South Central Noir

“I never stole nothin’ before, Samuel.” That admission killed all the excitement.

“Me neither.” His head dropped and his big shoulders slumped and they stood at the door, Samuel’s hand on the knob.

“I don’t think he knows where to find us, but if he finds us, he will kill us. He won’t even think about it.”

Samuel turned the knob and opened the door, then quickly closed it and hurried to the bed with the suitcase. “Gimme your purse, Mae,” he said, and he stuffed it full of money from Dave Hebert’s cashbox. “No matter what, don’t open this purse,” he said as he snapped it shut. Then he put some bills in his wallet, folded some and put them in his pants pocket, closed the suitcase, and took them back to the door. This time they left. It was still light out, and still warm, though the cool air was coming in from the ocean. Samuel put the suitcase into the trunk of their beat-up ’55 Ford Fairlane and covered it with blankets and put a toolbox on top. Then they got in the car and drove. Mae didn’t ask where they were going and Samuel didn’t say. They were both the kind of people who could get lost in their own thoughts, people who didn’t mind quiet, in fact preferring it over idle chatter and random noise.

Mae watched the street signs as they drove and knew enough to understand that they were driving west, away from Central Avenue, but she wasn’t sure where exactly they were. Then Samuel turned off the busy, wide street and onto streets lined with small, pretty houses, and there were colored people in all the yards and on all the porches. Samuel stopped in front of one of them. There were no people outside the house that needed painting and the yard with raggedy grass and wilted flowers. Mae looked the question at her husband.

“Fella I work with lives here, Gus Jackson. Him and his wife both from Texas.”

Mae frowned. “I never heard you mention him.”

“That’s ’cause I don’t much like him, and you won’t neither. He talks too much, outtalks everybody and knows everything. Loud and wrong is Gus. He’s a fool is what he is.”

“Then why are we here, Samuel?”

“They got an apartment up over the garage that till a couple of weeks ago some family was living in, and Gus couldn’t stop talkin’ about how glad he was when they moved on—”

“Maybe somebody else has moved in since then.”

“Gus woulda said. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut about something like that.” Samuel opened the car door. “Come on, my girl.”

Mae opened her door, got out of the car, and joined Samuel on the walk up the cracked cement walkway to the front door, which opened before they could knock.

“I thought that was you, Sammy! What brings you to my door?”

Gus Jackson was as big as he was loud, but he didn’t open the door any wider and he didn’t invite them in.

“This is my wife, Mae—”

“What y’all doin’ here, Sammy?”

Nobody called Samuel Sammy, and Mae was waiting for her husband to say that when the mass that was Gus got shoved aside and a woman half his size took his place in the now wide-open doorway. “I’m Velma Jackson. How’re y’all this evenin’?”

“Fine, thank you, Miss Velma,” Mae said, extending her hand. “We’re Mae and Samuel Hillaire. Samuel works at the port with Gus and we came to see if you’d rent us that apartment over top of your garage.”

The Jacksons looked surprised, then Gus looked nasty. “Why? You get put outta where you was livin’?”

Mae grabbed Samuel’s arm before he hit Gus. “No, we didn’t get put out but we left in a hurry ’cause I quit my job, walked out without a word ’cause I got tired of that mean, nasty cracker I worked for, and we were afraid he’d come lookin’ for me. So we just left.”

“Come in and sit down,” Velma said.

“What did your boss do that made you quit?” Gus demanded to know, and when she told them, he exclaimed, “That place on Central Avenue, the Chicken Coop? That’s the best fried chicken I ever ate!”

“When did you eat it, Gus, ’cause I’ve never had any.”

The man really was a fool! He launched into some elaborate lie, taking no notice of the look Velma was giving him, when she cut him off, explaining that the place above the garage was in no shape to be rented because Gus’s cousins all but destroyed it.

“That ain’t no way to talk about my people, Velma.”

“But it was all right for you to ask Mae and Samuel if they got put out from where they lived? And your people did tear it up. But I might know ’bout a place—”

“What place?” Gus was snarling now.

Velma, ignoring him, told them about a place on Normandie, around the corner from the beauty parlor where she worked: two stores, side by side, were just closed by the owners who’d lived upstairs and recently moved to someplace called the Inland Empire.

“Try not to talk to the husband. He don’t like colored people and don’t mind lettin’ you know, but the wife — her name is Elaine — she’s all right. At least she’s better than him.”

Mae and Samuel stood up and headed for the front door. “Thank you so much, Miss Velma,” Mae said.