Rush sat there, unmoved and unmoving. “There’s gotta be a link,” he said thoughtfully, as though to himself. “He’s usin you. He’s usin her. But what’s he up to? If you don’t know about each other...”
“Rush? Who? Nobody usin me, Rush. I just with you, man.”
Rush paid no attention. He was deep in his own thoughts. “What if,” he said, and then just sat there, brooding, rapping those fingertips on the table. He glanced at Pami as though he didn’t recognize her, didn’t know what she was doing there, wasn’t even thinking about her. Then he roused himself, sat up straighter, took a deep breath, and frowned hard at her, as though he’d just had a thought and didn’t like it. “What if,” he said, “you aren’t anythin at all? What if he finessed me with you, put me all over you while he’s getting it together with other people?”
“Rush? I don’t know what you’re talkin about.”
“And that’s good for you, too,” he told her. “It means you can go on livin.”
“Rush?”
“A while, anyway. How’s the sores?”
“About the same,” she said, truculent, and looked down at the table. She didn’t like it that he even mentioned those sores; she tried not to think about them herself.
The sores had started in the last few weeks, around her waist and in back under her shoulder blades; small but wet. She put drugstore greases on them, to keep them from showing through her clothes, but otherwise ignored them, or tried to. Hooking on Eleventh Avenue, she never had to take any clothes off anyway, so the Johns didn’t know.
“All right, baby,” Rush said, sounding weary and, for him, almost kindly. “Go on to bed.”
“Okay, Rush,” she said, hiding her relief, keeping a cool surface. She got to her feet and went into the other room, and pulled off her clothing, being very careful where the material stuck to the sores.
Off this room was a small bathroom without fixtures. The cold water still ran, and they had a basin and a Scotch bottle to catch it in. The hole where the toilet had been removed smelled so bad they kept an old piece of Sheetrock over it, but they still used it, and Pami did now, holding her breath when she moved the Sheetrock out of the way, squatting over the hole, wiping herself with paper napkins from the Kentucky Fried Chicken, sliding the Sheetrock back into place when she was finished, and expelling the long-held breath with a whoosh. But the smell stayed in the air for ten or fifteen minutes; nothing to be done.
Pami was filling the Scotch bottle with water and pouring it into the basin when Rush came into the room, made a disgusted face, and said, “Shit. I got to steal some Clorox, pour it down in there.”
“That’s a good idea, Rush.”
The basin full, Pami washed her face first, then her underarms, then squatted over it. Rush frowned at her sores. “You ain’t gonna be workin much longer, girl,” he said.
“I got time,” Pami told him, trying not to know how scared she was. “I got plenty of time, Rush.”
He ignored that. “I’m goin out for a while. Don’t leave that light on, I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Where you going, Rush?”
He gave her a look, as though to say she was lucky she didn’t get a broken arm for a question like that, and left.
Pami heard the apartment door squeak. It never closed one hundred percent, but why would anybody break in here? Then a minute later she heard the door squeak again, so maybe Rush changed his mind.
She always used to sleep naked, but because of the sores, she now wore an outsize T-shirt, which she had to wash in the basin every morning. It was still slightly damp now when she put it on, but it would warm quickly against her body. She went out to the other room to turn off the light and there was a man there, standing beside the table.
Cop. It stood out all over him. Big and beefy and soreheaded, in a gray topcoat and dark suit and tie. He looked at her with disgust and said, “You want to go back to Africa with that T-shirt on?”
She stared at him in horror. Go back? It had never occurred to her — it had all been so easy, getting here, staying here. That a twenty-shilling whore in Nairobi did about as well as a twenty-five-dollar whore in New York only meant she wasn’t doing worse, and in some ways life here was much easier. If she was arrested now, deported now, they’d be sure to find the sores, examine her, find out the truth. Lock her away somewhere, leave her to die. Trembling, afraid to speak because she would sound like a foreigner — I’m American! Black skin American! — she touched her shaking hands to the T-shirt, feeling her tight scared belly.
His look of disgust increased. “Go get dressed,” he said. “And tell Rush to come out here.”
He knew everything, this cop. But now she had to speak. Form the words with great care, she told herself, form the words the way they do in this neighborhood. “Sir, he isn’t here.”
“Oh, don’t waste my time,” he said. “He can’t get out the back way, there’s no place for him to go. Just send him out and get dressed.”
“Sir—” Would an American even say “sir”? Oh, I’m destroyed, she thought, despair cold against her throat. “Sir, it’s true. He isn’t here.”
The cop frowned at her, frowned at the doorway, lifted his head as though he was smelling for Rush. Like a dog. He seemed a little confused. He gestured for Pami to precede him, and they both went through the doorway into the dark second room, where there was just enough light-spill from the room they’d left behind to let Pami find her way around the cartons and mattress. But Pami knew the place.
The cop pointed. “What’s that?”
“Kerosene lamp, sir.”
“Light it.”
Pami’s fingers were awkward with fear. She struggled with the lamp, squatting beside it, small face furrowed all over with concentration. The light flared up at last, and she turned down the wick and lowered the glass chimney. The messy room came to amber life.
“Pick it up,” the cop said, and Pami did, the shadows all moving together, like an orchestra. Again the cop pointed. “That the John?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was no door to the bathroom, of course. The cop gestured for Pami to bring the lamp over and carry it into the little ruined room. He followed, standing in the doorway, wrinkling his nose. “How do you live like this?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Come back outside.”
Still carrying the kerosene lamp, Pami followed the cop to the outer room, where he sat at the table — in her chair, not Rush’s — and sprawled there, legs wide, thumbs hooked in belt. “Where’d Brother Rush go?”
“I truly don’t know, sir.” Pami had given up trying to sound like an American; whatever was going to happen would happen.
“You stupid little bitch,” the cop said, but without any heat, just weariness. “Don’t you know I can help you, if I want?”
Pami’s twisted jaw worked. He was offering her salvation — short-term salvation, it’s true, but that’s all she could hope for — he was showing her an open doorway, and she couldn’t step through it. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know where Rush is! I gotta go back to Africa because that? Rush don’t tell me — nobody ever told me nothing my whole life! Why anybody like you be so stupid come ask me questions? I don’t know nothing!”