Ed Gorman: Blood Game

Dr. Fitzgerald went over and started examining him. Once Rooney moaned, as if enduring intolerable pain. He started crying soon after. “I’m gonna die, ain’t I, Doctor?”

“You’re going to be fine.”

“You’re lying and you know it. I’m gonna die. I beat Sovich and a white man shoots me. It ain’t fair.”

“You lie there now and let me have a closer look at that wound.”

“It ain’t fair.”

Guild watched Rooney’s eyes. They were quick now with panic and fear.

As Dr. Fitzgerald bent over him, Rooney said, “They got a priest around here?”

“Lie still now. I don’t think they have a priest.”

“I got to tell somebody what I did.” He writhed then with his pain. He was delivering death just as a birthing woman delivered life. Rooney looked over at Guild. “I poisoned this man, this nigger. He was a boxer. I shouldn’t ought to done that. I just wanted to get ahead, was all. That was all.”

His entire body jerked. His bulging eyes bulged even more. His body jerked again. His eyes closed, white eyes replaced by dark lids.

“He was lucky to make it this long,” Dr. Fitzgerald said.

An hour and twenty-two minutes later, Guild stepped off the streetcar. His clothes were dry. He needed a shave. He was shaking and he wasn’t sure why.

He stood on the street comer, letting well-dressed pedestrians swirl by him on their way to the opera house and the vaudeville parlor. He stared for a long time at the hotel. He wondered which floor she was on. He wondered if she’d left.

Dropping his hand instinctively to his.44, he crossed the street, waiting for a hansom cab to pass by, sleek and black in the streetlight. He liked the fresh smell of the city following the rain. It felt as though it had been purged of something foul.

In the lobby he went up to the desk. He asked the clerk if Clarise had checked out.

“No, she hasn’t, sir.”

“You’re sure?”

“She was going to. Said she changed her mind.”

“Thank you.” He started away from the desk. “Oh. I need her room number.”

“Four-oh-six,” the clerk said without looking it up. His blue eyes said that he’d been smitten, and smitten most seriously by Clarise.

On the carpeted stairs Guild passed more people in evening dress going out. In his rumpled clothes, he seemed to elicit both amusement and disgust.

On the fourth floor he went down a long hall. At 406 he leaned forward to see if he could hear anything. Nothing.

He knocked.

Still he heard nothing. He glanced around the hallway and at the same time took his.44 from its holster. He tried the doorknob. Open.

He peered into the darkness of the room. Through a gauzy white curtain, plumped out from the window on a breeze, he saw a ghostly streetlight. The furnishings, bed, bureau, reading chair, and lamp were silhouetted against the glowing curtain.

He went inside.

The place smelled of Clarise’s perfume. Despite himself, he allowed himself a moment’s pleasure by closing his eyes and recalling last night by the river, the wonderful floating death of his orgasm and the fast roar of the water and the sweet, soft scent of her perfume.

She took one step from the shadows behind the door and quite skillfully got him square across the back of the head.

He was unconscious before he hit the floor.

“You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to hate me, Leo.”

“You killed two men tonight.”

“Sovich has killed enough colored people. I don’t worry about him. And you know what Rooney did. I wanted him to be blamed. I figured white folks would make his last minutes a lot more miserable than I could.”

“A minister killed him. A crazy white man. But you knew a white man would kill him, didn’t you?”

“That’s what I was hoping. White folks don’t like black folks who kill whites.”

“You should have seen him, Clarise. There at the last.”

“Did he suffer?”

“He suffered a lot. He was really scared, Clarise. The way you’re going to be. The way I’m going to be.”

“He killed my brother.”

“I know.”

“I tried to forgive him, Leo. I couldn’t.” She sighed and walked over to the window. In the street below, the clatter of hooves was sharp. “Back at the arena, I didn’t think I could go through with it. I looked at him for the first time. Really looked at him. I saw that he was just human like the rest of us. You ever convince yourself somebody’s not human and then all of a sudden you see they’re a scared animal just like you?”

“All the time.”

She turned back to Guild. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed. Her brown, gentle hands were folded in her lap. “I prayed God to forgive me, Leo, but somehow I couldn’t warn Rooney. I wanted to. I wanted to get up and shout out that-”

She started crying.

Guild rolled himself a cigarette and watched her. He took two long drags, and then he got up and went over and sat next to her, taking her gently into the crook of his arm, putting her warm, wet cheek on his shoulder. Her whole body trembled.

“I wish I could feel good, Leo,” she said. “I wish I could feel some satisfaction.” She cried harder again. “I deserve what happens to me, Leo. I shouldn’t have done it. I surely shouldn’t have.”

Guild walked over to the dresser. He took her bag and started throwing her things into it. He was neither gentle nor orderly.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “You’ve got to go,” he said. “Fast.”

“But Leo, I killed a man this afternoon.”

“He killed your brother.”

“But I still didn’t have any right to-”

“I said hurry.”

Looking at him in a kind of shocked disbelief, she rose from the bed and moved like an uncertain child to the closet.

“Hurry,” Guild said again.

She began taking dresses down from the closet and folding them in half. When she was finished, Guild took the dresses and put them inside the bag.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

“Depot.”

“Depot?”

“There’s a train pulling out of here in fifteen minutes.”

“To where?”

“Does it matter? Now, come on.”

Downstairs she paid the room clerk. He gave Guild, who was obviously nervous, a queer look.

In the street Guild kept her arm, steering her through the foot traffic and across the wide wagon-packed streets.

A block away they could hear the train getting ready to pull out. People’s loud good-byes floated on the air like colorful balloons.

He made her sit as he bought her a one-way ticket at the counter.

On the way to the train, their footsteps loud on the wooden platform, she said, “You sure you should be doing this, Leo?”

“You let me worry about this.”

At the car she boarded, she turned and said, “I wish we were going to be together again, Leo.”

“It wouldn’t work.”

“Why?” she said.

Without humor, he replied, “We’re too much alike. Now get on up there.”

She started crying. “Leo, please, won’t you reconsider? We could-”

“Board!” shouted the strolling conductor, checking his Ingram pocket watch. “Board!”

“You get up there,” Guild said. “You get up there right now.”

She leaned forward and kissed him quickly on the mouth.

He felt the kiss inside and out. He looked at her and felt alone. He wished there were some way she could stay.

“Board!” shouted the conductor.

The crowd pressed in, and she was lost in the midst of it, buoyed up the steps of the car as she moved inside with the others.

Guild knew better than to wait and wave.