“Fifty, and not one kiss-me-arse dollar …”
“All right!” Henry said, seeing the bargaining getting out of hand. “I am going to tell you what I am going to do. This fawn-coloured suit is just the thing for a wedding. I know how you would look in it. Man, try-on the suit right now. I want you to feel yourself in a good suit for a change. Every man should have a good suit. A good suit, at least one, that cost over a hundred dollars. Try on this other one, too.” He took down the black worsted suit. He was trembling. He had to have his money today. He had lost thirty dollars that belonged to Agatha. Again he had lost in a crap game. He had to have his money today. After having bought these two suits from the Crippled Civilians used store for six dollars, after having paid Vladdy, the invisible tailor and mender, fifteen to alter them, he was out twenty-one dollars. He wanted to make thirty more, off Boysie. Twenty-one and thirty is fifty-one, he said, making a fast calculation in his mind. “And I got to make a little profit on the side, too,” he told himself. Boysie felt good in the fawn-coloured suit. He looked good, too. He wanted to see himself in the black suit, too.
“I prefer the black one for the wedding, though,” he told Henry, after he had put it on.
“Black is your colour.”
“Yeah.”
“It is yours now. The fawn-one, too. Try-on the other one again. They is yours, man.”
The gleam of possession overpowered Boysie. He shrugged his shoulders into the jacket of the black worsted, as if he had just paid cash for it; as if he was born in it. Henry did not fail to notice this pride of possession.
“Made-to-fucking-measure!” Henry said. And indeed, Boysie looked like a black male model from the pages of the New Yorker magazine. “Goddamn, boy! if only you was a touch less black, you would have a whole fortune in front o’ you, by just wearing clothes and letting people take pictures of you in them clothes. You’s a born model!”
“You think so?”
“Eighty, and both is yours!”
And that was what Boysie agreed to. Henry was amazed: where the hell did he get all this cash from? But Boysie merely laughed, and hinted at something about “a loan from Brigitte.” Boysie paid him cash, then and there: eighty dollars, in tens!
Henry put the thirty dollars earmarked for Agatha’s business in the left back trousers pocket; fifteen for next week’s groceries in his left side-pocket; and the remaining thirty-five in his wallet. (“I gotta remember to get this changed-up into ones for that crap game this evening!”) He could now return to the match with Freeness and the boys, at Freeness’s house in the West End. When he saw Boysie walking through the door, wearing the fawn-coloured suit (his own clothes that he had worn to Henry’s, his jacket and his worn-out grey flannel trousers, were in a paper bag, and the black wedding-suit-to-be in the laundry bag in which it had been hanging since Vladdy gave it to Henry), and Henry looked at him, it made him feel a little sad.
But that sadness was nothing like the sadness he later experienced that night, when he lost his thirty-five one-dollar bills in the crap game; and then, “damn! I might as well spend this next fifteen that is for food to try to get back that thirty-five. Can’t stop now, not now, baby!”; and then when the food-dollar-bills had disappeared like autumn leaves in the wind, it was then that he had, in despair, felt his back trousers pocket and discovered Agatha’s thirty. In three wild bets, betting ten dollars each time that Freeness could not throw a four (it was then Freeness’s fifth “four-main”), and collapsing each time that Freeness threw a four … Henry shook his head, and had to borrow taxicab fare from Freeness in order to get out of the desolation of the West End.
“Man, I can throw a four-main in my sleep,” Freeness said, “you stupid old Bajan. Go home and tell your woman Agatha to send you back with some more dollar-bills!”
The first week, Boysie cleaned the fifteen rooms at the Baptist church house by sweeping them with the broom, as Old Man Jonesy had told him to do. It was hard work. He knew he had taken the wrong job. Dots had come down one night to help him clean and had never returned. She didn’t even press the point about living in the church house apartment that was rent-free. It was too musty. And all the religious books and religious tracts upset her. When she found out that Boysie was to sleep in the attic room, in which the double bed took up most of the space, she decided to continue at the Hunters’ a little longer until she was ready to rent the cheap apartment on Ontario Street.
Boysie was glad that she disliked the job and the quarters. Brigitte had come down every night after work and she would remain in the living quarters, lying on Jonesy’s bed, and Jonesy’s wife’s bed, in her panties, cocking up her feet, reading the religious tracts which Jonesy had stolen from the offices of the gentlemen and ladies downstairs. She would hold the religious tract in one hand and a bottle of German imported beer in the other. The cigarette smoke coming through her nostrils was the only thing that told you that she was alive in this posture, which she could hold, unmoving, for minutes and minutes …
Once, on her day off (which she would spend with him), she made a stain the size of a full moon on Jonesy’s white sheets. It took Boysie three hours washing it and then five dollars to get it cleaned professionally by the New Method Laundry. But Boysie enjoyed Brigitte’s company. When he returned upstairs to his quarters (he spent most of his time in
