South Street

by David Bradley

  “I know that,” Jake said. “While ago you was in such a rush to get me outa here, now you keep stickin’ your black nose in ma business. You gonna give me ma wine, or you gonna fuck around all damn day?”

  The other clerk looked over. “What’s the number on that?” The first clerk peered at the book. Jake rattled the number off without looking, as if he bought Portuguese wine every day. The second clerk looked at the first clerk. The first clerk closed his mouth and headed for the stockroom. “Let’s see your money,” said the second clerk.

  “I ain’t seen no wine yet,” Jake said.

  “How come a wino like you got a dollar fifty to spend on one bottle?”

  “How come a fat nigger like you wants to be knowin’ all ma business? You just gimme ma wine, I’m doin’ fine.” Jake reached into his pocket and produced the collection of change that Speedy had given him. He counted out a dollar forty-five, laid it on the counter. The first clerk returned bearing an oddly shaped bottle, glanced at the money, started putting the bottle into a paper bag. The second clerk reached for the coins, but Jake grabbed his wrist, held it fast until he had the bag in his hands. Then he let go. Smiling, holding back a grimace of pain, he turned and left the store. The door closed softly behind him. He turned and walked past the window, not glancing at the clerks inside. Once he was out of their sight his shoulders slumped and he rubbed his stomach. Clutching the bag, he turned off South Street into a shady, garbage-strewn alley and disappeared from view.

  5. Thursday

  BEHIND THE BAR OF LIGHTNIN’ Ed’s Bar and Grill Leo stood contentedly chomping on a ham-and-turkey sandwich of his own design and construction. Leo had never encountered anyone besides himself who was capable of making a sandwich that even came close to pleasing him. Leo hated sandwiches made with cold butter, which either caused the bread to rip or stuck to it in greasy lumps. He despised sandwiches which were made without sufficient meat, cheese, and mayonnaise. Salad dressing was beneath his notice; none of his sandwiches ever included either salad dressing or margarine. They did, however, include at least six ounces of lean meat. Leo’s sandwiches were famous the length of South Street. But while Leo liked his sandwiches fat, he had become disgusted with sandwiches from which the filling would squirt out on one side as he bit down on the other—Leo liked his sandwiches smothered sloppily with mustard and ketchup in addition to butter and mayonnaise. The sandwich that Leo held in his hand was of a special design which, Leo’s instinct toward culinary engineering assured him, should encourage all the critical fluids to remain within the confines of the bread. Leo belonged to the old school of engineers who work by trial and error. This was his sixteenth special design of the day, and as he stood behind the bar waiting for the meager Thursday-evening trade to meander through Lightnin’ Ed’s dark inviting doorway, Leo reflected that the best part of scientific experimentation was disposing of the failures. He raised the sandwich to his mouth and bit down as firmly as his Poligrip would permit. Ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise oozed over the sides of the sandwich and down onto the front of Leo’s big white butcher’s apron, staining it disgustingly. “Shfut!” exclaimed Leo, chewing his mouthful. He was disposing of the remains and contemplating his next attempt when the first customer of the evening entered Lightnin’ Ed’s.

  In forty-three years of tending bar Leo had developed a theory that the evening’s first customer was an important indicator of what the evening itself would be like. In his younger days Leo had welcomed the entrance of the occasional oddball, which usually signaled the advent of an interesting evening. Lately, however, Leo had most enjoyed the nights when his first customer was a regular—a nice, polite wino like Jake, or a reasonably well-behaved whore like Big Betsy, or a quiet, melancholy loser like Rayburn. Lately, Leo was not into shocks. Saturday night had been a tremendous strain, what with crazy white men and crazier black men named Brown running around all over the place. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday had all been fairly quiet, and Wednesday had been so quiet Leo had almost gone to sleep. He had looked forward to an equally quiet Thursday in which to prepare himself for the weekend. When he raised his eyes and looked over the hard brown crust of the pumpernickel bread of his leaky sandwich and saw his first customer, Leo wanted to close the bar down right then and there and go straight home to bed.

  It was the strangest customer that Leo had ever seen. It was about six feet long, but it could not have weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds. It had an epiglottis that bounded up and down a long bony neck like a berserk elevator. The rest of it was a jumble of knees, elbows, feet, hands, and ears. The chest was concealed behind a pink-and-purple-striped shirt and a light-brown-and-blue tie. The lower part of the body was hidden inside a pair of green-and-orange-checked trousers. The feet were encased in purple-and-yellow argyle socks inside a pair of sandals, and the eyes were obscured by large green shades with purple frames. The head supported a broad-brimmed yellow hat with a tartan hatband. The customer smiled at Leo and sat down on a stool. Leo beat a hasty retreat behind the roast beef and tried to regain some of his composure. He took a deep breath. “Evenin’, bro,” said Leo. “What’ll it be?”

  The customer opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, closed it, and went on opening and closing it like a beached catfish. Leo stared at him. The customer closed his mouth, fumbled in his pocket and drew out a piece of paper, looked at it, and returned it to his pocket. “Löwenbräu,” he said in a quavering but surprisingly rich basso profundo.

  “A lewd what?” said Leo.

  “A Löwenbräu,” repeated the customer.

  Leo shook his head, thought for a minute. “Oh,” he said, “I getcha. Sorry, brother, we ain’t had none a that foreign shit in a long time. No call for it; folks can’t hardly pronounce it, let alone drink it. Now we got your Schmidt’s an’ your Ortleib’s an’ your Readin’ dark an’—”

  The customer had pulled out the paper again. “Tequila,” he said.

  Leo stopped his recitation. “Tequila?”

  “You don’t have tequila?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, man, yeah, we got some tequila someplace here. You just hold on right there. Don’t get excited or nothin’, nothin’ now. …” Leo hurriedly lowered himself to his hands and knees behind the bar and, while pretending to search for the tequila, checked the positioning of his thirty-eight, his billy club, his sap, his brass knuckles, and his genuine Louisville Slugger baseball bat that had been personally autographed by Richie Allen when he had stumbled into Lightnin’ Ed’s one night to ask directions. Reassured, Leo got to his feet and located a dusty bottle of José Cuervo Especial on the back bar. “You, ah, drink this stuff straight?” Leo inquired, pouring out a shot and maintaining a discreet distance between himself and the customer, as if the customer might be catching.

  The customer consulted his paper. “With lemon and salt.”

  Leo wordlessly quartered a lemon and put it on a plate. He set the plate and a salt shaker on the bar. He pushed them both toward the customer, using the extreme tips of his fingers. The customer nodded. “Could I see the bottle?” he asked.

  Leo put one hand on his billy club and handed the bottle over. Leo wasn’t afraid of anything but mad dogs and psychos, and he wasn’t sure if he had one or the other or a combination of both. Either way he wasn’t taking chances. The customer gave the bottle a minute examination. “Where’s the worm?” he said finally.

  “The whahuh?” Leo retorted.

  The customer looked upset. “You mean there wasn’t any worm?”

  “Oh yeah,” Leo said quickly. “Oh yeah, there was a worm all right.” Beneath the bar he shifted his hand from the billy club to the thirty-eight. “Yeah,” he said, “there was a worm. A pink an’ purple an’ brown an’ blue an’ green an’ orange worm. Yeah, he was here all right.” Leo stopped suddenly and stared at the customer. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about, a goddamn worm?”

  “I, ah, thought there was supposed to be a worm in the bottle. Or maybe that was
mescal. Never mind. Where is everybody?”

  Leo decided that he had been drinking too much beer. He broke a forty-two-and-one-half-year-old rule and poured himself a double slug of rye, which he downed in one gulp. When he opened his eyes the first thing he saw was the pink-and-purple body shirt, and he closed his eyes again. He turned his head to the side and discovered that he could talk to the man without undue discomfort so long as he didn’t actually look at him. “Well,” Leo said, “it’s still early. Most folks don’t come in till ’bout eight, eight-thirty, maybe a little earlier if there’s a ball game on.”

  “You have a regular crowd in here, don’t you?” asked the customer.

  Leo tried to reconcile the voice with the rest of the customer but failed. “Yeah,” he admitted, “there’s a few folks that comes in all the time. Some folks come an’ go. You, you ain’t never been here before.”

  The customer leaned over the bar, nearly upsetting the tequila, which, Leo noticed, he had not touched. “You remember everyone who comes in?” the customer asked excitedly.

  “No,” said Leo, “but I’da remembered you sure.”

  The customer sighed and settled back on his stool.

  Leo let a few seconds of silence pass. “Why? You lookin’ for somebody?”

  “Well, in a way.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Leo, stealing a glance at his wristwatch to see if he could turn on the ball game and have an excuse to ignore the man, “a worm.”

  “What?”

  “Nothin’,” Leo said quickly. “You want a refill?”

  The customer lowered his head as if he were looking at the drink before him. His hand fished the piece of paper out of his pocket and he looked at it while he carefully licked the back of his left hand and sprinkled salt on it. Leo watched, fascinated. His eyes still on the paper, the customer picked up the glass of tequila in his left hand, took the wedge of lemon in his right hand, licked the salt, downed the tequila in one gulp, and bit quickly into the lemon. He took the lemon away from his face. His mouth hung open for a solid fifteen seconds. The rest of him seemed to go limp. “Humm,” he said. “Hummmm.” He reached up and removed the dark glasses. His eyes were slightly crossed.

  “You do that real well,” Leo said, pouring out another shot.

  “Hummm,” the customer said again. He shook his head, then, as if suddenly realizing what Leo had said, added, “Oh. I’ve been practicing. But only with iced tea.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Leo. He checked on the placement of the billy club once again. Then he switched on the TV. He was determined not to talk to the customer any more, even if it meant watching the CBS Evening News. Leo hated the news, but he glued his eyes to the screen. He muttered, reached up, and reduced the color tone to make Cronkite a mulatto.

  “Hummm,” said the customer. Leo looked over. The man licked the salt off his hand, gulped the tequila, chewed at the lemon. “Hummm,” he said. Leo reached over and refilled his glass and turned quickly back to the TV, just in time for the body counts.

  “Hummmm,” said the customer.

  “Jesus,” muttered Leo. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Brown shucked off his apron, hung it on a hook, and slid out from behind the bar. The night bartender replaced him in oily, disapproving silence, a look of suspicion on his swarthy face. Brown watched wordlessly as he ignored several waiting customers and went to the cash register and pointedly began to count the money. Brown chuckled and shook his head.

  “Hey, Adlai, c’mere,” came a voice from behind a wall of greenery growing out of a trellis affair that formed a partial divider between the barroom and a small, dimly lit dining room. Brown walked around the divider and sat down on a chair that shot out toward him, propelled by a small, almost dainty foot on the end of a large, almost elephantine leg. “You done real good back there. Too bad we can’t teacha youse ta talka good.”

  Brown grinned into the heavy-jowled Italian face across from him. “Whut’s wrang wid da way ah tawks, Mistuh Frankie, suh?” Brown said. “An’ I don’t think Alonzo thinks I’m doin’ too good back there.”

  Frankie chuckled, and his broad black tie bounced up and down on the tightly stretched front of his white shirt. “Alonzo’s mother was a Sicilian. You know how they are. Hate you people. Think you’re devils. Almost as bad as Protestants.”

  “What was your mother?” Brown said.

  “A Sicilian. You devil. Anyways, it sure was lucky for me, you comin’ in like that. I was goin’ nuts back there. I can’t keep on my feet all day no more.”

  “Get arch supports,” Brown suggested.

  “Get a new bartender, you mean. Either that or get a smaller stomach.”

  “What happened to Louie anyway?” Brown said.

  “Aw, that stupid … I come in this mornin’ like usual about one in the afternoon an’ they tell me we ain’t got no bartender. I come out to the bar an’ there’s this note from Louie sayin’ he run off with that bony Jewish bitch, that Lena Bernstein or Goldblum or whatever, one that useta sit down at the end a the bar drinkin’ Rollin’ Rock outa martini glasses.”

  “Yeah,” Brown said, “I know who you mean. But bony? Jesus, she musta weighed a hundred and eighty.”

  “Right,” Frankie said. “That’s her. Bony. Anyways, the note said it was true love. All I know is, it was a pain in the ass, an’ I had to work all goddamn day, until you come in. I just wish I could get my hands on that stupid wop….”

  “Why don’t you put a contract out on him?” Brown suggested.

  “Heh, heh, heh,” said Frankie. “We don’t do that kinda thing no more, Adlai, ain’tcha heard? That’s minor league stuff; for Puerto Ricans an’ dinges. Us wops is into big business—corporate finance, politics. We’re through with petty larceny an’ movin’ into grand theft.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Brown said. “I remember readin’ all about the opportunities openin’ up. I think it was in my complimentary copy of Black Enterprise.”

  “What’s that?” said Frankie suspiciously. “One a them radical papers?”

  “Kinda,” Brown said.

  “Humph,” Frankie said. “Bein’ serious now, Adlai, that’s what was wrong with that King fella. He didn’t understand big business. He thought he was all right with God on his side, but he forgot that even God could get overruled by a majority vote a the board a directors.”

  Brown stared at Frankie for a minute, then laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Frankie demanded.

  “Nothin’,” Brown said, wiping tears from his eyes.

  “Humph,” Frankie said. “Anyways, where’d you learn to tend bar?”

  “Place called Roger’s,” Brown said. “In Poughkeepsie.”

  “Poughkeepsie? What the hell was you doin’ in Poughkeepsie? There ain’t nothin’ there.”

  “Only Vassar,” Brown sighed.

  Frankie chuckled deep in the back of his throat.

  “Don’t laugh,” Brown said seriously. “It was true love.”

  “You know, Adlai, that’s what I like about you. You can take any four-letter word and make it sound like ‘fuck.’ Listen, I’m an old man that don’t like eatin’ alone. You wanna call up that gal a yours an’ see does she wanna come down an’ we’ll all have dinner?”

  Brown looked unhappy. “I don’t think she’d come. But I’ll stay.”

  Frankie regarded Brown with a look of curiosity, then shrugged and motioned to the waitress. “Hey, Maria. We want some dinner.” Maria was a tall Italian girl, plump and pretty, with long black hair teased up and held with too much spray, and deep black eyes surrounded by an alarming smear of silver eye make-up. Her tight uniform barely contained her. She pulled an order pad out of her apron pocket and stood, pencil poised. “Adlai wants a steak,” Frankie said, “’cause he’s been workin’ hard. Only one in the whole place been doin’ anything.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Maria said, “I been off since Monday.”

  “You’re off everyday,” grumbled Frankie.
“If you wasn’t my daughter-in-law I’d a fired you long ago.”

  “If I wasn’t your daughter-in-law you’d have to pay me decent. I’m too good a waitress to be workin’ for peanuts in a—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Frankie. “You get a raise. Now, Miss Super Smart-Ass Waitress, we want some steak. Rare. Tossed salad, an’ you make sure you tell that Vito ta keep the goddamn chickpeas outa mine. An’ baked potatoes on the side, butter on mine, butter an’ sour cream with chives for Adlai. I don’t know how he stands the stuff, but dinges is strange.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Maria, tossing off a mock salute. “And what dressing would you like on your salad? Italian?”

  “Shit, no,” said Frankie. “Russian. I don’t want none a that oily wop stuff on my salad. Adlai just wants oil. His folks is still tryin’ to imitate the wops, but they ain’t figured out what vinegar is yet.”

  Brown snorted. “Thank you, sir,” said Maria, snapping her pad shut and heading for the kitchen.

  Frankie grinned wolfishly. “She forgot the drinks. I been tryin’ to catch her makin’ a mistake for months. She’s never gonna hear the end of it.” He eased his bulk back against the wall. “All right, now, Adlai, what the hell’s the matter with you? You been in here a good four hours, an’ you ain’t started no fights. I ain’t heard you say ‘fuck’ moren ten times, an’ you ain’t insulted a single one a my customers. It’s been so quiet I damn near went to sleep.”

  “They didn’t insult me,” Brown snapped.

  “That ain’t never stopped you before.”

  Brown opened his mouth, closed it, and grinned ruefully.

  “You ain’t as touchy. You sick?”

  “Could be,” Brown said.

  “You have a fight with what’s her name?”

  “Not exactly,” Brown said. He took a deep breath. “I left.”

  “Left? Just like that?”

  “Yeah,” Brown said. “I just couldn’t stay there any more. It was … ruinin’ me, you know?”

  Frankie nodded. “Yeah. Tell me about it. Women is the funniest damn things in the world. Sometimes you wish you could get rid a every damn one of ’em. You say ‘blue’; some woman’ll give you fifteen perfectly good nonsensical reasons why blue has got to be somethin’ else—turquoise or aqua or some such crap. You know, I was married for thirty-seven goddamn years. To the same woman. She never liked me ownin’ a bar. She’d say, ‘Frankie, you gotta serve some food so respectable folk’ll come in.’ I’d say, ‘I run a bar, not a bingo game.’ I mean, hell, who wants respectable folks in a bar? Next thing you know you’ll have the priest in there. She wouldn’t listen, she had to come down. Not here, I had a place over on Christian Street then. She’d come down an’ start makin’ sandwiches, an’ then she got a hot plate and started makin’ pasta, an’ she had bread, an’ salad, an’ every other goddamn thing, an’ pretty soon everybody was comin’ in to eat an’ wasn’t nobody buyin’ nothin’ from the bar ’cept bottled beer an’ red wine, an’ I damn near went bankrupt. Hell, I didn’t care. We wasn’t starvin’ an’ she was happy an’ I was happy, an’ who gives a damn if the banks is happy? So I said the hell with it an’ turned the place into a restaurant. She useta have a hell of a time, bein’ everybody’s mama an’ givin’ away half my profit. After she died, I couldn’t stay down there. All them folks would come in an’ sit around drinkin’ wine an’ lookin’ sad. It was like a goddamn funeral. Fool woman never understood a thing about business. Everybody loved her an’ she loved everybody an’ we damn near starved to death. Them was the days.”