“Maybe that’s what makes them stupid.”
Joe looked up.
“You want a job?” Shank grinned. “I’ll give you a job, baby. Sales work. You pick your own hours and you make all the bread you want. Get dragged and you take the day off. Get hungry and you work overtime. No sweat, not anywhere up or down the line. I’ll give you a job if you’re hungry. But don’t go square on me. Don’t clerk in a shop or wait tables in a coffee joint. If you want to work you might as well make it pay.”
“You mean selling.”
“What else?”
“Selling pot,” Joe said. “I would have asked you. I didn’t think you had enough trade to pass around.”
Shank’s smile spread.
“Selling pot,” Joe repeated. “That’s one easy circuit. Anita might not go for it. She’s funny about that. But she’ll learn. It’s good bread and it’s easy. You sure you’ll cut me in on it?”
“Sure. But you’re not clear on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s not pot.”
“No? You branching out? Selling peyote, bennies, that type of stuff? I didn’t know there was that kind of bread in it. Peyote and bennies are almost legal.”
“Not peyote,” Shank said. “Not benzedrine, not goof balls, not dexies. Something else.”
He took Joe by the arm. “Come here,” he said, leading him to the dresser. He pulled open the drawer, took out a small cardboard box, opened it.
Joe stared.
“Heroin,” Shank said.
“That’s evil stuff, Shank. I don’t want to fool around with it.”
“Who fools? I don’t fool, man. I sell. A king-size difference. My customers like me. Everybody likes me. No sweat and no bother. You know the mark-up on this stuff? Fifty, seventy-five percent. Nice big margin. Can’t lose, man.”
“You can go to jail.”
“They give tickets for jaywalking, baby. I still cross in the middle of the block. You can’t swing with all the laws, Joe. You got to play it the way it has to be played. It’s the only way.”
Shank pursed his lips. It amazed him the way he always felt years older than Joe although chronologically it was the other way around. Now, I’m hiring Joe as a salesman after having ceremoniously raped Joe’s woman not too long ago. Shank was getting a special kick.
“I can understand it,” Shank said. “I been selling hard stuff since the Mau-Mau took his fall. My new connection put me wise to it. I was bugged at first. Nervous. Everybody on the street looked like law to me, every shadow a detective with a big gold badge and a cannon in his holster. You get used to it. The money is very tall and the customers come to you instead of the other way around. You get used to it and you get to like it. A man has a pocket load of horse and he never starves, Joe. Money in the bank. Think about it.”
Joe picked up one of the capsules, held it between his thumb and forefinger. Anita wouldn’t like his handling horse, he was certain. It was nothing they had ever talked about, but it was one of those things she was against, automatically.
But he also knew Shank was right about a job being no good for Joe. And Anita and he couldn’t move out on Shank unless they had money. And they had to move out or Anita would move on her own.
Why not let her move and forget it? He wondered about that and couldn’t come up with anything definite. In a number of ways the chick was an utter drag. No doubt about it—she was holding on, hanging on, wanting to change him, to grab him by the neck until he turned into a husband. But that was natural. She was a chick and chicks were like that. It was a question only of who would get there first, whether he could change her before she changed him. She was already very different from the innocent little virgin who had traipsed down to the Village to peer at the funny people.
And she would change some more.
But now it was Joe’s turn to make a concession. He and the girl would find an apartment. And he would sell for Shank. He could be cool about it. The police would never catch him.
“I’m in,” he said finally.
“Solid. We go out together tomorrow. I’ll hit you with a customer or two. Introduce you. Then you take the junk from me and sell it to them and we work out a split. I figure a straight split of fifty-fifty on the profits is straight enough. How about you?”
“Whatever you say.”
“You’ll make a few bills a week once you get going. Five or six times what they would pay you for clerking in a shop somewhere. It’s good money. Then you and the chick can take your own apartment. Hell, on that kind of bread you can take a good apartment. Maybe something in the West Village. Or uptown. Anywhere. Furnish it up nice. She would like that.”
“She probably would.”
“Women are that way,” Shank said. “You probably worry about her not liking this gig. Well, she won’t. I can tell you that right now.”
“I know.”
“But she’ll get used to it. She likes certain things. A nice pad, good furniture, a fridge full of food, a little money to blow on clothes. Give her all that and she’ll forget where the bread comes from. It’s amazing the way a chick can forget what she wants to forget.”
“I suppose so.”
“Money,” Shank said. “You know what I been doing? Been playing it cool, Joe. Got a bank account. Bank way uptown, another name on the account. The extra money goes there. Every week some more money goes in the account. In a couple of years I get out. Empty the account, put the dough in a money belt and disappear. I wind up in another town in another part of the country. Good clothes, lots of money. A stranger with plenty of money and a lot on the ball. I find my own place. Buy a club, maybe. Something like that. A fresh start with no questions and nobody who knows who I am. A new name and a new world. All ready to roll for me.”
“I didn’t know that. I thought you spent everything.”
“You thought wrong.”
“You got all the angles working for you,” Joe said. “I don’t know if I’ll do it that way. Just make the money and spend it. Take it easy.”
“You make your own life,” Shank said thoughtfully.
“It’s up to you. People get what they want. That’s how it goes, nine times out of ten.”
Anita was up in Harlem. She had taken the train there when she had left Joe; for perhaps an hour she had walked familiar streets and had seen familiar people. She had talked to some, for a moment or two, until there had been the mutual feeling of estrangement.
Now, sadly, Anita returned to the subway station. Harlem was another world now, the girl could not escape concluding. She no longer knew the people living there. She had become a part and parcel of Saint Marks Place. She lived with Joe and Shank. And you could never go back, she ruefully reflected. Not in a million years. You couldn’t reset the clock. Back on the train, back to Saint Marks Place, back to Joe. But certain things would have to change, Anita determined. She and Joe would have to secure an apartment of their own. Either that or, by God, she would move to a furnished room and live her own life. She wanted Joe, needed Joe, maybe loved Joe. But enough was enough and she had definitely, certainly, positively had more than enough. Enough of Shank, enough of the apartment on Saint Marks Place, enough of aimless living. There had to be another way to find yourself. You could find yourself without losing both yourself and the world in the process.
The train released her and in a few minutes she found herself back in the apartment. Joe and Shank were waiting for her.
“Something to tell you,” Joe said. “Got a job. We can have our own place now.”
At first Anita did not believe him. Then the news soaked in and her lips turned up in an automatic smile. Their own place, she exulted. Joe with a job. Their own life, and it could be a good life now, a clean life.