Chester Himes - All shot up

Big Six opened the window and said, “Push off, mother-raper. Quit pissing on this car.”

The drunk turned and peered at him through bloodshot black eyes. “I’ll piss on you, black boy,” he muttered in a Southern voice.

“I’m gonna see you do it,” Big Six said, stuck the toothpick in his change pocket and opened the door.

“Let him go on,” George Drake said. “Here comes Jackson down the stairs.”

“I’m gonna flatten him is all,” Big Six said. “Ain’t gonna take a second.”

In the right side mirror, George noticed two colored men coming from beside the house in front of which he was parked. They were carrying battered Gladstone bags like pullman porters on their way to work. They started across the street. The back window of the Cadillac was coated with snow, and he lost them in the rear-view mirror.

“Hurry up, man!” he called just as Big Six reached out a hand to clutch the drunk by the shoulder.

The drunk swung a long arc with his right hand, which he had held out of sight, and plunged the blade of a hunting knife through Big Six’s head. It went in above the left temple, and two inches of the point came out on a direct line above the right temple. Big Six went deaf, dumb and blind, but not unconscious. He teetered slightly and groped about aimlessly like an old blind man.

“Gooooodammmmm!” George Drake said, pushing open the door with his left hand, while reaching inside of his coat for his pistol with his right.

He had his left foot down on the street, buried in the snow, and his left hand gripping the edge of the door for leverage, when a noose was dropped over his head and he was jerked backward. A knee caught him in the back, and he felt as though his spine was broken. His hat fell off. The sap landed right above his left ear, and lights exploded in his head as he lost consciousness.

“Put him in the back,” the white man said from the other side, of the car. “And put the kiesters in the trunk.”

He turned his head, gave a last look at Big Six and forgot him.

Big Six was walking slowly down the sidewalk, dragging his feet in the snow. The wound bled scarcely any; a thin trickle ran down his cheek from where the point of the knife protruded. His eyes were open; his hat was on his head. But for the bone knife-handle sticking from one temple and two inches of blade from the other, he looked like the usual drunk. He was calling silently for George to help him.

The white man got into the back of the car and took hold of the end of the noose. One of the colored men got behind the wheel; the other was at the back, putting away the Gladstone bags.

A shining black hearse backed carefully from the garage beside the funeral parlor. It straightened up and pulled to the curb. A fat black man in a dark chauffeur’s uniform got out and closed the garage door. He looked across the street toward the Cadillac.

“Blink your lights once,” the white man said from the rear.

The driver hit the bright lights for an instant.

Jackson waved his right hand and got into the hearse.

The snowplows hadn’t got into the small side streets, and the hearse made slow progress until it came to Seventh Avenue. The Cadillac followed half a block behind with the lights dimmed.

The white man turned George Drake over on the floor, placed one foot on his back between the shoulder blades, the other on the back of his head, and drew the noose as tight as it would go. He kept it like that while the Cadillac followed down the cleaned traffic lane of Seventh Avenue and turned into 125th Street.

Scores of colored laborers, willing to pick up a few extra bucks on their off day, were shoveling the piles of snow into city dump trucks.

Cars were out again in the cleaned streets, and gay, laughing drunks were bar-hopping. Jokers were chunking tight, loose snowballs at their girl friends, who ran screaming in delight. A mail truck passed, emptying the boxes.

Big Six kept shuffling slowly toward Seventh Avenue with the knife stuck through his head. He passed a young couple. The woman gasped and turned ashy.

“It’s a joke,” the man said knowingly. “You can buy those things in the toy stores. Magical stuff. You stick ’em on each side of your head.”

The woman shuddered. “It ain’t funny,” she said. “A big grown man like him playing with kid stuff.”

He passed a woman with two children, on their way to the movies to see a horror film. The children shrieked. The woman was indignant.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, frightening little children,” she accused.

Big Six kept on slowly, lost to the world. “George!” he was calling silently in the rational part of his mind. “George. The mother-raper stuck me.”

He started across Seventh Avenue. Snow was banked against the curb, and his feet plowed into the snow bank. He slipped but somehow managed not to fall. He got into the traffic lane. He stepped in front of a fast-moving car. Brakes shrieked.

“Drunken idiot!” the driver cried. Then he saw the knife sticking from Big Six’s head.

He jumped from his car, ran forward and took Big Six gently by the arm.

“My God in heaven,” he said.

He was a young colored doctor doing his internship in Brooklyn hospital. They had had a case similar to that a year ago; the other victim had been a colored man, also. The only way to save him was to leave the knife in the wound.

A woman started to get out of the car.

“Dick, can I help?” She had only seen the handle of the knife. She hadn’t seen the blade coming out the other side.

“No-no, don’t come near,” he cautioned. “Drive to the first bar and telephone for an ambulance-better cross over to Small’s; make a U-turn.”

As she drove off, another car with two men stopped. “Need any help?” the driver called.

“Yeah, help me lay this man on the sidewalk. He’s got a knife stuck through his head.”

“Jumping Jesus!” the second occupant exclaimed, opening the far door to get out. “They think of new ways every day.”

Cars were double-parked on Lexington Avenue in front of the hospital, and a large crowd of people milled about on the slushy sidewalks. Photographers and newsmen guarded the front door and the ambulance driveway looking sharply at everyone who left. Somehow word had got out that Casper Holmes was leaving the hospital, and they were determined he wouldn’t get past.

Two prowl cars were parked across the street; uniformed cops stood about, beating their gloved hands together.

The heavy snow drifted down, leaving a mantle of white on hats and overcoats and umbrellas.

When the hearse drew up the cops cleared the entrance to the driveway.

A reporter opened the door of the driver’s compartment and flashed a light into Jackson’s face.

“It’s just the chauffeur,” he called over his shoulder to his colleagues; then he asked, “Who are you taking, Jack?”

“The late Mister Clefus Harper, a pneumonia victim,” Jackson replied with a straight face.

“Anybody know a Clefus Harper?” the reporter asked.

No one knew him.

“Don’t let me hold you up, Jack,” he said.

The hearse purred slowly down the driveway toward the back exit.

“Keep on going,” the white man in the rear of the Cadillac limousine said. “They’re going to take a little time to get him out, and we got to get rid of this stiff.”

The driver stepped it up, went past the double-parked cars and crossed 121st Street.

“Is he dead?” his companion asked.

“He ain’t alive,” the white man said as he bent over and began removing the noose from George Drake’s neck.

When he had finished he began emptying all of Drake’s pockets.

“Where we going to dump him?” the driver asked, as they approached 119th Street.