The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  He reckoned it had taken him more than an hour to get there from the Riverside Park in Manhattan. He had covered part of the distance by hopping a New York Central switch engine, but afterwards he had slunk along endless blocks of silent, sleeping residential streets, ducking to cover when anyone hove into view.

  Now he began to feel safe. But his body was still trembling as though he had the ague.

  He turned east in the direction of the Italian section.

  Apartment buildings gave way to pastel-colored villas of southern Italian architecture, garnished with flower gardens and plaster saints. After a while the houses became scattered, interspersed by market gardens and vacant lots overgrown with weeds in which hoboes slept and goats were tethered.

  Finally he reached his destination, a weather-stained, one-storied, pink stucco villa at the end of an unfinished street without sidewalks. It was a small house flanked by vacant lots used for rubbish dumps. Oddly enough, it had a large gabled attic. It sat far back of a wire fence enclosing a front yard of burnt grass, dried-up flowers and wildly thriving weeds. In a niche over the front door was a white marble crucifixion of a singularly lean and tortured Christ, encrusted with bird droppings. In other niches at intervals beneath the eaves were all the varicolored plaster saints good to the souls of Italian peasants.

  All of the front windows were closed and shuttered. Save for the faint sounds of a heavy boogie beat on a piano, the house seemed abandoned.

  Pinky vaulted the fence and followed a path through tall weeds around the side of the house, taking care to avoid a concrete birdbath, an iron statue of Garibaldi and a large zinc vase of artificial roses.

  There was a deep backyard enclosed by a high plank fence. The back door opened onto a grape arbor with thick clusters of purple grapes hanging between the dusty leaves. To one side was a rotting tool-and-wood shed adjoining a chicken coop and rabbit hutch. From the door of the tool shed a tethered nanny goat gazed at Pinky from sad wise eyes. Beyond was a dusty vegetable garden dying from thirst and neglect. But along the back fence a patch of well-watered, carefully tended marijuana weeds grew adjacent to a garage of corrugated steel.

  Pinky halted in the dark beside the arbor and listened. He breathed in a choking manner and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Now the sound of music was loud and defiant. Vying with the hard banging of piano notes was the ratchetlike rhythm of someone strumming an accompaniment on a double-sided wooden washboard. It sounded like a cross between bone-beating and rim-rapping.

  The two attic windows were wide open. Through the left-side one, from where he stood, Pinky saw the back of an upright piano, atop which sat a kerosene lamp and a half-filled bottle of gin. As he watched, a black, pudgy-fingered hand rose from the far side of the piano and grasped the gin bottle. The tempo of the piano changed. Instead of two-handed playing with the steady bass beat marching alongside the light fantastic tripping on the treble keys, there followed a wild left-hand riffing the whole length of the board.

  The hand holding the bottle reappeared. The hand withdrew. The bottle remained. The level of the gin had lowered noticeably. Suddenly the bass came in again like John Henry driving steel and the treble notes ran through the night like the patter of rain.

  Then another black hand appeared from the other side of the piano and took down the bottle. The sound of rim-rapping ceased and only the sound of beating bones continued. One side of the washboard had conked out. The hand and the bottle reappeared. After which the rapping went wild.

  Through the right-side window could be seen vague figures of shirt-sleeved men and black-shouldered women swaying back and forth, locked in tight embrace; the locked liquid motions steady and unchanging despite the eccentricity of the music, sometimes keeping on the beats, sometimes in between. The Bear Hug and the Georgia Grind were being performed with a slow steady motion. Black skin gleamed like oily shadows in the dim yellow rays of the single flickering light of the kerosene lamp.

  “Missa Pinky,” came a soft small voice from the dark.

  Pinky jumped and wheeled about.

  Big white circles shone from a small black face almost invisible in the dark. The skinny barefooted figure was clad in a patched mansize overall jumper.

  “Boy, what you want at this time of night?” Pinky said roughly.

  “Will you please, sir, go up and ask Sister Heavenly for two pods of Heavenly Dust for Uncle Bud?”

  “Why don’t you go up and get it yourself?”

  “She won’t sell it to me. I is too young.”

  “Why don’t Uncle Bud come get it hisself?”

  “He’s feeling po’ly. That’s why he sent me. He ain’t got the faith no more.”

  “All right, give me the money.”

  The boy stuck out a hand holding two crumpled dollar bills.

  Pinky went beneath the arbor and knocked on the back door.

  “Who dat?” a disembodied voice asked from within.

  “Me, Pinky.”

  Two white crescents flickered briefly in a glass pane of the upper-door panel. There was the click of a simple mortise lock and the door swung open.

  With his eyes accustomed to the dark, Pinky made out the vague figure of a stone-old, gray-haired man clad in a blue cotton nightgown which seemed to float about the pitch-dark kitchen. Faint bluish gleams came from a double-barreled shotgun which the old man held cradled in his right arm.

  “How is you, Uncle Saint?” Pinky greeted politely.

  “Middling,” the old man replied. His voice seemed to come from another part of the room.

  “I’s going up to see Sister Heavenly.”

  “You got feet, ain’t you?” Now his voice seemed to come out of the floorboards between Pinky’s feet.

  Pinky grinned dutifully and went through the kitchen toward the stairs in the back hall.

  He found Sister Heavenly sitting on a high throne chair in the corner of the attic farthest from the light. In the dark shadows she was an indistinguishable shape wrapped in dull black cloth.

  A sick man lay on a stretcher on the floor at her feet.

  Sister Heavenly was a faith healer. Pinky didn’t dare approach her while she was “ministering”.

  “You is going to be happy,” she crooned in an old, cracked voice which still retained remnants of a bygone music. “You is going to be happy — if you got the faith.”

  Her body swayed from side to side in time with the slow steady beat of the bass.

  The man on the stretcher said in a weak voice, “I is got the faith.”

  She crept down from the throne and knelt by his side.

  Her thin, clawlike, transparent hand extended a silver spoon containing white powder toward his face.

  “Inhale,” she said. “Inhale deeply. Breathe the Heavenly Dust into your heart.”

  The man sniffed rapidly four times in succession, each stronger than the previous.

  She climbed back into her throne.

  “Now you is going to be healed,” she crooned.

  Pinky waited patiently until she deigned to see him. She forbade interruptions.

  Sister Heavenly prided herself on being an old-fashioned faith healer with old-fashioned tried-and-true methods. That was why she used old-fashioned gin-drinking musicians and directed her clients to dance old-fashioned belly-rubbing dances. It was the first stage of the cure. She called it “de-incarnation”.

  She had kept Black Key Shorty on the piano for fifteen years. Washboard Wharton had come later. Both were relics of a bygone time. Washboard sat beside the piano holding a double-sided washboard which he strummed with rabbit-leg bones between his legs. Black Key had learned to play the piano in flats. Both were gin drinkers. They were the only ones she permitted to drink gin in her “Heavenly Clinic.” There was nothing wrong with them. But she had to heal the sick people who came to her with Heavenly Dust.

  “What you want, Pinky?” she asked suddenly.

  He gave a start; he didn’t think she had seen him.
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  “You got to help me, Sister Heavenly, I is in trouble,” he blurted out.

  She looked at him. “You’ve been beat up.”

  “How can you tell that, in all this dark?”

  “You don’t have no milk shine like you generally does.” On second thought she added sharply, “If it’s the police who done it, you git away from here. I don’t want no truck with the police.”

  “It weren’t the police,” he said evasively.

  “Well then you tell me about it later. I ain’t got no time to listen to it now.”

  “It ain’t only that,” he said. “There’s a little tadpole down in the backyard wants two pods of Heavenly Dust for Uncle Bud.”

  “I ain’t selling no pods to little punks,” she snapped.

  “It ain’t for him, it’s for Uncle Bud; and you don’t have to give it to him, I’ll do that,” he said.

  “Well, give me the money,” she said impatiently.

  He handed her the two crumpled dollar bills.

  She examined the money with disgust. “I ain’t selling no pods for a dollar no more. Leastways not at this time of night.” She took one small paper packet from somewhere beneath her layers of garments and handed it to him. “You give him this and tell him the price is two dollars,” she directed, grumbling to herself. “How do them cheapskates expect to get healed for a dollar, with prices of everything as high as they is?”

  “Another thing,” he said hesitantly. “I need a fix bad.”

  “Go see your friend,” she said shortly. “He’ll stake you to a fix.”

  “He ain’t my friend no more. He’s in jail.”

  She wheeled about on her throne. “Don’t tell me you were in the rumble with him, ’cause if you’ve come here with yourself all hot, I’ll turn you in myself.”

  “I weren’t with Jake when they caught him,” he denied evasively.

  She was staring at him sharply as though she could see in the dark.

  “Well, go down and open the buck rabbit and take a pill out,” she relented. “And don’t take but one, it’s all you’ll need, it’s a speedball. And be sure to close him up good. The spike’s in my bureau drawer.”

  As he started to turn away, she added, “And don’t think you’re putting nothing over on me ’cause I ain’t through with you yet. You just wait until I get time to talk to you.”

  “I got to talk to you too,” he said.

  The man on the stretcher was twitching in time to the music. “It’s cool, Sister Heavenly,” he said in the voice of a convert giving a testimonial. “I got the real cool faith.”

  Black Key Shorty was driving piles on the bass with his steady left hand while his right hand was frolicking over hot dry grass in a nudist’s colony. Washboard Wharton was giving out with grunting sounds like a boar hog in a pen full of sows.

  The strong orgiastic smell of sweat and red-hot glands was pouring from the windows into the hot sultry air.

  It didn’t mean a thing to Pinky. He felt so much like crying he was thinking only of a fix. He went down the stairs to the hallway and passed through the kitchen.

  Uncle Saint floated from the shadows with his double-barreled shotgun.

  “I’ll be right back,” Pinky said. “Sister Heavenly sent me to tap the rabbit.”

  “Don’t tell me your troubles, I ain’t your pappy,” Uncle Saint said, unlocking the door. His voice sounded as though it had come from the bottom of a well.

  The little boy in the overall jumper was waiting for Pinky in the grape arbor. He had discovered the grapes but was scared to take any.

  “Did you get ’em, Missa Pinky?” he asked timidly.

  Pinky fished the packet from his pocket. “Here, you give this to Uncle Bud and tell ’im the price has gone up. Tell him Sister Heavenly say don’t expect to get healed for nothing.”

  Reluctantly the little boy accepted the single pod. He knew he’d get a beating for bringing back only one. But there wasn’t anything to do about it.

  “Yessa,” he said and went slowly into the shadows.

  Pinky went to the rabbit hutch, reached through the hatch and caught the buck by the ears. With a deft motion of his free hand, he removed a small square of adhesive tape covering the rabbit’s rectum, then withdrew a long rubber plug with a tiny metal handle like a sink stopper. The rabbit remained motionless, staring at him from enormous fear-frozen eyes. He squeezed the rabbit’s stomach and a small aluminum capsule popped out. He put the capsule into his pants pocket and restoppered the rabbit.

  He wondered what other hiding places Sister Heavenly had. He was her nephew and her only living relative, but she had never told him anything. He reckoned she was getting ready to eat the rabbit if she let him know that much.

  At the kitchen door he again went through the amenities with Uncle Saint.

  “I’m going to Sister Heavenly’s room for a bang.”

  “You must think I’m the recording angel,” Uncle Saint grumbled. His voice sounded as though it came out of the oven. “Go to the devil, for all I care.”

  Pinky knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t challenge it. He knew that Uncle Saint would curse up a fit if he went somewhere in the house without telling him in advance.

  The top bureau drawer looked like the last stand of a hypochondriac. He found the hypodermic needle lying in the midst of syringes, thermometers, hatpins and hairpins, tweezers, shoe buttoners, and old-fashioned glass-topped bottles containing enough varicolored poisons to decimate an entire narcotic squad. The alcohol lamp sat openly on a marble-topped table in the corner, alongside a battered teapot and a set of stained test tubes. The sugar spoon was in a sugar bowl on the night table beside the bed.

  He lit the lamp and sterilized the needle over the flame. Then he emptied the white powdered cocaine and heroin from the aluminum capsule into the sugar spoon and melted it over the flame. He drew the liquid through the needle into the syringe and, holding the spike in his right hand, banged himself in the vein of his left arm while the C & H was still warm.

  “Ahhh,” he said softly as the drug went in.

  Afterwards he put out the lamp and returned the spike to the medicine drawer.

  The speedball had immediate effect. He went back to the kitchen stepping on air.

  He knew Sister Heavenly wouldn’t be ready for him yet, so he passed the time with the ancient gunman.

  “How long is you been a ventriloquist, Uncle Saint?”

  “Boy, I been throwing my voice so long, I don’t know where it’s at anymore myself,” Uncle Saint said. His voice seemed to come from the bedroom Pinky had just quit. Abruptly he laughed at his own joke, “Ha-ha-ha.” The laughter seemed to come from outside the back door.

  “You’re going to keep on throwing it around until it gets away some day,” Pinky said.

  “What business is it of yours? Is you my keeper?” Uncle Saint crabbed. He sounded like a ghost lurking underneath the floor.

  Upstairs, Black Key Shorty was riffing with his left hand again. Pinky knew that the gin bottle was pressed to his lips. Washboard Wharton was making like a skeleton with the galloping itch, waiting his turn.

  Pinky listened to the steady clumping of feet on the wooden floor. Everything was crystal clear to him again. He knew just what he had to do. But it was getting late.

  5

  The pilgrims had finally gone.

  Sister Heavenly was sitting up in bed, wearing a pink crocheted bed jacket trimmed in frilly lace. Long, curly, midnight-blue hair of a wig hung down over her shoulders.

  She was so old her face had the shrunken, dried-up leathery look of a monkey’s. The corneas of her eyes were a strange shade of glazed blue resembling an enameled surface, while the pupils were a faded ocher with white spots. She wore perfect fitting plates of brilliant, matched, incredibly white teeth.

  As a young woman her skin had been black; but daily applications of bleach creams for more than half a century had lightened her complexion to the color of pigskin. Her toothpic
k arms, extending from the pink jacket, were purple-hued at the top, graduating to parchment-colored hands so thin and fragile-looking as to appear transparent.

  In one hand she held a scalding hot cup of sassafras tea, with her little finger extended according to the dictates of etiquette; in the other a small, dainty, meerschaum pipe with a long curved stem and a carved bowl. She was smoking the finely ground stems of marijuana leaves, her only vice.

  Pinky sat beside the bed on a green leather ottoman, wringing his ham-size, milk-white hands.

  The only light in the room came from a pink-shaded light on the other side of the bed. The soft pink light gave Pinky’s bruised white skin the exotic coloring of some unknown tropical sea monster.

  “How come you think they’s going to croak him?” Sister Heavenly asked in her deep, slightly cracked, musical voice.

  “To rob him, that’s why,” Pinky said in his whining voice. “To get his farm in Ghana.”

  “A farm in Ghana!” she said scornfully. “If Gus got a farm in Ghana I got a palace in heaven.”

  “He got a farm, all right. I has seen the papers.”

  “Taking he got a farm — which he ain’t — how they going to get it by croaking him?”

  “She’s his wife. He done willed it to her.”

  “His wife! She ain’t no more his wife than you is his son. If they croak him, it’ll go to his relatives — if he got any relatives.”

  “She his wife all right. I has seen the license.”

  “You has seen everything. Suppose they croak him. They can’t go live on his farm. That’s the first place the police will look.”

  He realized she wasn’t convinced about the farm. He took another tack.

  “Then it’s his money. They’ll get that and run away.”

  “His money! I is too old and time is too short for this bullshit. Gus ain’t never had two white quarters to rub together in his life.”

  “He got money. A whole lot of money.” He looked away evasively and his voice changed. “His other wife in Fayetteville, North Carolina, died and left him a big tobacco farm and he sold it for a heap of money.”