Juke wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t live with who they were. And he could. They hated him for that, and Juke basked in their hatred, like envy. It was worth it, even if it sometimes cost him a punch in the nose.
What did surprise Juke was the cracker. Majority rules, but the cracker didn’t back down, even when he saw which way the wind blew here. He stood between them, his face all screwed up in disgust. Juke remembered another time this had happened, only then it was the cracker that wanted to slug him. Maybe the man was so itchy for a fight, to prove he was still a man, he didn’t care whose side he was on. Maybe he was defending Juke only because he didn’t know any better. It was exactly what Juke had hoped to get out of the man, but he didn’t know what to make of it when it happened without him having to trick it into happening.
Juke took his feelings and made a joke of them: “My hero.”
“Shut up,” said Blondie, and he turned back to the sailor. “I said let the kid go. He’s smaller than you.” Even angry, the cracker still looked slow and stolid. “What kind of man are you he can’t take a few names?”
“And what kind of man are you he wants to stand up for a coon? You think you’re Mrs. Roosevelt or something? A nigger lover?”
The arm that blocked Juke suddenly knocked Juke back and swung forward. The cracker hit the sailor in the stomach. The sailor let out an abrupt, loud groan and doubled over.
“Oh, yes!” cried the steward. “Just like the movies. Go to it, boys!”
Others jumped up and hollered, eager to see the sailors fight it out.
But the slugged man remained bent over, arms clutched around his stomach.
And Hank just stood there, fists at his side, looking almost embarrassed. “I ain’t no nigger lover,” he said.
The door flew open and Mrs. Bosch charged in. “What is the hubbub? Juke! Are you making trouble?” She looked around, saw the doubled-over sailor and the guilty Hank, then settled her fury on Juke. “What are you doing up here? You loll about and we get nothing but trouble. Shoo! There are things in the kitchen that must be done.”
Her hand shot out to cuff him on the head, but Juke knew how to duck Mrs. Bosch’s blows. He gave her a put-upon sigh, to show he wasn’t intimidated, then stepped toward the door. He watched Hank, wanting to see if he could tell by looking at him why he’d done what he’d done.
“Calm down, everybody. We are all family, remember. There is a war on and we must not fight with each other,” Mrs. Bosch told the room.
Hank only glanced at Juke, angrily narrowing his eyes at him. Then he looked away, folded his arms across his chest and made a face at the floor.
“Everybody. Sit down and listen up. You—there is a problem with your tummy?” Mrs. Bosch asked the sailor.
Juke pulled the door closed, took a few steps down the stairs, stopped and listened.
“Boys,” began the Witch-woman. “We have a new member to our establishment tonight. I know you will make him feel at home. His name is—”
“Hank,” went the cracker’s voice.
He was definitely a cracker, even if he had forgotten himself for a moment and stood up for a nigger. Juke was from Alabama and although he had run away to the North and Harlem when he was thirteen, he remembered how unpredictable poor whites were with coloreds: treat you like cousins one minute, like dirt the next. It was worse than with whites with money or Yankee whites, who never let you forget they thought you were dirt. Juke went down the stairs, telling himself he wasn’t going to get mixed up with any cracker, especially one so ignorant he didn’t know it was bad to be queer. That only made the cracker more unpredictable than ever.
Back in the kitchen, there was bread and meat to be sliced for the fools upstairs. Instead, Juke sat down at the oilcloth-covered table and flipped through an old issue of Life, his revenge on the Witch-woman for blaming everything on him. He was to blame, of course, and he was proud of that, but it didn’t lessen his anger at Mrs. Bosch. If she was going to treat him like a no-account nigger, he was going to act like one. He turned the pages and looked at the pictures. It was the usual lies. There were no colored faces, of course, except for two bare-assed cannibals on a desert island where the Americans were building an airstrip. Everybody looked so clean and wholesome and apple-pie good. Seeing through the lies made Juke feel very smart. For some reason, he badly needed to feel smart again.
The doorbell rang. Juke stood up and sauntered out to the hall to answer it. He recognized the two men through the peephole, so he didn’t have to clear them with Mrs. Bosch. The way he felt tonight, he could have let anybody in, plainclothesmen, G-men, whatever, although the Witch-woman really did seem to know someone important in a high place.
The two men were dressed in tailored suits, although Juke had figured out long ago that they were Army officers of some sort. You’d think they could have any enlisted man they wanted, instead of having to come here for it.
“Hello, boy. Valeska’s expecting us. What’s tonight’s selection look like?” One of the men handed Juke their hats and a dollar bill.
“Very good, suh. Just up the stairs, suh.”
And they went up the stairs, as bland and normal as two prosperous businessmen in Life, to suck and fuck with white boys. They looked so damn smug. They thought their secret didn’t show.
Juke saw nothing for them to be proud of. His nature announced itself in every wave of his hand and he liked it that way. He could at least be honest about that, even as he samboed the white money. Men of color were just as bad, strutting about like preachers, puffed up with the notion that their high-toned neighbors never dreamed they had so much in common with nelly queens and street trash. If Juke was going to watch people make fools of themselves, he preferred to do it downtown, where the fools were white. The condescension of “real men” felt less personal when it came mixed with white condescension. Juke had been kept for three months by a Harlem deacon when he first came north, and the man had treated him as no better than a slut, a piece of ass, a woman. The people downtown might not appreciate his conk or his “collegiate” clothes, but their indifference beat a colored man’s possessive contempt any day. There were even customers who asked for Juke—Dutchmen and limeys, mostly—and there was one man who slipped Juke a fiver, just to sit in a chair on the other side of the room and watch while the man was cornholed by Mick or anyone else who didn’t mind an audience. That was another reason why he preferred to work downtown: the spectacle of white people acting like donkeys. He wasn’t here because he found white men attractive. He wasn’t, he often told himself.
He was back in the kitchen, the magazine turned to a picture of Joel McCrea, when the doorbell rang again. When he came out to the hall, Mrs. Bosch was clomping down the stairs, like a horse.
“I am taking care of this, Juke. You take the beer and sandwiches up to the boys.”
“Right away, Miz Bosch. When I make the sandwiches.”
“Juuuk! What have you been doing all this time? You lazy…No, you take up the beer and glasses. I will do the sandwiches.” She was exasperated, but the Witch-woman spoke more kindly to Juke when there were no witnesses.
Juke went back to the kitchen while Mrs. Bosch answered the door. He took several milk bottles full of her homemade beer from the icebox—the woman was too cheap to buy a good refrigerator—and poured them into the big glass pitcher. Even cold, it was cloudy, dreary stuff. Resentful once over a humiliation upstairs, Juke had added his piss to the pitcher, and nobody noticed a thing. He set the pitcher and badly assorted glasses on a tray and carried them out.
“Mr. Johnson sent you?” Mrs. Bosch was asking a rat-whiskered man in the hall. Two other men were already climbing the stairs. “But which Mr. Johnson? That’s right, Juke. Upstairs, and tell them that the sandwiches are shortly coming.”
“Yes’m.” Juke went up the stairs, beer splashing out of the pitcher into the tray. One of the two newcomers stood shyly in the open door and Juke called out to his back, “Gangway, darling.
Coming through.” He steered around the man into the room.
“About frigging time!” shouted the steward. “I only asked an hour ago, you lazy black bastard.” Bunny still sat in the steward’s lap, his shirttail out and fly undone, blinking over something that had nothing to do with the steward.
Juke set the heavy tray on the table and looked around the room.
The card game had broken up now that more customers had arrived. The sailor Juke had baited was now flirting belligerently with one of the disguised Army officers. But Juke didn’t see Hank, his cracker, anywhere. Then he noticed that the other Army officer was gone.
Jealousy, like a hard bubble, swelled in his chest. And Juke instantly knew that despite all his care and sidestepping and smarts he had fallen in love with the cracker, and was going to pursue the man until he won him or broke a heart.
7
LOVE WAS ENTWINED WITH a good cause, and the cause looked stronger than ever. Rommel was smashing across North Africa. The Japs had been routed at Midway, but the Japanese only confused the issue. If Japan sued for peace, maybe Americans would see the situation in Europe more clearly. After all, it wasn’t Hitler who bombed Pearl Harbor. The early summer evening was beautiful.
Blair Rice boarded the Fifth Avenue bus at Seventy-Second Street, went up to the upper level and took a seat toward the back, as he had been instructed. He wore a straw boater this evening, as instructed. He disliked the unfashionable hat—it made him feel like his father—but it was the last week of June and his family and their acquaintances had left New York for the summer, war or no war. The city was his. The bus floated Blair through the city, past the enormous, blue-shadowed chateau of the Plaza where he had danced with debutantes. Past the sun-bronzed Savoy where he met his mother for tea, Bergdorf’s where his mother bought her prettiest clothes, Scribner’s where his father bought books on Egyptology. This was Blair’s city and today he felt more important than ever, full of love, charged with secrecy, entrusted with a mission. There was an opened pack of Luckies in his inside coat pocket. A piece of paper, rolled tight as a toothpick, had been slipped inside one of the cigarettes. What a cunning man Anna’s father was. Blair would show he could be as cunning. Part of him felt he was only playacting, but that was just the old observer in him, the Olympian intellectual, the connoisseur of action. Well, today he was not just appreciating an act, he was committing one.
Bands of gold, dusty sunlight crossed the avenue at each cross street. Except for a soldier and girl who cuddled at the front of the open deck, Blair floated alone above the shop windows and thin, dinner-hour traffic. His contact was to get on the bus somewhere in the Forties. It would be a woman. Anna hadn’t told him who the woman was or how they knew her or what she would do with the information in the cigarette. He wasn’t even told what the information was and only guessed it might be more cargo lists and shipping schedules, bits gathered by Anna in her conversations with sailors. Blair still disliked the easy way Anna had with other men, even if it were for a good cause. Blair loved the cause as much as he loved Anna, but it hurt his pride and propriety to see her so friendly with the hoi polloi.
He reached Forty-Second Street without anyone new climbing to the upper deck. The bus idled at a stoplight and Blair watched the river of hats in the crosswalk below. Footsteps clocked their way up the metal stairs just as the bus lunged forward. A woman stood at the top step and gripped the railing while she looked at the empty seats. Thirtyish, she wore a floral print dress and white gloves. It had to be her. She took the seat in front of Blair’s.
Blair waited for her to turn around and ask about his hat. That was the password. Instead, she twisted sideways in her seat and pretended to watch the buildings glide past, while she took in Blair from the corner of her eye.
Blair stared at her, waiting for the woman to face him.
She slipped a hand into the wide neck of her dress and mopped her sticky back and shoulder. There was a gray handprint of sweat and dirt on her glove. Then she looked straight at Blair and smiled. “Was so hot in my apartment, had to get out. Get some air,” she said. “Nice and cool up here.” A few strands of hair blew loose from her bun.
“Yes,” Blair announced. Why didn’t she mention his hat? Had she forgotten? He adjusted the brim, to remind her. The waffled straw felt like a thick, stale cracker.
“Such awful weather we’re having. Not the heat so much as the humidity. But you certainly look cool as a cucumber.”
A subtle reference to his hat?
“We used to get out of the city in the summer, my husband and I. But now that Bill’s off in the Army…” She sighed and gazed at Blair, patiently, as if expecting something from him.
It had to be her. Blair couldn’t imagine any other woman talking to a complete stranger like this, except a floozie. This woman looked and sounded like a dull, proper housewife.
“When we first met, my husband had a hat just like that. You don’t see many men wearing them anymore.”
“May I offer you a cigarette?” Blair said.
“Don’t mind if I do. Why, thank you.”
Blair reached into his pocket, found the pack, then found the cigarette. He turned it over in his fingers, saw the faint pencil mark and passed the cigarette to the woman.
Her red nails brushed his fingers when she took it. But instead of dropping the cigarette into her purse, she stuck it in her mouth.
Was she only faking for the benefit of anyone watching? But there was nobody up here to see them.
She looked at him, waiting. Then she said, “That’s okay,” opened her purse, took out a lighter and flicked the lighter with her thumb.
Blair watched in horror as the tip of the cigarette caught fire. She wasn’t the woman. He should snatch the cigarette from her lips before she smoked its secrets, but Blair was too stunned to move.
“Perfect,” sighed the woman, smoke pouring from her mouth and vanishing in the airstream. “A little breeze, a cigarette and a handsome young stranger.”
How could he have been so stupid? He wanted to get off immediately, but what if the cigarette didn’t draw right or went out and the woman noticed paper ash inside? He had to sit there and watch while this harlot smoked it down to nothing.
“Something the matter? You don’t look too good.”
“The atmosphere,” Blair mumbled.
“They have the right idea,” said the woman, pointing the cigarette at the couple towards the front. “That’s the only way to feel comfortable on hot, lonely evenings.”
She had almost smoked the cigarette down to her red fingernails, when she suddenly flicked the butt into the air. The bus was wheeling around the Washington Square Arch, turning in the traffic circle in the center of the park. Blair leaped up and grabbed the railing by the steps.
“You’re not going?” said the woman. “One more trip up the Avenue? Keep me company?”
Blair raced down the curved steps and jumped to the pavement as the bus slowed for the next stop. He didn’t look back to see if the woman got off to follow him. He crossed the circle to the curb where the butt would have landed.
He snatched up one butt, then another, then a third, then saw that the stone gutter was sprinkled with cigarette butts, tattered cigar ends, waxy candy wrappers. Where the hell were the street sweepers? He leaned over to grab up a cluster of butts and the hat dropped neatly from his head. It landed upside-down on its flat crown. He grabbed up the hat with both hands. Then he crushed it together between his hands, tried pulling it apart, then crushed it again. He stood at the curb, mangling and cursing the hat, trying to rip it in two, while Jewish couples and solitary bohemians glanced at him and continued their evening strolls. Finally, he took the hat, broken but whole, flung it into the bottom of a trash barrel and stepped angrily up the street, cursing the city, the war, himself.
It took him forever to find a taxi. The war spoiled even that, and the driver who finally picked him up was an unshaven clod who had to be told where the Yale Club was.
Blair was meeting Anna there. He rode uptown dreading her. She was going to think him an idiot, a fool.
Looking perfectly sweet with her white purse and white polka-dotted blue dress, Anna sat in a leather chair in the wainscotted bar of the club, smiling and sniffing at a sloe gin fizz. An army officer sat in the next chair, chatting with her. Blair winced when he recognized the officer as a classmate.
“Darling. Hello.” Anna stood up and went up on her toes to kiss Blair on the cheek. “I was wondering what was keeping you. Luckily, I had Captain Jervis here to keep me company.”
Blair nodded at the captain. “Evening, Jervis.”
“If it isn’t old Puffed Rice. This delightful lady is yours? I never would’ve guessed. And why are you still here?”
“I decided to summer in the city this year.” Blair checked out Anna’s shoes and stockings, assuring himself she hadn’t worn anything that might embarrass him with a classmate.
“What I mean is, why aren’t you in uniform? Everybody else we know is. Except for Donald, of course. And we know about Donald. Uncle Sam reject your hide?” He was gloating over the possibility, Jervis, who had been too busy chasing waitresses in New Haven to know Abyssinia from Czechoslovakia.
Blair’s asthma, which had saved him from having to compromise himself, shamed him at moments like these. So he lied. “The Government couldn’t spare me for active duty. They felt I was more important where I was.”
“Which is…?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Hush-hush, huh?” Jervis hid his awe with a light laugh. “Well, if they can find uses for scrap metal, Puffey, I guess they can find a use for you.”
Blair produced a pained smile. At times like these, there was a terrible urge to tell smug fools what he was really doing. But tonight the urge only reminded him of his failure. He noticed Anna lightly frowning at him as she sat down again.
The waiter came over, silver tray under his white-jacketed arm. “What can I get you, Mr. Rice? We’ve been requested to push the rum, on account of the war, but the bar is still fully stocked.”
Hold Tight Page 9
