Down These Strange Streets

unbalanced plate on a waiter’s palm. The high heels she had on made her legs look tight and way all right.

The light wasn’t all that good in the joint, which is one of its appeals. It sometimes helps a man or woman get along in a way the daylight wouldn’t stand, but I knew Alma May enough to know light didn’t matter. She’d look good wearing a sack and a paper hat.

There was something about her face that showed me right off she was worried, that things weren’t right. She was glancing left and right, like she was in some big city trying to cross a busy street and not get hit by a car.

I got my bottle of beer, left out from my table, and went over to her.

Then I knew why she’d been looking around like that. She said, “I was looking for you, Richard.”

“Say you were,” I said. “Well, you done found me.”

The way she stared at me wiped the grin off my face.

“Something wrong, Alma May?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I got to talk, though. Thought you’d be here, and I was wondering you might want to come by my place.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“All right.”

“But don’t get no business in mind,” she said. “This isn’t like the old days. I need your help, and I need to know I can count on you.”

“Well, I kind of like the kind of business we used to do, but all right, we’re friends. It’s cool.”

“I hoped you’d say that.”

“You got a car?” I said.

She shook her head. “No. I had a friend drop me off.”

I thought, Friend? Sure.

“All right then,” I said, “let’s strut on out.”

* * *

I GUESS YOU COULD SAY IT’S A SHAME ALMA MAY MAKES HER MONEY TURNING tricks, but when you’re the one paying for the tricks, and you are one of her satisfied customers, you feel different. Right then, anyway. Later, you feel guilty. Like maybe you done peed on the Mona Lisa. Cause that gal, she was one fine dark-skin woman who should have got better than a thousand rides and enough money to buy some eats and make some coffee in the morning. She deserved something good. Should have found and married a man with a steady job that could have done all right by her.

But that hadn’t happened. Me and her had a bit of something once, and it wasn’t just business, money changing hands after she got me feeling good. No, it was more than that, but we couldn’t work it out. She was in the life and didn’t know how to get out. And as for deserving something better, that wasn’t me. What I had were a couple of nice suits, some two-tone shoes, a hat, and a gun—.45-caliber automatic, like they’d used in the war a few years back.

Alma May got a little on the dope, too, and though she shook it, it had dropped her down deep. Way I figured, she wasn’t never climbing out of that hole, and it didn’t have nothing to do with dope now. What it had to do with was time. You get a window open now and again, and if you don’t crawl through it, it closes. I know. My window had closed some time back. It made me mad all the time.

We were in my Chevy, a six-year-old car, a forty-eight model. I’d had it reworked a bit at a time: new tires, fresh windshield, nice seat covers, and so on. It was shiny and special.

We were driving along, making good time on the highway, the lights racing over the cement, making the recent rain in the ruts shine like the knees of old dress pants.

“What you need me for?” I asked.

“It’s a little complicated,” she said.

“Why me?”

“I don’t know . . . You’ve always been good to me, and once we had a thing goin’.”

“We did,” I said.

“What happened to it?”

I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”

“It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”

“Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.

She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.

“You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Sure, baby, I know.”

“I sound to you like I been bad?”

“Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”

“Drunk?”

“Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”

“That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whiskey or wine.”

Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but its tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up a canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.

Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well-known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.

That was another reason me and her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took the mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whiskey and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.

When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across the room and into a chair.

She said, “You want a drink?”

“I ain’t gonna say no, long as it ain’t too weak, and be sure to put it in a dirty glass.”

She smiled. I watched from the living room doorway as she went and got a bottle out from under the kitchen sink, showing me how tight that dress fit across her bottom when she bent over. She pulled some glasses off a shelf, poured and brought me a stiff one. We drank a little of it, still standing, leaning against the door frame between living room and kitchen. We finally sat on the couch. She sat on the far end, just to make sure I remembered why we were there. She said, “It’s Tootie.”

I swigged down the drink real quick, said, “I’m gone.”

As I went by the couch, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t be that way, baby.”

“Now I’m baby,” I said.

“Hear me out, honey. Please. You don’t owe me, but can you pretend you do?”

“Hell,” I said, and went and sat down on the couch.

She moved, said, “I want you to listen.”

“All right,” I said.

“First off, I can’t pay you. Except maybe in trade.”

“Not that way,” I said. “You and me, we do this, it ain’t trade. Call it a favor.”

I do a little detective stuff now and then for folks I know, folks that recommended me to others. I don’t have a license. Black people couldn’t get a license to shit broken glass in this town. But I was pretty good at what I did. I learned it the hard way. And not all of it was legal. I guess I’m a kind of private eye. Only I’m really private. I’m so private I might be more of a secret eye.

“Best thing to do is listen to this,” she said. “It cuts back on some explanation.”