Only a crazy person would use the knowledge that a man was a murderer in order to cheat that man out of his pay. How could he know that Railroad wouldn’t kill him, or run away, or do both?
Lucky for Cauthron that Railroad had made his deal with Pleasure. But now he didn’t know what to do. If the old lady’s message was from God, then maybe this was his first test. Nobody said being good was supposed to be easy. Nobody said, just because Railroad was turning to good, everybody he met forever after would be good. Railroad had asked Pleasure to save him from Bobby Lee and Hiram, not Mr. Cauthron.
He needed guidance. He slid open the drawer of the table. Beside the Bible was his .38. He flipped open the cylinder, checked to see that all the chambers were loaded, then put it back into the drawer. He took out the Bible and opened it at random.
The first verse his eyes fell on was from Deuteronomy: “These you may eat of all that are in the waters: you may eat all that have fins and scales. And whatever does not have fins and scales you shall not eat.”
There was a knock at the door. Railroad looked up. “Yes?”
“Mr. Bailey?” It was Mrs. Graves. “I thought you might like some tea.”
Keeping his finger in the Bible to mark his page, Railroad got up and opened the door. Mrs. Graves stood there with a couple of tall glasses, beaded with sweat, on a tray.
“That’s mighty kind of you, Miz Graves. Would you like to come in?”
“Thank you, Mr. Bailey.” She set the tray down on the table, gave him a glass. It was like nectar. “Is it sweet enough?”
“It’s perfect, ma’m.”
She wore a yellow print dress with little flowers on it. Her every movement showed a calm he had not seen in a woman before, and her gray eyes exuded compassion, as if to say, I know who you are but that doesn’t matter.
They sat down, he on the bed, she on the chair. She saw the Bible in his hand. “I find many words of comfort in the Bible.”
“I can’t say as I find much comfort in it, ma’m. Too many bloody deeds.”
“But many acts of goodness.”
“You said a true word.”
“Sometimes I wish I could live in the world of goodness.” She smiled. “But this world is good enough.”
Did she really think that? “Since Eve ate the apple, ma’m, it’s a world of good and evil. How can goodness make up for the bad? That’s a mystery to me.”
She sipped her tea. “Of course it’s a mystery. That’s the point.”
“The point is, something’s always after you, deserve it or not.”
“What a sad thought, Mr. Bailey.”
“Yes’m. From minute to minute, we fade away. Only way to get to heaven is to die.”
After Mrs. Graves left he sat thinking about her beautiful face. Like an angel. Nice titties, too. And yet he didn’t even want to rape her.
He would marry her. He would settle down, like the grandmother said. But he would have to get an engagement ring. If he’d been thinking, he could have taken the grandmother’s ring—but how was he supposed to know when he’d killed her that he was going to fall in love so soon?
He opened the dresser, felt among the dead man’s clothes until he found the sock, pulled out his savings. It was only forty-three dollars.
The only help for it was to ask Pleasure. Railroad paced the room. It was a long time, and Railroad began to worry, before the cat came back. The cat slipped silently through her door, lay down on the table, simple as you please, in the wedge of sunlight coming in the window. Railroad got down on his knees, his face level with the table top. The cat went “Mrrph?” and raised its head. Railroad gazed into her steady eyes.
“Pleasure,” he said. “I need to get an engagement ring, and I don’t have enough money. Get one for me.”
The cat watched him.
He waited for some sign. Nothing happened.
Then, like a dam bursting, a flood of confidence flowed into him. He knew what he would do.
The next morning he walked down to the Sweet Spot whistling. He spent much of his shift imagining when and how he would ask Mrs. Graves for her hand. Maybe on the porch swing, on Saturday night? Or at breakfast some morning? He could leave the ring next to his plate and she would find it, with his note, when clearing the table. Or he could come down to her room in the middle of the night, and he’d ram himself into her in the darkness, make her whimper, then lay the perfect diamond on her breast.
At the end of the shift he took a beefsteak from the diner’s refrigerator as an offering to Pleasure. But when he entered his room the cat was not there. He left the meat wrapped in butcher paper in the kitchen downstairs, then went back up and changed into Bailey Boy’s baggy suit. At the corner he took the bus downtown and walked into the first jewelry store he saw. He made the woman show him several diamond engagement rings. Then the phone rang, and when the woman went to answer it he pocketed a ring and walked out. No clerk in her right mind should be so careless, but it went exactly as he had imagined it. As easy as breathing.
That night he had a dream. He was alone with Mrs. Graves, and she was making love to him. But as he moved against her, he felt the skin of her full breast deflate and wrinkle beneath his hand, and he found he was making love to the dead grandmother, her face grinning the same vacant grin it had when Hiram and Bobby Lee hauled her into the woods.
Railroad woke in terror. Pleasure was sitting on his chest, her face an inch from his, purring loud as a diesel. He snatched the cat up in both hands and hurled her across the room. She hit the wall with a thump, then fell to the floor, claws skittering on the hardwood. She scuttled for the window, through the door onto the porch roof.
It took him ten minutes for his heart to slow down, and then he could not sleep.
Someone is always after you. That day in the diner, when Railroad was taking a break, sitting on a stool in front of the window fan sipping some ice water, Cauthron came out of the office and put his hand on his shoulder, the one that still hurt occasionally. “Hot work, ain’t it boy?”
“Yessir.” Railroad was ten or twelve years older than Cauthron.
“What is this world coming to?” Maisie said to nobody in particular. She had the newspaper open on the counter and was scanning the headlines. “You read what it says here about some man robbing a diamond ring right out from under the nose of the clerk at Merriam’s Jewelry.”
“I saw that already,” Mr. Cauthron said. And after a moment, “White fellow, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” sighed Maisie. “Must be some trash from the backwoods. Some of those poor people have not had the benefit of a Christian upbringing.”
“They’ll catch him. Men like that always get caught.” Cauthron leaned in the doorway of his office, arms crossed above his belly. “Maisie,” Cauthron said. “Did I tell you Lloyd here is the best short order cook we’ve had in here since 1947? The best white short order cook.”
“I heard you say that.”
“I mean, makes you wonder where he was before he came here. Was he short-order cooking all round Atlanta? Seems like we would of heard, don’t it? Come to think, Lloyd never told me much about where he was before he showed up that day. He ever say much to you, Maisie?”
“Can’t say as I recall.”
“You can’t recall because he hasn’t. What you say, Lloyd? Why is that?”
“No time for conversation, Mr. Cauthron.”
“No time for conversation? You carrying some resentment, Lloyd? We ain’t paying you enough?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Because, if you don’t like it here, I’d be unhappy to lose the best white short order cook I had since 1947.”