Standing at the Scratch Line (17 page)

“Whatchoo think?” Big Ed asked amiably as he glanced at King.

“Still figurin’,” King replied, watching Jim enter the house.

“Any likelihood they’ll trace Minetti’s men to the Rockland?” Professor asked.

“Nope, Smitty reported that the Milanos and the Minettis got an all-out war goin’,” King answered without enthusiasm. “They ain’t studyin’ us. They gon’ be on guard against the Milanos. So we gon’ just have to wait until things cool off. Everybody’ll be contacted when we ready to go.”

“If that’s the case, I’ve got studying to do,” said Professor. “I’ve got several tests coming up next week. Smitty, can you drop me by my house? It’s close by.”

“Be happy to give you a ride, Professor,” Smitty said with a slight smile, which gave his dark brown face a melancholy look.

“I’m ready to go, too,” King said. “What about you, Big Ed?”

“Well, that big-leg girl name Leah want to drive me over to see her apartment before her show tonight. I just wanted to be friendly so I told her I’d go along with her.”

“Have a good time,” King said as Big Ed headed toward the house. He turned and said his good-byes to Professor and Smitty.

King watched his friends walk away. He went around the front to where he had parked his own car and took a deep breath. He leaned against a fender and lit a small cigar. The sky was full of clouds, which were propelled across its expanse, changing into different shapes as the wind coursed through them. A sudden opening in the clouds allowed a shaft of sunlight to shoot through to the darkened earth below, lancing across the dim contours of the landscape like a spotlight. For a moment the opening in the clouds appeared to be shaped like a gigantic eye and the beam moved quickly across the valleys and lowlands toward the hills from which King was watching. The shaft of light moved as if directed, as if the eye of God had materialized out of the gaseous mass and was now searching for something.

King made no sudden moves, nor did he feel any specific fear. He was a fatalist. He agreed with Sergeant Williams: if it was his time, it was his time. There was no avoiding the hand of fate. The beam faded just before it touched his car. He smiled because it had not touched his car and therefore could not be a symbol or an omen. King placed faith in neither God nor demon, neither heaven nor hell, and yet he was slightly superstitious. His experiences in the war had taught him that luck played as important a role as wariness and intelligence in the pursuit of survival. It was his feeling that luck could be enhanced by careful observation of the omens and symbols. But he was not a slave to “sign.” If the path he chose went against it, so be it: one could not always travel with luck or fate as companions. Sometimes they were strangers to be met as enemies. He took a final puff of his cigar and threw it into the gutter, where it sizzled briefly in the dampness. The winds swirled around him.

A light brown sedan honked as it went by. King saw the hunched-over form of Big Ed in the passenger’s seat as the car headed down the hill. The front door slammed and King heard the sound of a woman’s high heels hurrying down the stairs.

King wondered whether he was missing some crucial fact because he had decided on a course of action that everyone thought was insane. Yet it all seemed very logical to him. Every organization’s operations were vulnerable to attack by those willing to use secrecy and discipline. It was the first rule of military training. Crime organizations were no different than any other. But he understood and sympathized with Europe’s reluctance to get into an armed conflict. After they hit Minetti’s collection house, he planned to donate his percentage of the Palace to Europe. Then there would be nothing to keep him in New York. Once he had insured the ongoing viability of his investments with Goldbaum, he and Big Ed could go on down to New Orleans. But these thoughts vanished when he saw Mamie Walcott come out of the house.

He tipped his hat to her. “Can I offer you a ride?”

“Well, Mr. Tremain, I would like a lift home. I’ve got to be at the theater in three hours, but my apartment may be out of your way.”

“I’d be happy to oblige.” King opened the car door for her and helped her enter, then went around and got in. He started the car and nosed it into traffic. “Where to?” he asked.

Mamie had a little walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side and as King negotiated his way out of Brooklyn across the bridge to Manhattan, following her directions, the conversation between them was easy and frank. Mamie had a low husky laugh, which bubbled to the surface regularly. King learned that she was originally from Mississippi and had come up north in her late teens to live with her Aunt Iona because her father had been seriously injured in a farming accident and her mother was totally engaged in trying to nurse him back to health. As soon as she arrived, Mamie was an instant New Yorker. She found a number of venues for her singing that were not available to her in Mississippi. She sang blues and ballads in a string of small bars until she met Jim Europe. He had helped to get her career started. Now it was only a question of time until she got her chance at the “big time.”

King stopped the car in front of her apartment and placed his hand on her leg before she opened the car door. “I’d like to see you again,” he said quietly.

Mamie stared down at his hand, which remained on her leg, then looked him in the eye. “You’re bold. You don’t even know me.”

“I overheard yo’ conversation with Leah and Alice when you was in the kitchen. I thought maybe we could work out an arrangement,” King ventured, a smile flashing across his face. “I know you want to own your own club some day. Maybe I could help you along with that. Anyways, I always wanted to meet a woman that could make me holler and who could do things there ain’t names for.”

Mamie laughed. “You heard that, huh?” King nodded, smiling broadly. Mamie laughed again and said, “You’re still bold. You just put your hand on my leg without so much as a ‘by-your-leave.’ ” Mamie pushed his hand away. “What’s this arrangement you’re talking about? You aren’t trying to buy me, are you?” she asked with an innocent smile.

King sensed that she was having a good time—at least she made no effort to get out of the car right away—but he had no idea whether she was serious or if she was toying with him. He had no words for his confusion, and it was this lack of understanding that drove him to pay for sex rather than try to establish a relationship. He explained, “I’m new to New York. I don’t know the ways of the people here. I need somebody to pull my coat, like you’s doin’ for Alice. I got money. I can show a woman a good time, but I ain’t seen nothin’ but fast-talkin’ women who think they slick. I’m looking for somethin’ steady. I ain’t ready to settle down, but I likes the idea of the right woman on my arm. I heard what you had to say in the kitchen and I liked it. You seem down to earth. I like that. I hear you want to start yo’ own club. I think I can help.”

“But I got to be seeing you first, is that right?” Mamie asked with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah, I thought we could go places together—”

“Does seeing me mean bedding me?”

“You ain’t got to do nothin’ you don’t want to do,” King asserted. “I don’t know much about New York women or how to treat them, so if I offended you, I’m sorry,” King admitted. “I was hopin’ I could learn some of that off of you.”

Mamie softened. “You’re a good-looking man. I wouldn’t mind being seen with you, but you’ve got to do something about your clothes, honey!”

King looked down at his suit, which was one of the two that he had made for him by a Chinese tailor after he arrived from France. “What’s wrong with my clothes?” he asked. He looked down again. His suit was cut in the current fashion.

“They’re dirty and you’re dirty,” Mamie said crisply. “A woman wants to be romanced. She wants a man who bathes every day and wears a clean shirt each time he sees her. You need to take that suit to a laundry to be cleaned. Before I left Mississippi I smelled all the body odor I needed to smell for my whole life. We got indoor plumbing and piped-in hot water in New York City. There ain’t no excuse for letting body odor build up.”

“I only wears my shirts two or three days. Didn’t know I was creatin’ a problem,” King said and it was true. Sometimes along the frontline trenches in France, the men went without showers for weeks at a time. King realized immediately that he should have seen that different cleanliness standards had to be applied once he returned to the States. He was embarrassed.

It was dark by the time King parked his car and walked up to the flat he and Big Ed shared. It was on the top floor of a four-story walk-up and looked out upon a grassy area that had a rough baseball diamond. King went out on the roof and saw brief glimpses of the stars as the dark gray clouds continued their roiling motion across the night sky. He lit another small cigar and basked in the thoughts of Mamie. He had agreed to pick her up and take her to the theater at seven that evening. He felt a tremor of excitement pass through him. What he liked most about Mamie was that she was easy to talk to, that she listened and then offered intelligent responses. Most of what he knew of women was learned while in the army, and there were not many opportunities for colored soldiers to meet women who weren’t selling themselves. Mamie was his first real woman.

The wind gusted briefly. Above him, through a wide opening in the clouds, King saw the Big Dipper and the path of the Milky Way. The pale shape of a half-moon glimmered behind the clouds before all was again hidden behind an onrushing wall of cumulus. For King, life was changing like the sky; it was marching along with its usual pressures and demands. He was being forced to adapt to a different mode. He had grown used to the demands of the army. In uniform, one always knew what was required. Now he had to learn the rules of New York City streets. He went downstairs to run himself a bath.

Later that night King drove Mamie home from the theater. The waning moon and the stars had the sky to themselves. The clouds were gone. The brightness of the night sky was defused by the electric brilliance of the city. King commented on it as he stopped to let a horse-drawn wagon pass. “Seems like there ain’t no night sky in New York. That’s one thing I sure do miss.”

“Is the sky bright where you come from?” Mamie asked, staring at King in the changing shadows of the car’s interior. Despite her better judgment, she was attracted to his youthful and masculine handsomeness. She thought of the palm reader’s words and wondered what she was getting into by allowing King to approach her. In the theater community there were many handsome and pretty people but not many masculine ones. Yet his looks were only a small part of her attraction to him. There was something mysterious about him that excited her.

King brought the car to a stop for an electric stop signal and answered her. “Yeah, but it’s different. It seems closer, like you can reach up and touch it. And when the clouds cover up the sky, it’s like yo’ legs under yo’ dress: all you have to do is reach out and push the material away.” King reached down and pulled her dress and coat back and exposed her stockinged legs. He would have pushed her dress higher but she put a restraining hand on his.

“Looking for something?” she asked, but she did not remove his hand from her leg.

“I’m always lookin’ for somethin’ good,” he answered with another smile. The signal changed and King took his hand away to shift gears. King returned to his original topic and said, “I guess the stars is bright anywhere there ain’t no big city, but it ain’t close like it is down in the bayous. Them stars was plenty bright in northern France, but they was a million miles away and you knew it. You never thought about reaching up and touching them. In the bayous the stars and moon is just over your head and you knows they is alive ’cause they is twinklin’ and you can feel their strength.” He turned and gave her a smile that flashed his even, white teeth.

Mamie returned his smile and pulled her coat and dress back over her knees. “You’re from Louisiana? Where they have alligators?” she asked.

“Yep, I’m from ’gator country, where the bugs weigh a pound each and the lizards and snakes speak Cajun, and other varmints roam freely. My people have a farm just outside of New Orleans.”

“I come from a really small, small town in Mississippi called Three River Junction,” Mamie said. “I was happy to escape it. I never wanted to return after I saw the city’s lights and opportunities. Do you ever miss your home?”

“I think about it but I don’t miss it. I know I’ve got to go back and finish some important business, but there ain’t no rush. It’ll keep until I get there.” King turned the car down a narrow street and pulled to the curb in front of an old brownstone. He turned to Mamie and once again put his hand underneath both her coat and her dress and let it rest on the stockinged smoothness of her knee.

Mamie did not flinch or move. She did not try to remove his hand and merely watched him in the darkness. “Is this part of our arrangement?” she asked.

King kept his hand on her leg while he looked at her and said, “Ain’t nothin’ happenin’ unless you wants it.”

“Suppose I haven’t made up my mind yet?”

“When do you think you gon’ make up yo’ mind?” His hand gently pulled her legs open and caressed the soft skin above her stockings.

“Why don’t we go inside and talk things over?” Despite her doubts, Mamie realized that she had already committed herself in his direction, not by any specific action but in her mind. She was in a rut with her career and her life. There appeared to be nothing on the horizon other than King, which had the possibility of changing her circumstances. She did not feel that she was taking advantage of him. He would get his money’s worth. After all, they had an arrangement.

“That sounds alright with me,” King responded as he put his free hand behind her neck and kissed her. He pressed his mouth against her pliant lips and felt her tremble before she pushed him away.

“I want to get inside,” Mamie protested.

“So do I,” King responded with one of his rare attempts at humor.

As Mamie was fishing for her key to the front door, she asked King, “Do you believe in destiny, that things can be preordained?”