Chester Himes - The crazy kill

"Well, brandy and soda then. You know good and well that ice-cold drinks give me indigestion."

"I'll have iced tea," the attorney said.

"You get that from the waitress," Pee Wee said.

"Gin and tonic for me," Alamena said.

The waitress came with the silver, glasses and napkins, and Alamena gave the attorney the menu.

He started to grin as he read the list of dinners:

Today's Special — Alligator tail amp; rice

Baked Ham — sweet potatoes amp; succotash

Chitterlings amp; collard greens amp; okra

Chicken and drop dumplings — with rice or sweet potatoes

Barbecued ribs

Pig's feet a la mode

Neck bones and lye hominy

(Choice of hot biscuits or corn bread)

SIDE DISHES

Collard greens — okra — black-eyed peas amp; rice — corn on the cob — succotash — sliced tomatoes and cucumbers

DESSERTS

Homemade ice cream — deep-dish sweet potatoe pie — peach cobbler — watermelon — blackberry pie

BEVERAGES

Iced tea — buttermilk — sassafras-root tea — coffee

But he looked up and saw the solemn expressions on the faces of the others and broke off.

"I haven't had breakfast as yet," he said, then to the waitress, "Can I have an order of brains and eggs, with biscuits?"

"Yes, sir."

"I want some fried oysters," Dulcy said.

"We ain't got no oysters. It ain't the month for 'em." She gave Dulcy a sly, sidewise look.

"Then I'll take the chicken and dumplings, but I don't want nothing but the legs," Dulcy said haughtily.

"Yes'm."

"Baked ham for me," Alamena said.

"Yes'm." She looked at Johnny with calf-eyed love. "The same as always, Mr. Johnny?"

He nodded. Johnny's breakfast, which never varied, consisted of a heaping plate of rice, four thick slices of fried salt pork, the fat poured over the rice, and a pitcher of blackstrap sorghum molasses to pour over that. With this came a plate of eight Southern-style biscuits an inch and a half thick.

He ate noisily without talk. Dulcy had drunk three brandy-and-sodas and said she wasn't hungry.

Johnny stopped eating long enough to say, "Eat anyway."

She picked at her food, watching the faces of the other diners, trying to catch snatches of their conversation.

Two people got up from a far table. The waitress went over to clear their places. Chink walked in with Doll Baby.

She had changed into a fresh pink linen backless dress, and wore huge black-tinted sun glasses with pink frames.

Dulcy stared at her with liquid venom. Johnny drank two glasses of ice-cold lemonade.

The room filled with silence.

Dulcy stood up suddenly.

"Where you going?" Johnny asked.

"I want to play a record," she said defiantly. "Do you have any objections?"

"Sit down," he said tonelessly. "And don't be so mother-raping cute."

She sat down and bit off another fingernail. Alamena fingered her throat and looked down at her plate.

"Tell the waitress," she said. "She'll play it."

"I was going to play that platter of Jelly Roll Morton's, I Want A Little Girl To Call My Own."

Johnny raised his face and looked at her. Rage started leaping in his eyes.

She picked up her drink to hide her face, but her hand trembled so she spilled some on her dress.

Across the room Doll Baby said in a loud voice, "After all, Val was my fiance."

Dulcy stiffened with fury. "You're a lying bitch!" she yelled back.

Johnny gave her a dangerous look.

"And if the truth be known, he was just knifed to keep me from having him," Dolly Baby said.

"He'd already had a bellyful of you," Dulcy said.

Johnny slapped her out of her seat. She spun into the corner of the wall and crumpled to the floor.

Doll Baby let out a high shrill laugh.

Johnny spun his chair about on its hind legs.

"Keep the bitch quiet," he said.

Fats waddled over and put his bloated hand on Johnny's shoulder.

Pee Wee came from behind the bar and stood in the entrance.

Silently, Dulcy got back into her chair.

"Keep her quiet your God-damned self," Chink said.

Johnny stood up. Chairs scraped as everybody moved away from Chink's table. Doll Baby jumped up and ran into the kitchen. Pee Wee moved toward Johnny.

"Easy, pops," Pee Wee said.

Fats waddled quickly over to Chink's table and said, "Get her out. And don't you never come in here no more neither. Taking advantage of me like that."

Chink stood up, his yellow face flushed and swollen. Doll Baby came from the kitchen and joined him. As he left, walking high-shouldered and stiff-kneed, he said to Johnny, "I'll see you, big shot."

"See me now," Johnny said tonelessly, starting after him.

The scar on his forehead had swollen and come alive.

Pee Wee blocked his path.

"That nigger ain't worth killing, pops."

Fats gave Chink a push in the back.

"Punk, you're lucky, lucky, lucky," he wheezed. "Git going before your luck runs out."

Johnny looked at his watch, giving Chink no more attention.

"We gotta go, the funeral's already started," he said.

"We all is coming," Fats said. "But you go on ahead 'cause you is the number two mourner."

Heat shimmered from the big black shiny Cadillac hearse parked before the door to the store-front church of the Holy Rollers at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 143rd Street. A skinny little black boy with big white shining eyes touched the red hot fender and snatched back his hand.

The black painted windows of what had been a super market before the Holly Rollers took it over reflected distorted images of the three black Cadillac limousines, and of the big flashy cars strung out behind the big cocky hearse like a line of laying hens.

People of many colors, clad in garb of all descriptions, their burr heads covered with straw hats of every shape, crowded about for a glimpse of the Harlem underworld celebrities attending Big Joe Pullen's funeral. Black ladies carried bright-colored parasols and wore green eyeshades to protect them from the sun.

These people ate cool slices of watermelon, spit out the black seeds and sweated in the vertical rays of the July sun. They drank quart bottles of beer and wine, and smaller bottles of pop and cola, from the flyspecked grocery stores nearby. They sucked chocolate-coated icecream bars from the refrigerated pushcart of the Good Humor man. They chewed succulent sections of barbecued pork-rib sandwiches, cast the polished bones to the friendly dogs and cats and the bread crusts to the flocks of molting Harlem sparrows.

Trash blew from the dirty street against their sweaty skin and into their gritty eyes.

The jumble of loud voices, strident laughter and the tinkle of the vendor's bells mingled with the sounds of mourning coming from the open church door and the loud summer thunder of automobiles passing in the street.

A picnic had never been better.

Sweating horse cops astride lathered horses, harness bulls with open collars and patrol cars with rolled-down windows rode herd.

When Johnny backed his big fishtail Cadillac into a reserved spot and climbed out behind Dulcy and Alamena, a murmur ran through the crowd and his name sprang from every lip.

Inside the church was like an airless oven. The crude wooden benches were jam-packed with friends who had come to bury Big Joe-gamblers, pimps, whores, chippies, madams, dining-car waiters and Holy Rollers-but were being cooked instead.

With his two women, Johnny pushed forward toward the mourners' bench. They found places beside Mamie Pullen, Baby Sis, and the pallbearers-who included a white dining-car steward; the Grand Wizard of Big Joe's lodge, dressed in the most impressive red-and-blue, goldbraided uniform ever seen on land or sea; a gray-haired, flat-footed waiter known as Uncle Gin; and two Holy Roller Deacons.