The Big Gold Dream

3

A dilapidated moving van, minus the name of the owner or any identifying inscription save for a license plate almost obliterated by dirt, drew up in front of a four-storied brick tenement on 118th Street. The block was parallel to the one on 117th Street where the baptism had taken place a short time before.

Two big overall-clad colored men, one of whom had been driving, and a small, white-haired Jew, wearing a black suit and a brown felt hat, got out.

"Hey, auntie," the Jew called to a big black woman leaning from a first-floor window. "What floor does Rufus Wright live on?"

The woman gave him an evil look. "If you means Alberta Wright, she lives on the top floor."

The Jew's eyebrows shot upward, but he didn't reply.

"If Rufus has brought in a woman, we won't touch it," he said to his helpers as they climbed the smelly stairs.

The helpers said nothing.

On the fourth floor, a slick-looking Negro with straightened hair beckoned from the rear door and said, "Psst." He was wearing a pink sport shirt, a green silk suit and yellow linen shoes, and he had a wide, confidential grin.

The Jew and his helpers entered the parlor of a two-room flat.

The Negro closed the door and locked it, then said, "All right, daddy-O, let's get on."

The Jew looked about suspiciously. "You're alone, ain't you?" He had been around colored people so long he talked like one.

"Ain't I always?" the Negro countered.

"You know I got to get it straight."

"All right, set up your alibis."

The Jew frowned. "That's a bad word," he said, but the Negro didn't argue the point. The Jew asked, "Your name is Rufus Wright, ain't it?"

"Right," Rufus said.

The helpers, standing just inside the doorway, sniggered. Every time the Jew bought anything from Rufus, he went through the same act.

"This Is your place, ain't it?"

"Right."

"You own the furniture, don't you?"

"Right."

"Who is this woman, Alberta Wright?" the Jew threw in suddenly.

"Her? She's my wife," Rufus said, without batting an eye.

"Why didn't you stick to being a bachelor?" the Jew complained. "That was safer."

"Well, you see, daddy-O, this time it's different," Rufus said. "This time it's on her account that I got to sell my furniture."

"What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing wrong with her. She's dead is all. That's why I got to raise some money on a Sunday. I got to pay the undertaker some money in advance so he'll go down to the morgue and get her body."

The Jew grinned at his helpers to show he appreciated the story. "Well, that's all right," he conceded, relaxing. "Now we got everything straight." He turned again to his helpers and called them to witness. "You boys heard what Mr. Wright said."

They nodded.

"All right, Rufus boy, let's get down to business. Is that the set you want to sell?" he asked, pointing toward a huge blond-oak television set on a gate-legged table.

"I've decided to sell all of my furniture," Rufus said. "This funeral is going to be expensive, and I got to make a down payment of five hundred dollars."

"For that much, you had ought to got the whole Blumstein's department store," the Jew said drily.

"There's a lot of good stuff here," Rufus contended.

The Jew looked over the room, and his expression went sour. The room was jammed with a motley collection of worn-out furnishings arranged about a potbeilied stove like molting chickens about a mother hen: threadbare rugs; moth-eaten overstuffed chairs and a sofa, broken-legged tables; clocks without works; ceramic statuettes that had been through the Inquisition; a stuffed pheasant with a bald patch on its back; a set of scarred antlers mounted on the wall, flanked by faded lithographs of English hunting scenes; cutout photos of Negro blues singers hanging beside reproductions of the Virgin Mother and Child, The Last Supper and The Crucifixion cut from calendars given out by undertaker H. Exodus Clay.

"Do you call this furniture?" the Jew asked.

"These are mostly antiques in this room," Rufus said. "But there's a brand new set of furniture in the bedroom."

"Your wife couldn't say no to her white folks, could she?" the Jew cracked. "She must have brought everything home that they left for the trash man."

"She couldn't throw nothing away neither," Rufus added.

Grinning, the Jew took a notebook and stylo from his inside coat pocket and went to work. Rapidly and with scarcely a look, he itemized the furnishings, allowing $50 for the television set and $19 for everything else.

"I can't use the stove," he said. "Sixty-nine bucks for the lot. Okay."

"You mean that's all you want to pay for everything in this room?" Rufus asked incredulously.

"That's more than it's worth," the Jew said, adding with a grin. "I wouldn't pay it if it wasn't for your wife needing a decent funeral."

With an abrupt motion, Rufus opened his mouth and stuck it in front of the Jew's face. "Here, take my teeth too and have it done with," he blubbered.

The Jew looked into his mouth with interest. "Holy Mackerel, you got a red tongue, blue gums and white teeth," he observed. "If anybody calls you a Communist, you just open your mouth and show them the national colors."

Rufus closed his mouth and looked sheepish. "All right, sixty-nine bucks; if I got to, I got to."

The helpers started to move the furniture but the Jew stopped them. "Wait till I get it down legal," he cautioned.

In the bedroom the bureau drawers and the dressing table still contained Alberta's personal effects, lingerie and toilette articles as she had left them that morning, and the bed was made up and covered with a pink rayon spread.

"Get these drawers cleaned out," the Jew said.

Rufus began piling the contents helter-skelter in a corner of the room. The Jew went about his business of assessing the furniture without paying him the slightest attention.

When he had thrown off the bed linen to examine the mattress, the Jew said sharply, "This has been damaged."

The seams of the mattress on all four sides, both top and bottom, had been opened with a knife wide enough to permit a hand.

"I had to open it to put in some bug powder," Rufus said. "We been bothered with the bugs. But all it needs is sewing up a little and it'll look like new."

The Jew wasn't listening. He was sticking his arm through the openings and probing the padding with his fingers. With an enraged gesture, he wheeled it over to the floor and probed the other side. His face was a study in frustration.

"The deal's off," he choked in a furious voice. His sallow skin had turned the dull purple of a ripe fig.

"What the hell's the matter with you!" Rufus shouted, his eyes bugging in matching fury. "You think I'm going to sell you a mattress if there was any money hidden in it?"

"It's risky, too risky," the Jew said, half cowed by Rufus's threatening attitude. "If money has been stolen, I won't touch it."

"What risk is you taking?" Rufus kept raving. "You don't never take no risk. It's me takes all the risks. The way you cover yourself up with all kinds of legal tetches, all of Congress couldn't get nothing on you."

The Jew gave in. "All right, all right. We don't have to fight. I just like to do my own looking, whether I find anything or not."

"Hell, you think you're going to find a bale of money in every mattress that you buy," Rufus said scornfully.

It was rumored in Harlem that twenty years ago the Jew had found thirty-five thousand dollars in cash hidden in a mattress he had bought for 75? from a flea-bag hotel room in which an old white beggar had died.

Rufus kept on needling. "Us colored folks ain't got no money to hide. You Jews got it all."

The Jew was finished with it. "All right, drop it, boy. Twenty-seven fifty for what's in here, okay?"

"That's just what I mean," Rufus said. "My old lady paid two hundred seventy-five for this set less than a month ago."

"All right, stop breaking my heart-thirty-five, okay?" the Jew said.

Rufus wiped his smooth black cold-creamed face with a white silk handkerchief. "Okay, man, okay," he said harshly. "Let's get finished; I ain't got all day."

The Jew hid a vindictive smile and went into the kitchen. He took one look at the enamel-topped table and tubular stainless steel chairs with foam-rubber plastic-covered seats and said, "I can see that your wife was a cook."

He sat at the table and added up the total, allowing $13 for the kitchen's contents, exclusive of the table service and utensils. It came to $117. He then wrote a receipt on a form taken from a pad that looked like a check book:

Received from A. Finkeistein $117.00 for total furnishings of apartment No. 44, 118th Street, Manhattan, New York City.

Leaving it undated, he asked Rufus to sign it.

"Man, don't you never talk to me no more about taking risks," Rufus grumbled as he signed.

"You got to bury your wife," the Jew needled slyly. "I ain't got no wife."

The helpers exchanged looks and grinned.

"No cracks," the Jew warned. "You just sign here as witnesses."

Laboriously, they spelled out their signatures below.

"Okay, now you can take this junk and load it," the Jew said, tucking the receipt carefully into a stuffed wallet and extracting a thin sheaf of banknotes.

Stolidly the helpers shuffled into the sitting room and began slamming the furniture about. The colored lady had retired from her grandstand seat in the front window when they appeared on the street with the first load, but other windows up and down the street on both sides were occupied with the customary Sunday afternoon sightseers. No significance was attached to the moving. In a number of windows only the grayish bottoms of big bare black feet resting on the sills were visible from below; and they remained stationary. A patrol car idled past, but the cops didn't give the movers a second look. Moving on Sunday was a perfectly legitimate undertaking; many people figured that was the best time to do it.

The helpers loaded the bureau and the dressing table in the van alongside the sitting room suite, then, after knocking the bed apart, brought it down in sections. One of them brought down the mattress, and the other brought down the springs. They packed the springs but left the mattress on the tailgate to be used as a buffer for the stuff from the kitchen. Before going back up, they went forward to the driver's compartment and drank heartily from a bottle of California muscatel wine.

A young man standing in the doorway of the adjoining tenement sucked on a marijuana cigarette and watched them with an expression of infantile concentration. He had a big, flat body, whose wide square shoulders gave the impression of abnormal strength. He had a small head with a round babyish face and smooth brown hairless skin. His big eyes with their drug-widened pupils looked completely senseless. Despite the heat he wore a heavy tweed jacket with thick shoulder pads, a wide-brimmed beaver hat pulled low over his forehead and skintight mustard-colored corduroy pants tucked into black and white cowboy boots. On first sight he looked like a harmeless moron.

As soon as the Jew's two helpers went back upstairs, he squashed the marijuana butt, stuck it into the band of his hat and sauntered toward the truck. Without looking about to see whether or not he was being watched, he shouldered the mattress as though it were stuffed with down and began walking casually in the direction of Lenox Avenue.

A young brown-skinned woman, looking out of a window as he passed her tenement lodging, laughed melodiously.

"Hey, baby, come look at this spook with his house on his back," she called over her shoulder.

A muscular black man, naked to the waist, appeared at her side. "He's probably found a new gal and he's moving in with her," he said.

The young man turned the corner at Lenox Avenue and disappeared.

When the helpers came down with the kitchen table and chairs, they noticed the mattress was missing. They looked up and down the street. The young woman saw them and shouted, "Ain't no need of looking, 'cause sleepy done got it."

"Sleepy who?" one of them asked.

"How do I know who?" she replied. "You think I knows any niggers who steals mattresses?"

The muscular man reappeared at her side, and the helpers had business back upstairs.

The Jew was sniffing about in the kitchen when they came up. Figuring he might find something good to eat, they didn't disturb him with news of the stolen mattress but hurried to get finished.

The Jew lifted the lid from a big iron pot on the stove and found it half filled with a concoction of boiled rice and squares of orange-colored meat that smelled like fish. He dished up some with his finger and tasted it. "Mmmm, it's good," he said. "What is it?"

Rufus stuck his nose in the pot and tasted a bit of the bright-colored meat. "It's alligator tails and rice," he said. "It's a great dish in South Carolina." Then he added, "That's where my wife came from."

"Rest her soul," the Jew said, took a plate from the cupboard and began serving himself.

When the two helpers finished they found their boss eating from a plate on the stove and Rufus from a plate on top of the icebox.

"Tails and rice," they chorused in unison and joined the feast, putting their plates on the sink.

One stopped long enough to look for some whiskey but only found a bottle of black rum behind a stack of used paper sacks on the top shelf.

"You don't mind if us drink a little of this," he asked Rufus.

"Help yourself," Rufus said.

He and the Jew drank beer.

By the time they had cleaned the pot, everybody felt loveydovey. It wasn't until the three of them had gone downstairs and were about to enter the van that the driver remembered to tell the Jew about the stolen mattress.

The Jew looked thoughtful. He wasn't worried about the mattress, but with everybody having the same idea, he resolved to look into the stuffings of the living room suite as soon as possible.

Rufus was thinking along the same lines. Upstairs he had taken off the locked door of the clothes closet by knocking out the pins of the hinges, and was searching inside. But he didn't find anything but clothes, two empty pasteboard suitcases, a stack of shoe boxes filled with slips containing the hit numbers for the past five years and a variety of nameless junk.

He looked as though he had been taken.

After a moment he shrugged and walked out of the flat like a man trying to play the part of a good loser. He locked the door with the key that Sugar had given him, went down the stairs and hesitated for a moment in the entrance. He didn't see anyone who seemed concerned with him, so he went down the street and around the corner and got into his car parked in the shade on Lenox Avenue.