SEVEN
Sometimes the road appeared around the bend in his thoughts: buckling and pocked, scrubbed away by monsoons, the jungle clutching it close in a dark green smother. Disintegrating. Pepper heard the boys sing:
Engineers have hairy ears
They live in caves and ditches
They wipe their ass with broken glass
They’re rugged sons of bitches
No one knew why Services of Supply troops called themselves hairy ears—he found out later that all engineers used the nickname—but he understood the rugged sons of bitches part. Rugged son of a bitchness got him sent to Burma in the first place.
Pepper was born in a gray clapboard house on Hillside Avenue in Newark. Womb-wet and shaking, he belted his mother in the face when she lifted him for a kiss. “First punch,” he told her years later, bored of hearing the story. In his line, slugging someone hello was a job requirement, and his apprenticeship started early.
He left school in fifth grade to push a broom at the Celluloid Manufacturing Company. At lunch he’d sit on the loading dock atop a crate of black-and-white keys earmarked for the Ampico piano factory and watch the hustlers come and go outside Hank’s Grill, which maintained a well-loved craps game in the back, a couple of slot machines, and a hooker named Betty, known for cooing postcoital nursery rhymes. It was the Great Depression and times were strange and Betty stranger still. She had devotees.
One afternoon Pepper finally crossed the street and lunch-hour visits turned into daywork. A variety of crooks gave him nickels for errands, dispatched him to dilapidated tenements to deliver notes written on butcher paper and envelopes they warned him not to open. As if he gave a shit about their schemes; he did not. He liked the money. Nickels became rolls of bills after puberty shot him up a foot and he turned to bruising. He bounced at the Negro clubs on the Barbary Coast—the Kinney Club and the Alcazar Tavern—and made a name for sucker punches and a dizzying backhand. The owners pleaded with him to dress better, but Pepper stuck to his uniform of dungarees and stiff work shirt. Tucked in if he was feeling fancy.
He did not go to church. He was his own sermon. The fifth time Pepper beat a man unconscious the judge said it was either jail or sign up for the war effort. Boot camp and a berth on the USS Hermitage. The judge got a kickback for everyone he steered to war.
On the way over Pepper and the rest of the colored soldiers ate hardtack and beans in the dingy hull while the white boys chowed down on proper rations above. They showered in seawater, and Pepper cursed the whole time, not suspecting he’d long for such a luxury once he got down in the mud and silt. There were Negro soldiers who wanted to kill Nazis and Japs and were angry at their deployment behind the lines. Pepper, for his part, was most comfortable where no one was looking, the in-between places, whether it was an alley that separated the church from a line of juke joints or some map grid nobody’d heard of, like Pangsau Pass in the Patkai Hills. Hard to find a place more in-between than a road that didn’t exist yet, hard to find work more dangerous than carving out supply lines from India to China. It was one thing to believe the world was indifferent and cruel, and another to wake to proof every day in the treacherous mountain slopes, the hungry gorges and ravines, the myriad jungle treachery. Only a lazy God could deliver the meanness of things so unadorned.
None of the black boys had seen anything like it. The SOS was there to reestablish a route to China after the Japanese invasion of Burma, to conjure a road out of nothing, clear airstrips for materiel drops, lay mile upon mile of fuel line. The secondhand equipment was a joke—pickaxes broke in their hands, bulldozers shuddered and shook as the white officers looked on. But the native workers, the Burmese and Chinese coolies, had thirdhand equipment, so you thanked your lucky stars. Seven days a week, day and night—whorehouse hours. The road claimed a man a mile, so they said, and when the quota fell behind, the jungle made up for it in spades. Malaria, typhus. At quitting time landslides washed away the day’s work and men, too, sometimes. You buried them if you could find the bodies.
The night of the earthquake he thought the Devil was reaching up to claim him, but then he remembered he didn’t believe in the Devil or those above, and he went back to sleep.
Back home, Pepper had two dependable enemies: cops and bad luck. In the SOS, he found counterparts for them in command, whose harebrained operations were designed to destroy him, and in the jungle, with its random bloodthirst. Do the work, survive the day: He was used to living like this, and now everybody else had to play catch-up. Work and sleep. There were no brothels, no craps games worth a damn, nobody worth beating senseless. Nothing to do but complain, smoke reefer, and remove leeches from your balls. The leeches were out of myth. “Like being back home,” Pepper told his bunkmates as he put a Zippo to an especially large specimen. This was back when Pepper still told jokes. No one laughed because they were miserable or because they thought he was serious. Most of his unit was these dopey country boys.
He didn’t see combat, but did his first murder nonetheless. Thirty miles from Mongyu, a new deployment of native workers arrived, hardworking Burmese to replace the ones the jungle chewed up. Mostly they stuck to their own camp at quitting time, but there was one young man with delicate features who slunk around, ever underfoot. He wanted to learn English, he said. This gang of white officers used to taunt and waggle their tongues at him. He was not the first womanish man Pepper had seen—there was a place on Warren Street that catered to johns of that bent. The Burmese man only approached the white soldiers for practice, as if the colored grunts had a different language. (They did and they didn’t.) As the weeks went on, those officers kept on his case, lobbing kissy noises and jeers. The man just smiled and did a slow, servile nod, dipping his sad eyes from view.
There was no doubt who had beaten him so. One murky evening at the end of monsoon season Pepper went out to smoke some reefer by the Yard—that’s what they called the area for the broken-down bulldozers and cranes, as if it were a proper motor pool. No one around. No one was ever around when Pepper was put to the test, and he was not one to speak about things he said or did so what happened next joined the other items in his grim scrapbook. The man’s brains were spilled out in the mud when Pepper found him. Pants around his knees. If there’d been a hospital for native workers, he might have taken the man there. If anyone would’ve been held accountable, he might have reported it. White soldier calls someone a Jap spy, he can get away with anything.
Red bubbles on the Burmese nostrils wobbled and popped as he gurgled. Pepper fixed a palm to the man’s mouth and pinched closed the nose, then put a knee to his chest when he started to buck. Pepper’s hands were callused from the road work. He didn’t feel the man’s skin at all, like he was wearing thick rubber gloves.
You hear people say, “Oh, when our boy came back from the war, he was changed.” The war didn’t change Pepper, it completed him. He’d lose himself in different, darker caves and ditches when he returned to the States and started his career in earnest.
The rain washed the Burmese’s blood off his hands. In the barracks, Armed Forces Radio announced the score of the Dodger–Giants game eight thousand miles away. Back among normal people and their diversions. The normal world kept spinning when he was up to no good and he stepped back in like nothing happened. This Houdini trick.
The Dodgers were playing Cincinnati when he heard about Arthur.
He was at Donegal’s, up on Broadway. Friday night, three days after the heist. Everyone was hunkered and listening to the game. What kind of deviant rooted for the Dodgers on Giants turf? The Dodgers splitting Brooklyn for Los Angeles was a crime, and to cheer for the lost team meant you were an accomplice, but perpetrators and accomplices made up the majority of Donegal’s clientele. A tendency toward moral irregularity made you a regular. Pepper sat on a stool at the mahogany bar with the usual swindlers, thieves, and pimps. Kept his ears open for chatter about t
he Theresa job.
Banjo, an elderly hustler who claimed to be the first man to steal a car on the “Isle of Manhattan,” limped inside and announced that someone had bumped Arthur. The limp was courtesy of the robbery squad, who’d been disappointed that Banjo sicced his dog on them the last time they picked him up. It had been a crowbar-shaped disappointment.
Banjo placed his plaid beret over his heart in tribute to Arthur. The thief was known, with fans of his own among these Dodgers fans. Pour one out for the Jackie Robinson of safecracking. Pepper guzzled his beer and walked down to where the dead man had flopped. Eighth inning, six to one Dodgers.
Outside Arthur’s building on 134th, two cop cars had their lights spinning, red and white on the faces of the onlookers. No reason for it—the cops were waiting for the meat wagon—but they liked the show of power. As if white people didn’t remind these people of their place all day. At work, at the white bank, at the grocery store as the clerk explained they’d reached the end of their credit. Pepper jostled to the front of the mob. Scenes like this drew a crowd, killed time, especially on hot, listless nights. One of the cops—this beefy-faced peckerwood—noticed Pepper and gave him the once-over. Pepper stared back and the pig turned his attention to his shiny black shoes.
Pepper got the low-down from the wino swaying next to him. You want to know what’s going on, you ask the block wino. They see everything and then the booze pickles it, keeps it all fresh for later. The wino told him that a man named Arthur—“looks like a schoolteacher”—had been shot in his bed. The landlady saw the open door and phoned the precinct. “His head blown up like a watermelon fell off a cart.” The wino made an evocative splat sound. The landlady was a nice woman, he added, always with a warm hello no matter how shaky he was.
“That’s a shame,” Pepper told the wino. It was too bad, on top of not knowing where his damn money was. He’d liked Arthur, the way the man rubbed his fingertips together when he got to thinking, like he was about to punch out a safe. After the crew went to meet the furniture-store owner last night, he and Arthur went for a drink. The safecracker kept going on about this farm he owned. Out in the country. “I’m going to get a horse, and some chickens.” Come Labor Day, Arthur said, when the heat died down, he wanted to return to Carney’s Furniture and talk to the man about home furnishings. “We won’t say a word about the Theresa job. Won’t even acknowledge that we’ve ever met. Just a salesman and a man in the market. Just: Is it comfortable? Will it last?” He raised his glass to toast the idea.
Gets himself some land, then he kicks the bucket up here. Bought the farm, then bought the farm. More proof for Pepper’s philosophy vis-à-vis making plans. Whoever heard of a crook keeping chickens? Begging for God to smite your uppity ass. Take the road, for instance. Three years to finish, hundreds of men lost, and then the Japanese surrender a month later. It was only good for war and with the war over, the jungle took it back. What was it now? A ribbon of rubble in the mud.
When Pepper woke the next morning the heat was murderous and it was only seven a.m. A nice day for a hunt. Hunting a rat, smoking out a double-crosser—it had been a while. Pepper liked the heat, which flushed out weasels to stoops and shade. Plus today he’d have wheels. He waited outside the furniture store for Carney to show up, and then it was on to the likely hideouts, the fronts and flophouses and fuck pads of this chase.
* * *
* * *
The heat made Harlem into a forge. Pepper rode shotgun.
Pepper caught up with Carney as he unlocked the front door of the furniture store, greeting him with “Mr. Businessman.” Carney jumped, on alert from Freddie’s visit the night before. The keys in his hand a talisman of the lost, normal world. Everybody knew how to find Carney—one of the drawbacks of having his name in two-foot-tall letters on 125th Street. Chink Montague’s men, this crook. Freddie had all his addresses and in the last three days had popped up with bad news each time. Carney had never thought overmuch about his accessibility before, but now recognized it as a hazard in the criminal trade.
Miami Joe understood this. He was nowhere to be found. “I want to talk to that nigger,” Pepper told Carney after his greeting. “You can drive.”
“I can’t,” Carney said.
“You got that truck, right?”
Carney twisted a thumb at the store.
“That’s what your man is for, right?” Pepper said. “You the boss.”
Yes, Rusty could open up and handle business. Two minutes later Carney and Pepper were in the Ford pickup.
“Uptown,” Pepper said. He put a steel lunch box on the seat next to him. Just another day of work. “Your cousin told you what happened to our friend.” Said as a statement of fact.
“Uptown where?” Carney said. As if not acknowledging Arthur’s murder might make the man alive for a little more.
“It’ll come to me,” Pepper said. “This way for now.” He rolled down the window for a blast of hot air in his face.
Pepper told him about Donegal’s and the scene outside Arthur’s flophouse, which broke up when a soda bottle detonated on a prowl car and sent the onlookers for cover. Kids on the roof across the street, taunting the cops. “Used to call that ‘giving them the Blitz,’ ” Pepper said.
“I know,” Carney said. He was thirteen during the riots of ’43. A white cop shot a Negro soldier who’d intervened in the arrest of a Negro lady who’d had one too many. For two nights Harlem was aboil. His father went out “shopping” and returned with new duds for the two of them. Shopping of the sort where you step over the broken glass of the front window and don’t need help from the salesclerk. He wore that porkpie hat until the day he died, chocolate brown with a green feather in the brim that he wicked up whenever he left the house. Carney outgrew the slacks and sweater sooner than that. To this day whenever he walked past T. P. Fox or Nelson’s, he wondered if his father had stripped the clothes from their mannequins.
“Good days,” Pepper said. Dropping bombs on the cops from above. He chuckled and gazed off wistfully, recalling some caper. Carney recognized the look from his father. “Then your cousin Freddie showed up,” Pepper said. “Was it Chink? Is he onto us, or did Arthur have it coming from some old buddy? I told Freddie to get you and I went to find Miami Joe. But that nigger’s trying to be Houdini.”
Hence this Saturday-morning excursion. Freddie was probably still sleeping it off after getting his ashes hauled down in the Village. He’d shown up at Carney’s place, nervous as all get-out, and then split for the subway after delivering the news about Arthur. Too afraid to go to his mother’s—what if they were staking it out? Freddie had this blond chick on Bank Street, a Fordham co-ed he’d picked up one night at the Vanguard. The first time he took her out she asked if he had a tail. Her daddy had told her stories about Negroes and their monkey tails. “I showed her something else, I’ll tell you that.”
Freddie was safe or not safe, downtown in a different neighborhood and its other perils. Carney had gone back upstairs to the apartment—should he take the girls and leave town? Twice he’d driven up to New Haven for a swap meet and there was this little motel off the highway. Blinking sign. Whenever he saw it, he joked to himself that if he ever had to lam it, that’s where he’d go. color tv swimming pool magic fingers. Less funny now, when it involved explaining things to Elizabeth.
Lack of sleep made him foggy at the wheel. Pepper said, “Grady Billiards on 145th Street,” and broke down the situation. If it was Chink Montague was onto them, that was one thing. “But if Miami Joe is pulling a cross, that’s some other shit,” Pepper said. “Who has the loot?” Either way, Carney was part of the crew now and had to pitch in, the way Pepper saw it.
Carney squeezed the steering wheel, let go, squeezed harder. Over years this ritual had stilled the tremors when he got anxious. “Fucking truck is haunted,” he said under his breath.
“What’s th
at?”
“Hundred and Forty-Fifth Street,” Carney said.
If they wanted a lead on where Miami Joe hung his hat, they had to talk to some people. Pepper didn’t know Miami Joe well, first met him when he came over to him at Baby’s Best and said he had a job Pepper didn’t want to pass up. “Baby’s—you spent time in that place? Anything that starts there ends up in the pigsty.” Pepper should have known then that it’d go south, he said. He tapped the lunch box.
First up, a pool room on Amsterdam. Carney had walked the block many times and it was impossible that he’d never seen the joint before, but there it was with sooty windows and an ancient sign: Grady Billiards. Older than him. Pepper had him wait in the car. Carney thought he heard a loud crack, but a round of honking—a green sedan stalled out at the light—covered the noise. Pepper emerged, wiping blood on his dark blue dungarees. He got back in the passenger seat and opened his lunch box. Inside were an egg sandwich in wax paper, a faded thermos, and a pistol. He didn’t say anything while he ate half the sandwich and gulped down some coffee. “Three blocks up there’s another guy,” he said, finally.
Next stop was one of those Puerto Rican grocers. Carney nabbed a spot out front with a view inside. Pepper ignored the guy at the cash register and disappeared past the Employees Only door at the back. He came out nodding a minute later. Neither he nor the guy behind the counter acknowledged each other.
After that was a barbershop—Carney couldn’t see from his angle but caught the five customers duck out after Pepper walked in—and another pool room Carney had never noticed before. Places in Pepper’s city that were nowhere on his own map.
“We going to Mam Lacey’s after-hour’s spot,” Pepper said. “You know where that is?”
Carney had been there plenty; it had been a Freddie favorite. One of Carney’s, too, owing to the gregarious owner Lacey, a big, glad lady who kept track of all her customers’ drinks and predilections. Her station was behind the ramshackle bar, which was made out of old oatmeal crates, where she whispered offers too heavy in euphemism for Carney, square that he was, to decipher. Girls in the rooms upstairs, narcotics. He declined with a “No, thank you, ma’am,” and she’d wink: One day, my young man…But the spot had been closed down for years after a shootout. Or a knife fight. There were always new basement joints opening up.
Harlem Shuffle Page 8
