I was sitting on the stoop in front of the Grant when Paul comes by with Lenny and Joni. Far as I’m concerned, Lenny still looks like a faggot.
“Hey, Lonnie, how’s it going?” Lenny talks like he’s afraid his teeth are going to break or something.
“Okay,” I said. “Where you people headed?”
“Paul’s just showing us around the neighborhood,” Lenny says. “This place is something else!”
“You ought to get yourself one of them buses that be bringing white folks through,” I said, “if you want to see the real ghett-o!”
Paul started looking around like he was embarrassed to even be there. Then he started talking some jive about when the next practice was going to be. He knew when it was going to be the same as me. I didn’t even answer him, but Lenny did.
“We’re going out to the Nassau Coliseum later on to see The Spinners and Tyrone Davis. You want to come?”
“How much are the tickets?”
“Paul got them,” Joni said, squeezing his arm. “How much were they, Paul?”
“Fifteen dollars,” he said, half under his breath.
“I ain’t going,” I said.
They hemmed and hawed for a while longer, and then Lenny said that they had to be going. Fifteen dollars times three was forty-five dollars. I couldn’t figure out how Paul got that kind of bread. I knew he wasn’t working, and I knew his moms wasn’t coming up with no bread like that to send him to the Coliseum. Then I remembered what Mary-Ann had been saying about Paul’s name being on an envelope in Tyrone’s office at the club she works in. I couldn’t make it add up.
I started thinking more about Cal playing pro ball, and the truth was that I wanted to tell somebody. Not that I wanted somebody to know about it so bad, but I just wanted to talk about it to somebody so I could get it straight in my own mind. Then I had a thought that really knocked me out. I would take Mary-Ann over to see Cal, and then maybe I would tell her, if she liked him.
I went over to Paul’s place and knocked on the door, and Freddie, Paul’s brother, opened it. Soon as he saw it was me he got into his Muhammad Ali stance and went into a little jive shuffle. I dug it. Freddie was a nice kid. I told him there was a roach near his foot and he looked down and I gave him a little uppercut. That ticked him off because he was always falling for something like that.
“Mary-Ann home?”
“Yeah,” he said—he was still pouting—“but she’s sleeping.”
“Your mama home?”
“No, just me and Mary-Ann,” he said, “and I wouldn’t be here if I had a quarter!”
I gave him a quarter, and he split. Mary-Ann usually slept over at Tyrone’s place. When she did sleep at home, it would be when Paul wasn’t home and she’d sleep in his bed. I went into Paul’s room, and she was laying there with the covers up around her head.
I got on the bed and started blowing in her ear.
First she pulled the cover up around her ear, but I just pulled it away and started blowing in her ear again. Then she started murmuring something in her sleep. I did that for another minute or so, and it still didn’t seem that she was going to wake up, so finally I shook her by the shoulder. If she didn’t move around in her sleep, I would have thought she was dead because she didn’t wake up until I just about shook her head off.
“What you doing here?” she asked. Her eyes were only half opened, and she had her head tilted back so she could see through the slits.
“I got an idea,” I said.
“What kind of idea?”
“Who’s Cal?” she asked. “Ain’t he that wino you were talking about?”
“He’s okay,” I said. “I really dig the guy, and I want you to meet him.”
“Why?” She opened her eyes full for the first time and looked at me.
“You know you got some pretty eyes, girl,” I said.
“Yeah? What else?”
“You mean about Cal?”
“No, I mean about my pretty eyes,” she said. Then she pulled the sheet down her arm. “How about this dynamite shoulder?”
“Come on, be serious,” I said.
“When we going to meet him?” she asked. She slipped out of bed, and she had on a brown slip with lace on the bottom that lay against her thigh and sent goose pimples up my back. She stretched and then grabbed a blouse from the drawer as I tried to drag my mind back to what I had been thinking about.
“He’s probably over at the center now,” I said. “We could go over there and you can meet him.”
“You still didn’t tell me why you want me to meet him,” she said.
“I just do,” I said, “that’s all.”
“Do I have to meet your mother, too?” she asked. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on some little half socks.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “You’ve met my mother a lot of times.”
“Well, usually, when a guy starts bringing his girl to meet his parents and stuff …”
“He ain’t my father, he’s just the … what you want to go and say something like that for?” I asked. “You starting some dozens with me?”
“Hey, man, cool out,” she said. “I didn’t mean nothing. What you getting all upset about? I was just kidding in the first place!”
“Well, I don’t dig that kind of kidding,” I said, knowing I was madder than I should have been. “Forget the whole thing, I’m going.”
“Lonnie Jackson, will you get out of yourself for a minute?”
“Yeah.” I sat down.
“Why are you so hard to get next to?” she asked. “You’re about as fine as you want to be until you find yourself getting close to somebody.”
“How you know that, girl?” I asked.
“How you know that, girl?” She mimicked me. “You say ‘girl’ like girl is something bad when I start getting close to you. You think because you acting like some kind of wild animal, I can’t deal with you? You can’t get me off your trail that easy. I’ll come after you just like a big-game hunter. I’m going to track you down, stay on your trail until I get you in a corner, and then I’m going to be there when you come out scratching and clawing. And I’m going to be scratching and clawing, too. It’s going to be good. Mary-Ann, the big-game hunter. How’s that sound?”
“You sound dangerous.”
“I am, sugar, you might as well get that straight from the get-go!”
I kissed her and, just a little, not a lot … just a little … I was scared of her. Maybe she was as dangerous as she said she was.
* * *
On the way over to the center I told her about Paul and Lenny going over to the Nassau Coliseum. She said that Paul had a lot of money recently and she didn’t know where he was getting it from. When she asked him, he told her to mind her business.
“He’s always telling me that,” Mary-Ann said. “But usually he acts like it’s no big thing. When I asked him the other day, he started going through a lot of changes.”
“He’s trying to keep up with those la-di-das from uptown,” I said. “When they get tired of him, they’ll shake him loose and won’t even remember his name.”
We got over to the center, and Ox was in talking to Cal. He had Sparrow on his shoulder. We talked around for a while, and then I gave Ox the sign to split.
“Say, coach.” I closed the door behind Ox and hoped that nobody else would come in. “I want you to meet Mary-Ann.”
“Hey, hello.” Cal nodded towards her.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Mary-Ann said.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Cal said.
He didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t say anything. We just sat there for a minute.
“This is a nice little place you have here,” Mary-Ann said.
“What, er … what can I do for you?” Cal asked.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well …” He looked over at Mary-Ann. “Is Mary-Ann your lady?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“Man, well, why didn’t you say something?” Cal stood up and came around the desk and shook Mary-Ann’s hand. “Now I’m really glad to make your acquaintance, young lady. I didn’t know why he brought you here. I thought she might be a backup guard or something.”
Cal broke out some sodas, and we sat around and rapped for a while, and they hit it off real nice. It made me feel good, and when I took Mary-Ann back over to her mother’s place, she was really happy.
“Look, I want to tell you something about Cal,” I said. “But you got to keep it between you and me, dig?”
“Go ahead.”
“He used to play pro ball,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh?” I looked at her. “I tell you the guy used to play pro ball and all you can say is uh-huh? He played with the Big O, he played with cats like Twyman and Baylor. This dude was so bad they wrote him up in all the papers and stuff.”
“Hey, that’s really good!” she said.
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?”
“I know all the words, Lonnie,” she said. “But I don’t know how they feel coming out of you, dig? I mean, I just don’t have anything that makes me feel that way. You got your heart set on playing pro ball, and I’m still waiting to set mine on something.”
“Yeah. You know Cal could give me … not give me, not even teach me … what am I trying to say?”
“Help you.”
“Yeah, that’s right. He could help me with my game and everything.”
“You gonna let him?”
“Am I gonna do what? Sure, that’s what it’s all about,” I said. “He thinks I can make it, too.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Surprised? You seen me play, woman. You don’t have to know that much about the game to know I can play.”
“Not about your game, Lonnie All-Star. About you letting somebody help you.”
“I don’t need that much help,” I said. “He’s just showing me a few things, that’s all.”
“Things like what?” she asked.
“Like … I don’t know, just things,” I said. “Don’t make a big deal over it.”
Mary-Ann was right about me not letting a whole lot of people help me. I didn’t let people help me because I didn’t need it mostly. Besides that, it was just like Cal said, nobody gives you something for nothing. They’d either have something they’d want you to do for them or they’d want you to hang around them and act like you’re grateful. I didn’t know if Cal was going to turn out that way or not, but I really wanted to check him out. The cat really wasn’t into that much, but I was really digging him. Yeah, he seemed okay, but I was still checking him out.
The next day after practice Cal asked me if I wanted to meet his old lady. I didn’t want to, particularly, but I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went.
The A train rocked back and forth as we headed uptown. There weren’t too many people on it. At the far end of the car there were two teachers with their classes. The only thing was that the teachers were really young. I winked at one of them, and instead of turning away, she gave me a nice smile.
“I told you about Aggie?”
“You mentioned her,” I said.
“When I first met her, she was singing,” he said. “She’s good, but she just couldn’t get over.”
“If she was that good, she should have made it,” I said.
“Hey, man, you don’t know nothing, do you?” He looked at me and shook his head. “Just because you good at something don’t mean you have to make it. Especially us. Every time you see a black person who’s got it halfway made you can bet there’s a dozen more just as good as he is waiting for a chance. There’s a lot of singers out here who can smoke anything you see on television. How many ugly singers you see making records and singing on television?”
“None, really,” I said.
“Right. You think ugly people can’t sing? They out there, but they can’t make it. And for every black basketball player in the NBA under six ten, there’s two more out here just as good who won’t see the inside of the Garden unless he’s got a ticket or a broom. Anybody that looks at a black guy and tells him that he can make it in basketball just because he’s good is either lying or dumb. You got to be so special your feet don’t touch the ground when you walk. People used to laugh when Satchel Paige used to say, ‘Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.’ Any black cat in the world that knows anything knows what old Satch meant.
“I remember one time a black football player came over to me in a hotel and told me how hard it was to make it in the National Football League. He said, the only thing that made it for him was that he could sew buttons on uniforms.”
“Sew buttons on uniforms?”
“That’s the same thing I said when he told me. He said he went to the tryouts thinking he was bad. He started telling them about his college record and how many yards he had gained. He said this red-neck coach looked at him and pointed to a ten-foot brick wall. The coach said, ‘Boy, we got fifteen niggers in camp who can jump over that wall, we got ten that can run through it, and we got six that can run through it without messing up our uniforms, and we only got room on the squad for three. Now what can you do?’
“I knew a cat called Goat that had more moves than Ex-Lax. I knew another guy that used to come down to the park. We used to have those square metal backboards. He could jump up and put a quarter on the top of a backboard, then jump up and change the quarter for two dimes and a nickel. He could shoot, pass, and play defense. When they used to bring the white boys into Harlem to play in the Rucker Tournament, they wouldn’t even let these cats play.”
“If they were so good, how come they didn’t play in the NBA?” I asked.
“One cat couldn’t make it because he had a record; one cat was into dope; one couldn’t make it because someone said that he might have done something. They didn’t like the way one cat looked, he had about three teeth missing. Any old thing. They got a thousand cats like us that can play this game, Lonnie. A thousand guys that have a game and looking for something to do with it.”
We reached an apartment building on Manhattan Avenue, and Cal checked out his clothes in the mirror in the hallway. It was an old building, but it looked all right. Some of the tin was coming off the stairs and there were a few things written on the walls, but nothing too bad. I could tell that Cal was nervous.
“Hey, man.” I was behind him walking up the stairs. “She do know we’re coming, don’t she?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She knows I told her we’re coming. But once I told her I was coming by, and it was a pretty important time, and I didn’t show. So when I tell her now, she just takes it light, you know.”
We got to the top floor and went to one of the apartments and rang the bell. There wasn’t an answer, and Cal rang again. Still no answer. He knocked. Just when I figured there wasn’t going to be no answer, the door opened.
I’ve always figured that if you want to know a guy, you got to check him out with his woman. Some guys are okay until they get around their woman; then they start thinking they’re Superman or something. You can’t say this to them and you can’t say that to them because they think you’re chumping them off in front of their woman. The first time I met Cal was when he was laying in the playground, so I knew he wasn’t no bank teller or nothing like that. He had played ball and had paid some dues and stuff, too. So I figured I knew him. He was a pretty tough guy and wouldn’t take too much off nobody. Then I seen him with Aggie.
He had bought a bottle of wine, the kind you got to open with a corkscrew. Well, she gives him a little peck on the cheek and goes on fixing some supper and talking light talk, and he’s holding the bottle in his hand like he forgot it was even there.
“How come you holding the bottle in your hand?” I asked.
“Hmm?” He looked at me and then smiled this big smile and put the bottle on the table.
“So you play ball, too?” Aggie wiped her hands on the dishrag and turned towards me.
“A little,” I said.
“He any good?” She turned to Cal.
“Yeah, he’s nice, real nice,” Cal said.
“He must be to get you back in the game,” she said.
“Guess who I had a long conversation with this morning?” Cal said, undoing the bottle.
“Who?”
“Sweet Man Johnson.”
“He still the same?”
“Yeah, he still the same,” Cal said. “He ain’t gonna never change.”
“He’s the only one,” Aggie said. She went through a drawer full of junk and found a corkscrew and handed it to Cal. “Most of these people get more than two cents in the pocket, get their heads so big they can’t get their hats on. I saw Richie the other day, you remember that guy everybody used to call Buddha?”
“Yeah,” Cal said. “This cat was a Muslim when we first met him, see? Then a little bit later he turned to being Jewish. Then the last time we saw him he had joined the Jews for Jesus movement.”
“Right.” Aggie was stirring a frying pan full of onions and green peppers and sprinkling it with red pepper. “Anyway, I saw that fool the other day. He was on the downtown side of the A train platform, and I was on the uptown side, going to the hairdresser. He’s yelling and everything, and then he comes busting over. Now, dig it, he runs up one flight of stairs, across the station, and down the other flight of stairs, just to give me this card that says ‘Richard Thompson, Business Representative.’ He missed his train trying to impress me. And guess what he’s a business representative of? Avon Products!”
Me and Cal both laughed at that, but I was getting to feel really left out. It wasn’t like they weren’t talking to me, because they were. But I got the feeling I was supposed to leave, only I didn’t know exactly how to pull it off. And maybe that wasn’t it either. The thing was, like I said before, you got to see a guy with his woman before you really got to know him. With Aggie, Cal was different. He talked smoother, and they just seemed to touch bases in different places that I didn’t know because I hadn’t been there. “Remember this?” or “remember that?”
And Aggie was different, too. She had something, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. She was nice-looking, real nice, but she wasn’t sexy. Only she was sexy, but she wasn’t the kind of sexy that you would say anything to her on the street. She was like Joni, Lenny’s sister, in the way she carried herself. But she didn’t talk any different than me or Cal. I was sitting there all through dinner trying to figure out how she was different. I knew she was different, though, and I could really see her getting next to a guy.
“So what else you been doing with yourself?” Cal asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Aggie said. She and Cal were drinking coffee, and I was drinking the wine—it wasn’t sweet enough, but it was what we had. “I went up and saw Nina Simone at City College the other day.”
“You still go to those concerts.”
“I hadn’t been,” she said, “but this guy wanted to go.”
“Oh.” I could see that when she mentioned another guy, it took something out of Cal. He looked away for a minute, and a kind of sadness came over his face. So quickly, though, that I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t just a shadow.
“I’ve been trying to do some writing, too,” Aggie said. “My poetry isn’t all that’s it’s cracked up to be, but if I get the music put to it, it’ll be okay.”
“You know, I wrote some—” It came out before I even realized it was going to.
“You write poetry?” Aggie looked at me and waited for an answer.
“No,” I said, sorry I had opened my mouth about the story I had wrote. “It’s just this little jive story. You know.”
“What’s it about?” Aggie stood up and took some paper out of the closet.
“Nothing much,” I said.
“If you wrote it, then I would like to hear about it,” Aggie said.
“I didn’t know you wrote,” Cal said.
“I was telling a story to Paul’s little brother,” I said. They were both looking at me. “It sounded okay, so I wrote it down for some reason.”
“What’s it about?” Aggie asked. She was dead serious, too, like it was normal that I would go around writing stories.
“It’s about a giraffe named Gordon,” I said, looking right at Cal. “He’s tall, dig, and he eats the leaves from the tops of trees. And everybody digs him because he’s tall, but he gets tired of people saying how cool it is to be tall because he gets kind of … you know … ain’t nobody else as tall as he is.”
“I’d like to see it sometime,” Aggie said. She said it like she really meant it.
“What did you write?” I asked Aggie.
“I don’t have the tune finished yet,” she said, “but it goes something like this:
Honey, yes, I know it’s love
When I wake up in the mor-ning
And you’re the only thing
That’s on my miiind.
And baby, yes, I know it’s love
When I’m looking for a reason
And you’re the only one
That I can fiiind.
Oh, sugar, yes, I know it’s love
When the summer sun comes burning,
And it doesn’t touch the warmth
I feel for you.
Aggie could sing. Aggie could sing a bird right off a tree. The words she was singing were together, and so was the tune, but you didn’t even have to listen to the words or the tune because she was singing all in between the words and the meaning didn’t make as much sense as the feeling did. When she opened her mouth to sing, it was like she was a different person altogether. I felt like running outside and playing some ball for her, or doing something. I just wasn’t used to people being that heavy. When she finished, Cal turned to me, and I could see his eyes getting red and I thought he was going to let go, but he got himself together.
“What do you think?” Aggie looked at me and then at Cal.
Later, when we were leaving, Aggie said that she was going down to buy a container of milk. I said I’d go, figuring that I’d give them a chance to be alone. Maybe I wouldn’t even get the milk, I’d just go on to the Grant. But she said no, and she put on a sweater and we went downstairs.
“You can really do it,” Cal said to Aggie. They were holding hands.
“You’re just getting old,” she said. “Anything sounds good to an old man.”
“Who’s getting old?” Cal sucked his stomach in. “You must be out of your mind, girl.”
“You’re getting old,” she said. “I can see that hair getting kind of thin up there in front. You got to let me grease your hair sometimes.”
“I ain’t getting old,” Cal said. “I’m faster than this turkey here.”
“You can’t even beat me,” she said.
“See that lamppost down there,” Cal said. “I’ll give you a head start and beat you so bad you’ll think I’m sixteen years old.”
“You think so?” Aggie said.
“I know so.”
“Tie your shoes and I’ll consider it.”
When Cal looked down at his shoe, Aggie took off for the lamppost.
“Here I come! Here I come!” Cal shouted out.
When he shouted that, Aggie really started running. Cal didn’t run at all; he just watched her. When she got to the lamppost, she turned and saw that he hadn’t run. She watched him laughing as she leaned against the post, trying to catch her breath. And then, just as we got to where she was standing, her smiles changed to tears. She grabbed his shirt at the shoulders and held them and looked at him as if she was thinking of a way to throw him down or something. Then she kissed him.
“Take care of yourself, baby,” she said. “Don’t get yourself hurt.”
Then she was gone. Even from where we stood, we could see she was still crying as she went.
I saw Mary-Ann in front of the State Office Building. At first I almost didn’t recognize her. She looked different.
“Hey, what’s happening?” I said. I started to lean over and kiss her on the cheek.
“Go to hell!” she said.
She started walking away, just like that, and I let her. I figured she’d see I wasn’t chasing after her and stop, but she didn’t. Finally I did go after her. I spoke to her again, but this time she didn’t even answer. That’s the way we walked all the way uptown. Only she was really hoofing. I had to walk fast to keep up with her. I figured that maybe she’d cool down by the time she got uptown, so I waited before I said anything else to her. But I did check her out, and I saw why she looked so different. The left side of her face was bruised and swollen. You could tell even though she was wearing shades.
“What happened to your face?” I asked. She had stopped near the park and sat on the end of one of the benches. I sat down next to her. She didn’t answer me, and I just lay back against the bench and gave her all the time she needed. Finally she spoke.
“Paul slapped me,” she said.
“Paul?”
“Yeah. First Tyrone called me a name, and then Paul slapped me,” she said. “I got some more time, why don’t you cut me or something?”
“You know I ain’t that way.”
“I thought Paul wasn’t that way either,” Mary-Ann said. She had calmed down a little, and now she was beginning to cry. The physical part of the hurting was over, and now the other part was taking over.
“What happened?”
“I was in the club talking to Jackie and Ebony, Tyrone’s little daughter,” Mary-Ann said. “Me and Jackie was just playing with her, saying things like when she was going to get married, that kind of thing. Tyrone’s door is open, and he’s calling somebody on the phone. Then he gets into an argument over the phone, which is no big thing for him. First he’s asking whoever it was he was talking to about having lunch. They must have said no because he was like really coming on like he wanted to see them or something. So I figured it must be some white chick because that’s what he digs most.
“Anyway, then he gets mad because the chick says she don’t want to have lunch with him, I guess. He starts hollering over the phone, and then he slams it down. Me and Jackie don’t pay him no mind. Even little Ebony don’t pay him no mind. Then he sees me, and he tells me to go get my brother.”
“What he want Paul for?”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” Mary-Ann said. “So I asked him, and that’s when he sounded on me. Then I went home and told Paul what had happened, and he gets up to rush out to see what Tyrone wants. He don’t say nothing about Tyrone sounding on me. I catch him by the arm as he’s busting out the door, and he turns and slaps me! Now can you beat that?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, if you could, I got another one for you,” Mary-Ann went on. “I laid down for a while, then I went down and sat on the steps, feeling like change for about two cents when Nita comes up—”
“That Spanish chick?”
“Yeah, she come up and tells me that everybody is talking about how Paul done beat up some chick crosstown.”
“Said what?”
“That’s right.” Mary-Ann’s eyes were full of tears. “I’m going into Tyrone’s drawer and get that envelope with Paul’s name on it. That’s got to have something to do with this mess.”
I figured her to be right, but I didn’t think she should take Tyrone too lightly. I asked her when she was going to do it, and she got up and said she was going to do it right then.
“I don’t think that’s too cool.”
“Well, what else can I do?” Mary-Ann looked up at me. Either she was getting better-looking or I was looking at her different.
“You know when he’s going to be away from the office?” I asked.
“He’s supposed to be in Chicago for some big meeting tomorrow morning,” Mary-Ann said. “He’s leaving tonight.”
We waited around until two thirty in the morning before going to the club. I had my piece, only I didn’t let Mary-Ann know. If Tyrone did double back I wanted some heat to defend myself.
It was dark in Tyrone’s office. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my eyes. Mary-Ann had some matches, and we lit them and looked around the best we could, but they didn’t help too much. Then I took my jacket off and put it on the floor in front of the door so you couldn’t see the light coming from under the door, and we put on one of the lamps in Tyrone’s office. We covered it with a cloth, so it gave some light but not too much. The desk drawers were locked, and none of the keys laying on the desk worked. I tried to pull them open, but that didn’t work, and we figured it would take too long to try to pick the locks. Mary-Ann slipped out and went to her room and got the screwdriver that she used to change the television channels with. I jimmied open the middle drawer, and the rest came open. We looked for the envelope with Paul’s name on it, and we found it along with some other envelopes and a list of names and numbers. Paul’s name was on the list. Cal’s name was on it, too. There was some cash in a box in the same drawer, and we took that and a few other things, including some stamps and a calculator, to make it look like a robbery. I got my coat and went over to the Grant, and Mary-Ann followed a few minutes later. I had the envelopes, and we went over them.
Two of them had IOUs in them, one from a cop that used to hang around the place, and one from somebody else. Then there was a list of names with numbers next to them which I figured was also money that Tyrone had lent people. I couldn’t tell what some of the others were, and neither could Mary-Ann. We had saved the envelope with Paul’s name on for last. I opened it up. They were checks. They were all welfare checks made out to people from around the block. Then I looked on the back of them and saw they had all been cashed at one place.
“How come he’s got these checks in an envelope with Paul’s name on it?” I said aloud to myself.
Mary-Ann took the checks from me again and looked at them.
“You see this check?” She showed me one of them that was made out to Mrs. Susan Jenkins.
“Yeah?”
“This check was stolen from the mailbox,” Mary-Ann said. “I remember it was raining on the Friday after check day, and she said she had to go downtown and see about getting an emergency digit because her check and some others had been stolen.”
Some of the checks were from the same date as that one, and others were from different dates. They were all signed with the name on the front of the check, but you could tell they were all signed by the same person. I looked at the name of the store that was stamped on the back. It was over near Highbridge.
We counted the money we had taken—$160. Mary-Ann told me to keep it. We took everything else and put it in a bag and threw it down the garbage chute. We talked for a while, and I tried to get next to Mary-Ann, but she said she wanted to go back over to the club to sleep, just so everything would look normal. I told her she could go over later, but she still wasn’t in the mood.
“You going to check out that store tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
On my way to the Grant I felt every eye on the street was on my back. It wasn’t a good feeling.