The red face became redder, the super dropped Shrimpie and turned toward the big boy, enraged. Made for him—dodged another tomato—came on. Grappled, scuffled, slipped, fell, and found the boy astride him. Pounding on his head—pounding—gone quite crazy, pounding. The super was stunned less by the pounding than by the fact that the boy kept doing it. Even after he was shaken off, the boy kept fighting aggressively. Without a rod it wasn’t so easy to tame as overgrown sixteen-year-old devil. When they both let up, it was at least spiritually Joshua Jones’s round.
A bigger boy now, almost a man; well over six feet tall, but still ribby and hungry-looking. Eighteen now. Shining shoes in front of a Lenox Avenue barbershop. Making nine, ten, sometimes twelve dollars a week.
The head barber liked to stand in the doorway and kid the boy about being so big.
“Great big husky—” he would draw out the “great” till it was as long as Joshua himself—“great big husky like you—it’s a shame. You oughter be movin’ pianos ’stead o’ whippin’ shoe-leather. Benny, come ’eh. Look at dis boy. When he stoop over his heels is higher ’n his head.”
Joshua Jones took it good naturedly, grinned occasionally, said little. “Shine?” was the most he ever uttered, and from this the men dubbed him Shine.
Nobody called him Shine, however, but Negroes. A fay patron, with no other intent than to be genial, once repeated the name Shine after hearing the head barber use it. “How do you get to the subway from here, Shine, my boy?” he asked, paying his bill.
Shine looked him up and down, and after a moment inquired, “How’d you know my name was Shine?”
“Guessed it,” smiled the patron.
“Guess how to get to the subway, then.”
The patron stared, gaped and departed mystified at so sudden hostility.
But the head barber, looking on, grinned and approved. “Tight kid,” he commented. “What I mean, tight.”
A tight kid makes a hard man—two hundred and twenty pounds of hardness in this case, wrestling daily with pianos; pianos equally hard and four times as heavy; two hundred and twenty pounds of strength; not the mere strength of stevedores hooking cotton bales on a wharf; you can’t hurt a bale of cotton—it can’t hurt you; tumble it, hook it, kick it—what the hell? But pianos—even swaddled in quilting—pianos must be handled like glass. Not mere strength do they require, but delicacy and strength; not muscles driving out or yanking in with abandoned force, but muscles held taut, precisely controlled under however great tension, released or restrained at will. You are protecting not only the instrument but yourself and your partner at the other end. The soft edge of a cotton-bale won’t hurt a fellow’s foot—the hard one of a piano will break it.
A piano is a malicious thing; it loves to slip out of your grip and snap at your toes, with an evil chuckle inside. Push up its lip and see it sneer; touch it and hear it rumble or whine. Ponderous, spiteful, treacherous live thing—a single spirit in a thousand bodies, one of which will crush you soon or late.
A malicious thing. Only today they were putting a piano into a third-story window of a house on a busy street. They had used hooks over the cornice, and the cheap rotten cement crumbled. Cornices aren’t supposed to bear weight—an inferior mixture will do. One hook came through just as Shine was reaching out of the window to catch hold of the suspended instrument and guide it through the frame. He heard the crackle of broken cement above, saw the instrument sag a little while over it showered crumbs of broken cornice. With the hand already extended he grabbed the nearest leg of the upright and pulled it part way through the window just before the other hook lost its hold above. The greater part of the piano however was still unsupported outside the window—the longer arm of a lever that all but broke even Shine’s tremendous strength. Straining back with all the power of his back and arms, his knees braced against the lower edge of the window-frame, he held the instrument there slipping on the sill till Jinx and Bubber reached him. Someone must have been hurt in the crash that would surely have come otherwise.
“Thing nearly pulled me out the winder,” he remarked when the piano was again under control.
“Why the hell didn’ y’ let it go, then?”
Shine looked rather blank. “Damn ’f I thought of it,” he said and grinned at his own stupidity.
III
Joshua Jones, whom his fellows called Shine, came out of his reverie, to observe the return of Jinx and Bubber, arm in arm and quite happily drunk.
“This yeh freckle-face giraffe, he’s a good boogy,” Bubber declared. “Good boogy—yassuh. He’s my boy. Ain’t you my boy, biggy?”
“No lie,” Jinx agreed. “Tell ’im ’bout that licker we ruint.”
“Try some good licker,” Shine invited, turning the rest of his pint over to them. “Go ’head—I got enough.”
“Jes’ had some good licker, I tell y’—Pat saw us go—”
“Y’all drink,” Shine ordered, “and let me do the talkin’.”
“Talk, then—talk. Don’ nobody have to listen jes’ ’cause you talk. Talk.”
“I told y’all ’bout that Court Avenue job in the mornin’.”
“What d’ hell you so worried ’bout that job for?”
“Might have to get me some extra hands. Boss told me find somebody.”
There was quick and sober resentment on the part of Jinx and Bubber. “Extra hands—fo’ whut? Ain’ no job too big fo’ us three.”
“Trouble, maybe,” Shine explained. “You know what’s happened already. Guy tried to move in on 149th Street, this winter and they dared ’em to take the stuff out of the van. Jes’ las’ month, four blocks from where we go tomorrow, somebody put dynamite under a shine that moved in on his hardness. Well, boss is making this dickty pay for risk this time, and
