Color Him Dead

by Charles Runyon

  tattoo which each time drove him deeper and deeper into the pit of unconsciousness. He felt a final explosive starburst on top of his skull and knew that this time he was going out for good. He gave a violent, twisting lurch on the boot just before the blackness covered him. And in that dream world, when it was all so remote that it seemed not to concern him, he felt a faint pop against his ear and heard Doxie’s voice let out a shrill yelp of pain….

  His hearing returned before anything else. He knew he was in a rowboat. He heard the splash of oars and felt the heaving swell of the sea. He was wrapped in a cocoon of pain from the waist up.

  He opened his eyes and saw the night sky above him, fully black and sprinkled with stars. His head was lying on something soft and resilient. He turned his head and his nose touched soft fabric; he knew that smell of sun-dried clothing and that other, pungent, exciting odor.

  “Leta—”

  Her hand touched his lips; her face bent low and filled his vision. “We are all right. You sleep.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “It is for you to say.”

  His brain was in fragments too small to piece together. He raised his head and saw that they were halfway to Petty-lay. The calm sea gleamed like tinfoil which had been crumpled, then smoothed. The Pleiades were low in the Eastern sky, and he knew he’d been out for about two hours. A giant sat in the middle thwart, handling a pair of two-man oars as though they were canoe paddles.

  “He is Chaka, who sells me rum,” said Leta in answer to his whispered question. “He stopped the red man from killing you.”

  “He didn’t kill him?”

  “No, moi dudu. He picked him off and threw him aside.” She paused. “You wish to hide until you are well? My cousin she has a place back in the bush.”

  “All right.” He lay back, suddenly tired and sleepy. A meteor streaked out of Gemini and made a dying flare in the west. He closed his eyes and thought: The ancients used to call them evil omens….

  FOUR

  Soft hush of surf … grating of sand on the keel of the boat. Drew tried to rise but his limbs were weighted; he felt himself lifted, in two arms like tree-trunks, one around his back and the other beneath his knees. The man walked; each footfall drove shafts of pain into Drew’s head. He let himself escape into a cool oblivion where pain was only a distant echo….

  Roar of truck engine … soft lap beneath his rolling head … murmur of patois, Leta’s soft voice, and the giant’s rumble. Drew’s ears popped; he felt the center of gravity shift to the rear, pulling his head against Leta’s stomach. We’re going up, he thought, up into the bush, into the rain shadow of those craggy peaks. The acrid breath of the engine mingled with the green smell of the jungle, the heavy musk of decay. Life … death … how close the two….

  Consciousness left him. The next sound he heard was the crackle of a grass mat beneath his back. He smelled the damp musk of earthen floor and the smoke of a kerosene lamp. He opened his eyes and saw a pair of hands holding a warm cloth to his bruise-dappled stomach. The fingers were brown, with white luminous crescents beneath the nails. They transferred the cloth to a blackened saucepan set on a charcoal cookpot; twisted the cloth until water spurted between the fingers, then opened to show pink palms with thick pads of muscle between thumb and forefinger. Leta’s hands, strong and gentle. A plume of smoke curled from the lamp beside her. She touched the cloth to his stomach and looked up at him with sadness in her eyes.

  “I am Leta. I am not Edith.”

  Puzzled, he searched his mind and found an echo: Edith, Edith, he had called during his delirium. He closed his eyes; the thumping had receded to an ache no worse than a bad hangover.

  “You knew her before, Dudu?”

  Her voice was casual, but Drew opened his eyes and saw that she held the cloth in a white-knuckled grip.

  “No,” he said.

  Her eyes slid away from his. “Truly?”

  “Once I knew a girl like her, who was also named Edith. It was not the same one.”

  Leta moved the cloth idly, not looking at him. “I cannot believe that you make mistakes in such a small thing. Only in the big things.” She looked at him directly. “She is the reason you came here.”

  A protest rose in his throat, but he decided against it. Deceiving Leta was not worth the effort. “Then maybe you should leave me.”

  “I will stay by you,” she said. “But I tell you this—she is bad, bad.” The upward glow of the lamp cast her shadow hugely on the wall behind her, so that for a moment she seemed to be a tribal priestess pronouncing a prophecy of evil. “Her man is more bad than she. You are beaten now, your pride is hurt. But you are not dead, and I do not wish you to die.” She returned the cloth to the pan and then, as though explaining her emotions to herself, added: “I love you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She looked over her shoulder gravely and spoke in a tone of mild rebuke. “It is not bullshit that I love you.”

  “I didn’t mean … hell, give me a cigarette.”

  She lit it from the charcoal pot, her eyes squinting and nostrils flared. She put it between his lips and he drew deeply, contemplating the pattern of woven grass in the roof. What did he mean, anyway? The word annoyed him. Love. Carey had used the word; Carey had also divorced him during the trial and refused to let him see his son. Edith had used it, shouted it through a throat ragged with hysteria the night she shot her husband. Edith had also taken the stand, shy as a dove, lovely as a Madonna in her black suit and black hat, and she had pointed the black-gloved finger which consigned him to death. Love was a woman’s word, a woman’s reason for responding to a simple, biological urge.

  “You don’t have to stay,” he said again.

  “I will stay.” Her voice held a complacency which seemed rooted in the earth. “Until they put you into the sand and cover your grave with shells. Then I will find a new man.”

  Her calm talk of his death was chilling. He feared death, not as most men fear it, as a vague, hovering cloud on a distant horizon. He feared it as other men fear a vicious dog which crouches in the corner and snarls. He had prepared more than once to meet it: In death row, when he waited for his appeal to be heard; in that first escape, when the spotlights had stabbed him in the dark and that chattering gun had clubbed him from behind; in that last escape, when he had circled back to the graveyard to hide in the tomb of Cyrus Hill, where his leg swelled up tight and glossy, and he had slept with a gag over his mouth to keep from betraying himself in his delirium. Now he could see himself dead, his blood dried to a brown dust, his skull hollowed of all it contained—memories of sunshine spearing the dust-motes of a haymow, the thunk! of the bat which meant a grand-slam homer in the last of the ninth, and the sweet minty lips of a tall girl who had put her hands on his shoulders and given him his first real kiss. He could feel the wet salt-smelling sand clumping down on his chest, filling his nose and ears and staring eyes. He could see his grave like a raw wound in the sea grape, marked with conch shells bleached white as bones….

  He heard a sound, a soft sputter like a flooded engine, then a thin wail winding upward to a siren screech. He sat up suddenly and gasped from the pain which stabbed his head.

  Leta’s hands pressed against his chest. “It is only Marie’s baby.”

  For the first time he noticed the sleeping figures across the room—a woman and four … no, five children. The woman slept sitting up in the corner. She was black with the purplish tinge of the Ashanti. Her black beret rested just above her eyebrows, and a meager braid of hair stuck out from behind her ear like the tail of a rat. She wore a gray dress like Leta’s and a shawl which went around her waist and over one shoulder in toga fashion. Hammocked inside it was the twisting lump from which issued all the noise. Beside her on the mat, a pre-pubescent girl lay curled in fetal position, the sleek ebony of her body broken only by a pair of men’s shorts knotted around her waist. Three naked boys slept together like nested spoons in colors of yellow, brown and
black which hinted at the variety of their paternity. The boy on the end, about four, stirred in his sleep, found himself on the dirt floor, and struggled to rejoin the group, clutching the shoulders of his brother. A gray rat made a quick, humped scurry along the wall, then stopped and peered at Drew with a querulous, nasal squeak. Drew flipped his cigarette, and the rat scurried under the wall.

  The woman woke up, yawned, blinked, and shifted her shrieking bundle to a point beneath her right arm. She bared a black, bullet-shaped head, slid the gray dress off her shoulder and—like a magician conjuring a ripe eggplant—spilled out a swollen purple breast. She guided the nipple between the infant’s lips; the jaws worked, brows furrowed, cheeks hollowed, button-nose wrinkled as the baby dedicated its total existence to drawing nourishment from this great sloshing factory of food. It lost the breast once, and a blue-white stream arced out and poured over its face. She dabbed at the face with her shawl, stopped the incipient squawl with another mouthful of nipple, then closed her eyes and snored.

  He turned to see Leta crouched over the cookpot, the dark outline of her body showing through the gray dress. The swirl of smoke around her face made him think again of a high priestess engaged in a wierd rite to Damballa, Lord of Darkness. She dropped a furry substance into the fire. It sizzled and gave off an acrid stench.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It is best to burn such things,” she murmured. “You do not believe, I do not believe, but we do not know. Best not to leave part of yourself to be found by one who hates you, or your bowels will twist and you will lie on your bed and sweat, and after a long time maybe you die….

  Leta seemed preoccupied with his death tonight. He watched her drop another furry wad into the fire and realized it was hair. Hair? His hand flew to his scalp and found a prickly, half-inch stubble. And the beard! He was shorn of his disguise, naked and exposed. If it had not been for the leg, he would have leaped on Leta and perhaps slapped her, but the leg, the leg short-circuited all impulsive action.

  “For God’s sake, Leta.”

  She looked at him with eyes wide and wary. “I had to see how bad he hurt you. I could not wake you, and the blood was starting again….”

  He closed his eyes and stopped listening. He felt indecisive, cast adrift in an airy space where nothing existed, not even himself. He knew he should be thinking, planning his next move, but the weakness of his body sapped his will. Perhaps he would lie here until the disguise grew again. Leta would take care of him—oh hell yes, she wouldn’t care if he never got up again. She would bring him rum, she would feed him and apply the poultice of her body until his will grew soft and flabby. She’d have his kid, no doubt a sallow little bastard looking like nothing but a bleached-out Negro and she wouldn’t care if he became an incontinent old man smelling of urine. Hell, he could even be a basket case with all four limbs paralyzed, and that would be the clincher, she could do it all, mount him and everything, and she could have her status babies like turtle eggs slurping out in an endless stream—

  Stop it, he told himself. She’s a good kid, and if you chew her out she’ll say she did it because she loves you, and that’ll kick your legs out from under you. She could saw you in two with a dull cutlass, and if you complained she’d say, “But I love you,” and you’d feel like a bastard for screaming.

  He twisted impatiently beneath the cover and discovered he was naked. The chill which climbed his back came from something more than finding himself naked in a room with two women.

  The gun was gone.

  He sat up in a state of icy calm, his emotions suspended. “Leta. You undressed me?”

  “I had to—”

  “You find anything?”

  “Anything, ‘Sieur?”

  Her bewilderment was unmistakable. He grabbed his shorts from beside the pallet. “Where’s the man who carried me here?”

  “Chaka? He said he would wait in his bus to see if you need a doctor.”

  Drew called for his crutch, and Leta brought it. She protested little when he said he was going to see Chaka. Perhaps she read the determination in his eyes. She told him how to reach the road, and she gave him a flashlight. She advised him to tread lightly with Chaka; he was noted for his hatred of the blancs, she said, and held a certain status on the island, not only as a smuggler of rum, but as head of the fishing fleet which made the drag daily from Petty-lay to Barrington’s Isle.

  Outside the shack, Drew waited for his eyes to acclimate to the darkness. The star-salted sky stretched over the tree-tops like sequined black velvet. Orion spread his arms so close overhead that Drew felt he might reach up and seize the glittering sword at his side. Drew flashed the light, found the hole in the foliage which marked the path, and snapped it off. The memory remained in his brain like a photo negative. The path … watch for the roots … goddam, caught the crutch. Might be easier to ditch the crutch and go on hands and knees. Oh no, damn fer-de-lance, Leta said they hunted the morne at night …

  Drew moved downward in the still night and stepped onto the flat asphalt of the road. He flicked the light right, then left, found the bus squatting beside the road like an overgrown beetle. He snapped off the light and approached it slowly, guided by the odor of fish and charcoal.

  Nobody in the cab. He darted his beam into the rear and saw only wooden planks which served as seats for the passengers. Upstairs … nothing but lumped shapes like bags of charcoal. Chaka’s off taking a leak, seeing a girl. Check the cab again … tool kit between the seats. Ah! There she is, the only companion a man can trust—

  Hands gripped his shoulders and ripped him from the cab. He found himself flying through the air, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other. He resisted an urge to drop them and protect his head. Gun and flashlight more important … that’s it, loosen up, hit with a rolling … oh, Jesus.

  He lit on his left shoulder, paralyzing his arm and dropping the flashlight. He rolled once and managed to get to his knees with the gun in his hand; he pointed it toward a white shape beside the truck.

  “Hold it. I’ve got a gun.”

  Silence, then a rattle like dice. “And I hold your bullets, man.”

  Drew became aware of the gun’s lightness. No need to check, it was empty. He groped for the flashlight. “Chaka, that you? I’m the guy you carried up here.”

  “No, man. I know his face.”

  “Leta clipped off my beard.”

  “Oh. Well man, why you didn’t sing out?”

  At that moment Drew’s hand closed on the flashlight. He aimed it and thumbed the button. He’d known Chaka was big, but he was not prepared for the black mountain which loomed in the circle of his light. Chaka had biceps as big as Drew’s thighs. His ruffled white shirt strained to contain a torso like an office safe, and his flounder-sized hands rested on hips that should have been on a smaller man. White canvas trousers, pressed to a knife-blade crease, showed tight around elephant-hewed thighs and bulging calves. His black shoes must have been custom-made, for Drew could have set both feet side by side in either of them. Chaka was a giant, but his was not the grotesque, vacuous hugeness of a runaway pituitary; not the shambling, good-natured giantism of a man who feels apologetic around his pigmy companions. He was like a wolverine grown seven feet tall, flat head and malevolence, speed and strength, all in proportion. Violence flickered behind the yellowish whites of the eyes. His heavy features gave the impression of power rather than brute force; his forehead was wide and looked low only because the matted hair clung to his scalp like a karakul skullcap.

  “Now that you know me,” said Drew, “give me the shells.”

  Thick lips peeled back from ivory teeth, but there was no humor in it; rather like a savage preparing to crack his victim’s thighbone and suck his marrow. “First take the light from my eyes. Then we talk. Then I give back the shells.”

  His speech was hard to follow; it lacked inflection, as though all the effort had been expended in putting the words into English. Such physical power made D
rew edgy; he knew that Chaka could twist his head from his shoulders as easily as you twist a banana from the stem. His brain kept sending messages: Don’t stir him up, keep him calm.

  At Chaka’s suggestion, they got into the truck to avoid the mosquitos. Chaka produced a half-gallon jug of black rum, but Drew declined. His head throbbed. The truck cab was small and the giant took up most of the space. Black night pressed against the rolled-up windows. Chaka took a long pull on the jug while Drew sat sweating. Though the man had probably saved his life, he couldn’t avoid a feeling that Chaka’s interest was less than benevolent. Unable to wait, Drew rolled down the window, sucked in a deep breath of air, and opened hostilities:

  “Why did you take my gun?”

  Chaka gave a rumbling chuckle. “Guns are against the law, except for those of the police and white planters. How did you get it through customs?”

  Drew hesitated, then decided he wouldn’t be carrying the gun when he left anyway. “Crotch holster. You strap it around your thigh.”

  “Ah? And why does a painter trouble with all this?” He canceled the question with a chopping gesture. “You are no painter. I see painters. They have soft, woman eyes. Maybe some have hot bright eyes. But never cold eyes, like you. You did not come to paint.” He lifted the jug to his mouth, held it for a gurgling moment, then returned it to his lap. “I know why you came,” he said, releasing a belch which filled the cab with a misty smell of alcohol and molasses. “And I can help you.”

  “I need no rum or fish,” said Drew.

  Chaka’s voice hardened. “Look man, Seright? Well, I play no games, not with a blanc. You think I only guess why you came? No, man, I learn things from people and I put them together. Coutay, you came on flight fifty-one from Barbados. You catch taxi belong man name of Gregory, tell him you wish to see the capital. You ask questions and learn that Ba’ngton gone to Europe with sick wife, so you no longer wish to see our capital with its lovely white mansions and its dying black babies. You learn that Ba’ngton live in the bush when he home, but Gregory he will not carry you. You learn that his wife lives on an island, so you go to Petty-lay, look at the island through the glasses, try to rent a boat. Nobody carry you, for it is Ba’ngton land and nobody approach Ba’ngton land at night. A painter would now have decided to paint some other scenery. But you, you talk to a girl, Leta, you draw her picture and tell her you wish to paint on Ba’ngton’s Isle. She tells you men have died there, that trees grow from the tombs of dead soldiers, voices call at night, and tunnels beneath the land hide the bodies of dead Ba’ngton slaves. Still you wish to go, so Leta has her cousin to take you over. But on the island you paint very little. Mostly you wait. I wait also in my bus, and I wonder why you wait. And today, Leta comes ashore because you send her away, and my mind tells me something will happen. So I go over and catch you in the fight with the red man.” He paused for a drink. “I liked the fight, particularly when you strike out after Doxie give you his best. He does not expect people to get up after they have been kicked.”