Standing at the Scratch Line (98 page)

“Yep, I had ’em drafted right after I got off the phone with you! My attorney is out here from New York for the christenin’! You want to read ’em?” King handed her the papers.

Serena sat down at a writing table and laid the bowie on its shiny wooden surface. She read through the papers quickly.

King asked, “Ain’t that what we’s agreein’ to do?”

Serena nodded and picked up the knife in her right hand. She turned her left palm up. She drew the sharp blade of the knife across her open left hand. The blood spurted from the cut and spilled over the edge of her hand. She asked, “Is that deep enough, or do you want more?”

“That’ll do for signin’,” King answered without inflection.

“Where do I sign?”

“Right here,” King indicated the spot with his finger. “Use this quill. It’ll pick up the blood just fine!” After Serena finished signing the papers, King handed her a handkerchief to stem the flow of blood from her hand. He then nicked one of his fingers and pressed blood out for the quill. He signed the papers alongside Serena’s name.

“You didn’t cut yourself very deeply!” Serena observed.

“I ain’t got no need for penance or to prove a point. All I said was enough blood to sign these documents so’s we got a contract. You the one that took it out!”

There was a loud knocking on the hallway door. King went over to the door and asked, “Who is it?” He heard the muffled tones of Jack’s voice and opened the door.

Jack rushed into the room and looked from King to Serena and back again. He was breathing heavily as if he had been running some distance. “Have you heard?” he gasped. “LaValle is being held by Rocky Tisdale for outstanding debts and he’s threatening to hurt LaValle if they don’t get the money by this evening!”

“Don’t worry about it,” King said easily. “I’ll take care of it.”

“What happened to your hand, Mama?”

“Nothing to worry about. Just let your father handle this problem with Tisdale.”

“Sorry, Mama,” Jack answered, shaking his head. He turned to his father. “I want to go with you. This Tisdale is getting pretty bold! He’s operating on the edge of our territory right now! He needs to be taught a lesson! No one holds a Tremain hostage without paying for it!”

King repeated, “I said I’d take care of it!”

“I heard you, Pa, but I’m a man now.” Jack looked his father in the eye. There was no challenge in it. He was merely trying to communicate a point. “You either include me in your plans or I go without you.” His four years as an officer in the military service had changed him substantially. He had filled out and had come back with the bearing of a man. He was used to being listened to and commanding men. More important to King, Jack had been in combat and come back alive and uninjured.

“I was hoping that you’d stay with me,” Serena suggested to her son. “This whole thing has sort of frightened me. I’d feel better if you were by my side.”

“I’ll leave you a guard, Mama. I’m going after LaValle. I’ve already got some of my squad outside the hotel waiting. We’re locked and loaded!”

“May I speak to your father alone for a minute,” Serena interjected. “Perhaps we can work something out that won’t require your participation.”

Before leaving the room Jack declared, “I’m going, Mama. No matter what you work out!” Jack had the nose and dark eyes of his father and the likeness was even more obvious when his face had no expression. It was only when he smiled that all traces of King disappeared. Jack had a smile that transformed his face into a friendly and welcoming visage.

Serena waited until the door closed and then turned to King, “I want Jack to stay with me! I don’t want him to go! You talk him out of it!”

“Why?” King asked.

“Do I have to explain everything? Why risk both our sons? Let one stay here.”

“Are you tellin’ me everythin’ behind this request? I want you to come clean and tell me everything you know! Why do you think Jack is at risk?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“So this has nothing to do with Sister Bornais’s words?”

Serena paused and gave King a long, piercing look. “You went to see her, didn’t you?”

King smiled. “ ‘Course! I couldn’t trust you to tell me, could I? You just seem to keep on lyin’, just like it’s got to be a habit. Sure, I went back to New Orleans to see her after Amos was paralyzed. Sister Bornais spent the whole evenin’ with me and told me everythin’! She told me all about how LaValle gon’ be the cause of Jack’s death and how LaValle ain’t gon’ live too long neither.”

“Then you know why I don’t want Jack to go!”

“Sho’ do, but I ain’t gon’ stop him! He’s right, he’s a man! He makes his own decisions! He was blooded in the Big War. He knows what he’s doin’!”

“You’ll let him risk his life without intervening?”

“Seems to me that you the one that done put him at risk! And did it for years! Sister Bornais said you sealed both boys’ fate when you didn’t do right! Now, there ain’t nothin’ can change what’s been read. It’s in motion even as we speak. Anyway, you can’t stop death from happenin’. You couldn’t stop what happened to yo’ sisters. You can’t stop the rest of the evil you done set in motion! If it’s his time, it’s his time!”

“Sometimes you can be so cold!”

“Look who’s talkin’! I accepted yo’ son into my house. You let mine be raised in an orphanage! You the one who started this whole thing! Look what you’ve done to your own family! You the one that’s cold!”

“I’m asking for another favor! I’m begging for another favor! Please don’t let Jack go with you!”

“You out of favors!” King answered with a cynical chuckle. “You can’t beg me for nothin’ ’cause you ain’t got nothin’ else to trade!” King walked over to the signed documents on the table and took out a small vial of reddish powder and sprinkled it over the signatures.

“What’s that?” Serena asked.

“Just somethin’ Sister Bornais gave me,” King answered with his first real smile of the evening. “She say put a little of this here dust on a signature signed in blood and the one that reneges on the words of the contract will suffer a thousand times the pain they cause! When I told her it was for you, she put some extra special stuff in it too! I thought it might help you to keep yo’ feet on the straight and narrow.”

There was more knocking at the door. Jack pushed the door open. “Time is pressing, Pa. Are we together?”

“Comin’, son,” King answered. He slid a copy of the contract over to Serena. “That’s for you. Sister Bornais say this contract will stand until the conditions are met, even if the paper record is destroyed.” King turned and walked out of the room without saying good-bye.

Serena sat staring at the contract for several minutes without moving as she pondered the agreement she had made on behalf of LaValle. The pain in her left hand where she had cut herself throbbed with a dull ache, but it did not distract her. Oddly, King seemed already resigned to the prospect that neither Jack nor his brother would live their full limit of years. It was uncharacteristic of him to accept such things. Perhaps that’s why King had extended the curse with the signature in blood. Until his action, everything was finite. With the death of LaValle and Jack, the curse would also die, except that King had extended it into the future by binding her to a grandchild that she would rather not recognize.

She realized that for most of her life she had lived in a haunted prison constructed of intoned words and chants: words pirouetting in sonorous circles, weaving around her legs and arms, entering her ears and exiting her mouth, combining into sentences and wrapping themselves tightly around her and immobilizing her with their meaning. Just as the words in the contract were now reaching for her, to bind themselves around her—

Serena stood up suddenly. She had to get out of the suite. She was feeling strangely claustrophobic. She needed fresh air. She was halfway to the door when she remembered the contract. She went back to the table and grabbed the papers roughly in her right hand as if to ball them up and felt a sharp twinge on the tip of her index finger. Blood began to flow out of it, quite a lot of blood given the small size of the cut. It dripped down onto the papers, covering both pages with splotches of red. She saw that the powder that King had poured out had ground glass mixed in it. She looked down and saw that her blood had completely covered the powder on her signature. And still the cut would not stop bleeding. It continued to seep from her finger, obliterating words in the contract. It took several minutes before she was able to stanch the flow of blood.

Bare-chested and wearing only boxing shoes and fighting tights, Rocky Tisdale sat quietly on his stool in the chief groom’s small office and tried to focus his mind on the upcoming match. He had just finished a vigorous warm-up session and the sweat was still dripping off of him. His normal plan of action was to think about how he would attack his opponent, the strategy he would use, the different combinations of punches available, and most important, he tried to concentrate on the preparation of his mind for the fight. This evening, however, he was having greater difficulty than usual. It wasn’t only that he didn’t expect a real challenge from the man he was scheduled to fight, but he felt a gnawing excitement because he was on the verge of accomplishing a major coup. It looked like his days as the chief groom for the polo grounds stables might soon be over. He looked around his small shabby office with its garish overhead light, the frayed posters and tarnished mirror on its walls and the worn-out desk and chairs. He would not be sorry to leave it. He knew he was destined for bigger things. It had only been three days since Nino Molinari, one of the North Beach mob bosses, had taken him aside behind the stables and offered him the opportunity to collect on LaValle Tremain’s gambling debts. Rocky had done some collection work for Molinari before, but this was his first major assignment.

There was a knock at his door and he heard the voice of one of his grooms announce through the door, “Five minutes to fight time, Rocky! You need anythin’?”

“I’m good, Billy! I’ll be out in a few minutes!” Rocky stood up and admired the reflection of his sweaty, muscular brown body in the mirror. He was almost six feet tall and two hundred pounds. He ran his hand over the smooth skin of his shaved head and nodded his approval. Although he had almost forty fights, he still looked good and didn’t yet have the scars and injuries characteristic of a bare-knuckle fighter. He owed his looks to the fact that he was good with his fists.

Rocky donned a fancy, blue silk robe that he had purchased with the winnings from a previous fight purse. As he looked at himself in the mirror again, he had to admit he had done pretty well for himself as chief groom. It was a good position for a colored man. It wasn’t the money so much as the fact that he had the run of the stables, for his real money came from the Friday night bare-knuckle fights that he organized once a month in the barn behind the stables. The hostler, Old Man Cochran, left him to the daily management of the stables and only appeared if there was a sick horse, or if some society folk were coming out to ride.

Rocky took a deep breath. So much was riding on this evening. Molinari had told him that if he was successful in collecting from the Tremains, he would be offered the chance to run the Fillmore District operations for the North Beach mob. With that plum of an assignment he would become one of the most important colored men in San Francisco. Rocky didn’t see how it could fail. The Tremains had a reputation for paying their legitimate debts and it was no secret on the streets that LaValle was not a valued member of King’s family. The way Rocky had it figured, King wouldn’t intervene on LaValle’s behalf and, as a result, Rocky would be free to deal with LaValle’s mother. She had been paying all of his previous debts. She would pay this one. No mother would stand by and see her child hurt if she had it in her power to save him. And in the event Rocky did have to go up against King at some later time, he would have the backing of Molinari’s organization.

There was another knock on the door. “It’s time, Rocky!”

After tying his robe around his waist, Rocky opened the door and walked alongside Billy Childs to the handlers’ barn. Thick fingers of fog were drifting inland through the trees and shrubbery of Golden Gate Park and giving the surrounding landscape a surrealistic cast of undulating gray shadows. “What’s the crowd like, Billy?”

“We got a full house! More’n regular! Frankly, I’s sort of surprised. You ain’t fightin’ no contender or nothin’!”

“What kind of odds we gettin’?”

“We got to give three to one to get anybody to bet on Cornelius Lester against you! Most bettin’ men know he ain’t got nothin’ but a real long shot at winnin’.”

“I want to stop off and say a few words to our prisoner before I go into the barn.”

“You sure you want to do that before the fight?” Billy questioned. “I knows you can beat Lester, but this ain’t a good idea. You’s warmed out now. It’s pretty chilly out here. You best stay focused on the fight!”

“I said I want to say a few words to our prisoner!” Rocky repeated, letting an edge enter his voice. He didn’t like being questioned.

“You’s the boss, Rocky!” Billy answered as he led the way to a sheltered door on the back side of the barn. He knocked out a signal on its surface, consisting of three short taps repeated twice. The door swung open and Jim Tree’s scowling, dark brown face stared out challengingly. Rocky noted that Jim’s expression changed appropriately when he recognized who was waiting at the door.

Rocky and Billy were ushered into a long, rectangular room that had a row of narrow cabinets lining one wall. It was the colored jockeys’ changing room. At one end of the room there was a scarred wooden table surrounded by rickety wooden benches and a bare lightbulb hanging above it. LaValle was sitting at the table with a forlorn expression. He had a swollen and bloody lip, the result of aggravating Rocky with his mouth. His overall appearance was disheveled. His normally wavy, pomaded hair was sticking up in disarray. His shirt was torn and his face was dirty.

The three men he had guarding LaValle all crowded around Rocky wishing him luck for the fight. The two Tree brothers, who had done some bare-knuckle fights themselves, told him what they knew about his opponent. He listened with half an ear. They hadn’t fought at the level of competition that he had, so he took their advice with a grain of salt. Ezzard Williams shook Rocky’s hand and returned to his seat by the back door leading into the main hall of the handlers’ barn. He picked up a double-barreled shotgun and laid it across his lap. Ezzard was Rocky’s insurance should King Tremain come with guns.