Authors: George Elliott Clarke
George & Rue (10 page)
W
HEN Rue saw Silver, he saw red. He saw a man with an invisible X marked on the back side of the right side of his skull. Like on a treasure map. Maybe Silver’s wallet was pregnant with a small fortune in small bills. And the hammer was frankly iron, steely in its certainty, and it could bang up silver.
Rue slid in front, George in back.
Silver settled back, asked, “Where to, Georgie?” George directed Burgundy, who he’d known for three and a half years, out to the Wilsey Road: a perfect place for wielding a hammer violently, in peace.
Rue was just as cash-famished. Rue was desperate to get his good winter clothes out the cleaners. He had, oh, bout eight dollars’ worth of
habiliments
stuck fast there. Rue was too dapper to wear borrowed, raggedy “Georgian” overalls forever. As suave as a pulp villain, he was a black knife thrusting into a penal landscape of white. He was an ebony piano key sharply out of key with the surrounding ivory ones. He craved big money in coin and paper, and bullion, not bullshit.
Face the facts: cold’d left the two lads uncomfortable and shit out of luck. Winter was leaning mean, loud, and bitchy against the walls of their drafty castle. It stank of hunger. The boys’d hunker by some fossil of a fire, its flames shivering
worse than they was. Ice in their bathwater now injected itself into their blood. It was so cold, it was blissfully warmer to trudge through snow, to push through snow, to move face-first into blazing cold amid pieces of scattering woods.
The brothers—raw, black moderns—and their driver, silvery, swung past the Harvard-styled red-bricked University of New Brunswick, its terraced and treed slope overlooking the south bank of the Saint John River. They passed factories churning out shoes, soap, canoes, toothpicks, toilet tissue, and candy, but not hiring any Negroes.
The boys advised their driver to wheel the snowed-on, obscure hillbilly routes, ostensibly in search of a bootlegger who’d sell em hooch. But the hammer was there, in Georgie’s back pocket, a freezing, constant erection he couldn’t just sit on. Georgie looked out frosty windows at the snow-dirtied, snow-blasted roads, the pines as black and thick as mourners lined up almost onto the road itself, damn near close, and his gloveless hands barely warm in his pockets. Rufus bandied words with Silver, waiting for Georgie to strike from behind, when he, Rufus, would deliver a stunning punch. He’s hooting, grimacing, teeheeing, but waiting for that opportune split second when, after a little bloodshed, just a little, the hardworking taxi man’s stash will be his—and partly Georgie’s—to spend on what they want: booze, yes; cootchies, yes; a dashing silk suit, yes (if the cash don’t run dry).
But George had second thoughts even as the taxi bill rose higher every second. After all, Silver’d driven his first baby home from the hospital, delivering wife and newborn as kindly as a doctor. Maybe more so. Still, the carpentry hammer shifted awkwardly, rigidly, but nigh imperceptibly in the right back pocket of Georgie’s overalls. He was no paragon of cogitation, but he didn’t need to be. No, he be just hungry for warmth, starving for firewood, and also needy for scratch for beer,
some silver for a slice of blueberry pie and a Coke, maybe precious silky black stockings for Blondola.
They got to Dibs Cromwell’s place on Wilsey Road, and Georgie jumped out cause he knew he couldn’t hit Silver. He had to shake off the fear. Feelin cold’d help. Georgie played off like he was serious about visiting Dibs, but he only went halfway up to the house, then returned. Rufus eyed George’s vague intentions intently. Silver calculated how much Georgie already owed him and how much tonight would up the tab.
Georgie returned and Silver ask, “Where to next?”
Georgie could feel Rufus’s icy disgust, but said, “Over the river, to Ken Morris’s, his house is diangle to Cromwell’s.” The trio motored back across Fredericton to Barker’s Point, near Eatman Avenue, to go by Morris’s place. This time, Silver stopped in front of Morris’s house cause he was havin doubts about what Georgie was doin.
Well, George stepped out, knocked, and when Morris answered, George asked, sheepish, “Ken, you know where Dibs Cromwell is?”
Morris: “Nope. Go way, Georgie.”
Rue had the will to stamp on Silver. The Boston Tailors shop downtown was selling New English and Scots Wool Gabardine Ladies’ Suits and Men’s Suits. Silver could furnish Rue with a winter wardrobe.
“Hittin Silver will be just like blowin my nose—cept much easier,” he thought. The snow glared affirmatively. But Georgie had the hammer.
Clambering again into the rear of the cab, George felt relieved. There’d be no hittin Silver tonight. Time to go home.
Silver said, “Where to this time, George?”
George said, “Home.”
Rufus coughed. “Where’d you say we was goin, Georgie?” George said, “Home.”
Rue turned to Silver. “Naw. Silver, run us up to Jehial’s.” Silver was tired of this backing and forthing. He guessed the brothers wanted bootleg.
“Boys, want to split a beer? I got nice cold ones in the trunk.” He’d take them up to Jehial’s and sell them ale too: only sixty cents a bottle.
Rufus smiled: “Sure.”
Georgie couldn’t think. The Ford blasted through the snowbound, starry night.
Silver don’t mind selling booze out his trunk, and he don’t need payment up front since, because he owns two of the four taxis in all of Fredericton, a thirsty pedestrian has got to come calling on him again. In the meantime, the interest on their beer purchase and ride may have escalated prettily.
Silver’s a good man among very few good men, a veteran of the Hitler War who came back, delivered milk, got hitched, bought a house, then got into the taxi business, buying two cars and paying a second driver. His wife—petite, sweetheart Donna—was the dispatcher. She’d taken the call that set him out on this hours-long bootleg quest. Problem was, nobody’d pour a pint or a teaspoon for these two Coloured chaps who were always out of pocket, always wastrels, and who were dumbfounding at sports, but, otherwise, were undependable lazy asses, once intoxicated.
As Silver saw it, the centuries-misplaced and ocean-displaced Negroes, stranded in New Brunswick since 1783, had a problem with
Civilization,
its culture of taxes and jails, for they dared to love
Freedom
too much, liquor and lovin too much, music and guffaws too much, and were ornery, contrary, and disrespectful. They was natchally uppity, sassy, seditious, loud. They made poetry only when making fists—or making love.
Fair to say, Silver felt no malice toward em; they were, he mused, as God had shaped em, and there was nothing white
to be done about it. They seemed to like the squalor and the shacks and the shitty work. They quit early on schools, bought junk, ate maggoty meat, and begged to haul garbage, mop up other people’s filth and vomit, or do witless jobs: shovelling snow, laying down tar, whatever it took that didn’t take brains. Often surly, they’d laugh explosively, blaring white teeth for an instant, then retreat into silence. Like chillun, they lived off this and on that. True, Silver regretted slavery, too bad it happened. He don’t think his ancestors were involved in that grotty trade. But even if they had been, so was everybody else. His duty was to ferry Negroes, on credit, to the bank (rarely), the grocery store (weekly), bootleggers (nightly). He wished em well, and he wished the Hamilton boys would settle on a destination. But that Georgie could whistle and manhandle harmonica classically, and his brother, “Rupe” or something like that, was fun—a frothing Atlantic of stories. But tonight, Georgie’s harmonica harmonized nothing. The pristine four-door Ford sedan hummed on, blackly, into the snowy, moonlit woods.
Georgie was already tastin them “bews”—as he spoke it—in his head. He were happy to place the beverage on the taxi bill. George was thinkin he’d just tell Silver he’d square up next week. On that score, Rufus was ever more visibly agitated. The plan he’d agreed on with Georgie wasn’t bein executed. No: profits were bein pissed away in beer and turned into a Sargasso of debt. He saw red. Him wanted blood, then red wine, then pussy, then his pressed pants. In that easy order. Why waste words, time, budget on drinkin some white boy’s price-hiked beer and tourin the boonies of a nowhere province in the freezing-ass winter, when you could just tap the sucker on the skull, jack his dough, commandeer his car, buy tall beer, and claim a sugary dame? There’s no question in Rue’s head about what this gab and fabrications predicted. But Georgie had the hammer,
so him should do the clippin. Rue’s lust to hear a man holler was bad enough to make himself want to holler. He peered hungrily at the side of Silver’s head, but couldn’t hardly see through the dark.
The sedan slid icily to a stop at the bottom of Poplar—or Popple’s—Hill, just off the Richibucto Road, in the driveway of Jehial States, a couple miles north of Eatman Avenue where the boys lived. It slid. To a stop. Everyone lurched forward, shifting from half-in-shadow to half-in-moonlight and back again. Blurring.
Neither bothered nor pleased, Silver whistled and, because Jehial’s house was on a slight slope, turned the car around so it was aimed at the legislature across the river. Fredericton’s lights sparkled through the winter night, competing with the stars, across the frozen-up Saint John.
The moon glowers. Silver, Rufus, and George exit the car: slick black in moonlight, sleek black against snow. Their feet go
crump, crump
through the squeaky snow. Their breaths are pale, ephemeral amoeba. Silver whistles “Auld Lang Syne"; he goes to the trunk.
George walks with a loping slouch. He’d shifted the hammer from his back pocket to the inside of his shirt, and, as he’d left the car, it’d fallen out, luckily, into plush snow. Silver, not lucky, got out the opposite side, missing the hammer.
He cracked the trunk: “How about that bottle of beer?”
George: “Okay!” He sweated inside his seemingly ice-cold blood and nerves, almost delirious that, by losing the hammer, he’d prevented further damnation.
The radio bleated hits tearful, excited. “Route 66,” “Nature Boy,” “Lush Life.” The light jangle of change in Silver’s pocket chimed with the “moon-spoon-June” jingles. The coins shifting in Silver’s pocket sounded to Rue a lot like jailer’s keys. He
shuddered. No one paid any mind. But the noise was proof of piles of cash on Silver. Rue could imagine Silver as a Royal Bank manager, flush with money flashing George VI’s mocking face. Smell of woodsmoke pungently, sight of blue smoke shifting erratically in air, taste of runny noses on upper lips. Silver opened the trunk, got the boys one beer to share. The trio did get nicely on in ale. But if anyone fell down drunk, there was a blanket in back of the car.
The stars were flint, just broken bits of light, there, on the Richibucto Road, right outside the city limits and right beside obsidian wilderness. No better spot, amen, to use a hammer. Moonlit, the wind blew cold. The moon could tree and hang itself forever. The woods they’d stopped by was chilly but welcoming. Sleep couldn’t be too far. After sharing a beer, after waking a bootlegger. In the meantime, everyone’s shivering; six hands shaking with the tall brown New Brunswick beer bottle as it goes around.
As Silver lowered his hand, the moonlight shot off the pretty chrome casing of his Rolex Victory watch, a souvenir for war vets. Brown leather bound the timepiece to Silver’s wrist, its skin as fragile as that of a butterfly. At Silver’s neck, a black glass-bead rosary flashed. Silver was a slight, short man. He could be eclipsed. He could be taken without too much force. Here was a modus operandi, more or less. Rufus glared at Georgie, said nothing.
He thought, “Don’t Silver look a lick like Elmer Fudd?”
Far as Rue was concerned, Georgie was fuckin up again. And all he had to do was bust out Silver’s brains. He was, as usual, the rough part of a smooth plan: Would George hit Silver, please, so they could go into a house and eat?
Rue said to George, “Let’s go off a ways to chat about that gal.”
Silver laughs: “Can’t a married man listen in?”
Rue says, “You’ll hear all bout it later.” He puts an arm around George and they huddle away some paces from the car. White breath and black words venting.
Georgie was feelin queasy. “Well, I dropped the hammer.”
Rudy ask, “Where?”
George said, “Other side of the car.”
Frowning disgust, Rufus now ask, “What’s wrong wit ja, Joygee? Lost yer nerve?”
George say, “Ain’t hittin Silver. He’s been a pal.”
Rufus was unmoved: “Huh. Yer yellow skin’s yellow from the bone.”
George whimpered, “You want me to knock im off?”
Rue say, “You ain’t gonna hit him, I gonna hit him. Smack the fuck outta him.”
George almost sobbed: “Jiminy Cripes! No!”
Now Rue was just disgusted. “Damn it all to Hell!”
George protest: “I can’t hit Silver. I knows him.”
Rufus affirmed, “I gettin some cash money, get ma clothes out the cleaners. That’s that.”
George stamp his feet and shuffle a bit. “Why don’t we just knock over the damned cleaners?”
Rue’d not equivocate: “We’ll split the take dollar for dollar. We’ll sit at the big table, counting out his money.”
Jittery, George yelled over to where Silver was standin, “Silver, you know any cathouses round here?”
Silver let out a big laugh: “Beer’s gettin cold!”
The Hamiltons drifted back to the car. As they approached the vehicle, and while Silver’s vision was still blocked by the open trunk and while George was musing about the moonlight, Rue noticed where the hammer lay, only slightly shrouded by snow, and figured he could retrieve it, if-when needed, without much notice. Silver say, “Cheers, boys!” The bottle circled in the brilliant dark, followed by slurps. An opera of fraternity.
The car radio crooned saxophone and tambourine; it was the gravelly crooning of Nat King Cole striking sparks off ice. Cigarette-black and brackish phlegm spat into snow. Issuing from beer-oiled throats, men’s cussings mixed together Prime Minister Saint-Laurent and shit. But nobody noticed how evil multiplies, fanning out and circulating like the money supply—M1—itself.