Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

“I trust you,” Mullaney said.

“That’s fine,” Melanie answered, “because I have never trusted a white man in my entire life.”

“Then why are you helping me?”

“It’s the blue eyes that get me,” Melanie said. “Also, I like gamblers.”

“They’re brown.”

“Yes, but I’m drunk.”

“Which is probably the only reason you’re helping me.”

“No. I don’t like you to look so suspicious. I want you to look contented, man, contented.”

“How will we manage that?” Mullaney asked.

“I have never kissed a man who did not look extremely contented afterwards.”

“Oh, do you plan to kiss me?” Mullaney asked.

“I plan to swallow you alive,” Melanie said.

He felt very well-dressed in his pleatless trousers and vented jacket, wearing the white shirt and gold and black silk-rep tie Melanie had provided, very collegiate, although he had never dressed like this when he was attending City College from 1949 to 1951, and again from 1954 to 1956, after he had served his two-year stint in the Army. He missed the old maroon sweater he used to wear religiously to classes in those days, and he also missed what the sweater represented, an attitude he had tried to recapture when he began taking the gamble a year ago, an attitude exemplified by the sweater, which was theadbare at the elbows and beginning to unravel at the cuffs, exemplified too by the fact that he owned only one key and even that didn’t open anything he really possessed, it was to the lock of his mother Rose’s apartment. He missed the maroon sweater and the reckless who-gives-a-damn attitude he had worn all through college, the knowledge that he would not be called upon for any responsibilities deeper than having his assignments in on time, or wearing a rubber when he screwed some hapless girl from Hunter. These Ivy League garments were very chic and very well-tailored, but they did not come anywhere near being as debonair as his maroon sweater.

He missed his jasmine shirt, too, which had been a gift from Irene on his thirty-eighth birthday, and which he had cherished over the interceding year and a half, almost two years. The maroon sweater had disappeared a long time ago, gone the way of all shabby sweaters and attitudes, and now the jasmine shirt had a bullet hole in it, and it too had been replaced with a bass guitar player’s excellently tailored threads, and Melanie had promised to swallow him alive.

The suspense was killing him.

The suspense at first was compounded of two equal parts: the possibility that Freddie and Lou might at any moment knock on the apartment door, and the further possibility that Melanie might at any moment swallow him alive. There was something very strange about Melanie in that she had told him she did not trust any white man (he believed her) and yet she would not let him out of her sight, would not let go of his hand, would not stop rubbing her long sinuous cat’s body against him at every opportunity. He was beginning to suspect that she was naked beneath the clinging Pucci silk, and the notion of exploring this darkest heart, the possibility of being swallowed alive by a race and an intelligence that went back millenniums, consumed as it were by someone or something that simultaneously hated him and desired him was tantalizing and terribly exciting. But conversely, and contradictorily, and contrarily, he was terrified that she would indeed envelop him in her blackness, completely enclose him in the centuries-old vastness of her mother womb, absorb him, cause him to disappear from view entirely, swallow him alive exactly as she had promised.

Adding to the suspense was the advancing hour. He had crashed the party at perhaps twenty minutes past midnight, and it was now ten minutes past one, with still no sign of the diligent Freddie and Lou. This was a large apartment building, of course, and it could be assumed that if they were knocking on every door it would take them quite a while to work their way around to Melanie’s apartment, by which time she might already have feasted upon him and drunk his blood. Or, worse fate, Freddie and Lou might break in on the moment of climax, catch them in delicto , as it were, adding Indecent Exposure to their charges, or perhaps Disorderly Conduct, or perhaps extraditing him to Alabama and slapping him with a retroactive charge of Miscegenation, there were all sorts of possibilities to the law now that he was a fugitive.

By this time, many of Melanie’s guests, both black and white (the white ones puzzled him since he couldn’t understand why someone who didn’t trust white men would have three white men and two white women among her Friday-night party guests), were beginning to say their farewells and go off into the night to pursue their separate desires. He knew for certain now that Melanie was naked beneath the silk. He touched her breast and saw the nipple rise against the fabric and then she pulled away from him and smiled in wicked encouragement, and he saw desire and hatred mingled again on her face and wanted to love her and simultaneously wanted to destroy her, it was all very confusing.

In one moment, he hoped that Freddie and Lou would arrive quickly, revolvers drawn, handcuffs waiting, to carry him away from this dangerous, hateful cannibal who would most surely destroy him. But in the next moment, he devoutly wished that they would never find him, that he could take this exciting, beautiful, passionate and wanton woman, ravage her repeatedly, hate her, love her, possess her, be possessed by her, merge with her, become one with her, become some vaguely defined beige mixture of arms and legs and lips, settle the entire civil-rights movement there on her bed without assistance from Martin Luther King or anyone, thrash out the hate and leave only the love, and yet knowing this was impossible because too much of it was compounded in hate. Suspensefully, Melanie took his hand between her own two hands, palms full and cushioned and moist, and brought them to her mouth and nibbled at his fingers while he watched the clock. Help me Freddie and Lou, he thought, why is there never a cop around when you need one?

He noticed a rather fat and frizzled Negro woman sitting in an easy chair near the record player, moving her crossed leg in time to the music, so that her sandaled foot tapped out the beat on thin air. The woman was perhaps fifty or fifty-five, and she was wearing a black muu muu, white pearls around her throat, hair cut just like Melanie’s, in close tight African style. She kept beating her foot on the air as though she were squashing white missionaries and Belgian nuns, her skin very black, her teeth very white, her black eyes darting around the room as the number of guests dwindled, until finally it was a quarter-to-two, and the only people in the room were Melanie, the very black and menacing woman in the muu muu, and he himself, Andrew Mullaney.

It occurred to him along about then that Freddie and Lou were not going to find him this night, and so he began resigning himself to the pleasurably hateful fate of making love to Melanie. Suspense being a delicate thing at best, however, he realized that whereas Freddie and Lou were no longer a qualifying element, the large woman in the muu muu definitely was. He wondered if she was planning to spend the night, and then wondered how he could delicately ask about her.

Melanie saved him the trouble by saying, “I don’t think you’ve met my mother.”

“I don’t think I have,” Mullaney said. “Pleasure.”

“The white man is a horse’s ass,” Melanie’s mother said, not meaning anything personal.

“Don’t mind her,” Melanie said. “Would you help me take out the garbage?”

“The white man is fit for taking out the garbage,” Melanie’s mother said.