The Given Day (18 page)

Jessie said nothing. Luther said nothing.

"You can't," the Deacon said softly, his hands spread out on the table. "You just can't. Dream all you want, but some things ain't in the realm of possibility. No, boys, there's no way you can come up with my--oh, shit, it's a new week, I almost forgot--my six thousand eighty-four dollars."

Jessie's eyes slid to the side and then forced their way back to the center. "Sir, I need a doctor, I think."

"Need you a fucking mortician if'n we don't figure your way out this mess, so shut the fuck up."

Luther said, "Sir, just tell us what you want us to do and we'll sure do it."

It was Smoke who slapped him in the back of the head this time, but the Deacon held up a hand.

"All right, Country. All right. You cut to the chase, boy, and I respect that. So I will respect you in kind."

He straightened the lapels of his white jacket and leaned into the table. "I got a few folks owe me large change. Some of them in the country, some of them right here downtown. Smoke, give me the list."

Smoke came around the table and handed the Deacon a sheet of paper and the Deacon looked at it and then placed it on the table so Luther and Jessie could see it.

"There's five names on that list. Each one is into me for at least five hundred a week. You boys gone go get it today. And I know what you're thinking in your whiny-assed head-voices. You thinking, 'But, Deacon, sir, we ain't muscle. Smoke and Dandy supposed to handle the hard cases.' You thinking that, Country?"

Luther nodded.

"Well, normally Smoke and Dandy or some other hardheaded, can't-fucking-scare-'em sons a bitches would be handling this. But this ain't normal times. Every name on that list has someone in their house with the grippe. And I ain't losing no important niggers like Smoke or Dandy here to that plague."

Luther said, "But two unimportant niggers like us . . ."

Deacon reared his head back. "This boy is finding his voice. I was right about you, Country--you got talent." He chuckled and drank some more whiskey. "So, yeah, that's the size of it. You gone go out and collect from these five. You don't collect it all, you better be able to make up the difference. You bring it on back to me and keep going out and bringing it on back until this flu is over, I'll wipe your debt back to the principal. Now," he said, with that big broad smile of his, "what you think of that?"

"Sir," Jessie said, "that grippe be killing people in one day."

"That's true," the Deacon said. "So, if you catch it, you surely could be dead this time tomorrow. But if you don't get my money? Nigger, you surely will be dead tonight."

The Deacon gave them the name of a doctor to see in the back room of a shooting gallery off Second and they went there after they got sick in the alley behind the Deacon's club. The doctor, a drunken old high-yellow with his hair dyed rust- colored, stitched Jessie's jaw as Jessie sucked air and the tears ran quietly down his face.

In the street, Jessie said, "I need something for the pain."

Luther said, "You even think about the spike, I'll kill you myself."

"Fine," Jessie said. "But I can't think with this pain, so what you suggest?"

They went up into the back of a drugstore on Second, and Luther got them a bag of cocaine. He cut two lines for himself to keep his nerve up and four for Jessie. Jessie snorted his lines one after the other and took a shot of whiskey.

Luther said, "We going to need some guns."

"I got guns," Jessie said. "Shit."

They went back to his apartment and he handed the long- barreled .38 to Luther and slid the .45 Colt behind his back and said, "You know how to use that?"

Luther shook his head. "I know if some nigger try to beat me out his house I'll point this in his face."

"What if that ain't enough to stop him?"

"I ain't dying today," Luther said.

"Then let me hear it."

"Hear what?"

"If it ain't enough to stop him, you going to do what?"

Luther put the .38 in his coat pocket. "I'm going to shoot the son of a bitch."

"Then shit, Negro," Jessie said, still talking through gritted teeth, although now it was probably more from the cocaine than the pain, "let's get working."

They were a scary sight. Luther would admit that much as he caught their reflection in the window of Arthur Smalley's living room as they walked up the steps to his house--two wound-up colored men with masks that covered their noses and mouths, one of them with a row of black stitches sticking out of his jaw like a spiked fence. Time was, the look of them would have been enough to terror the money out of any God-fearing Greenwood man, but these days it didn't mean much; most folks were scary sights. The high windows of the small house had white Xs painted on them, but Luther and Jessie had no choice but to walk right up on the old porch and ring the bell.

By the looks of the place, Arthur Smalley had at one time tried to have a go at farming. Off to his left, Luther could see a barn in need of painting and a field with a skinny horse and a pair of knobby-looking cows wandering in it. But nothing had been tilled or reaped out there in some time and the weeds stood tall in midautumn.

Jessie went to ring the bell again and the door opened and they looked through the screen at a man about Luther's size but near twice his age. He wore suspenders over an undershirt yellowed by old sweat, the mask over his face yellowed with it, too, and his eyes were red from exhaustion or grief or the flu.

"Who you-all?" he said, and the words came out airless, as if whatever they answered wouldn't make no difference to him.

"You Arthur Smalley, sir?" Luther said.

The man slid his thumbs under his suspenders. "What you think?" "I had to guess?" Luther said. "I'd say yeah."

"Then you'd guess right, boy." He leaned into the screen. "What ya'll want?"

"The Deacon sent us," Jessie said.

"Did he now?"

In the house behind him someone moaned, and Luther got a whiff of the other side of that door. Sharp and sour at the same time, as if someone had left the eggs, the milk, and the meat out of the icebox since July.

Arthur Smalley saw that smell hit Luther in the eyes and he opened the screen door wide. "Ya'll want to come in? Maybe set a spell?"

"Nah, sir," Jessie said. "What say you just bring us the Deacon's money?"

"The money, uh?" He patted his pockets. "Yeah, I got some, drew it fresh this morning from the money well. It's still a little damp, but--"

"We ain't joking here, sir," Jessie said and adjusted his hat back off his forehead.

Arthur Smalley leaned over the threshold and they both leaned back. "I look like I been working of late?"

"No, you don't."

"No, I don't," Arthur Smalley said. "Know what I been doing?"

He whispered the words and Luther took another half- step back from the whisper because something about the sound of it was obscene.

"I buried my youngest in the yard night before last," Arthur Smalley whispered, his neck extended. "Under an elm tree. She liked that tree, so . . ." He shrugged. "She was thirteen. My other daughter, she in bed with it. And my wife? She ain't been awake in two days. Her head as hot as a kettle just come to boil. She gone die," he said and nodded. "Tonight most likely. Else tomorrow. You sure you don't want to come in?"

Luther and Jessie shook their heads.

"I got sheets covered in sweat and shit need washing. Sure could use a hand."

"The money, Mr. Smalley." Luther wanted off this porch and away from this sickness and he hated Arthur Smalley for not washing that undershirt.

"I don't--"

"The money," Jessie said, and the .45 was in his hand, dangling beside his leg. "No more bullshit, old-timer. Get the fucking money." Another moan from inside, this one low and long and huffi ng, and Arthur Smalley stared at them so long Luther started to think he'd fallen into some sort of trance.

"Ya'll got no decency at all?" he said and looked first at Jessie and then at Luther.

And Luther told the truth. "None."

Arthur Smalley's eyes widened. "My wife and child are--"

"The Deacon don't care about your domestic responsibilities," Jessie said.

"But you-all? What you care about?"

Luther didn't look at Jessie and he knew Jessie wasn't looking at him. Luther pulled the .38 from his belt and pointed it at Arthur Smalley's forehead.

"Care about the money," he said.

Arthur Smalley looked into that barrel and then he looked in Luther's eyes. "Boy, how does your mama walk the street knowing she birthed such a creature?"

"The money," Jessie said.

"Or what?" Arthur said, which is exactly what Luther had been afraid he'd say. "You gone shoot me? Shit, I'm fi ne with that. You want to shoot my family? Do me the favor. Please. You ain't gone do--"

"I'll make you dig her up," Jessie said.

"You what?"

"You heard me."

Arthur Smalley sagged into the doorjamb. "You didn't just say that."

"I damn well did, old man," Jessie said. "I will make you dig your daughter out her grave. Else I'll tie your ass up, make you watch me do it. Then I'll fill it back in, while she lying beside it, so you'll have to bury her twice."

We're going to hell, Luther thought. Head of the line.

"What you think about that, old man?" Jessie put his .45 behind his back again.

Arthur Smalley's eyes filled with tears and Luther prayed they wouldn't fall. Please don't fall. Please.

Arthur said, "I ain't got no money," and Luther knew the fi ght was gone from him.

"What you got then?" Jessie said.

Jessie followed in his Model T as Luther drove Arthur Smalley's Hudson out from behind the barn and crossed in front of the house as the man stood on his porch and watched. Luther shifted into second gear and put some juice into it as he passed the small fence at the edge of the dirt yard, and he told himself he didn't see the freshly turned dirt under the elm. He didn't see the shovel that stuck upright from the dark brown mound. Or the cross made from thin planks of pine and painted a pale white.

By the time they'd finished with the men on the list, they had several pieces of jewelry, fourteen hundred dollars in cash, and a mahogany hope chest strapped to the back of what had once been Arthur Smalley's car.

They'd seen a child gone blue as twilight and a woman no older than Lila who lay on a cot on a front porch with her bones and her teeth and her eyes lunging toward heaven. Saw a dead man sitting against a barn, blacker than black could ever get, as if he'd been struck by lightning through his skull, his flesh all bumpy with welts.

Judgment Day, Luther knew. It was coming for all of them. And he and Jessie were going to go up and stand before the Lord and have to account for what they'd done this day. And there was no possible accounting for that. Not in ten lives.

"Let's give it back," he said after the third house.

"What?"

"Give it back and run."

"And spend the rest of our short fucking lives looking over our shoulders for Dandy or Smoke or some other broke- down nigger with a gun and nothing left to lose? Where you think we'd hide, Country? Two colored bucks on the run?"

Luther knew he was right, but he also knew it was eating Jessie up as awful as it was eating him.

"We worry about that later. We--"

Jessie laughed, and it was the ugliest laugh Luther'd ever heard from him. "We do this or we dead, Country." He gave him an open- armed, wide- shouldered shrug. "And you know that. Less you want to kill that whale, sign you and your wife's death warrant in the pro cess."

Luther got in the car.

The last one, Owen Tice, paid them in cash, said he wouldn't be around to spend it no way anyhow. Soon as his Bess passed, he was going to get his shotgun and ride that river with her. He'd had him a raw throat since noon and it was starting to burn and without Bess there wasn't no fucking point to it anyway. He wished them well. He said, sure he understood. He did. Man had to make a living. Wasn't no shame in that.

Said, My whole fucking family, you believe that shit? A week ago we all in the pink, eating dinner 'round the table--my son and daughter- in- law, my daughter and son- in- law, three grandchildren, and Bess. Just sitting and eating and jawing. And then, then, it was like God Hisself reached through the roof and into their house and closed his hand 'round the whole family and squeezed.

Like we was flies on the table, he said. Like that.

They drove up an empty Greenwood Avenue at midnight and Luther counted twenty-four windows marked by Xs and they parked the cars in the alley behind the Club Almighty. There was no light coming from any of the buildings along the alley and the fire escapes hung above them and Luther wondered if there was anything left of the world or if it had all gone black and blue and seized up with the grippe.

Jessie put his foot on the running board of his Model T and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in a stream toward the back door of the Club Almighty, nodding his head every now and then, as if he heard music Luther couldn't and then he looked over at Luther and said, "I walk."

"You walk?"

"I do," Jessie said. "I walk and the road is long and the Lord ain't with me. Ain't with you neither, Luther."

In the time they'd known each other, Jessie had never, not once, called Luther by his Christian name.

"Let's unload this shit," Luther said. "Yeah, Jessie?" He reached for the straps that held Tug and Ervina Irvine's hope chest to the back of Arthur Smalley's car. "Come on now. Let's get this shit done."

"Ain't with me," Jessie said. "Ain't with you. Ain't in this alley. I think He done left this world. Found Hisself another one to be more concerned with." He chuckled and took a long drag on his cigarette. "How old you think that blue child was?"

"Two," Luther said.

" 'Bout what I guessed, too," Jessie said. "Took his mama's jewelry, though, didn't we? Got her wedding ring right here in my pocket." He patted his chest and smiled and said, "Heh heh yeah."

"Why don't we just--"

"I tell you what," Jessie said and tugged his jacket, then shot his cuffs. "Tell you what," he said and pointed at the back door of the club, "if that door be unlocked, you can forget what I said. That door open, though? God be in this alley. Yes indeed."