The Heat's on

5

The pilgrims had finally gone.

Sister Heavenly was sitting up in bed, wearing a pink crocheted bed jacket trimmed in frilly lace. Long, curly, midnight-blue hair of a wig hung down over her shoulders.

She was so old her face had the shrunken, dried-up leathery look of a monkey’s. The corneas of her eyes were a strange shade of glazed blue resembling an enameled surface, while the pupils were a faded ocher with white spots. She wore perfect fitting plates of brilliant, matched, incredibly white teeth.

As a young woman her skin had been black; but daily applications of bleach creams for more than half a century had lightened her complexion to the color of pigskin. Her toothpick arms, extending from the pink jacket, were purple-hued at the top, graduating to parchment-colored hands so thin and fragile-looking as to appear transparent.

In one hand she held a scalding hot cup of sassafras tea, with her little finger extended according to the dictates of etiquette; in the other a small, dainty, meerschaum pipe with a long curved stem and a carved bowl. She was smoking the finely ground stems of marijuana leaves, her only vice.

Pinky sat beside the bed on a green leather ottoman, wringing his ham-size, milk-white hands.

The only light in the room came from a pink-shaded light on the other side of the bed. The soft pink light gave Pinky’s bruised white skin the exotic coloring of some unknown tropical sea monster.

“How come you think they’s going to croak him?” Sister Heavenly asked in her deep, slightly cracked, musical voice.

“To rob him, that’s why,” Pinky said in his whining voice. “To get his farm in Ghana.”

“A farm in Ghana!” she said scornfully. “If Gus got a farm in Ghana I got a palace in heaven.”

“He got a farm, all right. I has seen the papers.”

“Taking he got a farm — which he ain’t — how they going to get it by croaking him?”

“She’s his wife. He done willed it to her.”

“His wife! She ain’t no more his wife than you is his son. If they croak him, it’ll go to his relatives — if he got any relatives.”

“She his wife all right. I has seen the license.”

“You has seen everything. Suppose they croak him. They can’t go live on his farm. That’s the first place the police will look.”

He realized she wasn’t convinced about the farm. He took another tack.

“Then it’s his money. They’ll get that and run away.”

“His money! I is too old and time is too short for this bullshit. Gus ain’t never had two white quarters to rub together in his life.”

“He got money. A whole lot of money.” He looked away evasively and his voice changed. “His other wife in Fayetteville, North Carolina, died and left him a big tobacco farm and he sold it for a heap of money.”

She took a long puff from her pipe and held it down by sipping tea. Her old faded eyes regarded him with cynical amusement over the rim of her cup. Finally, when she let the smoke dribble from her lungs, she said, “What you trying to con me out of?”

“I ain’t trying to con you.”

“Then what’s all this ’bout his other wife and his other farm, an’ all his money? You must be seeing double.”

“It’s the God’s truth,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I swear it.”

“You swear it. Long as I knowed Gus he ain’t never let no woman get no legal hold on him. And if you think any woman what knows that is fool enough to die and leave him something, you don’t know the female race.”

“He got something,” he maintained urgently. “He made me promise not to tell, but I knows it’s what they’s after.”

She smiled evilly. “Then why don’t you get it yourself, if it’s worth anything — poor as you is?” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

“I couldn’t rob Gus. He the only one who ever been good to me.”

“You get it and let them rob and murder you, if you is so set on protecting him.”

His face took on a desperate expression. Sweat trickled from the borders of his hair. Tears welled up in his eyes.

“You sitting there, making fun, and he might be dead,” he accused in his whining voice.

Slowly she put down her cup on the night table. She rested the pipe across her stomach and studied him deliberately. She saw, that something was troubling him. She realized with faint surprise that he was deadly earnest.

“Ain’t I been good to you, too, treating you like my own son — if I had a son?” she cajoled.

“Yassum,” he replied obediently. “But he took me in and called me his son.”

“Ain’t I told you time and again that you is my heir?” she insisted. “Ain’t I told you that you is going to inherit all that I got when I die?”

“Yassum, but you ain’t helping me now.”

“You ain’t got no right to hold out on me like this. God won’t like it,” she said.

“I ain’t holding out,’ he whined, looking trapped. “It’s just that I promised not to tell.”

She leaned forward and held his eyes in a hypnotic stare. “Is it in a trunk?”

Her eyes were like two balls of colored fire bearing down on him.

“Not when I seen it.”

“Is it in a sack?”

He felt his power to defy her slipping away.

“Twarn’t in no sack when I seen it.”

“Were it hidden in the house?”

He shook his head.

“In the closet?… Beneath the floor?… Behind the wall?”

He felt himself growing dizzy in a holocaust of lights.

“That ain’t how it were hidden,” he admitted.

“He got it on him,” she said triumphantly.

He was too worn out by her eyes to resist further.

“Yassum. In a money belt.”

Intense thought wrinkled her face like a prune.

“It’s jewelry,” she concluded. “He’s stolen some jewelry. Is it diamonds?”

His willpower gave way. He slumped forward and sighed. “It’s a treasure map,” he confessed. “It tells how to find a whole mess of buried treasure in Africa.”

Her eyes popped open as though the lids had broken.

“Treasure map!” she screamed. “Lost treasure! You still believe in lost treasure, as old as you is?”

“I know how it sound, but that’s what it is all right,” he maintained stubbornly.

She stared at him speculatively until he felt himself withering.

“Did you see it?” she asked finally.

“Yassum. It shows a river and the sea and just where the treasure is buried on the bank.”

“A river!” Her eyes glittered as her brain worked lightning fast. “Where did he get it?”

“He’s had it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “When he show it to you?”

He hesitated before answering. “Last night.”

“Don’t nobody but you know he got it?”

“His wife and the African know. He’s going to give it to the expressmen who come for his trunk this morning. They’re going to send it on to his farm in Ghana so can’t nobody rob him of it before he gets there. But I knows that woman and the African plan to kill him and take it before the expressmen get there — if they ain’t already done it.”

“Why didn’t you stay with him and protect him?”

“He wouldn’t let me; he said he had something to do. He went off and I didn’t know where he was at. That’s why I rung the fire alarm.”

“What time are the expressmen due?”

“Six o’clock.”

She drew from inside her gown an old-fashioned locket-watch attached to a thin gold chain. It read 5:27.

She jumped out of bed and began to dress. First she snatched off the black wig and substituted a gray one.

“You’ll find some green stuff in a bottle in the drawer,” she said. “Give yourself a shot. It’ll calm you. You’re too jumpy with all that C.”

While he was loading the spike and banging himself, she dressed rapidly. She paid him no attention.

She put on a flowing black gown over numerous petticoats, low-heeled black shoes and black silk gloves, elbow length. She pinned a small black straw hat to her gray wig with a long steel hatpin.

“Go start the car,” she said.

She listened until he had gone out of the back door. Then she picked up a large black-beaded handbag, got a black-and-white striped parasol from the closet, and went into the kitchen.

Uncle Saint had already dressed. He now wore a black chauffeur’s uniform and cap, several sizes too large for him, and of a fashion popular during the 1920s.

“Did you get it?” she asked tersely.

“I heered him,” he replied straight from his mouth. “If Gus’s cut is big enough to buy a farm, it can’t be chicken feed — whatever it is.”

“I have an idea what it is,” she said. “If we ain’t too late.”

“Let’s go then.”

She went outside. He picked up his shotgun from beside the doorway and followed her, closing and locking the door behind him. He was high as a kite.

Although objects were already visible in the gray dawn light, they did not see Pinky. But they heard him. He was on his knees on the hard-packed dirt floor of the garage, gripping the doorposts with his hands, trying to get to his feet, breathing in loud hard gasps. The muscles of his neck, arms and torso were corded; his blood vessels stood out like ropes.

“He’s got the constitution of an ox,” Uncle Saint said.

“Shhh,” Sister Heavenly cautioned. “He can still hear.”

His sense of hearing was unbearably heightened, and he heard every word they said as distinctly as though they had shouted. His mind was lucid. She gave me a knockout drop, he was thinking. But he could feel consciousness leaving him like a wrecked ship sinking slowly into the sea. Finally his muscles collapsed and he went down onto his face between the doorposts. He didn’t hear Sister Heavenly and Uncle Saint when they approached.

Uncle Saint reached inside the garage and turned on the light. A 1937 black Lincoln Continental sprang into view.

They stepped over Pinky without comment and left him lying there. Sister Heavenly got into the back. Uncle Saint placed the shotgun within easy reach on the floor of the front seat, then went forward to open the double doors.

He followed a dirt road across an abandoned field, pushing up to fifty, bouncing over rocks and ruts, leaving a cloud of dust. A gardener in his undershirt, wearing a straw hat, was milking a goat tethered to a tree. He paid no attention to the black limousine; it was a common sight. But when Uncle Saint got onto the macadam streets and pushed up to seventy and seventy-five, early-morning workers, milkmen and garbage collectors, turned to stare.