When Jack walks out of Reverend Taske’s rectory into the church proper, the first thing he sees is Gus sitting in a pew. His eyes are closed, his lips are moving soundlessly, but the moment Jack tries to glide past, his eyes open, and though he’s staring straight ahead, he says, “First time in a place like this, kid?”
Jack feels a tremor run down his spine. “You mean a black church?”
Very slowly, Gus turns his head. His eyes are boiling with rage, and Jack shrinks back into the shadows. “I mean a church, kid.”
Jack, hovering, doesn’t know what to say.
“I’m talkin’ God here.”
“I don’t know anything about God,” Jack says.
“What do you know ’bout?”
Jack shrugs, dumbfounded.
“Huh, smart white kid like you. Think you got all the perks, right?” His lips purse. “What you doin’ in these parts, anyway? Why ain’t you tucked away nice an’ cozy in yo’ own bed?”
“Don’t want to go home.”
“Yeah?” Gus raises his eyebrows. “Rather be beaten up in a alley-way?
“I’m used to being beaten.”
Gus stares at him for a long time; then he lumbers to his feet. “Come outta there, kid. Only rats stick to the shadows.”
Jack feels like an insect stuck on flypaper. His muscles refuse to obey Gus’s command.
Gus squints. “Think I’m gonna hurt you? Huh, that already been done real good.”
Jack takes a tentative step forward, even though it means coming closer to the huge man. He smells of tobacco and caramel and Old Spice. Jack’s frantic heart lurches into his throat as Gus lays a hand on his shoulder, turns him so that the early morning sun, colored by the handmade stained-glass windows in the church’s front, falls on him.
“That little muthafucka Andre.”
He looks up into Gus’s eyes and sees a curious emotion he can’t quite identify.
“Past time someone taught him an’ his crew a lesson, what d’you think?”
Jack feels a paralyzing thrill shoot up his spine.
Gus puts a thick forefinger across his lips. “Don’t tell the rev. Our secret, right?” He winks at Jack.
Mean streets flee before the grilled prow of Gus’s massive Lincoln Continental, white as a cloud, long as the wing of a seagull. Jack, perched on the passenger’s seat, feels his heart flutter in his chest. His hands tremble on the dashboard. Below them, dials and gauges rise and fall. Gus is so huge, his seat has been jacked to the end of its tracks, the back levered to an angle so low, anyone else would be staring at the underside of the roof.
Beyond the windshield, the climbing sun bludgeons blue shadows into gutters and doorways. The wind sends sprays of garbage through the early morning. Soot rises into miniature tornados. An old woman in garters pushes a shopping cart piled high with junk. An emaciated man, fists clenched at his side, howls at invisible demons. An empty beer bottle rolls into his foot and he kicks it viciously. The old woman scuttles after it, stuffs it into her cart, grunting with satisfaction.
But this ever-changing scene with all its sad detail nevertheless seems distant and dull compared with the interior of the car, which is alive with Gus’s fevered presence. It is as if his inner rage has frightened the very molecules of the air around him. It feels hot in the car, despite the roar of the air conditioner, and Jack somehow intuits that this unnatural heat is exceedingly dangerous.
Jack went once to the zoo with his class at school, while he was still going to school. He was both drawn to and terrified by the bears. In their black bottomless eyes he saw no malice, only a massive power that could never be harnessed for long, that could turn instantly deadly. He imagined such a bear in his room at night, raising its snout at the small sounds his father made, its wet nostrils flaring at the scent of his father’s approach. The music would mean nothing to the bear; it ignored Mama Cass and the others. And when the door to the bedroom swung inward, the bear would swat the man down before he could raise the belt. Of course, no such creature existed—until the moment Jack stepped into the white Lincoln Continental, felt the electricity sizzling and popping as it had through the bars of the bear’s cage.
“You know where Andre hangs out,” Jack says because he has a desperate need to banish a silence that presses on him like a storm descending.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Gus says as they round a corner.
Jack is trying hard to follow, but everything that’s happened to him over the last several hours is so out of his ken, it seems a losing battle. “But you said—”
Gus gives him a swift look, unreadable, implacable. “It’s not for me to punish Andre.”
They drive on in silence, until Gus flicks on the cassette player. James Brown’s umber voice booms from the speakers: “You know that man makes money to buy from other man.”
“It’s a man’s world,” Gus sings, his voice a startling imitation of Brown’s. “True dat, bro, it fo’ damn sho is.”
At length, they draw up in front of the All Around Town bakery on the ground floor of a heavily graffitied tenement. Through the fly-blown plate-glass window, Jack can see several men talking and lounging against shelves stacked with loaves of bread, bins of muffins, tins of cookies.
When he and Gus walk through the front door, he is hit by the yeasty scents of butter and sugar, and something else with a distinct tang. The men fall silent, watching as Gus makes his way toward the glass case at the far end of the narrow shop. No one pays any attention to Jack.
“Cyril,” Gus says to the balding man behind the counter.
The balding man wipes his hands on his apron, disappears through an open doorway in the rear wall, down a short passageway lined with stacks of huge cans, boxes, and containers of all sizes, into a back room. Jack observes the men. One curls dirt from beneath his fingernails with a folding knife, another stares at his watch, then at the third man, who rattles the pages of a tip sheet he’s reading. None of them look at Gus or say a word to each other or to anyone else.
The balding man returns, nods at Gus.
“C’mon,” Gus says, apparently to Jack.
Jack follows him behind the counter. As he passes by, the balding man plucks a chocolate-chip cookie off a pile in the case, gives it to him. Jack chews it thoughtfully, staring at the containers as he walks by.
The passageway gives out onto a cavelike room with a low ceiling the color of burnt bread. It is dominated by a line of enormous stainless steel ovens. A cool wind blows from a pair of huge air-conditioning grilles high up in the wall. Two men in long white aprons go about their laconic task of filling the kneading machines, placing pale, thin loaves into the ovens in neat rows.
Standing in the center of the room is a squat man with the neck of a bull, the head of a bullet. His wide, planular olive-gray face possesses a sleekness that can come only from daily shaves at a barbershop.
“Hello, Cyril,” Gus says. He does not extend his hand. Neither does Cyril.
Cyril nods. He takes one glance at Jack, then his round, black eyes center on Gus. “He looks like shit, that kid.” He’s got a curious accent, as if English isn’t his first language.
Gus knows a put-down when he hears one. He chews an imaginary chaw of tobacco ruminatively. “He looks like shit ’cause a Andre.”
Cyril, divining the reason for the visit, seems to stiffen minutely. “What’s that to me?”
Gus puts one huge hand on Jack’s shoulder with an astonishing gentleness. “Jack belongs to me.”
The bakers are looking furtively at the two men as if they are titans about to launch lightning bolts at each other.
“I would venture to say Andre didn’t know that.”
“Andre an’ his crew beat the crap outta Jack.” Gus’s voice is implacable. The inner rage informs his face like heat lightning.
Cyril waits an indecent moment before acquiescing. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I warned you ’bout that muthafucka,” Gus says immediately.
Cyril shows his palms. “I don’t want any trouble between us, Gus.”
“Huh,” Gus grunts. “You already been through that bloodbath.”
The Lincoln Continental is singed with invisible fire as Gus drives them away from the bakery. Gus, brooding, is like a porcupine with his quills bristling.
“That muthafucka,” he mouths, his eyes straight ahead. And Jack doesn’t know whether he means Andre or Cyril.
“You know that bakery isn’t a bakery,” Jack says. “First off, there were no customers, just some men standing around.” He’s afraid of what he’s said, afraid that Gus’s seething will find its outlet in him. But he can’t help himself; it’s part of what’s wrong with him. His brain is exploding with everything he saw, heard, intuited, extrapolated upon.
“Course it ain’t only a bakery. Fuckin’ Cyril runs drugs ’n’ numbers outta there.”
Times like now, when he can focus on what his own brain has recorded, when it shows him the big picture, when he can “read” the signs and from them build a three-dimensional model in his mind, he has a clarity of thought he finds exhilarating. “I mean they’re making something more than bread there.”
Brakes shriek as all at once his words sink in. Gus pulls the Continental over to the curb. The engine chortles beneath them like a beast coming out of a coma. Gus throws the car into park. His seat groans a protest as he twists around to stare at Jack.
“Kid, what the hell you talkin’?”
For once Jack isn’t intimidated. He’s in his own world now, secure in what he has seen, what he knows, what he will say.
“There was the smell.”
“Yeast and butter and sugar, yah.”
“Underneath all those things there was another smell: sharp and blue.”
“Blue?” Gus goggles at him. “How the fuck can a smell be blue?”
“It just is,” Jack said. “It’s blue, like the smell when my mother takes off her nail polish.”
“Acetone? Nail polish remover is all acetone. I use it to take glue spots offa stuff people bring in to my pawnshop.” Gus’s expression is thoughtful now. “What else, kid?”
“Well, that cookie the guy gave me was days old. It should’ve been fresh. Plus which, whatever he had on his hands wasn’t flour or yeast, because his fingertips were stained orange by what he had on them.”
Gus appears to think about this revelation for some time. At last he says, as if in a slight daze, “Go on. Anything else?”
Jack nods. “The room with the ovens should’ve been hot.”
“Course it wasn’t hot,” Gus says. “It’s hugely air-conditioned.”
“Still,” Jack persists, “no heat came from inside when they opened the oven doors. The loaves were too thin to be bread. That wasn’t dough they were putting in, it was something that needed drying.”
“How the hell—?”
“Also, that guy Cyril is scared of you.”
“Huh, you betta believe he is.”
“No,” Jack says, “I mean he’s scared enough to do something about it.”
Gus frowns. “You mean he actually wants to move against me?” He shook his head. “No way you could know that, kid.”
“But I do.”
“Cyril an’ I have a treaty—an understanding. Between us now it’s live an’ let live.”
“No, it’s not.”
Something in Jack’s voice—some surety—gives Gus pause. “What are you, kid, a oracle?”
“What’s an oracle?” Jack says.
Gus stares out the side window. “You like fried pork chops an’ grits?”
“I never had grits.”
“Shit, that figures.” Gus makes a disgusted face. “White folk.”
He puts the car in gear.