“Say what, sir?”
“Say it was a loan.”
“It was a loan, sir.”
“Indeed,” the Deacon said. “So, as to the terms of that loan, let me enlighten you. Smoke, what we charge a week for vig?”
Luther felt his head spin and he swallowed hard to keep his vomit down.
“Five percent,” Smoke said.
“Five percent,” the Deacon told Jessie. “Compounded weekly.”
Jessie’s eyes, which had gone hooded with the pain, snapped open.
“What’s the weekly vig on a thousand forty?” the Deacon said.
Smoke said, “I believe it work out to fifty-two dollars, Deacon, sir.”
“Fifty-two dollars,” the Deacon said slowly. “Don’t sound like much.”
“No, Deacon, sir, it don’t.”
The Deacon stroked his chin. “But shit, wait, what’s that per month?”
“Two hundred eight, sir,” Dandy chimed in.
The Deacon showed his real smile, a tiny one, having himself a time now. “Per year?”
“Two thousand four hundred ninety-six,” Smoke said.
“And doubled?”
“Ah,” Dandy said, sounding desperate to win the game, “that be, um, that be—”
“Four thousand nine hundred ninety-two,” Luther said, not even sure he was speaking or why until the words left his mouth.
Dandy slapped the back of his head. “I had it, nigger.”
The Deacon turned his full gaze on Luther and Luther saw his grave in there, could hear the shovels in the dirt.
“You ain’t dumb at all, Country. I knew that first time I saw you. Knew the only way you’d get dumb is hanging around fools like this one bleeding all over my table. It was my mistake to allow your fraternization with said Negro, and that’s to my everlasting regret.” He sighed and stretched his great bulk in his chair. “But it’s all spilt milk now. So that four thousand nine hundred ninety-two added to the original loan come out to …?” He held up a hand to stop anyone else from answering and pointed at Luther.
“Six thousand thirty-two.”
The Deacon slapped the table. “It do. Dang. And before ya’ll think I’m a merciless man, ya’ll need to understand that even in this, I was more than kind because ya’ll need to consider what you’d owe if, like Dandy and Smoke suggested, I’d added the vig into the principal every week as I did my computations. You see?”
No one said anything.
“I said,” the Deacon said, “do you see?”
“Yes, sir,” Luther said.
“Yes, sir,” Jessie said.
The Deacon nodded. “Now how you gone pay back six thousand thirty-two dollars of my money?”
Jessie said, “Somehow we’ll—”
“You’ll what?” The Deacon laughed. “You stick up a bank?”
Jessie said nothing.
“You go over to White Town maybe, rob every third man you see all day and all night?”
Jessie said nothing. Luther said nothing.
“You can’t,” the Deacon said softly, his hands spread out on the table. “You just can’t. Dream all you want, but some things ain’t in the realm of possibility. No, boys, there’s no way you can come up with my — oh, shit, it’s a new week, I almost forgot — my six thousand eighty-four dollars.”
Jessie’s eyes slid to the side and then forced their way back to the center. “Sir, I need a doctor, I think.”
“Need you a fucking mortician if’n we don’t figure your way out this mess, so shut the fuck up.”
Luther said, “Sir, just tell us what you want us to do and we’ll sure do it.”
It was Smoke who slapped him in the back of the head this time, but the Deacon held up a hand.
“All right, Country. All right. You cut to the chase, boy, and I respect that. So I will respect you in kind.”
He straightened the lapels of his white jacket and leaned into the table. “I got a few folks owe me large change. Some of them in the country, some of them right here downtown. Smoke, give me the list.”
Smoke came around the table and handed the Deacon a sheet of paper and the Deacon looked at it and then placed it on the table so Luther and Jessie could see it.
“There’s five names on that list. Each one is into me for at least five hundred a week. You boys gone go get it today. And I know what you’re thinking in your whiny-assed head-voices. You thinking, ‘But, Deacon, sir, we ain’t muscle. Smoke and Dandy supposed to handle the hard cases.’ You thinking that, Country?”
Luther nodded.
“Well, normally Smoke and Dandy or some other hardheaded, can’t-fucking-scare-’em sons a bitches would be handling this. But this ain’t normal times. Every name on that list has someone in their house with the grippe. And I ain’t losing no important niggers like Smoke or Dandy here to that plague.”
Luther said, “But two unimportant niggers like us …”
Deacon reared his head back. “This boy is finding his voice. I was right about you, Country — you got talent.” He chuckled and drank some more whiskey. “So, yeah, that’s the size of it. You gone go out and collect from these five. You don’t collect it all, you better be able to make up the difference. You bring it on back to me and keep going out and bringing it on back until this flu is over, I’ll wipe your debt back to the principal. Now,” he said, with that big broad smile of his, “what you think of that?”
“Sir,” Jessie said, “that grippe be killing people in one day.”
“That’s true,” the Deacon said. “So, if you catch it, you surely could be dead this time tomorrow. But if you don’t get my money? Nigger, you surely will be dead tonight.”
The Deacon gave them the name of a doctor to see in the back room of a shooting gallery off Second and they went there after they got sick in the alley behind the Deacon’s club. The doctor, a drunken old high-yellow with his hair dyed rust-colored, stitched Jessie’s jaw as Jessie sucked air and the tears ran quietly down his face.
In the street, Jessie said, “I need something for the pain.”
Luther said, “You even think about the spike, I’ll kill you myself.”
“Fine,” Jessie said. “But I can’t think with this pain, so what you suggest?”
They went up into the back of a drugstore on Second, and Luther got them a bag of cocaine. He cut two lines for himself to keep his nerve up and four for Jessie. Jessie snorted his lines one after the other and took a shot of whiskey.
Luther said, “We going to need some guns.”
“I got guns,” Jessie said. “Shit.”
They went back to his apartment and he handed the long-barreled.38 to Luther and slid the.45 Colt behind his back and said, “You know how to use that?”
Luther shook his head. “I know if some nigger try to beat me out his house I’ll point this in his face.”
“What if that ain’t enough to stop him?”
“I ain’t dying today,” Luther said.
“Then let me hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“If it ain’t enough to stop him, you going to do what?”
Luther put the.38 in his coat pocket. “I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch.”
“Then shit, Negro,” Jessie said, still talking through gritted teeth, although now it was probably more from the cocaine than the pain, “let’s get working.”
They were a scary sight. Luther would admit that much as he caught their reflection in the window of Arthur Smalley’s living room as they walked up the steps to his house — two wound-up colored men with masks that covered their noses and mouths, one of them with a row of black stitches sticking out of his jaw like a spiked fence. Time was, the look of them would have been enough to terror the money out of any God-fearing Greenwood man, but these days it didn’t mean much; most folks were scary sights. The high windows of the small house had white Xs painted on them, but Luther and Jessie had no choice but to walk right up on the old porch and ring the bell.