Such Sweet Thunder (3 page)

Minutes later Rutherford reappeared in the kitchen dressed, with the
Times
rolled and bent like a boomerang. He unbent the paper, unrolled and glanced at it with a heavy sigh, laying the paper on the table while he began to prepare his breakfast.

Amerigo thought: Black coffee two cups, two strips of bacon, two pieces of toast — with plum preserves!

He read the paper as he ate. And when he had finished eating he fixed his lunch … beans left over from supper.… He poured them into a little grayish white enamel bucket that he would warm at twelve on the little gas stove in the basement at the hotel where he had worked ever since the child was born … hoppin’ bells!

Amerigo watched him put on his cap and his suede jacket.
Mom bought him these for Christmas
.…

“So long,” said Rutherford, “an’ don’ forget to stay in the yard an’

play.”

“Yessir.”

Rutherford disappeared into the interior of the house. He waited until he had heard the click of the Yale lock on the front door and then he ran through the house and down onto the front porch. He sat on the top step and watched his father walk up the alley with long rhythmic strides, falling back on his slender legs as he climbed the hill.

That’s my father! he thought aloud, looking around for someone to tell, but as there was no one, he watched the tall young man fade out of sight in silence.

No sooner than he had turned into the great Admiral Boulevard than an old Model T Ford came zooming down the alley, its radiator boiling like a train. Bra Mo coming from the icehouse! The truck was loaded with frosty cakes of ice covered with gunnysacks and a big tarpaulin to keep the ice from melting. Brother Moore put on the brakes and climbed down from the driver’s seat and went around to the back of the truck and pulled the chain through the tailgate with a loud rattle, causing the gate to bang against the truck’s iron bed. Then he started removing the sacks and the tarpaulin from the ice.

He slipped down from the porch and ran up the hill to Brother Moore’s truck to watch.

“Mawnin’, ’Mer’go!” looking down at his bare feet. “Boy! Yo’ momma’s gonna
kill
you, traipsin’ through this alley wid no shoes on!”

“Yessir,” smiling broadly because Brother Moore smiled broadly, his small black face breaking up into an expression of tenderness.

“Mawnin’ folks!” He heard his friendly voice drifting down through his memory from a year’s distance. Brother Moore had just moved into the alley, into the house next to the empty house where Aunt Nancy and Erwin, her feebleminded nephew, lived.

“Mawnin’ folks! Me an’ ma wife jus’ moved up from Nawth Car’lina. Durham. Gonna settle down up heah. Ice an’ coal an’ kin’lin’ wood. Sho would like to serve you folks!”

He suddenly burst into a smile, for now he saw Mrs. Derby’s image. She and her husband lived on the second floor, north. A short, strongly built black woman with kinky hair and a pleasant, pockmarked face. Her left eye was blue and her right was brown and her husband was a hunter like an Indian, quiet. Mrs. Derby talked all the time, and dipped snuff! You could see it bulging under her tongue under her bottom lip. Ugh! Whenever she wanted ice she used to come out onto the porch and yell: “Bra Mo! Aw, Bra Mo!” and all the kids and grown-ups would laugh. It wasn’t until he joined St. John’s that the child found out that
Bra Mo
was a diminutive of Brother Moore!

Now Brother Moore grabbed the tongs from his shoulder and clawed one of the cakes on the end and pulled it away from the others with practiced ease. He slid it onto his shoulder and shifted his weight until the balance was right and carried it down to the far end of the basement to the icebox and eased it off his shoulder.

“Whew!” turning to the child who had followed him, “I sho’ hope you don’ nevah hafta work like this!” He returned to the truck and brought in another cake, and another, and soon the truck was half empty.

Meanwhile the sun was advancing rapidly down the alley. It sprawled lazily upon the rooftops. Soon now the raw freshness of the morning would have to give way to the hot sultry air of the summer’s day.

“Betta run ’long, son, yo’ momma’s gonna be worried when she wake up an’ you ain’ theah.”

“Yessir. S’long, Bra Mo.”

“S’long, ’Mer’go!”

He ran swiftly back to the porch. He tiptoed halfway up the hall stairs and listened to see if his mother was awake. Satisfied that she
was still asleep, he quietly descended the stairs again and feasted his eyes on his alley, knowing that the alarm clock would ring any minute now and she would wake up — she always slept until the last minute — and spring suddenly out of bed and descend upon him like a fresh sparkling little whirlwind! She would whir down the alley — run! — all the way to the laundry more than eight blocks away and arrive just before the whistle blew. Then she would begin her long hard day on the mangle in the steamy basement of Jefferson’s laundry until twelve o’clock when the whistle blew. And then she would run the eight blocks home in her white apron with a white hand towel wrapped around her neck to keep the sweat from irritating the rash that came because of the intense heat. Just to fix his lunch, and eat with him, with a smile on her face and her mouth set for a laugh! When she laughed her eyes and her pearly teeth would sparkle, and he would forgive her for making him suffer the humiliation of not being able to protect her when his father shouted at her and swore because she came home late. He understood a little why Rutherford might not go away, as he always feared he might, if not today then tomorrow, because Viola flowed like a bright stream of light through their lives, like the sun advancing down the alley.

He thought of noon already. How long it would be until then! Until then he would have to be alone in the backyard.

“But she ain’ woke yet!” he declared happily, deciding that he would remain on the porch as long as possible. The blue sky was now streaked with blazoning rays of golden light. Almost like it was evening. Only now the blue was harder, pregnant with a light composed of many bright hues. It feels funny, he thought, whirling within the dizzying swirl of brightness.

Magically the subtle shades of blue lifted like veils, revealing a world washed in clean morning air, transforming the dirty-gray earthen colors of the worm-eaten porches that leaned against, clung to, the dull redbrick facades of the houses. Taut green blades of grass pushed up between the cobblestones and rusty cans and piles of ashes and clinkers in the foundation of the empty house. Strong rays of yellow light converted little knots of trees into church windows and made the cobblestones look orange.

They’d never been as red as that! Except, perhaps, at sunset. In late September, or October when the moon rose early. As red as a pomegranate!

The lights within the houses had long since flickered on here and there and had already begun to grow pale in the face of the advancing sun.
Smoke from chimneys spiraled into the sky. Doors opened and raw-eyed men and women left their houses and headed up and down the alley for work. Suddenly the alley was caught in the crossfire of traffic from the boulevard and the avenue. The alarm clock rang upstairs.

He crept quietly up the steps and stole into his mother’s bed and snuggled in her arms and pressed his face against her breast and squeezed her tight.

“Be still, Amerigo,” she whined sleepily.

He struggled to keep still but his heart pounded with love, and his thoughts flitted around the speculation as to what would happen to him if his father didn’t come back. He kicked at the covers.

“If you don’ keep still!” said Viola.

A ray of sunlight crept in the window. Suddenly feeling the full intensity of his heat upon her face, Viola leaped out of the bed with a shriek and ran into the kitchen. The splash of cold water, the sound of teeth being brushed. Seconds later she shot into the middle room, dressed, and dashed clackedy-clack down the front steps, the child at her heels, and down the alley.

“Jus’ like a fiah en
jine!
God damned!” shouted Mr. Daniels, a tall thin yellow man with a long nose. He smiled, baring tobacco-stained teeth, swinging his pegleg in one direction and his crutch in the other, mimicking her as she yelled back over her shoulder:

“You be good, an’ don’t you set a foot out a that yard! ’Cause if you
do
, I’ll know it, an’ your daddy’ll know it, too! An’ you know what
that
means!”

“Yes’m!”

“Yo’ maw’s tellin’ you right, ’Mer’go!” cried Mr. Daniels. “A-l-l-ways do what your maw says. If I’d a done what my maw said I’d be walkin’ on two legs taday ’stead a three! Ah-ha! ha!”

“Told me you had four legs last night, you old devil!” declared a woman’s voice from the screened interior of the house next door.

Miss Maggie.

“Hush yo’ filthy mouth, hussy!” cried Mr. Daniels.

“Sixty-six, eighty-nine, an’ twenty-four on the big book,” said Miss Maggie, “an’ seven, six, nine on the little ’un. I had a dream. An’ if you bring me some money, you kin show me all the legs you got!”

Mr. Daniels plucked a long yellow pencil from behind his right ear and whipped out a thin narrow book from his vest pocket and quickly wrote the numbers down. Then he detached the carbon copy and stuck it under the screen.

“Lord knows I could use a little luck!” said Miss Maggie as her sickly yellow hand took the proffered ticket. Mr. Daniels nodded, and hobbled up the alley, his shoulders appearing grotesquely powerful under the crescent-shaped shoulder rest of his long yellow crutch.

A man ran heavily up the steps and almost knocked him down in his hurry to enter the opposite apartment. He wore a white sweat-stained cap, a pair of smudgy gray trousers, and rusty black run-over shoes that showed his naked grimy heels. His unshaven face was dirty and there was sleep in his eyes. His cheeks were drawn; large beads of sweat rolled down his face. His teeth chattered as he continued to beat on the door as if to break it down. During the anxious little pauses in which he listened for signs of life within the apartment, he continually rubbed his arms.

Boom! Boom! Boom!
He banged again, and finally the door opened. The man mumbled something through the crack that he couldn’t quite hear. Then the door opened wider and he rushed in, knocking over a chair as he did so. The door banged, but it didn’t shut because it had been banged too hard. Miss Sadie was standing by the little table next to the bed where Mr. Nickles lay sleeping on his side, with his back to them. Miss Sadie, a medium-sized yellow woman with sleepy eyes and a pockmarked but not unattractive face, stood as though she were in a daze, her silk negligee falling apart, revealing her naked body. He started at the patch of reddish brown hair between her legs, until his attention was distracted by the sudden violent movement of the trembling man who had grabbed her by the shoulders and was shaking her roughly. Mr. Nickles, without turning over, ran his hand under the pillow and withdraw a big blue gun and said: “Make the niggah show his money!”

The man fumbled nervously in his pockets and withdrew some dirty crumpled bills and threw them on the bed. Mr. Nickles turned over and counted it. “All right,” he said, and turned back over and went to sleep.

Miss Sadie took a little bottle from the table drawer and stuck a needle attached to a syringe in it and drew a clear liquid into the syringe. Then she stuck it into the man’s outstretched arm. Seconds later he sighed profoundly, an ecstatic smile took possession of his face, and he stepped into the corridor as though in a dream.

Miss Sadie noticed him as she was about to shut the door: “Hi, honey,” self-consciously pulling her negligee together. “Want some candy? Wait a minute.” Half walking, half stumbling into the middle room of the apartment she returned seconds later with a peppermint stick. “Here, baby!”

“No’m, thank you, my momma told me not to take nothin’ from nobody.”

“Aw, it’s just a little piece!” Her negligee fell open again, as she lifted him into her arms and rocked him back and forth, as though she would lull him to sleep. Her bosom was hot and she smelled like sweat and perfume, talcum powder, cigarettes, burned Vaseline, and sleep. She kissed him on the cheek and pressed his head against hers. Her lips were moist. Mr. Nickles stirred in bed and she immediately put him down, making a sign for him to be quiet, and pushed the peppermint stick into his pocket. Then she gently eased him out the door.

She’s pretty, he thought. Not as pretty as Mom, though. A deep sad feeling welled within him and made him want to cry. He stared at his front door until the sadness gave way to a blind passion that filled him with nervous excitement, and before he quite knew that he had done so, he had violently pushed the door open and banged it shut.…

He moved desultorily toward the table model radio and turned the knob. It cracked and hissed and popped. He slapped its rounded shoulder with the palm of his hand and a sweet oily voice spewed out into the air:

“And now, ladies, the sitting-up exercises for slim figures and happy futures!”

He straightened the covers on his bed, folded it up into a couch, and put the three big cushions in place.

“One! Two! Three! That’s right!
Again!
A-one!”

He moved the coffee table with the glass top in front of the sofa, folded the papers neatly, and placed them in the magazine rack.

“Ummm! Doesn’t that feel g-o-o-d. Lift up those legs! High now! One! Two! Three! That’s all, that’s all, ladies, un-til tomorrow morning at the same time when McClimmerick’s Salted Crackers presents.…”

His eyes flashed with the sudden brightness of remembering: peanuts, and chewing gum maybe, and maybe some peanut brittle! He began searching all the suspicious corners for something good to eat.

Soft piano music flowed from the speaker, sad, majestic, quite unlike the music Viola and Rutherford and all the people he knew always listened to, but beautiful just the same. It made him think about the alley in the evening just before nightfall. He hummed the melody.

“What’s the name a that?” he had once asked Viola.

“That’s classical music.”