“ ‘Jesus,’ ” Grave Digger echoed as he slowly straightened his bent figure. “ ‘Jesus bastard!’ What a thing to say.”
Coffin Ed’s face was like a thundercloud. “Jesus, Digger, Goddammit!” he flared. “What you want him to say, Jesus hallelujah? The mother-raper got his throat cut for a black whore—”
“How you know it was a black whore who did it?”
“By whoever!”
“All right, let’s call the precinct,” Grave Digger said thoughtfully, playing his flashlight over the dead man’s body. “Male, fair hair — blue eyes; jugular vein cut, dead on 123rd Street —” Glancing at his watch. “3.11 a.m.,” he recited.
Coffin Ed had hurried back to the car to get the precinct station on the radio. “Without his pants,” he added.
“Later.”
While Coffin Ed was transmitting the essential facts over the radio-phone, colored people in various stages of undress began emerging from the black dark tenements alongside. Black women in terrycloth robes with their faces greased and their straightened hair done in small tight plaits like Topsy; brownskinned women with voluptuous breasts and broad buttocks wrapped in bright-coloured nylon, half-straight hair hanging loosely about their cushion-mouthed sleepy-eyed faces; high yellows in their silks and curlers. And the men, old, young, nappy-headed, conk-haired, eyes full of sleep, faces lined where witches were riding them, mouths slack, wrapped in sheets, blankets, raincoats, or just soiled and wrinkled pajamas. Collecting in the street to see the dead man. Looking inexpressibly stupid in their morbid curiosity. A dead man was always good to see. It was reassuring to see somebody else dead. Generally the dead men were also colored. A white dead man was really something. Worth getting up any time of night. But no one asked who cut him. Nor why. Who was going to ask who cut a white man’s throat in Harlem? Or why? Just look at him, baby. And feel good it ain’t you. Look at that white mother-raper with his throat cut. You know what he was after.…
Coffin Ed gave Lieutenant Anderson a brief description of the dead body and a more detailed description of the black man in the red fez they had first seen running down the street with the pants over his arm.
“Do you think the murdered man had some extra pants?” Anderson asked.
“He didn’t have any pants.”
“What the hell!” Anderson exclaimed. “What the hell’s wrong with you? What are you holding back? Let’s have it all.”
“The man didn’t have any pants or underpants.”
“Mmmm. All right, Johnson, you and Jones stay put. I’ll call homicide, the District Attorney and the Medical Examiner and have them send their men, and I’ll put out a pickup for the suspect. You think I should seal up the block?”
“What for? If the suspect did it, he’ll be to hell and gone by the time you get the block sealed off. And if anybody else did it they were already gone. All you can do is take in a couple loads of these citizens for questioning if we can determine exactly where it was done.”
“All right, in time. Right now you and Jones stay with the body and see what you can learn.”
“What’d the boss say?” Grave Digger asked when Coffin Ed rejoined him beside the body on the sidewalk.
“Just the usual. The experts are coming. We’re to dig what we can without leaving our friend.”
Grave Digger turned towards the silent crowd collecting in the shadows. “Any of you know anything that might help?”
“H. Exodus Clay is the name of an undertaker,” a brother said.
“Does this look like a time for that?”
“To me it does. When a man’s dead you got to bury him.”
“I mean anything that might help find out who killed him,” Grave Digger said to the others.
“I seen a white man and a colored man whispering.”
“Where was that, lady?”
“Eighth Avenue at 15th Street.”
People in Harlem always drop the “one hundred” from the designation of their streets, so that 10th Street is 110th, 15th is 115th and 25th is 125th. That wasn’t very near but it was close enough.
“When, lady?”
“I don’t remembers ’zactly. Night ’fore last, I thinks.”
“All right, forget it. You folks go to bed.”
A little shuffling followed but no one left.
“Shit!” someone exclaimed.
“Those car cops must be sleeping,” Coffin Ed said impatiently.
Grave Digger began a cursory examination of the body. There was a cut across the back of the left hand and a deep cut in the palm of the right hand between the index finger and thumb. “He tried to ward off the knife first, then he grabbed the blade. He wasn’t very scared.”
“How you make that?”
“Hell, if he’d been trying to run, ducking and dodging, he’d been cut on the arms and back if his throat hadn’t been cut to start with, as you can see it hadn’t.”
“All right, Sherlock Jones. Then tell me this much. How come his privates ain’t been touched? If this was a sex fight that’s the first thing they go for.”
“How we know it was a sex fight? It was probably plain robbery.”
“Well, buddy-o, you can’t overlook the fact the man ain’t got no pants,”
“Yeah, there’s that, and this is Harlem, if you want to add it up that way,” Grave Digger said. “I just wish these mother-rapers wouldn’t come up here and get themselves killed, for whatever reason.”
“Iss bad enough killing our own,” a voice said from the dark. It was followed by a sudden indistinct babble as though the spectators were arguing the point.
Coffin Ed turned on them and shouted suddenly, “You people better get the hell away from here before the white cops come in, or they’ll run all your asses in.”
There was a sound of nervous movement, like frightened cattle in the dark, then a voice said belligerently, “Run whose ass in? I lives here!”
“All right,” Coffin Ed said resignedly. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Grave Digger was staring at the stretch of sidewalk where the body lay in a widening pool of blood. The headlights of their car starkly lighted the stretch down past the street lamp and the front steps of a number of crumbling houses on that side of the street that had been private residences of a sort a half-century previous. The people who had collected stood along the other side of the street and in back of their car so their dark faces were in the shadow but a row of rusty bare legs and splayed black feet with enormous toes were visible. A Harlem sidewalk, he thought, black feet and purple blood, and a man lying dead. This time he happened to be white. Most times he was black like the legs and feet of the people who stared at him. How many people had he seen lying dead in the street? He couldn’t remember, only that most of them had been black. Lying dead and without dignity on the dirty sidewalks. Lying in the coins of dried spit, sticky ice cream and candy wrappers, wads of chewed gum, stained cigarette butts, newspaper scraps, small bones from cooked meat, dog shit, urine stinks, beer bottles, hair-grease tins; stinking, gritty dirt blowing over them by every puff of wind.
“Anyway, no used condoms,” Coffin Ed said. “They don’t like it if there ain’t no risk.”
“Damn right,” Grave Digger agreed. “All you got to do is look around and see how many times they’ve lost.”
The first of the sirens sounded.
“Here they are,” Coffin Ed said.
The spectators moved back.
Interlude
“Like him?” Doctor Mubuta asked.
“He’s beautiful” the white woman said.
“Wrap him up and take him with you,” Doctor Mubuta said, coming as near to leering as he had ever done.
She blushed furiously.
Doctor Mubuta motioned to the cretin, who had no compunction about wrapping up the sleeping beauty in the bed sheet.
“Take him out and put him into the back of her car,” Doctor Mubuta directed. Then, turning to the blushing, speechless Mrs Dawson
, he said, “He is now your responsibility, Madame. And I trust that as soon as you have thoroughly investigated this miracle and convinced yourself of its authenticity, you will remit the balance of payment.”
She nodded quickly and left. They all watched her leave. No one said anything. No one on the street gave a second look at the black harelipped cretin placing a sheet-wrapped figure into the back compartment of an air-conditioned Cadillac limousine. It was Harlem, where anything might happen.
5
“You’ve been trying to outsmart the white folks, and you found that didn’t do no good cause they’re smarter than you are,” Doctor Mubuta was saying in his singsong voice, his heavy jaw moving with the lecherous twist of a big black whore shaking her butt. His voice was as solemn as his expression and his eyes were as humorless as those of a religious fanatic.
“Yeh!” The obscene twist of his jaw was caught, like one buttock aslant, then it resumed its suggestive grind: “And you’ve been trying to out-lie the white folk, only to discover it was the white folks who invented lying.”
The teen-aged white girl broke out of her hypnotic trance and giggled like she’d been caught out.
Everyone else was staring at him with open mouths as though he were exposing himself.
“Yeh! And you’ve been trying to out-Tom the white folks, and you’re surprised to find the white folks is stealing your talent, like they has stole everything you has invented.”
Mister Sam’s old rheumy eyes opened at that and he peeped at Doctor Mubuta. But he shut them immediately as though he didn’t want to see what he saw. Dick’s head moved slightly and an expression of pained cynicism flickered across his face. A subtle smile tugged at the corners of Anny’s mouth. Intolerable outrage took hold of Viola’s expression. Sugartit’s stretched black eyes remained unchanged as though she weren’t tuned in. Van Raff seemed to be smoldering at the incredible theft. The teen-aged white girl giggled again and tried to catch Doctor Mubuta’s eye. Suddenly he looked directly at her; his vision lost its vague sightless scope and focused on her, his bright red eyes stripping off her clothes and looking directly between her thighs.
“Yeh!” He might have said, “Yeh, man!”
The ejaculation made her start guiltily. She closed her legs and blushed.
Mister Sam seemed to be sleeping, or else dead.
Then they were all listening again, like passengers in a runaway bus, not knowing where they were going but expecting momentarily to run off the edge of the earth.
Doctor Mubuta’s expression went vacant again as though he had made his point, whatever it was.
“Yeh! You’ve been trying to out-yes white folks, but the white folks is yessing you so fast nowadays you don’t know who’s yessing who.”
“Shit!” Until then the speaker had been so inconspicuous he had passed for a gray shadow in the brightly lighted room.
The word was heard distinctly but not one hypnotized gaze switched from Doctor Mubuta’s belly-dancing under-jaw.
“Hear those shots?” asked Doctor Mubuta, ignoring the ejaculation.
The question was theoretical. They had been hearing the sound of sporadic shooting for some time and they all knew black youths were rioting on Seventh Avenue. It required no answer.
“Throwing rocks at the police,” Doctor Mubuta said in his same singsong voice. “Must think those white police is made of window glass.”
He paused for a moment as though inviting comment. But no one had anything to say; no one knew where it was leading to; they all knew white police were not made of window glass.
“I have the one and only solution for the Negro Problem,” Doctor Mubuta exclaimed, his heavy black belly-bumping jaw suddenly throwing it to the wind.
That was the one for someone to challenge him, but no one did.
“We’re gonna outlive the white folks. While they has been concentrating on ways of death, I has been concentrating on how to extend life. While they’ll be dying, we’ll be living forever, and Mister Sam here, the oldest of us all, will be alive to see the day when the black man is the majority on this earth, and the white man his slave.”
The teen-aged white girl stared at Doctor Mubuta as though she took it personally, and was even anxious to give it a try.
But not so with Mister Sam’s chauffeur, Johnson X, the invisible man. He could hold it no longer. “Shit!” he cried. “Shit!” One couldn’t tell whether it was an order or an exclamation. “Shit! Does anyone in their right state of mind, with all their pieces of gray matter assembled in the right way in they haid, with no fuses blowed in they brain, with they think-piece hitting on all cylinders — you dig me? Anyone — you — me — us — they—we — them—him or her—anyone—you dig me? believe that shittt?” His loose lips punctuated each word with a spray of spit, flapped up and down over white buck teeth like the shutter of a camera photographing missiles shot into space, curled and popped over the tonal effect of each sound, and pronounced the word “shit” as though he had tasted it and spat it out — eloquent, logical and positive.
“I believe it,” Mister Sam croaked, peeking at Johnson from his old furtive eyes.
“You!” Johnson exploded. It was an accusation.
Everyone stared at Mister Sam as though awaiting his confession.
“Niggers’ll believe anything,” Viola spluttered. No one contradicted.
Johnson X looked scornfully at Mister Sam from thick-lensed spectacles with heavy black frames. He was a tall angular man dressed in chauffeur’s livery. His small shaved skull merging into his wide curved nose gave him the appearance of a snapping turtle, and with the spectacles he looked as though he were trying to pass himself off as human. He might have been disagreeable but he wasn’t stupid. He was Mister Sam’s friend.
“Mister Sam,” he said, “I tells you right here and now to your face — I think you is nuts. You has lost whatever sense you was born with.”
Mister Sam’s eyes closed to slits of milky blue in his shrunken face. “Folks don’t know everything,” he whispered.
“I helps the old and the sick,” Doctor Mubuta jawed. “I rejuvenates the disrejuvenated.”
“Shit! Get yo’self in hand, Mister Sam. Look yo’ life in the face. Here you is ninety years old.…”
“More than that.”
“More than ninety, with almost all of yo’self in the grave, been diddling all kinds of women for sixty-five years.”
“Longer than that.”
“Been pimping and running whore house ever since you learned the stuff would sell —”
“Jes business. Buy low and sell high. It’s Jewish.”
“Been surrounded with women all yo’ life, and ain’t satisfied yet. Here you is nearmost a hundred years old and wants to go against the ordained order of creation.”
“Tain’t dat!”
“Tain’t dat!” Johnson X controlled himself. “Mister Sam, does you believe in God?”
“Dat’s it. I been believing in God for sixty-nine years. That’s ’fore you was born.”
Johnson X looked stumped. “Come again, I don’t dig you.”
“God helps them who helps themselves.”
Johnson X’s eyes popped, his voice became outraged. “Old and wicked as you is, as much sin as you has sinned in yo’ life, as many people as you has cheated, all the lies you has told, all the stuff you has stole, you means to lie there and say you is expecting some help from God?”
“Nothing takes the place of God,” Doctor Mubuta said in his singsong voice, sounding as pious as possible, then added as an afterthought, as though he might have gone too far, “but money.”
“Pick up that there Gladstone bag,” Mister Sam croaked.
Doctor Mubuta lifted the Gladstone bag that sat on the floor beside his doctor’s bag.
“Look in it,” Mister Sam ordered.
Doctor Mubuta opened the bag dutifully and looked into it, and for the first time his expression changed and his eyes seemed about to pop from his head.
“What you see?” Mister Sam urged.
“Money,” Doctor Mubuta whispered.
“You think that’s enough money to take the place of God?”
“Looks like it. Looks like an awful lot to me.”
“It’s all I got.”
Van Raff stood up. Viola turned bright red.
“And it’s yours,” Mister Sam informed Doctor Mubuta.
“No, it isn’t,” Van Raff shouted.
“I’se going for the police,” Johnson X said.
“Sit down,” Mister Sam croaked evilly. “Jes testing y’all. Ain’t nothing but paper.”
Doctor Mubuta’s face closed like the Bible.
“Let me see it,” Van Raff demanded.
“Is I is or is I ain’t?” Doctor Mubuta demanded.
“I think someone ought to stop this,” Anny said apologetically. “I don’t think it’s right.”
“Tend to your own business,” her husband snarled.
“Excuse me for living,” she replied, giving him a furious look.
“He ought to be put in the ’sylum,” Viola said. “He’s crazy.”
“I’m going to look at it,” Van Raff declared, moving forward to take the bag.
“And I found y’all out,” Mister Sam said.
“Now you’ve all had your say, can I proceed with the procedure?” Doctor Mubuta said.
“Leave it be,” Johnson X said to Van Raff. “It ain’t going nowhere.”
“It sure ain’t,” Van Raff declared, sullenly returning to his seat.
Neither of the teen-age girls had spoken.
In the strained silence, Doctor Mubuta opened his bag and extracted a quart-size jar containing a nasty-looking liquid and placed it atop the bed table beside Mister Sam’s bed. Everyone leaned forward to stare incredulously at the milky liquid.
Mister Sam stretched his neck and popped his old glazed eyes like a curious old rooster with a bare neck.
“Is that the stuff?”
“That’s the stuff.”
“Gonna make me young?”
Blind Man with a Pistol Page 4