Shella (21 page)

I stepped out of their car, the duffel bag in one hand. The Indian stepped out with me, watching my face.

“You have money?” he asked me.

I said I did. He held out his hand. I saw, people do that. I held his hand, squeezed when he squeezed.

The Indian shook his head. Sad, like he knew I wasn’t going to believe him. “We’ll be there when you come out,” he said.

I walked through the bus station once, then I came out on Randolph and walked over to the flophouse on Madison. The guy at the front desk looked at me too long—it was good I wouldn’t be there past tonight.

Before I went to sleep, I put my handkerchief through the gun barrel a few times.

The next morning, I found the train station, where the Indian said it would be. I took the A Train—it ran outside, above the street. I got off at Sheridan. It was a short walk to the blue house on Wilson. They gave me a room on the top floor. Seventy-five dollars a week.

The room was clean. Even the glass in the window. I looked out. There was an alley back there. An Indian was working on a car with the hood up.

“It’s better if you don’t just walk in,” the Indian had told me. “We’ll save that if nothing else works.”

When I tried to concentrate on all I had to say, my head hurt. I slept most of the day.

When I woke up, there was a note under my door. The
name of a car wash was printed on it. Underneath it said:
TOMORROW MORNING, GET A JOB
.

First thing in the morning, I walked over to the car wash. An Indian was running it. I asked him for a job. He didn’t ask me anything, not even my name. He pointed to a black guy, said he was the foreman. I went over to him. He gave me some towels, told me to wipe down the cars when they came out of the chute.

I worked all morning. The foreman told me it was lunch-time. The black guys had a place for themselves in the back. They all sat down and started to play cards. They slapped the cards down hard, yelling at each other. They were playing for money—I saw it on the table. One of them had a long razor scar down the side of his face. He saw me looking at him. He looked back—a prison yard stare.

I walked away.

The white guys were by themselves too. Just talking and eating their food. They had a bottle of wine they were passing around.

I walked across the street to a deli, got a sandwich and a bottle of cold water. I sat down next to the car wash.

The Indian boss came by, squatted down next to me. He spoke without moving his lips.

“Bad enough working with niggers, huh? Having one for a fucking foreman, that’s real hard for a white man to swallow.”

He got up and walked away.

That afternoon, I was wiping down a red Thunderbird. When I finished, the woman got in her car, handed me something. It was two quarters. I put them in my pocket. One of the white guys shook his head, pointed toward a big barrel right next to where the cars came out, a sign on it said
TIPS FOR THE MEN.

“We all throw in, split it up at the end of the day,” he said.

I threw my two quarters in there.

I finished the shift. We all walked around the back. The Indian came out, gave everyone their pay, in cash. I got twenty-five dollars. Then the black guy, the foreman, he dumped the barrel over. There were a few bills, mostly coins. The black guy counted it up. He split it into two piles, put one pile in his pocket. Then he dealt it out, one coin at a time. He dealt to everyone, all sitting around in a circle. A quarter for one guy, a quarter for the next guy. He started with the first guy to his left. When he came back around to himself, he dealt himself a quarter too. The black guy with the razor scar on his face watched. When he saw the foreman deal himself a share, he put his right hand in his pocket.

I knew what was going to happen. I just didn’t know when.

That night, I went to the bar they told me about. It was like all the others, except there was two different flags over
the mirror behind the bartender. One was red, with a flat blue X, white stars inside the blue stripes. I saw this flag before, plenty of times, in the South. The Confederate flag, Shella told me it was. The other flag was green on the ends, with white in the middle. The white had a design with horses or something on each side and some other stuff too. I never saw that one before.

I drank the way I always do. Watched the girls. Smoked a few cigarettes. “If nobody comes up to you after a couple of nights, you have to start a talk,” the Indian said.

Nobody came near me.

The next night, I was there for a couple of hours when a guy sat next to me. The barmaid came right over, like she knew him, brought him a beer.

He tipped the glass of beer toward me, nodded his head. “Haven’t seen you in here before,” he said.

“I just got in,” I said.

“Where you from?” His accent was like most of the white men in Uptown. Not South, exactly. Harder.

“Florida.”

“Looking for work?”

“I got a job.”

“Around here?”

“Yeah. In a car wash.” I could see the guy didn’t know what I was. He wasn’t looking for somebody to do work. “Bad enough working with niggers,” I said. “Having one for a fucking foreman, that’s real hard for a white man to swallow.”

“Yeah, that’s the way it is now. The fucking apes don’t
respect nothing. They’re out of control. It’s hard to be a white man today. They got all that Affirmative Action shit.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I felt good inside—I must of gotten it right. I wished the Indian could see me.

“They don’t come in here,” he said. “They know better.”

“Good.”

“See that flag?” he said, pointing to the green and white one over the bar. “It’s the Rhodesian flag—the true Rhodesian flag, after they kicked out the British. When it used to be a white man’s country. Before the nigger-loving UN gave it to the apes. It was a fucking jungle when they started. White men came from England, took it over. Cleared the land. It was a beautiful place. No race mixing, no fucking integration. It was a place for a white man to go, if he had the balls. No matter what your trouble was over here, that was the place to go. Paradise.”

“I wish I had known about it,” I said.

“You’d go there?”

“It would be better than prison.” Telling the truth as much as I could, the way the Indian said.

“You was in prison?”

I gave him a funny look, like you do in there when somebody’s close to pushing you.

“Hey, no offense, friend. I been there myself. Armed robbery,” he said. Like it was something special. “What’d you go for?”

“I killed a nigger,” I told him.

“Is that right? Hey, Katie, bring me another beer. And give my friend here whatever he’s drinking. Bring them over to my booth.”