Airtight Willie & Me, Page 2

  I paused and chuckled. “So, he couldn’t have no reason whatsoever not to help us, I fibbed and told him two kinfolks was in on my good luck. He knows I’ve only got two kin in the world, my Uncle Otis and Aunt Lula, both he’s never seen . . . He ain’t gonna hassle us. He just wants to meet you and find out you’re people with mother-wit and won’t go crazy with the money and get him in a squeeze for coming to our rescue.”

  Then I said, “He’s awaiting on the ninth floor of the Milford Building.”

  Willie touched the mark’s arm, and they started to walk away.

  I said loudly, “What you gentlemen gonna do, make me out a liar and fix it so my boss won’t help us? I told you he knows all the kin I got is Uncle Otis and Aunt Lula. Mr. Ellis ain’t no woman.”

  Willie shook the mark’s hand and said, “Mr. Ellis, rest easy! The same arrangements I make for me, I’ll make for you!”

  I said, “Don’t you think you oughtta tell the boss the excitement is got old Aunt Lula feeling poorly, so she went home to rest?”

  While Willie was gone, I brought the mythical office and boss to life for the mark with detailed descriptions. Willie returned breathlessly, reinforcing my wonderful boss and his luxurious office.

  Willie said, “Mr. Gilbranski liked me, and loves you! He was sold on my levelheadedness when I was able to put up the four thousand dollars from the sale of my farm as proof I’m used to big money. He’s satisfied I wouldn’t cause him no scandal. He told me he’d trust you with his life. He said to tell you, he takes care of business inside the office and you take care of me and Aunt Lula . . . I mean Mr. Ellis, outside the office.”

  I left to bring back Willie’s and the mark’s shares. At least, the mark was expecting his. When I got back, I gave Willie a manila envelope, fat with greenbacks rolled around the boodle of play money.

  Willie frowned and said with great annoyance, “Where the hell is Mr. Ellis’s share?”

  I shrugged and said, “Mr. Gilbranski said every tub must sit on its own foundation and make its own strong bond good faith. Aunt Lula . . . I mean Mr. Ellis ain’t showed his good faith in the right way.”

  Willie said huffily, “Since Mr. Ellis’s share ain’t here, take it all back! It ain’t right to have mine, and he don’t have his.”

  I said, “I didn’t say Mr. Ellis couldn’t get his share. All he’s got to do is satisfy the boss he’s a solid citizen like you did.”

  The mark’s eyes were spewing gray fire as he flung back his overcoat to reveal what could only be the handle of a hand ax protruding from his benny’s inside pocket.

  He blurted out, “Mr. Jackson sure spoke the truth. I’ve already decided none of us is getting a share unless I get mine . . . I’ll be back in two minutes, so stay here on the bench!”

  Willie and I looked at each other. At this most delicate juncture, Willie was supposed to go with the mark to get his cash bond.

  As we watched the mark unlock the trunk of a new Buick across the street, I said, “Willie, we oughtta cut this one loose!”

  Willie said, “Shit, I got a feeling he’s gonna be sweet as bee pussy. I’d play for the motherfucking devil today!”

  I feverishly tried to tie the mark to some celebrated ax murder in Ohio long ago. The mark returned and counted out a stack of “C” notes. As I was stuffing the entire three grand score into my overcoat pocket, the mark vised my shoulders and balefully stared into my eyes.

  He said, “Please! Mr. Franklin, don’t take my money to that peckerwood if you ain’t damn sure he’s on the dead level!”

  I said, “He’s famous for shooting straight in business and everywhere.”

  He released me and giggled, “So am I famous . . . for shooting straight!”

  I felt a bowel-gasket about to pop. As I turned away on Jell-O legs, I suddenly remembered all of the mark’s grisly infamy. He’d been a construction worker, who, around twelve years before, had riddled two men at a poker table for cheating.

  For a week, the Cleveland police put his mug shots in all the newspapers and cautions on all radio stations. A hundred police trapped him in a tenement. He critically wounded two detectives before his capture and was committed as hopelessly insane to a state hospital. Now, escaped or released, he would be waiting for me!

  I drank another cup of greasy spoon coffee before I started back to blow him off (get free of him). I stopped and waved two hundred yards away so Willie could point me out to the mark. They looked at me. Willie stabbed his index finger toward his chest. I waggled my head “no.” Willie stabbed his finger toward the mark. I waggled “yes.”

  I was drenched and stinking of fear sweat as the mark’s long legs pumped toward me in great athletic strides. When he was midway, I saw Willie fading away fast behind the mark. Just before I ducked around the corner, the mark glanced back at Willie. He howled piercingly and streaked toward me with the grace and speed of a gazelle.

  I pistoned south on Indiana Avenue. Before I turned at Fifty-sixth, to double back to our jalopy parked under the Garfield Boulevard El, I glanced back. The joker had been ultra-positively a second Jessie Owens in his youth. He was so close, I could see the gleam of his bared choppers and the glitter of the hatchet.

  I couldn’t have run another foot when I fell through the jalopy’s open door and collapsed beside Willie at the wheel. Willie’s face was pocked with sweat as he ground the starter furiously. We stared at the mark growing to the size of King Kong and heard his number thirteens grenading against the sidewalk. I got the window up just as he reached us.

  I said, “Oh, Mama!” over and over at the awful sound of the hatchet as he ran around the car smashing glass. His frothy mouth was quivering with madness as he chopped a confetti of glass into the car. He was reaching through the shattered window to unlock the door when the starter caught and Willie bombed the heap away.

  At that instant I made an obvious vow that I’ve kept to this moment!

  We got a pint of tranquilizer on the far Westside and sloshed the first hits down our chins.

  Willie suddenly laid out a bandana on the seat between us. He pulled out his boodle-wallet, slipped out of his overcoat, and said, “Pal-of-mine, we oughtta separate the boodle from the thirty-five-hundred frog skins so we can split right down the middle.”

  I stiffened at the thought he might try to switch me out of my end in the murk of fallen dusk. I placed all I held on the seat. And I was determined to challenge any suspect moves he made with the money before I had my end safely in hand.

  With his overcoat off, I wasn’t really worried that he was slick enough to burn me in his sweater sleeves. He shook his head as he looked at the score. He straightened out the bills. Then he made a flat package of the money. He tied it up in the wide bandana.

  He glanced at a passing police car and said, “Shit, Slim, we could get busted counting the score. Here, shove it under your seat until after we cop some ribs and a motel room for the split.”

  I x-rayed his hands as he passed the bandana, then I pushed it under the seat. He pulled away and parked behind a rib-and-burger joint on Lake Street.

  He sat there for a long time before he said, “Slim, you gonna cop the pecks?”

  I was racked with closet laughter. Did he believe I was sucker enough to leave him tending the score? I said, “Cop for yourself, Willie . . . I ain’t hungry.”

  He said, “I ain’t got a ‘sou’ to cop with,” and leaned down and pulled out the bandana.

  He untied it on the seat and removed a ten-dollar bill. He put our score back under the seat, and his mitt was clean coming out, except for the sawbuck.

  I hawk-eyed him as he got out and shut the door. He shivered elaborately and opened the car door. He leaned into the car and reached for his beanie draped across the back of the front seat. For only a mini-instant was his overcoat a curtain blocking him from view as he lifted off the seat.

  I thought, Houdini, with four-foot arms, couldn’t have plucked that score from beneath my seat at that rang
e. Anyway, I bent over and probed until my fingertips touched it. He slammed the door shut. I felt a twinge of guilt, watching the wind flap his overcoat tails, that he was trusting me with the score.

  In a couple of minutes, I heard the thunder of the Lake Street El Train pulling into the station down the street. I looked up at it passing on the way to the Loop. Was that Willie wrapped in his blue plaid benny grinning down at me from a window in the last car?

  I tore open the bandana! It was a dummy loaded with funny-money. I dug beneath the seat like a pooch for a buried bone. Nothing! I raced around the car and pawed beneath the driver’s seat. Something sharp gouged blood from my thumb tip. It was a fishhook tied to a length of twine that was tied to an anchor post beneath the seat.

  The cunning sonovabitch had probably choreographed the rip-off while we were in the cell. With vivid hindsight, I knew why he pretended he needed the sawbuck from the bandana. He wanted to get the fishhook into it when he put it back. Then he could reel it in with his left hand when he leaned into the car for his benny. The dummy bandana was preplanted to “blow me off” smoothly just in case I got suspicious, as I did, before he hit the wind.

  I leapt behind the wheel. Maybe I could catch him in the Loop, or at one of the El stops along the way. The gas gauge was on “E,” and I didn’t have a cent.

  I got out and inhaled deeply. I felt my belly jitterbug in the greasy clouds of soul-food aroma floating from the rib joint. I straightened my tie in a gum machine’s fractured mirror, then I psyched up the mirrored mack-man staring back. “You a bad, sugar-rapping ho-stealing motherfucker . . . ain’t you? Ain’t nothing can stop a ho stalking stepped like you . . . Ain’t that right?” Frantically I nodded yes and turned away.

  I was lucky! It was black ghetto Christmas. Saturday Night! Easy to cop a ho! I’d guerilla my Watusi ass into a chrome-and-leather ho den and gattle-gun my pimp-dream shit into some mud-kicker’s frosty car.

  I pimp-pranced toward a ho jungle of neon blossoms a half mile away. Some ass-kicker was a cinch to be a ho short when the joints folded in the A.M.

  TO STEAL A SUPERFOX

  It was late summer back in the nineteen forties. The weeks before, I had graduated from a federal prison. I was stalking ho runs in an Ohio burg. It was my birthday. I was ho-less, without a sou in my raise. I was decked out in a gold silk vine and accessories an old pal junkie ho had boosted the day before in Chicago.

  Around twilight I stopped by Pretty Phil’s, a pimp pal’s juke saloon and two-story trick hotel. We embraced. He wiggled his lips against my ear lobe as we disengaged. I thought about the rumors that he now dug stud tours of his sphincter cave.

  I cracked it was my birthday. He got on the phone and ordered a monster cake and several cases of Mums.

  We sat down and snorted white lady until two A.M. and gazed through the Venetian blinds of his front window. A cavalcade of tricks, flat-backers, stuff players, and thieves paraded past. I shifted uneasily when I caught Phil’s assassin Harlequin Great Dane eyeballing me enigmatically. Phil stroked her muzzle. She sighed and nested her head in his lap.

  Phil gave me a rundown on every qualified, stealable ho that passed. His rundowns were boss. Sure, I appreciated the crystal blow and his plans to celebrate my birthday. But had he forgotten what a blue-ribbon pal I had been back in Cleveland several years before? He had blown into town with no ho. And worse, no wheels and frozen fireworks exploding off his dukes, necessary to cop a star ho.

  I had loaned him my total flash. He had gone on to pimp a zillion. I had too much player pride to smooch his rear end to nudge his sense of all-out reciprocity. I seriously mulled the odds that Phil would test out as a chicken poo-poo amnesiac.

  I stared thoughtfully at Phil’s yellow bitch face. Like my scarlet doubt was a tennis ball, Phil bombed back the serve when he cracked, “Slim, honey, you hip, I know, that you got my personal pad upstairs and the use of my new wheels and ice to catch you a ho. And, pally, since you my size, play your ass off in any and all of them sixty ho catchers hanging in my closet.”

  He dropped a key into my shirt pocket, then he picked up a phone and called upstairs to have the linen changed. I would’ve kissed the gaudy mother if I hadn’t been leery of inviting his tongue up my jib. Phil eased out a portly bankroll. He peeled off several “C” notes and scooted them across the tabletop.

  I slid them into my shirt pocket. I was about to tell him what a thoroughbred, stand-up nigger he was when an ebonic money-magnet seized my eyes and struck me mute. She crossed the street and stood on ho point. You know, big exquisite props wide spread. Her crotch humped out to bulge her obese sex nest against her gauzy red dress. Her luminescent skin shone like indigo velour in the neon razzle. She was certified to be a bantam bundle of voluptuous headache for suckers.

  Oh, I knew at first gander she was a cold-blooded magician. I saw it in her arrogant body lingo. I saw it in the wizard choreography of her long, tapered fingers. It was confirmed by her fierce killer falcon eyes.

  I said dreamily, “Phil, I gotta own that slave . . . gimme a rundown on her and her master.”

  Phil curled his lupine lips. He gave me a look like I was that dingbat humpback of Notre Dame. He sneered, “Easy, Massa, since you gotta dream, go to Shitcon City. You could faster and more safely steal Betty Grable, Hedy Lamarr . . . every top mack man from coast to coast has a hard-on to cop that package over there. Her old man’s a stone gorilla. He’s shot and stomped a half-dozen niggers about that ho. She’s got his nose open wide enough to shove in a coffin. Catch on, pally? She’s Black Sue. She can pick a chump clean from all pockets and stashes in thirty seconds. Pally, that bitch is a Superfox Hall-of-Famer ho . . . Now gander the sweetness of the ho’s style on that paddy cutting in to her.”

  We watched a brawny white joker in a new Buick honk desperately at the instant that he spotted the pygmy ball lyncher. I’ve seen excited suckers in my time, but that lame has remained without peer in my memory. He just let his chariot drive itself. He coasted through a near-collision cacophony of honking horns as he stretched his neck back and ogled her with phosphorescent eyes.

  She flashed her teeth like a rabid panther. She undulated her flat gut to hook him for the killing floor. She jerked her head toward the yawning vestibule of a condemned fleabag hotel behind her. The sucker was so hot to sock it to her, he couldn’t risk parking or going around the block. His wheels screeched like a cat in an Osterizer when he U-turned. He parked crookedly in front of Phil’s sucker trap. He leapt out and galloped through graveyard traffic to her side of the stem.

  We had seen a gleaming gold watch on his wrist. A dime-sized jeweled stickpin had been shooting pastel fire from his necktie. She stood smiling at him behind the cobwebby glass of the vestibule. Almost immediately we saw their silhouettes merge. It was like they were dancing to the seductive beat of a Top Ten hit parade tune.

  Phil said, “Count the seconds, pally. That voodoo bitch is pure magic.”

  I started counting in my head. I had counted fifty-five seconds when the mark stepped out. He patted his hip pocket as he bullet-assed it down the sidewalk. He went into a hotel at the end of the block. His watch and stickpin were playing hooky. Black Sue peeped out and oozed down the alley across the way.

  Phil said, “That Houdini bitch took them extra seconds to lift his jewelry . . . Ain’t she a motherfucker? She’s sent that mark to check in for fun and games. He ain’t got the five bucks for the room. He’s gonna piss in his pants when he finds the ho has cleaned him out and put his wallet back . . . and rebuttoned his pocket!”

  I said, “That ho is two-and-a-half tons of sweet bread . . . Phil, I gotta steal that fox. I ain’t never gonna be satisfied if I cop a thousand girls. Phil, I deserve that ho, and the ho deserves me. I’m gonna toss the craps for her! Back me up, old buddy!”

  Phil shrugged. “Any and everything, pally. But like I laid it out front, you ain’t got nothing but sucker odds. So if you want to buck the saw and get in the pit with her g
orilla . . . He don’t allow the ho to even rap with nothing but suckers . . . and don’t forget he lugged her from New Orleans. Them pimps and hoes off’a Rampart Street got their own understanding of one another’s crazy shit and savvy of their thing together. One more time, Slim, let the ho be! Darling, I don’t want to cry like a cunt at your funeral.”

  Then Phil sighed. “Good luck, pally . . . Promise to bury you in a blue silk vine with a three-day wake.”

  We watched the stricken sucker stumble out to the sidewalk. He streaked back to the vestibule killing floor, where he kicked out the door glass panels. He scooted up and down the block, peeping into every joint and cranny. He was cavorting and hurting like his balls had been blow-torched. Finally, he sad-sacked into his Buick. He stomped the horses and blasted off to shake down the ghetto catacombs.

  Phil’s main ho, dwarfish Bitsy Red, and several hoes of his stable came in to set up the joint for the after-hours action and my birthday party. You know, stringing bunting and glitter crap around the mirrored joint.

  I said, “Phil, how long has that ho been down in this burg?”

  He said, “A week or so . . . Why?”

  I said, “A ho with her voltage is about due to hit the wind any time . . . You know, with the heat and all . . . I better get in the streets now to make some kinda contact with the ho. How about laying some more fast rundown on me . . . like has her old man got any chump shortcomings. . . craps, hard shit, or what not?”

  Phil grinned. “Like every nigger mack fresh outta big-foot country, he’s sizzling for young white ho pussy . . . He’s sported his dick twice at Aunt Lula’s joint out at the lip of town . . . He’s a half a ‘C’ note trick . . . cons himself he can steal one with his jib and dick. You ain’t got to hit the stem to take your shot at that ho . . . Every pimp and ho in town will ease in here before daybreak. Please, pally! . . . Be cool and don’t make Jabbo Ross, that’s the gorilla’s moniker, waste you in here and sour my roller fix for my joint.”