Chester Himes - All shot up

This threw the motorcycle rider off his timing. He had planned to cut quickly between the two trucks and shoot ahead before the inside truck drew level with the truck it was passing. When he got them behind him the two tracks would block off the street, and he would make his getaway.

He was pulling up fast behind the car carrying sheet metal when the tire burst and the driver tamped his brakes. He wheeled sharply to the left, but not quickly enough.

The three thin sheets of stainless steel, six feet in width, with red flags flying from both corners, formed a blade less than a quarter of an inch thick. This blade caught the rider above his woolen-lined jacket, on the exposed part of his neck, which was stretched and taut from his physical exertion, as the motorcycle went underneath. He was hitting more than fifty-five miles an hour, and the blade severed his head from his body as though he had been guillotined.

His head rolled halfway up the sheets of metal while his body kept astride the seat and his hands gripped the handlebars. A stream of blood spurted from his severed jugular, but his body completed the maneuver which his head had ordered and went past the truck as planned.

The truck driver glanced from his window to watch the passing truck as he kept braking to a stop. But instead he saw a man without a head passing on a motorcycle with a sidecar and a stream of steaming red blood lowing back in the wind.

He gasped and passed out.

His lax feet released the pressure from the brake and clutch, and the truck kept on ahead.

The motorcycle, ridden by a man without a head, surged forward at a rapid clip.

The driver of the refrigerator truck that was passing the open truck didn’t believe what he saw. He switched on his bright lights, caught the headless motorcycle rider in their beam and quickly switched them off. He blinked his eyelids. It was the first time he had ever gone to sleep while driving, he thought; and my God, what a nightmare! He switched the lights back on, and there it still was. Man or hallucination, he was getting the hell away from there. He began flashing his blinkers as though he had gone crazy; he mashed the horn and stood on the throttle and looked to the other side.

The truck carrying the sheet metal turned gradually to the right from faulty steering mechanism. It climbed over the shallow curb and started up the wide stone step of a big fashionable Negro church.

In the lighted box out in front of the church was the announcement of the sermon for the day.

Beware! Death is closer than you think!

The head rolled off the slow-moving truck, dropped to the sidewalk and rolled out into the street. Grave Digger, closing up fast, saw something that looked like a football with a cap on it bouncing on the black asphalt. It was caught in his one bright light, but the top was turned to him when he saw it, and he didn’t recognize what it was. “What did he throw out?” he asked Coffin Ed. Coffin Ed was staring as though petrified. He gulped. “His head,” he said.

Grave Digger’s muscles jerked spasmodically. He hit the brake automatically.

A truck had closed in from behind unnoticed, and it couldn’t stop in time. It smacked the little sedan gently, but that was enough. Grave Digger sailed forward; the bottom rim of the steering wheel caught him in the solar plexus and snapped his head down; his mouth hit the top rim of the steering wheel, and he mashed his lips and chipped two front teeth.

Coffin Ed went headfirst into the safety-glass windshield and battered out a hole. But his hard head saved him from serious injury.

“Goddam,” Grave Digger lisped, straightening up and spitting out chipped enamel. “I’d have been better off with the Asiatic flu.”

“God knows, Digger, I would have, too,” Coffin Ed said.

Gradually the taut headless body on the motorcycle spewed out its blood and the muscles went limp. The motorcycle began to waver; it went to one side and then the other, crossed 125th Street, just missing a taxi, neatly circled around the big clock atop a post at the corner and crashed into the iron-barred door of the credit jewelry store, knocking down a sign that read:

We Will Give Credit to the Dead

Roman got up and fastened his belt.

“When is this joker coming?” He was all for business now.

Sassafras stood up and shook down her skirts. Her face was sweaty, and her eyes looked sleepy. Her dress was stretched out of shape.

“He ought to be here any time,” she said, but she sounded as though she didn’t care if he never came.

Roman began looking worried again. “You’re sure this joker can help us? I’ve got a notion we’re up against some rough studs, and I don’t want nobody messing around who’s going to get rattled.”

Sassafras ran a greasy bone comb through her short, tousled hair. “Don’t worry ’bout him,” she said. “He ain’t going to lose his head.”

“This waiting around is dragging me,” he said. “I wish we could do something.”

“You call what we been doing nothing?” she said coyly.

“I mean about my car,” he said. “It’s going to soon be daylight and ain’t nobody doing nothing.”

She went over, put some coal on the fire and adjusted the damper. Her dress was pulled out of shape and hung one-sided.

“I’m going to see if he got any whisky left,” she said, rummaging about the shoes on the floor of the curtained-off clothes corner.

He followed her and saw a green dress hanging with the men’s clothes.

“This looks like your dress,” he said suspiciously.

“Don’t start that stuff again,” she said. “You think they only made one dress when they made mine. Besides which, his girl friend is about the same size as me.”

“You’re sure she ain’t wearing the same skin?” he said.

She ignored him. Finally she came up with a bottle of cheap blended whisky, three-quarters full.

“Here, drink this and shut up,” she said, thrusting the bottle into his hands.

He uncorked it and let whisky gurgle down his throat. “It ain’t bad, but it’s mighty weak,” he appraised.

“How you going to know bad whisky?” she said scornfully. “You’re been drinking white mule all your life.”

He took another drink, bringing the level down below half. “Baby, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse off his hoof and leave the skeleton still hitched to the plow,” he said, flexing his muscles. “Why don’t you see if your girl friend’s boy friend has got anything to eat in this joint.”

“If I found something, it’d just make you more suspicious,” she said.

“Anyhow, it’d fill my belly.”

She found some salt meat, a half loaf of white bread in wax-paper wrapping and a bottle of molasses in the bottom drawer. Then she opened a back window and delved into a screened cold-box attached to the sill; she found a pot half-filled with congealed hominy grits and a frozen can of sliced California peaches.

“I don’t see no coffee,” she said.

“Who wants coffee?” he said, taking another swig from the bottle.

Shortly the room was filled with the delicious-smelling smoke of fried fat meat. She sliced the gelatinous hominy and browned it in the hot fat. He opened the can with his pocket knife but the contents were frozen solid, so he put the can on top of the stove.

She couldn’t find but one clean plate, so she used one slightly soiled. She polished a couple of forks with a dry cloth.

He filled his plate with fried hominy, covered it with fried meat and doused it with molasses. He stuffed his mouth full of dry bread, then packed meat, hominy and molasses on top of it.

She looked at him with disgust. “You can get the boy out the country, but you can’t get the country out the boy,” she philosophized, eating her meat daintily along with bites of bread and holding her fried hominy between the first finger and thumb, according to etiquette.