The Street

by Ann Petry

  ‘Somep’n must have walked over your grave’—the hairdresser looked at her in the mirror as she spoke.

  And even under the words Lutie heard the stillness. It was crouched down in the next booth. It was waiting for her to leave. It would walk down the street with her and into the apartment. Or it might leave the shop when she did, but not go down the street at all, but somehow seep into the apartment before she got there, so that when she opened the door it would be there. Formless. Shapeless. Waiting. Waiting.

  18

  IT WAS BEGINNING TO SNOW when Lutie left the beauty parlor. The flakes were fine, small; barely recognizable as snow. More like rain, she thought, except that rain didn’t sting one’s face like these sharp fragments.

  In a few more minutes it would be dark. The outlines of the buildings were blurred by long shadows. Lights in the houses and at the street corners were yellow blobs that made no impression on the ever-lengthening shadows. The small, fine snow swirled past the yellow lights in a never-ending rapid dancing that was impossible to follow and the effort made her dizzy.

  The noise and confusion in the street were pleasant after the stillness that hung about the curtained booths of the beauty shop. Buses and trucks roared to a stop at the corners. People coming home from work jostled against her. There was the ebb and flow of talk and laughter; punctuated now and then by the sharp scream of brakes.

  The children swarming past her added to the noise and the confusion. They were everywhere—rocking back and forth on the traffic stanchions in front of the post-office, stealing rides on the backs of the crosstown buses, drumming on the sides of ash cans with broomsticks, sitting in small groups in doorways, playing on the steps of the houses, writing on the sidewalk with colored chalk, bouncing balls against the sides of the buildings. They turned a deaf ear to the commands shrilling from the windows all up and down the street, ‘You Tommie, Jimmie, Billie, can’t you see it’s snowin’? Come in out the street.’

  The street was so crowded that she paused frequently in order not to collide with a group of children, and she wondered if these were the things that Bub had done after school. She tried to see the street with his eyes and couldn’t because the crap game in progress in the middle of the block, the scraps of obscene talk she heard as she passed the poolroom, the tough young boys with their caps on backward who swaggered by, were things that she saw with the eyes of an adult and reacted to from an adult’s point of view. It was impossible to know how this street looked to eight-year-old Bub. It may have appealed to him or it may have frightened him.

  There was a desperate battle going on in front of the house where she lived. Kids were using bags of garbage from the cans lined up along the curb as ammunition. The bags had broken open, covering the sidewalk with litter, filling the air with a strong, rancid smell.

  Lutie picked her way through orange skins, coffee grounds, chicken bones, fish bones, toilet paper, potato peelings, wilted kale, skins of baked sweet potatoes, pieces of newspaper, broken gin bottles, broken whiskey bottles, a man’s discarded felt hat, an old pair of pants. Perhaps Bub had taken part in this kind of warfare, she thought, even as she frowned at the rubbish under her feet; possibly a battle would have appealed to some unsatisfied spirit of adventure in him, so that he would have joined these kids, overlooking the stink of the garbage in his joy in the conflict just as they were doing.

  Mrs. Hedges was leaning far out of her window, urging the contestants on.

  ‘That’s right, Jimmie,’ Mrs. Hedges cried. ‘Hit him on the head.’ And then as the bag went past its mark, ‘Aw, shucks, boy, what’s the matter with your aim?’

  She caught sight of Lutie and knowing that she was home earlier than when she went to work, immediately deduced that she had been somewhere to see Bub or see about him. ‘Did you see Bub?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. For a little while.’

  ‘Been to the beauty parlor, ain’t you?’ Mrs. Hedges studied the black curls shining under the skull cap on Lutie’s head. ‘Looks right nice,’ she said.

  She leaned a little farther out of the window.

  ‘Bub being in trouble you probably need some money. A friend of mine, a Mr. Junto—a very nice white gentleman, dearie—’

  Her voice trailed off because Lutie turned away abruptly and disappeared through the apartment house door. Mrs. Hedges scowled after her. After all, if you needed money you needed money and why anyone would act like that when it was offered to them she couldn’t imagine. She shrugged her shoulders and turned her attention back to the battle going on under her window.

  As Lutie climbed the stairs, she deliberately accentuated the clicking of the heels of her shoes on the treads because the sharp sound helped relieve the hard resentment she felt; it gave expression to the anger flooding through her.

  At first, she merely fumed at the top of her mind about a white gentleman wanting to sleep with a colored girl. A nice white gentleman who’s a little cold around the edges wants to sleep with a nice warm colored girl. All of it nice—nice gentleman, nice girl; one’s colored and the other’s white, so it’s a colored girl and a white gentleman.

  Then she began thinking about Junto—specifically about Junto. Junto hadn’t wanted her paid for singing. Mrs. Hedges knew Junto. Boots Smith worked for Junto. Junto’s squat-bodied figure, as she had seen it reflected in the sparkling mirror in his Bar and Grill, established itself in her mind; and the anger in her grew and spread directing itself first against Junto and Mrs. Hedges and then against the street that had reached out and taken Bub and then against herself for having been partly responsible for Bub’s stealing.

  Inside her apartment she stood motionless, assailed by the deep, uncanny silence that filled it. It was a too sharp contrast to the noise in the street. She turned on the radio and then turned it off again, because she kept listening, straining to hear something under the sound of the music.

  The creeping, silent thing that she had sensed in the theater, in the beauty parlor, was here in her living room. It was sitting on the lumpy studio couch.

  Before it had been formless, shapeless, a fluid moving mass—something disembodied that she couldn’t see, could only sense. Now, as she stared at the couch, the thing took on form, substance. She could see what it was.

  It was Junto. Gray hair, gray skin, short body, thick shoulders. He was sitting on the studio couch. The blue-glass coffee table was right in front of him. His feet were resting, squarely, firmly, on the congoleum rug.

  If she wasn’t careful she would scream. She would start screaming and never be able to stop, because there wasn’t anyone there. Yet she could see him and when she didn’t see him she could feel his presence. She looked away and then looked back again. Sometimes he was there when she looked and sometimes he wasn’t.

  She stared at the studio couch until she convinced herself there had never been anyone there. Her eyes were playing tricks on her because she was upset, nervous. She decided that a warm bath would make her relax.

  But in the tub she started trembling so that the water was agitated. Perhaps she ought to phone Boots and tell him that she wouldn’t come tonight. Perhaps by tomorrow she would be free of this mounting, steadily increasing anger and this hysterical fear that made her see things that didn’t exist, made her feel things that weren’t there.

  Yet less than half an hour later she was dressing, putting on the short, flared black coat; pulling on a pair of white gloves. As she thrust her hands into the gloves, she wondered when she had made the decision to go anyway; what part of her mind had already picked out the clothes she would wear, even to these white gloves, without her ever thinking about it consciously. Because, of course, if she didn’t go tonight, Boots might change his mind.

  When she rang the bell of Boots’ apartment, he opened the door instantly as though he had been waiting for her.

  ‘Hello, baby,’ he said, grinning. ‘Sure glad you got here. I got a friend I want you to meet.’

  Only two of the lamps in the
living room were lit. They were the tall ones on each side of the davenport. They threw a brilliant light on the squat white man sitting there. He got up when he saw Lutie and stood in front of the imitation fireplace, leaning his elbow on the mantel.

  Lutie stared at him, not certain whether this was Junto in the flesh or the imaginary one that had been on the studio couch in her apartment. She closed her eyes and then opened them and he was still there, standing by the fireplace. His squat figure partly blocked out the orange-red glow from the electric logs. She turned her head away and then looked toward him. He was still there, standing by the fireplace.

  Boots established him as Junto in the flesh. ‘Mr. Junto, meet Mrs. Johnson. Lutie Johnson.’

  Lutie nodded her head. A figure in a mirror turned thumbs down and as he gestured the playground for Bub vanished, the nice new furniture disappeared along with the big airy rooms. ‘A nice white gentleman.’ ‘Need any extra money.’ She looked away from him, not saying anything.

  ‘I want to talk to you, baby,’ Boots said. ‘Come on into the bedroom’—he pointed toward a door, started toward it, turned back and said, ‘We’ll be with you in a minute, Junto.’

  Boots closed the bedroom door, sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning his head against the headboard.

  ‘If you’ll give me the money now, I’ll be able to get it to the lawyer before he closes his office tonight,’ she said abruptly. This room was like the living room, it had too many lamps in it, and in addition there were too many mirrors so that she saw him reflected on each of the walls—his legs stretched out, his expression completely indifferent. There was the same soft, sound-absorbing carpet on the floor.

  ‘Take your coat off and sit down, baby,’ he said lazily.

  She shook her head. She didn’t move any farther into the room, but stood with her back against the door, aware that there was no sound from the living room where Junto waited. She had brought that awful silence in here with her.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ she said sharply. ‘I only came to get the money.’

  ‘Oh, yes—the money,’ he said. He sounded as though he had just remembered it. ‘You can get the money easy, baby. I figured it out.’ He half-closed his eyes. ‘Junto’s the answer. He’ll give it to you. Just like that’—he snapped his fingers.

  He paused for a moment as though he were waiting for her to say something, and when she made no comment he continued: ‘All you got to do is be nice to him. Just be nice to him as long as he wants and the two hundred bucks is yours. And bein’ nice to Junto pays off better than anything else I know.’

  She heard what he said, knew exactly what he meant, and her mind skipped over his words and substituted other words. She was back in the big shabby ballroom at the Casino, straining to hear a thin thread of music that kept getting lost in the babble of voices, in the clink of glasses, in the bursts of laughter, so that she wasn’t certain the music was real. Sometimes it was there and then again it was drowned out by the other sounds.

  The faint, drifting melody went around and under the sound of Boots’ voice and the words that he had spoken then blotted out what he had just said.

  ‘Baby, this is just experience. Be months before you can earn money at it.’

  ‘Nothing happened, baby. What makes you think something happened?’

  ‘I don’t have all the say-so. The guy who owns the Casino—guy named Junto—says you ain’t ready yet.’

  ‘Christ! he owns the joint.’

  The guy named Junto owned the Bar and Grill, too. Evidently his decision that she wasn’t to be paid for singing had been based on his desire to sleep with her; and he had concluded that, if she had to continue living in that house where his friend Mrs. Hedges lived or in one just like it, she would be a pushover.

  And now the same guy, named Junto, was sitting outside on a sofa, just a few feet away from this door, and she thought, I would like to kill him. Not just because he happens to be named Junto, but because I can’t even think straight about him or anybody else any more. It is as though he were a piece of that dirty street itself, tangible, close at hand, within reach.

  She could still hear that floating, drifting tune. It was inside her head and she couldn’t get it out. Boots was staring at her, waiting for her to say something, waiting for her answer. He and Junto thought they knew what she would say. If she hummed that fragment of melody aloud, she would get rid of it. It was the only way to make it disappear; otherwise it would keep going around and around in her head. And she thought, I must be losing my mind, wanting to hum a tune and at the same time thinking about killing that man who is sitting, waiting, outside.

  Boots said, ‘Junto’s a good guy. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll take to him.’

  The sound of her own voice startled her. It was hoarse, loud, furious. It contained the accumulated hate and the accumulated anger from all the years of seeing the things she wanted slip past her without her ever having touched them.

  She shouted, ‘Get him out of here! Get him out of here! Get him out of here quick!’

  And all the time she was thinking, Junto has a brick in his hand. Just one brick. The final one needed to complete the wall that had been building up around her for years, and when that one last brick was shoved in place, she would be completely walled in.

  ‘All right. All right. Don’t get excited.’ Boots got up from the bed, pushed her away from the door and went out, slamming it behind him.

  ‘Sorry, Junto,’ Boots said. ‘She’s mad as hell. No use your waiting.’

  ‘I heard her,’ Junto said sourly. ‘And if this is something you planned, you’d better unplan it.’

  ‘You heard her, didnya?’

  ‘Yes. But you still could have planned it,’ Junto said. He walked toward the foyer. At the door he turned to Boots. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mack,’ Boots said coldly. ‘She’ll come around. Come back about ten o’clock.’

  He closed the door quietly behind Junto. He hadn’t intended to in the beginning, but he was going to trick him and Junto would never know the difference. Sure, Lutie would sleep with Junto, but he was going to have her first. He thought of the thin curtains blowing in the wind. Yeah, he can have the leavings. After all, he’s white and this time a white man can have a black man’s leavings.

  Junto had pushed him hard, threatened him, nagged him about Lutie Johnson. This would be his revenge. He locked the door leading to the foyer and put the key in his pocket. Then he headed toward the kitchenette in the back of the apartment. He’d fix a drink for Lutie and one for himself.

  The murmur of their voices came to Lutie in the bedroom. She couldn’t hear what they said and she waited standing in front of the door, listening for some indication that Junto had gone.

  As soon as Junto left, she would go home. But she had to make certain he had gone, because if she walked outside there and saw him she would try to kill him. The thought frightened her. This was no time to get excited or to get angry. She had to be calm and concentrate on how to keep Bub from going to reform school.

  She’d been so angry just now she had forgotten that she still had to get two hundred dollars to take to the lawyer. Pop might have some ideas. Yes, he’d have ideas. He always had them. But she was only kidding herself if she thought any of them would yield two hundred dollars.

  There was the sound of a door closing, and then silence. She looked out into the living room. It was empty. She could hear the clinking sound of glasses from somewhere in the back of the apartment.

  And then Boots entered the room carrying a tray. Ice tinkled in tall glasses. A bottle of soda and a bottle of whiskey teetered precariously on the tray as he walked toward her.

  ‘Here, baby,’ he said. ‘Have a drink and get yourself together.’

  She stood in front of the fireplace, holding the glass in her hand, not drinking it, just holding it. She could feel its coldness through her glove. She would go and talk to Pop. He’d lived three steps in fron
t of the law for so long, he just might have a friend who was a lawyer and if Pop had ever done the friend any favors he might take Bub’s case on the promise of weekly payments from her.

  And she ought to go now. Why was she standing here holding this glass of liquor that she didn’t want and had no intention of drinking? Because you’re still angry, she thought, and you haven’t anyone to vent your anger on and you’re halfway hoping Boots will say something or do something that will give you an excuse to blow up in a thousand pieces.

  ‘Whyn’t you sit down?’ Boots said.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ And yet she didn’t move. She stayed in front of the fireplace watching him as he sat on the sofa, sipping his drink.

  Occasionally he glanced up at her and she saw the scar on his cheek as a long thin line that looked darker than she had remembered it. And she thought he’s like these streets that trap all of us—vicious, dangerous.

  Finally he said, ‘Lissen, you want to get the little bastard out of jail, don’t yah? What you being so fussy about?’

  She put the glass down on a table. Some of the liquor slopped over, oozing down the sides of the glass, and as she looked at it, it seemed as though something had slopped over inside her head in the same fashion, was oozing through her so that she couldn’t think.

  ‘Skip it,’ she said.

  Her voice was loud in the room. That’s right, she thought, skip it. Let’s all skip together, children.

  All skip together. Up the golden stairs. Skipping hand in hand up the golden stairs.

  ‘Just skip it,’ she repeated.

  She had to get out of here, now, and quickly. She mustn’t stand here any longer looking down at him like this, because she kept thinking that he represented everything she had fought against. Yet she couldn’t take her eyes away from the ever-darkening scar that marred the side of his face; and as she stared at him, she felt she was gazing straight at the street with its rows of old houses, its piles of garbage, its swarms of children.