Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  There are things a parent can utter to a child that should not be heard by others. Verdicts and spiky assessments, pettiness masquerading as principle and magnified by time, grudges that have taken root in the bones. A witness can render these things indelible and real in a way that they wouldn’t be if there were no one else around. No, it’s best not to hear your grown friend talked to the way Ambrose Van Wyck addressed his son. The humiliation splashes everywhere. You’ll get it on you and it’ll become your own bad time, the bloody resurrection of your own childhood sadnesses. In two minutes, Freddie was five years old again, back on 129th Street, cowering under the kitchen table as his father enumerated his mother’s shortcomings with sadistic flair.

  A specific reference compelled Linus to lunge, putting an end to Ambrose Van Wyck’s harangue: “It’s like that day on Heart’s Meadow all over again.” The glass of milk fell to the carpet. It would not be accurate to say that the two men fought or wrestled. “More like they gripped each other’s upper arms and shook.” Linus held back so as not to hurt the old man, and the old man despite his fury was too old to give the conflict much gas. It was a low-key battle, a mutual trembling. Freddie crept past them into the hallway. In a limp rush, Linus overcame his reticence, pushed, and the old man tumbled into a large, red leather club chair, panting.

  At 9:41 p.m., Linus and Freddie ran down the back stairs.

  At no point did Ambrose Van Wyck acknowledge Freddie’s presence.

  The riots hadn’t started yet but the night was full of sirens. A scuffle on a subway platform, kids running wild in a cafeteria: the preface to the next night’s unrest. In the original plan, Linus’s family wouldn’t know of the theft until the next day at the earliest. They wouldn’t immediately tie it to their rascal son, so the thinking went. Now the head start was gone.

  They packed up some clothes at the Ninety-Ninth Street apartment. “Where to?” Linus asked.

  Freddie thought of the Eagleton first thing. Miami Joe had asked him to pick up a gun from one of the residents once, for a job. He didn’t tell Freddie what it was, but its heft in the brown paper bag made an announcement. Freddie shook all the way down the stairs—and out on the street. The Imperial was right there. “We used to hang there every day,” Freddie said.

  “The rats,” Carney said.

  “Loving that popcorn.”

  The association with the old movie palace made the SRO stick in Freddie’s head. It was a natural place to lam it. Freddie got the bed. Linus slept on the floor, with the briefcase and his wadded-up robe for a pillow. When Freddie woke the next morning, Linus was gone, with the briefcase. Had he gone to score? Back to his family to beg forgiveness? Either way Freddie was too jazzed to stay inside. The Unsinkable Molly Brown was the first ad he saw in the movie section on the way downtown. Plus it had Debbie Reynolds. Freddie had already told Carney the rest—Saturday night, the first night of the riots.

  Back at the Eagleton, Linus was on the nod, leaning against the wall, sitting on the briefcase so that he’d wake if anyone tried to grab it. In the run-up to the robbery, Linus had talked of his grandmother’s diamond necklaces, gem-encrusted bracelets, a box full of gold coins, a variety of pirate treasure that had passed through the safe. The only notable item they’d walked away with was the emerald necklace, and between the cops, the crazies, the protest days, unloading it was unworkable. The emerald was too big for the fences Freddie knew, Abe Evans and the Arab. “I wasn’t going to bring you in, don’t worry.”

  They had to lie low until the heat was off. And 171st and above felt safe—from rioting Negroes with pitchforks, cops, and “my father’s men,” which Linus had never mentioned before. Private detectives? Ex-army guys? “They do work for him, make sure things get done.” After a brief scout, Freddie and Linus found an Irish bar on 176th that catered to marginal clientele, and a Greek diner with decent grub and broken tabletop jukeboxes. They made forays.

  Monday afternoon, Freddie had an itch at the back of his mind and called Janice, their next-door neighbor on Ninety-Ninth. She was relieved to hear from him—Linus’s apartment had been broken into and robbed. The subway roared in the earpiece as it passed outside Janice’s place, like suspense music—crazy violins—in an action picture. The super had called the cops after discovering their front door hanging on one hinge. Freddie told her they were behind on their installment payments to the Britannica company, they play for keeps.

  The submarine’s hull failed beneath the tons of pressure. Seawater geysered from joints, the depth gauges cracked and died, the whole vessel lit by a sickly red light: going down. The break-in freaked out Linus, still panting from the robbery and the fight with his father. They needed a safe place to stash the briefcase, he said, and had already chosen where: Carney’s. “Hell no,” Freddie said. “I wasn’t going to get you involved, but he said it was the best play.” He smiled reluctantly. “He liked you. Whenever I complained about some shit you said to me, or some fight we had back in the day, he’d say you were only looking out for me. And that he wished he had someone like that.”

  Freddie got choked up and went into the bathroom. Carney checked out the showroom again. No one had seen Freddie enter the store. Or they had seen him, had called for reinforcements, and were waiting to break in or to snatch Freddie when he walked out.

  Freddie returned. Handing off the briefcase to Carney improved their moods. Even with Washington Heights as a boundary, their Saturday night was something out of the old days, like when Linus sprang Freddie from the Tombs. They hit each place when it started taking off and left before it got dead, and found like-minded hedonists and lushes at every stop. “It wasn’t a full-moon night, but it was like we were the full moon, making everybody act crazy.”

  “First big night after the protests,” Carney said. “People were ready to cut loose.”

  “You got to ruin that, too?”

  Freddie went out to the Greek place for breakfast Sunday morning and gave himself permission to sit and enjoy the paper like a normal citizen. “Fooling myself.” Gone long enough for Linus to OD. “He’d been laying off while planning the job, like I said, but once we got uptown, he was back with gusto.” Freddie was hitting the booze so he didn’t feel he had a right to say anything.

  “Do you think it was an accident?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I didn’t mean he did it on purpose,” Carney said, “but was someone else in the room when you were out.” He told Freddie about Aunt Millie’s apartment getting tossed, and the homicide cops who came around the store, getting orders from above. “You stirred somebody up.”

  “No one would do that to Linus.” They sat with the implications. “I don’t know what to do,” Freddie said.

  “You have to split. It’ll take money.”

  Freddie nodded to the safe. “It’ll take that.” The emerald.

  “I got it,” Carney said.

  He needed help, however. He needed Pepper.

  SIX

  Pepper folded his newspaper flat when Carney appeared in Donegal’s doorway. He nodded at the bartender, who shambled to the other end of the bar, by the street. The bartender wore a sleeveless undershirt gone yellow. It exposed his massive arms and the bawdy Betty Boop tattoo that started on one bicep and continued on the other. Labeled before and after below his elbows.

  Carney gestured to the stool. Pepper granted his permission. He hadn’t changed his uniform; the faded dungarees might have been the same pair he wore the first time they met, after the Theresa, a dark speck of Miami Joe’s blood on the hem.

  “Buford thought you were serving papers,” Pepper said. “Policy is, officers of the court get the bat he keeps under there, in case.”

  “You look the same,” Carney said.

  “You got some more legwork for cops you need done?”

  “I didn’t see it that way.”

  “No other
way to see it.”

  Carney was about to say that he’d been doing the community a service by yanking a weed like Wilfred Duke, but three years on he was comfortable with the fact it had been revenge. “I didn’t think of the larger picture when it came to you, that is correct.”

  Pepper cracked his neck. “It was nice to see all those upstanding Negroes get theirs, I have to admit. That dude really run off with all their money?”

  “They say he’s in Barbados. Has some family down there.”

  “Bajan niggers will rip you off in a New York minute,” Pepper said.

  Outside, Donegal’s green neon sign had given Carney a twinge. Now that he was inside he was sure he’d been there many years before. The grotesque, disembodied grin floating on the good beer with good friends sign. The dusty jar of hard-boiled eggs that contained the same hard-boiled eggs from decades before. Pepper had been one of his father’s running partners so it made sense. Carney had carried this fantasy idea of Donegal’s from Pepper’s talk of the place, when he’d already seen it. He’d envisioned gunsels in zoot suits, block-browed experts in blunt force trauma, but the Wednesday-afternoon crowd looked like the bickering geezers who played chess in parks, trading pawns and grievances. Although in Donegal’s they drank from mugs instead of flasks.

  Carney had been a child—had his father left him there while he conducted some business? Watch my kid while I break this guy’s legs? Perched on a stool, his head barely clearing the cloudy varnish of the bar. Very young, if his father hadn’t left him in the apartment. Where was his mother? Anyone who could clarify things was dead.

  “You used to come here with my father,” Carney said.

  “Plenty. This was where—” Pepper cut off the anecdote. His smiles were rare and he terminated this smile precisely. “The bartender in those days was a crook,” he said, “like us. So if we finished a job late he’d open up and celebrate. Dawn coming in through the windows there. Newspaper trucks rumbling. That was Ishmael, before he got shot. He’s been dead, I don’t know, ten years?” His expression soured. “What do you want? Trying to sell me a couch?”

  Carney didn’t make the same mistake he made last time. He gave Pepper the rundown, from Freddie’s friendship with Linus and his rich family, to the interrupted robbery and everything that happened after it. The crook knew about the Theresa, the Duke job—no one else had as much dope on Carney’s other life. No reason not to come clean.

  Carney finished. Pepper scratched his neck, looked at the ceiling thoughtfully. He said, “Like the expressway.”

  “A lot of people think it’s Wick.”

  Pepper shrugged. A gun battle broke out on the afternoon movie, a Lee Marvin picture, and everyone in the bar stopped talking to check out the TV. For tips? To critique? The getaway car sped off and Donegal’s patrons returned to their affairs. “Using the riots,” Pepper said. “If I had something cooking, I would have done the same thing. Everybody running around like chickens with their heads cut off, you can pull a job.”

  “People weren’t acting crazy over nothing. They had good reason,” Carney said.

  “Since when do white people care about reason? They gonna put that cop in jail?”

  The bartender looked up from his racing form. “Put a white cop in jail for killing a black boy? Believe in the fucking tooth fairy.”

  “Buford knows what’s up,” Pepper said.

  “Newspapers talking about ‘looting,’ ” Buford continued. “Should ask the Indians about looting. This whole country’s founded on taking other people’s shit.”

  “How’d they fill their museums? Tutankhamun.”

  “Right? I’m glad they stood up,” Buford said. “I’m saying a week later it’s like it never happened.” He decamped to the other end of the bar again and relit his cigar.

  Like it never happened? This struck Carney as pure cynicism. For instance, after the riot of ’43, the pants his father had looted from Nelson’s had lasted two years before the knees gave out. That was something.

  They saw things differently, him and Pepper, but Carney had come to Donegal’s—risking a punch in the face—because the man had another angle on how the world worked. Which is what Carney required at the moment. Five years after the Theresa, another necklace had brought them together, one that made Lucinda Cole’s look like it rolled out of a gumball machine. “I’d like to hire you for security,” Carney said. “In case anyone else comes knocking.”

  “Sounds like someone might, one or another,” Pepper said. “Look, you don’t want my advice. You’re not an advice-taker and I don’t give a shit. But—cut him loose. He’s a loser. It’s already done.”

  “It’s not done. He’s splitting.”

  “Trouble’ll find him again. Your father would say, fuck him. Even if he is family. Even if it was you.”

  “That’s why,” Carney said.

  Pepper grimaced and gestured for another beer. “What are you going to do with the loot? The shit from the safe—who are you going to lay it off on?”

  “I have a guy who can handle it.”

  “Deals with that heavy shit.” Pepper sipped his Rheingold. “If he deals with that heavy shit, he covers his ass. What if covering his ass means hanging niggers out to dry?”

  “He’s solid.”

  “Nothing solid in the city but the bedrock.”

  He took the questions to mean that Pepper was in. Pepper did not disabuse him of that assumption.

  Carney mentioned a figure. Pepper said he had a mind for something from the store.

  “Whatever you need. What’s your current home situation?”

  “Situation?”

  “With regards to furniture—eat-in kitchen? Do you have a separate place for dining?” Carney knew not to say, How often do you entertain?

  “Do I look like I want people knowing what my house is like?”

  “A couch, then.”

  “That flips back when you put your feet up, with a lever.”

  “A recliner.”

  “That’s it—a recliner.” They did a deal for the security and miscellaneous manhandling.

  Carney laid down some bucks on the bar for Pepper’s beer and stood to go.

  Pepper said, “He used to say that you were going to be a doctor, you were so smart, but that you were smart enough to know you make more money being crooked.”

  “Who’d want to be a doctor?” Carney said.

  * * *

  * * *

  The shade outside their apartment, down the hill from Grant’s Tomb, provided a cool retreat from the day’s heat. Traffic was light on Riverside. When Carney tried to relax in his living room after a long day at the store, the squeal of the kids in the park below usually set him on edge, but today they were a token of normalcy. Gangsters strong-arming him into sedans, white cops disrupting his business, riots and real estate barons and what have you—it was nice to pretend his world remembered the old, stable orbit.

  Then Pepper said, “I’m here,” and Carney’s planet went awobble again. He handed Pepper the keys to the furniture store, as they had arranged. Ever since the Donegal’s meeting earlier that afternoon, the image of Pepper sitting at his desk on watch duty had made him chuckle. You’ll take the matching ottoman and fucking like it.

  “You got your boy on ice somewhere?” Pepper asked.

  “Out in Brooklyn,” Carney said. Freddie’s new hidey-hole was a rattrap off Nostrand.

  “I don’t want him underfoot.”

  Neither did Carney. Would Freddie appreciate his efforts when Carney packed him into the train, or bus, with all that get-out-of-town money? Before the bus pulled out of Port Authority—maybe the Newark Greyhound depot was a better bet—and Freddie disappeared Out West, would he give a proper thanks, or see it as something owed him?

  The goddamned park squirrels had been braze
n all summer—that was a whole nother story—so that’s what Carney thought the pressure on his leg was, a squirrel. “Daddy!” John said, wrapping his arms around his thighs. From the dirt on their clothes and the scrape on John’s knee, it looked like Elizabeth had taken them on a playground excursion.

  Carney introduced Pepper as a friend of his father—a mistake, as Elizabeth invited him to join them for dinner. She insisted when Carney made an excuse. “We have plenty.” She was disappointed the leftover pot roast (often dry, per statistics) usually went unconsumed by her family and welcomed help in polishing it off.

  Pepper didn’t put up the fight that Carney expected—a residue of politeness or curiosity—and that was that. The crook extended formal handshakes to May and John, like they were bank managers reviewing his loan application.

  The smell of the cooking meat filled the hallway outside the elevator. “Damn,” Pepper said, in pleasure, and he did not apologize for the blaspheming in front of little children because it did not occur to him. Pepper didn’t speak as Carney showed him around the apartment, until they reached the living room and he gave his verdict: “Nice setup.” He registered the rooms’ dimensions and checked out the angles from the window as if appraising the defensive and offensive possibilities of a hideout. Elizabeth went to get the pot roast out of the oven.

  The children, as they often did before dinner, lazed on the rug with their comics and toys, occasionally sharing with the grown-ups an urgent non sequitur. Carney normally leaned back in his spot on the Argent sofa but he didn’t want to appear too casual in front of their guest, who might judge his middle-class indulgences. Pepper took his time before he finally sat in the armchair. He crossed his arms.

  For the most part, the men sat in silence. At one point, John brought over his souvenir program to show it off and Pepper said, “World’s Fair—what will whitey think of next?”

  Elizabeth told May to get the good napkins and they sat down to eat. She had cooked the roast with potatoes and carrots and made cornbread earlier in the day. Elizabeth nodded in approval as Pepper helped himself to a healthy serving. Carney brought two cans of Schlitz to the table.