He gave a start; he didn’t think she had seen him.
“You got to help me, Sister Heavenly, I is in trouble,” he blurted out.
She looked at him. “You’ve been beat up.”
“How can you tell that, in all this dark?”
“You don’t have no milk shine like you generally does.” On second thought she added sharply, “If it’s the police who done it, you git away from here. I don’t want no truck with the police.”
“It weren’t the police,” he said evasively.
“Well then you tell me about it later. I ain’t got no time to listen to it now.”
“It ain’t only that,” he said. “There’s a little tadpole down in the backyard wants two pods of Heavenly Dust for Uncle Bud.”
“I ain’t selling no pods to little punks,” she snapped.
“It ain’t for him, it’s for Uncle Bud; and you don’t have to give it to him, I’ll do that,” he said.
“Well, give me the money,” she said impatiently.
He handed her the two crumpled dollar bills.
She examined the money with disgust. “I ain’t selling no pods for a dollar no more. Leastways not at this time of night.” She took one small paper packet from somewhere beneath her layers of garments and handed it to him. “You give him this and tell him the price is two dollars,” she directed, grumbling to herself. “How do them cheapskates expect to get healed for a dollar, with prices of everything as high as they is?”
“Another thing,” he said hesitantly. “I need a fix bad.”
“Go see your friend,” she said shortly. “He’ll stake you to a fix.”
“He ain’t my friend no more. He’s in jail.”
She wheeled about on her throne. “Don’t tell me you were in the rumble with him, ’cause if you’ve come here with yourself all hot, I’ll turn you in myself.”
“I weren’t with Jake when they caught him,” he denied evasively.
She was staring at him sharply as though she could see in the dark.
“Well, go down and open the buck rabbit and take a pill out,” she relented. “And don’t take but one, it’s all you’ll need, it’s a speedball. And be sure to close him up good. The spike’s in my bureau drawer.”
As he started to turn away, she added, “And don’t think you’re putting nothing over on me ’cause I ain’t through with you yet. You just wait until I get time to talk to you.”
“I got to talk to you too,” he said.
The man on the stretcher was twitching in time to the music. “It’s cool, Sister Heavenly,” he said in the voice of a convert giving a testimonial. “I got the real cool faith.”
Black Key Shorty was driving piles on the bass with his steady left hand while his right hand was frolicking over hot dry grass in a nudist’s colony. Washboard Wharton was giving out with grunting sounds like a boar hog in a pen full of sows.
The strong orgiastic smell of sweat and red-hot glands was pouring from the windows into the hot sultry air.
It didn’t mean a thing to Pinky. He felt so much like crying he was thinking only of a fix. He went down the stairs to the hallway and passed through the kitchen.
Uncle Saint floated from the shadows with his double-barreled shotgun.
“I’ll be right back,” Pinky said. “Sister Heavenly sent me to tap the rabbit.”
“Don’t tell me your troubles, I ain’t your pappy,” Uncle Saint said, unlocking the door. His voice sounded as though it had come from the bottom of a well.
The little boy in the overall jumper was waiting for Pinky in the grape arbor. He had discovered the grapes but was scared to take any.
“Did you get ’em, Missa Pinky?” he asked timidly.
Pinky fished the packet from his pocket. “Here, you give this to Uncle Bud and tell ’im the price has gone up. Tell him Sister Heavenly say don’t expect to get healed for nothing.”
Reluctantly the little boy accepted the single pod. He knew he’d get a beating for bringing back only one. But there wasn’t anything to do about it.
“Yessa,” he said and went slowly into the shadows.
Pinky went to the rabbit hutch, reached through the hatch and caught the buck by the ears. With a deft motion of his free hand, he removed a small square of adhesive tape covering the rabbit’s rectum, then withdrew a long rubber plug with a tiny metal handle like a sink stopper. The rabbit remained motionless, staring at him from enormous fear-frozen eyes. He squeezed the rabbit’s stomach and a small aluminum capsule popped out. He put the capsule into his pants pocket and restoppered the rabbit.
He wondered what other hiding places Sister Heavenly had. He was her nephew and her only living relative, but she had never told him anything. He reckoned she was getting ready to eat the rabbit if she let him know that much.
At the kitchen door he again went through the amenities with Uncle Saint.
“I’m going to Sister Heavenly’s room for a bang.”
“You must think I’m the recording angel,” Uncle Saint grumbled. His voice sounded as though it came out of the oven. “Go to the devil, for all I care.”
Pinky knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t challenge it. He knew that Uncle Saint would curse up a fit if he went somewhere in the house without telling him in advance.
The top bureau drawer looked like the last stand of a hypochondriac. He found the hypodermic needle lying in the midst of syringes, thermometers, hatpins and hairpins, tweezers, shoe buttoners, and old-fashioned glass- topped bottles containing enough varicolored poisons to decimate an entire narcotic squad. The alcohol lamp sat openly on a marble-topped table in the corner, alongside a battered teapot and a set of stained test tubes. The sugar spoon was in a sugar bowl on the night table beside the bed.
He lit the lamp and sterilized the needle over the flame. Then he emptied the white powdered cocaine and heroin from the aluminum capsule into the sugar spoon and melted it over the flame. He drew the liquid through the needle into the syringe and, holding the spike in his right hand, banged himself in the vein of his left arm while the C amp; H was still warm.
“Ahhh,” he said softly as the drug went in.
Afterwards he put out the lamp and returned the spike to the medicine drawer.
The speedball had immediate effect. He went back to the kitchen stepping on air.
He knew Sister Heavenly wouldn’t be ready for him yet, so he passed the time with the ancient gunman.
“How long is you been a ventriloquist, Uncle Saint?”
“Boy, I been throwing my voice so long, I don’t know where it’s at anymore myself,” Uncle Saint said. His voice seemed to come from the bedroom Pinky had just quit. Abruptly he laughed at his own joke, “Ha-ha-ha.” The laughter seemed to come from outside the back door.
“You’re going to keep on throwing it around until it gets away some day,” Pinky said.
“What business is it of yours? Is you my keeper?” Uncle Saint crabbed. He sounded like a ghost lurking underneath the floor.
Upstairs, Black Key Shorty was riffing with his left hand again. Pinky knew that the gin bottle was pressed to his lips. Washboard Wharton was making like a skeleton with the galloping itch, waiting his turn.
Pinky listened to the steady clumping of feet on the wooden floor. Everything was crystal clear to him again. He knew just what he had to do. But it was getting late.
5
The pilgrims had finally gone.
Sister Heavenly was sitting up in bed, wearing a pink crocheted bed jacket trimmed in frilly lace. Long, curly, midnight-blue hair of a wig hung down over her shoulders.
She was so old her face had the shrunken, dried-up leathery look of a monkey’s. The corneas of her eyes were a strange shade of glazed blue resembling an enameled surface, while the pupils were a faded ocher with
