If I Should Die

by Grace F. Edwards

I put the coffee down and looked from one to the other. “They started right after the lawsuit, then slacked off, and I thought that was the end of it. But after Erskin was killed, they started up again, got dirtier—which I still ignored. Until last night, when they got serious.”

  “Well, let me tell you,” my father said, moving away from the window and taking a seat at the table. “I was born and raised a short way from this very neighborhood and I ain’t being run out of town by nobody. Nobody, you hear? I’ve walked these streets at hours when there was nobody out but me; not even a stray dog. I dodged zip guns in the forties when those stupid gang wars threatened to tear Harlem apart. I’ve been down in the meanest holes, worked the dirtiest joints in good times and bad. I survived all of that. I survived!”

  His face was tight with anger and he took a swallow of coffee before he went on. “I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about so let’s just say that I’ve been through too much shit to be done in by some damn punk voice on the phone. Whoever’s making those calls can meet me face-to-face so I can kick their ass. They got my number. Let ’im call and make an appointment. I ain’t goin’ nowhere no time soon.”

  A zip gun could never compare to a Tec-9, but if a body was hit in the right spot, it was just as dead. I was so proud of Dad for standing up at that moment I could have kissed him. Tad looked from him to me and knew he was fighting a losing battle and I’m not sure I cared.

  He abandoned the official mode and moved to sit across from him at the table. “Mr. Anderson, listen. It’s more serious than you think.”

  “Young man, don’t presume to know what’s on my mind. And since we’re on the subject now, I’d like to know what’s on your mind.”

  “Sir?”

  “Regarding my daughter. What’s on your mind?”

  It came out of the blue. Well, maybe not so far out of the blue but I still did not want to believe what I was hearing.

  The three of us looked at each other and I could not tell whose eyes were wider and who stared longer. We each looked and the only sound in the silence came from the thin click of the grandfather clock in the hall. It seemed to grow loud yet no one said a word.

  Tad looked at me, and finally when he spoke, he was still looking at me even though he was talking to my father. It was as if Dad were standing behind me, leaning over my shoulder.

  “I’ve known Mali a long time, Mr. Anderson. And I’ve loved her for as long as I’ve known her. Even before she knew I loved her. Beyond that, I don’t know what more to say.”

  I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath and opened them again when his hand reached over and covered mine. I was glad to have something to hide my shaking fingers.

  Dad simply shook his head, and I knew better than to presume—as he said—to know what he was thinking.

  Later, much later, after Alvin had woken up and come downstairs in his pajamas to a breakfast of pancakes and bacon and two cups of hot chocolate and the four of us sat around the table eating, we watched the boy as if he were the last living remnant of some endangered species. Finally, Dad compromised. Alvin was to come out of school a month early and spend two weeks with Dad’s friend, an artist who, with his wife, shuttled between their homes in New Jersey and the Maryland shore.

  If things weren’t straightened out by that time, Alvin was to spend the rest of the summer on a schooner in St. Croix sailing with Captain Bo, the neighbor whose steel pan music had filled Tad’s apartment.

  “If anyone came looking,” Tad said, “it would be hard to find the boy.”

  I sighed inwardly, imagining my nephew swimming off the Maryland shore and eating fresh crab cakes for breakfast. Then sailing around the Virgin Islands on a schooner.

  Hell, we’re all in danger. Why can’t we all go …

  Dad, as usual, seemed to pick up my vibrations. “Trip sounds nice but I’m stayin’ put,” he said. “I got obligations, contracts to fulfill. I don’t leave no gig undone.”

  Tad glanced at me and I lifted my shoulders. Music was my father’s life. Playing was like breathing and there was nothing more to be said.

  Outside, on the stoop, Tad touched my face. “I see now where you got your stiff back. Your old man’s hard as a bag of tenpenny nails.”

  I leaned my head on his shoulder. “That’s the way he is. Like a rock. I’m surprised he compromised so quickly.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t question it. Be glad he did.”

  We were silent for a moment. I knew Dad had given in because another loss would have taken him right over the side. Tad had to struggle to convince him, but I had watched his face and seen the anger give way to concern.

  “My father trusts you. He knows you won’t let him down. And what you said to him about me. How you felt. You didn’t have to—”

  We were standing on the top step, side by side, and his hand moved to my waist, drawing me closer.

  “Your father asked me and I told him. I usually say what I mean and mean what I say. Or I say nothing at all. I didn’t think it would be that easy. I didn’t think I’d be able to do it.”

  “What?”

  “To say it. To tell someone again how I actually feel about them. People say I have no sense of humor. I take everything so seriously. Well, maybe I do. I try to—”

  He dropped his arms and took one step down so that his eyes came level with mine. His voice was low and I had to lean close. When he spoke, I caught the mild scent of peppermint and wanted to explore the inside of his mouth, feel his teeth, and taste his tongue, quickly, as if last night had not been enough for me. But I thought of the neighbors behind their lace curtains and let the feeling go.

  “Listen,” he whispered. “The last few hours, the last few hours were the best I’ve known in a long time. When I say ‘I love you,’ baby, it’s coming from a place inside me I can’t even name. I take things seriously because some damn serious things have happened to me.”

  He turned, touched my face again, and walked away, heading toward Seventh Avenue.

  I watched him move in that slow, slightly loping gait until he reached his car near the end of the block. The serious things he’d get around to telling me in his own good time. Right now it was enough to know how he felt.

  Back in the house, I tried to salvage the remainder of the morning. Tad was going to visit the hospital. If anything came up, he would call and I was to go to a street phone and call him back. Otherwise, I was to stay close to home. Dad had left to walk with Alvin, and after school, the boy was not to go out by himself, not even to walk Ruffin.

  I settled into the quiet to do some serious cramming. Exams were three weeks away and there was one book I practically needed to memorize.

  The call came at 11:30, sooner than I expected.

  “Listen, meet me at E. As soon as possible.”

  “E” would be Emily’s restaurant on 111th Street.

  “Right.”

  I said nothing more and hung up, beginning to feel like Double-Oh-Seven at His Majesty’s beck and call. I showered quickly, dressed, and exchanged my shoulder bag for a smaller purse containing a kubaton—a small retractable blackjack that fit in the palm of the hand. When you swung it, it snapped outward at least a foot. It was illegal but I’d worry about that if I got caught. At the moment, my adrenaline had kicked in so high I knew if I ran into Nightlife on the street, I would make him see orange stars.

  Emily’s had an early lunch crowd but Tad was already there and had managed to secure seats in the corner facing the street. I moved around the labyrinth of tables and waved. He rose to pull my chair out.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  The polite tone put me on alert. “Fine. What’s going on?”

  “Everything and nothing. First off, that low-life character they call Nightlife? Well, he must’ve been either a very strong guy or a very scared one. By the time I got to the hospital, he had signed out AMA—against medical advice. Leg broken in three different places, the doctor said, and he had the nerve to
sign out.”

  I leaned back in my chair and gazed at him, remembering all the telephone instructions last night.

  “Well, where did he go?”

  Tad glanced out of the window for a minute and his expression changed only slightly.

  “Not far. It was a bad move. A stupid move. His body was found an hour ago in an alley behind an abandoned building uptown. From the looks of it, he didn’t exactly hobble there. He was taken there and, from his condition, probably thrown from the roof. Some kids chasing their puppy through the alley came across him.”

  I looked around me. Patrons, some of them probably staff from North General Hospital and from the row of small businesses that had recently opened in the neighborhood, leaned over tables crowded with food. There were crosscurrents of talk and laughter as the music flowed. Some gestured animatedly although I couldn’t hear them above the hum of music.

  Ordinary people, casually dressed, discussing ordinary things. How would they react to the news of a broken body lying in some filthy alley? Probably the same as if a roach had crawled across their plate.

  Thrown from the roof.

  My hands were folded on the table and the unnatural weight of the handbag rested heavily in my lap. I wondered now if I would have used the weapon against him. He had been young and violent and involved in Erskin’s death and tried to harm me but now he was gone and his passing mattered to no one except Lexi, who was probably, at this moment, screaming in grief and tearing out her auburn-streaked weave.

  I wasn’t sure what I was feeling but suddenly all the anger I had felt toward him drained away, leaving me empty.

  I didn’t see the waitress standing patiently by the table until Tad spoke up: “Yes, two coffees … and how’re the muffins? Fresh?”

  The waitress looked at him and did a good job of hiding her annoyance. “They were baked this morning, sir.” She put heavy emphasis on the “sir” but Tad ignored it.

  “Good. We’ll have the muffins.”

  He waited until she walked away, then pulled out the notebook Mrs. Harding had given to me.

  It amazed me how easily he shifted gears. A man was dead and he was concerned about fresh muffins.

  He bent his head in concentration and his fingers eased down the line of numbers carefully, then stopped.

  “Look at this.”

  I leaned over to get a better look and to see if I had missed something earlier. It was a nine-digit number—313010489.

  “3130 is the address of the building where the body was found. I don’t know what the other numbers mean, but I think we’re getting close.”

  I looked at some of the other entries and one in particular caught my eye.

  “Excuse me. I have to double-check something.”

  I left the table, navigated through the tight crowd to the phone near the ladies’ room, and dialed Bertha’s number. Her voice came on against a background of loud talk and television drama, probably Sally Jessy Raphael. Not her favorite, she had said, but it was enough to hold her until the real soaps came on. She had the volume cranked so as not to miss a sigh.

  “Bertha’s Beauty Shop! It’s our duty … to make you a beauty! Hello!”

  I wondered how she had managed to hear the phone ring.

  “Listen, Miss Bert, it’s me. Mali. I dreamed about that beauty shop last night. You know, the Pink something or other …”

  “Fingernail! And you ain’t thinkin’ about goin’ there! You cuttin’ out on me? I don’t believe it!”

  Her voice rose another decibel and I rushed to calm her. “Bert, listen. It’s nothing like that. I dreamed about the place and I want you to put the number in for me. Check the address with Viv.”

  And without moving away from the phone or my ear, she shouted to Viv above the noise. “What’s the address of that shop you had? That’s right … 3370. Okay.”

  She spoke to me again, her voice still high. “It’s 3370 so you gonna have to drop the zero if you wanna combinate it forty-sixty, okay? Or you can drop a 3 and still combinate it. Whichever way you think gonna bring you your million bucks faster.”

  I listened, unable to decide. It was frustrating to be born and raised in the heart of Numbers City and not understand the first damn thing about combinating a digit. But then, math had never been my strong point and Bert lost me after that last zero.

  “Look, however you do it, it’s okay. I’ll leave it up to you.”

  “So you want it forty cents straight and sixty cents combo, right?”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Bert. I’ll see you next week.”

  “If you hit, you gonna see me tonight. Wait a minute.” She left the phone for a second, then came back on, laughing. “Miss Viv say she ridin’ your dream with a ten and hope you don’t mind. Say she might as well get somethin’ outta that dirty deal.”

  We shared a laugh and hung up. Tomorrow after class was time enough to visit the shop. By then, all the news not fit to print would have found its way into the place. I probably could’ve gotten more details from the Pink Fingernail but going there was out of the question now.

  I made my way back to the table and looked at the notebook again. 3370 was on the second page and 11787 completed the entry. I remembered Bert saying that Viv had celebrated the grand opening in 1987 and “the folks was throwin’ down champagne by the truckload and put away enough food to supply ten homeless hotels.”

  And she had opened on November 7, just in time to attract the big-bucks, fast-spending, Thanksgiving holiday crowd.

  “There it is,” I said, “our Rosetta stone. The address of Viv’s shop is 3370 and she opened on 11-7-87. Nightlife’s body was found behind 3130 Eighth Avenue. A phone call downtown’ll tell you if the building was bought on 10-4-89.”

  chapter twenty-one

  By the time we left the restaurant, the earlier bright sunshine had disappeared behind a mass of thunderheads boiling up over the East River. The temperature had dropped and I was not prepared to walk back home in my thin jacket. We hailed a cab, moved along 110th Street past the boathouse, and turned onto Powell Boulevard, where the branches of the trees on the traffic island seemed to bend like reeds in the wind.

  Tad reached for my hand, and when I glanced at him, his eyes were closed.

  “The shit is about to come down,” he whispered.

  I looked out of the window at the hurrying figures. Two women pushed strollers fast. A lanky boy with a backpack and headphones skated around the cars. A woman with a loaded shopping cart waited impatiently for the traffic light to change. The loungers had pulled their milk crates in, vacating their usual spots in front of the stoops.

  I turned to Tad again but his eyes were still closed. His brow was knotted and the muscle near his jaw was moving like a small stone and it occurred to me that he had not been referring to the storm.

  Before I could reach up to touch him, he opened his eyes. The burned brown liquid softness was gone.

  “Pack Alvin’s things. Have him ready by six tonight,” he said.

  I looked at him. “Tonight? That’s too soon. I thought—”

  “Listen, Mali. Please do as I say.”

  “What do you mean, do as you say? Tad, this is my nephew we’re talking about. I need to know something—”

  He held up his hands. “You ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. Okay?”

  I was so angry I could not answer. This had been another of my mother’s famous proverbs. The whole thing was getting to be too much. I sat back and remained quiet for the rest of the ride.

  I locked my door and listened as the cab pulled away, then went to the bar. It was only two o’clock but I fixed a vodka martini anyway, despite my shaking hands. How was I going to explain this turn of events to Dad when I didn’t really know what was happening myself? What was I going to say to Alvin?

  The house was quiet and I wandered upstairs to his room. He and Dad had not returned from school and his door was open. Ruffin lay on the floor at the foot of the bed and looke
d up at me with sad eyes.

  “Don’t tell me you know something also,” I whispered as I dragged a suitcase and duffel bag out of the closet. The boy had so much stuff, and all of it, no doubt in Alvin’s mind, was indispensable. I opened the chest of drawers, feeling like an intruder, and emptied all of his underwear, T-shirts, and socks into the duffel.

  In the closet were a half dozen or so pairs of jeans on the shelf and as many pairs of sneakers on the floor. I decided that five pairs of each should be enough and that once the bags were packed, there would be no additions, exchanges, or argument.

  When I reached for the stack of jeans, a cassette wedged at an angle on the shelf fell to the floor. “Profoundly Blue”—the tape Dad had given to Erskin. I took it and set it aside. This time, after Alvin was safely on his way and I had nothing to think about, I intended to relax and listen.

  Oddly enough, at four o’clock when Alvin came home, he was elated when he saw his suitcase and duffel by the door.

  “Man! So soon! I can’t believe it. I’m gonna be scuba divin’ and sailin’. How about that?”

  I watched him and thought of Clarence and how it would’ve been nice if he could have gone also. But the charges were still pending and he couldn’t even move across the street without notifying his attorney. He was out of jail technically but still dragging a ball and chain.

  I guess I focused on Clarence to keep from thinking about Alvin. In less than two hours, he would be walking out the door.

  Dad looked at the suitcase, then looked at me. “What happened?”

  “I … don’t know. Tad couldn’t tell me but I think he got some news.”

  “Unpleasant news.”

  “He didn’t say.”

  He glanced at his watch and something akin to panic creased his face. But a second later he straightened up and tried to smile.

  “Well, son. This is it for a while. I want you to call me every day, collect. Let me know how the weather is and how the folks are treatin’ you. Call every day. Say the word, I’ll be right there to pick you up, you hear?”

  Alvin moved his shoulders and leaned his weight on one foot, then the other. “Aw, Grandpa, I’m gonna be okay. I’m gonna be fine. I’ll be swimming, sailing …”