“I WASN’T SAYING IT just to be saying it,” Krystal said. “It was nice. I mean, really nice.”
Quincy said, “Nobody’s arguing, okay?”
“I remember when they put my mother under, it was like your generic, all-purpose, one-size-fits-all funeral. Preacher kept getting her name wrong. I didn’t give a shit, I mean she threw me out when I was fourteen, said if I was going to pedal my ass all over town I might as well do it for a living. I only went because my brothers said if I didn’t they’d hang out in front of my apartment and throw the johns down the stairs and because I wanted to make sure that old woman was dead. It was the only time I ever seen a smile on her face. Didn’t they do a good job on Vernon? He looked nice.” She’d been calling him Vernon ever since they’d begun the arrangements. In life it was always Congo, when she’d addressed him at all.
“He looked deader’n Bojangles,” Lydell said.
They were riding in one of the two white Cadillac limousines Quincy had hired for the procession; ahead of them, following the hearse, was the limousine carrying the Reverend Idaho, and behind them an assortment of Lincolns, Corvettes, Thunderbirds, Chevies, and Theron “Gidgy” Gidrey’s black-and-green Excalibur, was strung out for eleven blocks doing fifteen miles an hour on the way to Mt. Elliott Cemetery. Krystal, touching up her face with a compact shaped like a clamshell, had on a black minidress with sequined lace across the bodice, black fishnet stockings, and silver sandals with leather straps cross-hatching her calves like Richard Burton wore in Cleopatra. Quincy wore black sharkskin with his only white shirt and no necktie and Lydell had exchanged his yellow tie and hatband for respectful black. Quincy’s window was down and East Lafayette smelled of hot asphalt and spent cordite from exploded firecrackers. He had to remind himself it was the Fourth of July.
They passed a parked panel truck bearing the WWJ Channel 4 logo. A few yards away a silver-haired man in a blue blazer stood on the sidewalk with his back to them, facing a TV camera. He was holding a microphone.
“That Ven Marshall?” Lydell leaned forward and cranked down his tinted window.
“Probably just some reporter. Them anchormen don’t go outside for nothing.”
“I was on TV once,” Krystal said.
“Think Patsy’s watching?” asked Lydell.
“Somebody’ll tell him about it if he don’t see it.”
“I waved when I was getting into the wagon. Only they cut out the wave when they showed it.”
“Hope you’re right,” Lydell said. “I hate to think of spending all that bread on just Congo.”
“I was in a movie once, but the cops burned the negative.”
Quincy said, “The reverend surprised me. I didn’t think he could hop around like that.”
“He sure gives hell hell,” Lydell said. “Where’s Mahomet? I thought he was riding with us.”
“He took a bus back to Collingwood. Said he don’t like to see folks put in the ground.”
“Man can sing. What’s that he sang?”
“‘Freedom Road.’”
“Beats them low notes to death. Makes Lou Rawls sound like Little Anthony.”
“Man can sing,” Quincy agreed. Before the service he had taken Mahomet aside and told him he’d personally break his dick off if anything but lyrics came out of his mouth. He had had an anxious moment when Mahomet got up in front of the choir and cleared his throat, but when Quincy rolled up his funeral program and bent it in half, the singer got the message, and the next three minutes were the sweetest Quincy had ever spent in a place where he didn’t want to be. Mahomet was good, phenomenally good; the timbre of his voice was like the reverberation of a great bell, and the emotion behind it held the tragic richness of wine put down when “Freedom Road” was new.
There had been a brief tingling silence between the end of the last, incredibly attenuated note and Idaho’s approach to the pulpit, like a stone hanging at the top of its high arc before plummeting anticlimactically to earth. Perhaps because of it, the minister had started slowly and worked his way up, droning at first, then shortening his vowels and chopping his consonants, to a tent-fire pitch, ending with:
“‘And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees; therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire!’”Mahomet had then joined with the choir to sing “Praise Ye the Lord,” but although it stirred the people in the pews, many of whom joined in, clapping and swaying, it was that first quiet solo that had stayed with Quincy. It made him think for the first time of what Congo had lost, and of what all those who shared his color had lost since the first slaver set anchor off a barbaric shore. He thought then that he understood Emma and her tribal artifacts a little better, without wanting to see any of them again.
The graveside service was brief, with Idaho reading quietly from Matthew under a canvas with folding chairs set out for Quincy and his party while the other mourners stood in their dark clothes and jewelry. The pallbearers were Quincy, Lydell, Joe Petite, and Sebastian Bright from the East Side, and two of their collectors. Despite his name, Petite, a former Detroit Piston, was nearly seven feet tall, with wrists and ankles that stuck out of the suits he bought by the yard. Bright, shorter by almost a foot and a half, was two hundred pounds of hard fat with a glossy shaved head and a gold tooth in front; today he had foregone his trademark fawn suits for sober black flannel.
The casket, whose brushed bronze finish shone softly in the sun, descended into the vault with a hydraulic hum. When it came to rest, Idaho tossed the first handful of earth onto the lid. Quincy bent to scoop up a handful, paused, dropped it into the grave, and walked away. When Lydell joined him, dusting off his palms, Quincy stopped and pointed his chin in the direction of Mt. Elliott Street, where a man in a black tank top and faded Levi’s was leaning back against a sky-blue Cobra with his arms crossed, showing his biceps. The sun flared off a gold chain around his neck.
“My, oh, my,” said Lydell. “Mistuh DiJesus he sho’ nuff do likes to see his customers all de way into de ground, don’t he? Think Patsy sent him?”
“You don’t send guys like him anyplace. They just show up.”
“Man knows his wheels.”
Krystal caught up with them. “What you all looking at?”
Quincy told her. She shielded her eyes with her hand. “He don’t look like such hot shit to me.”
“He killed Congo.”
“Man’s got balls,” Lydell said. “Fuzz here and everything.”
Quincy said, “They ain’t looking for him. If they tossed him right now, he’d be cleaner than you.”
“Town’s full of dudes like that, showing off their big muscles,” Krystal said. “Ain’t a stiff wad in the bunch.”
Lydell poked a Kent into his holder. “What you figure he wants?”
“A look at the meat.” Quincy resumed walking. “Let’s go back to Collingwood.”
Gidgy’s Excalibur, bottle-green with black fenders and running boards, was parked in front of the blind pig when they got there. Loosely patterned on the 1930 Mercedes, the car had a flat rag top, wire wheels, a long medieval-looking hood secured with a leather strap, and chromed exhaust pipes bending down from holes in the hood.
“How’d he get here ahead of us?” Lydell stood on the curb while Quincy tipped the driver of the limousine. They’d let Krystal out in front of the apartment building on Woodrow Wilson to change.
“Gidgy never stays for graveside,” Quincy said. “He only bought the car for Sundays and funeral processions.”
“Looks like something the house nigger drives the rich old white lady in to Mah-Jongg. Them dope fiends got no taste.”
“Twenty grand worth of car, bro. They only sell a hundred and fifty a year.”
Lydell coughed. “Maybe Johnson’s right. They’s hope for this here Great Society after all.”
Upstairs, Mahomet was pouring clear liquid from a cocktail shaker into a glass on the table where Gidgy sat. The singer had taken off the black coat he’d worn to the funeral and tied on an apron that covered him almost to his patent-leather boots. As always he wore elevator heels.
“Thanks for coming, Gidge.” Quincy shook the hand of the man seated. It was like flipping a limp tow rope.
“I was just telling your man here he’s wasting his time tending bar. He’s good enough to sing with the Temptations.” Gidgy had on a box-back jacket that sheathed him past his hips and a red-and-green-striped bow tie on a Madras shirt. The brim of his white Panama and the smoked lenses of his old-fashioned round spectacles shielded his weak eyes from the unaccustomed glare of daytime. His long, could-be-forty, could-be-sixty face was like dark oiled wood, and his mouth was where smiles went to die. A gold earring the size of a Lifesaver glinted on his right lobe. A joint smoldered in a corner of his mouth like a conventional cigarette. From time to time he tilted his head to one side to release the acrid smoke trapped under his hat.
“I tried it,” Mahomet said. “Quincy knows all about it.”
Quincy lifted Gidgy’s glass and sniffed at it. “He can’t mix drinks neither. How much vermouth you put in that shaker?” he asked Mahomet.
“About a cup.”
Lydell said, “Jee-sus. We been working on the same bottle since we opened.”
“The man asked for a martini. Was I going to tell him I never made one?”
“Mahomet’s new,” Quincy said. “You hungry?” He nodded toward the spread on the bar. Krystal had overseen that part, little thin sandwiches and cocktail wienies among the ribs and collards. The room smelled like a barbecue.
“Maybe I get the munchies later. The rest coming?”
“Hope so. We can’t get all that into the fridge.”
“It was a nice one,” Gidgy said. “I only been to one better.”
“Big Nabob?”
“I ain’t that old. Buried my brother in fifty-nine. Well, my half brother, but I sprung for both halves. He tried to fly off a roof.”
Lydell was making a sandwich of ribs on pumpernickel. “Thought you boys never used the stuff you sell.”
“You mean to tell me you never played a number?”
“Not since I been in the business. It’s like cooking for yourself. Where’s the surprise?” He took a bite.
“Surprises is all I sell.”
After a few minutes the others began to arrive, first in singles and small groups, then in a steady stream until the bar and poolroom were filled with happy mourners juggling drinks and paper plates heaped with food. Quincy demoted Mahomet to waiter and for a time he and Lydell were too busy behind the bar to hold a conversation with anyone. Along with Joe Petite and Sebastian Bright and their people, the guests included longtime customers of both the blind pig and Quincy and Lydell’s policy business and other Twelfth Street-area entrepreneurs. Beatrice Blackwood, at fifty-two a handsome, fine-featured Jamaican who operated the Indio Spa on Bethune (No Asian Girls), arrived on the arm of her glowering, dashiki-clad houseman Kindu Kinshasha, who had fought heavyweight under the name Marcus Tyler. By the time Krystal showed up in a purple dress trimmed with black feather boas, the effect was lost in the crowd. She had Lydell float a twist of lemon in a tumbler full of gin and went off in a corner to sulk and soak.
“Anything for you, my man?” Lydell squirted seltzer into a glass of Scotch for Kindu Kinshasha to take back to his mistress.
“I don’t drink.”
“Religion?”
“Ulcer.”
Lydell handed him the glass. “I heard you fought Clay.”
“You heard wrong.”
“Beatrice told me you sparred with him when he was nineteen, twenty.”
“You don’t fight Clay. You try to get out of the ring alive.” He turned back into the crowd.
“It ain’t my argument,” Sebastian Bright was telling Quincy over a bottle of Budweiser. His shaven scalp and the gold tooth in the fixed smile sent off semaphores of reflected light.
“Cops told me the same three hit one of your places on Clairmount the night we got it,” Quincy said.
“You talking to cops now?”
“They was talking to me. You fixing to just let the Sicilians walk in and take over like the last thirty years never happened?”
“I don’t know it was Sicilians. You said that. I figure it was just some brothers trying to get ahead. I find them I cut their nuts off, but I understand why they done what they done. I ain’t looking for no war I can’t win.”
“You don’t fight, you already lost it.”
Sebastian laid a pudgy hand on Quincy’s wrist. His smile was set in concrete. “You throw a good wake, and I’m sorry about your boy. But you go stirring up shit with the Man, somebody gonna take you out. Maybe one of us.”
Quincy said, “Old Patsy cranks the organ, you just shake that tin cup, huh?”
The gold tooth disappeared. “I was running policy slips for Machine before you sat on your first pot. I seen that stairwell he got shot up in with his bodyguard right after they drug out the bodies. Looked like somebody went and dumped a tub of guts down the steps. Patsy’s old man Frankie done that, or had it done, which is the same thing. So when Patsy says, ‘Nigger, git,’ I dips my head and says, ‘Yes, suh,’ and shuffles on out de do’. I got this far playing the percentages. You want to lay it all down on a longshot, you just go right ahead. I’ll throw dirt down your hole.”
The wake had been going two hours when four new guests entered, single file because the doorway was barely wide enough for one. They stood just inside, two Negroes in their middle years and two in their twenties, looking around. Their loud sportcoats and open-necked shirts, strained at the shoulders and too short in the arms, stood out against all that funeral black like Easter eggs in an alley. Quincy went over to them.
“You’re Springfield?” The speaker, built along Quincy’s lines but longer in the arms, simian, took his hand in a knuckle-demolishing grip. His graying hair, strung through beads that rattled when he moved his head, hung to his shoulders, thrusting the Neanderthal bone structure of his face into frightening relief. He made Quincy feel fey. “They mentioned you on the Six O’Clock News. That’s some send-off you gave Vernon.”
“You relatives?” There was a certain similarity of build.
“No. Hell, no. We wrestled with him. You seen me on Channel Nine maybe, right after Mitch Miller.”
“I work nights.”
“I’m Mighty Joe Young, the Gorilla from Manila. These here is my son and my nephew, they’re the Bongo Brothers, Boone and Bosco. They bend crowbars and shit over each other’s heads to warm up the crowd.”
“Bet it works.” Having just reclaimed his hand from Mighty Joe Young’s, Quincy merely nodded at the two younger men, who looked enough alike to be twins, second carbons of their father and uncle with less spectacular facial framework and tightly curled hair cut close to their scalps.
“And this is Anthony Battle.”
Quincy looked at the last man, a Joe Young contemporary with an advanced forehead and hostile eyes in a medium-dark face without expression. “Just Anthony Battle? What’s your gimmick?”
“I wrestle.”
“Anthony should of been world heavyweight champion.
He’s the only man to take a cocoa-butt from Bobo Brazil and laugh at him.”
“What happened?”
“It was during a press conference,” Battle said.
“Oh.”
Mighty Joe Young explained. “The World Wrestling Guild owns all the contracts. The championship belt looks best on Bobo, so they bought the reporters to keep the story out of print.”
Lydell had joined them. “Think you can get me a date with Amazonia the Python Queen?”
“She’s married,” Mighty Joe Young said. “To the Guild treasurer.”
Quincy said, “Sorry you couldn’t make the funeral.”
“I read about this Congo getting killed, but I didn’t know it was Vernon till tonight when I seen the procession on TV. Old Cape Horn had a headlock on every one of us at one time or another. We come to pay our respects.”
“Vernon’s friends are welcome. What you all drinking?”
“It’s not us and the Sicilians. It’s the white man kicking us back down to the bottom.”
Mahomet’s deep voice, raised at the bar, flattened the murmuring in the room. Heads turned. The singer was standing in front of Joe Petite, looking almost straight up at the former basketball center towering over him by nearly two feet.
“You think we push liquor after hours and sell numbers because we want to?” he went on. “We do it because the white man has kept us out of everything legal. Now, just when we’re starting to build ourselves up in the last place that’s open, he’s saying coloreds need not apply. He killed one of us like he was stepping on a bug, or did you forget you’re here swilling and stuffing your face because of him? You’d be standing in his blood right now if I didn’t clean it up day before yesterday.”
There was a little silence before the tall man set his glass down on the bar and turned to go; it was an eerie vacuum in that room filled with people, and Quincy thought of the tingling moment that had followed “Freedom Road” in church. Petite paused when he reached Quincy.
“It was a real fine day, brother, but your help needs a muzzle.” He left.
The crowd started to thin out after that. Sebastian Bright shook Quincy’s hand, showed his gold tooth, and went out without a word. Beatrice Blackwood kissed Quincy on the cheek, said, “It was lovely, dear. Stop in any time for a body shampoo and a massage, no charge”, and left with Kindu Kinshasha. On his way out, Gidgy told Quincy he was expecting a shipment of Mexican that he’d cut him a deal on if he was interested.
Mahomet came over. His face was tragic. “Sorry, boss.”
“It was a good speech, man. Martin ought to know about you.”
“Twelve thou, with the booze and eats. ‘It was a real fine day, brother.’ Shiiit.” Lydell subsided into a coughing fit. Quincy pounded him until he stopped.
Mighty Joe Young held out a card between two fingers the size of frankfurters. “This is my agent’s number. He’ll know where to reach me anytime you want me.” The others followed him out.
“We can always have him put a half nelson on Patsy,” said Lydell, gasping for breath.
When the last guest had departed, Quincy sent Lydell and Mahomet home and scraped Krystal out of the corner where she sat spraddle-legged on the floor with her glass in her purple lap. Hours later in the apartment, still half-asleep and smelling of junipers, she found him in the dark and made him hard and climbed aboard. The telephone rang.
“Quincy, this is Sebastian Bright.”
“Yeah, Sebastian.” He put a hand on Krystal’s back, interrupting her rhythm.
“I got the people if you can get the guns.”
He sat up, dislodging her. The luminous dial on the alarm clock read 3:10. “What happened to playing the percentages?”
“Fuck the percentages. They hit Joe Petite’s place tonight behind the barbershop. Joe was dead a long time before he got to the floor.”