Devil in a Blue Dress

Chapter 19

Zeppo could always be found on the corner of Forty-ninth and McKinley. He was half Negro, half Italian, and palsied. He stood there looking to the world like a skinny, knotted-up minister when the word of the Lord gets in him. He’d shake and writhe with all kinds of frowns on his face. Sometimes he’d bend all the way down to the ground and place both palms on the pavement as if the street were trying to swallow him and he was pushing it away.

Ernest, the barber, let Zeppo stand out in front of his shop to beg because he knew that the neighborhood children wouldn’t bother Zeppo as long as he stood in front of the barber’s pane.

“Hey, Zep, how you doin’?” I asked.

“J-j-ju-j-just fi-f-f-fi-f-fine, Ease.” Sometimes words would come easy to him and other times he couldn’t even finish a sentence.

“Nice day, huh?”

“Y-y-y-yeah. G-go-g-g-go-good d-day,” he stammered, holding his hands before his face, like claws.

“Alright,” I said, and then I walked into the barbershop.

“Hey, Easy,” Ernest said as he folded his newspaper and stood up from his barber’s chair. I took his place and he blossomed the crisp white sheet over me, knotting the bib snug at my throat.

“I thought you come in on Thursdays, Ease?”

“Man can’t always be the same, Ernest. Man gotta change with the days.”

“Hotcha! Lord, give me that seven!” someone shouted from the back of the narrow shop. There was always a game of craps at the back of Ernest’s shop; a group of five men were on their knees back beyond the third barber chair.

“So you looked in the mirror this mo’nin’ and saw a haircut, huh?” Ernest asked me.

“Grizzly as a bear.”

Ernest laughed and took a couple of practice snips with his scissors.

Ernest always played Italian opera on the radio. If you asked him why he’d just say that Zeppo like it. But Zeppo couldn’t hear that radio from the street and Ernest only had him in the shop once a month, for his free haircut.

Ernest’s father had been a drinking man. He beat poor little Ernest and Ernest’s mother until the blood ran. So Ernest didn’t have much patience with drinkers. And Zeppo was a drinker. I guess all that shaking didn’t seem so bad if he had a snout full of cheap whiskey. So he’d beg until he had enough for a can of beans and a half-pint of scotch. Then Zeppo would get drunk.

It was because Zeppo was almost always drunk, or on the way to being drunk, that Ernest wouldn’t allow him in the shop.

I once asked him why he’d let Zeppo hang out in front of the store if he hated drunks so much. And he told me, “The Lord might ask one day why I didn’t look over my little brother.”

We shot the breeze while the men threw their bones and Zeppo twisted and jerked in the window; Don Giovanni whispered from the radio. I wanted to find out the whereabouts of Frank Green but it had to come up in normal conversation. Most barbers know all the important information in the community. That’s why I was getting my hair cut.

Ernest was brushing the hot lather around my ears when Jackson Blue came in the door.

“Happenin’, Ernest, Ease,” he hailed.

“Jackson,” I said.

“Lenny over there, Blue,” Ernest warned.

I glanced over at Lenny. He was a fat man, on his knees in a gardener’s suit and a white painter’s cap. He was biting a cigar butt and squinting at Jackson Blue.

“You tell that skinny bastard t’get away from here, Ernie. I kill the mothahfuckah. I ain’t foolin’,” Lenny warned.

“He ain’t messin’ wit’ you, Lenny. Get back to your game or get outta my shop.”

One nice thing about barbers is that they have a dozen straight razors that they will use to keep order in their shops.

“What’s wrong with Lenny?” I asked.

“Just a fool,” Ernest said. “Thas all. Jackson here is too.”

“What happened?”

Jackson was a small man and very dark. He was so black that his skin glinted blue in the full sun. He cowered and shone his big eyes at the door.

“Lenny’s girlfriend, you know Elba, left him again,” Ernest said.

“Yeah?” I was wondering how to turn the conversation to Frank Green.

“And she come purrin’ ’round Jackson just t’get Lenny riled.”

Jackson was looking at the floor. He wore a loose, striped blue suit and small-brimmed brown felt hat.

“She did?”

“Yeah, Easy. And you know Jackson stick his business in a meat grinder if it winked at him.”

“I’idn’t mess wit’ her. She jus’ tole’im that.” Jackson was pouting.

“I guess my stepbrother be lyin’ too?” Lenny was right there with us. It was like a comic scene in the movies because Jackson looked scared, like a cornered dog, and Lenny, with his fat gut hanging down, was like a bully dog bearing down on him.

“Back off!” Ernest shouted, putting himself between the two men. “Any man can come in here wit’out fightin’ if he wants.”

“This skinny li’l booze hound gonna have to answer on Elba, Ernie.”

“He ain’t gonna do it here. I swear you gonna have t’come through me t’get Jackson and you know he ain’t worth that kinda pain.”

I remembered then how Jackson sometimes made his money.

Lenny reached out at Jackson but the little man got behind Ernest and Ernest stood there, like a rock. He said, “Go back to your game while the blood still in your veins, man,” then he pulled a straight razor from the pocket of his blue smock.

“You ain’t got no cause to threaten me, Ernie. I ain’t shit on no man’s doorstep.” He was moving his head back and forth trying to see Jackson behind the barber’s back.

I started to get nervous sitting there between them and took off the bib. I used it to wipe the lather from my neck.

“See that, Lenny. You botherin’ my customer, brother.” Ernest pointed a finger thick as a railroad tie at Lenny’s belly. “Either you get back in the back or I’m’a skin ya. No lie.”

Anybody who knew Ernest knew that that was his last warning. You had to be tough to be a barber because your place was the center of business for a certain element in the community. Gamblers, numbers runners, and all sorts of other private businessmen met in the barbershop. The barbershop was like a social club. And any social club had to have order to run smoothly.

Lenny tucked in his chin and shifted his shoulders this way and that, then he shuffled backward a few steps.

I got out of the chair and slapped six bits down on the counter. “There you go, Ernie,” I said.

Ernie nodded in my direction, but he was too busy staring Lenny down to look at me.

“Why don’t we split,” I said to the cowering Jackson. Whenever Jackson was nervous he’d have to touch his thing; he was holding on to it right then.

“Sure, Easy, I think Ernie got it covered here.”

We turned down the first corner we came to and then down an alley, half a block away. If Lenny was to come after us he’d have to want us bad enough to hunt.

He didn’t find us, but as we were walking down Merriweather Lane someone shouted, “Blue!”

It was Zeppo. He hobbled after us like a man on invisible crutches. At every step he teetered on the edge of falling over but then he’d take another step, saving himself, just barely.

“Hey, Zep,” Jackson said. He was looking over Zeppo’s shoulder to see if Lenny was coming.

“J-Jackson.”

“What you want, Zeppo?” I wanted something from Jackson myself and I didn’t need an audience.

Zeppo craned his head back farther than I thought was possible, then he brought his wrists to his shoulder. He looked like a bird in agony. His smile was like death itself. “L–L-Lenny show i-is m-m-m-m-ad.” Then he started coughing, which for Zeppo was a laugh. “Y-y-you-ou s-sellin’, B-Blue?”

I could have kissed the cripple.

“Naw, man,” Jackson said. “Frank gone big time now. He only sell by the crate to the stores. He say he don’t want no nickels and dimes.”

“You don’t sell fo’ Frank anymore?” I asked.

“Uh-uh. He too big fo’a niggah like me.”

“Shit! An’ I was lookin’ fo’ some whiskey too. I gotta party in mind that need some booze.”

“Well maybe I could set a deal, Ease.” Jackson’s eyes lit up. He was still turning now and then to see if Lenny was coming.

“Like what?”

“Maybe if you buy enough, Frank’a cut us a deal.”

“Like how much?”

“How much you need?”

“Case or two of Jim Beam be fine.”

Jackson scratched his chin. “Frank’a sell by the case t’me. I could buy three an’ sell one by the bottle.”

“When you gonna see’im?” I must’ve sounded too eager because a caution light went on in Jackson’s eye. He waited a long moment then said, “Whas up, Easy?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, “why is you lookin’ fo’ Frank?”

“Man, I don’t know what you mean. All I know is I got people comin’ to the house on Saturday and the cupboard is bare. I got a couple’a bucks but I was laid off last Monday and I can’t spend it all on whiskey.”

All this time Zeppo was shimmying there next to us. He was waiting to see if a bottle would materialize out of our talk.

“Yeah, well, if you need it fast,” Jackson said, still suspicious, “what if I get you a deal somewhere’s else?”

“I don’t care. All I want is some cheap whiskey and I thought that was the business you did.”

“It is, Easy. You know I usually buy from Frank but maybe I could go someplace he sells ta. Cost a little more but you still save some money.”

“Anything you say, Jackson, Just lead me to the well.”

“M-m-m-m-me too,” Zeppo added.