A Rage in Harlem Read Online Free Page B

stretched across the middle of the table like two steeplechasers in a dead heat, came to a stop on four and three.
    “Four-trey, the country way,” the stick man sang, raking in the dice. “Seven! The loser!”
    Rock Candy reached for the money in the pot. Stack of Dollars raked in his bets. Abie took some, paid some.
    “You goin’ to buck ’em?” the stick man asked.
    Red Horse shook his head. He could pay a dollar for three more rolls.
    “Next good shooter,” the stick man sang and looked at Jackson. “What you shoot, short-black-and-fat?”
    “Ten bucks.”
    Jackson threw a ten-dollar bill and fifty cents into the circle. Red Horse covered it. The bettors got down, win and lose, in the books. The stick man threw the dice to Jackson, who caught the dice, held them in his cupped hand close to his mouth and talked to them.
    “Just get me out of this trouble and I ain’t goin’ to ask for no more.” He crossed himself, then shook the dice to get them hot.
    “Turn ’em loose, Reverend,” the stick man said. “They ain’t titties and you ain’t no baby. Let ’em run wild in the big corral.”
    Jackson turned them loose. They hopped across the green like scared jackrabbits, jumped the dog chain like frisky kangaroos, romped toward Abie’s field-cloth like locoed steers, got tired and rested on six and five.
    “Natural eleven!” the stick man sang. “Eleven from heaven. The winner!”
    Jackson let his money ride, threw another natural for the twenty; then crapped out for the forty with snake-eyes. He shot ten again, threw seven, let the twenty ride, threw another seven, shot the forty, and crapped out again. He was twenty dollars loser. He wiped the sweat from his face and head, took off his overcoat, put it with his hat on the coat rack, loosened the double-breasted jacket of his black hard-finished suit, and said to the dice, “Dice, I beg you with tears in my eyes as big as watermelons.”
    He shot ten again, rapped three times in a row, and asked the stick man to change the dice.
    “These don’t know me,” he said.
    The stick man put in some black-eyed number eight dice that were stone cold. Jackson warmed them in his crotch, and threw four naturals in a row. He had eighty dollars in the pot. He took down the fifty dollars he had lost and shot the thirty. He caught a four and jumped it, took down another fifty, and shot ten.
    “Jealous man can’t gamble, scared man can’t win,” the stick man crooned.
    The bettors got off Jackson to win and bet him to lose. Hecaught six and sevened out.
    “Shooter for the game,” the stick man sang. “The more you put down the more you pick up.”
    The dice went on to the next shooter.
    By midnight Jackson was $180 ahead. He had $376, but he needed $657.95 to cover the $500 he had stolen from Mr. Clay and the $157.95 to pay for his landlady’s stove.
    He quit and went back to the Last Word to see if he had hit on the numbers. The last word for that night was 919, dead man’s row.
    So Jackson went back to the dice game.
    He prayed to the dice; he begged them. “I got pains in my heart as sharp as razor blades, and misery in my mind as deep as the bottom of the ocean and tall as the Rocky Mountains.”
    He took off his coat when it came his second turn to shoot. His shirt was wet. His trousers chafed his crotch. He loosened his suspenders when his third turn came and let them hang down his legs.
    Jackson threw more natural sevens and elevens than had ever been seen in that game before. But he threw more craps, twos, threes and twelves, than he did natural sevens and elevens. And as all good crapshooters know, crapping is the way you lose.
    Day was breaking when the game gave out. They had Jackson. He was stone-cold broke. He borrowed fifty cents from the house and trudged slowly down to the snack bar in the Theresa Hotel. He got a cup of coffee and two doughnuts for thirty cents and stood at the counter.
    His eyes were glazed. His black skin had turned