Rainy said, “Man, I got it, I’ll take it. What’s a difference?”
Moke said, “This boy here’s suppose to take it’s what I’m saying to you.”
Rainy said, “No, man, I’m the one,” backing away from the van with the suitcase.
Stick was looking at Moke’s face, eyelids heavy in the light beams. He said, “Why would I do it? I come along for the ride.”
He heard Rainy, outside, saying, “I’m going, okay? I want to say hi to Nestor. I haven’t seen him.”
Moke was shaking his head. “Jeez-us Christ—hey, come back here, will you!”
Stick saw interior lights go on as a door opened behind the headlights, giving shape to a full-size American car. A figure appeared at the right front fender. Rainy was in the beams now, out in front of the van. He called out, “Nestor? . . . Who is that?” Raised the suitcase in one hand and gave it a pat with the other. “I got it, man!”
Moke said, “Well, shit, I don’t care.”
All that was happening was there in front of Stick, watching from a second-row seat. He saw Moke’s right hand dig inside the worn-out jacket.
Moke saying, “We’ll make ‘er a two-for-one special, today only.”
Stick yelled out, “Rainy!”
Through the windshield he saw Rainy look back. Saw the figure by the headlights raise something in his hands and saw the muzzle flash as he heard the burst of gunfire, a hammering sound out in the open. Saw Rainy, outside, stumble and saw nickel-plate gleaming inside, the big revolver coming up in Moke’s hand.
Stick lunged hard with his hands and shoulder into the back of Moke’s seat and felt it rush on its tracks and stop dead and heard Moke’s grunt as his head slammed against the windshield. Stick didn’t wait, stop to look. The headlight beams lit up the compartment, showed him the rear-door latch. He banged through the doors and left the van running, digging hard, that hammering sound chasing him until he was around the corner of the school building.
With no idea of direction he walked residential streets of tile-roofed bungalows concealed in shrubbery, aroused a few relentless dogs, came out to commercial lights again, finding South Dixie Highway without knowing where it was. He waved down a taxi, let the driver look him over, told the driver South Beach and didn’t say another word after that. They had to leave city streets and traffic, break free onto MacArthur Causeway before he opened the window to feel the breeze coming off the bay and to stare at distant solitary lights out in the Atlantic Ocean, listening in his mind to Moke saying, This boy here’s suppose to take it . . .
Suppose to die.
They sold nickel bags inside for seven bucks, they sold regular cigarettes, shampoo, all that kind of stuff; they sold shine made from potatoes, spud juice at ten bucks a gallon, or let fruit juice stand till it turned and drank that. Stick’s former partner, Frank Ryan, died of the potatoes in the prison hospital.
DeJohn Holmes said he could have anything he wanted. A sateen jacket? Blue and gold with his name on the back? Stick. Look nice, be a man of fashion.
Here was the strange part. It wasn’t any of the colored guys in the wool-knit caps he had to watch.
No, out of five thousand eight hundred and something losers shuffling around, hanging out in the yard, getting high, chasing sissies, it was a white guy named Luther doing two to five who stared at him a few weeks, circled in and finally told Stick he was going to kill him. Why?
(Just like, why would he have thought he had to watch Moke? He wasn’t mixed up in that business.)
It didn’t make sense: sitting there in the Big Top, the dining hall, one morning with his cold scrambled eggs and having this stone-eyed asshole biker chewing with his mouth open telling him he was going to put a shank in him when he least expected. The colored guys—Christ, he got along fine with the colored guys and they knew all about him, from DeJohn Holmes.
DeJohn was one of the “mayors” at Jackson and ran a section of the yard, taking cuts on the card games and numbers and renting out weight-lifting equipment by the quarter hour when he wasn’t using it. “Stay by me when you need to,” DeJohn told Stick. “I’ll show you how to jail, not lose any good time mixing up with crazies.”
But why did Luther want to kill him?
“ ’cause he see you talking to me when you should be hanging out with the white boys. Start with that,” DeJohn said. “Man like him, he don’t even know how to brush his teeth. You watch him ’cause you don’t know when the bug is going to go out on him and he turn hisself loose. Maybe he thinks in his stone mind you somebody else or you remind him of somebody stepped on him one time. Or he like to be like you and he can’t. He say he going to shank you and you say watching the motherfucker eat is enough to turn you sick to death anyway. But see, he so slow in the head he has to think, man, to blink. So I get him assigned the meat shop and let him see he fuck with my frien’ Stickley what can befall him.”
Pure luck. Getting next to DeJohn, being discovered by him. DeJohn’s story:
“A man point at me in Recorder’s Court, City of Detroit, say yeah, that’s him, that’s him. Say I’m the one come in his place with a gun and cleaned out both his cash registers. Yeah, that’s him. I draw thirty to life for the third and final time around. Now that man that pointed—not because I took his cash receipts but took his woman, one time, one night only and she love it—that man was Sportree, who died of gunshot at the hand of my frien’ Ernest Stickley, Jr.,” DeJohn said. “They some details missing, but it was some funny business following when you and Frank robbed the J. L. Hudson Company in downtown Detroit and got ate up.”
Stick was careful. He said he was doing his time for a grocery store in Oakland County, not any homicide or robbery in downtown Detroit.
DeJohn said, “I know that. It’s cool.” He said, “Believe me, my man. You my man and it’s cool. But it don’t change you did Sportree and the dude was with him.”
Stick said, to DeJohn only, okay, but it was unavoidable.
DeJohn said, “They all unavoidable when you have to do it. Like the two brothers in the shopping mall, in the parking lot, I believe was Northland.”
Stick said yeah, that had been unavoidable too, the two brothers wanting to mug him, for Christ sake, take his groceries.
DeJohn showed his gold and his pink tongue. “Groceries, yeah, shit”—enjoying it—”and the cash underneath the Wheaties from the store where you and Frank did your shopping.” DeJohn said, “What they say, you could have got a hundred years just for the cars you used on those jobs. You take the fall on the grocery store, but they got Frank on the big one, didn’t they? The Hudson’s store.”
Stick wondered how he knew all that.
DeJohn said, “You famous, baby.”
When Luther made the move it was at a time when Stick was playing basketball in the yard. He left the game wheezing, out of shape, put on his work jacket and sat bent over on a bench trying to get his breath. He felt the wet on his back and thought at first it was sweat. He began to smell something . . . Christ, gasoline, and heard it when Luther dropped the match on him and wouf the back of his jacket went up in flames and he dove head-first over to land on his back on the cement and roll from side to side grinding in that hot sting . . . seeing the guy standing there with the Windex squirt bottle of clear liquid watching him.
DeJohn said it was the man’s style and they should’ve known. “But the man lied to you, didn’t he? Say he was going to shank you.”
Three days later there was an accident in the butcher shop. Three witnesses in wool caps and white aprons swore Luther was splitting pork ribs with a cleaver, missed and cut off his left hand.
DeJohn said, “Man was lucky, wasn’t he? He could have been seriously hurt and bled to death.” He said, “I told him that, too.”
There was all kinds of luck.
Stick sat on the cement porch of the Hotel Bon-Aire, listening to elderly people with New York Jewish accents complain about high prices, about Medicare and how Reagan had b
etrayed them. The hotel was light-green stucco, four stories, and seemed more like a retirement home than a hotel. Stick could feel the old people staring at him; one asked if he was with the government, looking things over.
August, no tourists, but still a lot of people on South Beach.
He crossed the street always lined with cars and went out on the sand past the clumps of sea grape and the Cuban families cooking over charcoal, eating at the picnic tables, and lay in the sun listening to bits of voice sounds coming to him in Spanish. They sounded like they were arguing but looked like they were having fun. Try and figure out Cubans. He would lie in the sun not moving and think about going up to Stuart or Daytona, or maybe over on the west coast around Naples, work construction. He could always drive a transit-mix, he’d done enough of that before.
With the hot glare pressing on his glasses and his eyes closed tight he would try to look into the future to a place where a man forty-two, starting over, could find something interesting and make up for lost time. If he was going to work he’d have to stay in Florida and get back in construction. Not around Miami, though. Or Detroit. People up there with seniority were drawing unemployment. He didn’t look so far ahead that he pictured himself an old man on the street, he pictured himself now; but he couldn’t, no matter how hard he thought, see himself doing anything.
He still hadn’t spoken to his ex-wife or his daughter. Now, the way things were, he wasn’t ready.
He was going to buy some clothes and get lucky there. The manager of the hotel, an old bent-over guy, showed him laundry packages of stuff a guy had left in his room Stick could have for thirty bucks. Different-colored shirts with little polo players on them, nice pants just a little tight, a couple light jackets, everything clean and neatly folded, fairly new stuff but without that brand-new look, which Stick liked even better. The manager said this young fella that left the clothes was here in May, went off to Key West for the weekend and never came back. The manager settled for twenty. Stick went out and bought a pair of sneakers with blue stripes on the sides.
They were the most comfortable shoes he’d ever owned. In the early evening he’d walk up Collins Avenue from Seventh Street as far as Forty-first sometimes, up around the big hotels, and on the way back find a nice quiet bar, have a few bourbons over crushed ice, suck on that good stuff and feel himself, after a few evenings of it, beginning to settle down and get his confidence back. He burned the first day in the sun. But by the fourth day he looked like he was working construction again, getting tan faster than he ever had before. His hair even looked different, lighter; he let it fall in its natural bent instead of combing it back behind his ears. Four days and he looked like a regular Florida native. Next he would be going to discos, doing those slinky numbers with the ladies. There were enough of them around, he had a waitress or two hitting on him every night; but he wasn’t anxious to move in that direction yet. He had to make up his mind about something, take one thing at a time.
He bought a postcard to send to DeJohn that showed a bunch of alligators, one with its mouth wide open, next to a kidney-shaped cement pool. He would sit with his bourbon and stare at the empty white message side of the card, thinking:
Dear DeJohn, My luck almost ran out on me the other night . . .
Dear DeJohn, man, could I use you right now . . .
Dear DeJohn, Rainy asked me to go with him on a deal that was supposed to be a Sunday drive . . .
But if he was going to go into all that, he’d have to put it in a letter. Tell what happened. Tell what he was going to do about it.
Well, the way it looked when he first started thinking about it, nothing.
Because there was nothing he could do. And because it was none of his business, it was Rainy’s. Rainy knew there was always a risk, that kind of business, but it was how he made his living. It didn’t matter what the deal was and it didn’t do any good to think about it, because he didn’t know all the facts.
Chucky owes a Cuban money. Chucky makes the payment. The Cuban takes the money—you assume that—and has Chucky’s bagman killed. Why? Because as Rainy said, the Cuban was crazy, that’s all. You were dealing with people, they weren’t just weird, they had machine guns.
What he tried to do during the day, lying on the beach, taking walks along the surf, was think only about his future. Look at it in bright sunlight. Here it was, the world. What did it have to offer? All he had ever seen was one shady part of it. He found his thinking would come to: pick up a car and take off—And then his thinking would start jumping all over the place.
But in the evening, settled down, feeling himself again, he was able to narrow his view, look at pieces of what had happened and come to a conclusion that had a hole in it but still made enough sense. He believed, first:
They didn’t kill Rainy because he was Rainy. They didn’t seem to care who they killed. Either one, he or Rainy would do. Moke said, “Shit, I don’t care.” Or both of them. Moke said, “Make it a two-for-one special.”
But Rainy wasn’t the first choice.
Stick could see Moke looking at him and saying, “This boy here’s suppose to take it.”
He had to squint hard trying to understand this part.
Maybe he’d heard it wrong. Or Moke had decided on his own to send him out there with the suitcase; so in Moke’s mind he was suppose to take it and it was that simple.
Because if he’d heard it right, the way it sounded, then somebody had given Moke instructions. Send out the guy with Rainy. And who even knew there was going to be a guy with Rainy? Except Chucky.
So the second thing Stick came to believe:
Chucky was giving the Cuban somebody to kill. Part of doing business. Rainy said Chucky owned the Cuban money. Rainy didn’t know he owed the Cuban a lot more than that, he owed the Cuban a life, too. Maybe Rainy didn’t serve enough time to learn how those things worked. Stick knew.
He could sip his bourbon and know exactly why Chucky had picked him. Because he had crossed the line, walked where he shouldn’t have walked. Because he had given Chucky a look. Because he had inspected Chucky’s home, a room in it, and said he wasn’t impressed.
“You see anything you like?”
Asking for it. What was he supposed to say, yeah, I love it? Ask him who his decorator was?
Once Stick reached this conclusion he could look back at what had happened, including Rainy’s murder, and accept it. He wished he could have helped Rainy. But Rainy and all these people were in the same life. It was how they dealt with one another. To them, inside or outside eighteen-foot walls with gun towers, the life was the same. So if in time Stick could put Jackson out of his mind he’d be able to forget about this business too. Begin by walking away from it.
Except that he began thinking about Chucky now and the one hole—a question mark, really—in his conclusion.
Chucky might have set them up, but a fact still remained. The suitcase tested by the four-hundred-pound gorilla had been delivered. Didn’t Chucky owe somebody five thousand dollars?
On the postcard with the alligators on it he sent to DeJohn, the message read:
Dear DeJ:
So far you aren’t missing a thing not being here—as you can tell from that bunch of girls hanging around the swimming pool (over). Listen, I’d even take your old lady, Antoine, before I’d pick one of them. UGGGG!!! Tell the brothers disco is out and Soul is in. God bless you and take care of yourself. I’m going now to seek my fortune. Wish me luck.
Stick
He put on the lime green polo shirt, a pair of khakis faded almost white that didn’t need a belt and matched the poplin jacket; he put on his new sneakers with the blue stripes and stuffed the rest of his new wardrobe into a white canvas bag with blue handles. Well, look at sporty, he said to the dresser mirror, liking his color especially, his tan face smiling at him.
For seven years he had worn state clothes. He told DeJohn, turning down offers of sateen athletic jackets and sportshirts, he was reminding hims
elf he was a con and would not pretend to be something else until he was out of there.
Now what was he?
He’d find out pretty soon.
6
HE WONDERED WHY YOU COULD walk into a bar and smell it when it was empty or there were only a few people but you couldn’t smell it when the place was crowded.
He wondered why there were more cars in the parking lot than people inside the place.
Coming in from sunlight with his canvas bag Stick opened and closed his eyes in the dimness, saw only a few tables occupied, a couple of guys in hardhats sitting at the bar. It was so quiet he thought at first it was the wrong place. As he stood there the bell rang outside for the bridge to go up but nobody blew the foghorn. Maybe this was the time to come. He wasn’t feeling old, he was still feeling pretty good; a little tired maybe. It had taken three and a half hours and seven rides to thumb his way up US 1 from Miami to Lauderdale and to walk to the beach from federal highway.
No, it was the right place. The girl-bartender, Bobbi, was serving the two hardhats.
Stick went down to the other end of the bar where it was still afternoon, sunlight filling the wide opening to the terrace. A good spot. He could swivel a quarter turn on the stool, look across the Intracoastal and see the front of Chucky’s building, the blacktop drive curving up to the entrance.
When Bobbi came down the bar in her loose pink-knit shirt and said, “Well, hi, how’re you doing?” giving him a cocktail napkin, Stick was sure she recognized him. He said just fine and ordered a Michelob draft. But when she brought the beer and he placed a ten and a five on the bar she said, “What’s that for?”
“The other day, remember, I was in here with Rainy?”
She said, “You were?”
“You held the tab ’cause we were coming back later.”