Chester Himes - All shot up

The white man looked about. He was not very familiar with Harlem.

“Turn down this street,” he said. “It looks all right.” The big car floundered in inches of snow.

“Can you get through to Third Avenue?” the white man asked.

“Sure,” the driver said confidently. “A little snow like this won’t stop a Cadillac.”

The white man looked, up and down the street. There was no one in sight. He opened the curb-side door.

“Pull in a little,” he said.

The driver brushed the curb.

The white man rolled the body of George Drake out into the deep snow on the sidewalk. He closed the door and looked back once. The body looked like that of a fallen drunk, only there were no footsteps.

“Step it up,” he said.

Jackson pulled up before the back door of the hospital from which the dead were removed. He was no stranger there.

He got out, went around, opened the back of the hearse and began dragging out a long wicker basket. Two grinning colored attendants came from within the hospital and took the wicker basket inside with them.

Jackson got back into the driver’s seat and waited. He listened to an argument going on inside.

“You can’t come back here and poke your nose into these dead baskets,” an indignant voice was saying.

“Why not,” a laconic voice replied. “It’s a city hospital, ain’t it?”

“I’ll get the supervisor,” the first voice threatened.

“All right, I’ll go,” the laconic voice acceded. “I wasn’t looking for anyone; I was just curious as to how many people die in this joint during an average day.”

“More than you think,” the first voice said.

Eight minutes passed before the attendants reappeared, staggering beneath the weight of the loaded wicker basket. The lid was sealed with a metal clamp, to which was attached a name-card in a metal frame:

CLEFUS HARPER-male Negro

FOR: H. Exodus Clay Funeral Parlor

134th Street

They slid the basket into the coffin compartment and started to shut the doors.

“Let me do it,” Jackson said.

The attendants grinned and re-entered the hospital.

“Where you want to go, Mister Holmes?” Jackson asked in a stage whisper.

“We’re alone?” Casper asked in a low voice from within the basket.

“Yes, sir.”

“Joe Green’s boys are following in the Cadillac?”

“Yes, sir, they’s waiting outside in the street.”

“No one knows they’re tailing us?”

“No, sir, not as far as I know of. They’s keeping about a half a block behind.”

“Okay. Then drive me to my office on 125th Street. You know where that is?”

“Yes, sir, up over the Paris Bar.”

“Double-park somewhere close,” Casper instructed. “Then get out and come back and open the basket. Then stand there as if you’re doing something and watch the street. When it’s safe for me to get out without being seen, give me the word. You got that?”

“Yessir.”

“All right, let’s go.”

Jackson closed the back door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. The hearse purred slowly up the driveway.

Before reaching the street it was stopped again by newspaper reporters. They looked at the name tag on the basket. One of them made a note of it. The others didn’t bother.

The hearse turned toward 125th Street. Half a block distant it passed Joe Green’s black Cadillac limousine. Jackson glanced at the Cadillac. It looked unoccupied He began to worry. He drove slowly, watching it in his right-side fender mirror. When he had gone another half block, the Cadillac’s bright lights blinked once and went off. He was relieved. He blinked his own lights in reply and kept driving slowly until he had made the turn into 125th Street and saw the black Cadillac make the turn half a block behind him.

He crossed Park, Madison, Lenox, keeping to the right, letting the fast traffic pass him.

At Seventh Avenue he waited for a snowplow to pass, pulled around a dump truck, parked in front of the clock, that was being loaded by a gang of well-liquored men. They stopped and watched the hearse cross the avenue.

“Somebody going by way of H. Clay,” one of them remarked.

“Don’t ask who it is,” another replied. “It might be your mammy.”

“Don’t I know it,” the first one replied.

A Cadillac limousine pulled around the truck in the wake of the hearse and carefully crossed the avenue.

“That’s Joe Green’s big Cat,” a third laborer stated.

“Warn’t his men in it,” another replied.

“How you know? You running Joe’s business?”

“Most generally he got George Drake driving and Big Six sitting in the front.”

“Warn’t Joe in the back, neither.”

“Come on, you sports, and bend your backs,” the truck driver said. “You ain’t getting paid to second-guess Joe Green.”

The hearse double-parked beside a Ford station wagon in front of the drugstore adjacent to the Paris Bar. The drugstore was open for business, and a few customers were moving about inside. The Paris Bar seemed crowded as usual. Its plate-glass windows were steamed over, and from within came the muted sound of a jump tune issuing from the juke box.

The Cadillac double-parked at the corner in front of the United Cigar Store.

Jackson got out on the driver’s side, came around the front of the hearse and looked up and down the street. A couple of men issued from the Paris Bar, glanced at the hearse and went the other way.

Jackson went to the back, opened the doors and cut the metal seal on the wicker basket with his pocket-knife.

Casper lay in the basket, fully dressed except for a hat. He wore the same dark clothes he had worn into the hospital. A soft black hat with the crown crushed in lay atop his stomach.

“Want me to help you up?” Jackson asked in a whisper.

“I can get up,” Casper said roughly. “Close the doors and watch the street.”

Jackson left the doors slightly ajar and looked one way and the other and then across the street. Cars passed in the street, a bus went by; people came and went along the sidewalks, trampling the deep snow into slush.

“Where’s Joe’s car parked?” Casper asked from the crack between the doors.

Jackson jumped. He wasn’t used to people talking to him from the back of the hearse. He looked down the street and said, “In front of the Cigar Store.”

“When you leave, give ’em a blink,” Casper instructed. “How is it now?”

For a moment there was no one nearby; no one seemed to be looking in that direction.

“All right, if you come fast,” Jackson said.

Casper came fast. He was down on the street in one jump, the black hat pulled low over his silver white hair. He cleared the back end of the station wagon in two strides, leaped over the snow banked along the curb, slipped in the slush but caught himself, and the next instant was close to the doorway of the stairs leading to his offices above. His back was to the street as he inserted the key in the lock; no one had noticed him jump from the hearse; no one had recognized him; no one was paying him the least bit of attention. He got the door open and went inside, turned once and glanced at Jackson through the upper glass panel, signaled him to go on.

Jackson got back into the driver’s seat, blinked his bright lights and looked into the rear-view mirror.

The Cadillac’s bright lights blinked in reply.

The hearse drove slowly away.

The Cadillac pulled up and double-parked in the same position beside the station wagon.

“What you going to do with this heap?” the driver asked.

“Leave it right here, with the motor running,” the white man said. “If Joe Green’s a big shot, which he’s gotta be, ain’t nobody going to bother with it.”