Matt pulled Vivian and George into a basement doorway under a porch. The second man looked to where the shot came from and with his bloody right hand took a pistol from his belt. Tremont shot him and the man fired his pistol once into the sidewalk and, as he fell, his pistol flew into the street. He got up and limped toward the panel truck as the first man crawled into a crouch and disappeared around the corner of Green Street.
Tremont crossed Bleecker and shot the panel truck’s front tires, then shot out the windshield and fired shots into the engine. He kicked both pistols into a sewer and called to the fleeing white man as he vanished up the block, “Hey, buddy, you got a flat.” He walked back to Rosie who was trying to stand up, blood all over her face and clothes.
“What they want from you, Rose?” Tremont asked.
“Oh, Tree. You’re better, that’s good. Gimme a hand.”
Tremont tucked the AR-15 under his arm and lifted her up.
“I’m a mess,” she said. “Take me to Trixie’s.”
“Pretty nice shooting, Tremont,” Matt said.
“I been practicin’,” Tremont said. He crossed Bleecker and picked up his gun case and sack from where he’d left them in the alley.
George and Vivian came up from the basement. “In all my life put together I have never seen this much violence,” Vivian said. “Did they hurt you, dear?”
“Yeah, they did,” Rosie said, “but I got a piece of one.”
“Really? Are you bleeding? I’ve got bandages in my purse.”
“I got this blood but I don’t know if it’s mine or whose. See what I look like in Trixie’s.”
Tremont took Rosie’s arm and they walked up Bleecker.
“What’s Trixie’s?” Vivian asked.
“Trixie,” George said. “I know her for years. Pretty girl. She used to work in the Creole house.”
“Trixie’s a madam, Vivian,” Matt said. “And her place seems to be our next stop. Any port in a storm.”
They followed Tremont and Rosie a block westward toward the oldest continuing whorehouse in Albany, a landmark, run at only two locations on the same block since 1937 by Trixie, no second name, never needed one, born Glenda Tilley, 1909, she of legend, business acumen, ambition, peerless sex, tan skin, a thrust of breasts and a stand of full hips—arcs and lineage that would send you or anybody like you around the bend—and of that bleached, golden, idolized pussy of legend that was neither given nor purchased easily, of mouth and smile that would have been iconic had anybody been allowed to photograph it (her thirty police mug shots taken since 1931 were all unsmiling), who grew from adolescent dream girl into young beauty, came to understand that beauty meant money and so settled into keptness for a year, left that to join the Creole assembly on Division Street, the only one in town, saw the folly of being in the assembly when she could manage things herself, and so escalated to Madam.
In 1954, after Averell Harriman became governor, freeing Albany of twelve years of Thomas E. Dewey’s foul Republican Puritanism, Trixie became Madam Impervious. In 1958 Nelson Rockefeller sent Harriman elsewhere and reinvigorated Republican hostility to everything Democratic, including Albany’s prostitution. The public revelation that the sale of white puss was flourishing in Albany shocked the church, and so the political leadership that had allowed it to flourish for two centuries suddenly declared it taboo. The sale of black puss was deemed extremely wicked but not shocking, and so Trixie, in her three-and-a-half-story Bleecker Street protectorate, became Madam Queen of the Evening. And her reign continued on unto the dismantling of The Gut that was so egregiously in evidence on this brilliantly clear June evening in 1968.
Tremont went up the front steps of Trixie’s place, a pair of town houses fused to double the size of her domain, and rang the bell. A second-floor window opened and a black girl thrust her head and one naked breast halfway out to inquire, “Y’all lookin’ for somethin’?”
“Tell Trixie it’s Tremont and Rosie, an emergency,” Tremont said.
A light behind the front door went on and the black girl from the window, her nudity partially wrapped in a blue robe, held the door that opened into the front parlor where two white college-age boys were making decisions about four half-dressed, light-skinned black girls. Trixie, elegant in a long pink floral house gown and high heels, her hair in a lustrously two-toned upsweep, greeted the newcomers, but after one look at bloody Rosie and gun-toting Tremont she ushered them all into the back parlor where they settled into overstuffed armchairs and sofas, the Naked Maja staring down from one wall.
“Drink, Trix,” Tremont said. “Lot of it.” He sat on the large sofa and put the AR-15 beside him.
“Scotch if you got it,” George said.
Trixie mumbled a drink order to the girl in the blue robe and then said, “Tremont, what’s that gun and who you shootin’ at?”
“Somebody give it to me,” Tremont said.
“Two mothers beatin’ on me, wanted to kill me,” Rosie said, “but Tree shot ’em both. Saved my life.”
“You killed two people, Tremont?”
“Just hurt ’em. I killed their truck.”
“How come they on you, Rose? You got somethin’ they want?”
“No, but they think I do.”
“You cut or shot or what?”
“Got kicked and had to get off the street. I might be bleedin’.” She raised her blouse. “I guess I’m bleedin’.”
“I’ve got bandages,” Vivian said, and she took George’s emergency gauze and adhesive tape from her purse, and opened a small tube of ointment. “The nurse said this stops a lot of disease.”
“Good,” Rosie said. “I got a lot.”
“You people want anything besides drinks?” Trixie asked. “Some beautiful people out there in the front parlor.”
“We got places to go,” Tremont said.
“Then why you here?” Trixie asked.
“Here because of Rosie,” Tremont said.
“There was some sort of riot on Clinton Square,” George said. “It was quite a good fight.”
“Is that where you did your shootin’, Tremont?” Trixie asked.
“What shooting?” George asked.
Trixie looked at George for the first time. “I know you,” she said.
“Sure you do. You’re holdin’ up good, Trixie.”
“George, that is you. You used to come ’round for the numbers.”
“When you worked at the Creole place, and also at Big Jimmy’s.”
“That’s too long ago. I can’t remember that.”
“Didn’t you dance at Big Jim’s?” George asked.
“I danced, I tended bar, did what people did for Jim.”
“You look something like you used to, except your hair’s got some white in it.”
“It ain’t white, George, it’s frosted.”
“George,” Matt said, “do you know everybody in Albany?”
“I know the pretty ones,” George said.
“George always had an eye,” Trixie said.
Trixie’s black bartender, a burly man in his thirties, useful also with the obstreperous, came into the parlor twice, with trays of glasses, ice, pitcher of water, four bottles of Stanwix beer and a fifth of Haig & Haig Pinch-Bottle. He poured whiskey into four glasses and added ice. Tremont took a glass and downed it in one swallow. They all took glasses and George took a Stanwix. Tremont held his glass out for a refill.
“You coverin’ this check, Tremont?” Trixie asked.
“Put it on my bill.”
“I’ve got cash,” Vivian said. “How much is it?”
“You with George?”
“I’ve known George longer than you have,” Vivian said. She opened her purse and put three twenties on the table.
“Drink up,” Trixie said. She stared at Matt. “You’re Claudia’s friend. I see you with her down here.”
“Matt Daugherty. I’m Tremont’s friend too. Can I use your phone?”
Trixie took him down
the hall to a phone in an empty bedroom. “You’re that priest,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “And I met you years ago down here when I was a kid.”
“We get a few priests come by. They like to hit and run. Is Tremont flipped? He never used guns. I see him comin’ up those stairs holdin’ that machine gun like a baby and he look like one of those Black Panthers. Is that what he’s doin’?”
“Tremont got himself into a crazy situation with that gun but we’re working on it. He’s in serious pain, just out of the hospital. I want to get him off the street, but no cabs are running. Too much violence out there.”
“Yeah, Tremont shootin’ people.”
“Can you handle us till I get a car down here?”
“Do it fast. Get him and his gun on the road.”
Trixie went to the parlor and sat next to the gun. “Tremont,” she said, “how come you goin’ around savin’ women with a machine gun?”
“It’s an AR-15, Trix, and I’d be doin’ five to ten wasn’t for Rosie.”
He told her about the night he’s walking on Quay Street, goin’ here to there, and sees a woman facedown near the dock, looks close and it’s Jolene. He goes to talk to her but she ain’t much to talk to, dead drunk and wet. Then the cops turn up and take ’em both in and write up a charge says Tremont is Jolene’s pimp and he strangled her, raped her, and threw her in the river. When Jolene comes to she agrees with the cop and swears yeah, that’s how it was, Tremont did it. When Rosie hears Tremont’s in jail she calls the Night Squad detective sergeant she snitches for and tells him Tremont’s no pimp, he never went that direction. Jolene was bangin’ sixteen guys on a freighter and got so drunk she fell outa the little boat goin’ back to the dock and one of them sailors had to jump in and pull her out. Cop asks how Rosie knows this and Rose says I was with her. So the heavy steam woozled out of that rape charge against Tremont and he walked.
“Why they want to put you away, Tremont?” Trixie asked.
“That cop’s been down on me since Election when a Democrat give me five to vote the right way and I took it. I was broke, Mary was sick as hell and five’s five. I told Roy and he says you gotta give it back, but go public with a lawyer and tell ’em who gave it to you and the Brothers’ll go with you for support.”
Tremont did but they busted him, and his lawyer was useless. Patsy’s D.A. had called a press conference about vote buying and said he’d prosecute anybody who gave a five, or took a five. So who’s gonna admit taking one, and did you ever hear of anybody giving one back? The committeeman who slipped Tremont the fiver had a sudden heart attack, also a stroke, not to mention six or seven malignant brain tumors, so his family flew him someplace, nobody knew where, for emergency treatment; and unfortunately he couldn’t be subpoenaed. Quinn wrote the story for the paper and it got a laugh, the Brothers advanced their crusade against election fraud, and the five-dollar vote was news for five minutes. Tremont walked again and now the cops were hovering, waiting for him to make a mistake. One cop decided Jolene was his mistake, but Rosie begged to differ. “Jolene was no good,” Rosie said. “She didn’t even know how to fuck right. She already dead, somebody got her, or maybe she fell in again.”
“Buying votes, Big Jimmy used to buy votes,” George said.
“That’s right, he did,” Tremont said.
“It’s what got him in thick with the Democrats,” George said. “There was a big run by coloreds coming up from Alabama and living in the South End and spending their money at Jimmy’s club, seven-foot-two colored fella singing and you had jazz music day and night. Patsy McCall saw all those newcomers in Jim’s place and got the idea to make Jim a ward leader. But you can’t make a colored fella a real ward leader—those people are all Irish. So Patsy invented a ward that floated and he put Jim in charge. Jim rounded up coloreds no matter where they lived and fixed it so they voted in one of the wards down here. Jim saw the prostitutes weren’t voting so he had the cops arrest them all and bring them to the polls in the paddy wagon.”
“I voted twice that year,” Trixie said.
“Jim paid four bucks a pop,” George said, “and he’d do favors for anybody who asked. In the windup he got one hell of a bunch of voters for Patsy, who was so happy that he fixed it so Jim hit the numbers twice in one day. I wrote Jim’s play that day, a Wednesday, but I didn’t know it was fixed. Jim won thousands and poured free beer for a week. What a great fella. He’d give you the hat off his head and tell you what to do with it. I can see him at the bar in his brocade vest and pocket watch, and that size eight-and-a-half top hat he got from London. Remember his songs, Trixie?”
“A hundred of ’em.”
And George sang:“Just because my hair is curly,
Just because my teeth are pearly,”
“I hated that one,” Trixie said.
“You can’t hate that. It was Jimmy’s tune. He’d get encores.”
“I hated that shufflin’ stuff.”
“Coon songs,” Tremont said.
And George sang:“Just because my color’s shady,
That’s the reason maybe . . .”
“I used to wonder how could my daddy sing those tunes,” Tremont said. “I told him people didn’t want no more coon songs. He set me down right then and he talked like he never talked to me before:
“‘Boy, you gotta know this,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t for coon songs I wouldn’ta worked. Nobody hires giants, especially colored giants, but two summers the sideshow up at Al-Tro Park billed me as the Albany Giant—tap dances while he sings coon songs. Then His Honor the Barber come to town from Chicago and Seely Hawkins was singin’ in it and she brought Mr. Dudley to see my act. He asked did I want to be in his show, and he put me in doin’ a reprise of ‘Shine.’ That was Ada Walker’s tune and she owns it, but I did it late in the show and some nights I got six encores. Show went to Harlem, two weeks on Broadway, then down to Virginia, Georgia, even Texas, and people loved that song and a whole lot of others, with Big Jimmy Van singin’ ’em, and I got me a name in colored theater. I jumped into vaudeville when the show closed, played some theaters on Mr. Dudley’s circuit, then came north and did the white circuits, and people all over this country got to know Big Jimmy Van. I made good money for years and come home and opened a club, got married and had a son I called Tremont. And he grew up to hate coon songs.’
“That stuff,” Tremont said, “suckin’ us into the lowdown—coon funny, coon foolish, wind him up and he smile, he shuffle. When I was a kid I said nothin’ ever gonna make me do that. But it made Jim somebody. He always said the Barber was a new thing in colored theater. Mr. Dudley played the barber who dreams he wants to shave the president in the White House and then he gets to do it, even though it’s just a dream. And Big Jim said to me, ‘Havin’ a story to go with the ragtime and the cakewalk, that was a different kind of show. We made a little bit of history and we got on Broadway and pretty soon a lot of colored shows had stories and they quit doin’ the old minstrel stuff.’”
“I used to be a barber,” George said. “I shaved the Mayor.”
“The Mayor,” Tremont said. “Big Jim knew all the Mayors, all the politicians. He was the most famous black man in this town, flush and connected, ask Jim and he’ll fix it, if you’re on his side. Hot time in the old town tonight, if Jim says so, and he never had no shame, other people had shame. Jim sang ‘Shine’ so much it got in my brain and now it don’t matter what it means. Means Big Jim to me.”
“Politics,” Trixie said. “Tremont, why you foolin’ with that five-dollar vote? If you needed money you shoulda voted twice and got two fives, not give it back. You ain’t cut out for politics.”
“Never could get into it like Big Jim,” Tremont said. “He got me two, three city jobs but those paychecks wasn’t enough to buy a pair of shoes.”
So Tremont worked his own way, shoveling coal in a South End steam laundry, warehouse helper, short order cook in Chloe’s diner. At night he dressed up, a dude l
ike Big Jim, and played in the Skin game that Rabbit ran in the basement of his pool room on Madison Avenue, a lucky player, Tremont. After a while Rabbit hired him to play for the house and that was very fine until too many players lost too much too fast, fastest card game there is, and Patsy McCall sent the cops in—no more Skin in Albany. Small loss for Tremont. His hand and his eye, they were real quick, but he wasn’t cut out to be a hustler any more than he was cut out for politics. Something direct about Tremont. He never understood it but it kept him straight. He got to be a broiler man in a new French restaurant, okay money.
Big Jim closed his club in the late ’40s, gettin’ old. Also nightclubs were dying from the cabaret tax and everybody was stayin’ home to watch TV. Jim’s wife, Cora, who taught in a colored grammar school, never liked The Gut, so Jim bought a house in the West End of the city, miles from The Gut, but two days before they were going to move in somebody torched it, and Cora went into a depression. Patsy came to see Jim after the arson and gave him a house on Arbor Hill for Cora. It was in tip-top shape and down the block from the Hawkins family, quite a few coloreds up there by now. Jim didn’t own it but he never paid rent or taxes and he spent his last years there with Cora and he needed her. He went flooey at the end, told people he could fly and showed how he did it, wore a watch cap, arms tight to his side like doing a sailor dive. When it rained he took credit for moving the clouds because the flowers kept saying how dry they were.
When Tremont came home from Korea he moved into the Dongan Avenue house and when he married Mary he moved her in too and they had a few good years until Big Jim passed and then Cora went away too, and one day Tremont got a tax bill in the mail. He went to the ward leader and told them who he was, and about Jim, and the ward leader said that’s right, Big Jim had a free ride, but he’s dead. Pay your taxes, Tremont, which he did for a while and then couldn’t, so long, house. Things went like that, jobs, then no jobs, and he and Mary moved someplace else, two rooms. Tremont found Peanut and brought him home from the vacant lot and Mary sewed good for uptown women with money and Tremont drove a truck for a new laundry, so they both had an income and they hung in there and things weren’t that bad. But it slid downhill and there was wine to cool the slide. Mary slid faster than Tremont, who lost his job driving the truck when the Teamsters organized the laundry and wouldn’t let him into the union. He had to go on welfare when Mary got sick and he kept getting busted for drink and they were living in a rat hole and life started to piss Tremont off.