“That stuff,” Tremont said, “suckin’ us into the lowdown — coon funny, coon foolish, wind him up and he smile, he shuffle. When I was a kid I said nothin’ ever gonna make me do that. But it made Jim somebody. He always said the Barber was a new thing in colored theater. Mr. Dudley played the barber who dreams he wants to shave the president in the White House and then he gets to do it, even though it’s just a dream. And Big Jim said to me, ‘Havin’ a story to go with the ragtime and the cakewalk, that was a different kind of show. We made a little bit of history and we got on Broadway and pretty soon a lot of colored shows had stories and they quit doin’ the old minstrel stuff.’”
“I used to be a barber,” George said. “I shaved the Mayor.”
“The Mayor,” Tremont said. “Big Jim knew all the Mayors, all the politicians. He was the most famous black man in this town, flush and connected, ask Jim and he’ll fix it, if you’re on his side. Hot time in the old town tonight, if Jim says so, and he never had no shame, other people had shame. Jim sang ‘Shine’ so much it got in my brain and now it don’t matter what it means. Means Big Jim to me.”
“Politics,” Trixie said. “Tremont, why you foolin’ with that five-dollar vote? If you needed money you shoulda voted twice and got two fives, not give it back. You ain’t cut out for politics.”
“Never could get into it like Big Jim,” Tremont said. “He got me two, three city jobs but those paychecks wasn’t enough to buy a pair of shoes.”
So Tremont worked his own way, shoveling coal in a South End steam laundry, warehouse helper, short order cook in Chloe’s diner. At night he dressed up, a dude like Big Jim, and played in the Skin game that Rabbit ran in the basement of his pool room on Madison Avenue, a lucky player, Tremont. After a while Rabbit hired him to play for the house and that was very fine until too many players lost too much too fast, fastest card game there is, and Patsy McCall sent the cops in — no more Skin in Albany. Small loss for Tremont. His hand and his eye, they were real quick, but he wasn’t cut out to be a hustler any more than he was cut out for politics. Something direct about Tremont. He never understood it but it kept him straight. He got to be a broiler man in a new French restaurant, okay money.
Big Jim closed his club in the late ’40s, gettin’ old. Also nightclubs were dying from the cabaret tax and everybody was stayin’ home to watch TV. Jim’s wife, Cora, who taught in a colored grammar school, never liked The Gut, so Jim bought a house in the West End of the city, miles from The Gut, but two days before they were going to move in somebody torched it, and Cora went into a depression. Patsy came to see Jim after the arson and gave him a house on Arbor Hill for Cora. It was in tip-top shape and down the block from the Hawkins family, quite a few coloreds up there by now. Jim didn’t own it but he never paid rent or taxes and he spent his last years there with Cora and he needed her. He went flooey at the end, told people he could fly and showed how he did it, wore a watch cap, arms tight to his side like doing a sailor dive. When it rained he took credit for moving the clouds because the flowers kept saying how dry they were.
When Tremont came home from Korea he moved into the Dongan Avenue house and when he married Mary he moved her in too and they had a few good years until Big Jim passed and then Cora went away too, and one day Tremont got a tax bill in the mail. He went to the ward leader and told them who he was, and about Jim, and the ward leader said that’s right, Big Jim had a free ride, but he’s dead. Pay your taxes, Tremont, which he did for a while and then couldn’t, so long, house. Things went like that, jobs, then no jobs, and he and Mary moved someplace else, two rooms. Tremont found Peanut and brought him home from the vacant lot and Mary sewed good for uptown women with money and Tremont drove a truck for a new laundry, so they both had an income and they hung in there and things weren’t that bad. But it slid downhill and there was wine to cool the slide. Mary slid faster than Tremont, who lost his job driving the truck when the Teamsters organized the laundry and wouldn’t let him into the union. He had to go on welfare when Mary got sick and he kept getting busted for drink and they were living in a rat hole and life started to piss Tremont off.
He couldn’t steal and wouldn’t hustle and he got so desperate in the shithouse they were living in that he said a prayer to Jesus, “Dear Jesus, please don’t let me be found dead in this place, and don’t let me ever be taken in by front men or front women.” Those front men never took in Tremont’s daddy, who was hip. So Tremont decided from now on he would be new: I’m gonna do somethin’ that isn’t what somebody says I’m supposed to do. I’m gonna do somethin’ I want to do, or think I want to do, or don’t know I want to do but I’m gonna do it. Nobody said I hadda walk on Roy’s picket line or hang with the Brothers or go to Claudia’s and be a poll watcher or take five and give it back. But sometimes you’re ready for a little politics even if you don’t know you’re ready for it.
Nobody told Tremont to take that gun and go shoot target and then shoot those bums beatin’ on Rosie. Zuki just give him the gun and says we’re gonna have fun, scare a few people. But then he says to Tremont, we oughta shoot the Mayor.
We?
Yes, you.
Whoa, says Tremont, I don’t do what somebody says I oughta do, and when he took a long look he saw clear that Zuki was a front man. And Tremont had already took money and a gun from him. What the hell is wrong with you, Tremont? He started to drink again, nonstop, and when he got that pain he went down to Dongan Avenue and flopped on the stoop of his father’s old house that he couldn’t get into anymore and stayed there till Quinn and the Bish come by, and he told them about the gun and the Mayor.
Trixie tried to faint from shock but it wasn’t in her repertoire.
“Shoot the Mayor, Tremont? Shoot the Mayor?”
Tremont poured himself a shot of Pinch and held up the bottle. “I know you like the Mayor, Trix. Don’t you send him two cases of this stuff every Easter and Christmas? Seems I heard you say that.”
“The Mayor?” George said, “Is that who you want to shoot, Tremont?”
“Don’t wanna shoot the Mayor, George. Some fella said I should but I don’t think so.”
“Fella named Zangara shot Mayor Cermak of Chicago,” George said. “He was aiming at FDR but he missed. He was an Italian with stomach trouble and he lost two hundred at the dog races. They gave him eighty years but when Mayor Cermak died they sizzled him in Old Sparky.”
“Do the police know about the gun, Tremont?” Trixie asked.
“They might. It’s gettin’ around.”
“Then you gotta get outa here right now. I don’t want no part of this. No way I can explain you away if they come lookin’. And Rose, you gotta find your way home. What about that bleedin’? You bandage it up?”
“I can’t go out there yet,” Rosie said. “Gimme a little while.”
Matt had come back and was listening. “All we need is twenty minutes, Trixie. The car is coming.”
Trixie stood up. “Take ten and go down the back stairs and wait. Don’t let Tremont out front with that gun.”
“You got room for one more in that car?” Rosie asked.
“Sure,” Matt said. “It’ll be a squeeze.”
“You leave them be, Rose,” Trixie said. “You done enough. You just sit a while.”
Vivian had been studying the parlor, the mauve drapes, the wallpaper with the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe, the Maja painting over the mantel, the soft, indirect lighting, the oriental rug; and Trixie herself with those green crescent earrings and six bracelets and the long gown Vivian now sees is silk, and her lovely cleavage that was there but not overly, and her legs so elegant in those tall, black heels. Over sixty, must be, but so classy, so sexy. Maybe Vivian could take lessons.