Harlem Shuffle(25)

    Gets himself some land, then he kicks the bucket up here. Bought the farm, then bought the farm. More proof for Pepper’s philosophy vis-à-vis making plans. Whoever heard of a crook keeping chickens? Begging for God to smite your uppity ass. Take the road, for instance. Three years to finish, hundreds of men lost, and then the Japanese surrender a month later. It was only good for war and with the war over, the jungle took it back. What was it now? A ribbon of rubble in the mud.

When Pepper woke the next morning the heat was murderous and it was only seven a.m. A nice day for a hunt. Hunting a rat, smoking out a double-crosser—it had been a while. Pepper liked the heat, which flushed out weasels to stoops and shade. Plus today he’d have wheels. He waited outside the furniture store for Carney to show up, and then it was on to the likely hideouts, the fronts and flophouses and fuck pads of this chase.



* * *



*

The heat made Harlem into a forge. Pepper rode shotgun.

Pepper caught up with Carney as he unlocked the front door of the furniture store, greeting him with “Mr. Businessman.” Carney jumped, on alert from Freddie’s visit the night before. The keys in his hand a talisman of the lost, normal world. Everybody knew how to find Carney—one of the drawbacks of having his name in two-foot-tall letters on 125th Street. Chink Montague’s men, this crook. Freddie had all his addresses and in the last three days had popped up with bad news each time. Carney had never thought overmuch about his accessibility before, but now recognized it as a hazard in the criminal trade.

Miami Joe understood this. He was nowhere to be found. “I want to talk to that nigger,” Pepper told Carney after his greeting. “You can drive.”

    “I can’t,” Carney said.

“You got that truck, right?”

Carney twisted a thumb at the store.

“That’s what your man is for, right?” Pepper said. “You the boss.”

Yes, Rusty could open up and handle business. Two minutes later Carney and Pepper were in the Ford pickup.

“Uptown,” Pepper said. He put a steel lunch box on the seat next to him. Just another day of work. “Your cousin told you what happened to our friend.” Said as a statement of fact.

“Uptown where?” Carney said. As if not acknowledging Arthur’s murder might make the man alive for a little more.

“It’ll come to me,” Pepper said. “This way for now.” He rolled down the window for a blast of hot air in his face.

Pepper told him about Donegal’s and the scene outside Arthur’s flophouse, which broke up when a soda bottle detonated on a prowl car and sent the onlookers for cover. Kids on the roof across the street, taunting the cops. “Used to call that ‘giving them the Blitz,’?” Pepper said.

“I know,” Carney said. He was thirteen during the riots of ’43. A white cop shot a Negro soldier who’d intervened in the arrest of a Negro lady who’d had one too many. For two nights Harlem was aboil. His father went out “shopping” and returned with new duds for the two of them. Shopping of the sort where you step over the broken glass of the front window and don’t need help from the salesclerk. He wore that porkpie hat until the day he died, chocolate brown with a green feather in the brim that he wicked up whenever he left the house. Carney outgrew the slacks and sweater sooner than that. To this day whenever he walked past T. P. Fox or Nelson’s, he wondered if his father had stripped the clothes from their mannequins.

“Good days,” Pepper said. Dropping bombs on the cops from above. He chuckled and gazed off wistfully, recalling some caper. Carney recognized the look from his father. “Then your cousin Freddie showed up,” Pepper said. “Was it Chink? Is he onto us, or did Arthur have it coming from some old buddy? I told Freddie to get you and I went to find Miami Joe. But that nigger’s trying to be Houdini.”

    Hence this Saturday-morning excursion. Freddie was probably still sleeping it off after getting his ashes hauled down in the Village. He’d shown up at Carney’s place, nervous as all get-out, and then split for the subway after delivering the news about Arthur. Too afraid to go to his mother’s—what if they were staking it out? Freddie had this blond chick on Bank Street, a Fordham co-ed he’d picked up one night at the Vanguard. The first time he took her out she asked if he had a tail. Her daddy had told her stories about Negroes and their monkey tails. “I showed her something else, I’ll tell you that.”

Freddie was safe or not safe, downtown in a different neighborhood and its other perils. Carney had gone back upstairs to the apartment—should he take the girls and leave town? Twice he’d driven up to New Haven for a swap meet and there was this little motel off the highway. Blinking sign. Whenever he saw it, he joked to himself that if he ever had to lam it, that’s where he’d go. color tv swimming pool magic fingers. Less funny now, when it involved explaining things to Elizabeth.

Lack of sleep made him foggy at the wheel. Pepper said, “Grady Billiards on 145th Street,” and broke down the situation. If it was Chink Montague was onto them, that was one thing. “But if Miami Joe is pulling a cross, that’s some other shit,” Pepper said. “Who has the loot?” Either way, Carney was part of the crew now and had to pitch in, the way Pepper saw it.

Carney squeezed the steering wheel, let go, squeezed harder. Over years this ritual had stilled the tremors when he got anxious. “Fucking truck is haunted,” he said under his breath.