Room To Swing

by Ed Lacy

  7

  AS THE Chevvy hit the soft shoulder, tires and brakes screaming, I got the wheel under control, swung sharply toward the road. The old car seemed to shiver and dip, then skidded another few feet to a stop. The truck driver was a bold cat. He'd stopped a few feet down the road and was watching me in his fender mirror. I jumped out of the car and ran toward the truck—and slowed to a walk. Lover boy Willie jumped down from the truck, hitched up his pants, and came toward me, the high shine on his boots sparkling in the sun.

  I cursed him for being the village idiot under my breath, knew before he opened his silly mouth all this had nothing to do with Thomas—he was jealous of my being with Frances. I asked, “What do you think you're trying to do, junior?”

  His tan face flushed at the “junior,” but his eyes had the sullen cast of a pug. Not that I was worried. In a ring maybe Willie might take me but in a free-for-all I was too much for him. He said, “Watch your fat tongue, heavy. You ought to know how to drive. I hear you're a hot rod with a foreign racing heap.”

  “One of us doesn't know how to drive. If this is meant to be a big joke, I'm not for laughs.”

  His smile showed even, very white teeth. He was a joker who gave the mirror a lot of time. “Maybe I was trying to see if you can take it. I don't go for no cat moving in on my time. Especially a stooge in fancy clothes. Frances may—”

  The word stooge hit me where I lived. I was a prize dummy—there was somebody else in on the Thomas publicity deal I hadn't even thought of! Kay had said something about having a “stooge planted” to blow the whistle on Thomas after his case appeared on TV. That meant the stooge had to be in on things, that he—or she—either knew all about me, or was in a position to find out easily. Suppose he had crossed the TV people, tried shaking Thomas down, and it had ended in a fight? But that didn't add. Thomas didn't have dime one. Hell with why; main thing was to find out who the stooge was and then see ...

  I was watching Willie without seeing him, my mind racing, and now he was hitting me on the shoulders and neck with the side of his right hand, yelling, “Knew you'd chicken out!”

  The “blows” didn't hurt and I thought he was having a fit, at first, and then I got it; this clown was giving me the side of his hand as a Judo chop—which can break a bone, even kill you, if done right. It must have been something he'd learned as a paratrooper, only never learned right. I kicked his right boot above the ankle hard as I could. As he howled and bent over to grab his right leg, I kicked the left ankle out from under and he sat down hard, moaning, trying not to scream.

  “There you are, Willie, no hands. Not that it's any of your business, but Frances is merely showing me the town. Keep polishing your boots and out of my hair, or I'll really work you over, maybe even dirty your boots—with you.” I walked back to the Chevvy and drove on, keeping an eye on him via the rear window for a moment. I hoped I'd put the proper fear of God into Willie. A jerk behind a wheel is more dangerous than if he had a gun.

  I left him sitting at the side of the road, still holding his ankles. I was feeling high about the stooge idea, then it fell down hard. One thing was for positive, I couldn't learn who the stooge was in Bingston. It meant returning to New York, seeing Kay, and she made me uneasy. There were too many unexplained coincidences pointing toward her. I might try phoning her, but that would be a hell of a risk. I let the stooge idea remain in the back of my mind, for more thinking. In a sense it was reassuring, proved I had to keep digging into the case, that I would come up with something. Or was I merely being a fool and digging my own grave?

  Bingston burned its garbage, and the Hills was a smouldering field of great heaps of tin-can skeletons, broken bottles, and other unburnable objects. Every couple of months a bulldozer probably stacked the current garbage into a new pile. There was an odd, musky odor you smelled as soon as you neared the dumps, the mysterious stink of decay and death.

  About a hundred yards off at right angles from one of the old garbage heaps—some sort of green weeds were growing on it—stood this small wooden shack, bleached by the sun and weather, unpainted for the last hundred years, if it ever had known paint. The windows were covered with newspaper and cardboard; a faint trickle of smoke was coming from the cockeyed brick chimney sagging against the back of the house. A broken step took me to a small porch with two busted rocking chairs on it. From the porch the garbage heaps seemed to be inching toward the shack like a glacier of waste.

  Mrs. Simpson was a surprise, very cheerful and neat. She was a butterball of an old woman, her gray hair in tiny thick braids all over her head, not a wrinkle in her plump dark face, but a ragged faint white mustache over the toothless mouth and a foggy cataract over one eye. Her sweater and plain dress were clean and newly ironed and she padded around in new sneakers. The room I opened the door on— most likely the only room in the shack—was a museum of broken furniture, a coal stove, a working fireplace, bundles of junk, an oil lamp, and a spotless wide bed with a very white spread. Of course the garbage stink was everywhere.

  Mrs. Simpson, who could have been eighty, ninety, or a hundred, spoke in a thin drawl as she said, “Come in. Long time since I've had such a fine strapping man call on me. Come in, boy.”

  She nodded toward a chair held together by wire and rope and which fooled me by not collapsing as I cautiously sat on it. “My name is Jones, Mrs. Simpson. I'm a writer and—well, I'm trying to do a true-fact crime story on this Thomas killing. You know, while it's news. I thought you might be able to tell me something about Porky Thomas.”

  “I know about you, the musician man staying at the Davis house,” she squeaked, sitting in a rocker and fixing her good eye on me. “Seems like they paying too much attention to Porky, now. Had people down here with lights and cameras asking about him. Took movie pictures of me and my house. Too bad they didn't pay him all that mind when he was younger.”

  “Tell me, what sort of a man was he?”

  “Man? I never knew Porky as a man. I knew him as a child, a white child.”

  “How did he get along with coloured people?” I asked, trying to get her talking. “I know you all lived together here at one time.”

  “Used to be houses not a stone's throw from here. We all used the same pump and outhouse. Now they want me to move. Why? I ask 'em. I'm too old to move. My children are dead or gone, I'm alone, why should I uproot myself? Nobody said move when I was younger. Do you know I was born a slave?”

  The old gal must have witnessed half the history of our country in her lifetime, but I had no time for history now. “What about Thomas, did he—”

  “Don't be impatient, boy. Ain't often I get the chance to talk to people. Why, many is the time, in the old days, when young Thomas slept right in this room, on a mat before the fire. Many is the meal I gave him. He used to get me wood from the dump, build a fire for my washing. He only became mean when he got older, when things turned so bad for him.”

  “How was he mean?”

  “White-mean. About the last I seen of him, maybe a few months before he got hisself in all that trouble with May, I awoke in the night to find the one window I had was busted. There he stood, outside my house, another rock in his hand. He was drunk back. He used to try to be a hard drinker, but he never was. Most times he was acting drunk because I know a few drinks made him sick. I stood in the doorway and asked why he'd busted my window and he says, 'What are you going to do about it, you ole nigger?' So I said nothing, just looked at him hard. He come closer, this wild whiskey look in his eyes. I wasn't scared of him, I never was. Walked right up to me he did. Then he drops the rock and begins to bawl. Cried like a child. He says, 'Ma Simpson, can I please have a glass of water?' Always called me Ma. I got him water and he took out a handful of money, give me five dollars to fix the window, says how sorry he is. That's the last I ever did see of him. Crying like a child.”

  “What about the troubles he got into? I mean, before the business with May?”

  The old woman pulled out a t
in snuffbox, put some under her lip. “They was real nice children, the Russell kids. Tim still drops by. After me to move, but he means well. Porky wasn't in any real trouble, never. Before he beat on May. He did a lot of things young boys do, but seemed he was always caught. If he stole it was only because he was needing things so bad. Ask me, he was meaner when he come out of that reform school than before he went in. I do recall how—after he come out of this reform place—he slapped Mamie Guy and her husband beat Porky up something terrible. Of course none of that got to the police. He'd stole some shirts from Mamie and was angry because she accused him to his face.”

  “Who's Mamie Guy?”

  “Lives out on Beech Road. Shucks, when I was a girl coming along, wasn't even a house or road there, just woods and woods. Nice for picnics and—”

  “Mamie Guy still live there?”

  She sighed. “You just won't let me finish a sentence. I had to give up my washing; pains in my legs and shoulders was getting fierce. I gave her my customers. Porky, he was helping me, delivering and calling for the laundry on an old beat-up bicycle he'd put together. So he begins helping Mamie; her boys was too young to help her then. He took these expensive silk shirts, tried to say Mamie had done it. But it was all straightened out.”

  “Where does Mamie's husband work now?”

  “Last I hear he was doing porter work in one of them big stores downtown.”

  “Who else did Porky ever have a serious fight with? Is there anybody else who hated him?”

  “Sam Guy never hated him. Nobody did, just didn't pay no attention to Porky.”

  “Did he ever knife or pistol-whip any one, seriously hurt somebody? Even another kid?”

  “No siree. Porky wasn't real bad. I seen plenty young ones wild like him who settle down to a good life. Ask me, I think May made a mistake in not marrying him. I mean, before she had to.”

  I couldn't think of any more questions. I stood up. She rocked back and forth as she said, “A welcome sight to see a black man dressed good like you. All the washing and ironing I done, I know expensive duds.”

  I thought, “Yeah, I'll be the best-dressed man in the hot seat,” as I said, “Well, good day, Mrs. Simpson. Thank you for your time.”

  She got to her feet. “A coloured writer, my how times have changed. Now, like I told those other people, don't make Porky out a bad one. It wasn't he was good nor bad, just so hungry poor. Now that he's dead I know the Lord will give him a better time up there.”

  Out on the porch I asked, “Does Tim Russell come to see you every day?”

  “Oh my no. Maybe once or twice a month. Matter of fact I ain't seen him for couple weeks now. He drives me to town, helps me shop.”

  “Does he leave Bingston often?”

  “Tim leave here? I should say not, except for the time he was a soldier.”

  I said good-by again and headed for town. My brain was going in circles. I was still wondering who the “stooge” might be, what motive he could have for killing Thomas. And for some reason I was amazed at Mrs. Simpson being so hale and full of cheer despite all the hard work she must have known. I couldn't remember if the local paper had two editions, so I parked on the main drag and went into the tobacco shop. It was the same paper I'd read in the morning. As I stepped back into the Chevvy, the cop I'd run into when I first hit this burg, and maybe Bingston's only cop, called from across the street, “Hey there, boy, I want to see you.”

  I knew a “wanted” flier had finally reached him and my stomach started churning—until I saw the lazy way he was ambling across the street. He said, pleasantly, “Hear that pretty car of yours broke down. Puzzles me: America makes the best darn cars in the world, like this old Chevvy still gets you places.... Like I told the wife, why should a body buy a foreign car and pay so much more money?”

  “I got a buy on mine, secondhand.” Bingston was a damn goldfish bowl. I had to clear out of here fast. It was, or could be, as dangerous for me as New York. At least in New York I could be checking on this stooge angle. In Bingston I was a sitting duck.

  “Me, I don't even hold much with the new cars coming off the Detroit assembly lines today. Too much fancy stuff on 'em. Waste of money.”

  “I suppose so,” I said, wanting to say something about Thomas, that I'd read about it in the papers. But I didn't have the nerve. The N.Y.C. police must have some kind of contact with Bingston, and the last thing I wanted was to get this hick cop interested in me. He asked, “Think you can get your car fixed soon?”

  “Expect to... sir. I'm having a part sent here air mail.” I waved and he nodded, as if dismissing me, and I drove off.

  I parked outside the bakery. Through the window I watched Frances waiting on a customer, the pleasant contrast of her white worn jacket and her warm brown skin. When the customer left I honked the horn. Frances waved at me, then said something to the elderly white woman camped on a high stool behind the cash register. They argued for a moment, then Frances came rushing out, asked, “Did you learn anything new, Touie? I can only stay a second.”

  “Nothing, except that I have to leave Bingston.”

  “Why?”

  “Far as the killing goes, I'm running in circles here, going no-place. Bingston isn't even a good hideaway; everybody in town knows I'm here, even about my car 'breaking down.'”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Back to New York, I guess. I've thought of something that needs looking into there.”

  “But they're looking for you in New York. Touie, why leave at all? People know about you here because you're a stranger. If you remained here and found a job, as Jones, you'd soon be forgotten—I mean, wouldn't stand out. As you said, the New York police are looking for 'a' Negro. Once you became a part of the community here, you'd be safe. They certainly aren't looking for 'a' Negro in Bingston.”

  The woman in the bakeshop knocked on the window.

  “No dice. I phoned somebody in New York this morning; the police already know I'm the Negro. In time they're sure to contact Bingston, if they haven't already. Main reason I came here was to find the killer. All I've found was that Thomas was a mixed-up kid.”

  “If the police know about you, then to go back to New York seems—“ She turned sharply and nodded at more knocking on the window. “When are you leaving?”

  “Thought I'd go out to the farm and pick up my car, leave now.”

  “Touie, at least wait until I come home at five-thirty. Let's talk about this. All right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Tim should be in soon, and I'll ask about his uncle, and Thomas' father. I have to run now. Not a customer in the store and she's wearing her knuckles out on the window. See you at the house in about an hour.” She went back into the shop.

  I headed for the Davis house but I was too nervous to sit around. I turned off at the nearest side street, drove aimlessly. I'd better get rid of the Jaguar. Take it from the farm, so they wouldn't get into any jam, if I was caught, ditch it in some river or lake. Although it would break my heart to do that. In New York I could get a room in the coloured section of Brooklyn, or the Bronx—although I didn't have much money, in fact no money if I took a train back to New York. Maybe I could get a job, anything, that would keep me eating for a week or two, while I checked on the stooge, Kay's boss, and Thomas' girl in the cafeteria. Damn, if I could only sell the Jag, be enough dough to keep...

  I passed a dirt road and a dirty white sign on a metal post that read: beech road. Backing up, I turned into the road. It seemed to be all woods until I passed a few new and neat-looking ranch houses, and after another couple hundred yards a weather-beaten shack with a new tarpaper roof, the remains of a fence. A coloured kid about twelve was sitting in the yard with his back to me. I stopped the Chevvy and walked back to the yard. Suddenly there was a coughing sound, exactly like a mortar shell going off. I looked around wildly, was so startled I nearly hit the ground.

  The kid was watching a bright red rocket about a foot long hissing up thro
ugh the air. It went a few hundred feet high, did a cockeyed somersault, then came spiraling down to the ground at the boy's feet.

  “What's that?”

  He jumped as he turned to stare at me, a solemn-faced youngster in a worn sweater and torn dungarees and patched shoes. “Whatcha think it is? It's a rocket.” He touched a small plastic stand. “This is my rocket launcher. Pip, isn't it?”

  It was a crazy scene: the shack that probably hadn't changed since it was built before the Civil War, and the sleek little rocket.

  He opened a paper bag, showed me some white powder. “I put a charge of this atomic fuel in the launcher, add water, and when the reaction reaches its prime I release the rocket. Came in the mail today. Cost me four bucks but— Hey, Mister, you live around here?”