Estelle found the note waiting on the table.
Dear Friend,
Wash the plate and the cup and the knife and the fork for me. Put them in the dish wreck. Hang up the towel on the nail above the sink. Leave the bed as it is, I will sleep there tonight. You were tense last night. Aspirins are in the cupboard above the sink.
Love, Mrs. Macmillan.
Estelle did not feel safe until she was sitting at the back of the bus, five minutes later. She did not wash the plate.
She asked two bus conductors twice, “This going to Toronto?” And twice they said, “Sure thing, miss!” A woman who looked like a traveller, seasoned and pickled by custom and the sun, got in. Estelle turned to her and said, “ ’Scuse me, lady. Is this the bus that going to Toronto, in truth?”
The woman, whose voice was younger than her face, said, “Sure is, miss!” And then she added, for her own private reasons, “Wouldn’t be on it, if it weren’t!”
It was only then that Estelle sat back, breathed freely and tried to put together the drama of Mrs. Macmillan; because now, for the first time since she had met her in the hotel, she was in a position of mental strength and health to look back and decide, with less fear of her own sanity, the answer to the question, “Is she goddamn mad?”
Boysie couldn’t believe it. “Imagine, man, that after almost one full year, gorblummuh! twelve months to be exact, that I been walking ’bout this blasted city unemploy, looking for a job, and I couldn’t get no blasted job at all, no matter how hard I try! And now, gorblummuh, right outta the fucking blue, a man ups and gives me a job!” He was shouting so much over the telephone that Henry, who himself could not believe it, and who had come to believe that Boysie, like himself, was unemployable, was finding it very difficult to hear. “Man, look at this thing, though! A man, it appears he is a Jamaican-man, who been working at this place on Sin George Street for donkey years as a janitor and cleaner and general Mr.-Fixit-kind-o’-man, and he want to go home to Jamaica for a little rest from the hard work, so he ups and tells Reverend Markham, who ups and calls Dots, to ask me to hold-down this job till he come back. And I had was to say to Dots, ‘Dots, is a blasted good thing that we didn’t forget all-together to drop in ’pon Reverend Markham church one Sundee last year, gorblummuh! Gorblummuh! and all I have to do is sweep-out fifteen rooms every night, carry a little wastepaper and other slight garbage outside, by the side o’ the building, post a few letters after the people finish working, and be-Christ, I hauling-in sixty-somebody dollars a week. Man, I am robbing them! I robbing their arse in this job, Henry!” Boysie was actually being paid eighty dollars a week, but knowing that Henry was always broke, he foresaw the possibility of unpaid loans and therefore thought first of protecting himself. It was his victory over Henry, one of the few in the years they were running together.
“Where you say the place is?”
“Sin George, I tell you. The Baptist church house. And guess what else?”
“You have to water the garden, and clean out the closets and polish the sign ’pon the door, and wash-off the windows, and …” And Henry broke into a ridiculing laugh.
“Kiss my arse! You think I is a slave? Nothing like that at all, man. They have a special man to do them things. But the special thing is that there have an apartment going free with the job! You hear what I say! It have four rooms on one floor, and if you climb a stairs, the man tell me, you will find yourself in a next floor with two more big rooms. The whole place furnished too. The whole place is mine!”
“Boy, this is your year!” Henry stopped laughing now.
“Man, Canadian people real stupid. Real arse-hole stupid, in truth! You think a thing like this could happen to me back in the Wessindies?” Boysie sucked his teeth in a long rasping noise. “Man, I should be paying the Baptist-people to have this job. But they paying me!”
Henry was serious, and he was overjoyed to hear of Boysie’s success. Although he could not report the same successful news, he held no grudge against his friend. As a matter of fact, he was so happy that he invited Boysie down that same evening to buy him a drink (“Goddamn, Boysie have so much luck that I want to touch him and let some o’ that luck rub off on me. And I am going to buy the fucker any kind o’ drink, beer, hard liquor, liqueur — anything he want. I just touched my woman for twenty bucks, and I am going to invest half ’pon Boysie, tonight. We celebrating his job, the first real kiss-me-arse ipso-facto-job in this white man country”). They would go to their favourite drinking place, the Paramount, where drinks could be washed down by the southern-fried chicken wings which the Chinese man behind the counter of steam and oil and fat and smokescreen whipped up in five minutes flat, together with generous coatings of flour.
Hastily, Boysie accepted the invitation. He even kissed his wife, on her lips.
