South Street

by David Bradley

  “That was good,” she said, making her voice furry.

  “Don’t lie,” Brown said. “You don’t need to lie.”

  “It almost worked.”

  “Sooner or later,” Brown said.

  “It’s easy for you to say that, dammit!”

  “Yep,” Brown said. “It’s easy for me to say that.”

  “It almost worked.” She stared into the night. “Hey,” she said after a while. “You asleep?”

  “Yeah,” Brown said.

  10. Friday

  LEROY BRIGGS DESCENDED THE stairs at the unprecedented hour of 10:00 a.m., causing a minor stir in the nearly unoccupied lobby of the Elysium Hotel; the desk clerk stared and stopped eating his breakfast—a bean pie purchased from his friendly Muhammed Speaks man—and Willie T. looked up from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. “Mornin’, men,” said Leroy in a John Wayne voice.

  The desk clerk nodded respectfully.

  “Mornin’,” said Willie T. “Somethin’ wrong?”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re up pretty early.”

  “It’s gonna be a long day. We got work to do. Come on, Willie, I’ma take you out an’ buy us some breakfast.” Leroy grinned toothily.

  “But, but, but,” stuttered Willie T., “it ain’t but ten o’clock. The bars ain’t open yet.”

  “I know that, fool. That’s how come I always stay in bed till noon. But today I want me some real breakfast.”

  “You mean,” Willie T. gasped, “food?”

  “Well, Willie, you can eat whatever pleases you, s’long as it ain’t attached to me. But, yeah, I want me some food. I want me some ham, an’ some eggs, an’ some grits—”

  “Grits? What the hell’s grits?” said Willie T.

  Leroy looked at him and shook his head sadly. Willie T. gulped and clumsily folded his paper. “What you read that shit for anyways?” Leroy demanded. “Wall Street Journal, shit. Ain’t no nigger never made no million dollars in the damn stock market. ’Sides, everybody knows how to get rich: buy low, sell high, pay your protection, an’ kill any muthafucka that gets in the way. Now come on, Willie, quit fuckin’ with that honky paper an’ let’s get it on.” Leroy sniffed disdainfully and stepped out into the mid-morning sunlight. “Damn,” he said, and blinking, pulled on his sunglasses. “These things don’t work worth shit. Somebody been fuckin’ with ma shades. I ain’t seen the sun this strong in weeks.”

  “You ain’t been outside in the daytime in weeks,” Willie T. said.

  “What you mean by that shit?” Leroy asked mildly.

  “Ain’t nobody never made no million dollars playin’ no numbers, either,” Willie T. said.

  Leroy turned to look at him. “Now, Willie,” Leroy said patiently. “I realize that maybe I ain’t been as active as I mighta been lately. I know I been lettin’ things slide a little, not taken care a business the way I shoulda been. I heard about them stories been goin’ around ’bout how I done lost it. But, Willie, those folks been talkin’ like that just don’t know me that well, an’ I’ma have to spend the day gettin’ better acquainted. But you,” Leroy smiled broadly and Willie T. felt his spine turn to jello, “you sposed to be knowin’ me, Willie.” Leroy’s smile faded to be replaced by a look of profound sorrow, a look that was matched by the regret in Leroy’s voice. “You ain’t sposed to be listenin’ to no tales. You ain’t sposed to be thinkin’ ole Leroy done turned into a chocolate marshmallow. You sposed to know that ain’t hardly the case. You do know, don’t you, Willie?” There was a note of pleading in Leroy’s voice.

  “Sure,” said Willie T., almost curtly.

  “Sure what?”

  “Sure, I know,” Willie T. said patiently. “Umpghfk,” he added, as Leroy’s left fist made violent contact with his unprotected face. “I, uglumfhgth,” he went on, as Leroy planted a kick in his belly with sufficient force to score a field goal from seventy yards out.

  “Sure, boss,” Leroy coached gently.

  “Ahh,” said Willie T. from his position on the sidewalk. Blood trickled slowly from his mangled nose.

  Leroy toed him. “That ain’t quite right,” Leroy said.

  “Sure, boss,” Willie T. gasped.

  “That’s fine, Willie,” Leroy said, beaming. “‘Yes, sir’ might be a small improvement, but we wouldn’t want to get too formal, do we?”

  “No, sir,” groaned Willie T.

  Leroy grinned. “I just hate kickin’ ass on an empty stomach. That’s why we gone go have us some breakfast. Your teeth okay?” Willie T. looked up at him resentfully. “I’m sorry I had to do that to you now, Willie, I really am. But you was gettin’ so damn uppity. Now you go wash your face an’ we go grease.” Willie T. picked himself up and started back into the Elysium. “Don’t be all day now,” Leroy said. “There’s lots more assholes gotta be reacquainted with Leroy Briggs.” Willie T.’s pace increased perceptibly. “Hold it,” Leroy barked. Willie T. stopped dead in his tracks. “Never mind washin’ your face. We’ll use you as a sample.”

  Willie T. turned to face him, wiped blood out of his eye. “Shall I get the car, boss?”

  Leroy shook his head. “Naw. We gonna walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “Uh huh.” Leroy grinned wolfishly and set off in the direction of the North Carolina Bar-B-Q. Willie T. trailed lamely. “Yes, sir,” Leroy said, squinting ahead of him at the shimmering concrete, “we gonna get with the times. We gonna have us a damn teach-in. We gonna give everybody a little elementary education, then we gonna pick out a few a them loud-mouthed cunt-lickers an’ send ’em to high school. If they don’t get the message, we may have to get ’em a scholarship to college. An’ then, I’ma find that fuckin’ Brown an’ graduate his ass clean to hell.”

  Willie T., scurrying along beside him, stared. “We goin’ after Brown, boss, for real?”

  “Unh unh, Willie. We ain’t goin’ after Brown. I am goin’ after Brown. He’s all mine.”

  “But what if he works for Gino like he said?”

  “He don’t work for no Gino.”

  “How do you know?” Willie T. demanded.

  Leroy stopped and turned. “Your nose stopped bleedin’ yet? Must have, ’cause, nigger, you startin’ to forget already. I say the nigger gets spent. An’ I say I’ma be the one that spends him. An’ I say he don’t work for no damn Gino. An’ if I say it’s so, it’s so.”

  Willie T. cautiously took a step backward before he said, “You say the sky’s purple, that don’t make it purple.”

  Leroy sniffed and considered the argument. “Willie, look at the sky.” Willie T. looked up at the sky. “What color is it?”

  “Blue,” Willie T. reported.

  “Right,” Leroy agreed. “But in a minute now, you keep lookin’, it’s gonna change color. It’s gonna be purple.” Leroy reached out and grasped Willie T.’s crotch, firmly, but without squeezing. “What color is it now?” Leroy asked mildly.

  “Purple,” Willie T. said promptly.

  Smiling, Leroy released him and headed off to the Delmonaco to prepare for a busy day.

  The Elysium’s barroom buzzed into Friday night—buzzed with the news of Leroy’s miraculous rejuvenation. Leroy, everyone agreed, casting thoughtful glances at a morose and black-eyed Willie T., who sat in a corner drinking Coke and pondering Leroy’s novel approach to higher education, had made a dramatic recovery. By actual count he had bashed fourteen noses, bloodied seven heads, blackened eleven eyes, broken two arms, sprained one ankle, kicked innumerable posteriors, and inflicted multitudinous lacerations, contusions, and abrasions in his campaign to reassure South Street of the degree of his control. Willie T. had watched the entire demonstration, trembling every time Leroy raised his shoe over the writhing and bloody form of a thoroughly convinced lackey, preparatory to tramping out his message with a terrible swift kick in the groin. Willie T. was not particularly bothered by the carnage, but he shuddered to consider what the rewards for his own insolence might have been. Injur
ies, serious and superficial, had at first been left behind Leroy like the trail of a tornado, but as the day had worn on and the word had spread that Leroy was on the rampage, various individuals had begun to do themselves bodily harm in desperate attempts to get out of the way. Leroy’s day on the warpath had provided the emergency rooms of three different hospitals with quite a few lively moments. Apart from the mundane injuries, there was the crushed pelvis sustained by Harry the Hype as, in an effort to escape an advancing Leroy, he had tripped over the putrefying carcass of a deceased cat and fallen into the path of the only garbage truck that had been seen on South Street in some two and one-half months. That case had gone to Graduate Hospital. The interns at Philadelphia General had been confounded by the condition of Fast Freddy Fennel, whom Leroy had surprised while he was enjoying the professional courtesies of a lady of the evening. Leroy had grasped Fast Freddy firmly by neck and scrotum and had held his face tightly against the prostitute’s somewhat pungent pudendum. Fast Freddy had passed out. Leroy had waited patiently for him to revive, passing the time by discussing the weather and the problems of the small-business person with the lady. Each time Fast Freddy had come to, Leroy had shoved him under again. Following the fourth submersion, Fast Freddy had suffered a mild fit. Leroy had personally summoned an ambulance, and Fast Freddy had been rushed off to intensive care. Leroy had politely finished off what Fast Freddy had begun, had complimented the young lady on her competence, and had paused for a slug of gin for lunch before setting off in search of one Twinkletoes Johnson, a homosexual booster, whom he had discovered in a deli at Fourth and Bainbridge, in intimate conversation with an Italian queen. Enraged by the incipient miscegenation, Leroy had thrown Twinkletoes belly-down over a table and had slit his pants up the back with a meat cleaver. Some minutes later the emergency-room staff at the Pennsylvania Hospital, though used to extracting odd items such as shot glasses, light bulbs, and six-ounce coffee jars from the anuses of the neighborhood’s gay denizens, were somewhat shocked when, with much farting and groaning on the part of the patient and much tugging and swearing on the part of the attendants, Twinkletoes’ bowels had disgorged three and a quarter pounds of knockwurst.

  Leroy’s program had been an unqualified success. South Street trembled where Leroy walked. Satisfied, he had returned to the Elysium around four in the afternoon, just as black clouds began to drift in over the city from the east. He had mounted the stairs to his chambers, where he had mounted Leslie and, after spurring onward for some time, he knocked her out onto the floor, consumed half a bottle of Beefeater, and went to sleep.

  Some time later Leslie had descended the stairs, clad in a pair of sprayed-on pants that showed the curl of her pubic hair and a halter so brief it exhibited every bruise that Leroy had lavished upon her. She sat at her usual table and looked across the barroom at the morose Willie T., envying him his twin shiners. She had, with artful use of eyeshadow, managed to suggest yellow-green bruises around her own eyes, but the skin was not puffy and the color was not quite right, and close inspection would have convinced anyone that Leroy had failed to actually hit her—he had merely kicked her out of bed. Being kicked out of bed was, Leslie felt, all right, but it fell short of the true and total commitment in her relationship with Leroy that would have been symbolized by a pair of black eyes. Still, she did have a very ugly bruise on her back—no one could find anything phony about that—and she was more or less content. She reached across the table for one of Charlene’s cigarettes, wincing pleasurably at the tenderness of her muscles.

  “Damn if I’d let any man do that to me,” Charlene said.

  “Ain’t any man,” Leslie said. “It’s Leroy.”

  “I don’t care who it is,” Charlene said. “Any nigger lays a hand on me, he’s gonna be drawin’ back a nub.”

  “Humph,” Leslie said.

  “I mean to hit me,” Charlene clarified.

  “An’ if it wasn’t a nigger, you wouldn’t mind?”

  “Shit,” Charlene said, “you know I ain’t gonna be messin’ with no slimy honkies. They send me ma check every month, an’ I don’t got to be screwin’ nobody for it. Mister Charlie sign his John Henry on the bottom line, an’ that’ll be as close to his ass as I’ma be comin’. An’ I still ain’t gonna be lettin’ no nigger be bangin’ me around.”

  Leslie looked at her and raised her eyebrows.

  “You know what I mean,” Charlene said.

  Leslie smiled. “It’s just Leroy’s way,” she said.

  “Leroy’s way gonna get him knifed in the back.”

  “By who? They all scared.”

  “Ain’t nobody scared a nobody’s back in the dark,” Charlene said. “If I was you I’d go on back to Rayburn. He’s your husband.”

  “Uh huh,” Leslie agreed. “An’ Leroy’s ma man. Leroy walks up an’ down, Rayburn sorta shuffles, like he’s sorry to dirty the street. Leroy wants somethin’, he takes it. Rayburn wants somethin’—lemme tell you. I ’member one time Rayburn wanted a radio, you know, one a them little transistor things, fit in your pocket? So the fool sees one he likes in the store window. Twenty-three dollars. Fool starts savin’. Two dollars an’ thirty cent a week. Ten weeks later he goes down to the store with his twenty-three dollars in his hot little fist. Only he done forgot the sales tax. Five per cent. Dollar fifteen. So he waits another week. Goes on down. Twenty-four fifteen. Only they done raised the damn price. Twenty-eight ninety-nine. He comes on back, keeps on savin’. Two weeks later I hear they gonna raise the sales tax. I says to maself, Jesus, I can’t stand no more a this. So I went on down an’ stole me one a them radios. Gave it to him. Won’t work. Needs batteries. Don’t you know the crazy fool went back to the same store wantin’ to know didn’t the batteries come with it or did he have to buy ’em separate. Called the cops, but they couldn’t believe anybody’d be that damn dumb, so they let him go. Cops kept the radio.”

  “That’s sad,” Charlene said.

  “That’s Rayburn,” Leslie snorted. “He’d starve in a supermarket. Ain’t ’cause he’s honest, it’s ’cause he’s so dumb he can’t even do nothin’ wrong right.”

  “Well, maybe he ain’t much, but at least he didn’t beat you.”

  “Sure he did. I made him. Only he couldn’t do that right, neither. Lemme tell you—”

  “Oh yeah. Tell us.”

  Charlene looked up. Leslie resisted the urge to spin around. “’Nessa, some day somebody’s gonna kill you, you keep on sneakin’ around like that.”

  Vanessa walked around and slid onto a chair. “I ain’t sneakin’, I just naturally move quiet.” She smiled and signaled to the bartender. “Leroy been usin’ your back to park his Cadillac on?”

  “He’s been parkin’ her on her back,” Charlene said disgustedly, “on the floor.”

  “From what I hear that’s Les’s most usual position—on her back on the bed, on the floor, on the table, on the street—”

  “Shup,” Leslie said.

  “—over garbage cans, on a pool table—”

  “I said, shut up.”

  “Why sure, honey, only don’t you want me to tell Charlene ’bout the time I seen you ticklin’ your pussy with a rat?”

  “I don’t want you to tell me about it,” Charlene said.

  “Oh, it wasn’t weird or nothin’,” Vanessa assured her. “I mean the rat was dead.”

  Charlene, looking a little ill, went off to the ladies’ room. “You’d think she’d be used to me by now,” Vanessa said mildly. She paid for her drink, plucked the pineapple off the top, and ate it.

  “Leroy’s been on the rampage,” Leslie said.

  “So I hear.”

  “I don’t think he’ll bother you, long as you keep outa his way.”

  “Little sister, Leroy ain’t gonna do nothin’ to me. An’ you better do like I told you: find out where some bodies is buried ’fore them lovetaps he’s been givin’ you get a little harder. Leroy can get kinda strange.”

  Leslie swallow
ed heavily. “This afternoon he come in, you know, after he done beat up half the world? He had this big gun. Looked like a cannon.”

  “Leroy don’t carry no gun,” Vanessa said. “If he can’t scare the piss outa it or beat the shit outa it or run it down with his car, he calls it Jesus an’ tries to forget about it.”

  “He’s got a gun now,” Leslie said. She finished her drink in one gulp and called for another. She waited silently until it was set before her. “When he came in,” she said, staring down at the glass, “he grabbed me an’ ripped ma dress right off.” She looked up at Vanessa. “Ain’t nobody had to bother rapin’ me in years, you know?” Vanessa nodded silently. “Well. After he got done, he pulled out the gun an’ tries to stick it up inside me. I wouldn’t let him, so he gave me the gun an’ made me do it maself. He said it was all right, the safety was on an’ ’sides it wasn’t loaded. He made me. Then he takes the gun back an’ sits there an’ loads the damn thing, an’ then he makes me do it again. He said it was okay, the safety was on. Then he takes the gun back and clicks the safety off. An’ then he come for me again.” Leslie shuddered and dropped her eyes.

  “You didn’t like it?” Vanessa said innocently.