ME AND MY BROTHER Loftis came in by the old lady’s window. There was some kinda boobytrap — boxes of broken glass — that shoulda warned us Miss Bailey wasn’t the easy mark we made her to be. She had been living alone for twenty years in 4-B down the hall from Loftis and me, long before our folks died — a hincty, half-bald West Indian woman with a craglike face, who kept her door barricaded, shutters closed, and wore the same sorrylooking outfit — black wingtip shoes, cropfingered gloves in winter, and a man’s floppy hat — like maybe she dressed half-asleep or in a dark attic. Loftis, he figured Miss Bailey had some grandtheft dough stashed inside, jim, or leastways a shoebox full of money, cause she never spent a nickel on herself, not even for food, and only left her place at night.

Anyway, we figured Miss Bailey was gone. Her mailbox be full, and Pookie White, who run the Thirty-ninth Street Creole restaurant, he say she ain’t dropped by in days to collect the handouts he give her so she can get by. So here’s me and Loftis, tipping around Miss Bailey’s blackdark kitchen. The floor be littered with fruit rinds, roaches, old food furred with blue mold. Her dirty dishes be stacked in a sink spidered with cracks, and it looks like the old lady been living, lately, on Ritz crackers and Department of Agriculture (Welfare Office) peanut butter. Her toilet be stopped up, too, and, on the bathroom floor, there’s five Maxwell House coffee cans full of shit. Me, I was closing her bathroom door when I whiffed this evil smell so bad, so thick, I could hardly breathe, and what breath I drew was horrible, like a solid thing in my throat-pipes, like soup. “Cooter,” Loftis whisper, low, across the room, “you smell that?” He went right on sniffing it, like people do for some reason when something be smelling stanky, then took out his headrag and held it over his mouth. “That’s the awfulest stink I ever smelled!” Then, head low, he slipped his long self into the living room. Me, I stayed by the window, gulping air, and do you know why?

You oughta know, up front, that I ain’t too good at this gangster stuff, and I had a real bad feeling about Miss Bailey from the get-go. Mama used to say it was Loftis, not me, who’d go places — I see her standing at the sideboard by the sink now, big as a Frigidaire, white with flour to her elbows, a washtowel over her shoulder, while we ate a breakfast of cornbread and syrup. He graduated fifth at DuSable High School, had two gigs, and, like Papa, he be always wanting the things white people had out in Hyde Park, where Mama did daywork. Loftis, he the kinda brother who buys Esquire, sews Hart, Schaffner and Marx labels in Robert Hall suits, talks properlike, packs his hair with Murray’s, and took classes in politics and stuff at the Black People’s Topographical Library in the late 1960s; who, at thirty, makes his bed military style, reads Black Scholar on the bus he takes to the plant, and, come hell or high water, plans to make a Big Score. Loftis, he say I’m bout as useful on a hustle — or when it comes to getting ahead — as a headcold, and he say he has to count my legs sometimes to be sure I ain’t a mule, seeing how, for all my eighteen years, I can’t keep no job and sorta stay close to home, watching TV or reading World’s Finest comic books, or maybe just laying dead, listening to music, imagining I see faces or foreign places in water stains on the wallpaper, cause somedays when I remember Papa, then Mama killing theyselves for Chump change — a pitiful li’l bowl of porridge — I get to thinking that even if I ain’t had all I wanted, maybe I’ve had, you know, all I’’m ever gonna get.

“Cooter,” Loftis say from the living room. “You best get in here quick.”

Loftis, he’d switched on Miss Bailey’s sulfur-colored living room lights, so for a second I couldn’’t see and started coughing — the smell be so powerful it hit my nostrils like coke — and when my eyes cleared, shapes evolved from the light, and I thought for an instant like I’d slipped in space. I seen why Loftis called me, and went back two steps. See, 4—B is so small, if you ring Miss Bailey’s doorbell the toilet’d flush. But her living room, webbed in dust, be filled to the max with dollars of all denominations, stacks of stock in General Motors, Gulf Oil, and 3M Corporation in old White Owl cigar boxes, battered purses, or bound in pink rubber bands. It be like the kind of cubbyhole kids play in, but filled with things — everything — like a world within the world, you take it from me, so like picturebook scenes of plentifulness you could seal yourself off in here and settle forever. Loftis and me both drew breath suddenly. There be unopened cases of Jack Daniel’s, three safes cemented to the floor, hundreds of matchbooks, unworn clothes, a zinc laundry tub, dozens of wedding rings, rubbish, World War II magazines, a carton of one hundred canned sardines, mink stoles, old rags, a birdcage, a bucket of silver dollars, thousands of books, paintings, quarters in tobacco cans, two pianos, glass jars of pennies, a set of bagpipes, an almost complete Model A Ford dappled with rust, and, I swear, three sections of a dead tree.

“Godamighty damn!” My head be light; I sat on an upended peachcrate and picked me up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“Don’t you touch anything!” Loftis, he panting a little; he slap both hands on a table. “Not until we inventory this stuff.”

“Inventory? Aw Lord, Loftis,” I say, “something ain’t right about this stash. There could be a curse on it . . .”

“Boy, sometimes you act weakminded.”

“For real, Loftis, I got a feeling . . .”

Loftis, he shucked off his shoes and sat down heavily on the lumpy arm of a stuffed chair. “Don’t say anything.” He chewed his knuckles, and for the first time Loftis looked like he didn’t know his next move. “Let me think, okay?” He squeezed his nose in a way he has when thinking hard, sighed, then stood up, and say, “There’s something you better see in that bedroom yonder. Cover up your mouth.”

“Loftis, I ain’t going in there.”

He look at me right funny then. “She’s a miser, that’s all. She saves things.”

“But a tree?” I say. “Loftis, a tree ain’t normal!”

“Cooter, I ain’t gonna tell you twice.”

Like always, I followed Loftis, who swung his flashlight from the plant — he a nightwatchman — into Miss Bailey’s bedroom, but me, I’m thinking how trippy this thing is getting, remembering how, last year, when I had a paper route, the old lady, with her queer crablike walk, pulled my coat for some change in the hall-way, and when I give her a handful of dimes, she say in her old Inner Sanctum voice, “Thank you, Co-o-oter,” then gulped the coins down like aspirin, no lie, and scurried off like a hunchback. Me, I wanted no parts of this squirrelly old broad, but Loftis, he holding my wrist now, beaming his light onto a low bed. The room had a funny, museumlike smell. Real sour. It was full of dirty laundry. And I be sure the old lady’s stuff had a terrible string attached when Loftis, looking away, lifted her bedsheets and a knot of black flies rose. I stepped back and held my breath. Miss Bailey be in her long-sleeved flannel nightgown, bloated, like she’d been inflated by a tire pump, her crazy putty face bald with rot, flyblown, her fingers big as bananas. Her wristwatch be ticking softly beside a stump of half—eaten bread. Above the bed, her wall had roaches squashed in little circles of bloodstain. Maggots clustered in her eyes, her ears, and one fist-sized rat rattled in her flesh. My eyes snapped shut. My knees failed, then I did a Hollywood faint. When I surfaced, Loftis, he be sitting beside me in the living room, where he’d drug me, reading a wrinkled, yellow article from the Chicago Daily Defender.

“Listen to this,” Loftis say. “‘Elnora Bailey, forty-five, a Negro housemaid in the Highland Park home of Henry Conners, is the beneficiary of her employer’s will. An old American family, the Connerses arrived in this country on the Providence, shortly after the voyage of the Mayflower. The family flourished in the early days of the 1900s! . . .'” He went on, getting breath. “‘A distinguished and wealthy industrialist, without heirs or a wife, Conners willed his entire estate to Miss Bailey of 3347 N. Clark Street for her twenty years of service to his family’ . . .” Loftis, he give that Geoffrey Holder laugh of his, low and deep, then it eased up his throat until it hit a high note and tipped his head back onto his shoulders. “Cooter, that was before we was born! Miss Bailey kept this in the Bible next to her bed.”

Standing, I braced myself with one hand against the wall. “She didn’t earn it?”

“Naw,” Loftis, he folded the paper — “Not one penny” — and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. His jaw looked tight as a horseshoe. “Way I see it,” he say, “this was her one shot in a lifetime to be rich, but, being country, she had backward ways and blew it.” Rubbing his hands, he stood up to survey the living room. “Somebody’s gonna find Miss Bailey soon, but if we stay on the case — Cooter, don’t you square up on me now — we can tote everything to our place before daybreak. Best we start with the big stuff.”

“But why didn’t she use it, huh? Tell me that?”

Loftis, he don’t pay me no mind. When he gets an idea in his head, you can’t dig it out with a chisel. How long it took me and Loftis to inventory, then haul Miss Bailey’s queer old stuff to our crib, I can’t say, but that decrepit old ninnyhammer’s hoard come to $879,543 in cash money, thirty-two bank books (some deposits be only $5), and me, I wasn’t sure I was dreaming or what, but I suddenly flashed on this feeling, once we left her flat, that all the fears Loftis and me had about the future be gone, cause Miss Bailey’s property was the past — the power of that fellah Henry Conners trapped like a bottle spirit, which we could live off, so it was the future, too, pure potential: can do. Loftis got to talking on about how that piano we pushed home be equal to a thousand bills, jim, which equals, say. a bad TEAC A3340 tape deck, or a dowm payment on a deuce-and-a-quarter. Its value be (Loftis say) that of a universal standard of measure, relational, unreal as number, so that tape deck could turn, magically, into two gold lamé suits, a trip to Tijuana, or twenty-five rimjobs from a ho — we had $879,543 worth of wishes, if you can deal with that. Be like Miss Bailey’s stuff is raw energy, and Loftis and me, like wizards, can transform her stuff into anything else at will. All we had to do, it seemed to me, was decide exactly what to exchange it for.

While Loftis studied this over (he looked funny, like a potato trying to say something, after the inventory, and sat, real quiet, in the kitchen), I filled my pockets with fifties, grabbed me a cab downtown to grease, yum, at one of them high-hat restaurants in the Loop . . . But then I thought better of it, you know, like I’d be out of place — just another jig putting on airs — and scarfed instead at a ribjoint till both my eyes bubbled. This fat lady making fishburgers in the back favored an old hardleg babysitter I once had, a Mrs. Paine who made me eat ochre, and I wanted so bad to say, “Loftis and me Got Ovuh,” but I couldn’t put that in the wind, could I, so I hatted up. Then I copped a boss silk necktie, cashmere socks, and a whistle-slick maxie leather jacket on State Street, took cabs anywhere, but when I got home that evening a funny, Pandoralike feeling hit me. I took off the jacket, boxed it — it looked so trifling in the hallway’s weak light — and, tired, turned my key in the door. I couldn’t get in. Loftis, he’d changed the lock and, when he finally let me in, looking vaguer, crabby, like something out of the Book of Revelations, I seen this elaborate booby-trapped tunnel of cardboard and razor blades behind him, with a two-foot space just big enough for him or me to crawl through. That wasn’t all. Two bags of trash from the furnace room be sitting inside the door. Loftis, he give my leather jacket this evil look, hauled me inside, and hit me upside the head.

“How much this thing set us back?”

“Two fifty.” My jaws be tight; “I toss him my receipt. “You want me to take it back? Maybe I can get something else . . .”

Loftis, he say, not to me, but to the receipt, “Remember the time Mama give me that ring we had in the family for fifty years? And I took it to Merchandise Mart and sold it for a few pieces of candy?” He hitched his chair forward, and sat with his elbows on his knees. “That’s what you did, Cooter. You crawled into a Clark bar.” He commence to rip up my receipt, then picked up his flash-light and keys. “The instant you buy something you lose the power to buy something.” He button up his coat with holes in the elbows, showing his blue shirt, then turned round at the tunnel to say: “Don’t touch Miss Bailey’s money, or drink her splo, or do anything until I get back.”

“Where you going?”

“To work. It’s Wednesday, ain’t it?”

“You going to work?”

“Yeah.”

“You got to go really? Loftis,” I say, “what you brang them bags of trash in here for?”

“It ain’t trash!” He cut his eyes at me. “There’s good clothes in there. Mr. Peterson tossed them out, he don’t care, but I saw some use in them, that’s all.”

“Loftis . . .”

“Yeah?”

“What we gonna do with all this money?”

Loftis pressed his fingers to his eyelids, and for a second he look caged, or like somebody’d kicked him in his stomach. Then he cut me some slack: “Let me think on it tonight — it don’t pay to rush — then we can TCB, okay?”

Five hours after Loftis leave for work, that old blister Mr. Peterson, our landlord, he come collecting rent, find Miss Bailey’s body in apartment 4-B, and phoned the Fire Department. Me, I be folding my new jacket in tissue paper to keep it fresh, adding the box to Miss Bailey’s unsunned treasures, when two paramedics squeezed her on a long stretcher through a crowd in the hallway. See, I had to pin her from the stairhead, looking down one last time at this dizzy old lady, and I seen something in her face, like maybe she’d been poor as job’s turkey for thirty years, suffering that special Negro fear of using up what little we get in this life — Loftis, he call that entropy — believing in her belly, and for all her faith, jim, there just ain’t no more coming tomorrow from grace, or the Lord, or from her own labor, like she can’t kill nothing, and won’t nothing die . . . so when Conners will her his wealth, it put her through changes, she be spellbound, possessed by the promise of life, panicky about depletion, and locked now in the past cause every purchase, you know, has to be a poor buy: a loss of life. Me, I wasn’t worried none. Loftis, he got a brain trained by years of talking trash with people in Frog Hudson’s Barber Shop on Thirty-fifth Street. By morning, I knew, he’d have some kindawheeze worked out.

But Loftis, he don’t come home. Me, I got plenty worried. I listen to the hi-fi all day Thursday, only pawing outside to peep down the stairs, like that’d make Loftis come sooner. So Thursday go by; and come Friday the head’s out of kilter — first there’s an ogrelike belch from the toilet bowl, then water bursts from the bathroom into the kitchen — and me, I can’t call the super (How do I explain the tunnel?), so I gave up and quit bailing. But on Sat’day, I could smell greens cooking next door. Twice I almost opened Miss Bailey’s sardines, even though starving be less an evil than eating up our stash, but I waited till it was dark and, light-headed with hunger, I stepped outside to Pookie White’s, lay a hardluck story on him, and Pookie, he give me some jambalaya and gumbo. Back home in the living room, fingerfeeding myself, barricaded in by all that hope made material, the Kid felt like a king in his countingroom, or God in February, the month before He made the world (Mama’s saying), and I copped some z’s in an armchair till I heard the door move on its hinges, then bumping in the tunnel, and a heavy-footed walk thumped into the bedroom.

“Loftis?” I rubbed my eyes. “You back?” It be Sunday morning. Six-thirty sharp. Darkness dissolved slowly into the strangeness of twilight, with the rays of sunlight flaring at exactly the same angle they fall each night, as if the hour be an island, a moment, outside time. Me. I’m afraid Loftis gonna fuss bout my not straightening up, letting things go. I went into the bathroom, poured water in the one-spigot washstand — brown rust come bursting out in flakes — and rinsed my face. “Loftis, you supposed to be home four days ago. Hey,” I say, toweling my face, “you okay, brah?” How come he don’t answer me? Wiping my hands on the seat of my trousers, I tipped into Loftis’s room. He sleeping with his mouth open. His legs be drawn up, both fists clenched between his knees. He’d kicked his blanket on the floor. In his sleep, Loftis laughed, or moaned, it be hard to tell. His eyelids, not quite shut, show slits of white. I decided to wait till Loftis wake up for his decision, but turning, I seen his watch, keys, and what looked in the first stain of sunlight to be a carefully wrapped piece of newspaper on his nightstand. The sun surged up in a bright shimmer, focusing the bedroom slowly like solution do a photographic image in the developer. And then something so freakish went down I ain’t sure it took place. Fumblefingered, I unfolded the paper and inside be a blemished penny. It be like somebody hit me hard between the shoulderblades. Taped on the penny be a slip of paper, and on the paper be the note. “Found while walking down Devon Avenue.” I hear Loftis mumble like he trapped in a nightmare. “Hold tight,” I whisper, “it’s all right.” Me, I wanted to tell Loftis how Miss Bailey looked four days ago, that maybe it didn’t have to be like that for us — did it? —- because we could change. Couldn’t we? Me, I pull his packed sheets over him, wrap up the penny, and, when I locate Miss Bailey’s glass jar in the living room, put it away carefully, for now, with the rest of our things.