Pinky peered through the plate-glass window of a laundrymat at the corner of 225th Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx. There was an electric clock on the back wall. The time read 3:33.
The sky was overcast with heavy black clouds. The hot sultry air was oppressive, as before a thunderstorm. The elevated trestle of the IRT subway line loomed overhead, eerie and silent, snaking down the curve of White Plains Road. As far as he could see, the streets were empty of life. The silence was unreal.
He reckoned it had taken him more than an hour to get there from the Riverside Park in Manhattan. He had covered part of the distance by hopping a New York Central switch engine, but afterwards he had slunk along endless blocks of silent, sleeping residential streets, ducking to cover when anyone hove into view.
Now he began to feel safe. But his body was still trembling as though he had the ague.
He turned east in the direction of the Italian section.
Apartment buildings gave way to pastel-colored villas of southern Italian architecture, garnished with flower gardens and plaster saints. After a while the houses became scattered, interspersed by market gardens and vacant lots overgrown with weeds in which hoboes slept and goats were tethered.
Finally he reached his destination, a weather-stained, one-storied, pink stucco villa at the end of an unfinished street without sidewalks. It was a small house flanked by vacant lots used for rubbish dumps. Oddly enough, it had a large gabled attic. It sat far back of a wire fence enclosing a front yard of burnt grass, dried-up flowers and wildly thriving weeds. In a niche over the front door was a white marble crucifixion of a singularly lean and tortured Christ, encrusted with bird droppings. In other niches at intervals beneath the eaves were all the varicolored plaster saints good to the souls of Italian peasants.
All of the front windows were closed and shuttered. Save for the faint sounds of a heavy boogie beat on a piano, the house seemed abandoned.
Pinky vaulted the fence and followed a path through tall weeds around the side of the house, taking care to avoid a concrete birdbath, an iron statue of Garibaldi and a large zinc vase of artificial roses.
There was a deep backyard enclosed by a high plank fence. The back door opened onto a grape arbor with thick clusters of purple grapes hanging between the dusty leaves. To one side was a rotting tool-and-wood shed adjoining a chicken coop and rabbit hutch. From the door of the tool shed a tethered nanny goat gazed at Pinky from sad wise eyes. Beyond was a dusty vegetable garden dying from thirst and neglect. But along the back fence a patch of well-watered, carefully tended marijuana weeds grew adjacent to a garage of corrugated steel.
Pinky halted in the dark beside the arbor and listened. He breathed in a choking manner and tears streamed down his cheeks.
Now the sound of music was loud and defiant. Vying with the hard banging of piano notes was the ratchetlike rhythm of someone strumming an accompaniment on a double-sided wooden washboard. It sounded like a cross between bone-beating and rim-rapping.
The two attic windows were wide open. Through the left-side one, from where he stood, Pinky saw the back of an upright piano, atop which sat a kerosene lamp and a half-filled bottle of gin. As he watched, a black, pudgy- fingered hand rose from the far side of the piano and grasped the gin bottle. The tempo of the piano changed. Instead of two-handed playing with the steady bass beat marching alongside the light fantastic tripping on the treble keys, there followed a wild left-hand riffing the whole length of the board.
The hand holding the bottle reappeared. The hand withdrew. The bottle remained. The level of the gin had lowered noticeably. Suddenly the bass came in again like John Henry driving steel and the treble notes ran through the night like the patter of rain.
Then another black hand appeared from the other side of the piano and took down the bottle. The sound of rim-rapping ceased and only the sound of beating bones continued. One side of the washboard had conked out. The hand and the bottle reappeared. After which the rapping went wild.
Through the right-side window could be seen vague figures of shirt-sleeved men and black-shouldered women swaying back and forth, locked in tight embrace; the locked liquid motions steady and unchanging despite the eccentricity of the music, sometimes keeping on the beats, sometimes in between. The Bear Hug and the Georgia Grind were being performed with a slow steady motion. Black skin gleamed like oily shadows in the dim yellow rays of the single flickering light of the kerosene lamp.
“Missa Pinky,” came a soft small voice from the dark.
Pinky jumped and wheeled about.
Big white circles shone from a small black face almost invisible in the dark. The skinny barefooted figure was clad in a patched mansize overall jumper.
“Boy, what you want at this time of night?” Pinky said roughly.
“Will you please, sir, go up and ask Sister Heavenly for two pods of Heavenly Dust for Uncle Bud?”
“Why don’t you go up and get it yourself?”
“She won’t sell it to me. I is too young.”
“Why don’t Uncle Bud come get it hisself?”
“He’s feeling po’ly. That’s why he sent me. He ain’t got the faith no more.”
“All right, give me the money.”
The boy stuck out a hand holding two crumpled dollar bills.
Pinky went beneath the arbor and knocked on the back door.
“Who dat?” a disembodied voice asked from within.
“Me, Pinky.”
Two white crescents flickered briefly in a glass pane of the upper-door panel. There was the click of a simple mortise lock and the door swung open.
With his eyes accustomed to the dark, Pinky made out the vague figure of a stone-old, gray-haired man clad in a blue cotton nightgown which seemed to float about the pitch-dark kitchen. Faint bluish gleams came from a double-barreled shotgun which the old man held cradled in his right arm.
“How is you, Uncle Saint?” Pinky greeted politely.
“Middling,” the old man replied. His voice seemed to come from another part of the room.
“I’s going up to see Sister Heavenly.”
“You got feet, ain’t you?” Now his voice seemed to come out of the floorboards between Pinky’s feet.
Pinky grinned dutifully and went through the kitchen toward the stairs in the back hall.
He found Sister Heavenly sitting on a high throne chair in the corner of the attic farthest from the light. In the dark shadows she was an indistinguishable shape wrapped in dull black cloth.
A sick man lay on a stretcher on the floor at her feet.
Sister Heavenly was a faith healer. Pinky didn’t dare approach her while she was “ministering”.
“You is going to be happy,” she crooned in an old, cracked voice which still retained remnants of a bygone music. “You is going to be happy — if you got the faith.”
Her body swayed from side to side in time with the slow steady beat of the bass.
The man on the stretcher said in a weak voice, “I is got the faith.”
She crept down from the throne and knelt by his side.
Her thin, clawlike, transparent hand extended a silver spoon containing white powder toward his face.
“Inhale,” she said. “Inhale deeply. Breathe the Heavenly Dust into your heart.”
The man sniffed rapidly four times in succession, each stronger than the previous.
She climbed back into her throne.
“Now you is going to be healed,” she crooned.
Pinky waited patiently until she deigned to see him. She forbade interruptions.
Sister Heavenly prided herself on being an old-fashioned faith healer with old-fashioned tried-and-true methods. That was why she used old-fashioned gin-drinking musicians and directed her clients to dance old- fashioned belly-rubbing dances. It was the first stage of the cure. She called it “de-incarnation”.
She had kept Black Key Shorty on the piano for fifteen years. Washboard Wharton had come later. Both were relics of a bygone time. Washboard sat beside the piano holding a double-sided washboard which he strummed with rabbit-leg bones between his legs. Black Key had learned to play the piano in flats. Both were gin drinkers. They were the only ones she permitted to drink gin in her “Heavenly Clinic.” There was nothing wrong with them. But she had to heal the sick people who came to her with Heavenly Dust.
“What you want, Pinky?” she asked suddenly.
