George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  Rue glared coldly. “You think we gonna redcap? Shit! We’s gonna stay slaves forever!” He paused, then snapped: “Somebody want to shovel shit on us? Well, we’ll shovel it right back.” Rue had philosophy: “Joygee, ya gonna go on biggin up Blondola every year, letting her shit out babies year after year, bang, bang, bang, with nothin in the bank?”

  George just looked at his frozen-faced brother.

  “Ya wanna have children, Joyge, ya gotta have cash. Look at what poverty did for us! Nothin!”

  George replied: “I been working honest to provide for the wife and house.”

  Rue guffawed: “Joygee, we is just thieves, pure thieves. We steal firewood, chickens, clothes off clotheslines, even fools’ bad ideas.”

  George’s rejoinder: “Sin’s on ya like lice, Rudy.”

  Rue just smiled. “All I’m sayin is, we stun and rob a man. I ain’t sayin he gotta be hit hard enough to kill.”

  In his mind’s eye now, George saw a white man staggering, bloody and wallet-less, through a downtown alley, maybe Mazzuca’s Lane.

  The decision to go out and hit a white man real hard to get some cold cash did not require much dialogue:

  George: You was sayin …

  Rue: You know what I mean …

  George: That right there.

  Rue: It’s like that.

  So a hammer was gonna fuck up a head. Skin a skull. There was no other way to make a dollar. They could smell the money brewing in their stomachs, hear it rustling on their backs.

  But there was contentiousness. Otho—thirteen months old—ate at Mrs. Roach’s house cause there was no food in his own, and his mama was confined with his newborn sister, Desiah, cause Doc Clayton Pond’s delivery bill was unsettled. Georgie couldn’t just go back in the woods and hammer down some trees, because he had to baby Otho. He couldn’t leave Otho with Mrs. Roach every day cause she had three children of her own. Mr. G. Hamilton’d already been to the Unemployment Office in downtown Fredericton. But there was no porter job on the train, no white man hirin help, no company wantin two arms to lift, shift, and steady packages. Worse, he couldn’t hoist a beer because he didn’t have none: when your pocket’s dry, your mouth’s dry.

  George left Rue dreamin at the kitchen table in the afternoon and took a bus downtown and visited Blondola at the Fredericton General Hospital. She was lookin good, feelin better. George’d hardly peeped at his daughter, Desiah, when crippled up, white-haired Doc Pond, wobbling on his crutches, called him out into the corridor and said, “Georgie, we’re gonna keep your wife and baby here until you pay my bill or give me a welfare slip from city council.” Georgie didn’t go back in the hospital room, but faced the chilly Friday, January 7th air of 1949, and caught the bus at King and Westmoreland.

  He got him home at about 4 p.m. Where Rue was, he hadn’t a clue. His feet and hands were so cold he could hardly coax fire out the matches and the couple sticks of wood he’d boosted in the neighbourhood. Then, he tidied the embarrassingly barren table and trudged over to Mrs. Roach’s to pick up Otho. When Georgie entered the Roaches’ place, he was surprised—and not—to see Rue, sittin at Mrs. Roach’s big maple table, finishin up a steamin plate of beans and wieners. Weren’t Rue evil enough to reach for a pitcher of maple syrup and pour a gallon of it, slowly, cruelly, over that hot, fulfilling food, but to do it casually too, as if it were not a feast? Rue smiled, then took Mrs. Roach’s delicious homemade brown bread, dipped it in molasses, scooped up some beans, and ate like a king. Unfair: him could solicit anything out of anybody, but here was Georgie, starvin.

  A fortyish, cedar-skinned, big, amiable woman, Mrs. Roach didn’t offer George food, but she let him sit by the stove for warmth, then she went into a bedroom to get Otho. George ask Rue what he’d done all day.

  Rue snapped, “Slep.”

  George say, “Why doncha help put sumpin into the house?”

  Rufus, coldly: “I’s no slave.”

  Mrs. Roach come back, hand goo-gooing Otho to Georgie, ask, “Why doncha play sweet on your harmonica, Joygee?” George obliged. He played his Dante Marine Band harmonica, dirty, frothily, as if he were on stage at the Capitol Theatre in Saint John, and Mrs. Roach grinned and patted her hefty thighs in rhythm. He blew out the blues songs that he’d perfected on the high seas during the war: “Burning Water” and “Death Be Gentle.” (Those hungry for true blues remembered George Hamilton was always anxious to please.) But Georgie was too shy and too ashamed to beg Mrs. Roach for biscuits and beans.

  The brothers lingered at Madame Roach’s abode until her man, Roach, trudged in from the woods, at about 5 p.m., along with Jehial States, who was so crafty as to seem a simpleton, but was actually so astute as to work only when he wished and to do his best work when he was least sober. Roach, a fiftyish lumberman, plaid-shirted, plaid-jacketed, blue-jeaned, and work-booted, with a stocking cap on and brown plug tobacco and a black pipe in a pocket, him had a bottle of red wine and a dozen tall beer he set generously on the table. Then they all got busy—except the missus and the children—sipping wine and tippling beer and blaring blues to harmonica. But one man was hungry and another was angry.

  The boys got wine and beer from Roach, to settle their blasphemated guts. By 7 p.m., Roach swayed so elegantly—blind drunk, he seemed to float out his front door, but pissing himself as he went.

  George—cradling a squalling Otho—and Rufus returned to the redoubt of Master George A. Hamilton, Esquire. Frankly hard up, they parleyed about their zilch cash.

  George had a suggestion: “Break into a store, a house, a car, lift some goods.” Anything solid turns liquid in crooked hands.

  Rue hissed, “That’s no good, we want cash.” The correcto idea was, as Rufus’d hinted that morning, to go to Fton, pick a man, pull him in an alley, knock his noodle to his ass, haul his wallet out his pocket, scram.

  George blurted, “I don’t wanna go to Dorchester for two years!”

  Rue rejected that riposte: “I had fucked-up luck two years ago. I ain’t wouldn’t’ve even had to go out that night if you’d had a drop of drink in this house for your brother. It’s only a little bitty job to slug a sucker.” Besides, Rue wanted “a fur cap, a fur coat, and a silver-handled, silver-tipped walking stick, please and thank you.”

  George: “Okay, but ya need a blackjack.” George got his poverty-struck toolbox, and the boys rummaged its paltry, poor-condition contents until Rue, recalling a piano, picked out a hammer. George whistled: the hammer could work.

  Then, hulking, horse-faced Plumsy Peters knocked to see what the boys had to drink. Rue drawled his answer, “Naw, but we’s gonna get some—if you mind the house, keep the fire goin.” George added: “And keep an eye to Otho.” Plumsy nodded okey-dokey. Slow-witted, with a bumpy face, he could cook and steal: his skills kept him in food and clothes, if not in lodging and drink.

  Roughly 7:30 p.m., the Hamiltons walked down Eatman Avenue to the Richibucto Road: two dark men tossing shadows like knives into the unsuspecting white snow. They passed the Roaches, said “Good night.” Then Rue approach Roach, ask him to “hold on to” a lighter. Roach give him two dollars for the pawn, then Rufus run back up to where George was. Good fresh cash for a beer and the bus. It come, they got on, sat at the back by two gals they knew—Yamila James and Zelda King. The bus rattled, wheezed, left the duo at Carlton and Queen streets, smack dab in Fred Town. From here, they could not go wrong. But that hammer stuck in Georgie’s back pocket, it didn’t hang right.

  They passed a billboard pledging “Jesus Saves” and another billboard, by a nearby grocery, swearing “Swanson saves you more.” Hungry—hungry, Geo thought: “Only water in my stomach.” Rue was cold-blooded cold. Blown from roofs, snow the shade of pure milk—or impure night—snuck down with the lacy, sure manoeuvres of a million generations of spiders. They tromped past the legislature; it sat near Fredtown’s mansioned riverfront strip, Waterloo Row. From here, the boys could look across the river to the shacks of Barker’s Point. The moo
n: an albino slug breathing against a black-soil sky.

  Rue breathed out a cold mist to tell George to hit and lug a fool into an alley. But it was Friday night.

  “Too many people on the street. No way to hit a man.”

  So George said, “I’ll phone a taxi.” He took out his wallet, empty cept for three cab company cards, and chose Elroy’s Taxi. He stepped into a phone booth and dialled. A woman answered; a taxi’d pick em up outside the Canadian Legion hall in ten minutes. Georgie said as much to Rue, who decided to go into the Legion to buy a beer. He come out a couple minutes later without a beer.

  Rue say, “Joygee, those people is crazy in there. They won’t sell me a beer without a membership.” Nothing to do, then, but choose who’d clip the driver. Rufus resolved: “Joyge, it’s your plan, your hammer, and you’re the one carryin it.”

  George nodded.

  It were a foolproof plot, yep. But designed by one fool and one foolhardy philosophe.

  Then the cab arrived and George shook. He was expecting a stranger. But here was Silver—leaping to open the passenger side doors of the black Ford sedan with black leather upholstery for George and Rufus as if they was gentlemen. Silver wore a black sable coat, black leather shoes, a black-looking cap, and his usual warm, azure eyes.

  HAMMER

  My truth is a hammer

  coming from the back.

  —THULANI DAVIS, X

  I

  WHEN 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.