He checks the rearview mirror a few times on the way home, but there’s no one on his tail tonight, and he feels a familiar sense of relief at the end of a long summer day, the bright white sun safely tucked in for the night and the black air around him cool enough to breathe. He cuts the AC to save on gas and rolls down both his windows, leaning across the front seat to reach the one on the passenger side. The air is soupy, fogging up the windshield. Jay wipes at the inside of the glass with the palm of his hand. Then he turns up the radio.
On 1430 AM, there’s a gal on the line making a breathy latenight confession. Wash Allen is holding all other calls, trying to talk her through it. “I know you got something to say now. Old Wash is right here. I’m listening.”
“I don’t know if I can tell it,” the girl says. She’s young, maybe eighteen. There’s a jump and shake in her voice, like she can’t sit still, like a kid who’s had to pee for an hour. Finally, she spills it, a sordid story about messing around with her mother’s boyfriend, a man twice her age. They planned to tell her mother a dozen times, but never got around to it. “It just never seemed the right time.” And now, without saying a word to her about it, “That man gone and asked my mama to marry him.” She starts crying. “I just don’t know what to do.” Should she confess to her mother or take it to the grave, facing every Christmas and Fourth of July and Juneteenth picnic in the foreseeable future knowing where that man has put his hands?
At first, Wash is kind of on her side, making a point that the man ought to have known better, that he had no business foolin’ with a kid, a girl as young and impressionable as this one quiver ing on the line. “He’s a snake, Wash, he is,” she says. “I told him we got to tell Mama, we
“Wait a minute. You’re married?” Wash asks.
Jay turns up the volume.
“You ain’t tell the people that part. How old are you, girl?” “I’ll be thirty come October.”
“Oh, Looo-rrd!” Wash whistles into his microphone. The phone lines are lit up for this one. The first caller to get
through is a cat calling himself Mellow Yellow. “That girl gon’ have to clean this mess up herself,” he says. “She married and grown. She oughta known better.”
“Yeah, Wash, this is Smokey here. And it’s not all that girl’s fault. Her mama need to look at what
“You see, Wash, you see how they do us?” the next caller asks, a woman, a frequent caller named Sunshine. “The men always putting it on us.”
And on and on they go, one call after another, turning this gal’s very personal, very particular problem into a forum for all manner of grievances men and women have against each other. Before long, the conversation descends into talk about how cheap black men are. To which one caller replies, “Y’all ladies got bet ter jobs than us half the time, shoot. Y’all oughta pay sometime too.”
Wash goes to commercial break, playing a Betty Wright song as the out.
Jay is a couple of blocks from home when the DJ comes back on the air, claiming to have the girl’s lover and future stepfather on the line.
Jay parks in the alley behind his apartment building.
On the radio, Dark ’n’ Lovely tells the old man to keep his thing in his pants, to leave the girl and her mother alone.
Solid Gold takes the men’s side, turning on her fellow sister, saying gals like that “give the rest of us a bad name.”
Colt 45 wants to know who was better in the sack. The future stepfather says Mom’s got some skills, “but twenty-nine-year-old hips are hard to beat.”
Jay snaps off the radio. He sucks his Newport down to the head, then tosses it out the window, catching a glimpse of some thing moving in his side-view mirror; it’s just a flash, gone before it even registers. He looks out the window, down the length of the south side of the alley, but doesn’t see anything unusual. He checks in the other direction. Beyond the lone bulb on the back side of his building, the alley is dark. From his vantage point, nothing seems out of the ordinary. Not the trash Dumpsters or the broken TV that’s been there for weeks or Mr. Johnson’s Pon tiac. Jay rolls up the driver-side window. Then he leans across the front seat, reaching for the window handle on the passenger side.
A hand, pale and hairy, reaches into the car, pressing down on the glass.
Jay stops cold. He looks up and sees a man standing on the other side of the passenger door, a man in his late forties proba bly, hair cropped close on the sides. He’s wearing a white buttondown and a sports coat, the start of tomorrow’s beard growing at this late hour. He lifts his pinky finger up and down, tapping the glass with a rather large gold ring. “I want to talk to you.”
He’s not dressed like the longshoremen Jay came across tonight, or any he’s ever seen, frankly, and the thought flashes across his mind: this guy
Jay clears his throat. “You want to tell me what this is regard ing?”
The man looks up and down the alley, then leans his impres sive torso inside the car. Jay can smell liquor on his breath, scotch probably, and the faint hint of tobacco and mint. “I’d rather we get someplace private,” he says.
“You got some identification on you . . . sir?” Jay asks.
The man from the black Ford smiles. “Sure.”
He stands tall then, pulling back the side of his sports coat, revealing a holstered pistol, a .45 as far as Jay can tell. He makes sure Jay gets a good look at it, that he’s made himself perfectly clear: this is all the identification he needs.
Jay feels his stomach sink. This is dirty.
Nothing about this feels right. The fancy threads, the gold ring, the scotch. “You’re not a cop . . . are you?”
The man shakes his head.
Jay makes a dash for the .38 in his glove compartment. He barely gets a hand on the weapon before the man from the black Ford cocks his .45. It’s a horrible sound, sharp and threatening. The power of the gesture pushes Jay back in his seat. “Don’t be stupid,” the man says. “I just want to talk to you.”
He keeps the gun on Jay and nods for him to get out of the car.
“Not here,” Jay says, almost a whisper. “Not in front of my wife.”
