To Florida? Hell, he’d never been south of Atlantic City.
The next day they were on the highway. New sub, same duties. Four hundred meters and closing. Freddie’s submarine was anywhere he was cut off from the lives of normal people: a city jail; bouncing around in a debauched bubble with a buddy. Now it was a burgundy 1955 Chevy Two-Ten sinking through the treacherous fathoms of the Jim Crow South. Stay off their sonar, don’t make a sound.
The trip down was fine. They stuck to big cities, where it was easier to cop if you had the eye. “Linus was like an Indian scout when it came to dope.” Ran aground in St. Augustine—flat tire. “It’s the oldest city in America. Some Spanish motherfuckers claimed that shit in the 1500s. It’s on all the trinkets.” The old dude in the garage was cool and they were fixed up in no time but it was the first sunny afternoon in a spell. They decided to flop at the Conquistador Motor Lodge and bivouac for a few days.
Linus rented the room while Freddie waited in the car, per their road-trip custom. Freddie bought some cheap trunks at the five-and-dime across the street and cannonballed into the pool. The manager’s wife burst out of the office waving a bent curtain rod and told him to get his nigger ass out of there. When they went out for breakfast the next morning, the pool was as dry as a bone.
“What a disgusting little fucker!” Linus said. He wanted to call the police, or the newspapers. His family had connections with CBS in New York.
Freddie told him to wake up. Instead of leaving town they leased a furnished bungalow four blocks from the water. They were a shaggy duo by now. By way of explanation for renting to weirdos, the landlord offered that her son had run off to San Francisco. Look, the weather was better, the sky was bigger. The bartender at a Negro bar on Washington did a little peddling on the side. They decided to wait out the winter in St. Augustine.
Afternoons they passed the flyswatter back and forth and played gin rummy, nights they partook of the limited menu and always went to bed less hungry.
Freddie dimly recalled some race problem from the news last summer. It turned out St. Augustine was smack-dab in the middle of the rights movement. “If I had known,” Freddie said, “I would have told Linus to keep on driving—drive on the fucking rims. These teenage kids—fourteen, fifteen years old—had a sit-in at the Woolworth’s, and the judge gave them six months in reform school. Some dudes got beat up for protesting a motherfucking Klan rally—and the deputies arrested them for getting beat up! One night we were drinking beers in this one spot and the KKK marched up the street, all brazen. I’m from New York, I’ve never seen that shit before. Niggers really live like that down there? KKK walking around, no big deal?” Freddie sighed. “You can’t go anywhere these days without stumbling into a hotbed.”
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference made their usual fuss all winter, the NAACP. On the street, those fucking crackers mistook him and Linus as part of the college-kid contingent who came down to protest, when anyone could see they were way too ragged. “Give me a break, man,” Linus told the grocery clerk who ordered him off the premises. “I’m just trying to buy some mixers.”
The last straw was when they heard Martin Luther King was going to visit. King, cracker cops, the KKK. “I said, Time to split, Linus. He said no problem—his family had cut him off anyway and he had to return to New York to dance for his money.” Plus the bartender at the bar got busted for statutory rape, bye-bye connection. Freddie checked the weather. New York City was warm again. “I was making time with this kindergarten teacher, she was nice, but what are you going to do—argue with Mother Nature?”
They weren’t over the Georgia line before Linus brought up the setup. “I’d told him about the Theresa thing, back when,” Freddie said.
“The whole thing?” Miami Joe in a rug?
“We were brothers. I told him everything.” Freddie didn’t apologize. “He’d ask me questions: How’d you keep track of who was on duty? What about the elevator operator? Pulling the job in his mind. Knocking over his own family, he was stuck on it. Who knows what it meant for him—he wanted to stick it to them, he wanted the money, the thrill. They owed him. And his allowance wasn’t going to cover it.”
“Did you see Pedro when you were down there?” Carney asked.
“It didn’t occur to me.”
Linus rented a pad on Park and Ninety-Ninth Street, overlooking the subway tracks. Eleven blocks up the ave from his parents but a different city. At some point he started writing stuff down. The names of doormen, which elevator man had a bladder condition, how many doors between the service gate on the street to the back stairs. Laying off the dope. “Enough to keep from getting sick,” as he put it.