“Eat him!” Guitar shouted. He swung easily over the double pipes that bordered the lot and began to circle the bird at a distance, holding his head a little to the side to fool the peacock, which was strutting around a powder- blue Buick. It closed its tail and let the tips trail in the gravel. The two men stood still, watching.
“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?” Milkman asked.
“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.
“Faggot.” Guitar laughed softly. “White faggot.”
Milkman laughed too, and they watched a while more before leaving the used cars and the pure white peacock.
But the bird had set them up. Instead of continuing the argument about how they would cop, they began to fantasize about what the gold could buy when it became legal tender. Guitar, eschewing his recent asceticism, allowed himself the pleasure of waking up old dreams: what he would buy for his grandmother and her brother, Uncle Billy, the one who had come up from Florida to help raise them all after his father died; the marker he would buy for his father’s grave, “pink with lilies carved on it”; then stuff for his brother and sisters, and his sisters’ children. Milkman fantasized too, but not for the stationary things Guitar described. Milkman wanted boats, cars, airplanes, and the command of a large crew. He would be whimsical, generous, mysterious with his money. But all the time he was laughing and going on about what he would do and how he planned to live, he was aware of a falseness in his voice. He wanted the money—desperately, he believed—but other than making tracks out of the city, far away from Not Doctor Street, and Sonny’s Shop, and Mary’s Place, and Hagar, he could not visualize a life that much different from the one he had. New people. New places. Command. That was what he wanted in his life. And he couldn’t get deep into Guitar’s talk of elegant clothes for himself and his brother, sumptuous meals for Uncle Billy, and week-long card games in which the stakes would be a yard and a half and then a deuce and a quarter. He screamed and shouted “Wooeeeee!” at Guitar’s list, but because his life was not unpleasant and even had a certain amount of luxury in addition to its comfort, he felt off center. He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents’ past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well. He hated the acridness in his mother’s and father’s relationship, the conviction of righteousness they each held on to with both hands. And his efforts to ignore it, transcend it, seemed to work only when he spent his days looking for whatever was light-hearted and without grave consequences. He avoided commitment and strong feelings, and shied away from decisions. He wanted to know as little as possible, to feel only enough to get through the day amiably and to be interesting enough to warrant the curiosity of other people—but not their all-consuming devotion. Hagar had given him this last and more drama than he could ever want again. He’d always believed his childhood was sterile, but the knowledge Macon and Ruth had given him wrapped his memory of it in septic sheets, heavy with the odor of illness, misery, and unforgiving hearts. His rebellions, minor as they were, had all been in the company of, or shared with, Guitar. And this latest Jack and the Beanstalk bid for freedom, even though it had been handed to him by his father—assigned almost—stood some chance of success.
He had half expected his friend to laugh at him, to refuse with some biting comment that would remind Milkman that Guitar was a mystery man now, a man with blood-deep responsibilities. But when he watched Guitar’s face as he described what could be had almost for the asking, he knew right away he hadn’t guessed wrong. Maybe the professional assassin had had enough, or had changed his mind. Had he…? “Did you…?” As he listened to him go over each detail of meals, clothes, tombstones, he wondered if Guitar simply could not resist the lure of something he had never had—money.
Guitar smiled at the sun, and talked lovingly of televisions, and brass beds, and week-long card games, but his mind was on the wonders of TNT.
By the time they’d exhausted their imaginative spending, it was almost noon and they were back on the edge of Southside. They picked up where they’d left off in the discussion of the scheme. Guitar was ready now; Milkman was still cautious. Too cautious for Guitar.
“I don’t understand you. You come running after me with a dynamite proposition, and for three days we talk about it, the best news I’ve had since pussy, but when we get down to business, you come up with some shit about how it can’t be done. You shucking me or what?”
“What would I be shucking for? I didn’t have to tell you about it.”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know why you doing it. You know about me—you can guess why I’m in it. But money ain’t never been what you needed or couldn’t get.”
Milkman ignored the reference to why Guitar was “in it,” and said as calmly as he could, “I need it to get away. I told you, man. I got to get out of here. Be on my own.”
“On
“Fuck you. What difference does it make why I want it?”
“Cause I’m not sure you do want it. At least not bad enough to go ahead and cop.”
“I just want it right. No hassles. No…You know, burglary is a serious crime. I don’t want to end up in—”
“What burglary? This ain’t no burglary. This is Pilate.”
“So?”
“So! They’re your people.”
“They re still people, and people scream.”
“What’s the worst? What’s the worst thing can happen? We bust in, right? Suppose all three of them are there. They’re women. What can they do? Whip us?”
“Maybe.”
“Come on! Who? Hagar? Right up in your face she blows it. Pilate? She loves you, boy. She wouldn’t touch you.”
“You believe that?”
“Yeah, I believe it! Look. You got qualms, tell me about them. Because you related? Your daddy’s more related than you are, and it’s his idea.”
