Chester Himes - All shot up

Sassafras started giggling.

Roman gave her a dirty look as he ran around and climbed in beneath the wheel. He put his pistol and coonskin cap on the seat between them and took off in a hurry. But some sixth sense told him he had a better chance of getting away by driving slowly.

He was driving like a preacher on the way to church when he came to Third Avenue and turned south.

The occupants of the first of the prowl cars coming fast from the north saw the slow-moving Buick just before the prowl car screamed around the corner into 116th Street. They didn’t give it a second thought. They hadn’t seen the driver, and they couldn’t imagine anybody crawling along at that speed in the hottest car east of the Mississippi River.

Roman drove down past 114th Street and parked in front of a mattress factory behind an open-bed truck.

“I got to give this situation some thought,” he said.

Sassafras couldn’t stop giggling. Every time she looked at him it got worse.

“This ain’t no laughing time,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to make me mad.”

“I know it ain’t, sugar,” she admitted, half choking. “But ain’t nobody looking at you in that get-up going to burst out crying.”

“Well, it’s your fault,” he accused. “Taking me to see that stool pigeon-”

“How was I to know he was a stool pigeon,” she flared. “I been there lots of times before with other mens and he ain’t never-” She caught herself.

“I know you has,” he said. “You don’t have to rub it in. I ain’t expected you to get all rusty while I’ve been away. I ain’t no fool.”

She put her arm about his neck and tried to pull his head down to her. “I has been true to you, sugar,” she said. “I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

He pulled his head back. “Listen, baby, this ain’t no time for sweet talk. Here I is, done blowed a whole year’s pay, and you is swearing to bald-face lies on stacks of Bibles.”

“It ain’t no lie,” she said. “If you’d taken the trouble to test it, instead of buying Cadillacs-”

“You wanted the car as much as me.”

“What if I did? That don’t mean I think a Cadillac is the only thing God made.”

“This ain’t no time to argue,” he said. “We has got to do something-and fast. I got a notion we has been awfully lucky so far, but it ain’t going to last forever. The cops is going to catch us in this hot car and then-”

She cut him off. “We could go see a man I know who’s in the automobile business. He might can help us.”

“I done seen all the men in the automobile business I needs to see,” he said. “I has had it. What I’m thinking of doing is see if I can find some of my ship-buddies and get them to help me look for my car.”

“This man I’m talking about could do more good than them,” she contended. “If that big bright Cadillac is anywhere in Harlem, he is more likely to find it than anybody I know of.”

“If all these mens you know-” he began, but she wouldn’t let him finish.

“What mens?”

“This bald-headed pappy passing himself off as a fortune teller-”

Her lips curled. “You ain’t jealous of him, I hope.”

“Well, he damn sure wasn’t no woman.”

“This man ain’t a bit like him.”

“If you think that makes me happy-”

“It ain’t like that,” she said. “I hardly know him. He’s just a business acquaintance.”

“What kind of business?”

But she ignored that. “We can ask him to look around and see what he might find,” she said. “And also we can stay in his house whilst he’s looking. You ain’t got nowhere to stay.”

“I was depending on staying with you the time I wasn’t staying in my car. Is you got some man staying in your room?”

“You make me sick,” she said. “You know can’t no man stay in my room, as respectable as those people is I room with.”

“Well, how is us going to pay this man for staying in his house and searching for our car?” he wanted to know. “I gave Mister Baron my last dollar.”

“We can sell him the tires off this car,” she said, “He’s in the used-tire business.”

“I get it,” he said. “I ain’t as dumb as you think. He’s tire thief.”

“Well, what if he is,” she said. “He’s got to know where cars is at in order to steal their tires. And that’s just who you need, somebody who knows something.”

“Well, all right then, let’s go give him the tires off this car and get started looking. Where is he at?”

“He lives in the Alley. He’s got a big place of his own.”

He started the car and drove down to 112th Street and turned back toward Lexington. Just back of the buildings facing on Third Avenue was a narrow passageway that turned at a right angle and ran between the crosstown streets.

It was a tight squeeze for a big car-there wasn’t space on either side to open the door and get out-and he had to back up three times to turn the corner.

“I’d hate to get caught in here,” he said. “Ain’t no way to go but up.”

The Alley was flanked by rows of two-story brick buildings, in varying degrees of decay, that had once been carriage-houses for the residents of 112th and 111th Streets. Now families lived on the second floors that had been servants quarters, and the carriage stalls were filled with long-forgotten junk, in which rats bred and children played and little girls lost their maidenheads.

“It’s here,” she said, indicating a rotten wooden carriage-house door spotted with patches of rusty tin. “Let me see if he’s in.”

The door was fastened by iron bars bolted to the rotten wood and a brass lock the size of a hitching block.

He stopped the car, and she got out and peered through a spyhole beside the lock.

“He ain’t in,” she said. “His motorcycle ain’t here.”

“What’s us going to do?” he said.

“Let me think,” she said, putting the tips of her mittened fingers to a dusty gray cheek and looking absent. “Oh!” she said brightly. “That reminds me. He gave me a key to the door.”

She started digging in her handbag.

“What’s he doing giving you a key to his door?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s for his girl friend,” she said lightly. “She and I is pals. And he said if she come by and he was out for me to let her in.”

To the right of the carriage-house doors was a small door that opened on to a staircase leading to the quarters above. She inserted a key in the Yale lock and said, “There! Now we can just go inside and wait for him.”

“You know this man mighty well,” he said.

“His girl friend and me is just like that,” she said, holding up a hand with the thumb pressed tightly to the first mittened finger. “I’ll just run up and get the key to the big lock so you can put the car inside where won’t nobody see it.”

“If I likes this, I likes oats in my ice cream,” he said. “And I ain’t no mule.”

But she didn’t wait to hear him. She ran up, got the key and opened the big doors, and he maneuvered the car into a dark, damp room with bare beams and a flagstoned floor smelling of tire rubber and earth mold. Hanging to toolboards on the walls were the various equipment for changing and repairing tires, but no tires were in sight.

He got out, grumbling to himself. She closed and locked the gate, switching about with a bright, excited insouciance, as though her pants were crawling with seventeen thousand queen ants.

“Now we’ll just go upstairs and wait,” she said, moving as though all the ants were biting her lightly.

The upstairs was one room. There were sets of windows at both back and front, the panes covered with oiled brown paper. In the center, on one side, was a coal-burning, pot-bellied stove. The nearest corner was filled by a double bed with a chipped, white-enameled iron frame. The opposite corner was curtained off for a clothes closet. On the other side of the stove was a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top, on which sat a two-burner gas plate. A square table with dirty dishes occupied the center of the floor. Before the inside windows was a third table with a cracked white porcelain washbowl and pitcher. Water was supplied by a hose coming from a single tap at the level of the baseboards. The toilet was outside, behind the carriage house. The only covering for the bare wooden floor was a variety of men’s garments.