Harlem Shuffle(27)

“Miami Joe’s too busy to sleep—” Pepper’s slap echoed in the backyards of 145th between Eighth and Seventh. A window opened a few buildings over, some bystander. Pepper didn’t even look. The window closed.

Carney remembered the boy as he had been not too long ago: gap-toothed and smiling. He said, “Do you have to?”

Pepper gave him a look—cold steel—and returned to Mam Lacey’s ne’er-do-well offspring. “Your mother ran a nice joint,” he said.

    “I should have joined the navy,” Julius said.

His mother dies, Carney figured, Julius takes over the place and instead of listening to his customers’ tales of crime, he decides to participate. One thing leads to another. What of the rooms upstairs, the girls who used to work up there? What lived in the rooms now?

“Where’s he sleep?” Pepper said.

Julius said, “I asked him if he had anything cooking, and Joe said he wouldn’t take me along anymore if I was like this. Those were good times…” He trailed off. Then the back side of Pepper’s hand brought him to. “He’s in that flophouse on 136th and Eighth, the one with the old doctor’s sign out front. Third floor…” With that, he bunched one end of the blanket and made it into a pillow. Carney looked back as he and Pepper stepped back into the building. Julius was unconscious again, nestled into his narcotic hideaway.

Out on the street, Carney turned the ignition. “He was a happy kid.”

“Those the ones you have to look out for,” Pepper said. “They got a lot to catch up on if they start late.”

The old truck bucked as it always did, then they were in the street. Julius had inherited a building and an illicit bar, Carney this Ford truck. He didn’t see his father much once he got out of Queens College. Mike Carney had taken up with Gladys in Bed-Stuy and made Brooklyn his hunting ground. Carney was working in Blumstein’s furniture department and saving up his money in a sock in a boot under his bed. Saving up for what, he didn’t know.

Then the afternoon when Gladys came to the department store to tell him that his father had been killed by the cops. “There’s someone here to see you.” His father had broken into a pharmacy to steal a box of cough syrup, the strong stuff druggies were into.

“You still work here,” Gladys said.

“I’m working my way up,” Carney said. Last winter they gave him a shift in the Santa suit, a mark of Blumstein approval. The long-running Santa had taken to the bottle and they were teaching him a lesson. Can’t have people breathing rotgut on our customers’ kids.

    “?‘Working your way up’—that’s what he said.” Gladys was a full-figured Jamaican gal with a thick, honeyed accent. His father had always liked West Indian women. “Manhattan is an island, too, I figure, so we got a lot in common. Even if I don’t understand half of what they say.”

Carney couldn’t bring himself to ask Gladys for details. Cut down by police—it was how he suspected his father would exit this planet. By police or another crook. The day he picked up his father’s truck was the last time he saw Gladys. She threw herself wailing over the hood as if it were his coffin. Two guys from down the street had to pry her off.

Carney had the truck a whole year before he ran over a nail on Lenox Avenue. He went to get the spare in back. That’s how he found the money. Thirty thousand in cash. Spare-tire bank. If he’d sold the truck, he wouldn’t have found it. That was just like his father, to make him earn his down payment. Three months later Carney signed the lease for 125th Street.



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*

Carney’s companion had his face zipped up in contentment, twisting to check the derrieres of neighborhood beauties and narrating their travels down the avenues. “That’s a good chicken spot,” Pepper said. “You ever eat there?” The blood on his jeans had dried to a dark smudge, oil or grime from a distance. Pepper rode shotgun, but he was in the driver’s seat.

Pepper said he wanted to stop for lunch at Jolly Chan’s for chop suey. The owner knew Pepper and gave them a table in the corner, by the window. There was a fish tank with greenish water over by the kitchen door. Something moved inside it. Red-and-orange dragons writhed on the wallpaper, roiling like clouds.

    They didn’t speak much and Carney’s stomach was too sour to accept food. Pepper was preoccupied as well and only ate half his plate. He sat so he could watch the street.

“What made you want to sell couches?” Pepper said, poking at his food.

“I’m an entrepreneur.”

“Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”

Carney explained that he got a tip about a furniture store that was going out of business. The previous tenant had lit out in the middle of the night. The rent was cheap. It was a steal. Carney was nervous, and babbling prevented contemplation of Pepper’s stony face. What was in the man’s head? Might as well talk to a sidewalk. Carney shared tidbits from his business-school classes about the logistics of taking over a failing venture. Maintaining or severing existing relationships with suppliers, how to avoid the assumption liabilities. The couch in the basement, for example. It was there, this inherited problem, and he’d had to figure out how to deal with it.