For love of Imabelle

3

Jackson climbed three flights of stairs and rapped on a red door in a brightly lit hall.

A metal disk moved from a round peephole. Jackson couldn’t see the face, but the lookout saw him.

The door opened. Jackson went into an ordinary kitchen.

“You want to roll ’em or roll with ’em?” the lookout asked.

“Roll ’em,” Jackson said.

The lookout searched him, took his fingernail knife and put it on the pantry shelf alongside several man-killing knives and hard-shooting pistols.

“How can I hurt anybody with that?” Jackson protested.

“You can jab out their eyes.”

“The blade ain’t long enough to go through the eyelid.”

“Don’t argue, man, just go down to the last door to the right,” the lookout said, leaning against the door frame.

There were three loose nails in the door casing. By pressing them the lookout could blink the lights in the parlor, bedrooms, and dice room. One blink for a new customer, two for the law.

Another lookout opened the door from the inside of the dice room, closed and locked it behind Jackson.

There was a billiard table in the center of the room, and a rack holding billiard balls and cue sticks on one wall. The shooters were jammed about the table beneath a glare of light from a green-shaded drop lamp. The stick man stood on one side of the table, handling the dice and bets. Across from him sat the rack man on a high stool, changing greenbacks into silver dollars and banking the cuts. He cut a quarter on all bets up to five dollars, and fifty cents on bets over five dollars.

The bookies sat at each end of the table. A squat, bald-headed, brown-skinned man called Stack of Dollars sat at one end; a gray-haired white man called Abie the Jew sat at the other. Stack of Dollars bet the dice to lose; took any bet to win. Abie the Jew bet the dice to win or lose, barring box cars and snake eyes.

It was the biggest standing crap game in Harlem.

Jackson knew all the famous shooters by sight. They were celebrities in Harlem. Red Horse, Four-Four and Coots were professional gamblers; Sweet Wine, Rock Candy, Chink and Beauty were pimps; Doc Henderson was a dentist; Mister Foot was a numbers banker.

Red Horse was shooting. He shook the number eight bird’s eye dice loosely in his left hand, rolled them with his right hand. The dice rolled evenly down the green velvet cover, jumped the dog chain stretched across the middle of the table like two steeplechasers in a dead heat, came to a stop on four and three.

“Four-trey, the country way,” the stick man sang, raking in the dice. “Seven! The loser!”

Rock Candy reached for the money in the pot. Stack of Dollars raked in his bets. Abie took some, paid some.

“You goin’ to buck ’em?” the stick man asked.

Red Horse shook his head. He could pay a dollar for three more rolls.

“Next good shooter,” the stick man sang and looked at Jackson. “What you shoot, short-black-and-fat?”

“Ten bucks.”

Jackson threw a ten-dollar bill and fifty cents into the circle. Red Horse covered it. The bettors got down, win and lose, in the books. The stick man threw the dice to Jackson, who caught the dice, held them in his cupped hand close to his mouth and talked to them.

“Just get me out of this trouble and I ain’t goin’ to ask for no more.” He crossed himself, then shook the dice to get them hot.

“Turn ’em loose, Reverend,” the stick man said. “They ain’t titties and you ain’t no baby. Let ’em run wild in the big corral.”

Jackson turned them loose. They hopped across the green like scared jackrabbits, jumped the dog chain like frisky kangaroos, romped toward Abie’s field-cloth like locoed steers, got tired and rested on six and five.

“Natural eleven!” the stick man sang. “Eleven from heaven. The winner!”

Jackson let his money ride, threw another natural for the twenty; then crapped out for the forty with snake-eyes. He shot ten again, threw seven, let the twenty ride, threw another seven, shot the forty, and crapped out again. He was twenty dollars loser. He wiped the sweat from his face and head, took off his overcoat, put it with his hat on the coat rack, loosened the double-breasted jacket of his black hard-finished suit, and said to the dice, “Dice, I beg you with tears in my eyes as big as watermelons.”

He shot ten again, rapped three times in a row, and asked the stick man to change the dice.

“These don’t know me,” he said.

The stick man put in some black-eyed number eight dice that were stone cold. Jackson warmed them in his crotch, and threw four naturals in a row. He had eighty dollars in the pot. He took down the fifty dollars he had lost and shot the thirty. He caught a four and jumped it, took down another fifty, and shot ten.

“Jealous man can’t gamble, scared man can’t win,” the stick man crooned.

The bettors got off Jackson to win and bet him to lose. He caught six and sevened out.

“Shooter for the game,” the stick man sang. “The more you put down the more you pick up.”

The dice went on to the next shooter.

By midnight Jackson was $180 ahead. He had $376, but he needed $657.95 to cover the $500 he had stolen from Mr. Clay and the $157.95 to pay for his landlady’s stove.

He quit and went back to the Last Word to see if he had hit on the numbers. The last word for that night was 919, dead man’s row.

So Jackson went back to the dice game.

He prayed to the dice; he begged them. “I got pains in my heart as sharp as razor blades, and misery in my mind as deep as the bottom of the ocean and tall as the Rocky Mountains.”

He took off his coat when it came his second turn to shoot. His shirt was wet. His trousers chafed his crotch. He loosened his suspenders when his third turn came and let them hang down his legs.

Jackson threw more natural sevens and elevens than had ever been seen in that game before. But he threw more craps, twos, threes and twelves, than he did natural sevens and elevens. And as all good crapshooters know, crapping is the way you lose.

Day was breaking when the game gave out. They had Jackson. He was stone-cold broke. He borrowed fifty cents from the house and trudged slowly down to the snack bar in the Theresa Hotel. He got a cup of coffee and two doughnuts for thirty cents and stood at the counter.

His eyes were glazed. His black skin had turned putty-gray. He was as tired as though he’d been plowing rocks with a mule team.

“You look beat,” the counterman said.

“I feel low enough to be buried in whalebones, and they’re on the bottom of the sea,” he confessed.

The counterman watched him gobble his doughnuts and gulp his coffee.

“You must have got broke in that crap game.”

“I did,” Jackson confessed.

“Looks like it. They say a rich man can’t sleep, but a broke man can’t get enough to eat.”

Jackson looked up at the clock on the wall and the clock said hurry-hurry. Mr. Clay came down from his living quarters at nine o’clock sharp. Jackson knew he’d have to be there with the money and find some way to slip it back into the safe when Mr. Clay opened it if he expected to get away with it.

Imabelle could raise the money, but he hated to ask her. It meant she’d have to be dishonest. But the kind of trouble they were in now would make a rat eat red pepper.

He went into the hotel lobby next door and telephoned his apartment.

The Theresa lobby was dead at that hour save for a few working-johns who had to make eight o’clock time downtown, and were hurrying into the hotel grill for their morning grits and bacon.

His landlady answered.

“Is Imabelle come home?” he asked.

“Your yallah woman is in jail where you ought to be too,” she answered evilly.

“In jail? How come?”

“Right after you phoned here last night a United States marshal brought her back here under arrest. He was looking for you too, Jackson, and if I’d knowed where you was I’d have told him. He wanted you both on a counterfeiting charge.”

“A United States marshal? He had her under arrest? What’d he look like?”

“He said you knew him.”

“What did he do with Imabelle?”

“He took her to jail, that’s what. And he confiscated her trunk and took that along in case he didn’t find you.”

“Her trunk?” Jackson was so stunned he could barely speak. “He confiscated her trunk? And took it with him?”

“He sure did, lover boy. And when he finds you—”

“Good God! He confiscated her trunk? What did he say his name was?”

“Don’t ask me no more questions, Jackson. I ain’t going to get myself in any trouble helping you to escape.”

“You ain’t got a Christian bone inside of you,” he said, and slowly hung up the receiver.

He stood sagging against the wall of the telephone booth. He felt as though he had stumbled into quicksand. Every time he struggled to get out, he went in deeper.

He couldn’t figure out how the marshal managed to get hold of Imabelle’s trunk. How had he found out what was in it — unless he had scared her enough to make her tell? And that meant she was in trouble.

What made it so bad for Jackson was he didn’t know where to look for the marshal. He had no idea where the marshal had taken Imabelle. He didn’t believe the marshal had taken her to the federal jail because the marshal was out for all he could get. The marshal wouldn’t take her trunk down to the jail if he expected to get a cut for himself. But Jackson had no idea how to go about tracing him. And he didn’t know what he could do to save her trunk if he found the marshal.

He stood on the empty sidewalk in front of the Theresa, trying to think of a way out. His face was knotted from mental effort. Finally he muttered to himself, “There ain’t no help for it.”

He’d have to see his twin brother Goldy. Goldy knew everybody in Harlem.

He didn’t know where Goldy lived, so he’d have to wait until noon when Goldy appeared on the street. He was afraid to loiter on the street himself. He didn’t have the price of a movie, although there was one in the block that opened at eight o’clock in the morning. But there was a professional building around the corner on 125th Street with a number of doctors’ offices.

He went up on the second floor and sat in a doctor’s waiting room. The doctor hadn’t arrived, but there were already four patients waiting. He kept moving back in line, after the doctor had arrived, letting everybody go ahead of him.

The receptionist kept looking at him from time to time. Finally she asked in a hard voice, “Are you sick or aren’t you?”

By then it was almost noon.

“I was, but I feel better now,” he said and put his hat on and left.