by Ann Petry
‘Right nice legs, ain’t she, dearie?’ Mrs. Hedges inquired from the window.
He gave her one quick look of hate and then turned his head away. Even early in the morning she was there in that window like she’d been glued to it. She was drinking a cup of coffee, and he wished that while he was standing there she would suddenly gag on it, choke, and die before his very eyes. So that he could stand over her and laugh. He couldn’t remain out here with her looking at him. His pleasure in the morning and in the street faded, died as though it had never been.
There was nothing for him to do but go inside. He wanted to get some more air and look around a bit. He wasn’t ready to go in yet. He wasn’t going to let her drive him away. He was going to stand there until he got good and ready to go. He was uncomfortably aware of her unwinking gaze and he shifted his feet, thinking he couldn’t bear it. He would have to go back in the house to get away from it.
His eye caught the postman’s slow progress up the street. His gray uniform disappeared in and out of the doorways. Each time he appeared, Jones noticed how the heavy mail sack slung over his shoulder pulled him over on one side, weighing him down. Watching him, Jones decided he would stay right there until the postman reached this building. That way the old sow wouldn’t know she had chased him inside.
Post-office trucks backed into the street, turned and moved off with a grinding of gears. Children scampering to school were added to the stream of people passing by. The movement in the street increased with each passing moment, and he cursed Mrs. Hedges because he wanted to enjoy it and couldn’t with her sitting there in the window watching him.
The superintendent next door came out to sweep the sidewalk in front of his building. Jones saw him with relief. He walked over to talk to him, welcoming the opportunity to put even a short distance between himself and Mrs. Hedges. This way she Couldn’t possibly think she had driven him off.
‘Kind of late this morning, ain’t you?’ the man asked.
‘Overslept myself.’
‘Sure glad this wasn’t a heavy snow.’
‘Yeah. Don’t know whether snow or coal is worse.’ Jones was enjoying this brief chat. It proved to Mrs. Hedges that he was completely indifferent to her presence in the window. He searched for something humorous to say so that they could laugh and the laughter would further show how unconcerned he was. He elaborated on the theme of snow and coal, ‘Got to shovel both of ’em. One time when white is just as evil as black. Snow and coal. Both bad. One white and the other black.’
The sound of the other man’s laughter was infectious. The people passing by paused and smiled when they heard it. The man clapped Jones on the back and roared. And Jones discovered with regret that the hate and the anger that still burned inside him was so great that he couldn’t even smile with the man, let alone join in his laughter. And the laughter died in the other man’s throat when he looked at Jones’ sullen face.
The man went back to sweeping the sidewalk and Jones waited for the approach of the postman. He was next door. In a minute he’d turn into this house. Yes. He was coming out now.
‘Well, I gotta go.’
‘See you later.’
He followed the postman into the hall, feeling triumphant. It was quite obvious to Mrs. Hedges that he had simply come inside to get his mail, not because of her looking at him. Then he felt chagrined because knowing everything like she did she probably knew, too, that he never got any mail.
The postman opened all the letter boxes at once, using a key that he had suspended on a long, stout chain. The sagging leather pouch that was swung over his shoulder bulged with mail. He thrust letters into the open boxes, used the key again to lock them and was gone.
Jones made no effort to open his box. There wasn’t any point, for the postman hadn’t put anything in it. He stood transfixed by the wonder of what he was thinking. Because he had found what he wanted. This was the way to get the kid. Not even Junto with all his money could get the kid out of it. The more he thought about it, the more excited he became. If the kid should steal letters out of mail boxes, nobody, not even Junto, could get him loose from a rap like that. Because it was the Government.
The thought occupied him for the rest of the morning. It was foremost in his mind while he shook down the furnace, carried out ashes, even while he put a washer in a faucet on the second floor and cleaned out a clogged drain pipe on the third floor.
During the afternoon he studied the mail box keys in his possession, taking them out of the box where he kept them and strewing them over the top of his desk. These were duplicates of the keys that the tenants had. He pondered over them. He had to figure out a master key—make the pattern for a master key. He didn’t have to make the key himself, the key man up the street could turn it out in no time at all, there wasn’t anything complicated about a mail-box key.
He went next door to see his friend, the super, in response to a sudden inspiration.
‘Lissen,’ he said craftily. ‘Let me borrow one of your mail-box keys for a minute. Damn woman in my house has lost two keys in two days. None of my other keys will work in her box. I thought one of yours might work. She’s having a fit out there in the hall wanting to get her mail.’
‘Sure,’ the man said. ‘Come on downstairs. I’ll get one for you.’
Jones tried the key in the boxes in the hall. With just a little forcing it worked. He looked at it in surprise. Perhaps it would work anywhere on the street. He would have liked to ask the man if it was a master key, but he didn’t dare.
He spent the rest of the afternoon drawing careful outlines of the keys. Then he evolved one that seemed to embody all the curves and twists of the others. It was slow work, for his hands were clumsy, sometimes the pencil slipped in his haste. Once his hands trembled so that he had to stop and put the pencil down until the trembling ceased.
The final pattern pleased him inordinately. He held it up and studied it, surprised. This last, final drawing wasn’t really a copy. It was his own creation. He was reluctant to put it down, to let it go out of his hands. He picked it up again and again to admire it.
‘I shoulda took up drawing,’ he said, aloud.
He held it away from him, turned it around, until finally, half-closing his eyes and staring at it, he thought he saw a horizontal line across the length of the drawing. He threw it down on the desk in disgust, his pleasure in it destroyed.
Was he going through life seeking the outline of a cross in everything about him? Min had done this to him. There were other things she had done to him which he probably didn’t even begin to suspect. He thought of her standing in front of the bureau whispering, ‘It’s for my heart,’ strangely unafraid, almost as though she had some kind of protection that she knew would prevent him from doing violence to her.
She had changed lately, now that he thought about it. She dominated the apartment. She cleaned it tirelessly, filled with some unknown source of strength that surged through her and showed up in numberless, subtle ways. She was always scrubbing and cleaning the apartment just as though it were hers, and then beaming approval at the result of her effort, so that her toothless gums showed as she smiled at her own handiwork.
Suddenly he laughed out loud. The dog pricked up his ears, scrambled to his feet, and came to where Jones was sitting at the desk and thrust his muzzle into his hand. Jones patted the dog’s head in a rare gesture of affection.
Because he was going to fix Min, too. Min was going to take the drawing to the key man and get the master key made. There would be nothing, no scrap of evidence, no tiny detail to connect him with this thing. Even if the kid should say that he, Jones, had showed him how to open the boxes, had given him the key, all he had to do was deny it. He had been Super on this street for years, collecting rents and scrupulously turning them over to the white agents. That alone was proof of his honesty. No one would believe the story of a thieving little kid—a little kid whose mother was no better than she should be, whose mother openly lived w
ith white men.
No. They’d never be able to pin anything on him It would be the kid. And if things worked out right, it would be Min, too.
When Min came home from work that night, he greeted her cordially but not too cordially, because he didn’t want her to wonder what had made him change his attitude toward her.
‘Your heart bother you today?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. She looked at him distrustfully. ‘Not much anyway,’ she added hastily.
‘I was wondering about it.’ He hoped she would think that this concern about her heart accounted for his cordiality because he had been going out of the house almost as soon as she came home from work, not saying anything, deliberately waiting until she entered the living room and then brushing past her in order to show his distaste for her, thus making it obvious that he was hastening to get away from the sight of her.
She took off her coat and hung it up in the bedroom, shaking it carefully after it was on the hanger. When she unfastened the scarf around her head, she looked at herself in the mirror and automatically she sought the reflection of the cross hanging over the bed.
‘Supper’ll be ready in a minute,’ she said cautiously.
‘Okay.’ He stood up, yawned, went through an elaborate, exaggerated stretching. ‘I’m good and hungry.’ He was beginning to enjoy himself.
He went to stand in the kitchen door while she set the table, talking to her companionably as she moved from table to stove. Gradually the faint suspicion, the slow caution in her face and in her eyes lessened, and then disappeared entirely. It was replaced by a quiet pleasure that grew until her face was alive with it. She talked and talked and talked. Words welled up in her, overflowed, filled the kitchen.
He ate in silence, wondering if he would ever be able to get the sound of her flat, sing-song voice out of his ears. It went on and on. He lost all sense of what she was saying, though in sheer self-defense he made the effort to catch it. It was like trying to follow the course of a tortuously winding path that continually turned back on itself, disappeared in impenetrable thickets, to emerge farther on at a sharp angle having no apparent relation to its original starting point.
‘Mis’ Crane’s got three of the smallest kittens. Just born a month ago and the canned milk don’t agree with them. So when we got to the rug on the living room we hadn’t any of the soap chips. The man at the store said that kind is gone over to the war. And I got bacon there. A whole half pound. Mis’ Crane was surprised because Mr. Crane has it for breakfast every morning. The drippings make the greens have a nice taste, don’t they? Them Eighth Avenue stores is the only place that’s got ones that have a strong taste. And the collards was fresh in this afternoon so I got it for tomorrow—’
Finally he gave up the effort to follow the train of her thought. She wouldn’t know whether he really listened or not. He nodded his head occasionally which satisfied her.
After supper he wiped the dishes, and the fact that he was standing near her, staying there to help her, increased the flow of her words until it was like a river in full flood.
He lay down on the sofa in the living room while she went through such elaborate and long-drawn-out, totally unnecessary cleaning that he couldn’t control his impatience as he listened to and identified her movements. She was scrubbing the kitchen floor, washing out the oven, scouring the jets of the gas stove.
Finally she came to sit in the big chair in the living room, her eyes blinking with pleasure as she looked at the canary and talked to him. She was breathless from her scouring of the kitchen and she talked in gasps and spurts. ‘Cheek! Cheek! Dickie-boy. You going to sing, Dickie-boy? Cluk! Cluk! Dickie-boy!’
‘Min,’ he said, and stopped because that wasn’t the right tone of voice. It was too charged with urgency, too solemn, too emphasized. He had to keep his voice casual; make what he was saying sound unimportant and yet important enough for her to get dressed and go out again.
Her head turned toward him as though it were on a swivel. There was a slight rigidity in her posture as she waited for him to continue.
Jones sat up and put his hand on his head. ‘I got a awful headache,’ he said. ‘And I got to have a mail-box key made for one of them damn fools on the third floor. She done lost two keys in two days and I ain’t got another one. I was wondering if you’d take the pattern around to the key man and wait while he made it.’
‘Why, sure,’ she said. ‘I’d be glad to. A breath of air would be real nice. Sometimes it seems awful close and shut up inside here, especially after Mis’ Crane’s having so much room around her and—’
After she got her things on, he gave her the drawing, handing it to her carelessly. When he saw how slackly she held it, he couldn’t help saying, ‘Don’t lose it.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I don’t ever lose nothing. Only today I was thinking that I never lose nothing. Everything I’ve ever got I been able to keep—’
She had to talk awhile longer and he listened, biting his lips in impatience as she rambled on and on. Finally she left, limping slightly because she hadn’t had a chance to soak her bunions. But her face was warm with the pleasure of being able to do something for him.
The key was such a slender little thing, he thought, when Min returned with it and handed it to him; it was so small and yet so powerful.
Min soaked her feet and talked and talked and talked. She undressed and came out of the bedroom to stand near the couch where he was sitting, fondling the key.
‘You ain’t sleeping in the bedroom tonight?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said absently. He glanced briefly at her shapeless, hesitant figure. This was her way of inviting him to sleep with her again. I think I fixed you, too, with this little key, he thought. And I hope I fixed you good. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘My headache’s too bad.’
The next afternoon Jones stood outside the building and waited for Bub. The street was swarming with children who laughed and talked and moved with gusto because school was out.
When Bub ran in from the street, he was moving so swiftly that Jones almost didn’t see him. All of him was alive with the joy of movement—his arms, his legs, even his head. Kicking up his heels like a young goat, Jones thought, watching him. A little more and he’d jump right out of his skin.
‘Hi, Bub,’ he said.
‘Hi, Supe’—he was panting, chest heaving, eyes dancing. ‘Hi, Mrs. Hedges’—he waved toward the window.
‘Hello, dearie,’ she replied. ‘You sure was going fast when you turned that corner. Thought you couldn’t put your brakes on there for a minute.’
He laughed and the sound of his own laughter pleased him so that he laughed louder and harder in order to enjoy it more. ‘I can go even faster sometimes,’ he said finally.
‘How about you and me building something in the basement this afternoon?’ Jones asked.
‘Sure. What’ll it be, Supe?’
‘I dunno. We can talk it over.’
They went into the hall and Jones opened the door of his apartment.
‘Thought you said we were going into the basement.’
‘We gotta talk something over first.’
Jones sat down on the sofa with the boy beside him. The boy sat so far back that his legs dangled.
‘How’d you like to earn some money?’ Jones began.
‘Sure. You want me to go some place for you?’
‘Not this time. This is different. This is some detective work catching crooks.’
‘Where, Supe? Where?’ Bub scrambled off the sofa to stand in front of Jones, ready to run in any direction, already seeing himself in action. ‘How’m I going to do it? Can I start now?’
‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute: Don’t go so fast,’ he cautioned. This was the easiest thing he’d ever done in his life, he thought with satisfaction. He paused briefly to admire his own cleverness. ‘There’s these crooks and the police need help to catch them. They’re using the mail and it ain’t easy to get them. You gotta be
careful nobody sees you or they’ll know you’re working for the police.’
‘Go on, Supe. Tell me some more. What do I have to do?’ Bub implored.
‘Now what you have to do is open mail boxes and bring the letters to me. Some of them will be the right ones and some won’t. But you bring all of them here to me. You gotta make sure nobody sees you give them to me. So you bring them down in the basement. I’ll be down there waiting for you every afternoon.’
He took the slender key out of his pocket. ‘Come on out in the hall and I’ll show you how she works.’
The key was stiff in the lock. It turned slowly. He had to force it a little, but it worked. He had the boy try it again and again until he began to get the feel of it and then they returned to his apartment.
‘Don’t never open none of them boxes in this house,’ he warned. He put one of his heavy hands on the boy’s shoulder to give emphasis to his words. ‘This ain’t the place where the crooks are working.’
He hesitated for a moment, disturbed and uneasy because Bub had been silent for so long. ‘Here,’ he said finally and extended the key toward the boy. ‘You got the whole street to work in.’
Bub backed away from his outstretched hand. ‘I don’t think I want to do it.’
‘Why not?’ he demanded angrily. Was the little bastard going to spoil the whole thing by refusing?
‘I don’t know’—Bub wrinkled his forehead. ‘I thought it was something different. This ain’t even exciting.’
‘You can earn a lot of money.’ He tried to erase the anger from his voice, tried to make it persuasive. ‘Mebbe three, four dollars a week.’ The letters would yield at least that much. Yes. He was safe in saying it. The boy didn’t answer. ‘Mebbe five dollars a week.’
‘I don’t think Mom—’
‘Your ma won’t know nothing about it. You’re not to tell her anyhow,’ he said savagely. He made a superhuman effort to control the rage that burst in him. He must say something quickly so that the boy wouldn’t tell her anything about it. ‘This is a secret between you and me and the police.’