Of course, it was even more powerful for me, since I was in some general contact with Susan’s feelings and reactions as well. Andy’s and Susan’s emotions, sensations, all mixing together in my semi-human brain; what an explosive cocktail!
I’m so happy I’ve had this chance to get to know and learn about humans, before the end.
22
Three-thirty in the morning. Pami’d only made two hundred twenty-five dollars tonight, but there wasn’t any action left on the street at this hour. Most of the other whores were already gone. Three-thirty on a Tuesday morning, traffic up Eleventh Avenue for the Lincoln Tunnel was down to a couple tired dishwashers and accordion players; not customers.
Pami had to make a decision now: go home, or hope for just one more twenty-five-dollar hit. It was a tricky balancing act she had to do here. Rush didn’t like her to come home much after three on weeknights—because he had to hear all about everything she did before they could go to sleep—but he could turn mean if she came home with less than four hundred dollars.
Well, it wasn’t going to happen, not tonight. No more tricks tonight. So Pami Njoroge, the litde twenty-five-dollar whore, left her Eleventh Avenue stroll and walked to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue to take the subway uptown. To wait for the subway uptown; sometimes you had to wait a long time at this hour in the morning.
And right there on the subway platform was one more trick for the night: a half-drunk Spanish man that first thought he’d just hassle her, but then grinned and got happy when she said, with her clipped, mechanical-sounding Kenyan accent, “You gimme twenty-five bucks, I give you blowjob. Else you go away”
Down at the far end of the platform was a five-foot-high orange metal box to put trash in. They went down to the other side of that, even though they were the only ones on the platform, and there she exchanged her service for his cash, and at the end of it she saw he was thinking about knocking her on the head and robbing her—Rush would really beat the shit out of her, that ever happen—so she showed him the little spring knife in her tiny shoulder bag, and said, “You want that was your last blowjob in the world?”
All of a sudden, he couldn’t speak anything but Spanish. Backing away from her, brown eyes very round, he jabbered away about his innocence and how she was misunderstanding him, all in his New World Spanish—which she couldn’t understand anyway, and didn’t give a damn about—and then he hurried away to the middle of the platform, where he knew he could be seen by the person in the tollbooth.
About ten minutes later a bunch of drunk black teenage boys came in, loud and full of energy, and Pami tensed up, but they didn’t pay her any attention and soon after that the train roared in. She boarded an almost empty car and sat there with her thoughts on the long ride uptown.
The apartment belonged to Rush, on 121st Street near Morningside Park. The big old building with its gray-stone facade didn’t belong to anybody—maybe the city—and half the apartments were empty, all torn up, the sinks and toilets and wiring and wood molding all ripped out. Sometimes you’d see old mezuzahs on the floor—they looked like water beedes, only they didn’t move—the parchment inside them gone, shredded to dust. The people who stripped the apartments were simple and superstitious, and they knew the mezuzahs were strong religious fetishes of the tribe who once lived here, so they pried the litde metal containers off the doorposts with screwdrivers before carrying the wood away They didn’t want bad luck to follow them out of the building.
Nobody who lived in the building now knew the language or even the alphabet on the parchment papers folded into the mezuzahs. Nobody knew that the word Shaddai on the outside was one of the many names of God, or that the tiny writing on the inside was from the Hebrew Bible (also called, by others, the Old Testament), from Deuteronomy 6 and 11.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
And:
And it shall come to pass, if ye shall harken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord thy God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy catde, that thou mayest eat and be full. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; And then the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you. Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord sware unto your father to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.
The people who’d tapped the litde nails into the soft chestnut and oak and pine wood, holding the words in place at the doorposts of their houses as they’d been commanded, were long gone. The latter owners of the building, who also knew the law and the language but who had for the most part ignored or forgotten it, were also gone. There was no one in the building now to worry about the coming of the rains or the gathering of the corn, and it had been long since the grass here was for catde. Nor was there anyone, in any language, to ponder the warning on those long-disintegrated scraps of paper: the kindling of wrath, the shutting of heaven, the quickness of the perishing.
Pami left the train at 125th Street and walked down through dark streets where people slept on the ground; but they were healthier than the people who slept on the ground in Nairobi. Sometimes more dangerous, too; Pami knew to keep walking quickly, keep the litde spring knife in her hand, look only straight ahead. Her heels made nervous sharp sounds on the old cracked sidewalk.
The building where she lived with Brother Rush—he liked to call himself Brother sometimes, when he was trying to pull one of his political or religious scams—was in the middle of the block, with smaller brick tenements on one side and brick- strewn rubble where tenements had once stood on the other. The doorway was always open, the door itself long since gone. The still-occupied apartments were mosdy in two vertical lines in the rear corners of the building, where the old chimneys and flues still existed and the water pipes hadn’t frozen because of the heated occupied building on the next block which abutted this one at the back. There was water in the building—nobody was sure why—but of course no heat, so in winter the residents burned whatever they could find in the old shallow fireplaces originally meant for coal.
Pami and Rush used two rooms at the rear of a second-floor apartment, one with a mattress for sleeping and some cardboard cartons for storage and kerosene lamps for light and warmth, and the other with a table and some chairs and plastic milk boxes to sit on and actual electricity from an extension cord (a series of extensions cords, heavy-weight ones) snaking up an airshaft from another building, where a guy Rush knew had tapped into the incoming electric service, Rush paying him two bags for the service (both heavily cut).
It was in the room with the table and chairs that Rush mosdy lived. He wasn’t much of a dealer, but what litde goods passed through his hands he sold at that table. All his sch
emes and scams with his druggie friends were talked out at that table (and came to nothing). He ate and drank at that table, and counted Pami’s earnings there every night. And they sat there together for her to tell him everything that had happened since they’d seen each other last.
Pami didn’t understand what that part was all about. She’d known men who got off by listening to their women talk about fucking other men, but this didn’t seem to be like that. (Rush mostly didn’t care about fucking anyway, which was a nice relief.) It was like he was listening for something, some special particular event, his narrow dark head cocked, his red-rimmed eyes brooding, his hands half-clenched on the scarred wood of the table. He never reacted to what she told him, never gave back anything more than a grunt when she was finished; and then they could go to bed.
He was waiting for her as usual tonight, seated at the table, alone in the room, illuminated by the light from one dirty- shaded table lamp on the floor over by the hot plate, an empty Kentucky Fried Chicken carton on the floor at his feet. He was waiting for her as usual, but he wasn’t as usual, and she picked up on that right away. (She was always very aware of her environment, sharply aware of anything around her that might be a threat.)
“You late, baby,” he said, that gruff hoarse voice as always sounding as though it was about to conk out completely, but there wasn’t exactly the same menace in it as usual; something, whatever it was, had him distracted, kept him from turning the entire weight of his mean attention on her.
Still, she played her normal part: “Slow night, Rush,” she said. “Very slow night. All I gotis two-fifty, but there’s nobody on the street an I didn’t wanna come home too late.”
She couldn’t quite keep the wheedle out of the last part of that—when Rush was mean, he was very mean—but tonight he seemed hardly to notice at all. “Sit down,” he said. ‘Tell me about it.”
“Okay, Rush.”
She sat across the table from him, putting her litde shoulder bag on the wood in front of herself, and as she took out the wads of money and replaced the spring knife in the bag he sat and listened, his full lips moving sometimes, in and out, as though he was tasting some old meal. She told him about the johns, about the other hookers, about the people on the street, every encounter of the night, the Spanish man and the drunken teenagers and nobody much at all on the subway and nobody except sleeping people on the streets of the neighborhood.
He listened, smoothing out the money, counting it, stacking it, finally putting it away in his pants pocket. She finished her recital and sat up, ready for him to nod his permission for her to get up and go into the other room and get ready for bed, which was the way it always went, but tonight was different. Tonight, Rush fixed her with those dark eyes of his with the redness all around them, and sat there in silence for a long minute while she got increasingly nervous and scared, wondering what she’d done wrong. And then he said, “I’m gonna say a name to you. You tell me what that name means when you hear it.”
Pami had no idea what this might be about. “Okay, Rush,” she said.
Rush nodded. He seemed almost to go to sleep. Then he said, very slowly, enunciating much more carefully than he usually did, “Susan Carrigan.”
Pami blinked slowly, thinking. Susan Carrigan.
Rush’s horny fingers tapped on the table. “Well? Pami? Susan Carrigan. Well?”
“I don’t know, Rush,” she said. “It don’t mean anything to me.”
“It damn well better mean something to you,” Rush said, “I’m asking you what it means.”
Pami’s fear and helplessness made her jittery at the table. Dark masses of shadow moved in the room, echoing every movement made by either of them. “I don’t know! Rush. That’s no kinda name I know. What is that? Some social worker? Somebody like that?” Then, thinking maybe she saw some corner of what this problem might be, she said, “Rush? Somebody say I talking against you to social workers? It’s a lie. I don’t talk to nobody but you, you know that.”
Rush sat there, unmoved and unmoving. ‘There’s gotta be a link,” he said thoughtfully, as though to himself. “He’s usin you. He’s usin her. But what’s he up to? If you don’t know about each other...”
“Rush? Who? Nobody usin me, Rush. I just with you, man.”
Rush paid no attention. He was deep in his own thoughts. “What if,” he said, and then just sat there, brooding, rapping those fingertips on the table. He glanced at Pami as though he didn’t recognize her, didn’t know what she was doing there, wasn’t even thinking about her. Then he roused himself, sat up straighter, took a deep breath, and frowned hard at her, as though he’d just had a thought and didn’t like it. “What if,” he said, “you aren’t anythin at all? What if he finessed me with you, put me all over you while he’s getting it together with other people?”
“Rush? I don’t know what you’re talkin about.”
“And that’s good for you, too,” he told her. “It means you can go on livin.”
“Rush?”
“A while, anyway. How’s the sores?”
“About the same,” she said, truculent, and looked down at the table. She didn’t like it that he even mentioned those sores; she tried not to think about them herself.
The sores had started in the last few weeks, around her waist and in back under her shoulder blades; small but wet. She put drugstore greases on them, to keep them from showing through her clothes, but otherwise ignored them, or tried to. Hooking on Eleventh Avenue, she never had to take any clothes off anyway, so the johns didn’t know.
“All right, baby,” Rush said, sounding weary and, for him, almost kindly “Go on to bed.”
“Okay, Rush,” she said, hiding her relief, keeping a cool surface. She got to her feet and went into the other room, and pulled off her clothing, being very careful where the material stuck to the sores.
Off this room was a small bathroom without fixtures. The cold water still ran, and they had a basin and a Scotch botde to catch it in. The hole where the toilet had been removed smelled so bad they kept an old piece of Sheetrock over it, but they still used it, and Pami did now, holding her breath when she moved the Sheetrock out of the way, squatting over the hole, wiping herself with paper napkins from the Kentucky Fried Chicken, sliding the Sheetrock back into place when she was finished, and expelling the long-held breath with a whoosh. But the smell stayed in the air for ten or fifteen minutes; nothing to be done.
Pami was filling the Scotch bottle with water and pouring it into the basin when Rush came into the room, made a disgusted face, and said, “Shit. I got to steal some Clorox, pour it down in there.”
“That’s a good idea, Rush.”
The basin full, Pami washed her face first, then her underarms, then squatted over it. Rush frowned at her sores. “You ain’t gonna be workin much longer, girl,” he said.
“I got time,” Pami told him, trying not to know how scared she was. “I got plenty of time, Rush.”
He ignored that. “I’m goin out for a while. Don’t leave that light on, I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Where you going, Rush?”
He gave her a look, as though to say she was lucky she didn’t get a broken arm for a question like that, and left.
Pami heard the apartment door squeak. It never closed one hundred percent, but why would anybody break in here? Then a minute later she heard the door squeak again, so maybe Rush changed his mind.
She always used to sleep naked, but because of the sores, she now wore an outsize T-shirt, which she had to wash in the basin every morning. It was still slightly damp now when she put it on, but it would warm quickly against her body. She went out to the other room to turn off the light and there was a man there, standing beside the table.
Cop. It stood out all over him. Big and beefy and soreheaded, in a gray topcoat and dark suit and tie. He looked at her with disgust and said, “You want to go back to Africa with that T-shirt on?”
She stared at him in horror. Go bac
k? It had never occurred to her—it had all been so easy, getting here, staying here. That a twenty-shilling whore in Nairobi did about as well as a twenty- five-dollar whore in New York only meant she wasn’t doing worse, and in some ways life here was much easier. If she was arrested now, deported now, they’d be sure to find the sores, examine her, find out the truth. Lock her away somewhere, leave her to die. Trembling, afraid to speak because she would sound like a foreigner—I’m American! Black skin American! —she touched her shaking hands to the T-shirt, feeling her tight scared belly.
His look of disgust increased. “Go get dressed,” he said. “And tell Rush to come out here.”
He knew everything, this cop. But now she had to speak. Form the words with great care, she told herself, form the words the way they do in this neighborhood. “Sir, he isn’t here.”
“Oh, don’t waste my time,” he said. “He can’t get out the back way, there’s no place for him to go. Just send him out and get dressed.”
“Sir—” Would an American even say “sir”? Oh, I’m destroyed, she thought, despair cold against her throat. “Sir, it’s true. He isn’t here.”
The cop frowned at her, frowned at the doorway, lifted his head as though he was smelling for Rush. Like a dog. He seemed a litde confused. He gestured for Pami to precede him, and they both went through the doorway into the dark second room, where there was just enough light-spill from the room they’d left behind to let Pami find her way around the cartons and mattress. But Pami knew the place.
The cop pointed. “What’s that?”
“Kerosene lamp, sir”
“Light it.”
Pami’s fingers were awkward with fear. She struggled with the lamp, squatting beside it, small face furrowed all over with concentration. The light flared up at last, and she turned down the wick and lowered the glass chimney. The messy room came to amber life.
“Pick it up,” the cop said, and Pami did, the shadows all moving together, like an orchestra. Again the cop pointed. ‘That the john?”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Page 19
