John Ball - Johnny Get Your Gun

He pulled up and parked near to the emergency entrance of the Huntington Memorial Hospital. As he went inside he noted at once a gangling Negro youth who was waiting in the corridor. He knew that he wanted to talk to this young man, but his first concern was for the patient who had just been brought in. The receptionist nurse, who knew him, quickly shook her head. “You’ll have to wait, Mr. Tibbs,” she told him. “The boy is in critical condition; they’ve taken him into surgery. Even if he pulls through, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to see him tonight. At least I don’t think so.” As she finished speaking she inclined her head, very slightly, toward the teen-ager standing in the hallway.

“Thank you,” he said. “If you get any further word, let me know immediately. Will you, please?”

“Of course-I’ve already asked them to keep me informed.”

In a manner which seemed almost casual Tibbs turned away from the desk, walked down the corridor a short way, and then turned to speak to the obviously tense youth who seemed to be not quite sure where he was. “Did you bring in the boy who was shot?” he asked.

The young man looked slightly down at him from his six foot height and took his time before he answered. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“A friend of yours?” Tibbs asked.

Despite his obvious tension, the young Negro took a studied time before he answered. Then he said simply, “Yeah.”

“It’s a good thing you brought him immediately,” Tibbs told him. “It’s possible that you may have saved his life.”

He was ignored.

This was not a new game, he had encountered it many times before. Pretending he had not noticed, he took his own time before he put his next question. Then he asked, “What happened?”

The Negro youth lifted his shoulders by way of reply and then let them settle back into position.

Once more Tibbs waited, then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a small leather case, opened it, and displayed his badge. He very seldom did that, if he had to offer credentials he preferred a simple calling card. In this instance the badge itself was the proper answer.

“Why didn’t cha tell me?” the tall boy asked.

“I just did.” There was no edge to the words, they came out only as a flat statement. “Who are you?”

The teen-ager shifted his weight. “Charlie Dempsey. They call me Sport.”

“What happened, Sport?”

“Well, we was out drivin’ in my car, doin’ nothin’ much, when we seen this kid. He looked like he was real lost so I stopped. I figured maybe he needed some help.”

“Just like that.”

Again the shoulders rose and fell in a slow movement. “I figured if we took the kid home, we might get a dollar or two for the trouble.”

Tibbs nodded his head slowly as if that explanation had satisfied him. “Did you get out?”

“No, Beater, he got out. Nice and friendly-like he walked up to the kid. When they started talking then we all got out, I did and so did Jeff and Harry. Jus’ got out, that’s all. As soon as we got up near to the kid he called us a bunch o’ niggers.”

“I don’t like that word,” Tibbs said.

For the first time Dempsey looked at him with something like interest in his eyes.

“Well we didn’t like it neither and we tol’ him so. Just nice like. He was only a little kid.”

“Was he wearing a jacket?”

“Yeah?”

“What color?”

“Red.”

“New?”

“Naw, old. His arms was stickin’ out the elbows.”

“What about the gun?”

“Well, all we seen was this paper bag he had. Beater, he asked the kid what was in it and he said his lunch.”

“You didn’t believe that.”

“’Course not. Then all of a sudden the bag falls off, there the kid is standin’ with the gun. First I thought it was a water pistol or somethin’, then the kid he says it’s real.”

“Did you believe him?”

The Negro youth’s voice rose slightly. “Mister, I wasn’t takin’ no chances on that. I started to edge around him so’s I could grab him from the back. Jeff and Harry, they went for the sides. Beater, he stayed where he was in front. With the kid pointin’ the gun at him he didn’t dare go noplace.”

Tibbs glanced down the hall toward the nurse receptionist, but she seemed occupied in working with a form on her desk.

“And then?”

Again the maddening shoulder shrug before the answer came. “The kid, he tried to jerk away, same time he fired the gun and hit Beater right in the guts. The damn little monkey shot him in cold blood.”

“Go on.”

“Well, Beater, he grabbed hisself and went down. Mister, I was too scared to know what I did. I let the kid go; I think he fired again, but I ain’t sure, then he turned and run like hell. We didn’t give no damn for him; we laid Beater out in the car and I brought him here.”

“Where are the others?”

“They went home.”

Tibbs produced his notebook. “Where do you live, Sport?” he asked. Dempsey gave him his address and those of his other two associates.

“Tell me about Beater, what sort of a fellow is he?”

This time there was no preliminary shoulder shrug, instead the boy seemed glad to answer the question. “Beater, he’s got talent, he can do anythin’. Real sharp. He’s a great cat on the skins, as good as they come, s’why we call him Beater. Good in a fight, clean like, good talker. He’s got it all.”

“Good friend of yours?”

“Best I got.”

That sobered Tibbs, knowing what he did about the injured boy’s condition. He flared with inner anger at the senselessness of it all. The loaded gun kept where a child had access to it; the idiotic mistake of grabbing a badly frightened boy from the rear when he was holding a gun and someone was standing directly in front of him.

Guns, dammit, guns! The right to keep and bear arms was given when a raw young country was part of a great, wild, largely unknown continent. In crowded modern cities a loaded gun was as lethal as a pit viper, a machine for killing and nothing else. Killing. First there was Kennedy and the bitter, terrible reality of a presidential assassination. Then Martin Luther King, as a Negro Tibbs could never forget that one. Because King had been more than just a prominent public figure who had been cut down; he had been the whole pride and hope of a long-suffering people, a man whose voice was listened to everywhere-and respected. The manhunt for his killer had been one of the most intensive in all history, but that did not bring King back, or his words, or give back to the Negro people their Nobel Prize winning peacemaker.

Then Robert Kennedy-three bullets from a small.22 had stopped his energy, his intensive drive, erased his victory over Eugene McCarthy, terminated in mid-flight his bid for the Presidency. One man, any man, could do it at any time.

It bit deeply into Tibbs’s being because so many who had fallen had been Negroes, leaders who had offended the Southern white establishment. And among the dead lay the white mailman who had gone to the South to ask for fairness for his fellowmen and who had left his life there.

Because someone had a gun , a gun he could buy as easily as a stick of gum. Now Johnny McGuire was still in the city somewhere, still loose, still frightened, and still armed with a gun with several live bullets nested in its chambers.

For a few seconds Virgil had a hard time controlling himself. He saw before him the face of Mike McGuire, who ruthlessly forced other cars off the road when he was piqued, who in his ignorance considered himself to be a superior being, and who kept a gun to feed his vanity and cover his weaknesses.

In rage and frustration he clamped his teeth and cursed the day he had become a policeman. Then he would not have had to face things like this. But they would still be happening, whether he saw them with his own eyes or not. And until the last bullet was out of Johnny McGuire’s gun, or until he was captured and the weapon was safely taken from him, who knew what could happen.