Do or Die

by Grace F. Edwards

  “What’s the matter? Afraid you’ll lose something if you drink too much?”

  Her filmy gaze had been glued on Tad, and everyone at the table waited, glasses poised. I waited also. Feeling Tad’s hand under the table tighten on my thigh, his fingers sending me the signal to be cool, ignore her, I love you.

  I concentrated on his hand as it slid along my knee, then I listened in the silence to my breathing, counting my intake of breath, relaxing. Breathing. Relaxing. Resisting the impulse to reach across the table and snatch that fall—or whatever they called those scraps of counterfeit hair that she had hanging over her shoulder—then snatch her sorry behind and throw her overboard.

  But Tad’s hand had moved to my thigh, where his fingers began to work magic at the top of my stocking. I sat there and smiled.

  And before she’d managed to tip the second bottle she got sick. Right there at the table, she’d almost turned green and had to run to her room. My smile in the silence did not go unnoticed and the others declined a second round, probably convinced that I’d slipped a hex on the bottle.

  Friday, everyone had assembled in the Grand Lounge and prepared to board the tenders for the concert on Goat Island. Tad noticed me scanning the crowd. “I know who you’re looking for. Why don’t you forget it?”

  “I just want to make sure she’s not on the same tender,” I murmured. His eyes narrowed in irritation so I said no more. I did not mention that I’d gone to her cabin earlier to have it out with her once and for all. There was a Do Not Disturb Sign, which I ignored and knocked on the door. I heard music but nothing else, which was fine with me. I hoped she’d remain sick, I hoped she’d remain draped over the toilet all the way back to New York.

  The evening breeze swept from the ocean and made me appreciate Tad’s arm around me. Al Jarreau made me forget the earlier unpleasantness. Dad, who had been sitting with his own circle of friends, joined us on the trip back to the ship in time for the midnight buffet, which featured every chocolate dessert imaginable.

  I took samples back to the cabin, fed Tad like a player in one of those old Roman orgies, and was amazed at what chocolate could do for your love life.

  So you see, Mali, she got sick. You had a good time. Evil is as evil does.

  The next day, again caught up in the crowds, the music, and the general excitement at Fort Adams, I could think of little else: Regina Carter, Branford Marsalis, and Chick Corea were standouts but it was Aretha, the queen, who blew us all away.

  A hush fell over everything when her clear, perfect, soul-shaking voice sailed out and over the crowd, caught the current and swept the water, where hundreds of small craft, with decks crowded, had anchored.

  I was wide-eyed behind my sunglasses, too afraid to blink, too afraid that this extraordinary moment would end too soon. And finally, when it did, I rested my head on Tad’s shoulder and cried.

  13

  I opened the door and stepped into the sound of Miles Davis’s “Doo-Bop,” the set in which he had captured the sounds of the street, the urban sound, with the rapper Easy Mo Bee.

  It was fast-driven wordwork undercut by Miles’s leisurely instrumental riff. It filled the house and I stood there listening, imagining that everything was back to the way it should be. Hearing it meant that Dad felt well enough to concentrate. But he emerged from his studio looking the same—tired. Worn out.

  “No word on Ozzie yet,” he said, “but Tad left a message. Wants you to call.”

  In my room, I kicked off my shoes as I dialed his number, then just as quickly, before the dialing was completed, I hung up.

  Not now. I’ll only have to lie when he asks what I’ve been doing. And I don’t want to do that. Not now.

  I walked to the window and looked out, staring at nothing, listening to nothing, despite the chorus of sparrows and starlings in the trees that lined the curb.

  You’re not exactly dodging him, you know. Just do what you gotta do, what you planned to do, and then call him when you’re done. It’s not like outright lying …

  It was Mama’s voice. I closed my eyes. I no longer heard the birdsongs but I couldn’t turn off the voice.

  And I couldn’t turn off the memory of Tad standing beside me on that wide deck in a black, quiet 3 A.M.

  A moon hung low and bright against the night color of the water. We could not see the water, could only hear it, and imagine its depth.

  “This is what it means to be out of this world,” he had whispered. “Out of touch almost, with everything and everyone except the one most important person in my life.”

  His hand had circled my waist and I leaned into him, feeling the soft rhythm and roll of the deck as the ship sliced through the night. The quiet was unbroken and we had remained like that, so close that I could gauge the beat and rhythm of his heart. I thought of nothing and no one but him and a kind of peace, a complete and quiet state, settled over me.

  I turned from the window and quickly slipped my shoes on, grabbed my shoulder bag, and was nearly out the door when Dad called from the kitchen, “Going out again?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated, then said, “Listen, if Tad calls again, tell him I’m still out, okay?”

  This brought him from the kitchen, his face wrinkled with worry. “What’s going on, Mali? Where are you off to?”

  “Charleston gave me a few names,” I said, not wanting to go into too much detail and certainly not ready to tell him what these folks did for a living. “I’m going to contact one more person, then head back home.”

  “Mind telling me where this person lives?”

  “No problem.”

  I wrote the name and address on a slip of paper and slipped out the door as he studied it. “Back in an hour. I promise.”

  I headed downtown, a fast walk without too much to see except a young man at the corner of 128th Street busily beating a public phone to death in lieu of the twenty-five-cent refund. If he had been armed, he probably would have shot it.

  The plaza of the Harlem State Office Building at 125th Street was crowded with people lounging in the afternoon sun.

  On 116th Street, the dome of the mosque that Malcolm X once headed cast a shadow on the row of stores and restaurants that defined Little Africa.

  I cut through 114th Street, where I passed Alvin’s school. Wadleigh High, now coed, was the first public high school for girls chartered in New York, and actresses Jean Stapleton and Anna Marie Horsford are alumna of this national landmark.

  The closer I came to 110th Street, Harlem’s gateway, the more impressive the housing appeared. What would have been described as tenements a few years ago now had restored entrances flanked by huge planters overflowing with flowers and protected by gleaming iron railing. Young trees and clipped shrubs lined the immaculate sidewalks and I wondered where the old tenants had gone and what the new rents were like.

  At 112th Street, St. Nicholas Avenue converged with Malcolm X Boulevard. At the apex, I found Myrtle Thomas’s house, a tall gray building facing a small supermarket across the street. There were several upscale businesses in the area, including an accounting firm, a bakery, and a popular catering hall facing the northern perimeter of Central Park.

  The entrance to Myrtle’s house was also decorated with planters. I couldn’t tell the age of the flowers but the stone containers looked new. The front door was fashioned of etched glass set in oak and I paused to scan the narrow bronze strip listing the tenants. Her name was not there but there was one blank slot. I took a chance and pressed the bell next to it.

  I thought about what I was going to say into the intercom and decided to be up front if indeed it was her bell. That was the fastest and easiest way. If she didn’t agree, then the hell with it. Move on.

  I was surprised when the buzzer sounded. I stepped quickly into the foyer and the carpet felt thick under my feet. The light from the wall sconces was soft enough to take at least ten years off my face when I glanced into the pier mirror at the end of the corridor. I didn’t look too long
before a door a few feet from the mirror opened and a woman stepped out.

  “Oh,” she said. “Did you ring? I thought—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I did ring. I’m looking for Myrtle Thomas.”

  Her expression, not exactly soft to begin with despite the benign lighting, took on the substance of rock. This was the Thursday woman. She was as tall as I, about five feet nine, but built with the kind of sturdiness that forecasted an eventual battle of the bulge. Her brown face was framed by a halo of auburn hair and at one time, I supposed that she had probably been very pretty. When she opened her mouth, her voice was as hard as her face. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Mali Anderson and I’m Starr Hendrix’s cousin. I need to ask—”

  “How did you get my name?”

  “From her notebook.”

  “Starr’s dead. What do you want?” Thursday had placed her hands on her hips, a sign that told me to go slow or go back home.

  “I know Starr’s dead,” I whispered, hoping to bring her voice down to a more normal range. “I’m here because of her father.”

  “I don’t know him. What do you want from me?”

  “I … I just need … to talk to you, or to someone, anyone,” I whispered, putting on my best bereaved expression. “Her father, he’s an old man, still in shock. I don’t know if he’ll ever get over this. I need to find a way to help him, I need to be able to tell him something.”

  She looked at me and although her expression was still as sour as last month’s milk, she opened the door wider and jerked her thumb, beckoning me inside. I entered, wondering if this was a good idea, but, well, what the hell …

  The apartment was completely bare, the only available sitting space a small crate among the boxes and cases that crowded what was once the living room. There was no furniture and no lamps and the ceiling fixture highlighted gray outlines of several pictures that had been removed from the walls.

  “You caught me just in time. I got one more thing to do tonight and tomorrow I’m out of here.”

  I didn’t ask her destination, not yet anyway, but stood near the door leading into the kitchen. That also was empty of furniture and probably of food.

  “I thought you were the delivery guy,” she said. “I ordered take-out a half hour ago.”

  I nodded and waited as she rummaged through her bag and took out a cigarette.

  “Okay, so you’re Starr’s cousin. What’s wrong with her old man?”

  “Well,” I said, undecided where to go with this, “he never understood her, didn’t know what drove her to do the things she did.”

  “You’re kiddin’. Hell, if he didn’t know, and he’s her old man, how you expect somebody else, a stranger, to know?”

  “You’re right,” I murmured. “It’s just that when there’s no answer, it’s hard to—”

  “Ahh, what the hell,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. Once she got started, she talked fast, picking at memory, and seemed in a rush to get it all out and over with. As if talking about it now would acquit her of ever having to mention it again.

  “I ain’t gonna be here anyway so … Well, I don’t know that much but let me tell you this. I first met Starr when Henry was tryin’ to turn her, but she was so tough, so strong, even with the Vegas treatment.”

  “The Vegas treatment?”

  “Yeah. The three of us went for a weekend. Always somethin’ big happenin’, which meant ready steady money. Starr was still the princess so he strolled the strip, talkin’ his talk, showin’ her all the lights and shit, and gettin’ her to dream in Technicolor about how it was gonna be.

  “I was supposed to play backup like usual, you know, tellin’ her all what she was gonna get if she played her game correctly. Instead, she wound up tellin’ me what I was supposed to be doin’.

  “So Henry sent me on private duty—two hundred dollars an hour—and said he was gonna convince her by himself. I told him he was wastin’ his time.

  “After I had made my first four or five thousand, I told him we should head back east and leave her ass right there to leg it home the best she could. Let her fuck her way back. But she woulda probably called her daddy and he woulda flew out to rescue her like some white knight. Or is it a white horse, I forget which.”

  Myrtle’s laugh was short. “Well, I don’t know what happened. Most pimps woulda walked away, wrote her off if she couldn’t bring in that fast money, but Henry saw her as some kind of challenge, though to this day, I can’t figure out why.”

  The cigarette hung in her mouth unlit as she searched her bag for her lighter. She gave up and leaned over the stove at an angle, turned on the jet, and lit the cigarette that way. Then she stood erect and drew in a deep breath of smoke.

  “ ‘I can’t lose with the stuff I use,’ he liked to say. Only thing was his stuff wasn’t workin’. Not that time. I mean he was a fast talker and he nearly had her. It shoulda been easy.”

  She took a long drag and I looked at her and wondered how anything could have been easy. From what I’d heard, Starr had been one single-minded sister. Myrtle drew in another lungful and I watched the smoke trail from her nostrils as if she were one of those old-time silent-screen movie stars.

  “Henry—Short Change—was the kind of man who could tip into your dreams,” she continued. “I mean waking dreams, not like in the midnight hour—that time was for makin’ sure a woman knew what and how to do what she was supposed to do. But past that time. More toward dawn. When life is pink with possibilities. He’d tap into those early A.M. dreams, plans, and hopes, and he’d whisper, ‘I can make it happen, baby.’ All the while, his hands is steady workin’, movin’ up and down, and his fingers mixin’ in your money maker and pretty soon you think it’s all gonna be as good as that …”

  All you got to do is …

  As Myrtle spoke, I imagined a trap sliding open wide and silent and a clawed hand reaching out.

  “… at least,” she continued, “that’s the way he usually worked it. He could talk the talk but he soon found out that so could she. And it wasn’t too long before she told him to kiss her ass.”

  “Starr said that?”

  “Yes, indeed, she did. Your cousin’s the only one I know that said somethin’ like that to his face and didn’t get beat. But I guess he got back in other ways.”

  “The drugs?”

  “Yeah. That’s what he did. Then when she went to court, that really blew it.”

  “You think he did her in?”

  Myrtle looked at me, took another lungful of smoke, and shrugged.

  “Who knows? She had her other man, didn’t she? Coulda been him. Or it coulda been some other pimp or dealer or somebody who had it in for him and everybody connected with him. Coulda been anybody, way I see it.”

  The bell rang, startling us both. This time she went to the intercom and pressed the button to speak.

  I heard a garbled response and she pressed the buzzer to allow the caller to enter.

  “I’m leavin’ for Vegas tomorrow night,” she said, stubbing the cigarette in the kitchen sink. “Some a’ that big money got my name on it and I mean to claim it.”

  I didn’t respond but wondered what she was going to do and how long she’d be able to do it. Vegas had young girls by the busload coming in every hour, some as young as fourteen or fifteen, and the woman standing before me, hard times notwithstanding, appeared to be close to forty. On a good night with the right light she could perhaps shave off five years. Perhaps. My hope was that she’d learned a little something from Starr and stashed some of that fast cash. She was going to need it.

  Myrtle returned my stare. “You know, since you her cousin, how come there ain’t been no wake for the girl? How come we ain’t hear nothin’ about no funeral or something?”

  Before I could answer, she said, “You know what we did? We gonna meet tonight, before everybody split up. Gonna have our own thing. Martha was already gone, went home and married a preacher. Ain’t that to
o much? But I called and she flew back up just for this. We gonna do this just the way I think Starr would’ve done it for one of us. I don’t know where Sara Lee is, but most of us will be there.”

  “May I come?” I asked, not knowing where this meeting, this wake, would be, and hoping it wouldn’t be someplace where I might have to step out of a fourth-floor window if the situation got tight.

  Myrtle lit another cigarette and sized me up and I quickly added, “Her dad, he isn’t in his right mind right now. Starr didn’t have a funeral. He had her cremated and went there and sat all alone until it was over. He loved Starr but that was the only wake she had and I didn’t even know about it until it was all over.”

  “He did that? Sat in that place all by himself?”

  I shook my head. “No funeral and no wake.”

  “Damn! That’s some deep stuff.”

  “He isn’t in his right mind,” I said again and added, “If I can just tell him something, you know, that might bring him back, something good that he’d like to hear about her.”

  The bell rang and when she opened the door, the aroma told me that she had received take-out from Charleston and that Jo Jo was standing at the threshold. As Myrtle went to get her purse, I stepped into view and pressed my finger to my lips. We looked at each other and nodded like two strangers who might have once occupied space on the same elevator.

  14

  Maybe Charleston’s ribs and secret sauce had something to do with it but there was a fissure in Myrtle’s gravelly attitude after she ate. She agreed to let me accompany her and we left the apartment.

  On Lenox Avenue, it had grown dark and the night folks were coming out, looking for the usual excitement that comes with the dark. Blinking lights flashed from small bars and posters promoted the local jazz groups. The street was crowded and excitement blew through the air like barely contained steam.