Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

“Don’t mind her,” Melanie said. “The incinerator is down the hall.”

“The white man is fit for the incinerator,” Melanie’s mother said, which sent a shiver up Mullaney’s spine.

They gathered up the bags of garbage in the kitchen, and carried them to the front door. At the door, Melanie said, “Why don’t you go to sleep, Mother,” and Mother simply replied, I’m not sleepy.”

“Very well,” Melanie said, and sighed, and opened the door. She preceded Mullaney down the empty hallway toward the small incinerator room. He pulled open the furnace door for her, and she dropped the bags of garbage down the chute. Below, somewhere in the bowels of the building, there was the sense if not the actual sound and smell of licking flames, a hidden well of fire destroying the waste of a metropolis. He released the handle, and the door banged back into place. Below, the building throbbed with consuming fire, a dull steady roar that vibrated into the soles of his feet and shuddered through the length of his body.

“Kiss me,” Melanie said.

This is the gamble, he thought as he took her into his arms. This is why I took the gamble a year ago, I took it for this moment in this room, this girl in my arms here and now, I have written sonnets about girls like this. I took the gamble so that I could make love to women in the stacks of the New York Public Library, I took the gamble so that I could make love to women in incinerator rooms, black or white, yellow or red, lowering her to the floor and raising the Pucci silk up over her brown thighs and reaching his hand into the thick tangled black hair suddenly revealed, the pink wet wonder of her parting to receive him, “I hate you,” she said, “Yes,” he said, “love me,” and she wrapped her long legs around him. He reached for the top of her dress, lowered it off her shoulders and kissed the dark nipples against the dark skin, “I hate you,” she said again, “Love me,” he said, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” her teeth clamped into his lips, he could taste blood, he thought She will kill me, and thought This is the gamble, and remembered he had once very long ago when he was a soldier made love, no, had not made love, had laid, had humped, had fucked a Negro prostitute in a curbside crib while his buddy waited outside for his turn, and had not considered it a gamble. And had later told Irene that he had once laid a colored girl, and she had said, “How lucky you arc,” and he had not known whether or not she was kidding. Here and now, here with the fires of hell burning in the building below, here with a girl who repeated over and over again as he moved inside her, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” he wondered about the gamble for the first time in a year, and came without her. “I hate you,” she said, with excellent reason this time.

He told her he was sorry, which he truly was, and which he thought was a gentlemanly and certainly American thing to admit, as she pulled her dress down over her long brown legs, and stood up. She said his apology was accepted, but that nonetheless he had been an inadequate and disappointing partner, whereas she had been hoping for someone with skill and virtuosity enough to perform on Ferris wheels, for example.

“I would be willing to do it on a roller coaster!” he shouted in defense, and then lowered his voice because it was, after all, the wee small hours of the morning, whispering, “I’m truly sorry, Melanie.”

Yes, she said, but you must admit there is something about the white man that can only engender hatred and distrust, dusting off her Pucci dress, and tucking her breasts back into the bodice. The white man has been taking for centuries and centuries, she said, and he doesn’t know how to give, you see, nor even how to accept graciously. The white man (he was beginning to feel as if he’d been captured by the Sioux) knows only how to grab and grab and grab — which is why you have that look on your face that Mother always warned me about — but he doesn’t know what he really wants or even why the hell he’s grabbing. The white man is a User and a Taker and a Grabber, and he will continue to Use and Take and Grab until there’s nothing left for him to feast upon but his own entrails, which he will devour like a hyena, did you know that hyenas eat their own intestines?

“No, I did not know that,” Mullaney said, amazed and repulsed.

It is a little known fact, Melanie said, but true. You must not think I’m angry at you, or would harbor any ill feelings toward you, or seek any revenge other than not permitting you to spend the night in my apartment, which would be impossible with Mother here, anyway. She despises the white man, as you may have gathered. I, on the other hand, like the white man, I really do. As a group, that is. And whereas it’s true that I’ve never met one individually or singly of whom I could be fond, this doesn’t mean I don’t like them as a group. I am, for example, keenly disappointed in you personally, but this needn’t warp my judgment of the group as a whole, do you understand? In fact, I suppose I should be grateful to you for proving to me once again just how undependable the white man really is, as an individual of course. Trust him, let him have his way with you, and what does he do once again but leave you with empty promises, though I wouldn’t march on Washington for something as trivial as this, still I think you know what I mean. Now I suppose you think I’m going to ask you to give me back those clothes you’re wearing, send you out into the night wearing your own flimsy yellow shirt with the bullet hole in it, but no, I’m not the type to seek revenge or to harbor any ill feelings, as I’ve already told you. I like the white man, I do. So you can keep the clothes because they once belonged to a Negro who is ten times the man you are, though I don’t wish to offend you or even cause you any embarrassment. But perhaps they’ll remind you as you go through life that you once took a little colored girl in an incinerator room, grabbed her and took her and used her, and left her not hating you, certainly not hating you, but nonetheless feeling a very keen disappointment in you, which I should have been prepared to expect. But grateful to you nonetheless for ascertaining it once again to my satisfaction. I am, in fact, extremely satisfied. Your performance was exactly what I expected, and therefore I am satisfied with my disappointment, do you understand what I’m saying?

“Oh, of course,” Mullaney said, relieved.

“Well, good then,” Melanie said, and offered her hand and said, “Good luck, I hope the fuzz don’t get you, I take the pill.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I take the pill, don’t worry, and I hope the fuzz don’t get you.”

“Thank you,” Mullaney said.

The fuzz were waiting for him outside the building.

In fact, Freddie, or Lou, or perhaps both of them, hit him on the head with a blackjack or some similar weapon or weapons.

At eight o’clock on Saturday morning, Mullaney was brought up to the lieutenant’s office, together with the eight other prisoners who had spent the night downstairs in the precinct’s detention cells.

The lieutenants name was Bozzaris, and he sat behind a scarred wooden desk in the only two-window office in the squad-room, puffing on a cigar and studying the men who stood before the desk in various attitudes of discomfort. He had very black hair parted in the middle. The part seemed to lead directly into a rather long cleaving nose which bisected his face, pointing toward the long cigar in the exact center of his mouth, which seemed in turn to join the cleft in the exact center of his chin, so that Bozzaris seemed to possess a face that had been formed by folding an ink blot in half, thereby producing two equal and identical sides.