Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

Can I help you as in Can I help you? As opposed to What are you doing here? Ray Carney, in his years, had a handle on the variations.

Carney’s Furniture had been a furniture store before he took over the lease, and a furniture store before that. In sticking around for five years, Carney had outlasted Larry Early, a repellent personality ill-suited for retail, and Gabe Newman, who lit out in the dead of the night, leaving behind a clutch of fuming creditors, his family, two girlfriends, and a basset hound.

Freddie leaned over. “You heard me talk about this nigger every once in a while—Miami Joe?” “What’s he, run numbers?” “No, he’s that dude wears that purple suit. With the hat.” Carney thought he remembered him maybe. It wasn’t like purple suits were a rarity in the neighborhood.

Two guys tumbled through the front door, brawling. Bert reached for Jack Lightning, the baseball bat he kept by the register. Summer had come to Harlem.

Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked,

At Nightbirds, Freddie had made him promise to think about it, knowing that Carney usually came around if he thought too long about one of his cousin’s plots. A night of Carney staring at the ceiling was enough to close the deal, the cracks up there like a sketch of the cracks in his self-control.

“They call him Yea Big?” Freddie said. “On account of his johnson.”

Gets himself some land, then he kicks the bucket up here. Bought the farm, then bought the farm. More proof for Pepper’s philosophy vis-à-vis making plans. Whoever heard of a crook keeping chickens? Begging for God to smite your uppity ass. Take the road, for instance. Three years to finish, hundreds of men lost, and then the Japanese surrender a month later. It was only good for war and with the war over, the jungle took it back. What was it now? A ribbon of rubble in the mud.

The front room had smelled rank from cigarette and cigar smoke in the glory days, and from the cheap beer and rotgut soaked into the floorboards, but the stench now was another register of foul.

The cookies were stale and the fortunes discouraging.

There was a Collins-Hathaway sling-back chair for guests, but Munson sat on Carney’s Ellsworth safe. It was a modest number, dark gray with a levered handle. Carney didn’t have an etiquette book in front of him, but he was sure it was bad manners to sit on a man’s safe.

Pepper was a gourmand in that he liked chops and he liked ribs.

“Nice safe,” Pepper said. “What’s wrong with it?” “Apart from how small it is?” “Yes.” “It’s an Ellsworth, and I’m always happy to see an Ellsworth. But you don’t want to own a safe that makes a thief happy.” That set Carney sulking for the rest of the meeting.

Carney and Zippo walked four blocks to the lot where Carney kept his truck. He got a feeling it was a pickup-truck night, a tryto-outrun-bad-luck night. Might he need the truck bed? Carney didn’t like the notion of dumping bodies in the back of his truck, deceased or not deceased or any which way. Once is bad luck; twice and it looks like you’re getting accustomed.

Carney was about to fall asleep when it occurred to him that Linus’s overdose was not an accident. “Mother of fucking God,” he said, out loud this time. Elizabeth put a pillow over her head.

Inside the briefcase were some personal papers, miscellany of private importance—a Valentine’s Day card from one Louella Mather, a 1941 Yankees Double Play baseball card featuring Joe DiMaggio and Charley Keller—and the biggest cut emerald Carney had ever seen.

Dandy’s run was cut short when Blake Headley slipped a disk; his understudy’s inert line readings broke the spell. The play was never produced again, save for an avant-garde attempt in Buenos Aires that closed during the first intermission (arson).