Daddy Was a Number Runner (9 page)

“A man's got to have something like that car,” Daddy said, “so he knows he's a man.”

“I thought making all them babies would have told him that,” Mother said, getting in the last word.

Mrs. Caldwell was saying now that she didn't care how Robert felt about it, she was applying for relief, too, and if he didn't like it he could stop hanging around with all those politicians and find himself a job.

“Y'all hear about Mrs. Petrie?” Mrs. Taylor asked. “Poor thing has another one in the oven.”

Mrs. Petrie was the Twins' mother.

“How many does that make?” Mrs. Caldwell asked.

“Nine,” my mother said.

“Them Catholics and that rhythm system gonna bust that oven wide open one of these days,” Mrs. Taylor said. They all laughed.

“What's the rhythm system, Rebecca?” I asked.

She just giggled and looked silly so I knew it had something to do with lovemaking that grownups were always whispering about. Like I said, Daddy didn't have to worry about me learning anything from Rebecca because she never told me nothing. Well, whatever the rhythm system was the Petries had it down pat 'cause they had a brand-new baby each and every year.

F
IVE
fourteen finally played and not a minute too soon.

“Somebody kick me,” Daddy demanded, “kick me for being a damn fool. If I had just kept that dollar on five fourteen we'd be rich tonight. Did I tell you I was playing that number because Francie dreamt a catfish bit her? Then just night before last I dreamt about my mother and switched that dollar to nine sixty-nine which plays for the dead. Somebody give me a good, swift kick in the behind.”

Daddy was sitting on the piano bench, his back against the piano, facing our neighbors who had heard through the grapevine that Daddy had hit his number for a quarter and also the boleta, and had come over to help us celebrate. Mother caught it, too, for ten cents straight and thirty cents combination. Altogether they collected a fortune, almost three hundred dollars.

Mrs. Maceo was sitting in the big chair by the window frowning at her husband draped in a corner drinking himself red-eyed on King Kong. She shook her head at him in disgust, but Papa Dan ignored her, his yellow face beaming with his usual grin.

Mrs. Maceo turned toward Daddy. “The same thing happened to me last week, Mr. Coffin. You all remember that six forty-two played last Tuesday. I'd been playing that number for a month because I dreamed I was back home in Georgia planting sweet potatoes in the backyard. Madame Zora's dream book gives six forty-two for potatoes, and that same day, first thing I saw in the morning was a car with that number on its license plate. I loaded up on it. Threw my money away on that stupid number for a whole month and then dropped it two days before it came out.”

“I know what you mean,” Slim Jim said. “I missed my main number that same way last month and I'd been playing it for two dollars straight.” Slim Jim was working for Jocko now, ever since he got out of jail a few weeks ago.

Then Mrs. Taylor and everybody else told how they, too, had messed up on their numbers.

Papa Dan belched in his corner and Sukie mumbled something under her breath which I didn't catch. We were sitting on the floor with Maude and Rebecca eating ice cream and cake and sipping that punch Mother had made. Daddy had bought two quarts of vanilla and strawberry for us and a big crock of King Kong for the grownups, though he didn't drink himself, but nobody was drinking it except Papa Dan and Slim Jim. Most of the women were eating up our cake.

“Whatcha gonna get new?” Sukie asked me.

“A pair of shoes for Sunday and a yellow dress I saw in Woolworth's basement.”

“I'll wash and straighten your hair tomorrow,” Rebecca offered, “a late birthday present.”

“Thank you, Rebecca.” My twelfth birthday had been last week. Mother had given me a dime and Daddy a quarter and now I was gonna get some new clothes, too. I smiled at Sukie, glad that we were best friends again and sorry that when I had that thirty-five cents last week I kept it a secret from her. She always shared the money she sneaked out of her mother's purse with me, and I decided then and there that I wouldn't hold out on her no more. Starting next week.

The Twins and their parents came in, Mrs. Petrie's stomach marching ahead of her as usual. Each of the Twins had a smaller child by the hand, a girl and a boy about a year apart, one coffee-brown and the other very black. All of the Petrie children were a different color. Mrs. Petrie was fair and her husband dark and they seemed bent on having a baby every color in between. The Twins were round and yellow, like a butterball, and they didn't seem to mind that
wherever they went they had to cart some of the younger ones with them. Mother went in the kitchen and brought them all back a dish of ice cream.

“Stop that dribbling,” one Twin told her little sister, and wiped the child's mouth with the back of her hand.

“You want some more ice cream?” I asked Rebecca.

“No, but I think I'll go get some more punch.”

I walked back to the kitchen with her and as soon as we got there I knew why she liked that punch so much. The boys were standing in a circle around that big dishpan Mother had made the punch in and James Junior was sparking it with King Kong. Sterling and Vallie were watching him, together with Sonny and some other boys from Madison Avenue. That tall black one with the curly hair was Luke Washington, I thought, and the boy that looked just like him was probably his younger brother. I had heard that they both belonged to the Ebony Earls.

Rebecca grinned at Junior. “Mr. Punch Man, what you got for me?” She held out her cup and Junior smiled back at her as he dipped it in the pan. She jive-talked with the boys and stood there sipping that punch like she didn't know it had King Kong in it and I thought, if her mother saw her standin' there drinkin' that stuff she'd slap her up side her head. King Kong was homemade gin and Daddy said the niggers acted like they didn't know Prohibition was over 'cause they were still brewing their own.

I got a cup and handed it to Junior and he was filling it up when old Sterling said to me: “And just what do you think you're doing?”

“Getting me some punch. What does it look like I'm doing?”

He pointed to the milk bucket on the sink which had
some straight punch in it. “Drink that,” he said, taking the cup out of my hand and emptying it back into the pan.

“I don't want none then,” I said.

Rebecca was smoking that bamboo straw we made baskets with at the playground and passing it around to the others. I smoked straw, too, but I didn't dare do it now with Sterling watching. He was the strangest brother a girl ever had, always shouting and punching me when I made him mad, but never letting me have any fun.

“Your sister's growing up, Sterling,” Sonny said, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “You oughta let her have a little sip.”

All eyes turned on me and I felt stupid and mad at Sterling for treating me like a kid in front of everybody.

“She ain't that grown,” he said.

“Well, she did grow some,” Vallie said. “That's the word for Francie. Grew-some.” They all fell out laughing, but it was Sonny, staring at me from under half-closed lids, that ran me out of there back up to the front room.

Elizabeth was sitting on the couch looking wistfully at the door. Daddy had just told her she was as pretty as a black queen of the Nile and it was the truth. Her eyes had gotten brighter and she laughed, showing her dimples. She was the prettiest of all the Caldwell girls and nice with it, too. She glanced at the door again and I knew she was hoping her husband Robert would come home and come over. But even if he came home he wasn't coming over here, I knew. He didn't have much to do with any of us, although he talked to Daddy all the time through the dining-room window about the Scottsboro boys and Ethiopia and stuff like that. Robert didn't seem to like nobody but Daddy, and Elizabeth, too, I guess.

Mr. Edwards, our sad-faced janitor, perched himself on the arm of our sofa, which was none too steady to begin with, and began talking to Elizabeth who soon had him laughing. I was glad about that because Mr. Edwards didn't laugh much since he lost his wife last year.

I guess it's different to lose somebody you love in death, like when we buried Mr. Caldwell last year. Everybody cried and Mrs. Caldwell held up very well until they threw the dirt on top of the casket at the cemetery. Then she howled like a banshee. But afterward we could talk about Mr. Caldwell and remember his funny West Indian ways and laugh at how he used to lock his children out if they weren't home at night by the time he told them to be.

But it wasn't like that when Mr. Edwards lost his wife. He really didn't lose her, she lost him, just upped and disappeared one night from their three-room apartment behind the stairs. His cousin Gabriel, who had come up from New Orleans to stay with them until he got settled, was gone, too. Since then everybody kept saying what a sad thing it was 'cause Mr. Edwards was such a decent man and all, although he was twenty years older than Mrs. Edwards and should have known better than to marry a high-yaller hot-blooded Creole from New Orleans. It was like a never-ending funeral with everybody clucking their teeth in sympathy whenever they saw Mr. Edwards, but being careful not to mention his wife's name, and he had shrunk so much since then that his skin folded about him now like a blanket. I liked Mr. Edwards. Whenever he sent me to the store for him he always gave me a dime. He was nice, so I was glad to see Elizabeth making him laugh for a change.

Daddy started to play the piano and everybody came in from the kitchen and crowded into the middle of the floor, doing the lindy. Then Daddy played a fox-trot and the
grownups danced. Everybody sure had a good time, even Papa Dan, who had slid down in his corner to a sitting position and was snoring gently.

After everyone had gone home, Mother and Daddy sat at the dining-room table counting their money. If they counted it once they counted it a hundred times. There was something different about them tonight, some soft way they looked at each other with their eyes and smiled.

I went to bed and didn't even bother to pull the couch away from the wall, I was that happy. Let the bedbugs bite. Everybody, even those blood-sucking bugs, had to have something sometime.

W
E
were eating high off the hog and it sure was good to get away from that callie ham which you had to soak all night to kill the salt and then save the juice and skin to flavor beans and greens for weeks later. Nobody had to coax me now to eat those delicious pork chops and gravy and roast turkey which Daddy stuffed with his secret Geechee recipe. Daddy was a real mean cook when he had something to work with. That's what he was during the war, a cook with the navy.

It was nice, just like old times again. James Junior and Sterling came home every evening for dinner and we all ate around the dining-room table and then played checkers afterward or sang around the piano with Daddy or caught a cool breeze up on the roof and Daddy had stopped slamming doors and cursing so much.

He paid up the two months' back rent and Mother hauled us all downtown to Klein's and bought us some school clothes and two pairs of shoes each—one for Sunday and sneakers for every day—and I got that yellow ruffled dress from Woolworth's basement, too.

I even started back to music with Miss Jackson, but that only lasted two weeks 'cause by that time we was back to where we was before, just as if the big hit had never been. In fact, I think we were poorer than before. Having lived so high on the hog we naturally hated to go back to hard times. It wasn't long before the explosion came.

That Saturday Mother was at work and Daddy had already left on his rounds. I was in the kitchen cooking hominy grits and ten cents' worth of dried herrings for breakfast, stretching it out with a fishy gravy. I hated herrings and decided then and there that when I was grown I would never look another herring in the face. Mother's gravy was smooth but mine was pasty and the hominy had lumps in it. Junior ate his breakfast quietly but Sterling had to make some comment.

“Slop ain't fit for a pig,” he said, looking at me with a frown and pushing his plate away.

“You're a pig,” I hollered at him.

“Call me a pig again and your butt will hit this floor.”

“You're a pig.”

He slapped me.

“Leave her alone,” James Junior said.

“He's always hitting me for nothing.” I started to cry.

Sterling banged out of the house with his shoeshine box. James Junior made me blow my nose and promised me a nickel if I would stop crying. I stopped, and he left. I knew I wouldn't see him again for the rest of the day. Now that Mother was working, Junior stayed away from home more than ever.

I was still in the kitchen, scorching the rice for dinner, when the two plainclothes cops pushed past that rotten lock Daddy had never fixed and walked right in.

By the time I got to the dining room they were poking around as if they had been invited in. I knew instantly that they were cops. The oldest one was a beefy, huge man with loose jaws like a bulldog. The younger one was nervous and had quick movements like a bird.