“Catch, you God-damned son of a bitch, Lord forgive me,” he raved at the reluctant motor. “Catch, you mother-raping bastard son of a bitch of a God-damned car — Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean it.”
He saw Jodie coming down the dimly lit hall, growing bigger and bigger in the rectangular perspective.
“Lord, have mercy,” Jackson prayed.
Jodie came out of the doorway in a long flying leap, the knife blade flashing in the gloom. He hit the pavement, skidded toward the curb, bent forward and flailing the air with both hands as if trying to halt his charge on the edge of a precipice, got his balance and turned as the old Cadillac motor roared.
Jackson shifted into drive and put weight on the treadle; the old hearse took off with a heavy whoomping sound, so fast the right edge of the front bumper hit the left rear-fender of the pickup truck before Jackson got control, bent the fender into a mangled fin that scratched a river of scars on the black side of the hearse as it roared past, barely missing an iron stanchion of the overhead trestle as it turned west into 130th Street.
“One more shave that close, Lord, and this brother ain’t going to be here long,” Jackson muttered as he wrapped his short fat arms about the wheel and watched the street come up over the hood.
19
When Imabelle came downstairs and left Goldy and her man, Jackson, struggling with her trunk of gold ore, she glanced briefly at the parked hearse, giggled again, and started running down Park Avenue toward the 125th Street Station.
She didn’t know the train schedule, but there would be a train leaving for Chicago.
“This sweet girl is going to be on it,” she said to herself.
The 125th Street Station sat beneath the trestle like an artificial island, facing 125th Street. The double-track line widened into four tracks as it passed overhead on the gloomy, dimly-lit wooden platform. Passengers alighting there for the first time had the impulse to turn about and climb back into the train. The platform shook like palsy and the loose boards rattled like dry bones every time a train passed.
From the platform could be seen the lighted strip of 125th Street running across the island from the Triborough Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Brooklyn, to the 125th Street ferry across the Hudson River into New Jersey.
At street level the hot, brightly-lit waiting room was crammed with wooden benches, news-stands, lunch counters, slot machines, ticket windows, and aimless people. At the rear a double stairway ascended to the loading platform, with toilets underneath. Behind, out of sight, difficult to locate, impossible to get to, was the baggage room.
The surrounding area was choked with bars, flea-ridden flophouses called hotels, all-night cafetarias, hop dens, whorehouses, gambling joints, catering to all the whims of nature.
Black and white folks rubbed shoulders day and night, over the beer-wet bars, getting red-eyed and rambunctious from the ruckus juice and fist-fighting in the street between the passing cars. They sat side by side in the neon glare of the food factories, eating things from the steam tables that had no resemblance to food.
Whores buzzed about the area like green flies over stewing chitterlings.
The whining voices of blues singers, coming from the nightmare-lighted jukeboxes, floated in noisome air:
Muggers with scarred faces cased the lone pedestrians like hyenas watching lions feast.
Purse snatchers grabbed a poke and ran toward the dark beneath the trestle, trying to dodge the cops’ bullets pinging against the iron stanchions. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t.
White gangsters, four and six together in the bullet-proof limousines, coming and going from the syndicate headquarters down the street, passed the harness cops in the patrol cars, giving them look for look.
Inside the station plainclothes detectives were on twenty-four hour duty. Outside on the street a patrol car was always in sight.
But Imabelle was more scared of Hank and Jodie than she was of the cops. She had never been mugged or fingerprinted. All the cops had ever wanted from her was a piece. Imabelle was a girl who believed that a fair exchange was no robbery.
She had her black coat buttoned tight, but running made the skirt flare, exposing a teasing strip of red dress.
A middle-aged church-going man, good husband and father of three school-age daughters, on his way to work, dressed in clean, starched overalls and an army jumper, heard the tapping of her heels on the pavement when he stepped from his ground-floor tenement.
“A mighty light-footed whore,” he mumbled to himself.
When he came out onto the sidewalk he looked around and saw the flash of her high-yellow face and the tantalizing strip of red skirt in the spill of street light. He caught a sudden live-wire edge. He couldn’t help it. His wife had been ailing and he hadn’t had his ashes hauled in God knows when. As he looked at that fine yaller gal tripping his way, his teeth shone in his black face like a lighthouse on the sea.
“You is for me, baby,” he said in a big bass voice, grabbing her by the arm. He was willing to put out five bucks.
Without breaking the flow of her motion she smacked him in his face with her black pocketbook.
The blow startled him more than it hurt. He hadn’t meant her any harm; he just wanted to give the girl a play. But when he thought about a whore hitting a church man like himself, he became enraged. He closed in and clutched her.
“Don’t you hit me, whore.”
“Turn me loose, you black mother-raper,” she fumed, struggling furiously in his grip.
He was a garbage collector and strong as a horse. She couldn’t break free.
“Don’t cuss me, whore, ’cause I’m going to get some of you whether you like it or not,” he mouthed in a red raving passion of rage and lust, aiming to throw her to the pavement and rape her then and there.
“You going’ to get some of your mama, you big mother-raper,” she cursed, digging a switchblade knife, similar to Jodie’s, from her coat pocket. She slashed him across the cheek.
He jumped back, clinging to her with one hand, and felt his cheek with the other. He took away his bloody hand and looked at the blood on it. He looked surprised. It was his own blood.
“You cut me, you whore,” he said in a surprised voice.
“I’ll cut you again, you mother-raper,” she said, and began slashing at him in a feminine fury.
He released her and backed away, striking at the knife with his bare hands as though trying to beat off a wasp.
“What’s the matter with you, whore?” he was saying, but his voice was drowned by the thunder of a train approaching the station. Suddenly the whistle blew like a human scream.
It scared her so much she jumped back and stared at the slashed man as though it had been he who had screamed.
“I’ll kill you, you whore,” he said, preparing to charge her knife.
She knew she couldn’t make him run, couldn’t cut him down, and if he overpowered her he’d kill her. She turned and ran toward the station, swinging the open knife.
He ran after her, trailing blood from his face and hands.
“Don’t let ’im catch you, baby,” someone called encouragement from the dark.
The train overtook them, thundered by overhead, shaking the earth, shaking her running ass, shaking the blood from his wounds like scattered rain drops. It started grinding to a stop. The thunder terrified her; the brackish sound filled her mouth with acid.
She threw the knife into the gutter and ran past the line of waiting taxicabs, the cruising whores, the colored loiterers; turned, without stopping, through the side entrance into the waiting room, ran back to the women’s toilet underneath the stairs, and locked herself inside.