Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

I opened my eyes and rose carefully. The room was a mess and William Morze huddled in the remains of the green chair, whimpering, a blinded mass of black flesh that was covered with strips of torn yellow silk and patches of dark red blood. Nick Jones writhed on the floor and screamed once more. I bent down and saw that the left leg of his fawn slacks was soaked with blood just below the knee. I ripped the slacks open and looked at his calf. It was bleeding all right, but it wasn’t serious. I tapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll live,” I said.

“It feels like the goddamned thing is gone,” he said and managed to sit up. I turned and looked at the opposite end of the room. Necessary was already on the phone, talking into it from around one of his Camels. He hung up and moved toward us.

Suddenly the room seemed full of tall, broad-shouldered blacks who poured into the living room from the rear of the house. Some of them held revolvers. They advanced on me threateningly until Jones waved them away. He sat on the torn and shredded divan and stared at his bleeding leg. Then he looked up at the blacks and said, “One of you motherfuckers go see if the bathroom’s got anything to bandage this with.” A chunky tan man hurried away and then they all began talking at once.

Necessary was bending over Morze. When he got up, he shook his head. “Dead?” Jones asked.

“He’s alive, but I think he’s blind,” Necessary said. “If the ambulance ever gets here, they might keep him alive. Maybe. He’s a mess.” He turned to me. “You all right?”

“I’m okay.”

Morze was whimpering again in the remains of the green chair. Jones stared at him. “He was a very good old man,” he said softly. The six or seven Negroes were quiet now, looking at Morze with a kind of horrified fascination. The chunky tan man returned with a roll of gauze and knelt down by Jones and started to bandage his bleeding calf. He wasn’t very good at first aid.

Necessary drew close to me. “You saw them,” he said.

“Just two cars. Two Fords. That’s all I saw.”

“You couldn’t tell who it was.” Necessary wasn’t asking questions; he was merely stating the facts as he understood them.

“They were too far away,” I said.

Necessary nodded and then looked at me with his brown and blue eyes. “Thanks for—” He never did finish thanking me for whatever favor he thought I’d done him, probably the hard shove that had sent him reeling down the living room, because the siren screamed outside. We looked through the shattered window and it was Sergeant Krone and the Imperial. Krone was out of the car now and running toward the house, his .38 revolver drawn. He kept swinging the revolver from left to right and back again and the crowd of blacks opened and then closed behind him. There must have been five hundred of them and they stared at Krone and at the house and at its shattered window.

“Where the Christ did they come from?” Necessary asked.

One of the blacks opened the door for Krone and he bounded through, waving his .38 around. “Will you put that goddamned thing away,” Necessary snapped. Krone gazed around wildly before he put the revolver back in its holster.

“What happened?” he asked. “They called me on the radio with an OIT here.”

“Well, they were right,” Necessary said. “An officer was in trouble, but he’s not now so you can take all these people into the rear of the house and get their names and find out if they saw anything.”

Just as Krone was herding the last of the blacks through the door that led to the rear of the house, we heard another siren. A red-and-white ambulance edged its angry way through the black crowd and two white attendants got out and started rolling a stretcher toward the house. Two squad cars, their sirens also moaning, arrived just after the ambulance. Four white cops spilled out of the cars, took a look at the sullen crowd which must have grown to 750 by then, and started edging toward the house, their hands on their holstered gun butts. Necessary, watching, shook his head in disgust. “Christ,” he said, “all we need is for one of those rednecks to shoot some nigger.”

I let the ambulance attendants in and they frowned when they saw what was left of Morze who still whimpered and squirmed in the green chair. The older of the two looked at me and grimaced. “I reckon we’ll have to take him all the way down to Charity emergency,” he said and frowned again as if he didn’t much care for long rides.

Necessary tapped the attendant on the shoulder. “What’s the closest hospital?” he demanded.

“I suppose the Colfax Clinic is, but — shit — we can’t take a nigger there.”

Necessary shot out his right hand, grasped the attendant’s shirt front, and jerked him close. Their faces were no more than six inches apart. “You’re going to take two niggers to the Colfax Clinic,” he said softly, “and they’re going to get the best treatment there is by the best doctors there are. You understand?”

The attendant nodded — a little vigorously, I thought.

“And if you get any static from anyone at the Colfax Clinic, you tell them that unless these two niggers get the best treatment there is, then Chief Necessary’s gonna get whatever kind of court order he needs to close that place down tight by six o’clock tonight. Now you got that?”

The attendant nodded again, even more vigorously than before. “Yessir,” he said. “I understand.”

Quickly, the two attendants loaded the whimpering Morze onto the wheeled stretcher. I moved over to Jones and helped him up. “You’d better go with him,” I said. Jones nodded and grimaced at the pain as he stood on his wounded leg.

“Here,” I said, and took his left arm and draped it around my shoulder. We moved slowly out of the house, past the four cops, and into the crowd which by now numbered at least a thousand. It was a sullen, too quiet crowd. They pressed in close to the wheeled stretcher and there were some gasps and oh mys when those near enough caught sight of Morze’s bloody, blinded face. I helped Jones limp close behind the stretcher.

Morze suddenly popped upright and screamed: “Nick! I can’t see, Nick! Where’s Nick?” Then he collapsed on the stretcher as I helped Jones to kneel down by him.

“I’m here, Bill,” Jones said softly. The man on the stretcher nodded and stared wildly about with his sightless eyes. “You gotta do some thing, Nick, you gotta do something for me.” He said that loudly enough for those who pressed close to hear it.

“Come here,” Morze said, “come here, Nick.”

I helped Jones go closer. “You gotta do it, Nick.”

“Whatever you say, Bill.”

Then he whispered his dying request and there were only two who heard it, Nick the Nigger and me. “Burn it, Nick, burn the fucking place down.” Then William Morze whimpered once more and died.

I helped Jones rise. He looked at the crowd of dark faces that encircled him. “What he say, Nick?” one large black man demanded. “What Saint Billy tell you t’do?”

The word spread quickly through the crowd — Saint Billy done told Nick what to do. Other voices near the stretcher started demanding the instructions. Nick the Nigger looked around carefully at the encircling black faces. Then he looked at me and smiled faintly. “This one’s for you, Dye.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said.

“Help me over to that one,” he said, indicating the large black who had first asked what Morze’s final request had been. I helped him over. He looked at the man for several moments. The man stared back patiently.

“You want to know what Bill said?”

“We gotta know,” the man said.

Nick the Nigger nodded several times, not taking his gaze from the man’s face. “Bill said cool it. That’s all. Just cool it.”