The Big Gold Dream

9

Sugar stood beside a felt-covered kidney-shaped table in a room back of a grocery store on Lenox Avenue near 118th Street, watching the stud poker game.

"What time is it?" he asked the game keeper.

The game keeper pulled out an old-fashioned Elgin watch.

"Twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds past two o'clock," he replied, gold crowns flashing as he talked.

"I got to go," Sugar said.

"What's stopping you?" the game keeper asked.

Sugar picked his way through the dark store, and the door keeper let him out into the street.

He hurried back toward Eighth Avenue, warily approaching the scene where Alberta had been arrested. The crowds had disappeared, and the dark street was practically deserted.

The wrecked cars had been pushed to the curb, and a lone patrolman guarded the supermarket. Otherwise the coast was clear. He found a colored man who had witnessed the rumpus sitting on a tenement stoop, as though waiting for something else to happen. The man told him the cops had found the murder knife on the lady they arrested.

Sugar couldn't figure that one. He knew she hadn't killed him, but what was she doing with the knife? He couldn't think of a single reason. But that could wait. Whatever she was doing with it didn't make any difference now. It spelled trouble, big trouble with a capital T.

He felt in his pocket for a cigarette. He didn't have any. He was hungry, but he didn't have the price of a feed. He didn't know anybody he could borrow so much as half a dollar from. The jokers he played tonk with didn't have any more money than he had ordinarily, and that was only what their women gave them; and he knew they wouldn't lend him any if they had. He didn't have anything valuable enough to sell. He didn't have the talent to pick pockets, if there had been anybody's pocket to pick. He didn't have the nerve to rob anybody. He wasn't strong enough to mug. He hadn't made any connections with other women since he had had Alberta; he had been too lazy. He was a naturally lazy man.

And now he didn't even have any place to sleep, as tired and worn out as he was, having been up all the night before and running around all day long.

That was when he came to realize how much Alberta meant to him.

There was no need now of thinking about ways and means of stealing her money.

The main thing now was to get his woman back. Let her do the worrying. She'd find them some place to stay and something to eat. She might even find her money back. She was a strong, resourceful woman. He could depend on her.

But it would take money to get her out on bail.

He thought of Cassie. She was another kitchen slave, like Alberta. If she could afford to keep that Dummy in chips, maybe she had something cached away. And she and Alberta were such good friends maybe she would dig some of it up.

He went over to Cassie's on 112th Street, but nobody answered.

He stood in the street, feeling low and disgusted. Harlem was rough, he thought. If you didn't have money, you didn't have friends. He thought of the time he had been in jail down South. He had seen a hungry rat lapping up red pepper and sitting in a pan of water to keep its stomach cool.

He saw a man coming from the direction of Seventh Avenue. As the man came nearer Sugar saw that he was big, and wearing an old cap and clean starched overalls. But Sugar's eyes lit on the lunch pail the man was carrying. If he had had a knife, he would have tried to mug the man for his lunch. But he hadn't been able to borrow a knife. No one had been willing to lend him a knife. It wasn't what he might have done with it; it was just that nobody wanted to be without a knife. It wasn't that people wanted to use their knives on other people; it was just that they wanted to have their knives in case other people started cutting on them.

The big workman passed, keeping at a distance, his free hand in his pocket gripping his knife. Not that he suspected Sugar of any bad intentions; he just wanted to be prepared.

Sugar's feet started moving him in the direction of home. It was empty; the furniture was gone; the door was locked; his woman was in jail; and what was more the home didn't belong to him, and he didn't have the key. But it was home, the only one he had.

"Pssst!"

He came near jumping out of his skin.

The big fat black lady was invisible in the dark window.

"Who that?" he asked in a frightened whisper.

She came closer, and he could make out the whites of her eyes in the dim light from the distant street lamp.

"It's me-Miz Teabone."

"Hell," Sugar said evilly. "Why don't you go to bed."

"The police been here looking for you," she informed him in a stage whisper.

"Looking for me?" He was ready to light out and run a crooked mile.

"Grave Digger and Coffin Ed," she whispered theatrically. "Where's your woman?"

"She's in jail."

"I knowed it," Mrs. Teabone said triumphantly. "When I heard over the radio that a Jew-man named Abie had been killed up in the Bronx, I knowed she done it. I got second sight."

"The Jew!" Sugar exclaimed. "He dead?"

"He ain't alive," she said juicily. "She beat his head in with a hammer."

"She didn't do it," he said loyally. "It must have been somebody else."

"You is the only other somebody else," she said.

Again his feet got the message before it arrived at his brain. He was running. He didn't know where he was going, but he was on his way.

Something came up fast behind him and grabbed him by the sleeve. It sounded like a winded animal. His scalp rolled. It was late at night, he was alone on the street and he didn't have a knife. He tried to put on speed. He was afraid to look around.

"Let go!" he gasped in terror.

The thing tightened its grip and pulled up beside him. They turned the corner into Lenox Avenue, neck and neck. The thing grunted urgently. He looked about and saw a gaping mouth circled with even white teeth in a broad flat face. But behind the teeth was a gaping black hole where normally a tongue should have been.

"Dummy!" he exclaimed, panting.

He stopped and sucked in air.

"Jesus Christ, man, don't scare me like that," he complained.

Dummy kept grunting. His soft brown eyes, peering out from beneath knobs of scar tissue, were urgent.

"Man, stop making those noises," Sugar said.

Dummy clutched his hand and stuck a dirty scrap of writing paper in it.

Sugar took it and turned to let the light fall over his shoulder. He read: the mens wants you /lay low/go to mammy stormy/she safe.

He looked up.

Dummy's head jerked anxiously up and down.

He nodded and said, "Okay."

Dummy grinned, and his mouth looked like an exhibit of dental plates.

He was a short, heavy-set Hawaiian-looking man with thick, gray-shot, curly hair. His coarse, lumpy face was interlaced with tiny scars. He had cauliflowers for ears and pile hammers for hands. Muscles bulged from his dark brown T-shirt, but fat put him in the heavyweight division. He might have been any age from thirty to fifty.

He made an O with his right thumb and forefinger and turned down Lenox toward 116th Street. Sugar watched him for a moment, He had the half-sliding, bent-over gait of a full-grown gorilla.

Sugar wondered how he knew the police were looking for him. Where did he come into the story? What was his pitch? Did he know about the money?

On sudden impulse he decided to follow Dummy. But it wasn't easy. Dummy kept looking to both sides and over his shoulder with the instinctive caution of a man who can't hear. Sugar stepped into a doorway and let Dummy turn the corner into 116th Street. Then he ran after him in his high-kneed, churning, double-jointed gait.

He rounded the corner just in time to see Dummy disappear into the shadows beneath the entrance to Sweet Prophet's Temple of Wonderful Prayer.

Mammy Stormy's was over on Seventh Avenue near 115th Street. If Dummy saw him walking down 116th Street, he would naturally figure he was on his way to Mammy Stormy's. But if Dummy had gone into the Temple, he would soon know.

Above a narrow entrance, wedged between a dismal grocery store and a curtained hair-dressing parlor, was a small sign hanging in a glass box with the faintly discernible word: Hotel. At night the hotel entrance served the resident prostitutes as a sentry box and transient drunks as a water closet. During the day dogs dropped in to find out what the neighboring dogs had been eating.

As Sugar approached, a teenage girl came down the steep flight of stairs. Her cotton dress was rumpled and torn, and her straightened hair was mussed and stuck out from her skull like a mangled cactus plant. She was a thin girl, with small breasts, and her thin black face was wet with tears and ugly from crying,

Dummy came quickly from the entrance to the Temple and trotted across the street. Sugar kept coming toward them, trying to look as though it wasn't any business of his.

"He Georgiaed me," the girl told Dummy hysterically. "He sent me to Georgia."

Sugar couldn't help but hear her. He knew she meant that a man she had taken to her room had shown her some money, but afterwards had refused to pay her. He was surprised to learn that Dummy was trying to pimp.

Dummy told the girl to shut up with sign language, but she didn't understand. She thought he didn't understand what she was trying to tell him. She tried to demonstrate with gestures how the man had used her and put her out of the room without paying her.

"You ought to lay for him and rob him," she said. "He got a big roll of money; I saw it."

Dummy grabbed her and shook her, trying to make her hush. He didn't want Sugar to know what was happening. But the girl thought he was going to beat her because she had let herself be cheated.

"Don't beat me," she begged. "I'll help you. We can both rob him easy; he ain't got nothing but a knife."

Dummy pushed her back into the hotel entrance. She fell on the stairs and didn't try to get up. In his excitement he was trying to talk. The sounds made Sugar's flesh crawl.

Dummy took a dirty scratch pad and a pencil stub from his hip pocket and scrawled hurriedly: git goin man / the gunmens be here soon, and gave it to Sugar.

"How do you know the cops is looking for me if you been here all night with this chippy whore?" Sugar asked suspiciously.

Dummy wrote, they found the knife you throwed away on alburda.

Sugar's eyes popped. "The knife I throwed away! What knife?"

Dummy wrote: the one you stabbed rufus with.

"Man, Jesus Christ, look here," Sugar began, but Dummy grabbed him by the arm and pointed.

At the end of the block the dim lights of a small black sedan were turning slowly into 116th Street. It was now close to four o'clock.

A gargling sound issued from Dummy's mouth as he tried desperately to talk. But Sugar got the message anyway. From that distance he couldn't recognize the car nor see the faces of its occupants. But only Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson could raise that look on Dummy's face.

The only way to go without being seen was up the stairs. Sugar leaped over the huddled figure of the little prostitute and started quickly up the steep flights of stairs. Dummy stuck a foot inside and kicked the girl, and she jumped to her feet and followed Sugar.

"Ain't you coming, too," Sugar called softly down the stairs.

But Dummy sprinted across the street and vanished in the shadows of the entrance to the Temple.