Strivers Row (11 page)

He would have run out of the room then if she had laughed. He thought that he would have run all the way back to Boston—but instead she cupped her smooth hand around his, flicking on the little jeweled lighter. She lit the joint again, and moved right up against him.

“Here, let me show you,” she whispered, and reclaimed the joint, taking another long pull on it. Then she put both her hands on his face and kissed him deeply, openmouthed—sending the sweet smoke drifting slowly back into his throat and up to his brain. He sputtered again, but she only smiled and took another long drag, repeating the process. Going even slower this time, letting her lips run slowly across his teeth, his tongue, before she pulled back, just giving him time to expel the smoke.

She kissed him again and again, until he felt he was breathing the gage along with her, the smell of her skin. A great contentment, unlike anything he had ever known before, settling in his chest and head, the constant, racing desire in his head just
stopping
for the moment. She kept kissing him even after she had handed the joint back to him, and for a long time they had nothing to say—stopping for a drag, then necking again. Malcolm kissing his way down to a small cove where her neck met her white, powdered shoulders. There he just rested his head for a long time, happy enough never to move again, basking in the smell and the touch of her.

He raised his head at last to see that she was looking at him, the whites of her dark eyes shining. All around them the room seemed to pulsate agreeably. It was a small space, furnished only with the bed and a chest of drawers, a single chair, but there was a large, blue window—its color the rich, glowing purple-blue that was the last shade of night.

Malcolm stood up and walked over to it, but by the time he got there it was already changing, just replaced by the tattered gray first light of morning. He looked out, down over the Harlem Valley—the rooftops of the tenements, and the bigger, blocky apartment houses with their cone-shaped water towers squatting on top of them like little party hats. A few milk trucks, and the earliest, horse-drawn vegetable and fish carts making their way through the gray streets. The taxis still swooshing their way around them, people in suits and silk dresses still coming out of bars and up from basement after-hours joints.

It's already going again,
Malcolm wondered,
or don't it ever stop?
He remembered dimly that his train was supposed to be leaving early this morning, but he was not going anywhere.

“What do you see?” Miranda called lightly to him from the bed, and he came back to her. “What you lookin' at, baby?”

Something in her voice seemed different, just for a moment, and he glanced at her sharply before he shrugged and sat back down, taking the joint from her again—still trying to understand what seemed so familiar about her.

“Just all of it,” he said. “All of it.”

“You up here alone?” she asked him solicitously—her white girl's voice clear and churchy once again. “You have any family? Any friends?”

“Nah. Just those guys from the train.”

He sat up a little straighter then, turning to her with his eyes bright.

“I'm gonna be a entertainer, too, you know.”

“That so?”

He thought at first that she might be making fun of him, but then she reached out and stroked the side of his head again. He took another big toke and decided to tell her all about it, the words pouring out of him.

“That's right. Just like my half-brother. Earl Little Junior. Maybe you heard of him? He used to sing under the name Jimmy Carlton sometimes?”

“Can't say that I have.”

“Well, that's prob'ly 'cause he dead. He died a couple years back, they said it was tuberculosis, but we think he was poisoned,” Malcolm told her, lowering his head for a moment, before his eyes lit up again.

“I know these things. We all got the second sight in my family, you know. We ain't just trash. My daddy was a Garvey man, an' my mamma's an educated woman. She could always see things, you know.”

“Could she, now?”

“Yeah. She saw my daddy's death, too,” he said, and went momentarily quiet—seeing that afternoon, and the rabbit's body still running in the dirt.

Miranda leaned in closer and put an arm around him, and suddenly he was surrounded again by the flowery smell of her skin.

“Go ahead,” she said, kissing her way down his cheek to his mouth. “You can tell me anything you want.”

He couldn't help talking about it, then. That day when he was six years old, and he had come back from school to find them fighting over the rabbits again. They had kept a hutch full of them behind the house in Lansing, jackrabbits and conies and cottontails. They had kept chickens, too, and raised most of their own food on the three acres they owned before the court took it away from them. His mother would kill the chickens, all right, twisting off their heads without blinking—but she never liked to kill the rabbits. She argued that they made more money selling them out by the road, but Malcolm knew what she really believed, that the Bible held they were unclean for eating—though she didn't dare say that to her husband, who was a jackleg preacher and considered himself the final authority on all things having to do with God's word.

That day when he was six, Earl had ordered her to take one of them from the hutch for his supper, and they had waged another one of their monumental battles, ranting and throwing things at each other all through the house, and out onto the front porch. There Malcolm had waited, trembling, until they both came storming through the screen door. Barely noticing him, intent as they were on fighting each other. His father cursing, his mother weeping and spewing out insults the way she did when she was maddened beyond all reason or fear.

She was still holding the long, gray rabbit by its ears, Malcolm saw, when she stalked out on the porch. It was one of his favorites, a bunny he had named Betty, after a white girl at school he was partial to. The rabbit was still alive, writhing and struggling under his mother's tight grip, though things had a way of smashing when his mother was in this sort of rage and she was already clenching her fist around Betty's ears so tightly that it was making desperate, squeaking rabbit sounds.

She ignored it, running down the porch steps and after her husband as if in a trance. But just as she reached him, Earl had turned and yanked the animal out of her hands. Before they could do anything he had closed one large hand around the animal's head and pulled it right off—dropping both the head and the quivering, blood-gushing body of the rabbit in the bare, packed dirt of their front yard. Then he had turned and walked off again through the yard without another word, heading down the road toward town. His mother stunned into silence for the moment—staring down with Malcolm at the rabbit where it still seemed to be trying to run, its legs twitching. The head lying on one side, the rabbit's single, visible eye fluttering as it stared up blindly into the afternoon sun.

“That was when she saw it,” Malcolm told Miranda on the bed. “She saw it right in that rabbit there, an' she grabbed up her apron and she run after him.”

“Saw what?” she asked. “

‘Early!' she was yellin' after him. ‘Early! If you go, you won't come back!' ”

“And did he?”

He told her the rest of it right then, feeling warmer and more secure in her arms than he ever had in anyone's, even his mother's. He told her how his father had waved, strangely enough, at the bottom of the hill just down from their house. Turned, despite all his rage, when he heard her voice and waved just like that, as if he were only going on one of his preaching or Garvey trips for the afternoon.

He told her, too, how it had felt, waiting all through the night for his Daddy to return. His mother picking up the rabbit from the ground, skinning it and parsing it with her kitchen knives, and carefully frying up its pieces for supper as she had been told. They had all sobbed and carried on about the idea of eating Betty, and Malcolm had felt sick to his stomach at the prospect. But as the evening wore on and they got hungrier, they had eaten up their rabbit pieces, delicious in the collards and onions and butter she had cooked it in. All of them falling asleep right where they were then, at the kitchen table or in the front parlor, in the unaccustomed luxury of having enough to fill their bellies.

Only his mother had stayed up, pacing about the house, rigorously cleaning up the plates and pans. She was the only one still awake when the police car had come, its headlights shining through their windows, startling Malcolm and the rest of them from their sleep. Usually they would be told to stay low and keep quiet when the prowler came by, a visit from the police meaning courts and liens, and eviction notices. But this night his mother had run to the door in her bathrobe, screaming already when she saw the cop standing there, knowing what it meant even before he could tell her what had happened.

She had gone with him at once, had wrapped her robe tighter around her and gone with the policeman to Sparrow Hospital without another word, leaving the rest of them to sit up and talk through the night, speculating on what had happened. Wilfred and Hilda had thought their Daddy was in jail, and Philbert had thought he might be in the hospital, but Malcolm was sure already he was dead.

“I knew it right then, maybe even before he
was
dead,” he told Miranda, very seriously. “When something is about to happen, I can feel it. Nothing in this world ever catches me napping. It's the truth!”

“All right, I believe you,” she told him, gently pulling him back down to the bed, smiling sympathetically—but still not laughing at him.

“I could see him lying right out on the trolley tracks there—”

Only when the sky was the same tattered gray it was now had his mother returned, looking numbed. They were all hungry by then, their stomachs aching for some kind of breakfast, but instead they had stood silently around the kitchen listening to her tell them, in her newly numbed voice, how she had found their father—his left arm crushed and his left leg splayed open and almost cut off above the knee, barely alive by the time she arrived. Unable to say a thing, drugged up on morphine as he was—only staring up at her from the hospital bed with his one good eye, his chest heaving.

“They say he tried to step up on the trolley, and he missed his step—but we never believed that!” Malcolm told Miranda, almost shouting now to remember it. “They said he didn't see the trolley 'cause there wasn't any streetlights, an' he had one eye. But we knew who killed him!”

“Who?”

“It was the Black Legion!” Malcolm told her in a low voice now. “They killed him, 'cause he was a race man! Everybody knew that about my daddy. He was a proud black man, an' they left him to die on the trolley tracks.”

“Come here,” she said to him, but he didn't move on the bed, still thinking that maybe she was laughing at him.

“You don't know 'bout such things, bein' a white girl—”

“I know about a lot of things,” she said, and took one more toke and pressed her lips against his. Then she raised the skirt of her dress, and sat on his lap and pushed him slowly down onto the bed. Kissing him again and again as she lay over him. Carefully undoing his drape, unbuttoning his coat. Peeling off the pleats, undoing the big, gold letter “L.” She undressed him as she would a child, until he lay all but naked beneath her, and then she began to move on top of him.

He reached his hands up gingerly to feel her breasts, and she let him—but then she grabbed his wrists and made him stop when he began to squeeze too hard and enthusiastically. Still smiling at him as she lowered the strings of her yellow dress, working it slowly down until her breasts were bared to him. They were full and heavy, with areolas and nipples that were large and dark in the half-light, and he reached for her eagerly again, but she made him go slow. Holding his hands again and running them over her gently, showing him how she liked it. Sliding them on down her sides, where he could just feel the ridges of her ribs, the slope of her fine, wide hips and bottom. When she leaned down and licked and sucked on his fingers, he thought he would not be able to bear it anymore, but she just looked down and chuckled at him.

“Hold up now, Red,” she told him, and got up to shuck her tight dress the rest of the way off her body, then her panties and her shoes after it, until she climbed back on the bed altogether naked now, and still chuckling. Leaning down over him again, the gracious slope of her breasts just touching his chest.

She held herself wholly against him for a moment, like a blanket. Her sweet-smelling arms around his neck, her thighs pressed against his, the scratch of her hair against him almost unbearably promising. Then she kissed him on the mouth again, long and hard, and sat up—still teasing him, still not doing anything right away, until in his desperation he finally gave her what she was looking for:

“Put me in you,” he whispered frantically, mortified by the words even as they came out, but desperate to say them. “Put me in you!”

She laughed once more—a light, pretty sound—and began to work her hips against him.

It was over fast, but afterward she lay silently with him, stroking his cheek, his hair, his body, and soon they began again. This time it went slower, and he was astonished and gleeful over her reaction, and this time, afterward, they lay grinning together, almost nose to nose, with her arm around his neck and his hand still on her hip.

“Goddamn, goddamn,” he said, unable to get over it. “It was never
nothin'
like this. Goddamn!”

After that they talked for a long time again, and though he had regretted at first saying anything at all about his mother or his father, he told her still more—things he had never thought he would tell anyone. He told her how soon after Earl had died, his mother had walked over to Mrs. Stohrer's, a white neighbor she liked and often confided in about the travails of her husband, and pulled a butcher knife out from under her coat. Dangling it, point down, on her own knee for a while, before she pointed it at Anna Stohrer and explained how white people had killed her husband, and now, she was sorry, but she had to take a white life in return. Mrs. Stohrer had been frightened enough to pick up her chair in self-defense, but just then her husband had come in and his mother had run back out into the still, Michigan night. The Stohrers had not pressed charges, but stories about the incident had begun to circulate throughout Lansing, and then down through the Pleasant Cove school, and that was when Malcolm had first begun hearing from white people that his mother was crazy.