Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses—white and purple, powder blue, pink and white, lace and voile, velvet and silk, cotton and satin, eyelet and grosgrain. The scraps stayed with him all night and he remembered Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians bending in the wind to catch the heart-red pieces of velvet that had floated under the gaze of Mr. Robert Smith. Only Guitar’s scraps were different. The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter hymn.
Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man. He couldn’t do it with a piece of wire, or a switchblade. For this he needed explosives, or guns, or hand grenades. And that would take money. He knew that the assignments of the Days would more and more be the killing of white people in groups, since more and more Negroes were being killed in groups. The single, solitary death was going rapidly out of fashion, and the Days might as well prepare themselves for it.
So when Milkman came to him with a proposal to steal and share a cache of gold, Guitar smiled. “Gold?” He could hardly believe it.
“Gold.”
“Nobody got gold, Milkman.”
“Pilate does.”
“It’s against the law to have gold.”
“That’s why she got it. She can’t use it, and she can’t report its being stolen since she wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place.”
“How do we get rid of it—get greenbacks for it?”
“Leave that to my father. He knows bank people who know other bank people. They’ll give him legal tender for it.”
“Legal tender.” Guitar laughed softly. “How much legal tender will it bring?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
“What’s the split?”
“Three ways.”
“Your papa know that?”
“Not yet. He thinks it’s two ways.”
“When you gonna tell him?”
“Afterwards.”
“Will he go for it?”
“How can he
“When do we get it?”
“Whenever we want to.”
Guitar spread his palm. “My man.” Milkman slapped his hand. “Legal tender. Legal tender. I love it. Sounds like a virgin bride.” Guitar rubbed the back of his neck and lifted his face to the sun in a gesture of expansiveness and luxury.
“Now we have to come up with something. A way to get it,” said Milkman.
“Be a breeze. A cool cool breeze,” Guitar continued, smiling at the sun, his eyes closed as though to ready himself for the gold by trying out a little bit of the sun’s.
“A breeze?” Now that Guitar was completely enthusiastic, Milkman’s own excitement was blunted. Something perverse made him not want to hand the whole score to his friend on a platter. There should be some difficulty, some complication in this adventure. “We just walk over there and snatch it off the wall, right? And if Pilate or Reba say anything, we just knock them out the way. That what you have in mind?” He summoned as much irony as he could into his voice.
“Defeatism. That’s what you got. Defeatism.”
“Common sense is what I got.”
“Come on, old dude. Your pappy give you a good thing and you want to fight it.”
“I’m not fighting. I just want to get out alive and breathing so what I snatch does me some good. I don’t want to have to give it to a brain surgeon to pull an ice pick out the back of my head.”
“Can’t no ice pick get through the back of your head, nigger”
“Can get through my heart.”
“What you doin with a heart anyway?”
“Pumping blood. And I’d like to keep on pumping it.”
“Okay. We got us a problem. A little bitty problem: how can two big men get a fifty-pound sack out of a house with three women in it—women who all together don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”
“What you have to weigh to pull a trigger?”
“What trigger? Nobody in that house got a gun.”
“You don’t know what Hagar’s got.”
