All shot up

Chapter 10

When Roman and Sassafras came running down the stairs from Lady Gypsy’s and made for the Buick parked at the curb, it was a good thing that nobody saw them. They were enough to catch the eyes of the blind. Roman had stuck Lady Gypsy’s fortune-telling turban, with its big glass eye, on the side of his head-so now he had three eyes all looking in different directions. He had draped the rainbow-colored gown over his leather jumper and army pants, but it was too short, and his paratrooper boots were showing. He carried his coonskin cap in his left hand and his big rusty. 45 in his right. “If we get caught I’m going to act crazy and start running,” he panted hoarsely. “They won’t shoot a crazy fortune teller.”

Sassafras started giggling.

Roman gave her a dirty look as he ran around and climbed in beneath the wheel. He put his pistol and coonskin cap on the seat between them and took off in a hurry. But some sixth sense told him he had a better chance of getting away by driving slowly.

He was driving like a preacher on the way to church when he came to Third Avenue and turned south.

The occupants of the first of the prowl cars coming fast from the north saw the slow-moving Buick just before the prowl car screamed around the corner into 116th Street. They didn’t give it a second thought. They hadn’t seen the driver, and they couldn’t imagine anybody crawling along at that speed in the hottest car east of the Mississippi River.

Roman drove down past 114th Street and parked in front of a mattress factory behind an open-bed truck.

“I got to give this situation some thought,” he said.

Sassafras couldn’t stop giggling. Every time she looked at him it got worse.

“This ain’t no laughing time,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to make me mad.”

“I know it ain’t, sugar,” she admitted, half choking. “But ain’t nobody looking at you in that get-up going to burst out crying.”

“Well, it’s your fault,” he accused. “Taking me to see that stool pigeon-”

“How was I to know he was a stool pigeon,” she flared. “I been there lots of times before with other mens and he ain’t never-” She caught herself.

“I know you has,” he said. “You don’t have to rub it in. I ain’t expected you to get all rusty while I’ve been away. I ain’t no fool.”

She put her arm about his neck and tried to pull his head down to her. “I has been true to you, sugar,” she said. “I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

He pulled his head back. “Listen, baby, this ain’t no time for sweet talk. Here I is, done blowed a whole year’s pay, and you is swearing to bald-face lies on stacks of Bibles.”

“It ain’t no lie,” she said. “If you’d taken the trouble to test it, instead of buying Cadillacs-”

“You wanted the car as much as me.”

“What if I did? That don’t mean I think a Cadillac is the only thing God made.”

“This ain’t no time to argue,” he said. “We has got to do something-and fast. I got a notion we has been awfully lucky so far, but it ain’t going to last forever. The cops is going to catch us in this hot car and then-”

She cut him off. “We could go see a man I know who’s in the automobile business. He might can help us.”

“I done seen all the men in the automobile business I needs to see,” he said. “I has had it. What I’m thinking of doing is see if I can find some of my ship-buddies and get them to help me look for my car.”

“This man I’m talking about could do more good than them,” she contended. “If that big bright Cadillac is anywhere in Harlem, he is more likely to find it than anybody I know of.”

“If all these mens you know-” he began, but she wouldn’t let him finish.

“What mens?”

“This bald-headed pappy passing himself off as a fortune teller-”

Her lips curled. “You ain’t jealous of him, I hope.”

“Well, he damn sure wasn’t no woman.”

“This man ain’t a bit like him.”

“If you think that makes me happy-”

“It ain’t like that,” she said. “I hardly know him. He’s just a business acquaintance.”

“What kind of business?”

But she ignored that. “We can ask him to look around and see what he might find,” she said. “And also we can stay in his house whilst he’s looking. You ain’t got nowhere to stay.”

“I was depending on staying with you the time I wasn’t staying in my car. Is you got some man staying in your room?”

“You make me sick,” she said. “You know can’t no man stay in my room, as respectable as those people is I room with.”

“Well, how is us going to pay this man for staying in his house and searching for our car?” he wanted to know. “I gave Mister Baron my last dollar.”

“We can sell him the tires off this car,” she said, “He’s in the used-tire business.”

“I get it,” he said. “I ain’t as dumb as you think. He’s tire thief.”

“Well, what if he is,” she said. “He’s got to know where cars is at in order to steal their tires. And that’s just who you need, somebody who knows something.”

“Well, all right then, let’s go give him the tires off this car and get started looking. Where is he at?”

“He lives in the Alley. He’s got a big place of his own.”

He started the car and drove down to 112th Street and turned back toward Lexington. Just back of the buildings facing on Third Avenue was a narrow passageway that turned at a right angle and ran between the crosstown streets.

It was a tight squeeze for a big car-there wasn’t space on either side to open the door and get out-and he had to back up three times to turn the corner.

“I’d hate to get caught in here,” he said. “Ain’t no way to go but up.”

The Alley was flanked by rows of two-story brick buildings, in varying degrees of decay, that had once been carriage-houses for the residents of 112th and 111th Streets. Now families lived on the second floors that had been servants quarters, and the carriage stalls were filled with long-forgotten junk, in which rats bred and children played and little girls lost their maidenheads.

“It’s here,” she said, indicating a rotten wooden carriage-house door spotted with patches of rusty tin. “Let me see if he’s in.”

The door was fastened by iron bars bolted to the rotten wood and a brass lock the size of a hitching block.

He stopped the car, and she got out and peered through a spyhole beside the lock.

“He ain’t in,” she said. “His motorcycle ain’t here.”

“What’s us going to do?” he said.

“Let me think,” she said, putting the tips of her mittened fingers to a dusty gray cheek and looking absent. “Oh!” she said brightly. “That reminds me. He gave me a key to the door.”

She started digging in her handbag.

“What’s he doing giving you a key to his door?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s for his girl friend,” she said lightly. “She and I is pals. And he said if she come by and he was out for me to let her in.”

To the right of the carriage-house doors was a small door that opened on to a staircase leading to the quarters above. She inserted a key in the Yale lock and said, “There! Now we can just go inside and wait for him.”

“You know this man mighty well,” he said.

“His girl friend and me is just like that,” she said, holding up a hand with the thumb pressed tightly to the first mittened finger. “I’ll just run up and get the key to the big lock so you can put the car inside where won’t nobody see it.”

“If I likes this, I likes oats in my ice cream,” he said. “And I ain’t no mule.”

But she didn’t wait to hear him. She ran up, got the key and opened the big doors, and he maneuvered the car into a dark, damp room with bare beams and a flagstoned floor smelling of tire rubber and earth mold. Hanging to toolboards on the walls were the various equipment for changing and repairing tires, but no tires were in sight.

He got out, grumbling to himself. She closed and locked the gate, switching about with a bright, excited insouciance, as though her pants were crawling with seventeen thousand queen ants.

“Now we’ll just go upstairs and wait,” she said, moving as though all the ants were biting her lightly.

The upstairs was one room. There were sets of windows at both back and front, the panes covered with oiled brown paper. In the center, on one side, was a coal-burning, pot-bellied stove. The nearest corner was filled by a double bed with a chipped, white-enameled iron frame. The opposite corner was curtained off for a clothes closet. On the other side of the stove was a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top, on which sat a two-burner gas plate. A square table with dirty dishes occupied the center of the floor. Before the inside windows was a third table with a cracked white porcelain washbowl and pitcher. Water was supplied by a hose coming from a single tap at the level of the baseboards. The toilet was outside, behind the carriage house. The only covering for the bare wooden floor was a variety of men’s garments.

In addition to a single drop light in the center of the room, hanging from one of the uncovered beams were several tiny wall lamps from the ten-cent stores.

Sassafras turned on the bright drop light and flung her coat across the unmade bed. She was wearing a red knitted dress to match her cap, and black lace stockings.

It was so cold in the room their breath made vapor.

“I’m going to make a fire,” she said. “You just set down and make yourself comfortable.”

He gave her an evil and suspicious look, but she didn’t notice it.

She bent over and looked into the potbellied stove, her duck-shaped bottom tightening the seat of her dress.

He put his coonskin cap on the table beside a dirty plate and placed the rusty pistol on top of it.

“There’s a trap already laid,” she said, and got a box of kitchen matches from the chest of drawers.

“You don’t know where he keeps his money, too, do you?” he asked.

She lit the fire and opened the draft, then turned around and looked at him. “What’re you grumbling about to yourself?”

“You’re acting more at home here than a hen in a nest,” he said. “You’re sure your business with this man ain’t what I’m thinking?”

She took off her cap and shook loose her short, straightened hair.

“Oh, don’t be so jealous,” she said. “You’re frowning up enough to scare out the fire.”

“I ain’t jealous,” he denied. “I’m just thinking.”

She began clearing the dirty dishes from the table and stacking them beside the gas hot plate.

“You sailors is all just alike,” she said. “If you had your way you’d handcuff a girl’s legs together and take the key to sea.”

“You ain’t just saying it,” he admitted, growing more and more angry as he watched her domestic activity.

The fire began roaring up the chimney, and she half-closed the damper. Then she turned and looked at him; her sloe eyes glittered like brilliants.

“Take off those Mother Hubbard clothes so I can kiss you,” she said, shaking the kinks out of her muscles.

“This place sure is making you kissified,” he complained.

“What’s wrong with that?” she said. “You can’t expect a cow to chew her cud when she got a field full of grass.”

He glared at her. “If you make eyes at this man, there’s going to be asses whipped,” he said threateningly.

She moved into him and snatched off the turban with the third eye.

“That thing is galling your brains,” she said.

“It ain’t my brains,” he denied.

“Don’t I know it,” she said, groping at him.

“Let me get off these womanish things,” he said, and began pulling the robe up over his head. “I feels like a rooster trying to lay an egg.”

“You is sure got chickens on your mind,” she said, tickling him in the stomach while the robe covered his face.

He jumped back, laughing like a big tickled goon, hit his calves against the edge of the bed and fell sprawling across it on his back.

She jumped on top of him and tried to smother him with the folds of colored cloth. He tore open a hole for his head to come through, and she jumped backward to her feet and bent double laughing.

He got his feet on the floor and his legs underneath him, and pushed from the bed like a young bull starting a charge. His lips were stretched, his tongue lolled from one corner; he looked as though he might be panting, but his breath was held. The frown still knotted his forehead, but his gray eyes were lit, the right one focused on her and the left one ranging off in the direction of the stove. His head peered from the folds of colored cloth hanging across his leather jacket and down his back.

He lunged for her.

She let his hands touch her, then twisted out of his grip, spinning on her toes, and went half across the room.

He put his big shoulders low, long arms outstretched like a grappling wrestler, and charged toward her. She got the table in between them. She was panting with laughter.

“Butterfingers,” she taunted, kicking off her shoes.

“I’ll get you,” he panted.

He knocked over a chair trying to circle the table, but she kept just beyond his reach. Then, with a quick unexpected motion, he gripped the table by the edge, lifted it inches from the floor and threw it to one side.

Now nothing stood between them.

She shrieked and turned, but he got hold of her waist from behind and rode her face down across the bed. She was lithe, quick and strong, and she twisted from beneath him, coming face up at the foot of the bed. He jumped like a big cat and straddled her, gripping her upper arms with both hands.

She went limp for a moment and looked up at him from burning black challenging eyes. An effluvium of hot-bodied woman and dime-store perfume came up from her in a blast. It filled his mouth with tongue floating in a hot spring of saliva. Her lips were swollen, and her throat was corded. He could feel the hardness of her nipples through his leather jacket and woolen shirt.

“Take it and you can have it,” she said.

Abruptly his mind began to work. His body went lax, his grip relaxed and his frown deepened.

“All this trouble I’m in and that’s all you can think of,” he said.

“If this won’t cure your troubles nothing will,” she murmured.

“We ain’t got much time,” he complained.

“If you’re scared, go home!” she hissed, and balled herself up to jump from the bed.

He went taut again before she got away and flattened her shoulders back.

“I’m going to cool you off,” he said.

She put her knees against his chest and pushed. He let go her arms and grabbed her stockinged legs just above the knees and began to open them. Her legs were strong enough to break a young man’s back, and she put all of her strength into keeping them closed. But he hunched his overgrown muscles and began bearing down. They locked in a test of strength. Their breath came in gasps.

Slowly her legs began to open. They stared into one another’s eyes. The stove had begun to smoke, and their eyes smarted.

Suddenly she gave way. Her legs went wide so quickly he fell on top of her. He clutched at flimsy cloth, and there was a tearing sound. He flung something from his hand. Buttons sailed in all directions, like corn popping.

“Now!” she screamed.