“It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“They’re crazy, Guitar. Nobody knows what they’ll do;
“I know they’re crazy. Anybody live like they do, selling fifty-cent wine and peeing in a bucket, with one million dollars hanging over their nappy heads, has to be. You scared of craziness? If you are,
“I don’t want to be caught, that’s all. I don’t want to do time. I want to plan it so neither one happens. How come that’s too much to ask? To plan.”
“It don’t look like planning. Looks like stalling.”
“It is planning. Planning how to get them out the house. How to get us in the house. How to cut that sack off the ceiling and then get back out the house and on down the street. And it’s hard to plan with them. They’re not regular. They don’t have regular habits. And then there’s the wineheads. One of them liable to drop in any old time. They’re not clock people, Guitar. I don’t believe Pilate knows how to tell time except by the sun.”
“They sleep at night.”
“Anybody sleep can wake up.”
“Anybody woke up can be knocked down.”
“I don’t want to knock nobody down. I want them gone when we hit.”
“And what’s gonna make them leave?”
Milkman shook his head. “An earthquake, maybe.”
“Then let’s make an earthquake.”
“How?”
“Set the house on fire. Put a skunk in there. A bear. Something. Anything.”
“Be serious, man.”
“I’m trying, baby. I’m trying. Don’t they go nowhere?”
“All together?”
“All together.”
Milkman shrugged. “Funerals. They go to funerals. And circuses.”
“Oh, man! We have to wait for somebody to die? Or for Ringling Brothers to come to town?”
“I’m trying to figure it out is all. At the moment we don’t have a chance.”
“Well, if a man don’t
“Be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? You can’t get no pot of gold being reasonable. Can’t nobody get no gold being reasonable. You have to be unreasonable. How come you don’t know that?”
“Listen to me….”
“I just quit listening. You listen! You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life! Live it!”
Milkman’s eyes opened wide. He tried hard not to swallow, but the clarion call in Guitar’s voice filled his mouth with salt. The same salt that lay in the bottom of the sea and in the sweat of a horse’s neck. A taste so powerful and necessary that stallions galloped miles and days for it. It was new, it was delicious, and it was his own. All the tentativeness, doubt, and inauthenticity that plagued him slithered away without a trace, a sound.
Now he knew what his hesitation had been all about. It was not to give an unnatural complexity to a simple job; nor was it to keep Guitar on hold. He had simply not believed in it before. When his father told him that long story, it really seemed like Jack and the Beanstalk … some fairy tale mess. He hadn’t believed it was really there, or really gold, or that he could really have it just for the taking. It was too simple. But Guitar believed it, gave it a crisp concreteness, and what’s more, made it into an act, an important, real, and daring thing to do. He felt a self inside himself emerge, a clean-lined definite self. A self that could join the chorus at Railroad Tommy’s with more than laughter. He could tell this. The only other real confrontation he’d had was hitting his father, but that wasn’t the kind of story that stirred the glitter up in the eyes of the old men in Tommy’s.
Milkman didn’t think through any of this clearly. He only tasted the salt and heard the hunter’s horn in Guitar’s voice.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”
“What time?”
“One-thirty. I’ll pick you up.”
“Beautiful.”
Far down the road, a long way from Milkman and Guitar, the peacock spread its tail.
On autumn nights, in some parts of the city, the wind from the lake brings a sweetish smell to shore. An odor like crystallized ginger, or sweet iced tea with a dark clove floating in it. There is no explanation for the smell either, since the lake, on September 19, 1963, was so full of mill refuse and the chemical wastes of a plastics manufacturer that the hair of the willows that stood near the shore was thin and pale. Carp floated belly up onto the beach, and the doctors at Mercy knew, but did not announce, that ear infections were a certainty for those who swam in those waters.
