A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “The address is 2711 South Wentworth.”

  His wrist rested on the top of the steering wheel, the fingers dangling over the backside. He let his eyelids drop and dulled his entire face.

  “Shall I find another cab?”

  “It’s your neck.”

  “Exactly.”

  “See what I mean?” he asked when they got to Wentworth and started trolling for the 2711 address. Despite the cold night, there were lots of people on the street, which was, she supposed, what he meant: people, dark-skinned people, on the street.

  “There it is. I’ll get out here.”

  “You want, I’ll wait for you.”

  Lucybelle remembered hearing “You Send Me” wafting out the club door. The round bouncer staring at her. Stella might not even be there tonight. “No, thank you.”

  “Your neck.”

  Lucybelle paid him, without a tip, and slammed the door extra hard to make sure he understood she was finished with him. Then, before she lost her nerve, she pulled open the door to Tiny and Ruby’s Hot Spot.

  The patrons were two- and three-deep at the bar, shouting their drink orders and laughing at jokes. A dozen couples danced in the middle of the club, some of the women in full-skirted dresses with fitted tops, silky fabrics printed with splashy abstractions or colorful flowers. A few wore men’s pants and suit jackets, polished shoes and shiny ties. On the far side of the room a small stage held a live band, fronted by Tiny, that short basketball of a woman, playing the hell out of a trumpet.

  Lucybelle felt a profound and immediate happiness in being there, swallowed up by the laughter and music, even as she regretted not dressing more appropriately for a Saturday night on the town. There were a few other white women in the club, but everyone stared at her anyway, standing just inside the door in her wool slacks and plum coat, clutching a purse and two books, looking like someone’s aunt. Even Tiny spotted her from the stage, and when she finished that tune she set the trumpet on its stand and held out her hand for someone, anyone, to help her off the stage. She rolled right toward Lucybelle.

  “Help you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Stella.”

  Tiny cupped her ear, signaling that she couldn’t hear, and then stepped around Lucybelle and opened the door to the street. When they were outside, Tiny said, “We’re full tonight.”

  Lucybelle could tell that Tiny thought she’d stumbled into the wrong club, or worse, that she was some kind of undercover snitch. You couldn’t really look more square than she did. “I’m looking for Stella. She owns Acme Transport.”

  Tiny narrowed her eyes and lied, “Don’t know any Stella. Good night.”

  “We, I mean you and I, actually met a few months ago. On Halloween.”

  Tiny reared back and looked at her hard. “Arkansas.”

  That stung. She’d been a story for Stella. She pictured Tiny and Stella, and maybe the sultry-voiced dispatcher at Acme Transport, sitting around laughing at the farm girl out alone on Halloween night, dressed in a cape and fedora.

  “My name is Lucybelle.”

  “Hoo wee. What are you doing here? I thought you were a fare.”

  “Well, yes. That’s right. And I shorted Stella a bit. I want to pay her.”

  “A bit? That cop stripped her wallet. And she’d just been to the bank that day.”

  Despite the temperature having dropped into the twenties, Lucybelle felt a hot flush of chagrin. She had been a story. And the cause of Stella’s grief with the racist cop.

  “You say you’re here to pay her?”

  Lucybelle nodded.

  “Wait here.”

  Lucybelle wanted to go back inside, but she did as she was told. The sidewalk was cold, dim, lonely.

  Not thirty seconds later, Stella stepped briskly out the door, as if Lucybelle’s appearance were an emergency. She looked pained, glanced at the cars passing on Wentworth, nodded at a couple on the sidewalk. She took Lucybelle’s elbow, guiding her around to the shadowed side of the building. “What are you doing here?”

  “I owe you some money.”

  Stella reared back. “You came all this way to pay a six-month-old fare?”

  “Well, I thought maybe I’d have a drink—”

  “I don’t expect a fare to pay when you’re subjected to what you were subjected to.”

  “It was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. The color of my skin caused that particular fuss. Which is to say it was the fault of the cop’s attitude.”

  “Fair is fair. Here. Just take the money.” Lucybelle pulled the wad of cash from her purse. “And here’s your book too. Plus, another one I thought you might like.”

  “Hey! Don’t be pulling all that money out right here on the street. I can’t take it, anyway.” She ignored the books.

  “Why can’t you take the money?”

  Stella chuffed. “What happened that night is what I call the bulldagger tip. It happens. Part of business. Nothing that I worry about.”

  “He called you a boy.”

  “Sure he did. But he knew exactly what I am. He won’t stop me again, in any case.”

  “How’s that?”

  “So it’s a thousand questions again.”

  “I thought you liked questions.”

  “Look, I’m going to have Rusty run you home.”

  “Who’s Rusty?”

  “One of my drivers.”

  “I thought I might have a drink.”

  Another chuff, and then, “Suit yourself.” The words were short, but Stella’s face softened into what looked like an involuntary quizzicality. She didn’t leave.

  “I’ll buy you one,” Lucybelle said. “Since you won’t take my fare money.”

  Stella smiled at the ground.

  Lucybelle grinned too. This club was a relief. So was a woman who read poetry and studied photography, who owned her own company and dressed as she pleased. Why had she tolerated Phyllis’s complicated artifice all those years?

  “Sorry,” Stella said, lifting her head, the smile gone. “I’m busy. But let me know when you’re ready to go.” With that Stella turned and went back inside the club.

  Lucybelle stood shivering, wondering. Was it the color barrier? She ought to hail a cab and just leave, but she’d come all this way, and she really would like a drink. She pushed open the door and made her way to the bar.

  A butch girl with bad acne, so young she still had baby fat, slid off the end barstool and gestured at it.

  “I’ll stand,” Lucybelle said.

  “No you won’t. Come on, sugar, have a seat.”

  Sugar. Ha. That’s what Bader called her.

  “Ruby!” the girl shouted for the bartender. Beneath the veneer of bravado, the kid seemed anxious, maybe a little scared.

  Lucybelle sat and the tall bartender strolled down and asked what she’d like to drink.

  “Gin. Rocks. Thank you.”

  “Pour her something from the top shelf,” the girl told Ruby. “Don’t give her that gut rot you pour for the rest of us.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Lucybelle said.

  “Oh, yeah it is.” She was adorable with her adolescent skin and smile, her reach into adulthood on this cold Saturday night.

  “Thank you. But you look too young to be buying women drinks.”

  The kid grinned. “I’m twenty-one.”

  “Sure you are.”

  Tiny was back on stage, swinging a sweet ballad with her horn, and the floor was packed with slow dancers. The sight of all those embracing women knotted Lucybelle’s throat to her heart. Tiny’s trumpet hollered, crescendoing and then backing down, while the guy on piano shimmied into the opening and the woman on bass kept time with a soothing thrum.

  “Ruby’s the drummer,” her self-appointed hostess said. “But she don’t like to let go of her bar. Not when it’s this crowded.”

  The drink arrived at the same time Stella stepped up with another kid, who didn’t look much older than Luc
ybelle’s new friend. “This is Rusty. She’ll run you home when you’re ready.” Rusty was a scrappy character, so skinny she looked hungry, dressed like a boy from another era, including a cap and suspenders. Her elbows and knees jabbed at her shirt and pants. Her full lips, and the freckles dotting her light-brown face, compromised the tough-girl act. Her burnished hair, pulled straight up from the nape of her neck and back from her temples, was tied in a knot that showed under the cap. Lucybelle imagined the hair styled entirely differently for when she attended church on Sunday with the family. Rusty shifted her weight from one foot to the other, nodding her head in judgment, though she didn’t even look at Lucybelle as Stella introduced them.

  “Why can’t she sit a spell?” the kid at the bar asked. “Why’re you sending her off ? We’re just getting to know one another.”

  Lucybelle took a sip of her drink.

  Babyface pressed her case. “You know Ruby don’t like nobody being snooty in her bar. Everyone gets the welcome mat, same as everyone else.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Stella said. “She can stay as long as she likes. Just find Rusty when you’re ready.” Clearly she was trying to get rid of her but managed to make it sound like she was being chivalrous. Lucybelle felt a hot embarrassment about the two books in her lap, one a return and the other a gift, evidence of a misconstrued intimacy.

  Yet Lucybelle remained stubbornly at the bar, sipping her gin, while Rusty stood waiting at the door, scowling at her, as if Lucybelle were ruining her evening by not leaving. When she finished her drink, she thanked the underage girl, slid off the barstool, and left the club.

  Rusty stepped out right behind her. “Car’s in back.”

  “I can call a cab.”

  “What do you think it is that I drive?”

  Lucybelle looked at the kid in her suspenders and shirtsleeves, no jacket or coat, as if to underscore how quick she wanted to make this interruption to her evening. She figured that she might as well give Stella’s taxicab company business, rather than call that one with the racist driver, so she nodded her acquiescence and followed Rusty around to the parking lot behind the club. Rusty opened the back door of a black-and-white Acme Transport car and stared off into the distance as Lucybelle climbed inside.

  “I have the address,” Rusty said. She drove under the speed limit and it took them a full forty minutes to get to the apartment in Evanston. When Lucybelle asked the amount of the fare, Rusty said, “It’s covered already.”

  “What?”

  “I said the fare is paid.”

  Lucybelle dropped a five-dollar tip in the front seat and got out.

  Rusty got out too. “She said I was supposed to see you to the door.”

  “That’s all right. This is my building.”

  “Suit yourself,” Rusty said, sounding like Stella. She jumped back in the cab, and Lucybelle heard the door lock clunk down.

  That night she dreamed she was wading through the flooded rice fields at home in Arkansas, slogging thigh-deep in muddy water, the thirsty roots soaking it up, the seeds of grain fattening. She awoke feeling plumped with a painful but nourishing anticipation.

  Sunday, March 16, 1958

  The doorbell sounded at a quarter to nine. Still in her pajamas, Lucybelle padded to the window and looked out. An Acme Transport taxicab was parked across the street.

  She scrubbed her face, brushed her teeth, and pulled on last night’s trousers, blouse, and sweater. By the time she yanked open her front door, the stoop was empty. She ran down the stairwell and then along the glistening, ice-covered cement path between her building and the neighboring one. Just as she reached the Michigan Avenue sidewalk, her feet flew out from beneath her. She landed so hard on her hip she thought she might have broken it. Her eyes squeezed shut in pain.

  “Hey,” Stella said softly. “Hey. You okay?”

  Something warm and wet touched her face. She opened her eyes to find the Worthingtons’ basset hound snuffling its way down her body, happily detecting L’Forte.

  “Winston!” Mrs. Worthington called. “Come!” Then, “My dear girl, are you all right? Anything broken?”

  The three of them, Stella and the Worthingtons, huddled around her.

  “You can go, boy,” Mr. Worthington said to Stella.

  “That’s my cab,” Stella said. “She called me.”

  Her brain was a soup of pain, but Lucybelle appreciated the quick-thinking lie.

  “Clearly she’s not going anywhere now. Run along.”

  “Yes, I am,” Lucybelle managed to croak. “I’m going somewhere. Please stay.” She tried to clear her head in spite of the throbbing in her hip. “Please stay,” she said again. She forced herself to look up at the elderly white couple and said, “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Worthington, but I’m fine.”

  “Oh, no you’re not, dear. Come upstairs. We’ll make you a nice cup of tea.” She shooed Stella with a flapping hand.

  “Stella,” Lucybelle said. “Stay. Please.”

  The Worthingtons glanced at one another. Mr. Worthington grabbed Winston’s collar, as if the hound needed to be protected from the crazy white lady on the ground and the Negro girl-boy cab driver, and they continued on down the street. Lucybelle had never been so glad about anyone’s departure.

  “Can you get up?” Stella asked.

  “It’s questionable.”

  “That was a pretty fall.”

  Lucybelle rolled over onto her hands and knees, and from that position pushed slowly to her feet. She brushed the grits of rock and ice off her pants and then took a couple of experimental steps. “Nothing’s broken, I don’t think.”

  “You tore your trousers.” Stella gestured at her hip where the wool had ripped a good three inches, revealing a sliver of her white panties and the top of her thigh.

  “Charming,” Lucybelle said. Her hair, she knew, was a mess of curls on top and flattened in the back where she’d slept on it. “I have to take L’Forte out. Do you want to walk with us?”

  “Who’s L’Forte?”

  “My dog. Just a minute, okay? I’ll get him and be right back.” She began limping up the walkway and then turned. “Will you wait? Please?”

  Stella nodded.

  Upstairs Lucybelle tried to brush her hair, but the dry cold air sent her curls in all directions. She pulled on a hat her mother had knit to go with the plum coat, but it was the wrong shade of purple and clashed. When she took it off again, her hair was even more witchy, so she tugged the hat back on, called L’Forte, and then made her way back down the stairs and out to the street.

  Stella leaned against a tree trunk, hands sunk in the pockets of her creased trousers, which hung to the perfect length over polished black shoes, her black wool overcoat opened at the front. She’d put on a pair of sunglasses, and bursts of sunshine glinted off each of the green lenses. Lucybelle thought she ought to be surprised to see Stella, but she wasn’t. She owed her money, after all, and Stella’s refusing to take it last night somehow compounded the debt.

  L’Forte stopped to lift his short back leg on a tree and then headed east at a clip.

  “He’s going to the lake.”

  “I only have a few minutes. I got church soon.”

  “It’s just two blocks.”

  “A hot dog on legs.”

  “Are you making fun of my dog?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Hey, let me get my camera. Hold on.”

  L’Forte turned and watched Stella jog across the ice-free street to her cab. He sat down and drew back his brown ears, as if he were worried about her departure, and then wagged his tail when she returned. He barked twice, cheerfully, before leading the way to the lake.

  “I can’t figure him out,” Lucybelle said. “He seems to like you.”

  “That’s so difficult to understand?”

  “He has such strong opinions, is all. For example, he’ll only go to the lake on sunny days. He can’t abide gloomy ones.”

  “Sounds like he has good sense, me and sun
shine.”

  L’Forte pranced around the frozen puddles and climbed up on a rock to look at the lake. A hard, cold silver light sparkled the water. The ice floes popped and tinkled as a breeze jostled them against one another. Lucybelle still wasn’t used to that expanse of water, a lake so big it might as well have been called a sea. It daunted her, like a border, but also enticed her.

  “He looks like he’s considering a voyage,” Stella said, snapping a picture of L’Forte. She tossed a stick and the dachshund shot out after it. For the next few minutes he ran, fetched, and dropped for his new best friend. Stella laughed every time he leapt up in the air to catch the stick, his plug of a body with the short stubby limbs flying. She took a series of pictures of him in action, giving Lucybelle directions about how to toss the stick so she could get the best light on the little dog. Catching on to the more sophisticated game of photography, L’Forte scrambled onto one of the shore rocks and then, holding the stick in his mouth like an Olympic relay runner, turned and looked at Stella, as if to say, photograph me now. Stella did.

  While they played, Lucybelle fervently wished she hadn’t taken that spill, wasn’t limping along in torn trousers and bed-wrecked hair, wearing mismatched clothing. She took off her glasses and held them up to the light. They were smudged as well.

  “Cigarette?” Stella knocked a Chesterfield out of the pack she drew from her coat’s inside pocket.

  “God, yes.”

  Stella loosed her full smile, the one that caved deep dimples on either side of her mouth. She cupped her hands around the lighter’s little flame and lit Lucybelle’s cigarette. She wore a class ring, platinum with a green stone. Lucybelle wanted to put the pad of her index finger on the stone. It looked like it would be icy and clarifying to the touch.

  “My brand too,” Lucybelle said inhaling gratefully.

  “Sometimes I roll my own,” Stella said.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Stella cocked her head and twisted her mouth to the side.

  “Why are you here?”

  Stella sat on a bench and waited for Lucybelle to sit as well. They smoked in silence for a minute. “I’m sorry about last night. I guess I was a jerk.”

  “You guess?”

  “I was a jerk.”