II

Patmore, the proprietor, appeared, a large, powerful man with a broad, hard face, a bright display of gold teeth, and the complexion of a guinea hen’s egg. He wore a loose brown suit, of which the coat was large and boxy and the ample trousers sharply creased but so long that they broke about his ankles in cubistic planes and angles. Smoke and the caustic vapors of rum had rendered his voice rough and husky, and when he spoke you had an irresistible impulse to clear your throat.

Pat addressed Bubber. “You and Long-Boy still at it, huh?”

“Aw⁠—’at string-bean’s crazy. I’m gon’ snap ’im in two and string ’im one these times.”

“Know what I’m go’n’ do with you two?”

“Whut?”

“See that door over there?”

“Yea.”

“That’s the cellar door, see? Next time y’all start anything in hyeh, I’m go’n’ send the two of you down there and let you settle it once and for all. Best man come out⁠—other one drug out. See?”

“Any rats down there?”

“Yea⁠—and y’all’ll make two more.”

“Well,” grinned Bubber, “when I walk out, them rats’ll have some bones to gnaw on anyhow,” and he moved off toward the pool room.

Ignoring Pat’s attempt to play the genial host, Shine had already returned to his drink with an indifference hardly short of insult. He now replenished his glass from a pint bottle in his hand, and slipped the bottle into his own hip pocket.

Pat’s green eyes narrowed. “That’ll be only three bucks to you, Shine.”

Shine looked up. “What?”

“Anybody else⁠—four.”

“This,” said Shine, “is good licker.”

“ ’Course ’tis. All my licker is good.”

“This ain’ never been yourn⁠—’scription licker.” Shine sampled his glass with an odd mingling of relish and unconcern, the one unmistakably for his drink, the other for his company.

Pat feigned incredulity. “Mean that’s your licker?”

“ ’Tain’t my brother’s.”

“Mean⁠—” Pat’s unbelief mounted “⁠—mean⁠—you buy licker somewhere else and bring it in my place to drink?”

Shine tossed off the rest of the glass, set it down on the bar counter, and looked upon Pat, who was almost as tall as himself, with a wearily tolerant smile.

“Sho’ takes you a long time to see a thing,” he remarked. “You hear me say it’s ’scription. You ain’t runnin’ no drugstore, are y’? You see me drink it. You ain’t blind, are y’? Yea, I bought it. Yea, I brought it here. Yea, I’m drinkin’ it. Now what the hell ’bout it?”

A smaller man equally “bad,” equally convinced of the necessity of being hard, but aware of physical odds against him, would have said this with sneers and sarcasm, thus bolstering his courage against his handicap. Shine however had never found it necessary to be nasty as well as bad. He had spoken with an air of amusement, and there was but a touch of challenge in his terminal remark.

Pat stood silent a moment. Eventually he said, “Nothin’ ’bout it, big boy. Nothin’. Jes’ askin’ f’ information, that’s all.” And rather too abruptly he walked away.

Shine stared long into his third glass of ’scription liquor before he lifted it to his lips. Good whiskey is not like gin. Gin makes you forget, good whiskey makes you remember. Perhaps it was at the memories in this, his third glass of good whiskey, that Shine now stared.⁠ ⁠…

A boy, overgrown, bigger by far than his fellow orphan asylumites, so much bigger that they never challenged him to do battle as they frequently challenged the others. As big, almost, as the superintendent, about whom the smallest thing was his pebble of a heart. They were all at work in the truck garden, Shrimpie, Frankfurter, Jellybean, and the others, as well as this overgrown one whose name was then Joshua Jones. They were picking tomatoes, mostly green ones, to be taken to the kitchen and made into “pickalilly.” They were seeing who could pick most in the hour allotted to them for the work.

And Shrimpie, unaware that they were being watched from the window of the nearest cottage, suddenly stopped, staring in surprise and delight at a big, red, prematurely ripe tomato in his hand.

“Y’all kin work fast as you please,” Shrimpie declared. “I’m gon’ stop and eat this hyeh one.”

Three bites out of the luscious thing⁠—and the superintendent’s hand was on Shrimpie’s shoulder. Three cruelly vehement shakes of Shrimpie’s little body⁠—and a hard green tomato sped through space and broke on the super’s cheek.

The red face became redder, the super dropped Shrimpie and turned toward the big boy, enraged. Made for him⁠—dodged another tomato⁠—came on. Grappled, scuffled, slipped, fell, and found the boy astride him. Pounding on his head⁠—pounding⁠—gone quite crazy, pounding. The super was stunned less by the pounding than by the fact that the boy kept doing it. Even after he was shaken off, the boy kept fighting aggressively. Without a rod it wasn’t so easy to tame as overgrown sixteen-year-old devil. When they both let up, it was at least spiritually Joshua Jones’s round.

A bigger boy now, almost a man; well over six feet tall, but still ribby and hungry-looking. Eighteen now. Shining shoes in front of a Lenox Avenue barbershop. Making nine, ten, sometimes twelve dollars a week.

The head barber liked to stand in the doorway and kid the boy about being so big.

“Great big husky⁠—” he would draw out the “great” till it was as long as Joshua himself⁠—“great big husky like you⁠—it’s a shame. You oughter be movin’ pianos ’stead o’ whippin’ shoe-leather. Benny, come ’eh. Look at dis boy. When he stoop over his heels is higher ’n his head.”

Joshua Jones took it good naturedly, grinned occasionally, said little. “Shine?” was the most he ever uttered, and from this the men dubbed him Shine.

Nobody called him Shine, however, but Negroes. A fay patron, with no other intent than to be genial, once repeated the name Shine after hearing the head barber use it. “How do you get to the subway from here, Shine, my boy?” he asked, paying his bill.

Shine looked him up and down, and after a moment inquired, “How’d you know my name was Shine?”

“Guessed it,” smiled the patron.

“Guess how to get to the subway, then.”

The patron stared, gaped and departed mystified at so sudden hostility.

But the head barber, looking on, grinned and approved. “Tight kid,” he commented. “What I mean, tight.”

A tight kid makes a hard man⁠—two hundred and twenty pounds of hardness in this case, wrestling daily with pianos; pianos equally hard and four times as heavy; two hundred and twenty pounds of strength; not the mere strength of stevedores hooking cotton bales on a wharf; you can’t hurt a bale of cotton⁠—it can’t hurt you; tumble it, hook it, kick it⁠—what the hell? But pianos⁠—even swaddled in quilting⁠—pianos must be handled like glass. Not mere strength do they require, but delicacy and strength; not muscles driving out or yanking in with abandoned force, but muscles held taut, precisely controlled under however great tension, released or restrained at will. You are protecting not only the instrument but yourself and your partner at the other end. The soft edge of a cotton-bale won’t hurt a fellow’s foot⁠—the hard one of a piano will break it.

A piano is a malicious thing; it loves to slip out of your grip and snap at your toes, with an evil chuckle inside. Push up its lip and see it sneer; touch it and hear it rumble or whine. Ponderous, spiteful, treacherous live thing⁠—a single spirit in a thousand bodies, one of which will crush you soon or late.

A malicious thing. Only today they were putting a piano into a third-story window of a house on a busy street. They had used hooks over the cornice, and the cheap rotten cement crumbled. Cornices aren’t supposed to bear weight⁠—an inferior mixture will do. One hook came through just as Shine was reaching out of the window to catch hold of the suspended instrument and guide it through the frame. He heard the crackle of broken cement above, saw the instrument sag a little while over it showered crumbs of broken cornice. With the hand already extended he grabbed the nearest leg of the upright and pulled it part way through the window just before the other hook lost its hold above. The greater part of the piano however was still unsupported outside the window⁠—the longer arm of a lever that all but broke even Shine’s tremendous strength. Straining back with all the power of his back and arms, his knees braced against the lower edge of the window-frame, he held the instrument there slipping on the sill till Jinx and Bubber reached him. Someone must have been hurt in the crash that would surely have come otherwise.

“Thing nearly pulled me out the winder,” he remarked when the piano was again under control.

“Why the hell didn’ y’ let it go, then?”

Shine looked rather blank. “Damn ’f I thought of it,” he said and grinned at his own stupidity.