Chester Himes - The big gold dream

The man kicked at the gun with his left foot at the same time that he swung the hammer again with his right hand. The Jew had pressed the switch, and the light came on the instant the hammer smashed the reflector. It was as though a bolt of lightning had struck once, almost at the moment of the thunder, making the darkness blacker. The flashlight sailed from the Jew's hand and rolled across the yard. His hand and forearm were filled with pins and needles up to his elbow.

The Jew was blinded. Both arms were useless. But he kicked out viciously and caught his assailant on the shin. Grunting with pain, the assailant doubled over. The hammer blow aimed at the Jew's head struck him in the ribs. The sound of a breaking rib came like a drum beat from under water. The Jew tried to scream but didn't have the breath. His assailant swung backhanded from a one-footed stance. The blow caught the Jew over the right ear with the sound of a butcher cleaving a marrow bone. The Jew's tightly stretched mouth went instantly slack; his taut muscles went limp. He fell in a flabby heap.

The assailant bent over and rained blows on the prostrate figure. For a time there was only the rising and the falling of the hammer, the soft meaty sounds as it landed on the Jew's face and head.

Then suddenly it stopped.

The assailant dropped the hammer to the pavement, sat down and put his face in his hands. Inhuman sounds spewed from his mouth. He sounded as though he were crying with uncontrollable terror.

Suddenly the crying stopped.

The assailant rose to a squatting position and snapped on a cigarette lighter. In the flickering light the Jew appeared to be a bundle of bloody rags. The light snapped off quickly.

Quickly, in the dark, the assailant searched the Jew's body. He found nothing, no money, no wallet, no papers.

He had to go inside. His body shaking with terror, he couldn't find the switch. By aid of his cigarette lighter, he descended the stairs. Suddenly a stair squeaked beneath his weight. The cigarette lighter fell from nerveless fingers, and he had to grope for it in the darkness. His breath made a wheezing sound. Finally he found the lighter. It didn't work immediately. He groped his way to the bottom of the stairs and tried the lighter again. It burned, but the flame was more feeble than before.

Time was running out.

For a moment he stood in the door and looked over the room. Objects were barely discernible in the dim flickering light, but he made out the workbench where the Jew had last been seen standing. He crossed to it, put the lighter down and began snatching open drawers. He found it where the Jew had put it.

He held the oiled silk pouch in his hand as though it were as fragile as hope of heaven. His body was bent forward. His eyes were focused. His face held an expression of savage greed.

One hundred grand, he thought.

Suddenly he heard the loose stair creak.

His head was gripped in a vise of ice. It was the dead Jew coming for his money. Instinctively he whirled about, snatching up a wood chisel for a weapon. Only his stifled breathing was audible, but he could sense a presence on the stairs.

He put the pouch into his hip pocket and buttoned the flap, then snapped on his lighter, held it in one hand and the chisel in the other and tiptoed cautiously toward the door.

As he reached the door, he heard feet clatter down the stairs. His body collided with another. In the black dark neither could see. He stabbed out with his chisel and heard a sharp cry of pain. At the same time he felt the cool, quick, almost painless slash of a knife across his cheek. Theirs was a brief but furious struggle. He stabbed out crazily, pumping the chisel with an insensate fury. He could feel the difference when it chopped into the wall and when he made contact with cloth and flesh. He couldn't see the knife, but he knew it stabbed the air about him. He felt it enter his flesh countless times. He felt no pain, but he was crazed with terror.

On both sides there were unintelligible grunts-no more. No words were spoken. No curses uttered. Two bodies weaved and ducked and stabbed blindly in the utter darkness. Then the first one broke free and ran.

He thought he was running toward the stairs until he banged into a solid object in the dark. He bounced off, tripped over something else and fell full length onto something that felt like bed springs. He could hear the other in furious pursuit, banging into furniture and grunting like an animal.

The springs seemed to have wrapped themselves about his legs. He fought them off as though they had hands, kicking and stomping. Other objects rose from the dark and struck him in all conceivable places. Something hooked into his ear and tore the lobe. Something else chopped him squarely in the mouth. Objects clutched his ankles. It was as though the broken and dilapidated furniture had taken on life to torture him like a mob of lynchers. His pursuer was undergoing the same torture but that was no consolation.

By the time he had made a tour of the basement storeroom, he had been battered unmercifully. His breath came in sobs. He still clung to the chisel, but he scarcely had the strength to use it. Finally he encountered the stairs. He dragged himself up. He could hear his unseen assailant furiously fighting the treacherous furniture and grunting unintelligible curses in the dark.

He came out in the dark courtyard sucking for breath. His mouth ballooned with vomit, and his teeth bit together. He found the body of the dead Jew where he had left it. He felt a crazy impulse to scream at the top of his voice. He knew he was bleeding from many stab wounds, but he couldn't feel them.

The sudden silence below alerted him again. He heard the loose stair squeak loudly as a foot leaped upon it. He ran toward the shed.

The motor of the moving van was still running as he had left it. Without a loss of motion he leaped into the driver's seat. He put the big old van into reverse, raced the motor and released the clutch. It backed into the gate like a battering ram. The gate broke from its hinges and sailed across the sidewalk into the middle of Third Avenue. The truck followed.

He pulled the emergency brake from force of habit and was running before he hit the ground.

Morningside Park is one of those rocky jungles on the uninhabitable eastern edge of the stone ridge forming the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. For the most part it is overgrown with dense foliage and interlaced with steep winding stairways, upon which none but the simple-minded dare to venture after dark.

Shortly after midnight, patrol cars converged on that area of the park near the bench where Sugar had met Rufus that afternoon.

There had been an anonymous report to the precinct station that a man was heard screaming there.

But by the time the first of the patrol cars arrived, the screaming had ceased. Drops of dark blood led from a flashy green sedan parked at the curb. There were blood splotches on the back of the driver's seat and on the steering wheel. The drops grew into heavy blobs on the sidewalk leading toward the darkness of a public lavatory and the black-dark jungle of the park beyond. The lavatory was closed and locked for the night, and the trail of blood led around it into the overgrown foliage. Police flashlights stabbed the pools of darkness in the dense undergrowth.

The usual Harlem crowd had collected on the sidewalk and the street, and the cops had difficulty keeping them back.

"Here it is!" a cop announced.

It was curled deep within a clump of shrubbery where it had crawled to hide.

"Stand back! Get back!" a police corporal ordered.

"I know him; I knows that man," a big black man in working clothes said excitedly. "He be George Clayborne."

"And who be you?" the corporal asked.