XAVIER CUGAT AND HIS orchestra had opened up a third front on the stage of the Club Trocadero.
In the background, the musicians in their scarlet coats laid down a barrage with marimbas and trumpets while their black-tailed general worked the floor, beating his palms and stamping his patent leathers. Between them a handsome conga player pounded artillery out of a torpedo-shaped drum, his hair in his eyes. The singer, a Latin goddess of war in shimmering white with an explosion of red rose in her hair, chick-chick-a-boomed the chorus of “Cuban Pete” into a microphone that resembled nothing so much as a grenade. The dance floor was a whitecapped Nordsee of couples doing a frantic rhumba. The entire building shook like the hull of a destroyer under enemy fire.
A suspicious-looking doorman collected the six-dollar cover charge from Earl and turned them over to a greeter in tails and a dark study who conducted them to a tiny table near the short corridor to the rest rooms. Dwight, seeing Earl’s face go flat, feared a confrontation from which they could not possibly emerge victorious. His brother’s sudden grin as he stepped in to hold Elizabeth’s chair, which the greeter was obviously not going to do, filled him with relief. It occurred to him then, briefly, how much of his life had been lived according to Earl’s mercurial temperament.
Earl, fully ensconced as host, ordered Old Taylor and soda for himself and Dwight and a cherry Coke for Elizabeth. Their waiter glanced speculatively at Dwight, but did not ask for proof of age. He wasn’t asked often, although sometimes in the past his brother had been when he himself had not. He wondered at just what point he had begun to look like the older of the two Littlejohns.
The music was too loud for conversation. When their drinks came they lifted their glasses, making up their own toasts in their heads, and drank. It amused Dwight that Elizabeth could not resist eating her cherry first. Most women, the ones he had observed anyhow, saved theirs for last if they ate them at all. In some things, he decided, she would always be a girl of fifteen.
The nightclub was filling rapidly. Dotted with ferns and dwarf palms in clay pots, its ceiling an aviary of papier-mâché parrots and its adobe-textured walls covered with bullfight posters and lattices strung with flowering vines, it looked as if it had been dug up by the roots in downtown Rio de Janeiro, or what someone who had never been closer to Rio than a Cesar Romero movie at the Capitol thought it might look like, and replanted square in the middle of the Rust Belt. At any moment Dwight expected a fat generalissimo to waddle in on the arm of a blond American starlet.
Earl leaned over and yelled in Dwight’s ear, “Makes you want to run down to Mexico, don’t it?”
“South America,” Dwight said.
Grinning, his brother nodded and sat back. He hadn’t heard a syllable.
A cigarette girl drifted by, wearing fruit on her head and a dress that showed she hadn’t any stretch marks. Earl caught her attention, laid a dollar bill on her tray, took a box of Parliaments, and refused change. She beamed her thanks and cruised on. Earl offered the box to Elizabeth. She took one. He lit it and one for himself off a table lighter shaped like a pineapple. Dwight wondered when his brother had switched from Luckies. They saw each other almost every day and he was conscious that they were losing touch.
He was conscious, too, never had his mind off it for long, that he hadn’t held up his end of the bargain with Lieutenant Zagreb. He’d had every intention, after bringing Earl home from the record store on Erskine, of reporting to the lieutenant that Gidgy was his brother’s link with the black market; he’d even thumbed a nickel into the slot of a pay telephone a block from Sojourner Truth and dialed two digits from the card Zagreb had given him. Then he’d hung up. There was something about Gidgy’s eyes, or rather the absence of them in that long solemn face behind the smoked glasses, that told him he had more to fear from him than he did from the police.
It had taken him the better part of forty-eight hours, on four hours’ sleep, to convince himself he wasn’t a coward, that he wasn’t afraid for himself. There was Beatrice, who had directed him to Gidgy in the first place, and who would certainly be caught up in repercussions if the Racket Squad raided Abyssinia Records and Sheet Music. There was Earl. And in all cases there was Elizabeth.
He’d been thinking a lot about her since Beatrice had asked him who he wanted to find Earl for, himself or his sister-in-law. Shit, who was he kidding, he’d been thinking about her a long time. It took a near stranger to tell him why.
He watched her now, smoking her cigarette like a grown-up lady, moving her shoulders to the clickety beat from the bandstand, leaning over to hear something Earl was saying, then tipping back her head and laughing, showing a horseshoe of perfect teeth and the long smooth line of her throat. She caught him looking and winked, then turned her head to look at the band. The wink warmed him as if he were standing up to his neck in the Gulf off Mobile.
Beatrice Blackwood was a smart woman.
The rousing tune ended on a sting of brass. The crowd clapped and hooted, and Cugat went immediately into “My Shawl,” a romantic ballad with the drums and Bolivian scratches shunted into the background. Earl stood, a little unsteadily, burlesqued a bow from the waist, and gripped the back of Elizabeth’s chair. She shot a concerned glance at Dwight, who smiled back and lifted his glass in a gesture of blessing. She rose and accompanied Earl to the dance floor.
The waiter came by. Dwight ordered another round, asking for the bartender to go a little more heavily on the soda and lighter on the whiskey, and paid for it. The waiter withdrew without a word or even a nod. Dwight reminded himself that that would have passed for hospitality unprecedented in Eufala. He was thinking too much of Alabama lately. He’d spent most of his nineteen years wishing he were anyplace else.
The drinks arrived just as Earl and Elizabeth returned, Earl apologizing for his two left feet, Elizabeth telling him to stop, he was just fine. Dwight noticed a faint limp as she headed down the corridor to the ladies’ room.
“Next slow one’s yours, little brother.” Earl plunked himself down and drank. “I should of waited for a jitterbug.”
“You’d wait a long time with Cugat.”
He made a face over his glass. “Starting to water down the booze. Your idea?”
“It’s early yet.”
“Dwight, you’re gonna make somebody a great wife.”
The band threw itself into “South of the Border,” sealing off conversation; which Dwight thought was just as well.
Elizabeth returned, smiled thanks at Dwight for her fresh Coke, and ate her cherry. They listened to the music, and then she and Dwight danced to “Cielito Lindo.” She’d freshened her scent in the ladies’ room. He knew she couldn’t afford any but the most common kind, yet he’d never smelled anything quite like it on any other woman. He decided she had a natural musk that changed it and made it exclusively hers.
“What you going to study?”
He started. “What?”
When she smiled with her lips closed she looked just like Lena Horne. “You said you was putting money aside to go to school. What kind of classes?”
“Mechanics.”
“I thought you didn’t want to work with your hands.”
“Not forever. I want to own my own garage, pay other people to work with their hands for me. But that don’t figure to happen right away. Even Henry Ford didn’t start out in a white shirt.”
“No, He just started out white.”
He looked at her.
“I don’t mean to shoot you down,” she said. “It’s just all anyone in this town ever talks about is Henry Ford, Henry Ford, Henry Ford, like he’s God. All he done was build himself up from flat ground. When you’re colored, you start in a hole.”
He thought about that. “At least I ain’t digging it any deeper since I come up here. That’s a step in the right direction.”
“I love you, Dwight.” She laid her head on his shoulder. “You’re the best brother.”
When they got back to the table, Earl had ordered another round. His glass was already half-empty.
“Let’s go to the Casanova,” he said. “This spick music’s giving me the Tijuana trots.” His speech was slurring.
Dwight said, “I’m hitting the head. Then I think we better go home.”
“Whassamatter, you don’t wanna miss Lum and Abner?”
Dwight went down the corridor. His bladder was close to bursting.
There was a short wait for a urinal. When one opened up he stepped toward it. The man standing next to it turned away, zipped up, and put a hand against Dwight s chest. “That one’s busted, boy.”
He looked up into the man’s beefy, flushed face. He wore his hair long and greasy to his collar and he had an old triangular scar on his left cheek that might have been made by someone’s ring. He smelled as if he’d been soaking in a tubful of beer.
Dwight said, “It ain’t busted. I just seen somebody using it.”
“You like looking at white men’s peckers?”
Dwight backed away from the man’s hand and walked around him. When a hand grabbed his shoulder and started to turn him he turned into it and swung his right fist up from the floor. He felt the jolt all the way to his shoulder when he connected with flesh and bone. Something struck him from behind then, a sharp blow to a kidney, and his bladder let go. When he turned that direction, a black light burst in his head. He tried to stay on his feet, but someone pushed him and someone else tripped him and he felt himself going down, with things striking him from all sides. He tried to get up, but a blow to the back of his neck flattened him. He was being kicked now. He curled himself into a tight ball. The harsh lemony disinfectant on the floor and the stench of his own urine burned his nostrils. His ears roared. Kicking and kicking, grunts behind the kicking. Something gave way with a snap and more kicking. The door swung open, drifted shut slowly against a percussive wave of frantic Latin music from the stage, clacking castanets and brumping brass, maracas rattling like shattered bones. He was wading in black water, he kept losing the bottom and ducking under. The burning in his nostrils increased, as if they were filling with water, but he knew it was blood. For a while he tried to stay above the surface. Then he gave up and let himself go. No one could hit you when you were underwater.
He awoke in the ambulance, the siren screaming in his ears, but the shock of the pain and the rhythm of movement made him dip back under. The pain woke him again when they were rolling him up a ramp, and again when he was being washed. He was aware of being bumped through a pair of swinging doors, of a sharp wave sweeping the length of his body as he was lifted from gurney to bed, details that afterward he wasn’t sure he hadn’t dreamt. He came to full consciousness aching all over and hearing Earl’s voice, close but muffled behind a gauze curtain hung from rings on the portable rail surrounding the bed: “I don’t see why we can’t take him home, if nothings busted.”
“Listen to the doctor, hon.” This was Elizabeth.
“He has two cracked ribs and a concussion.” This was a new voice: male, white, tired. “Closed head injuries are tricky. I’ve seen men sustain beatings far less severe, go to bed with nothing more than a slight headache, sometimes not even that, and in the morning they’re dead. We need to hold him overnight.”
“Sure you ain’t just trying to up the ante? Ford don’t cover this.”
“Earl! I’m sorry, Doctor. He’s drunk.”
“This is Detroit General. We don’t have to fill beds on a Saturday night. Your brother’s the eleventh brawl victim brought in here since I came on at eight. I’m told that’s some kind of a record since they repealed Prohibition. All but two of them were colored.”
“What’s going on?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know. The other night I heard Edward R. Murrow saying the London Home Guard has Airedales that whimper when they hear enemy bombers approaching—gives them an extra second or two to activate the air-raid sirens. After a few months in the emergency room you get to be like one of those dogs. All the time I was getting ready for my shift I had a feeling this was going to be a long weekend.”