Snow’s good word did it for me. If he thought I deserved a snort, I probably did. I peeled the paper down, twisted the cap off, and sipped. My lips began to tingle, but I liked the stuff well enough to take an even bigger hit, which made even the doubtful Mariani say, “Atta way to do er, kid!”
I recrimped the sack and gave the bottle back to Curriden, my mouth still atingle with the furry bittersweetness of sloe berries. A fire ran from my tongue to my gut.
“You’re eating with the Pharram ladies tonight, right? Yeah, well,” Curriden said, “you’ve got to give em an hour or so to get set. Meantime, come along with Quip and Vito and me on a little victory jaunt.”
Phoebe’d said to meet her under the grandstand after the game so Curriden’s plans seemed wrong to me-but maybe he knew something I didn’t.
“It’s okay, Dum-uh, Danny. We’ll get you to the Pharram place in a hour. Drop you right at their door. Taxi ride’s on me-my gift for what you’ve helped us do, kid.” He looked at the eight or nine Hellbenders still in the locker room. “We’re four games over.500!” he shouted. “Thanks to Dumbo and his hustlin rookie pals!”
I blushed and took another slug of Curriden’s contraband firewater.
“Look, Reese,” Parris said. “Same damn color as your gin.”
My color stayed high. The furry tingle in my mouth caught an elevator and rode to my brain. I wasn’t drunk, but I was already close to tipsy. Even so, when Curriden, Parris, and Mariani whisked me out to the parking lot, skirting the area where Phoebe’d planned to meet me, it felt WRONG. Sure, Curriden’d never had it in for me, and it did seem logical Phoebe’d need some time after the game to get ready. But these rascals had kidnapped me.
Parris and Mariani had me wedged between them in the back seat of a red-and-white taxi. Curriden sat up front, playing fingertip drumrolls on the dash and giving directions. “The Strip,” I heard him say. “The Wing and Thigh.” The stadium sank away behind us like a three-masted ship going under the concealing arc of the world.
The streets boogie-woogied with energy. News of our win had run through tony white and run-down colored neighborhoods alike. Our driver, a horse-faced black man, yelled out the window at some of his friends on a street corner: “Gang way! Got me some mighty Hellbenders hyeah! Gang way, yall!”
“Hush that,” Curriden said. “We’re incognito tonight.”
What you really mean, I thought, is, it’d embarrass us all to the bottoms of our pocketbooks if Mister JayMac learned of our destination and slapped us all with fines. The tingle in my brain shredded into a dozen throbbing aches.
We drove past the farmer’s market and crossed the tracks between the business district to the north and the neon-lit part of Penticuff Strip to the south. Our driver hung a right on the eastern side of the tracks. The alley straight ahead-a tunnel of jazzy electric signs and uniformed GIs-opened out like a Mardi Gras party.
“Jesus, lookit all the sojers,” Mariani said.
Parris said, “Be nice to em and they’ll let you live.”
The driver dropped us off in front of an eatery serving fried chicken and cole slaw: The Wing & Thigh. In its window someone’d pasted up movie posters and flyers recruiting farm workers-volunteers-for the fall harvest. Curriden led me, Mariani, and Parris into The Wing & Thigh.
The place had the length and width of two or three railway coaches, with a counter down one side and ten or twelve tables against the facing wall. In the back, through the smoke eeling over the tables, a shaky staircase rose to a rickety landing; below it, a red EXIT sign glowed over the beaded curtain in the door there. A jukebox blared Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” but the smells of boiled turnip greens, pepper sauce, and frying chicken didn’t much remind me of yuletide fixings. It was July, even if just barely.
“Don’t you want a piece?” Curriden asked me.
Uh-uh. In another hour, I’d be eating with the Pharrams.
“Well, I do,” Curriden said. “Order up, Vito.” He handed Mariani a fiver-Diamond Jim Brady tipping the doorman. “Order us three he-man plates, with cole slaw, chips, and iced tea, and give me my change when I get back.”
“Where you goin?” Parris asked. His sing-song suggested he already knew. “To get Danny his piece?”
Curriden grabbed my shirt front and pulled me through that beer-sloshed alley, with its stink of vinegar and fry scald, towards the staircase. GIs looked up from their tables, and some of the gals eating chicken with them, as silk-gussied a bunch as I’d ever seen, their fingers shiny with joint fat, winked at me or reached out to pinch my flank. Mama would’ve called em hussies, and I already had a hunch-just a hunch-how The Wing & Thigh had got its name.
Beyond the door at the top of the landing was another set of stairs, flush with the outside rear wall, that climbed to an access hall right over The Wing & Thigh’s kitchen and serving area. In that hallway, Curriden and I came to a desk manned-womanned, I mean-by a female in an ivory dress with a push-up bodice and an oval cutout that showed her belly button. Don’t ask me to describe her face.
“Do for you gennelmen?” she said.
“For Danny Boy here,” Curriden said, “my little brother.”
To the woman’s right, some paired hooks with number tags on them-like you’d see in a barber shop-ran on a strip of fluted molding nailed up at shoulder height. Each pair of hooks had a woman’s name over it, but four of the names had tags reading “Not Available” on them.
“ Flossie, Jordan Kaye, Roberta, Sabrina, and Irene are all in this evening,” the woman said.
“Give him Sabrina,” Curriden said.
“Here.” The woman handed him No. 26 from the “take” hook under Sabrina’s name. “Payment, please.” Curriden paid. “Now yall may go down the hall to wait.”
So Curriden and I wove our way down the long corridor. It was furnished with four scummy fish tanks on hospital carts, calendar paintings of old plantation houses, and a worn strip of plum-colored rug. We passed several doors and entered a waiting room-a holding tank, more like-with folding chairs and a low table stacked with magazines.
Three soldiers sat in this room. No one talked or read a magazine. Two GIs looked bored. One had a nervous jiggle in his leg. Curriden and I sat down next to him. This PFC had a rash of razor nicks under his receding chin. He cut his eyes at us, then smiled real big.
“Gonna wear her out. Gonna do my steel-driving level best to split er clean in two.”
The corporal sitting next to him said, “Be lucky he don’t pop a knee before he gets in there.”
“Ha ha,” said the PFC. “What a kidder.”
Just then, it sledgehammered me I’d come to a brothel-I mean, I’d taken in all the accouterments, but now I understood Curriden meant to see me through a rite of passage. He caught me by the shirt and pulled me back down.
Down the hall, a door opened across from one of the fish tanks; a man in khaki strolled towards me to the waiting room, looked in at the five of us, and said, “Number twenty-five for Sabrina. Lady says she’s off at nine, whether her trick is or not.” He checked his watch. “I got eight till.”
“Sabrina,” the PFC said. “Whoa, that’s me!” He flashed his tag and stood up. For the first time since we’d entered, the floor stopped vibrating. “I’ll do her three times in eight minutes. She’ll be hanging on for dear life.”
Curriden grabbed the guy’s number and gave him a wadded-up dollar bill. “Pick a gal who don’t get off till later. Life’s too short to rush things.”
“Hey, gimme my number!”
“Uh-uh.” Curriden tipped him back into his chair with a soft three-fingered push and led me down the hall to Sabrina. The GI didn’t follow us-he had an extra buck and more sense than to mess with a guy as big and built as Curriden.
In the bulb-lit fish tank across from Sabrina’s room-all the light in the hall came from these tanks, dapples of cool aquamarine on the walls and floor-the fish swam in hypnotized and hypnotizing schools: fish with stripes or spots, fish with lacy wedding-gown fins and tails, fish with see-through skins and bones aglow like tiny Christmas trees.