for good now. That it was just a matter of time and strategy, working out their mutual escape from West Indian Archie, but that she would be with him from now on. Malcolm was so certain of this that he was wondering only about how hard it would be to let Archie down—when he spotted the man himself, standing in front of his apartment building.

His first inclination had been to run—to turn around and simply dash back down onto the subway platform, or flag a cab. But there were no cabs in sight, and anyway, Archie had already seen him, was raising a huge hand in greeting and coming down the sidewalk toward him. Malcolm made himself walk on steadily toward him, made himself smile. Resisting the impulse to reach for the small silver pistol in his jacket pocket, telling himself that Archie's greeting meant that nothing was wrong, that it wasn't some kind of ambush.

“Red! Detroit Red!” he called out, opening his mouth, and with a burst of relief Malcolm realized that he could see the man's prominent gold teeth, smiling at him in the streetlight. He grabbed up Malcolm as if he were a child, pressing his skinny body to him until he was almost out of breath.

“What you layin' down, Archie?”

“Where you be, boy?” Archie bellowed, chuckling, the smell of rum and cigar smoke heavy on his breath. “I got to talk to my utility man!”

“Anything you want, Archie.”

“Lookit you, Red,” he went on, sniffing ostentatiously all around him. “I think you been layin' up somewhere, son. I think you been doin' some
tom
cattin'!”

Malcolm was immediately on edge again, but Archie only punched him lightly in the shoulder, obviously delighted about something.

“What you need me for, Archie? You got to pay off ?”

“Nah, nah, Red, it's this,” he said, and flashed some papers out of his jacket at Malcolm, something he couldn't quite make out in the evening gloom. “A trip for two. I'm takin' Miranda down to Asbury Park for a couple weeks. Got the best hotel rooms there is down there, we're gonna have us a fine time!”

“That so?” Malcolm said, trying to sound as disinterested as he was able. The rushing in his head so bad that he almost blew it right then and there, and asked Archie what about her job down at the Café Society.

“Yah, I got her a break from her gig an' everything. All-paid vacation! It's gonna be
fine
—but I need you to cover for me, Red. I need you to do extra routes every day, an' make all the payoffs. Huh? How 'bout it? An' don't worry 'bout a little more work—you be makin' more scratch for that girl I know you got!”

He had gone on chuckling to Malcolm, and pounding his back and shoulder as he laid out his extra duties. And Malcolm accepting it, pretending to listen carefully, all the while trying to fight down the roaring voice in his head telling him that he was a fool—that nothing was truly his at all, and that it never would be.

The very next day, after Archie and Miranda had left on their vacation, Sammy the Pimp had come by to see him. Malcolm had been up most of the night, sleepless with misery to think of them together—unable to see her, or talk to her, or hold her for all that time, wondering if he would ever really have her back. He had been still logy with sleeplessness when Sammy the Pimp stopped by, which he told himself later was why he had ever listened to Sammy's proposition to double the money he made from Archie.

“Kisca.
Tea
, from Africa. You dig? I got a merchant marine, bring it back,” Sammy told him. “I know enough sailor boys to keep it comin', too.”

“So?” Malcolm shrugged.

“So you already knockin' your trilly all over town, runnin' numbers for Archie. He's already got it all squared with the blue, too. Don't you see it, Red? I'm just askin' you to take the opportunity, move a few sticks f 'me along the way.”

“I don't know,” Malcolm said thoughtfully, smoothing a hand back over his conk.
But Sammy wasn't wrong, thinking how easy it would be, with the police already paid off, and believing him to be just another one of Archie's runners.

“Archie oil up my head for me, he know I was runnin' gage with his numbers.”

“But Archie ain't here, is he?” Sammy countered. “An' he don't ever have to find out.”

“I don't know.”

“What don't you know?” Sammy scoffed. “It's all cozy, groovy, an' nice. You already ruggin' wit' half my customers anyways.”

“I don't got the money for a stake,” Malcolm said, still hedging. Thinking now of everything he had heard at Small's about what the cops did to drug runners.
Thinking of that little room at the Thirty-second Precinct. Listening to the pimp next door, begging them not to mark up his face—

“Hey, I ain't playin' you Fourteenth Street here,” Sammy said slowly, as if he thought Malcolm didn't understand. “You got a position I need, I stake you to the stake. You just take ten percent the first week. After that, we all even, split everything down the middle.”

He plucked a folded-over paper bag out of his inside jacket pocket, and tossed it over to Malcolm.

“That meet wit' your approval, Nome?”

Malcolm could smell the deep, sweet scent even before he opened the bag—the best weed he had ever sniffed. But when he peered inside, he was surprised by how little there seemed to be.

“We can make enough from this?”

“Sure we can, Red! You just got to roll the sticks tight enough. Here, lemme show you,” Sammy said, taking the bag back from him and producing a pack of rolling papers from the corner drugstore.

They spent the rest of the morning rolling sticks on the kitchen table, Malcolm's roommates having departed for their defense jobs. Sammy showing him how to clean the tea and roll it tight, so as to maximize their profit out of each bag. The finished joints each about as large as a wooden matchstick.

“But then you give 'em just a little pinch,
there
, so they
look
like they fatter for the squares. You dig?”

When they had rolled a hundred sticks between them, Sammy had shown him how to hide them in a half-empty pack of Lucky Strikes, and how to stick the pack high up in his armpit, close to his body.

“That way, someone comes up on ya, you just go 'round the corner or into a doorway an' let your arm drop,” he told Malcolm— demonstrating it, the cigarette pack falling soundlessly out of his wide jacket sleeve.

“You see? You just let it go. Let the pack fall right out, while you keep walkin'. Nobody will even see it. Then, if you can, you go back an' collect it.”

He made Malcolm practice it a few times, walking back and forth across the kitchen floor until he had it down cold. Complimenting him on how cool, and natural, he looked, Sammy the Pimp's taut bald head grinning merrily.

“You see, Red? They can't touch us!”

It was only when he began selling drugs that Malcolm knew he was truly free. It seemed to him as if time itself had expanded, and he lived his life exactly as he pleased, and just as he had always dreamed that he might before he came to Harlem. He could do whatever he wanted to throughout the vast City.

He liked to kill his morning with a movie. There was no action before the afternoon anyway, and movies played twenty-four hours a day in the City now, serving the defense workers as they went off their shifts. On a slow day, he might see five in a row. Taking his pick of all the neighborhood theaters in Harlem, the airy, blue-and-white Moorish villa at 126th Street and Seventh Avenue that was the Alhambra, or the Washington or the Roosevelt, or the Regent.

When it got too hot he went down to the new, air-conditioned newsreel theater in Grand Central Station, or the vast palaces at Radio City, and around Times Square. Excited, now, to spread out through Manhattan. Nervous as it still made him to go anywhere below 110th Street, he would steel himself to the pleasure, loving just to sit in the downtown theaters, even before the movie came on. Staring up into the vast, golden bowl that was the Roxy, or the Paramount, with its glittering chandeliers, and huge marble columns. There was a promenade around the top of its lofty, vaulted ceiling, where people could walk, and look down on the entire theater below. Sitting in his seat, he could hear their whispers drifting down to him, slipping in through the movie dialogue, not quite comprehensible—more secret communications from the City.

He saw everything that came out, no matter what it was—gangster flicks and war movies, musicals and comedies and domestic dramas. His favorites he saw over and over again, moving with them as they traveled around the City—
Casablanca
and
Johnny Eager
;
Cabin in the Sky
, and
Stormy Weather
, which was always playing at the Roxy. Sometimes slipping in near the end, just to watch Cab Calloway sing “Old Geechy Joe,” and “The Jumpin' Jive,” or the Nicholas Brothers do their seven—
seven
—consecutive splits over each other—one after another, leaping hand to toe, with no pauses and no cuts, all while descending a staircase for their big finish. When he had finally had enough, he would stagger out into the dizzying afternoon sunlight. Trying to imitate Bogart's walk, or his grimace, or the way John Sublett pulled his hand along his grinning, bare skull—so much like Sammy the Pimp's—as he sang “Shine”—

Just because my color's shady,

That's the difference, maybe,

why they call me Shine, sway your blues'ies.

Why don't you shine?

Sometime about mid-afternoon he would finally make his way back to his room, or over to Sammy's apartment on West 144th Street to roll the sticks. To his surprise, Sammy seemed to live there with only a single woman, named Hortense, a very tall, very beautiful Spanish girl, with mocha-colored skin, and jet black hair that was held loosely in a single red ribbon before plunging halfway down her back. From everything that Sammy had told him about how to get a woman, he had expected someone fearful and unsure, but Hortense strutted imperiously through the kitchen when she chose to, leaning down to pinch Sammy's cheek roughly between two of her long, bright red fingernails. When Sammy demanded that she make them something to eat, she only stared at him with disdain, and when he cursed her she laughed.

“Did you know chico used to be a waiter? In Paducah, Kentucky!” she said to Malcolm, her dark face flashing with mirth. “But then he knocked up a girl an' had to get outta town. That's how he become a pimp. Careful you don't end up back in Pa-du-cah, chico.”

Sammy cursed her again, but she only strode out of the room, still laughing, and he turned back to cleaning and rolling the gage with Malcolm.

“See?
That's
the kinda woman you get when you know how to operate,” he said when she had left—nodding his head sagely, as if he had been trying to teach Malcolm something all along.

“I see, all right.”

“None a my other girls could get away wit' that, I'd beat 'em silly for it. But you don't want no mousy, useless types around when you got work to do. You want someone can watch your back!”

When they had rolled a few hundred sticks, Malcolm would start out on his rounds. He tried to figure out the best routes beforehand, to cover Archie's customers as well as Sammy's, and to bring in new clientele.

He made most of his own connections in the bar of the Braddock Hotel on West 126th Street. The bar itself wasn't much—tattered and musty, and crowded with working girls, including transvestites who made Malcolm squirm when they winked and made eyes at him. But he could listen to Walter Brown and Jay McShann's band playing “Hooty Tooty Blues” at the Apollo, just across the alley, and between their sets the musicians would step out through the open stage door, and buy his sticks. He charged them five dollars for ten sticks, and threw in two more free for the regulars—excited to see that many of them were the same singers, and sidemen, and bandleaders whose shoes he had shined up in Boston. They called him
Red
, and let him hang around on the back stairs, smoking the skinny, matchstick joints that went up in a flash, one after another. The musicians sticking the roaches in their mouthpieces, or even in a dried-out, hollowed-out chicken-thigh bone, trying to preserve a last, faint contact high for later.