Harlem Shuffle(23)
Freddie’s face went overcast. “I ain’t the bogeyman,” Freddie said.
“Let me get the girls upstairs,” Carney said. As the front door closed, he turned. Freddie was gone. When he came back down his cousin was across the street, on the stoop of the flophouse. There’d been a fire—a junkie smoking in bed—and char haloed the empty windows.
“I saw your lights were out so I waited.” Freddie scanned the street and stuck his shaky Zippo to the cigarette.
“What is it?”
“Arthur’s dead.”
SEVEN
Sometimes the road appeared around the bend in his thoughts: buckling and pocked, scrubbed away by monsoons, the jungle clutching it close in a dark green smother. Disintegrating. Pepper heard the boys sing:
Engineers have hairy ears
They live in caves and ditches
They wipe their ass with broken glass
They’re rugged sons of bitches
No one knew why Services of Supply troops called themselves hairy ears—he found out later that all engineers used the nickname—but he understood the rugged sons of bitches part. Rugged son of a bitchness got him sent to Burma in the first place.
Pepper was born in a gray clapboard house on Hillside Avenue in Newark. Womb-wet and shaking, he belted his mother in the face when she lifted him for a kiss. “First punch,” he told her years later, bored of hearing the story. In his line, slugging someone hello was a job requirement, and his apprenticeship started early.
He left school in fifth grade to push a broom at the Celluloid Manufacturing Company. At lunch he’d sit on the loading dock atop a crate of black-and-white keys earmarked for the Ampico piano factory and watch the hustlers come and go outside Hank’s Grill, which maintained a well-loved craps game in the back, a couple of slot machines, and a hooker named Betty, known for cooing postcoital nursery rhymes. It was the Great Depression and times were strange and Betty stranger still. She had devotees.
One afternoon Pepper finally crossed the street and lunch-hour visits turned into daywork. A variety of crooks gave him nickels for errands, dispatched him to dilapidated tenements to deliver notes written on butcher paper and envelopes they warned him not to open. As if he gave a shit about their schemes; he did not. He liked the money. Nickels became rolls of bills after puberty shot him up a foot and he turned to bruising. He bounced at the Negro clubs on the Barbary Coast—the Kinney Club and the Alcazar Tavern—and made a name for sucker punches and a dizzying backhand. The owners pleaded with him to dress better, but Pepper stuck to his uniform of dungarees and stiff work shirt. Tucked in if he was feeling fancy.
He did not go to church. He was his own sermon. The fifth time Pepper beat a man unconscious the judge said it was either jail or sign up for the war effort. Boot camp and a berth on the USS Hermitage. The judge got a kickback for everyone he steered to war.
On the way over Pepper and the rest of the colored soldiers ate hardtack and beans in the dingy hull while the white boys chowed down on proper rations above. They showered in seawater, and Pepper cursed the whole time, not suspecting he’d long for such a luxury once he got down in the mud and silt. There were Negro soldiers who wanted to kill Nazis and Japs and were angry at their deployment behind the lines. Pepper, for his part, was most comfortable where no one was looking, the in-between places, whether it was an alley that separated the church from a line of juke joints or some map grid nobody’d heard of, like Pangsau Pass in the Patkai Hills. Hard to find a place more in-between than a road that didn’t exist yet, hard to find work more dangerous than carving out supply lines from India to China. It was one thing to believe the world was indifferent and cruel, and another to wake to proof every day in the treacherous mountain slopes, the hungry gorges and ravines, the myriad jungle treachery. Only a lazy God could deliver the meanness of things so unadorned.
None of the black boys had seen anything like it. The SOS was there to reestablish a route to China after the Japanese invasion of Burma, to conjure a road out of nothing, clear airstrips for materiel drops, lay mile upon mile of fuel line. The secondhand equipment was a joke—pickaxes broke in their hands, bulldozers shuddered and shook as the white officers looked on. But the native workers, the Burmese and Chinese coolies, had thirdhand equipment, so you thanked your lucky stars. Seven days a week, day and night—whorehouse hours. The road claimed a man a mile, so they said, and when the quota fell behind, the jungle made up for it in spades. Malaria, typhus. At quitting time landslides washed away the day’s work and men, too, sometimes. You buried them if you could find the bodies.
The night of the earthquake he thought the Devil was reaching up to claim him, but then he remembered he didn’t believe in the Devil or those above, and he went back to sleep.
Back home, Pepper had two dependable enemies: cops and bad luck. In the SOS, he found counterparts for them in command, whose harebrained operations were designed to destroy him, and in the jungle, with its random bloodthirst. Do the work, survive the day: He was used to living like this, and now everybody else had to play catch-up. Work and sleep. There were no brothels, no craps games worth a damn, nobody worth beating senseless. Nothing to do but complain, smoke reefer, and remove leeches from your balls. The leeches were out of myth. “Like being back home,” Pepper told his bunkmates as he put a Zippo to an especially large specimen. This was back when Pepper still told jokes. No one laughed because they were miserable or because they thought he was serious. Most of his unit was these dopey country boys.