For love of Imabelle

14

When Jackson emerged from the narrow passageway, a crowd had already collected in the street. He looked like something the Harlem River had spewed up. His overcoat was torn, the buttons missing, the sleeve slashed, he was covered with black muck, dripping dirty slime; his mouth was swollen, his eyes were red, and he looked half dead.

But the other people didn’t look much better. The sound of pistol shooting and the screaming of the patrol car sirens had brought them rushing from their beds to see the cause of the excitement. It sounded like a battle royal taking place, and shootings and cuttings and folks dead and dying were a big show in Harlem.

Men, women and children had piled into the street, wrapped in blankets, two and three overcoats, pyjama legs showing over the tops of rubber overshoes, towels tied about their heads, draped with dusty rugs snatched hastily from the floor. Alongside some of the apparitions, Jackson looked like a man of elegance.

Most of them were milling about the police cordon that blocked the entrance to the alleyway on the other side of the Heaven, leading back to the shack where the shooting had taken place. Necks were craned, people stood on tiptoe, some sat astride others’ backs trying to see what was happening.

Only one man wrapped up in a dirty yellow blanket like a black cocoon saw Jackson slip from the hole. Two cops were approaching, so all he did was wink.

The cops were looking at Jackson suspiciously and preparing to question him when a fist fight broke out among the crowd on the other side. They hurried to join the group of harness cops converging on the fighters.

Jackson followed quickly, squeezed into the crowd.

“Let them niggers fight,” he heard somebody say.

“Start one fight and everybody wanna fight,” someone else said.

“Everybody in Harlem’s a two-gun badman anyway. All they need is some horses and some cows and they’d all be rustlers.”

Jackson couldn’t see the fighters, but he kept worming toward the center of the crowd, trying to get lost.

A man looked at him and said, “This joker’s been fighting too. Who you been fighting, shorty, yo’ old lady?”

Somebody laughed.

Jackson noticed a cop looking at him. He started moving in another direction.

“They done croaked a copper,” a voice said. “That’s what they done.”

The mob rolled back toward the cordon. The fist fight seemed to have been quelled.

“White copper?”

“Yeah, man.”

“They gonna be some ass flying every whichway in Harlem ’fore this night’s over.”

“You ain’t just saying it.”

Jackson had wormed to the edge of the crowd and found himself face to face with the two cops who’d first noticed him.

“Hey, you!” one of them called.

He ducked back into the crowd. The cops started plowing after him.

Suddenly the attention of the crowd was attracted by the sound of enraged dogs growling. It sounded like a pack of wolves battling over a carcass.

“Hey, man, look at dis!” someone yelled.

The mob surged in a solid mass toward the sound of fighting dogs, sweeping Jackson away from the pursuing cops.

On the other side of the Heaven, directly in front of the passage where Jackson had escaped, two huge dogs were rolling, snapping, growling, and slavering in a furious fight. One was a Doberman Pinscher the size of a grandfather wolf; the other a Great Dane as big as a Shetland pony. They belonged to two pimps who had been walking them at the time the shooting broke out. The pimps had to walk them two or three times every night because the flats they lived in were so small they had to keep the dogs chained up all the time, and the dogs howled and kept them awake. They’d taken them off the chains to let them run. The dogs were so vicious they’d started fighting on sight.

They rolled back and forth across the sidewalk, into the gutter and out again, fangs flashing in the dim light like mouths full of knives. The pimps were flailing the fighting dogs with their iron chains. Others scattered when the dogs rolled near.

“I got five bones says the black dog wins by a knockout,” a man said.

“Who you kidding?” another man replied. “I takes a black dog any day in the year.”

The cops neglected Jackson momentarily to separate the dogs. They approached cautiously with drawn pistols.

“Don’t shoot my dog, mister,” one of the pimps pleaded.

“They ain’t gonna hurt nobody,” the other pimp added.

The cops hesitated.

“Why aren’t those dogs muzzled?” one of the cops asked.

“They was muzzled,” the pimp lied. “They lost their muzzles fighting.”

“Only way you can separate them is with fire,” an onlooker said.

“Them dogs needs shooting,” someone replied.

“Who’s got some newspaper?” the first pimp asked.

Someone ran to get some newspaper from a junk cart parked at the curb up the street. It was a dilapidatd wagon with cardboard sides and bowlegged wheels pulled by a mangy, purblind, splay-legged horse that would never eat grass again. The junkman who owned it had joined the crowd around the fighting dogs.

A man grabbed a piece of newspaper from the stack the junkman had collected, brought it back on the run. He rumpled it into a torch and someone set it on fire and threw it beneath the fighting dogs. In the brief light supplied by the blaze the Doberman’s bared fangs could be seen sinking into the Great Dane’s throat.

The policeman leaned over and clubbed the Doberman on the head with the butt of his pistol.

“Don’t kill my dog,” the pimp whined.

Jackson saw the cart and headed toward it, climbed up into the seat, took the frayed rope reins and said, “Giddap.”

The horse stretched its scabby neck and twisted its head about to look at Jackson. The horse didn’t know the voice. But he couldn’t see as far as Jackson.

“Giddap,” Jackson said again and lashed the horse’s flanks with the rope reins.

The horse straightened out its neck and started moving. But it moved in slow motion, like a motion picture slowed down, its legs moving with each step as though floating slowly through the air.

A cop Jackson hadn’t seen before appeared suddenly and stopped him.

“Have you been here all the time?”

“Nawsuh. Ah just driv up,” Jackson said, speaking in dialect to impress the cop that he was the rightful junkman.

The cop had no doubts about Jackson being a junkman. He just wanted information.

“And you didn’t see anyone running past you who looked suspicious?”

“He just driv up,” the man said who had seen Jackson emerging from between the buildings. “Ah seed him.”

It was the code of Harlem for one brother to help another lie to white cops.

“I didn’t ask you,” the cop said.

“Ah ain’t seed nobody,” Jackson said. “Ah just setting here minding my own business and ain’t seed nobody.”

“Who hit you in the mouth?”

“Two young boys tried to rob me. But dat was right after dark.”

The cop was irritated. Questioning colored people always irritated that cop.

“Let’s see your license,” he demanded.

“Yassuh.” Jackson began fumbling in his coat pockets, going from one to another. “Ah got it right heah.”

A police sergeant shouted to the cop.

“What are you doing with that man?”

“Just questioning him.” The sergeant looked briefly at Jackson.

“Let him go. Come here and help block this entrance.” He pointed to the passage through which Jackson had escaped. “We have a man cornered back there somewhere and he might try to come through here.”

“Yes, sir.” The cop went to block the exit.

Jackson’s colored friend winked at him.

“De hoss is gone, ain’t he?”

Jackson exchanged looks. He couldn’t take a chance on winking.

“Giddap,” he said to the nag, beating its flanks with the reins.

The nag moved off in slow motion, impervious to Jackson’s blows. At that moment the junkman looked from the crowd to see if his property was safe and saw Jackson driving off in his cart. He looked at Jackson as though he didn’t believe it.

“Man, dass my wagon.”

He was an old man dressed in cast-off rags and a horse blanket worn like a shawl. He had a black woolen cloth wrapped about his head like a turban, over which was pulled a floppy, stained hat. Kinky white hair sprouting from beneath the turban joined a kinky white beard, grimy with dirt and stained with tobacco juice, from which peered a wrinkled black face and watery old eyes. His shoes were wrapped in gunny sacks tied with string. He looked like Uncle Tom, down and out in Harlem.

“Hey!” he yelled at Jackson in a high, whining voice. “You stealin’ mah wagon.”

Jackson lashed the nag’s rump, trying to get away. The junkman ran after him in a shuffling gait. Both horse and man moved so slowly it seemed to Jackson as though the whole world had slowed down to a crawl.

“Hey, he stealin’ mah wagon.”

A cop looked around at Jackson.

“Are you stealing this man’s wagon?”

“Nawsuh, dat’s mah pa. He can’t see well.”

The junkman clutched the cop’s sleeve.

“Ah ain’t you pa and Ah sees enough to see that you is stealing my wagon.”

“Pa, you drunk,” Jackson said.

The cop bent down and smelled the junkman’s breath. He drew back quickly, blowing. “Whew.”

“Come on and git in, Pa,” Jackson said, winking at the junkman over the cop’s head.

The junkman knew the code. Jackson was trying to get away and he wasn’t going to be the one to rat on him to a white cop.

“Ah din see dat was you, son,” he said, climbing up onto the seat beside Jackson.

The cop shrugged and turned away disgustedly.

The junkman fished a dirty plug of chewing tobacco from his coat pocket, blew the trash from it, bit off a chew, and offered it to Jackson. Jackson declined. The junkman stuck the plug back into his pocket, picked up the rope reins, shook them gently and whined, “Giddyap, Jebusite.”

Jebusite drifted off as though coasting through space. The junkman reined him between the score of patrol cars parked at all angles in the street like tanks stalled in a desert.

Farther down the street civilian cars were parked, others were coming, curious people were converging from every direction. The word that a white cop had been killed had hit the neighborhood like a stroke of lightning.

The junkman didn’t say anything until they were five blocks away. Then he asked, “Did you done it?”

“Done what?”

“Croaked dat cop?”

“I ain’t done nothing.”

“Den what you runnin’ for?”

“I just don’t want to get caught.”

The junkman understood. Colored folks in Harlem didn’t want to get caught by the police whether they had done anything or not.

“Me neither,” he said.

He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street and wiped his mouth with the back of his dirty cotton glove.

“You got a bone?”

Jackson started to take out his roll, thought better of it, skinned of a dollar bill and handed it to the junkman.

The junkman looked at it carefully and then tucked it out of sight beneath his rags. At 142nd Street, directly in front of the house where Jackson and Imabelle had formerly roomed, he stopped the horse, got out and started picking over the pile of garbage.

Jackson thought of Imabelle for the first time since he’d begun his escape. His heart came up and spread out in his mouth.

“Hey,” he called. “You want to take me down to 121st Street?”

The junkman looked up with an armful of trash.

“You got another bone?”

Jackson skinned off another dollar bill. The junkman threw the trash into the back of the wagon, climbed back to his seat, stashed the dollar and shook the reins. The nag floated off.

They rode in silence.

Jackson felt as though he were at the bottom of the pit. He’d been clubbed, cut at, shot at, skinned up, chased, and humiliated. The knot on his head sent pain shooting down through his skull like John Henry driving steel, and his puffed, bruised lips throbbed like tom-toms.

He didn’t know whether Goldy had found Imabelle’s address, whether she’d been arrested, whether she was dead or alive. He hardly knew how he’d gotten out alive himself, but that didn’t matter. He was sitting there riding in a junk wagon and he didn’t know anything. For all he knew, right at that moment, his woman might be in deadly danger. What was more, now that the gang knew the police were on to them, they might run away with Imabelle’s gold ore. But just so long as they didn’t hurt Imabelle, he didn’t care.

His clothes were wet on the outside from the puddle he’d fallen into, and wet on the inside from his own pure sweat. And all of it was icy cold. He sat trembling from cold and worry, and couldn’t do a thing.

Colored people passed along the dark sidewalks, slinking cautiously past the dark, dangerous doorways, heads bowed, every mother’s child of them looking as though they had trouble.

Colored folks and trouble, Jackson thought, like two mules hitched to the same wagon.

“You cold?” the junkman asked.

“I ain’t warm.”

“Wanna drink?”

“Where’s it at?”

The junkman fished a bottle of smoke from his ragged garments.

“You got another bone?”

Jackson skinned off another dollar bill, handed it to the junkman, took the bottle and tilted it to his lips. His teeth chattered on the bottle neck. The smoke burnt his gullet and simmered in his belly, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

He handed the half-emptied bottle back.

“You got a woman?” the junkman asked.

“I got one,” Jackson said mournfully. “But I don’t know where she’s at.”

The junkman looked at Jackson, looked at the bottle of smoke, handed it back to Jackson.

“You keep it,” he said. “You need it more’n me.”