The Big Gold Dream

17

Sugar Stonewall was in the courtroom when Alberta was bound over. It was safe enough. Half of the spectators were colored people who looked just like him. Still, he was tense.

He had begged his subway fare downtown. Now he stopped a colored woman in the corridor and asked, "Lady, can you give me fifteen cents to get uptown? I just ain't got no money."

She fished a subway token from her purse and handed it to him without looking up.

He stopped on the way out and drank from the fountain. Water wouldn't nourish him, he knew, but it helped to weight his empty stomach down.

He walked over to Broadway and caught the A express train, transferred to a local at 125th Street and rode back to 116th Street.

It was about eleven o'clock when he arrived at the tenement on 118th Street where Alberta had her flat.

The big black woman hanging out of the front window on the ground floor was beginning to show signs of wear. The sun was on that side of the street, and her eyes blinked sleepily in the sunshine, but she was still hanging on with grim determination.

Sugar tried to slip past her, but she opened her eyes and caught him.

"I thought you'd be in jail by now," she said by way of greeting.

"Why don't you leave me alone, woman," he muttered.

"I ain't doing nothing to you," she said, taking offense. "It ain't none of my business what you people do."

He entered the hall without replying. He kept going, up to the roof, and paused for a moment at the top of the fire escape to case the windows on the other side of the back court. Most of the windows were wide open, and housewives were visible doing their Monday morning chores. The weekly washings were strung on pulley lines from one building to another, crisscrossing one below the other down the narrow pit to the bottom. The graveled tar of the flat, burning hot roof was soft beneath his feet.

Finally he relaxed. He was on familiar ground. The heat bubbling from the tarred roof, the smell of cooking collard greens and pork and the jarring clash of colors on the lines of Monday wash put him at his ease.

He went down the fire escape and tried the window. A woman watched him from the kitchen window across the courtyard, but she had seen him in the flat often enough to know him. The shades were drawn and the window was locked, but he had long before prepared for such an emergency. A tiny hole was chipped in the window glass just above the catch, and a rusty tenpenny nail was wedged in the corner between the window frame and sill, where he had left it.

He opened the catch, raised the window and went inside, slipping beneath the shade. The woman across the way lost interest and returned to her chores when she didn't hear any sounds of fighting.

He discarded his sweat-stained rayon jacket and dirty straw hat and went to work. He searched every nook and cranny in the three rooms, going about it methodically. He examined every board in the floor, the baseboards, probed all the rat holes. He even pried loose the tin can tops nailed over the larger rat holes and speared in the openings with a fork. He went through the closet and the cupboards, moving the dishes and the utensils, and the cans, boxes, cartons and stacks of old paper sacks to look underneath them. He emptied the containers of salt and flour, sugar and corn meal, dried peas and hominy grits, and refilled them one by one. He searched the fire-box of the potbellied stove in the sitting room, the oven of the gas stove in the kitchen, inside the electric refrigerator and underneath.

Then he dumped the shoe box containing the policy slips and studied them. They didn't give him any clue.

Two hours later he was convinced the money wasn't there. He was beginning to doubt whether there had been any money. The only thing left to do was to go back and try to find Mabel. It wasn't likely that Rufus had given her any large sum of money to keep for him, but she might know something. The trouble was getting in to see her.

From the kitchen window he could see the people in the various kitchens across the courtyard sitting down to eat. He figured this would be a good time to call on Mabel. But he was so tired and hungry his wits were blunted. He figured he ought to eat first. He had seen food in the refrigerator but had not paid it any attention.

Now he explored it again. He found three pork chops, two eggs, a saucepan hall-filled with cold hominy grits and a serving dish containing dandelion greens and okra that had been boiled with pigs feet. The pigs feet had already been eaten.

He got out the big iron skillet, poured in some half rancid drippings from the lard can on the back of the stove and put the chops on to fry. While they were frying, he pried the hominy grits from the saucepan in one piece, and cut it into slices an inch thick.

When the chops were done he added more drippings, fried the hominy grits a rich brown, stacked them alongside the chops and fried the eggs country style. He put the fried eggs on top of the grits and dumped the greens and okra into the pan, bringing it just to a boil.

He left everything on top of the stove and ate, standing, until it was all gone. By then he was so sleepy he couldn't keep his eyes open.

He went into the bedroom, stretched out on the floor with his head on the pile of Alberta's lingerie and went to sleep.

Twenty minutes later he was snoring loud and steadily. When he exhaled, his snores sounded like a herd of buffalos drinking water; when he inhaled they sounded like a round saw cutting through a fat pine knot. His mouth was open, and a bottle fly was crawling about the crater as though trying to get up nerve to take the plunge. Every now and then Sugar would strike at it limply with his right hand, but he only succeeded in knocking his bottom lip out of shape.

He didn't wake up when the window was slowly raised by someone on the fire escape. He didn't see the man slide cautiously underneath the shade and enter the room.

The man had an open knife in his hand. It had a heavy, brutal-looking blade about seven inches long. The man approached on tiptoe and looked down at his face. He chased the fly with his shoe, but Sugar didn't stir.

The man tiptoed to the door and looked into the kitchen; then he tiptoed to the other door and looked into the sitting room. Then he went back, stood over Sugar and watched him sleeping. He looked as though he were trying to make up his mind about something.

After a while he knelt down beside Sugar and placed the knife on the floor within easy reach. He took his time searching all of Sugar's pockets.

All this didn't even cause a break in Sugar's snoring.

The man did not even smile. Obviously he had no sense of humor.

He picked up the knife and stood up. Still holding the knife open and ready, he scrounged out of the window backwards and went up the fire escape, leaving the window open.