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By Root 483 0

on their skulls underneath their short-cropped, kinky hair and streamed down their dark, intent faces. Coffin Ed’s hair was peppered with gray. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown into his face. That had been more than three years ago, and the acid scars had been covered by skin, grafted from his thigh. But the new skin was a shade or so lighter than his natural face skin and it had been grafted on in pieces. The result was that Coffin Ed’s face looked as though it had been made up in Hollywood for the role of the Frankenstein monster. Grave Digger’s rough, lumpy face could have belonged to any number of hard, Harlem characters.

Grave Digger sucked the gristle from his last chicken foot and spat the small white bones onto the pile on his plate.

“I’ll bet you a bottle he don’t make it,” he said in a low voice, barely audible.

Coffin Ed looked at his wrist watch. “What kind of bet is that,” he replied in a similar tone of voice. “It’s already five minutes to twelve, and she got off at eleven-thirty. You think she’s waiting for him.”

“Naw, but he thinks so.”

They glanced surreptitiously at a man sitting in a worn wooden armchair in the corner beside the stove. He was a short, fat, bald-headed man with the round, black, mobile face of a natural-born comedian. Except for an overcoat, he was dressed for the street. He was staring across at them with a pleading look.

He was Mister Louise, Mammy’s husband. He had been picking up a hot little brownskin waitress at the Fischer Cafeteria next to the 125th Street railroad station every Saturday night since the new year began.

But Mammy Louise had got a bulldog. It was a six-year-old bulldog of a dirty white color with a mouth big enough to let in full-grown cats. It sat on its haunches directly in front of Mister Louise’s shinily shod feet and stared up into his desperate face with a lidded, unblinking look. Its pink mouth was wide open as it panted in the steamy heat; its red tongue hung down its chest. There was a big wet spot on the floor where it had been drooling as though it would like nothing better than a hunk of Mister Louise’s fat black meat.

“He wants us to help him,” Coffin Ed whispered.

“And get ourselves chawed up by that dog instead of him.”

Mammy Louise looked up from the stove where she had been stirring a pot. She was fatter than Mister Louise, but not quite as tall. She wore an old woolen bathrobe over an old jersey dress, under which were layers of warm woolen underclothing. Over the bathrobe she wore a black knitted shawl; her head was protected by a man’s beaver hat with a turned-up brim, and her feet were encased in fur-lined woodsmen’s boots.

She was a Geechy, born and raised in the swamps south of Tater Patch, South Carolina. Geechies are a mélange of runaway African slaves and Seminole Indians, native to the Carolinas and Florida. Their mother tongue is a mixture of African dialects and the Seminole language; and she spoke English with a strange, indefinable accent that sounded somewhat similar to a conference of crows.

“What you two p’licemens whispering about so seriously?” she asked suspiciously.

It took a moment before they could piece together what she said.

“We got a bet,” Grave Digger replied with a straight face.

“Naw we haven’t,” Coffin Ed denied.

“You p’licemens,” she said scornfully. “Gamblin’ an’ carryin’ on an’ whippin’ innocent folkses’ heads with your big pistols.”

“Not if they’re innocent,” Grave Digger contradicted.

“Don’t tell me,” she said argumentatively. “I has seen you.” She curled her thick, sensuous lips. “Whippin’ grown men about as if they was children. Mister Louise wouldn’t stand for it,” she added, looking slyly from her husband’s desperate face to the slobbering bulldog. “Get up, Mister Louise, and show these p’licemens how you captured them train robbers that time.”

Mister Louise looked at her gratefully and started to his feet. The bulldog raised up and growled