Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

They walked around town looking in shop windows. Josie preferred the hardware stores where he could peruse cookware and other kitchen paraphernalia and Delvin enjoyed office supply stores. They both enjoyed the mule barn. In Rance City mules were sold out of a brick barn attached to a hardware and farm supply store. They worked their way over there past the sewing shop, the department store, the pharmacy with the spinning pinwheels in the window, the dime store (where they stopped off and walked the undulate wooden floors looking for pocket knives which they found and couldn’t afford but enjoyed studying through the glass case window), the men’s shop, dress shop, red brick hotel and restaurant, paint store, granite bank with recessed windows and big brass door, appliance store with the washing machines and new Frigidaires standing out on the sidewalk ready for purchase, a couple of insurance offices, two car dealerships (Ford and Packard), the movie theater showing a double bill of Constant Motion and The Flamingo Kid Goes to Paris , starring Manfred Boudin the Dancing Cowboy. He thought occasionally of the life of movie stars, tickled that at the moment he was thinking of Gloria Swanson or Ramón Navarro they were at that same moment, possibly, sitting down to supper in their dining nooks or washing their socks in the upstairs bathroom, maybe cutting pictures out of a magazine to paste into a scrapbook. Movie stars, soldiers, famous negro writers and artists excited him. He was prone, if not to hero worship, to affection for successful people. He felt some of this affection for Josie who seemed far ahead of him with his plans and accomplishments. In one part of himself he knew Josie was scatterbrained and bootless, but still he wanted to believe in his writing plans; he was the first person he’d met who was writing a book, and Josie had encouraged him to begin one too. Plenty of room in that profession, he said.

They talked often of books and were in fact talking of the book Smashed Idols , written by the negro thinker Davis Stuckey, who lived, so the flyleaf said, on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, when they entered the Harding Hardware and Sale Barn on Stomont street across from the city waterworks. A boy Delvin’s age was leading three mules down the low wooden ramp from the barn into the street. He tied the mules to an iron post ring and went back inside. The smells of equine matters reminded Delvin of the stable shed back in Chattanooga. He wondered how the Ghost was doing. Probably by now riding the horses around town with a feather in his hat. And felt a shiver when he thought of what still lay in wait for him there, police lurking, his face most probably still on a wanted poster at the post office (though he’d never seen it out in the world), men growing old but still on standby, keeping an eye out for the cold-hearted shooter of white children, hands ready to reach out quick as a cat to catch that boy should he reappear in the oldtime streets. He shuddered. Nights he had lain awake thinking of the trouble to come. They entered the store and poked around for a while among the metal and leather and wood items. A white man looked hard at them and Delvin smiled a friendly smile. “Cooking equipment,” he said. “Over yonder,” the man said, indicating with his chin some low shelves. “Thank you, sir.” He had never cared much for these stores. In Harding’s the equipment, tools, the bulbous or spirally or contorted or bent metal and other work minutiae, baffled and oppressed him so that in a short time he began to sweat and feel as if he needed air.

“I’ll be over in the barn,” he told Josie and started out of the store.

As he exited through the front door he saw a small towheaded man pass — foolishly — behind the tied mules. One of the mules, in a motion quick as a snake, lashed out with his back feet and caught the man in the forehead. The man went down as if he’d been shot. He lay in the dirt street crumpled on his side with his arms stretched out ahead of him like he was running. But he wasn’t moving. His eyes were open and his eyeballs were red with blood.

The stable boy who had come back outside and a white man who leapt suddenly past Delvin both pulled at the mules. The man struck the offending one, a blocky gray, on the side of the head with his fist. The mule’s knees buckled and he almost went down.

“Goddamn you beast,” the man cried. He then turned and struck the colored boy. The boy skittered away, with the man chasing him for a few steps before he turned and came back.

Delvin was shoved roughly aside by men rushing from the store, but he gathered himself and pegged into the street to look. The downed man, wearing overalls and a gray suit coat, had a fresh red quarter moon mark sunk into his forehead. The mark ran up into his stiff yellow hair. There was no blood and except for his red eyes no other sign of wounding.

“God, Clarence,” someone said over and over, “God, Clarence.” Speaking apparently to the felled man.

Josie, breathing heavily, joined Delvin. With a loud clatter that made people jump, a big wooden barrel containing rakes and shovels by the door was knocked over. The implements spilled onto the sidewalk. A large man stepped on a shovel and stumbled and fell to his knees. “Oh, Jesus,” another man said. Two women in light summer dresses had tears in their eyes as they rushed up. “Help him,” one of them said, like she was ordering schoolchildren, even though people were already bending to the fallen man. The men had pale or red or red and pale mottled faces. The faces of the africano men watching darkened.

“Get back,” a large white man yelled. “Get back, you”—as if everybody was trying to assault the man on the ground.

Somebody spoke from the crowd to the fallen man as if he were only sleeping, telling him to get up. “Get up off the ground, Clarence,” the calm clear male voice said. “Get up now.”

A man in a dark suit knelt beside him. Another man knelt on the downed man’s other side and raised his limp hand and massaged it. Another negro boy led the mules back into the barn. They too had an agitated look, and one kept stepping sideways. The boy hit the stepping mule with the flat of his hand and the mule dropped its head and came along. Delvin couldn’t see where the first boy had gone. He hoped he was all right.

Police arrived in a car and then the boxy ambulance hauled up just ahead of a dust cloud that rolled over the assembled. A woman began coughing and couldn’t stop; a large man in a checked coat started to pull her down the street but she resisted until he quit and then they stood looking at the ambulance attendants as they bent over the man, who hadn’t moved.

One of the attendants, a slim man wearing a white coat over a gray long-sleeved jersey, carefully straightened the man’s arms and then, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them, folded them over the man’s stomach. The man’s eyes were open and he was looking straight up. It was clear that the fallen man was dead. This fact spread through the crowd. People gasped and somebody — it sounded like a man — began to cry.

The limp body was lifted onto a stretcher, placed in the ambulance and carried away.

Delvin and Josie stayed until the area had begun to clear. Far down the street, under a large sycamore tree, two colored boys stood in the street, pulling a piece of rubber between them as they watched the dispersing crowd. A policeman asked Delvin if he had seen the accident.

“Nawsuh,” he said, “I didn’t. I come out and saw the gentleman on the ground.” He’d known he was dead though, he said.

“How is that?’ the policeman, a man with white-blond hair and a creak in his voice, asked.

“I use to work in a funeral parlor.”