No Time to Die Page 8

  He had eaten like this for days, weeks, months. Couldn’t remember when last he’d been in the kitchen to warm up a pot of soup or plug in a coffeepot. The last time, before he’d run up to the Bronx, he’d stepped in the kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water and witnessed a mass movement over the crusted dishes piled in the sink.

  He had switched off the lights and sneaked back to his room, past his mother snoring on the couch in front of the blank television, and stuffed the cracks under his door with rags. But in the morning, every morning, he watched vermin scatter under the stained tile in the bathroom when he switched on the light. He watched them fall thick and fast as he shook out his towel and sour facecloth at arm’s length. He held his toothbrush under boiling water, and when the water wasn’t hot, he didn’t bother to brush at all. No point in picking up more germs.

  And he’d settled for the dinners patched together with stolen cold cuts. When he felt flush, he sat at the counter in Pan Pan’s in the last seat, breathing in the steam from a bowl of soup.

  Hazel never noticed that she hadn’t cooked for her son in twenty years. She ordered out and alternated between pizza and Chinese and, when she was flush, barbecue dinners.

  Occasionally one of her “overnighters”—all of whom she called “Pop” because they popped in and right back out, rarely staying more than twenty-four hours—brought a bucket of fried chicken.

  When Ache had returned from the Bronx, it seemed that the same dishes were still in the sink and the same smelly cartons were still on the floor.

  Now he placed the sandwich wrapping and empty can in a plastic bag and tied it in a tight knot. He thought of turning on a brighter light but the unshaded fifteen-watt ceiling bulb was too much for him. The light penetrated his head sometimes and made it hurt like all those lights in the store.

  People starin’ like they had nuthin’ better to do.

  But he needed the job. Where could he go?

  But I got to go somewhere. Somewhere else. Bitch come in the place tonight, just as we closin’. Funny eyes. Look right at me like she know somethin’. All the while, sweet-talkin’ that stupid-ass manager she want ice cream. He had the lock on the door and opened back up just for her. Fuckin’ ice cream can’t nobody even pronounce the name of. And him grinnin’ from ear to ear watchin’ them long legs, watchin’ that ass move down the aisle like she got a engine in it.

  He squirmed on the bed, remembering how she had turned around, approaching him at the checkout, and the tight shrinking he’d felt when she’d gazed at him. At first, a shock had passed through him. He was staring at the eyes of Mercy Anne. He was back in the sixth grade once more, sitting directly behind her. Only now these eyes were different. They were stronger, bolder, unafraid.

  And goddamn laughin’ like she saw somethin’ funny.

  He had felt the panic tighten his chest, cutting his breath, but at the same time, he fought to keep the elation under control. Mercy Anne. He never thought he’d get a second chance.

  He watched her leave the store and he’d left the manager alone to struggle with the lock. Shit, that was his job anyway.

  And he trailed the funny eyes, keeping to the shadows, several feet behind her. Strivers’ Row. Waited in the thick shadow of the trees across the street. Waited almost two hours.

  And the bitch come back out trottin’ a fuckin’ horse. But I’m a do somethin’. Show her who to laugh at.

  He removed his shirt and pants and hung them on the nail behind the door, then sat on the bed again, his hands fingering the sagging edges of the mattress, waiting.

  Finally, when the voice, a whisper in the dark, came to him, the message confused him at first.

  Looka here, Ache. This time, you could get two for one. A two for one. You ain’t never did that before. This’ll put you over.

  The voice faded, leaving him alone in the silence. Then he smiled and snapped his fingers at the brilliance of the idea. Two for one. How ’bout that. Both of ’em got to go. Funny Eyes and that other one. Look right through me like I wasn’t there.

  He moved to lie down near the light and to read again the scrap of the article he’d torn out of the Amsterdam News two days earlier.

  Felicia Temple, well-known Harlem artist, will exhibit her paintings at the Studio Museum Sunday afternoon 1–6 p.m.

  The museum. That ain’t nuthin’. I already been to her house. Couple times.

  But he had only seen her one time. It was the housekeeper or someone else who usually did the shopping who’d come to the door. Ms. Temple was too busy. The first time, he hadn’t known any better and went up the steps to the front door. When the lady who was probably the housekeeper opened it, he had caught a momentary glimpse of an eighty-foot expanse of polished hardwood floor flowing from foyer to living room to dining room filled with pictures and a style and abundance of furniture he’d never seen before.

  The crystal chandeliers blinded him but that was not important. He could always escape from those kinds of light. The wood carvings were another matter. They were huge masks decorated with beads and shells and some kind of tangled straw. And empty space where sight should have been. But he imagined them angled down from the walls, looking at him.

  “You must be new,” the lady who was probably the housekeeper said as she pointed over the brass railing. “The groceries are usually delivered through the downstairs entrance.”

  She had smiled and said “son,” so the fear and anger that had ballooned in his chest dissolved to a dull ache. Now he felt nothing, no anger toward the housekeeper, a short, round woman who kept pushing her glasses back on her dark face and who could have been his grandmother—if he knew who his grandmother was. But he didn’t know. Didn’t know his grandfather either. Or his father for that matter.

  He could not reach back in memory because there was nothing there, only a midnight that frightened him whenever he thought about it. So he remained in the present with his mother and her wall of rage. It was all he knew.

  The lady had pointed and he had taken the box through the wrought-iron door under the steps, through the long, carpeted hall with the gleaming wainscoting, lugging the box to the kitchen at the back of the house where everything including the hanging pots and pans glowed silver.

  “Remember to always bring it through this way,” the lady said as she reached into a vase on the pantry shelf for his tip.

  He had waited impatiently, eyes roving, and saw the garden and the easel and the tall, thin lady who stepped away from the easel with her hand to her chin, like she was studying something only she could see.

  He had stared at her brown skin and silver-white hair pulled back in a smooth ball. He could not guess how old she was, only that she was so beautiful he’d stopped breathing for a moment. Her jeans and T-shirt were paint-spattered but in the enclosure of greenery she looked like somebody in the movies.

  Not … not like them skanks all spread out in those magazines.

  “Here you are,” the housekeeper said.

  He reached for the two dollars, not knowing what to say, so he said nothing.

  Outside, he looked up and down 136th Street for someplace to sit, to ease the tight feeling in his chest, but there were no benches, so he walked across St. Nicholas Avenue and sat near the park.

  Faces with no eyes.

  He leaned over on the bench and felt the sweat run down the back of his neck and down his chest, causing the shirt to stick to his skin. He waited for the familiar voice to come and tell him what he should do but there was only silence.

  He opened his eyes as a group of day campers wearing red and black T-shirts and black shorts passed by, escorted by three teenage counselors, one in the front, middle, and rear. The day campers held hands, laughed, and shouted nursery rhymes to a rap beat.

  The sun bore down and his shirt felt clammy. He stared at the small faces through half-closed eyes, looking for the ugly one and wondering what the child was feeling. But all the faces were smiling, so it was hard t
o tell who the ugly one was. And who had been shut in darkness with nothing but a box of cereal.

  He watched until they turned and disappeared into the park at 140th Street. His breathing was not so ragged now and his chest didn’t hurt as much, so he left the bench and made his way back to the store.

  That had been two days ago. Now he lay on the bed in the dim glow thinking of the women. Mercy Anne and her dead white eyes had come back on those long legs to laugh all over again. And that woman in the garden, all that dead white hair rolled in a ball against her neck. And those stupid masks. She put them up there, to look down on him.

  He folded the scrap of paper carefully and tucked it in the space between the sagging mattress and box spring where he kept the other news clippings and the pages and ads from Soldier of Fortune, Body Builder, and Hustler.

  Studio Museum. Okay.

  Loud laughter drifted down the hall and he heard Hazel stomp her feet a few times but he eventually managed to fall asleep. In his dreams, he had gotten two for one. The headlines blared. He was on television. He wasn’t Jeffrey Dahmer, but Geraldo was shaking his hand anyway, and he was famous.

  And he did not wake when the dream morphed into something else. He was in school again, this time in the principal’s office, struggling to remain upright on a steeply angled treadmill. Someone turned the motor and it began to revolve faster and faster but his hands were tied to the railings and he could not free himself. Just ahead, a piece of paper dangled from somewhere just beyond his sight line. Then the print grew like the letters on an optician’s chart, small at the bottom, but large enough at the top and growing larger with each revolution of the treadmill to tell him how the free lunch pass that had guaranteed at least one meal a day had been taken away because his mother wouldn’t fill out the forms. She wouldn’t fill out the forms.

  The chart dissolved and he was out of school, standing at a checkout counter, bagging groceries, and at the end of the day all the nickels and dimes he had earned had somehow slipped through his fingers.

  The shadow of the Harlem State Office Building loomed large across Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and cast a shade over the blockfront where the old RKO Alhambra movie theater once stood. The modernized facades, between 125th and 126th Streets, now housed the New York State Motor Vehicle Bureau, a billiard parlor, and a Masonic lodge.

  On Sunday the bureau was closed and its doorway provided a niche for a Senegalese vendor to sell sunglasses. When Ache approached, the peddler dipped into his canvas bag and came out with nine different styles dangling from his fingers.

  Ache chose the glasses with the darkest lenses and tried them on under the glow of the vendor’s brilliant smile. “It look good, brother. Look good.”

  He said nothing but folded the glasses and slipped the vendor a ten-dollar bill. The vendor temporarily closed shop, keeping his eyes peeled for another customer or a roving “quality of life” patrol car, whichever came first.

  He donned the glasses, made his way across the avenue, and sat on one of the stone benches dotting the plaza and scrutinized the crowd. Several minutes later he moved slowly across 125th Street and, hidden behind the lenses, entered the museum.

  In the corridor he stared in surprise at the smiling young woman behind the admission desk.

  Five dollars. I got to pay five dollars to walk in here. Shit. Bust a hole in my pocket. Ten for the glasses and now five to get in. Shit.

  He felt the bile churn up in his throat and wondered whether he should swallow or bathe the smile off the girl’s face with the hot splash of his saliva. But a uniformed guard was standing at attention less than three feet away. And besides, he really did want to see the lady with the silver hair.

  So he parted with the money and moved along the narrow corridor. He peeped in the store that sold books and beautiful souvenirs but the lights, too bright, kept him out. He could not remember a time when he’d liked bright lights. Perhaps when he had been very young; before his mother discovered the power of the locked closet.

  The first time, he had screamed, banged his head against the door until stars danced before him. The second time, he had cried again but did not bang his head so hard. The times after that, he gradually accepted the darkness as a natural part of his world. He did not close his eyes, did not fold into the familiar knot, but stretched out on the fetid rags layering the floor.

  When the voices began, they confused him at first because there had been so many. The one he liked best was the one who called him “Ache,” told him how smart he was to take darkness as a hideout.

  You cool, Ache. Slick. Long as you can think in the dark, what you need light for? Can’t run up on nobody at high noon. Think about that …

  The voice that called him “Ache” silenced the others, inverted his fear of dark to light so that when he was thrown in the closet again, his only concern was that he would be ignored, overlooked, forgotten, and perhaps left to starve to death. The memory of the dark steadied him as he edged cautiously along the hall and entered the main gallery.

  He had never been inside a place like this—a large, two-tiered room where people moved in a slow parade, brochures in hand, pausing to study each picture. Lights shone directly on the paintings, so he did not look at them.

  Somewhere in the crowd, a woman’s voice filtered up, explaining that the Studio Museum had originally opened in 1967 in a rented loft on upper Fifth Avenue to showcase the works of black artists who were excluded from gallery and museum shows downtown. At that time, only Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, and Romare Beardon had general national exposure.

  The museum opened at its current site in 1982, and visiting artists were regularly sent to Harlem’s schools to help children develop an appreciation for the fine arts.

  The woman spoke to the crowd and he eased forward, then stopped. The voice did not belong to Felicia Temple. This woman was too short, her hair was dark, and she wore glasses, so he stopped listening and wandered away.

  He stepped into the garden where a loose knot of a dozen or so people were standing in the sun examining the sculpture and murmuring among themselves. A faint breeze ruffled the wide brim of a woman who stood apart from the group. When she turned, he saw that she was not the one.

  He moved back inside, and the tight squeezing he thought had gone away now returned. It spread beyond his throat and dropped anchor in his chest. Felicia Temple wasn’t here. Maybe she didn’t even exist. He thought of the masks again and confusion overwhelmed him. Maybe it had been the ghost of one of those others, standing at that easel in the garden. Maybe no one had been there at all.

  He headed for the steps leading to the second floor and took them two at a time, nearly knocking over the waiter walking down with a platter balanced above his head.

  “Whyn’t the fuck you look where you goin’?”

  The waiter stared in surprise, then stepped around him gingerly, as if circumventing a large rodent. A man and a woman standing directly behind the waiter stared at Ache, then looked away, shaking their heads.

  By the time he reached the top of the stairs, his stomach had churned into a loop of pain and it was hard to concentrate. He saw a line forming near a large reception table decorated with trays of food. There was a line near the bar also.

  He listened to the chink of plates and utensils and gazed at the food and wondered how much it cost. Was it free? No one was reaching into their pockets. It was free. So were the drinks. He watched the women on the line reach into the trays for small things to place on their plates.

  She was not there. Nor was she at the bar where long thin glasses were filled and refilled with a sparkling wine. He turned to retreat down the stairs when the three-piece combo—flute, bass, and drums—struck up, sending a soft fanfare of sound over the room. He glanced to the right of the musicians and saw her sitting at a small glass table with two men and another woman. Sweat made his palms slippery as he adjusted his glasses. He had nearly missed her.

  She was laughing at somethi
ng but the sound did not reach him. She leaned forward to shake someone’s hand, and the sleeve of the red loose-knit silk sweater slanted off her shoulder. Her hair glimmered in the indirect lighting.

  Behind his sunglasses, he could make out the movement of her mouth and he wanted the words to spill over him. He wanted her to raise her hand and wave and smile; her eyes to follow him and let everyone know that she knew him. And they would all smile and nod approvingly.

  But she raised a shawl of some kind to her shoulders and the two men and the woman rose when she did. A second later the glass table was empty.

  Two days later, as he packed groceries, he listened to the lady who was the housekeeper chatting with the cashier.

  “I know this is a large delivery, but I’m going out of town for a few days. My niece’s getting married in Florida and I’m going down to help her mama. Make sure that woman put the right fork in the right place on the right table, you know what I mean? Some folks want to do things right but just don’t know how. I’m leaving next Tuesday.”

  He listened as the cashier said, “I know what you mean. There’s so much to think about when it comes to weddings. Especially big ones. A thousand things can go wrong just like that.”

  He bowed his head. He did not want the woman to recognize or remember him.

  I did not get to Dr. De’s until Saturday morning, a week later. And only after Dad had looked at me closely, then asked if I needed “walking around” money. And after Alvin, more directly, did a pretty good imitation of Eddie Murphy baying at the moon when I had come down to breakfast.

  I’d had no time for hair grooming. I was still at war with myself trying to adjust to the idea that James might not have killed Marie and that he might not have been responsible for Claudine either.

  When I stepped into the crowded barbershop, Dr. De, Smitty, and Charlie each had at least four people waiting. “… and that’s not counting the folks who took a number and stepped out to the laundermat or the supermarket,” a young man said as he moved over on the bench, allowing me to squeeze in.