MINUS 065 AND COUNTING

Dreaming sleep had just begun when his tight-strung senses ripped him back to wakefulness. Confused, in a dark place, the beginning of the nightmare held him for a moment and he thought that some huge police dog was coming for him, a terrifying organic weapon seven feet high. He almost cried aloud before Stacey made the real world fall into place by hissing:

“If he broke my fuckin light I’m gonna-”

The boy was violently shushed. The cloth across the entrance rippled, and Richards turned on the light. He was looking at Stacey and another black. The new fellow was maybe eighteen, Richards guessed, wearing a cycle jacket, looking at Richards with a mixture of hate and interest.

A switchblade clicked out and glittered in Bradley’s hand. “If you’re heeled, drop it down.”

“I’m not.”

“I don’t believe that sh-” he broke off, and his eyes widened. “Hey. You’re that guy on the Free-Vee. You offed the YMCA on Hunington Avenue.” The lowering blackness of his face was split by an involuntary grin. “They said you fried five cops. That probably means fifteen.”

“He come outta the manhole,” Stacey said importantly. “I knew it wasn’t the devil right away. I knew it was some honky sumbitch. You gonna cut him, Bradley?”

“Just shut up an let men talk.” Bradley came the rest of the way inside, squatting awkwardly, and sat across from Richards on a splintery orange crate. He looked at the blade in his hand, seemed surprised to see it still there, and closed it up.

“You’re hotter than the sun, man,” he said finally.

“That’s true.”

“Where you gonna get to?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to get out of Boston.”

Bradley sat in silent thought. “You gotta come home with me an Stacey. We gotta talk, an we can’t do it here. Too open.”

“All right,” Richards said wearily. “I don’t care.”

“We go the back way. The pigs are cruising tonight. Now I know why.”

When Bradley led the way out, Stacey kicked Richards sharply in the shin. For a moment Richards stared at him, not understanding, and then remembered. He slipped the boy three New Dollars, and Stacey made it disappear.

MINUS 064 AND COUNTING

The woman was very old; Richards thought he had never seen anyone as old. She was wearing a cotton print housedress with a large rip under one arm; an ancient, wrinkled dug swayed back and forth against the rip as she went about making the meal that Richards’s New Dollars had purchased. The nicotine-yellowed fingers diced and pared and peeled. Her feet, splayed into grotesque boat shapes by years of standing, were clad in pink terrycloth slippers. Her hair looked as if it might have been self-waved by an iron held in a trembling hand; it was pushed back into a kind of pyramid by the twisted hairnet which had gone askew at the back of her head. Her face was a delta of time, no longer brown or black, but grayish, stitched with a radiating galaxy of wrinkles, pouches, and sags. Her toothless mouth worked craftily at the cigarette held there, blowing out puffs of blue smoke that seemed to hang above and behind her in little bunched blue balls. She puffed back and forth, describing a triangle between counter, skillet, and table. Her cotton stockings were rolled at the knee, and above them and the flapping hem of her dress varicose veins bunched in clocksprings.

The apartment was haunted by the ghost of long-departed cabbage.

In the far bedroom, Cassie screamed, whooped, and was silent. Bradley had told Richards with a kind of angry shame that he should not mind her. She had cancer in both lungs and recently it had spread upward into her throat and down into her belly. She was five.

Stacey had gone back out somewhere.

As he and Bradley spoke together, the maddening aroma of simmering ground beef, vegetables, and tomato sauce began to fill the room, driving the cabbage back into the corners and making Richards realize how hungry he was.

“I could turn you in, man. I could kill you an steal all that money. Turn in the body. Get a thousand more bucks and be on easy street.”

“I don’t think you could do it,” Richards said. “I know I couldn’t.”

“Why’re you doing it, anyway?” Bradley asked irritably. “Why you being their sucker? You that greedy?”

“My little girl’s name is Cathy,” Richards said. “Younger than Cassie. Pneumonia. She cries all the time, too.”

Bradley said nothing.

“She could get better. Not like… her in there. Pneumonia’s no worse than a cold. But you have to have medicine and a doctor. That costs money. I went for the money the only way I could.”

“You still a sucker,” Bradley said with flat and somehow uncanny emphasis. “You suckin off half the world and they comin in your mouth every night at six-thirty. Your little girl would be better off like Cassie in this world.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Then you ballsier than me, man. I put a guy in the hospital once with a rupture. Some rich guy. Cops chased me three days. But you ballsier than me.” He took a cigarette and lit it. “Maybe you’ll go the whole month. A billion dollars. You’d have to buy a fuckin freight train to haul it off.”

“Don’t swear, praise Gawd,” the old woman said from across the room where she was slicing carrots.

Bradley paid no attention. “You an your wife an little girl would be on easy street then. You got two days already.”

“No,” Richards said. “The game’s rigged. You know those two things I gave Stacey to mail when he and your ma went out for groceries? I have to mail two of those every day before midnight.” He explained to Bradley about the forfeit clause, and his suspicion that they had traced him to Boston by postmark.

“Easy to beat that.”

“How?”

“Never mind. Later. How you gonna get out of Boston? You awful hot. Made ’em mad, blowin up their oinkers at the YMCA. They had Free-Vee on that tonight. An those ones you took with the bag over your head. That was pretty sharp. Ma!” he finished irritably, “when’s that stuff gonna be ready? We’re fallin away to shadows right before ya!”

“She comin on,” Ma said. She plopped a cover over the rich, slowly bubbling mass and walked slowly into the bedroom to sit by the girl.

“I don’t know,” Richards said. “I’ll try to get a car, I guess. I’ve got fake papers, but I don’t dare use them. I’ll do something-wear dark glasses-and get out of the city. I’ve been thinking about going to Vermont and then crossing over into Canada.”

Bradley grunted and got up to put plates on the table. “By now they got every highway going out of Beantown blocked. A man wearin dark glasses calls tension to himself. They’ll turn you into monkeymeat before you get six miles.”

“Then I don’t know,” Richards said. “If I stay here, they’ll get you for an accessory.”

Bradley began spreading dishes. “Suppose we get a car. You got the squeezin green. I got a name that isn’t hot. There’s a spic on Milk Street that’ll sell me a Wint for three hundred. I’ll get one of my buddies to drive it up to Manchester. It’ll be cool as a fool in Manchester because you’re bottled up in Boston. You eatin, Ma?”

“Yes an praise Gawd.” She waddled out of the bedroom. “Your sister is sleepin a little.”

“Good.” He ladled up three dishes of hamburger gumbo and then paused. “Where’s Stacey?”

“Said he was goin to the drug,” Ma said complacently, shoveling gumbo into her toothless maw at a blinding speed. “Said he goan to get medicine.”

“If he gets busted, I’ll break his ass,” Bradley said, sitting heavily.

“He won’t,” Richards said. “He’s got money.”

“Yeah, maybe we don’t need no charity money, graymeat.”

Richards laughed and salted his meal. “I’d probably be nabbed now if it wasn’t for him,” he said. “I guess it was earned money.”