“Salaam, baby!” the mountain said, with his pronounced accent. Harlem and black cats automatically came back to mind. “How you feel, Jeffrey, baby!” Atlas said, after the official greeting.
Before Jeffrey told Atlas how he felt, he looked back, and guiding Atlas’s eyes by the direction of his own eyes, which were focused on Boysie and Henry (the only persons in the room who were finding this meeting interesting enough to stare at it), he said, “Let’s beat the shit outta these two dumb West Indian monkeys! There’s too much West Indians in my goddamn city, baby!” He made a step in their direction. But he was only pretending. He then sat down beside Atlas, and hid Atlas from part of the room by the bulk of his body. And he laughed as if there had been a particularly good dirty joke being told.
Atlas laughed and his whole body rackled like an old car. “These goddamn dumb West Indian dudes should be back in the canefields, sweating!” the mountain man said. In the next breath, he gave his order for drinks. “Double bourbon. On the rocks! For my friend here. And bring me a can o’ tomaaato juice, a double bourbon, no ice, a Red Cap ale, and ahhh … you want anything else, baby? …” And he seemed to forget all about West Indians and his city and the other customers getting drunk in the room.
“Fucking American nigger!” Henry said.
“They frighten me sometimes, yuh know.”
“No blasted wonder the white people in the States …”
“I have no love …”
“I hate them American negroes more than I hate white people, you don’t know that?”
“Me, too. I am glad as arse I’m not a ’Merican negro.”
“I prefer to be a fucking American Indian than to be an American negro.”
“Me, too.”
And with this agreement of their racial attitudes understood, Henry ordered three more glasses of beer for each of them. Boysie raised one of his new glasses to his head. When he took it away, there was only the reading of his beer-leaves and fortune in the bottom of the glass, twinkling like beads and foam, then dying. “Fucking Americans!” Boysie raised the second glass to his head; and as it touched his lips, Henry rested his hand on the glass-bearing hand, on Boysie’s hand, and said, “Wait a minute.” Boysie waited. Henry didn’t do anything just then. Boysie put the glass down.
Then Henry began to talk. “You have known me as a man, who, gorblummuh, would tell you if a spade is really a fucking spade, right? Right!” He waited until Boysie nodded. But when Boysie nodded, his head fell out of control, slightly, lower than he had intended. “Right! And I mean to say to you, that in all the time we been firing rums together and having a beer, here and at the Pilot, in all that time, Saturday nights running down whores, or going to the Tropics, in all them things that we do together, I mean to say to you, you can’t say in all honesty that I ever let you down in something that was important, or that was serious. Right?” Again, Boysie nodded. This time, however, he remembered the beer in his head. “Right! Now, this is what I want to put to you. I been listening to what you just tell me, and on the telephone too, concerning the job and the apartment that goes with the job. Now, don’t get me wrong. ’Cause, I mean, if what I am going to put to you should sound wrong in a certain way to you, I expect you as a man to talk up and say to me, ‘Henry, you wrong as shite!’ I expect that much from you. But you have led me to understand, however, that this place is big enough for two people living together, to live in together, right?”
“Right!” This time, Boysie didn’t have to nod.
“Right!” Henry was leaning forward, close enough to kiss Boysie’s face. But he smelled the beer-breath and the stink of tobacco, and said to himself, “This bastard smell stink as hell!” He went on to say, “Now you know that I am thinking ’bout marriage for Agatha. You also know that I is a man with hard luck, meaning that everybody in this blasted place is against me, in a certain way, in regards to getting employment, or getting a job. And you also know, you can bear me out in this, that I is one man who try hard as shite to find employment in this city. I isn’t a lazy man. A West Indian isn’t a lazy immigrant, like some o’ the pricks sitting down right here in this room, drinking this blasted cheap draught beer, from twelve when the tavern opens to one o’clock in the fucking morning when it close. You know all that, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“Now, the position is this, Boysie. I want to get married real bad to Agatha. Real bad. I know I am making the biggest fucking mistake in my fucking life, but to err is man. And goddamn, I am only a man. You can’t kill me for being a man. And ergo, quod erat demonstration, yuh can’t kill me nor hang me nor lynch my arse, because I err. Right?”
“Quod a rat demonstra …”
“Gorblummuh, you know Latin, too?”
“I just pick
