“Look, Milk. She’s been trying to kill you for almost a year. Used everything she could get her hands on and never once did she use a gun.”
“So? Maybe she’s thinking. Wait till next month.”
“Next month she’ll be too late, won’t she?” Guitar leaned his head over to the side and smiled at Milkman, an engaging boyish smile. Milkman hadn’t seen him this relaxed and cordial in a long long time. He wondered if that’s why he had let him in on it. Obviously he could pull it off alone, but maybe he wanted to see Guitar warm and joking again, his face open and smiling instead of with that grim reaper look.
They met again on Sunday on route 6 away from the colored part of town. A road consisting of used-car lots, Dairy Queens, and White Castle hamburger places. It was empty of shoppers that morning—nothing but the occasional sound of automobiles breaking the graveyard silence of the cars in the lots, lined up like tombstones.
Since that last conversation—the important one in which Guitar explained his work, not the brief chancy talks they’d had afterward—Milkman wished he had the nerve to ask Guitar the question that was bothering him. “Has he?” He could hardly phrase the question in his own mind, and certainly could never say it aloud. Guitar had impressed him with the seriousness and the dread of the work of the Days, and the danger. He had said that the Days never even talked about the details among themselves, so Milkman was sure any inquiry from him would only make Guitar sullen again. And cold. But the question was there. “Has he done it? Has he really killed somebody?” Like the old men on Tenth Street, now he bought the morning and evening papers, and once every two weeks the black newspaper, and read nervously, looking for reports of murders that appeared suspicious, pointless. When he found one, he followed the news stories until a suspect was found. Then he had to see if there were any black people murdered by someone other than their own.
“Did you do it yet?” He was like a teen-age girl wondering about the virginity of her friend, the friend who has a look, a manner newly minted—different, separate, focused somehow. “Did you do it yet? Do you know something both exotic and ordinary that I have not felt? Do you now know what it’s like to risk your one and only self? How did it feel? Were you afraid? Did it change you? And if I do it, will it change me too?”
Maybe he could ask him one day, but not this day when it was so much like old times. Taking risks together the way they did when Milkman was twelve and Guitar was a teen-ager and they swaggered, haunched, leaned, straddled, ran all over town trying to pick fights or at least scare somebody: other boys, girls, dogs, pigeons, old women, school principals, drunks, ice cream vendors, and the horses of junkyard men. When they succeeded they rode the wind and covered their mouths to aggravate their laughter. And when they didn’t, when somebody out- insulted them, or ignored them, or sent them running, they wisecracked and name-called until the sweat of embarrassment evaporated from the palms of their hands. Now they were men, and the terror they needed to provoke in others, if for no other reason than to feel it themselves, was rarer but not lighter. Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way. (Except for women, whom they liked to win with charm but keep with indifference.)
It was like that again now, and Milkman didn’t want to lose it.
There was something else too. Guitar had placed himself willingly and eagerly in a life cause that would always provide him with a proximity to knife-cold terror. Milkman knew his own needs were milder, for he could thrive in the presence of someone who inspired fear. His father, Pilate, Guitar. He gravitated toward each one, envious of their fearlessness now, even Hagar’s, in spite of the fact that she was no longer a threat, but a fool who wanted not his death so much as his attention. Guitar could still create the sense of danger and life lived on the cutting edge. So Milkman had brought him into this scheme only partially for his help. Mostly because this escapade cried out for a cutting edge to go with its larklike quality. With Guitar as his co-conspirator, Milkman could look forward to both fun and fear.
They sauntered on down route 6, stopping frequently to examine the cars, gesticulating, bantering each other about the best way to burglarize a shack that, as Guitar said, “didn’t have a door or window with a lock.”
“But it’s got people,” Milkman insisted. “Three. All crazy.”
“Women.”
“Crazy women.”
“Women.”
“You’re forgetting, Guitar, how Pilate got the gold in the first place. She waited in a cave with a dead man for three days to haul it out, and that was when she was twelve. If she did that at twelve to get it, what you think she’ll do now when she’s almost seventy to keep it?”
“We don’t have to be rough. Cunning is all we need to be.”
“Okay. Tell me how you gonna cunning them out of the house.”
“Well, let’s see now.” Guitar stopped to scratch his back on a telephone pole. He closed his eyes, in either the ecstasy of relief or the rigors of concentration. Milkman stared off into the sky for inspiration, and while glancing toward the rooftops of the used-car places, he saw a white peacock poised on the roof of a long low building that served as headquarters for Nelson Buick. He was about to accept the presence of the bird as one of those waking dreams he was subject to whenever indecisiveness was confronted with reality, when Guitar opened his eyes and said, “Goddam! Where’d that come from?”
Milkman was relieved. “Must of come from the zoo.”
“That raggedy-ass zoo? Ain’t nothing in there but two tired monkeys and some snakes.”
“Well, where then?”
“Beats me.”
“Look—she’s flying down.” Milkman felt again his unrestrained joy at anything that could fly. “Some jive flying, but look at her strut.”
“He.”
“Huh?”
“He. That’s a he. The male is the only one got that tail full of jewelry. Son of a bitch. Look at that.” The peacock opened its tail wide. “Let’s catch it. Come on, Milk,” and Guitar started to run toward the fence.
“What for?” asked Milkman, running behind him. “What we gonna do if we catch him?”
