Bug Jack Barron

14

Night streets. Yeah, night streets of Harlem, Watts, Fulton, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East-East Village, Evers all the same, hot heavy crowded and sullen with odors of greasy cooking dirt drunk-piss pot junk and cheap whore-perfume; oil-on-steel sounds of quiet, too quiet in shantytown side-streets, the hollow frenzy of Saturday night (it’s always Saturday night) on King Street, Evers’ main drag. The Street, The Street running down Lenox Avenue to Bedford to Fulton to King Street, night on The Street same in any city with interchangeable parts of mass-produced Black America like cheapjack copies of the real thing turned out by Japanese sweatshops; whores junkies jds bars Lenox Avenue strip joints Fulton jazz cellars Bedford hockshops furtive street-light pushers winos. King Street miasma, a Desolation Row of daisy-chain memories coast to coast made Jack Barron feel like a pale white predator moving on his toes down the black jungle trail of King Street—the Shade, the Man, hunter and the hunted.

Bet your ass there’s no “Black Shades” out here, Barron thought, feeling a thousand liquid Negro eyes on the back of his neck clocking the lone shade moving down their street, their turf—hey, what’s that shade doin’ here, he the Man? (Every shade moving down Bedford, Lenox, Fulton, King, The Street marked as The Man by the gray tin badge of his skin.) But ain’t that what you really are betting, Barron, your living-color ass is all, out here in the nitty-gritty, black nitty gritty, where the word came from in the first place?

Hey, what you doing here, White Boy? street signs junkies sloe-eyed black women forward-panther-sloping bucks polishing their cool-eyed gaze like New York PRs honing up their switchblades seemed to ask. Go walk this street, and tell yourself America don’t have a race problem—Civil Rights is all, wars and whores on poverty, is all, never had no race problem here man, not in the good old USA. Slavery maybe, lynchings maybe, riots maybe, endemic small-scale revolution maybe, wouldn’t want one to marry my sister maybe, degenerate black motherfuckers maybe, send ’em all back to the jungle maybe, but them’s all social problems, see, we got no race problem in Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

Send ’em back to the jungle, yeah! Barron thought wryly. Somebody say send ’em back? Walk in Harlem, Fulton, Evers, man, and you stop worrying about sending people back to the jungle, too uptight watching the jungle come back to people.

“Course there’s something to be said for the jungle, Barron thought, clocking the alive, desperate faces, jazz of the streets moving nice and easy in a liquid sulky beat, sensual relief of a junkie making his score, smirking mating-dance bridal-bargain between a tall thin cat and a little A-head-eyed whore. It’s nitty and it’s gritty and it’s all here you happen to be black, in Strip City, the Village, H-A, you happen to be cool. But if you’re a square old shade with no jungle inside you at all, never walked down MacDougal at 5 a.m., never from door to East Side Puerto Rican door, never felt the heat, never saw The Man out there waiting—then, baby, when you hear those tom-toms wailing from Evers Harlem East Village tribal jungles, better pour another stinger, rub on the old citronella, and fit a new clip in your carbine, ’cause the natives are restless tonight.

That why you’re trotting down this here jungle trail to meet Franklin in The Clearing instead of playing Big Bwana and summoning the cat to the District Officer Governor’s Mansion gin and tonic carefully guarded by loyal askari? So you got no eyes to play Bwana—Tarzan of the Jungle’s the name of the game.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s all a crock of shit, but maybe you gotta give that jungle inside a little transfusion once in a while, score on a street corner, fight in a bar, see the wrong end of a knife, keep the old juices flowing. All of them Bwanas out there, they don’t, except every ten years or so—and then they call it a war.

Up the block was an opaque-windowed barfront, green-paint-on-dirty-glass palm fronds under a tinfoil moon in a dead-black sky, green grime-subdued neon sign flashing “The Clearing.” And outside maybe twenty bucks goofing, cats too down and out not to get bounced from inside. Right outside the doorway like an honor guard of junkies—native kraal and Mr Henry George Franklin waiting for him inside.

Look dangerous, man, Barron told himself, feeling old remembered instincts hunching him forward in his funky black jacket, picking up neon flickerings in the pits of his hardened, tense-muscled eyes. Way you gotta play it on this ground, no black shades here—just Us and The Man.

Feeling the tension-interface before him bulging inward against the clot of black men guarding the door, eyes straight ahead never looking to the side to acknowledge the sullen-stare question the back of his neck knew was there—Hey what you doin’ here, you shade mother you?

Barron threaded through them, neither intruding on turf nor giving ground. And like a bubble bursting through layers of oily tropical waters, was through, and inside.

A big barn of a room (scars patterning the flakey-paint ceiling where the barroom, amoeba-like, had absorbed shops or apartments by knocking down walls) sunk down a half-flight from the entrance, down three stairs into the cellar, huge slash-pop green poster-fronds painted halfway up the dim grimy-white walls like chartreuse flame in the junkie-funky fluorescent light that turned the sea of black faces to ashy washed-out blue-gray.

The far side of the room was a long bar with a black plastic bartop over some phony ersatz wood; no bar stools, only beertaps visible, and behind the bar no bottles, no mirror, just a crude phallic mural of warriors black and pagan around a tribal fire. Not a mirror in the entire room.

Barron stood above the tangle trying to spot Franklin before stepping down into The Clearing, the turf, choked with invisibly-bruised black bodies, gut-knowing he had better show a non-Man reason for being there real quick. Sullen eyes began to turn upward, measuring him as he stood there like so much meat—one spade? Hard-up junkie? Flush dumb John out for a piece of black tail? The Man? Is this shade mother The Man? Down here in black man’s country, where The Man’s a nigger? Federal heat? Barron felt the paranoia rising, a thousand eyes sharpening their knives… gotta make a move quick!

“Hey, ol’ Jack Barron—” a hoarse barroom shout from a two-man table at the far corner where the bar met the wall. Barron saw Henry George Franklin, alone with a bottle and two glasses, blearing at him through the thick blue smoke, waving a vague hand from a fawn-colored sportjac sleeve. “Hey, ol’ Jack, over here!”

Barron felt an electric thrill as he sensed his name flashing like a running mouse through the crowd. No shouts, no mumbling, just a sudden series of dampening drops in the general noise level jumping around the room like a silence-ghost, leaving knots of black men, dark-skinned women, staring up at him in its wake; then a general turning toward him, a couple of shouts, a quick tension-moment when nobody moved that came as fast as it went. And then a tall, willowy, New-York-street-face Negro standing just below him flashed him an ironic, brother-hippy smile, pulled a pair of black shades out of a jacket pocket and put them on.

And the man next to him did likewise. And the man next to him. In waves. In spreading circles. Then a rustle of glass and clothing and plastic and three-quarters of the people in the room were wearing black shades, staring up at him with obsidian plastic-framed sightless eyes as if waiting for some countersign while the moment continued to hang.

More of Luke’s mindfuck games? Barron wondered. Guy that started it a plant? Luke’s having me followed? Or… or could it be real?

He fished into his jacket pocket (did I put them here on purpose?), pulled out the pair of black sunglasses Greene had given him, put them on, stepped down to the floor of the bar room.

And abruptly the wheeling and dealing resumed, and it was like Jack Barron wasn’t there, like he was invisible, like he was black as the best of them—the ultimate compliment, but cool and distant as the top of Mount Everest. Like he was… a black shade. And he knew dead-certain Luke hadn’t engineered this one; it was too cool, too choreographed, too underplayed, too yeah, to be anything but a gut-reaction. The Black Shade…

Barron made his way across the crowded barroom—with no more than a nod or two in his direction, a smile here and there (cool, real cool, from the womb of cool)—to the table where Henry George Franklin nodded to him, poured him a shot of Jack Daniels even as he sat down.

Barron fingered the drink, then sipped it as he studied Franklin’s seamy, puffed face, stubble on the verge of becoming a beard, liver-brown bloodshot eyes, yellowed teeth in a slack wet mouth, and stinking like a brewery: face of Brackett Count estimated hundred million losers behind the glass interface of the black shades.

“Y’came, ol’ shade Jack Barron,” Franklin said half-affrontedly, “now ain’t that a bitch! Big important shade TV star in a place like this.”

“I’ve been thrown out of crummier holes flat on my ass,” Barron said, one-of-the-boys-wise, tossing down the drink half for the flash half for the gesture.

Franklin studied him thoughtfully, his eyes no less opaque than the shades Barron still was wearing, finally said: “Maybe jus’ have,” and poured each of them another drink.

“Yessir,” he said, “good ol’ Jack Daniels. No more corn out of Mason jars for ol’ Henry George… nossir, nothin’ but bottled-in-bond for me and my fancy shade guest. Yeah, ol’ Jack, fifty thousand dollars, that buys a lot of good whiskey and bad women…” And he bolted down another drink.

“Let’s talk about that money, Henry,” Barron said, noticing strange hostile looks flickering across the faces of men who happened to glance sideways at the table, dirty looks seemed directed at Franklin the Negro, instead of Barron the shade. “The man who gave it to you must’ve given you some name.”

“Suppose he did,” Franklin muttered, pouring yet another drink. “Don’t rightly remember, and besides, ol’ Jack, who cares? Like I say, he was just some crazy rich man’s fancy shade messenger-boy, wouldn’t be using his real name, now would he? Not for goin’ around buying people’s kids. That’s gotta be some kinda crime, don’t it?”

“Did it ever occur to you that it might be a crime to sell your daughter?” Barron asked.

“Look, ol’ Jack, let’s talk man to man, okay?” Franklin said, waving a maudlin thumb in Barron’s face, “Y’got jus’ two kinds of people, lotsa different names, maybe, but only two kinds of people—them as got somethin’ to lose, and them as got nothin’ to lose. Shade what can go around handing out satchelfuls of money, that’s gotta be someone’s got somethin’ to lose, got reason to worry ’bout legal or not legal, ’cause he plays it cool and The Man’s on his side, unless he does something real stupid. But a dirt-poor nigger with nothin’ but a crumbly ol’ shack, few acres of no-good land he don’t even own and a seven-year-old daughter t’feed, he got nothin’ but nothin’ to lose, why should he care ’bout legal? Law’s against him day he’s born till the day he dies, ’cause he’s black, ’cause he’s poor, ’cause he’s been in and out of jail a few times for having too much to drink, gettin’ in a couple fights, stealin’ a little here and there to keep his belly from growling… When you broke, you take chances.”

“So you sold your own flesh and blood just like that,” Barron said. “Like you were a fucking slave trader, is all! I don’t understand you, Franklin, and I don’t know if I want to.”

Franklin bolted down his drink, poured another, stared into the brown liquid, said: “Black shade they call you, tha’s a good one…’cause there jus’ ain’t no such thing. Jus’ like that, the man says. Ain’t no jus’ like that, either. Try bein’ black, try havin’ nothin’ at all for forty-three years, try livin’ on Food Stamps and tinned peanut butter, savin’ up enough money in a month to get drunk one night to forget you is nothin’ got nothin’ never’ll habe nothin’, and knowin’ that little girl eats up half what money you got never gonna be nothin’ better than you, dirt-poor nigger and off your back, you lucky, and then some crazy shade drives up to your place when you had a little corn to begin with, feeds you a whole bottle of whiskey, then throws a satchelful of hundred-dollar bills at you and all he wants is…” Franklin began to shake, sobbed once, downed the drink, poured another, and drank that too.

“Look, Mr Barron,” he said, “I told you everything I know. Maybe I’m not a good man maybe I’m a bad man—piece of shit I sometimes think. But I want her back! Don’t want some crazy shade to have her! All right, all right, I did wrong, did real wrong, couldn’t help myself. I want her back! Y’gotta help me, man. I’ll give back the money if I gotta, but I want her back… I ain’t much, but I’m her poppa. She ain’t much, but she’s all I got. Y’gotta help me get her back.”

“Okay, okay,” Jack Barron said as Franklin’s watery, bloodshot, livery eyes pinned him, eyes of a man who’d done wrong and knew it, but didn’t quite know why, guarded eyes of a man who didn’t see himself as a criminal, or a louse but a loser, congenital black-skin-predestined loser, stupid, ignorant mark taken in some con game based, as they all were, on his desperation, on the difference between being a spade and being a shade, eyes that accused Barron, himself, his daughter, the child-buyer, the nature of the universe, saying: “It’s not my fault I’m a shit, it’s what you made me, all of you, it’s what I’ve been born.”

“I’m on your side,” Barron said. “Yeah, comes nitty-gritty time, gotta be on your side whether I like it or not. I don’t know what I can do, but whatever it is I’ll do it, right now, tonight. Okay? Show you what happens when you bug Jack Barron. We’re gonna go straight to the Governor’s Mansion and I’ll have Luke Greene put every fuzz in the state on it, run you through the files on every kook in the country. Come on, let’s split.”

Henry George Franklin stared at him in stupefied, disbelieving awe. “You mean it, man! You really mean it? ol’ Jack, you ain’t jus’ puttin’ me on, you gonna take me up there to see the Governor, top nigger what runs the whole state? You gonna tell him what to do?”

“Bet your ass I’m gonna tell him what to do!” Barron told him. (Fucking Luke owes me plenty for not shafting him today, let him do what he’s paid for, for a change, give him less time to mess with my head.) “Bigger men than Governors are gonna do what I say when I get back to New York.”

Abruptly, he remembered what had really dragged him to Mississippi was not Franklin at all, was Benedict Howards. First time in nearly a month I’ve gone a whole day without thinking of that fucker. But there’s the stink of Bennie all over this, he half-threatened to do me in over it, scared shitless I’d find out something from this cat. But what? He’s just a poor dumb fucker don’t know his ass from his elbow. Makes no sense. Not unless…

“You okay, man,” Franklin said as he got up from the table. “Y’know that, ol’ Jack, you’re pretty fuckin’ all right for a shade TV star… Who knows maybe you got black blood back there somewhere, maybe you are a black shade?”

Outside, King Street had passed over the midnight line: people coming from more than going to, junkies either fixed or in the deep shakes, quick-throw whorehouses, past their peaks, winos far gone or sleeping it off in pools of vomit, paddy wagons raking up the fallen human leaves, a London-fog of potsmoke rancid grease spilt beer drunken piss settling down on the buildings, gutters, alleyway in a funky-spent film.

Beside him, Henry George Franklin was stone-silent, like a hunched-forward wino who had made the price, passed through the flash, and was now out of it whether busted in the tank or pissing in his pants blotto in an alley; he had done his thing for the night and till the bleary dawn came entrusted his fate to the hands of the gods. And Barron, picking up on the wasted roach-end mood thought: throw the whole damn thing in Luke’s lap and forget it. What else is there to do?

He stared up the street looking for a cab—nothing in sight but a paddy wagon, couple trucks, and two funky old 70s cars. New York reflexes, Barron began walking up the street, some reason you never get a cab in the ass-end of nowhere just standing around, and besides, on a street like this, gotta keep moving, is all. Franklin trailed after him a glassy-eyed zombie.

Half a block up King Street, Barron got a flash. Something was wrong, out of tune, blowing a cold wind down the back of his neck. It made him break his stride, twist around to look behind him—

Like a sudden slap in the face, an unreal firecracker-backfire sound, a hard metal bee buzzed by his ear, and a sharding scream of tin as a garbage can between him and the wall of a nearby building exploded in a flash of metal, gray slop and wet orange peels.

Barron dove to the sidewalk face forward, arms covering his head rolled behind a parked car as another shot split the air around a low sickening moan saw Henry George Franklin clutch at his belly as he folded; then a third bullet smashed Franklin’s skull, flipped him backward to the sidewalk like a bloody ruined doll.

Across the street people were shouting as they ran in both directions from the mouth of an alley, and he saw a man resting the barrel of some kind of snub-nosed assassin-rifle on the lid of a rusty garbage can behind which he crouched.

A smoke-flash from the rifle, and a bullet exploded through two layers of car-window, ricocheting off the wall behind him and blowing the tire by his leg with a soft cush of air as it sprayed him with glass. Another backfire-sound, and the car body shook twice against his cheek as a bullet tore through the double metal walls of the far door, then spent itself in the door against which he huddled.

Down the street two cops were running toward the alley from the paddy wagon, and the siren sounded as the paddy wagon began to back jaggedly up King Street.

A clatter of metal as the gunman fled up the alley, kicking over the garbage can.

Barron got to his feet, both pants-knees torn and the flesh beneath abraded and bleeding lightly. He was shaking. Five shots in as many seconds—the first five bullets he had ever faced.

A yard or two away lay Henry George Franklin, blood pooling on his stomach, his smashed face mercifully hidden by a clot of amorphous red. Barron retched once, turned away, saw one of the cops racing across the street toward him, and, in a flash of adrenalin, the reality of the moment penetrated the time-delay circuit to his head.

First shot was for me! Me! déjà vu gunshots cowboys Indians racing up the hill at Iwo Jima Eliot Ness Zapruder film capgun-marching soldiers Oswald folding Viet Nam-headline war-images echoed in his mind… but the blood on the sidewalk in gallons and quarts was the same stuff in nicks on his own face cut shaving, same as the light redness on his skinned slightly-burning knees, pieces of Henry George Franklin white slivers of skull in sickening red wetness was same stuff inside him, just as sticky-soft vulnerable bag of pulsing slimy organs was him, kept him alive.

Dead… I could be dead, laying there a lump of decomposing meat, no difference except he missed me. And he didn’t mean to miss me, first shot was at my head, and after he got Franklin he went after me again, the motherfucker tried to kill me, really tried to make me dead. Some son of a bitch wanted me dead!

How’s that for your nitty-gritty street-reality, smart-ass? Some Oswald-Ruby-Sirhan loonie whips out a—

Image of a man resting a gun on a garbage can flashed on the playback screen of his mind, zoomed in on the gun: a cool piece of lightweight, high-powered, purposeful steel. High-powered, rapid-fire, no mail-order .22 no Manlicher-Carcano. A pro gun.

And a pro job.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Five shots just like that, first one right on the old button, if I hadn’t moved off-rhythm, next two right into Franklin, and then right into the car. A hit-man contract job for sure!

“You all right?” The cop had reached him, taken one quick look at the ruined body, then ignored it like the rest of the ugly refuse littering the street. The cop’s square face like any other cop’s face, hardly noticed it was black.

“Nothing broken…” Barron muttered, his thoughts elsewhere, back in the apartment, Benedict Howards saying, “Don’t talk to Franklin, or else—” Howards scared shitless, Hennering’s plane exploding, his widow smashed by the wheels of a rented truck.… Or else… or else…

Only three people knew I was coming down here time enough to arrange a hit, he realized thickly, Sara. Luke. And Howards. No one else. Howards killed Franklin like he killed Hennering, tried to kill me. Had to be Howards!

The Foundation bought Tessie Franklin. The flash seemed to come from nowhere, but in the after-image wake of the gestalt-inspiration the train of logic behind it stood out hard and clear:

Howards is the only man in the world could’ve contracted for the hit in time. Howards wanted me dead, wanted Franklin dead, something he was scared enough of coming out in public to kill me for, kill Franklin for, and the only thing that made Franklin any different from twenty million other losers was he’d sold his kid. So if Bennie wanted Franklin shut up, Bennie’s outfit had to have bought the kid…

And if Bennie bought Tessie Franklin, that’d sure as shit be reason enough to make double sure I didn’t find out, and if I did I wouldn’t get it on the air. Hit-man maybe really did this job after all, maybe only supposed to scare me. Anyway, Franklin’s dead, I got nothing live to put on the air…

“Hey,” said the cop, “ain’t you Jack Barron? Sure, I see your show every week.”

“Uh…” Barron grunted, lost in convolutions of snake-dancing logic, remembering the first bullet right at his head, two more college tries after Franklin was dead… No doubt about it, that cocksucker Howards wanted me dead, Franklin or no Franklin, and that don’t make sense with the only cat I could do a show around dead, unless…

Unless there are other people who’d sold their kids to the Foundation walking around loose.

“Yeah, I’m Jack Barron,” he said, coming out of it fighting, “and I’m staying with Governor Greene. How about getting me a lift back to the Governor’s Mansion muy pronto! Got a whole lot of checking to do.”

“You got any idea who wanted to kill you, Mr Barron?” the cop said.

Barron hesitated. No thanks, he thought, this is between Bennie and me. Too many tangles, in too deep-immortality, three murders and my name on a murderer’s paper, the show, national politics, and Christ knows what else, all balled up in a writhing glob like a mob scene at a convention of spastic octopuses, too many waves to risk ringing in any dumb local fuzz.

Yeah, and something else too, admit it Barron, something maybe only the Sicilian in Vince’d understand. Vendetta’s the name of the game, Bennie, just a two-handed game of Russian roulette for all the marbles between me and you. Your boy blew the opening move, and now it’s my turn, Howards, don’t walk past any dark alleys. I’ll nail your ass to the wall or know the reason why! Nobody takes free pot-shots at Jack Barron and gets away whole.

“Haven’t the faintest idea, officer,” he said. “Far as I know, I haven’t got a real enemy in the world.”