And:
And it shall come to pass, if ye shall harken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord thy God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; And then the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you. Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord sware unto your father to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.
The people who’d tapped the little nails into the soft chestnut and oak and pine wood, holding the words in place at the doorposts of their houses as they’d been commanded, were long gone. The latter owners of the building, who also knew the law and the language but who had for the most part ignored or forgotten it, were also gone. There was no one in the building now to worry about the coming of the rains or the gathering of the corn, and it had been long since the grass here was for cattle. Nor was there anyone, in any language, to ponder the warning on those long-disintegrated scraps of paper: the kindling of wrath, the shutting of heaven, the quickness of the perishing.
Pami left the train at 125th Street and walked down through dark streets where people slept on the ground; but they were healthier than the people who slept on the ground in Nairobi. Sometimes more dangerous, too; Pami knew to keep walking quickly, keep the little spring knife in her hand, look only straight ahead. Her heels made nervous sharp sounds on the old cracked sidewalk.
The building where she lived with Brother Rush — he liked to call himself Brother sometimes, when he was trying to pull one of his political or religious scams — was in the middle of the block, with smaller brick tenements on one side and brick-strewn rubble where tenements had once stood on the other. The doorway was always open, the door itself long since gone. The still-occupied apartments were mostly in two vertical lines in the rear corners of the building, where the old chimneys and flues still existed and the water pipes hadn’t frozen because of the heated occupied building on the next block which abutted this one at the back. There was water in the building — nobody was sure why — but of course, no heat, so in winter the residents burned whatever they could find in the old shallow fireplaces originally meant for coal.
Pami and Rush used two rooms at the rear of a second-floor apartment, one with a mattress for sleeping and some cardboard cartons for storage and kerosene lamps for light and warmth, and the other with a table and some chairs and plastic milk boxes to sit on and actual electricity from an extension cord (a series of extensions cords, heavy-weight ones) snaking up an airshaft from another building, where a guy Rush knew had tapped into the incoming electric service, Rush paying him two bags for the service (both heavily cut).
It was in the room with the table and chairs that Rush mostly lived. He wasn’t much of a dealer, but what little goods passed through his hands he sold at that table. All his schemes and scams with his druggie friends were talked out at that table (and came to nothing). He ate and drank at that table, and counted Pami’s earnings there every night. And they sat there together for her to tell him everything that had happened since they’d seen each other last.
Pami didn’t understand what that part was all about. She’d known men who got off by listening to their women talk about fucking other men, but this didn’t seem to be like that. (Rush mostly didn’t care about fucking anyway, which was a nice relief.) It was like he was listening for something, some special particular event, his narrow dark head cocked, his red-rimmed eyes brooding, his hands half-clenched on the scarred wood of the table. He never reacted to what she told him, never gave back anything more than a grunt when she was finished; and then they could go to bed.
He was waiting for her as usual tonight, seated at the table, alone in the room, illuminated by the light from one dirty-shaded table lamp on the floor over by the hot plate, an empty Kentucky Fried Chicken carton on the floor at his feet. He was waiting for her as usual, but he wasn’t as usual, and she picked up on that right away. (She was always very aware of her environment, sharply aware of anything around her that might be a threat.)
“You late, baby,” he said, that gruff hoarse voice as always sounding as though it was about to conk out completely, but there wasn’t exactly the same menace in it as usual; something, whatever it was, had him distracted, kept him from turning the entire weight of his mean attention on her.
Still, she played her normal part: “Slow night, Rush,” she said. “Very slow night. All I got’s two-fifty, but there’s nobody on the street an I didn’t wanna come home too late.”
She couldn’t quite keep the wheedle out of the last part of that — when Rush was mean, he was very mean — but tonight he seemed hardly to notice at all. “Sit down,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
“Okay, Rush.”
She sat across the table from him, putting her little shoulder bag on the wood in front of herself, and as she took out the wads of money and replaced the spring knife in the bag he sat and listened, his full lips moving sometimes, in and out, as though he was tasting some old meal. She told him about the Johns, about the other hookers, about the people on the street, every encounter of the night, the Spanish man and the drunken teenagers and nobody much at all on the subway and nobody except sleeping people on the streets of the neighborhood.
He listened, smoothing out the money, counting it, stacking it, finally putting it away in his pants pocket. She finished her recital and sat up, ready for him to nod his permission for her to get up and go into the other room and get ready for bed, which was the way it always went, but tonight was different. Tonight, Rush fixed her with those dark eyes of his with the redness all around them, and sat there in silence for a long minute while she got increasingly nervous and scared, wondering what she’d done wrong. And then he said, “I’m gonna say a name to you. You tell me what that name means when you hear it.”
Pami had no idea what this might be about. “Okay, Rush,” she said.
Rush nodded. He seemed almost to go to sleep. Then he said, very slowly, enunciating much more carefully than he usually did, “Susan Carrigan.”
Pami blinked slowly, thinking. Susan Carrigan.
Rush’s horny fingers tapped on the table. “Well? Pami? Susan Carrigan. Well?”
“I don’t know, Rush,” she said. “It don’t mean anything to me.”
“It damn well better mean something to you,” Rush said, “I’m asking you what it means.”
Pami’s fear and helplessness made her jittery at the table. Dark masses of shadow moved in the room, echoing every movement made by either of them. “I don’t know, Rush. That’s no kinda name I know. What is that? Some social worker? Somebody like that?” Then, thinking maybe she saw some corner of what this problem might be, she said, “Rush? Somebody say I talking against you to social workers? It’s a lie. I don’t talk to nobody but you, you know that.”