her.
“What?”
“The woman who died. You think you could have saved her?”
“I know it. I got the ear’a the man run the place. He’da let ’er stay.”
“No,” she said simply.
“What you mean, no?”
“We are all of us trapped, Mr. Rawlins. Trapped in amber, trapped in work. If you can’t pay the rent you die.”
“That ain’t right,” I said.
Her eyes brightened even more and she smiled at me. “No, Mr. Rawlins. It is wrong.”
It sounded so true and so final that I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I held my peace, staring at her pale delicate hands. I could see the trace of blue veins pulsing just under the white skin.
“Come on down when you’re ready,” she said, rising and moving toward the door. “I’m making breakfast now.”
As if she’d conjured it, I suddenly smelled coffee and bacon.
She sat at a maple table in an alcove that looked out onto a very green backyard. There was a tangerine tree right out the window. It was covered with waxy white blossoms. The flowers were being picked over by dozens of hovering bees.
“Come have a seat,” she said to me. She got up and took my arm just above the elbow. It was a friendly gesture, and it gave me a pang of guilt in the chest.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Coffee?” Shirley asked. She wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Love it,” I said as sexy as I could with a hangover.
She poured the coffee. She had long, lovely arms and skin as white as the sandy beaches down in Mexico. White-skinned women amazed me back in those days. They were worth your life just to look at in the South. And anything that valuable held great allure.
“Before the war started my father sent me out of Poland in a box,” she said as if continuing a conversation.
“He’s a pretty smart guy, your father.”
“He said that he could smell it-the Nazis coming.” She looked like a young girl. I had the urge to kiss her but I held it in check.
“That’s why my father works with you, Mr. Rawlins. He knows that the trouble he felt in Poland is just like what you feel here.” There were tears in Shirley’s eyes.
I thought of why I was there and the toast dried on my tongue.
“Your father is a good man,” I said, meaning it. “He wants to make things better.”
“But he has to think of himself too!” she blurted out. “He can’t keep doing things that will take him away from his family. He has to be here. He’s getting old, you know, and you can’t keep taking things out of him.”
“I guess he might spend a little too much time out on his charities, huh?”
“And what if no one worries about him? What happens when the Cossack comes to his door? Is anybody going to stand up for him?”
I could feel her tears in my own eyes. Nothing had changed since the night before. I was still traitorous and evil.
Shirley got up and went into the kitchen. Actually she ran there.
“Would you like some more toast, Mr. Rawlins?” Shirley asked when she’d come back in from the kitchen. Her eyes were red.
“No thanks,” I said. “What time you got?”
“Almost twelve.”
“Damn. I better get down there to help your father or he’s gonna wonder what we been doin’.”
Shirley smiled. “I can drive you.”
It was a nice smile. I shuddered to see her trust me, because her father’s ruin was my only salvation.
“You’re pretty quiet,” Shirley Wenzler said in the car.
“Just thinkin’.”
“About what?”
“About how you got the advantage on me.”
“What do you mean?”
I leaned over and whispered, “Well, you got to give your opinion on my chest but the jury still out on yours.”
She focused her attention back on the road and blushed nicely.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I always like to flirt with pretty girls.”
“I think that was a little bit more than flirting.”
“ ’Pends on where you come from,” I said. “Down here that was just a little compliment from an admirer.” That was a lie, but she didn’t know it.
“Well, I’m not used to men talking to me like that.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
She let me out at First African. I shook her hand, holding it a little longer than I should have. But she smiled and was still smiling as she left.
I watched the little Studebaker drive away. After that I noticed the dark Buick with the two dark-suited men. They were parked across from the church then. Just sitting there as if they were salesmen breaking for an afternoon lunch.
22
First African had an empty look to it on weekdays.
Christ still hung over the entrance but he looked like more of an ornament when the churchgoers weren’t gathered around the stairs. I always stopped to look up at him, though. I understood the idea of pain and death at the hands of another-most colored people did. As terrible as Poinsettia’s death was, she wasn’t the first person I’d seen hung.
I’d seen lynchings and burnings, shootings and stonings. I’d seen a man, Jessup Howard, hung for looking at a white woman. And I’d seen two brothers who were lynched from two nooses on the same rope because they complained about the higher prices they were charged at the county store. The brothers had ripped off their shirts and gouged deep scratches in each other’s skin in their struggles to keep from strangling. Both of their necks, broken at last, were horribly enlongated as they hung.
Part of that powerful feeling that black people have for Jesus comes from understanding his plight. He was innocent and they crucified him; he lifted his head to tell the truth and he died.
While I looked at him I heard something, but it was like something at the back of my mind. Like a crackle of a lit match and the sigh of an old timber in a windstorm.
Chaim was down in the basement, already working on boxes of clothes. He was holding up an old sequined dress, squinting at the glitter.
“Looks good,” I said.
“Not bad, eh, Easy? Maybe Mrs. Cantella could find a new husband?” His smile was conspiratorial.
“Probably won’t be no better than the last nine men she had.”
We both laughed. Then I started helping him. We moved clothes from one box to another while putting prices on them with little eight-sided paper tags and safety pins. For plain dresses we charged a dollar and for a fancy one we charged one seventy-five. All pants were sixty-five cents, and hats and handkerchiefs ran about a quarter.
