“Call me if you run into any trouble,” Cully said. “And the next time you come here we’ll have dinner with Gronevelt. He likes you and he’s a good guy to have on your side.”
I nodded. Then I took the cash receipts out of my pocket. The receipts good for thirty thousand dollars in the casino cage of the Xanadu Hotel. My expenses for the trip, gambling and air fare came to about the other three thousand. I handed the receipts to Cully.
“Keep these for me,” I said. I had changed my mind.
Cully counted the white slips. There were twelve of them. He checked the amounts. “You trust me with your bankroll?” he asked. “Thirty grand is a big number.”
“I have to trust somebody,” I said. “And besides, I saw you turn down twenty grand from Jordan when you were flat on your ass.”
“Only because you shamed me into it,” Cully said. “OK, I’ll take care of this. And if things get real hot, I can loan you cash out of my roll and use these as security. Just so you don’t leave any traces.”
“Thanks, Cully,” I said. “Thanks for the hotel room and the meals and everything. And thanks for helping me out.” I felt a real rush of affection for him. He was one of my few friends. And yet I was surprised when he hugged me goodbye before I got on the plane.
And on the jet rushing through the light into the darker time zones of the East, fleeing so quickly from the descending sun in the West, as we plunged into darkness, I thought about the affection Cully had for me. We knew each other so little. And I thought it was because we both had so few people we could really get to know. Like Jordan. And we had shared Jordan ’s defeat and surrender into death.
– -
I called from the airport to tell Value I had come home a day early. There was no answer. I didn’t want to call her at her father’s house, so I just caught a taxi to the Bronx. Vallie still wasn’t home. I felt the familiar irritated jealousy that she had taken the kids to visit their grandparents in Long Island. But then I thought, what the hell. Why should she spend the Sunday alone in our project apartment when she could have the company of her happy-go-lucky Irish family, her brothers and sisters and their friends, where the kids could go out and play in fresh air and on country grass?
I would wait up for her. She had to be home soon. While I waited, I called Artie. His wife came to the phone and said Artie had gone to bed early because he wasn’t feeling good. I told her not to wake him, it wasn’t important. And with a little feeling of panic I asked what was wrong with Artie. She said he just felt tired, he had been working too hard. It wasn’t anything even to see the doctor about. I told her I would call Artie at work the next day, and then I hung up.
Chapter 15
The next year was the happiest time in my life. I was waiting for my house to be built. It would be the first time I’d own a house of my own, and I had a funny feeling about it. That now finally I would be just like everybody else. I would be separate and no longer dependent on society and other people.
I think this sprang from my growing distaste for the housing project I was living in. By their very good social qualities blacks and whites moved up in the economic scale and became ineligible to stay in the housing project when they earned too much money. And when they moved out, their places were taken by the not-so-well-adjusted. The blacks and whites moving in were the ones who would live there forever. Junkies, alcoholics, amateur pimps, small-scale thieves and spur-of-the-moment rapists.
Before this new invasion the housing project cops beat a strategic retreat. The new kids were wilder and started taking everything apart. Elevators stopped working; hall windows were smashed and never repaired. When I came home from work, there were empty whiskey bottles in the hallways and some of the men sitting drunk on the benches outside the buildings. There were wild parties that brought in the regular city cops. Vallie made sure she picked up the kids at the bus stop when they came home from school. She even asked me once if we should move to her father’s house until our own house was ready. This was after a ten-year-old black girl had been raped and thrown off the roof of one of the project buildings.
I said no, we’d sweat it out. We would stay. I knew what Vallie was thinking, but she was too ashamed to say it out loud. She was afraid of the blacks. Because she had been educated and conditioned as a liberal, a believer in equality, she couldn’t bring herself to accept the fact that she feared all the black people moving in around her.
I had a different point of view. I was realistic, I thought, not a bigot. What was happening was that the city of New York was turning its housing projects into black slums, establishing new ghettos, isolating the blacks from the rest of the white community. In effect using projects as a cordon sanitaire. Tiny Harlems white-washed with urban liberalism. And all the economic dregs of the white working class were being segregated here, the ones too badly educated to earn a living, too maladjusted to keep the family structure together. Those people with a little something on the ball would run for their lives to the suburbs or private homes or commercial apartments in the city. But the balance of power hadn’t shifted yet. The whites still outnumbered the blacks two to one. The socially oriented families, black and white, still had a slim majority. I figured the housing project was safe at least for the twelve months we would have to stay there. I really didn’t give a shit about anything else. I had, I guess, a contempt for all those people. They were like animals, without free will, content to live from one day to the other with booze and drugs fucking just to kill time whenever they could find it. It was becoming another fucking orphan asylum. But then how come I was still there? What was I?
A young black woman with four kids lived on our floor. She was solidly built, sexy-looking, full of vibrant good humor and high spirits. Her husband had left her before she moved into the project, and I had never seen him. The woman was a good mother during the day; the kids were always neat, always sent off to school and met by the bus stop. But the mother was not so much on the ball at night. After supper we could see her all dressed up, going out on a date, while the kids were left home alone. Her oldest kid was only ten. Value used to shake her head and I told her it was none of her business.
But one night, late, when we were in bed, we heard the scream of fire engines. And we could smell smoke in our apartment. Our bedroom window looked directly across to the black woman’s apartment, and like a tableau in a movie, we could see flames dancing in that apartment and the small children running through it. Vallie jumped up in her nightgown, tore a blanket off the bed and ran out of our apartment door. I followed her. We were just in time to see the other apartment door open down the long hallway and four children come running out. Behind them we could see~ flames in the apartment. Value was running down the hallway after them, and I wondered what the hell she was doing. She was running frantically, a blanket in her hand trailing the floor. Then I saw what she had seen. The biggest girl, coming out last, shooing the younger ones before her, had begun to fall. Her back was on fire. Then she was a torch of dark red flame. She fell. As she writhed on the cement floor in agony, Vallie jumped on her and wrapped her in the blanket. Dirty gray smoke rose above them as firemen poured into the hallway with hoses and axes.
The firemen took over, and Value was back with me in the apartment. Ambulances were clanging up onto the internal walks of the project. Then suddenly we saw the mother in the apartment opposite us. She was smashing at the glass with her hands and screaming aloud. Blood poured over her finery. I didn’t know what the hell she was doing, and then realized that she was trying to impale herself on the glass fragments. Firemen came up behind her, out of the smoke billowing from the dead flames, the charred furniture. They dragged her away from the window, and then we saw her strapped down on a stretcher being carried into the ambulance.