"I weren't with Jake when they caught him," he denied evasively.

She was staring at him sharply as though she could see in the dark.

"Well, go down and open the buck rabbit and take a pill out," she relented. "And don't take but one, it's all you'll need, it's a speedball. And be sure to close him up good. The spike's in my bureau drawer."

As he started to turn away, she added, "And don't think you're putting nothing over on me 'cause I ain't through with you yet. You just wait until I get time to talk to you."

"I got to talk to you too," he said.

The man on the stretcher was twitching in time to the music. "It's cool, Sister Heavenly," he said in the voice of a convert giving a testimonial. "I got the real cool faith."

Black Key Shorty was driving piles on the ba.s.s with his steady left hand while his right hand was frolicking over hot dry gra.s.s in a nudist's colony. Washboard Wharton was giving out with grunting sounds like a boar hog in a pen full of sows.

The strong orgiastic smell of sweat and red-hot glands was pouring from the windows into the hot sultry air.

It didn't mean a thing to Pinky. He felt so much like crying he was thinking only of a fix. He went down the stairs to the hallway and pa.s.sed through the kitchen.

Uncle Saint floated from the shadows with his double-barreled shotgun.

"I'll be right back," Pinky said. "Sister Heavenly sent me to tap the rabbit."

"Don't tell me your troubles, I ain't your pappy," Uncle Saint said, unlocking the door. His voice sounded as though it had come from the bottom of a well.

The little boy in the overall jumper was waiting for Pinky in the grape arbor. He had discovered the grapes but was scared to take any.

"Did you get 'em, Missa Pinky?" he asked timidly.

Pinky fished the packet from his pocket. "Here, you give this to Uncle Bud and tell 'im the price has gone up. Tell him Sister Heavenly say don't expect to get healed for nothing."

Reluctantly the little boy accepted the single pod. He knew he'd get a beating for bringing back only one. But there wasn't anything to do about it.

"Yessa," he said and went slowly into the shadows.

Pinky went to the rabbit hutch, reached through the hatch and caught the buck by the ears. With a deft motion of his free hand, he removed a small square of adhesive tape covering the rabbit's r.e.c.t.u.m, then withdrew a long rubber plug with a tiny metal handle like a sink stopper. The rabbit remained motionless, staring at him from enormous fear-frozen eyes. He squeezed the rabbit's stomach and a small aluminum capsule popped out. He put the capsule into his pants pocket and restoppered the rabbit.

He wondered what other hiding places Sister Heavenly had. He was her nephew and her only living relative, but she had never told him anything. He reckoned she was getting ready to eat the rabbit if she let him know that much.

At the kitchen door he again went through the amenities with Uncle Saint.

"I'm going to Sister Heavenly's room for a bang."

"You must think I'm the recording angel," Uncle Saint grumbled. His voice sounded as though it came out of the oven. "Go to the devil, for all I care."

Pinky knew this wasn't true, but he didn't challenge it. He knew that Uncle Saint would curse up a fit if he went somewhere in the house without telling him in advance.

The top bureau drawer looked like the last stand of a hypochondriac. He found the hypodermic needle lying in the midst of syringes, thermometers, hatpins and hairpins, tweezers, shoe b.u.t.toners, and old-fashioned gla.s.s-topped bottles containing enough varicolored poisons to decimate an entire narcotic squad. The alcohol lamp sat openly on a marble-topped table in the corner, alongside a battered teapot and a set of stained test tubes. The sugar spoon was in a sugar bowl on the night table beside the bed.

He lit the lamp and sterilized the needle over the flame. Then he emptied the white powdered cocaine and heroin from the aluminum capsule into the sugar spoon and melted it over the flame. He drew the liquid through the needle into the syringe and, holding the spike in his right hand, banged himself in the vein of his left arm while the C & H was still warm.

"Ahhh," he said softly as the drug went in.

Afterwards he put out the lamp and returned the spike to the medicine drawer.

The speedball had immediate effect. He went back to the kitchen stepping on air.

He knew Sister Heavenly wouldn't be ready for him yet, so he pa.s.sed the time with the ancient gunman.

"How long is you been a ventriloquist, Uncle Saint?"

"Boy, I been throwing my voice so long, I don't know where it's at anymore myself," Uncle Saint said. His voice seemed to come from the bedroom Pinky had just quit. Abruptly he laughed at his own joke, "Ha-ha-ha." The laughter seemed to come from outside the back door.

"You're going to keep on throwing it around until it gets away some day," Pinky said.

"What business is it of yours? Is you my keeper?" Uncle Saint crabbed. He sounded like a ghost lurking underneath the floor.

Upstairs, Black Key Shorty was riffing with his left hand again. Pinky knew that the gin bottle was pressed to his lips. Washboard Wharton was making like a skeleton with the galloping itch, waiting his turn.

Pinky listened to the steady clumping of feet on the wooden floor. Everything was crystal clear to him again. He knew just what he had to do. But it was getting late.

5.

The pilgrims had finally gone.

Sister Heavenly was sitting up in bed, wearing a pink crocheted bed jacket trimmed in frilly lace. Long, curly, midnight-blue hair of a wig hung down over her shoulders.

She was so old her face had the shrunken, dried-up leathery look of a monkey's. The corneas of her eyes were a strange shade of glazed blue resembling an enameled surface, while the pupils were a faded ocher with white spots. She wore perfect fitting plates of brilliant, matched, incredibly white teeth.

As a young woman her skin had been black; but daily applications of bleach creams for more than half a century had lightened her complexion to the color of pigskin. Her toothpick arms, extending from the pink jacket, were purple-hued at the top, graduating to parchment-colored hands so thin and fragilelooking as to appear transparent.

In one hand she held a scalding hot cup of sa.s.safras tea, with her little finger extended according to the dictates of etiquette; in the other a small, dainty, meerschaum pipe with a long curved stem and a carved bowl. She was smoking the finely ground stems of marijuana leaves, her only vice.

Pinky sat beside the bed on a green leather ottoman, wringing his ham-size, milk-white hands.

The only light in the room came from a pink-shaded light on the other side of the bed. The soft pink light gave Pinky's bruised white skin the exotic coloring of some unknown tropical sea monster.

"How come you think they's going to croak him?" Sister Heavenly asked in her deep, slightly cracked, musical voice.

"To rob him, that's why," Pinky said in his whining voice. "To get his farm in Ghana."

"A farm in Ghana!" she said scornfully. "If Gus got a farm in Ghana I got a palace in heaven."

"He got a farm, all right. I has seen the papers."

"Taking he got a farm -- which he ain't -- how they going to get it by croaking him?"

"She's his wife. He done willed it to her."

"His wife! She ain't no more his wife than you is his son. If they croak him, it'll go to his relatives -- if he got any relatives."

"She his wife all right. I has seen the license."

"You has seen everything. Suppose they croak him. They can't go live on his farm. That's the first place the police will look."

He realized she wasn't convinced about the farm. He took another tack.

"Then it's his money. They'll get that and run away."

"His money! I is too old and time is too short for this bulls.h.i.t. Gus ain't never had two white quarters to rub together in his life."

"He got money. A whole lot of money." He looked away evasively and his voice changed. "His other wife in Fayetteville, North Carolina, died and left him a big tobacco farm and he sold it for a heap of money."

She took a long puff from her pipe and held it down by sipping tea. Her old faded eyes regarded him with cynical amus.e.m.e.nt over the rim of her cup. Finally, when she let the smoke dribble from her lungs, she said, "What you trying to con me out of?"

"I ain't trying to con you."

"Then what's all this 'bout his other wife and his other farm, an' all his money? You must be seeing double."

"It's the G.o.d's truth," he said, avoiding her eyes. "I swear it."

"You swear it. Long as I knowed Gus he ain't never let no woman get no legal hold on him. And if you think any woman what knows that is fool enough to die and leave him something, you don't know the female race."

"He got something," he maintained urgently. "He made me promise not to tell, but I knows it's what they's after."

She smiled evilly. "Then why don't you get it yourself, if it's worth anything -- poor as you is?" Her voice dripped sarcasm.

"I couldn't rob Gus. He the only one who ever been good to me."

"You get it and let them rob and murder you, if you isso set on protecting him."

His face took on a desperate expression. Sweat trickled from the borders of his hair. Tears welled up in his eyes.

"You sitting there, making fun, and he might be dead," he accused in his whining voice.

Slowly she put down her cup on the night table. She rested the pipe across her stomach and studied him deliberately. She saw that something was troubling him. She realized with faint surprise that he was deadly earnest.

"Ain't I been good to you, too, treating you like my own son-- if I had a son?" she cajoled.

"Ya.s.sum," he replied obediently. "But he took me in and called me his son."

"Ain't I told you time and again that you is my heir?" she insisted. "Ain't I told you that you is going to inherit all that I got when I die?"

"Ya.s.sum, but you ain't helping me now."

"You ain't got no right to hold out on me like this. G.o.d won't like it," she said.

"I ain't holding out,' he whined, looking trapped. "It's just that I promised not to tell."

She leaned forward and held his eyes in a hypnotic stare. "Is it in a trunk?"

Her eyes were like two b.a.l.l.s of colored fire bearing down on him.

"Not when I seen it."

"Is it in a sack?"

He felt his power to defy her slipping away.

"Twarn't in no sack when I seen it."

"Were it hidden in the house?"

He shook his head.

"In the closet? . . . Beneath the floor? . . . Behind the wall?"

He felt himself growing dizzy in a holocaust of lights.

"That ain't how it were hidden," he admitted.

"He got it on him," she said triumphantly.

He was too worn out by her eyes to resist further.

"Ya.s.sum. In a money belt."

Intense thought wrinkled her face like a prune.

"It's jewelry," she concluded. "He's stolen some jewelry. Is it diamonds?"

His willpower gave way. He slumped forward and sighed. "It's a treasure map," he confessed. "It tells how to find a whole mess of buried treasure in Africa."

Her eyes popped open as though the lids had broken.

"Treasure map!" she screamed. "Lost treasure! You still believe in lost treasure, as old as you is?"

"I know how it sound, but that's what it is all right," he maintained stubbornly.

She stared at him speculatively until he felt himself withering.

"Did you see it?" she asked finally.