The Street

by Ann Petry

  ‘I don’t know your name, baby,’ Boots said softly.

  ‘Lutie Johnson,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs. Lutie Johnson,’ he said slowly. ‘Very nice. Very, very nice.’

  The soft, satisfied way he said the words made her sharply aware that there wasn’t a house in sight, there wasn’t a car passing along the road and hadn’t been since they parked. She hadn’t walked into this situation. She had run headlong into it, snatching greedily at the bait he had dangled in front of her. Because she had reached such a state of despair that she would have clutched at a straw if it appeared to offer the means by which she could get Bub and herself out of that street.

  As his tough, unscrupulous face came closer and closer to hers, she reminded herself that all she knew about him was that he had a dance band, that he drove a high-priced car, and that he believed there was plenty of money in Harlem. And she had gone leaping and running into his car, emitting little cries of joy as she went. It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that from his viewpoint she was a pick-up girl.

  When he turned her face toward his, she could feel the hardness of his hands under the suede gloves he wore. He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Very, very nice,’ he repeated, and bent forward and kissed her.

  Her mind sought some plausible way of frustrating him without offending him. She couldn’t think of anything. He was holding her so tightly and his mouth was so insistent, so brutal, that she twisted out of his arms, not caring what he thought, intent only on escaping from his ruthless hands and mouth.

  The dashboard clock said nine-thirty. She wanted to pat it in gratitude.

  ‘You’re going to be late,’ she said, pointing at the clock.

  ‘Damn!’ he muttered, and reached for the ignition switch.

  7

  THEY CAME BACK over the Storm King Highway. ‘It’s the quickest way,’ he explained. ‘But you better hold on tight, baby.’

  The road kept turning back on itself, going in and out and around until she was dizzy. They went through the abrupt curves so fast that she had to hold on to the door with both hands to keep from being thrown against Boots.

  He seemed to have forgotten she was sitting beside him. She decided that he was playing a game, a dangerous, daring game—trying to see how fast he could go around the sudden, sickening curves without turning the car over. He kept his eyes on the road as it wound in and out ahead of them. He was half-smiling as though he was amused by the risks he was taking. As the lurching and swaying of the car increased, she began to believe that it was only staying on the road because he was forcing it to.

  The headlights picked up the signs that bordered the road: ‘Winding Road Slow Down’; ‘Watch For Fallen Rock.’ She lost interest in whatever defiance Boots was hurling at the high hills above and the river below. If they should plunge over into the river, Bub would never know what had happened to her. No one would know. The car would go down, down, down into the river. The river would silently swallow it and quietly continue toward the sea. Or these craggy hills might suddenly spew mountains of rock down on them and crush them beneath it.

  She thought of the apartment where she lived with a sudden access of warmth, for it was better to be there alive than buried under this silent river or pinioned beneath masses of rock on the highway.

  And then they were down. As the road straightened out into a broad expanse of concrete highway, she relaxed against the seat. There was very little traffic. They passed an occasional car, a lumbering heavy-laden truck and that was all.

  ‘How do you get gas?’ she asked.

  ‘Pay more for it. There’s plenty of it around if you know where to go.’

  Yes, he would know where to go to get gas and anything else he wanted. He would know where and how to get the money to pay for it with. Money made all the difference in the things you could have and the things that were denied to you—even rationed gas. But there were some things—‘How come you’re not in the army?’ she asked.

  ‘Who—me?’ He threw his head back, and for the first time laughed out loud—a soft, sardonic sound that filled the car. The thought amused him so that he kept chuckling so that for a moment he couldn’t talk. ‘You don’t think I’d get mixed up in that mess.’

  ‘But why weren’t you drafted?’ she persisted.

  He turned toward her and frowned. The long scar on his cheek was more distinct than she remembered it. ‘Something wrong with one ear,’ he said, and his voice was so unpleasant that she said nothing more about it.

  As they approached the upper reaches of the Bronx, he slowed the car down. But he didn’t slow it down quite enough. There was the shrill sound of a whistle from somewhere in back of them.

  A cop on a motorcycle roared alongside, waved them to the curb. ‘Goin’ to a fire?’ he demanded.

  He peered into the car and Lutie saw a slight stiffening of his face. That meant he had seen they were colored. She waited for his next words with a wincing feeling, thinking it was like having an old wound that had never healed and you could see someone about to knock against it and it was too late to get out of the way, and there was that horrible tiny split second of time when you waited for the contact, anticipating the pain and quivering away from it before it actually started.

  The cop’s mouth twisted into an ugly line. ‘You—’

  ‘Sorry, Officer,’ Boots interrupted. ‘My band’s play in’ at the Casino tonight. I’m late and I was steppin’ on it. Should have been there a half-hour ago.’ He pulled a wallet from an inside pocket, handed the cop a card and his driver’s license.

  The cop’s expression softened. When he handed the license and the card back to Boots, he almost but not quite smiled. Lutie saw that he was holding something else in his hand. It was a bill, but she couldn’t see the denomination.

  The cop looked at her. ‘Don’t know that I blame you for being late, Mack,’ he said suggestively. ‘Well, so long.’

  And he was gone. Even with cops money makes a difference, she thought. Even if you’re colored, it makes a difference—not as much, but enough to make having it important. Money could change suicide into an accident with a gun; it could apparently keep Boots out of the army, because she didn’t believe that business about there being something wrong with one of his ears. He had acted too strangely when he said it.

  Money could make a white cop almost smile when he caught a black man speeding. It was the only thing that could get her and Bub out of that street. And the lack of it would keep them there forever. She reaffirmed her intention of using Boots Smith. Somehow she would manage to dodge away from his hard, seeking hands without offending him until she signed a contract to sing with his band. After the contract was signed, she would tell him pointedly that she wasn’t even faintly interested in knowing him any better.

  She contemplated this goal with satisfaction and the old feeling of self-confidence soared in her. She could do it and she would.

  Boots started the car. ‘I’m so late I’ll have to dump you at 135th Street in front of the Casino.’ He was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Where do you live, baby?’

  ‘On 116th Street. It isn’t far from the Junto.’

  They were silent the rest of the way downtown. Boots took advantage of every opening in the traffic, barely waiting for a light to change to green, soaring past them as they turned to red at intersections.

  He parked the car between the no parking signs in front of the Casino. ‘I’ll look for you tomorrow night, baby,’ he said. ‘Come by about ten and you can go over some stuff with the band.’

  ‘Okay.’ She got out of the car without waiting for him to open the door.

  ‘Wear a long dress, huh?’ he said. He came to stand beside her on the sidewalk.

  When he started to put his arm around her, she smiled at him and walked away. ‘Good night,’ she said over her shoulder.

  He watched her until she reached the corner of the street. ‘Very, very nice,’ he said softly, and then turned into the C
asino.

  Lutie crossed Seventh Avenue, thinking that by this time tomorrow night she would know whether she was going to leave 116th Street or whether she was to go on living there. Doubt assailed her. She had never sung with an orchestra before, she knew nothing about the technique of singing over a mike—suppose she couldn’t do it.

  A Fifth Avenue bus lumbered to a stop at the corner. She climbed the narrow stairs to the top deck arguing with herself. Spending a dime for car fare was sheer extravagance. But it didn’t matter too much, because Boots had paid for the beer she drank at the Junto, so she hadn’t dented her budget as much as she had anticipated. But the Eighth Avenue bus only cost a nickel. Yes, and she would have had to stand up all the way home; besides, five cents saved didn’t make that much difference.

  The bus started down the street with a grinding of gears and a rumbling and groaning that she immediately contrasted with the swift, silent motion of Boots’ car. He could spend money carelessly. He never had to stop and weigh the difference in price between two modes of transportation.

  She began to compare him with Jim. There was a streak of cruelty in Boots that showed up plain in his face. Jim’s face had been open, honest, young. Come to think of it, when she and Jim got married it looked as though it should have been a happy, successful marriage. They were young enough and enough in love to have made a go of it. It always came back to the same thing. Jim couldn’t find a job.

  So day by day, month by month, big broad-shouldered Jim Johnson went to pieces because there wasn’t any work for him and he couldn’t earn anything at all. He got used to facing the fact that he couldn’t support his wife and child. It ate into him. Slowly, bit by bit, it undermined his belief in himself until he could no longer bear it. And he got himself a woman so that in those moments when he clutched her close to him in bed he could prove that he was still needed, wanted. His self-respect was momentarily restored through the woman’s desire for him. Thus, too, he escaped from the dreary monotony of his existence.

  She examined this train of thought with care, a little surprised to realize that somehow during the last few years she had stopped hating him, and finally reached the point where she could think about him objectively. What had happened to them was, she supposed, partly her fault. And yet was it? They had managed to live on the income from having State children there in the house in Jamaica and it had been her fault that they lost them.

  She began to go over the whole thing step by step. Jim’s mother died when Bub was not quite two. There was a mortgage on the house and the mortgage money had to be paid.

  ‘We don’t have to worry about a thing, Lutie,’ Jim had said. ‘Mom left a thousand dollars insurance money.’

  So he didn’t put too much effort into looking for a job. Somehow the thousand dollars melted away—interest on the mortgage, and taxes and gas and light bills nibbled at it. Mom’s funeral took three hundred and fifty dollars of it. They had to have clothes and food.

  Six months after the funeral there wasn’t any money left in the bank. She found the bank book on the kitchen table. Its pages were neatly perforated with the words ‘Account Closed.’ The last entry left a nice row of zeros where the balance would normally have been. Jim started hunting for a job in dead earnest and couldn’t find one.

  Finally they went into Harlem to consult Pop. It was on a Sunday—a warm spring day. Irene, Pop’s girl friend at the moment, gave them beer and they sat around the kitchen table drinking it.

  ‘You got the house,’ Pop offered. He spoke slowly as though he were thinking hard. ‘Tell you what you do. You get some of these State chillern. They pay about five dollars a week apiece for ’em. You get four or five of ’em and you can all live on the money.’

  Lutie sipped the beer and thought about the house. There was an unfinished room in the attic and three small bedrooms on the second floor. Put two kids in each room and they could take six of them—six times five would mean thirty dollars a week.

  ‘He’s right, Jim,’ she said. ‘It would be about thirty bucks a week.’ She took a big swallow of beer. ‘We could manage on that.’

  There were papers to be filled out and investigators to be satisfied, but finally the children arrived. Lutie was surprised at how easy it was. Surprised and a little chagrined because theirs wasn’t a completely honest setup. For they had said Jim worked in Harlem and a friend had verified the fact when inquiries were made. So the State people didn’t know that the children were their only source of income. It made her uneasy, for it didn’t seem quite right that two grown people and another child should be living on the money that was supposed to be used exclusively for the State children.

  She had to work very hard to make ends meet. She tried to make all the meals good, appetizing ones and that meant spending most of her time hunting bargains in the markets and preparing dishes that required long, careful cooking. It was during that period that she learned about soups and stews and baked beans and casserole dishes. She invented new recipes for macaroni and spaghetti and noodles.

  It had been nothing but work, work, work—morning, noon, and night—making bread, washing clothes and ironing them, looking after the children, and cleaning the house. The investigator used to compliment her, ‘Mrs. Johnson, you do a wonderful job. This house and the children fairly shine.’

  She had to bite her lips to keep from saying that that wasn’t half the story. She knew she was doing a fine job. She was feeding eight people on the money for five and squeezing out what amounted to rent money in the bargain. It got so at night she couldn’t go to sleep without seeing figures dancing before her eyes, and mornings when she got up, she was so tired she would have given anything just to lie still in bed instead of getting up to cook quantities of oatmeal because it was cheap and filling, to walk twelve blocks to get co-operative milk because it cost less.

  She could hear the word ‘cheap,’ ‘cheap,’ ‘cheap,’ whether she was asleep or awake. It dominated all her thinking. Cheap cuts of meat, cheap yellow laundry soap, yeast in bulk because it was cheap, white potatoes because they were cheap and filling, tomato juice instead of orange juice because it was cheaper; even unironed sheets because they saved electricity. They went to bed early because it kept the light bill down. Jim smoked a pipe because cigarettes were a luxury they couldn’t afford. It seemed to her their whole lives revolved around the price of things and as each week crawled by she grew a little more nervous, a little more impatient and irritable.

  Jim finally stopped looking for work entirely. Though to be fair about it he did help around the house—washing clothes, going to the market, cleaning. But when there wasn’t anything for him to do, he would read day-old newspapers and play the radio or sit by the kitchen stove smoking his pipe until she felt, if she had to walk around his long legs just one more time, get just one more whiff of the rank, strong smell of his pipe, she would go mad.

  Then Pop almost got caught selling the liquor he concocted in his apartment. So he stopped making it. He couldn’t get a job either, so he couldn’t pay the rent on his apartment and he came home one night to find one of those long white eviction notices under his door.

  He came all the way to Jamaica to tell her about it.

  ‘You can come stay with us till things look up if you don’t mind sleeping in the living room,’ she offered.

  ‘You’ll never regret it, Lutie darlin’,’ he said fondly. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’ His lips brushed against her cheek and she caught the strong smell of the raw whiskey he had been drinking.

  She stood on the little glass-enclosed front porch and watched him walk down the path. He didn’t seem to grow any older, no stoop in his shoulders; his step was firm. As a matter of fact he held himself more stiffly erect with each passing year. She sighed as she watched him cross the street heading toward the bus stop. He might hold himself up straighter and straighter as the years slipped by, but he drank more and more as he grew older.

  That night after dinner she told Jim. ‘Po
p’s been put out of his apartment. He’s coming here to stay with us.’

  ‘He can’t stay here,’ Jim protested. ‘He drinks and carries on. He can’t stay here with these kids.’

  She remembered that she had been washing dishes at the kitchen sink and the dishwater slopped over on her legs from the sudden abrupt movement she made. She never wore stockings in the house because it was cheaper not to and the dishwater was lukewarm and slimy on her bare legs, so that she made a face and thought again of the word ‘cheap.’ She was tired and irritable and the least little thing upset her.

  She couldn’t stop herself from answering him and she was too exhausted to be persuasive about it, too incensed by the criticism of Pop to let the whole thing drop and bring it up again later, leading around to it, not arguing but gently showing how she really couldn’t do anything else.

  ‘He’s my father and he hasn’t any other place to go. He’s going to stay here with us.’ Her voice was insistent and she threw the words at him bluntly, using no tact.

  Jim got up from the chair where he’d been sitting and stood over her, newspaper in hand. ‘You’re crazy!’ he shouted.

  Then they were both shouting. The small room vibrated with the sound of their anger. They had lived on the edge of nothing for so long that they had finally reached the point where neither of them could brook opposition in the other, could not or would not tolerate even the suggestion of being in the wrong.