Underworld (47 page)

Manx is surprised by the super's attitude, knocked a little off-balance. The super seems determined. Should be the landlord's problem. Why run around doing detective work? Let the landlord go into his pocket for replacements. Those pockets so deep the man's knees get skinned by rattling change.

Someone stands on the corner preaching to the wind.

Manx is also surprised by the super's forearms. Got some strength in those arms, wrestling garbage cans, you know, rolling the cans diagonal across the pavement.

“I think you got your business backwards,” Manx says. “Because what we see in this block of buildings is buildings getting robbed, not shovels getting robbed. They breaking in left and right.”

“I'm telling you what I hear.”

“And I'm saying this is the thing you ought to be occupying your time. Jimmy guards on the doors.”

“I find out you took those shovels I go to the landlord and you're out on the street, brother.”

Awful biggity for a cripple.

“Because he will listen when I talk.”

Most janitors around here are floaters who work in one neighborhood and then another, come and go, staying one step ahead of something. This man's dug in like infantry.

“You and me, we're through passing the time,” he says. “You show up at my door with a shovel in your right hand and a shovel in your left, then I listen to what you say.”

Manx cocks his head, makes his eyes go tight in phonied concentration. He's looking to stare the man down, put the man in his place.

But the super pushes on past. Manx is leaning into the man but the man pushes on past, clumsily, every step a contortion and a labor, and Manx is fazed once more—he was just getting set to make a major statement.

He walks over toward Amsterdam Avenue. Three kids run by, going like hellfire, and he sees Franzo Cooper in a suit and tie, standing by the shoe repair.

“Who died? You're all dressed up, Franzo.”

Turning as he speaks, wanting one last look at the super, he's not sure why, to shoot a beam of evil, maybe.

“You seen my brother?” Franzo says.

He's wearing a hat with a little feather in the band and his shoes have a military shine. The neon shoe is out of juice.

“I'm going to Tally's.”

“You see him, tell him I need his car.”

“Who died, Franzo?”

“I need to go to Jersey to see a lady. Else I die. What you doing?”

“Nothing much.”

“I die of lovesick, man. Tell him to get over here with that junkheap. Be worth his while.”

There's the beauty school, the shoe repair, the furnished rooms and over the door of the shoe repair there's a neon highshoe and the neon, he sees, is dark and cold, which brings him down a ways, a little sag in his mood.

The traffic stops and rolls at the corner, rolls on into the night, and a man stands by the rib joint preaching. Three or four people stop a minute and get the drift and stand another minute and go where they're going and two or three others come and listen and leave and the cars roll past and the light changes and the cars roll on.

The preacher says, “They say that only insects survive.”

He's an old man with a hungry head, veined at the temples, and his hands are coming out of his sleeves. The sleeves of his jacket are so shrunk down that you can see way up his wrists. Long flat fingers marking his words and bicycle clips on his pants.

Three kids race by, like fleeing the scene.

“This is what they say and I believe them because they study the matter. All the creatures God put on earth, only insects survive the radiation. They have scientists studying the cockroach every second of his life. They watch him when he sleeps. He comes through a crack in the wall, there's a man with a magnifying glass been waiting since dawn. And I believe them when they say the insects still be here after the atom bombs will fell the buildings and destroy the people and kill the birds and the animals and masculate the dogs and cats so they can't begat their young. I believe them in and out and up and down. But I also got news for them. I know this before they do. We all know this, standing here right now, because we veterans of a particular place. Do we need somebody telling us how insects survive the blast? Don't we know this from the morning we born? I'm talking to you. Nobody here need scientific proof that insects be the last living things. They already pretty close. We dying all the time, these roaches still climbing the walls and coming out the cracks.”

Manx glances back the other way. He'd like to get one last look at the super to nourish his grudge.

People stop to get the street preacher's drift, six or seven folks standing in the wind. Manx looks at the old man in his cuffed pants like some uniform a boy invents, playing army. There's something thin-skulled about him, his head is naked and veined and papery. A man listens, interested, in a French hat, a black beret, and two women in those sister outfits, sister so-and-so from the storefront church, glad to meetcha, with napkins on their heads and frown faces.

“Nobody knows the day or the hour.”

Two men in suits and their well-dressed wives, the men want to listen, the ladies say no thanks—cockroach talk is not their deedly-dee.

“Russians explode an atom bomb on the other side of the world. You got your radio tuned to the news? I'm telling you the news. Clear
across the world. And you're standing there saying don't mean nothing to me. Old business, you're saying. The business of the generals and the diplomats. But right now, this here minute, while I'm talking and you're listening, officials making plans to build bomb shelters all over this city. Building bomb shelters that hold twenty-five thousand people under the streets of this city. And guess what you don't hear on today's news. You have to stand in the wind and hear it from me. Every one of those people standing in those shelters while the bombs raining down is a white person. I'm talking to you. Because not one single shelter's being built in Harlem. All right. They're putting shelters on the Upper East Side. They're putting shelters down lower Sixth Avenue. They're sheltering Forty-second Street all right. They're putting shelters out in Queens all right. They're sheltering Wall Street deep and dry. A-bombs raining from the sky, what are you supposed to do? Take a bus downtown?”

Manx has a faint grin.

A girl's standing there with her boyfriend and she says, “He's a agitator, let's go.”

Manx can appreciate the man's argument but it's a little removed. The argument is satisfying because it's the multiplying into millions of the little do's and don'ts he carries around every day.

She says, “He's a agitator, let's go.”

But it's the do's and don'ts he has to live with, not the news of the world with that rooster that goes scraw scraw in the movie house down the street.

The man's still talking, standing tall and with a whippy kind of bend in his body, a head like a hatched egg that's all veined out, and three kids race by, and a face so naked you think you've known him all your life, pants cuffed tight, and some kids race by.

“Where's your bicycle, man?”

And the boyfriend's got his cap slung low, not moving from the spot, and the girlfriend's saying, “He's a agitator, let's go.”

The man's swiveling his head to catch an eye somewhere.

“They say stop paying rent. I don't say stop paying rent. I don't say blow up the gas and electric, the power and light. They say walk the landlords to the river. I don't say walk the landlords to the river or
stand them up against the wall. I say take a dollar bill out of your pocket where it's folded up tight because you been saving it for this and that. Unfold this dollar bill and turn it over to the backside where they keep their secret messages. They keep their Latin words and their Roman numbers.”

And the man takes a wadded bill out of his pocket and unfolds it like a magic trick and then he waves the money at the group in front of him.

“You see the eye that hangs over this pyramid here. What's pyramids doing on American money? You see the number they got strung out at the base of this pyramid. This is how they flash their Masonic codes to each other. This is Freemason, the passwords and handshakes. This is Rosicrucian, the beam of light. This is webs and scribbles all over the bill, front and the back, that contains a message. This is not just rigamarole and cooked spaghetti. They predicting the day and the hour. They telling each other when the time is come. You can't find the answer in the Bible or the Bill of Rights. I'm talking to you. I'm saying history is written on the commonest piece of paper in your pocket.”

And he holds the bill by its edges and extends his elbows, showing the thing for what it is.

“I've been studying this dollar bill for fifteen years. Take it to the privy when I do my hygiene. And I worked those numbers and those letters all whichway and I hold the bill to the light and I read it underwater and I'm getting closer every day to breaking the code.”

And he draws the dollar to his chest and folds it five times and puts it in his pocket, smaller than a postage stamp.

“This is why they're watching me with that eye that floats over the top of the pyramid. They're watching and they're following all the time.”

Manx needs a drink. He hurries up Amsterdam past a TV-radio store where a TV is flickering and half a dozen people are watching in the cold. About a block away he see some guys running toward him, grown men, you know, pounding over the sidewalk, over the iron hatchways that lead to storage cellars, rattling the metal as they come, and he sees they're sort of half laughing, they're embarrassed, must be
a crap game down an alley that the police broke up, and they go past him rattling the hatchways and looking back, running and half laughing and looking back.

He almost wants to turn around and run with them. He sees the humor of it. They'll meet in some doorway three blocks away laughing and panting and catching their breath, feeling grown-up stupid, and they'll find a place to do their gambling, the back room of a barbershop or someone's living room if the wife's not there.

But the wife is there.

Because I got a wife can't stand the sight of me even if I'm ten miles away, and will not let me breathe without a comment, and makes more comments in her head, and she is definitely there.

A dog looks out a first-floor window.

Yeah, black men running in the streets. Manx found himself running in the '43 riot and he probably had that same look on his face, conscious of being caught up in something he shouldn't be doing but doing it anyway, running past Orkin's where Ivie bought a sample coat, a coat a dummy used to wear, on sale cheap, and it rankled his mind all right, and all the Orkin's dummies were on the sidewalk now, torsos tumbled in the gutter, and heads without bodies, and slim necks and pale hair, and dummies armless like famous statues. He recalls this now, the big windows busted and dummies in garters, dummy legs in stockings and garters and kids in tuxedos, men running in the streets and a kid maybe twelve years old in a top hat and looted tux and a cop was leading him to a prowl car, funniest damn thing, top hat and tails and dragging pants—even the cop had a sweetheart smile.

He goes the last four blocks with his head turned away from the wind and the wind is whipping off the Hudson and Manx is walking like a horse with a spooked head.

But how different once you step inside the bar. The warm buzz, the easy breathing, the rumps happy on their stools. The buzz in Tally's is special tonight, more bodies than the usual midweek slump and more static in the air—and then he remembers. There's a tone, a telling rustle in the room and he pats the side of his jacket and feels the baseball and understands that they're talking about the game.

He waves to Phil, who's behind the bar, Tally's brother, in his plain
shirt and fancy suspenders, and he gestures a question
where
—and Phil nods toward the far corner and there is Antoine Cooper sitting with a drink in front of him and two tall shovels leaned on the wall behind.

Manx sits across from Antoine, sits sideways in his chair so he doesn't have to look at the shovels.

“I seen Franzo standing in the dark.”

“I know it. He wants my car. But he can't have it.”

“What's that you're drinking?”

“He's looking to make some chick he's better off avoiding. Trust me. I already done her.”

Manx looks around the room, takes in the buzz, hears half a sentence fly up out of shared laughter and he decides not to mention the shovels. He is aghast at the shovels. The shovels should not be here in any manner, way, shape or form. But he decides for now he won't say a word.

“What was that riot in forty-three? I'm trying to recall how it started. They filled so many holding cells in so many station houses they had to open an armory.”

“Forty-three. I'm in the army, man.”

“They had bleeding men carrying their loot under armed guard. Put them in an armory on Park Avenue.”

“We had our own riot,” Antoine says.

Manx goes to the bar and gets a Seagram's from Phil—he likes his rye in a short glass with a single ice cube.

Phil says, “What's happening?”

“I hear they played a ball game today.”

“Goddamn it was something.”

Manx carries the drink back to the table with one hand clutching the glass in the usual manner and the palm of the other hand under the glass, supporting it like some polished object in a church.

The ice cube is mainly scenery.

Antoine says, “How the boys doing?”

“The boys. The boys spread far and wide,” Manx says. “Randall's in the South somewhere, bivouacking, you know, training in the field. And Vernon.”

“I know where Vernon's at.”

“Vernon's on the front line is where he's at. They got a quarter million troops they're looking at across the line. Them Chinese.”