Wound Tally

The building was there at seven-thirty and would be there at eight. Darnell walked east on 133rd with his hands in the pockets of trousers he’d pressed that morning on a board balanced between the radiator and the bed. The crease was good. He had ironed it while the coffee went cold on the sill, and now the crease cut through the heat like it had somewhere to be.

It was already ninety-one degrees.

Four-twelve West 133rd Street stood between a laundry that opened at six and a storefront church that opened when its pastor felt the spirit, which was Tuesdays and Saturdays and some Fridays if the pastor’s wife had been at him. The building was five stories of brown brick gone the color of a bruise under the August sun. Sixteen apartments. Fire escapes on the east face hung with laundry and the occasional chair dragged out for the evenings. A woman named Odette on the fourth floor kept a cat on a rope that walked the fire escape rail like a circus act, and the rope was always exactly the same length, which meant Odette had measured it. Darnell knew the building the way a butcher knows a carcass — every joint, every weakness, every place the knife goes clean.

He did not own it.

The building belonged to a man named Floyd Pinckney who lived in Mount Vernon and came down twice a year to argue with the boiler. Floyd Pinckney had never measured a rope in his life, had never noticed Odette’s cat, had never stood across the street at seven-thirty in the morning and watched the light hit the east face and thought about what that light was worth per square foot. Darnell had done all of these things. Ownership, in his experience, was a matter of attention, and Floyd Pinckney paid none.

At the corner of Lenox, a hydrant had been opened overnight. Water ran thick and fast down the gutter, carrying bottle caps and the cellophane from someone’s cigarette pack. Kids would be in it by noon. Darnell crossed to the dry side without breaking stride, without looking at the water, the way a man steps around a hole in the floor of a room he has walked through many times.

“Greer.” Tick was on the corner, leaning against the mailbox with a Racing Form folded into a tube. Tick was nineteen and had been running numbers for Bumpy’s people since he was fifteen, and in those four years he had developed a body like a telephone pole and an opinion about everything on the block. His real name was Theodore Tillman but nobody had called him that since Eisenhower’s first term.

“Morning, Tick.”

“Morning nothing. It’s hot as the back of a stove and I been standing here since six forty-five waiting on a man who told me six-thirty and I want to know what kind of man says six-thirty and means seven.”

“A man with his own schedule.”

“A man with no respect is what. You see that hydrant? Somebody opened that at three in the morning. I heard the wrench. Three in the morning, Greer. That’s not children. That’s a grown person who decided to flood a city block because they were warm.”

“It’s August.”

“It’s a felony is what it is.” Tick unrolled the Form, rolled it back. “Where you going looking like Sunday?”

“I have business.”

“Business.” Tick said the word like he was testing a tooth. “I know about your business. Your business been busy. I hear your business been all up and down 133rd telling people they can own a piece of something.”

Darnell looked at him. Tick looked back with the steady, amused patience of a man who watches a block the way other men watch television.

“I hear things,” Tick said. “I am standing on this corner fourteen hours a day, Greer. I hear the rats in the walls of that man’s building from here.”

“Floyd Pinckney’s building.”

“That’s the one.”

“I never said otherwise.”

Tick smiled. It was a wide smile, white and immediate, and it meant nothing and everything and mostly it meant that Tick had heard enough to know the shape of the thing and was content to watch it move. “You be careful with that deacon,” Tick said. “Church money spends different.”

Darnell kept walking.

The diner on Lenox had a counter and six booths and a fan that moved the air from one side of the room to the other without cooling it. Darnell took the booth by the window. He ordered coffee and did not drink it. The coffee sat on the table between his hands and the hands were still, which was unusual, which took concentration because the hands were what betrayed him — always adjusting a collar, turning a matchbook, aligning the salt with the pepper. When the hands were still the face could do its work. The face was his best instrument. It was lean and quick, with a quality of attention that people mistook for concern, and the teeth were good. He showed the teeth often. Laughter was a currency he had been spending since he came back from overseas, and it had not yet inflated.

Purnell Ames came in at ten past ten. He was a large man, fifty-two, with the careful posture of someone who had been told to sit up straight in childhood and had never received the countermanding order. He wore a gray suit that was too heavy for August and carried a Bible with a white envelope tucked inside the front cover, visible when he set it on the table the way a man might set a briefcase, with the clasp facing outward.

“Brother Greer.”

“Deacon Ames.”

They shook hands. Purnell sat and ordered coffee and drank it immediately, which Darnell noted because it meant Purnell was comfortable. A nervous man holds his coffee. A comfortable man drinks it.

“I spoke with Agnes,” Purnell said. Agnes was his wife.

“How is Sister Ames?”

“Agnes is Agnes. She has her opinions.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

Purnell smiled. It was a different kind of smile from Tick’s — careful, earned, released only after internal committee. “She wants to know about the plumbing,” he said.

“The plumbing is sound.” Darnell said this because it was true. Floyd Pinckney’s boiler was ancient and fought him every winter, but the pipes in 412 were copper, replaced during the war by a landlord with more foresight than Floyd. “Copper pipes. Replaced in forty-three or forty-four. The building’ll be standing when we’re both in the ground.”

“That’s what Agnes wants to hear.”

They sat with that for a moment. Two men in a booth drinking coffee and not-drinking coffee, and between them the envelope in the Bible and the building neither of them named.

“I was telling Agnes about that sergeant of yours,” Purnell said. “The one who read the map upside down.”

Darnell laughed. The laugh was real, or it had been real the first hundred times he told the story, and by now the mechanism was so practiced that the distinction had worn away. “Sergeant Howell. Man got us lost three separate times in country the size of this diner. We ended up in a village that wasn’t on any map because he was holding the map with north at the bottom, and the villagers fed us and tried to trade us a goat.”

Purnell laughed. The laughter was easy between them and it sealed something the way a handshake seals, and Darnell watched Purnell’s hand move toward the Bible, toward the envelope. The hand knew what the mouth had not yet said.

Then the door opened and a woman came in. She was not Claudine. She was a woman of about forty in a yellow housedress carrying a paper bag, and she moved through the door running an errand between other errands, and the paper bag crinkled as she passed their booth, and Darnell’s hand was gripping the edge of the table hard enough that the knuckle of his right index finger went white.

Two seconds. Maybe three.

Then he was back and his hand was flat on the table and he was grinning and saying, “This heat,” and Purnell was looking at the hand.

“You all right, Brother Greer?”

“Ninety-one degrees and climbing. My doctor says I need to drink more water.”

“Well.” Purnell moved the Bible slightly to the left. The envelope stayed inside. “I’ve been thinking I’d like to see the building. Walk the exterior. Agnes wants me to look at the windows.”

“Absolutely.”

“This afternoon? Say three?”

“Three is fine.”

“I’ll bring what we discussed.”

“I appreciate that, Deacon.”

They shook hands again and Purnell left. The coffee on Darnell’s side of the table was still full. He sat in the booth for a while. The fan moved the air. His hands found the matchbook.

Claudine Rowe’s salon was on 131st, south side, between a shoe repair and a vacant lot where somebody had been storing mattresses. The sign said CLAUDINE’S in gold leaf that had been carefully applied and was starting, in places, to prove that careful application and permanence are different things. The door was propped open with a brick.

Inside it smelled of bergamot and pressing oil and the scorched sweetness of hot metal touching hair. A woman sat under a dryer reading Jet magazine. The dryer hummed at a frequency that filled the room and made normal speech feel like something conducted through a wall. Claudine was at the back station, wiping the counter with a rag that she folded into quarters between wipes.

She was thirty. She had a daughter somewhere — Darnell had heard this from Tick, who heard everything from everyone — and she ran the salon six days a week and on the seventh she did not rest but did the books. She had hands that were elegant in the way that hands that work become elegant: not soft, not decorative, but precise.

“Mr. Greer.”

“Miss Rowe.”

“Come in the back.”

The back room was small, stacked with boxes of product and a folding table with two chairs. Claudine sat in one and gestured at the other. Darnell sat. Between them on the table was a tin ashtray with the logo of a hotel neither of them had been to.

“Delphine Odom came in here three weeks ago,” Claudine said. “Got a press and set. Talked the whole time about an investment opportunity. A building on 133rd. Shares.”

Darnell said nothing.

“I know that building. I know Floyd Pinckney’s rent man, because Floyd Pinckney’s rent man’s wife gets her hair done here. There are no shares. There is no investment. There’s a man in pressed trousers telling working people they can own something.”

“People can own things.”

“Not that building.”

The dryer in the front room cycled down and then cycled up again. The woman turned a page of her magazine.

“What do you want, Miss Rowe?”

“Twenty percent.”

Darnell looked at her. She looked back. She had the face of a woman who had done arithmetic before coming to the table and was not interested in revising it.

“Twenty percent of what?”

“Of what Purnell Ames gives you today, and of whatever comes after. I’m not interested in justice. Justice doesn’t pay the lease on this shop.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then I say yes. To Delphine. To Floyd Pinckney’s rent man. To whoever’s next.”

Darnell leaned back in the folding chair. It creaked. The bergamot was thick in the air and the heat was worse in the back, no fan, just the boxes and the two of them and the arithmetic she had already done.

“That building,” he said. “The pipes are good. Copper. But the basement — I hear the sub-floor’s gone. Water damage.”

“Since winter,” Claudine said. “Pipes are fine but the ground under them isn’t.”

“You can smell it when the ground is wrong.” His voice changed. Not louder. Flatter. “Before it goes. You can smell it. Wet and something else underneath the wet. A sweetness that isn’t sweet.”

Claudine stopped wiping the counter. She had picked the rag back up at some point, the way hands do, and now the rag was still.

“The ground looks fine,” he said. “Solid. You walk on it and it holds. And then the weight shifts and the whole thing goes to water.”

He was not talking about the basement of 412 West 133rd Street. Neither of them said so. The dryer in the front room hummed.

“Twenty percent,” Claudine said.

“Fifteen.”

“Twenty.”

“Fine.”

She folded the rag into quarters again. “Three o’clock?”

“You know about that?”

“I know about everything on this block, Mr. Greer. That’s why you’re going to pay me twenty percent.”

At three the block was an audience. Ninety-eight degrees and every stoop occupied, every window open, every body that could be outside pulled outward by the heat and the boredom and the fact that indoors was worse. Two old men on the stoop of 410 played dominoes on a board balanced on their knees. Tick had migrated half a block south and leaned against a lamppost, watching nothing, watching everything. Kids ran through the hydrant spray screaming, and the water hit the asphalt and steamed and the steam rose and joined the haze that sat over the block like a headache.

Purnell Ames arrived at three-twelve in the same gray suit with the Bible under his arm. He had sweated through the suit at the collar and under the arms and he did not seem to notice. He walked with the careful, forward-leaning motion of a man who has committed to something and wants the commitment over with.

Darnell met him on the sidewalk in front of 412. They did not shake hands this time. Darnell had rolled his sleeves to the elbow. It was too hot. The keloid on his left forearm was visible — a raised rope of scar tissue, pink-brown and shining, that ran from the inside of his wrist to the crook of his elbow. It had healed beyond the original wound the way keloids do, the body producing twenty times the collagen needed, the scar growing past its own borders.

“You see the brickwork,” Darnell said. “Original. 1923, maybe 1924. They don’t lay brick like this anymore.”

Purnell looked at the brick. Purnell did not know brick from anything but he nodded because a man who is about to spend four hundred dollars needs to nod at something.

“The fire escapes were inspected — I want to say 1948. The railings are wrought iron, not that pot-metal they’re using now.” Darnell moved down the face of the building, pointing, narrating. He knew every detail. The knowledge was genuine even if the ownership was not, and genuine knowledge has a texture that even a church deacon can feel.

“Odette up on four — you can see her cat on the railing — she’s been there eleven years. That’s a building people stay in. That tells you about the bones.”

From across the street: Claudine. She stood at the corner of 131st and Seventh with her arms folded, watching. She wore a white blouse and her hair was pinned up and she was perfectly still the way buildings are still, and her stillness was the loudest thing on the block.

Darnell saw her. He kept talking.

“The foundation is what you want to look at. You want to look at what’s holding the weight. Load-bearing walls on the east and west, running the full height. You take out a load-bearing wall — ” He paused. His voice had shifted again, the way a radio drifts between stations. “You take out the wall and everything above it comes down. Looks solid from outside. Inside, the weight has nowhere to go.”

Purnell was watching him.

“We held a position for three days in a farmhouse. Stone walls. Looked like it had been there a hundred years. We were four in the south room, sleeping in rotation, and the wall — ”

He stopped. The street was there. The hydrant, the kids, the dominoes, the old men, Tick on the lamppost, the cat on the railing, the August light on the east face of a building he did not own. All of it was there and he was there and the farmhouse was also there, the two places layered like negatives in a darkroom.

“The structural integrity,” he said. But the sentence had nowhere to go.

Claudine was still across the street. She had not moved. She was just a woman standing on a corner in the heat, watching a man sell something he did not have, and her watching had changed the weight distribution and the solid ground was behaving like water.

Purnell took the Bible from under his arm and held it in both hands in front of his chest. The envelope was still inside. His hands pressed the covers together.

“I think I need to talk to Agnes,” he said.

“Sure. Sure, of course.”

“The heat,” Purnell said. “This heat makes it hard to think.”

“It does.”

“I’ll telephone you.”

“Any time, Deacon.”

Purnell walked north on Seventh. He walked the way a man walks when he has been saved from something he does not fully understand and wants distance from the place where it almost happened. The gray suit darkened with sweat at the small of his back.

Tick appeared at Darnell’s elbow. How he moved that fast from half a block away was the kind of question the block did not bother asking about Tick.

“That went bad,” Tick said.

“It went.”

“You were talking about walls, Greer. I was right there and you were talking about walls in a voice I have not heard come out of you before and I am telling you it was a different voice.”

“I was talking about the building.”

“You were not talking about the building.” Tick looked at him with something that was not sympathy — Tick did not trade in sympathy — but was recognition that a thing had occurred. “I’m going to collect my money from a man who owes me money. You should sit down somewhere.”

Tick left.

Darnell sat on the stoop of 412 West 133rd Street. The stone was warm from the full day of sun. Odette’s cat walked the railing above him, precise and unbothered, the rope measuring its world in the same length it always had. The domino players played dominoes. The hydrant ran. From down the block came the sound of someone’s radio playing something with horns.

After a while, Claudine crossed the street and sat down two steps below him. She did not say anything about the twenty percent. She did not say anything about the con that had just died in public on a hot block in front of an audience that would, by tomorrow, have the story in six different versions, none of them accurate, all of them true.

She looked at his arm. The sleeve was still rolled. The keloid shone in the late light.

“Korea?” she said.

“Korea.”

“It healed big.”

“That’s what it does. Heals more than it needs to.”

She looked at the street. He looked at the building. The hydrant ran and the water found the gutter and the sound of it reached the stoop. Claudine’s lease was due on the first and the first was eight days away. Darnell’s rent was also due. His suit needed pressing. The hands were in his lap and they were still and the stillness cost him something each time.

Claudine pulled a cigarette from somewhere and lit it. She smoked it halfway down without saying anything. Then she said, “You eat yet?”

“No.”

“You should eat.”

She smoked the rest of the cigarette. She did not leave. The building stood over them with all its weight in the right places, its load-bearing walls intact, its copper pipes carrying whatever they carried in the dark underneath. Eight days until the first.