OF WILSON MCCOY, QUINCY Springfield had said, “Wilson ain’t pissed because he’s black. He’s pissed because he’s an asshole and everybody knows it.” Lydell Lafayette had added that on five minutes’ acquaintance he was ready to practice discrimination against McCoy “with a fry-pan upside his head.” Now they were seated with him at the card table in the little utility room off the basement where McCoy sold drinks from 2:00 a.m. until dawn.
The block, bounded by Kercheval and Pennsylvania, was crowded with single-and two-family houses separated by strips of brown grass scarcely wide enough for a man to walk on without brushing against a wall on either side. The boards were parched and paintless and in the daytime old people sat on the sagging porches looking as bleached and gray as the horsehair sofas and overstuffed chairs that had grown too shabby for even the dark cramped living rooms and been exiled.
The house belonged to McCoy’s mother, a nearly deaf woman of sixty-five who slept each night through believing her son worked nights waxing the floors at Felician Academy High School, a job he’d been fired from nine months earlier after an electric typewriter and a hundred dollars in staples and stationery disappeared from the office during his shift. At twenty he was the last of eleven children still living at home, a slat-thin, unlikely-looking Black Panther alumnus with a sunken chest, a straggly Fu Manchu moustache and chin whiskers, and an enormous Afro with a black beret clinging to one side at all times like moss on a boulder. Tonight he was wearing a dirty pinstripe vest over no shirt and bell-bottom jeans that looked as if they’d been urinated on by the Pistons bench. Quincy suspected the Panthers had turned him out for reasons of hygiene.
“You sure this is accurate?” McCoy dropped ash from his cigarette on the sheet of ruled notepaper in front of him and tried to brush it off. His hand was oily with sweat and he left a muddy smear on the diagram. The room had no ventilation.
“I drew it myself. Been there a hundred times.” Quincy used his finger for a pointer. “This here’s the express. It stops only two places, the ground floor and forty-three.”
“Looks too easy.”
“Well, there’s security, and people going in and out all the time.”
“Fuck the people. We need to know how many guards.”
“Easy to get. What kind of guns you need? We got a connection.”
“Full auto.”
“Noisy.”
“What we want,” McCoy said. “Louder the noise, less pain-in-the-ass heroes we got to deal out. Plus we might not have time to play Annie Oakley. Spray and run.”
“I don’t want no bystanders hit.”
“No big deal, blood. That time of day downtown, all’s we hit is white meat.”
“Hey, I ain’t mounting no crusade for the fucking race. I’m just trying to stay alive.”
“Okay, man. Everything’s cool.” Backpedaling. Quincy seemed to be the only man, black or white, whom McCoy feared to cross.
Lydell coughed; or maybe it was a laugh. The cough had become such a constant that Quincy never noticed it unless a third party expressed annoyance. The loss of weight was now unmistakable, and lately Lydell had complained of a sore back. He had taken to carrying a handsome walnut stick with a gold knob to help him get up and down. But he refused to see a doctor. The man who had escalated a few bar-splinters in his hand and wrist to the level of a Purple Heart now dismissed obvious serious illness as simple exhaustion. And he was smoking more than ever.
McCoy showed no irritation at the persistent coughing. He was the most perfectly self-absorbed individual Quincy had ever met. Quincy had heard somewhere that McCoy had been allowed to sleep in the same bed with his parents until age fifteen, at which time his sixty-two-year-old father had left home to move in with a waitress and part-time prostitute who lived down the street. After that, according to the rumor, Wilson had gone on sleeping with his mother. A few months later the father and his mistress were found shot to death in the bedroom of their apartment. The motive was officially recorded as robbery, but the police couldn’t explain why the thief would have reloaded his revolver twice and emptied it three times into the couple on the bed. Wilson and his mother were questioned, but the murder weapon never turned up and the case remained open, as did so many others in neighborhoods like Kercheval.
“How many men you going to use?” Quincy asked.
“How many you want? We can go in with a dozen and cover all the exits.”
“Too flashy. Cops might not spend too much taxes looking for whoever offed a bunch of thugs, but if we rub their noses in it they dog us into the ground.”
“We can do it with three. Somebody got to cover your innocent lily-butt bystanders.”
Their conversation was wrapped in the whooshing and thudding of the old gas water heater in the corner and a clatter of voices and music from the basement-turned-saloon outside, where a radio played straight Motown for the drinkers and dancers. When the noise swelled suddenly, McCoy leaned back in his chair and opened the door.
“Mahomet,” he said. “That boy draws excitement like a knuckle-bone draws flies.”
Through the opening the three watched Mahomet working his way through the brightly clad customers swaying on the linoleum and sitting on the sofa and chairs, pausing here and there to shake hands and flash his white grin, as brilliant as Sebastian Bright’s in the reflected light of his suit. He wore white all the time now, even when he wasn’t speaking; people who had never seen or listened to him recognized him on the street by his wardrobe and reputation. Behind him, dressed in dark suits and spread black collars like a rack of eight balls, trundled the exaggerated musculature of Mighty Joe Young, the two Bongo Brothers, and Anthony Battle, poor dead Congo’s friends from the World Wrestling Guild. As bodyguards they managed somehow to look even larger than they were without dwarfing the compact Mahomet. It was a group calculated to turn heads away from the scene of a multiple accident.
“Looks like somebody done left Pat Boone in the oven too long.” Lydell, who had developed a reluctant respect for Mahomet during the scuffle at 1300, still didn’t like him.
The newcomer stopped outside the open door to the utility room. Hanging back a pace, the quartet of wrestlers stuck out four feet on either side of him.
“Quincy. Krystal told me at the apartment you were here.” Mahomet seemed to be waiting for him to rise and approach.
Quincy, who unlike Lydell was more amused than irritated by his former inmate’s ascent from jailbird to rib-joint messiah, stayed seated. “You spellbinding tonight?”
“Not tonight. I came to find out if you heard about Gidgy.”
“Gidgy stays out of the news.”
“That’s changed. Cops hit the Morocco a little while ago. They arrested six for possession. One of them was the proprietor, the radio said. Isn’t that Gidgy?”
Lydell put out his cigarette in a puddle of melted ice on the table. “They wouldn’t take Gidgy. Gidgy’s got a connection.”
“I’m just telling what I heard.”
“Where’d they take him?” Quincy asked.
“Police headquarters.”
“Shiiit.” Lydell clamped a fresh Kent into the holder and lit up.
“Gidgy was getting us our guns,” Quincy told McCoy.
“Bail him.”
“That ain’t what I’m worried about.”
“Think the cops know?”
“We only know one man likes to hear himself talk,” Lydell said.
Mahomet said, “It wasn’t me.”
“Fucking white police state, that’s what we got here.” McCoy studied the crude upraised fist tattooed on his left bicep. “We ought to go out and take over some stores, bring the TV people down here and tell ’em what’s what.”
Lydell grinned, ghastly in his emaciation. “Shiiit. You been talking about going out and taking over stores ever since I know you. Why don’t you start one of your own?”
“They say who done the raid?” Mahomet shook his head. Quincy got up and peeled the back of his shirt away from his skin. “I don’t like Gidgy getting took down. Wasn’t no lieutenant from Vice called that.”
“Mayor wants to go to Washington,” Lydell said. “Elections fuck everything up.”
McCoy folded the diagram sheet lengthwise twice and stuck out the flat tube. “Want to scrub?”
“Just get your people and go over that floor plan.”
“It cost you. Where you going to get it now you’re out of bidness?”
“How much to start?” Quincy produced a roll of hundreds.
McCoy combed his beard with his fingers. “Thousand. No, fifteen hunnert. That splits better three ways.”
Quincy counted the bills onto the table. When McCoy reached for them, Quincy banged the heel of his hand down on top of the stack. “I hear them talking about this in the alley, I’m coming back.”
“You won’t hear.”
“Let’s split, Lydell.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Quit fucking around.”
Lydell’s hand was clenched on the knob of his stick. He was still grinning. “Nobody’s fucking nobody, bro. I can’t get up.”