Fatty and Big Soap were in the thick woods behind the jook joint. Fatty’s head was stuck inside the hood of an ancient-looking convertible when Rusty emerged from the back door of the jook and yelled out, “Fatty, your sister’s here to see you.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“Don’t ask me,” Rusty said, strolling up to take a closer look.
“Tell her I’m busy. I got to see if this thing runs. I think it’s a Great Chadwick Six.”
“Any relation to a Great Big Dimwit?” Rusty said, nodding at Big Soap, who was underneath the car scrubbing the frame with a wire brush. Only Big Soap’s feet could be seen.
“If it’s a Chadwick Six, it’s worth some big chips. Those cars were made right here in Pottstown,” Fatty said.
“This piece of junk?” Rusty said, stepping back to look at the torn seat, dead tires, and an old gas lamp where the horn should be. “Where’d you get it?”
“They tore down an old house over on Bartelow Street where one of the big shots who ran the Neapco company lived. I found this behind it.”
“You found it? Don’t it belong to the house?”
“I freed it, Rusty. From the woods. Me and Soap here. I plan to sell it. Who knows what something like this can bring? What’s Bernice want?”
“She’s your sister, Fatty,” Rusty said. He headed back inside to the bar.
Fatty unfurled himself from the chassis and left the tools where they were in the dirt. He wasn’t exactly sure the car was a Great Chadwick Six. He’d never seen one, nor a photo of one. But he’d read someplace that there were only a few thousand made, back in the early 1900s. The company had gone belly-up two decades before, and while the car had no insignia that he could make out, if by chance the car was a Great Chadwick, well . . . what luck! That would be fly-the-coop money. Get-out-of-town money.
He found Bernice sitting on the porch bench, her hands folded neatly in her lap, wearing one of her church hats. She was, to his surprise, alone, for she was usually trailed by one or two of her brood of kids when she made her occasional outdoor forays, which were mostly to church.
“You going to a fish fry?” he asked, stepping onto the porch and seating himself on a crate.
Bernice frowned. The two were not close. They had not had a conversation that lasted more than five minutes in years. Their dispute over ownership of their father’s house had morphed into a general dissatisfaction that had lasted for years. It bothered him that his once beautiful sister had let her life fall to pieces and had kids with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who came along. Three fathers. Eight children at last count, or so he’d heard. They lived blocks apart. It might as well have been miles.
“I didn’t see you at Chona’s funeral,” she said.
“She was Miss Chona to me.”
“Stop talking foolish,” Bernice said. She glanced about at the jook joint’s yard, the junk, the high weeds, the piled wood, the car carcasses, the tattered stand where he made hamburgers and sold them every afternoon, the sign on the battered front door that read “Fatty’s Jook. Caution. Fun Inside.”
She pointed at the sign. “You having fun?”
“Bernice, get the show on the road.”
“What?”
“Get to your point.”
“You need to get saved.”
“I’ll see you later,” Fatty said, disgusted. He rose off the crate and moved toward the porch steps.
“I got something for you,” she said. “You’ll like it.”
That stopped him. He paused at the top of the stairs, his hand on the banister. “You making your own money without a printing press now?”
“That’s all you think about.”
“Did Daddy leave me some money?” he asked.
She frowned. That was a sore point. Their father, Shad Davis, had been saving for them to go to college, but had died early, leaving only the house they lived in. “You need to let go of that one,” she said.
“I ain’t hanging on to it,” Fatty said. “That was fifteen years ago.”
“It would’a worked out, you going to college. There was a little money in there, to start.”
“Well now, I got a better plan. I’m moving to Hollywood to make movies.”
“Better than working your way down past the label on every bottle of booze you come across?”
“I don’t drink booze. I sell it.”
“That’s worse.”
“When you open a riding academy for Bible thumpers, call me, okay?”
“You can’t judge me for walking God’s road.”
“Glad you walking some kind’a road. ’Cause you and Jesus wasn’t wearing out the road between here and Graterford when I was in there picking my teeth off the floor.”
“Momma was dying.”
“Did they stop making pen and paper in those years, too?”
“You put yourself in there. And I sent you a Bible.”
“Whyn’t you make something of yourself, Bernice? What you come here bothering me with all this nonsense for? All that stuff is past. It’s gone now. What you want?”
“I said I got something for you,” she said.
“If it ain’t money, I ain’t interested.”
“It’s valuable,” she said.
“Where’d you get it, finishing school?”
Bernice, her calm nearing its edges, pursed her lips. “You just like the white man,” she said. “It must be a terrible burden to pretend you know everything.”
“Hurry on home, Bernice. And don’t stop for bread.”
He stepped down off the porch and walked a few steps, and as he did, he heard—or thought he heard—her mumble a number. That stopped him. He turned back and put his foot on the bottom step.
“Did I hear right?” he said.
“You heard right.”
“If you said four hundred dollars, it’s a parlor trick.”
“I ain’t here to show no tricks. Jesus is my salvation.”
“If you wasn’t my sister, I’d throw you off the porch right now.”
“I ain’t here for myself. Just so you know. I’m doing missionary work.”
“Do it somewhere else then. You ain’t got four hundred dollars anyway. If you had that kind of money, you’d be packing the kids up and catching the first thing smoking outta here.”
“I ain’t got to go no place to know my Savior.”
“Listen to yourself, Bernice!”
Bernice sighed. “I got one question. And after you answer it, I’ll leave what I brung you and go on about my business. And I don’t want to see you no more and have nothing to do with you because I have lived too long and you are too nasty. I know I’m a hard woman. I’ve made a few mistakes in life. But I’m no worse than these other mothers out here who pray ‘Lord, let my child be wise and good’ when they really mean ‘Let this child have more power and money than I have.’ I don’t do that with my children. That’s what our father did to us. He built things. The Jewish church, a lot of houses and buildings and things. He tried to build us, too. But he never finished. Maybe he wasn’t building us the right way before he left this life. Maybe that’s why we’re like we are now.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Who helped us through when Daddy passed?”
“Just ’cause somebody brings around groceries and helps you cart water and walks you to school from time to time don’t make ’em a friend.”
“Where’d you get such an evil heart?”
“Look who’s talking. You ain’t said two words to nobody out here in years. I ain’t against Chona’s people, Bernice. They was good people.”
“But you ain’t had the decency to show your face at her service.”
Fatty rolled his eyes. “If you want a wailing wall, use the woodpile over there. I don’t know nothing about Jews servicing their dead.”
“Neither do I. But I went.”
“If you want to knucker yourself to the Jews around here for tossing us a few nickels in the old days, go ahead. You paid ’em back by hiding Dodo from the state. That’s aiding and abetting, by the way. Somebody was telling the man from the state everything. You could’a got caught ’cause of that blabbermouth, whoever it is.”
“My own preacher!”
“Snooks? You lyin’!”
“I’m telling you what God’s pleased with.”
“Snooks ain’t that stupid.”
“Reverend Spriggs. Stop calling him Snooks,” Bernice said.
“I’ll call that peanut head whatever name I want. I don’t believe it.”
“He told me hisself. He confessed to me last Sunday after church. Said he told the colored man from the state about Dodo. He didn’t mean to, but turns out the colored man didn’t want no part of catching up to Dodo anyway. His job was to drive around the big bosses from the state. So when they sent him to fetch Dodo, it was just extra butter beans and soup for him. He ain’t had no intentions of catching nobody. He got to drive the big state car by hisself and burn up a whole day and get paid. He didn’t no more care for catching Dodo than you and I would care to snatch a flea out the air and swallow it. Every time they sent him to fetch Dodo, he’d call on Reverend Spriggs first. Then Reverend Spriggs would call on me. And I’d step over to Chona’s and hide Dodo where they couldn’t find him. He stayed free playing in my yard for a long time, and the state never did pick him up. Doc found him by accident. He didn’t bring nobody from the state with him when he came by the store. Doc coming that day by hisself, that was a surprise.”
Fatty felt his face growing hot. The mention of Doc Roberts made him furious. He sucked his teeth. “You come all the way up here to tell me about them rascals? I couldn’t give a sh—” And here he shifted, because Bernice was sanctified and still his sister, so he deferred. “I’m glad the colored man from the state tipped his mitt to Reverend Spriggs. But we don’t owe him or Reverend Spriggs nothing. What do we owe each other on this Hill, Bernice? We got nothing. Ain’t never gonna have nothing. Everything good in this town is off this Hill. Miss Cho—Chona, I looked in on her from time to time. But she had her own people to look after her. We don’t owe them. They don’t owe us.”
“It wasn’t no them and us. It was we. We was together on this Hill,” Bernice said.
“Stop tricking yourself, sis. Them days is gone. The Jews round here now, they wanna be in the big room with the white folks. All they gotta do is walk in the room and hang their hat on the rack. Let me and you try that. See what happens.”
“Chona wasn’t like them.”
“If she wasn’t a cripple, she’d a been just like them.”
“Something’s wrong with you, Fatty, to let that kind’a evil thinking in your heart.”
Fatty frowned. He hated these kinds of talks. “I said Miss Chona was . . . she was all right. We ain’t never gonna meet nobody like her again, that’s for sure.”
Bernice was silent a long moment. She seemed to be trying to make a decision. Then she nodded.
“You ain’t really got nothing to give me, do you?” Fatty said.
Bernice, for the first time, smiled. And for a moment, the years dropped away, and beneath the church hat, the prissy posture, and the fortress of silence that she barricaded herself behind, she was the Bernice of old, the tall, gorgeous girl who sang like a bird.
“I do got something to give you. But I got a question to ask you first. You worked a lot with Daddy back when we was little. When you worked with him, did y’all lay any water pipes?”
“Dug a bunch of everything. Wells. Graves. Laid pipes. Daddy did everything.”
“A water pipe?”
“We worked on two or three at least.”
“On the Hill?”
“Yeah, I reckon.”
“Any around Hayes and Franklin?”
“Don’t remind me. There’s a well there ’bout fifteen feet deep.”
“Is it near the public fountain in the lot where everybody gets water?”
“Yep. Daddy did that for the Jewish church, I believe. I don’t know why that well is so deep. I think the water table runs under the bottom of that well. There’s a well pump at the bottom there. It was a nasty job, setting that up. That was a long time ago. I was young.”
“Can you find it?”
“Course I can. It’s in the lot near the Clover Dairy, not far from the public faucet. The well’s capped. The city put a concrete manhole cover on top of it and it might be covered by grass and junk. But it’s there. The pipes are down under that cap, maybe eight or nine feet, or maybe even fifteen feet. I believe it’s fifteen, though I can’t remember exactly.”
She stood. “All right then.”
She opened her purse, withdrew a large brown envelope that appeared to contain a book, and gently placed it on the bench where she had been sitting. “This is for you.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a gift.”
“If it’s a Bible, take it to the store and get your money back. I still got the last one you gave me.”
“Nothing wrong with a Bible,” she said. “Bible’s got a good message.”
“Does that package got four hundred dollars in it?”
“Look at what you’ve become, you cheatin’ low-life swine. No. It does not have four hundred dollars in it.”
“So it is a Bible!”
But she was gone, off the porch and down the muddy road, moving in a hurry.
Watching her leave, Fatty was so mad that he had to stifle the urge to toss the package at her head as she took the shortcut that sloped down onto the Hill, her hat bobbing up and down in the weeds and going out of sight.
The brown envelope sat unopened on the porch all afternoon and was still there when he opened the jook joint that night. Only because customers began rolling in with the usual cursing and shouting and staggering around the porch as the jukebox blasted Erskine Hawkins records did he take it behind the building to the back staircase where, in the low light of the bare light bulb and out of sight of customers, he ripped open the brown paper packaging.
He was right. It was a Bible. And there was not four hundred dollars in it. There was five hundred. And an envelope bearing a two-page note.
He read the first page quickly, glanced at the second page, and found an extra four hundred dollars taped to it. He ripped the four hundred dollars off the second page so fast that he didn’t realize he’d torn off part of the page.
“Praise God,” he said.
He ran off to the front of the jook joint, laughing as the rest of the second page, bearing the rest of the note, fluttered to the ground. Later on, he was sorry he had been in such a hurry.