King of the Corner (16 page)

The foyer smelled of mildew and old urine. Doc rested his thumb on the soiled white rubber call button next to the old woman’s name on the directory. “Anybody there?”

“Try it.”

He pressed. A buzzer razzed and he pushed open the inner door. They rode a clanking old brass-plated elevator to the fourth floor, where he had to give the doors a nudge when they stuck halfway open. The hallway, lit by unshaded electric bulbs spaced too far apart in the ceiling and painted dark green over the plaster and wainscoting, smelled like the foyer, but someone had added Lysol.

Stopping at her door, he heard music inside. It sounded like Otis Redding. The door opened away from his knuckles and a broad black male face confronted his at a level, something that didn’t happen often. Doc recognized one of the men who had escorted Beatrice Blackwood into the funeral home. He had on what looked like the same dark suit and conservative tie, as if he had just returned from another service. Doc felt a flash of suspicion and hostility between them like an electric arc: the race thing. Then the man’s eyes went to Beatrice and his face metamorphosed into something Doc would never see directed at him.

“You look like a pirate,” was the first thing he said.

Doc could have done better than that.

The man’s name was Truman. Doc never found out if it was his first or his last, because she only introduced him by the one name. He didn’t shake Doc’s hand, but he opened the door wide enough to let them both in with no show of reluctance, and Doc assumed that he was just socially awkward. He was carrying around thirty pounds more than he should have, but he moved them well enough to have had some training as an athlete. Doc guessed boxing; flat scar tissue glittered like pieces of Scotch tape at the corners of both eyebrows.

He didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because in the next second bright light flooded the dim apartment and a lot of people were yelling something all at once that might have been “Surprise!” The timing was off, as it always was, and some people started early and one or two others missed the moment and it ended in untidy tatters.

Doc’s was the only white face in the room. The guests—it seemed at first there were a hundred of them, but it was more like twenty—had been seated and standing around the room with the curtains closed and most of the lights off, and the sudden illumination as the switches were turned had dazzled him, but it was just normal lamplight in a room full of tobacco smoke. Unlike Truman, the others were dressed anything but conservatively, in bright colors and jewelry that clanked and sporting an occasional gold tooth. Doc looked around to see if Needles and his friends were there, but he soon determined that he was the youngest person present by at least ten years.

Beatrice made no attempt to look surprised. She smiled and stood still and turned her cheeks this way and that for kisses and allowed herself to be embraced. There seemed to be a kind of protocol in the order in which the others came forward to bestow their affections, but it didn’t seem to be according to age, as some of the grayer heads came later, and he decided he didn’t know enough about the hierarchy to follow the pattern. He was largely—but not pointedly—ignored.

The room was more of a surprise than the party. The furniture was dyed leather and polished wood and chrome, the hardwood floor buffed to a satiny sheen, and underneath the cigarette odor the place smelled of citrus wax and regular airing. Books lined built-in shelves in a wall papered in bright yellow. Beatrice Blackwood had managed through no small effort and expense to construct a moat between her home and the squalor of her neighborhood without abandoning it.

Beatrice’s queenly reserve shattered in a squeal that prickled Doc’s skin under his clothes. She tottered forward, arms out, dividing the crowd, and bent to embrace an old man seated in an easy chair in the corner. Completely bald to the narrow brim of his Tyrolean, he had the dark gaunt look of an African wood carving. The lenses of his gold-rimmed half-glasses were opaque and the cane his long bony hands were folded on was bamboo with a broad white band halfway down its shaft in the universal symbol of the blind. His suit was electric blue, cut extravagantly, and he wore black silk socks and alligator shoes. He unfolded one hand to pat her on the back.

“Gidgy, I heard you was dead and buried.” Her Jamaican-accented speech had slipped from cultured third-person to street argot.

“Buried, anyways. Croakers won’t even let me smoke the weed no more.”

“That ain’t no Chesterfield there in the ashtray.”

“Sweet thing, I done turned eighty last month. I was running out of things to do that I ain’t supposed to.”

“You still selling?”

“No. Hell, no. That damn crack has gone and roont the drug culture. I only deals in Acapulco and Asian and I can’t get my price.
You
still selling?”

“No. That AIDS thing got everybody staying home pulling they own chain. You hear about Quincy?”

“I heard he died.”

“Well, you knew him, how he was built. He didn’t weigh no more than ninety pounds at the end.”

“I always told that boy he’d fuck hisself to death.” He pointed the cane in Doc’s general direction. “Who’s that white boy you got with you?”

“Can you see him?”

“Somebody looked out the window. He one of them Libber Als?”

Beatrice remembered her manners then, disengaged herself from the old man, and came over to grasp Doc’s arm. “This is Doc Miller, he drove me over from the hospital. He works for Maynard Ance. You all know Maynard.” The sculpted tones were back.

Doc felt a general lifting of the atmosphere then, as if a window had been opened. He wondered how many digits that assembly totaled in past bond. Beatrice went off to mingle. Doc was offered a drink by a woman with her hair cropped close to her skull and a forked scar on her left cheek that crinkled the skin around that eye when she smiled. He accepted a vodka and water. Somebody else offered him something to eat, and he became aware then of the sweet smell of hot grease. One minute later he was holding a paper plate weighted down with ribs in a maroon sauce. The volume on the old-fashioned cabinet stereo was turned up, and it was straight Lou Rawls, Stevie Wonder, and Martha and the Vandellas from then on. The woman with the scar was talking to Beatrice when the music got louder. She raised her voice. “ …another surprise. Truman?”

The big man in the dark suit set his paper plate down on the stereo, rapped gently at a side door, listened with his ear to the panel, and pushed it open. Alcina Lilley came out.

“I
WAS BORN IN
K
INGSTON
, that much I know,” Beatrice Blackwood said. “I think in 1914, but I don’t know what month. I was the eighth girl in the family. When I was about six months old my father sewed me up in a tobacco sack and threw me in a river. I don’t know which one; Jamaica has more rivers than it has girl children.”

She paused to break a two-inch column of ash next to a row of them in the saucer on the kitchen table. She only used it twice per cigarette, a trick that fascinated Doc. With at least six Bacardis in her system, she had stopped referring to herself by name, but she showed no signs of loss of coordination or concentration. Her cataracted right eye looked milky behind her glasses. Doc had no idea how much she could see with it, or through the holes in the patch over her left. There were sixteen of them arranged in a star, like a Chinese checkerboard.

Doc had had only the one vodka, after which he kept refilling his glass from the tap in the apartment’s clean little kitchen, but he was getting sleepy. It was dark out and the tobacco smoke burned his eyes. The music from the living room improvised all around the rhythm of his pulse.

Beatrice went on. “A policeman fished me out. By the time the police tracked down my father he had himself barricaded in the house. He shot my mother and five of my sisters with an army gun; the other two were in school. He’d have shot himself too, probably, but he was out of bullets. The police did it for him.

“I got artificial respiration, but no one knew how long my brain had gone without oxygen, so I was registered as an idiot at the orphanage. I must’ve thought they were right, because I didn’t start talking until I was four years old. After that they couldn’t shut me up. I was adopted by a couple named Thornton. He was a retired British Army officer. I was eleven or twelve when he took me to bed the first time. Mrs. Thornton found out and threw me out of the house.” She sipped Bacardi. “When I was sixteen a man named French Bill took me to Detroit with four other girls. He sold me to Hattie Long and I went to work for her.”

“Sold you?”

“Well, my work card, but it came to the same thing. They called me a domestic. The first time you tried to run away Bill bruised you up. If you tried again—well, nobody ever made a third try. Hattie was a woman ahead of her time. She ran the first integrated house in Detroit. Some of those big auto men liked their meat dark, you see, and that black trade got big after the Rouge plant opened, but none of the other white places would touch it. She took a special interest in me. She taught me how to dress and talk and which fork to use and where to hide a knife where I could get to it in a hurry. ‘Ruby,’ she said—Ruby Sandoval, that’s my birth name, my great-grandmother was a Spanish slave—‘Ruby, don’t ever lose the accent. There’s lots of girls prettier than you, but the second they open their mouth they might as well be out on Michigan Avenue giving out hand jobs at a buck a throw. When you’ve got something nobody else has, hang on to it.’ I cried like a baby at her funeral. By then I had my own place. I met them all: Joey Machine, Jack Dance, Frankie Orr. You’re too young to remember those names.”

“I remember Frankie Orr.”

“His boy Patsy lost his cherry at my place on Twelfth. Personally I don’t believe it, that boy was crippled in more than just his legs, but I didn’t ask my girls any questions as long as they came through with the house cut and the customers left looking satisfied.”

She shook her head, smiling. She didn’t look as old when she wasn’t showing the perfection of her dentures. “The sixties, now, that was the time to be on Twelfth Street. Those were our Roaring Twenties: blind pigs, rib joints, our music coming out of every open car window. Quincy Springfield ran the numbers. You should’ve seen the
shirts
that boy wore, all the colors of Life Savers. They made parks out of some of the buildings that burned down in the riots and boarded up the rest, so you wouldn’t know it to look at the place now, but for a little while there we owned the town.”

“You own it now. The mayor’s black and so’s the chief of police and most of the population.”

“That’s not owning it.” She laid a fresh column next to the last. “That’s being owned by it.”

He drank some of his water. “Who’s Gidgy?”

“Theron Toussaint L’Ouverture Gidrey.” The name rolled grandly off her experienced tongue. “Nobody ever got poisoned on his merchandise, although some OD’d because they weren’t used to the pure original. He had a half-interest in the Morocco Motor Hotel on Euclid. Maybe you heard that name.”

“There was a Morocco Motel incident.”

“STRESS cops broke down the door in ’73 looking for a liquor-store robber. They shot and killed three people. One of them was Gidgy’s sister’s son Richard. Gidgy had a stroke the next day. He never did get back his eyes.”

“Was the robber there?”

“No, the police in North Carolina arrested him about a week later. Richard wasn’t in the business, he was just staying there while he was going to Wayne State. Well, Gidgy had to expect something like it in his line of work. Anyway nobody around here cried when Young took office and disbanded STRESS. Some of those white cops went around with notches on their guns. Seriously.”

The air changed in the kitchen, stirred by the two-way door. Doc knew—and was aware that he knew—that Alcina Lilley had entered behind his back. He stood. Her head came above his shoulders, which made her almost six feet tall in her moderate heels. She was wearing a beige skirt that should have hobbled her at the knees but didn’t, and a matching jacket with a double row of big cloth buttons. There was no blouse; the diamond-shaped expanse of medium brown flesh that was her bosom and the neck that grew up out of it were without lines or blemishes except for a small mole just above the shadow where her lapels met. She had full lips, small eyes set far apart, and a short nose and long upper lip that colluded in the overall impression of youth. As at McCoy’s funeral, her only makeup—almost an afterthought—was a touch of lipstick. He couldn’t believe she had been married to a man dead twenty-four years.

“It was a lovely party, Beatrice,” she said.

Beatrice drew a fresh cigarette out of her pack and smiled. “You should tell Truman. Would you believe it was his idea? He’s starting to develop an imagination. Thank you for coming. I was afraid we were only going to see each other at funerals from now on.”

“Poor Wilson. I can’t think of anything good to say about him.”

“Neither could he. I suppose that’s why he shot himself.” She leaned forward while Doc lit the cigarette from a throwaway lighter, thanked him, and sat back. “Are you ready to go home? Truman will drive you.”

“I don’t think so,” Alcina Lilley said. “He passed out about a half-hour ago.”

“That boy never will learn how to drink. He’s Sebastian Blight’s youngest, you know. When he gave him to me for protection he didn’t tell me I was supposed to finish raising him. Doc—I hate to ask.”

“Where do you live?” he asked the younger woman.

“Birmingham.” She couldn’t prevent a light drawl from seeping into certain words and names.

“Mind riding in a motor home? The man I work for calls it a bus.”

She smiled, briefly lighting the grave arrangement of her features. “As long as you don’t put me in the back.”

Beatrice separated a finger from her glass to beckon. When Doc leaned down she kissed his cheek. “Tell Maynard thanks. He knows Beatrice can’t get along without her handsome young men.”

He touched the back of her wrist. “Like hell.”