I WAS DOWN AT THE BLUE LIGHT JOINT THAT NIGHT, FINISHING OFF SOME ribs and listening to some blues, when in walked Alma May. She was looking good too. Had a dress on that fit her the way a dress ought to fit every woman in the world. She was wearing a little flat hat that leaned to one side, like an unbalanced plate on a waiter’s palm. The high heels she had on made her legs look tight and way all right.
The light wasn’t all that good in the joint, which is one of its appeals. It sometimes helps a man or woman get along in a way the daylight wouldn’t stand, but I knew Alma May enough to know light didn’t matter. She’d look good wearing a sack and a paper hat.
There was something about her face that showed me right off she was worried, that things weren’t right. She was glancing left and right, like she was in some big city trying to cross a busy street and not get hit by a car.
I got my bottle of beer, left out from my table, and went over to her.
Then I knew why she’d been looking around like that. She said, “I was looking for you, Richard.”
“Say you were,” I said. “Well, you done found me.”
The way she stared at me wiped the grin off my face.
“Something wrong, Alma May?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I got to talk, though. Thought you’d be here, and I was wondering you might want to come by my place.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“All right.”
“But don’t get no business in mind,” she said. “This isn’t like the old days. I need your help, and I need to know I can count on you.”
“Well, I kind of like the kind of business we used to do, but all right, we’re friends. It’s cool.”
“I hoped you’d say that.”
“You got a car?” I said.
She shook her head. “No. I had a friend drop me off.”
I thought, Friend? Sure.
“All right then,” I said, “let’s strut on out.”
I GUESS YOU COULD SAY IT’S A SHAME ALMA MAY MAKES HER MONEY TURNING tricks, but when you’re the one paying for the tricks, and you are one of her satisfied customers, you feel different. Right then, anyway. Later, you feel guilty. Like maybe you done peed on the Mona Lisa. Cause that gal, she was one fine dark-skin woman who should have got better than a thousand rides and enough money to buy some eats and make some coffee in the morning. She deserved something good. Should have found and married a man with a steady job that could have done all right by her.
But that hadn’t happened. Me and her had a bit of something once, and it wasn’t just business, money changing hands after she got me feeling good. No, it was more than that, but we couldn’t work it out. She was in the life and didn’t know how to get out. And as for deserving something better, that wasn’t me. What I had were a couple of nice suits, some two-tone shoes, a hat, and a gun—.45-caliber automatic, like they’d used in the war a few years back.
Alma May got a little on the dope, too, and though she shook it, it had dropped her down deep. Way I figured, she wasn’t never climbing out of that hole, and it didn’t have nothing to do with dope now. What it had to do with was time. You get a window open now and again, and if you don’t crawl through it, it closes. I know. My window had closed some time back. It made me mad all the time.
We were in my Chevy, a six-year-old car, a forty-eight model. I’d had it reworked a bit at a time: new tires, fresh windshield, nice seat covers, and so on. It was shiny and special.
We were driving along, making good time on the highway, the lights racing over the cement, making the recent rain in the ruts shine like the knees of old dress pants.
“What you need me for?” I asked.
“It’s a little complicated,” she said.
“Why me?”
“I don’t know . . . You’ve always been good to me, and once we had a thing goin’.”