Cleopatra Jones stared down at the
twinkling lights of the city from her luxurious penthouse
apartment; her city, the city she protected and watched
over. Her slim, glamorous face and form reflected back from the
window, a ghostly angel of perfection against the night
scene . . .
Oh, hell, who was I tryin’ to kid, anyway? Yeah, it was
dark and I was lookin’ out the window, but all cities look
glamorous and mysterious at night, even Philadelphia, and only
thing the woman starin’ back at me in the glass had in common
with tall, lean Cleo was that we were both black females
who’d come up in the world.
It hadn’t taken me long to put the weight back on that
I’d lost back in that Garden place, though I wasn’t as
bad as I had been. Truth is, the most fattenin’ stuff in the
world is also about the cheapest, and when you’re dirt poor
you wind up with lots of peanut butter and real fatty stuff cause
it goes further and fills better. Oh, the tummy was still okay, but
the hips were growin’ and so were my tits, which seemed
oversized even when I was down at my model weight (thanks, Ma!). At
five six, with a naturally round face and lots of bushy hair (I
know it’s not in fashion but it’s the only way I could
ever control it without spendin’ two hours a day on it) I
looked, well, plump, anyway.
I guess we was the only self-made poor folk in the Camden ghetto
back then. Daddy was a retired Army colonel; he coulda done better
by just bein’ retired—there weren’t too many
retired black colonels then. But, no, he’d been a cop in the
Army and he was a little too old to be a cop after and a little too
black in that day and time to be a commissioner or police advisor,
and he had this dream.
Back then there wasn’t a single black-owned and operated
private detective agency in the area—those that had the
background didn’t have the bread to get started. He pumped it
all into settin’ that agency up. Not much—a dingy
office overlookin’ a side street in one of the lousier
sections of the ghetto even back then, some secondhand furniture
and files, and a phone and a sign on the directory and the glass
door to the office. Spade & Marlowe, PI. With Ma as
his secretary he got enough clients to pay the bills, with a little
help from his pension. Trouble was, the clients weren’t
exactly the well-to-do types and we pretty much got peanuts even
when he did his job right—if we got anything at all.
My comin’ along pretty well finished off any surplus,
although I always knew that I was the one thing Daddy loved as much
as that agency. We got by, but then Ma died young—she always
had a real blood pressure problem and never did much take them
pills—and he had the agency and me and the agency was the
money for us to live. I dunno, I guess maybe I wanted all his
attention and got very little, since he was in and out at all hours
and I had to be pretty much on my own. I got to be somethin’
of a wild child, runnin’ with a bad pack, never carin’
’bout school or the future or nothin’, just
blowin’ reefer and drinkin’ booze and gettin’
into lots of trouble. Just about the only thing I really paid
attention to was makin’ sure Daddy didn’t know—we
used to steal blank report cards and fill ’em out real
convincing-like, and I could always come up with the right answers
for his questions. I guess now I was rebelling against him in a
way, and maybe against the whole world as I saw it, but I
didn’t see no future and no purpose to nothin’. Lost my
virginity real young, too; when I finally got knocked up good, I
stole some stuff from a store and hocked it for enough to get an
abortion. It weren’t no easy thing to do, but there was no
way to keep a baby from Daddy’s knowin’, and
that settled that.
That kind of neighborhood you was always around users and
dealers, pimps and whores, and they weren’t no creatures of
evil and sin to me. I knew ’em by their first names, and they
knew me. To a kid like me, they were romantic kinds of figures, and
if nothin’ else they was the only black folks who seemed to
me to be makin’ it. I’d slept around so much by the
time I was sixteen that all my fantasies were about bein’ a
hooker. Dress up real sexy-like, and have the dudes pay
you to get laid. Easy money, easy work. Only who my Daddy was kept
me from either joinin’ up with a string or bein’ taken
in by a pimp. Ain’t no way no pimp in that part of town
wanted the Colonel as an enemy.
Finally, of course, Daddy found out about it. Had to, sooner or
later. We had one big hell of a scene, and for the first and only
time in his life he actually beat me good, and I was ready to pack
up, run away, and go to some other city like New York and sell
myself on the streets, but I got so mad I came out first to tell
him, knowin’ it would hurt him, and I couldn’t find him
at first. Then I figured he was in the bedroom, and he was, only I
didn’t go in or show myself and my bad mad just kinda faded
out.
He was cryin’. Colonel Harold Parker, U.S.A. (Ret.), one
of the toughest dudes in the world, was cryin’. John Wayne
woulda cried before Daddy. It must have been the first and only
time in his life he did it. This was the man who had dug a bullet
out of his own side with a knife, then driven himself twenty miles
to the hospital.
Pretty soon, I was cryin’, too, and I ran into him and we
held each other and cried it out. After that, we made a deal. I
didn’t want to go back to school, and he didn’t want me
in with that crowd no more anyway, so he agreed, though he
didn’t like it, to let me come in and take over Ma’s
old job as the secretary, receptionist, you name it. In exchange,
when things got straightened out in the office and we got a little
ahead on the bills, I’d take some night classes, get my
G.E.D. high school equivalency, and maybe more if we could figure a
way to afford it. ’Cause I was his business manager,
he’d know where I was and what I was doin’, and our
free time would be our free time.
Well, I never did take to school, and I never got through eighth
grade, but I managed. I always read—Ma and Daddy had seen to
that from early times, and I kept doin’ it even when the gang
made fun of it—so I had a leg up on some of them kids who
have high school diplomas and straight A averages who
couldn’t spell cat or write much beyond their name.
I got a big vocabulary, but I never could keep all that grammar
shit right. Well, you know, you speak black English on the streets
and white English around Daddy and it’s kinda like
thinkin’ in one language and talkin’ another. I got one
of them ghetto-southern accents I ain’t never gonna lick, and
I gave up years ago tryin’ to correct my grammar. It’s
a lost cause. I’m a low-class hick with a big vocabulary, so
sue me.
I got the bug, though, helpin’ Daddy on cases and
gettin’ things mostly in shape. The files might not have had
the best grammar but they was complete and up to date. I never was
no good at math, but after we got the free calculator for
subscribing to PI Magazine I always knew we was deep in a
hole. Still, I learned the business, for what it was worth.
It’s a damned dull, boring job with no respect and few
rewards, no matter what the books and TV and movies tell you. No
big action, either. Daddy had a gun, a big magnum, but he almost
never carried it and I don’t think he ever fired it as a PI.
I did a lot of practicing with that sucker and I got pretty good,
but that thing has a kick they don’t show you on
them TV shows and it ain’t much good at any range. I also
took karate and judo lessons at the Y and got pretty good at that,
though I never had much call to use ’em.
I also just about cut out any social life. It weren’t none
of Daddy’s doin’, it was just me. Truth was, I just
didn’t have much self-image, as they call it. Never did. When
Ma died and Daddy was away so much, I couldn’t be on my own,
so I got into the gang and did what the gang did. I figure now
that’s what all that fantasizing ’bout bein’ a
hooker was all about. Any girl who has that trade as her sole
ambition ain’t got much sense of herself. When men pay, then
you got worth, right there, in dollars and cents. I was fat and
slow and no matter how good a shape I whip into I ain’t never
gonna be no Tina Turner.
Daddy and the agency, then, became my whole life, my whole
identity. I don’t blame nobody, but it’s just the way I
am. I can’t change that any more than I can change how I look
or how I talk. Nobody would believe it if I told ’em,
anyway—except maybe Sam, who knows it but just can’t
figure it.
But one night Daddy didn’t check in—the cops did,
and I had to go down and identify the body. He hadn’t even
taken his gun with him on that job, but he got far too many holes
to go anywhere afterwards. It was kinda weird standin’ there,
in the morgue, lookin’ at his water-soaked and bloody,
bullet-ridden body. One part of me said it was him, but with all
the life out of him he just didn’t look real,
somehow. I couldn’t even cry, but all through that night and
the next few days I just got madder and madder. The cops had no
real leads and he’d been pretty closemouthed about it all
even to me, ’cept that it was something big, bigger than
he’d ever had before.
I cracked the case, after two months, when the cops
couldn’t, and I got some reputation as hot shit for it but it
wasn’t all that damned hard. Sure, I didn’t know
anything about that case, but whoever it was didn’t know that
and I just began to put out the word that I had leads and knew more
than I did and set myself up as a target. The cops thought it was
real gutsy of me, but truth was I’d just had all I had left
in the world snatched from me and I didn’t really care if
they killed me so long as I got at least one of the bastards
involved. Detective shit is more guts and dull routine than
anything else; there ain’t no real Sherlock Holmeses. The
only thing is, most of the crooks around ain’t all that
smart, either—they just got smart lawyers. I set myself up,
got invited to a meet just like Daddy, and I went, just like Daddy,
only I took the magnum. ’Course, the gun didn’t do no
good, but the fact that I also called the cops helped nab the
triggermen in the act of tryin’ to kill me and led eventually
to the indictment and conviction of a popular young black
politician on the way up who just happened to be in the mob’s
pocket.
All that didn’t help, though. Fact is, I got no new cases
worth much and lost some old clients even though I got a reputation
as a PI at least as good as Daddy out of it. Big Tony and the mob
never did get touched by it all, even though they ordered it; the
white folks had gone scot-free and the black folks had taken the
fall, as usual, and for some reason I got blamed for that. Crazy
thing was that the only folks who would toss a case or two my way
were the smalltime crooks in the ghetto. Seems they were impressed
and wanted me on their side.
Still, not enough came in to make even the basic bills, and I
sold the house and lived on that for a while, takin’ a
one-room dump near work. I was just goin’ through the
motions, though, and I knew it. I just didn’t know anything
else to do. Oh, I had a bunch of relatives, mostly cousins, in the
area, but about the best I could hope for was some kind of job as a
domestic or cab driver or something. I didn’t have no skills
to speak of, no real contacts, no diploma—and you needed that
just to collect garbage—and only me as a job reference.
Couldn’t get no unemployment—I was
self-employed—and welfare didn’t mean shit unless you
had a couple of illegitimate kids. The only guys I knew who might
be marriage bait were either ones I couldn’t stand, ones who
wanted some kind of house nigger, or ones that were already as high
as they were gonna go and were like street cleaners or handled the
drive-in window at McDonald’s.
Here I’d done somethin’ the cops couldn’t or
wouldn’t do, and dumb luck or not I done it good, and instead
of gettin’ the gold stars and thanks and all the rest I got
shut out. I got to admit that my fantasies turned back again, and
every time I passed one of the hookers I got more and more
tempted—and without Daddy around I had offers from a couple
of local pimps.
The cops, though, had at least a little soft spot for me, since
I’d given them some good collars. I mean, a couple of white
cops got to bust a bunch of meddlesome black dudes in Camden, and
that was gold stars on them. That’s why, at just about this
time, they sent Sam around to me.
Sam was older than me by a good ten years, pudgy, balding, but
kinda cute. He was also the first white man I ever took a liking
to, and a big shock. It was the first time I found out Jewish white
guys could be about as poor and out of it as me. He was a cop from
Bristol, up north a bit in Jersey, and he was down tryin’ to
track down a ring that snatched little kids and turned them into
kiddie porn objects. Fact was, I took to him right off, not just
’cause I needed somebody right then but even though he was
white and Jewish he reminded me one hell of a lot of Daddy. He had
that same sense of moral outrage Daddy always did, more than I ever
could bring up, and when he was after bad guys he wanted their
asses bad. He also had a real passion for the old detective stories
and for all them old detective movies on the Late Late Show
starring Bogart or Robert Montgomery or Lloyd Nolan, the kind my
Daddy always loved and grew up on. And, like me, he wasn’t
too thrilled to be a detective, he just didn’t know how to do
nothin’ else. He also had a college education and real
brains. He goes on them brains, too; I go on feelin’s and
sometimes guts but I ain’t never gonna be no brain and I know
it.
In the end, we busted those suckers, got back one kid, and
exposed a crooked cop who shielded them, but it didn’t stop
there. Fact was, I knew what I saw in Sam, but I never will know
just what he saw in me, but he’s the only white man I ever
been around who never showed one ounce of racism or racial hangups.
Sam quit the Bristol force—he never was too comfortable on
the vice squad anyway—and came down with what little he had
to try and make the agency work. We kinda hoped if maybe a white
ex-cop was around some of the black folks would give us more
business, and it did bring in some, but not nearly enough. We got
married at city hall—the bride wore jeans—and even that
had a price. My relatives didn’t approve at all, and his
relatives were even madder than mine. I was still poor and broke,
but it didn’t really matter no more.
Fact was, I grabbed for Sam ’cause I needed somebody bad,
but I really fell in love with him. Real bad. I ain’t never
been in love with nothin’ or nobody before or since like
this. From the moment we moved in together, he was the only thing
important in my whole life. He kept the agency goin’ by sheer
willpower mostly for my sake, as it turned out, and he never would
believe me when I told him I’d be happy if he got a salaried
job doin’ most anything and I played house and mommie, but
it’s true.
I know, I know—on the outside it looks like black woman
makes it in the cold world, but I never saw my case written up in
Jet or Ebony or even the National
Enquirer. If you got the brains and the education and the
skills and the drive then go for it, baby, but I ain’t ever
gonna have them things and I just ain’t one for crusades. If
Women’s Lib wants to nail me for it, that’s all right,
but I didn’t see no cases from them when I was a woman-owned
business. Sam told me he didn’t mind if I kept my name, but
I minded; outside of the bed, it was the only way I could
really show him just how much he meant to me. Besides, I like the
look I get from people when they find out somebody who looks and
talks like me is Brandy Horowitz. A Jewish American Princess
I’m not. The trouble is, my life’s still all cliffhangers. I was
about to pack it in when Sam showed in the nick of time and saved
me. When we both were gonna pack it in as detectives and him take a
security guard’s job down in Delaware and me be a housewife,
in walked a case that changed everything. Started out as a little
mob-related thing and wound up with us discoverin’ the
biggest secret since the A-bomb, maybe bigger.*
Don’t ask me how it works, or how it’s possible, but
it’s so. It ain’t possible, but it is and that’s
that. Sorta like if God came down and worked miracles in front of
everybody—it would convince even most atheists. Well, this
thing’s like that. I ain’t sure I believe in
flyin’ saucers, neither, but if one landed in front of me and
little green men got out and asked for directions, I think I
would.
There ain’t just one universe, there’s millions of
’em, maybe more, and they all exist smack dab on top of each
other. No, that’s not right—they’re all in the
same place, only nobody and nothin’ in one can see or hear or
sense the existence of the others. They all started from the same
creation, but they spread out at different speeds and don’t
ask me no more. I ain’t the smart one, and even Sam
can’t really explain it. They say there seems to be no end to
them—they stretch onwards to eternity on both sides of us.
Because there’s so many, almost anything that mighta happened
in our universe but didn’t happened somewheres else. Like,
everybody says how lucky I am—I always seem to get better
when it can’t get no worse, like I told you. But
there’s maybe a couple of hundred other worlds so close to
ours that I exist, and this is the only one in which I married Sam.
The other me’s wound up whores and maybe addicts or stuck in
lousy marriages or dead or somethin’, but I’m the lucky
one.
Now, not too many people know about this, but one world found
out that this was so and figured out a way to go between the
worlds. How the hell they ever did that, or even figured out that
the other worlds existed, I can’t imagine, but they did. This
network to go between is kinda weird, like a long tunnel, but it
runs mostly like a railroad, with switchmen and stations and stuff
like that. Of course, even the ones who run the thing, called the
Labyrinth, which Sam tells me is a word that means a maze and comes
from one of them ancient mythology stories, only have stations on a
few hundred, or maybe thousand, worlds. They’re pretty
closemouthed about that. They keep explorin’, keep
lookin’ in at ones, until they find ones that have
somethin’ they might need. Might be an invention, or just a
bright idea, or some raw material they need—anything. When
they find somethin’ like that they set up a station and put
in a permanent crew and then they also recruit locals to help run
things.
They don’t really care about the worlds they move into,
’cept as how they can make a profit from it, and one of the
things they move into and eventually take over is organized crime,
which seems to exist one way or another everyplace. Like here the
Mafia and a bunch of other big crime groups are really wholly owned
and operated by these dudes from another world—and most of
the crooks don’t even know it. They also got a legit arm, the
General Ordering and Development Corporation, or G.O.D., Inc. as we
all call it when we don’t just say ‘the Company.’
You may never have heard of it, but chances are you’re one of
their customers. You know all those things they advertise on
late-night UHF TV stations and all them cable stations—knife
sets, pen sets, crazy gadgets that never really work, discontinued
and outdated merchandise, cheap imports, that kind of shit. You
know what I mean. They have an 800 number to call to order or an
address at the station, but down right at the bottom, in real small
print, they have to put their name and headquarters address of who
they really are and where they’re really at. Well,
that’s where you find General Ordering and Development,
Inc.
Most all the folks who work for that company don’t know
who or what it really is, neither. Just the ones at the very top,
and some of the company security people, and them that run and
secure the stations.
They can’t have a station just anywhere. First of all,
most places each world is totally isolated from the others, but
there’s always a bunch of weak points. A lot of
disappearances, people bustin’ into flame, visions, ghosts,
you name it come from them weak points. Most of them ain’t
too useful, though; I mean, you build a station in downtown
Philadelphia somebody’s gonna find out sooner or later. They
go for the isolated, middle-of-nowhere places, which are few and
far between these days, and they also got to be ones they can buy
up lock, stock, and barrel. The big station here’s out in a
hick town in redneck Oregon called McInerney—the only place
they could buy up and control that was away from everything and
everybody. They got a second little station up near State College
in Pennsylvania, which is also middle-of-nowhere wilderness, but
since they stuck both Penn State University and the biggest state
pen up in there it ain’t the favorite spot. It’s mostly
automated and used only when necessary.
They got the company headquarters smack in the middle of
downtown Des Moines, Iowa. It’s on a weak point, but they
can’t risk usin’ it. All they can do there is send
messages back and forth through it.
They don’t have but a fraction of the worlds with
stations. They only been here since the early fifties, and not in
force till later’n that. I guess it was only then we came up
with somethin’ worth stealin’.
The Company and the Mafia and whatever pay real good and more
than pay all expenses, and also cover up whatever it is that
faraway home world wants here that we got and they want to steal.
Don’t ask me what it is—that’s a closely guarded
secret.
Still and all, we came out winners from that one in spite of a
bunch of close scrapes and even more cliffhangers. We also did the
company a big favor by exposing some rotten apples, and unlike the
last time we got somethin’ out of it. A fair amount, really,
considerin’ where we came from. We got a small suite of
offices for the agency in a midtown Philadelphia high rise the
company owns rent-free, our old bills paid off, several thousand
bucks in seed money, and we also got some pretty good payin’
clients referred to us by the Company or their people.
Not that the cases were any different or any more
thrillin’ than the old ones were, but there were
lots of clients and they all paid and paid real good. At
rates that started at two hundred and fifty bucks a day plus
expenses, we did all right. Got us a fancy two-bedroom apartment in
one of the new developments right in town, too, which is where I
was that night, lookin’ out the window and wishin’ Sam
were around. He wasn’t, though; he was in Pittsburgh until
the next afternoon, checking out an accountant livin’ way
beyond his means.
It was crazy, but right then, with a lot of what I’d
always dreamed of all around, I was thinkin’ ’bout
quittin’ the business. It was really Sam’s anyway,
now—I just helped out and gave support and advice now and
then. Fact was, I was what the bankers call more a liability than
an asset. We was movin’ in higher circles and higher society
with these clients. They was all educated, well off, rich—and
I ain’t talkin’ ’bout race here, since some of
’em was blacker’n me. I wasn’t the
good-lookin’, glamorous type, didn’t know what fork to
use or what wine went with what—in my old circles,
Thunderbird was a step up—and it was like them and me come
from different parallel worlds. You didn’t have to walk the
Labyrinth to find that kind of thing. All I had to do was open my
mouth and I was low class, uneducated, ignorant. Most folks thought
I was the receptionist anyway, or maybe the cleaning lady.
Oh, Sam made a big thing about how he needed me, couldn’t
get along without me, and all that, and I think maybe he believed
it himself, but it wasn’t true. Just goin’ in to work
was gettin’ more and more depressin’ every day, even
when I had a lot of work to do. We needed more people, sure, but we
needed nice, clean-cut young folks who were college grads and
talked just right and all that. Most of my friends, the few I had,
were from the old neighborhood in Camden or among some of my
cousins all over the place. Now that we had money I was
discoverin’ just how many relatives I had, too. I could sure
buy company, but none I felt good with.
In the end, I guess, it was just that I was beginnin’ to
feel useless and without much to do. We was just too removed from
what I’d been used to and brought up with. All this new
wealth built a wall between me and the kind of poor folks who were
all I knew all my life. I could drop over there, but it was never
the same. I had what they wanted and probably would never have and
they knew it. Crazy thing was, too, I didn’t really feel safe
over there anymore.
See, that was the reason for all the trouble I got in, and maybe
the reason a lot of black kids get screwed for life. I mean, there
you are, a kid in a neighborhood where there’s so many poor
folk a lot ain’t got nothin’ to lose and a lot more
just give up. Crime’s real big and deep rooted there, simply
’cause it’s the only real source of jobs and steady
income. Most folks there don’t wanta kill you, they just
don’t think two steps ahead. If you’re wearin’ a
jacket and one wants it, he’ll just go up and off you and
take it. The only way a kid’s got any real chance if they
don’t wanta be like that themselves is to join a gang. I
guess it’s always been that way. I seen West Side
Story twelve times. The boys in the gang, they give you
protection ’cause it’s the code, and the girls, well,
they give the boys whatever they want. Most times, you’re as
safe as you can be, but you grow up feelin’ dependent on
folks and with no real confidence in yourself, even though you wind
up actin’ tough and talkin’ tough so nobody knows how
scared you are, and the boys grow up thinkin’ of girls as
dependent, weak, things and not people.
The leaders of them gangs ain’t got much smarts;
they’re all muscle and nerve, so they don’t like
anybody to be smarter than they are. You gotta talk gutter talk,
like what they like, do what they say. That way you wind up with
your first kid at fifteen or so and a life on welfare.
That’s why when Daddy took me outta the gangs he also took
most of my protection, my security. By the time he took me out, I
was set, you know. A part of me will always be that little girl,
and I’ll always talk and act like I had to all them
years.
Over there now, though, I was nothin’ but a target.
Nailin’ Daddy’s killers got me some respect but it
didn’t do nothin’ for my nerve deep down. When I was
with Daddy, or Sam, or the cops, it was somethin’ else, but
all alone I’m just a scared little ghetto girl.
I never was much for church goin’, neither, so I
didn’t really have that to fall back on. Most of ’em I
knew were either preachers on the make for some kind of political
office or cause or decidin’ on how the blacks got to hold a
revolution or make some new country somewheres, while the rest just
sat there and sang and prayed and said we might be down now but
wait till we die and then we’d be in the Promised Land. Well,
I never seen where that country was gonna be, and they
wouldn’t let Sam in, anyways, and I just ain’t so sure
about no Promised Land, or at least if they’d let me in when
I got to the gates. Lookin’ at the folks who were sure it was
there and sure they’d get there, I ain’t so sure a
place filled with them types is where I want to be trapped for
eternity, neither. Daddy never did have much belief in God, even on
the battlefields, but he belonged to a church ’cause it
brought in some business. Maybe that’s why men got more power
in business than women—they make better hypocrites.
So, I was cut off from my old neighborhood and people, and my
relatives weren’t no damned good to me when I needed
’em and I didn’t see why I should be so damned good to
them, now, and I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere in the
business society of most all our clients—Sam didn’t
like ’em none, but he could pretend he did for the money and
jobs—and ’cause I was rough and foul-mouthed and talked
like a poor ignorant nigger I wasn’t invited to no parties or
social occasions.
Not that I wanted to go back where I was. Uh uh. I ate real
good, the sheets were satin, and I had a jacket in the closet there
that was genuine mink, and folks who woulda laughed in my face a
while back now kept tryin’ to get me to take their credit
cards. We was doin’ real good—maybe eighty grand a year
or more, before taxes, and we had a shitload of deductions. It was
crazy. Years and years I worked like a dog and got nothin’
but poorer and poorer—I’d’a made a profit
goin’ on welfare—but now I had all this stuff and not
only didn’t I have to work for it, it was better I
didn’t. If Daddy had this agency the way it was now, then
maybe I’d’a grown up fancy and speakin’ all clear
and nice like some TV newsperson and have gone to all the right
schools and I’d be right up there now. I mean, I seen some of
them high-steppin’ black folks around, and they seem to be
real in and real popular. They’re even more uncomfortable
when I’m around, though; guess I remind ’em too much of
their roots or what they beat. Maybe kinda like that sergeant in
Soldier’s Story who thought black society
couldn’t afford blacks like me no more.
Thing was, them oreos wanted to forget where they came from; I
couldn’t help but bring it with me.
That left Sam as the only important person in my life. He was my
lover and my best friend, but he was really my only
friend. He was everything rolled into one, but when he wasn’t
around I had nothin’. I needed something of my own, some
place where I’d feel comfortable and something to do I felt
important at.
I’m also not gettin’ no younger. Oh, sure, with our
connections with the Company we can get a lot of fancy stuff that
keeps us lookin’ and feelin’ better than we should and
maybe give us real nice lookin’ old ages, but I never yet
seen a drug that didn’t have a price and I sure
wouldn’t start on them things if I was gonna have kids.
I’m thirty-two now, my clock’s tickin’ on that no
matter what magic they can pull, but I don’t want to bring up
no kids in a downtown apartment. They’ll have enough problems
bein’ half black and half white, and I want them schooled and
brought up so they at least’ll be comfortable in this society
where only money really matters.
We’re makin’ out good but we’re spendin’
good, too. Hard to stop when you ain’t never had it before
and never thought you would, and that’s both Sam and me. If I
got to be my own universe I want a nice, big house with lots of
land, like out in the new-money sections of the Main Line.
Well, I always get down in the dumps when Sam’s not
around. I had to do something, though, and I knew it. I’d
quit smokin’ ’cause we couldn’t afford it and now
I was up to two packs a day and, as I say, the weight was
comin’ back fast, but I just couldn’t bring myself to
put myself on some diet. Who the hell was I tryin’ to
impress, anyway?
I just settled back on the bed and was goin’ through the
TV cable guide when the phone rang. It was late, so I figured it
had to be Sam, but it wasn’t. It was Bill Markham.
Now, we hadn’t seen or heard from Bill Markham in quite a
while, so it was a pretty big surprise. He was head of security for
the Company here on our Earth, a native of here, too, and while he
helped us get where we were he also was one of them folks whose
nuts we’d pulled out of the fire when we stumbled into this.
Without even a Christmas card after all this time, I figured that
if Bill called it wasn’t to see how we was.
“Brandy, is Sam back yet?”
“Uh uh. Not till tomorrow afternoon, last I knew.
Why?”
“We’ve had something come up that might be up your
line. Company business.”
“I can tell him to call you when he gets in.”
“Uh uh. No, this concerns both of you. You, really, more
than Sam.”
I was curious, at least. “Anything you can tell me
now?”
“Not over the phone. It’s not a security problem
here—yet—but it’s better told in the office where
you can see the materials I have. Sam might as well be there,
because he can have a role, too, if he wants, and I can’t see
this going off or you agreeing to anything if he’s not
in.”
“You might be right,” I admitted. “We’ll
see. Sam’s due to get in to the airport ’bout
three-forty in the afternoon, and I know he’s plannin’
to come straight in to the office.”
“Fine. Why don’t the two of you come straight over
to my offices in the Tri-State Building? We’ll talk
there.”
“Uh, yeah, sure, Bill. No hints?”
“Not now. Tomorrow. See you then.”
“Yeah, okay,” I responded, and he hung up.
Now I really got to wonderin’, and worryin’ a
little, too. Me more than Sam. That was the real puzzler. I mean,
we been damned lucky all in all, and we were even luckier when we
fell into our lone case with the Company so far. We shoulda died or
been marooned forever in one of those parallel worlds more than
once.
Trouble was, all that we had here and now we owed to the
Company. Everything. They gave it to us, but always with a string.
Every once in a while the Company might, or might never, ask us a
favor, but we sure as hell were expected to jump if it did.
That phone call wasn’t no request for a friendly
get-together. It was an order.
For a complete account of this case, and all the gory details,
read The Labyrinth of Dreams, available at finer e-book distribution sites everywhere. Back
Cleopatra Jones stared down at the
twinkling lights of the city from her luxurious penthouse
apartment; her city, the city she protected and watched
over. Her slim, glamorous face and form reflected back from the
window, a ghostly angel of perfection against the night
scene . . .
Oh, hell, who was I tryin’ to kid, anyway? Yeah, it was
dark and I was lookin’ out the window, but all cities look
glamorous and mysterious at night, even Philadelphia, and only
thing the woman starin’ back at me in the glass had in common
with tall, lean Cleo was that we were both black females
who’d come up in the world.
It hadn’t taken me long to put the weight back on that
I’d lost back in that Garden place, though I wasn’t as
bad as I had been. Truth is, the most fattenin’ stuff in the
world is also about the cheapest, and when you’re dirt poor
you wind up with lots of peanut butter and real fatty stuff cause
it goes further and fills better. Oh, the tummy was still okay, but
the hips were growin’ and so were my tits, which seemed
oversized even when I was down at my model weight (thanks, Ma!). At
five six, with a naturally round face and lots of bushy hair (I
know it’s not in fashion but it’s the only way I could
ever control it without spendin’ two hours a day on it) I
looked, well, plump, anyway.
I guess we was the only self-made poor folk in the Camden ghetto
back then. Daddy was a retired Army colonel; he coulda done better
by just bein’ retired—there weren’t too many
retired black colonels then. But, no, he’d been a cop in the
Army and he was a little too old to be a cop after and a little too
black in that day and time to be a commissioner or police advisor,
and he had this dream.
Back then there wasn’t a single black-owned and operated
private detective agency in the area—those that had the
background didn’t have the bread to get started. He pumped it
all into settin’ that agency up. Not much—a dingy
office overlookin’ a side street in one of the lousier
sections of the ghetto even back then, some secondhand furniture
and files, and a phone and a sign on the directory and the glass
door to the office. Spade & Marlowe, PI. With Ma as
his secretary he got enough clients to pay the bills, with a little
help from his pension. Trouble was, the clients weren’t
exactly the well-to-do types and we pretty much got peanuts even
when he did his job right—if we got anything at all.
My comin’ along pretty well finished off any surplus,
although I always knew that I was the one thing Daddy loved as much
as that agency. We got by, but then Ma died young—she always
had a real blood pressure problem and never did much take them
pills—and he had the agency and me and the agency was the
money for us to live. I dunno, I guess maybe I wanted all his
attention and got very little, since he was in and out at all hours
and I had to be pretty much on my own. I got to be somethin’
of a wild child, runnin’ with a bad pack, never carin’
’bout school or the future or nothin’, just
blowin’ reefer and drinkin’ booze and gettin’
into lots of trouble. Just about the only thing I really paid
attention to was makin’ sure Daddy didn’t know—we
used to steal blank report cards and fill ’em out real
convincing-like, and I could always come up with the right answers
for his questions. I guess now I was rebelling against him in a
way, and maybe against the whole world as I saw it, but I
didn’t see no future and no purpose to nothin’. Lost my
virginity real young, too; when I finally got knocked up good, I
stole some stuff from a store and hocked it for enough to get an
abortion. It weren’t no easy thing to do, but there was no
way to keep a baby from Daddy’s knowin’, and
that settled that.
That kind of neighborhood you was always around users and
dealers, pimps and whores, and they weren’t no creatures of
evil and sin to me. I knew ’em by their first names, and they
knew me. To a kid like me, they were romantic kinds of figures, and
if nothin’ else they was the only black folks who seemed to
me to be makin’ it. I’d slept around so much by the
time I was sixteen that all my fantasies were about bein’ a
hooker. Dress up real sexy-like, and have the dudes pay
you to get laid. Easy money, easy work. Only who my Daddy was kept
me from either joinin’ up with a string or bein’ taken
in by a pimp. Ain’t no way no pimp in that part of town
wanted the Colonel as an enemy.
Finally, of course, Daddy found out about it. Had to, sooner or
later. We had one big hell of a scene, and for the first and only
time in his life he actually beat me good, and I was ready to pack
up, run away, and go to some other city like New York and sell
myself on the streets, but I got so mad I came out first to tell
him, knowin’ it would hurt him, and I couldn’t find him
at first. Then I figured he was in the bedroom, and he was, only I
didn’t go in or show myself and my bad mad just kinda faded
out.
He was cryin’. Colonel Harold Parker, U.S.A. (Ret.), one
of the toughest dudes in the world, was cryin’. John Wayne
woulda cried before Daddy. It must have been the first and only
time in his life he did it. This was the man who had dug a bullet
out of his own side with a knife, then driven himself twenty miles
to the hospital.
Pretty soon, I was cryin’, too, and I ran into him and we
held each other and cried it out. After that, we made a deal. I
didn’t want to go back to school, and he didn’t want me
in with that crowd no more anyway, so he agreed, though he
didn’t like it, to let me come in and take over Ma’s
old job as the secretary, receptionist, you name it. In exchange,
when things got straightened out in the office and we got a little
ahead on the bills, I’d take some night classes, get my
G.E.D. high school equivalency, and maybe more if we could figure a
way to afford it. ’Cause I was his business manager,
he’d know where I was and what I was doin’, and our
free time would be our free time.
Well, I never did take to school, and I never got through eighth
grade, but I managed. I always read—Ma and Daddy had seen to
that from early times, and I kept doin’ it even when the gang
made fun of it—so I had a leg up on some of them kids who
have high school diplomas and straight A averages who
couldn’t spell cat or write much beyond their name.
I got a big vocabulary, but I never could keep all that grammar
shit right. Well, you know, you speak black English on the streets
and white English around Daddy and it’s kinda like
thinkin’ in one language and talkin’ another. I got one
of them ghetto-southern accents I ain’t never gonna lick, and
I gave up years ago tryin’ to correct my grammar. It’s
a lost cause. I’m a low-class hick with a big vocabulary, so
sue me.
I got the bug, though, helpin’ Daddy on cases and
gettin’ things mostly in shape. The files might not have had
the best grammar but they was complete and up to date. I never was
no good at math, but after we got the free calculator for
subscribing to PI Magazine I always knew we was deep in a
hole. Still, I learned the business, for what it was worth.
It’s a damned dull, boring job with no respect and few
rewards, no matter what the books and TV and movies tell you. No
big action, either. Daddy had a gun, a big magnum, but he almost
never carried it and I don’t think he ever fired it as a PI.
I did a lot of practicing with that sucker and I got pretty good,
but that thing has a kick they don’t show you on
them TV shows and it ain’t much good at any range. I also
took karate and judo lessons at the Y and got pretty good at that,
though I never had much call to use ’em.
I also just about cut out any social life. It weren’t none
of Daddy’s doin’, it was just me. Truth was, I just
didn’t have much self-image, as they call it. Never did. When
Ma died and Daddy was away so much, I couldn’t be on my own,
so I got into the gang and did what the gang did. I figure now
that’s what all that fantasizing ’bout bein’ a
hooker was all about. Any girl who has that trade as her sole
ambition ain’t got much sense of herself. When men pay, then
you got worth, right there, in dollars and cents. I was fat and
slow and no matter how good a shape I whip into I ain’t never
gonna be no Tina Turner.
Daddy and the agency, then, became my whole life, my whole
identity. I don’t blame nobody, but it’s just the way I
am. I can’t change that any more than I can change how I look
or how I talk. Nobody would believe it if I told ’em,
anyway—except maybe Sam, who knows it but just can’t
figure it.
But one night Daddy didn’t check in—the cops did,
and I had to go down and identify the body. He hadn’t even
taken his gun with him on that job, but he got far too many holes
to go anywhere afterwards. It was kinda weird standin’ there,
in the morgue, lookin’ at his water-soaked and bloody,
bullet-ridden body. One part of me said it was him, but with all
the life out of him he just didn’t look real,
somehow. I couldn’t even cry, but all through that night and
the next few days I just got madder and madder. The cops had no
real leads and he’d been pretty closemouthed about it all
even to me, ’cept that it was something big, bigger than
he’d ever had before.
I cracked the case, after two months, when the cops
couldn’t, and I got some reputation as hot shit for it but it
wasn’t all that damned hard. Sure, I didn’t know
anything about that case, but whoever it was didn’t know that
and I just began to put out the word that I had leads and knew more
than I did and set myself up as a target. The cops thought it was
real gutsy of me, but truth was I’d just had all I had left
in the world snatched from me and I didn’t really care if
they killed me so long as I got at least one of the bastards
involved. Detective shit is more guts and dull routine than
anything else; there ain’t no real Sherlock Holmeses. The
only thing is, most of the crooks around ain’t all that
smart, either—they just got smart lawyers. I set myself up,
got invited to a meet just like Daddy, and I went, just like Daddy,
only I took the magnum. ’Course, the gun didn’t do no
good, but the fact that I also called the cops helped nab the
triggermen in the act of tryin’ to kill me and led eventually
to the indictment and conviction of a popular young black
politician on the way up who just happened to be in the mob’s
pocket.
All that didn’t help, though. Fact is, I got no new cases
worth much and lost some old clients even though I got a reputation
as a PI at least as good as Daddy out of it. Big Tony and the mob
never did get touched by it all, even though they ordered it; the
white folks had gone scot-free and the black folks had taken the
fall, as usual, and for some reason I got blamed for that. Crazy
thing was that the only folks who would toss a case or two my way
were the smalltime crooks in the ghetto. Seems they were impressed
and wanted me on their side.
Still, not enough came in to make even the basic bills, and I
sold the house and lived on that for a while, takin’ a
one-room dump near work. I was just goin’ through the
motions, though, and I knew it. I just didn’t know anything
else to do. Oh, I had a bunch of relatives, mostly cousins, in the
area, but about the best I could hope for was some kind of job as a
domestic or cab driver or something. I didn’t have no skills
to speak of, no real contacts, no diploma—and you needed that
just to collect garbage—and only me as a job reference.
Couldn’t get no unemployment—I was
self-employed—and welfare didn’t mean shit unless you
had a couple of illegitimate kids. The only guys I knew who might
be marriage bait were either ones I couldn’t stand, ones who
wanted some kind of house nigger, or ones that were already as high
as they were gonna go and were like street cleaners or handled the
drive-in window at McDonald’s.
Here I’d done somethin’ the cops couldn’t or
wouldn’t do, and dumb luck or not I done it good, and instead
of gettin’ the gold stars and thanks and all the rest I got
shut out. I got to admit that my fantasies turned back again, and
every time I passed one of the hookers I got more and more
tempted—and without Daddy around I had offers from a couple
of local pimps.
The cops, though, had at least a little soft spot for me, since
I’d given them some good collars. I mean, a couple of white
cops got to bust a bunch of meddlesome black dudes in Camden, and
that was gold stars on them. That’s why, at just about this
time, they sent Sam around to me.
Sam was older than me by a good ten years, pudgy, balding, but
kinda cute. He was also the first white man I ever took a liking
to, and a big shock. It was the first time I found out Jewish white
guys could be about as poor and out of it as me. He was a cop from
Bristol, up north a bit in Jersey, and he was down tryin’ to
track down a ring that snatched little kids and turned them into
kiddie porn objects. Fact was, I took to him right off, not just
’cause I needed somebody right then but even though he was
white and Jewish he reminded me one hell of a lot of Daddy. He had
that same sense of moral outrage Daddy always did, more than I ever
could bring up, and when he was after bad guys he wanted their
asses bad. He also had a real passion for the old detective stories
and for all them old detective movies on the Late Late Show
starring Bogart or Robert Montgomery or Lloyd Nolan, the kind my
Daddy always loved and grew up on. And, like me, he wasn’t
too thrilled to be a detective, he just didn’t know how to do
nothin’ else. He also had a college education and real
brains. He goes on them brains, too; I go on feelin’s and
sometimes guts but I ain’t never gonna be no brain and I know
it.
In the end, we busted those suckers, got back one kid, and
exposed a crooked cop who shielded them, but it didn’t stop
there. Fact was, I knew what I saw in Sam, but I never will know
just what he saw in me, but he’s the only white man I ever
been around who never showed one ounce of racism or racial hangups.
Sam quit the Bristol force—he never was too comfortable on
the vice squad anyway—and came down with what little he had
to try and make the agency work. We kinda hoped if maybe a white
ex-cop was around some of the black folks would give us more
business, and it did bring in some, but not nearly enough. We got
married at city hall—the bride wore jeans—and even that
had a price. My relatives didn’t approve at all, and his
relatives were even madder than mine. I was still poor and broke,
but it didn’t really matter no more.
Fact was, I grabbed for Sam ’cause I needed somebody bad,
but I really fell in love with him. Real bad. I ain’t never
been in love with nothin’ or nobody before or since like
this. From the moment we moved in together, he was the only thing
important in my whole life. He kept the agency goin’ by sheer
willpower mostly for my sake, as it turned out, and he never would
believe me when I told him I’d be happy if he got a salaried
job doin’ most anything and I played house and mommie, but
it’s true.
I know, I know—on the outside it looks like black woman
makes it in the cold world, but I never saw my case written up in
Jet or Ebony or even the National
Enquirer. If you got the brains and the education and the
skills and the drive then go for it, baby, but I ain’t ever
gonna have them things and I just ain’t one for crusades. If
Women’s Lib wants to nail me for it, that’s all right,
but I didn’t see no cases from them when I was a woman-owned
business. Sam told me he didn’t mind if I kept my name, but
I minded; outside of the bed, it was the only way I could
really show him just how much he meant to me. Besides, I like the
look I get from people when they find out somebody who looks and
talks like me is Brandy Horowitz. A Jewish American Princess
I’m not. The trouble is, my life’s still all cliffhangers. I was
about to pack it in when Sam showed in the nick of time and saved
me. When we both were gonna pack it in as detectives and him take a
security guard’s job down in Delaware and me be a housewife,
in walked a case that changed everything. Started out as a little
mob-related thing and wound up with us discoverin’ the
biggest secret since the A-bomb, maybe bigger.*
Don’t ask me how it works, or how it’s possible, but
it’s so. It ain’t possible, but it is and that’s
that. Sorta like if God came down and worked miracles in front of
everybody—it would convince even most atheists. Well, this
thing’s like that. I ain’t sure I believe in
flyin’ saucers, neither, but if one landed in front of me and
little green men got out and asked for directions, I think I
would.
There ain’t just one universe, there’s millions of
’em, maybe more, and they all exist smack dab on top of each
other. No, that’s not right—they’re all in the
same place, only nobody and nothin’ in one can see or hear or
sense the existence of the others. They all started from the same
creation, but they spread out at different speeds and don’t
ask me no more. I ain’t the smart one, and even Sam
can’t really explain it. They say there seems to be no end to
them—they stretch onwards to eternity on both sides of us.
Because there’s so many, almost anything that mighta happened
in our universe but didn’t happened somewheres else. Like,
everybody says how lucky I am—I always seem to get better
when it can’t get no worse, like I told you. But
there’s maybe a couple of hundred other worlds so close to
ours that I exist, and this is the only one in which I married Sam.
The other me’s wound up whores and maybe addicts or stuck in
lousy marriages or dead or somethin’, but I’m the lucky
one.
Now, not too many people know about this, but one world found
out that this was so and figured out a way to go between the
worlds. How the hell they ever did that, or even figured out that
the other worlds existed, I can’t imagine, but they did. This
network to go between is kinda weird, like a long tunnel, but it
runs mostly like a railroad, with switchmen and stations and stuff
like that. Of course, even the ones who run the thing, called the
Labyrinth, which Sam tells me is a word that means a maze and comes
from one of them ancient mythology stories, only have stations on a
few hundred, or maybe thousand, worlds. They’re pretty
closemouthed about that. They keep explorin’, keep
lookin’ in at ones, until they find ones that have
somethin’ they might need. Might be an invention, or just a
bright idea, or some raw material they need—anything. When
they find somethin’ like that they set up a station and put
in a permanent crew and then they also recruit locals to help run
things.
They don’t really care about the worlds they move into,
’cept as how they can make a profit from it, and one of the
things they move into and eventually take over is organized crime,
which seems to exist one way or another everyplace. Like here the
Mafia and a bunch of other big crime groups are really wholly owned
and operated by these dudes from another world—and most of
the crooks don’t even know it. They also got a legit arm, the
General Ordering and Development Corporation, or G.O.D., Inc. as we
all call it when we don’t just say ‘the Company.’
You may never have heard of it, but chances are you’re one of
their customers. You know all those things they advertise on
late-night UHF TV stations and all them cable stations—knife
sets, pen sets, crazy gadgets that never really work, discontinued
and outdated merchandise, cheap imports, that kind of shit. You
know what I mean. They have an 800 number to call to order or an
address at the station, but down right at the bottom, in real small
print, they have to put their name and headquarters address of who
they really are and where they’re really at. Well,
that’s where you find General Ordering and Development,
Inc.
Most all the folks who work for that company don’t know
who or what it really is, neither. Just the ones at the very top,
and some of the company security people, and them that run and
secure the stations.
They can’t have a station just anywhere. First of all,
most places each world is totally isolated from the others, but
there’s always a bunch of weak points. A lot of
disappearances, people bustin’ into flame, visions, ghosts,
you name it come from them weak points. Most of them ain’t
too useful, though; I mean, you build a station in downtown
Philadelphia somebody’s gonna find out sooner or later. They
go for the isolated, middle-of-nowhere places, which are few and
far between these days, and they also got to be ones they can buy
up lock, stock, and barrel. The big station here’s out in a
hick town in redneck Oregon called McInerney—the only place
they could buy up and control that was away from everything and
everybody. They got a second little station up near State College
in Pennsylvania, which is also middle-of-nowhere wilderness, but
since they stuck both Penn State University and the biggest state
pen up in there it ain’t the favorite spot. It’s mostly
automated and used only when necessary.
They got the company headquarters smack in the middle of
downtown Des Moines, Iowa. It’s on a weak point, but they
can’t risk usin’ it. All they can do there is send
messages back and forth through it.
They don’t have but a fraction of the worlds with
stations. They only been here since the early fifties, and not in
force till later’n that. I guess it was only then we came up
with somethin’ worth stealin’.
The Company and the Mafia and whatever pay real good and more
than pay all expenses, and also cover up whatever it is that
faraway home world wants here that we got and they want to steal.
Don’t ask me what it is—that’s a closely guarded
secret.
Still and all, we came out winners from that one in spite of a
bunch of close scrapes and even more cliffhangers. We also did the
company a big favor by exposing some rotten apples, and unlike the
last time we got somethin’ out of it. A fair amount, really,
considerin’ where we came from. We got a small suite of
offices for the agency in a midtown Philadelphia high rise the
company owns rent-free, our old bills paid off, several thousand
bucks in seed money, and we also got some pretty good payin’
clients referred to us by the Company or their people.
Not that the cases were any different or any more
thrillin’ than the old ones were, but there were
lots of clients and they all paid and paid real good. At
rates that started at two hundred and fifty bucks a day plus
expenses, we did all right. Got us a fancy two-bedroom apartment in
one of the new developments right in town, too, which is where I
was that night, lookin’ out the window and wishin’ Sam
were around. He wasn’t, though; he was in Pittsburgh until
the next afternoon, checking out an accountant livin’ way
beyond his means.
It was crazy, but right then, with a lot of what I’d
always dreamed of all around, I was thinkin’ ’bout
quittin’ the business. It was really Sam’s anyway,
now—I just helped out and gave support and advice now and
then. Fact was, I was what the bankers call more a liability than
an asset. We was movin’ in higher circles and higher society
with these clients. They was all educated, well off, rich—and
I ain’t talkin’ ’bout race here, since some of
’em was blacker’n me. I wasn’t the
good-lookin’, glamorous type, didn’t know what fork to
use or what wine went with what—in my old circles,
Thunderbird was a step up—and it was like them and me come
from different parallel worlds. You didn’t have to walk the
Labyrinth to find that kind of thing. All I had to do was open my
mouth and I was low class, uneducated, ignorant. Most folks thought
I was the receptionist anyway, or maybe the cleaning lady.
Oh, Sam made a big thing about how he needed me, couldn’t
get along without me, and all that, and I think maybe he believed
it himself, but it wasn’t true. Just goin’ in to work
was gettin’ more and more depressin’ every day, even
when I had a lot of work to do. We needed more people, sure, but we
needed nice, clean-cut young folks who were college grads and
talked just right and all that. Most of my friends, the few I had,
were from the old neighborhood in Camden or among some of my
cousins all over the place. Now that we had money I was
discoverin’ just how many relatives I had, too. I could sure
buy company, but none I felt good with.
In the end, I guess, it was just that I was beginnin’ to
feel useless and without much to do. We was just too removed from
what I’d been used to and brought up with. All this new
wealth built a wall between me and the kind of poor folks who were
all I knew all my life. I could drop over there, but it was never
the same. I had what they wanted and probably would never have and
they knew it. Crazy thing was, too, I didn’t really feel safe
over there anymore.
See, that was the reason for all the trouble I got in, and maybe
the reason a lot of black kids get screwed for life. I mean, there
you are, a kid in a neighborhood where there’s so many poor
folk a lot ain’t got nothin’ to lose and a lot more
just give up. Crime’s real big and deep rooted there, simply
’cause it’s the only real source of jobs and steady
income. Most folks there don’t wanta kill you, they just
don’t think two steps ahead. If you’re wearin’ a
jacket and one wants it, he’ll just go up and off you and
take it. The only way a kid’s got any real chance if they
don’t wanta be like that themselves is to join a gang. I
guess it’s always been that way. I seen West Side
Story twelve times. The boys in the gang, they give you
protection ’cause it’s the code, and the girls, well,
they give the boys whatever they want. Most times, you’re as
safe as you can be, but you grow up feelin’ dependent on
folks and with no real confidence in yourself, even though you wind
up actin’ tough and talkin’ tough so nobody knows how
scared you are, and the boys grow up thinkin’ of girls as
dependent, weak, things and not people.
The leaders of them gangs ain’t got much smarts;
they’re all muscle and nerve, so they don’t like
anybody to be smarter than they are. You gotta talk gutter talk,
like what they like, do what they say. That way you wind up with
your first kid at fifteen or so and a life on welfare.
That’s why when Daddy took me outta the gangs he also took
most of my protection, my security. By the time he took me out, I
was set, you know. A part of me will always be that little girl,
and I’ll always talk and act like I had to all them
years.
Over there now, though, I was nothin’ but a target.
Nailin’ Daddy’s killers got me some respect but it
didn’t do nothin’ for my nerve deep down. When I was
with Daddy, or Sam, or the cops, it was somethin’ else, but
all alone I’m just a scared little ghetto girl.
I never was much for church goin’, neither, so I
didn’t really have that to fall back on. Most of ’em I
knew were either preachers on the make for some kind of political
office or cause or decidin’ on how the blacks got to hold a
revolution or make some new country somewheres, while the rest just
sat there and sang and prayed and said we might be down now but
wait till we die and then we’d be in the Promised Land. Well,
I never seen where that country was gonna be, and they
wouldn’t let Sam in, anyways, and I just ain’t so sure
about no Promised Land, or at least if they’d let me in when
I got to the gates. Lookin’ at the folks who were sure it was
there and sure they’d get there, I ain’t so sure a
place filled with them types is where I want to be trapped for
eternity, neither. Daddy never did have much belief in God, even on
the battlefields, but he belonged to a church ’cause it
brought in some business. Maybe that’s why men got more power
in business than women—they make better hypocrites.
So, I was cut off from my old neighborhood and people, and my
relatives weren’t no damned good to me when I needed
’em and I didn’t see why I should be so damned good to
them, now, and I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere in the
business society of most all our clients—Sam didn’t
like ’em none, but he could pretend he did for the money and
jobs—and ’cause I was rough and foul-mouthed and talked
like a poor ignorant nigger I wasn’t invited to no parties or
social occasions.
Not that I wanted to go back where I was. Uh uh. I ate real
good, the sheets were satin, and I had a jacket in the closet there
that was genuine mink, and folks who woulda laughed in my face a
while back now kept tryin’ to get me to take their credit
cards. We was doin’ real good—maybe eighty grand a year
or more, before taxes, and we had a shitload of deductions. It was
crazy. Years and years I worked like a dog and got nothin’
but poorer and poorer—I’d’a made a profit
goin’ on welfare—but now I had all this stuff and not
only didn’t I have to work for it, it was better I
didn’t. If Daddy had this agency the way it was now, then
maybe I’d’a grown up fancy and speakin’ all clear
and nice like some TV newsperson and have gone to all the right
schools and I’d be right up there now. I mean, I seen some of
them high-steppin’ black folks around, and they seem to be
real in and real popular. They’re even more uncomfortable
when I’m around, though; guess I remind ’em too much of
their roots or what they beat. Maybe kinda like that sergeant in
Soldier’s Story who thought black society
couldn’t afford blacks like me no more.
Thing was, them oreos wanted to forget where they came from; I
couldn’t help but bring it with me.
That left Sam as the only important person in my life. He was my
lover and my best friend, but he was really my only
friend. He was everything rolled into one, but when he wasn’t
around I had nothin’. I needed something of my own, some
place where I’d feel comfortable and something to do I felt
important at.
I’m also not gettin’ no younger. Oh, sure, with our
connections with the Company we can get a lot of fancy stuff that
keeps us lookin’ and feelin’ better than we should and
maybe give us real nice lookin’ old ages, but I never yet
seen a drug that didn’t have a price and I sure
wouldn’t start on them things if I was gonna have kids.
I’m thirty-two now, my clock’s tickin’ on that no
matter what magic they can pull, but I don’t want to bring up
no kids in a downtown apartment. They’ll have enough problems
bein’ half black and half white, and I want them schooled and
brought up so they at least’ll be comfortable in this society
where only money really matters.
We’re makin’ out good but we’re spendin’
good, too. Hard to stop when you ain’t never had it before
and never thought you would, and that’s both Sam and me. If I
got to be my own universe I want a nice, big house with lots of
land, like out in the new-money sections of the Main Line.
Well, I always get down in the dumps when Sam’s not
around. I had to do something, though, and I knew it. I’d
quit smokin’ ’cause we couldn’t afford it and now
I was up to two packs a day and, as I say, the weight was
comin’ back fast, but I just couldn’t bring myself to
put myself on some diet. Who the hell was I tryin’ to
impress, anyway?
I just settled back on the bed and was goin’ through the
TV cable guide when the phone rang. It was late, so I figured it
had to be Sam, but it wasn’t. It was Bill Markham.
Now, we hadn’t seen or heard from Bill Markham in quite a
while, so it was a pretty big surprise. He was head of security for
the Company here on our Earth, a native of here, too, and while he
helped us get where we were he also was one of them folks whose
nuts we’d pulled out of the fire when we stumbled into this.
Without even a Christmas card after all this time, I figured that
if Bill called it wasn’t to see how we was.
“Brandy, is Sam back yet?”
“Uh uh. Not till tomorrow afternoon, last I knew.
Why?”
“We’ve had something come up that might be up your
line. Company business.”
“I can tell him to call you when he gets in.”
“Uh uh. No, this concerns both of you. You, really, more
than Sam.”
I was curious, at least. “Anything you can tell me
now?”
“Not over the phone. It’s not a security problem
here—yet—but it’s better told in the office where
you can see the materials I have. Sam might as well be there,
because he can have a role, too, if he wants, and I can’t see
this going off or you agreeing to anything if he’s not
in.”
“You might be right,” I admitted. “We’ll
see. Sam’s due to get in to the airport ’bout
three-forty in the afternoon, and I know he’s plannin’
to come straight in to the office.”
“Fine. Why don’t the two of you come straight over
to my offices in the Tri-State Building? We’ll talk
there.”
“Uh, yeah, sure, Bill. No hints?”
“Not now. Tomorrow. See you then.”
“Yeah, okay,” I responded, and he hung up.
Now I really got to wonderin’, and worryin’ a
little, too. Me more than Sam. That was the real puzzler. I mean,
we been damned lucky all in all, and we were even luckier when we
fell into our lone case with the Company so far. We shoulda died or
been marooned forever in one of those parallel worlds more than
once.
Trouble was, all that we had here and now we owed to the
Company. Everything. They gave it to us, but always with a string.
Every once in a while the Company might, or might never, ask us a
favor, but we sure as hell were expected to jump if it did.
That phone call wasn’t no request for a friendly
get-together. It was an order.
For a complete account of this case, and all the gory details,
read The Labyrinth of Dreams, available at finer e-book distribution sites everywhere. Back